These are the stories I found interesting on the web in the past few days:
Swedish Opposition Wins Election, Exit Polls Show
The opposition laid the groundwork for victory two years ago when it formed the Alliance for Sweden, with common policies on taxes, the economy and welfare, last month issuing its first joint election manifesto. It also managed to convince voters it had the best recipe to end a decade of stagnation in the Swedish labor market.
““The four opposition parties allied into a formidable alternative,” said Anders Sannerstedt, a political-science professor at Lund University. “They have never been this united and in tune with each other — I have to call it historic.”
The largest opposition party, the Moderates, took 26.6 percent, according to the SVT exit poll, while the Liberals got 7.3 percent, the Center Party 8.2 percent and the Christian Democrats 7.6 percent. The exit poll gave the Social Democrats 34.3 percent of the vote, the Left 5.8 percent and the Greens 5.5 percent.”
Really amazing trends in European Politics. I wonder how this will be spun in the American Press???
Proxy Terrorism From Iran
NATAN SHARANSKY is a former deputy prime minister of Israel and currently a member of parliament for the opposition Likud Party.
September 12, 2006
“IN THE SUMMER of 2000, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin told me a story that I have been unable to get out of my mind. We were meeting in the Kremlin, and I raised the grave danger facing the world from the transfer of missile technology and nuclear material to the Iranians. In Putin’s view, however, the real danger came not from an Iranian nuclear-tipped missile or, for that matter, from the lethal arsenal of any nation-state.
“Imagine a sunny and beautiful day in a suburb of Manhattan,” he said. “An elderly man is tending to the roses in his small garden with his nephew visiting from Europe. Life seems perfectly normal. The following day, the nephew, carrying a suitcase, takes a train to Manhattan. Inside the suitcase is a nuclear bomb.”
The threat, Putin explained to me a year before 9/11, was not from this or that country but from their terrorist proxies — aided and supported quietly by a sovereign state that doesn’t want to get its hands dirty — who will perpetrate their attacks without a return address. This scenario became real when Al Qaeda plotted its 9/11 attacks from within Afghanistan and received support from the Taliban government. Then it happened again this summer, when Iran was allowed to wage a proxy war through Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and northern Israel. But this time, the international community’s weak response dealt the global war on terror a severe blow.”
Natan Sharansky wrote the book The Case for Democracy, which highly influenced my thinking about the possibility for democracy being established all over the world. In this editorial he shares a sobering insight on terror.

The ongoing failure of imagination
“Prior to 9/11, most Americans found the idea that international terrorists could mount an attack on their homeland and kill thousands of innocent citizens not just unlikely, but inconceivable. Psychologically, Americans imagined that they lived in a security bubble. Terrorist attacks, including those on U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, occurred elsewhere. These beliefs were reinforced by the conventional wisdom among terrorism experts, who argued that terrorists sought not mass casualties but rather mass sympathy through limited attacks that called attention to their cause.
As we approach the fifth year without a second successful terrorist attack upon U.S. soil, a chorus of skeptics now suggests that 9/11 was a 100-year flood. They conveniently forget the deadly explosions in Bali, Madrid, London, and Mumbai, and dismiss scores of attacks planned against the United States and others that have been disrupted. [1] The idea that terrorists are currently preparing even more deadly assaults seems as far-fetched to them as the possibility of terrorists crashing passenger jets into the World Trade Center did before that fateful Tuesday morning.
As one attempts to assess where we now stand, and what the risks are, the major conclusion of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission deserves repetition: The principal failure to act to prevent the September 11 attack was a “failure of imagination.” [2] A similar failure of imagination leads many today to discount the risk of a nuclear 9/11.”
I keep having dreams about nuclear terror. I have had them since my teens, and my dreams have been part of the reason for the many preparations that our family has made over the years, but lately I have been having even more urgent dreams about massive death and destruction in America. This article was a sobering call for the average person in the US to make some serious preparations.
IN MEMORIAM: ORIANA FALLACI, 1929 – 2006
David Horowitz memorializes Oriana:
Oriana Fallaci has died after a long struggle with cancer at the age of seventy-seven. Her last years were spent in the United States in part because she was hunted in her own beloved Italy because of her war against the Islamic jihad. A fatwa calling for death was issued an Islamic jihadist; an Italian judge attempted to put her in jail for offending the invaders. She found refuge in the United States. But she also embraced America as her homeland in exile because she understood that America was the global center of resistance to the Islamic threat. The attacks of 9/11 inspired her.
From her sick bed she wrote two polemics — The Rage and The Pride and The Force of Reason which are clarion calls to action to defend the West. If we prevail in this battle to defend our civilization they will be remembered in the same way that Tom Paine’s Common Sense is remembered as a summons to Americans to defend their freedom. Orianna Fallaci was a woman of unbelievable courage. We will not see her like again soon. May we honor her by heeding her warnings and dedicating ourselves to the struggle to which she gave her final hours.
One of Oriannas editorials on the eve of the war in Iraq in 2003:
The Rage, the Pride and the Doubt
Thoughts on the eve of battle in Iraq.
Academe in a Time of Crisis
“According to David Horowitz, the prominent conservative activist, that extra public scrutiny stems from widespread exasperation with the professoriate in a time of crisis. “If we weren’t in the war on terror, the stakes would be a lot lower,” he says, “and the public wouldn’t be paying attention.”
But Mr. Lukianoff says that frustration with “out of touch” professors is not the only reason academic freedom controversies have taken up more airtime in recent years. The tension between liberty and security — and the need to protect the former — has itself become a staple concept in the national consciousness, he says. After September 11, 2001, people are “more aware of academic freedom,” he says. “Public outrage doesn’t just go one way.”
According to Robert O’Neil, director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, an autonomous organization with close ties to the University of Virginia, the legal and non-governmental institutions that safeguard academic freedom have not been cowed since September 11.”
I’m all for academic freedom, but as a mother of a daughter who is a senior in high school, and is actively making decisions about where she will attend college, I am very interested in her attending a school where she will get both sides of the story….not just the liberal, socialist, watered down patriotism of the left.
If Only Bin Laden Had a Stained Blue Dress
Ann Coulter:
“If you wonder why it took 50 years to get the truth about Joe McCarthy, consider the fanatical campaign of the Clinton acolytes to kill an ABC movie that relies on the 9/11 commission report, which whitewashed only 90 percent of Clinton’s cowardice and incompetence in the face of terrorism, rather than 100 percent.
Islamic jihadists attacked America year after year throughout the Clinton administration. They did everything but blow up his proverbial “bridge to the 21st century.” Every year but one, Clinton found an excuse not to fight back.
The first month Clinton was in office, Islamic terrorists with suspected links to al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein bombed the World Trade Center.
For the first time ever, a terrorist act against America was treated not as a matter of national security, but exclusively as a simple criminal offense. The individual bombers were tried in a criminal court. (The one plotter who got away fled to Iraq, that peaceful haven of kite-flying children until Bush invaded and turned it into a nation of dangerous lunatics.)”
Ann always has an interesting take on things….
Plan B Is a Bad Plan
Jennifer Roback Morse
“The dispute over the morning-after pill has hinged on the politics of FDA approval and the science of abortion. Did the FDA withhold approval just to placate Bush’s conservative base? Is Plan B really “emergency contraception” or it is really a very early abortion? Now that the morning-after pill has been approved for over-the-counter use, we need to ask ourselves how it will affect the spread of Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs). I predict the morning-after pill will induce a new round of increases in sexually transmitted diseases.”
Morality is the answer for all of these issues.
About That Mercedes?
Claudia Rosett
“But what’s really at issue here is not simply money — or a Mercedes — but the integrity of a United Nations that in handling crises demands the public trust. And what we still need from Kofi Annan is not a quip, but serious answers to the many questions still out there … about that Mercedes.”
‘Bioethicist’: OK to kill babies after they’re born
“An internationally known Princeton “bioethicist” and animal-rights activist says he’d kill disabled babies if it were in the “best interests” of the family, because he sees no distinction in the child’s life whether it is born or not, and the world already allows abortion.
The comments come from Peter Singer, a controversial bioethics professor, who responded to a series of questions in the UK Independent this week.
Earlier, WND reported Singer believes the next few decades will see a massive upheaval in the concept of life and rights, with only “a rump of hard-core, know-nothing religious fundamentalists” still protecting life as sacrosanct.
To the rest, it will be a commodity to be re-evaluated regularly for its worth.”
Don’t know what to say…
Jenny Hatch