A More Islamic Islam

Geneive Abdo wrote on WaPo A small group of self-proclaimed secular Muslims from North America and elsewhere gathered in St. Petersburg recently for what they billed as a new global movement to correct the assumed wrongs of Islam and call for an Islamic Reformation.

It needs one, to bring the 7th century religion into the 21st century.

Across the state in Fort Lauderdale, Muslim leaders from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Washington-based advocacy group whose members the "secular" Muslims claim are radicals, denounced any notion of a Reformation as another attempt by the West to impose its history and philosophy on the Islamic world.

They prefer the 7th century approach.

The self-proclaimed secularists represent only a small minority of Muslims. The views among religious Muslims from CAIR more closely reflect the views of the majority, not only in the United States but worldwide. Yet Western media, governments and neoconservative pundits pay more attention to the secular minority.

Actually we are keeping an eye on the radical ones as well, to make sure they do not succeed.

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White House Opposes D.C. Vote

WaPo reported The White House declared its opposition yesterday to a bill that would give the District its first full seat in the House of Representatives, saying it is unconstitutional, and a key Senate supporter said such concerns could kill the measure. "The Constitution specifies that only 'the people of the several states' elect representatives to the House," said White House spokesman Alex Conant. "And D.C. is not a state."

Precise;y. DC should only be the land where people work. With the exception of the White House the land where people live should be given back to Virfinia or Maryland, whichever turned it over to become a part of DC

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Public school bondage

Rocky Mountain News reports The state of Utah has just passed a landmark educational voucher program under which every family, depending on its income, will be reimbursed between $500 and $3,000 per child for annual tuition paid to the private school of their choice.

Fantastic news. I am not wild about making it a function of income; I think that each family should be able to get whatever amount of money the state has allocated per child for the public school system, and that parents should be able to direct that money to the public, private, or religious school of their choice. But this is certainly good news.

This will now give parents of modest means options that the well-to-do have long enjoyed. Their school-age children will no longer be a captive audience. Parents will be empowered as educational consumers, giving them choices and leverage consumers enjoy in all other spheres of our market economy. They'll be free to choose the educational model they believe best fits the unique needs of their children, and will be freed from the bureaucracy and politics of government-delivered education.

Wonderful.

Predictably, the educratic establishment is in full counterattack. The Utah teachers' union has launched a campaign to repeal the new law. If that fails, they'll try their luck in court. Their resistance is bred of desperation.

Absolutely. They know that the product they offer can't stand the competition.

First, the union's survival is at stake. Under a voucher system, education is still publicly financed through taxpayer dollars. That doesn't change. But what does is the union's monopoly to deliver publicly funded education exclusively in government schools. Under a voucher system, competition would bloom.

And parents would be free to choose to send their child whereever they want.

Second, there's the ideological opposition to competition and free choice in education. The educratic establishment - from administrators, to the teachers' colleges that staff the schools, to the unions that run them and the school boards they elect - is liberal to its core.

And the only way to get more liberals is to brainwash the children.

They covet their power to set the agenda, to dictate subject matter and educational techniques, to influence impressionable young minds and mold the next generation of liberal activists. They've turned their government schools into laboratories for social engineering, downgrading basic academics and old-fashioned notions of American exceptionalism, patriotism and individualism in favor of collectivism, political correctness, diversity, environmentalism, feminism, and delusional self-esteem. They have a death grip on these schools that they're loath to release.

Which is exactly why it must be done.

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Jihadists to be freed

Gulfnews reported Saudi Arabia said that 90 per cent of those who have been detained for holding "deviant thoughts" have reformed and announced their repentance.

So jihadists will be freed, if they just say I am sorry.

.... But authorities emphasised that they would not set free those militants arrested for taking part in terrorist attacks across the country.

That is as long as they were threatening sites outside of the Kingdom. But if they were attacking Saudia Arabia, they will continue to be held.

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Extremists Trying to Sign Up to Be School Bus Drivers

FOXNews reported The Associated Press reports that members of the unnamed extremist groups have succeeded in gaining the drivers licenses, but a Department of Homeland Security official told FOX News that "at this time there is no evidence that any of these individuals have got these jobs, or got hold of school buses."

That is nice. What are you doing to make sure they don't get such jobs?

FBI spokesman Richard Kolko adds, speaking with FOXNews.com: "There is no plot. There is no threat. And parents and children can feel perfectly safe."

Just as long as their bus driver does not shout Allahu Akbar.

The Department of Homeland Security official said the bulletin was sent to state and local law enforcement officials, and "some school districts have reported an increased number of foreign nationals seeking school bus driver positions and a number of other unusual events."

But no one should worry. They are just sending out this notice so that when a School Bus is hijacked and the kids are killed, they can say well we warned everyone.

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Phony Fraud Charges???

NYT reported In its fumbling attempts to explain the purge of United States attorneys, the Bush administration has argued that the fired prosecutors were not aggressive enough about addressing voter fraud. It is a phony argument; there is no evidence that any of them ignored real instances of voter fraud.

Maybe the reason there is no evidence is that the attorneys refused to investigate the complaints.

But more than that, it is a window on what may be a major reason for some of the firings. In partisan Republican circles, the pursuit of voter fraud is code for suppressing the votes of minorities and poor people. By resisting pressure to crack down on “fraud,” the fired United States attorneys actually appear to have been standing up for the integrity of the election system.

Do "minorities and poor people" have some sort of right to vote multiple times?

John McKay, one of the fired attorneys, says he was pressured by Republicans to bring voter fraud charges after the 2004 Washington governor’s race, which a Democrat, Christine Gregoire, won after two recounts. Republicans were trying to overturn an election result they did not like, but Mr. McKay refused to go along. “There was no evidence,” he said, “and I am not going to drag innocent people in front of a grand jury.”

The purpose of the grand jury is to determine whether there is evidence or not.

Later, when he interviewed with Harriet Miers, then the White House counsel, for a federal judgeship that he ultimately did not get, he says, he was asked to explain “criticism that I mishandled the 2004 governor’s election.”

What was the answer?

Mr. McKay is not the only one of the federal attorneys who may have been brought down for refusing to pursue dubious voter fraud cases. Before David Iglesias of New Mexico was fired, prominent New Mexico Republicans reportedly complained repeatedly to Karl Rove about Mr. Iglesias’s failure to indict Democrats for voter fraud. The White House said that last October, just weeks before Mr. McKay and most of the others were fired, President Bush complained that United States attorneys were not pursuing voter fraud aggressively enough.

Then he did the right thing by firing people that were not doing enough. After all, they serve "at the pleasure of the President, and if he is not pleased, they should go."

There is no evidence of rampant voter fraud in this country.

There certainly have been many examples of voter fraud. What about the fake voter registration forms submitted by the highly partisan ACORN group. What does it take before the NYT sees them as rampant. Do Republicans have to benefit, and is voter fraud that helps Dems O.K. with the NYT.

Rather, Republicans under Mr. Bush have used such allegations as an excuse to suppress the votes of Democratic-leaning groups. They have intimidated Native American voter registration campaigners in South Dakota with baseless charges of fraud. They have pushed through harsh voter ID bills in states like Georgia and Missouri, both blocked by the courts, that were designed to make it hard for people who lack drivers’ licenses — who are disproportionately poor, elderly or members of minorities — to vote.

You have to have a photo id to board a plane, or cash a check, or fill some prescriptions at the pharmacy counter, or rent a video at Blockbuster. And Georgia, at least, was willing to provide them for free to low income people, and have a van that drove to the neighborhoods to issue the cards.

Florida passed a law placing such onerous conditions on voter registration drives, which register many members of minorities and poor people, that the League of Women Voters of Florida suspended its registration work in the state.

Maybe that was because of the fake voter registration forms submitted by the highly partisan ACORN group.

Rick Moran blogged I guess thousands of fake voter registration forms submitted by the highly partisan ACORN as well as other frauds perpetrated by the usual suspects at the AFL-CIO, Moveon, and other liberal advocacy groups should be allowed into the system – at least according to the Times. We wouldn’t want to disturb the moronic notion that partisan Republicans use “code” to differentiate between real people and sock puppets who would be capable of voting 5, 10, or 20 times at different polling stations. Democrats never perpetrate these kinds of frauds – just ask the dead people in any Chicago cemetery and they’ll swear on their graves that such shenanigans never take place.

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Great Global Warming Swindle

The UK’s Channel 4 called “The Great Global Warming Swindle” and it understandably has alarmists upset. That makes me happy. Perhaps if they scream enough about it, the MSM will mention what they are saying, and people may choose to examine both sides of the subject.

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Obama urges compassion in Mideast

Des Moines Register reported Illinois Sen. Barack Obama on Sunday told a small group of Iowa Democrats that U.S. policy in the Middle East can be compassionate as well as tough - while he also provided these influential voices in the leadoff caucus state with an up-close view of him as a presidential candidate.

Obama told the Muscatine-area party activists that he supports relaxing restrictions on aid to the Palestinian people. He said they have suffered the most as a result of stalled peace efforts with Israel.

What about the Israeli citizens killed by rockets launched from two large synagogues in the Gaza settlements that they turned over to the Palestinians to see if they really deserved a state of their own, only to see those synagogues used as rocket launch sites, and the the high-tech greenhouses built by Israelis, that formerly provided employment for many Palestinians, have been looted, burned, and turned into cover for weapons smuggling tunnels.

"Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people," Obama said while on the final leg of his weekend trip to eastern Iowa.

"If we could get some movement among Palestinian leadership, what I'd like to see is a loosening up of some of the restrictions on providing aid directly to the Palestinian people," he added.

The Palestinian Islamist group Hamas rejected on Monday criticism by al Qaeda's second-in-command and said it was still committed to Israel's destruction despite a ower-sharing deal with the Fatah faction. Is that what you mean by movement?

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The 'Surge' Is Succeeding

Robert Kagan wrorte in WaPo A front-page story in The Post last week suggested that the Bush administration has no backup plan in case the surge in Iraq doesn't work. I wonder if The Post and other newspapers have a backup plan in case it does.

And the Dems are wringing their hands trying to figure out how to pull us out and have a failure they can blame on Bush, all the time seeing that even their own member are seeing that the surge is working.

Leading journalists have been reporting for some time that the war was hopeless,

Which shows what little they know.

a fiasco that could not be salvaged by more troops and a new counterinsurgency strategy. The conventional wisdom in December held that sending more troops was politically impossible after the antiwar tenor of the midterm elections. It was practically impossible because the extra troops didn't exist. Even if the troops did exist, they could not make a difference. Four months later, the once insurmountable political opposition has been surmounted. The nonexistent troops are flowing into Iraq. And though it is still early and horrible acts of violence continue, there is substantial evidence that the new counterinsurgency strategy, backed by the infusion of new forces, is having a significant effect.

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