http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/the-immoderate-moderation-of-the-moderates/ In an article I posted on FrontPage Magazine, in which I was at pains to suggest that from the standpoint of the ongoing war of Islam against the West—anyone who doubts this has not been paying attention—the distinction between Islam and Islamism is functionally moot, if not chimerical. I was by no means implying […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ On a mild London afternoon, two Muslims rammed a car into a British soldier returning to the barracks after working at the Tower of London. They shouted Allah Akbar and hacked and slashed at his body in an attempt to behead him. By the time they were done, his body could only be identified […]
Wall Street Journal columnist launches vitriolic attack on New York City bike share program
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2334602/Wall-street-journal-launches-vitriolic-attack-New-York-City-bike-share-program.html
Wall Street Journal editorial board member Dorothy Rabinowitz attacked the green Citi Bike program in an online video
Rabinowitz criticized Major Bloomberg for his support of the program calling him a ‘totalitarian’ and ‘autocratic’ leader
She also blasted cyclists for their alleged disregard of traffic laws
By Laurie Kamens
A Wall Street Journal columnist made an impassioned attack against New York city’s new bike share program, known as Citi Bike.
In an online video segment entitled ‘Death by Bicycle,’ editorial board member Dorothy Rabinowitz criticized Mayor Bloomberg for allowing the ‘dreadful program’ to come to New York.
Rabinowitz also attacked cyclists who she said were given carte blanche to ignore the rules of the road in the interest of environmentalist programs.
When asked by the host of Wall Street Journal Live why she thought the local government would want to implement a program like this, Rabinowitz came out swinging replying, ‘Do not ask me to enter the minds of the totalitarians running this government of the city.’
She went on to attack Bloomberg for his support of the program and bemoan the damage she felt it had done to the city.
‘Envision what happens when you get a government that is run by an autocratic major before which you are helpless,’ she said. ‘We now look at a city who’s best neighborhoods are absolutely begrimed by these blazing blue Citibank bikes.’
http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2013/06/01/a-governments-racist-hiring-and-targeting-of-conservatives-and-pregnant-women/?print=1
Government targeting of conservatives is not confined to a couple of federal departments, as demonstrated by the events in a small District of Columbia employee relations board. A letter obtained by PJ Media documents open racism and hostility toward pregnant and conservative employees in the D.C. Public Employee Relations Board (PERB). The letter also demonstrates that lawless hostility toward conservatives is a characteristic of all levels of government.
According to a resignation letter from its executive director, this District of Columbia government board responsible for resolving employee disputes with management has engaged in racist hiring practices, discrimination against pregnant women, and hostility toward conservatives.
The behavior described in the resignation letter of former executive director Ondray Harris is another example of the broader hostility toward conservatives found throughout federal agencies such as the IRS, EPA, and Justice Department.
Ondray Harris, an attorney, resigned as executive director of PERB on May 24, 2013. His resignation letter contains accounts of disturbing, racist, and illegal behavior by board members Don Wasserman and Ann Hoffman. Among the behavior:
Harris, an African-American, was criticized by board member Don Wasserman for hiring white men to work for PERB. From the letter:
“Mr. Wasserman rebuked me with regard to my hiring white male employees. What is more, Mr. Wasserman demanded that I ‘refrain from hiring white men in the future’ to fill open Attorney-Advisor positions supporting PERB.”
http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2013/06/01/the-pursuit-of-the-normal/?print=1 In case you didn’t know it, Tel Aviv can get hot. I was sitting in the courtyard of this place called Sonya’s, having lunch with the Rubin family [1], when the sun moved around to my side of the table and in a few minutes I felt as if I were Peter O’Toole in […]
http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2013/06/02/the-irs-scandal-it-just-gets-worse-and-worse/?print=1
Remember Malik Obama? He’s the Kenyan-born half brother of the more famous Obama. The men, who first met in 1985, are not close, but each served as the best man [1] at the other’s wedding. Malik has what The Daily Caller delicately calls [2] “a checkered past.” That’s not the president’s fault, of course, any more than Jimmy Carter was responsible for his erring brother Billy.
There are, however, wheels within wheels here. Consider the Barack H. Obama Foundation, [3] a 501(c)(3) entity founded in 2011 and presided over by Malik Obama. Never heard of it? I hadn’t either until a friend pointed out the curious connection between Lois “Fifth Amendment” Lerner, one of the IRS officials at the center of the widening scandal engulfing that federal agency, and the Barack H. Obama Foundation. It turns out that these last several years the IRS has not only been harassing groups whose descriptions include phrases like “tea party” and “patriot.” It has also been bending over backwards to give preferential service to certain groups with a different political complexion. Groups, that is, like the Barack H. Obama Foundation. As The Daily Caller reports [2], Ms. Lerner
signed paperwork granting tax-exempt status to the Barack H. Obama Foundation, a shady charity headed by the president’s half-brother that operated illegally for years.
According to the organization’s filings, Lerner approved the foundation’s tax status within a month of filing, an unprecedented timeline that stands in stark contrast to conservative organizations that have been waiting for more than three years, in some cases, for approval.
Lerner also appears to have broken with the norms of tax-exemption approval by granting retroactive tax-exempt status to Malik Obama’s organization.
Yikes! No wonder she wants to take the Fifth. Where do you suppose this rottenness ends? Yesterday, Israpundit pointed out [4] in a video that Malik’s “checkered past” extends to the present. Among other things, he is the executive secretary of the Islamic Da’wa Organisation [5], an entity that was created by the Sudanese government, which is considered by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist state. [6] So why was Ms. Lerner so eager to facilitate the fund-raising operations of a foundation presided over by a man with such dubious connections?
I do not know the answer to this. But one thing, I think, is certain: we’re going to hear a lot more about this affair and I predict that Malik won’t be the only person named “Obama” involved.
http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-francejihadist-critical-mass/ On May 25, a 21-year-old soldier named Cédric Cordiez was stabbed in the neck in the La Defense district of Paris. He survived, but the aggressor’s intention was clearly to kill him (possibly even to sever his head). Four days later, a suspect referred to as Alexandre D., a 22 year-old-convert to Islam, was […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/349739/mental-illness-and-homicides-e-fuller-torrey-sally-satel
A federal agency tasked with mental-health treatment makes the system worse.
‘My son was only able to get treatment by killing his mother.” This was the testimony of Joe Bruce at congressional hearings on May 22. In 2006, Will Bruce, then 24 and suffering from schizophrenia, killed his mother, Amy, with a hatchet. “But an unbearable aspect of Amy’s death,” Bruce told members, “is that my own tax dollars helped make it possible.”
Bruce was referring to the federally funded Disability Rights Center of Maine, whose employees coached Will on how to get out of the psychiatric hospital and avoid being treated. As a result, Will returned home. Two months later and still psychotic, he killed his mother.
Today, Will Bruce is being properly treated. The young man, who was eventually deemed not guilty by reason of insanity and now resides indefinitely in a forensic institution, acknowledged to his dad that “none of this would have happened if I had been medicated.”
In a steady voice, Joe Bruce delivered his jaw-dropping testimony before the House Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, chaired by Representative Tim Murphy (R., Pa.), a psychologist. The subcommittee is especially well suited for medically related investigations, as it also includes two physicians (Michael Burgess from Texas, and Bill Cassidy from Louisiana) and a nurse (Renee Ellmers from North Carolina).
The hearings were the third forum held by this subcommittee to investigate psychiatric aspects of the mass killings at such now-infamous places as Newtown, Conn.; Littleton and Aurora, Col.; Tucson; and Virginia Tech. While almost everyone else has stressed the gun issues, the subcommittee has focused on the role played by untreated severe mental illness.
The hearing examined the role of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), a little-known component of the Department of Health and Human Services. The size of the agency, which has 600 employees and a budget of $3.5 billion, pales in comparison with that of other federal health programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. This makes it one of Washington’s stealth agencies flying under the radar and rarely in the news.
Yet SAMHSA’s core mission is important: to reduce “the impact of substance abuse and mental illness on America’s communities.” The subcommittee wanted to know how well SAMHSA was meeting its obligation to deliver services to the severely mentally ill.
SAMHSA administrator Pamela S. Hyde was questioned for two hours by subcommittee members. They asked her multiple times why SAMHSA’s detailed three-year planning document contained no mention of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, and why SAMHSA employs not even one psychiatrist in its Center for Mental Health Services, the entity responsible for services for mentally ill people.
No satisfying answers from Hyde were forthcoming, confirming what Murphy observed in his opening statement: “It’s as if SAMHSA doesn’t believe that serious mental illness exists.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/349917/oprahs-commencement-confusion-charles-c-w-cooke
What do you get if you cross a collection of witless Hallmark platitudes, a fairly strange and inordinately rich woman who has lived in a bubble for 30 or so years, and a congregation of people virtually begging to be told that they are wonderful?
The answer? Oprah Winfrey’s recent commencement address at Harvard University.
As one might expect, Winfrey’s rambling lecture featured the same series of fatuous prosaicisms that almost all university commencement addresses contain. And yet, somehow, it was worse. “In our political system and the media,” Winfrey proclaimed self-seriously at the outset,
we often see the reflection of a country that is polarized, that is paralyzed, that is self-interested. And yet I know you know the truth. We all know that we are better than the cynicism and the pessimism that is regurgitating throughout Washington and the 24-hour cable-news cycle.
This is what the English delicately call “total bloody tosh.” It appears not to have dawned on Winfrey that “the media” and “our political system” are “reflecting” those things because they are there. That is what the word “reflection” means. The country is “polarized”; it is “paralyzed” because it is polarized; and human society is — and always will be — “self-interested.” Our constitutional republic is designed to diffuse that self-interest and polarization peacefully, but that it does so extremely effectively should not be taken as a sign that our politics will be serene. They will not.
Nevertheless, judging by her words, Oprah evidently thinks she’s above all that. And, as is customary, she elected to flatter the group assembled in front of the dais by pretending that they are above all that, too. For some inexplicable reason, all groups of graduating students are ostensibly invested with magical powers the moment that they pull on a gown; moreover, for at least the duration of the address, they are informed that they belong to a generation that is better than any other generation has ever existed before in the history of the world. “Your generation is uniquely poised for success unlike any before it,” President Obama rather brazenly told Morehouse College graduates last month. Nobody bothered to ask, “Why?” Nobody dared to stand up, like George Harrison in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, and to say, “I’m not!”
Mercifully, my graduation ceremony did not feature a commencement speaker, the birthday clown of the academic world. Instead, I stood for an hour in a cold hall and was subjected to an ancient ceremony conducted almost entirely in Latin. This had the welcome effect of making all of the attendees feel extremely small and insignificant, and of reminding us that, while great people had gone through these Oxford halls, we had not yet done anything even close to being of note. It was wonderful.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/06/larry_king_carrying_soviet_water.html
Larry King Carrying Soviet Water
Last week was a truly extraordinary one at the borders of the Putin dictatorship. Passing through the outward-bound turnstiles on a one-way trip into neo-Soviet exile were a trio of dissidents named Sergei Guriev (an economist), Masha Gessen (an author), and Oleg Kashin (a reporter). And passing them on the way in, to join international pariah Julian Assange on Kremlin-controlled propaganda TV network Russia Today, was the doddering Larry King.
The background for all this immigration activity was a trial taking place in the city of Kirov. There, Russia’s dissident #1, Alexei Navalny, was facing charges that could send him to prison in Siberia for ten years. Navalny, who now has over 350,000 followers on Twitter, irked the Kremlin by leading a street protest movement that at its height saw over 100,000 Russians flood the streets of Moscow chanting anti-Putin slogans and calling for his ouster. The Kremlin responded to Navalny just as it did to Mikhail Khodorkovsky when the latter announced his intention, as Navalny has done, to seek Putin’s job. It lobbed a barrage of embezzlement charges and followed up with a classic neo-Soviet show trial.
Rather than follow in Navalny’s footsteps, Guriev, Gessen, and Kashin are heading for the exits. Imagine that Paul Krugman was calling for Barack Obama’s ouster instead of his sainthood, and you’ll have an American version of Guriev, one of Russia’s most high-profile and respected economists. Leading Western expert Russia economist Anders Aslund calls the MIT- and Princeton-trained Guriev “a truly outstanding individual” as well as “one of the greatest Russian networkers and public performers,” and Guriev was the central figure at the New Economic School, Russia’s leading center of economic learning.
But Guriev was also a tough critic of Putin, which was unsurprising, given the dismal economic performance of the Putin government in recent years. Following a massive recession in 2009, Russia’s economic growth has fallen precipitously while inflation has soared. Unable to tolerate criticism on the key bulwark of his power, Putin forced Guriev out of the NES and made it clear that the next step would be incarceration. Guriev was forced to flee.
On economics, Putin is the man behind the curtain, and he knows it. He must liquidate any Toto he spots, and quick. He has circulated the propaganda that his vicious crackdown on civil liberty was necessary to save the country from economic collapse due to the failed policies of his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, but that’s simply false. In Yeltsin’s last year in office, the Russian economy was roaring, with over 6% growth, and the next year it was 10%. When Putin’s policies took effect the year after that, growth fell by half. Now mired again in recession, Putin’s public support is shattering, and he is doing all he can to silence critics and hang on to power.
