Why Chris Christie Will Never Be President of the United States | Daniel Pipes

Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor since 2010, has qualities and achievements that appeal to mainstream conservatives, from his direct style to his impressive budget cutting. As a result, he has won support to run as a Republican candidate for president of the United States.

But Christie has an Achilles Heel that gives one pause.
He came under criticism from fellow conservatives for nominating Sohail Mohammed, an Islamist who aspires to apply Islamic law, the Shari'a, as a state superior court judge; for an outline of these concerns, see the Investigative Project on Terrorism, "Gov. Christie's Strange Relationship with Radical Islam."

In response, Christie delivered a tirade on July 26, 2011, on the topic of Shari'a:

Sharia law has nothing to do with this [i.e., the appointment of Sohail Mohammed] at all. It's crazy. It's crazy. … So, this Sharia law business is crap. It's just crazy. And I'm tired of dealing with the crazies. I mean, you know, it's just unnecessary to be accusing this guy of things just because of his religious background.

Read more »

Unrepentant | by Rachel Shukert | Tablet Magazine

Larry David, the antihero of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, is particular, a prig, and constantly aggrieved. But he’s fine with that—which is why, contrary to type, he’s not at all neurotic.

There are three adjectives that are often used to describe Larry David, the star and creator of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which recently premiered its eighth season after two excruciating, Curb-less years. One is “bespectacled,” which is fair enough. Another is “bald,” a signifier David’s television alter-ego regards as a traditionally oppressed tribal identity (spitting in biblical fury when the assimilationists among this imagined fraternity of the hairless attempt to “pass” under the camouflage of a baseball cap or, God forbid, a toupee). Finally, and most ubiquitously, he is “neurotic.”

“Larry David plays himself as bald, bespectacled neurotic,” the New York Times wrote in a review of the new season. “Larry David plays a neurotic fussbudget named Larry David,” the Washington Post said in 2010. “He’s officially an LA neurotic,” the New York Post recently bemoaned. Far be it for me to argue with writers for such august publications. But having said that: I don’t think any of these people actually know what “neurotic” means, other than a word you swap in when you think it’s impolite to say “Jew.” Read more »

Ron Paul - Obama of the Right

Vice Chair of Republican Liberty Caucus resigns in protest against Ron Paul. Calls Paul supporters "a cult" prone to bigotry and conspiracy theories.

Adam Holland

Aaron Biterman, Vice Chair of the Republican Liberty Caucus, has resigned from that organization in protest of its support for the presidential candidacy of Ron Paul. Biterman also cited among his reasons for resigning a cult-like atmosphere, promotion of conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism among Ron Paul supporters. (Read here: Aaron Biterman Resigns from Republican Liberty Caucus)

According to the blog Sara for America, Biterman has indicated that he would no longer be associated with any group that supports Ron Paul.

Per his Facebook posts, the resignation comes as a result of his refusal to lead an organization that supports Ron Paul. But, not stopping there, Biterman, a libertarian, plans to continue his battle. He has formed a new group: Push Back Against the Ron Paul Cult, “A strategy and informational forum to fight back against Ron Paul’s misguided, anti-liberty supporters.”

Read more »

Paul Krugman, Michelle Bachmann, and the Uses of Chutzpah | Tablet Magazine | BY MICHAEL WEX

The past few months there’s been a rash of chutzpah sightings—that is, lots of public uses of the Yiddish word, if not any more actual chutzpah than usual. The best part: It’s even being used correctly.

More than one commentator criticizing Standard & Poor’s decision to downgrade the U.S. credit rating has accused the agency of chutzpah; a Supreme Court justice wrote a recent dissent describing the petitioners’ argument in a public finance case as an instance of the same quality, and a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination finds so much chutzpah in the incumbent’s behavior that she is impelled to use the word before she’s even learned to pronounce it. The past few months have seen a jump in chutzpah sightings—in public uses of the Yiddish word for nerve or audacity, if not in chutzpah itself, which has become so predictable a feature of public life that it now provokes weary resignation as often as outrage or fury.

Between S&P, Elena Kagan, and Michele Bachmann, “chutzpah” is now ranking higher on Google Trends than at any time since the great spike of 2007, caused by a perfect storm of a Bush aide calling out the Clintons over the Scooter Libby affair and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad requesting permission to visit ground zero. Indeed, if Google’s search insights are any indication, “chutzpah” consistently out-performs the “cojones” that are sometimes invoked in its place—and is a runaway winner in Washington. (The main exception was in August 2010, when Sarah Palin, yet another potential president, accused President Barack Obama of having a nether profile more suited to a Ken doll than to a leader, and cojones were “on everybody’s lips,” as CNN’s Jeanne Moos put it.) While more Americans are familiar with Spanish than with Yiddish—a simple Google search yields 12.5 million entries for “cojones,” a mere 2.7 million for “chutzpah”—and more people are thus likely to require an explanation or definition for a use of “chutzpah,” there is a simple reason why neither term should replace the other: Real chutzpah is not the same thing as cojones. Read more »

Space Aliens Are Probably Progressive Liberals By Daniel Foster | National Review Online

By now you’ve probably read about the paper — authored by a NASA-affiliated scientist along with two scholars from Penn “Hockey Stick Graph” University — laying out various scenarios that might play out in the aftermath of first contact with an alien intelligence. The paper, published in Acta Astronautica, hilariously suggests that an otherwise benevolent alien race might nevertheless destroy us in a “preemptive” strike designed to stop us from global-warming our way to galactic dominion. You read that right. (Shall we call this manner of preemptive strike the Gore Doctrine?)

In any event, I’ve read the paper (so you don’t have to) and that’s just the tip of the melting iceberg. It turns out that any alien race that comes into contact with us will, by the very fact of their advanced state of development, very likely resemble what we mere Terrans think of as progressive liberals. Indeed, one of the answers advanced by the authors to the question of why we haven’t been contacted by aliens already is that we aren’t yet worth their time — that they are waiting until we achieve a “societal benchmark such as sustainable development or international unity” before they pick up the phone. Read more »

The Long Tradition of Jewish Farming in America Tablet Magazine | BY LEAH KOENIG

The trend toward local and organic foods has also helped fuel a resurgence in Jewish farming, a seeming oxymoron that actually has a long and deep history in this country

Every morning before breakfast, Rabbi Rafoel Franklin, 60, an Orthodox Jew living in Swan Lake, N.Y., puts on tefillin, says his morning prayers, and then heads outside to milk his 30 cows. Three decades ago Franklin and his wife, Naomi, left Monsey, N.Y., the ultra-Orthodox hamlet outside New York City, to start their farm in the Catskills. Franklin, who became religious as an adult, had spent his childhood in Montana and once worked as a wildlife biologist. He moved out of Monsey because he wanted to live a life that reflected his love of the natural world as well as his devotion to the Torah. “In Monsey I was working as a shochet”—a ritual slaughterer—“and I was dissatisfied by what I saw,” Franklin told me. Read more »

Obama Betrays Another Ally: U.S. to Deny Taiwan's request, "We are so disappointed in the United States" Atlas Shrugs

Obama stabs another long-time, die-hard ally in the back. Meticulously documented in my book, The Post American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America, we see time and time again the Obama administration intent on abandoning America’s friends and encouraging our enemies. In a breathtaking surrender to China, Obama has thrown Taiwan under the bus. He is stunning in his betrayal of good, reliable allies who had unfalteringly stood by us.

Add Taiwan to the body pile-up ...... Egypt, Honduras, Israel, Poland, the Czech Republic, India, et al.

There are fears that losing Taiwan could spell the end of U.S. power projection in the region. Losing Taiwan would "change everything from the operational arch perspective to the posture of Japan and the U.S. India, et al."

Read more »

Five Myths About Rick Perry | FrontPage Magazine | by Ben Shapiro

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is now the frontrunner for the Republican nomination.

Many people are aware of his focus on the Tenth Amendment, his state’s tremendous record of job creation (40% of all jobs created since the beginning of the recession have been in Texas), and his formidable campaigning abilities.  But as with all other Republican candidates, there are rumors swirling about his positions and history that are worth examining.  Let’s take them, point by point. Read more »

Myth #4: Perry is soft on Islam.
Salon.com recently reported that Perry was a “pro-Shariah” candidate, a charge that obviously got heavy traction among conservatives – and with good reason. It’s a serious charge. It’s also dramatically false, as columnist David Stein points out. Perry’s relationship is with a Muslim leader called the Aga Khan, who leads a sect called the Ismailis, which has 15-20 million followers. Aga Khan has been labeled an infidel by both Sunnis and Shias for his support for Israel. Perry worked with Aga Khan to implement an educational element in the Texas curriculum about Islam. Here are some of the elements of that educational program: “Muslims often lack respect for Western traditions and points of view … From its early days, Islam reacted aggressively toward its civilized neighbors the Byzantines and the West …While Westerns studied Islamic culture, Muslims showed almost no interest in Western culture, remaining ignorant of modernity and its impact.” The program also calls Israel “the historic homeland of Jews” and gives details about how Arab states refused to admit Palestinian refugees after 1948. There’s a reason Perry has won the Defender of Jerusalem award from the State of Israel, and it’s not just because Texas is Israel’s fourth largest trading partner. Read more »

Powering Down | Tablet Magazine | by Jennifer Bleyer

When my husband turned to me one day and said he thought we should start observing Shabbat, it was only a little less surprising than if he had said he wanted to start crocheting tea-pot cozies.

“Shabbat?” I said. “Are you serious?”

My husband, you see, is a proudly secular Jew who thinks that religion amounts to at best harmless superstition and at worst nefarious brainwashing. He’s outwardly respectful of the religious, of course, and he has adapted admirably to my request that we keep kosher at home (even as he relishes his bacon cheeseburgers at restaurants). He dutifully sits through my family’s two lengthy Passover Seders every year. But he maintains that belief in God is as preposterous as belief in the tooth fairy.

So, it was somewhat shocking when he came up with this Shabbat idea, although I knew what had inspired it. We’d been feeling that something just wasn’t right about answering non-emergency work-related phone calls at 10:30 on a Friday night, or checking email reflexively upon awakening on Saturday. We yearned to carve out a space in our week to shut it all down. Read more »

Park Slope Food Coop's Proposed Boycott of Israeli Goods Tablet Magazine | by Jennifer Bleyer

A proposed boycott of Israeli products at the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn, a 38-year-old grocery where political passions run high, is raising worries among its sizable Orthodox Jewish membership

Pity the Park Slope Food Coop. Drubbed almost annually by some crabby reporter in the New York Times, satirized by author Amy Sohn in her last novel, Prospect Park West, the 38-year-old cooperative grocery store in the heart of gentrified Brooklyn suffers from an image problem. The conventional wisdom is that it’s a bastion of smug bourgeois bohemians flitting around organic produce aisles in yoga pants, proclaiming their virtuosity on everything from international politics to composting. It’s an image that hasn’t been helped by the coop’s latest media storm: a proposal by a tiny cohort of members to have Israeli products pulled from its shelves.

In truth, the coop’s nearly 16,000 members are actually a varied bunch, representing a cross-section of Brooklynites seen in few places outside of the subway. Yes, many are like me: a white, liberal, college-educated parent who lives in brownstone Brooklyn. But the aisles are also populated by Rastafarians in knit hats, silver-haired women surviving on Board of Education pensions, artsy kids who live with 10 roommates in Bushwick, and a sizable number of Orthodox Jews loading up their carts on Thursday nights in preparation for Shabbat. Read more »

US Pressure Israel to apologize to Turkey. Israel says: NO

Ynetnews:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Wednesday that Israel will not apologize to Turkey over the 2010 flotilla incident, despite an earlier demand by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to do so.

Haaretz
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Wednesday that there will be no improvement in ties with Israel, unless it apologizes for the 2010 Gaza flotilla raid which killed nine Turkish activists.

Ynetnews:
Turkey-Israel ties reach new low: As Israeli Ambassador to Turkey Gabby Levy prepares to complete his term in two weeks, Jerusalem is concerned that Turkey will refuse to approve a replacement ambassador due to the ongoing diplomatic crisis between the two nations.

Atlas Shrags:
OBAMA DEMANDS ISRAEL APOLOGIZE TO TURKEY FOR GENOCIDAL JIHAD "FLOTILLA," OR ELSE. ISRAEL SAYS NO

Obama Re-Writes History on Bush and Jerusalem Commentary Magazine

by Omri Ceren

Now this is just getting silly. The Obama White House is gearing up for a Supreme Court case in which it will defend its refusal to list “Jerusalem, Israel” on the passports of Americans born in the Israeli capital. As part of its preparations the administration recently scrubbed all the captions on a White House photo gallery of Vice President Biden in the city, changing “Jerusalem, Israel” to “Jerusalem.” The optics of methodically erasing the word “Israel” from the White House webpage caused a predictable uproar.

Those who make it their business to rationalize White House hostility toward Israel were relieved, then, when the Washington Jewish Week’s Adam Kredo published an article claiming that the Bush administration had enforced an identical policy. Kredo cited a “search of the Bush White House’s archives” and photos of Laura Bush touring the Western Wall to conclude that the Bush White House webpage “never explicitly labeled [Jerusalem] as part of Israel.” Though he was otherwise unsparing in criticizing the White House’s “horrible, simply ridiculous… photo mistake,” Obama’s defenders latched on to his article anyway. The NJDC and J Street found particularly grating and obnoxious ways to pass along the article. You should read them because they’re about to become deeply embarrassing. Read more »

Rick Perry and Islam | Sultan Knish a blog by Daniel Greenfield

Some questions have been raised about Rick Perry's views on Islam.

Islamic infiltration into American politics means that every candidate deserves close scrutiny. My purpose is not to attack Perry, but to conduct a preliminary discussion of the subject. Pamela Geller and Debbie Schlussel have written their own articles, which add more pieces to the puzzle. As with every candidate, the discussion will go on as more materials are brought forward.

First of all it's important to recognize that the Rick Perry question, is also the Chris Christie question, it's the question that comes with every governor from a state with a large and politically active Muslim population. This question will have more serious implications as the size of the Muslim population expands even further.

The multicultural pandering that used to be associated with the Tammany Hall political machine has become second nature in American politics. There is hardly a governor who does not pay lip service to diversity or do roundups of all the religious groups in America. That's an unfortunate reality.

The initial good news is that Rick Perry did not try to influence the judicial system on behalf of a member of a terrorist organization, or appoint a terrorist Imam's political affiliate to a superior court judgeship the way that Christie did. Read more »

White House Mischief | Daniel Pipes

The White House engaged in two furtive gambits last week that painfully exposed the Obama administration's amateurish, deceitful Middle East-Islamic policies.

The first case concerned the thorny issue of Jerusalem's legal status in American law. In 1947, the United Nations ruled the holy city to be a corpus separatum (Latin for separated body) and not part of any state. All these years later and despite many changes, U.S. policy holds that Jerusalem is an entity unto itself. It ignores that in 1950 the Government of Israel declared western Jerusalem to be its capital and in 1980 declared the whole of Jerusalem to be the capital. The Executive Branch even ignores U.S. laws from 1995 (requiring a move of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem) and 2002 (requiring that U.S. documents recognize Americans born in Jerusalem as being born in Israel). Instead, it insists that the city's disposition be decided through diplomacy.

Challenging this policy, the American parents of Jerusalem-born Menachem Zivotofsky, demanded on his behalf that his birth certificate and his passport list him as having been born in Israel. When the State Department refused, the parents filed a lawsuit; their case has now reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Read more »

U.S. Democratic Senator spreading blood libel

Senator Leahy with his friend

Senator Leahy thinks that IDF (or at least part of it) operates under a different moral code than the rest of the armies including NATO and the US; that accomplishing military objective with the least lost of life possible is not what it is after - there is something else - the blood, spilled beyond necessary. He is not advocating cutting funds to US army, no ending support or cooperation with armies of NATO or any other country. It's just the Jewish Army.
The whole idea of cutting aid to certain units specifically (as if US directly funds every IDF unit) cater to antisemitic favorite: US aid to Israel. The rest of US foreign assistance, which makes the bulk of it usually not mentioned as often and not specified(though Egypt gets almost as much funds as Israel). But the key here is not money. The goal is to mention IDF in this context. And this is blood libel pure and simple.

My opinion, based on what is available in the press (and we know quite a bit about violations of human rights by other armies including the US) IDF should be used as an example of moral conduct under circumstances where the goal of the enemy is not to win, but to depict IDF in terms of human rights violations. Almost 40 years now (since 1973) Israel is fighting with militarily inferior enemies. They know they can't win a battle. Their objective is different: to give a chance to people like senator Leahy to exercise their anti-semitism.

U.S. Senator seeks to cut aid to elite IDF units operating in West Bank and Gaza - Haaretz

Senator Patrick Leahy claims Shayetet 13 unit, undercover Duvdevan unit, and the Israel Air Force Shaldag unit involved in human rights violations in occupied territories.

U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy is promoting a bill to suspend U.S. assistance to three elite Israel Defense Forces units, alleging they are involved in human rights violations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Leahy, a Democrat and senior member of the U.S. Senate, wants assistance withheld from the Israel Navy's Shayetet 13 unit, the undercover Duvdevan unit and the Israel Air Force's Shaldag unit.
Read more »

Independent opinion on IDF moral conduct:

Col. Richard Kemp Testifies at U.N. Emergency Session

Canada Is the World’s Most Pro-Israel Country Tablet Magazine

Since the 2006 election of the conservative politician Stephen Harper as prime minister, Canada has become arguably the most pro-Israel country in the world

BY JORDAN MICHAEL SMITH

One night in August 2006, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer was speaking at a fundraiser for the United Jewish Appeal’s Israel Emergency Campaign in a Toronto hotel. Before an audience of 2,500, Krauthammer extolled the virtues of those leaders who were supporting Israel in the conflict then under way with Hezbollah in Lebanon. He singled out for praise Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who was showing great leadership in openly siding with Israel, he said. At the mere mention of Harper, who was not in attendance, Krauthammer’s audience suddenly burst into furious applause, as though its collective gratitude for the prime minister had finally been articulated for the first time.

As prime minister, Harper has transformed Canadian foreign policy toward Israel and the Middle East. Abandoning Canada’s longstanding posture of even-handedness in the Arab-Israeli conflict, the country has become arguably the most pro-Israel country in the world. From being the first world leader to cut off funds to the Palestinian Authority in 2006 when it was taken over by Hamas, to speaking out against growing global anti-Semitism, Harper has embraced Israel as has no Canadian leader before him. “It is hard to find a country friendlier to Israel than Canada these days,” gushed Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, in 2010. “No other country in the world has demonstrated such a full understanding of us.” Read more »

Agnostics for Perry | Roger L. Simon

Rick Perry only just announced his presidential run Saturday, but out here in the blue-blue City of Angels I am already detecting severe signs of PDS — Perry Derangement Syndrome.

Usually it goes like this: Okay, the economy is a little better in Texas than it is here (of course that’s the oil companies), but why does he have to be sooooo religious? What’s with all this Christ business all the time?

Most of this comes from liberal christians and jews (lower case deliberate) for whom public displays of faith are considered vulgar, even suspect. An Elmer Gantry lurks around every corner.

For the jews…okay Jews (I made my point)… their age-old knee-jerk response to evangelicals is heavily at play. This attitude is so outdated as to be laughable, but it is so ingrained in their psyches that these Jews have lost the ability to distinguish between friends and enemies. Even a cursory Google search reveals that Rick Perry is one of the greatest supporters of Israel ever to run for high office in this country. Of course, it’s quite possible that many of these Jews don’t care about that. But they should.

Nevertheless, who am I to talk? As the title of this essay indicates, I am an agnostic. Read more »

Perry's Problematic Pals | American Thinker

Pamela Geller

Texas Governor Rick Perry announced Saturday that he is going to seek the Republican nomination for President, and in his speech declaring his candidacy, he sounded great: 'we reject this President's unbridled fixation on taking more money out of the wallets and pocketbooks of American families and employers and giving it to a central government,' Perry said. ''Spreading the wealth' punishes success while setting America on course to greater dependency on government. Washington's insatiable desire to spend our children's inheritance on failed 'stimulus' plans and other misguided economic theories have given us record debt and left us with far too many unemployed.'

Perry promises to fix all that: 'We'll create jobs. We'll get America working again. We'll create jobs and we'll build wealth, we'll truly educate and innovate in science, and in technology, engineering and math. We'll create the jobs and the progress needed to get America working again.'

Sounds good. But Perry has been sucked into the propaganda vortex, and is now wielding his enormous power to influence changes in the schoolrooms and in the curricula to reflect a sharia compliant version of Islam. He is a friend of the Aga Khan, the multimillionaire head of the Ismailis, a Shi'ite sect of Islam that today proclaims its nonviolence but in ages past was the sect that gave rise to the Assassins. Perry has concluded at least two cooperation agreements between the state of Texas and the Ismailis, including a comprehensive program to feed children in Texas public schools and taqiyya nonsense about how Islam is a religion of peace. Read more »

2009 State Dept cable: "Syrian officials, at every level, lie." Elder of Ziyon

A fascinating 2009 memo released by Wikileaks as President Obama was actively trying to re-engage Syria shows that the White House has not been listening to State Department advice on how Syria acts diplomatically.

Excerpts:

As the U.S. continues its re-engagement with Syria, it may help us achieve our goals if we understand how SARG officials pursue diplomatic goals. Syrian President Bashar al-Asad is neither as shrewd nor as long-winded as his father but he, too, prefers to engage diplomatically on a level of abstraction that seems designed to frustrate any direct challenge to Syria's behavior and, by extension, his judgment. Bashar's vanity represents another Achilles heel: the degree to which USG visitors add to his consequence to some degree affects the prospects for a successful meeting. The SARG foreign policy apparatus suffers from apparent dysfunctionality and weaknesses in terms of depth and resources but the SARG punches above its weight because of the talents of key individuals. SARG officials generally have clear, if tactical, guidance from Bashar and they are sufficiently professional to translate those instructions into recognizable diplomatic practice. But in a diplomatic world that is generally oiled by courtesy and euphemism, the Syrians don't hesitate to be nasty in order to achieve their objectives. The behaviors they employ as diplomatic 'force-multipliers' are the hallmarks of a Syrian diplomatic style that is at best abrasive and, at its worst, brutal.  Read more »

"They are not embarrassed to be caught in a lie."

Lying is a part of the Middle East culture - from Bangladesh to Morocco(at least), whether politics or bazaar. Something westerners don't understand.

Palestinians hail Obama’s speech | Saudi Gazette

RAMALLAH, West Bank – Palestinians hailed US President Barack Obama’s speech to the Muslim world on Thursday as a good start, while the Israeli premier huddled with aides to hammer out the Jewish state’s response.

The Palestinian Authority welcomed Obama’s stand in calling the Palestinian situation “intolerable,” reiterating his support for a sovereign Palestine, and saying that Jewish settlements must stop.
“It is a clear and frank speech,” President Mahmoud Abbas’s spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeina told AFP. “It is an innovative political step and a good beginning on which one must build.”
The speech broke with the “preceeding partial American policy” in favor of Israel, he said. Read more »

American Jewish man abducted in Pakistan | JTA

(JTA) -- An American citizen working on an aid development project was kidnapped from his home in Pakistan.

Warren Weinstein, 70, who has been identified as Jewish, was snatched from his home in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore early Saturday, according to news service reports.  Read more »


Liberalism Kills
I imagine he is liberal. Why did he go there - to be a neighbor of Osama bin Laden?
Has not Daniel Pearl already proven: Pakistan (any stan for that matter) is not a place for Jews.

Argentina's Jewish Villages Keep Traditions Alive | NPR

In the 1890s, Russian Jews fleeing anti-Semitic violence and discrimination arrived by the thousands to a remote corner of the Argentine Pampas. They founded hamlets similar to the shtetls they left behind. They spoke Yiddish, built synagogues and traditional Jewish schools — and became farmers and gauchos, the mythical Argentine cowboys.

Now, only a dwindling number of their descendants remain, but they're intent on saving the Jewish culture that flourished for decades. In Entre Rios province, the center of Argentina's rural Jewish communities, there are still gauchos, Hebrew lessons and sacred scrolls to be found.

Jaime Jruz is among those who consider keeping the old traditions alive a debt owed to those who first settled the region. He roams his ranch on horseback, rounding up cattle and keeping track of his goats. His farm, on the outskirts of Carmel, goes back more than a century.

It was bought on a payment plan by his grandfather, who had arrived in Argentina aboard the Bismarck, a ship carrying Jews seeking a new life in the New World. Now 65, Jruz says he has lost a step or two and is one of the last Jewish gauchos around.

Many of his friends have given up the backbreaking work, and his three daughters, like most young Argentine Jews, live in the cities. But Jruz says the past and the work his ancestors put into the farms of Entre Rios weigh heavily on him. Read more »

Newest entrant into GOP field, Rick Perry, is longtime friend of Israel—and Jesus | JTA

WASHINGTON (JTA) -- To some conservative Jews, Texas Gov. Rick Perry would make an excellent presidential candidate. He’s been to Israel more than any other candidate in the field and has said he loves it. And Perry creates jobs.

But other Jewish conservatives seeking the anti-Obama candidate look at the three-term governor and see something arresting: He believes he’s on a mission from God.

Perry has nonplussed longtime Jewish supporters by claiming that he has been “called” to the presidency and by hosting a prayer rally this month that appealed to Jesus to save America.

Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post’s Right Turn columnist and a bellwether of Jewish conservatism, took liberals to task on her blog for treating the event as “a spectacle” -- it was borne of deeply considered worries about the country’s parlous state, she said -- but Rubin also expressed caveats about the rally. Read more »

More:
Gov. Rick Perry: America Needs New Leadership (Full Text of Announcement Speech)

Philip Levine named U.S. poet laureate | Jewish Journal

Philip Levine, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1995, has been named the 18th poet laureate of the United States.

The appointment of Levine, who at 83 is one of the oldest poet laureates, was announced Wednesday by Librarian of Congress James Billington.

Levine, of Fresno, Calif., is the author of 20 collections of poems, including “The Simple Truth,” for which he won the Pulitzer Prize.

“Philip Levine is one of America’s great narrative poets,” Billington said. “His plainspoken lyricism has, for half a century, championed the art of telling ‘The Simple Truth’—about working in a Detroit auto factory, as he has, and about the hard work we do to make sense of our lives.” Read more »

The System Works | National Review Online

Of all the endlessly repeated conventional wisdom in today’s Washington, the most lazy, stupid, and ubiquitous is that our politics is broken. On the contrary. Our political system is working well (I make no such claims for our economy), indeed, precisely as designed — profound changes in popular will translated into law that alters the nation’s political direction.

by Charles Krauthammer

The process has been messy, loud, disputatious, and often rancorous. So what? In the end, the system works. Exhibit A is Wisconsin. Exhibit B is Washington itself.

The story begins in 2008. The country, having lost confidence in Republican governance, gives the Democrats full control of Washington. The new president, deciding not to waste a crisis, attempts a major change in the nation’s ideological trajectory. Hence his two signature pieces of legislation: a near–$1 trillion stimulus, the largest spending bill in galactic history; and a health-care reform that places one-sixth of the economy under federal control.

In a country where conservatives outnumber liberals 2–1, this causes a reaction. In the 2010 midterms, Democrats suffer a massive repudiation at every level. In Washington, Democrats suffer the greatest loss of House seats since 1948. In the states, they lose over 700 state legislative seats — the largest reversal ever — resulting in the loss of 20 state chambers. Read more »

Obama's Ramadan Dinner Guest List Hides Attendance of Stealth Jihadists Tied to Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood Atlas Shrugs

Obama's seditious Ramadan dinner is the consummate achievement of the stealth jihad. Allahu FUBAR!

First, I blogged that Obama honored the sacrifices that Muslim Americans made on 911 and 'the sacrifices that Muslim Americans have made for the country,' while not pointing out their true contribution to America.

If that wasn't subversive enough, we discover that the Obama White House is covering up the Muslim Brotherhood proxies and stealth jihadists at the Ramadan celebration bombathon.

Why are they hiding? Because they know. And they know that we know.

Obama's Iftar guest list omitted attendees with links to Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood. - Jihad Watch

Read more »

Bachmann Wins Iowa Straw Poll, Cements Her Top-Tier Status in GOP Race | FoxNews.com

AMES, IOWA –  Rep. Michele Bachmann won the Iowa Straw Poll Saturday, affirming her status as a top-tier candidate in the Republican race to challenge President Obama in 2012.

Bachmann received 28 percent of the nearly 17,000 votes cast. Texas Rep. Ron Paul was close behind her with 27 percent. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty came in a distant third with 13 percent of the vote, followed by former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum with 9 percent and businessman Herman Cain with 8 percent. Read more »