The Remnant: No Gay Marriage for Poland

From The Remnant:

http://www.remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=3143:no-gay-marriage-for-poland

Daniel Hannan: On The Proximity of The End

Daniel Hannan MEP is warning of the end of the European Union, but his remarks could also be directed at the United States.

"You cannot spend your way to growth. You cannot increase consumption without producing anything (at least not in the long term). You cannot debase a currency without consequences, and you cannot keep borrowing forever. And if you try to keep doing those things, what happens? You're about to find out."

Say Goodbye to Turkey

That's Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and he's no Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the father of modern Turkey who truly believed in a secular democracy form of government for his homeland. Erdogan doesn't much like us or Israel (somebody tell our president before he sells Turkey our F-35 Joint Strike Fighter), but he's gotten very close to our greatest enemy, and together they are Two Dangerous Guys.

Erdogan was reelected last Sunday, and that is bad news for us, because there can be no doubt his plans are to eventually replace the country's secular government (the legacy of Ataturk) with a religious one (guess which religion).

Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at The American Enterprise Institute, just wrote about Sunday's election in Turkey and the title of his piece is: Erdogan’s Re-election Marks a New Era, But Not a Good One, which pretty well sums it up.

Finally, here's a much more in-depth piece on the problems of Turkey written by Michael Rubin for the July/August 2010 edition of Commentary.

Turkey, from Ally to Enemy

A Tea Party for Finland - the First in Europe

(Click to enlarge)

From The Hill's Pundits Blog:

The problem with globalization, aside from megalomania, is that it stretches the culture to its thinnest and brings it to its maximum least potential: everyone a John Lennon, everyone a Marx, everyone an Oprah, everyone an Obama. Then it snaps. What you had at the beginning was Lord Nelson. What you get at the end is "American Idol." At the beginning you get Jefferson. At the end you get Joe Biden.

As The New York Times reports, in the general election in Finland last weekend, “the nationalist and populist True Finn Party emerged from political obscurity after largely campaigning on the evils of the European Union and its bailouts of Greece and Ireland. It claimed 39 seats in Finland’s Parliament — almost eight times the number it won in the 2007 election — and it is likely to become a partner in any coalition government.”

For the Times, it is the new terror that dare not speak its name, but its name is Tea Party. And: “Finland is not alone. Anti-European Union and anti-immigration parties have been on the rise in Sweden, Italy, Hungary and the Netherlands in the past year, and more may follow. It is a worrisome trend for supporters of the union, and for efforts to safeguard the euro by offering emergency loans to the weakest member nations and to better coordinate budget and spending policies in the countries that use it.”

Not a surprise that the Finns turned first. They are said to be as tough as boiled owl and singularly held off Stalin in the Winter War. Now they hold off the mediocrity which is the EU.


Wonder what their version of our "Don't Tread on Me" flag looks like?

Caroline Glick: Israel's Iron Lady

Caroline Glick was interviewed by Leah Zinder, on the English news magazine Closeup, in Jerusalem recently, and she posted this video of the interview during which she takes no prisoners.

Bruce Thornton: Preserving American Exceptionalism

Bruce Thornton, whose five part interview with Peter Robinson was featured earlier on this Blog (you can find all five parts by typing his name in the "Search This Blog" box on the right), has written an essay for The Heritage Foundation on Political Thought. The title of his essay is: America the Delusional? Overcoming Our European Temptation, and it is adapted from his book: Decline and Fall: Europe’s Slow-Motion Suicide.
Reproduced here is the final section of his essay:

Preserving American Exceptionalism

All of these American ideals––political freedom and autonomy, citizen independence and self-reliance, limited government, religion, patriotism, and nationalist autonomy backed up by vigorous military power—comprise American exceptionalism. These ideals that define our nation would have to be weakened or discarded if America were to follow the EU road to utopia.

Regrettably, we have already been travelling down that road for decades. By the early 20th century, the rise of Progressivism had established in the public discourse the doctrine of social, economic, and political change controlled and directed by technical elites. This class, backed by government power, would work to improve and perfect life and solve problems based on what Bradley C. S. Watson describes as a “faith in intelligence and expertise translated into support for a vast state mechanism that would be confidently dedicated to ensuring growth—by means of progressive education, the administrative state, and redistribution of capital.”[38]

The expansion of the federal government that commenced under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, was furthered by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, and has intensified under Barack Obama is continuing this process. The result is increased entitlement spending and government intrusion into the economy, education, and social life. Consequently, the U.S. is now facing many of the same fiscal problems that afflict Europe, with entitlement spending projected to double by 2050 and public debt slated to rise to 180 percent of GDP by 2035.[39] And let us not forget the erosion of traditional independence and self-reliance, the constriction of freedoms, and the infantilizing of Americans that follow the greater intrusion of government power into our daily lives and business.

Such policies and the philosophy behind them require that the ideals of American exceptionalism be discarded if the U.S. is to follow the path of the EU, as many liberals believe we should. The cost of abandoning those ideals would be larger and more expensive government and increasing encroachments on the quintessential American political goods of individual freedom and self-reliance. Without a political sea change in the next few years, the United States will continue to head down the road to nowhere.


You can read Dr. Thornton's entire essay by clicking here.

The EU is Crumbling. Good Riddance!

Daniel Hannan isn't the only Euroskeptic who happens to be a Member of the European Parliament. That's Nigel Farage, who also is an MEP, and who also is not afraid to state his position publicly. According to a post on PowerLine, Farage "tells more truth about the entire European experiment [in under four minutes] than all European bankers, commissioners, and politicians have done in the past decade." Surely the European Union is not what the Man of the Century had in mind when he called for a United States of Europe in 1946.