From the Jerusalem Post:

…MKs close to Netanyahu went further and specifically ruled out Netanyahu accepting a single Palestinian refugee or giving the Palestinians or any foreign entity control over Jerusalem’s Holy Basin, singling out the Temple Mount and Western Wall.

When asked whether they thought they could make peace without paying the price that Olmert was willing to pay, Netanyahu’s confidants would only say that this was what the current negotiations were intended to determine.

“There is no situation in which Netanyahu or any Likud leader could offer the Palestinians what Olmert offered, especially regarding Jerusalem,” said Likud faction chairman Ze’ev Elkin…

Which is just the nature of things – would we offer the Washington Monument to our most deadly enemies in return for peace?

The trouble with making peace between Israel and the Palestinians is that the Palestinians want things they cannot have, and have no conceivable right to have. The modern Jewish settlement of Israel came via gift of the British, who by right of conquest in defensive war had gained dispositive control over Palestine in 1918. Once established, the Jewish people of Israel then gained control over the whole of Jerusalem by right of conquest in defensive war. Jerusalem is an Israeli city – a Jewish city; any Palestinians who live there do by sufferance of the Israelis. To demand all or part of it as a price for peace is simply absurd.

The trouble here is that our current leadership doesn’t understand what the fuss is all about. Not having much discernible religious belief, nor much of a sense of patriotism, they simply don’t understand the emotion behind Jewish access to the Temple Mount. It can’t be given away.

For the Palestinians to have peace they are going to have to give up their silly dreams of Jerusalem as their capitol city – but they won’t give up the dream as long as they are encouraged to think that by a combination of violence and stubbornness they’ll eventually get their way. And so, peace is currently impossible – it can’t be made as the sides have no means of reaching an agreement.

The Palestinians have to be confronted with a harsh either/or decision – either accept a peace treaty with Jerusalem as the undivided capitol of Israel, or face being walled off in whatever territory Israel decides to leave them, along with a cut off of all foreign aid for the Palestinian State. In either case, Israel will have peace – what the Palestinians would have if they don’t accept the offer won’t be much, but they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.

Just an astounding bit of news from Zero Hedge:

Ever wonder how China can endlessly generate goal-seeked GDP of precisely 8.00001% year after year? Or how it can constantly find use for the massive and ever-larger surplus of warehoused commodities? Simple – never stop building. Which, apparently means blowing up empty building before they are even finished and rebuilding them. Rinse. Repeat. After all gotta keep all those construction workers from rioting, and all those USD reserves redirected into Brazilian and OZ commodities, now that China is not really buying US debt anymore. China Hush has some stunning pictures confirming that in its search of the great home bubble perpetual engine, the politbureau comrades may have stumbled onto the bricks and mortar equivalent of Shangri La…

It seems that China is demolishing buildings only a few years old in order to make room for even newer, larger buildings. This is sheer madness – but a strong indicator that I’m right in thinking that China’s economy is Potemkin. Shiny and bright on the surface (at least those parts of the surface the Chinese government presents to foreign governments and investors), not so pretty underneath. It must never be forgotten – though it has been quite ruthlessly forgotten by the money men of the West – that China is governed by an inhuman dictatorship. It is corrupt, it is cruel – and it is heading for a fall.

Draft Cain, 2012?

Mudslinging is all the Democrats have left…well, more accurately, its all they really had to begin with.

Obama’s policies just made things worse. Some people, believe it or not, are just figuring this out.

What to do when your church starts rejecting everything you believe in.

Wonder if the Czech Republic would consider swapping Presidents with us?

Independents are as angry as Republicans; meaning only Democrats are even remotely satisfied with things as they are. Guess how that will work out on November 2nd?

From the AP:

President Barack Obama’s $30 billion small community business lending program faces one big challenge: many of the community banks and businesses it’s supposed to help don’t want it.

The lending program is part of a bill that passed the House of Representatives on Thursday and now awaits the president’s signature. The legislation contains a mix of tax cuts and credits aimed at helping small businesses. The centerpiece of the bill is an effort to make billions of dollars available to community banks for loans to small businesses…

…Bank executives say their customers don’t want loans, even at low interest rates, because the sluggish economy has chilled expansion plans. Some say the federal money isn’t worth it because they fear it will come with too much regulatory oversight.

“We have taken a strategic decision not to have our primary regulator, the government, also be a partner in our bank,” said William Chase Jr., CEO of Triumph Bank in Memphis…

That is the first intelligent statement I’ve seen from a banker in quite a long while. Mr. Chase seems to have learned the lesson – when Uncle Sam comes bearing gifts, think “Trojan Horse”.

The flaw in the Obama plan is that it is geared toward identifying what Obama and Co think should be done. The trouble is that no one in DC can really know what should be done. The US economy is 300 million people all doing things day by day which no one can track. The smartest people in the world in possession of the most detailed analysis of the economy can’t figure it out – its simply impossible. Too many variables.

This is why if you’re going to cut taxes, at all, they should be cut across the board. When you do that, you simply allow people an easier time of doing whatever it is they prefer. The economy is not some esoteric thing separate from the people – it is, simply, the people living their lives. Right now, the people are laboring under straightened finances and this has caused economic growth to grind to a halt – and we may, indeed, slip back in to full blown recession (with the caveat that, federal number crunchers aside, we may never have really left it).

Leave more money with the people and they’ll immediately gain greater flexibility as well as greater ability to make long term plans – recovery is automatic under such circumstances because the people don’t just sit around waiting for government permission to create wealth. They just do it, unless the government prevents them (which is, essentially, what government has been doing these past two years).

Outside of the financial straight jacket we’ve got on, the biggest threat to the economy is our debt – and investors can perceive that we’re fast approaching a fiscal brick wall. So in addition to across the board tax cuts to get things moving again, we need to seriously and deeply cut government spending. If we do this – cut taxes and spending – then we’ll be in a real recovery in less than a year, and on the road to returned prosperity in two or three years.

Obama’s little program is just more of the same economic idiocy – it not only won’t fix things, it will make them worse. And people see this.

HAT TIP: Mish’s

From the Miami Herald:

With a little over a month remaining before the Nov. 2 election, the three-way race for U.S. Senate is turning into a two-man race — for second place…

…Rubio is favored by 40 percent of likely voters, up from 38 percent last month; Crist’s support has dwindled to 28 percent from 33 percent, according to the Mason-Dixon Research & Associates survey of 625 likely Florida voters. The margin of error: plus/minus four percentage points…

Good to keep in mind that once upon a time the TEA Party-backed Rubio was supposed to be a sure loser. The more “moderate” Crist was supposed to win – and the GOP was to pay the price for getting “extreme” and backing someone as out of the mainstream as Rubio.

Guess that bit of talking point hasn’t worked out as well as thought..

This shows that a solid conservative can build support – and shows a path for victory exists even for O’Donnell in Delaware. She’s doing it smart – saying goodbye to the national media and spending all her time building support in Delaware, which is the only place it matters for her.

We can win, everywhere, if we just try – we don’t need to water down the message. It is falsehood to say that strong conservatism can’t win. Strong liberalism can’t – outside of a few strange districts and a couple odd States – but conservatism can. Why? Because conservatism is true and is in tune with bedrock American values. We’ve blinded ourselves with a series of lies about what is possible in politics – and Rubio is showing the way out.

Some thoughts from me as to why the “save the RINO’s” crowd is wrong – the TEA Party is representative of bedrock America, and we must adhere to the values and desires expressed in that movement.

The TEA Party does not set policy – that is for people in the regular political parties to do. What they are doing is calling people to account…the American people want their country back. Whichever party most firmly grasps this and best demonstrates that they will do just that, will win.

In this case, about the funding of an anti-Israel Jewish group. Soros? George Soros? Never heard of him – yeah, right:

The Jewish-American advocacy group J Street, which bills itself as the dovish alternative to the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobby, has secretly received funding from billionaire George Soros despite previous denials that it accepted funds from the Hungarian-born financier and liberal political activist.

Tax forms obtained by The Washington Times reveal that Mr. Soros and his two children, Jonathan and Andrea Soros, contributed a total $245,000 to J Street from one Manhattan address in New York during the fiscal year from July 1, 2008 to June 30, 2009…

J Street, itself, is just another “if only Israel wasn’t so bad” liberal group. It provides media air cover for those who want to be anti-Israel, but are still concerned about becoming flat-out anti-Semitic (a lot of people on the left don’t care any longer about that – being anti-Semitic seems to be developing in to a test of purity on the left; but, some still do…and so, J Street). As such a group, no one really need concern themselves with that they say – but it is rather typical of leftist groups that they can’t seem to get by without lying.

Nor, it seems, can they get by without taking money from even the most disreputable sources. George Soros is a liberal financial shark who made his money by figuring out how to legally steal it via financial manipulation. He is not a very nice man, as far as that goes – and on top of that, he doesn’t provide anything of worth to average people. He doesn’t make anything other than money for himself – and, of course, for the various kook-left causes he backs. If J Street wanted to be in any way respected, they would have told Soros to pound sand…but, they took his money, instead.

A web of lies and corruption have been spread around America today – and we can start ripping them asunder on November 2nd.

As long as the “right” people are being discriminated against – Christopher Coates’ testimony from Hot Air:

In the spring of 2009, Ms. King, who had by then been appointed Acting AAG for Civil Rights by the Obama Administration, called me to her office and specifically instructed me that I was not to ask any other applicants whether they would be willing to, in effect, race-neutrally enforce the VRA (Voting Rights Act). Ms. King took offense that I was asking such a question of job applicants and directed me not to ask it because she does not support equal enforcement of the provisions of the VRA and had been highly critical of the filing and prosecution of the Ike Brown case…

The Brown case was, according to Coates, “…some of the most outrageous and blatant racially discriminatory behavior at the polls … that I have seen or had reported to me in my thirty-three plus years as a voting rights litigator…”. This is what comes of playing racial politics for generations. We have built up a system where voting rights violations (as well as more conventional voter fraud) is routine on the Democrat side of the aisle. Its ok, you see?, because white people are inherently racist, and must be made to pay, forever, for actions done long ago.

Justice is the absence of injustice. Just as even the smallest bit of falsehood makes a whole thing untrue, so does the smallest bit of injustice make justice disappear. Oil and water mix better than justice and injustice. When we said, “and justice for all” back in the days of Jim Crow, we were not stating the truth about our nation – as long as someone was denied the right to vote because of his skin color, we did not have justice in voting. We then fixed that by banning the use of race as a qualifier for voting…but, now, liberals have put it right back in there.

Just as once upon a time dark skin could mean you’d not have your right to vote respected, so now having light skin can cause the same problem. While not, at the moment, as widespread as Jim Crow, it is spreading – and our nation because ever more unjust as it spreads.

We will not take a step back, liberals. We will not let you replace one racial tyranny with another. We, at least, have learned our lessons – that all people, regardless of skin color, are our brothers and sisters. We will not let you divide us and foster hatred among us – we are Americans, and all of us will be secured the right to vote per the Constitution and laws of the United States of America.

Mish notes a report about the 7,000,000 or so people who have exhausted their unemployment benefits and asks:

With the exception of those opting for social security, some 7 million people who want jobs and once collected unemployment benefits, now have no job-related income.

Think those 7 million people are about to go on a spending spree? Think those forced into social security are about to go on a spending spree? Think the self-employed with no income are about to go on a spending spree? Think the 26 million unemployed or under-employed are about to go on a spending spree? Think the countless millions of working Americans barely scraping by are about to go on a spending spree?

Well, I don’t either…

…People are broke, yet Congress opts to punish those still working by letting tax cuts expire. Is this amazing or simply par for the course?

Par for the course, I’m afraid. It must be kept in mind that Democrat leaders don’t actually care about people – they talk about caring; they’ll run whole campaigns on the theme of their concern for the poor and working people, but they don’t really care. G. K. Chesterton once ventured to explain why this should be:

Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.

The leaders of the Democrats are rich – some times, quite fabulously. While Pelosi and Co will talk about the GOP favoring the millionaires and billionaires, the fact is that most of such are on the Democrat side. How many conservative billionaires can you name? How many billionaires are sponsors of conservative groups? Democrats are the party of the rich – they’ve just got the brass to attack “the rich” while they sleep on piles of money.

But as rich people, the only thing they really know about is money – so, they’ll spend money and give money and do all sorts of things with money. But money, of itself, tends to attract people who don’t always have the best interests of others at heart. If you’re flashing the cash at a problem, that cash will be taken…but its no assurance that the cash will be taken for the problem listed. In this case here, all the Democrat spending – and they’ve spent trillions over the past couple years – has not managed to get in to the hands of the poor nor the middle class.

If they would, as Chesterton observed, give themselves away they would have better ensured the money went where most needed. As it was, it mostly ended up in the vaults of millionaires and billionaires as well as lining the pockets of well heeled union bosses and various liberal groups.

We can change this, if we change the government on November 2nd. The choice is ours – but I’m hoping we might get a new set of leaders who will, perhaps, have the ability to see things from the point of view of those who are suffering.