The Swedish Model: Government Austerity
Sweden, like Norway, is often held up as a country which is “socialist and successful.” For example, Sweden has high taxes yet also has had healthy economic growth recently. In this century so far, Sweden’s total tax bite amounted to 52% of GDP, while the U.S.’s was 32%. Yet Sweden’s real GDP grew 2.3% per year from 2001 to 2011, and ours grew only 1.6% per year. Prima facie evidence that high taxes don’t kill an economy, right?
In July I deconstructed the Norwegian “Miracle,” the other “socialist and successful” country. It’s Sweden’s turn now.
Sweden, like Norway, consists of a small, not very diverse, mostly white and Christian people. Its population is 9.1 million — a bit less than North Carolina’s. (There are 13 cities in the world with bigger populations.) Not only are native Swedes white, but so are most of Sweden’s immigrants. The CIA World Factbook lists its immigrants as “Finns, Yugoslavs, Danes, Norwegians, Greeks, Turks.” And 85% of that population is Lutheran; 85% live incities – 22% in the Stockholm area itself. (Read more…)
AJC 2012 Survey of American Jewish Opinion
AJC’s survey of 1,040 American Jews was conducted by GfK, September 6 – 17, 2012. Margin of error is plus or minus five percent. AJC is a 501(c)(3) organization that neither supports nor opposes candidates for elected office. Conducted annually since 1990, AJC surveys often are cited as an authoritative barometer of American Jewish opinion on a range of issues.
1. Where would you place yourself on this scale?
| Liberal | 26.6% |
| Lean Liberal | 20.4% |
| Moderate, middle of the road | 33.9% |
| Lean Conservative | 11.3% |
| Conservative | 7.4% |
Israel Stands Alone
The world’s best-known secret has finally been revealed: the United States and Israel do not see eye-to-eye on Iran’s nuclear program.
In an unusually public ping-pong, the Obama administration rebuffed an Israeli effort to clarify America’s Iranian “red lines,” the point at which it would agree that its negotiations-cum-sanctions strategy has failed and it would take military action to stop the Iranian nuclear project.(Read more…)
National “Jewish” “Democratic” Council: Obama Supports Israel 
by Bill Levinson
Smears, Lies and Videotape: RJC and the Day After Yom Kippur by David Harris, head of the National Judenrat Democratic Kapos confirms what we have said for a long time: there is a “denomination” of Jewish voters who will vote for anything, and we mean anything, with a D after its name.
- WASHINGTON, DC- The National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) today denounced the Republican Jewish Coalition’s new video attacking President Barack Obama’s excellent record of support for Israel.
“Support for Israel” = telling the Arabs that the status of Jerusalem is negotiable and that Israel must give up land for peace, and acquiescing to Iran’s production of nuclear weapons. This is of course the same National Judenrat Democratic Kapos that used its purportedly Jewish identity to whitewash MoveOn’s promotion of anti-Semitic (and anti-Catholic) hate speech while posting the anti-Christian hate video “Bubbie versus the GOP.” The video featured Jesus, Evangelical Christians, and the Cross in a “This is the Enemy” context.
Criminalizing the Defamation of Islam
By Amil Imani, American Thinker
Nothing prompts the hundreds of ordinarily feuding and fighting sects of Islam to come together like the slightest disrespect shown to the founder of their religion or their religious sanctity. With the slightest hint from their vested-interest clergy and politicians, mobs of Muslims pour into the streets in a frenzy, burning things, destroying buildings, and killing people they consider, however remotely, complicit in defaming Islam.(Read more…)
Treif Alert for Jewish Voters
by Bill Levinson
Treif Alert for Jewish Voters
Next: Al Sharpton raps for the Obama campaign. (Read more…)
Wild Bill Stands With Israel
Laura: I have said often that devout American Christians are more solid and trustworthy allies of Israel then Jewish liberals.
MSM Tipping Point On Obama in the Middle East?
The repercussions from 9/11/12—the day the roof fell in on the Obama administration’s Middle East policy—continue to rumble across the diplomatic and political landscapes. Before that day, much of the country’s political and media establishment had been studiously ignoring signs of trouble in the Middle East or, when problems were too serious to ignore, studiously refraining from drawing conclusions about the overall state of US policy in the region.
The anti-American riots that have been rocking the Muslim world since 9/11 have shaken the establishment out of its complacency. Increasingly, even those who sympathize with the basic elements of the administration’s Middle East policy are connecting the dots. What they are seeing isn’t pretty. It’s not just that the US remains widely disliked and distrusted in the region. It’s not just that the radicals and the jihadis have demonstrated more political sophistication and a greater ability to organize and strike than expected and that the struggle against radical terror looks longer lasting and more dangerous than thought; it’s that the strategic underpinnings of the administration’s Middle East policy seem to be falling apart. A series of crises is sweeping through the region, and the US does not—at least not yet—seem to have a clue what to do. (Read more…)
Mitt Romney: A New Course for the Middle East
Restore the three sinews of American influence: our economic strength, our military strength and the strength of our values.
Disturbing developments are sweeping across the greater Middle East. In Syria, tens of thousands of innocent people have been slaughtered. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has come to power, and the country’s peace treaty with Israel hangs in the balance. In Libya, our ambassador was murdered in a terrorist attack. U.S. embassies throughout the region have been stormed in violent protests. And in Iran, the ayatollahs continue to move full tilt toward nuclear-weapons capability, all the while promising to annihilate Israel.(Read more…)
Huckabee: Obama’s Libya cover-up worse than Watergate
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee on Friday said the American people “have flat-out been lied to” by President Barack Obama and his administration about the violence in Libya — and this cover-up is worse than Richard Nixon’s scandal because “nobody died in Watergate.”
“Let’s just get blunt. No way to sugar coat this — We’ve been lied to. We have flat-out been lied to. They know they’ve lied,” Huckabee told Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom.” “It’s as if airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center and somebody says, ‘those were just accidents. The planes veered off course.’ Everybody with two eyes and IQ above plant life understands that what happened in Egypt and what happened in Libya was not some spontaneous reaction to a stupid 13-minute video on YouTube. It was a planned, coordinated, orchestrated attack led by terrorists.”(Read more…)
Why Arabs are so Easily Offended
The writer analyzes a culture that is diametrically opposed to what we are taught.Ron Jager, INN.com
“Call me Ishmael”, is the opening sentence that opens the novel “Moby Dick” authored by Herman Melville. Ishmael, who is telling the story of Moby Dick, recounts that he is sailing to sea out of a sense of alienation and cultural inadequacy.
Ishmael describes the behavior of Captain Ahab who is so relentless in his obsession to kill the great white whale, that he is willing to endanger the entire ship, all of his sailors, just to kill the great white whale. The name Ishmael, the son of the Patriarch Abraham from the old Testament as well as the Koran symbolizes more than anything the sense of being rejected and being scorned my one’s peer’s and by one’s civilization.(Read more…)
‘UNSKEWED’ POLLS SHOW NEARLY 8-POINT ROMNEY LEAD
Website adjusts major surveys by ‘removing Democratic Party bias’Jerome R. Corsi, a Harvard Ph.D., is a WND senior staff reporter.NEW YORK – Arguing that most of the major polls reported by establishment media are “skewed” in favor of the Democratic Party and incumbent Barack Obama, a website contends that a true gauge of the presidential race, based on more realistic models, shows Republican challenger Mitt Romney leading by an average of nearly eight points.In its daily readjustment of the polling data, UnskewedPoll.com also produces a table showing the spread in President Obama’s approval/disapproval ratio is an average of 8.8 percent more disapproval, as of Monday. (Read more…)
Ted Belman
Jerusalem, Israel
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