Interesting and likely scenario, which will put the Western european
notions of "acceptance. tolerance, and diversity" and parliamentary democracy against "Sharia" law and Wahabi justice in direct conflict with each other. Kind of like pitting a wolverine against a three toed sloth in a fight.

The Palestinian elections a few months back that brought the Hamas into government and recent events in Gaza might suggest a foretaste of what is going to come, sooner or later.

I had the good luck to take a Scandanavian vacation a few years back, and talked to a Mercedes enthusiast in Oslo, who owned a 420SEC.

He was very troubled by the huge influx of unskilled Arab refugees into Norway, and said, "They like Mercedes too. But they can only afford the cheap ones, like the W124s"

__________________
1991 560 SEC AMG, 199k <---- 300 hp 10:1 ECE euro HV ...

1995 E 420, 170k "The Red Plum" (sold)

2015 BMW 535i xdrive awd Stage 1 DINAN, 6k, <----364 hp

1967 Mercury Cougar, 49k

2013 Jaguar XF, 20k <----340 hp Supercharged, All Wheel Drive (sold)

* Never voted to raise taxes.
* Never voted for an unbalanced budget.
* Never voted for a federal restriction on gun ownership.
* Never voted to raise congressional pay.
* Never taken a government-paid junket.
* Never voted to increase the power of the executive branch.
* Voted against the Patriot Act.
* Voted against regulating the Internet.
* Voted against the Iraq war.
* Does not participate in the lucrative congressional pension program.
* Returns a portion of his annual congressional office budget to the U.S. treasury every year.
* Introduces numerous pieces of substantive legislation each year, probably more than any single member of Congress.
* Has consistently upheld the Constitution as the framework from which his voting decisions have been based.

I must like "hot air", since I live in Arizona. Don't like him? I'm not surprised.

That is very, very,well stated, Ernesto. It states succinctly exactly how I feel, about them both.

Soon, an embittered, disillusioned and exhausted electorate will have to choose someone again.

It's still a great system, though, in the end.

__________________
1991 560 SEC AMG, 199k <---- 300 hp 10:1 ECE euro HV ...

1995 E 420, 170k "The Red Plum" (sold)

2015 BMW 535i xdrive awd Stage 1 DINAN, 6k, <----364 hp

1967 Mercury Cougar, 49k

2013 Jaguar XF, 20k <----340 hp Supercharged, All Wheel Drive (sold)

You and rattlers.

Coming from you, I take that comment as a point of pride.

Easy for RP to do all the things that you attribute to him while being a member of Congress. Let him try to do the same as President and then we'll see.

As I stated before RP = hot air. Lots of it.

__________________
Current Benzes

1989 300TE "Alice"
1990 300CE "Sam Spade"
1991 300CE "Beowulf" RIP (06.1991 - 10.10.2007)
1998 E320 "Orson"
2002 C320 Wagon "Molly Fox"

Res non semper sunt quae esse videntur

My Gallery

Not in this weather!

He sounds better than the other choices....especially the lying be-ach Hillary

Like him or not, Ron Paul absolutely offers a real choice. He is not under the umbrella of stereotypical sound-bite politician that seems to cover just about everyone else who has entered the race...

Today's Washington Post has an opinion piece describing all the similarities between Chamberlain and George W. Bush. I love it.

Here's a link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/29/AR2007062902304.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

And here's the article:

Why Winston Wouldn't Stand For W
George W. Bush always wanted to be like a wartime British prime ministers. He is. But it's not the one he had in mind.
By Lynne Olson
Sunday, July 1, 2007; Page B01


President Bush's favorite role model is, famously, Jesus, but Winston Churchill is close behind. The president admires the wartime British prime minister so much that he keeps what he calls "a stern-looking bust" of Churchill in the Oval Office. "He watches my every move," Bush jokes. These days, Churchill would probably not care for much of what he sees.

I've spent a great deal of time thinking about Churchill while working on my book "Troublesome Young Men," a history of the small group of Conservative members of Parliament who defied British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasing Adolf Hitler, forced Chamberlain to resign in May 1940 and helped make Churchill his successor. I thought my audience would be largely limited to World War II buffs, so I was pleasantly surprised to hear that the president has been reading my book. He hasn't let me know what he thinks about it, but it's a safe bet that he's identifying with the book's portrayal of Churchill, not Chamberlain. But I think Bush's hero would be bemused, to say the least, by the president's wrapping himself in the Churchillian cloak. Indeed, the more you understand the historical record, the more the parallels leap out -- but they're between Bush and Chamberlain, not Bush and Churchill.

Like Bush and unlike Churchill, Chamberlain came to office with almost no understanding of foreign affairs or experience in dealing with international leaders. Nonetheless, he was convinced that he alone could bring Hitler and Benito Mussolini to heel. He surrounded himself with like-minded advisers and refused to heed anyone who told him otherwise.

In the months leading up to World War II, Chamberlain and his men saw little need to build up a strong coalition of European allies with which to confront Nazi Germany -- ignoring appeals from Churchill and others to fashion a "Grand Alliance" of nations to thwart the threat that Hitler posed to the continent.

Unlike Bush and Chamberlain, Churchill was never in favor of his country going it alone. Throughout the 1930s, while urging Britain to rearm, he also strongly supported using the newborn League of Nations -- the forerunner to today's United Nations -- to provide one-for-all-and-all-for-one security to smaller countries. After the League failed to stop fascism's march, Churchill was adamant that, to beat Hitler, Britain must form a true partnership with France and even reach agreement with the despised Soviet Union, neither of which Chamberlain was willing to do.

Like Bush, Chamberlain also laid claim to unprecedented executive authority, evading the checks and balances that are supposed to constrain the office of prime minister. He scorned dissenting views, both inside and outside government. When Chamberlain arranged his face-to-face meetings with Hitler in 1938 that ended in the catastrophic Munich conference, he did so without consulting his cabinet, which, under the British system, is responsible for making policy. He also bypassed the House of Commons, leading Harold Macmillan, a future Tory prime minister who was then an anti-appeasement MP, to complain that Chamberlain was treating Parliament "like a Reichstag, to meet only to hear the orations and to register the decrees of the government of the day."

As was true of Bush and the Republicans before the 2006 midterm elections, Chamberlain and his Tories had a large majority in the Commons, and, as Macmillan noted, the prime minister tended to treat Parliament like a lapdog legislature, existing only to do his bidding. "I secretly feel he hates the House of Commons," wrote one of Chamberlain's most fervent parliamentary supporters. "Certainly he has a deep contempt for Parliamentary interference."

Churchill, on the other hand, revered Parliament and was appalled by Chamberlain's determination to dominate the Commons in the late 1930s. Churchill considered himself first and foremost "a child" and "servant" of the House of Commons and strongly believed in the legislature's constitutional role to oversee the executive (even when, after becoming prime minister, he often railed against MPs who criticized him). In August 1939, when Chamberlain rammed through a two-month parliamentary adjournment just weeks before the war began, Churchill -- then still a backbencher -- exploded with anger in the House, calling the prime minister's move "disastrous," "pathetic" and shameful." He encouraged his anti-appeasement colleagues to mount similar attacks against Chamberlain, and when one of them, Ronald Cartland, called the prime minister a dictator to his face in the same debate, Churchill congratulated Cartland with an enthusiastic, "Well done, my boy, well done!"

Likewise, Churchill almost certainly would look askance at the Bush administration's years-long campaign to shut down public debate over the "war on terror" and the conflict in Iraq -- tactics markedly similar to Chamberlain's attempts to quiet his opponents. Like Bush and his aides, Chamberlain badgered and intimidated the press, restricted journalists' access to sources and claimed that anyone who dared criticize the government was guilty of disloyalty and damaging the national interest. Just as Bush has done, Chamberlain authorized the wiretapping of citizens without court authorization; Churchill was among those whose phones were tapped by the prime minister's subordinates.

Churchill, by contrast, believed firmly in the sanctity of individual liberties and the need to protect them from government encroachment. That's not to say that he was never guilty of infringing on them himself. In June 1940, when a Nazi invasion of Britain seemed imminent, he ordered the internment of more than 20,000 enemy aliens living on British soil, most of them refugees from Hitler's and Mussolini's fascist regimes. But as the invasion scare abated over the next few months, the vast majority were released, also by his order. "The key word in any understanding of Winston Churchill is the simple word 'Liberty,' " wrote Eric Seal, Churchill's principal private secretary during the early years of the war. "He intensely disliked, and reacted violently against, all attempts to regiment and dictate opinion. . . . He demanded for himself freedom to follow his own star, and he stood out for a like liberty for all men."

Writing about Churchill and Chamberlain, I've discovered, is like administering a Rorschach test to one's readers. People see in Churchill and Chamberlain what they want to see. They draw parallels between the 1930s and the events of today according to their own political philosophy. I've received congratulatory letters and e-mails from people who see similarities between the current U.S. woes in Iraq and Chamberlain's disastrous conduct of the so-called phony war in 1939-40. But I've also gotten fan mail from readers who favorably compare the Tory rebels' courageous fight against Chamberlain to the Bush administration's campaign against those opposing the Iraq war. Among those who've written me in praise of the book are Bush adviser Karl Rove and Howard Wolfson, the communications director of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign.

The president no doubt has his own Churchill. "He was resolute," Bush has remarked. "He was tough. He knew what he believed." But Churchill would snort, I believe, at the administration's equation of "Islamofascism," an amorphous, ill-defined movement of killers forced to resort to terrorism by their lack of military might, to Nazi Germany, a global power that had already conquered several countries before Churchill took office in 1940. Still, key members of the Bush administration have compared critics of the wars on terrorism and in Iraq to the appeasers of the 1930s, thus implicitly equating their boss and themselves to Churchill and the "troublesome young men" who helped bring him to power. During bleak days in Iraq, the administration's hawks can be forgiven for hoping that history will show them to be as far-sighted about a gathering storm as Churchill was in the 1930s.

But history has its own ways, and we cannot make the long-dead titans we admire give us their modern blessing. As the world's two most prominent and powerful democracies, the United States and Britain had a responsibility to serve as exemplars of democracy for the rest of the world, Churchill believed. But to be fitting role models, he argued, both countries had to do their best to ensure that the "title deeds of freedom" were strongly safeguarded within their own boundaries. "Let us preach what we practice," he declared in his 1946 "Iron Curtain" speech in Fulton, Mo. "But let us also practice what we preach."

contact@lynneolson.com

Lynne Olson, a former White House correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, is the author or coauthor of four books of history.

Unlike Churchill, Bush had the power to go it alone. Do you think that Churchill would not have gone to war with Germany, had England the power to do so alone?

Churchill had no choice -- England could not have withstood Germany's might alone. Nor could the USSR. In the case of England, that country had the will and the skill but not sufficient population and not sufficient industrial capacity. Canada and the USA supplied both. Eventually these three countries formed a unified command structure and common strategy and tactics that would have defeated Germany whether or not the USSR entered the war. It would have been a tremendous undertaking had the USSR not been absorbing huge punishment (and later, inflicting it) on Germany's Eastern front.

In the case of the USSR, they had manpower beyond Hitler's comprehension but the USSR did not have the war-fighting skill necessary to win (Lenin & Stalin had essentially eradicated the officer corps and substituted their own version of political correctness in place of sound military doctrine) or even for a stalemate until the USA & Canada came to their relief through massive sea-lift replenishment of all manner of war-making material. Because of our combined support in materiel, the USSR was given the time to learn military tactics the hard way -- huge, disastrous battles with terrific loss of life to the USSR. But through attrition, the Soviet Army gained general officers and tactics that could match and eventually overcome the war-weary, and depleted German Army.

B

I'd prefer 'Hot Air' over a "brain fart" ... anytime!

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If it was in England's interest to go it alone, then that's what he would have done, I suppose.Likewise, the United States cannot effectively fight the current threat alone.

Here's a little reminder for those "strong, silent types" (no, not the Goodyear tires aka poster commercial slogan ...)

It takes a little skill to watch and to read the rolling footnote while listening (and understand) the audio voice .... have fun!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSCN0oXDr70

__________________

Absurd London “Bomb Plot” Inaugurates “Control Freak” Brown
Friday June 29th 2007, 3:25 pm

“British police Friday thwarted a car-bomb attack that would have brought carnage to the streets of London just days before the second anniversary of the July 7, 2005, bombings that claimed 52 lives,” writes Nile Gardiner for the neocon house organ, the National Review Online. “The car was packed with nails, gas canisters and petrol containers, and left outside a nightclub near Piccadilly Circus. This latest attempt to kill and maim hundreds of civilians is most likely the work of al Qaeda or one of its numerous British-based affiliates. It was timed to coincide with the departure of Tony Blair, and the entrance of new Prime Minister Gordon Brown. It also coincided with Blair’s appointment as the Quartet’s new Middle East envoy in the face of strong opposition in the Arab world.”

Gardiner has no evidence “al-Qaeda,” the database, is involved in this absurdly incompetent plot, and even Scotland Yard has said it is far too early to determine who is behind the “foiled attack,” but now that the corporate media is hysterically braying “al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda,” it makes little difference who is responsible. Gardiner believes, or wants us to believe, the plot was “timed to coincide with … the entrance of new Prime Minister Gordon Brown,” and in fact Gardiner may be correct, although not for the reason he states. Brown was selected to lord over the British people because he is a darling of the Bank of England, a former chancellor of the Exchequer, a medieval English institution for the collection of royal revenues, that is to say the fleecing of subjects. As well, Brown was selected because he is regarded as a “control freak” and “totally uncollegiate,” according to Charles Clarke, the former home secretary. In short, he unflinchingly runs roughshod over his victims, the sort of psychological makeup considered a prerequisite for a principate, especially one taking orders from bankers and the globalist coterie.

It stands to reason Tony Blair’s “appointment as the Quartet’s new Middle East envoy” faces “strong opposition in the Arab world,” as Blair is a war criminal. He was informed by the Foreign Office that an attack on Iraq was illegal under international law and he met with Bush in Crawford April 2002 and vowed his support for the invasion, that is to say he promised to donate the lives of Brits in the effort to slaughter Iraqis, an effort that has paid off handsomely (more than 750,000 killed to date), that is if you’re a psychopath, as Blair obviously is. Arabs who know anything about Blair realize he is a pathological liar, as he said up until the eve of the invasion attacking Iraq was not inevitable when in fact he secretly agreed with the neocons to attack Iraq all along.

In addition to sending out the message Gordon Brown is the “war on terrorism” prime minister, the fake would-be attack, likely staged by MI5, serves as yet another object lesson for British commoners, who, according to the New York Times, “shrugged stoically at the July 7 bombings two years ago” and “seemed less than troubled here today after police announced that they had defused an explosive mixture of gasoline, nails and gas canisters in a car abandoned outside the Tiger Tiger on a thoroughfare called Haymarket.” Staged terrorism and repeatedly foiled plots carried out by terrorists apparently unable to tie their shoes in the morning without assistance is “something you get used to, living in London,” according to a lawyer quoted by the Times. “And given the stance our government made on the war in Iraq and elsewhere, I think we are just getting used to being a target. It’s something we have to live with.”

No doubt, as well, Brits will need get “used to” the fact their country is “sinking into a police state,” as George Churchill-Coleman, who headed Scotland Yard’s anti-IRA squad, told the Guardian two years ago. “We live in a democracy and we should police on those standards…. I have serious worries and concerns about these ideas on both ethical and practical terms. You cannot lock people up just because someone says they are terrorists. Internment didn’t work in Northern Ireland, it won’t work now. You need evidence.”

Of course, you need evidence to claim “al-Qaeda” is behind the sloppy and wholly amateurish work in London today, but that has not stopped the corporate media or the fear-monger hacks with an agenda—i.e., slaughtering Muslims and divvying up the Middle East—from leading to conclusions and thus subjecting the public to non-stop propaganda.

__________________

Vote for him and he'll set you free.

__________________
Current Benzes

1989 300TE "Alice"
1990 300CE "Sam Spade"
1991 300CE "Beowulf" RIP (06.1991 - 10.10.2007)
1998 E320 "Orson"
2002 C320 Wagon "Molly Fox"

Res non semper sunt quae esse videntur

My Gallery

Not in this weather!

An "article" without attribution is not worth the paper that it isn't printed on.

If by a police state the "author" is referring to things like the over 500,000 video camers installed in Englad, then let's turn the USA into a police state too.

The only people who fear cameras and other forms of surveillance are terrorists and criminals.

__________________
Current Benzes

1989 300TE "Alice"
1990 300CE "Sam Spade"
1991 300CE "Beowulf" RIP (06.1991 - 10.10.2007)
1998 E320 "Orson"
2002 C320 Wagon "Molly Fox"

Res non semper sunt quae esse videntur

My Gallery

Not in this weather!

In your case you lack the capacity to tell the difference.

I am not going to let you bait me into writing something that will attract Chris or Hatties attention.

Your empty ramblings, however, lack the force of argument; therefore they mean absolutely nothing.

__________________
Current Benzes

1989 300TE "Alice"
1990 300CE "Sam Spade"
1991 300CE "Beowulf" RIP (06.1991 - 10.10.2007)
1998 E320 "Orson"
2002 C320 Wagon "Molly Fox"

Res non semper sunt quae esse videntur

My Gallery

Not in this weather!