And The Beat Goes On...

It's been said that the presidential elections of 2012 could be the most important elections of our lives.  Our news are filled with film clips and sound bytes of presidential debates.  The Republican candidates vying for the nomination are in full swing campaigning throughout the country and the media is in a frenzy looking to report breaking news. 

In the meantime, a group of malcontents is defying the law, destroying public property, defacing monuments, defecating on the American flag, and creating mass disorder and civil disobedience while protesting what they perceive to be abuses by large corporations and Wall Street.  Americans seem to be oblivious to the fact that former Obama Green Jobs Czar, Van Jones,  an avowed Communist, predicted this "American Autumn" where people would take to the streets in protest to capitalism.

Around the world, news are breaking as fast as we can read them.  It is difficult and dangerous to focus on just one issue when so many other events that can affect our lives are taking place.  We can't allow ourselves to remain uninformed, complacent with our lives, and forget that around the country and the world, "The beat goes on!"
Two Sisters



The Return: Gilad Shalit Comes Home
by Martin Peretz - Tel Aviv Journal

The return to Zion has been a trope in Jewish history for more than 3,000 years. It pertains to the people Israel itself. And it applies also to individual Jews, both in the abstract and in the tactile, as a matter of conscience and as a fact of communality. You will know already from my other writings just how much I pity those Jews who are alienated from these considerations or, worse yet, haven’t the slightest idea of what I mean. Of course, ignorance of one’s past can excuse a lot. But it’s not a satisfying answer to inquiring children. Good luck to those who feel they can wing it.
Gilad Shalit’s return to Israel after nearly five years and four months in captivity to Hamas, the official and unembarrassed terrorist wing of the Palestinian movement, and incommunicado even to the International Red Cross (which has a mortifying record of utter indifference to the Jewish prisoners in the concentration camps of another totalist ideology to live down), was experienced by Israel as a whole, by Israel in its home, and by Israel in its dispersion. As The New York Times aptly pointed out, Shalit was the first captured Israeli soldier to be returned alive in 26 years. For those Jews who pray and especially for those who don’t really but try—which, in the present season, means just about all of Jewry, yes, this tiny remnant of 14 million living souls—the journey of Shalit back to his family and to his nation is a moment of celebration anda kind of victory. It is also a conflicted moment given the number of terrorists who were released at the same time; this line from Yehuda Amichai (cited by Rabbi Avraham Weiss in a commentary on Shalit) sums up the situation perfectly: “A person needs to love and hate at the same moment. To laugh and cry with the same eyes. … To make love in war and war in love.” READ MORE


The job destroyers
by Michael Goodwin - The New York Post

With each passing day, the Occupy Wall Street movement is picking up steam. The growing roster of A-list supporters at home and from around the globe is impressive, if that’s the right word.
Iran’s chief mad mullah, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, loves the protests, the government of China applauds them, and Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez is positively gung-ho.

Naturally, the American Nazi Party favors the lusty attacks on the “Judeo-capitalist banksters” while the Socialist Party USA and the Communist Party USA are happy passengers on the anti-Wall Street bandwagon.

Oh, and Barack Obama hearts the movement, too.

Because you should judge a man by his allies, our president might want to reconsider the villainous company he is keeping. Despite his claim that protesters reflect a “broad-based frustration about how our financial system works,” the people sleeping in Zuccotti Park are not there to help him create middle-class jobs or save the ones that exist.
If they were, America’s crackpot foreign and domestic adversaries wouldn’t be cheering. Their support reveals what the movement is really about.

Plain and simple, the movement is about destroying capitalism, which most protesters see as the enemy. They don’t want to fix the financial system. They want to bring it down.

Movement leaders don’t want the economy to grow, which would mean the Big Bad Banks would be healthy enough to lend and Evil Corporations would be healthy enough to borrow. They want to redistribute wealth, not create it.

They hope banks and corporations go belly-up, except, of course, for those that produce cool stuff they like. The cool stuff, actually, all stuff, should be free because profits are filthy. READ MORE


Taking Aim at Iran's Revolutionary Guard
by Ilan Berman, Washington Times

The foiled Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States, which was made public by the White House on Oct. 11, amounts to a dramatic escalation of the West’s confrontation with Iran. In the wake of the disclosure, the Obama administration has talked tough, pledging new diplomatic pressure against Iran and emphasizing that “all options are on the table” as it contemplates its response.

But what can actually be done about Iran’s clerical army and the radical regime that enables it? The most ready answer...READ MORE

No Terrorist Ties Seen in Courthouse Arrests
by Jim Forsyth - Radio WOAI.com

Officials in San Antonio now say that five men who were born in Morocco and live in France were not involved in any terrorism or threatening activities when they were arrested after breaking into a fourth floor courtroom in the historic Bexar County Courthouse in downtown San Antonio early today.

"There does not appear to be any terroristic activity," Bexar County First Assistant District Attorney Cliff Herberg said this afternoon.

Three of the men were arrested as they walked out of the 120 year old courthouse building shortly before 2 AM today, and two others were arrested in an RV that was parked outside the courthouse. At the time, officials said photographs of 'infrastructure' found inside the RV raised concerns, but Bexar County Sheriff Amadeo Ortiz says the five have been investigated and have no known ties to any terrorist groups.

"I don't know what their reasons were, but they came here and they were partying at several bars before coming to the Courthouse," Ortiz said, adding that several beer bottles were found in the RV. "There is no indication that they meant to do any harm to the courtroom, they have been cooperative with us, and there is no reason to suspect that this was terroristic activity of any description."

Surveillance video shows one of the men walking down a Courthouse hallway wearing a huge Mexican-style sombrero hat, while another man is seen playing with a judge's gavel.

Ortiz said the five are "pranksters, not terrorists."

"Due to the demeanor, due to the bottles of beer that we found, due to the fact that they had been in a couple of bars before they came over here," he said, joking that if "their mothers saw them, they would not be pleased." 

The FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, as well as Department of Homeland Security officials have been involved in the investigation and will remain involved. Herberg said the five will face felony burglary charges and will remain locked up for some time.    READ MORE