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To: bentway who wrote (643129)	1/22/2012 2:34:12 PM
From: longnshort	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576893

Egypt's Islamists win 75 percent of parliament Email this Story Jan 21, 4:03 PM (ET) By AYA BATRAWY (AP) Protesters chant slogans at a rally honoring those killed in clashes with security forces in Tahrir... Full Image Google sponsored linksEric Cantor: Job Killer? - How far will Eric Cantor go to protect the 1%? Sign Petition! www.CWA-Union.org/FAAPetitio 2012 Caucus Coverage - Make This Election Your Election Have Your Voice Heard in 2012! www.americanselect.org CAIRO (AP) - Final results on Saturday showed that Islamist parties won nearly three-quarters of the seats in parliament in Egypt's first elections since the ouster of authoritarian president Hosni Mubarak, according to election officials and political groups. The Islamist domination of Egypt's parliament has worried liberals and even some conservatives about the religious tone of the new legislature, which will be tasked with forming a committee to write a new constitution. It remains unclear whether the constitution will be written while the generals who took power after Mubarak's fall are still in charge, or rather after presidential elections this summer. In the vote for the lower house of parliament, a coalition led by the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood won 47 percent, or 235 seats in the 498-seat parliament. The ultraconservative Al-Nour Party was second with 25 percent, or 125 seats. The Salafi Al-Nour, which was initially the biggest surprise of the vote, wants to impose strict Islamic law in Egypt, while the more moderate Brotherhood, the country's best-known and organized party, has said publicly that it does not seek to force its views about an appropriate Islamic lifestyle on Egyptians. (AP) Protesters hold placards depicting Egypt's ousted President Hosni Mubarak, one encircled in a noose... Full ImageThe two parties are unlikely to join forces because of ideological differences, but both have a long history of charity work in Egypt's vast poverty-stricken neighborhoods and villages, giving them a degree of legitimacy and popularity across the country in areas where newer liberal parties have yet to get a foothold. Muslim Brotherhood lawmaker Mohammed el-Beltagi said the new parliament represents "the wish of the Egyptian people." Egypt's elections commission acknowledged that there were voting irregularities, but the vote has been hailed as the country's freest and fairest in living memory. The liberals who spearheaded the revolt that toppled Mubarak struggled to organize and connect with a broader public in the vote, and did not fair as well as the Islamists. The Egyptian bloc, which is headed by a party founded by Christian telecom tycoon Naguib Sawiris, said it won 9 percent of the seats in parliament. Egypt's oldest secular party, the Wafd, also won around 9 percent. (AP) Protesters chant slogans at a rally honoring those killed in clashes with security forces in Tahrir... Full ImageNewer parties, such as the liberal Revolution Continues Party won 2 percent, as did the Islamist Center Party, which had been banned from politics under Mubarak. The results leave the liberal groups with little ability to maneuver in parliament, unless they choose to mobilize the street in protests or work on key issues with the dominant Islamist groups, said Mohamed Abu-Hamed, the deputy leader of the liberal Free Egyptians Party. The Brotherhood has refused to join recent street protests, saying that elections and the new parliament are the best ways to respond to demands that the military transfer power immediately to a civilian authority. "The street and the parliament are not at opposite ends. The issues are not going to be resolved by protests, but through parliamentary laws," the Brotherhood's el-Beltagi said. The final tally, which includes at least 15 seats for former regime figures, comes as little surprise since election results had been partially announced throughout the three stages of the vote, which took place over several weeks across the country. The United States long shunned Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and turned a blind-eye to the arrest and torture of Salafis, who now comprise the bulk of Al-Nour Party's constituents, under Mubarak, who was a longtime U.S. ally. However, top U.S. officials from the State Department have recently met with the Muslim Brotherhood's leaders, who have in turn assured Western officials that they respect minority rights and support democracy. A White House statement said that President Barack Obama called Egypt's ruling military leader, Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, on Friday and welcomed the historic seating of the lower house of Egypt's Parliament, which is set to convene for the first time on Monday. Activists have accused the country's military leaders of repressive tactics. Critics say the nearly 12,000 civilians who have faced military trials since Mubarak's ouster have not been afforded proper due process. Chief military prosecutor Adel el-Morsi said that 1,959 people convicted in military courts since Mubarak's ouster would be released on the one-year anniversary of the start of the uprising on Wednesday. Among them would be Maikel Nabil Sanad, a blogger who was arrested in March and sentenced to two years in prison on charges of criticizing the armed forces and publishing false information for comments on his blog comparing the military to Mubarak's regime.

To: bentway who wrote (643129)	1/22/2012 2:43:27 PM
From: PROLIFE	Respond to of 1576893

Presidential Nonsense Last week, President Barack Obama, at a Capital Hilton fundraising event, told the crowd, “We can’t go back to this brand of you’re-on-your-own economics.” Throughout my professional career as an economist, I’ve never come across the theory of “you’re-on-your-own economics.” I’m guessing what the president means by — and finds offensive in — “you’re-on-your-own economics” is that it’s a system in which people are held responsible for their actions, that they take risks and must live with the results, that people can’t force others to pay for their mistakes, and that they can’t live at the expense of other people. President Obama’s vision was shared by our Pilgrim Fathers of the Plymouth Colony in modern-day Massachusetts. They established a communist system. They all farmed together, and whatever they produced was put in a common storehouse. A certain amount of food was rationed to each person regardless of his contribution to the work. Many Pilgrims complained that they were too weak from hunger to do their share of the work. As deeply religious as the Pilgrims were, they took to stealing from one another. Gov. William Bradford, writing his history of the colony in “Of Plymouth Plantation,” said, “So as it well appeared that famine must still ensue, the next year also if not some way prevented.” In 1623, after much debate, a new system was set up, in which every family was assigned a parcel of land, and whatever they produced belonged to the family. Gov. Bradford then observed, “The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.” After Gov. Bradford’s establishment of what Obama calls “you’re-on-your-own economics,” harvests were so bountiful that Bradford is credited with establishing what we now call Thanksgiving. There are several seemingly immutable, hard-wired characteristics about humans that socialists, liberals and progressives find difficult to deal with and would like to change. People tend to work harder and produce more when they own what they produce. Property is better cared for when it is privately owned. People love to exchange, what Adam Smith called a “propensity to truck (and) barter.” To suppress these characteristics requires brute force. President Obama also told the Washington Hilton crowd that “we are not a country that was built on the idea of survival of the fittest.” Obama is not by himself, but “survival of the fittest” is one of the greatest misunderstandings of Charles Darwin’s pathbreaking work “On the Origin of Species.” When Obama and most other people use the expression “survival of the fittest,” they suggest that a bunch of people or animals are competing with one another and the strongest, smartest or cleverest survives. That’s not what Darwin and evolutionary biologists have in mind. Instead, what they have in mind is that those who survive have characteristics that make them better-equipped to survive and hence reproduce themselves in a particular environment. They are not laying waste to their competitors. Let’s try a few survival of the fittest questions. Which companies do you think should survive and expand, those that can meet the changing wants of their customers in a least-cost fashion or those that cannot do so? If the means of communication become cheaper through fax machines, the Internet and telephones, should subsidies be expended to help the U.S. Postal Service survive? Years ago, typing was done on a mechanical typewriter; milk was delivered to doorsteps via horse and wagon; slide rules were used to make calculations. Should any of these products and practices have survived, or was it OK for natural selection to consign them to the dustbin of history? Try cornering the president or his supporters, and ask them whether they believe government should ensure that the unfit survive and rather than “you’re-on-your-own economics” there should be “you’re-on-somebody-else economics.” Posted by Walter Williams frontpagemag.com