Election day. And so it begins...

... the intolerance by the so-called "tolerant" Democrats:



Unhinged Perriello/Obama supporter rips up GOP signs, screams “You f**king House nigger white-black bitch!”

Follow the link to see the video. And more.

Locally, during our last election, some Democrats went around with a baseball bat in the wee hours of the morning, and beat all the GOP signs into the ground. This year it's been better; they've only run over a couple of the signs with their cars.

Some Democrats have trouble understanding the difference between opponents and enemies. Not surprising, since members of their leadership often demonstrate the same problem.

     

Burkha hides poet's face; facing death threats

Kudos to a Brave Saudi Housewife

[...] In a live broadcast across the entire Arab world, wearing her burkha, alone on stage, Hissa Hilal attacked hardline clerics as

‘vicious in voice, barbaric, angry and blind, wearing death as a robe cinched with a belt,’

The studio audience loved it. Viewers cast their votes for her. Militants issued death threats.




[...] Her poem was seen as a response to Sheik Abdul-Rahman al-Barrak, a prominent cleric in Saudi Arabia who recently issued a fatwa saying those who call for the mingling of men and women should be considered infidels, punishable by death. But, more broadly, it was seen as addressing any of many hard-line clerics in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region who hold a wide influence through TV programmes, university positions or websites.

‘Killing a human being is so easy for them, it is always an option,’ she told AP.

She described hard-line clerics as ‘vicious in voice, barbaric, angry and blind, wearing death as a robe cinched with a belt,’ in an apparent reference to suicide bombers’ explosives belts.

The three judges gave her the highest marks for her performance, praising her for addressing a controversial topic. That, plus voting from the 2,000 people in the audience and text messages from viewers, put her through to the final round. [...]

With death threats pouring in, it's perhaps just as well no one could see her face.

Also in Saudi Arabia:

Lawyer: Saudi could behead Lebanese for witchcraft

[...] BEIRUT – The lawyer of a Lebanese TV psychic who was convicted in Saudi Arabia for witchcraft said Thursday her client could be beheaded this week and urged Lebanese and Saudi leaders to help spare his life.

Attorney May al-Khansa said she learned from a judicial source that Ali Sibat is to be beheaded on Friday. She added that she does not have any official confirmation of this. Saudi judicial officials could not be immediately reached for comment.

A Lebanese official said Beirut has received no word from its embassy in Riyadh about Sibat's possible execution. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

The Saudi justice system, which is based on Islamic law, does not clearly define the charge of witchcraft.

Sibat is one of scores of people reported arrested every year in the kingdom for practicing sorcery, witchcraft, black magic and fortunetelling. These practices are considered polytheism by the government in Saudi Arabia, a deeply religious Muslim country.

[...]

Sibat made predictions on an Arab satellite TV channel from his home in Beirut. He was arrested by the Saudi religious police during his pilgrimage to the holy city of Medina in May 2008 and sentenced to death last November.

"Ali is not a criminal. He did not commit a crime or do anything disgraceful, " al-Khansa said. "The world should help in rescuing a man who has five children, a wife and a seriously ill mother."

She added that Sibat's mother's health has been deteriorating since her son was sentenced to death.

New York-based Human Rights Watch said last year that Sibat's death sentence should be overturned. It also called on the Saudi government to halt "its increasing use of charges of 'witchcraft,' crimes that are vaguely defined and arbitrarily used."

Last year, the rights group presented a series of cases in the kingdom, including that of Saudi woman Fawza Falih, who was sentenced to death by beheading in 2006 for the alleged crimes of "witchcraft, recourse to jinn (supernatural beings)" and animal sacrifice.

On November 2, 2007, Mustafa Ibrahim, an Egyptian pharmacist, was executed for sorcery in the Saudi capital of Riyadh after he was found guilty of having tried "through sorcery" to separate a married couple, Human Rights Watch said.

They execute tourists for witchcraft? No wonder Saudi Arabia is such a popular tourist destination. But what can you expect from a place that bans Valentine's Day, under harsh penalties? You can't exactly "feel the love".
     

The Republican Winners, and Their Message

Some Republicans won in this decidedly difficult election year for Republicans. Do they have any advice the GOP should heed, as it licks it's wounds and tries to plan a strategy for 2010?

3 Successful Republicans Caution Against a Move to the Right

[...] Senator Collins, Senator Alexander and Representative King were among Republicans who defied the odds in a terrible year for their colleagues. Their re-elections provide a possible road map for how the party can succeed in a challenging political environment. The answer, the three veteran politicians agreed, is not to become a more conservative, combative party focused on narrow partisan issues.

“What doesn’t work is drawing a harsh ideological line in the sand,” said Ms. Collins, of Maine, who early in the year was a top Democratic target for defeat but ended up winning 61 percent of the vote while Senator Barack Obama received 58 percent in the presidential race in her state.

“We make a mistake if we are going to make our entire appeal rural and outside the Northeast and outside the Rust Belt,” said Mr. King, of New York, who easily won re-election in a region shedding Republicans at a precipitous rate.

“We can stand around and talk about our principles, but we have to put them into actions that most people agree with,” said Mr. Alexander, of Tennessee, a self-described conservative who was able to attract African-American voters.

Their comments go to the competing visions for the party’s future that will confront Republicans as they return to Capitol Hill next week to elect House and Senate leaders and begin the process of adjusting to a second consecutive round of resounding losses on Capitol Hill. [...]

(bold emphasis mine) Notice they didn't say "abandon conservatism". They simply speak of being more flexible, reaching out instead of being too narrow and intolerant, and not putting all our eggs in one basket.

Some would call that common sense.

The Democrats regained control of Congress by their clever stategy of supporting Blue Dog Democrats, conservative Democrats, to gain wins against Republicans. I'm wondering if the Republicans shouldn't learn something from that, and try supporting "Red Dog" Republicans, liberal Republicans, to win against democrats in blue states.

Instead, a vocal element in the Republican party has become strident, labeling anyone who doesn't fit their definition of conservative as RINOs, moderates who need to be driven out of the party.

Look where that's gotten us today. The entire Northeast, once a Republican stronghold, has been lost to the Democrats as many of New England's Republicans have abandoned the party they feel has abandoned them.

Even here in Oregon, the Uber Republicans who felt our Republican Senator Gordon Smith was too liberal to support, decided to throw their vote away on the Constitution party instead. Now we have that disgusting pig Jeff Merkely as our new senator. How is that supposed to be an improvement?

There has been too much focus on trying to kick people out of the Republican party. It's clearly a losing strategy. Isn't it time we focus on trying GROW our party and to attract people INTO it instead?


Related Links:

Can't we all just get along?

"Politics is the art of the possible"

PAWLENTY CALLS FOR A MORE DIVERSE GOP
     

Does Obama = Tolerance? The Experiment

Tolerance fails T-shirt test

As the media keeps gushing on about how America has finally adopted tolerance as the great virtue, and that we're all united now, let's consider the Brave Catherine Vogt Experiment.

Catherine Vogt, 14, is an Illinois 8th grader, the daughter of a liberal mom and a conservative dad. She wanted to conduct an experiment in political tolerance and diversity of opinion at her school in the liberal suburb of Oak Park.

She noticed that fellow students at Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama for president. His campaign kept preaching "inclusion," and she decided to see how included she could be.

So just before the election, Catherine consulted with her history teacher, then bravely wore a unique T-shirt to school and recorded the comments of teachers and students in her journal. The T-shirt bore the simple yet quite subversive words drawn with a red marker:

"McCain Girl."

"I was just really curious how they'd react to something that different, because a lot of people at my school wore Obama shirts and they are big Obama supporters," Catherine told us. "I just really wanted to see what their reaction would be."

Immediately, Catherine learned she was stupid for wearing a shirt with Republican John McCain's name. Not merely stupid. Very stupid.

"People were upset. But they started saying things, calling me very stupid, telling me my shirt was stupid and I shouldn't be wearing it," Catherine said.

Then it got worse.

"One person told me to go die. It was a lot of dying. A lot of comments about how I should be killed," Catherine said, of the tolerance in Oak Park.

But students weren't the only ones surprised that she wore a shirt supporting McCain. [...]

Death threats? That's a bit over the top. But hey, it's eighth graders we're talking about, so I wouldn't take it too literally. But still, not exactly a lot of tolerance.

Of course, she wore the Obama t-shirt the next day, and the reactions to that... well, read the whole thing. In the end she wrote a report about it for her history class, and the irony of intolerance by the "tolerant" Obama supporters made for an interesting classroom discussion.

Even after the experiment, Catherine never did say who she preferred. Maybe she'll grow up to be a "swing" voter. ;-)
     

We must abandon the principle of free speech

WHAT!?! If we want to reconcile with Islam, that is what we must do, according to some Islamist "authorities". American writer Joshua Trevino at the Brussel's Journal has the details:

Too Good to Win. Is the West Losing the War?

[...] Last week, I returned from the Third International Conference on the Muslim World and the West in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The aim of the conference was to “bridge the gap,” as they put it, between the Muslim world and the West.

Now, this seems like a worthy thing. Surely we of the West ought to find our common ground with the Muslim world, and vice versa. Surely there is common ground to be found. Surely the problems between us are predominantly problems of understanding and comprehension… and surely they are solvable with a little goodwill.

I admit to having been a bit dismayed when, at a pre-conference interview, the chairman — a Columbia University alumnus named Imam Feisal Rauf — told me that Muslim violence was “predominantly” the fault of Westerners. Nonetheless, I soldiered on in the belief that we could — how to put it? — bridge the gap.

To say that the luminaries of the conference disappointed my hopes is to understate things. But to say that that were luminous is to be perfectly accurate. I’ll just name three of the most prominent and powerful:

• Secretary-General of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Ekmeleddin Ihsanouglu of Turkey.
• Former Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz.
• His Royal Highness Prince Turki bin Faisal al Saud, former director of Saudi intelligence, and until recently the Saudi Ambassador to the United States.

These men are educated… well traveled… experienced… wealthy… and Westernized. And each of them told the conference that for the West and Islam to reconcile, the West must abandon the principle of free speech. [...]

(bold emphasis mine) Josh give the details of what they said, and it's shocking. It's bad enough that the whole conference was like that. But even worse, all the representatives from the West who were invited to speak agreed with them! Josh speculated about that:

[...] The deputy speaker of the French National Assembly was there, as was a Spanish ambassador, an Australian MP, and various other mostly European functionaries. Every single one of them accepted the demand for an end to free speech without complaint.

We might call this the mindset of the quisling. Or, to invoke the opposite side of that historical allusion, we might say that they merely adhere to Winston Churchill’s admonition that “it is better to jaw-jaw than to war-war.”

There is tremendous wisdom in Churchill’s statement — but to take it at face value is to ignore that the man himself would not “jaw-jaw” with simply anyone, on any terms. This, after all, is a man for whom Mohandas Gandhi was deemed a morally unfit interlocutor. (I believe Churchill was right on this, but that’s for another speech.) Churchill rightly understood that to talk with someone in the absence of conditions gives some measure of moral sanction to that person.

For Churchill, to sit down with Hitler on equal terms, conceding from the start the legitimacy of the Nazi’s desires, was to lose the battle before it began. [...]

Churchill wasn't a fool, and we would do well to follow his example. And lest you think this is merely a Muslim bashing article, it's not. Josh does not agree that these attitudes represent the whole of the Islamic world. He maintains that we must not accept the "logic" that our freedom is responsible for Islamic terror, and insists that we have an obligation, to ourselves and the Islamic world, to stand up and defend our freedom. He ends the article with an explanation of why he became a Republican at the tender age of nine. Way to go, I say.