Naomi Wolf and "family values"

James Taranto illustrates the absurdity of radical feminist Naomi Wolf. She is in early-stage talks with the global news network Al Jazeera and James wonders if she will wear a veil. What is disconcerting is Wolf's defense of Muslim treatment of women with a rationale that sounds exactly like the traditional Christian defense of family values.

Are we in the West radically misinterpreting Muslim sexual mores, particularly the meaning to many Muslim women of being veiled or wearing the chador? And are we blind to our own markers of the oppression and control of women?

The West interprets veiling as repression of women and suppression of their sexuality. But when I travelled in Muslim countries and was invited to join a discussion in women-only settings within Muslim homes, I learned that Muslim attitudes toward women's appearance and sexuality are not rooted in repression, but in a strong sense of public versus private, of what is due to God and what is due to one's husband. It is not that Islam suppresses sexuality, but that it embodies a strongly developed sense of its appropriate channelling--toward marriage, the bonds that sustain family life, and the attachment that secures a home.

Close your eyes and you can hear the Family Research Council saying

"[Christian]attitudes toward women's appearance and sexuality are not rooted in repression, but in a strong sense of public versus private, of what is due to God and what is due to one's husband. It is not that [Christianity] suppresses sexuality, but that it embodies a strongly developed sense of its appropriate channelling--toward marriage, the bonds that sustain family life, and the attachment that secures a home."

This kind of statement by a Conservative would be relentlessly mocked by the press and teh media, accusing those who hold these opinions of wanting to keep women repressed, tied to the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant.  It is no secret that Muslin demands on women, their dress and their freedom to travel, even forbidding them to be out without a male guardian, are infinitely more repressive than the most devout Christian. That Wolf would defend it shows clearly that for her and her supporters hatred of the West trumps everything.

.F18 Carrier Ops .

From take-off to landing.

Senator Marco Rubio State of the Union

Pelosi: Congressional pay cut undermines dignity of job...

The people who hold these offices have undermined the dignity of the job.  And since when is a member of Congress dignified?  The members of the Ruling Class have a VERY high opinion of themselves which is totally unwarranted.

Student Starts Business Delivering 'Emergency Condoms' on Campus...

By day, Kyle McCabe is a sophomore student at the College of New Jersey in Ewing Township.

By night, he's the president of his very own startup called "Condam," which is short for "Condom Ambulance."

Because nothing says true love like an "emergency condom."

Political Science Prof Bans Students From Using FOXNEWS As Source...

Via DRUDGE. Those open minded Liberals in academia.

The syllabus tells students in a West Liberty University political science course what sources they can and cannot use.

 

Among those students are asked not to use are The Onion, an openly fictitious parody of real-life news, and Fox News, a professional news organization.

 

In the syllabus, the professor allegedly says, "The tagline Fox News makes me cringe."

WELL, TO BE FAIR, BY “NATIONAL CONVERSATION” THEY GENERALLY MEAN “SHUT UP WHILE WE YELL AT YOU.”

Whenever I hear a Liberal start nattering on about a "national conversation" I know exactly what they mean. 

“At a meeting, elected officials simply get up and leave during a gun expert’s presentation.

Nobody has a "conversation" with a Liberal, they lecture and if you don't agree they call you names.

Ex-San Diego mayor who gambled away $1 billion remorseful

Sorry about that. 

Hopes it doesn't affect her reputation.

Need I mention she's a Democrat?

A year ago, she was guest of first lady; a career update

Roger Chesley is a local columnist for the Virginian Pilot. He recounts what I imagine he considers a heartwarming story of a young local woman, Amber Morris, who got her 15 minutes of fame as the object of one of Barack Obama’s examples. She got to sit next to Michelle Obama during the 2012 State of The Union speech.

Last year, the White House invited Morris to the State of the Union. She had answered a question about the importance of an extra $40 in her paycheck. The money was the result of the payroll tax cut that was enacted in December 2010, extended early last year and recently phased out.

But her story tells us a lot more about the situation college graduates find themselves in as they learn what it’s like to live on Barack Obama’s America.

She’s a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University and the Northeastern University law school. For a brief time after graduating law school she had a job in Boston at a nonprofit associated with Northeastern. She lost that job when the funding ran out. Here’s a little thing I learned reading Glenn Reynolds, a law professor, who has been writing about the higher education bubble for some time. Law schools often hire their graduates in positions like hers for a period of time after graduating just to be able to say that their graduates got jobs when they graduated. As she found out, they are not actually the early stages of a career, but a temporary position designed to make the law school’s job placement statistics look better.

Her next move was back home where she moved in with her parents, where she lives today. This graduate of VCU and Northeastern law school is today gainfully employed.

At Taste Unlimited, she's risen from entry-level assignments to a full-time position. The Oceanfront store has about 10 part-time employees. Morris now earns about $25,000 annually, receives medical and dental benefits and said she has "stability."

As to whether she has student loans to pay off, something that is very likely, Roger Chesley is silent.

It seems that Amber has seen the light. I have been to Taste Unlimited. The job she has in no way requires even a high school diploma, much less a law degree. What this country desperately need is people who can make things and fix things, skills she wishes she had.

So on Tuesday night, while baking a batch of cupcakes, she stayed tuned to Obama's annual address to Congress.

She said she was "fascinated" by the president's allusion to a practice in Germany, where high school graduates are ready to work in technical jobs, including computers and engineering. She also wondered whether more emphasis in high school should be put on vocational jobs like plumbing and carpentry.

"It's frowned upon," she said, "but it's a valid alternative route."

How does she view the job market locally?

"I think more people are willing to hire," Morris said. Employees who have left Taste Unlimited, for example, have been able to get new jobs quickly.

"There's still a little bit of fear in the job market... but it's getting a little bit easier," she added. "People are taking a little bit of a breath and starting to expand."

This little story is a teachable moment, one that has lessons for many kids and parents who are wondering what the future holds, but I failed to see a light go in in Roger Chesley’s head.

Inside the Battle of Hoth

How did the Galactic Empire ever cement its hold on the Star Wars Universe? The war machine built by Emperor Palpatine and run by Darth Vader is a spectacularly bad fighting force, as evidenced by all of the pieces of Death Star littering space. But of all the Empire’s failures, none is a more spectacular military fiasco than the Battle of Hoth at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back.

From a military perspective, Hoth should have been a total debacle for the Rebel Alliance. Overconfident that they can evade Imperial surveillance, they hole up on unforgiving frigid terrain at the far end of the cosmos. Huddled into the lone Echo Base are all their major players: politically crucial Princess Leia; ace pilot Han Solo; and their game-changer, Luke Skywalker, who isn’t even a Jedi yet.

 

Read the whole thing.  Including comments such as ...

Have you even served with the Imperial forces? Sure it's easy to take potshots from your military blog in some no-name star system while the fleet and its legions fight the rebel insurgents, but combined space/air/ground operations are a lot messier than any infographic could ever portray.

Even with the Empire's full spectrum dominance of the battlespace, you can't just leverage fleet assets which are optimized for ship-to-ship combat into a large scale ground invasion force. A Star Destroyer might have more firepower than the entire militaries of less advanced worlds but you still need a proper ground assault ship to support infantry landings.

Unfortunately, the do-nothing blowhards in Coruscant couldn't get funding for the promising alternative designs from Sienar Fleet Systems and we ended up (as usual) with Kuat Drive Yards' overpriced, overdue, and underperforming AT-AT mess.

Rush Limbaugh on Obama's success" "It's that Obama never, ever, allows himself to be seen as governing."

RUSH: I realize in the opening segments of the broadcast that I had a little fun with this, but I do want to tell you something here that has been sort of an eye opener for me. Now, it may have been something that you understood long ago. It may have been something you put together long ago. I must confess that I only just realized this today. And it's about trying to understand how could so many people say they disagree with Obama's policies and yet reelect him. I know that you and I have expressed our puzzlement and our curiosity over the great disconnect there is in this country. The people that vote for Obama don't like where we're going, the direction of the country, the policies of Obama, yet he wins elections.

So we've all been taking our stabs at trying to explain why. Well, he won reelection because he did such a good job of demonizing Romney that he made everybody afraid to vote for Romney and they settled and just voted for Obama, vote for the guy who's already there, at least he's a known quantity. But the New York Times story today finally opens my eyes to what we're dealing with, at least for me. And, as I say, you may have understood this long ago. "Polls Show Dissatisfaction With Country's Direction, but Support for Obama's Agenda."

Now, you and I, in what I would call the high-information voter sector, understand what a giant disconnect that is. How in the world can people be dissatisfied with the country's direction while at the same time support the very agenda that's causing it? This just doesn't compute to you and me. We recognize that it is Obama's agenda which is leading to the problems this country has and thus the dissatisfaction that people have regarding the country's direction. But the majority of people who vote, there is no connection of those two things whatsoever. They support Obama's agenda, and they are terribly unhappy about the direction of the country, and, therefore, they do not associate Obama's agenda or his policies with the direction of the country.

They do not associate Obama's policies with what has happened to the country. They don't associate all the spending and all the debt with the lack of jobs. They don't make that connection, they don't see any connection, they don't see it at all. Now, to me this is an eye-opener, and it's going to force me to assess exactly how to go forward here in dealing with these people. The idea is to persuade them. I mean, they are the low-information voters.

Now, if they're unhappy with the economy, if they're unhappy with jobs, if they're unhappy with the debt, if they're unhappy with the housing market and yet support Obama's agenda, then they obviously do not connect Obama's policies as being in any way related to or responsible for the country's direction that they don't like, which means a number of things. It means that they see Obama as working really hard to try to fix everything, rather than Obama as the reason for things worsening. They just do not see that. And to you and me it's a slam dunk. It's one plus one is two. These are people, outcome-based education, two plus two is five and we'll give 'em an A for trying. They don't see it.

So Obama is not at all connected to the tragic destruction of this country. He is seen as somebody who wants to fix it. It's the same thing as people seeing Colonel Sanders as a guy running a hospital to save chickens. Wouldn't compute. It wouldn't make any sense. But that's how he's viewed. Now, maybe one reason is that he's successfully blamed Bush all these years and the exit polling data last November, vast majority of people still do blame Bush for the economy, but it's more than that. It's that Obama never, ever, allows himself to be seen as governing. He is constantly campaigning.

Obama is constantly seen as in competition with what's happening in Washington. It is though there are straw men. There are men behind curtains. There are invisible, evil people doing all this to the country. He's trying to expose them and he's working very hard. Romney is one of them. Bush was one of them. There are a bunch of other people, we don't know who they are. But Obama is trying to find them. He's trying to expose them and trying to fix all this. Obama is not seen as the guy behind the curtains pulling the levers. Obama is not seen as the guy who does not like the way the country was founded and is trying to take this country in a different direction. He's not seen at all in the way he really is. It can't all be because of the media.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: You may have figured this out long ago, but it just hit me -- and if you figured it out long ago and you've been trying to get through here and tell me, I wish you'd have gotten through. For those of you who figured it out and I didn't, I'm just now getting to it. I apologize for being a late arrival to the party, but now -- now -- it all makes sense. For five years Obama has never once allowed himself to be seen as governing.

He is constantly campaigning against mysterious forces who have ill intentions trying to harm you and this great country. There are these figures behind the screen, behind the curtain. Romney was one. Bush was one. There are others. Obama's trying to expose them. Throughout history dictators, for example, have never really been blamed for the bad things that happened in their countries. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, none of them were blamed by the rank-and-file citizenry.

They were, instead, the leaders of the revolution!

They were the great figures trying to change all the evil that was happening to everybody. Here's Obama. Let me prove this to you. I have for you a little sound bite, 36 seconds, of people from the Frank Luntz focus group on Fox last night. Every one of these people voted for Mitt Romney. These are swing voters in Santa Monica. Now, Santa Monica's a liberal hotbed, but every one of these people that you hear voted for Mitt Romney, and they are talking about their perception of last night's State of the Union speech.

[people in focus group telling us they liked Obama's speech]

RUSH: Those people all voted for Romney, and they -- even the people that voted for Romney -- do not associate Obama with any of the problems in the country. This is what you and I are gonna have to learn and learn fast. No matter what is said, no matter what evidence happens, no matter what's reported, it will not be possible to connect Obama to the negativity that's happening in the country today because he's campaigning against it himself. That's the reason for the perpetual, never-ending campaign. It is why, in eight years, he will never allow himself for even one day to be seen as actually governing or presiding over any of this.

He's always going to be running against the very things he's doing.

Police are not there to protect you.

Don't beleive that?  So they say in court. 

A madman kills four, NYPD manhunt follows. Two officers are in a subway cab when the madman enters the car, and they do nothing to stop him. He stabs a passenger right next to them, who in turn wrestles him down, at which point the NYPD folks finally emerge. Now he sues the city, and it of course argues that it has no legal duty to protect the citizenry.

Now, give up your guns!

Who set the fire that burned the cabin with Dorner in it?

Did Dorner set the fire that burned him to death, did the police, or was Chris Dorner Torched Waco Style?

Gun control is a movement of old, white people

Glenn Reynolds

BING MEASURED AUDIENCE REACTION TO THE STATE OF THE UNION, and it tanked during the gun-control discussion.

Gun control is a movement of old, white people. By endorsing it, Obama just looks like a cornball brother.

I did not watch the State of the Union speech

Not just because I have a life, don't need to see moral preening, don't need to see strawmen knocked down, don't think an hour of blatant lies is entertaining, I  never do.

State of the Union

Man, it would be fun to argue like a liberal

Althouse Channels Obama on Benghazi

Here's what I've been assuming happened: It looked like our people were overwhelmed and doomed, so there was shock, sadness, and acceptance. But then the fight went on for 7 or 8 hours. The White House folk decided there was nothing to do but accept the inevitable, and then they witnessed a valiant fight which they had done nothing to support. It was always too late to help. It was too late after one hour, then too late after 2 hours, then too late after 3 hours.... When were these people going to die already? After that was all over, how do you explain what you did?

Sounds reasonable.

Alabama State Rep Leaves Democratic Party with a Bang

Dr. Ben Carson On Criticizing Obamacare: "Somebody Has To Stand Up To The Bullies"

Remember when it was patriotic to dissent? That was when Liberals were out of power. Now we are told to "respect authority" or, in other words, shut up and sit down.

DR. BENJAMIN CARSON: There are a group of people who would like to silence everybody and have everybody go along to get along, but that's not going to be very helpful for us in the long run, in terms of solving our problems. And somebody has to be courageous enough to actually stand up to, you know, the bullies.
 

 The woman who interjected herself in one of the Presidential debates by siding with Barack Obama CNN's Crowley Asks Panel If Dr. Carson's Speech Was "Offensive"  By her comments Crowley identifies herself as one of the bullies.

DR. CARSON: One of the things I also said during the speech is there will be some people who will say, 'but you’re a doctor and you’re a surgeon, you should be sticking to that.' And I mentioned the fact that five physicians signed the Declaration of Independence and were involved in the framing of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and several other things.

There’s absolutely no reason at all that physicians, scientists, shouldn’t be involved in things that affect all of us. We’re people who've learned how to make decisions based on facts, empirical data, rather than on ideology, and one of the geniuses, one of the real things that made us a great nation, is that we brought people from all backgrounds into the legislative process. So that all of us would be able to place our interests there and we've gone significantly away from that.

And no one goes up to a lawyer and says why are you getting involved in this, that and the other thing. I don't see why they would say it to a physician, who has more education than anyone else in society.