WoW!!

The Watchers Council- it's the oldest, longest running cyber comte d'guere ensembe in existence - started online in 1912 by Sirs Jacky Fisher and Winston Churchill themselves - an eclective collective of cats both cruel and benign with their ability to put steel on target (figuratively - natch) on a wide variety of topictry across American, Allied, Frenemy and Enemy concerns, memes, delights and discourse.

Every week these cats hook up each other with hot hits and big phazed cookies to peruse and then vote on their individual fancy catchers

Thus, sans further adieu (or a don't)

Council Winners

First place with 2 1/3 votes! –Joshuapundit-Who’s ‘Responsibility?’

Second place with 2 votes –The Noisy Room – John McCain’s Progressive Hand Is Behind The Purge Of Tea Party Detractors From The Arizona GOP

Third place *t* with 1 2/3 votes –Bookworm Room – The New York Times ignores the reasons why Swedes might be turning against immigrants

Third place *t* with 1 2/3 votes – VA Right! - Barack Obama – The President of No!

Fourth place with 1 vote –Ask Marion – Time For GOP Leadership

Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote –Nice Deb – Lefty Losers Spam Twitter With Lie About Officer Liu’s Widow

Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote –Simply Jews – Jonathan Freedland and the liberal Zionists’ support: thanks but no thanks

Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote –The Razor – What I learned In 2014

Fifth place *t* with 2/3 vote –The Right Planet – British Lawmaker: Hitler Was a Socialist

Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote – The Glittering Eye -The Problem With Student Debt

Sixth place *t* with 1/3 vote –The Independent Sentinel – Cuomo’s Captious New Law: No More Selfies With Tigers and Lion

Non-Council Winners

• First place with 2 1/3 votes! –Rush Limbaugh -The GOP Leadership’s Attitude Toward Its Own Base Is Unprecedentedsubmitted by Ask Marion
• Second place with 2 votes –Victor Davis Hanson – Autopilot nation submitted by Joshuapundit
• Third place *t* with 1 2/3 votes –Roger L. Simon/PJ Media – Egypt’s al-Sisi Makes Extraordinary Speech on Islam submitted by The Glittering Eye
• Third place *t* with 1 2/3 votes –Sultan Knish –December 31st, 1912 submitted by The Independent Sentinel
• Fourth place *t* with 1 vote –Klari Goldman Bates/ Times Of Israel – A Tango With Hypocrisy submitted by Simply Jews
• Fourth place *t* with 1 vote –Peter Pomerantsev/Politico – Inside Putin’s Information War submitted by The Razor
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes – USNI News – Navy Wants Rail Guns to Fight Ballistic and Supersonic Missiles Says RFI submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Angry White Dude – Trust the Republicans They Said! This Time Will Be Different, They Said!submitted by VA Right!
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes – Powerline – Liberals Can’t Argue, They Can Only Bully [Updated] submitted by The Watcher
• Sixth place with 1/3 vote –Weasel Zippers -Today #BlackLivesMatters Imploded submitted by Nice Deb

See you next week!

el Sisi

Pyramidland's General President - same cat who invented V Checks for girls - recently delivered a Ummah Culpa that is especially delish and totally au courant...

Egyptian president (and strongman) Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi delivered a possibly epochal speech at Al-Azhar University on New Year's Day. More than a thousand years old, Al-Azhar is considered by many to be the epicenter of scholarly m"Hammedism.

Addressing the assemblage of imams in the room, al-Sisi called for a "religious revolution" in which you know what clerics take the lead in rethinking the direction m"Hammedism has taken recently. An excerpt (as translated by Raymon Ibrahim's website):

"I am referring here to the religious clerics. … It's inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma (Islamic world) to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible!

"That thinking — I am not saying 'religion' but 'thinking' — that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the centuries, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It's antagonizing the entire world! ... All this that I am telling you, you cannot feel it if you remain trapped within this mindset. You need to step outside of yourselves to be able to observe it and reflect on it from a more enlightened perspective.

"I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move … because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost — and it is being lost by our own hands."

Pic - "Western leaders also need to be more forthright in defense of liberal values. They have a lot of ground to make up."        

Charlie Hebo

Mein Gott! 44 was correct in this case when he LOL'd the future doesn't belong to cats who insult the PBUH guy

The satirical weekly has been the target before, having been fire-bombed back in late 2011 after running a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed and its editor has been under police protection for some time. Even though a target of Islamist ire, the magazine has not shied away from running other stories and cartoons offensive to Muslim sensibilities. Just this week it ran a cover story on a new book that imagines a future France in which the country is led by an Islamic party and has a Muslim president who, among other things, bans women from the workplace. 

No doubt also worrying French officials is that, unlike the recent terrorist attacks in Quebec and Ottawa in October or the one in London in May 2013, the attack on the Paris magazine office Charlie Hebdo was, it appears, well-planned and done with skill.

But what will be something of a surprise to the French is that the attack took place at all. Since the mid-1990s, and after a decade of terrorism on its streets, Paris has not seen a major terrorist attack.  As written in 2007 (“France: Europe’s Counterterrorist Powerhouse”) and in Safety, Liberty and Islamist Terrorism: American and European Approaches to Domestic Counterterrorism, France had been, especially before 9/11, in a “league of its own” when it comes to developing investigative tools, court proceedings, and laws that have allowed French authorities to stay ahead of the terrorist problem. 

This aggressive stance has of course upset civil libertarians of the French left and right—not unlike here in the U.S. in the wake of the Snowden leaks of the programs of the National Security Agency.  

As the U.S. Congress turns this year to the issue of whether to renew, reform, or let die key sections of the Patriot Act on terrorism surveillance, it might want to keep in mind what has just happened in Paris. If a country such as France—with as strong a counterterrorism effort as there is in a liberal democracy—is still vulnerable, it should give some pause to those members who think now is the time to water-down our own counterterrorism efforts.

Mother Russia

Rossiya-Matushka!

Commonwealth revises her military doctrine...

Decrying what it sees as Western efforts to turn Ukraine into a "front line of confrontation,” the revised doctrine would allow for Russia to deploy precision conventional weapons “as part of strategic deterrent measures” against what it sees as its principal threat: NATO. According to the document “the expansion of NATO’s military infrastructure to the Russian borders” poses a significant threat to Russian security. The doctrine also allows for the use of tactical nuclear weapons in the case of a conventional attack that “threatens the very existence” of the Russian state.

Narod!

The new defense doctrine cites NATO troop deployments and induction of former Soviet-allied states as the top threat to Russian security. It also deems the developing Prompt Global Strike program of the United States as hostile. The precision weapons system is being designed to be able to strike anywhere in the world so swiftly that the target has too little time to respond.

The new doctrine also mentions NATO missile defense plans as destabilizing and for the first time identifies a priority for Russia to protect its natural resource and maritime interests in the Arctic Sea.

Palestine Forever Quest

Boring your britches off faster than mee maw's tale of the cat who cried wolf

The Palestinian Authority is not a country, but rather a group allied with a terrorist organization, and for that reason its appeal to the International Criminal Court should be rejected out of hand, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday. Netanyahu’s comment came at the end of an interministerial meeting he convened in Tel Aviv to discuss ways to combat the Palestinian Authority’s signing of the Rome Statute and its intention of bringing Israelis to the court on war crimes charges. “We expect the International Criminal Court to completely reject the hypocritical act by the Palestinian Authority, because the Palestinian Authority is not a state. It is an entity in an alliance with a terrorist organization, Hamas, that commits war crimes,” he said.

See,

The ICC gambit follows the Palestinian Authority’s failed effort at the United Nations Security Council to obtain recognition as a state. That effort resulted in part from the Obama administration’s malfeasance. Former ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton writes:

A firmer U.S. strategy might have prevented the dilemma from arising. The White House’s opening diplomatic error was in sending strong signals to the media and U.S. allies that 44, wary of offending Arab countries, was reluctant to veto any resolution favoring a Palestinian state. Secretary of State John Kerry took pains not to offer a view of the resolution before it was taken up. Such equivocation was a mistake because even this administration asserts that a permanent resolution of the Israeli-Arab conflict requires direct negotiations and agreements among the parties themselves.  

No draft resolution contrary to these precepts should be acceptable to the U.S., or worth wasting time on in the diplomatic pursuit of a more moderate version. This American view, advocated for years and backed by resolute threats to veto anything that contradicted it, has previously dissuaded the Palestinians from blue-smoke-and-mirror projects in the Security Council.

As bad as the administration has been, however, responsibility for these antics rests squarely with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. “Palestinians continue to be plagued by poor leadership. Being unable to get nine votes in the Security Council; losing when they might have won by delaying a month; energizing American opposition to their actions—all to join an organization where they are actually far more at risk than Israel,” observes former deputy national security adviser Elliott Abrams. “The Fatah leadership in Ramallah is not brave enough to face down Hamas and make peace, nor brave enough to face their own people in an election. So they go for these gyrations in New York instead, hoping to fool Palestinians into thinking these charades constitute courageous action.”

The Palestinian Authority’s repudiation of bilateral negotiations as the route to a peace settlement leaves 44, who has sought at every turn to blame Israel for the breakdown in the “peace process,” with egg on his face. Not only could 44 not restrain allies such as France and Jordan from proceeding on the U.N. Security Council proposal, but also the Palestinian Authority is entirely unresponsive to his pleas to return to the bargaining table, despite all his coddling.

All of this leaves the Palestinian people no better off, and arguably worse. The administration will be under pressure to limit support to the Palestinian Authority and to exit from any international organization that accepts the Palestinian Authority. Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies notes: “The idea now is to sow fear among Israelis that the threat of war crimes lingers. But it’s still unclear whether the PA has a case, let alone standing.” The move will have no effect on Israel nor improve the Palestinian Authority’s bargaining position, he warns. “The Israelis are not cowering. The Palestinian street is not impressed. The international community has grown weary of these diplomatic stunts,” he says. “Ultimately, there is little choice for the PA but to return to the tough slog of negotiations.”

Abbas will not do this, however. The international theatrics are a sign that he is unable to move forward to a positive way on behalf of Palestinians, who will discover that none of his machinations bring them any closer to a state. Michael Makovsky of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a pro-Israel group, observes that Abbas “feels weak domestically versus Hamas and compelled to bolster his hardline creds.” Makovsky speculates that Abbas might actually want “to abet the Israeli right’s chances in March parliamentary elections, because–he believes–it could lighten pressure on him to make hard choices.” Whatever the thinking, “None of these inferences are encouraging for a lasting deal and the US should pressure Abbas to change course,” says Makovsky.

Frankly, this mess was entirely foreseeable and inevitable once Obama began parroting the Palestinian Authority’s line that it was ready for peace, that Israel had to be bullied and that Israeli building stood in the way. How could the Palestinian Authority be less intransigent than the president of the United States? How could Abbas stop inciting violence and distance himself from Hamas if the president kept saying that he was already a “partner for peace”?

44 came into office with the misguided belief that the United States had been too close to Israel (which under 43 had withdrawn from Gaza, lifted checkpoints and agreed not to expand the footprint of settlements). Instead, 44 cozied up to the Palestinian Authority, encouraging its worst instincts and making bilateral negotiations more difficult. If nothing else, Abbas has demonstrated yet again how disastrous the 44-Hillary Clinton-John Kerry Middle East foreign policy has been. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how things could get any worse — unless, of course, Iran gets the bomb.

WoW!!

The Watchers Council- it's the oldest, longest running cyber comte d'guere ensembe in existence - started online in 1912 by Sirs Jacky Fisher and Winston Churchill themselves - an eclective collective of cats both cruel and benign with their ability to put steel on target (figuratively - natch) on a wide variety of topictry across American, Allied, Frenemy and Enemy concerns, memes, delights and discourse.

Every week these cats hook up each other with hot hits and big phazed cookies to peruse and then vote on their individual fancy catchers

Thus, sans further adieu (or a don't)

Council Winners

• *First place with 3 votes!-The Noisy Room – Meet The Agitators Behind the New York Protests and Cop Killings
• Second place with 2 1/3 votes –The Right Planet – A World Conspiracy
• Third place *t* with 1 vote –Ask Marion – Experimental treatment uses immune system to fight Cancer – Immunotherapy coming to US in 2015
• Third place *t* with 1 vote –Bookworm Room – A “Letter of Solidarity” from Cal. State University, Northridge reads like a parody of Leftist anti-Americanism
• Third place *t* with 1 vote –Nice Deb – Giuliani Doubles Down On Obama Criticism, Says de Blasio Should Apologize To NYPD (Video)
• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes –Simply Jews – US policy on Cuba as a (recalcitrant) state of mind
• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes –The Independent Sentinel – Ministry of Truth News: Obama Says Race Relations Are Better Under His Reign
• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes –GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD – The Iran – Pakistan War
• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes –Joshuapundit-Thought Crime! College President Begs For Forgiveness After Saying ‘All Lives Matter’
• Fourth place *t* with 2/3 votes –The Glittering Eye -We Never Had It So Good

Non-Council Winners

• First place with 2 1/3 votes! –Kurt Schlichter – 2014: The Year The Liberal Lies Died submitted by Joshuapundit
• Second place with 1 2/3 votes – Allen West – Quite possibly the most racist article you will ever read submitted by The Watcher
• Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes –Kenneth Timmermann/FrontPageMag–Obama’s White Whale submitted by The Noisy Room
• Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes –Breach Bang Clear-Ferguson, Idiot Cops, and Experts Who Know Nothing At All submitted by Bookworm Room
• Fourth place with 2/3 vote -Bill Flax/Forbes – Obama, Hitler, And Exploding The Biggest Lie In History submitted by The Right Planet
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes -The Passing Parade – The Benchley Memorandum, not by Robert Ludlum submitted by Simply Jews
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes -FrontPage Mag –Front Page’s 2014 Person of the year: The American Police Officer submitted by The Independent Sentinel
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes – Ishaan Tharoor/WAPO Blogs – 7 Awful Unreported Conflicts submitted by GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Sharyl Attkisson -Belatedly Released and Revealing Fast & Furious Docs submitted by Nice Deb
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes -TechCrunch – On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs submitted by The Glittering Eye
• Fifth place *t* with 2/3 votes -Rabbi Uri Pilichowski/Times Of Israel – The terror attack that didn’t make the news submitted by The Watcher
• Sixth place with 1/3 vote -American Thinker -American Thinker – American Achiever of 2014: Sarah Palin submitted by Ask Marion

See you next week!

The Libyan Civil War

Libya is fixing to get all het up...

For three years, Libya has been without a functioning government, police force, or army. The country has been ripped apart by warring fiefdoms of ex-rebels who helped oust Qaddafi but have since directed politics with AK-47s and anti-aircraft guns. This summer, as the battle lines began to harden, two rival factions emerged to vie for control of Libya:

On one side is the newly elected parliament that has been banished to the eastern city of Tobruk — supported by the fractured remains of Qaddafi soldiers who defected during the uprising, as well as regional powers like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

 On the other side is Libya Dawn, a self-described revolutionary coalition of militiamen and Islamist-leaning politicians that originated in the western city of Misrata, allegedly backed by Turkey and Qatar.

Money and war are the main topics of conversation. The country’s oil authorities and ministries now lie in the hands of Libya Dawn, which claims to be the legitimate government. The Islamist coalition’s case was bolstered after a November Supreme Court decision, which it said nullified the House of Representatives and a constitutional amendment on which the June elections were based.

The Libyan Central Bank, fighting to maintain its neutrality, has refused to channel the country’s lucrative oil revenues to either administration since the court decision. It is only paying “expenses” for both administrations, and basic salaries, which ironically includes those of the militias, who were absorbed into the interior and defense ministries by the former parliament in 2012.

The decision has rendered the Tobruk parliament’s plans and newly drafted $42 billion budget for the next financial year nothing more than pieces of paper.

For the politicians and military leaders in Tobruk, that means war.