shttp://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2012/12/16/sharia-thirsty-take-solid-first-round-lead-in-egypts-constitutional-referendum/ A female Morsi supporter ( “Fatima” Cousin Itt ?) holds aloft a placard that reads: “yes to the constitution” Al-Ahram is reporting the ten individual governorate [2] and pooled final [3] results, noting that all these unofficial tallies, are from governorates’ presiding judges, except Cairo’s, which are from the tallies of the Freedom and […]
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/12/17/preventing-school-massacres It’s three days since the horrific Newtown, Connecticut school massacre, and talking about it isn’t getting any easier. Like every event on the list of mass murders it joins, the Newtown murder spree has evoked another round of debate on gun control. But like the shootings at Columbine high school, the Aurora movie theater, […]
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/editorials/reading_riting_and_race_HuOzG2iaw6tOmSHkdzo8mI
Is arithmetic racist? Are English and science and art?
These might seem like stupid questions, but — speaking of stupid — a federal judge says the answer is yes, they are, and slapped New York City with a judgment that could cost the school system hundreds of millions.
The case involves a 16-year-old lawsuit, a handful of unqualified teachers who tried to cast their own failures as a civil-rights violation — and the lefty lawyers who have abetted their cause.
Would-be teachers in New York must pass a state exam called the Liberal Arts and Sciences Test, or LAST, to demonstrate a basic grasp of English, math, history and science.
They have four hours to answer 80 multiple-choice questions, which feature short passages, graphs, pictures and poems — and they must also write a coherent essay.
It’s not asking much. Teachers only have to score 67 percent on the multiple-choice portion, and the questions are absurdly easy. As a former city teacher told The Post, the exam is “high-school level, so anyone with a high-school [diploma] should be able to pass it, regardless of race.”
But that hasn’t been the case. Back in the 1990s, whites passed at far higher rates than blacks and Hispanics.
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/335767
President Obama said the federal government has to do something meaningful to prevent future shootings, like the recent massacre of 26 children and adults at a school in Newtown, Connecticut. Here is what the federal government can do to prevent violence related to mental illness:
1. Start demonstration projects of Assisted Outpatient Treatment (e.g. Kendra’s Law in New York, Laura’s Law in California) throughout the country. AOT allows courts to order individuals with mental illness to stay in treatment as a condition of living in the community. It is only applicable to the most seriously ill who have a history of violence, incarceration, or needless hospitalizations. AOT is proven to keep patients, the public, and police safer. The Department of Justice has certified AOT as an effective crime-prevention program. But mental-health departments are reluctant to implement AOT because it forces them to focus on the most seriously ill. Demonstration projects would help mental-health departments see the advantage of the program. (For why some people with serious mental illness refuse treatment, see this. See also how Assisted Outpatient Treatment laws (Kendra’s Law in NY and Laura’s Law in CA) keep patients, the pubic and police safer
2. Write exceptions into the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) so parents of mentally ill children can get access to medical records and receive information from their children’s doctors on what is wrong and what the children need. Right now, for reasons of “confidentiality,’ doctors won’t tell parents what is wrong with their kids or what treatment they need, even as they require parents to provide the care. As a result, when a child goes off treatment, the parents’ hands are tied. They have all the responsibility to see the person is cared for, but none of the information or authority to see it happens. We have to change the patient confidentiality laws so parents can help prevent tragedies rather than become a punching bag for the public when something horrific happens.
http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2012/12/chuck-hagel-for-defense-secret.php?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Chuck+Hagel+for+Defense+Secretary+-+Bring+it+On%21&utm_campaign=20121217_m114705123_Chuck+Hagel+for+Defense+Secretary+-+Bring+it+On%21&utm_term=Continue+reading___
Many in the American Jewish community are aghast to discover that President Obama is planning to appoint former Senator Chuck Hagel to serve as Defense Secretary. If you want the skinny on how Hagel has come to be known as one of the few ferociously anti-Israel senators in the past generation, Carl from Jerusalem at Israel Matzav provides it.
Meantime, all I can say is I don’t understand how anyone can possibly be surprised. Shortly after word came out that Hagel is the frontrunner for the nomination, I read a quaint little blog post written by a conservative leaning commentator voicing her belief that Obama wouldn’t want to risk his relations with Israel’s supporters by appointing Hagel. But as Powerline pointed out today, this is the entire point of the nomination. Obama isn’t stupid. He picks fights he thinks he can win. He hasn’t always been right about those fights. He picked fights with Netanyahu thinking he could win, and he lost some of those.
But he is right to think he can win the Hagel fight. The Republican Senators aren’t going to get into a fight with Obama about his DOD appointee, especially given that it’s one of their fellow senators, even though many of them hate him. The Democrats are certainly not going to oppose him.
Obama wants to hurt Israel. He does not like Israel. He is appointing anti-Israel advisors and cabinet members not despite their anti-Israel positions, but because of them.
Some commentators said that Susan Rice would be bad because she was anti-Israel and they hoped that Obama would appoint someone pro-Israel. But John Kerry is no friend of Israel. And as far as I was concerned, we would have been better off with Rice on the job.
Unlike Kerry, Rice is politically inept. She walked into Sen. John McCain’s office with the intention of convincing Sens. McCain, Lindsey Graham and Oympia Snowe that she was competent to serve as Secretary of State despite the fact that she deliberately misled the public on what happened at the Sept. 11 jihadist attack on the US consulate in Benghazi.
But she failed. In commenting on the meeting, all three senators said they were more concerned after speaking with Rice than they were before they did. That is, they said she was a political incompetent. Can there be any doubt that Sen. Kerry will be able to play the politics of Capitol Hill far more effectively than Rice?
And what reason does anyone have to believe that Assad’s great defender will be any more supportive of Israel than Rice would have been? But with him in the driver’s seat now, instead of having a political incompetent whom no one can stand serving as the spokesman for Obama’s anti-Israel foreign policy, in Kerry we will have a competent, reasonably popular politician on the job.
It’s time for people to realize the game has changed. Obama won.
Obama won with 70 percent of the Jewish vote despite the fact that his record in his first term was more hostile to Israel than any president since Jimmy Carter. No one can expect him now, after his victory, to feel even slightly constrained in his desire to weaken the US relationship with Israel.
So far, he has made clear that he feels no constraints whatsoever. Take the Palestinians at the UN for example. Obama enabled the Palestinians to get their non-member state status at the UN by failing to threaten to cut off US funding to the UN in retaliation for such a vote.
Both Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush issued such threats during their tenures in office and so prevented the motion from coming to a vote. Given that the Palestinians have had an automatic majority in the General Assembly since at least 1975, the only reason their status was only upgraded in 2012 is because until then, either the PLO didn’t feel like raising the issue or the US threatened to cut off its financial support to the UN if such a motion passed. This year PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas said he wanted to have a vote and Obama responded by not issuing a threat to cut off UN funding. So the Palestinians got their vote and, as expected, it passed overwhelmingly.
Seeing the upgrade as a Palestinian move is a mistake. It was a joint Palestinian-American move.
And Obama made that move and no one balked. Indeed some New York Jews applauded it.
Let there be no doubt, Obama will get Hagel in at Defense. And Hagel will place Israel in his crosshairs.
The only way to foil Obama’s ill intentions towards Israel even slightly is to be better at politics than he is. And he’s awfully good.
Moreover, one of his strongest advantages is that Israel’s supporters seem to have never gotten the memo. So here it is: Obama wants to fundamentally transform the US relationship with Israel.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324407504578183312848676912.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
THIS IS A LOVELY TRIBUTE TO WONDERFUL NEWTOWN…..THERE IS ALSO A SECTION OF NEWTOWN CALLED “PALESTINE” AND THE NAME EVOLVED BECAUSE DOZNES OF JEWISH FAMILIES WERE RELOCATED TO NEWTOWN IN THE EARLY PART OF THE LAST CENTURY TO TAKE THEM AWAY FROM THE CROWDING AND POVERTY OF THE LOWER EAST SIDE IN NEW YORK CITY. BESIDES BEING A REMINDER OF THE JEWISH TIES TO “PALESTINE” LONG BEFORE THE INVENTION OF “PALARABS,” THE JEWS FOUND A BUCOLIC HAVEN. THEY TRIED THEIR HANDS AT FARMING BUT MOST WENT INTO RETAIL. ….RSK
The word “community” is overused. It is even the title of a television sitcom. But in the context of Newtown—the Connecticut town of 27,000 that I’ve known as home since 1969—it is authentic. Yet from within our midst came Adam Lanza, now a murderer of 20 innocent local children, six of their dedicated teachers, and his own mother.Today the world is focused on our heretofore-bucolic slice of America. As the international media’s satellite dishes sprout and their choppers descend to dissect the shooting and the shooter, Newtown is mostly presented as either an affluent suburb of New York or a picture-perfect New England hamlet with old-timey colonial houses, horse farms and a historic Main Street.Neither characterization does it justice. To live here is to know why, after two decades of global wandering, I returned eight years ago to raise my family.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324640104578161593492943144.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
Wind and solar power cannot possibly meet the world’s growing need for more electricity.
Investing in and using fossil fuels is so wrong it should be seen as the equivalent of support for apartheid. That is the message being promoted by 350.org, the organization headed by environmental activist Bill McKibben.
Over the past month or so, Mr. McKibben and a rotating cast of activists have held rallies in 21 U.S. cities encouraging students to campaign for ridding their university endowments of investments in coal, oil and natural gas. The effort is modeled on the 1980s effort to get universities to shed investments in companies that did business in apartheid-era South Africa. A few small schools, including Unity College in Maine and Hampshire College in Massachusetts, have responded to the pressure and agreed to rid their portfolios of fossil-fuel stocks.
One of the slogans used in 350.org’s divestment campaign is “Do the math.” OK. Let’s.
Set aside the financial arguments for—or against—investing in companies that produce hydrocarbons. Further, let’s not judge the claims made by Mr. McKibben and his allies that a concentration of 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere is “the safe limit for humanity.”
Let’s do the math by considering what will happen if we humans—in the words of the campaign—attempt to “go fossil free” and rely solely on “clean energy.” To make the computation simpler still, let’s ignore oil altogether, even though that energy source represents about 33% of all global energy use and is indispensable for transportation.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ Forget the Grand Prix or the Daytona 500, the real race right now is the race to Damascus. The racers include Syrian rebels in pickup trucks with mounted machine guns and homemade tanks, toting weapons and equipment supplied and paid for by Qatar and Turkey, and more covertly by the British and French intelligence […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/12/hillary_in_hiding.html For once, I am inclined to believe Hillary Clinton. The U.S. Secretary of State, suffering from a sick stomach, has reportedly fainted and bumped her head. As a result, her spokespeople have already announced that she will be unable to testify at the Benghazi hearings, although she was not due to appear until December […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/12/us_ambassador_tells_georgia_to_vote_for_a_palestinian_state.html
From the former Soviet Republic of Georgia comes news of an extraordinary betrayal by the Obama Administration. As Obama continues to abandon freedom in his support of Muslim Brotherhood and Sharia revolutions and regimes in Egypt and elsewhere, he has taken behind-the-scenes steps to further the international isolation of Israel, the only democracy in that Middle East.
Just before the November 29 United Nations vote granting non-member state observer status, the U.S. ambassador to Georgia, Richard Norland, an Obama appointee, met with Georgian Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili. During their conversation, Norland recommended that the Prime Minister that Georgia should vote in favor of a Palestinian state.
This happened despite the U.S.’s official opposition, as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the vote “unfortunate and counterproductive … plac[ing] further obstacles in the path of peace.” Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said on the day of the vote: “None of the vital interests of peace appear in the resolution that will be put forward before the General Assembly today and that is why Israel cannot accept it.” He was right. But in Georgia, the U.S. was betraying a steadfast and true ally.
This information comes from Gabriel M. Mirilashvili, a prominent businessman and corporation owner in Georgia, who is Vice-President of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress and head of the World Congress of Georgian Jews. Mirilashvili says that he heard this from Ivanishvili himself, and that there exists an official record of the conversation between Norland and Ivanishvili. When Mirilashvili urged Ivanishvili to oppose the Palestinian statehood resolution, Ivanishvili responded that the American ambassador had told him to support it.
It is also interesting to note that a few days before this meeting, George Soros came to Georgia and also met with Prime Minister Ivanishvili, and they agreed to collaborate on various initiatives. President Obama’s close ties to Soros goes back to the 2007 and the run up to the 2008 presidential election.
Meanwhile, another source said that Georgia is harboring Chechen jihadists — killers who have Georgian passports. When some of these jihadis were arrested in Turkey, the Turkish press published the fact that they were traveling on Georgian passports. What’s more, their leader, Umar Sugaipov, who is not currently in Georgia, is a former deputy head of security for the late President of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, Aslan Maskhadov.
This is the kind of government that the Obama Administration is whispering with to work against Israel. That the U.S. Ambassador to Georgia would advise that nation’s Prime Minister to support a Palestinian state is shocking, but not surprising. This is what the U.S. under Obama has been covertly but effectively pursuing on the world stage for four years now. While Obama is courting influential Jews in America and Americans who support the tiny Jewish state, he is betraying Israel, our only reliable ally in the Middle East.
Obama’s foreign policy has been instrumental in the rise of jihadist and Islamic supremacist regimes across the Middle East and North Africa. And it is not difficult to see what the second Obama presidential term will bring. President Obama is consistent in his foreign policy. Four years into his presidency, the world is radically transformed, and soon will be unrecognizable.
