Today the New York Post published my piece on Iraqi Parliamentarian Mithal al-Alusi’s contention that Iran is tampering with votes to fix the Iraqi election.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think last week’s drama surrounding Vice President Joe Biden’s supposed “embarrassment” and Hillary Clinton’s rage over an Israeli decision to build 1600 apartments in East Jerusalem seems manufactured?
So, here’s the deal; one year ago, Mark Hanes of CNBC fame said that he thought the market may have hit a bottom. One year later; it has proven to be prophetic. The market is up 60 percent from last year’s bottom and Hane’s is taking full credit for it. CNBC shamelessly is following suit. All morning long, they have done nothing but extol Mark Hane’s call of the market bottom. Let me share with you just one exchange I heard this morning. Hanes was talking to another market analyst who said, “Hey, Mark, I called the market bottom two weeks after you did, so I did pretty well,” to which Haines said, “ I called it within two minutes.” And, that is when I wanted to throw up.
The Telegraph is reporting that President Obama has threatened to withdraw support from any Democrat who refuses to support his health care monstrosity. He will not make campaign swings through their districts before November, he will not help them raise money, he will not offer them a soft landing of a cushy job if they lose re-election, he will not stop unions from pulling their financial support.
I wrote that the absurd Obama administration outrage at Israel for planning to build 1600 apartments in Jerusalem in a few years can only be understood as a wish to distract Arabs inconveniently obsessed by Iran. Apparently, beating up on Israel is also an attempt to distract from the collapse of the administration’s strategy to contain Iran with robust sanctions with the help of Russia and China. The plan has been to convince the Russians to help with Iran by selling out Poland and the Czech Republic. An isolated China would then fall into place.
The United States has announced that it will report its own human-rights failings to the United Nations, in particular the UN’s Human Rights Council, half of whose members are degenerate dictatorships.
Run for the hills, those infernal conservatives are rewriting history. Or so one might gather from much of the coverage of Texas’ latest textbook battle.
Blogger Nebojsa Malic, who lived through the Bosnian war, posted a very sharp column today that demonstrates the parallel between the memorial to the “8,000” Srebrenica “victims” and the memorial at Bleiburg. The 1945 Bleiburg memorial is a monument to the fleeing Croatian/Bosnian Nazis (”Ustashas”) who were killed by Tito’s Partisans at the end of the war. It was an attempt by the surviving Ustashas to hide their Hitler-aligned genocide of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies, by accusing the Partisans of a “greater” crime – the massacre of fleeing Nazis. The image below shows the Croatian-Nazi flag on the memorial stone, alongside the Muslim crescent/star — as victims in WW2. Malic explains how this perversion is equivalent to what today the Srebrenica memorial attempts to do to history. (That memorial is in a town near Srebrenica, called Potocari).
Who knew that Israel itself would provide the excuse the Obama Administration needed to turn America against its longtime ally and redirect the course of Jewish history?
Last Thursday the Lawfare Project, a non-profit founded by attorney Brooke Goldstein to confront “lawfare,” held a conference that assembled a remarkable constellation of legal lights to examine the ways jihadists are attempting to hijack Western legal systems—and to fight back, legally.
The extraordinary double standard at work between the West and the Muslim world is one of the most troubling elements in the ongoing clash of cultures.
The glee with which the Obama administration jumped on the Jewish state for a misplaced timing of an announcement is palpable. I write administration because Obama himself is silent. He knows Jews will have tough enough time voting for him as is, he does not need to give his 2012 Republican opponent additional ammunition. Instead, he sends Hillary Wynette, the woman Bill Clinton passed on to him (by convincing her to take a career killing job she did not want) to do his dirty work. After all, this is the woman who praised Suha Arafat after Suha accused Israel with infecting Palestinians with the HIV virus. Hillary is famous for standing by her man. She can have no qualms attacking Israel for actions she has praised mere months ago as Barry Rubin notes:
Two years ago, Dhaba Almontaser, aka Debbie, lost her chance at being principal of the Khalil Gibran Middle School after the New York Post revealed her affiliation with a group that had printed Intifada NYC tee shirts. Dhab/Deb first denied that she knew anything about the shirts, then shifted to explaining that intifada was a harmless word that really meant “shaking off.” That’s a curious way to describe the death of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians killed during the First and Second Intifadas. It’s like saying that the American Revolution is about going around in circles, which is actually what Dhab/Deb was doing in her public interviews. She sued the Dept of Education for forcing her to resign and her case was dismissed. Every American knows that losing the first round is just the opening salvo to an unlimited number of litigations, especially when other people are paying your legal fees so that case will be appealed.
Tom Hanks—actor, producer, featherweight thinker—has made some very silly comments regarding his understanding of World War II in order to flack The Pacific War, a miniseries he produced for HBO.
We are in the world George Orwell and Ayn Rand saw coming. It is a world where words no longer have meaning and A is not A. Consider the following two examples:
When we last saw New York Democratic Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, she had succesfully buried an outrageous provision in an Intelligence Appropriations Bill coming out of her committee. A few weeks ago, she had OK’d a clause that would have allowed the prosecution of CIA agents involved in using enhanced interrogation techniques on al Qaeda terrorists. Even some of her fellow Democrats saw the insanity of what she tried to do and worked with Republicans to have the provision removed.
This may be a fluke or a new trend. Time will tell. If the former, Europe may yet escape both Dhimitude and xenophobe rule. When the Danish cartoonists and their paper were threatened by Islamists for their Muhammad cartoons, the danish media did not unite behind them. But when axe wielding Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks is similarly threatened, the Swedish media pushed back. This time Islamists failed to divide and conquer:
Robert Halderman has been sentenced to six months in jail for trying to extort money from David Letterman regarding his affairs with several women on his staff. In exchange for pleading guilty and apologizing to Letterman and the world, the Emmy award winning producer must also perform 1,000 hours of community service and remain on probation for four and a half years. David Letterman, on the other hand, has seen his ratings rise ever since he pre-empted Halderman’s threats by revealing his own pecadillos to an audience that laughed uncomfortably, unsure of whether the talk show host was joking or serious. Even though having sex with underlings is frowned upon and even punishable, no repercussions have accrued to Dave who deftly switched his role to that of injured party, with nary a peep from NOW.
Some guy named Eamonn Daniel Higgins from Laguna Niguel, Ca. was arrested Monday for running a ring that helped dozens of Arabs get U.S. student visas, Associated Press reports.
A recent survey is sending shock waves through the power elite. A new poll reveals that Americans believe that Barack obama failed to deliver on his campaign promise to restore America’s good name in the world:
New York Democratic Congressman Eric Massa finds himself in the middle of a political cyclone. Last week, he said he’d not seek re-election amid allegations he sexually harassed a male staffer. Over the weekend, he signaled he’d resign effective this afternoon. As of now, he may. Or he may not.
In the election’s aftermath, Mithal al-Alusi, an Iraqi Parliamentarian up for re-election, told a member of the Australian media he thanks former U.S. President George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Here is what he said:
“Sophisticated” foreign policy analysts agree with Ahmadinejad that a nuclear Iran is a fait accompli and containment is the only viable response to it. It would mean bringing the Middle East, including Israel, under the American nuclear umbrella. Former Secretary of state James Baker advocated just such a policy on Fareed Zakaria GPS a couple of weeks ago.
In the February unemployment report released today, 36,000 jobs were lost, and the total unemployment rate—which includes those who have given up looking for work and who are only working part-time when they’d like full-time work—ROSE from 16.5% to 16.8%. Almost 15 million Americans are out of work, many for weeks and even months at a time.
The confrontation in the sub Indian continent between al Qaeda, the Taliban and their allies on the one hand and the three democracies they target, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, on the other hand must be reevaluated in terms of international cooperation against the Jihadi threat. A regional system should be established to integrate the struggle against all Jihadi forces in the subcontinent. There needs to be a separation between the ethnic and territorial questions from the fight against Terrorism. Once that distinction is made the possibilities of internationalization of counter terrorism will be high. Jihadists based in any country of the subcontinent must not be given legitimacy by any Government on the ground of a local ethnic issue. Jihadi forces must be confronted collectively, while diplomacy and international mediations assist in solving the local problems.
Who could invent a scenario as improbable as a lying, fraudulent, mob-inciting, unelected, race-baiting, black hack sitting in judgment on a blind, black, lying governor who’s pinch-hitting for a whoring white hypocrite who had to resign? New Yorkers will all have vertigo before Albany gets sorted out but I confess that nothing made me sympathetic to David Paterson’s plight until Al Sharpton convened the group of black democrats to consider whether to withdraw their support from him. This took place at a restaurant in Harlem Thursday night and you can bet that the reverend never paid for his own dinner, just as he claimed he never paid for the clothes hanging in his closet which he said were simply on loan to him. David Paterson may be injudicious and on the dole, but so far, none of his sins of omission or commission rival those of the Tawana Brawley defender, the Steven Pagones accuser, the rabble-rouser who officiated at four days of violence and looting in Crown Heights that culminated in the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum, or the man who inflamed a crowd in Harlem until a store (rented by a Jew but owned by a black church) was torched, customers were shot and seven employees died from smoke inhalation.
As I write this, the Administration and its allies in Congress are attempting to pass their health care reform bill with a simple majority vote, through an arcane budgetary process in the Senate known as “reconciliation”. There are many details, but only one is important: a reconciliation bill cannot, under Senate rules, be filibustered, so the Democrats only need 51 votes to pass it, rather than the 60 normally required to shut down debate and take a vote. (The House does not permit a minority to prolong debate, so all the Democrats need in the lower chamber is the same 5-vote majority they won in November.)