Michael van der Galien
Michael van der Galien was born in the Dutch city of Leeuwarden in 1984. For as long as he can remember, he has been obsessed with the United States. When he was 17 years old, he started blogging - of course about America. His articles have been published at Big Hollywood, Pajamas Media, Hot Air (the GreenRoom) and Right Across The Atlantic. He's also an editor for the Dutch conservative blog, De Dagelijkse Standaard.
Tens of thousands protests against the Maoists who are trying to bring down the Nepalese government
Maoists in Nepal – a historically peaceful Buddhist country – are trying destroying their country’s economy in order to regain power. They’ve staged a crippling general strike in order to force Prime Minister Madhav Kumar to resign.
The Maoists, who hold about 40 per cent of seats in the 601-seat parliament, demand the formation of a national unity government under, what else, their own administration. The strike is nothing more than a pressure tactic, experts say, “to return to power.” Of course they can’t be bothered by the fact that they’re endangering Nepal’s fragile peace process.
Fed up with the Maoists‘ power hunger, more than 25.000 dentists, lawyers and other professionals took the streets. They demand an immediate end to the strike. They’ve had enough of economic misery. They want the Maoists to get out of the way and let the country move forward. read more…
Isn’t this typical for the politically correct leftist totalitarians who have taken over high school and universities nationwide?
On any other day at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, Daniel Galli and his four friends would not even be noticed for wearing T-shirts with the American flag. But Cinco de Mayo is not any typical day especially on a campus with a large Mexican American student population.
Galli says he and his friends were sitting at a table during brunch break when the vice principal asked two of the boys to remove American flag bandannas that they wearing on their heads and for the others to turn their American flag T-shirts inside out. When they refused, the boys were ordered to go to the principal’s office.
“They said we could wear it on any other day,” Daniel Galli said, “but today is sensitive to Mexican-Americans because it’s supposed to be their holiday so we were not allowed to wear it today.” Administrators called their shirts “incendiary” and said they’d cause fights on campus. read more…
The world’s top-earning hedge fund managers have bankrolled almost exclusively Democratic campaigns, according to Silla Bush of The Hill:
The top 10 highest-paid hedge fund managers in 2009 have dished out campaign contributions almost only to Democrats.
Over their lifetimes, those managers have given almost $33 million in campaign contributions to Democrats, according to research by the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) and that is based on data maintained by the nonpartisan CQMoneyline.
My, my, who would have thought? read more…
From left to right: David Cameron (Tories), Nick Clegg (Lib-Dems) and Gordon Brown (Labor)
Today, the British people will determine who will be their next prime minister. Will it be the current PM, Gordon Brown of Labor, the surprising Nick Clegg of the left-of-center Liberal Democrats party, or Tory leader David Cameron? Which one of these ambitious men will move to 10 Downing Street?
Shortly before election day, the conservative Tories were leading relatively comfortably in the polls. Their lead on the number two, Brown’s Labor party, averages 7% according to the poll of polls. The Lib-Dems, meanwhile, trail Labor by a mere 1%. read more…
From the looks of it, things could get ugly very quickly between the two Koreas. The Telegraph reports that the North has “completed deployment of about 50,000 special forces along the border with South Korea.” This development comes amid high tensions over the sinking of a Seoul warship by the North Korean navy.
South Korean experts believe the North wants the troops to infiltrate the South when war breaks out between them. “The threat that North Korea may infiltrate special forces for limited warfare has become real,” an unidentified senior government official told Yonhap news agency. read more…
The AFP reports that three people “were killed in a firebomb attack on a bank in central Athens on Wednesday” during a demonstration. “Twenty others were being evacuated from the building.”
It’s obvious that the firebombing is the result of the major economic crisis in Greece. People are upset, they fear that their futures, which once seemed so bright, are being taken away from them or at the very least clouded in darkness.
The Greek government knew for years that the economy was weak and unstable. They knew that the first serious economic crisis to come their way would ruin the country. Yet, they did nothing.
This truly is a country on the brink of collapse. We can only wonder what its impact will be on the Euro and, of course, on the European Union as a whole. There are already some in Germany who say that they want get rid of the Euro and replace it with a new currency. It’s likely that others will follow suit, especially if the situation continues to deteriorate in Greece.
Meanwhile, every European now fears that it won’t end with Greece. Portugal and Spain are, experts say, next. North-Western Europeans, however, are not willing to bail out all these countries. “Why should we pay for their irresponsible behavior?” the average Dutchman, for instance, wonders. And even if Germans, the British, the Dutch and so on did want to help out weak EU-member states they could not afford it because they too have serious economical problems looming ahead.
It seems that I’m not the only conservative blogger who has decided to real Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. John Hawkins, who runs Right Wing News and who writes columns for Townhall, did the same and published a post yesterday with key quotes from this bible for (left-wing) community organizers.
Some examples (that also struck me when I read through the first couple of chapters): read more…
“As thousands of union members converged on Wall Street last week, they were joined in solidarity by Kevin Keating,” writes Capitol Confidential for Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government. “Keating, a photographer on the 1976 movie ‘Harlan County, U.S.A’ and an unabashed communist joined his union brethren in demanding the Obama-Dodd financial takeover bill that would give unions greater ability to takeover the governing boards of companies and drain resources into their own coffers.” read more…
From the looks of it, Obama could be in more trouble than even his most passionate opponents thought. According to the National Inquirer, Obama has had an affair with his former aide Vera Baker.
While Baker has insisted in the past that “nothing happened” between them, reports reveal that top anti-Obama operatives are offering more than $1 million to witnesses to reveal what they know about the alleged hush-hush affair.
Among those being offered money is a limo driver who says in 2004 that he took Vera to a secret hotel rendezvous in a Washington hotel where Obama was staying.
An ENQUIRER reporter has confirmed the limo driver’s account of the secret 2004 rendezvous and has also learned that on-site hotel surveillance video camera footage could provide indisputable evidence to the investigation.
It’s remarkable that this news isn’t covered by the mainstream media. First of all, this isn’t merely a rehash of old reports. Secondly, the Lewinsky-affair proved that affairs of presidents are newsworthy – to put it mildly. read more…
Fausta Wertz – a conservative blogger who’s originally from Puerto Rico – has written a great post for her blog about the mainstream media’s inability to understand that many legal immigrants have little to no sympathy for illegal immigrants. As Fausta puts it:
What CNN can’t figure out is that Latinos in the USA who have worked their way to legally live here in accordance of US law, and who have taken the trouble of learning the language and the customs, and are fully integrated into American society are not happy to see people who willfully violate the law be granted special treatment and issued instant victim status…
It’s all because of the Left’s beloved identity politics. If you’re “Hispanic” (which is a completely artificial term, by the way), you’ve got to be in favor of amnesty. After all, most illegal immigrants are Hispanics, just like you. And if you’re an African American you have to support affirmative action. If you don’t, you’re a traitor. Why? Well, because most beneficiaries of affirmative action look just like you. read more…
Great news; Soren Dayton writes for Big Hollywood that Senator Chris Dodd’s finance regulation bill “creates a whole office full of government bureaucrats with unlimited salaries.” This even though federal employees are already earning 12% more than private employees. Isn’t that wonderful?
Just look at the text of Section 152 (d).
(d) OFFICE PERSONNEL
(1) IN GENERAL
—The Director, in consultation with the Chairperson, may fix the number of,
and appoint and direct, all employees of the Office.
As Dayton notes, this means that “the Director of the Office of Financial Research picks the size of the department, not Congress. And their pay is set at the discretion of the office, not subject to the rules governing civil servants.” read more…
A couple of weeks ago, I decided to do something I should have done when then-Senator Barack Obama announced he’d run for president : I ordered a copy of Saul Alinsky‘s Rules for Radicals.
Of course I realize that Alinsky isn’t exactly the most beloved author and activist among my fellow conservatives. He was a radical progressive who helped taught like-minded individuals how to force their progressive plans upon the rest of the nation. Although I’m not exactly a fan of the man either, the reality of the situation is that he inspired and continues to inspire many progressives. Barack Obama taught Alinsky’s concepts and methods in workshops. Without his mentor’s strategy chances are Obama would never have been president.
And Obama isn’t the only progressive greatly influenced by Alinsky. Hillary Clinton was inspired by this godfather of community organizing as well, for instance. We can be certain that Rules for Radicals serves as the political bible for many others like these two influential progressives. read more…
