Mark Steyn om Præsident Obama og Dronning Elizabeth

Lidt Steyn er altid godt:

Ground Control to President Obama

We don’t need attempts at soaring rhetoric in a time of earthbound problems.

Round about this time in the election cycle, a presidential challenger finds himself on the stump and posing a simple test to voters: “Ask yourself — are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

But, in fact, you don’t need to ask yourself, because the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances has done it for you. Between 2007 and 2010, Americans’ median net worth fell 38.8 percent — or from $126,400 per family to $77,300 per family. Oh, dear. As I mentioned a few months ago, when readers asked me to recommend countries they could flee to, most of the countries worth fleeing to Americans can no longer afford to live in.

Mere HER i National Review Online. Orange County Register her.

Vivat Regina

Mark Steyn – 10 June 2012

The trick to monarchy is not queening it. In The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth’s great novel of the Habsburg twilight, the Emperor Franz Joseph has it down to a tee:

‘At times he feigned ignorance and was delighted when someone gave him a longwinded explanation about things he knew thoroughly… He was delighted at their vanity in proving to themselves that they were smarter than he …for it does not behoove an emperor to be as smart as his advisers.’

At dinner in Melbourne and Sydney, as in Toronto and Montreal, I have sat next to clever, dazzling politicians — the coming men of the coming republic — mimicking Her Majesty’s absurd voice and mocking her dreary stolidity. ‘If people smirked behind his back, he pretended not to know about it,’ wrote Roth of Franz Joseph. ‘It does not behoove an emperor to compete with wags and sophisticates.’ And a year or three later the coming men have come and gone, and there’s the Queen, opening a hospital, touring a school.

Mere HER i The Spectator.

Leon de Winter om fodbold

Kun om fodbold. Ikke andet:

Germany Battles Holland ‘We Need This Ritualized War’

Takis Würger – June 12, 2012

Germany and the Netherlands are set to clash at the European Football Championship on Wednesday night, reigniting a deep-seated rivalry between the neighboring countries. Dutch writer Leon de Winter tells SPIEGEL why the Dutch hate the Germans and need the “ritualized war” of the game.

Spiegel: Mr. de Winter, why do the Dutch hate us?

De Winter: Of course we don’t hate you, but the rivalry is the inheritance of the Nazi era. The Dutch couldn’t forgive Germany for occupying their country. You stole our bikes.

Spiegel: Your bikes?

De Winter: And second, the Nazis also showed the Dutch what cowards we are.

Mere HER i Der Spiegel.

Christopher Caldwell om krigsmoral

Caldwell anmelder bog af Goldsmith:

Vetted, Altered, Blessed

‘Power and Constraint,’ by Jack Goldsmith

By Christopher Caldwell – June 8, 2012

When the Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah was captured, six months after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, C.I.A. lawyers were asked to approve a battery of tough interrogation techniques hastily thrown together. They did not much fear that posterity would think them ruthless. On the contrary, the C.I.A.’s No. 2 attorney worried that “with all the restrictions and precautions and scrutiny by lawyers and doctors and psychologists,” they’d look like a bunch of wimps.

It is not as a bunch of wimps that history has remembered George W. Bush’s antiterrorist team. The Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, who worked briefly in the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel, has himself been critical of his former colleagues’ “unilateralism” and their preference for power over persuasion. But he has also been an eloquent dissenter from the view that the Bush administration simply ran roughshod over the Constitution.[...]

Mere HER i The New York Times.

Video: Daniel Pipes, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Alex Thomson

Barnabas Fund udsender løbende bulletiner om forfølgelse af kristne i Syrien, mange tusind er flygtet. Der meldes konstant om dræbte, – mindst 10.000 mennesker er omkommet siden marts 2011, siger FN ifølge BBC. Bilbomber, mortergranater, raketter og anden saliggørende islamisk fred. Våben til regimet strømmer ind bla. fra Iran og Rusland, skriver The New York Times. USA hjælper derimod oprørerne med materiel, kan man læse i Time Magazine. Og Syrien har i forvejen verdens største arsenal af kemiske våben, fortæller The Washington Times. The National Review Online beretter, at det ikke var Assad-regimet, der stod bag den grusomme massakre i Houla og Homs. Der var derimod sunnimuslimske oprørere, der gjorde det. Ofrene var shiamuslimer, alawier og kristne. Borgerkrig i fuld skala, mener højtstående kilder i FNs fredsbevarende styrker  - Herve Ladsous, the U.N.’s peacekeeping chief - i et interview i New Zealand’s Rhema Radio. Hizbollah, Al Qaeda, Det Muslimske Broderskab med flere, – de er der allesammen. Der kan blive brug for mange hvide rosiner til de fromme jihadister fra Syrien, men det siger Fogh Rasmussen ikke noget om. Alex Thomson fra Channel 4 har derimod interessante oplysninger:

Syrian Rebels tried to get Alex Thomson Channel 4 Reporter killed to boost anti-Assad Propaganda

Alex Thomsen bloggede om episoden hos Channel 4:

• Set up to be shot in no mans land?

Meget grundig artikel fra The Daily Mail:

• At least 17 killed in Syria as Channel 4 news reporter says he was ‘deliberately set up to be shot’

Daniel Pipes siger også noget om Syrien:

Daniel Pipes & Allan Lee on Syria – June 13, 2012

From New Zealand’s Rhema Radio: The United Nations says Syria is now involved in all-out civil war, after their own UN Monitors were shot at by rebel forces. As we’ve heard, there are terrible tales of children being used as human shields, tortured and killed and increasingly, calls for other nations to take some sort of action. Now Russia’s giving the Syrian regime attack helicopters — and it’s clear the rebel forces are also being armed from somewhere.

Daniel Pipes is president of the Middle East Forum and a fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, and he shares on the issue.

Fra France 24:

NATO: Anders Fogh Rasmussen & Annette Young – Syria similar to Bosnia – June 13, 2012

France 24: A growing number of people are starting to compare Syria to the situation the world faced with Bosnia during the mid 1990s. Among them is NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who talks to Annette Young about the lessons that should have been learnt from the Balkans.

Opdatering – Mange af Pipes’ artikler oversættes til dansk. Et par af de nyeste:

• Hold jer ude af det syriske morads
• Flere tanker om at undlade at gribe ind i Syrien

Opdatering 19. juni 2012:

Halvdelen af Syriens befolkning er under 15 år. Og 60 pct. af Syriens 23 millioner indbyggere er under 20 år:

Matthew R. J. Brodsky: Assessing the Syrian Uprising

Matthew R. J. Brodsky is Director of Policy, Jewish Policy Center; Editor, inFocus Quarterly. He spoke at the Center for Security Policy ‘s National Security Group Lunch on the topic: “Assessing the Syrian Uprising”

Se eventuelt The American Spectator:

• Demography Is Destiny in Syria

Andre kilder: EkstraBladet, Jyllands-Posten, Jyllands-Posten, The American Spectator, The American Spectator, The American Spectator, Barnabas Fund, Commentary Magazine, Foreign Policy, Foreign Policy, Foreign Policy, Gatestone Institute, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The New York Times, The Washington Times, The Jerusalem Post, Reuters, Reuters, PJ Media, CNN, Daniel Pipes, Daniel Pipes, Daniel Pipes, Russia Today, Russia Today, Snaphanen,

Video: Michelle Malkin om bloggere og konservative

Fra en helt aktuel konference, Right Online 2012, 15. – 16. juni 2012. Hug til rød presse:

Michelle Malkin at 2012′s RightOnline

Opdatering 17. juni 2012 – Michelle Malkin talte igen dagen efter:

Right Online 2012 – Malkin (Day 2)

Video: Allen B. West om USAs illegale indvandrere

Præsident Obama (der selv er illegal indvandrer uden amerikansk statsborgerskab?), har givet visse illegale indvandrere opholdstilladelse – The Washington Post:

President Obama said Friday his administration would stop deporting some illegal immigrants who were brought to the country as children and have gone on to be productive and otherwise law-abiding residents, forcing the emotional immigration policy debate into the forefront of the presidential campaign.

Allen B. West undrer sig over dekretet fra Det Hvide Hus – Martha MacCallum interviewer:

West responds to President’s Immigration details

Fox News with Bill and Martha – 6/15/2012

Andre kilder: Michelle Malkin,