Stephanie Cutter: "Benghazi Only an Issue Because of Romney & Ryan"

From RedState "Obama Campaign Official Stephanie Cutter: Benghazi Terrorist Attack ‘Only an Issue because of Romney and Ryan’":

STEPHANIE CUTTER: In terms of the politicization of this — you know, we are here at a debate, and I hope we get to talk about the debate — but the entire reason this has become the political topic it is, is because of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. It’s a big part of their stump speech. And it’s reckless and irresponsible what they’re doing.

BROOKE BALDWIN: But, Stephanie, this is national security. As we witnessed this revolution last year, we covered it–

CUTTER: It is absolutely national security–

BALDWIN: –it is absolutely pertinent. People in the American public absolutely have a right to get answers.

Newcastle Muslim Players Not Wearing Club Shirt with Wonga Logo

Demba Ba, Papiss Cisse, Cheick Tiote and Hatem Ben Arfa, four Muslim players of the English Premier League team Newcastle United, could refuse to wear their club's new shirt.

Newcastle United's new sponsor is the loan company Wonga, and Islamic Sharia law forbids interest on money lent. Interest is not paid on Islamic bank accounts.

This Islamic prohibition on interest is the reason why the UK's previous Labour government secretly created a loophole allowing Muslims to take a property mortgage without paying interest, which also makes it cheaper for them than for everybody else.

We are all equal before the law but some are more equal than others. When some non-Muslims discovered the loophole and exploited it for themselves, the discovery caused outrage among the British public opinion who was until then unaware of this privilege given to Muslims.

Now the Muslim players of Newcastle United may decide not to wear the shirt with the logo of Wonga.

What is puzzling, though, is that they wore shirts with logos of previous sponsors like Virgin Money, as can be seen from the video above, which was lending money with interest.

This is very similar to Muslims rioting in half the globe for a video posted on YouTube when there are dozens or even hundreds of similar videos on the internet, many of which can be considered as much or even more offensive to extra-sensitive Muslims.

Could it be that we see here the well-known problem of Muslim inbreeding at work?

How To Lie to the Infidels

Pakistani cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan held a rally against CIA drone attacks in Pakistan. Of course, you never hear him complain about what Pakistani Muslims do to the country’s Christians with its infamous blasphemy law.

But that is the thing: whereas the traditionally Christian countries of the West always point the fingers at themselves first and foremost, Muslims hardly ever criticize their own, preferring to find faults with other people. That moral difference is, among many others, due to the gulf between our different roots: Christianity and Islam.

We’ll hear a lot of talk on how drones have the effect of radicalizing young Muslims and similar inanities. All they need to get radicalized and become jihadists is not drones, but a good copy of the Quran and, if they are illiterate, someone to read it to them.

Throughout the last decades there has always been a purported “reason” why Muslims became terrorists, except the real one: their pseudo-religion.

Let’s get a clear insight from the horse’s mouth. In the article I was a fanatic… I know their thinking, says former radical Islamist, former British jihadist Hassan Butt candidly explains the “double-talk” used by Islamists. To us, the enemy, they use the propaganda of Muslim tit for Western tat, retaliation for what we supposedly did to them. But in reality the hostility towards the kuffars (highly derogatory Arabic term for non-Muslims) is eternally founded on Islamic theology and does not require pretexts or excuses.

This auto-biographical article is precious because it is one of the few instances in which Islamists tell the truth to us infidels.

Butt wrote after the London and Glasgow terrorist plots:

I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like 9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy.

By blaming the Government for our actions, those who pushed this “Blair’s bombs” line did our propaganda work for us.

More important, they also helped to draw away any critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

The attempts to cause mass destruction in London and Glasgow are so reminiscent of other recent British Islamic extremist plots that they are likely to have been carried out by my former peers.

And as with previous terror attacks, people are again saying that violence carried out by Muslims is all to do with foreign policy.

For example, on Saturday on Radio 4′s Today programme, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, said: “What all our intelligence shows about the opinions of disaffected young Muslims is the main driving force is not Afghanistan, it is mainly Iraq.”

I left the British Jihadi Network in February 2006 because I realised that its members had simply become mindless killers. But if I were still fighting for their cause, I’d be laughing once again.

And he’d be laughing again now, hearing that CIA drones are the new excuse du jour.

Senegalese Immigrants in Italy Want Protection Money for Parking

The above video from a local Sardinian newspaper, translated by me, is about a crime of intimidation by a group of Senegalese immigrants in the capital of Sardinia, Cagliari.

A couple refused to pay the "parking fee" to one of them, an extortion since the Senegalese man has no right on the par cark, a sort of protection money. After their refusal, he then tried to sell them his merchandise.

When they refused again, he became menacing and called a group of his countrymen and mates who surrounded the car, not letting the Italian couple get out of it and threatening them, until they eventually called the police. The Senegalese man was also abusive to the police and got arrested for that as well.

This is a common phenomenon in Italy now. For a few decades there have been what Italians call "vu' cumpra'" (the Italian phrase "want to buy?" distorted by the vendors' poor Italian language skills). These pedlars are usually black African immigrants selling their merchandise on beaches, in restaurants, streets, car parks and so on.

Italian blogger Pietro Melis says in his post titled "Here are the fruits of the do-gooders philosophy":

It is not clear why there is no law preventing from staying in Italy those who do not have a legally paid employed position which, in addition, has not been taken away from unemployed Italians willing to do the same job. The others out, return them to their country. For them there is no place.

The do-gooders philosophy, which kills justice, in the confusion between morality and law, has led to the expansion of what Marx called a "reserve army" of the unemployed which has the effect of keeping wages low with the blackmail of dismissal and replacement with a lower-cost unemployed.

The reported episode [described above] highlights an intolerable situation.

These "vu' cumprà'" must get out of the way. Must be driven back to their countries because they are illegal.

They sell ​​merchandise produced outside the law, squat on public land, do not pay taxes and create unfair and illegal competition. And continually bother you on the beach.

But nobody intervenes because of the do-gooders philosophy, lest you get accused of racism. And with this excuse they do what they want, even becoming violent.

They have also for a long time now formed a gang that claims the payment of protection money in addition to the ordinary parking fee, so you have to pay twice. And you have to pay protection money even for parking where there is no fee. Otherwise you may find that your car has been damaged, at least with a mark on the body. And no-one intervenes and throws them out of car parks.

And they are mostly Islamic. We are victims of a policy that has bred a culture of the multiracial and multicultural society, with all the consequences that we can see.

Indigenous crime was not enough. It was necessary to import other crime. Prisons are overcrowded because half the prison population is made up of foreigners. This is the beautiful result of a crazy policy.

Notice how, at the end of the video above, another African immigrant says to the newspaper reporter that he heard the Italian woman use expletives against the Senegalese. The police had no evidence for that and, given the limited command of the Italian language shown by the "witness", it's hard to know what he actually did or did not hear.

Thank God Italy does not have, like the UK, a Macpherson Report dictating: "A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person".

But it's only a question of time.

Misery of Relativism

There is objectivity in epistemology, in matters of what is true or false.

There is objectivity in ethics, in matters of what is right or wrong.

There is objectivity in aesthetics, in matters of what is beautiful or ugly.

The fact that these things are difficult to achieve and that we don't always know if and when we have achieved objective truth or rightness or beauty should not be confused with the fact that they don't exist. That would be confusing the subjective with the objective.

Legalizing Infanticide or Limiting Abortion

UK Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has said that the legal time limit on abortion should be halved from 24 weeks as it is now in the UK to 12 weeks, although Home Secretary Theresa May, interviewed yesterday about the extradition to the USA of Abu Hamza and other four suspect terrorists, has made it clear that the government does not intend to follow that recommendation.

On the question of abortion, I think that the debate has been too fixated on some "demarcation points", magic moments where the moral status of the organism would suddenly change.

Typically these are two: the moment of conception and that of birth. No doubt these are crucial biologically, but biology should not necessarily dictate ethics.

The moral philosopher Peter Singer was right when he wrote some considerations to the effect that there is nothing about birth that can alter the morally relevant characteristics of a being.

A foetus one day before birth is very much like a baby after birth. This argument has been used by Peter Singer, and now by others following his argument, to justify infanticide. The BMJ's Journal of Medical Ethics published in February 2012 an article entitled "After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?", which repeats what Singer says. This could be the slippery slope that the pro-life campaigners have warned about.

Obama has been accused of legalizing infanticide for voting three times in the Illinois Senate against the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act, which was designed to ensure that, if a live baby fully emerged before an abortion was successfully completed, the baby would be saved.

Singer's argument is logic, indeed is what I always thought even before reading his books. But it coud be used in the opposite direction, to cast ethical doubts on the acceptability of abortions in advanced stages of pregnancy. There are foetuses perfectly viable at 6 months, the time when abortions are still allowed by the UK law. Premature babies can survive, sometimes in incubators.

I suggest that maybe we should think in terms of degrees of increasing moral worth, rather than a clearcut demarcation line - be it conception or birth, neither of which per se, and especially birth, is conducive to difference in morally relevant characteristics of the being in question.

The moral and legal answer to the question of allowing abortion should not, perhaps, be a black-or-white yes or no, but depending on many curcumstances, and very prominet among those should be the age of the embryo or foetus.

What is absurd is for women to shut all the discussion by saying "it's my body, so I decide".

It makes as much sense as for a killer to say "I used my hand to kill, the hand is part of my body, therefore no-one can tell me what I can or cannot do with it".

 The fact remains that, even if a foetus is inside a woman's body, it is still a different living, and in some stages sentient being, so should not be treated just like an appendix of her body.

First Obama-Romney Debate

Romney clearly dominated the discussion. Obama lacked bite, probably because he already has four years of presidency behind him, during which he knew that he failed.

Romney was much more concrete, and his superior experience both in business and as state governor of Massachusetts to Obama, whose only experience has been as an inept president, one of the worst in American history, showed.

Obama had four minutes more in the debate than he should have had, but then we know that he is the darling of the media who let him off the hook and let him get away with anything.

When all is said and done, Obama has already had a go at the job and failed at it miserably. At least Romney hasn't tried yet. He should be given the benefit of the doubt.

If I were undecided (and American) that's how I would go about it. It would be the most scientific, empirical, evidence-based method to decide coeteris paribus.

But all the rest is not equal. Romney's arguments are much stronger, more solid and well-founded.

The objection made to Romney by Obama that he didn't give,offer specific enough details of his plans, whether in healthcare, tax or financial regulations, echoed by some commentators, is not a negative point at all. This just highlights the difference between Democrats and Republicans: the latter don't want the President to have a too much detailed plan in advance to impose on the nation, whether people want it or not and whether Congress accepts it or not. Like Obamacare for instance.

The President for them must show flexibility, adaptability, the willingness to compromise with political opponents and above all a clear sense of the limits of government.

This first debate focused largely on the economy,  an area of which - welfare - is the territory of what the media  called Romney’s gaffe, wherewas in fact it was his telling the truth.

Leftist parties - and I'm talking generally here, not just about the US - are often repeatedly voted in power even after failure because of a form of bribe.

There have been cases of political candidates, of all colours, who would pay individuals to vote for them. I think that parties of the Left can do exactly the same although on a much bigger scale: many people vote for them in exchange for benefits, tax credits and all the rest of the enormous welfare machine that was among the causes of many countries' economic collapse.

Melanie Phillips puts it this way: “The general point that too much of America is being sucked into state dependency – and that by increasing their number Obama is effectively gerrymandering the election -- remains a powerful one.”

When people talk about joblessness as if it were an inexorable fate, I find it risible. It’s not all that difficult, even for the not too intelligent, to buy and resell stuff from a market stall, for instance.

People who made a fortune like the British magnate Alan Sugar often started with nothing. Sugar is keen to recount how he began when he was still at school, buying from warehouse and selling to his schoolmates. That doesn’t take a genius or a rich family, does it?

In certain cities, like London (and I suspect there will be cities like that in America), it’s almost impossible not to find a job. It may not be a high-flying post, but there is always some business looking for help.

Similarly, when I hear politicians say that “people are hurting”, I find that an exaggeration. People were hurting during the Second World War, in past ages when they were going hungry, and now in some parts of the Third World.

The reality is that many people in the West had got used to spending more than they had and could afford, and now that they can’t do that anymore they “are hurting”. I suppose you can call it that if you are a shopaholic or if you are addicted to certain material goods, but then it’s a case of withdrawal symptoms so hurting does you good.

The fixation with “keeping up with the Joneses” is something that many will have to learn to discard. But it wasn’t a healthy attitude anyway. There is no harm or “hurt” in that. People just have to learn to live within their means, that’s all. And that includes, first and foremost, the government.