To the Most Terrible goes the allegiance of the crowd. ISIS knows this, according to some analysts, and is therefore pursuing “strategy of social control … designed to frighten an audience into submission”. Just how well it works is demonstrated by the reluctance of Western intellectuals to say anything that might provoke or anger Islamic radicals even to the point of not drawing cartoons. While they explain their delicacy away as the consequence of high-minded enlightenment, were they more candid they would admit the real reason was fear. The more frightful ISIS is, the more “tolerant” Western intellectuals become.
Exhibit A: Yesterday, Senate Democrats blocked a trade bill supported by Obama and Republicans (yes, you read that correctly). Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., led the revolt by Democrats. On Saturday, Obama said the following of Warren:
"The truth of the matter is that Elizabeth is, you know, a politician like everybody else. And you know, she's got a voice that she wants to get out there. And I understand that."
Did you see the sexism? Did you see it? Those three sentences are teeming with sexism so wrong, so disrespectful, I'm surprised the outrage brigade isn't calling for his head....
This is just Obama's most recent brush with sexism. After all, this is a man who has been waging his own "war on women" for years. In 2013, he was considering replacing Debbie Wasserman Schultz as head of the Democratic National Committee, which is about as sexist a thing as anyone could do. Wasserman Schultz was prepared to call him out on it in such terms. Luckily for Obama, she was mollified by the patriarchy and allowed to keep her job.
And let's not forget May 2008, when then-Sen. Obama called a female reporter "sweetie" during a visit to a Chrysler plant in Sterling Heights, Pa. A month earlier, he had called a female factory worker in Allentown, Pa., "sweetie" as well. And don't forget his famous sexist response to Hillary Clinton: "You're likable enough, Hillary."
That's a seven-year history of sexism for Obama.
When you are dealing with the mainstream media, it is always difficult to tell if you are dealing with willful ignorance or just plain old ignorance-ignorance. There are plenty of moronic savants in the national media who have cracked the “hot take” code to please their left-wing masters but have no fundamental grasp of history, or much of anything much of else.The act of willful ignorance in the media manifests itself through bias, and lies of omission conjured up to serve that bias. These dishonest liars know they are dishonest liars, and willfully choose to not tell the world pertinent facts like, say, Baltimore has been run by Democrats for a half-century, Hillary Clinton is in favor of legally aborting infants born alive, Ted Kennedy abandoned a drowning woman, and George Zimmerman is Hispanic.Anyone who knows anything about history understands that tactically and morally, Geller’s provocative Muhammad Cartoon Contest was no different than Dr. Martin Luther King’s landmark march from Selma to Montgomery.The first thing the spittle-flecked will scream upon reading the above is that I am comparing Geller to King. I did not know King. I do not know Geller. I am not comparing anyone to anyone. What I’m comparing is one righteous cause to another.The second thing the spittle-flecked will scream is that King never would have held a Draw Muhammad Cartoon Contest … which brings me to the first reason there is no moral or tactical difference between Garland and Selma:1. The Oppressor Chooses the Form of Protest, Not the Protester2. The Deliberatively Provocative Symbolism of the Site of the Protest3. A Righteous Cause for Civil Rights4. I Come In Peace5. Democrat Bigots Victim-Blame6. For the Righteous Cause of Freedom, People Risk Their LivesIn 1965, defying racist Democrats posed a legitimate threat to your life.In 2015, defying jihadists poses a legitimate threat to your life.Martin Luther King knowingly risked his life. Pamela Geller knowingly risks her life.—In both good and evil ways, Sunday in Garland, Texas, history repeated itself.The national media is hiding that fact because they are either too bigoted, cowardly, and biased to tell the truth, or too ignorant to see the truth.
One of the difficulties of getting people to behave better epistemically is that, whilst intellectual dishonesty is wrong, it is difficult to convict people of intellectual wrongs. As David Stove showed in his wonderful paper ‘What is Wrong with Our Thoughts?’ (The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies Chapter 7 ), there are indefinitely many ways of cheating intellectually and for most there is no simple way to put one’s finger on how the cheat is effected. There is just the hard work of describing the species in detail.Some time ago I wrote a paper entitled The Vacuity of Postmodernist Methodology (here or here or here ) in which I described and named a number of such cheats that I detected in postmodernism. One of these I named the Motte and Bailey Doctrine. There has recently been a flurry of use of this concept to analyse ethical, political and religious positions (e.g. here, here) so I am taking the opportunity to have a look at it again.A Motte and Bailey castle is a medieval system of defence in which a stone tower on a mound (the Motte) is surrounded by an area of pleasantly habitable land (the Bailey), which in turn is encompassed by some sort of a barrier, such as a ditch. Being dark and dank, the Motte is not a habitation of choice. The only reason for its existence is the desirability of the Bailey, which the combination of the Motte and ditch makes relatively easy to retain despite attack by marauders. When only lightly pressed, the ditch makes small numbers of attackers easy to defeat as they struggle across it: when heavily pressed the ditch is not defensible, and so neither is the Bailey. Rather, one retreats to the insalubrious but defensible, perhaps impregnable, Motte. Eventually the marauders give up, when one is well placed to reoccupy desirable land.
“If you’re struggling — if you’re working but don’t seem to be getting ahead, and over the last 40 years sadly, I think there’s been an effort to either make folks mad at folks at the top or to be mad at folks at the bottom, and I think the effort to suggest that the poor are sponges, leeches, don’t want to work, are lazy, are undeserving got traction. And look, it’s still being propagated. I mean, I have to say that if you watch Fox News on a regular basis, it is a constant menu. They will find folks who make me mad. I don’t know where they find them. They’re all like, ‘I don’t want to work, I just want a free Obamaphone,’ or whatever.” We mean, this is supposed to be like the greatest orator in history or whatever, but we find it unconvincing nonetheless.
President Obama’s performance in pushing for approval of fast track legislation of the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal, in which he’s allied with Republicans and has spent the last week castigating and insulting liberal Democrats, has been one of the most bizarre and ill-advised performances of his presidency....
Mr. Obama’s tirades on trade have included accusations that theseliberal Democratsconservative Republicans are ignorant abouttrade[insert any issue] policy, insincere when offering their opinions, motivated by politics and not the national interest, and backward looking towards the past.
Bosch Fawstin, a former Muslim who won the Muhammad cartoon contest at the Texas free speech event attacked by two gunmen Sunday, will soon be added to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) list of hate groups....Mr. Fawstin laughed when asked about the SPLC report: “So they want to put a cartoonist on there who doesn’t act out violently? Go for it,” he told Reuters.Garland police killed two gunmen who opened fire Sunday on a security guard outside Ms. Geller’s event, where Dutch politician Geert Wilders was the keynote speaker. The security guard’s injuries were not life-threatening.
That's what it was, by the way - although you might have difficulty telling that from the news coverage. The Washington Post offered the celebrated headline "Event Organizer Offers No Apology After Thwarted Attack In Texas", while the Associated Press went with "Pamela Geller says she has no regrets about Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest that ended in 2 deaths". The media "narrative" of the last week is that some Zionist temptress was walking down the street in Garland in a too short skirt and hoisted it to reveal her Mohammed thong - oops, my apologies, her Prophet Mohammed thong (PBUH) - and thereby inflamed two otherwise law-abiding ISIS supporters peacefully minding their own business.It'll be a long time before you see "Washington Post Offers No Apology for Attacking Target of Thwarted Attack" or "AP Says It Has No Regrets After Blaming The Victim". The respectable class in the American media share the same goal as the Islamic fanatics: They want to silence Pam Geller. To be sure, they have a mild disagreement about the means to that end - although even then you get the feeling, as with Garry Trudeau and those dozens of PEN novelists' reaction to Charlie Hebdo, that the "narrative" wouldn't change very much if the jihad boys had got luckier and Pam, Geert Wilders, Robert Spencer and a dozen others were all piled up in the Garland morgue.If the American press were not so lazy and parochial, they would understand that this was the third Islamic attack on free speech this year - first, Charlie Hebdo in Paris; second, the Lars Vilks event in Copenhagen; and now Texas. The difference in the corpse count is easily explained by a look at the video of the Paris gunmen, or the bullet holes they put in the police car. The French and Texan attackers supposedly had the same kind of weapons, although one should always treat American media reports with a high degree of skepticism when it comes to early identification of "assault weapons" and "AK47s". Nonetheless, from this reconstruction, it seems clear that the key distinction between the two attacks is that in Paris they knew how to use their guns and in Garland they didn't. So a very cool 60-year-old local cop with nothing but his service pistol advanced under fire and took down two guys whose heavier firepower managed only to put a bullet in an unarmed security guard's foot.The Charlie Hebdo killers had received effective training overseas - as thousands of ISIS recruits with western passports are getting right now. What if the Garland gunmen had been as good as the Paris gunmen? Surely that would be a more interesting question for the somnolent American media than whether some lippy Jewess was asking for it....In Copenhagen, in Paris, in Garland, what's more important than the cartoons and the attacks is the reaction of all the polite, respectable people in society, which for a decade now has told those who do not accept the messy, fractious liberties of free peoples that we don't really believe in them, either, and we're happy to give them up - quietly, furtively, incrementally, remorselessly - in hopes of a quiet life. Because a small Danish newspaper found itself abandoned and alone, Charlie Hebdo jumped in to support them. Because the Charlie Hebdo artists and writers died abandoned and alone, Pamela Geller jumped in to support them. By refusing to share the risk, we are increasing the risk. It's not Pamela Geller who emboldens Islamic fanatics, it's all the nice types - the ones Salman Rushdie calls the But Brigade. You've heard them a zillion times this last week: "Of course, I'm personally, passionately, absolutely committed to free speech. But..."Free speech is necessary to free society for all the stuff after the "but", after the "however". There's no fine line between "free speech" and "hate speech": Free speech is hate speech; it's for the speech you hate - and for all your speech that the other guy hates. If you don't have free speech, then you can't have an honest discussion. All you can do is what those stunted moronic boobs in Paris and Copenhagen and Garland did: grab a gun and open fire. What Miliband and Cotler propose will, if enacted, reduce us all to the level of the inarticulate halfwits who think the only dispositive argument is "Allahu Akbar".Alas, we have raised a generation of But boys. Ever since those ridiculous Washington Post and AP headlines, I've been thinking about the fellows who write and sub-edit and headline and approve such things - and never see the problem with it. Why would they? If you're under a certain age, you accept instinctively that free speech is subordinate to other considerations: If you've been raised in the "safe space" of American universities, you take it as read that on gays and climate change and transgendered bathrooms and all kinds of other issues it's perfectly normal to eliminate free speech and demand only the party line. So what's the big deal about letting Muslims cut themselves in on a little of that action?Why would you expect people who see nothing wrong with destroying a mom'n'pop bakery over its antipathy to gay wedding cakes to have any philosophical commitment to diversity of opinion? And once you no longer have any philosophical commitment to it it's easy to see it the way Miliband and Cotler do - as a rusty cog in the societal machinery that can be shaved and sliced millimeter by millimeter.Do what the parochial hacks of the US media didn't bother to do, and look at the winning entry in Pam Geller's competition, which appears at the top of this page. It's by Bosch Fawstin, an Eisner Award-winning cartoonist and an ex-Muslim of Albanian stock. Like many of the Danish and French cartoons, it's less about Mohammed than about the prohibition against drawing Mohammed - and the willingness of a small number of Muslims to murder those who do, and a far larger number of Muslims both enthusiastic and quiescent to support those who kill. Mr Fawstin understands the remorseless logic of one-way multiculturalism - that it leads to the de facto universal acceptance of Islamic law. All that "Prophet Mohammed" stuff, now routine even on Fox News. He's not my prophet, he's just some dead bloke. But the formulation is now mysteriously standard in western media. Try it the other way round: "Isis News Network, from our Libyan correspondent: Warriors of the Caliphate today announced record attendance numbers for the mass beheading of followers of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ..."
The soft jihad is a suppler enemy fighting for rather more valuable real estate in Europe, Australia and North America, so it uses western shibboleths of "diversity" and "multiculturalism" to enfeeble those societies. And it does so very effectively - so that when a British soldier is hacked to death on a London street in broad daylight, you can't really quite articulate what's wrong with it; or that, upon the death of the ugly king of a state where Christianity is prohibited, the Christian ministers of Westminster Abbey mourn his passing; or that, when Australians are held siege in a Sydney coffee shop, the reflexive response of progressive persons is to launch a social-media campaign offering to battle Islamophobia by helping Muslims get to work; or that, when violent Muslims stage their first explicit anti-free-speech attack on American soil, everyone thinks the mouthy free-speech broad is the problem. This soft jihad goes on every day of the week, and Bill O'Reilly doesn't even seem to be aware that it exists....f you make the concessions that Francine Prose and Michael Ondaatje are implicitly demanding, what kind of art remains? There was a big fuss a few weeks ago when Steve Emerson said on Fox News that Birmingham, England was a Muslim no-go zone, and the BBC gleefully mocked him because it's only 28 per cent Muslim or whatever. That 28 per cent is pretty spectacular in just a couple of generations. How long before it's 40 or 50 per cent? So, if, circa 2030, you're a PEN member in Birmingham and you want to write a novel about your turf, it will necessarily involve a consideration of the relationship between an ever more Islamic city and what remains of its non-Islamic elements.But Islam is telling you that subject's closed off. Not long after 9/11, some theatre group in Cincinnati announced a play contrasting a Palestinian suicide bomber and the American Jewish girl she killed. Local Muslims complained, and so the production was immediately canceled - because all the arty types who say we need "artists" with the "courage" to "explore" "transgressive" "ideas" fold like a cheap Bedouin tent when it comes to Islam. The Muslim community complained not because the play was anti-Muslim: au contraire, it was almost laughably pro-Palestinian, and the playwright considered the suicide bomber a far more sensitive sympathetic character than her dead Jewish victim.But that wasn't the point: the Muslim leaders didn't care whether the play was pro- or anti-Islam: for them, Islam is beyond discussion. End of subject. And so it was.Can Islam be made to live with the norms of free societies in which it now nests? Can Islam learn - or be forced - to suck it up the way Mormons, Catholics, Jews and everyone else do? If not, free societies will no longer be free. Pam Geller understands that, and has come up with her response. By contrast, Ed Miliband, Irwin Cotler, Francine Prose, Garry Trudeau and the trendy hipster social-media But boys who just canceled Mr Fawstin's Facebook account* are surrendering our civilization. They may be more sophisticated, more urbane, more amusing dinner-party guests ...but in the end they are trading our liberties.A final cartoon from Bosch Fawstin:
"Stay quiet and you'll be okay:" Those were Mohammed Atta's words to his passengers on 9/11. And they're what all the nice respectable types are telling us now.
Appearing on FBN's Cavuto Friday night, MRC President Brent Bozell argued that the news media are losing the trust of the American public because they've become more "marginalized" and "radicalized" during the Obama years, deliberately ignoring news "if it harms the narrative of the left."...Both MRC's Bozell and The Hill's Lauren Ashburn agreed that the media were too infatuated with government to act as an effective watchdog. But when Ashburn disagreed that journalists were ignoring liberal scandals, pointing to recent coverage of the Clinton Foundation scandal, Bozell called that "nonsense."They have not gotten to the bottom of a single one of the Obama scandals....Look at the IRS, look at Benghazi, look at the VA, look at so many scandals -- they've been dropped. This one, this Clinton one, will be dropped as well.
While all of this blame on Pam Geller might bring back memories of the Jim Crow era when Newspapers & pols blamed attacks against blacks on civil right crusaders provoking otherwise peaceful people into violence which would beg the question: Does the media have any shame? (No they don’t) but I don’t think that’s the real lesson of the day.I think the real lesson is for Christians, particularly protestants who believe in “Once saved always saved” to grab their guns bombs start shooting.By the left’s argument we have established responsibility for religious violence lies at least in part, for the person who commits an act that acts provokes ones deeply held religious beliefs.Well if drawing a cartoon for display at a private event what about a Gay pride parade? Or forcing someone to bake a cake for a Gay Wedding or forcing a JP to perform one? After all Sodomy is one of the sins that “Cry out to heaven for vengeance?” Wouldn’t taking vengeance for such a sin would be justified?
But first, a confession. I’m far more hateful than Pamela Geller. In fact, I’d argue there’s no way that she could hate jihad more than I do. I’ve seen jihad up-close, in an Iraqi province where jihadists raped women to shame them into becoming suicide bombers, where they put bombs in little boys’ backpacks then remotely detonated them at family gatherings, where they beheaded innocent civilians while cheering wildly like they were at a soccer match, and where they shot babies in the face to “send a message” to their parents. I’ve seen the despair in the eyes of the innocent victims of jihad, and — believe me — that despair is infinitely greater than the alleged “anguish” caused by a few cartoons.Simply put, to know jihad is to hate jihad. And if you hate jihad, you will likely do more to help actual Muslims — to save them from death and misery — than the most politically-correct newspaper editor or the most hand-wringing academic.
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott's top business advisor on Friday claimed climate change was a ruse encouraged by the United Nations to create a new authoritarian world order under its control.Maurice Newman, chairman of the Prime Minister's Business Advisory Council, said the real agenda was "concentrated political authority. Global warming is the hook".In a column for The Australian newspaper to coincide with a visit by UN climate chief Christiana Figueres, he added that the world had been "subjected to extravagance from climate catastrophists for close to 50 years". ..."Figueres is on record saying democracy is a poor political system for fighting global warming. Communist China, she says, is the best model," he wrote...Newman said "hopefully, like India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Tony Abbott isn't listening (to the UN)".But he warned that "having gained so much ground, eco-catastrophists won't let up"."After all, they have captured the UN and are extremely well-funded. They have a hugely powerful ally in the White House," he said."They will continue to present the climate change movement as an independent, spontaneous consensus of concerned scientists, politicians and citizens who believe human activity is 'extremely likely' to be the dominant cause of global warming."And they will keep mobilising public opinion using fear and appeals to morality."
What would happen to all these people insisting, “I’m all for freedom, but…”? What would happen to their sudden respect for religious sensitivities? How would they deal with it if the brutal murder of gay people we’re seeing in the Middle East was brought right to their doorstep? How would they reconcile the cognitive dissonance caused by two of their favorite groups of pet victims colliding in such an inconvenient fashion?
What would happen to their poor widdle heads?
My jaw dropped when I saw the tweet below, purportedly from the Associated Press. “Pamela Geller says she has no regrets about Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest that ended in 2 deaths”Are we seriously supposed to mourn or even regret the death of two murderous jihadis who acted to stifle freedom of speech?What would the AP do if, as Rush Limbaugh suggested, jihadis start enforcing Islam’s severe prohibition against homosexuality by murdering gays who “provoke” them as the contest sponsored by Pamela Geller did?
Deal with your white sh*t, white people. slavery is a *YALL* thing.
“White masculinity isn’t a problem for america’s colleges, white masculinity is THE problem for america’s colleges.”
Every MLK week I commit myself to not spending a dime in white-owned businesses. and every year i find it nearly impossible.”
“Professor Grundy is exercising her right to free speech and we respect her right to do so.”
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| This is what racist bigots look like. |
So, I'm driving to the range yesterday while listening to NPR, as one does, and The Diane Rehm Show is discussing the Garland, Texas incident. There's a guest or two fighting a valiant rear-guard action for the First Amendment, trying to explain to the hostess that it even protects people's right to be icky and Republican.
Then they opened the lines for callers and I very nearly drove into the ditch, yelling at the radio and gnawing on the steering wheel in impotent frustration:"Welcome back, I'm Indira Lakshmanan, sitting in for Diane Rehm. We're talking about the Texas attack, ISIS, and the limits of free speech. I'm gonna read a post that we got here, an email from Jean, who says that if someone published cartoons of women, LGBTs, blacks, or a dozen other protected groups, wouldn't they be prosecuted as hate speech? And why does offense of anti-Islamic speech get a pass in the name of free speech?"Jean you ignorant slut, do you know what they call it when people publish "cartoons of women, LGBTs, blacks, or a dozen other protected groups"? They call it the internet....
Seriously, yesterday's Diane Rehm Show was the scariest thing I've heard on the radio since I listened to Mystery Theater on a battery operated boom box sleeping out in a friend's treehouse when I was twelve. It used to be that if there was one thing you could at least count on liberals for, it was a vigorous defense of free speech; it's a cause that has found the ACLU in bed with the NRA on at least one occasion I can think of. This new turn is... chilling.
You're not going to believe this -- despite not being real, and also being crazy, and also being criminals, and also being Democrats, they have a website.
Tax cheats kept jobs at IRS, audit finds.
The IRS fired just two out of every five employees found to be tax cheats over a decade-long span, according to a new federal audit.
Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration found that 1,580 employees willfully violated tax law from October 2003 to September 2013. The IRS was supposed to fire all of those staffers, under a 1998 law.
But the inspector general found that the IRS commissioner saved 960 of them — 61 percent in all — who were instead given counseling, reprimands or suspensions.
“We need to make sure we put American workers first in everything we do, from immigration to tax policy to regulatory reform.”
Call it the Caudillo Test: It’s no longer enough for a Democratic presidential candidate to pledge to reform immigration laws. You have to pledge to end-run the nation’s elected legislature if it doesn’t go along. Good to know! …
He also shared tweets by others encouraging an attack similar to the massacre at the office of Paris-based Charlie Hebdo magazine, including calls for "brothers in Texas" to go to the event "with your weapons, bombs or with knifes", News Corp Australia reported.He also shared a map of the building where the cartoon event was held and tweets by others encouraging an attack similar to the massacre at the office of Paris-based Charlie Hebdo magazine, including calls for "brothers in Texas" to go to the event "with your weapons, bombs or with knifes", News Corp Australia also reported.Fairfax Media conducted an interview with him through Twitter. While his identity cannot be verified, Fairfax Media has no reason to doubt he is the same person who posted the previous statements that appear to encourage the Texas attacks.He refused to give details about himself, but said he was aged in his 20s, lived in Perth and regularly attended a mosque. He said he previously worked at Amnesty International Australia.
Have you ever read a more squirm-inducing sentence than that? It appeared in a pro-Hillary piece in Dame magazine, written by a person with a vagina who intends to vote for Clinton because she also has a vagina.Let's leave aside the unfortunate image conjured up by that sentence ("You can hold a pencil with that thing?!") The bigger problem with such unabashed declarations of "vagina voting" is that they confirm the descent of feminism into the cesspool of identity politics, even biologism, and its abandonment of the idea that women should be valued more for their minds than their anatomy.Kate Harding, the vagina voter in question, isn't only going to vote with her vag—she's also going to tell everyone about it. "I intend to vote with my vagina. Unapologetically. Enthusiastically... And I intend to talk about it," she wrote in Dame.She thinks Hillary would be a great president because she "knows what it's like to menstruate, be pregnant, [and] give birth."
“I perfectly understand that a believer can be shocked by a satirical cartoon about Mohammed, Jesus, Moses or even the Pope. But growing up to be a citizen, is to learn that some ideas, some words, some images, can be shocking.“Being shocked is part of democratic debate. Being shot is not.”
Rick Snyder became Governor after the crash. He and the Republicans were swept into office in November 2010 by the fury to which Obamacare gave rise, and he and they brought to the challenge all of the virtues and vices of the businessman. Those virtues are considerable. Businessmen can add and subtract. They are used to deal-making, and they are skilled in keeping enterprises going. The vices of the businessman are, however, considerable as well. When it comes to scruples, they tend to come up short. Pragmatism nearly always trumps principle.If you find what I say annoying or even insulting, pause for a moment and ask yourself this. In 2009, when Barack Obama was pushing what his party named the Affordable Care Act, which side did the executives of the healthcare industry take? Did they warn us of the dangers involved? Did they take their stand with the patients they served? Or did they consult the bottom line – their bottom line – and sell us out? Put more bluntly, were they bought by Obama and the Democrats?Do not tell me that they did not know what they were doing. This is a sphere in which they have far greater expertise than anyone else. They knew which way the wind was blowing, and they chose profit over principle. Individuals may sacrifice profit for principle. Soldiers often sacrifice their lives in such a manner. But businessmen in their guise as businessmen very rarely prefer the common good to the good of their enterprise; and, when businessmen go into politics, they tend to exhibit the habits they learned in private enterprise.Think about it this way. When was the last time that you heard a Republican speak about justice? The Democrats do so all the time. They speak with great frequency about “social justice,” and Republicans rarely challenge them on the basic principles. Consider what is called “affirmative action.” The phrase is a euphemism for politically enforced racial and sexual discrimination. It is a sign in the window that says, “White men need not apply.” You know that, and I know that. When was the last time that you heard a Republican candidate say as much? When was the last time you heard a Republican denounce “affirmative action” as unjust. When it comes to principled argument, the Republicans – who are owned lock, stock, and barrel by the Chamber of Commerce – generally fall silent. In the face of evil, they temporize.
Last night at a public hearing on the budget in Prince George’s County, Maryland, a flyer with the following headline was circulated:
From Baltimore to Jerusalem It’s the Same Game. In 10 years Chris Van Hollen and Ben Cardin sent 1.2 billion dollars of Maryland Federal taxpayer money to the Apartheid state of Israel to build schools, roads and other infrastructure while saying Maryland doesn’t have the money to help develop our communities.
The flyer goes on to attack the “Israel lobby,” which allegedly is using Black politicians to split the African-American vote so as to “ensure that Blacks don’t get political power in the Senate.” It also accuses “apartheid” Israel of training U.S. cops in how to “set up paramilitary police armies in minority neighborhoods. . .all across the [United States].” And it accuses Israel of sending Black Jews to prison camps and suppressing the birth rate of Black Jews. . . .
Who circulated the flyer? Surely, it was supporters of Donna Edwards, the African-American congresswoman who is running against Van Hollen for the Senate. It would be interesting to hear what Edwards has to say about this attack on her rival and a sitting Democratic (Jewish) Senator.
It says the militants will target Geller and anyone who hides or hosts her."This threat illustrates the savagery and barbarism of the Islamic State," Geller told the Daily News in a statement she later posted on her website.Asked if she would increase security or cancel any public appearances, Geller told the News, "Of course," but said she could not elaborate for security reasons.
A couple of ISIS wannabes tried to shoot up an exhibition of cartoons in Garland, Texas, and the police put them down before the civilians could get to them: a triumph for duty and marksmanship.What didn’t happen next?There is a mosque in Garland, Texas. It was there yesterday, it’s there today, and it will be there tomorrow. After two radical Muslims attempted to massacre some infidels down the road a bit, there was no angry mob of Texans storming the place with F-350s and rifles. If any vehicle full of armed men rushed to the Muslims’ place of worship, you can be sure that it was the local police exercising an abundance of caution and nothing more.It’s easy to be snarky–”Oh, yay for us! No massacre, give Texas a cookie!” But only those parochial minds with the narrowest of experience could fail to appreciate how unusual that is in the world. Instead of retaliation, we have open-handed toleration that verges on the destructive.Pamela Geller seems to me like she might be a very nasty piece of business indeed,but you know who I don’t want to hear about it from? CAIR and the rest of the Muslim Brotherhood fan club. “Oh, but she was trying to inflame the Muslims!” protest the usual assortment of bed-wetters. Yeah? So, what? Time to put on your big-boy First Amendment pants and buck up, little campers.
Molten lava, rocks and gas went flying through the air on Hawaii's Kilauea volcano after an explosion was caused by the partial collapse of a crater wall.The collapse triggered a small explosion, spreading lava and debris around the rim of Kilauea's Halemaumau Crater, the U.S. Geological Survey's Hawaiian Volcano Observatory says.Janet Babb, a geologist with the USGS, compared the blast on Sunday to taking a hammer to the top of a bottle of champagne."You look at the bottle and you see the liquid, but you don't see the gas," she said. "There's a lot of gas in the lava. And so, when that rock fall hits the lava lake, it's like the moment you knock the top of the champagne bottle off and that gas is released and it hurls molten lava and rock fragments."
William Ruto made the remarks at a church service on Sunday, the day U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry arrived for talks. The United States has been at the forefront of calls for gay rights in Africa and criticizes anti-gay laws on the continent.
A new poll released Monday indicated that Americans believe race relations are at their worst in more than two decades.
Two heavily-armed men suspected to have been carrying explosives were killed by police after opening fire outside the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Dallas, at around 7pm during an controversial event where caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad were being displayed.The SITE Intelligence Group reported that an Islamic State (IS) fighter claimed on Twitter that the shooting was carried out by two pro-Isis individuals.In a series of tweets and links, a jihadist named as Abu Hussain AlBritani, which SITE said was British IS fighter Junaid Hussain, claimed that '2 of our brothers just opened fire' at the Prophet Muhammad exhibition in Texas.
Once again, be very glad we don’t have a Republican president right now. If we did, we would be treated to a merciless media pounding, night-and-day, on the series of strategic failures, mistakes and false starts that have characterized America’s war strategy in Afghanistan since 2009. ...
President Obama has been permitted to fail in Afghanistan quietly and off center stage. We hear nothing anymore about the months of agonized reflection before choosing strategies that didn’t accomplish their goals. We never see mentions of his 2008 campaign rhetoric about Afghanistan—”the necessary war”—against which we might be asked to measure what has actually been achieved....
But the heavy media bias against Republicans and for mildly to solidly left-of-center Democrats isn’t just a question of conscious and malicious bias. When the press puts Republicans through the wringer while giving Democrats the best deal it can, it’s often a reflection of the groupthink that comes naturally and almost inevitably to those who’ve spent their lives as bubble babies in the ultra-liberal world of the contemporary American campus where intellectual homogeneity is considered a virtue....
The news articles and opinion pieces they write aren’t biased in the sense that they are consciously telling untruths or twisting facts. They are reporting the world as they see it. And in that world, Obama is a master strategist, a visionary diplomat, and an innovative thinker out to change the way the world works.
More than twenty years ago in the Cato Journal, distinguished law and economics scholars David Haddock and Daniel Polsby published a paper entitled “Understanding Riots” that’s still highly relevant in making sense of events like these. Employing familiar economic concepts such as opportunity cost, coordination problems, and free-rider issues, Haddock and Polsby help explain why riots cluster around sports wins as well as assassinations, funerals, and jury verdicts; the group psychology of rioting, and why most crowds never turn riotous; the important role of focal points (often lightly policed commercial areas) and rock-throwing “entrepreneurs” of disorder; the tenuous relationship between riots and root causes or contemporary grievances; and why when a riot occurs the police (at least those in places like the United States and United Kingdom) seldom manage to be in enough places at once, more or less by definition.The H&P paper helps explain why so many of the memes of the past 24 hours are off base: the “protests turn violent” headlines (yesterday’s riots broke out in different places from where there had been demonstrations), the “Freddie Gray’s family is horrified” stories (irrelevant since this riot, like most, had little to do with sending any message of protest), and, of course, the “what about sports riots?” meme (yes, the riots yesterday have a lot in common with English soccer riots, and it’s important to understand why.) “Authorities looking for ways to explain why trouble has broken out on their watch sometimes ascribe exaggerated organizational powers to ‘outside agitators,
It's beginning to look as if the Democratic Party can't whip African-Americans into an anti-white frenzy to turn out on Election Day, and then say, "OK, thanks, guys! That's all we need."
KALAMAZOO (WWJ) – If you thought you felt an earthquake on Saturday — you did. And It was one of the strongest quakes ever experienced in Michigan.Paul Caruso, a geophysicist with the United States Geological Survey, said an earthquake with a magnitude of 4.2 and a depth of focus of 5.9 km was measured around 12:23 p.m. about nine miles southeast of Kalamazoo, near Galesburg.
A pair of protests Friday night will put a voice to concerns over law enforcement issues in North Texas. However, with about 1,000 people expected to be in attendance, the demonstrations bring up questions about safety.
