http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/345373 America’s tax code is a 74,000-page unintentional comedy. As the Monday, April 15, tax-filing deadline mercilessly approaches, millions of Americans will cry as they calculate what they owe Washington and then fork it over. But amid those tears there will be plenty of laughs. The U.S. Tax Code is so tangled and twisted that […]
http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/
“Why does the Church of England hold Jews in contempt?” asked the prominent Anglican blogger Archbishop Cranmer last year, following the General Synod of the Church of England’s endorsement of the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI), which he powerfully characterised as
“nothing but an insidious front for a pro-Palestinian campaign to propagate the partisan lie that, while Israel is besieged by child killers, infiltrated by suicide bombers, surrounded by Islamist propagandists and endures almost daily missiles launched at civilian areas, she is the aggressor, the terroriser, the occupying force.
The declared vision of the EAPPI is to bring ‘internationals to the West Bank to experience life under occupation’. Its mission is to ‘accompany Palestinians and Israelis in their non-violent actions and to carry out concerted advocacy efforts to end the occupation’. They ‘support acts of non-violent resistance’ in order to achieve this and, since Israel is the ‘occupying force’, it stands to reason that the EAPPI’s raison d’être is to criticise and delegitimise Israel, a country which contends daily with concerted efforts to wipe its people off the face of the earth.
The EAPPI creed is very simple: Palestinians are victims; Israelis are aggressors; Zionists are evil; the IDF are terrorists. It was spawned by the World Council of Churches which, over the years, has passed motions calling for ‘an international boycott of goods produced in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied territories’; lauded Yassir Arafat as a hero for ‘bringing the Palestinian people together’; and called for ‘the right of return of Palestinian refugees’, despite this posing an existential threat to the Jewish homeland. The WCC unashamedly declares: ‘The EAPPI is a central element of the Ecumenical Campaign to End the Illegal Occupation of Palestine.’
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/04/hey_jay-z_-_obama_didnt_know_about_fast_and_furious_either.html
The Jay-Z story took another silly turn yesterday.
First, Jay-Z decided to release a song about his trip to Cuba. The lyrics are incredibly stupid but no one ever said that Jay-Z had a Masters in English or an ounce of common sense:
“”I done turned Havana into Atlanta,” he rapped. “Boy from the hood, but got White House clearance.”
He continued: “Politicians never did s— for me except lie to me, distort history, wanna give me jail time and a fine. Fine, let me commit a real crime. … Obama said, ‘Chill you gonna get me impeached.’ You don’t need this s— anyway, chill with me on the beach.'” (Fox)
Second, The White House is claiming that they didn’t know anything about the couple’s “special considerations” to travel to Cuba. Even Jay Carney got into it with a reporter.
Maybe President Obama did not know that Mr and Mrs Carter were traveling to Cuba to celebrate their 5th wedding anniversary. However, are we supposed to believe that anyone can walk into the Treasury Dept and get special consideration to travel to Cuba?
I think that we are learning again that “hope and change” has “tourist” and “first class” seats. Just check out all of those high rent Democrats who got government loan guarantees for Solyndra, et al.
“Yes we can” is a lot easier when there is cash in the envelope!
The point is that travel to Cuba is hard. This is why many Americans fly to Mexico or Jamaica and hop over without having their passports marked by the Cuban authorities.
A couple of years ago, a friend in Dallas went to Cuba to take some bibles on a purely humanitarian mission. He told me that Treasury put him through “hoops” to prove that it was not a pleasure trip and purely “educational”.
The Jay-Z affair is not “Fast & Furious” or “Benghazi” but it is amazing how the Obama administration plays the dumb card and gets away with it!
My guess is that most Americans find this whole episode somewhere between hilarious and stupid. However, we Cuban-Americans are not laughing at all, especially those of us who had a family member in a political prison for 14 years without a trial (my dad’s cousin Ignacio). I won’t tell you how the families of executed political prisoners feel about seeing some ignorant clown walking on the streets of Havana with a Che T-shirt!
It is offensive, to say the least. It is also ignorant given what Che said about black people! Read the quotes and tell me if you don’t think that Jay-Z checked his intelligence at the airport hangar when he went to Cuba.
Perhaps Jay-Z should release another song and call for artistic freedom and the release of Allan Gross, the US citizen in a Cuban prison for no reason at all. It will be deeply appreciated by the Gross family and the musical community on the island.
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/04/kim_jong_uns_shoes.html If you can mentally put yourself in Kim Jong-un’s shoes, once you are aware of the constraints he faces you will understand why the South Koreans aren’t getting terribly worried about how the current round of threats will end. Far from being crazy, KJU is acting rationally for someone in his position, and he’s […]
http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2013/04/11/Senate-Dems-Blocking-Resolution-To-Honor-Margaret-Thatcher
Senate Democrats are hesitating to honor the former prime minister of Great Britain who, along with President Reagan and Pope John Paul II, tackled communism.
This is particularly galling in light of the fact that 16 Republicans crossed the aisle to vote for cloture on the Democrats’ gun control bill, today.
Heritage Action reports:
A Senate resolution to honor Lady Thatcher was supposed to pass last night. However, per well placed sources on the Hill, Democrats have a hold on the resolution.
To refuse to honor a woman of such great historical and political significance, who was deeply loyal to the United States, is petty and shameful. One truly has to wonder, what is it about Lady Thatcher that gives them pause? Her unfaltering commitment to freedom? Or perhaps the way she fought for individual liberty and limited government?
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3229/justice_in_guatemala_44_years_later Justice in Guatemala: 44 years later John Gordon Mein’s death, like that of Chris Stevens, remains uninvestigated, his murderers unidentified and unpunished. 44 years later, it’s time to put that right August 28th, 1968 was a hot day in Guatemala City when U.S. ambassador John Gordon Mein drove towards the U.S. Embassy. Within minutes, […]
http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2013/04/08/the-warriors-call-to-duty/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-warriors-call-to-duty It has been nearly eight months since jihadists attacked U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed, and many more were badly injured. And that is pretty much all we know for sure about an incident that has – let’s face it – been subjected to the most […]
http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=6893
Someone ought to pull aside some of television’s talking heads and magpies of the left and explain how babies are made.
They’re very, very upset that Mitch McConnell, the senator from Kentucky who is the leader of the Republicans in the U.S. Senate, is openly practicing politics, like an actress coming out of the closet as a thespian, or a shopkeeper shamelessly committing nepotism with his daughter.This is so far mostly of interest to a small but noisy conventicle of magpies, perched on telephone wires in Washington and Manhattan, chattering to each other about the day the senator sat down with his aides to talk about a prospective challenge from Ashley Judd, the movie starlet.
They were discussing Miss Judd’s strengths, such as there may be, and her weaknesses, and how a McConnell campaign could exploit the weaknesses if in fact she ran against him in November. You might think this is just what all successful politicians do, but somebody made a tape recording of the conversation and leaked it to David Corn of Mother Jones magazine, and overnight the incident became Son of Watergate (though the cliché-mongers of the media are trying to christen it “McConnellgate”). A McConnell campaign aide, equally bereft of imagination, likened the leak to something the Gestapo of Nazi Germany might have done, and the FBI was called in to see whether partisan evil-doers had planted a bug in the wall.
Soon everybody was trying to get an oar in while the water was lukewarm. The National Jewish Democratic Council demanded an apology, or something, for the reference to the Gestapo – the brutal Nazi secret police – “just days after Holocaust Remembrance Day.” The hapless McConnell aide probably should have cited the KGB, though reference rights to the Holocaust do not necessarily include rights to the Gestapo, an equal opportunity terrorizer. World War II belongs to everybody, though comparisons to Hitler by anyone who gets a parking ticket are getting tedious and going out of style in the better capital salons.
http://sarahhonig.com/2013/04/12/another-tack-amusing-ourselves-to-death/
An obscure 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, should be particularly compelling to Israelis. Its author, the late Neil Postman, made a sound case for his contention that Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World accurately predicted our current lifestyle.
Our judgment is crippled by an overpowering addiction to entertainment and news presentation constitutes merely another showbiz feature. Complexities are conveniently diluted and events of the day are offered as a packaged commodity, almost like the drugs with which the denizens of Huxley’s future medicated themselves into bliss. Shallow stimulation and immediate gratification have replaced thought and remembrance.
Cyber-wizardry only exacerbated these already preexisting inclinations. But unlike Postman, who lamented the decline of logic and knowledge, there are those who actually celebrate the loss. Foremost among them is our own president Shimon Peres, always ever-eager to lead the vanguard of what he promotes as progress.
A few years ago, for example, Peres pontificated thus: “Why is it important to know how many people Napoleon killed? …If you want details, go to the Internet.”
It was no slip of the tongue. His previous pearls of wisdom informed all and sundry that Google had “liberated us from the great effort to remember things… Why remember? The past isn’t so great. It’s full of tragedy and war… Look to the future, forget about the past… Personally, I have very little patience for history. I believe that to imagine is more important than to remember.”
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2467/Weiners-Sexting-Revelations-Miss-the-Real-Juicy-Stuff-Humas-MB-Connections.aspx More than 5,000 words into the New York Times Magazine report on everything ex-Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., and his wife, Huma Abedin, want you to know about Weiner’s “sexting” scandal that led him to resign from Congress in 2011, reporter Jonathan Van Meter pauses the story. Van Meter, a contributing editor at Vogue and […]
