November 29, 2012

Lethal Shiite Iranian Jew-Hatred, Despite Abject Dhimmitude

Lethal Shiite Iranian Jew-Hatred, Despite Abject Dhimmitude

November 29, 2012

Lethal Shiite Iranian Jew-Hatred, Despite Abject Dhimmitude

Andrew Bostom
I have written repeatedly and at length (here, here 1,2,3,  and here) about the visceral, najis ("infidel impurity")-inspired, intermittently apocalyptic (and certainly at present) Islamic Jew-hatred that has pervaded Iranian Muslim society since the nation became a Shiite theocracy ~ 1502, under Shah Ismail.
Despite being only a vestigial, vanishingly small minority that lives in abject, crushing dhimmitude, here is a pathognomonic contemporary example of how Iranian Jew-hatred manifests itself at present-past as prologue.
As reported by UPI, today (11/29/12):
A Jewish woman was stabbed to death in Isfahan, Iran, in what her family said was a religiously motivated crime....[The] 57-year-old woman, identified as Tuba N., was killed Monday, allegedly by her Muslim neighbors, who had been trying to drive the family from their home and confiscate their property, which is adjacent to a mosque..."The religious radicals even expropriated part of the house and attached it to the mosque's courtyard. The Jewish family appealed to the courts ... despite the threats to their lives. Thugs broke into her home, tied up her two sisters who were living with her, and repeatedly stabbed her to death.
The attackers then removed her hands. [emphasis added]
The killing occurred while the woman's husband was in Tehran.
...[M]embers of the city's dwindling Jewish community fear further bloodshed. Isfahan, the third largest city in Iran, was home to some 1,200 Jews in 2009. Now, however, ... estimates [are] fewer than 100 families remain.
... Iranian authorities attempted to cover up the killing and have yet to return the woman's body to her family.


Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/11/lethal_shiite_iranian_jew-hatred_despite_abject_dhimmitude.html#ixzz2DdT69Fwq

November 12, 2012

333,000 Votes in 4 Swing States Would Have Given Romney the Presidency

333,000 Votes in 4 Swing States Would Have Given Romney the Presidency



333,000 VOTES IN 4 SWING STATES WOULD HAVE GIVEN ROMNEY THE PRESIDENCY

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On November 6,  2012, 3.2 million fewer Americans voted for Mitt Romney than President Obama. 61.8 million Americans voted for Obama, while only 58.6 million voted for Romney.

Despite losing the popular vote 51% to 48%--not a landslide for Obama by any means, but on the other hand not the “neck and neck” outcome many predicted--Mitt Romney would be President today if he had secured 333,908 more votes in four key swing states.
The final electoral college count gave President Obama a wide 332 to 206 margin over Romney. 270 electoral college votes are needed to win the Presidency.
Romney lost New Hampshire’s 4 electoral college votes by a margin of 40,659. Obama won with 368,529 to Romney’s  327,870.
Romney lost Florida’s 29 electoral college votes  by a margin of 73,858. Obama won with 4,236,032 to Romney's 4,162,174.
Romney lost Ohio’s 18 electoral college votes by a margin of 103,481. Obama won with 2,697,260 to Romney’s 2,593,779 
Romney lost Virginia’s 13 electoral college votes by a margin of 115,910. Obama won with 1,905,528 to Romney’s  1,789,618.
Add the 64 electoral college votes from this switch of 333,908 votes in these four key states to Romney’s 206, remove them from Obama’s 332, and Romney defeats Obama 270 to 268.
Overall, voter turnout was down, from 131 million in 2008 to 122 million in 2012. Obama won 7.6 million fewer votes than he did in 2008, and Romney won 1.3 million fewer than McCain in 2008.
Romney improved his vote total's over McCain's by the slightest amount in three of these four states, but in Ohio, he actually had 81,000 fewer votes than McCain in 2008.
What do these facts tell us?
Both parties lost support of the population in the four years between 2008 and 2012. While Obama lost more support, he started with more, and he was able to hang on to enough of his base to overcome Romney's inability to keep and expand his base.
Obama’s victory doesn’t constitute a mandate for his far left agenda to “transform America” into some nightmarish amalgam combining the worst features of a European socialist state with an Indonesian oligarchy.
This election was not about grand vision. It was about small details and focused pandering to specific demographic groups.
The Obama campaign performed its nationally divisive mission of small ball with excellence and focus. In contrast, the Romney campaign failed in the basic nuts and bolts of campaigning and lost focus on the four key states that mattered by diverting the candidate's time and the campaign's financial resources to states that didn't matter.
While Romney campaigned in Ohio on Election Day, his last campaign event took place in Pennsylvania, where he didn't have a chance. Romney had no election day campaign stops in Virginia or Florida, though he did have an election eve event in New Hampshire.
An even more critical error took place in the diversion of financial resources from Virginia, Florida, New Hampshire, Ohio to "expand the map" and buy expensive television ad time in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Pennsylvania. This grand strategy, developed by Karl Rove's Crossroads Group and influenced by senior campaign advisor Ed Gillespie, was a fatal error in crucial last weeks of the campaign.
Combining the "expand the map" error with an ineffective, highly centralized, last minute get-out-the-vote effort that fizzled, and there was no way for candidate Romney to overcome the blunders of his campaign team on election day. The  Republican Party/Romney campaign get-out-the-vote effort was a debacle of mind-boggling proportion, capped off by an epic election day fail of its never before tested multi-million dollar ORCA software program.
For the Republicans to retain the House and take the Senate in 2014, and then the Presidency in 2016, conservatives are going to have to improve their ground game dramatically. Democrats work at this for every one of the four years before the next Presidential election. It's time for conservatives to do the same.

November 06, 2012

My Vote Next Week - wstreet.com

My Vote Next Week - wstreet.com

My Vote Next Week

11/1/2012
By Charles Payne, CEO & Principal Analyst
A few years ago I appeared on the Glenn Beck show and discussed my "briefcase" story about how my best Christmas present ever was destroyed at my junior high school in Harlem.  Glenn asked if we could take a tour and so the next week we headed uptown for a special show.  Toward the end Glenn asked who I voted for.  I said Barack Obama and explained not for political reasons but to repay a debt and I mentioned Rosa Parks.  A lot of people I've never met were seriously upset and disappointed.
If there was more time I would have explained my vote in greater detail not to appease anyone but to illuminate my thinking, my family's history and America's history.
As a child I used to visit my grandparents a lot in the heart of Alabama.  Back then those visits were grueling.  Using the bathroom in an outhouse and washing by standing up in a metal tub because they had no indoor plumbing until the mid 1970s.  Yet, even then I knew my grandparents were special people.  In the heart of the south during turbulent and dangerous times for black people they carved out a big piece of land that had crops, cows, chickens, pigs and a couple of horses.  (One summer my grandfather told me this brown and white cow was mine filling with pride and a sense of wealth I carried throughout my childhood.)  In addition to their house there was another, cobbled together like an abstract painting, down yonder.

My grandfather used to wear shoes that were so turned up they almost pointed true north.  He ate with his fingers in an elegant and efficient manner and knew how to get everything done.  My grandmother was rugged and fierce.  I would watch her work the iron stove with astonishment as she moved wood around with her hands impervious to fire and hot embers.   With all due respect to Scarlett Johansson my grandmother was a real life super hero.  Together my grandparents were the kind of rugged individuals that built their lives without handouts but single-minded determination.
Yet, I always felt a sense of worry about a kind of fear and kind of violence that permeated the air.  That aura hit me when we went to a nearby wooden shack that served as a candy and soda pop store.  Run by an old blind white women I used to wonder how come people didn't just take stuff and run.  Sure, there was southern hospitality and honor that still is distinctly different than attitudes up north but there was also that aura of a kind of punishment that would go beyond basic justice.  That aura of fear always hurt my feelings.
You see, my superhero grandmother never used a pillow when she slept; instead she would simply cross her arms.  She slept that way so she could hear the nightriders.  Living a proud and resourceful life through those conditions put me and my cousins and now our children in a position to better experience the American Dream.  For that I will be forever grateful.  It was a debt I thought I could partially repay in the voting booth four years ago.  I was planning to vote for McCain but months but the fact is his campaign was a disaster.  Stopping for TARP only to vote for it and muffling Sarah Palin while underplaying his experience at the exact moment the nation needed experience was frustrating and made my decision easier.
Fast forward to the present and what will drive my vote for the White House this time.  Well, it's going to come back to the notion of debt.   A few weeks ago I became a grandfather for the first time with the arrival of little Cassidy into the world.
At 4 pounds twelve ounces she is so tiny and so precious.  I know I have to be a warrior to make her path in life easier for her to pursue happiness.  With this role my main goal is to remove hurdles when and where I can.  Among them the giant debt America has piled up in the past four years.  Then there's the movement toward mediocrity, class envy as a weapon and less unity in the United States.
Four years ago I voted to repay a debt this time around I'm voting to remove debt.
This time around I'm voting to remove a different kind of aura of fear that's felt by all Americans- a fear we may no longer be the beacon of the world.  I'm voting for the right for people to be rugged individuals like my grandparents who did build it themselves.
I'm voting for baby Cassidy and all the babies of America for a chance to excel in an atmosphere of opportunity rather than shuffle along on a crutch of hope in the shadow of fear with the weight of massive financial debt.  This is not an endorsement, it's up to the candidates to convince voters who to pull the lever for, but people keep asking me.   I'm voting for Mitt Romney this time around.
Charles Payne
Charles Payne
Wall Street Strategies

After Sandy New Jersey Becomes Unwilling Test Case for Internet Voting - Arik Hesseldahl - News - AllThingsD

After Sandy New Jersey Becomes Unwilling Test Case for Internet Voting - Arik Hesseldahl - News - AllThingsD


After Sandy, New Jersey Becomes an Unwilling Test Case for Internet Voting

Holding an election is complicated. Holding an election eight days after a historically significant disaster? Probably exponentially so. This is the circumstance in which the state of New Jersey will find itself tomorrow.
Gov. Chris Christie has orderedcounties to provide ways for people who have been displaced by Hurricane Sandy to vote in Tuesday’s election by fax and email. The system will follow in part a similar scheme developed for New Jersey residents serving overseas in the military to cast their ballots.
To say that no one is going to be happy with the result, no matter what it is, is probably understating it. To the extent that the process is understood — it was at this writing still in the process of being implemented — it will work like this.
On Election Day, those who have not yet taken advantage of early voting opportunities must by 5 pm local time print and return either by email or fax an Electronic Ballot Application. (Some counties are using or accepting other forms. See this story at NJ.comfor more on that.) Once you’ve filled out and returned that form, you’ll get a response with instructions for how to vote, a secrecy waiver form and a ballot, all of which must be returned by 8 pm local time.
Military personnel are required to file a paper ballot by mail after sending an electronic vote, but right now there is some lack of clarity as to whether or not that will be required of displaced email and fax voters.
Alternately, if you are displaced, you can still vote in person by finding the nearest polling place and voting with a provisional ballot.
Laying aside the obvious fact that many people in New Jersey have more immediate concerns — staying warm, staying fed, rebuilding their lives in the wake of the disaster — the opportunities for difficulty and the risk of problems are, in theory, numerous.
Voting via the Internet can be done successfully when there is sufficient infrastructure in place to support it. The nation of Estonia, a former Soviet Republic, has allowed electronic voting since 2005 when it launched a pilot project to coincide with some municipal elections. That year only 9,800 people, or less than 2 percent of the more than 1 million eligible voters, voted electronically. Last year, the figure had risen above 140,000, or more than 15 percent of eligible voters.
Estonia has something that New Jersey doesn’t: A mandatory smart card ID. It looks like a state drivers license with a chip in it. The chip contains a set of cryptographic keys used to protect and authenticate the stored data, which includes the name, gender and other information about the person.
Email is by its nature inherently insecure. It can be spoofed, hacked, used to introduce malware into a target system and as the delivery mechanism for numerous other very bad things. There are an awful lot of people who work in the computer security business who will recoil at the very idea of the sanctity of democracy in New Jersey being entrusted to email.
There are additional security concerns: The servers receiving the votes will be connected to the Internet, and therefore vulnerable to remote attack. Shared computers in libraries and community centers where displaced people might vote will not have been properly secured in a way that will guarantee against tampering.
And even if secured in some way, what’s to stop some digital trouble makers — like, say, Anonymous to name but one — from launching a disruptive denial of service attack on some unsuspecting county, or indeed the entire state, as a way of proving some inane ideological point? The mind reels at all the ways that this could go wrong.
But let’s focus for a minute on what could go right. Despite the protestations of certain politically affiliated groups who would have you believe that voter fraud is a pervasive and widespread problem on a national scale, the American voting system tends to work pretty well. If you accept that the potential for voter fraud exists within a system that is far from perfect, people have tended not to take advantage of it. A five-year federal inquiry into voter fraud that ended in 2007 found that it happens so rarely as to be statistically non-existent.
Voting via traditional methods is by and large an honor system. Every time I stand in line at a polling place clutching my state drivers license and passport just in case, I’m always surprised that I rarely have to show it. New York is not a state with a voter-I.D. law. Neither is New Jersey. So when a person shows up at the proper polling place and his or her name appears on the list of registered voters, that person is allowed to vote. That same presumption of honesty should be broadly applied here, under the circumstances.
There will be losers, and they will be unhappy and will likely challenge the result. They will probably resort to the courts and demand complicated recounts if the results in various races are close. Nationally, New Jersey is not a swing state and it’s essentially a given that President Obama can count on winning its 14 electoral votes. The challenges will likely come in statewide and local races, but this is what courts are for: Settling disputes.
Barring a technical failure — the risk of which is admittedly real — there is no reason that electronic voting, selected as probably the least bad of a series of bad options, cannot be effective.
But the situation in New Jersey raises the question about why the voting process hasn’t modernized with the rest of society. New Jersey has become an unwilling test case to see if Internet voting can work in the country that invented the Internet.