The Conservative Papers » Republicans

Anti-Israel GOP Candidate Ron Paul Prepares to Bow Out; Votes Against Israel Again

kalel — Tue, 15 May 2012 04:30:35 +0000

Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul has announced he is cutting spending and preparing to wind down his campaign.

US Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX)

The GOP candidate said in a statement Monday that he would continue his drive to gather delegates to take a “strong message” to the Republican national convention.

However, “we will no longer spend resources campaigning in primaries in states that have not yet voted,” he said. “Doing so with any hope of success would take many tens of millions of dollars we simply do not have.”

The Texas Congressman is lagging far behind the man most likely to win the nomination at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Mitt Romney.

Paul was one of only two U.S. Representatives who opposed the nearly unanimous vote of approval by Congress last Wednesday on the United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012. The measure tightens America’s security ties with the Jewish State.

Paul currently has only 104 delegates to his credit, while Romney has 966. Neither has enough to win the convention, however, if the vote were to be held today. Romney is still short the 1,144 delegates he needs to win the nomination at the present time – but the voting is not finished.

There are 11 primaries and caucuses that have yet to vote, among them Nebraska, Oregon and Utah, before the polls close on June 26.Popular Posts:

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Romney Set to Meet Santorum

kalel — Sun, 06 May 2012 06:39:13 +0000

Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum are set to have a private meeting on Friday in Pittsburgh, Pa.

Romney greet supporters in New Hampshire

Romney will be looking to gain Santorum’s endorsement – and the delegates that are bound to him under GOP primary rules – prior to the Republican National Convention in August.

Santorum is expected to demand assurances that conservatives and Tea Party Republicans will be represented by the Romney campaign.

The outcome of the meeting – which comes on the heels of Newt Ginrich ending his campaign and calling on Republicans to back Romney – will no doubt will influence the tone and timing of a Santorum endorsement.

No public Romney-Santorum appearance is scheduled.

An endorsement by Santorum, who has suspended his bid for the GOP presidential nomination, would likely help Romney surge forward in his contest with US president Barack Obama.

Obama will hold his first official campaign rallies of the 2012 election Saturday in the battleground states of Ohio and Virginia — both of which he won in 2008.

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, who has campaigned with Romney in Virginia over the past two days, will hold a preemptive press conference on Friday to blunt Obama’s rally.

Obama presently has a 2-3 point lead in the key electoral states of Florida, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia. However, his lead in the polls has consistently dwindled in recent months and he is now fighting for his political life.

The president’s approval ratings have remained under 50% thus far this year. No president since Harry Truman has won re-election with an approval rating below 50 percent in April of a re-election year.

Additionally, the Rasmussen Employment Index slipped another three points in April, bringing the index down to the level measured at the start of 2012.

At 80.7, the index is still above findings throughout 2011, but with perceptions of the economy forming the central issue of the 2012 race, dropping number aids Romney rather than Obama.

Sunday marks six months before the presidential election.Popular Posts:

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Chris Christie’s Islam Problem

kalel — Wed, 02 May 2012 00:12:34 +0000

by Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson
National Review Online
May 1, 2012

A Quinnipiac poll in April showed Chris Christie the most popular potential Republican vice-presidential candidate, thanks to his budget cuts and standing up to government employee unions. But the governor of New Jersey has a problem, specifically an Islam problem, in the way of his possible ascent to higher office. We regret to report that, time and again, he has sided with Islamist forces against those safeguarding American security and civilization.

Derek Fenton removed by police after burning pages of the Koran in 2010.

Some examples:

2008: When serving as U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Christie embraced and kissed Mohammed Qatanani, imam of the Islamic Center of Passaic County, and praised him as “a man of great goodwill.” He did this after Qatanani had publicly ranted against Jews and in support of funding Hamas, a U.S. government–designated terror organization, and on the eve of his deportation hearing for hiding an Israeli conviction for membership in Hamas. In addition, Christie designated a top aide, Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles McKenna, to testify as a character witness for Qatanani.

2010: After Derek Fenton burned three pages of a Koran at a 9/11 memorial ceremony, his employer, New Jersey Transit, got Christie’s approval to fire him. Christie vocally endorsed Fenton’s termination, even though this meant protecting Islam at the expense of Fenton’s constitutional right to free speech, declaring, “I don’t have any problem with him being fired.” The American Civil Liberties Union successfully represented Fenton to get his job back.

2011: Christie appointed an Islamist, Sohail Mohammed, to the New Jersey state superior court. Mohammed’s record includes serving as general counsel to the American Muslim Union (which has stated that a “Zionist Commando Orchestrated The 9-11 Terrorist Attacks”), acting as spokesman for Muslim prisoners who went on a hunger strike due to being jailed during Ramadan, defending Palestinian Islamic Jihad operative Sami Al-Arian (whose indictment, Mohammed said, was “nothing but a witch-hunt”), and helping Qatanani’s legal defense. Mohammed is not a lawyer for Islamists but one of them.

Gov. Christie talks to Sohail Mohammed at the American Muslim Union.

When members of New Jersey’s Senate Judiciary Committee asked Mohammed appropriately tough questions about his enthusiasm for Islam’s archaic law code, the Shari’a, Christie ridiculed the lawmakers: “Shari’a law has nothing to do with this [appointment of Mohammed] at all. It’s crazy. It’s crazy. … So, this Shari’a law business is crap. It’s just crazy. And I’m tired of dealing with the crazies. I mean, you know, it’s just unnecessary to be accusing this guy of things just because of his religious background.” Delighted by this outburst, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) thanked and applauded Christie.

2012: Revelations that the New York Police Department had conducted surveillance of Islamists in the New Jersey towns of Newark and New Brunswick prompted not gratitude but outrage from Christie, who termed the action arrogant and paranoid while mocking NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly as “all knowing, all seeing.”

In short, Christie has hugged a terrorist organization member, abridged free-speech rights, scorned concern over Islamization, and opposed law enforcement counterterrorism efforts. Whenever an issue touching on Islam arises, Christie takes the Islamist side against those –the DHS, state senators, the NYPD, even the ACLU – who worry about lawful Islamism eroding the fabric of American life.

"Secure America Now" took out a full-page advertisement on Mar. 19 in the New Jersey Journal, protesting Gov. Christie's interference into the New York Police Department's counterterrorism efforts.

“Secure America Now” took out a full-page advertisement on Mar. 19 in the New Jersey Journal, protesting Gov. Christie’s interference into the New York Police Department’s counterterrorism efforts. (Click here for enlarged version.)

Two factors render this pattern especially curious: First, soft-on-Islamism policies are common among Democrats but rare among Republicans (Grover Norquist being the major exception). Second, Christie has an ostentatiously pro-Israel stance, as reflected by his speeches and his recent “Jersey to Jerusalem” trip; this makes him unusual, for pro-Israel views typically go hand-in-hand with concern about Shari’a. How does one reconcile the Christie contradiction?

It could be that, other than fiscally, he is not a conservative but a moderate. It could be ego: the governor is just more brilliant than the rest of us. Or, as several analysts suggest, it could be cynical double pandering: Muslims get what they want most and Zionists what they want most, with each party ignoring what Christie does for the other. Interestingly, Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut pursued this double track policy (soft on Islamism, staunch on Israel) and became the Democrats’ VP candidate in 2000.

Whatever the reason, we conclude that Chris Christie lacks the moral compass, gravitas, and integrity needed to serve as vice-president of the United States.

Mr. Pipes is president of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. Mr. Emerson is executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism. © 2012 by the authors. All rights reserved.

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Obama’s Mysterious Campaign Strategy

kalel — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 06:39:00 +0000

By Peter Wehner

President Barack Obama

One of the things that have puzzled political commentators is why President Obama is running the campaign he is. Rather than tacking to the center, as Bill Clinton did, Mr. Obama is running a campaign that is based on stoking class resentments and raising taxes on the rich. Rather than laying out a second-term agenda, he’s hyper-focusing on issues like contraception, the GOP’s so-called “war on women,” and inserting himself into the Rush Limbaugh-Sandra Fluke controversy and Trayvon Martin tragedy. Rather than invoking the unifying language of 2008, the president is using incendiary language, accusing Republicans of targeting children with autism and Down syndrome, of being members of the “flat earth society,” and embracing a budget that demonstrates their “Social Darwinism.” For good measure, the GOP favors “dirtier” air and water.

Assuming there is a rationale behind this strategy, what might it be?

The answer might be found in demographics.

As National Journal’s Ron Brownstein reminds us, in 2008 Obama won the presidency by carrying 80 percent of minorities (who comprised 26 percent of all voters); 52 percent of college-educated white women; 42 percent of college educated white men; 41 percent of non-college white women; and 39 percent of white men without a college degree.

Analyzing recent polls, Brownstein concludes, “Obama is largely holding the minority and college-educated white women who comprise two pillars of the modern Democratic base (along with young people.) But he is facing erosion among blue-collar white men and struggling to maintain even his modest 2008 support among the two swing quadrants in the white electorate: the college-plus white men and non-college white women.”

Given his inability and unwillingness to run on his record, the Obama strategy appears to rest on achieving three things: (1) energizing the turnout of his base (minorities, young voters and liberals); (2) winning the support of college-educated white women (who tend to be socially liberal); and (3) preventing a collapse among non-college educated whites (by irradiating Governor Romney rather than winning their affection).

To put it another way: Obama has essentially given up on appealing to working-class white men (his approval rating is in the low 30s or below in most polls), which explains why he’s refusing to borrow a page from Bill Clinton’s re-election playbook. Mr. Obama is gambling his re-election on winning close to eight out of 10 minority voters while assuming they will comprise a higher percentage of the vote in 2012 than they did in 2008 (say, 28 percent v. 26 percent of all votes); and improving just a bit on the 52 percent of college-educated white women he won in 2008. If he can achieve that, Obama believes he can offset his decreasing support among white men and non-college white women.

Will it work? I doubt it. My guess is that the president will have a hard time replicating his 2008 popularity with minorities; that Governor Romney will be able to sufficiently repair relations with college-educated white women (which were damaged during the primary); and that in the course of the election, Mr. Obama’s liberalism and invective will further alienate those who are already moving away from him.

Because of his extraordinary ineptness at governing, the president has limited options when it comes to the 2012 campaign. He’s decided to go with the most ruthless, partisan, and divisive alternative open to him. Mr. Obama will lose the election, in my judgment. And in the process, as we’ve already seen, he’ll stain his reputation and lose a good deal of his honor.Popular Posts:

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GOP Backing $680M for Iron Dome Despite Obama’s Attempt To Prune Aid to Israel

kalel — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 01:43:22 +0000

US lawmakers are considering an aid allotment of $680 million to strengthen Israel’s Iron Dome short-range rocket shield.

An Iron Dome launcher fires an interceptor rocket

The move by Republican lawmakers comes in the face of previous attempts by the Obama administration to prune defense aid to Israel.

Senior Republicans Howard McKeon (R-CA) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) criticized Obama for his lack of support of a “vital defense cooperation program.”

The Obama administration earlier announced that an “appropriate” level of funding will be provided for this program, but did not request any specific sum for 2012.

The refusal to specify a funding commitment for Iron Dome – Israel’s bleeding-edge of advancement anti-rocket system – has effectively stopped Congress from allotting the funds at all.

According to IDF officials Iron Dome intercepted over 80 per cent of some 300 targets in March. Presently, Israel has three Iron Dome systems, which must be constantly redeployed based on regular threat assessments.

Defense officials want to have at least nine Iron Dome units in operation by 2013, while the IDF says it needs at least 15 to properly protect Israel’s populous urban centers.

The US spent over $200 million aiding in Iron Dome deployment in 2011. However, while the US has approved $235 million to finance the lesser-known Israeli anti-missile systems “Arrow” and “Magic Wand” for 2012, the Iron Dome allotment remains undefined.

US military aid to Israel is set to be delivered as part of a $30 billion 10-year military-aid package signed by President George W. Bush administration in 2007.

From 2009 till 2018 the US is expected to grant Israel some $3 billion per year. Israel may spend 26 percent on locally-manufactured systems while the remaining 74 percent must be spent on US-manufactured systems.

The Obama administration says, like its predecesors, that it considers Israel to be “the protector of peace in the Middle East,” whose “strength and superiority in the region is critical to regional stability.”

“We don’t just support Israel because of a long standing bond; we support Israel because it is in our national interests to do so,” US assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs Andrew J. Shapiro said last November.Popular Posts:

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Newt Gingrich – The Conservative Truth (VIDEO)

kalel — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 01:42:04 +0000

Don’t listen to the biased media, or politicians on either side when they bash Newt. The truth is that he has always pushed a Reagan agenda. He led a revolution in Congress to get the first CONSERVATIVE majority in almost 50 years, and he did not make life cozy for Dems or Republicans because he insisted on change.

Learn more by watching the video:

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Newt: If this goes to the convention I can win

kalel — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 16:42:09 +0000

Newt says that if Romney can be stopped and this primary goes to the convention, he believes that he can indeed win the nomination:

Phase one has to be stopping Romney because the fact is if he gets 1,144 vote, he’s the nominee, fair and square — it’s over.

On the other hand, if as voters look at this — as happened last week, for example in Mississippi and in Alabama, as happened the previous week in Kansas — if people say, no, they don’t want Romney, then I think you get to a situation after June 26 where there is a 60-day conversation.

Santorum won’t have a majority, I won’t have a majority, Romney won’t, Ron Paul won’t — if that’s what happens, then we will have a real conversation about who can best beat Barack Obama. I think that most Republicans agree that if the key is to debate the president – he will have a billion-dollar campaign fund. If the key is who can take him on head to head, I think I am proving every day with this energy campaign, that I can take on Obama, that I can design strategies that put him in a huge disadvantage.

Here’s the full interview:

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Why the RNC Fired Michael Steele

kalel — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 01:52:50 +0000

By: Peter Egan
April 4th, 2012

Despite the unwavering and dedicated efforts of the liberal elitists at the Republican National Committee doing everything within their capabilities to subvert the will of the voters and install Massachusetts liberal Mitt Romney as the 2012 GOP Presidential nominee, there remains an outside shot that the sentiments of the overwhelming majority of Republican voters could still play a factor in determining a nominee, averting a disaster scenario in which the Republican alternative to the Democrat incumbent is a man whose positions are nearly indecipherable from those of Obama.

For most everyone paying attention, it has become overtly clear that the RNC and the unelected party bosses who have controlled the candidate selection process for all of this author’s lifetime and probably closer to a century or more have been trying their best to rig the game in order to favor Romney. That their “guy” hasn’t wrapped up the nomination by now (it’s April 02, as of this writing) has them beside themselves, infuriated and making no bones about their discontent with the fact that all candidates not named Mitt Romney have not yet withdrawn from the race like they were supposed to.

Make no mistake, that Romney has not yet secured enough delegates to claim decisive victory is not for lack of corruption on behalf of his buddies at the RNC. These are the same people who nearly immediately following the most successful midterm election in GOP history fired the man who orchestrated the 2010 Republican sweep that brought the party control of the U.S. House of Representatives, broke the Democrats’ Senate super-majority and would have won the Senate outright had massive and unprecedented voter fraud in Nevada not gone unpunished. [Note: In that race between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Tea Party conservative Sharron Angle, Reid's opponent received tens of thousands more votes than did Reid, but the fox was charged with protecting the hen-house, with the SEIU engaging in well-documented manipulation and fraud of the electronic voting machines in which votes for Angle were switched to Reid, and a large number of heavily Democrat-leaning precincts recorded more votes than there were eligible voters registered to vote within said precincts.]

At the time of Steele’s firing, the decision seemed as baffling as it was unprecedented. Here was a man who as leader of the party helped orchestrated an unprecedented and record-setting midterm election for the GOP in which the party picked up 63 seats in the House and six in the Senate. There was a net change of 126 caucusing members in the House, giving the Republicans a majority with 242 of the chamber’s 435 seats, and barring Nevada’s election fraud of historic proportion would have evened the Senate at 50 a piece.

Why would a party chase a man out the door who had just led them delivered a majority in an election in which the odds of doing so based on the numbers seemed virtually impossible? While at the time the decision appeared to make no sense whatsoever, in April of 2012 as the Republican Presidential primary calender moves into the homestretch, the answer is plainly obvious. It is also beyond disgusting.

In August of 2010, Steele implemented a new set of rules governing how the party elects its nominee for the November Presidential general election. Rather than have a handful of liberal states plus South Carolina (for the misguided appearance of fairness) determine the nominee before the overwhelming majority of the country even gets to vote, Steele spread out the calender, implementing penalties for states that broke the rules and held their contests prior to Super Tuesday. The penalty for doing so would entail the loss of 50% of a state’s total delegates plus the proportional distribution of those delegates rather than a winner-take-all vote. This enabled states that actually vote Republican in the general election to play a role in determining who the party’s nominee would be. Hence the RNC’s fury and the reason they angrily replaced Steele with the relatively obscure Reince Preibus.

The result of Steele’s rule changes have extended the contest at least into April, and have forced the RNC’s hand-picked liberal to spend hundreds of millions of dollars battling conservative candidates whose combined vote totals far outweigh that of the liberal former Massachusetts governor. The race appears headed for a brokered convention, at which, at least in theory, a candidate other than the liberal supported by the RNC could emerge as the party’s nominee.

Not that the party elites will go away quietly. They’ve already been rigging things to the best of their ability to favor Romney, hitting the airwaves and doing the talk-show circuit proclaiming that his nomination is “inevitable”. Naturally, the “Superdelegates”, mostly RNC members or other top party officials, are nearly all lining up behind Romney. Of the 37 who have committed as of the time of this writing, 32 of those 37 have announced they will be voting for Romney.

Additionally, the party elites saw to it that Virginia’s rules were drawn up in such a way that the two conservatives in the race were excluded from the ballot altogether, handing the state to Romney by default while denying the voters of Virginia their say in who the party’s next Presidential nominee should be. There was a primary in Missouri, which conservative leader Rick Santorum dominated winning 55% of the vote, but there were no delegates awarded. Instead, a second “nonbinding” caucus is to be held over a period of several weeks. Nobody seems to fully understand what a “nonbinding” caucus is, but from everything this author has read, it is apparently a vote in which the delegates awarded are not necessarily done so in a manner consistent with the vote of the people. Thus, Missouri will have held two elections in which neither determined how the state’s delegates will be allocated.

Florida’s 50 delegates were supposed to be distributed proportionately due to the fact that the state moved up its primary to January 31. However, Romney outspent his opponents 20-1 after a backroom meeting with RNC officials in which he was instructed that if he won the state, they’d award all delegates to him. He spent an obscene amount of money, and the RNC broke the rules and gave all 50 delegates to Romney. Had any other candidate won Florida, the delegates would have been proportionately assigned.

At this point, we the people had better start to put an enormous amount of pressure on the RNC as well as on state party officials and state delegates. Our only hope to defeat Obama with a candidate that’s actually to the right of him politically is to thwart the RNC’s corrupt attempt at rigging the election for the Massachusetts liberal whose policies as governor were strikingly similar to Obama’s Marxist agenda as President.

Had Michael Steele not pulled the wool over the eyes of the people who’ve helped lead the nation down the path of destruction, what fleeting hope of electing a leader capable of restoring our country to sanity, much less greatness, would be nonexistent. While we’ve still a long uphill battle to fight in ensuring that the party recognizes that 2/3 of Republicans are voting AGAINST Romney, rendering him unfit to serve as the nominee, it’s more than we’d have had the man on whose watch the 2010 63-seat blowout of Congressional Democrats occurred not taken measures to protect we the voters from the likes of those whose agenda is to see to it that the two candidates squaring off in November would be completely and totally indecipherable were it not for the color of their skin.

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Got Principles? The Ryan Budget Does

kalel — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 16:44:06 +0000

Buried deep in the President’s hyperbolic assault on the House-passed budget last week—with all that “radical vision” and “social Darwinism” rhetoric—was one kernel of truth: “This isn’t a budget supported by some small rump group in the Republican Party,” the President said. “This is now the party’s governing platform. This is what they’re running on.”

Exactly right. The fiscal plan authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul D. Ryan (R–WI) is not just a blueprint for spending. It’s a vision for governing that deliberately and self-consciously seeks to advance “the timeless principles of the American Idea”—among them limited government, free enterprise, and economic liberty.

Ryan’s plan identifies the nation’s looming fiscal crisis as a product of big government. For the fourth consecutive year, a trillion-dollar-plus federal deficit burdens the nation, and the government’s publicly held debt is on course to exceed the size of the entire U.S. economy within a decade and to nearly double it by 2035. Clearly, this trend must be reversed.

The President’s “balanced approach” of demanding higher taxes to close the gap between spending and revenue misses the point. Deficits and debt are symptoms of a more fundamental problem: the inexorable growth of government that unfolded through the past century. It is the size and scope of government that must be limited, and that means reducing spending. That is the Ryan budget’s driving fiscal policy.

Big government is more than a budgetary problem. As government expands, it absorbs and suffocates what Ryan’s budget calls “the core institutions of a vibrant civil society—families, neighbors, churches and charities.” These institutions, not the government, are the source of America’s strength. Reducing the size of government, by reducing its spending, allows them to flourish.

Reversing the Keynesian-inspired meddling of the past several years, Ryan’s budget promotes the “prosperity of commerce,” as Hamilton termed it. The budget ends crony capitalism and other market distortions and therefore gives the economy room to grow. “This budget stops Washington from picking winners and losers across the economy,” the budget report says. “It rolls back corporate subsidies in the energy sector. It ends the taxpayer bailouts of failed financial institutions, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It repeals the government takeover of health care enacted last year and begins to move toward patient-centered reform.”

Federalism and free markets are also central to the budget’s domestic policy reforms. The budget’s restructuring of Medicaid and food stamps applies the principle of federalism: It shifts more control to the states over how the programs are administered and how dollars are spent. The Medicare premium support proposal—in which future enrollees choose their coverage from a variety of plans, rather than relying solely on the government—aims to bring to retirees’ health care the same benefits of market competition that exist throughout the economy. The Ryan budget transforms a huge, government-run entitlement into a model of patient-centered reform.

Finally, in this period of widespread dysfunction in Congress, the House’s adoption of its budget resolution stands as a refreshing exception—a necessary assertion of Congress’s governing responsibility and constitutional role. Until 1974, all congressional actions on the budget were piecemeal—separate spending and tax bills—and only the President had a comprehensive budget. The Congressional Budget Act of 1974, though, established for the first time a coordinated congressional budget process. It enhanced Congress’s authority on budgeting after 50 years of executive dominance. “With the Budget Act of 1974,” explains John A. Marini, “Congress became a dominant force in the formulation of fiscal policy, and a major player in setting national priorities.”

The Ryan budget may not fulfill all its ambitions perfectly; few congressional measures do. But it does express a conviction about governing rooted in America’s First Principles—a conviction reflected in its fiscal direction, its specific policies, and the very fact of its passage in the House.Popular Posts:

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Overcriminalization Interrupted: Senate Passes House Version of Stock Act

kalel — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 04:02:47 +0000

“Hallelujah” overstates the point, but we are pleased that the Senate on Thursday accepted the revisions to the STOCK Act made by the House of Representatives.

As Heritage explained in two earlier Issue Briefs on this subject, the additional public corruption provisions that the Senate initially wanted to include in the bill gave rise to a batch of different potential overcriminalization issues. Some of them were definitional problems that, perhaps, could have been remedied by redrafting the bill.

If Congress is going to outlaw conduct and send people to prison when they commit it, it is incumbent on Congress itself to spell out precisely what is verboten. Otherwise, the courts would have been left with that job, which is not the way to run a railroad.

But some of the issues raised by the Senate version of this legislation went to the heart of two competing visions of the proper relationship between the federal and state governments. Reasonable people can disagree in good faith over the proper scope of each one – they have, in fact, since Gibbons v. Ogden was decided in 1824, if not beforehand – and they will continue to disagree over that issue as time goes by.

Nothing in the version of the bill headed to the President keeps Congress from revisiting this subject later this year or in the sweet by-and-by. If that were to happen, we hope that issues such as these receive the debate that they deserve. For now at least, the debate is over.

Hallelujah!

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