Serbia: Italian group probes depleted uranium use in NATO bombings

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It takes a special kind of hatred to repeatedly stab an infant through the heart. Last year, in the Jewish community of Itamar, North of Jerusalem, Palestinians invaded the home of Ruth and Udi Fogel. The parents were killed. Then the practitioners of peace went to work on the kids. Yoav (age 11), Elad (age 4) and three-month old Hadas were stabbed through the heart and had their throats slit. Word of the atrocities was greeted with jubilation on the Palestinian street; where candy was distributed to children to celebrate this great victory over the Jewish people.

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Consider paper towel dispensers.

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Six-term incumbent Indiana Republican Senator Richard Lugar is facing off in a close race against upstart challenger Richard Mourdock, the state treasurer, who is, according to one news site “running to Lugar’s right with tea-party backing.”

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If you haven’t seen Footnote yet, you should;  it’s a movie that lends itself to the type of discussion and explication that’s usually reserved for significant literary works.  If you haven’t seen it and intend to, please don’t read this article - you should come to your own conclusions before reading mine.  Half the fun of this movie is trying to solve a puzzle for which there are many clues and allusions;  your conclusion depends upon how you interpret those and it’s fitting in a movie that has the Talmud at its core, that there will always be another point of view.

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A Google translation of this March 23rd story from Republika Srpska’s “Fokus”:

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     Here are a few of the topics that have been covered or reviewed in the New York Times during the past week:  mothers of autistic children finding it difficult to date;  brides resorting to gastric feeding tubes in order to lose weight before the wedding;  mothers being too harsh on each other’s parenting techniques;  mothers monopolizing the role of parenting, rendering fathers irrelevant;  breast-feeding mothers relinquishing their sexuality to their maternal desires.  It certainly seems that as women have risen to occupy the highest echelons of professional accomplishment, we are increasingly being force-fed a diet of whining and junk food for the mind.  It used to be that these subjects were relegated to women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal or Ms, much as celebrity news was once confined to movie magazines or pulps like People, Us and their spinoffs.  Today, even the Wall Street Journal has its equivalent of Page Six, not to mention its real estate porn page featuring the week’s most exorbitant sale.

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I was barely finished with my recent blog “A Tired Script: Tampa Terrorist from Pro-American Kosovo,” which asked journalists to notice their own words about Albanians loving us because we bombed their turf rivals, and mocked their rote exercise of inserting the requisite Albanian-pro-Americanism paragraph in articles about the latest Albanian terrorist. I was barely finished writing it when I happened upon the March issue of Newsmax magazine at the house of a relative who has since promised to cancel his subscription.

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Yet another case of an Albanian who should be allowed in the U.S. but is getting the shaft. If you read this Motion to Deny by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals supporting the decisions of the original immigration judge and then the Board of Immigration Appeals, you will see why. As Liz, who circulated the item, put it: “No asylum in the U.S.A. for an Albanian who didn’t play by the rules of USA’s [terrorist] allies.”

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As more and more details emerge about the Colombian adventure of several members of the Secret Service, the story keeps getting raunchier…and more outrageous.

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     In an article referencing the anomie of young people like Henry Wachtel, the teenager who beat his mother to death last week, Ginia Bellafante suggests that it’s impossible “to view Mr. Wachtel’s tragedy apart from the life that the film suggests - one in which parents are absent, opportunities seem meager and the resulting freedoms feel joyless in the wake of so much anxiety about a precarious future.”  (NYTimes 4/15/12  The film is “Our Time,” a cinema verite short in which Henry Wachtel had a leading role.  It appeared at the Cannes Film Festival last year and deals with middle class teens in New York who are not part of the affluent life style and high achievement of kids prominently in view in this city of 1 percenters.  As I read this article, I thought back to previous generations of teenagers - immigrants who came to this country without the language or the means to survive - who not only survived but excelled;  teenagers who got drafted into the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War - some never to return, some to return as physical or mental basket cases, many of whom overcame their crippling disabilities to resume their lives or bravely create new ones.  I thought of the words “so much anxiety” to describe kids who have a roof over their heads, a means of support, educational opportunities, no draft in sight and in Henry’s case, a mother who lived with and cared for him.

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Trayvon’s death is very sad. A handsome seventeen year old walking home is now dead. I have a teenage son who can mouth off and act impulsively. He could get himself in trouble one day. Or not.  On the other hand, there is evidence to suggest Zimmerman acted in self-defense: a broken nose, cries for help and alleged statement that Martin was sitting on top of Zimmerman.

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President Obama’s entire political career has been based on smoke and mirrors, finely spun imagery, and fantasyland projections. Governing, however, has been a rude awakening—for him and for us. Reality has a way of intruding uninvited and upsetting the most delicately arranged illusion.

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As the Syrian government continues slaughtering its own people by the thousands, the Islamists solidify their grip on Egypt and other parts of the Arab world and Iran continues its race for a nuke while threatening to annihilate the Jews, a debate over a house in Hebron is making news.

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For decades, the Left has been accusing Republican presidents of carrying out “imperial” presidencies. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush…they were all accused of abusing their power and trampling the other two co-equal branches of government. That, of course, was not true, but when did the truth ever stop the Left?

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The internet has made it clear that there is no such thing as free speech, but, actually, I’m not so sure there really ever was.

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Many folks are prematurely celebrating the death of ObamaCare after the pummeling of the administration’s lawyer—the Solicitor General—and others arguing on the law’s behalf. The questioning was aggressive, the Constitutional questions pointed, and the SG a nervous wreck.

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