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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (112036)	9/6/2011 12:03:11 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	1 Recommendation Respond to of 224729

kenny_troll : breaking news ????????????? Dow Jones 12:00 PM Averages: DJIA 11,027.10 DN 213.16 09/06 12:00 PM 30 INDUS 11,027.10 DN 213.16 OR 1.90% 20 TRANSP 4,345.74 DN 99.58 OR 2.24% 15 UTILS 420.17 DN 6.55 OR 1.53% 65 STOCKS 3,777.50 DN 73.98 OR 1.92%

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (112036)	9/6/2011 12:24:41 PM
From: grusum	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224729

Why should taxpayers have to pay for someone else's national defense? we ALL have a stake in the defense of our nation. it's OUR defense, not someone else's. we don't ALL need or want health insurance. you don't have the RIGHT to FORCE your beliefs down OUR throats. you don't have the right to force us to do anything we don't want to do. if you want health insurance, you should buy it yourself, not try to force someone else to pay for it. Why should I have to pay for New Jersey's disaster relief? if you don't live in new jersey, you shouldn't.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (112036)	9/6/2011 12:51:55 PM
From: JakeStraw	4 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224729

>>Why should I have to pay for New Jersey's disaster relief? What an ignorant, callous, thoughtless statement... Last time I checked New Jersey and all the other states that were impacted by Hurrican Irene were a part of our country. You should be ashamed to post such inconsiderate, heartless nonsense!

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (112036)	9/6/2011 1:08:58 PM
From: FJB	2 Recommendations Respond to of 224729

As big jobs speech looms, 77% say Obama has nation on wrong track September 6, 2011 \| 5:06am latimesblogs.latimes.com It could be worse. But not much. With only 427 days left before Americans pass judgment on Barack Obama's presidency, nearly eight out of 10 of them say in a poll that they believe the country is seriously off on the wrong track. That 77% is up 17 points just this year. And it's the highest since George W. Bush went back to Texas. Here's how bad the new ABC News/Washington Post Poll is for Obama: The good news for now is that by only a 2-to-1 margin (34%-17%), respondents say the Democrat's efforts on the economy have done more harm than good. After all, with recorded unemployment at 9.1%, no new jobs created last month and no outlook for improvement, the number could be 3-to-1. And it may well become that. No wonder Rick Perry entered the Republican race. It's so bad that Vice President Joe Biden may want to look around for a new top of the ticket in 2012, lest he lose his job and that lucrative rent on the guest house from the Secret Service agents protecting him. Even less-than-conservative websites like salon.com are publishing anguished articles nowadays such as "What Democrats Can Do About Obama."...

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (112036)	9/6/2011 3:12:48 PM
From: locogringo	2 Recommendations Respond to of 224729

Why should I have to pay for New Jersey's disaster relief? If I would have posted "SCREW THOSE PEOPLE IN NEW ORLEANS, they mean nothing at all to me", what 6 letter word would you and your selfish friends be calling me, after Katrina hit? You get more and more hysterical the more that your elected hero is shown to be a proven LIAR, a proven LOSER, and quite a hypocrite when it comes to name calling.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (112036)	9/6/2011 4:17:02 PM
From: FJB	3 Recommendations Respond to of 224729

Another one of Obama's dozens of foreign policy failures gets even worse. Egypt becoming a radical Muslim state with the US at the top of its enemy's list. Inside Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood September 6, 2011 1:32 P.M. By Stanley Kurtz While Egypt’s secular political parties flounder, the power of the Muslim Brotherhood continues to grow. To understand why, there is no better place to turn than Eric Trager’s article, “The Unbreakable Muslim Brotherhood: Grim Prospects for a Liberal Egypt” in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs (subscriber restricted). In sharp contrast to generally thin mainstream press reporting on Egypt’s post-revolutionary politics, Trager’s piece is based on in-depth interviews with about 30 current and former Muslim Brothers over a three month period. This enables Trager to piece together a detailed account of the Brotherhood’s structure and recruitment practices, showing in the process how dramatically different the Muslim Brotherhood is from a conventional political party. For example, at first recruiters don’t even identify themselves as Muslim Brothers but simply “build relationships with their targets in order to scrutinize their religiosity.” Through a lengthy and complicated promotion process, the piety and ideology of junior members are closely monitored. Tiny local cells, called “families,” meet regularly and “spend much of their time discussing members’ personal lives and activities.” Recruits also devote a good deal of effort to studying the work of Muslim Brotherhood founder, Hasan al-Banna (not a moderate), and at advanced levels begin donating between five and eight percent of their income to the organization. Before reaching the final level, recruits are often tested by being fed false information, after which they’re tempted to report it to state security. While the basics of this system go back to the Brotherhood’s founding, the details were elaborated and formalized under decades of pressure from Egypt’s rulers. This is the sort of ideological commitment and discipline we see in groups like the old Communist Party in the West, and bears little relation to what Americans think of as conventional political activity. There is certainly nothing about the picture painted by Trager we would call liberal, in the classic sense of that word. The Brotherhood’s top-down discipline isn’t perfect. In certain instances since the revolution, younger members have been able to influence the group’s direction. But Trager shows why a significant breakaway by supposedly more moderate younger members is highly unlikely. The Muslim Brotherhood is planning to contest nearly half the seats in the upcoming parliamentary election (through the nominally distinct Freedom and Justice Party), and Trager thinks the Brotherhood is likely to win the “vast majority” of these seats. The Brotherhood has also moved aggressively to ally with–actually, coopt–a select group of secular parties, leaving the Brotherhood likely to emerge as the most powerful force in the new assembly. Trager also shows that what the Muslim Brotherhood means when they call their goals “moderate” bears little relationship to what Americans mean by that word. The Brotherhood claims that being moderate signifies renouncing violence, denouncing terrorism, and refusing to work with jihadists. Yet Trager’s interviews reveal almost universal exceptions to these rules in the minds of Brotherhood members for Israelis, Americans, and Brits, whose countries are considered “gangs that kill children and women and men and destroy houses and fields,” and are thus appropriate targets for violence. Trager wants the United States to help Egypt’s liberal parties reach the rural masses, in hopes of blunting what he sees as the Brotherhood’s otherwise unstoppable appeal to the religious hinterlands. That seems a wan hope. Even Trager admits that Egypt’s secular political parties are either “too new to be known or too discredited by their cooperation with the previous regime.” He adds: “Concentrated within the small percentage of Internet-using, politically literate Egyptians, their numbers are surprisingly small.” Realistically, the only force in Egypt capable of keeping the Muslim Brotherhood and the broader Islamist movement in check is the military. Egypt’s military is now engaged in a complicated dance of cooperation and competition with the Brotherhood, outlined capably in another new Foreign Affairs article, “Commanding Democracy in Egypt,” by Jeff Martini and Julie Taylor. These two articles from the latest issue of Foreign Affairs can be combined with Amr Bargisi’s piece in The Weekly Standard on the rise of an Islamist candidate for Egypt’s president to create a disturbing trilogy. True, Bargisi expresses the hope that stewardship of Egypt’s rapidly deteriorating economic situation may discredit Islamism. Even so, the weakness of Egypt’s secular parties, as well as their seldom reported but very real deficit of authentic liberalism, leaves little hope that a continued Egyptian economic meltdown will somehow produce the liberal renaissance the revolution itself could not. The more likely scenario is a continuing battle between Egypt’s Islamists and the military, with the West the loser.