Does anyone seriously wonder what the Democratic campaign against Mitt Romney will feature this fall? Romney will be portrayed as an out-of-touch rich guy…and a racist.
Looking in the dictionary under the word “chutzpah” and the word “hypocritical” we find this recent JTA report: “The head of the Palestinian Olympic Committee called the campaign to hold a minute of silence for the 11 Israelis murdered at the 1972 Munich Olympics ‘racism.’”
Let’s see if we can discern, with our Sherlock Holmesian powers of deduction, where the International Olympics Committee’s heart lies. And let’s include the BBC, while we’re at it.
That is the question that Rock Cellar Magazine’s “Both Sides Now!” section tackles in the current issue. Since Obama is obviously a socialist and worse, I did the “pro” side. Meaning, yes he’s a socialist. My friend Ed Rampell, a regular contributor to the magazine, did the “con” side, since he’s a real socialist and doesn’t see Obama as the real thing. (I told him he needs to appreciate the concept of transition. Meaning, if Obama gets reelected, he’ll show Ed they really are on the same page.)
Years ago, when Jane Fonda was married to Tom Hayden, she was Phil Donahue’s guest on his talk show. For this performance, the once bulimic daughter of Hollywood royalty who married Roger Vadim and became Barbarella, then an anti-American, North Vietnam afficionado, then the wife of a former hippie SDS activist turned State Senator - wore a white blouse with a peter pan collar and a simple cardigan sweater and claimed to be happy as a California wife who did her own housework. Aw shucks! Flash forward to the dynamic duo of Huma Abedin, 37 year old Muslim fashionista politico who is Hilary Clinton’s right hand man and her husband, disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner, formerly a nebbishy Jewish boy from Brooklyn who made good in NY politics until the desire to display his private package in semi-public resulted in his resignation from very public office. These two have welcomed People magazine into their home to see their “normal” family raising a baby with hubby doing bath time upstairs and the laundry in the basement. It’s interesting how an alpha woman who wears only designer clothes and handbags and is known for never being seen in the same outfit twice, lives in an apartment without a washer/dryer and apparently without household help. Puhleez.
To some, progress means bulldozing the past. “America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers,” rued actor James Earl Jones, “erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again.” Steamrolled: battlefields, historic shrines, even homes by eminent domain.
In its loftiest Orwellian doublespeak, the Wall Street Journal of July 18th informs us that the number of New York Students who scored proficiency level on state-wide standardized English tests has jumped from 52.8% to 55%. In New York City, the number of students who achieved proficiency in English has leaped from 43.9% to 46.9%. In other words, the news that only slightly more than half the 436,000 students taking the test throughout the state passed it, and that the majority of students taking the test in NYC flunked it - is headlined in the WSJ as “Student Test Scores Jump in New York.” These students would have to be olympic pole vaulters to make this “jump” anything but shocking, shameful and totally discouraging. If the staggering sum of 18.82 billion dollars that gets funneled into the Department of Education’s annual budget can’t bring most students to a passing grade, why do we continue to fund it? Though a better headline might be “New York City Jumps Ship As It Closes Rotting Dept of Education,” Mayor Bloomberg congratulated Chancellor Denis Walcott with the salvo of “a wonderful accomplishment,” a line that would surely have elicited a smile from that great, dead satirist, Jonathan Swift.
Shocking news out of Israel today as it is being reported that Israeli officials have begun arresting what is expected to be tens of thousands of Africans residing in the Jewish State, and deporting them to detention camps.
In the arcane world of particle physics, where Professor Stephen Hawking is a celebrity (and smart enough to be a recurring guest on The Simpsons), it’s news when he gambles on a scientific finding – and bigger news when he loses. He recently admitted losing $100 to a colleague when a new subatomic particle was discovered. The particle, believed to be the Higgs boson, is named after Edinburgh physics professor Peter Higgs, who theorized a field of these invisible particles all across the universe, decelerating other tiny particles and conferring them with mass.
Here’s a novel notion: Considering what’s at stake in Syria for US interests, how about Team Obama leading for once from the front, rather than from “behind”?
In case you are unaware of this, which, if you’re not expressly looking for this type of news you probably are, Israeli officials are in Jordan helping Syrian refugees, JPost.com reported.
So, there’s this Global Counterterrorism Forum comprised of 32 countries, including the United States, Columbia, Canada, South Africa, Nigeria, Australia and New Zealand. It also includes the European Union, nine European countries, 10 Arab/Muslim countries and three Asian ones.
It’s 2012, but you would not know that in Iraq, where women still regularly face court-ordered virginity tests the outcome of which can cost them their lives, according to news reports.
Forty-two-year-old Alexander Cvetkovic, accused of Srebrenica-related war crimes, is an Israeli citizen who is ethnically Serb. The latter usually means his chances of avoiding extradition to a Bosnian show trial aren’t good. Political expediency has been the rule governing all world governments facing Bosnian-Muslim demands for war crimes extraditions, based on dubious howls of “genocide.” So dubious that laws have been enacted in Europe to enforce the belief that extrajudicial executions of Muslim soldiers are on par with the Holocaust.
Comic strips never really die. Charlie Brown is forever about to kick the football that Lucy is helpfully teeing up for him. Dagwood eternally gazes in rapt anticipation at a sandwich a foot high. Krazy Kat swoons in expectation of his daily brick to the head.