http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443437504577547313612049308.html?mod=hp_opinion The system to review misconduct is rigged so even abusive teachers can stay on the job. By resisting almost any change aimed at improving our public schools, teachers unions have become a ripe target for reformers across the ideological spectrum. Even Hollywood, famously sympathetic to organized labor, has turned on unions with the documentary […]
A mystery too deep for me (Islamist edition) http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/ The other day, I wrote a brief column in this space called “The State Department Invertebrate Embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood.” Taking off from a column by Andy McCarthy about the case of Huma Abedin. You remember Abedin. She’s a top aide to Secretary of State […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
New York City has been invaded, its buildings blown up and its citizens slaughtered hundreds of times. The invaders come every summer, descending from the sky and under the earth. Sometimes they aliens or gods or monsters. They are, however, never Muslims.
Every summer, for 10 dollars you can see a fantasy version of September 11 reenacted with invading enemies who deserve no mercy and receive none. They come in swarms, buildings fall, people run for cover and then they are beaten back and banished. And then, as summer fades, we pause for that obligatory week in which attention must be paid to commemorating the attacks of September 11 while seeing no connection between the discharges of tension through fictional victories used as an escape mechanism from a war that we dare not fight.
The Dark Knight, the previous Batman film, contained an elaborate analogy to the War on Terror, a shadow version of the real war fought out by men in costumes proving that it was possible to release a big-budget movie supportive of the War on Terror so long as it was dressed up in the right costume.
Since then, and before, New York City has been attacked by meteors, ice ages, mythical skeletons, more costumed criminals, the year 2012, and every possible imaginary scenario that can be dreamed up. It just hasn’t been attacked by Muslims because that’s something that doesn’t happen in movies. Only in real life.
The actual enemy rarely shows up in movies. There have been more movies made attacking the War on Terror than movies showing American soldiers and law enforcement officers fighting terrorists. After ten years of war there have hardly been any movies made about the war in Afghanistan and the most watched movie about the War in Iraq began with an anti-war quote, just so no one made any mistakes about where everyone involved stood. And all of these are a drop in the bucket.
http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2012/07/29/the-book-to-defeat-obama-stanley-kurtzs-spreading-the-wealth/?print=1
[1]What Stanley Kurtz has accomplished in his new book Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities [2], to be published on August 2, is nothing less than the complete exposure of President Barack Obama’s secret plans for his second term in office — plans that in reality amount to an assault on the values, well-being ,and quality of life of the very middle-class voters he claims to represent.
The unfortunate title — not an attention-grabber in bookstores —does not covey the breadth of his research, the scholarly yet readable and comprehensive analysis of where the president is coming from, and the nature of the social policy Obama will put into practice if he wins a second term. They amount to an entire gamut of initiatives, some well underway, to redistribute wealth not from the fabled 1% — who really do not have enough to save us from fiscal Armageddon even if the government took 80% of their profits — but from the average, middle-class, hardworking citizens who sought better lives and realized the American dream by moving to the suburbs, where the air is cleaner, the schools are decent, and life is peaceful and integrated.
These citizens are the very swing voters Obama is now courting; his many TV commercials about helping the middle class target them. What Kurtz reveals in chilling detail is that the group of radicals surrounding the president — names most of us (including me) are not familiar with — are nevertheless as dangerous and extreme in their goals as Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, and Reverend Jeremiah Wright. While those three are persona non grata in the White House, these unknown radicals are just as important, and they are planning social policy with Obama’s approval.
Here are their names, and when Kurtz’s book is published, they will hopefully become household names and what they advocate will be there for anyone to see. They are: Mike Kruglik, Obama’s boss and his trainer when Obama was a community organizer in the 1980s; Myron Orfield, a University of Minnesota law professor; John Powell, a law professor at Ohio State University who believes America suffers from structural racism; David Rusk, a former mayor of Albuquerque, NM, who favors annexation of the suburbs by the cities; and Linda Darling-Hammond, a proponent of a politicized curriculum for schools, a close associate of Ayers, and a leader in the administration’s effort to create new national standards and tests for our schools.
http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2012/07/29/dershowitz-flacks-for-obama/
“Why is the august law professor suddenly acting like a low-rent Ivy League Deborah Wasserman-Schultz?”
HE HAS HARDLY BEEN A “STAUNCH DEFENDER OF ISRAEL”….SLAMMING THE SETTLEMENTS AT EVERY TURN AND SHILLING FOR THE “TWO STATE SOLUTION”….RSK
Harvard law professor and pundit Alan Dershowitz is, like most of us, a man of parts — good and bad. I witnessed the good personally a few years ago when I saw him go toe-to-toe with supporters of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the UN’s Durban II conference in Geneva. He was magnificent.
Of course, opposing Ahmadinejad isn’t exactly a complicated moral challenge. The execrable Iranian is auditioning for Junior Hitler. Still, Ahmadinejad’s presence as speaker at a “human rights conference” was a disgrace and, as much as anyone else on the scene, Dershowitz led the charge against him.
He has also been a staunch defender of Israel against the likes of Walt and Mearsheimer and he recently had some insightful things to say about the dubious second-degree murder indictment of George Zimmerman. (We’ll excuse as best we can Dershowitz’s cringeworthy participation in OJ’s prevaricating legal Dream Team as an unfortunate exercise in self-promotion.)
But today, for reasons that are unclear at best, at the very moment of Mitt Romney’s arrival in Jerusalem, the law professor has decided to inject himself in the political process by publishing an apologia pro vita Obama [1] regarding the president’s Israel policy. He has no “buyer’s remorse,” Dershowitz tells us, from supporting Obama in 2008 and will do it again this year.
All this although the president has made no secret of his distaste for the prime minister of Israel, both through overheard conversation with Sarkozy and his own ugly snubbing of Netanyahu at the White House. More importantly, in actual political terms, the Obama administration seems to have a policy of putting pressure on the Israelis in the peace process but never on the Palestinians. Besides being grossly unfair, this has also been unworkable and will undoubtedly continue to be so. (It is also arguably racist because it treats the Palestinians as ungovernable children unable to compromise like adults.) Obama’s Middle East policy has achieved the hat trick of being at once cynical, unimaginative, and reactionary.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/praise-the-troops-screw-the-troops?f=puball
It’s a rare politician, left, right or center, who won’t grab a photo opportunity with our troops then plaster the image all over campaign materials. Even the hard left has learned to mouth insincere praise for the men and women in uniform before attacking our national defense. Nonetheless, we’re about to see another shameless and shabby example of Capitol Hill hypocrisy: Those senators and representatives-including yours, my fellow conservatives–are going to put 100,000 veterans out on the street. And that’s just the beginning.
It’s not just the dreaded sequestration issue, which would force across-the-board cuts at the Pentagon. Those who have served our country in our recent wars are going to get served with pink slips over the next few years, no matter what happens before the automatic-cuts deadline on the Hill. Why? Because spending is going to get tighter, and Republicans and Democrats alike are going to slash troop strength to protect lavish spending on our defense-industry cartel. When the political chips are down, ain’t nobody on the Hill loves a Soldier more than he loves Lockheed-Martin.
There really is plenty of fat, even now, in our vast defense budget. But instead of cutting the fat, we’ll cut the muscle.
You’re going to hear the usual rationale: “We won’t need ground troops in tomorrow’s wars.” We’ve been sold that same b.s. time and again. Replay recent history: After World War II, the advocates of airpower swore the age of the infantryman had passed. We demobilized and starved the handful of Army divisions remaining on active duty. And what came next? Korea, an infantryman’s war, and we were embarrassingly unready. Then we were told that the age of the grunt had really, really passed, since atomic weapons would rule the battlefield. And we cut Soldiers again to invest in long-range bombers and missiles. And what came next? Vietnam, another infantryman’s war.
After Vietnam, every “serious” person knew we’d never do anything like that again. So we hollowed out our ground forces. Yet, every significant military action over the following decades required boots on the ground: Grenada, Panama, Desert Storm, Somalia, the Balkans, even Sinai peacekeeping. Then a new Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, assured us that we didn’t need all those ground troops anymore: Better to free up money for the technologies that single-handedly would win the coming wars, and we could start by cutting two Army divisions and paring down the Marine Corps. And what came next? Afghanistan and Iraq, where our too-lean ground forces were stretched to the limit (but did their duty nobly).
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-extremities-of-extremism
n Joel Brinkley’s July 20th SF Gate article, “Morsi’s silence on extremism speaks volumes,” the term extremists occurs five times, extremism once (in the title). Although he employs the term so many times, he does not know what it means. Aside from that paucity of understanding, his incredulity speaks volumes about his ignorance of the nature of the “Arab Spring.”
Mohammed Morsi has been Egypt’s president for less than a month, and already senior clerics in his country and around the Islamic world are loudly calling for the demolition of the pyramids, Egypt’s most important tourist attraction and among the Seven Wonders of the World.
Saudi Sheikh Ali bin Said al-Rabi’i called them heinous “symbols of paganism.” In recent days, similar calls have been echoing through Egypt and the region, including one from a Bahraini sheikh who urged Morsi to “destroy the pyramids and accomplish what the Amr bin al-As could not.” He was referring to the Prophet Muhammud’s companion who conquered Egypt in the seventh century but didn’t have the technological wherewithal to accomplish the task.
Morsi is the Muslim Brotherhood’s triumphant president of Egypt. The Brotherhood is dedicated to transforming the country into one governed by primitive, brutal, misogynist, barbaric Sharia law.
What’s surprising is that Morsi has had nothing to say about this, not a word. Neither has he said anything about numerous “freelance” efforts to enforce other elements of Shariah law across Egypt, even though his new government hasn’t said that’s his plan.
Of course, what people like Brinkley do not grasp is that Morsi isn’t an “extremist.” He represents the essence of Islamic religious and political doctrine. He isn’t going to question calls to destroy the pyramids or impose jizya on Copts. His “silence” is an implicit sanction of those ideas and worse. After all, he ran on the platform of “purifying” Egypt. What does Brinkley expect Morsi to say? “Oh, that’s just extremist talk. Pay no attention to it. I’m really just a moderate.”
Or, take Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, who “purified” his country of private property, freedom of the press, and prosperity.
Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez has signaled a preference in the U.S. presidential campaign by comparing Mitt Romney to his own challenger.
Chavez, who is up for re-election a month before U.S. President Barack Obama, has in recent weeks expressed a clear preference for the man currently in the White House….
“I believe the person to best explain the loser’s agenda isn’t Barack Obama but rather Romney, because it’s the extreme right-wing agenda that borders on the fascism of the United States,” Chavez told tens of thousands of supporters in the western city of Maracaibo.
“In the end, it’s the same project,” Chavez said, referring to Obama as “a good guy.” (Italics mine.)
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/07/obama_and_aesop.html After learning that the students in my public speaking class at a local college never heard of Aesop’s Fables, I found my tattered 1946 edition of Aesop: Five Centuries of Illustrated Fables, selected by John J. McKendry. The book originally commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, features woodcuts dating as far back as […]
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2199/Spiking-the-Examiner.aspx
News flash: The Washingon Examiner spiked my syndicated column on the Muslim Brotherhood and why five House Republicans — Reps. Michele Bachmann, Trent Franks, Louie Gohmert, Tom Rooney and Lynn Westermoreland — were correct to call on Inspectors General to investigate MB influence on US government policy-making. And therein lies a tale.
If the newspaper’s online search function is accurate, it is even more perplexing to note that the Examiner hasn’t run a single news story on the media-politics feeding frenzy, led by Sen. John McCain, directed at Rep. Michele Bachmann for raising questions about strong indications of Muslim Brotherhood penetration of the Washington policy-making chain. The geyser of Left-cum-GOP-Establishment hysteria arose from Bachmann et al pointing out in a letter to the State Department IG that Huma Abedin, a top advisor of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, has close family members involved in MB-associated groups and movements, which are dedicated to the destruction of the West. Indeed, it was on the mention of Huma Abedin that the Examiner told me the paper turned down my column (full column reprinted below).
A little backstory.
I have noted before with dismay that the Washington Examiner automatically spikes any syndicated column I write regarding what might be referred to as President Obama’s identity issues.
These include: the debate over the constitutional requirement that the president and vice president be “natural born”; this same debate as it enters court in eligibility challenges litigated from New Jersey to Georgia to the US Supreme Court; and related pieces of “natural born” legislation introduced in some state legislatures, including Arizona’s. Since April 27, 2011, when Obama published a highly problematic illustration of a birth certificate on the White House website, the debate has taken a darker turn. There is now extensive evidence that fraud and forgery took place in the creation of the White House birth certificate. What that means to the Examiner is that it now also auto-spikes columns about this evidence and other sensational news coming out of the Cold Case Posse investigation mounted by the renowned Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Regrettably, Townhall.com has this year decided to spike columns on this same subject by myself and others. In fact, the silence on this epic story extends across the public square, from Left to Right, from CNN to Fox, from Democrats to Republicans. When, earlier this year, this began happening to my column in a more systematic way, I was shocked. Others, too. I will note for the record that concerned scribes expressed outrage and alarm over such censorship, for which I remain grateful. It is a more than passing strange sensation to write about what clearly seems to be important news in our country’s history involving Americans from different states, from different walks of life — lawyers, judges, detectives, computer experts, government officials including the president, and more — knowing full well that some outlets won’t run it because the subject is verboten in the public square. I have even come to expect this treatment on the subject, which must be some dangerous stage of complacency.
In a way, then, I almost welcome this latest, very different spike as a salutary jolt of alarm.
DEAR DERSH: IT’S BEST TO BE PRESUMED A FOOL THAN TO WRITE THIS DRIVEL AND REMOVE ALL DOUBT…..RSK
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3216/obama-buyers-remorse
Republicans are trying to woo away Jews who voted for Barack Obama in 2008, hoping they have experienced “buyer’s remorse.” I, for one, have experienced no such remorse. I have gotten from President Obama pretty much what I expected when I voted for him: a pragmatic, centrist liberal who has managed—with some necessary compromises—to bring us the first important healthcare legislation in recent history, appointed excellent justices to the Supreme Court, supported women’s rights, eliminated the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy, maintained the wall of separation between church and state, kept up an effective war against terrorism and generally made me proud to be an American who cast my vote for him.
Even with regard to his policy toward Israel, which has generated much of the impetus for this “buyer’s remorse” campaign, President Obama has kept his promises. During the last campaign, I and others urged candidate Obama to go to Israel and visit Sderot, which was being shelled by rockets from Hamas-controlled Gaza. He then went to Sderot and while standing in front of the lethal rockets that had inflicted so much damage—physical and psychological—to so many children and adults, this is what the candidate said:
“I don’t think any country would find it acceptable to have missiles raining down on the heads of their citizens. The first job of any nation state is to protect its citizens…If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. And I would expect Israelis to do the same.”
And when the Israeli Defense Forces finally had to respond to the rocket terror with Operation Cast Lead, President Obama supported Israel’s actions and his administration condemned the Goldstone Report as deeply flawed and biased against Israel.
