It’s become habitual for movies to pair ordinary (Ben Stiller) or geeky (Adam Driver) comedic men with unusually beautiful women like Naomi Watts and Amanda Seyfried. Of course we would accept this if these men were playing the movie stars they actually are but that type of unbalanced casting starts us off being incredulous when the males are playing losers (Ben Stiller) or wannabes (Adam Driver). The latter is more than a foot taller than Stiller yet there’s a scene where Ben dons Adam’s jacket and roller-blades – both of which fit perfectly. It’s a minor moment but another peg for the incredulity board which is disconcerting in a movie that purports to poke fun in the mores of contemporary urban twenty and forty-somethings. If the object of the poke isn’t recognizably authentic, there’s no stuffing in the satire.
They are what David Mamet called “The Wicked Son(s)”…a pox on them and their ilk….rsk
Members of a group of Jewish supporters of the Democratic Party who met with President Barack Obama this week urged him to remove the long-standing American veto protection of Israel at the United Nations. The group, affiliated with the left-wing lobby group J Street, pledged to support the president within the Jewish community in the event of a Security Council resolution calling for the creation of a Palestinian State.
The exchange took place in the second of two meetings Obama held with American Jewish leaders to discuss the current negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, as well as other regional issues. According to a source who was in the room, one J Street supporter told the president that if he decided to back a Palestinian state resolution over Israeli objections, “let us know first, and we’ll do the legwork for you, in the community… so you’re not going to come in cold.” Among the J Street supporters who were part of the delegation meeting with Obama were Alexandra Stanton, Lou Susman and Victor Kovner.
I know the (Aussie) ABC are a bunch of doctrinaire lefties for the most part, but I always enjoy my appearances thereon and Tony Jones is a not un-agreeable host, all things considered. Still, it’s sad to see them providing a platform for serial litigant and Clime Syndicate warmano Michael E Mann.
As you know, Mann is suing me for describing his famous scary “hockey stick” graph as “fraudulent”, which it is. The graph shows a straight-line “shaft” of the stick representing 900 years of stable global temperature, followed by a sharp upturned blade representing the 20th century temperature rocketing up and out the top right-hand corner. The “message” (which Mann and his colleagues were concerned not to “dilute” with any subtleties or qualifications) was simple: We’re all outta graph paper. This thing’s off the charts with nowhere to go but up through the ceiling at an unprecedented rate. Give us all your money or the planet’s gonna fry.
Instead, from the very moment Mann joined the global-warming A-listers, the actual, real-world temperature flatlined and his hockey stick got the worst case of brewer’s droop since records began. As I’ve said before, if you graduated from college last summer, there’s been no “global warming” since you were in kindergarten; if you graduated from high school, there’s been none since you were born. For the generation that had Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth (heavily reliant on the hockey stick) shoved down its throat from K through 12, it doesn’t feel like that, but nevertheless it’s a fact: The “pause” in global warming is about to enter its third decade, and simply being a climate-pause denier (to coin a phrase) is no longer tenable.
Mrs Clinton continues her tour of her future subjects, in which selected pre-screened “everyday Americans” are graciously permitted into the van to commune with the ultimate non-everyday American. The effusions of the US media’s court eunuchs over Mrs Clinton’s ability to pass as an “everyday American” and actually visit a Chipotle suggest this is going to be a very long 18 months.
The last time a Clinton was in the White House it was what he was doing outside the White House that dominated the press coverage. Sixteen years ago, Bill Clinton celebrated beating the rap at his impeachment trial with what appeared to be some desultory bombing of the Serbs, but boy, it was a big bang for Bill and Hill. This was my Sunday Telegraph column of August 1999:
President Obama wielded his pen yesterday to begin the process of removing the longstanding U.S. designation of Communist Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, a move that pushes the U.S. closer to restoring full diplomatic ties with the brutal Caribbean dictatorship.
Obama’s action comes as watchdog group Judicial Watch yesterday claimed [1] that America has a terrorist problem closer to home than Cuba which is 90 miles away from the U.S. coast in Florida.
The group says the Muslim terrorists of Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS or ISIL) are operating a camp about eight miles from the U.S. border near El Paso, Texas. The base is located in an area called Anapra which is west of Ciudad Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Another Islamic State cell is located in Puerto Palomas and is targeting Columbus and Deming, N.M., for easy access to the U.S. Sources for the information include a Mexican Army field grade officer and a Mexican Federal Police Inspector, according to Judicial Watch.
It is unclear what, if anything, the Obama administration is doing about this.
We need to stop micromanaging what recipients buy with their food stamps. It would be hard to find someone outside the cocoon of Washington special interests who would defend our current welfare system. We spend nearly $1 trillion a year to fund over 100 separate anti-poverty programs, yet we have achieved only minimal gains in helping people escape poverty. By conventional measures, the poverty rate today is as high as when the War on Poverty was declared more than 50 years ago. Even alternative poverty measures that are arguably more accurate show few gains in recent years. We may have made poverty more comfortable, but we are not helping people become independent and self-sufficient. The need for reform is obvious.
The apostate author has done something of an about-face since her last book, in which she dismissed any reasonable hope that the Creed of the Sword might be reformed. Take away its supremacist worldview, as she thinks might be possible, and it doesn’t leave much for reformed Muslims to pray for.
From Caged Virgin to Infidel to Nomad, Ayaan Hirsi Ali milked the memoir, which is fine because she has an important story to tell and it bears reiteration and elaboration. Now there is Heretic (Harper Collins, 2015, 272 pages), which continues the catchy one-word titles that Ann Coulter has made into an art form but which jumps genre. Heretic is not primarily a memoir; it is a structured call for reformation within Islam. It also represents a mind change.
In Nomad Hirsi Ali “believed that Islam was beyond reform, that perhaps the best thing for religious believers in Islam to do was to pick another god”. In Heretic she not only calls for reform but believes in its feasibility and possibility. While I think she was right in Nomad – as I will explain – that doesn’t take away from the instructive value of Heretic; for non-Muslims and, perhaps, even more so for Muslims prepared to be seen reading it.
“It simply will not do for Muslims to claim their religion has been ‘hijacked’ by extremists. The killers of IS and Boko Haram cite the same religious texts that every other Muslim in the world considers sacrosanct.”
Awarded Hillary Clinton ‘Liberty Medal’ on the Eve of 1st Anniversary of Benghazi Attack
At a gala ceremony in Philadelphia on September 10, 2013, former Governor Jeb Bush honored former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton with the prestigious Liberty Medal on behalf of the National Constitution Center. The medal was presented ”in recognition of her lifelong career in public service and for her ongoing advocacy efforts on behalf of women and girls around the globe.”
Said the National Constitution Center chairman, Governor Jeb Bush:
Former Secretary Clinton has dedicated her life to serving and engaging people across the world in democracy. These efforts as a citizen, an activist, and a leader have earned Secretary Clinton this year’s Liberty Medal.
At the time, conservatives were taken aback that Clinton would be so honored almost a year to the date of the terrorist attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, that left four Americans dead. One conservative group released an online video at the time proclaiming Jeb Bush “unelectable” to the presidency for having presented the prestigious award.
Days after Iran deal, Pentagon acts fearing nuclear missile attack that would burn out America’s electronic-based defenses.
The Pentagon has decided to reopen the Cheyenne Mountain Air Defense facility, which housed the heart of America’s air and missile defense of North America. The facility had been mothballed in a “cost-saving” move in 2006.
Last week, Admiral William Gortney, head of US NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) and US Northern Command, reversed that decision and announced the Pentagon was spending an opening ante of $700 million to oversee reactivation of the Cheyenne mountain-embedded facility.
The reason – the Pentagon’s fears of a nuclear Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) attack by a missile that would burn out America’s overly-dependent defense, which is based on modern electronics.
US NORAD and US Northern Command aren’t just acronyms. They represent the last-ditch American defense of the continental United States homeland. NORAD originally stood for North America Air Defense Command, but now stands for North American Aerospace Command. US Northern Command is the area-specific designation of the US military command that is responsible for the continental United States homeland.
Why has no one read it?
In a dark Yiddish masterpiece that predated the Holocaust by two decades, the poet Uri Zvi Greenberg envisioned the annihilation of Jewish life in Europe. Today, seven decades after that vision became cataclysmic reality, as Jews this week observe the annual commemoration of the Holocaust on Yom Hashoah, and as the Jewish horizon in Europe darkens once again, his work speaks with fresh immediacy.
Greenberg (1896-1981) was not only one of Yiddish literature’s foremost modernists but arguably the greatest Hebrew poet of the last hundred years. If his name is unfamiliar today, that is because he inhabits a strange kind of cultural quarantine. Literary critics in Israel acknowledge his titanic stature, yet in a country that pays high honor to its writers, he has never been part of Israel’s school curriculum, and you won’t find him among the quartet of 20th-century Hebrew poets whose faces were recently added to Israeli banknotes. Nor is much of his work—including In malkhes fun tseylem (“In the Crucifix Kingdom”), which I offer here for the first time in English translation—available in English.
