RUTHFULLY YOURS

Stalked by Stupidity Posted By Roger Kimball

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2012/04/15/stalked-by-stupidity/

As regular readers of Roger’s Rules know, I do not often read our former paper of record. The only time I tend to encounter the New York Times in propria persona is when I visit friends in Northwest Connecticut. Being an early riser, I motor down to a local emporium to collar the papers and the needful for breakfast. Since this happens only every few months, my view of the paper’s devolution is dramatized by a sort of time-lapse effect. If you were subjected to the paper day in and day out, I reckon you wouldn’t notice the degradation quite so vividly.

Consider “Young, Black, Male, and Stalked by Bias,” [1] an op-ed by Brent Staples. Here’s how the piece opens:

The door to the subway train slides open, revealing three tall, young black men, crowding the entrance, with hooded sweatshirts pulled up over downward-turned faces; boxer shorts billowing out of over-large, low-slung jeans; and sneakers with the laces untied.

Your response to the look — and to this trio on the subway — depends in part on the context, like the time of day, but especially on how you feel about young, male blackness.

If it unsettles you — as it does many people — you never get beyond the first impression. But those of us who are not reflexively uncomfortable with blackness . . .

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/ND17Dj05.html

The poison drip never stops. Last week, regulators in the United States fined Goldman Sachs US$22 million for failing to prevent research analysts from feloniously advising favored clients of changes to stock recommendations. And federal prosecutors reportedly will offer immunity against a back-office manager of the busted commodities firm MF Global in return for testimony against its former chief, Jon Corzine, who ran Goldman Sachs before becoming senator and governor in New Jersey.

Corzine allegedly signed off on the improper transfer (that is, theft) of customer funds to meet margin calls for the firm’s own account.

A $22 million fine for research violations sounds like a slap on the wrist for a technical violation, to be sure, but it points to a red thread which, if we follow it carefully, will illuminate flaws in the American economy that are no fault of Goldman Sachs. The Corzine case is straightforward: either he stole the money or he didn’t, and either the Justice Department will press the matter upon a former Democratic senator and governor, or it won’t.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/sayeeda-warsi-the-baroness-with-bad-news-for-the-old-guard-7646623.html?printService=print

Baroness Sayeeda Warsi is standing, surrounded by large sacks of African chillies, having an animated conversation with a former nuclear submarine engineer about his new range of hot sauces.

Since we met five hours ago, we’ve already launched the Tories’ Welsh local government election campaign in Newport; visited the first “wireless” town centre in Monmouth; and toured a women’s refuge in Cardiff.

But for the moment, as we sample the Hot Diggidy Dog sauces (“You just can’t take the spice,” Warsi jokes), Simon Llewellyn, the firm’s boss, wants to bend her ear about bank lending.

“You can only get a loan now if you’re already successful enough not to need it,” he laments. She listens, suggests a new government scheme which might help him, and when he still seems downbeat promises to personally deliver a letter of complaint to the Treasury.

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2012/4/16/main-feature/1/poison-pen/e

Nobel Prize-winning German novelist—a former SS soldier, no less—accuses the state of Israel of seeking to exterminate an entire people, and the literary republic yawns. But when Israel bars its accuser from entering the country, because ex-Nazis have no place in the Jewish state, the cries of “bullying” and “censorship” nearly drown out the original accusation.

Günter Grass, the 84-year-old German writer best known for his 1959 novel The Tin Drum, published a poem earlier this month in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (a Munich daily), which was generally described as critical of Israel. “What Must Be Said,” a 69-line poem written as a first-person confession in Grass’s own voice, “breaks a long standing German taboo and publicly criticizes Israel,” Al-Jazeera cheered.

Running on Empty: The Cliché Candidacy of Barack Obama

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/running-on-empty-the-cliche-candidacy-of-barack-obama/

The last few weeks have been disastrous ones for the Obama re-election effort. The evidence for this is in several areas, including public opinion surveys. The Rasmussen daily tracking survey, one of the very few to use a likely voter screen at this point in the cycle, now has Mitt Romney leading Obama [1] by five points. A new Fox survey of registered voters has Obama with his lowest approval number to date at 42%, trailing Romney [2] head-to-head by 2%.

On the issue front, the Obama team has suffered many severe blows. It turns out that several members of the Supreme Court, maybe even a majority, think the issue of the constitutionality of the individual mandate in ObamaCare is a serious one. The liberal commentariat from Jeffrey Toobin to Linda Greenhouse, caught in their tight cocoon that ignores alternative views, had assured themselves before the Court took up the matter that the constitutionality of the mandate was a trivial concern. After a few days of oral arguments, during which the Obama administration’s lawyers were badly outclassed by the attorneys for the states challenging the law, public support for the law dropped to its lowest level and support for the Supreme Court rose.

The Devil We Don’t Know, Part II

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/04/16/the-devil-we-don%e2%80%99t-know-part-ii/print/

Bestselling writer and speaker Nonie Darwish is the author of the compelling autobiography Now They Call Me Infidel, about growing up in Egypt and her break from Islam, and Cruel and Usual Punishment, an exposé of the stark reality of sharia. Her new book, The Devil We Don’t Know: The Dark Side of Revolutions in the Middle East, explains what really lies behind the Arab Spring movement, and it exposes Islam as the belief system that will inevitably doom those revolutions.

For the first part of this interview, click here.

Mark Tapson: You write that “liberty and equality for women in the Middle East are closely linked to defeating sharia.” But you note that “Islamic feminism is a twisted kind of feminism that champions pride in Islamic bondage.” Can you elaborate on that?

Nonie Darwish: It is a fact that there is hardly any Islamic feminist movement. How could it be that female citizens of the most oppressive anti-women system on Earth fail to take the opportunity of the Arab Spring to change their destiny and the destiny of their daughters and granddaughters? The answer to this question is very complex and part of the larger problem of Islam itself. Muslim women are at a much greater disadvantage if compared to Western feminists who did not have to overcome death penalties, humiliation, flogging and societal rejection and isolation if they violate religious laws.

The Deadly Consequences of Being Pro-Israel in the U.K.

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/04/16/the-deadly-consequences-of-being-pro-israel-in-the-uk/

The email came from a man calling himself Jihad Alshamie and the message was simple enough. “It is people like you who deserve to die.” The email was one of many streaming into the inbox of John Howell, a British member of parliament, in response to a simple question that he had asked. Howell had inquired of a left-wing activist what his position on the hundred rockets that had fallen on Israel was. And from there the death threats followed.

Howell joins the ranks of other MPs, including such prominently pro-Israel members of parliament as Louise Ellman and Robert Halfon, who have been on the receiving end of astounding volumes of vitriol and venom for refusing to align with the pro-terrorist position that dominates the political and intellectual climate in the United Kingdom. The threats that they have received are a taste of the charged atmosphere that defines the debate.

World Powers to Iran: Keep Building Nukes

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/04/16/world-powers-to-iran-keep-building-nukes/print/

On Saturday the P5+1 countries (the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, and China plus Germany) met with Iran in Istanbul for what is being called a “first round” of nuclear talks. By all accounts, it was a “round” with little or no substance—except one major result: the parties agreed to reconvene for another “round” in Baghdad in another five weeks, on May 23.

No one seriously concerned about Iran’s ongoing enrichment of uranium, its ongoing transfer of centrifuges to its deep-underground Fordo site, its ongoing work on nuclear-weapons development, could be pleased with this result. As Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu put it bluntly: “My initial impression is that Iran has been given a freebie. It’s got five weeks to continue enrichment without any limitation, any inhibition.”

Some, though, were indeed happy with the meeting’s outcome.

One was EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton—who not long ago made waves when she reacted to the Toulouse terror by equating the Israeli army with mass murderers. Ashton called Saturday’s talks “constructive and useful” and rhapsodized: “We expect that subsequent meetings will lead to concrete steps toward a comprehensive negotiated solution which restores international confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of the Iranian nuclear program.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/295986/mourdock-indiana-editors
One need not support formal term limits to recognize the existence of informal ones, and the tightening polls in the Indiana Senate Republican primary suggest voters there may be starting to think Senator Richard Lugar has been in Washington long enough.
The conventional wisdom has been that the six-term incumbent Lugar is a safer general-election bet than his opponent, state treasurer Richard Mourdock. But the primary has heretofore shown Lugar to be out of touch with Hoosiers, an institutionalized Capitol Hiller who for a spell was ruled ineligible to vote in his own primary after a local board determined he hadn’t owned a home in Indiana in three decades. Though a subsequent ruling allowed Lugar to claim a family farm as a residence, the die is cast. Lugar has become a carpetbagger in his own state.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

Misinformation from U.S. Dept Of Health And Human Services About Islam And Female Genital Mutilation

Christopher Holton

Genital mutilation is clearly proven tied to Islam. Why has the US Dept. of Health and Human Services used our tax dollars to say it isn’t? Why does the Obama Administration lie about it, prolonging the barbarity?

Jews Stifling Jews

Gadi Adelman

Peggy Shapiro, appointee to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council and child of Holocaust survivors, was invited to speak at Purdue University Calumet on “Nazi roots of contemporary anti-Semitism”. So why was the event canceled?

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