http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2012/06/06/wisconsin-and-california-show-that-local-taxes-are-a-political-death-trap/ Wisconsin and California Show that Local Taxes are a Political Death Trap Here’s a simple piece of arithmetic to keep in mind after Wisconsin voters overwhelmingly supported Gov. Scott Walker and California voters backed pension cuts for retired municipal workers. I reviewed some of these numbers last October in this space, and add some […]
http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2012/05/31/rapist-roman-polanskis-new-film-to-defend-antisemites-and-misogynists/
“Whether D will be about Roman Polanski as Dreyfus, or Muslims as the new Jews, or perhaps even both, celebrated auteur Polanski has it wrong. Dreyfus was innocent; Polanski was not. And the persecuted minority today is not Muslim but, as always, Jewish.”
Famed (and infamous) director Roman Polanski has announced that his next film project will be D, a political thriller based on the real-life tale of Alfred Dreyfus, the French Jew wrongly imprisoned for spying at the turn of the century. What drew him to the topic? Its theme of antisemitism? Perversely, it is about a persecuted minority – just not the one you might think.
The creative force behind such films as Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, and The Pianist among many others, Polanski pled guilty to raping an underage girl in 1977, then fled the United States for the protection of France’s non-extradition law. There his filmmaking career has thrived and he has lived the high life of a revered artist. The list of awards and honors bestowed upon him and his films is towering; he is even the recipient of France’s highest civilian honor, the Legion d’Honneur, alongside such notables as Gen. George Patton, Victor Hugo, and, coincidentally, Dreyfus himself.
Polanski and his apologists consider his fugitive status to be nothing more than petty persecution on the part of Puritanical Americans who don’t understand that a great artist should be above the law. So when Polanski was in Switzerland to attend the Zurich Film Festival in 2009 and was put temporarily under chateau arrest at the behest of the U.S., French Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand gave vent to melodramatic outrage:
To see him thrown to the lions and put in prison because of ancient history — and as he was traveling to an event honoring him — is absolutely horrifying. There’s an America we love and an America that scares us, and it’s that latter America that has just shown us its face.
(Mitterand should be comforted to know that back here in scary America, Polanski is still supported by Hollywood sophisticates who rush to the defense of a sex offender but who would be absolutely horrified, as Mitterand might put it, to find themselves in the same zip code with a Republican.)
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/06/grifters_on_parade.html
Obama has failed as a leader, he has failed as a statesman, and he is now failing as a fraud.
The nearly simultaneous exposure of the false claims of Elizabeth Warren to Cherokee ancestry and Obama’s to Kenyan nationality is an example of two events that are not quite a pure coincidence. While each of these episodes is causally unrelated, what we’re seeing is the same process working itself out in two distinct cases.
As all the world knows, an author’s bio written in the early ’90s stated that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. There is little or no possibility that it was printed without his knowledge. (One of the similarities between the two cases is that the institutions involved simply repeated what the principals said.) The bio made the Kenya claim because that’s what Obama told its fabricators to put down. Furthermore, the claim was allowed to stand for over a decade, being edited out only in 2006.
So what are we to make of this? With anyone else, the case would be open and shut. But as we’ve come to learn regarding Obama, there are always layers beneath layers, going all the way down to the level of the fabled turtle that holds everything up. While Obama could have made the claim because it was true, it is just as likely that he did so because it was convenient at the time or served some purpose not obvious at first glance. The one undeniable axiom concerning Obama is that he lets no opportunity to help himself out slip past unexploited.
I have always been skeptical of the Kenya birth claim because there is no positive evidence for such an occurrence. All the evidence presented thus far has been circumstantial (when not simply fabricated), pointing in several directions and capable of being matched to a number of mutually exclusive hypotheses. As is often true in such cases, the simplest, most spectacular, and most unproveable theory of them all has seized public attention.
An unfortunate side-effect of the birth debate is that it has served to mask the bulk of the undeniable questions surrounding Obama’s record, in particular his college records, which have faded almost to invisibility. In the light of the fake bio, they may well have been transformed into the most critical element of them all.
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/06/911_defendants_lawfare_mocks_the_american_justice_system.html
Brooke Goldstein is a New York City-based human rights attorney, award-winning filmmaker, and media personality, and serves as director of The Lawfare Project. Skylar Curtis is an attorney, legal analyst and a research associate at The Lawfare Project.
Can an attorney demand that every woman in the courtroom dress in an “appropriate” way? What if “appropriate” means adhering to a conservative version of sharia, or Islamic law? At the May 5 arraignment of the alleged 9/11 masterminds, defense counsel asked for just that.
Cheryl Borman, representing defendant Walid bin Attash, asked the court to order the women in the courtroom to dress “appropriately” as a show of “respect” for her client’s religious beliefs. That is, Borman insinuated, women in an American courtroom should dress according to sharia law because the defendant is a Muslim. Defense counsel stated that simply looking at the prosecution team’s female members could cause him to “sin” and lose his “focus” on the trial.
In a show of passive-aggressiveness and dramatic flair, Borman accused “someone” in the courtroom of dressing improperly. While she didn’t define what attire would indeed be “appropriate,” Borman herself wore a black hijab and long black robe, showing only her face. Curiously enough, Borman is not a Muslim. However, bin Attash’s other lawyer boasted that “[o]ur client has never seen Ms. Bormann’s hair, he’s never seen her arms, he’s never seen her legs.” Coming from Borman, an accredited attorney, not only is the request to limit the garb of another legal professional to what is acceptable under sharia law in an American courtroom insulting, but it flies in the face of American values.
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1284/it_s_always_the_death_of_democracy_when_the_left_loses_an_election_isn_t_it_
I’m going to take another stab at Mitt Romney’s old ‘corporations are people too’ comment which has been lobbed around as a ‘gaffe’ for many months now.
Citizens United notwithstanding, the issue of campaign finance in a democratic society is potentially one of the greatest areas in which the United Kingdom and the United States will have their respective internal battles for decades to come. Constitutional reform can only deliver so much.
I’m sure you’ve heard all the arguments before: corporations and their management are wealth and job creators, the unions fund the left as much as private enterprise backs the right – so on and so forth.
So why do we still seem to be suffering from circular thinking when it comes to campaign and political finance? While the issues have been argued out in terms of balancing the scales of justice in such an area – perhaps we have done little to address the true driving force behind such emotional thinking on the topic: morality.
A conservative will tell you that morality in this area is defined by the effort exerted by individuals or groups who have consequently earned enough to influence elections. The application of your labour or indeed the fruits of your labour in the political sphere one might argue, is a fundamental democratic right.
On the left, it is often remarked that ‘fairness’ should be paramount – that everyone should perhaps be able only to give a capped amount (actually the system that the US has in place when it comes to direct campaign funding). In the United Kingdom, this is slightly more relaxed, with individuals able to contribute vast amounts to political parties, as author JK Rowling did when she gave £1million to the Labour Party in 2010.
But throw in Super PACS, external organisations, unions, corporate sponsorships, think-tanks and all the other appendages of political activism and soon you have, on both sides of the pond, a fine mess indeed.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2012/06/06/Democrats-Join-GOP-in-Condemning-White-House-Intelligence-Military-Leaks
Legislators from both parties are condemning a string of leaks from the “highest levels” of the White House about the Osama bin Laden killing, President Barack Obama’s oversight of a terrorist “kill list,” and U.S. cooperation with Israel in creating the Stuxnet computer virus to target Iranian nuclear facilities, among others. The leaks, which always seem to make their way to selected mainstream media headlines, and which paint Obama as a tough-minded commander-in-chief, are being described as a threat to national security.
Senate Democrats, in particular, have been vocal. The Hill quotes Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee: “This is like an avalanche. It is very detrimental and, candidly, I found it very concerning,” Feinstein said. “There’s no question that this kind of thing hurts our country.”
Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, added to the criticism, saying that the leakers–whoever they may be–were acting contrary to national security: “A number of those leaks, and others in the last months about drone activities and other activities, are frankly all against national-security interests,” he said, according to The Hill. “I think they’re dangerous, damaging, and whoever is doing that is not acting in the interest of the United States of America.”
http://times247.com/
Syrian massacre reported, dozens slaughtered
Agence France-Presse
Thursday, June 7, 2012
News
Syrian massacre reported, dozens slaughtered
Pro-regime militiamen armed with guns and knives swept through a village in central Syria slaughtering dozens including women and children, a watchdog said on Thursday in allegations denied by Damascus. Read more…
Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1x6GPjw2a
Obama claims GOP bought Walker win
Ralph Z. Hallow
In what might be seen as a sign that he felt stung hard enough to hurt, President Obama on Wednesday blamed Republicans’ outspending Democrats as the reason Gov. Scott Walker survived a union-driven recall election in Wisconsin on Tuesday. Read more…
Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1x6GXNgEn
Inside the Ring: Forbes pressures Obama
Bill Gertz
A key House Republican this week stepped up pressure on the Obama administration for its weak public response to the growing threat posed by China’s military buildup. Read more…
Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1x6GhtgsX
Military mulls discipline for Afghan Koran burnings
The Hill
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Blogs
A recently completed Pentagon inquiry into the accidental burnings of Qurans in Afghanistan could result in disciplinary action against U.S. troops. Read more…
Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1x6HDVDMs
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
moral crisis tends to go hand in hand with an identity crisis. It’s when you don’t know who you are that you’re most likely to take refuge in a political or ethical identity that provides you with the comfort of a false sense of superiority. When all other identities fall apart, you can always rely on being the better man, the better nation and the empty space with the moral high ground.
Societies that go multicultural tend to experience identity drift and take refuge in a self-definition based on values. Who are Americans? As generations of presidents on the left and right have told us, they are people who believe in American values. What are American values? They’re the values that Americans are told they need to believe in, in order to be Americans. Like tolerance, immigration, free trade, and respecting the right of anyone to be a member of the Communist Party or the Muslim Brotherhood.
In a time of crisis, nations and peoples have to choose to survive. But what is survival? Proponents of a values-based identity have argued that survival means the survival of our values. If we take Measure X against an enemy, whether it’s outlawing the Communist Party or waterboarding Islamic terrorists, then we have “killed our values” and we are no longer Americans. It doesn’t matter then whether an act saves millions of American lives, if it means we destroy our values, then we have killed the only worthwhile thing about us.
http://www.aim.org/
AIM Report
The issue of global warming continues to be a fault line in this country and across the world. There are, on the one hand, those who believe, like Al Gore, that the earth is warming to a catastrophic degree, that it is caused by man’s overuse of carbon-based energy, and if we don’t hurry and do something about it we will face the melting of glaciers and ice sheets, biblical flooding, and increased tornadoes and hurricanes. Their holy grail is the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which they cite as confirmation of their theories.
In a recent interview with Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), we discussed his recent book, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, in which he documents his personal journey of discovery on this issue—from his early days in politics, as the mayor of Tulsa, to his time as a congressman—from his years in the insurance and oil businesses, and seeing firsthand the heavy hand of the federal government.
In what way is global warming a hoax? Inhofe said, “…I’m talking about MoveOn.org, George Soros, Michael Moore, the Al Gore Hollywood elites, and all that. These are people who really want to believe this, and they have unlimited funds that they pour into campaigns. They brag about having ‘defeated’ people, that they’re able to do, and that’s how they got so much political power. That is where the hoax comes in, because they’re perpetrating a hoax, and that hoax is that catastrophic global warming is taking place in the world now, and it’s due to manmade gases—CO2, carbon, methane, that type of thing—and what they want to do is just shut down this machine called America.”
http://babalublog.com/2012/06/castro-dictatorship-averaging-over-400-political-arrests-per-month-in-2012/
THE NEW “HOT SPOT” IN THE CARIBBEAN IS CUBA…..THESE FACTS DON’T SEEM TO BOTHER THE TOURISTS
Castro dictatorship averaging over 400 political arrests per month in 2012
By Alberto de la Cruz, on June 6, 2012, at 7:52 am
Only five months into 2012, the Castro dictatorship in Cuba has already amassed a total of 2,258 arrests of peaceful human rights and democracy activists on the island, reports CIHPRESS, a Cuban independent news agency. In their latest monthly report, the agency documented 343 arrests of dissidents and opposition members in the month of May.
2012 has been one of the most repressive years for the resistance in Cuba with the violent arrest of dissidents reaching a crescendo in March during the visit by Pope Benedict XVI. In the days leading up to the papal visit, the repressive Castro regime amassed 760 arrests. However, the arrests carried out in the months prior to and after the visit by the pope were not much lower, with the regime averaging over 400 arrests of opposition members during 2012.
At the current rate, the Castro dictatorship is on pace to carry out over 5,400 arrests of political opponents in 2012, a notable 41% increase in repression over 2011, and a whopping 262% increase in repression over 2010.
