http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ben-shapiro/the-president-of-hollywood/ There was a time when the artistic community felt an obligation to speak truth to power. It was called the Bush years. Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central hosted the White House Correspondents’ Dinner back in 2006, and proceeded to blast President George W. Bush repeatedly, suggesting that “reality has a well-known liberal bias,” that […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ Someone chalked a long red line along the street outside my building. The line is sloppy, it turns, wavers and meanders. Car tires have already rubbed it pink in places and dogs have done to it what large four-legged animals do naturally when taken out of the confines of narrow apartments. The line turns […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346941/obamaclinton-reparations
Abraham Carpenter Jr., a farmer in Grady, Ark., has more insight into human nature than the average sociologist. “Anytime you are going to throw money up in the air,” he told the New York Times, “you are going to have people acting crazy.”
Carpenter is quoted in an astonishing 5,000-word Times exposé on the federal government’s wildly profligate program to compensate minority and women farmers for alleged discrimination. The government rigged the game against itself and in favor of anyone claiming taxpayers’ dollars. It was like a gambling house that fixed its slot machines to always come up triple cherries (and pay out other people’s money).
The enormous scam was set in motion by a 1997 class-action lawsuit called Pigford v. Glickman, with black farmers alleging that the Department of Agriculture discriminated against them in allocating loans. The Government Accountability Office and the Agriculture Department found no evidence of ongoing discrimination, but that black farmers had been treated unfairly in the past. This injustice became the predicate for officially sanctioned fraud amounting to reparations for non-white, non-male farmers.
The Clinton administration decided on a $1 billion settlement, “more a political decision than a litigation decision,” one lawyer told the Times. The presiding judge expanded the definition of claimants to include anyone who had “attempted to farm,” and no written complaint of discrimination was necessary. The judge wanted to set up a mechanism to provide “those class members with little or no documentary evidence with a virtually automatic cash payment of $50,000.”
He succeeded brilliantly. Staff from lawyers’ offices filled out forms for claimants at mass meetings. People filled out applications for their kids. Entire families filled out applications. Most applicants had never received any loans, making it impossible to check the record to verify their claims.
The Times examined 16 ZIP codes in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and North Carolina, and found that “the number of successful claimants exceeded the total number of farms operated by people of any race in 1997, the year the lawsuit was filed. Those applicants received nearly $100 million.” In Little Rock, Ark., ten members of one extended family reaped a cool half a million dollars.
Tens of thousands of applicants missed the 1999 deadline of the original suit. Their claims were probably even weaker than the original ones. But as a senator, Barack Obama supported paying the late applicants, and as president, he successfully sought another $1.15 billion for the purpose.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346942/surprise-stimulus-money-misspent What kind of project pays a couple of politically connected people hundreds of thousands of dollars for producing next to nothing? An Obama stimulus project, of course. More than four years after President Barack Obama signed the $787 billion stimulus package into law, troubling details continue to emerge. Earlier this month, for example, the […]
http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/richard-falk-al-gore-and-al-jazeera/?print=1 For a good rundown on Richard Falk, a special rapporteur of the United Nations Human Rights Council, see the scathing coverage by Geneva-based UN Watch [1], which blew the whistle last week on Falk’s article blaming America for the terrorist bombings in Boston. But let’s connect a few more dots. Falk’s article ran not […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323528404578452841949606234.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond
Until not long ago, Israelis remained prudently coy about whether they would strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. More recently, prominent Israelis have voiced doubts about whether Israel can strike those facilities, at least in any way that would make a lasting difference to Tehran’s bid to acquire nuclear weapons.
Essentially, they’re saying it’s all a bluff.
The transition marks another decline in the quality of the Jewish state’s deterrence. This would be bad news in better circumstances. Considering the way the Obama administration is acting with respect to Syria, it’s much worse than that.
That’s because President Obama has now made it clear that, when it comes to rogue regimes and weapons of mass destruction, he’s exactly the bluffer he promised he wasn’t. He warned repeatedly that the use by Bashar Assad’s regime of chemical weapons against the Syrian people was a red line, a game changer, a thing “we will not tolerate.” And he responded to the regime’s use of chemical weapons by doing nothing. This is supposed to be the guy who has Israel’s back and will never allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon?
What’s Fuhgeddaboudit in Yiddish?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324874204578441032081716170.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop Millions of Americans will pay more for health insurance, lose their coverage, or have their hours of work cut back. In recent weeks, there have been increasing expressions of concern from surprising quarters about the implementation of ObamaCare. Montana Sen. Max Baucus, a Democrat, called it a “train wreck.” A Democratic colleague, West Virginia’s […]
http://www.steynonline.com/5545/the-sheik-of-araby
April 29th apparently marks the anniversary of the launch of the Islamic conquest of the Iberian peninsula in the year 711 – AD, that is; not sure how it’s numbered Islamically. So I thought it would be fun to have a suitably Islamo-dominant number for our Song of the Week. But then I realized I didn’t know any, apart from “Put On A Wahhabi Face”, cheerily sung by millions of Saudi wives as they’re being fitted for their burqas. So, instead of that, how about an all-American number about the desert sands?
Question: What’s the connection between Rudolph Valentino, Adolf Hitler and the Beatles?
Answer: This song:
I’m The Sheik Of Araby
Your love belongs to me
At night when you’re asleep,
Into your tent I’ll creep…
Until 9/11 sparked the current torrid romance between western lefties and the Islamists, the last time the stern men of the desert had the developed world mooning over them was 90 years ago. Even before Rudolph Valentino’s screen version, The Sheik was a smash: E M Hull’s novel sold two million copies within a year of publication in 1919. It’s a cracking read, right from its splendid first sentence:
Are you coming in to watch the dancing, Lady Conway?
And, if you think today’s Euro-American feminists are pretty submissive in the face of Islamist theocrats, well, at the very dawn of female emancipation, millions of women apparently wanted nothing more than to be forcibly seized by some Bedouin chieftain, trussed up over his Arab stallion and ridden into the desert to be his bride. Valentino’s moment was brief: the film of The Sheik opened in 1921 and he was dead by 1926, at the age of only 31. And, to the puzzlement of your average bloke, Hollywood’s first great screen lover was frankly a bit of a nancy boy. But his alleged smoldering eroticism drove the gals crazy, and 80,000 of them showed up for his funeral, and came near to rioting. It was the biggest send-off for a charismatic Middle Eastern type until the Ayatollah Khomeini’s six decades later, when the excitable young lads clutching at his shroud managed to yank the corpse off the bier at one point.
So in the early Twenties the trick for Tin Pan Alley was to figure out a way to cash in on all this sheik chic. There’s always been a niche market for lyric exoticism – “Moonlight On The Ganges” and whatnot – and songwriters were already gingerly setting a toe or two on the desert sand. In 1915 Irving Berlin wrote a number called “Araby”, which includes some of the most atrocious rhymes in that great man’s illustrious career, starting with the first couplet –
Tonight I’m dreaming of Araby,
That’s where my dreams seem to carry me
– and continuing all the way through to the final eight bars:
Soon you’ll see within a caravan
An Arab man
Will take me over the desert…
In between comes one of the better quatrains:
That’s why I long to be
Where all those happy faces
Wait for me,
Beside the fair oasis…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2316264/MELANIE-PHILLIPS-What-kind-society-treats-smacking-war-crime–teaching-children-watch-porn.html
What kind of society treats smacking as a war crime – while teaching children how to watch porn?
A group of sex education ‘experts’ has suggested that pupils should be taught in school about pornography, on the grounds that it is not ‘all bad’ and can even be ‘helpful’ to them.
Yes, you read that right.
The Sex Education Forum says in a new publication for schools that pornography should be taught in terms of ‘media literacy and representation, gender, sexual behaviour and body image’.
Behind the gobbledegook, this seems to be at least in part a confused attempt to deal with the fact that children are now accessing all manner of dubious or harmful material on the internet.
Accordingly, this publication warns that the sex and bodies in pornography ‘are mostly unrealistic’, and that such material may involve coercing participants into performing sex acts. But it also suggests showing such images to children at age 14. Moreover, it states they might find some of the positions in such porn films ‘helpful’, while being made aware that ‘the so-called pleasure’ they see ‘may be anything but’.
http://www.grasstopsusa.com/df042913.html.
Two weeks ago today, two brothers are alleged to have set off a bomb at the finish line of the Boston Marathon that left three dead – including an eight-year-old boy – and injured 282. At least 14 lost limbs. Our president implored us not to “jump to conclusions” and thus end up stereotyping his favorite faith.
In the interim, a friend sent me a link to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists website. (In case you’re curious, here it is http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/wanted_terrorists/@@wanted-group-listing.) With one exception (a convert named Adam), all had names like Ibrahim, Abdul, Omar, Jamal, Abdullah, Ramadan, Hasan, Mohammed and Muhammad. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.
As the political establishment, mainstream media, academia and our moralizer-in-chief have pointed out repeatedly in the past fortnight, there’s absolutely no connection between Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (AKA, the Boys from Chechnya, via Dagestan) and the Religion of Peace.
“The Boston Bombers Were Muslim: So?” ran a headline in The Atlantic. Over at MSNBC, Chris (if I only had a brain) Matthews told us motivation was irrelevant: “Where was their inspiration? Where did they get the guidance? Why is that important? … I mean, what difference does it make why they did it, if they did it?”
In 1945, six million Jews were dead – murdered in death camps and by mobile killing squads. Why did Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann and the S.S. do it? What was their motivation? (Could it have had something to do with Nazi race-theory, set forth in the fascist bible?) Why is that important? I mean, what difference does it make why they did it, if they did it? “The Architects of the Holocaust Were Nazis: So?”
