By remarkable coincidence, Sarah Palin's new book, Going Rogue: An American Life just came out, jumped to the top of my ‘waiting to read” stack, and includes the phrase “Commonsense Conservative” is featured in that book. Combine it with Richard Branson's “Gaia Capitalism” and you have the makings of something special.
This book is short (123 pages), easy to read, and an inspiring patriotic labor of love, a gift to all of us who care deeply for American the Beautiful and are confused and/or angry about all that has been done “in our name” by the festering cesspool of Washington-based politicians and senior bureaucrats who live to claim budget share (inputs) rather than deliver public service (outputs).
The author provides the single best, most complete, and most sensible demarche against EARMARKS that I have ever seen. Included are eight illustrations and I will list them here because they capture the essence of this book's common sense:
Seventy per cent of Afghans surveyed see poverty and unemployment as the major cause of the conflict in their country, according to new research by international aid agency Oxfam and a group of Afghan organisations. Ordinary Afghans blame government weakness and corruption as the second most important factor behind the fighting, with the Taliban coming third, followed by interference by neighboring countries.
Al Qaeda today no longer poses a direct national security threat to the United States itself, but rather poses a second-order threat in which the worst case scenario would be an al Qaeda-trained or -inspired terrorist managing to pull off an attack on the scale of something in between the 1993 Trade Center attack, which killed six, and the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, which killed 168.
In 1987, the conservative author Midge Decter described her association with Israel and those willing to place it above conventional judgment. ‘We know ourselves to be bound by ties so deep, so essential, so unconditional, that they are beyond daylight examination. To be a Jew is not an act, it is a fate. The existence of Israel is absolutely central to that fate. The rest is mere details – knowable, unknowable, makes no difference.’
This vein of thinking can be gathered from Israel’s leader David Ben-Gurion in a New York Times Magazine article in December 1960. On that occasion he was defending the illegal abduction of the war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who had been nabbed by Mossad agents from Argentina. ‘I know they [the abductors] committed a breach of the law, but sometimes they are moral obligations higher than formal law.’
This idea of Israel, and Jewish fate, being placed in the realm of an obligatory ‘higher law’, does lend itself to various, dangerous implications. Decter’s observations resonate with the recent decision by Tel Aviv to allow 900 new homes to be built in East Jerusalem in the sprawling Jewish neighbourhood of Gilo. 40,000 Israelis are already resident there. President Obama has gone so far as to see the move as ‘dangerous’. The Secretary General of the UN, Ban Ki-moon has publicly seen the gesture as one that undermines the peace effort.
International conventions and views, which tend to find such settlements illegal, are considered inapplicable by the rank and file in Tel Aviv. The law of nations, that seemingly abstract body of customs and norms that are often more honoured than people might realize, are cast aside as undue hindrances to the functioning of the state.
The perceptive social theorist, Zygmunt Bauman, claims that Israeli policy persists in being made in the shadow of the Holocaust. The narrative of threatened existence girds such policies, whether they be ruthless measures against the Palestinians, or the issue of constructing more settlements. A state of affairs like an ‘indivisible’ Jerusalem are created, an assertion of something supposedly non-negotiable. Lines are drawn across borders, and there is a stubborn refusal to budge.
ROME — The head of a U.N. food agency expressed regret Wednesday that an anti-hunger summit failed to result in precise promises of funding, and critics said the meeting had only thrown crumbs to the world's 1 billion people without enough to eat.
TURN IN THESE CIA FUGITIVES : They’ll get 5-8 Years
By Carolyn Keuhn
NOV.4, 2009: Italy convicted 23 CIA rendition perps. All could be imprisoned if they leave the US.
An Italian judge on November 4, 2009, convicted 23 CIA agents and two Italian agents over their role in the 2003 kidnapping of a Muslim cleric. Milan judge Oscar Magi sentenced former Milan CIA station chief Bob Seldon Lady (on left in PHOTO with Luciano Pironi) to 8 years and 22 other agents (PHOTOS) to 5 years in prison for their role in the abduction of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. Also convicted was Air Force Colonel Joseph Romano (COLOR PHOTO), who was responsible for the CIA kidnapping team’s flight to Egypt from a U.S. air base in Italy.
WANTED: CIA Renditiones
CONTACT: Interpol, the international police agency, by email or at this FAX number in Switzerland: +33 4 72 44 71 63. (Refer to the warrant number given in the Robert Lady photo caption.) Or contact your local or national police.
The US is shielding the perps, whose names and PHOTOS are shown [at original source].
The recent closing of this five year award-winning newsletter by Mark Satin, author of the book Radical Middle: The Politics We Need Now has yielded a marvelous “best of the best” series of links on a single page that we strongly recommend to anyone with a brain interested in democracy and the creation of a prosperous world at peace.
Patriotic Love and Common Sense For All
