One can almost feel the vibration of the wheels spinning as climate research laboratories, universities, NGOs, bureaucrats, the liberal media and even the White House push into overdrive on damage control over the dirty little secrets revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia, Climate Research Unit. We can be sure that no rock will go unturned to discredit skepticism about man-made global warming theory and find plausible cause for Saint Obama to still save us from ourselves. But if indisputable evidence of scientists conspiring to cook science is enough to put the kibosh once and for all on a dubious, untestable theory based mostly on computer models, we have somewhere in our midst a new hero, namely the man or woman who purloined the emails from the computers of the global-warming Tribunal
In Afghanistan, a Just War I argue that the war in Afghanistan, like the Civil War and the Second World War, is bound to remain a case of just war not because of the reasons it was fought but because of it’s consequences, the freeing of Afghan women. True, Afghan women, like freed American slaves and Freed Jews before them, have a long way to go. But there can be little doubt that their liberation has begun and a return of the Taliban would put them back in shackles. Consider this exchange on “This Week:”
Just watched this video clip from FOX News of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani discussing the impending trial of high level al Qaeda operatives, including 9/11 master planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in New York City.
Duke Bluebeard’s Castle was never one for the squeamish, but English National Opera’s production tips Bela Bartok’s masterpiece into an abyss of atrocity. Originally staged during the First World War, it retells the fable of a Transylvanian count who keeps his wives in a dungeon as a Freudian parable of female sexual curiosity and impotent male vengeance.
There is an odd gap in media coverage of the White House gate-crasher. As of 8:10 AM this morning, Pacific time, a Google News search of “Tareq Salahi” (in quotation marks) yields 3,222 hits. Mr. Salahi is an avid polo player, and adding the word “polo” to the search produces 246 hits. As TPM has revealed, he has also served as a board member of the American Task Force on Palestine. But replacing “polo” with “Palestine” leaves only 8 hits. There is no evidence that the group had any involvement in this incident, but isn’t this connection at least as newsworthy as his polo-playing?
The British statesman Benjamin Disraeli said famously, “The Tory Party is the stupid party.” Segue to its lineal descendant. Today’s Republican elite is hapless, not to mention clueless, even hopeless. Less is not more for the GOP.
Barack Obama was just photographed leaving the White House carrying a copy of GQ magazine. Not unusual for a stylin’, hip guy like the Bama. What IS unusual is that the cover photo . . . is of him.
The spirit of Ebenezer Scrooge lives, downtown this year. Not at the Daley Plaza, which features a smaller Christmas tree than in years past. Budgetary concerns dictate a single tree rather than smaller trees lashed together, the custom since 1955. Including platform and star on top, the shorter display tree still stands an imposing 60 feet tall and the seasonal spirit probably won’t be dampened for most people.
Thanksgiving dinner beckons so this is going to be short though not sweet. It is just that my breakfast was spoiled by reading Nicholas Kristof’s cowardly column, The Religious Wars which tears apart Judaism and Christianity but dares not mention Islam.
The film is about a man’s midlife crisis in a mainstream Jewish community in the Midwest, set in 1967 when society was on the cusp of change and institutions were stuck in the past. The hero suffers marital breakdown, workplace stress, debt issues and other commonplaces of the modern era. The rabbis he consults lack the certainties of the East European shtetl from which his ancestors stem and where the film enigmatically begins. He is, in a word, lost.
You wish to know why there is no job creation in the private sector? Why only the jobs of government employees are safe? The answer is simple, explains GEORGE MELLOAN, banks have been told not to “risk” lending to private borrowers, especially to job creating small businesses. Now, the more bankers lend to government, the higher their salaries. In other words, we are dealing with a perfect job and capitalist economy killer. Lenin would have been proud.
World Jewry and those who wish to see it survive – and, actually, Western civilization generally – needs to wake up and realize the rules of the game have changed, and react appropriately.
In Washington, DC, it’s sorta the “best of times” for Democrats: On Saturday, the “motion to proceed” on health care reform passed along party lines in the U.S. Senate. Despite varying poll numbers, various twists and turns and hours-to-come of debate and amendments, this decades-long legislative desire for the Left is closer to becoming the law of the land than at any point in history.
Three hours early. My central memory of appearing on the “Oprah Winfrey Show” is they asked that I show up three hours prior to taping, just so I’d be there, ready when they needed me.
How many of the parents paying the full tuition of $51,000/year at Wesleyan University know that part of that sum indirectly goes for educating prisoners who are double murderers? In the best of all Woebegone worlds, where money is infinite and there is no need to prioritize, an argument could be made for educating sociopaths who will never use this luxury to repay society with their service. An argument might be made that an educated prison body may be less volatile and therefore, if nothing else, college for prisoners is a worthwhile investment in penal management. In the real world of Woeishere, only a fraction of students competing for placement in elite colleges attain this opportunity and for increasingly more of them, the tuition represents a punishing family sacrifice. Is it ethical for Wesleyan to bring its professors and curriculum inside the walls of a high security prison in Connecticut and to underwrite education for society’s worst offenders at the expense of opportunities for law-abiding, hard-working students and their parents? If professors were not devoting time to teaching prisoners, they could direct their attention to more students or perhaps to courses for veterans who put their lives on the line for all of us, or disadvantaged senior citizens who contributed their lifetime taxes and skills to the state of Connecticut.
Any slight chance that New York might get a Republican governor next year basically ended with Rudy Giuliani’s apparent decision not to run for the office in 2010. There’s still some discussion in Hizzoner’s camp that he might run for senate against incumbent Kirsten Gillibrand.
Islamic nations are fighting to legally and internationally ban anything they consider blasphemous, Associated Press reports. And while they cynically try to paint it as an effort to ensure everyone’s human rights, all one has to do to know better is listen closely to what they themselves say.
Valentine’s Day must have been busy this year, because I’ve seen an unusual amount of very pregnant women around town lately — on the elevator, on the train, in the streets
In a monumental cover-up that only begins to approximate the colossal, decentralized conspiracy that brought you an Islamic Bosnia and a KKKLA Kosovo and revived Hitler’s Independent State of Croatia, our “security” and “intelligence” agencies, along with all of Congress, have been keeping from you the obvious fact that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was an al-Qaeda plot involving several Iraqis. It was because of the Clinton-directed coverup of Oklahoma City that the Bush administration couldn’t tell you the real Iraq-9/11 connection, and why during the pre-Iraq hearings all that Dick Cheney could manage was: “There’s a connection. There’s a connection.”
In perhaps the most irresponsible decision ever made by an American president in wartime, Obama is moving top al Qaeda terrorists, including 9-11 masterminds Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh—to New York City to stand trial in civilian courts.
One of the things that struck me in the last week was that the president’s poll numbers were holding pretty firm, despite a string of blunders and setbacks - his weird behavior after Fort Hood, the passage of an unpopular health “reform” bill, and, too late for most polls, his disgracefully deep bow before the emperor of Japan and the announcement that the mastermind of 9-11 will be tried in an ordinary courtroom in densely populated Manhattan.
I think its a cross between irony and poetic justice. But of all the yummy chickens-coming-home-to-roost situations that one expects, and duly gets, with regard to the Kosovo issue (the Russia/Georgia war was just one), I couldn’t have foreseen, nor asked for, something as delectable as the notion of Bill Clinton — “liberator” of Kosovo — being sent to the Middle East to make sure that his Kosovo scenario isn’t repeated with the Israelis and Palestinians. That is, to make sure that his Kosovo precedent isn’t used as a precedent. Debka File has the story:
Despite all the Obama administration’s chin- rubbing and hand- wringing about how to proceed in Afghanistan, the president hasn’t been to the war-torn country since entering the White House.
During the 2008 campaign, Sarah Palin suggested that Alaska’s proximity to Russia gave her some insight into national security. The media lampooned her.
Stop telling me that unemployment is a lagging indicator. It may be so but it is higher and is lagging more in the US than in the rest of the developed world. Not only German but even British unemployment is declining! Oh, yes, it picked at 7.9% and declined to 7.8% to the “surprise” of economists. The are probably the same economists who no longer dare attach the word surprise to the ongoing decline in German unemployment to 7.7%. After all, Brown, unlike Merkel, used generous economic stimulus to try to deal with the recession. So clearly the stimulus alone is not responsible for the lack of decline in the American unemployment rate.
President Obama is big on summits. He loves to hear the sound of his own voice, of course, and he loves to gas around with so-called “experts.” Which would be fine, except that the “experts” love the sound of their own voices too and soon, everyone is talking themselves into a circle. And nothing gets done.
Will political correctness, obligatory to DC culture, prevail over BRAVO TV’s demand for drama? DC consultants and power women weigh in on what will make the show successful and what will make it fall short.
On this sad post Fort Hood massacre Veteran’s Day, it seems appropriate to recall that political correctness and excess legalism are nothing new. During my recent visit to the Newport U.S. Naval War College Museum I came accross the amazing story of the October 7, 1916 “visit” of the German submarine U-53 to Newport, RI. Then, as today, not only the American politial authorities but also it’s armed forces refused to confront dangers staring them in their face. You see, the US was still neutral: