"Stand for freedom"

(image by antiqueprints.com)


William Kristol gets it right on Egypt:

Stand for Freedom

Read the entire article here.

Obama´s Egypt envoy Frank Wisner - a total failure

When you put close friends of socialist dictator Mubarak in charge of dealing with the popular uprising in Egypt, you get what you deserve - a total failure.

Obama´s Egypt crisis envoy, former Enron man and close friend of Mubarak, Frank Wisner now openly sides with Mubarak and his henchmen:

"Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak must stay in power for now to steer the political transition, President Obama's special envoy for Egypt told reporters Saturday.

"We need to get a national consensus around the preconditions for the next step forward. The president must stay in office to steer those changes," Frank Wisner told a security conference in Munich, Germany, during a video conference from Washington, Reuters reported.
Wisner, former U.S. ambassador to Egypt and India who is seen as having a good relationship with the Mubarak regime, was dispatched to Cairo earlier this week by Obama to meet with Egyptian leaders.
"There is a chance to move forward," Wisner told the security conference Saturday. "It's fragile, it's the first stage, things could go wrong. But the direction is promising".

Read the entire LA Times article here.

I have sad it before, and I said it again: The inexperienced Obama has totally misjudged the situation in Egypt by putting Mubarak´s close friends Hillary Clinton and Frank Wisner in charge. To ignore the wishes of the great majority of Egyptians, who demand the immediate removal of Mubarak, is something the US is going to regret.

People are ready to sign almost anything - if its about the environment

This Penn and Teller video is not new, but the message it conveys is still very true; people easily can be duped into signing almost anything - particularly if it is in some way related to the environment or e.g. global warming. That´s why we should not take all the polls presented to us as facts seriously.

Watch the video here.

(image by bigfoto.com)

Ronald Reagan - a great American

Man is not free unless government is limited.
Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan - once so despised and ridiculed by "progressive" European leaders, journalists and "intellectuals" - would have been 100 on February 6. This weekend there will be a great number of articles about the centenary in newspapers all over the world. I will only refer to one of them, written by the veteran Washington Post journalist Lou Cannon, author of several books on Reagan:

On the eve of Ronald Reagan's election as president of the United States in 1980, a radio reporter asked him what it was that Americans saw in him. Reagan hesitated and then replied: "Would you laugh if I told you that I think maybe they see themselves and that I'm one of them?"

Thirty years and four presidents later, Americans still see themselves in Reagan. In a Gallup poll in 2009 they ranked Reagan as the best president, just ahead of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.
This highly generous assessment is based on more than likeability. Reagan left the world safer and the United States more prosperous than he found it. Even some liberal scholars who disdained Reagan when he was in the White House now acknowledge his effectiveness as a leader, especially his role in ending the Cold War. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, his partner in that enterprise, said at Reagan's funeral that the U.S. president was "an extraordinary political leader" who had "decided to be a peacemaker."
 ----
Reagan was at once a man of conviction who thought seriously about the great issues of his time and an ordinary American, never braggy, who treated his audiences -- all of us, really -- with consideration and respect. His greatest single quality was his self-deprecating humor, which came naturally to him and was honed into an effective political weapon. He made fun of his age, his work habits, his vanities, his ideology, his alleged lack of intelligence, and his supposed domination by his wife. When he was speaking to a political rally in Florida and a wind blew his speaking cards off a podium, Reagan picked them up, shuffled them together, and quipped that it really didn't matter what order they were in. When a reporter during the first gubernatorial campaign brought Reagan a studio picture showing him with the title chimpanzee in the movie "Bedtime for Bonzo," Reagan signed it and wrote, "I'm the one with the watch." On Air Force One he signed a picture of a sleeping Marlin Fitzwater, his press secretary, with the inscription, "Marlin, we're only supposed to do this at cabinet meetings."

Read the entire article here.


Of all the speeches Reagan gave, I think this one, deservedly, is the one that most people, at least in Europe, will remember and cherish:

EU to become "most climate-friendly region in the world"

Remember a few years ago, the European Union announced that by 2010 it would be  "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion". The programme that would produce this miraculous achievement was called the Lisbon Strategy. Well, 2010 is history now - and so is the failed Strategy.

But that does not stop the EU from dreaming up similar "strategies". The latest one was this week announced by the unelected EU "climate comissioner", former Danish journalist Connie Hedegaard:

As Commissioner for the new DG Climate Action, it is Connie Hedegaard’s ambition that, in five years’ time, Europe is the most climate-friendly region in the world. With this in mind, she was quick to stress the role that space can play in tackling climate change.

In her opening address, Commissioner Hedegaard said, "Today, we are focusing on the tools needed for the International Climate Change Policy Regime. In that respect, space is not just nice to have; it’s a need to have.

"We need science, knowledge and facts to formulate European policies. With those policies in place, we then need the tools to monitor them"

While stressing that Earth observation is essential for monitoring, reporting and verification, Commissioner Hedegaard also pointed to satellite navigation as an important space tool, "The transport sector accounts for 27% of all European emissions. Satellite navigation can help develop intelligent traffic systems to limit those emissions"

With climate change a priority, Commissioner Hedegaard is working with Vice-President Antonio Tajani to develop a joint strategy on space and climate. As part of this, Commission Hedegaard invited experts from the space sector to provide inputs for consultation.

PS

If, for a change, the EU climate strategy actually would succeed, it would mean a decisive blow to EU economic competitiveness. But that does not worry the warmist Hedegaard and her likes.

It is also interesting to note that Hedegaard, without naming Galileo, tries to promote the economically disastrous European Galileo satellite navigation project. Climate change (former global warming) can be used for all kinds of purposes.  

Mubarak´s and Ben Ali´s parties were members of the Socialist International

This is how the Socialist international defines itself:

PROGRESSIVE POLITICS for a fairer world

The Socialist International is the worldwide organisation of social democratic, socialist and labour parties. It currently brings together close to 170 political parties and organisations from all continents. (List of members in full)

If you click the present list of members, you will not find dictator Mubarak´s National Democratic Party or  Ben Ali´s  Tunisian Constitutional Democratic Assembly among the members. However, until the 31 January Mubarak and his party were highly regarded members of this socialist elite group priding itself on working "for a fairer world". Ben Ali and his party belonged to the Socialist Interntional until 17 January.

That it took popular uprisings to remove the two dictators from the "progressive" club says something about the socialist brotherhood.

Unelected EU "foreign minister" lectures Egyptians on "deep democracy"

Baroness Ashton, EU "foreign minister" still today refused to demand the immediate removal of Mubarak. Instead the unelected Labour Baroness lectured the Egyptians about "deep democracy" in an article published in the Guardian. William Dove, writing in the International Business Times comments:

The international reaction to the ongoing political chaos in Egypt took an amusing turn today when the European Union's High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Baroness Catherine Ashton, penned an article in The Guardian saying she wanted to see "deep democracy" take root in Egypt.

Baroness Ashton repeated the line emerging from Washington and London that there should be a swift "transition" from the reign of Hosni Mubarak to something as yet unknown.
However she also warned that Egypt should not become what she called a "surface democracy" with votes and elections, but should be a "deep democracy" with the rule of law, an independent judiciary, free speech, free trade unions and etc.
The irony of this is of course that Baroness Ashton came to her present high office through neither "deep" nor "surface" democracy but by working her way up through the British quangocracy before finally being appointed one of the top jobs in the quango of quangos, the EU.