http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/111074/sec_id/111074
The play within the play
In October 2011 an extraordinary opportunity to apprehend the ill-defined “Middle East” conflict was offered in the form of a play within the play. Discourse was disabled by flesh and blood images acting out the drama with exquisite unity and perfect casting. Playing the role of Israel, Gilad Shalit, courageous survivor of five years of unspeakable deprivation, emerged frail, pale but gloriously resistant. The little that we know of the conditions of his imprisonment is already too much. Kidnapped at the age of 19 near the Kerem Shalom crossing in Israel (two IDF soldiers were killed in the cross-border attack), held in some sort of dungeon, starved of human company, starved of daylight, undernourished, not even given eyeglasses with which to see the ugly contours of his constricted world, Gilad stood before us, a miraculous survivor. The celestial light of dignity suffused his flesh and bones with metaphysical force.
What decent human being would not have misgivings about the release, in exchange for Shalit, of 1027 murderers, thieves, and thugs determined to use their liberation as a license to renew the persecution of Israeli Jews?
Another Tack: Obama of the open mic ‘The tongue weighs practically nothing,” notes the anonymous aged adage, “but so few folks can hold it.’ Some supercilious sorts don’t even seem to try too hard – like American President Barack Obama, given to remarkable and repetitive chattiness when he’s precariously near open microphones. He is so accident-prone, […]
Reading the paper the other day, I came across a story about Jews (“Jewish settlers”) being ordered, by Israeli officials, to leave some of their new homes in Hebron. Naturally, Hebron’s location was given as the “West Bank,” and Jews were portrayed as merely militant troublemakers in someone else’s land.
Nowhere was it mentioned–and rarely ever is–that Jews have lived and owned land in Hebron for about 4,000 years, clear up to the 20th century, when they were massacred by Arabs in the 1920s and 1930s.
David, son of Jesse (born in another “West Bank” town, Bethlehem), was crowned King of Israel in Hebron and had some of his children there. A thousand years earlier, Abraham had made Hebron known to the world in the first place by purchasing a burial plot there for many of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people.
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/04/climategate_heads_to_court.html As a climate scientist, I am quite familiar with the background facts that Prof Michael E. Mann (now at Penn State U) so shamelessly distorts in his new book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. First, the scientific background: Mann’s claim to fame derives from his contentious (and […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/295248/social-darwinism-andrew-c-mccarthy
The one and only.
After hearing President Obama’s hilarious diatribe against the Ryan budget — a timid document that adds trillions to the deficit, takes a generation to bring the federal budget into balance, and makes zero effort to cancel out the innumerable departments, agencies, and programs that have exploded the federal micromanagement of American life — I have a question for the community-organizer-in-chief.
In light of his froth over this Ryanesque scourge of “Social Darwinism,” does the president favor repealing the laws that prohibit Americans from feeding the animals at the national parks that Obama risibly accuses Representative Ryan of trying to shut down?
You’ve probably seen the signs — they befoul the scenery throughout the Grand Canyon, Acadia, Yellowstone, the Everglades, Yosemite, etc. No food for the fauna. The Darwinists at the U.S. Park Service claim that animals must learn to fend for themselves if they are to survive and thrive. When you feed animals, the bureaucrats coldly explain, they become dependents and no longer function as nature intends. They lose their capacity to make their own way. They fill up on foods that are harmful to their digestive systems. There is a dulling of the instincts that help wildlife avoid danger — they lose the fear of humans and cars, leading many of them to be killed while expecting to find food on the roadside. Some signs are downright mean in admonishing: “A fed animal is a dead animal.”
Mr. President, where is the empathy?
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11737/pub_detail.asp
I am subject to various enthusiasms and, in 2008, I wrote a series about beef and the vast network of phony consumer advocates, vegetarian types, animal rights groups and headline chasing media folks who love a good scare campaign, all trying to convince Americans that beef was bad for them.
Today, it is a smear campaign about a type of meat promoted in the media as “pink slime.” Typically, it is a pack of lies and it’s going to cost some folks their jobs and drive up the cost of beef if allowed to go unchallenged.
What is being demonized in this 21st century reincarnation of the 1989 Alar apple scare is finely textured, 95% lean beef. It is composed of small parts of beef that are still available for use after the cuts with which we are more accustomed, like sirloin, brisket, top round, flank, porterhouse, and some forty other selections, are taken.
* VIDEOS * TODAY’S HOT PICKS *
1. BREAKING: It’s On: 5th Circuit Dares Obama to Deny Power of Judicial Review
2. VIDEO: Bret Baier GRILLS Jay Carney over Senate refusal to vote on budget in over 1,000 days
3. VIDEO: Judge Andrew Napolitano ripped into the president for inaccuracies in his argument for the law and against the Court
4. VIDEO: Greta asks Wasserman-Schultz: Should Obama pressure Harry Reid and the Senate to produce a budget? – Wasserman: “Not True” Reid Won’t Put Obama Budget to a Vote
5. VIDEO: Why would potential military plans be leaked to the media about how Israel might attack Iran’s nuclear facilities?
6. VIDEO: O’Reilly Maintains that Taxpayer Money is Being Wasted at a Colossal Rate
7. VIDEO: CNN Meteorologist Attributes Texas Twisters to ‘CLIMATE CHANGE’
8. VIDEO: VP Biden to High School Girls: ‘Pregnancy is Pre-Existing Condition’
9. VIDEO: Nikki Haley Argues Contraception when appearing on ‘The View’
10. Proof That Obama is Linked to Radical Alinsky
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11734/pub_detail.asp
President Obama is wrong in oh so many ways on Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act), perhaps historically, unprecedentedly so. It is the role of the Justices of the Supreme Court to rule on Obamacare, and indeed, if they are truly to act as arbiters of the will of the people, to rule against it. Indeed those Justices who support the President in his assertion that Obamacare is Constitutional will be the ones demonstrating “Judicial Activism”. As a Constitutional lawyer, he knows this, but as a politician he ignores it in the same way he apparently ignores anything and everything that he disagrees with, including the Will of the American People.
The Founding Fathers brilliantly set up our government to be limited, using three separate but equal branches to counterbalance each other. They wisely chose to have staggered but regular elections for two of the branches, the Presidency (Executive) and Congress (Legislative), while providing for the best legal minds of each generation to be appointed with life tenure to the Supreme Court (Judicial) by the elected bodies in order to provide checks and balances on those elected bodies. The particular role of the Judicial body is to ensure that the Legislative and Executive bodies follow the Will of the People.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11731/pub_detail.asp In testimony given to the Congress, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta asserted that Congress’s war powers authority is irrelevant. As he described it, U.S. intervention in Libya, Syria or elsewhere would be justified by permission from “relevant” international tribunals, such as the U.N. Security Council and NATO. The approval of the congressional representatives being unnecessary. […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
The story of the Naked Emperor is one of the most powerful stories we have because it is about the nakedness of our fictions, it is a story about the stories we tell, stories so widely accepted that they make the most naked lies possible.
Our bookstores and libraries have fiction and non-fiction sections, tightly delineating the difference between the two, and while it is polite to admire the authors in the fiction section for their inventive storytelling, it is riskier to go up to a New York Times journalist and compliment him for the same thing. But it is riskiest of all to treat a story that the media is telling us as nothing but a story.
That is something Stephanie Eisner, a cartoonist at the Daily Texan, a student newspaper at the University of Texas discovered, when she drew a little cartoon which depicted the Trayvon Martin case as a simplistic story being told by a maternal tabloid media to a gullible child. Accuse the storytellers of telling stories and they fight back with a story aimed at you. The story was that Eisner was a racist or as one student protest sign said, “The Daily Texan, Racist Since 1900”. And how do you argue with that?
