It's the Ideology: emotionally disturbed media parsing Mumbai

(Ocean County Register, Steyn): "But we're in danger of missing the forest for the trees. The forest is the ideology. It's the ideology that determines whether you can find enough young hotshot guys in the neighborhood willing to strap on a suicide belt or (rather more promising as a long-term career) at least grab an AK-47 and shoot up a hotel lobby. Or, if active terrorists are a bit thin on the ground, whether you can count at least on some degree of broader support on the ground. You're sitting in some distant foreign capital but you're of a mind to pull off a Mumbai-style operation in, say, Amsterdam or Manchester or Toronto. Where would you start? Easy. You know the radical mosques, and the other ideological front organizations. You've already made landfall.

• It's missing the point to get into debates about whether this is the
  

• "Deccan Mujahideen" or the ISI or al-Qaida or Lashkar-e-Taiba. That's a reductive argument. It could be all or none of them.
  

• The ideology has been so successfully seeded around the world that nobody needs a memo from corporate HQ to act: There are so many of these subgroups and individuals that they intersect across the planet in a million different ways.
  

It's not the Cold War, with a small network of deep sleepers being directly controlled by Moscow. There are no membership cards, only an ideology. That's what has radicalized hitherto moderate Muslim communities from Indonesia to the central Asian 'stans to Yorkshire, and co-opted what started out as more or less conventional nationalist struggles in the Caucasus and the Balkans into mere tentacles of the global jihad.

• Many of us, including the incoming Obama administration,
  

• look at this as a law-enforcement matter.
  

• Mumbai is a crime scene, so let's surround the perimeter with yellow police tape, send in the forensics squad, and then wait for the D.A. to file charges.

There was a photograph that appeared in many of the British papers, taken by a Reuters man and captioned by the news agency as follows: "A suspected gunman walks outside the premises of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus or Victoria Terminus railway station."

• The photo of the "suspected gunman" showed a man holding a gun.
  

• We don't know much about him – he might be Muslim or Episcopalian, he might be an impoverished uneducated victim of Western colonialist economic oppression or
  

• a former vice-president of Lehman Brothers embarking on an exciting midlife career change –
  

but one thing we ought to be able to say for certain is that a man pointing a gun is not

• a "suspected gunman" but a gunman.
  

"This kind of silly political correctness infects reporters and news services worldwide," wrote John Hinderaker of Powerline. "They think they're being scrupulous – the man hasn't been convicted of being a gunman yet! – when, in fact, they're just being foolish. But the irrational conviction that nothing can be known

• unless it has been determined by a court and jury isn't just silly, it's dangerous."

Just so. This isn't law enforcement but an ideological assault –

• and we're fighting the symptoms not the cause.
  

Islamic imperialists want an Islamic society, not just in Palestine and Kashmir but in the Netherlands and Britain, too. Their chances of getting it will be determined by the ideology's advance among the general Muslim population, and the general Muslim population's demographic advance among everybody else.

So Bush is history, and we have a new president who promises to heal the planet, and yet the jihadists don't seem to have got the Obama message that there are no enemies, just friends we haven't yet held talks without preconditions with. This isn't about repudiating the Bush years, or withdrawing from Iraq, or even liquidating Israel. It's bigger than that.

• And if you don't have a strategy for beating back the ideology, you'll lose.

Whoops, my apologies. I mean "suspected ideology.""

George Bush beats Obama to the punch--turns over US economy to European Fabian Socialists via G20 Meeting

• If you like socialism, you might not like "Fabian Socialism." It works slowly behind the scenes without the knowledge of most citizens.
  

"The results of the G-20 economic summit amount to nothing less than the seamless integration of the United States into the European economy. In one month of legislation and one diplomatic meeting, the United States has unilaterally abdicated all the gains for the concept of free markets won by the Reagan administration and surrendered, in toto, to the Western European model of socialism, stagnation and excessive government regulation. Sovereignty is out the window. Without a vote, we are suddenly members of the European Union. Given the dismal record of those nations at creating jobs and sustaining growth, merger with the Europeans is like a partnership with death.

At the G-20 meeting, Bush agreed to subject the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and our other regulatory agencies to the supervision of a global entity that would critique its regulatory standards and demand changes if it felt they were necessary. Bush agreed to create a College of Supervisors.

• According to The Washington Post, it would "examine the books of major financial institutions that operate across national borders so regulators could begin to have a more complete picture of banks' operations."

Their scrutiny would extend to hedge funds and to various "exotic" financial instruments. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), a European-dominated operation, would conduct "regular vigorous reviews" of American financial institutions and practices. The European-dominated College of Supervisors would also weigh in on issues like executive compensation and investment practices.

There is nothing wrong with the substance of this regulation. Experience is showing it is needed. But it is very wrong to delegate these powers to unelected, international institutions with no political accountability.

• We have a Securities and Exchange Commission appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, both of whom are elected by the American people. It is with the SEC, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve that financial accountability must take place.

The European Union achieved this massive subrogation of American sovereignty the way it usually does, by negotiation, gradual bureaucratic encroachment, and without asking the voters if they approve. What's more, Bush appears to have gone down without a fight,"...

• from Townhall.com

Academic credentials of Dr. Allen Hershkowitz, CCNY product

Hershkowitz is routinely identified as NRDC "senior scientist," but his academic credentials say he majored in politics and money--no science mentioned. He is what he seems --a professional shuck and jive artist out of the 1970's CCNY mold:

"He received his Ph.D. in political economics from the City University of New York Graduate School in 1986, specializing in energy resources economics;

• an M. Phil in political economics in 1982;

• a B.A. (cum laude) from the City College of New York in 1978,

• and; a Certificat D’assiduite from the University of Grenoble in 1975." GoGreenExpo.com (item at end of article)

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The real drag on the McCain-Palin ticket

• via Lucianne.com

On news of Obama's election, Russian Pres. sets off missiles in Europe

"President Dmitri Medvedev took advantage of the euphoria in America today to order the deployment of missiles inside Europe as a response to US plans for a missile defence shield.

• Speaking within hours of Barack Obama's election as the new US President, Mr Medvedev announced that Russia would base Iskander missiles in its Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad next to the border with Poland.

He did not say whether the short-range missiles would carry nuclear warheads. Mr Medvedev also cancelled earlier plans to withdraw three intercontinental ballistic missile regiments from western Russia."...