Still Wonderin'

Gay TSA Agents? Who do we ask? Who do we tell?

2010-11-19T09:28:00.003-05:00

The Churban Bais Hamikdash Mosque

2010-08-22T15:39:00.006-04:00

The affront seen so clearly by opponents of the Ground Zero Victory Mosque is based as much on history as sensibility. There are Mosques all over the world on sites that once held great importance to other religions or societies. This is not arbitrary.

Constructing a mosque on the actual site or its proximity is a strategic means to achieve some or all of the following objectives:

1) invalidating historical land claims by original owners
2) memorializing and celebrating their defeat
3) marking others' territory as eternally Islamic.

Jews should be particularly sensitive to this method of domination. We're reminded of it on every trip to Jerusalem, in every picture of our Temple Mount, and in every odious claim that the site of the Bais Hamikdash is not, and never was our spiritual Ground Zero.

Settled science explains why liberals are such pricks.

2010-03-11T16:05:00.003-05:00

Finally! A research study that explains why liberals are such sanctimonious douchebags, and why being Machmir makes you a thief. HINT: It's because they're just better than you.

Environmental Hypocrisy

A new study shows that people are more likely to cheat and steal after buying green products.

By Sharon Begley | Newsweek Web Exclusive

Mar 9, 2010

There have probably been environmental hypocrites ever since the first caveman professed his love of wildlife right before going out and slaughtering giant herds of megafauna, but it's never been clear exactly what underlies the hypocrisy. Sure, it's easier to say than to do (to laud walking and carpooling but drive an SUV), and we're all good at exceptionalism (everyone else should cut back on jet travel, but it's really important that I take my private jet to the meeting on climate change). Still, hypocrisy is so rife, there surely has to be more to it.

In the case of environmental hypocrisy, that "more" may be the virtuous glow we get from doing one little green thing: it casts an outsize moral halo. That is, we feel so righteous when we buy organic food or a compact fluorescent bulb or a Prius that our internal moral cup runneth over. According to this model, which is called compensatory ethics (see the PDF of the first paper on this Web site), people have an inner sense of how morally virtuous they need to feel to support their self-image. If a few actions (including espousing actions for other people) are enough to justify how we like to think of ourselves, then we do not need to perform any additional virtuous actions. It's as if we accumulate moral points for ethical actions, and having accumulated "enough" we are free to act amorally, or even immorally. That's why reminding people of what wonderful humanitarians they are causes them to give less to charity.

"Virtuous acts can license subsequent asocial and unethical behaviors," writes Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto in a paper scheduled for publication in the coming months in Psychological Science.

Two new experiments suggest there is something to this. Mazar and Zhong had 156 volunteers (University of Toronto students) visit online stores that carried mostly green products, or only a few. After browsing for a while, some of the volunteers played the dictator game: they were given $6, and told they could propose to divide the money with a partner any way they liked. The caveat: the partner could accept or reject the proposed division, and if he rejected it, then no one would get any money. Proposing a 5-to-1 split was therefore likely to send both parties home empty-handed, whereas a 3-3 split, or even a 4-2, was more likely to pay off.

Volunteers who saw lots of green products proposed more generous splits than those who saw conventional ones, by $2.12 to $1.59—one third more. That reflects the well-established priming effect, in which subtle cues shape our behavior (if we see pictures of upscale restaurants, we tend to improve our table manners; seeing Apple's logo makes people more creative, at least in lab experiments). Simply seeing green products, which symbolize high ethical standards and selflessness, causes people to unconsciously adjust their behavior to be more ethical and generous, in this case by sharing more money.

Buying green products—some of the volunteers were given $25 to spend in the green store, while others were given $25 to spend in the conventional store—had an entirely different effect. Volunteers who bought up to $25 worth of ecofriendly stuff from the green store shared less money ($1.76) than those who purchased from the conventional store ($2.18). (Just to be clear, the volunteers were not given a choice about which online store to patronize.) For the green buyers, altruism in the dictator game decreased. More alarming, when the green buyers were then given a chance to cheat on a computer game, and lie about it to the scientists in order to win more money—basically, to steal—they did. Buyers of conventional products did not. And in an honor system in which they took money from an envelope to pay themselves their winnings, the green buyers stole six times more than the conventional buyers did.

"In line with the halo associated with green consumerism…people act more altruistically after mere exposure to green products," Mazar and Zhong write in their upcoming paper. But they "act less altruistically and are more likely to cheat and steal after purchasing green products than after purchasing conventional products." Or, as Mazar put it to me, "we are more likely to transgress morally after we have bought ourselves some moral offsets" (analogous to carbon offsets: buy enough so you can drive that Hummer). It was especially striking that the moral balancing occurred in an area of life—being generous with money, cheating on a computer game—that has nothing to do with green behavior. "This suggests that if we want to change people's behavior for the better, we have to be sure it doesn't backfire," says Mazar—starting, perhaps, by eliminating the halo of self-congratulatory, smug virtuousness that surrounds green behavior.

The usual caveats for this kind of experiment apply. One hundred fifty-six university students may not be representative of society as a whole. The situation was artificial: playing the dictator game and the computer game, not helping a blind man across the street or volunteering at a soup kitchen. The amount of money at stake in the computer game where cheating and stealing were possible was small—less than $1. Still, as Mazar points out, the money was completely real to the volunteers, and she believes the findings do apply in the real world.

There is no telling how powerful the boomerang effect of compensatory ethics might be. If someone has just bought free-trade, shade-grown coffee, is he more likely to shove you out of his way? If she's just lugged her e-waste to the recycling center, is she more likely to cut in line at the bank? Just to be safe, I'm not letting my husband anywhere near our tax return after he weatherstrips our doors this weekend.

Al Gore: As a businessman...

2010-03-01T08:09:00.004-05:00

As a businessman, [Al Gore] is an investor in alternative energy companies.

Al Gore says Cap & Trade legislation is the best solution to his manufactured Global Warming Crisis. And his supporters take him seriously despite his admitted considerable financial interest in seeing such legislation passed. Wouldn't that fly in the face of those liberals who aim to undermine the credibility of Global Warming skeptics by painting them as paid stooges of the oil industry? You'd think.

Al Gore submitted an op-ed to the NYTimes this weekend, waxing obsequious about how fortunate we'd be if only his detractors were right about the holes they keep plugging in the sky he insists is falling. With tears cynical enough to disassociate alligators with insincerity, Gore mourns over a sprinkling of cherry-picked sources that he believes undermines the growing pile of disproof that already far exceed my rosiest schadenfreude fantasies.

The sourcing ends as Gore settles into the spooky campfire voice he uses for spun yarns about the bogeymen of political inertia, and our generation's culpability for the wretched future our grandchildren are certain to suffer; karmic vengeance, no doubt, for not running to line Gore's pockets.

Scolding America's inconvenient rejection of his neo-Marxism, Gore lays blame for all the galaxy's ills at dug-in Republican heels, along with "market fundamentalists" (i.e., capitalists), and "showmen masquerading as political thinkers." The big finish is mangling a quote from Churchill, in a way that would probably make Churchill smile for its deviousness.

i don't believe a word Gore says. I think he's a phony and a fraud, and disturbingly content to sell his country down a road that will cripple our economy. But if I were naive, I'd be completely perplexed that someone Gore isn't concerned that the credibility of this urgent issue is being compromised by his financial interest in his success; why he doesn't recognize the taint of hypocrisy in his ponderous choice to live in the mammoth carbon boot print of his mansion, rather than something more in line with a track house in Levittown.

But I'm not naive, and Gore is no different from all other liberals: he is unable to comprehend why it's unsavory for Al Gore: As an idealist... to advocate a cause that will advance the financial interests of Al Gore: As a businessman...

Like all other liberals, Al Gore defines a principle as something that involves my pocket. My only hope is that Gore's refusal to acknowledge that, like all other people, the term "conflict of interest" just might apply to him, too, will continue to fuel his own Global Warming problem -- that being more and more people warming to the idea that Gore's posing as the defender of our planet's climate is an unvarnished fraud.

February 28, 2010

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change

By AL GORE
It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.

Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.

But what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands. We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake.

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.

It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

Because these and other effects of global warming are distributed globally, they are difficult to identify and interpret in any particular location. For example, January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.

Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.

The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere — thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States. Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm.

Here is what scientists have found is happening to our climate: man-made global-warming pollution traps heat from the sun and increases atmospheric temperatures. These pollutants — especially carbon dioxide — have been increasing rapidly with the growth in the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and forests, and temperatures have increased over the same period. Almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are melting — and seas are rising. Hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and more destructive, though their number is expected to decrease. Droughts are getting longer and deeper in many mid-continent regions, even as the severity of flooding increases. The seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures is being disrupted, posing serious threats to agriculture. The rate of species extinction is accelerating to dangerous levels.

Though there have been impressive efforts by many business leaders, hundreds of millions of individuals and families throughout the world and many national, regional and local governments, our civilization is still failing miserably to slow the rate at which these emissions are increasing — much less reduce them.

And in spite of President Obama’s efforts at the Copenhagen climate summit meeting in December, global leaders failed to muster anything more than a decision to “take note” of an intention to act.

Because the world still relies on leadership from the United States, the failure by the Senate to pass legislation intended to cap American emissions before the Copenhagen meeting guaranteed that the outcome would fall far short of even the minimum needed to build momentum toward a meaningful solution.

The political paralysis that is now so painfully evident in Washington has thus far prevented action by the Senate — not only on climate and energy legislation, but also on health care reform, financial regulatory reform and a host of other pressing issues.

This comes with painful costs. China, now the world’s largest and fastest-growing source of global-warming pollution, had privately signaled early last year that if the United States passed meaningful legislation, it would join in serious efforts to produce an effective treaty. When the Senate failed to follow the lead of the House of Representatives, forcing the president to go to Copenhagen without a new law in hand, the Chinese balked. With the two largest polluters refusing to act, the world community was paralyzed.

Some analysts attribute the failure to an inherent flaw in the design of the chosen solution — arguing that a cap-and-trade approach is too unwieldy and difficult to put in place. Moreover, these critics add, the financial crisis that began in 2008 shook the world’s confidence in the use of any market-based solution.

But there are two big problems with this critique: First, there is no readily apparent alternative that would be any easier politically. It is difficult to imagine a globally harmonized carbon tax or a coordinated multilateral regulatory effort. The flexibility of a global market-based policy — supplemented by regulation and revenue-neutral tax policies — is the option that has by far the best chance of success. The fact that it is extremely difficult does not mean that we should simply give up.

Second, we should have no illusions about the difficulty and the time needed to convince the rest of the world to adopt a completely new approach. The lags in the global climate system, including the buildup of heat in the oceans from which it is slowly reintroduced into the atmosphere, means that we can create conditions that make large and destructive consequences inevitable long before their awful manifestations become apparent: the displacement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees, civil unrest, chaos and the collapse of governance in many developing countries, large-scale crop failures and the spread of deadly diseases.

It’s important to point out that the United States is not alone in its inaction. Global political paralysis has thus far stymied work not only on climate, but on trade and other pressing issues that require coordinated international action.

The reasons for this are primarily economic. The globalization of the economy, coupled with the outsourcing of jobs from industrial countries, has simultaneously heightened fears of further job losses in the industrial world and encouraged rising expectations in emerging economies. The result? Heightened opposition, in both the industrial and developing worlds, to any constraints on the use of carbon-based fuels, which remain our principal source of energy.

The decisive victory of democratic capitalism over communism in the 1990s led to a period of philosophical dominance for market economics worldwide and the illusion of a unipolar world. It also led, in the United States, to a hubristic “bubble” of market fundamentalism that encouraged opponents of regulatory constraints to mount an aggressive effort to shift the internal boundary between the democracy sphere and the market sphere. Over time, markets would most efficiently solve most problems, they argued. Laws and regulations interfering with the operations of the market carried a faint odor of the discredited statist adversary we had just defeated.

This period of market triumphalism coincided with confirmation by scientists that earlier fears about global warming had been grossly understated. But by then, the political context in which this debate took form was tilted heavily toward the views of market fundamentalists, who fought to weaken existing constraints and scoffed at the possibility that global constraints would be needed to halt the dangerous dumping of global-warming pollution into the atmosphere.

Over the years, as the science has become clearer and clearer, some industries and companies whose business plans are dependent on unrestrained pollution of the atmospheric commons have become ever more entrenched. They are ferociously fighting against the mildest regulation — just as tobacco companies blocked constraints on the marketing of cigarettes for four decades after science confirmed the link of cigarettes to diseases of the lung and the heart.

Simultaneously, changes in America’s political system — including the replacement of newspapers and magazines by television as the dominant medium of communication — conferred powerful advantages on wealthy advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened advocates of legal and regulatory reforms. Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment. And as in times past, that has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic. Their most consistent theme is to label as “socialist” any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace.

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption. After all has been said and so little done, the truth about the climate crisis — inconvenient as ever — must still be faced.

The pathway to success is still open, though it tracks the outer boundary of what we are capable of doing. It begins with a choice by the United States to pass a law establishing a cost for global warming pollution. The House of Representatives has already passed legislation, with some Republican support, to take the first halting steps for pricing greenhouse gas emissions.

Later this week, Senators John Kerry, Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman are expected to present for consideration similar cap-and-trade legislation.

I hope that it will place a true cap on carbon emissions and stimulate the rapid development of low-carbon sources of energy.

We have overcome existential threats before. Winston Churchill is widely quoted as having said, “Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes, you must do what is required.” Now is that time. Public officials must rise to this challenge by doing what is required; and the public must demand that they do so — or must replace them.

Al Gore, the vice president from 1993 to 2001, is the founder of the Alliance for Climate Protection and the author of “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.” As a businessman, he is an investor in alternative energy companies.

ObamaCare ... this just says it all

2010-02-23T15:13:00.002-05:00

All the blowhard liberal phonies whining about inferior America's standing in healthcare compared to all other industrialized nations, whatever that means, is a bunch of BS smokescreen to justify the horrific healthcare agenda being forced on U.S. citizens by the Obama administration. The compare the U.S. unfavorably to Canada, UK, Denmark, and plenty of other supposed paragons of health care that just happened to embrace socialist medical coverage.

Any thinking person that can get an appointment at any doctor for any ailment at nearly any time knows this is moronic. And anyone who claims this is only available to the wealthiest Americans, and then launches into all that claptrap about 35 million uninsured Americans, is a liar trying to sell you something even they don't want.

This article about Canadian Premier Danny Williams going to have a routine heart procedure in Florida, in lieu of having it done in Canda, where the only form of the procedure would involve waiting in line behind those others waiting for the surgery, and then having to settle for an invasive surgery that is no longer given in the United States because it is highly invasive, involving broken bones and and considerable recovery, in enlightening.

Socialist healthcare EVERYWHERE is no different. By messing around with doctor fees, limiting specialties, removing incentives for innovation and excellence in medical care is a fairly predictable formula for diminished quality and availability of medical care. This is exactly what Obama and the fools he sees eye to eye with want to foist on me and you. Forget the fact that it would not apply to any member of Congress or the Obama administration, it will literally wreck a health care system that stands as the nearly unattainable standard of the world -- liars like Michael Moore be damned.

Read between the lines of the article to follow, and try not to chortle bitterly when considering the outcome will be of what our elected, liberal, Democrat idiots think is for our own good.

My heart, my choice,' Williams says, defending decision for U.S. heart surgery
By Tara Brautigam (CP) – 19 hours ago

An unapologetic Danny Williams says he was aware his trip to the United States for heart surgery earlier this month would spark outcry, but he concluded his personal health trumped any public fallout over the controversial decision.
In an interview with The Canadian Press, Williams said he went to Miami to have a "minimally invasive" surgery for an ailment first detected nearly a year ago, based on the advice of his doctors.

"This was my heart, my choice and my health," Williams said late Monday from his condominium in Sarasota, Fla.

"I did not sign away my right to get the best possible health care for myself when I entered politics."
The 60-year-old Williams said doctors detected a heart murmur last spring and told him that one of his heart valves wasn't closing properly, creating a leakage.

He said he was told at the time that the problem was "moderate" and that he should come back for a checkup in six months.
Eight months later, in December, his doctors told him the problem had become severe and urged him to get his valve repaired immediately or risk heart failure, he said.

His doctors in Canada presented him with two options - a full or partial sternotomy, both of which would've required breaking bones, he said.

He said he spoke with and provided his medical information to a leading cardiac surgeon in New Jersey who is also from Newfoundland and Labrador. He advised him to seek treatment at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami.
That's where he was treated by Dr. Joseph Lamelas, a cardiac surgeon who has performed more than 8,000 open-heart surgeries.

Williams said Lamelas made an incision under his arm that didn't require any bone breakage.

"I wanted to get in, get out fast, get back to work in a short period of time," the premier said.
Williams said he didn't announce his departure south of the border because he didn't want to create "a media gong show," but added that criticism would've followed him had he chose to have surgery in Canada.

"I would've been criticized if I had stayed in Canada and had been perceived as jumping a line or a wait list. ... I accept that.

That's public life," he said.

"(But) this is not a unique phenomenon to me. This is something that happens with lots of families throughout this country, so I make no apologies for that."

Williams said his decision to go to the U.S. did not reflect any lack of faith in his own province's health care system.
"I have the utmost confidence in our own health care system in Newfoundland and Labrador, but we are just over half a million people," he said.

"We do whatever we can to provide the best possible health care that we can in Newfoundland and Labrador. The Canadian health care system has a great reputation, but this is a very specialized piece of surgery that had to be done and I went to somebody who's doing this three or four times a day, five, six days a week."

He quipped that he had "a heart of a 40-year-old, so that gives me 20 years new life," and said he intends to run in the next provincial election in 2011.

"I'm probably going to be around for a long time, hopefully, if God willing," he said.

"God forbid for the Canadian public I won't be around longer than ever."

Williams also said he paid for the treatment, but added he would seek any refunds he would be eligible for in Canada.

"If I'm entitled to any reimbursement from any Canadian health care system or any provincial health care system, then obviously I will apply for that as anybody else would," he said.

"But I wrote out the cheque myself and paid for it myself and to this point, I haven't even looked into the possibility of any reimbursement. I don't know what I'm entitled to, if anything, and if it's nothing, then so be it."

He is expected back at work in early March.

Copyright © 2010 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Scariest Superbowl Commercial

2010-02-08T09:05:00.007-05:00

I wonder what Audi was thinking when they made this commercial. It made me wish I could buy an Audi just to push it off a cliff. It also made me wonder how many green goons were left drooling in their tofu dip after seeing this horrifying vision of environmental dystopia.

UPDATE: I'm relieved to discover that I'm far from alone in what I thought of Audi's terrifying, unfunny commercial last night.

I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, President.

2010-01-26T19:24:00.003-05:00

It's an Obama world, and you're just along for the ride.

From Breitbart

1/19/2010 = 9/11/2001 = ?

2010-01-19T17:43:00.011-05:00

Gematrias. Eh. It could be that I'm bad at math, which I am. It could be the allowable margin of error that places the right swoon over the right sum. Either way, I'm inclined to be skeptical of spiritual prognosticators with calculators.

And yet, today's date, 1-19-2010, which has the same numbers as 9-11-2001, gave me pause. Considering the clash of civilizations taking place today in Massachusetts, the two dates having the same numerical value strikes me as ironic, or just further proof that G-d has one heavenly (or helluva) sense of humor.

It's reasonable to predict that unless Pelosi, Reid, and President Obama reveal themselves to be laser-wielding aliens who threaten to incinerate Congress if their suicidal health bill isn't passed, a Brown win in Mass, will send terrified Democrats running for the exits.

The events of 9-11-2001 were the start of the enduring tragedy that set this country down a path that only becomes more twisted and dark as we progress. I'm praying that, Venahapach Hu, the events of 1-19-2010, namely a historic vote that brings down Obama's HealthCare Frankenstein monster, will signal a genuine turning point for this country, away from ideological insanity and political self-immolation, back to being a great, proud, resourceful, and constructive nation.

Unsettled Science ...

2009-12-02T18:58:00.004-05:00

The talks at Copenhagen are expected to find ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions globally.

But Professor Ian Plimer, said that to stop climate change Governments should find ways to prevent changes to the Earth’s orbit and ocean currents and avoid explosions of supernovae in space.

Of the saga of the leaked emails, he said: “If you have to argue your science by using fraud, your science is not valid.”

I hope Al Gore is hiding under a bed.

Grinch-in-Chief

2009-11-19T11:11:00.005-05:00

Fulfilling his campaign promise to cut Federal spending, President Obama's White House has halved the number of Jewish guests traditionally invited to the annual White House Chanukah celebration.

Millions of Jewish voters, whose fervent support in November 2008 propeled Mr. Obama to the White House, however, understand that this ponderous affront is a reasonable sacrifice that will allow the administration to maintain current spending levels on more vital national expenditures like this, this, this, this, and this.

Rogue Reader

2009-11-18T10:39:00.003-05:00

When asked by reporters in Beijing if he plans to read "Going Rouge," the new book written by Sarah Palin, President Obama answered that "he probably won't read it."

Hang on a moment. Sarah Palin is the former Vice Presidential candidate, currently an extremely visible political figure, and is the public face of an increasingly vocal wave of energized Republican Conservative activism fueled directly by Obama administration policies and perceived excesses.

Certainly there must be a dozen WH staffers tearing the book apart so they can start digging as much rebuttal mud they can possibly find. So, yes, technically, the president may not read it.

But does he really want to appear that dense by implying he has no interest in what is already a bestseller? It was dopey enough to hear of Robert Gibbs' smug claim that the president "wasn't even watching election returns." The administration's myopic posturing is childish. And an insult to our intelligence.

The president must think this is high school, and he's just too cool to care.

Really. Who's advising this guy?

Puff the Magic President

2009-11-06T13:07:00.004-05:00

Barack Obama was elected because he's a good pubic speaker. Oddly, his reportedly remarkable oratorical talent seems to come and go like a distant radio signal. His speeches range from riveting to ridiculous, with broad gaps in between.

Yesterday was one of his ridiculous days. Unfortunately for the President, his latest valley of eloquence had to come on the a day a crazed army psychiatrist stationed at Fort Hood, Texas shot and killed 13 people, and injured over 30.

Instead of stepping to the podium with a sober tone, comforting and reassuring a nation that traditionally looks to its president for strength and stability in times of tragedy, the President began thanking a list of people for their role in organizing a conference most Americans knew nothing about. It wasn't brief.

The president kept going for nearly two and a half minutes, thanking people, drawing applause, smiling to the crowd, and seemingly unaware of the tragedy had just taken place.

Then, just as he finished pledging undying support to the invisible audience, his off-the-cuff suddenly shifted from jocular to jeremiad. Like an actor getting into character, he lowered the tone of his voice and ticked off the known specifics of the shooting. Halting and atonal, he offered perfunctory condolences and a form-letter pledge of promised government assistance. Not forgetting to remind everyone who he is, he noted that because he's the Commander in Chief, he 'll everything possible to find out what happened, and why.

The thing is, President Obama is not a very good actor. When caught unprepared, his voice turns tentative and flat. Words stumble from his mouth in random, hurky jerky clumps that draw attention from what he's saying to how. When Mr. Charisma loses his mojo, you'll hear more sincerity coming from the gas company's phone reception loop than the presidential podium.

His facial expression revealed no emotion or expression. He was reading from notes and referring to them every sentence or two. He seemed more preoccupied with getting through the speech than why he was giving it.

There you have it. Millions of people voted to elect a president who's key qualification was the ability to give a humdinger of a speech. What will happen when they to understand that without a teleprompter and days of practice, the president sounds like an utter boob?

If you want to listen to someone with something to say, check this out.

The Muslim Murder Gene

2009-11-06T08:32:00.006-05:00

I've said it before: there is some genetic tripwire unique to Muslims that makes them murder and maim. Maybe it's nature. Maybe it's nurture. Maybe it's both. But it's there, it's real, and it's a grave danger to every civilized society.

I write this in response to the horrific shooting spree that took place yesterday, at the Fort Hood army base in Texas. My immediate thought was that it was a Muslim. I knew what was coming the moment the news anchor said, "the shooter is reported to be..." [insert Muslim name].

Once again, a Muslim in the military, a psychiatrist, no less, opens fire on fellow soldiers, despite there being no significant indication of that murderous potential. As if on cue, the apologists and morally retarded ponderously insist that this tragedy is no different that those three or four obscure incidents involving American, non-Muslim soldiers who go postal.

The argument proves nothing. Much like the specious scum who invoke Timothy McVeigh and the KKK to every inference of the connection between Islam, terrorism and your run-of-the-mill barbarity.

We learn in statistics that correlation does not indicate causation. The mathematical model for the unique Jewish concept of Havei dam L'kaf z'chus -- not to judge the actions of others.

On the other hand, the conventional wisdom that "If it walks like a duck," and "If there's smoke there's fire," is wise indeed. Why take chances for the sake of intellectual restraint. Just because we shouldn't draw conclusions based on correlative data doesn't mean we should to avoid taking measures to protect ourselves.

If the pit bull down the block attacked several people, it's possible they provoked the attack. But that shouldn't stop me from avoiding the danger by taking another route.

Just last week, the news reported that a Muslim man ran over his daughter with a car, because he felt she was becoming too "Westernized."

Also last week, a Muslim woman in Staten Island slashed her sleeping husband's throat because he forced her to dress provocatively and eat pork; serious violations of her Islamic beliefs. Forcing anyone to violate their religious beliefs is a serious issue; not to be taken lightly. But, even when plausibly justified, to respond with murder, and in such a gruesome manner, is largely atypical.

But not among Muslims.

In 2009, Americans have become more familiar with a savage Muslim custom known as "honor killings." For the uninitiated, an honor killing involves the brutal murder, and mutilation of a young Muslim woman, who is known or suspected to be engaged in any number of un-Islamic behavior, by her father. Or her brother, uncle, or a male cousin (and occasionally her mother). Islam's apologists usually offer meandering gauze to prove that honor killings violate Muslim tenets, occur very rarely, and even then, among the minority of radicals that are found in every society and every religion.

I highly doubt that.

When the equivalent "un-Behavior" occurs in a Jewish family, they sit shiva; Catholics pray; Protestants sulk and drink; and most other people shrug and accept. Muslims murder.

Last year, a prominent Muslim businessman in upstate New York, the founder of an Islamic television station and described as a "moderate," decapitated his wife. The atrocity is mind-numbing. And, yet, unsurprising.

In the earlier stages of the Iraq war, Western civilization was horrified when al-Quada terrorist began kidnapping American soldiers, reporters, and contractors, and while laughing and chanting slogans, sawed off their heads on video, and held the decapitated head up to the camera like a baseball trophy.

American citizens were going white and feeling wobbly as they considered this demonic atrocity. My good friend was talking to his Muslim-American mechanic, and asked what he thought. My friend knows this mechanic, who is an American citizen, for nearly a decade. He always thought that their friendship was proof that, with a little respect and understanding, Jews and Muslims could get along just fine.

His mechanic's thoughts shocked him. He had no thoughts. Or anger. Or opinion. He just said, calmly, distractedly, "We should pray."

We should pray. We should pray that these Muslims take their murderous genes and predisposed hatred for life and universal freedom, and go away.

It's a Green Eyed Fraud...

2009-11-03T08:40:00.006-05:00

It's astounding that Liberal skunks like Al Gore and the NY Times refuse to acknowledge the definition of "conflict of interest."

It's an old story that Al Gore is positioned to earn millions, if not billions, of dollars from legislation that results from his phony Global Warming hysterics.

It's galling, but no surprise, when the NY Times finally reports Gore's financial motives for this global con, the devotes the article to validating Gore's outrageous justifications, minimizing Gore's cynical greed, and painting his public thievery as altruism.

It's true that Gore is not an elected official, and has every legal right to spout any nonsense he wants, and to profit from said nonsense in any way possible.

It's no different than your run-of-the-mill, dirtbag televangelist who claims to heal the sick, talks in tongues until his followers swoon, and then prays all the way to the bank.

But it is a problem when once-Presidential Candidate and former-Vice-President Al Gore uses his considerable access and influence to lobby the President, the Senate, and Members of Congress to pass massive "Green Legislation," from which he will personally net earning in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

It's unconscionable that protecting Gore's investments will be directly linked to bilking billions of dollars from helpless, middle-class chumps through higher taxes, tightening regulations, and across-the-board higher costs for energy and manufactured goods.

It's outrageous that Gore's spectacular fraud is being ignored or shrugged away by the most influential members of the media.

It's criminal that so many are letting Gore to get away with it.

Down with -ism!!!

2009-10-23T13:03:00.002-04:00

"Democracy isn't perfect and freedom isn't everywhere - but we never had to build a wall to keep our people in" - JFK

Something to look forward to...

2009-10-07T22:55:00.002-04:00

This article from the UK is a raw look on what happens when the government becomes inextricably entwined with healthcare.

Obama and his band of mealy-mouthed liars want you to believe that US healthcare is substandard compared to other industrialized nations. You'd have to be crazy to believe them. Not to mention, suicidal.

Jimmy Carter hates White People

2009-09-16T10:16:00.003-04:00

Former-President Jimmy Carter and President Barack Obama have a lot in common: they're both arrogant, humorless, clueless, elitist wonks.

The only difference between them is that Jimmy Carter is white and President Obama is black. Unfortunately for Mr. Carter, while the fact that he's white is never, ever mentioned, Mr. Obama being black is a fact the media is making sure we will never, ever forget.

And this makes Jimmy Carter VERY jealous.

Why?

Because President Obama's permanent escape route from criticism that he's driving this country over a cliff, is that his critics are lying racists. Meanwhile, the only possible way Jimmy Carter can justify the unprecedented atrocity that was his presidency, is that he's a complete moron.

When Jimmy Carter makes comments such these, he probably closes his eyes and wishes someone was saying it about him.

Ronald Reagan on ObamaCare...

2009-08-14T09:51:00.003-04:00

Ronald Reagan knew the score on ObamaCare before Barack Obama was born:

And in the immortal words of Shlomo Hamelech: There's nothing new under the sun.

Something's Fishy...

2009-08-14T08:06:00.011-04:00

Last week, Linda Douglass, the communications director for the White Houses Health Reform Office, posted a YouTube video (below) to announce the creation of an email address which private citizens could use to forward "scary chain emails" and breathless claims online that contain "disinformation" (note the subtle doublespeak overtone)," deceiving headlines," and other 'fishy" information that oppose the Obama administration's brutish campaign to eradicate the health insurance industry, and thereby redefine the concept of healthcare in the United States.

Her chiding tone, condescending explanation of how information is "distorted," and disingenuous insistence that any opposing arguments are simply the work of dissident "fear mongers" who wish for nothing less than to deprive helpless poor people of access to medical treatment of any sort is bone-chilling. The basis of her claim and the video itself is unsettlingly fishy.

Actually, the whole lot of "healthcare reform" proponents are nothing but fishy (NOTE: the use of the term "healthcare reform" is a blatant deception, as the initial legislation is taking aim at insurance providers. Only then will sights be set on changing healthcare. By then, it will be too late for anyone to object, as the government will control the pursestrings).

Their fishy generalities and doubletalk, paeans to fairness and efficiency, sketchy calculations and speculative optimism I hear from elected officials and slavish Obama supporters are ponderously unhelpful, illogical, and above all, thoroughly unconvincing. They accept the "57 million uninsured Americans" claim as with same unquestioning certainty as I would the expiration date on a container of milk. And present this very fishy number as the basis, logic, and concluding argument of the entire debate.

I doubt many of the proponents fully understand what a "single-payer" system entails, or consider it fishy that the legislators rocketing forward with this abortion of reform are not, and will never be subjected to the excesses or failures of their doing. Members of Congress, the Senate, and all other political leaders of notable standing are given free health coverage in perpetuity.

Instead, they direct venom, distortions, aspersions, assumptions, accusations, and every means available to obfuscate the issue, delegitimize its detractors' arguments, and stifle genuine debate on the merits or shortcomings of this plan.

Their unwillingness of the administration, media pundits, and supporters to engage opposing views with any response that extends beyond smarmy sound-bites and smirky ripostes is extremely fishy. It would seem as if the administration has taken a few pages from the Catholic Church playbook to keep information at a minimum and govern through guilt and threats of repercussion.

I don't think the cartoon posted below says it all, but it sure says a lot:

SOURCE: www.farleftside.com

If you want to see what I mean, read some of the comments on digg.com, where I found this cartoon, and not the number of diggs -- positive or negative -- next to comments that support or object this abominable plan.

ObamaCare makes me wonder...

2009-08-03T16:44:00.005-04:00

I wonder ...

Is Obama working to institute government control of our nation's healthcare system to limit healthcare access for seniors, which will decrease life expectancy, which will help solve the looming threat of Social Security and Medicare insolvency?

Tom Daschle has already said that seniors should "be more accepting of the conditions that come with age instead of treating them."

Does Daschle want to create a de facto healthcare policy that causes people to die younger?

Obama promises that his proposed system will save money. A lower national life expectancy would certainly reduce the need for expensive, "unnecessary" healthcare. It will certainly reduce the burden on social security. It also allows the government to collect estate taxes sooner and more frequently.

What about recently resurgent fears about global overpopulation? Lower life expectancy would certainly help to alleviate that problem.

Is the goal of Obama's healthcare plan to cause boomers to die at younger ages?

I wonder ...

So that's the way it is...

2009-07-20T20:09:00.003-04:00

Anyone familiar with the comments left on Vos Iz Neias knows that half the comments come from idiot peasants who have no education and zero intelligence. Generations of inbreeding will do that to you.

While reading the comments on this post, I suddenly realized why Chareidi rabbonim are so vocal in their opposition to frum Jews having internet access. They know their followers are mindless cretins, and they're desperate to prevent everyone else from finding out.

Attention: ARABS ARE BEASTS. That is all.

2009-07-09T17:12:00.003-04:00

Read the story below. There is no justification for this ghastly crime. The actions of these two animals can be explained simply as so much more of the demonic bloodlust stamped into arab DNA.

Arabs , and more so devout Muslim arabs, crave murder. Their visceral tug toward acts of brutal, bloody homicide is the single answer to every problem, grievance, frustration, or slight. Hatred, anger, grievances, lies, thievery, destructiveness, and poetic fantasies of blood soaked vengeance is an autonomous arab impulse.

It's some evolutionary quirk honed to provide a ready green light to commit unprovoked, craven butchery at a moment's notice.

Some people dream of money. Others dream of sex. Arabs dream of murder.

I simply do not believe there is an arab lacking this itch, regardless of how deeply hidden it may be, and I'm certain that any arab reading this will immediately feel the urge to brutally kill me.

Jews reason. Arabs kill.

Palestinians say they killed cabbie for revenge
July 9, 2009
JERUSALEM (JTA) -- Two Palestinians confessed to killing an Israeli taxi driver for revenge.

Muhammad Khaldi and Muhammad Uda told Shin Bet interrogators that they murdered Gregory Rabinovich in May to avenge the death of a relative, an Islamic Jihad operative, at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces, according to reports.

The suspects were arrested May 23 by the Shin Bet, which lifted a gag order on the case Thursday.

Rabinovich was found strangled near the northern town of Gan Yavne.

Khaldi and Uda, of the West Bank village of Arana near Jenin, were charged with Rabinovich's murder in Petach Tikvah District Court.

(Now) I Shop at Trader Joe's

2009-06-21T08:39:00.004-04:00

I just read about Trader Joe's principled stand against Anti-Israel activists demanding that Israeli products be removed from their store shelves.

As happy as I am for this rejection of Anti-Israel activism, I equally appreciate the willingness of a national chain to defy political pressure when other retailers might have easily made the spineless business decision to fold.

There is a Trader Joe's in my neighborhood and I will start shopping there more often. In the event that you may choose to do the same, I've provided a list of many Trader Joe's store locations.

CONNECTICUT

Danbury*
113 Mill Plain Rd.
Danbury, CT 06811
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 203-739-0098

Darien*
436 Boston Post Rd.
Darien, CT 06820
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 203-656-1414

Fairfield*
2258 Black Rock Turnpike
Fairfield, CT 06825
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 203-330-8301

Orange*
560 Boston Post Road
Orange, CT 06477
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 203-795-5505

West Hartford*
1489 New Britain Ave.
West Hartford, CT 06110
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 860-561-4771

Westport*
400 Post Road East
Westport, CT 06880
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 203-226-8966

DELAWARE

Wilmington*
5605 Concord Pike
Wilmington, DE 19803
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 302-478-8494

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA/ MARYLAND

Washington DC
1101 25th Street NW
Washington, DC 20037
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 202-296-1921

Annapolis*
160 F Jennifer Road
Annapolis, MD 21401
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 410-573-0505

Bethesda*
6831 Wisconsin Avenue
Bethesda, MD 20815
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 301-907-0982

Columbia*
6610 Marie Curie Dr. (Int. of 175 & 108)
Elkridge, MD 21075
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 410-953-8139

Gaithersburg*
18270 Contour Rd.
Gaithersburg, MD 20877
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 301-947-5953

Pikesville*
1809 Reisterstown Road, Suite #121
Pikesville, MD 21208
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 410-484-8373

Rockville*
12268-H Rockville Pike
Rockville, MD 20852
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 301-468-6656

Silver Spring*
10741 Columbia Pike
Silver Spring, MD 20901
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 301-681-1675

Towson*
1 E. Joppa Rd.
Towson, MD 21286
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 410-296-9851

MASSACHUSETTS

Acton*
145 Great Road
Acton, MA 01720
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 978-266-8908

Arlington*
1427 Massachusetts Ave.
Arlington, MA 02476
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 781-646-9138

Boston*
899 Boylston Street
Boston, MA 02115
Trading Hours: 9 am - 10 pm
Phone: 617-262-6505

Brookline
1317 Beacon Street
Brookline, MA 02446
Trading Hours: 9 am - 10 pm
Beer & Wine Sales: 9 am- 10 pm Mon-Sat
12 pm - 10 pm Sun
Phone: 617-278-9997

Burlington*
51 Middlesex Turnpike
Burlington, MA 01803
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 781-273-2310

Cambridge
748 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA 02139
Trading Hours: 9 am - 10 pm
Beer & Wine Sales: 9 am - 10 pm Mon-Sat
12 pm - 10 pm Sun
Phone: 617-491-8582

Framingham
659 Worcester Road
Framingham, MA 01701
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Beer & Wine Sales: 9 am- 9 pm Mon-Sat
12 pm - 9 pm Sun
Phone: 508-935-2931

Hadley*
375 Russell Street
Hadley, MA 01035
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 413-587-3260

Hanover*
1775 Washington Street
Hanover, MA 02339
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 781-826-5389

Hyannis*
Christmas Tree Promenade
655 Route 132, Unit 4-A
Hyannis, MA 02601
Trading Hours: 9 am - 9 pm
Phone: 508-790-3008

Needham Hts*
958 Highland Avenue
Needham Hts, MA 02494
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 781-449-6993

Peabody*
300 Andover Street, Suite 15
Peabody, MA 01960
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 978-977-5316

Saugus*
358 Broadway, Unit B
(Shops @ Saugus, Rte. 1)
Saugus, MA 01906
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 781-231-0369

Shrewsbury*
77 Boston Turnpike
Shrewsbury, MA 01545
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 508-755-9560

Tyngsboro*
440 Middlesex Road
Tyngsboro, MA 01879
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 978-649-2726

West Newton*
1121 Washington St.
West Newton, MA 02465
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 617-244-1620

NEW JERSEY

Edgewater*
715 River Road
Edgewater, NJ 07020
Trading Hours: 9 am – 10 pm
Phone: 201-945-5932

Florham Park*
186 Columbia Turnpike
Florham Park, NJ 07932
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 973-514-1511

Marlton*
300 P Route 73 South
Marlton, NJ 08053
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 856-988-3323

Paramus*
404 Rt. 17 North
Paramus, NJ 07652
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 201-265-9624

Wayne*
1172 Hamburg Turnpike
Wayne, NJ 07470
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 973-692-0050

Westfield
155 Elm St.
Westfield, NJ 07090
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 908-301-0910

Westwood*
20 Irvington Street
Westwood, NJ 07675
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 201-263-0134

NEW YORK

Brooklyn
130 Court St
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 718-246-8460
Alcohol: Beer Only

Commack*
5010 Jericho Turnpike
Commack, NY 11725
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 631-493-9210

Hartsdale*
215 North Central Avenue
Hartsdale, NY 10530
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 914-997-1960

Hewlett*
1280 West Broadway
Hewlett, NY 11557
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 516-569-7191

Lake Grove*
137 Alexander Ave.
Lake Grove, NY 11755
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 631-863-2477

Larchmont*
1260 Boston Post Road
Larchmont, NY 10538
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 914-833-9110

Merrick*
1714 Merrick Road
Merrick, NY 11566
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 516-771-1012

New York (Union Square Grocery)
142 E. 14th St.
New York, NY 10003
Trading Hours: 9 am - 10 pm
Phone: 212-529-4612
Alcohol: Beer Only

New York (Union Square Wine)
138 E. 14th St.
New York, NY 10003
Trading Hours: 9 am - 10 pm Mon-Sat
12 pm - 9 pm Sun
Phone: 212-529-6326
Alcohol: Wine Only

Oceanside*
3418 Long Beach Rd.
Oceanside, NY 11572
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 516-536-9163

Plainview*
425 S. Oyster Bay Rd.
Plainview, NY 11803
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 516-933-6900

Queens*
90-30 Metropolitan Ave.
Queens, NY 11374
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 718-275-1791

Scarsdale*
727 White Plains Rd.
Scarsdale, NY 10583
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 914-472-2988

PENNSYLVANIA

Ardmore*
112 Coulter Avenue
Ardmore, PA 19003
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 610-658-0645

Jenkintown*
933 Old York Road
Jenkintown, PA 19046
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 215-885-5240

Media*
12 East State Street
Media, PA 19063
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 610-891-2752

North Wales*
1430 Bethlehem Pike (corner SR 309 & SR 63)
North Wales, PA 19454
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 215-646-5870

Philadelphia*
2121 Market Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103
Trading Hours: 9am - 10pm
Phone: 215-569-9282

Pittsburgh*
6343 Penn Ave.
Pittsburgh, PA 15206
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 412-363-5748

Wayne*
171 East Swedesford Rd.
Wayne, PA 19087
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 610-225-0925

RHODE ISLAND

Warwick*
1000 Bald Hill Rd
Warwick, RI 02886
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 401-821-5368

VIRGINIA

Alexandria 612 N. Saint Asaph Street
Alexandria, VA 22314
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 703-548-0611

Bailey’s Crossroads
5847 Leesburg Pike
Bailey’s Crossroads, VA 22041
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 703-379-5883

Centreville
14100 Lee Highway
Centreville, VA 20120
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 703-815-0697

Fairfax
9464 Main Street
Fairfax, VA 22031
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 703-764-8550

Falls Church
7514 Leesburg Turnpike
Falls Church, VA 22043
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 703-288-0566

Newport News
12551 Jefferson Ave., Suite #179
Newport News, VA 23602
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 757-890-0235

Reston
11958 Killingsworth Ave.
Reston, VA 20194
Trading Hours: 9 am - 9 pm
Phone: 703-689-0865

Richmond (Short Pump)
11331 W Broad St, Ste 161
Glen Allen, VA 23060
Trading Hours: 9 am - 9 pm
Phone: 804-360-4098

Springfield
6394 Springfield Plaza
Springfield, VA 22150
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 703-569-9301

Virginia Beach
503 Hilltop Plaza
Virginia Beach, VA 23454
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 757-422-4840

Williamsburg
5000 Settlers Market Blvd (corner of
Monticello and Settlers Market)
Williamsburg, VA 23188
Trading Hours: 9 am – 9 pm
Phone: 757-259-2135

*For accurate driving directions on the
web, please use 5224 Monticello Ave.

If you were going to see the President...

2009-05-22T16:55:00.005-04:00

Our whole lives, we've been fed that classic guilt trip about coming late to davening: "If you were going to see the President of the United States, you'd make sure to be on time. But for the Master of the Universe, your Creator, you come late? Shaygetz!"

But it sure would be fun to say, "Well, I DID go to see the POTUS, and I DID come late." Now, if I were invited to meet the President of the United States, I'd make sure to be on time, even if I still come late to davening.

But these kids (article pasted below) have a lifelong get-out-of-guilt-free card (If any of them are Jewish, they just may enjoy the chance to use it).

(By the way, when you click through to the link, make sure to read through the comments. It's delightful to know that Democrats and liberals have developed such a yen for personal responsibility.)

Sobbing Kindergarteners Snubbed for Steelers?
Kids locked out of White House; officials say they were too late

Picture caption reads: President Obama enjoys his new Steelers jersey after making children cry.

By ANNE REYNOLDS
Updated 11:19 AM EDT, Fri, May 22, 2009

Thursday was supposed to be the highlight of the year for more than 100 kindergarteners from Stafford County, Va. They got up early and took a chartered bus to the White House for a school field trip. But when they arrived, all the 5-year-olds got was a lesson in disappointment.

A group of young students didn't get to tour the White House, and they say it's because of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

The buses from Conway Elementary arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue a little later than planned, and they were locked out.

"We were going to the White House, but we couldn’t get in so I felt sad," 5-year-old Cameron Stine said.

Parents say they were just 10 minutes late for their scheduled tour. School officials say White House staff said they needed to get ready for the president's event with the Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers, so they couldn't come in.

"I was angry cause they were disappointed," parent and chaperone Paty Stine said.

The Steelers and the Obama administration used their time together to create 3,000 care packages for U.S. troops as part of a Wounded Warriors initiative.

A lot of preparing had gone into the trip. Conway Elementary teachers had been planning the trip for months, each child paid $20 for a seat on the chartered bus, and names were submitted to the White House for clearance.

Parents say they tried to make it on time, but their chartered buses hit heavy traffic that slowed them down substantially. They thought they were supposed to show up by 10:15, but they say they arrived at 10:25 instead, and couldn’t get in.

"The person who headed this White House trip up came out and said, 'I’m sorry, the White House tour's off.' There were a lot of crying kids," parent Barbara Stine said.

The White House tells a slightly different story. A spokesperson said the group was actually supposed to be there at 9:30, but they held the gates for the group until 10:30, 15 minutes longer than they told the group, but when they still hadn't arrived, they had to draw the line.
Paty Stine said the White House staff should have made an exception. She feels the kindergarteners were snubbed for the Steelers.

"Here we have President Obama and his administration saying, 'Here we are for the common, middle class people,' and here he is not letting 150 5- and 6-year-olds into the White House because he’s throwing a lunch for a bunch of grown millionaires," Stine said.

Thursday night the White House released this statement: "The President and First Lady are dedicated to opening the doors of the White House to the public, and it is unfortunate to see young people miss a tour. The visitor’s office is already working to reschedule the group."

Parents say it's probably too late. The school year ends in a few weeks and they doubt the tour can be made up in that time.

Happy Earth Day (chumps)

2009-04-24T14:07:00.003-04:00

Enjoy this delightful Earth Day greeting from the late George Carlin.*

Contains some foul language

Obama is Oblowing it

2009-03-13T09:56:00.002-04:00

Can you visualize one trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000)? I couldn't. Then the good folks at Mint.com make it a bit easier to see why Obama is Oblivious.

At least the financial catastrophe was called off.

One question: if things are "not as bad as we think," then why is he "signing an imperfect omnibus bill because it's necessary for the ongoing functions of government"?

Who is this guy fooling?

Global Warming went to see a man about a horse

2009-03-02T22:24:00.004-05:00

It makes perfect sense. With the worldwide hysteria of Global Warming cooling off due to the most inconvenient cooling trend of the last few years, Orthodox Climatologists are now convinced that Global Warming -- which really, really, really, really does exist, and is really, really, really, really caused by evil humans (READ: Republicans) -- is taking a break.

No. Really.

Global Warming: On Hold?
Michael Reilly, Discovery News

Warming, What Warming?

March 2, 2009 -- For those who have endured this winter's frigid temperatures and today's heavy snowstorm in the Northeast, the concept of global warming may seem, well, almost wishful.
But climate is known to be variable -- a cold winter, or a few strung together doesn't mean the planet is cooling. Still, according to a new study, global warming may have hit a speed bump and could go into hiding for decades.

Now this is entirely reasonable. Apparently, Global Warming is shy. Must be all the attention it's been getting these last few years.

Earth's climate continues to confound scientists. Following a 30-year trend of warming, global temperatures have flatlined since 2001 despite rising greenhouse gas concentrations, and a heat surplus that should have cranked up the planetary thermostat.

It's almost polite for the article to to admit that the Earth's climate continues to confound scientists. According to Al Gore, scientists know everything, unless they happen to be disagreeing with him. I also find it funny to read the incredulous, "Should have cranked up the planetary thermostat."

"This is nothing like anything we've seen since 1950," Kyle Swanson of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee said. "Cooling events since then had firm causes, like eruptions or large-magnitude La Ninas. This current cooling doesn't have one."

Now, everybody, calm down. I'm sure there's a perfectly good explanation for this. How could there not? Scientists, after all, are paid by their grant awards to know everything:

How does this square with temperature records from 2005-2007, by some measurements among the warmest years on record? When added up with the other four years since 2001, Swanson said the overall trend is flat, even though temperatures should have gone up by 0.2 degrees Centigrade (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) during that time.

The discrepancy gets to the heart of one of the toughest problems in climate science -- identifying the difference between natural variability (like the occasional March snowstorm) from human-induced change.

But just what's causing the cooling is a mystery. Sinking water currents in the north Atlantic Ocean could be sucking heat down into the depths. Or an overabundance of tropical clouds may be reflecting more of the sun's energy than usual back out into space.

"It is possible that a fraction of the most recent rapid warming since the 1970's was due to a free variation in climate," Isaac Held of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton, New Jersey wrote in an email to Discovery News. "Suggesting that the warming might possibly slow down or even stagnate for a few years before rapid warming commences again." Swanson thinks the trend could continue for up to 30 years."

So either this fabricated hysteria is 30 years too early, or Global Warming is NOT the most urgent issue of our generation. But fortunately...

"...he warned that it's just a hiccup, and that humans' penchant for spewing greenhouse gases will certainly come back to haunt us."

(READ: We'd better act now before the Republicans win back control of the government.)

"When the climate kicks back out of this state, we'll have explosive warming," Swanson said. "Thirty years of greenhouse gas radiative forcing will still be there and then bang, the warming will return and be very aggressive."

Or so he hopes. (READ: S’iz shver tzu zein a climatologist*)

* It’s hard to be a climatologist.

Were you invited to the White House yet?

2009-03-02T10:09:00.008-05:00

The piffle that passes for news these days is astonishing. The story below was distributed by the Associated Press and presented as news.

Seems that ever since the Obama family occupied the White House, it's become quite a social environment -- social as in cocktail parties, concerts, conga lines, cheerful get-togethers, and various sumptuous feasts (so nice of us to foot the bill).

I have no problem with the President living it up. Even if the nation is on the verge of economic catastrophe (his words) and fighting two wars.

But I do have a problem with President Obama's specious explanation for his ramped up social schedule; and how this and other outrageous statements go virtually unchallenged by our curiously subdued national press.

President Obama says:

"The governors' dinner was "a great kickoff of what we hope will be an atmosphere here in the White House that is welcoming and that reminds everybody that this is the people's house," Obama told the state chief executives after they had dined on Maryland crab, Wagyu beef, Nantucket scallops and citrus salad."

Thanks for the reminder. Incredibly this steaming pile, complete with menu description, was preceded with this breathless commentary by the AP reporter:

"The flurry of entertaining is in keeping with the Obamas' promise to make the White House a more open place for everyone."

Did she have bamboo shoots in her fingernails when she said that? Maybe it was just the mesmerizing sincerity of this "Aw shucks" remark from the President:

"We are just temporary occupants. This is a place that belongs to the American people and we want to make sure that everybody understands it's open," he said.

Everyone understands it's open? Really? Perhaps I've neglected to check the mailbox for the invitation. It is possible my Evite to yuck it up at the White House for Wednesday night (that's party night at the WH) went straight to my spam folder? No wonder I've been spending Wednesday nights washing my hair.

It's nice the President and this AP reporter are in thrall of every word he says. But this (!!!???):

"Sometimes when you're in the presence of the most powerful person in the world, in the most powerful democracy in the world ... I was in awe that I was comfortable," said Honda, chairman of the Asian Pacific American Caucus. "I think that's his style and how he grew up, who he is. "He's down to earth and engaging," Honda said.

Fawning comments like these belong in the junk mail I get from Kupat Ha'ir. Certainly not a mainstream wire service.

And this must have come from Pravda:

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn, said Obama was very cordial, and he and the first lady made guests feel comfortable. The president talked to everyone before the game started, she said, including a 12-year-old boy who asked Obama where the bathroom was.

"My favorite part was when he personally served us cookies - oatmeal raisin - when we were watching the game," she said.

Am I still on same round, blue globe, or another planet altogether? Had someone repeated this lobotomized blather about our previous president, it would have triggered weeks of 24/7 scrutiny and commentary by major media outlets.

...not to mention, months of fodder for our suspiciously disinterested "F- You Corner" of bloggers, pundits, commentators, comedians, and your garden variety of frothing activists. Not a word.

It is possible they're too focused on bashing a man who is no longer president, and blaming all of life's ills in a legislative body which is no longer in the majority?

Better question: is this how all totalitarian regimes begin?

Here's the article. Just make sure you have a waterproof bag or bowl nearby:

Obama kicks up White House entertaining

Mar 2, 6:58 AM (ET)

By DARLENE SUPERVILLE

WASHINGTON (AP) - The White House is the place to be on Wednesdays.

Since the presidency changed hands less than six weeks ago, a burst of entertaining has taken hold of the iconic, white-columned home of America's head of state. Much of it comes on Wednesdays.

The stately East Room, where portraits of George and Martha Washington adorn the walls, was transformed into a concert hall as President Barack Obama presented Stevie Wonder with the nation's highest award for pop music on Wednesday.

A week before that, the foot-stomping sounds of Sweet Honey in the Rock, a female a cappella group, filled the East Room for a Black History Month program that first lady Michelle Obama held for nearly 200 sixth- and seventh-graders from around Washington.

Cocktails were sipped during at least three such receptions to date, all held on Wednesdays.

Bookending the midweek activity were a Super Bowl party for select Democratic and Republican lawmakers and a dinner for governors, the new administration's first black-tie affair. It was capped with a performance by the 1970s pop group Earth, Wind and Fire, and a conga line.
The flurry of entertaining is in keeping with the Obamas' promise to make the White House a more open place for everyone.

The governors' dinner was "a great kickoff of what we hope will be an atmosphere here in the White House that is welcoming and that reminds everybody that this is the people's house," Obama told the state chief executives after they had dined on Maryland crab, Wagyu beef, Nantucket scallops and citrus salad.

"We are just temporary occupants. This is a place that belongs to the American people and we want to make sure that everybody understands it's open," he said.

At the dinner in the State Dining Room, the Obamas looked comfortable, chatting and smiling with their guests. Afterward, they escorted the governors down the hall to the East Room, which had been arranged with few tables and chairs to encourage dancing to "September,""Boogie Wonderland" and other hits from a musical group Obama listened to growing up.
The conga line formed after the media were escorted out and, apparently, after Obama had called it a night.

"Thank you also for waiting until I had left before you started the conga line," the president told the governors the next morning. "I hear it was quite a spectacle."

Some Obama guests say he immediately puts them at ease. He indulges them and serves cookies, too.

"People like me felt comfortable in his presence," said Rep. Mike Honda, D-Calif., a self-described "poor country boy" who said he felt like a "freshman going to the senior prom" when he attended a White House reception for leaders of the congressional caucuses.

"Sometimes when you're in the presence of the most powerful person in the world, in the most powerful democracy in the world ... I was in awe that I was comfortable," said Honda, chairman of the Asian Pacific American Caucus. "I think that's his style and how he grew up, who he is.

"He's down to earth and engaging," Honda said.
Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., was among those invited for the Super Bowl. He said Obama, an avid sports fan, joined his guests for most of the game between the Arizona Cardinals and Pittsburgh Steelers.

"It wasn't a circumstance where he came in and said 'Hi' and then left," Franks said. "He actually stayed and watched the game."
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn, said Obama was very cordial, and he and the first lady made guests feel comfortable. The president talked to everyone before the game started, she said, including a 12-year-old boy who asked Obama where the bathroom was.

"My favorite part was when he personally served us cookies - oatmeal raisin - when we were watching the game," she said.
The gathering over hot dogs and hamburgers was one of several get-to-know-the-members-of Congress events Obama held as he lobbied lawmakers to support the nearly $800 billion tax-and-spend economic package he recently signed into law. His efforts produced no Republican votes in the House and just three in the Senate, but Franks said he still appreciated the Democratic president's efforts to reach out to the opposing party.

"I think the value of social interaction like this is not so much that it co-opts anyone in any way. It certainly didn't in my case," said Franks, who said he had a substantive conversation with Obama at the party, "I think it humanizes and personalizes opponents. We can diminish politics and try to work together for what's right for the country."

Obama played the role of "first fan" at the Wonder tribute, where he opened up about his and his wife's common enjoyment of Wonder's music.

"As Stevie knows, I'm a huge fan. And he has been a great supporter," Obama said before presenting the award-winning, singer-songwriter with the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song from the Library of Congress.

He said Wonder's songs "became the soundtrack of my youth" and that in them he "found peace and inspiration, especially in difficult times."

Obama presented the medal to Wonder, then wrapped the singer in a bear hug. As the media were led out of the room, Wonder struck up "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours," which was a staple of Obama's campaign rallies.

LOAN MODIFICATION IS A SCAM!!!

2009-02-25T22:26:00.004-05:00

Q: What do sub-prime mortgages, life insurance cash settlements, day-trading, Amway, selling cell-phones*, and car leasing* have in common?

A: They're all sleazy, get-rich-quick schemes that have proved uncommonly attractive to overly-uneducated, overly-unambitious Mesivta graduates.

Loan modification is a sleazy exploitative scam that preys on desperate people facing the loss of their homes. Loan modification companies are popping up in the NY area like zits on a 13-year-old.

I've posted an article from Crains describing what this is all about. I can close my eyes and just picture several people I know, who are no doubt feverishly at work to set themselves up in this scummy new cash cow.

If YOU'RE reading this -- you'd better not one of them:

Mortgage holders are marks

By Daniel Massey
Published: November 30, 2008 - 5:59 am

Shelly Ann Bell was only a month behind on her mortgage in August, but with the interest rate scheduled to adjust upward and $4,000-a-month payments staring her in the face, she knew it would soon be impossible to keep up.

So when the 28-year-old nurse manager got a call from a man promising to help modify the mortgage on her single-family home in Springfield Gardens, Queens, it sounded like a way out of her troubles.

She says she paid $2,150 to the Loan Modification Group, a Florida-based company, and was told to cease making monthly mortgage payments. She's now five months behind, and in danger of losing the home she bought in 2007 so her 3-year-old son could grow up with a backyard.

“I haven't gotten a loan modification,” she says. “I haven't gotten anything from them.” The company could not be reached for comment.

With citywide foreclosures up 50% over a year ago, some of the same bankers and brokers who sold unaffordable, subprime loans are now joining the rapidly growing ranks of mortgage modification consultants.

While some members of what an online ad called one of the “fastest-growing job markets in the country” run legitimate businesses, housing advocates say many are taking people's money and doing little or nothing in return.The burgeoning industry has caught the attention of the FBI's New York office and the state attorney general.

At best, loan modification companies provide homeowners with a service they could get for free from their lenders or nonprofit housing counselors, says the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Frequently, they ask homeowners for thousands of dollars up front, which is illegal in 12 states, including New York, unless the fee is made to a lawyer or nonprofit. As part of the sales pitch, homeowners are often advised to stop making mortgage payments, putting their homes in further jeopardy of foreclosure.

Often, the companies do little to facilitate an affordable mortgage modification, advocates say.

Firms bombard homeowners with mailings and phone calls; they scour public records for homeowners whose properties are in danger of being foreclosed, and they advertise on Craigslist.

“You see one here and there, and then all of a sudden you realize it's an epidemic,” says Jessica Attie, co-director of South Brooklyn Legal Services' Foreclosure Prevention Project. “They sound very appealing. It's hard for people to know many are not legitimate companies.”

Attorney Adam Cohen of MFY Legal Services' Foreclosure Prevention Project, says one of his clients paid nearly $5,500 to American Modification Agency, a Long Island company that also operates as Amerimod Modification Agency. He was drawn by a flier stating that AMA was the “only company that is registered, licensed, insured and bonded to modify mortgages in the United States that has a 100% success rate and money-back guarantee.”

That cloak of professionalism is misleading, as there is no way to be licensed as a mortgage modification consultant, Mr. Cohen says. And AMA not only failed to produce an affordable modification for his client, but it also caused the client to fall $30,000 behind on his mortgage by telling him not to make his payments, Mr. Cohen says.

John Schaefer, an attorney for AMA, says the client was already substantially behind in his payments and that the company was able to facilitate a modification within 22 days, which the client reneged on. As for the claims in the flier, an AMA spokesman says the agency had “no record of authorizing or authenticating” the leaflet.

The company, which claims to have 400 agents, has raised concern among officials in New Jersey, where the Mercer County clerk recently issued a consumer alert that AMA purported in phone solicitations to be working with the clerk's office.

Law enforcement agencies are zeroing in. The Illinois attorney general last month filed seven lawsuits against modification firms that failed to negotiate workouts for clients. And the Colorado attorney general has filed 15 cease-and-desist orders against such companies.

In New York, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's office is reviewing complaints, a spokeswoman says. The FBI's New York office is also investigating.

“We are aware of it and are working diligently to address the issue,” says Supervisory Special Agent Rachel Rojas. “This is a new scheme, and we assume it's going to get worse.”

Entire contents © 2009

* selling cell-phones and leasing cars are not inherently sleazy at all. But they were in the 80s, and late 90s, respectively, when opening a leasing company or a cell phone store became the career ambition of every smooth-talking conscience-deprived yeshiva boy on the East Coast.

Change We Can Believe In? Mission Accomplished!

2009-02-13T16:57:00.003-05:00

As far as fulfilling campaign promises go, no one can beat President Obama.

He based his whole campaign on a promise for change that ninnies the world over swallowed whole.

The good news is that the President just delivered said change. And it's the kind of change we're going to be choking on for generations to come.

Obesity be damned!!!

2009-01-01T12:53:00.005-05:00

Supporters of New York State Governor David Patterson's recently proposed tax levy on high-sugar content beverages, at an anti-obesity rally in Manhattan earlier this week.

MoC & stillwonderin': Modern Prophets of Doom?

2008-12-16T17:07:00.008-05:00

The prescience of MoChassid's recent series, "The Coming Crisis for Jewish Institutions," (II, III, IV) is hardly surprising.

As the immutable laws of financial physics dictate, the gravy train must end somewhere. The trouble begins when nonprofits and various other non-self-sustainers refuse to believe that gravy doesn't grow on the trees lining Central Avenue.

But what does amaze me is the breathtaking timing of MoC's series, having launched it mere days before Bernie Madoff forever redefined the term "smoke and mirrors."

As many of us now know, the list of Jewish charities and institutions that were heavily invested in Madoff's magic investment fund is staggering.

If it wasn't so stunning it would be funny: some of the biggest minds in Jewish nonprofit finance were essentially tossing boatloads of cash into a fountain and waiting for their wishes to come true.

My stomach hurts just thinking about it. It's a crisis, and it's already here.

What should amaze everyone else is that MoC and I caused all this to happen. MoC by bringing up the subject, and me for revealing what would bring the crisis. As you'll see in the image below, my comment made on the very first installment of "The Coming Crisis..." says it all.

Incidentally, I've been saying for years that the current assumptions of the Jewish nonprofit industry amounted to little more than a blatant Ponzi scheme. I like to be right. Just not always.

(By the way, the cynical naysayer who ridicules my miraculous prophesy just beneath my comment should be ashamed for doubting my powers.)

Lame duck, my a$$

2008-12-14T21:07:00.003-05:00

Check out President Bush's reflexes when the wacky Iraqi lobs his shoes at him.

In the video, GWB ducked twice, narrowly dodging the podiatric projectiles whizzing over his head. The guy moves and thinks quick, and kept his cool. In the thick of it, also had the presence of mind to wave off the Secret Service agent who sped to the lectern to, from what I read, remove the President from the room.

ADDED THOUGHT (12-16-08): I don't know what the deal is with the President's Secret Service detail, but we should all thankful that the reporter was holding a pair of shoes and not a pair of grenades.

Infant in Chief

2008-11-25T23:03:00.003-05:00

This sign is adorable. Does he have matching business cards, too?

Lazy Voters + Lazy Media = President Obama

2008-11-18T11:50:00.003-05:00

I know this is beating a dead horse, and I have no great love for Fox "Echo Chamber" News, but I found this funny and thoroughly unsurprising:

Greedy + Stupid = Stupider

2008-11-18T11:42:00.002-05:00

Meet the last person in the world to hear about the Nigerian bank scam. More accurately, meet the world's leading expert in the Nigerian bank scam.

Hatred with an O

2008-11-14T09:53:00.004-05:00

Why do liberals naturally veer toward groupthink and militant fascism? This Chicago girl* has no idea. But she does know what it's like to disagree with the open-minded, bipartisan, tolerant supporters of President-elect Obama.

* Stick around until the end of the clip to find out just what kind of person was being targeted by these narrow-minded Liberal bigots. Liberalism is not about loving and caring about others. It's about forcing Liberal beliefs down other people's throats and harassing anyone who dares to have their own opinion.

O what an asshole.

2008-11-11T11:52:00.006-05:00

More than two months BEFORE he enters office, Obama has already done much to demonstrate what an immature, vindictive leader he will prove to be.

By leaking details of his private conversations with President Bush, less than one full day after taking place, Obama and his clueless coterie are bolstering the concerns about his qualifications voiced during the campaign.

Unlike Democrats -- who seem to prefer being dead rather than to admit being wrong -- most Republicans are more than happy to be proven wrong about Obama. The twisting feeling I've had in my stomach since the day after the election indicates that we're not.

The matter of this leak is not trivial and only serves to vindicate those who expect much harder times times under the "rule" of a man who seems to be already proving he is less and less a glorific agent of hope and more and more a thoroughly inept Succah decoration.

A reminder to all you pie-in-the-sky, liberal bozos out there: Change goes both ways.

FROM DRUDGEREPORT.COM

BUSH ANGER: OBAMA AIDES LEAK CHAT DETAILS
Tue Nov 11 2008 09:28:10 ET

Just hours after President Bush and President-elect Obama met in the Oval Office of the White House, details of their confidential conversation began leaking out to the press, igniting anger from the president, sources claim.

"Senator Obama would be wise to keep close counsel," a top Bush source warned.

"BUSH AND OBAMA AT ODDS OVER AID FOR AUTO INDUSTRY," splashed the NEW YORK TIMES in an exclusive Monday evening, quoting "people familiar with the discussion."

The two met at the White House in private, without staff.

"Bush indicated at the meeting that he might support some aid and a broader economic stimulus package if Obama and congressional Democrats dropped their opposition to a free-trade agreement with Colombia," claimed the TIMES.

The ASSOCIATED PRESS quickly followed with details of the conversation, citing "aides who described the discussion on grounds of anonymity, citing the private nature of the meeting."

Bush advisers view the leaks as an effort to undermine the president's remaining days in office.

"Senator Obama may not be familiar with a long-standing tradition of presidents holding their private conversations, private," a senior adviser explained to the DRUDGE REPORT.

Developing...

O Give Me a Break

2008-11-10T09:07:00.004-05:00

Obama-mania is going beyond crazy and sets a frightening precedent for a very turbulent 4 years. The Obama worship has got to stop. It is bordering on pathological, Lubavitcher Rebbe (L'havdil) territory.

By the way ... take a look at what time these We Love Barack rallies are scheduled to be held, and for how long. Is anyone planning to work anymore?

Planning under way for Obama holiday

The Capital-Journal

Published Sunday, November 09, 2008

Plans are being made to promote a national holiday for Barack Obama, who will become the nation's 44th president when he takes the oath of office Jan. 20.

"Yes We Can" planning rallies will be at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. every Tuesday at the downtown McDonald's restaurant, 1100 Kansas Ave., until Jan. 13. The goals are to secure a national holiday in Obama's honor, to organize celebrations around his inauguration and to celebrate the 200th birthday of President Abraham Lincoln, who was born on Feb. 12 1809.

At 7:30 a.m. on Inauguration Day, Obama Cake will be served at the downtown McDonald's, and a celebration is scheduled for 8 p.m. to midnight Jan. 20 at the Ramada Hotel and Convention Center, 420 S.E. 6th.

Odoctrination

2008-11-07T00:03:00.000-05:00

Catch The Wave? Yes, We (easily) Can!

2008-11-06T23:01:00.007-05:00

Is this the hope we should believe in? If so, then God help us!...

PART I

PART II

Strange Brew

2008-11-06T15:29:00.001-05:00

There's something happening here.
What it is ain't exactly clear.

-- Buffalo Springfield

Yes, We (hope we) Can...

2008-11-06T07:45:00.003-05:00

I've been disappointed twice in this long presidential campaign.

Both times I saw worthy candidates proved faulty for their allegiance to classical campaign over-think: overly cautious campaign planners committed to messages and strategies that woefully undersold an otherwise brilliant candidate.

Surprisingly, they didn't grasp the lesson learned from Al Gore 2000: Be yourself.

Had John McCain been elected, given the chance, he would have gone down in history as one of America's greatest presidents. Placing so many good reasons aside, he is fundamentally endowed with the treasured traits of Americana: decency, generosity, humility, and pragmatism that lies bound with America's unique brand of pathological optimism.

McCain's concession speech encapsulated all of what he is, and underscored all he was reluctant to share during the campaign.

Sen. John McCain was the right man for the job in every way but timing. We'll never know how the world would look today had he clinched the nomination in 2000. Very different? Perhaps. But he didn't get the nomination in 2000. And he didn't win the presidency in 2008.

Behind the cynicism and bluster I'm just another mushy sentimentalist. The triumph of faith, kindness, and unity mists my eyes every time. I did not, and would not have voted for Obama. I freely shared those feelings on this blog.

To me, his associations with the liberal left wing are still a concern. The liberal left's theology about ecology, economy, society, sexuality, race, religion, free speech, and human rights, among others, scare me. I believe the left is as capable of cruel totalitarianism as the most extreme fringes of the right.

As I listened to Obama's victory speech, I was entranced and inspired, yet oddly unsettled by the gravity of his sway. I focused instead on my own private hope that Obama's soaring oratory would unite us as country without unleashing or lending credence to the worst excesses of the liberal left.

Watching as the camera panned the faces of black men, women, and children in the crowd, I felt something entirely different. There they stood, stone still, eyes dazed and dumbstruck, and radiating a joy that could only be caused by the discovery that the nation they knew as so unrepentantly racist, was instead so unfairly maligned.

Seeing their joy, I prayed they were gazing beyond the moment at a land of unrealized opportunity that belongs to anyone committed to making it their own.

I saw Jesse Jackson, tears running down his face, and I prayed his tears sprang from the realization that he and his exploitionist ilk were finally out of business. Or that his means to achieve a noble end had become grotesquely distorted, and would no longer do.

I saw somber, silenced Al Sharpton standing humbly behind the scenes at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta watching poll returns in quiet contemplation. I prayed he was thinking: "My role going forward is to help my own people remain fueled by this day to create and preserve functional, self-sustaining lives and communities."

I listened to reports describing throngs of jubilant black people dancing and singing in Chicago's Grant Park and through the streets in towns and cities across the United States. I heard no reports of violent, malevolently vindictive eruptions, despite what was predicted, and that I prayed would not happen.

I interpreted the tone of their celebrations as pride in this country; a sentiment I pray will infect the nation without veering into a climate of militant isolationism and distrust.

I felt the possibility that those who truly believe their nation and the system are stacked against them -- could discover that their potential lies within, and is worthy of finding.

I prayed that the poles of this nation would come to see that being right doesn't mean someone else must be wrong, and that elevating some doesn't have to come at the expense of others.

Watching Obama, joined on stage by his wife, children, Joe Biden and his family, I felt that an Obama presidency is a blank slate -- much like Obama himself -- leaving room for hope that our new president will focus his considerable ability to inspire this nation's citizens to rise above their hatred for one another for the sake of each other.

Yes, we can. Will we? We can always pray.

Time Magazine goes Country (Yossi)

2008-10-23T19:17:00.007-04:00

"Well, who are you gonna' believe, me or your own eyes?" -Chico Marx

About 51.1% of U.S. voters seem to be suffering the throes of a collective Barack Obama swoon. Unswooning voters are noting that such swooning is rarely seen beyond the borders of your average fascist society.

But one figures hard-bitten political beat reporters and commentators -- a crowd typically more cynical than your average game show host -- carry enough world-weary cynicism to resist such vapors.

Apparently not. Joe Klein, is a political commentator for Time Magazine. After years of writing for New York Magazine, among other publications, he gained notoriety for writing the "Anonymous" tome Primary Colors -- Klein's scathing tell-all about Bill Cinton's pants-down management style. Klein book was researched while he followed Clinton during his first presidential campaign trail in 1991. I would describe Klein as a journalist with a traditionally liberal outlook, but hardly a cheerleader.

...and oddly, reading his current column in Time Magazine (see below), Klein answers an unasked question: "Why Barak Obama is Winning," with giddy squeals of delight.

His article is really a list of breathless superlatives paired with lines of hagiologic Obama rhetoric . While reading, I smiled and wondered where Joe was on February 7, 1963. I coild picture his bedroom wall just plastered with Tiger Beat pinups of Barack Obama.

The it occurred to me just how well Klein's simpering loveletter would fit between the covers of Country Yossi Magazine.

Apparently, Joe Klein, under Obama's spell, sounds no less Golly-gee, Hooray about Earth's latest savior than a CYM cover story anointing the revealed brilliance behind the latest, forgettable Eli Gerstner masterpiece (YBC excluded).

Painting Obama as evolution's endgame, in viscous, hyperbolic blather, Klein is right up there any Country Yossi writer talking tongues about Coney Island Avenue's latest, new-and-doomed-to-close restaurant.

If Joe Klein has gone so ga-ga for Obama, the rest of the world must already be stark raving mad. Unless this year's Mr. October turns out to be this year's Tickle Me Elmo -- the season's adorable must-have object of infatuation, soon-to-be punchline -- we may be in for a scary ride.

Because with the way voters are acting, the adulation that's come with Obama's historic campaign may turn out not to be the good kind of historic, if you catch my Mussolini.

Here's Klein's tripe. As soon as I dig myself from underneath this pile of bubble gum and lollypops I'll write a letter to the editor.

A misnomer grows in Brooklyn...

2008-10-11T21:34:00.003-04:00

Here's a great blog entry about that wonderful neighborhood formerly known as a Modern Orthodox Suburb of Borough Park.

We Stole Flatbush

Glass Houses

2008-10-10T10:30:00.003-04:00

Will someone explain the definition of irony to Jimmy Carter.

The worst president of modern history, an incompetent, micromanaging wonk who precipitated and presided over an era characterized for its excruciating political and economic misery, was compelled to criticize the Bush administration's economic policies and lay blame at its doorstep for having caused the current economic catastrophe.

While the jury is still far out on who is at fault, though many seem quite certain the breadcrumb trail leads right to Demoratic apathy and liberal lunacy, the truth remains to be seen.

In the meantime, however, one would think that someone with a legacy like Carter would know to keep his mouth shut. Then again, it's probable that someone with a legacy like Carter's may simply lack the common sense to understand what makes his comments so idiotic.

Ex-president Carter slams Bush on market crisis
Fri Oct 10, 2008 9:09am EDT

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Former President Jimmy Carter said on Friday the "atrocious economic policies" of the Bush administration had caused the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Carter told reporters on a stopover in Brussels that "profligate spending," massive borrowing and dramatic tax cuts since President George W. Bush took office in 2001 were behind the market turmoil and economic crisis.

"I think it's because of the atrocious economic policies of the Bush administration," said the 84-year-old Democrat, who served in the White House from 1977-1981 during a period of high inflation and energy crisis.

Whoever wins next month's U.S. presidential election would inherit economic problems that would force them to postpone implementing some of their proposed reforms, he said.

"The economic situation is an entrenched problem. It is going to take years to correct what has been done economically," Carter said, adding he hoped Democrat Barrack Obama would win and immediately improve Washington's image in the world.

Eight years ago, the United States had a budget surplus, low inflation and a stable, strong economy, he said.

Carter said he was astonished that the United States now owed China "in the neighborhood of $1 trillion."

Deregulation and what he called a withdrawal of supervision of Wall Street had encouraged irresponsible elements in the U.S. financial system, enabling banks to borrow 30 times their value.

Carter was on his way back from a private peace mission to Cyprus with fellow elder statesmen Lakhdar Brahimi of Algeria and Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, intended to give a push to talks between the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot leaders on a settlement to reunite the divided island.

(Reporting by Paul Taylor; editing by Sami Aboudi)

What won't Jesse do for attention?

2008-09-04T13:18:00.006-04:00

He's been frozen out of a historic milestone that should otherwise be the culminating event in his career. Of no surprise to Jesse Jackson's ungullible unfollowers, he's nowhere to be found within the Obama campaign. And for good reason: he's the anti-Obama.

Barack Obama's very being undermines the very being of Jesse Jackson.

Jesse is famous for leveraging knee-jerk rage and self-righteous fraud to extort truckloads of money from terrified corporate types. He achieves this through his Zelig-esque ability to insert himself into any issue that could possibly be twisted into a rascist claim and a profitable outcome.

Because it's good for business, Jesse perpetuates black poverty and victimhood by endlessly churning the simmering blind fury African-Americans seem to have claimed as a crucial aspect of their cultural heritage.

Whether you're for Obama or not, it's hard to deny credit to him for being a black American who models the mindset that blacks, just for being black, require no special accommodation. In doing so, Obama is speaking a language Jesse does not understand. Or more likely, understands all to well as being bad for business.

You can tell Jesse's pissed by his unfortunate and unintentional remarks about genital mutilation, namely Obama's, made on live television into a mic that was supposed to be off.

His current and unquestionably forced obscurity must be giving his an ulcer. Which is why I found the following article particularly funny. I don't wish illness or pain on Jesse Jackson, but the timing is classic, and the fact that the media was informed of this via press release is beyond amusing.

Rev. Jesse Jackson hospitalized for stomach pains

Sep 4, 11:31 AM (ET)

CHICAGO (AP) - The Reverend Jesse Jackson is being treated at a Chicago hospital after experiencing severe stomach pains.
Jackson tells The Associated Press that he is feeling much better after being at Northwestern Memorial Hospital overnight. He says that doctors have told him he has viral gastroenteritis but are conducting more tests.
Jackson says he was campaigning and doing voter registration in Georgia earlier in the week when he began to feel ill after apparently becoming dehydrated. Back in Illinois, he entered the hospital Wednesday.

The 66-year-old civil rights leader says he isn't sure when he'll be released.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Protection says viral gastroenteritis is an inflammation of the stomach and intestines and isn't considered serious for most people.

Al Gore: Freeze your heart out

2008-09-01T11:08:00.002-04:00

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Global Warming is a fraud. It's given rise to what will ultimately be a trillion dollar carbon credit industry, which is a financial trading vehicle fundamentally based on the buying and selling of air. And by air, I don't mean the means to create more clean, environmentally friendly air, but rather the nebulous, non-existent snake oil kind.

To digress just one step further, Al Gore owns large stakes in carbon credit trading companies that rake in buckets of money from U.S. manufacturers and major corporations unable to shake the political vindictiveness of the global warming mafia and the self-righteous wrath of millions of grade school children propagandized by the high priests of global warmingism that are infecting our schools and children's edu-tainment.

That all said, scientists who have been ignored and discredited for much of this decade, who have been studying, finding evidence of, and finally validating their observations that rather than a man-made warming trend, the world is actually heading into a long term cooling trend. The cooling trend, as liberals and brainwashed school children everywhere will be distressed to discover, has nothing to do with pollution, big oil, the Republicans, or incandescent lightbulbs. Rather, it is part of a natural weather cycle and is dependent on how many sun spots occur within a given period of time. The total lack of sun spot activity over the month of August has flabbergasted solar researchers. It's been nearly a century since an entire month has passed with zero sunspots observed. The degree of solar activity has been decreasing with greater rapidity for the better part of three years.

The implications of Global Cooling are significant, but not permanent, and not manageable by a bunch of self-righteous do-gooders. Incidentally, by "do-gooders," I mean, they do good for their personal income, not really anyone else.

Will there be Global Cooling? Who the heck knows? I'm not a scientist. But what i do know is that whenever the brainless liberals, Jimmy Carter, the UN, and the twits in Hollywood break out the soapboxes to champion some dubious cause, while claiming that conservatives, big business, the Republicans, and you are to blame, you'd be best advised to run the other way. They never (and i mean NEVER) fail to be wrong.

The Moslems of Mea Shearim

2008-08-24T19:41:00.005-04:00

When I was in Israel for the year, I spent most of my time in and around Ma'alot Dafna and Arzei Birah, two small Jerusalem neighborhoods in walking distance to the epicenters of Charedism, Mea Shearim and Geula.

In Ma'alot Dafna, I was attracted to Ohr Sameach and friendly with several families, and fell in love with Arzei Birah, across the street, which was a friendly, inviting neighborhood, populated with Israeli and Anglo families, Kollel couples with infants, and scores of positive Jewish influences for an 18-year-old desperately seeking spirituality.

There was a Chassidishe Rov in Arzei Birah who was warm, welcoming, and, though he couldn't speak a word of English, so normal. The now-famed Machlis family of Ma'alot Dafna, then drawing just dozens of guests every Friday night and Shabbos -- today, it's reportedly hundreds -- exposed me to a brand of Shabbos and Judaism that gave me passion and pride.

I became extremely close to several kollel families who taught emunah through actions, and a frumkeit that incorporated discussion without pretense, an unapologetic consciousness of the greater world, old fashioned Jewish gall and pragmatism, and the idea that enjoying life and life with kedusha are not mutually exclusive.

The combined influences I found in these communities remain a critical before-and-after demarcation in my life. By emulating those I met, and receiving guidance through their advice, led me to make some wonderful choices that, thank God, continue to enrich my life and color my outlook.

The news story below is sickening. That it occurred in a community which gave so much to a spiritually starved, Jewish teenage boy is saddening. That it highlights the shifting tactics of Chareidi Judaism's inner struggles from social manipulation to violent coercion is frightening. That it took the Israeli Legal System to pursue justice, not Chareidi leaders and community residents is unforgivable.

Chareidi modesty patrols, as despicable and depraved as they may be, are not new. Neither is thuggish violence in the name of religion. Until now, however, Islam has cornered the market of institutionally supported brutality against women. Until now.

If the point of Chareidi insularity (i.e., no education, no job skills, no tolerance for religious diversity, no extra-communal integration, no infrastructure to promote self-sufficiency, etc.) is to keep Jews pious by sheltering them from outside influences, then one needs look no further than the rancid seepage of Islam’s warped values into the Chareidi mainstream to underscore the failures of Chareidism, and the culpability of those leaders and followers who shaped and perpetuate it.

Read it and weep:

Jerusalem, Israel - A 29-year-old man affiliated with Jerusalem’s haredi Mishmeret Tzniut, roughly translated as “modesty squad,” has been indicted in a Jerusalem court for allegedly assaulting a 31-year-old woman in her apartment, together with six other men, after they suspected she had carried out “improper” relations with other men, court documents released today show.

The suspect, Elhanan Buzaglo, who worked for the haredi modesty squad - a vigilante group active in the Mea Shearim and Geula neighborhoods that sees to it that the city’s haredi residents conduct themselves in accordance with the conventions of their ultra-observant lifestyle - was allegedly paid $2,000 for his services, the charge sheet states.

The chilling three-page indictment relates how the seven men brutally assaulted their victim - a divorced woman who had previously led a haredi lifestyle - in her home in the Ma’alot Dafna neighborhood on the night of June 1.

The men, armed with a bat and tear gas, barged into her home in the predominantly haredi neighborhood at 10:45 p.m., the charge sheet relates.

“The defendant and the others shoved the complainant, dropped her to the floor, beat her, slammed her head against the floor and kicked [her] all over her body.”

“The defendant or one of the others sat on her head in a bid to prevent her from seeing what was going on and to prevent her from resisting,” the charges continue.

The men also allegedly tied a piece of cloth to the woman’s mouth and warned her that should she open her eyes, they would spray tear gas into them.

During the assault, the attackers checked the woman’s two cellphones to see who had called her, and repeatedly called her a “whore” and a “liar.”

Before the men left, they reportedly told the woman that she must leave her apartment, or that night’s attack would “only be the beginning,” and that if she remained there she would be murdered.

The woman suffered serious injuries all over her body and required medical treatment.
She subsequently received threatening phone calls and letters, and as a result decided shortly thereafter to move out of her apartment, even though her lease was not up for another year.

Buzaglo was arrested last month after his fingerprints were found in the plaintiff’s apartment, police said.

“A man who is allegedly willing to take part in the cruel beating of a young and helpless woman ’suspected’ of socializing with married men, and all this solely for money, is a dangerous, conscienceless person with no inhibitions,” Judge Nava Ben-Or wrote in her decision to extend his remand in custody.

A second suspect has been arrested in the case, Jerusalem police spokesman Asi Aharoni said.

The suspect, Binyamin Meirovitch of Jerusalem, is believed to be one of the modesty squad’s leaders, and the person responsible for the illicit organization’s operations.

The other men involved in the attack remain at large.

[Source: Vos Iz Neias]

It's a Pagan Lag B'Omer Charlie Brown

2008-05-19T09:12:00.003-04:00

It's that glorious time of the year ....

Send money if you're stupid. Get nauseous if you care.

Bamba-Ban is not what you think

2008-05-09T12:21:00.006-04:00

From Ynet:

The Haredi Community, an ultra-Orthodox communal organization which strongly opposes Zionism, declared a consumers' boycott on leading Israeli food brands that have been adorned with the Israeli flag in honor of the country's 60th birthday.
(read more)

Why must people assume the worst of our leaders? The "Bamba Ban" is not the "latest" in a string of mindless edicts that only cause hardship, division, and serve to thoroughly discredit the wisdom and sanity of current Chareidi leadership.

In fact, the "Bamba Ban" is the first phase of a multi-stage public health campaign conceived and launched by the Gedolim -- who have nothing but love and concern for their fellow Jews -- to wean Chareidim off junk foods that offer little nutritional value, empty calories, deadly transfats, excessive sugar, salt, chemical and preservatives, not to mention a catalyst for the grave illness or certain death of children who are severely allergic to peanuts.

Their next series of "bans" (ha ha) are as follows:

1) A ban on unhealthy, sugary Coca-Cola that cause cavities and have caffeine by means of denouncing the bottle's suggestive phallic shape

2) A ban on Egged busses because they prevent people from walking more --- by means of denouncing the way public transportation forces men and women into close quarters.

3) A ban on music that can damage hearing --- by means of denouncing it as the devil's music that flies on the face of the bountiful goodness and glory of the Lord Jesus Christ, shlitah.

4) A ban on all forms of media which has frightening news stories that can cause undue stress and anguish leading to high blood pressure and heart disease --- by means of denouncing it as a source for tumah and corrosive outside influence.

5) A ban on red clothing because it's a sakanah if one were to pass a bull grazing a field and unwittingly cause themselves to be gored --- by means of denouncing red clothing as suggestive.

6) A ban on sunlight because excessive exposure to the sun causes deadly skin cancer --- by means of denouncing the sun as the object most often worshipped by idolaters and depraved Californians, which is a clear danger to young chareidim who may be influenced to idol worship the sun's spiritually harmful rays.

7) A ban on employment because of its potential to damage one's self-esteem should he receive an unsatisfactory performance review --- by means of denouncing employment as the materialistic preoccupation of lowly parasitic non-Jew non frum who lack emunah.

It's offical ...

2008-05-05T17:11:00.009-04:00

Our housekeeper cannot speak a word of English and it bothers me.

Not for cultural or nationalistic reasons. Rather, because her language limitations force me to remember several key words in Spanish, and subject myself to great humiliation every time I present her with a to-do list in the tortured Spanish grammar produced with Google Translate; no doubt a source of great merriment for New York's Guatemalan community.

Would it be so difficult for immigrants to learn English?

On the other hand, why should I expect anything of the sort from uneducated immigrants when so many of the self-appointed anti-immigration nincompoops claiming to champion American's cultural dignit y are barely smarter than my houseplants?

A Convenient $300 Million Ad Campaign

2008-03-31T03:00:00.023-04:00

Al Gore's latest inconvenient truth is the mountain of credible scientific evidence presenting climate change as more complex and nothing at all like he portrays in his movie, An Inconvenient Truth.

And it seems, based on the article below, that Al and his merry band of weather bilking frauds are realizing there won't be enough egg in the world to cover their faces if the forces championing impartial (READ: apolitical) scientific discovery prevail.

So their convenient response is launching a three-year, $300 million advocacy campaign to reassure every living organism in North America not to worry; that the world really is coming to an end, just like Saint Al promised.

I don't have to tell you that $300 million is no chump change ... even when spread over three years.

Consider that The American Legacy Foundation, the nation's anti-smoking campaign bought $100 million in advertising in its first year, and now spends about $30 million annually. The Ad Council, which receives $40 million a year in donated media time to run its close to 50 different campaigns ranging from the "Just Say No" anti-drug campaign to the "Smokey the Bear" commercials, only occasionally hits the $100 million annual mark for its campaigns.

And, again, that's for FIFTY different advocacy issues.

The cynical strategy of Gore's backers is to clog all possible debate about his subjective, not to mention profitable, opinion about the highly objective and demonstrably observable mechanisms of earth science.

This is propaganda of Stalinistic proportions.

The title of the campaign is "We," drips with fascist overtones, and seems to deliberately create a wedge between the believers and non-believers. The ads also will sidestep all the annoying facts and evidence that discredit Al's iffy data and arrogant insistence that his science is more scientific than anyone else's. Instead, we'll be pummeled with a hazy, feel-good campaign that brands anyone who refuses to place "man-made global warming" after "death" and "taxes" on the list of mankind's immutable certainties as enemies of future civilization.

It makes me wonder if the follow-up campaign will be titled, "The Lottery."

Television commercials are scheduled to run during the nation's most popular television shows. And it's a virtual certainty that we'll soon be smothered in (environmentally unfriendly) print advertising. Plus, I guarantee the campaign included turn-key classroom curricula, children's books, cartoons, and a host of other guerilla marketing techniques guaranteed to rob young minds of any shred of objectivity regarding a VERY objective theory.

It's only a matter of time before 30-foot portraits of Al Gore's big fat head begin appearing in public spaces.

I believe Al Gore is a greedy, self-serving fraud. I believe the industries that will be created to combat so-called "man-made global warming" are as large and potentially profitable as weapons manufacturing. I believe $300 million is being fronted as seed money by shrewd, albeit cynical, investors who will reap exponential benefit from the propagation of Al's lie.

I also believe the words of famed advertising copywriter Bill Bernbach who said, "A great ad campaign will make a bad product fail faster. It will get more people to know it's bad."

Unfortunately, in the time it takes people to realize they're being duped, the worst of the damage will already be done by shameless, self-righteous hypocrites, who are the worst kind of criminals.

Gore Launches Ambitious Advocacy Campaign on Climate
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 31, 2008

Former vice president Al Gore will launch a three-year, $300 million campaign Wednesday aimed at mobilizing Americans to push for aggressive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, a move that ranks as one of the most ambitious and costly public advocacy campaigns in U.S. history.

The Alliance for Climate Protection's "we" campaign will employ online organizing and television advertisements on shows ranging from "American Idol" to "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." It highlights the extent to which Americans' growing awareness of global warming has yet to translate into national policy changes, Gore said in an hour-long phone interview last week. He said the campaign, which Gore is helping to fund, was undertaken in large part because of his fear that U.S. lawmakers are unwilling to curb the human-generated emissions linked to climate change.

"This climate crisis is so interwoven with habits and patterns that are so entrenched, the elected officials in both parties are going to be timid about enacting the bold changes that are needed until there is a change in the public's sense of urgency in addressing this crisis," Gore said. "I've tried everything else I know to try. The way to solve this crisis is to change the way the public thinks about it."

Private contributors have already donated or committed half the money needed to fund the entire campaign, he said. While Gore declined to quantify his contribution to the effort, he has devoted all his proceeds from the Oscar-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," the best-selling companion book, his salary from the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers and several international prizes, such as the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, which add up to more than a $2.7 million. Paramount Classics, the documentary's distributor, has pledged 5 percent of the film's profits to the group, and some of the money raised through the 2007 Live Earth concerts will help the campaign, along with Gore's proceeds from an upcoming book on climate change.

While "An Inconvenient Truth" urged viewers to fully inflate their car tires and to install compact fluorescent light bulbs to combat global warming, Gore said he is now focused on ensuring that the United States enacts a national carbon emission cap and ratifies a new global pact on climate change in the next three years.

"The simple algorithm is this: It's important to change the light bulbs, but it's much more important to change the laws," he said. "The options available to civilization worldwide to avert this terribly destructive pattern are beginning to slip away from us. The path for recovery runs right through Washington, D.C."

The new effort comes at a time when the three remaining major party presidential candidates -- Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) -- have all endorsed federal limits on greenhouse gases, virtually ensuring that the next occupant of the White House will offer a sharp break from President Bush's climate policy.

All three have discussed global warming with Gore in phone calls over the course of the past few months. While McCain backs a more modest plan than that favored by the Democrats -- he supports a 60 percent reduction in greenhouse gases from 1990 levels by 2050, compared with Obama and Clinton's vow of an 80 percent cut during that period -- the presumptive Republican nominee emphasized during a recent stop in Chula Vista, Calif., that he had pushed for a federal cap-and-trade system before either of his opponents came to the Senate.

"Neither have proposed legislation or played any public role during their time in the Senate," McCain said, sidestepping the fact that Clinton and Obama both back climate legislation, up for a Senate vote in June, that he has yet to endorse.

Gore, who backs a 90 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by mid-century, said that while he's "encouraged" that the remaining candidates back mandatory limits on greenhouse gases, they still need to be pushed: "What happens after the election will depend on whether or not we win enough hearts and minds in the country as a whole."

And former Rep. Sherwood L. Boehlert (R-N.Y.), a board member of the two-year-old alliance, said the candidates' commitment to a cap-and-trade system does not negate the fact that the majority of Americans fail to see climate change as a compelling political issue.

"Most Republicans, along with most Democrats, are focused almost exclusively on Iraq, the war against terrorism and the economy," Boehlert said. "That leaves little room for anything else."

In an effort to penetrate Americans' consciousness and change lawmakers' political calculus, the group aims to enlist 10 million volunteers through a combination of network and cable commercials, display ads in magazines ranging from People to Real Simple, and online social networks. By contrast, the civil rights and antiwar movements in the 1960s each boasted about 5 million activists.

Cathy Zoi, the Alliance for Climate Protection's chief executive, said the group will focus on individuals known in the advertising world as "influencers" who talk to a disproportionate number of people in their communities. While some ads will target inside-the-Beltway policymakers, the bulk of their efforts will focus on the general public.

"This is modern organizing," Zoi said, adding that the campaign aims to convince voters that "this is a solvable problem."

In an effort to broaden the campaign's appeal, the alliance has already forged working partnerships with groups including the Girl Scouts and the United Steelworkers of America. One of its early ads will feature the unlikely alliance of clergymen Pat Robertson and Al Sharpton sitting on a couch on Virginia Beach, talking about their commitment to address climate change.

Its first ad, which is narrated by the actor William H. Macy, highlights American's collective responses to historical challenges. "We didn't wait for someone else to storm the beaches of Normandy," Macy intones. "We didn't wait for someone else to guarantee civil rights." The commercial will run several times Wednesday on shows such as "Good Morning America," "Today," "American Idol," "Larry King Live" and "Anderson Cooper 360."

League of Conservation Voters president Gene Karpinski, whose group is supporting the effort, said he's optimistic the "we" campaign will succeed in a way that traditional environmental groups have not. "It heightens both the urgency and the sense we can get the job done with the broad middle that will make the difference," Karpinski said, "while having the resources to communicate in a sophisticated way, in a more expansive fashion than the community has done before."

Without question, the campaign represents one of the most far-reaching public advocacy initiatives in recent years. The American Legacy Foundation, an anti-smoking campaign that arose out of the massive 1998 tobacco settlement, made $100 million in ad buys its first year, but its funding quickly dwindled and it now spends $30 million annually. The Ad Council -- which runs public service announcements ranging from the "Just Say No" anti-drug message to the "Smokey the Bear" commercials -- receives an average of $40 million a year in donated media for the 50 campaigns it operates and only occasionally hits the $100 million annual mark for its campaigns.

The climate alliance's initiative, however, will not go unchallenged by climate change skeptics. Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, a nonprofit funded by the coal industry and its allies, is spending about $35 million this election to bolster support for coal-generated electricity. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank that receives part of its funding from oil and gas companies, recently spent close to $35,000 to run a television ad both in the District and in scattered cities throughout the country attacking Gore, and plans a follow-up campaign. The ad argues that Gore and his allies in Hollywood use plenty of energy but that "Al Gore wants to cut our energy use, putting our jobs and our future in jeopardy."

Myron Ebell, who directs energy and global warming policy for CEI, said the fact that Gore feels compelled to run such an elaborate ad campaign highlights the extent to which his conservation message has failed to resonate with the American public. "He's spending a hundred million dollars to convince the American people to make sacrifices that he and his elite friends are not willing to make," Ebell said, adding that while many Americans may now blame humans for causing climate change, "the American people are not there with other alarmists" when it comes to supporting deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

John Podesta, president of the progressive think tank Center for American Progress, said the fact that independent groups are already advertising on the issue underscores how much more politically relevant climate change is in the 2008 election, especially because Congress is unlikely to send a bill to Bush for signing this year. It is unclear whether the Senate has 60 votes to pass a cap-and-trade bill this summer, and the House Energy and Commerce Committee has yet to produce a companion climate bill.

"This will be played out on the candidate level, but also among an array of parties who have a stake in the outcome," Podesta said. "Without presidential leadership, you're left with a regional division and a partisan division [in Congress] that's likely to produce movement, but not the bold kind of change that's needed. You need a president for that."

Staff researcher Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.

Saint Meilich ???

2008-03-27T16:28:00.007-04:00

Decisions... decisions... decisions...

I really would like to buy a great talisman for success and protection... but with so many to choose from, I just can't decide.

If you could help me make a decision, I'd really appreciate it.

Choice # 1

Choice # 2

Global Waning

2008-03-23T08:17:00.005-04:00

The latest from the Global Warming is Liberal Fiction Department, the so-called warming trend most global warming hysteria is baed upon, peaked and has been reversing since 1998.

Mind you, global cooling is no great shakes, either. But my beef with global warming has never been about being right. It's about unmasking how mindless our enlightened masses truly are.

And since making uneducated predictions is so in vogue these days, my prediction is that once "man-made global warming" is irreversibly debunked, the high priests of climate calamity will insist the very same man-made build up of carbon particles responsible for global warming are now blocking the sun's heat and throwing the planet into a deadly cooling trend. Expect most of them to invest in warm weather clothing and insulation manufacturers.

Their new hysteria will be how cooler weather will destroy our planet and spending trillions of dollars to reverse the trend is our only savior.

Expect to start hearing about frost-based crop failures, scarcity of water, unsustainable heating oil demand, the extinction of countless species due to the global freeze on fragile eco-systems, and general societal chaos and environmental crisis.

Climate facts to warm to

Christopher Pearson | March 22, 2008

CATASTROPHIC predictions of global warming usually conjure with the notion of a tipping point, a point of no return.

Last Monday - on ABC Radio National, of all places - there was a tipping point of a different kind in the debate on climate change. It was a remarkable interview involving the co-host of Counterpoint, Michael Duffy and Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. Anyone in public life who takes a position on the greenhouse gas hypothesis will ignore it at their peril.

Duffy asked Marohasy: "Is the Earth stillwarming?"

She replied: "No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you'd expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years."

Duffy: "Is this a matter of any controversy?"

Marohasy: "Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued ... This is not what you'd expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you'd expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up ... So (it's) very unexpected, not something that's being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it's very significant."

Duffy: "It's not only that it's not discussed. We never hear it, do we? Whenever there's any sort of weather event that can be linked into the global warming orthodoxy, it's put on the front page. But a fact like that, which is that global warming stopped a decade ago, is virtually never reported, which is extraordinary."

Duffy then turned to the question of how the proponents of the greenhouse gas hypothesis deal with data that doesn't support their case. "People like Kevin Rudd and Ross Garnaut are speaking as though the Earth is still warming at an alarming rate, but what is the argument from the other side? What would people associated with the IPCC say to explain the (temperature) dip?"

Marohasy: "Well, the head of the IPCC has suggested natural factors are compensating for the increasing carbon dioxide levels and I guess, to some extent, that's what sceptics have been saying for some time: that, yes, carbon dioxide will give you some warming but there are a whole lot of other factors that may compensate or that may augment the warming from elevated levels of carbon dioxide.

"There's been a lot of talk about the impact of the sun and that maybe we're going to go through or are entering a period of less intense solar activity and this could be contributing to the current cooling."

Duffy: "Can you tell us about NASA's Aqua satellite, because I understand some of the data we're now getting is quite important in our understanding of how climate works?"

Marohasy: "That's right. The satellite was only launched in 2002 and it enabled the collection of data, not just on temperature but also on cloud formation and water vapour. What all the climate models suggest is that, when you've got warming from additional carbon dioxide, this will result in increased water vapour, so you're going to get a positive feedback. That's what the models have been indicating. What this great data from the NASA Aqua satellite ... (is) actually showing is just the opposite, that with a little bit of warming, weather processes are compensating, so they're actually limiting the greenhouse effect and you're getting a negative rather than a positive feedback."

Duffy: "The climate is actually, in one way anyway, more robust than was assumed in the climate models?"

Marohasy: "That's right ... These findings actually aren't being disputed by the meteorological community. They're having trouble digesting the findings, they're acknowledging the findings, they're acknowledging that the data from NASA's Aqua satellite is not how the models predict, and I think they're about to recognise that the models really do need to be overhauled and that when they are overhauled they will probably show greatly reduced future warming projected as a consequence of carbon dioxide."

Duffy: "From what you're saying, it sounds like the implications of this could beconsiderable ..."

Marohasy: "That's right, very much so. The policy implications are enormous. The meteorological community at the moment is really just coming to terms with the output from this NASA Aqua satellite and (climate scientist) Roy Spencer's interpretation of them. His work is published, his work is accepted, but I think people are still in shock at this point."

If Marohasy is anywhere near right about the impending collapse of the global warming paradigm, life will suddenly become a whole lot more interesting.

A great many founts of authority, from the Royal Society to the UN, most heads of government along with countless captains of industry, learned professors, commentators and journalists will be profoundly embarrassed. Let us hope it is a prolonged and chastening experience.

With catastrophe off the agenda, for most people the fog of millennial gloom will lift, at least until attention turns to the prospect of the next ice age. Among the better educated, the sceptical cast of mind that is the basis of empiricism will once again be back in fashion. The delusion that by recycling and catching public transport we can help save the planet will quickly come to be seen for the childish nonsense it was all along.

The poorest Indians and Chinese will be left in peace to work their way towards prosperity, without being badgered about the size of their carbon footprint, a concept that for most of us will soon be one with Nineveh and Tyre, clean forgotten in six months.

The scores of town planners in Australia building empires out of regulating what can and can't be built on low-lying shorelines will have to come to terms with the fact inundation no longer impends and find something more plausible to do. The same is true of the bureaucrats planning to accommodate "climate refugees".

Penny Wong's climate mega-portfolio will suddenly be as ephemeral as the ministries for the year 2000 that state governments used to entrust to junior ministers. Malcolm Turnbull will have to reinvent himself at vast speed as a climate change sceptic and the Prime Minister will have to kiss goodbye what he likes to call the great moral issue and policy challenge of our times.

It will all be vastly entertaining to watch.

THE Age published an essay with an environmental theme by Ian McEwan on March 8 and its stablemate, The Sydney Morning Herald, also carried a slightly longer version of the same piece.

The Australian's Cut & Paste column two days later reproduced a telling paragraph from the Herald's version, which suggested that McEwan was a climate change sceptic and which The Age had excised. He was expanding on the proposition that "we need not only reliable data but their expression in the rigorous use of statistics".

What The Age decided to spare its readers was the following: "Well-meaning intellectual movements, from communism to post-structuralism, have a poor history of absorbing inconvenient fact or challenges to fundamental precepts. We should not ignore or suppress good indicators on the environment, though they have become extremely rare now. It is tempting to the layman to embrace with enthusiasm the latest bleak scenario because it fits the darkness of our soul, the prevailing cultural pessimism. The imagination, as Wallace Stevens once said, is always at the end of an era. But we should be asking, or expecting others to ask, for the provenance of the data, the assumptions fed into the computer model, the response of the peer review community, and so on. Pessimism is intellectually delicious, even thrilling, but the matter before us is too serious for mere self-pleasuring. It would be self-defeating if the environmental movement degenerated into a religion of gloomy faith. (Faith, ungrounded certainty, is no virtue.)"

The Cartoon(s) that Roared (Weeeee're Baaaaack!)

2008-03-19T22:00:00.002-04:00

I posted this last year to revisit the delightful nature of political dissent in Islamic societies. The cartoons below somehow led to the deaths of 50 people. Osama Bin Laden just mentioned them again on his latest message from the cave.

It's been a bit over a year since the Islamic world errupted in fury over a few cartoons that appeared in a Danish newspaper. The supposed impetus of the Muslim's ire was the nature of these cartoons; they depicted the prophet Mohammad, in some cases unfavorably.

Evidently, this is a big no-no for Muslims. They claim some dubious Koranic prohibition against reproducing the image of Mohammad. Predictably, adherents of Modern Islamodoxy, who excel at nothing but putting the 'mad' in Mohammad, rioted, burned stuff, and demonstrated their general unsatiable murderous rage for all things Western. Yawh. What else is new?

Curious to revisit the whole frustrating affair, I searched online for the cartoons but they where nowhere to be found. For sure there were plenty of articles and analysis. But not one site had the cartoons for the showing. Perplexed, I pressed on.

I finally found them posted on one, lone website: www.michellemalkin.com. For the sake of preserving history, and sticking it to all the wimpy, easily cowed editors -- the very same who empower and encourage the religion of peace in its relentless campaign of destruction and arrogance -- I decided to keep the bad memory alive. I just hope Pam Greenbaum won't sue me:

And once again, my personal favorite ...

Global Warming ... Where art thou ?

2008-03-19T14:48:00.004-04:00

Seems like the wheels are coming off Al 'Blubberbrain' Gore's retirement plan ... or what other people call the crisis of Global Warming.

With the release of his excruciatingly pompous movie "An Inconvenient Truth," Gore the bore gave clueless liberals all over the world permission to panic over what Al assured them would be the world's soon and certain demise -- death by warming, if you will. Holding his Oscar, Nobel Peace Prize, and gazillions of dollars in carbon offsets sales, Al was probably all set to buy a small island somewhere and bask in the, dare we say, sun?

But what's this? Scientists suddenly baffled over why the world isn't warming nearly as much as Al promised, and they happily believed?

I truly enjoyed reading the article pasted below on, of all places, the NPR website. Climate change may be a function of our miraculous and still mysterious earth. But the more self-righteous, self-important, self-indulgent blowhards like Al gore, the UN, and every liberal organ on our still delightfully temperate globe insist that Global Warming is our undoing, the more I start to wonder who's making how much money on the news.

The Mystery of Global Warming's Missing Heat

by Richard Harris

Morning Edition, March 19, 2008 · Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.

In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.

"There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant," Willis says. So the buildup of heat on Earth may be on a brief hiatus. "Global warming doesn't mean every year will be warmer than the last. And it may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming."

In recent years, heat has actually been flowing out of the ocean and into the air. This is a feature of the weather phenomenon known as El Nino. So it is indeed possible the air has warmed but the ocean has not. But it's also possible that something more mysterious is going on.

That becomes clear when you consider what's happening to global sea level. Sea level rises when the oceans get warm because warmer water expands. This accounts for about half of global sea level rise. So with the oceans not warming, you would expect to see less sea level rise. Instead, sea level has risen about half an inch in the past four years. That's a lot.

Willis says some of this water is apparently coming from a recent increase in the melting rate of glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica.

"But in fact there's a little bit of a mystery. We can't account for all of the sea level increase we've seen over the last three or four years," he says.

One possibility is that the sea has, in fact, warmed and expanded — and scientists are somehow misinterpreting the data from the diving buoys.

But if the aquatic robots are actually telling the right story, that raises a new question: Where is the extra heat all going?

Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research says it's probably going back out into space. The Earth has a number of natural thermostats, including clouds, which can either trap heat and turn up the temperature, or reflect sunlight and help cool the planet.

That can't be directly measured at the moment, however.

"Unfortunately, we don't have adequate tracking of clouds to determine exactly what role they've been playing during this period," Trenberth says.

It's also possible that some of the heat has gone even deeper into the ocean, he says. Or it's possible that scientists need to correct for some other feature of the planet they don't know about. It's an exciting time, though, with all this new data about global sea temperature, sea level and other features of climate.

"I suspect that we'll able to put this together with a little bit more perspective and further analysis," Trenberth says. "But what this does is highlight some of the issues and send people back to the drawing board."

Trenberth and Willis agree that a few mild years have no effect on the long-term trend of global warming. But they say there are still things to learn about how our planet copes with the heat.

Words fail for these words

2008-03-18T12:32:00.004-04:00

This is not an endorsement. But this speech will deserve its place among the best of our generation:

OBAMA SPEECH IN FULL: A MORE PERFECT UNION
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008/ 10:17:53 ET
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign – to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one.

Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.

This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either “too black” or “not black enough.” We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.

And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.

On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:

“People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters….And in that single note – hope! – I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shame about…memories that all people might study and cherish – and with which we could start to rebuild.”

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy – particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice is we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans -- the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man whose been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives – by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Ironically, this quintessentially American – and yes, conservative – notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds – by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

I would not be running for President if I didn’t believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation – the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.

There is one story in particularly that I’d like to leave you with today – a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King’s birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.

She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”

“I’m here because of Ashley.” By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.

END

Al Gore Ends Global Warming!!!!

2008-02-26T21:18:00.003-05:00

It's practically a Law of Physics: liberals always think the sky is falling.

But those crybaby drama-queens never get tired of being wrong. The most recent example is as good as any.

Yes. It was only a matter of time before Al Gore's call for the gullible masses to join his quixotic battle the universe's largest windmill proved to be that much more bellyaching from Mr. Bad News.

Now, reports strongly indicate that the liberal dogma of man-made Global Warming is taking a chill. Literally.

It began with Al Gore presenting his position on a subjective meteorological theory as fact in his condescending 2005 documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

Full disclosure: I committed to reserve judgment of Al's movie and opinion until after I saw it, but could only sit through the first 30 minutes of Al's sanctimonious snoot.

But from the flappety-flap I endured in those 30 minutes, in contrast to the ecclesiastical awe of Weatherman Al that followed his film, it was clear that someone wasn't wearing clothes.

But after two years of histrionic dogma about the melting polar bears and shrinking ice caps, the message is getting through that that someone are best advised better cover up and soon.

Yesterday, an article in the Canada-based National Post quoted a report from the U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) that this winter has been the coldest since 1966. The article continues by saying that

"many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its "lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back."

It would seem that despite Al's glorious run, he was barking up an embarrassingly wrong tree.

Of course, one newspaper does not a fool make. Which is why I was so interested to see this article in dailytech.com, a thoroughly apolitical science and technology news aggregator website, which leads with "Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming."

The article goes on to explain that such an assertion is far from anecdotal.

"[E]vidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously."

From what this and the other article describe, the sudden cooling trend is being caused by a lack of solar activity, which has a chilling effect on global climate. The pattern of solar inactivity is consistent with the beginning stages of past "ice ages."

Incidentally, this is not good news. Historically, the world and our civilization have fared worse in eras of cooler temperatures, as a result of lower crop yields and various other social and economic challenges that materialize when the average temperature drops.

But this is all beside the point. Had Al Gore and his self-serving backers understood that our challenge would be an increasingly colder, not warmer, climate, he would have found some way to blame that falling sky on big business and the Bush administration . And he would have just as easily weaseled his way into creating a multi-trillion dollar industry dedicated to spending trillions of dollars to warm up the world. Maybe.

I'm similarly confident that Al and his band of fair weather frauds, after transforming a reasonable scientific debate into a ideological clash of civilizations will be forced to spin some outrageous sophistic bunk to show how the glacial reef forming off the Gulf of Mexico thoroughly jives with their catechism of man-made Global Warming.

Needless to say, whenever whiners like Al Gore swear there the world is ending, to the cheers and adulation of millions of rudderless nincompoops who would rather be dead than wrong, I just expect the exact opposite of whatever the swear will happen.

Thanks a lot Al. By becoming the boy who cried Weather, you've put us all out in the cold.

WWDTS: What Would Daas Torah Do?

2008-02-25T01:14:00.004-05:00

There's an extremely frightening article copied below Insipid Yeshiva Propaganda Daily that reads like the script of a hostage video. Or like an article in Pravda.

The only snippet of mirth I felt when reading this pitiful white flag was learning that Lipa, in listing songs knowingly composed by non-Jews, that he will no longer perform, mentioned "Yidden" by name.

But reading this sentence:

"This decision was reached after he consulted with Daas Torah, and talking to leading Gedoley Yisroel,"

led me to conclude that ...

... we have all sinned and deserve judgment, but God, the Father, sent His only Son Daas Torah to satisfy that judgment for those who believe in Him. Daas Torah, the creator and eternal Son of God, who lived a sinless life, loves us so much that He died for our sins, taking the punishment that we deserve, was buried, and rose from the dead according to the Gedoley Yisroel. If you truly believe and trust this in your heart, receiving Daas Torah alone as your Savior, declaring, "Daas Torah is Lord," you will be saved from judgment and spend eternity with God in heaven.

Either that or someone threatened to destroy Lipa's life if he didn't cave.

I'm not sure which is worse.

EXCLUSIVE: Lipa Schmeltzer Backs Out Of Big Event Concert (from YWN)

There has been much talk regarding the Kol Koreh issued by Gedoley Yisroel banning the "Big Event Concert". Rumors were being spread as to the status of the massive show - which was scheduled for March 9 in Madison Square Garden.

Many people were questioning us why we did not post anything. YWN had consulted with leading Gedolim, and we were instructed not to post anything regarding this issue until now.

Yeshiva World has just spoken to Lipa Schmeltzer (Motzei Shabbos 5:45AM EST) and he has informed us that he will not be singing at the "Big Event Concert". This decision was reached after he consulted with Daas Torah, and talking to leading Gedoley Yisroel.

Lipa Schmeltzer must be publicly commended for listening to the words and wisdom of true Gedoley Yisroel.

Lipa tells YWN that many people have had issues with the type of material that he has been singing during his career. He always chose to ignore the requests of some of his fans to change his style of singing. Although he did have certain standards that he always kept (never singing for mixed crowds) [EDITOR'S NOTE: THIS IS A HUGE LOAD OF SHIT!!!!], he many time decided to follow the customers requests - and sing questionable tunes.

Lipa now has decided to make a big change. He has decided to turn over a leaf, and will be changing his entire style of music. He has decided that he does not think that the current style of Jewish music is apropos for Frum people to be listening to.

The past week has been very tough for Lipa and his family. Tough decisions have been made. Major decisions. Decisions about money. Decisions about his future. But Lipa has made the correct decision.

Lipa has met with many Gedoley Yisroel in the past two days, and spent countless hours talking to them. He has decided to forfeit a large sum of money by not singing this concert - and instead chose Daas Torah.

We are sure that Hashem will pay him back double for making the correct decision, and being Mikadesh Shem Shomayim!

Lipa also tells us that he is very concerned that there will be a backlash at the Rabbonim. He is publicly asking everyone to please refrain from making any accusations against any Rabbonim. "There is no reason for anyone to mix into this business, and everyone should rest assured that this was all done Bishalom", Lipa said. "I don't want anyone to talk Lashon Hara and Motzei Shem Ra against anyone -
especially the Gedolim whom I have tremendous respect for".

"I have recently started learning Bichavrusa with a leading Rosh Yeshiva [EDITOR'S NOTE: BY "LEARNING" THE REPORTER MEANS "GETTING SCARED", BY "BICHAVRUSAH" HE MEANS "DEATH THREATS", AND BY "A LEADING ROSH YESHIVA", HE MEANS "THE COMMISSION FOR THE PROMOTION OF VIRTUE AND THE PREVENTION OF VICE."] , and I promised him that I will never sing any songs which were composed by non-Jews. Being true to my word, I have sang at more then a dozen Chasuna's since I made that decision - and I have not sang "Yidden", "Abi-Mileibt", or "Numa" (Rabbi Nachman M'uman) or any other song that is questionable as to its origin", Lipa told YWN.

"People should know that this Kol Koreh and ban against The Big Event was not directed at me personally, but at all concerts in general. [AND THAT I REJECT THE UNPROVOKED ACTS OF AGGRESSION PERPETRATED BY THE SATANIC MILITARY OF THE CRIMINAL AMERICAN GOVERNMENT]. The Rabbonim felt the need to put their foot down and attempt to stop all future concerts in NY."

For any further information regarding the status of the Big Event Concert, please call the concert hotline at 718-873-0888.

Rudy, sorry to see you go ...

2008-01-30T12:19:00.000-05:00

In 1992, Rudy Giuliani was elected Mayor of New York City just in time to save the once-great, now-imploding city from what may have been the final nail in its decaying coffin.

There's no need to go into the hoary details of New York's dire straits. All that matters is that Rudy showed when he did and became the catalyst for one of the most remarkable transformations in this country's history. Rudy, it seemed, was pulling the City of the precipice of ruin with his bare hands.

Rudy is far from black and white. As his critics love to mention, he is flawed. Deeply. He is my political hero and I freely mention that he is flawed. Deeply.

But that's the irony of reality. The best leaders aren't always the nicest people. Just as the nicest people rarely make the best leaders. Fiorello La Guardia, Rudy's political hero, the Mayor who nursed New York City through the worst days of the Depression, unleashed a tour de force of development, infrastructure improvements, and decimated nearly every so-called convention of New York's entrenched cronyistic political culture.

And yet, La Guardia was a maniac. His managerial brutality forced dozens of commissioners, officials, and support staff out of his employ. Yet, this petty tyrant got things done.

Michael Bloomberg seems polite and genteel to the cameras, and appears to have effortlessly added 8 years of Rudy's golden era. But billionaires don't become billionaires by playing the nice guy.

I'm certain that Bloomberg is a billionaire and Rudy is not, is because, unlike Rudy, Bloomberg is a master at the rare skill of ramming an agenda down opponents' throats barehanded, and making them genuinely appreciate the experience. And if he can't make them love it, terrorize them to the point that they won't dare do anything but what Bloomberg wants. Again, you don;t become a Billionaire by playing the nice guy.

As for rudy, I wish he had done better in the campaign. I have no idea if his Florida strategy was poor planning, or unsuccessful due to circumstances only insiders could know.

I've removed the Rudy for President link on the side of my blog because I've always thought that people who drive around with loser bumper stickers are exactly that.

If he had been president, he would have made things interesting. Perhaps too interesting. But I would have felt we were in capable hands.

Sorry to see you go Rudy.

Rhetorical Question of the Day: 1/20/08

2008-01-20T13:16:00.000-05:00

How demented does one have to be to think, say, and find comfort in the following?

Hezbollah Has 'Heads' of Israeli Soldiers: Hezbollah Chief

Jan 19 06:01 AM US/Eastern

"We have the heads, the hands, the feet"

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah said in a fiery speech on Saturday that his Lebanese Shiite militant group had the "heads" and "body parts" of soldiers that the Israeli army had abandoned.

"We have the heads, the hands, the feet and even a nearly intact cadavre from the head down to the pelvis," he said in his first public appearance in more than a year to commemorate Ashura, Shiite Islam's holiest day.

"The Israeli army left behind the remains of the bodies of a large number of soldiers," said Nasrallah.

Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers in July 2006 led to a 34-day war with the Jewish state that left more than 1,200 civilians dead in Lebanon, a third of them children, as well as 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers.

The Jewish state failed in both its stated aims for launching the war: to stop rocket fire on northern Israel and to recover the two soldiers.

If it looks like it, and it smells like it, it's probably ...

2008-01-10T14:51:00.000-05:00

Dog Poop Footprints Lead Police To Drunken Driving Suspect

POSTED: 8:24 am EST January 10, 2008
UPDATED: 8:33 am EST January 10, 2008

DURHAM, N.C. -- A Durham man accused of drunkenly driving into a yard was found after police followed a smelly trail of dog feces footprints.

Police said 18-year-old Josue Herrios-Coronilla drove his black Camaro on the wrong side of the road Wednesday and crashed into the yard of Bill McDonald, the owner of four dogs.

When police arrived, they found crushed bushes, a damaged fence, an inoperable car - and a fresh shoe print in a pile of dog feces.

Following an odoriferous trail down the street, Durham police Sgt. Dale Gunter noticed a white van driving toward him.

When he asked the passenger to step out, he noticed alcohol on the man's breath and evidence all over his shoes.

Herrios-Coronilla was charged with driving while impaired and drinking underage.

In case you were wonderin'

2008-01-04T01:03:00.000-05:00

Good Shabbos in Brooklyn

2007-12-31T13:27:00.001-05:00

I spent this past Shabbos in the Midwood / Marine Park communities of Brooklyn. I'm happy to state on the record that EVERY Orthodox Jewish person I encountered -- black-hatted and otherwise -- said "Good Shabbos" to me.

Don't label this an anomaly, or cynically attribute it to my "looking like everyone else," and, therefore, eligible for 'native treatment.'

While I certainly don't look bizarrely out of place in Brooklyn, I don't wear a hat, have a smallish knit yarmulke, and wear a brown coat.

Nor were the "Good Shabbos" wishes the result of any campaign to assert my suburban social superiority by sanctimoniously spitting a militant "Good Shabbos" to every frum Jew to cross my path.

They were all just plain, old "Good Shabbos," as any gracious Ohev Yisroel would wish another.

Some were in response to my initial "Good Shabbos," some were mutually initiated, and some others were proffered proactively. All count equally, and all were wonderful to receive.

I figured everyone would be happy to know.

Swatching the years go by ...

2007-12-23T17:29:00.000-05:00

I don't think I'm getting old. At least I think I don't.

Thank God, I have little kids running around my house and toys to trip over day after day. I still use some of the housewares I received as engagement and wedding gifts, and I usually still fit into my wedding tuxedo.

My long gone hair line makes me feel bad, not to mention bald, but not old. And the occasional sighting of younger, home-video version me usually triggers more mirth than mid-life crisis.

But I just realized that when you're in your 30's, a wormhole to middle-age opens whether you're ready or not. It happens the first time you discover the same stuff you owned as a teenager being sold on eBay at historical artifact prices.

Exhibit A: My Swatches

I've owned four Swatch watches in my life -- two I purchased on my own, the third was a gift, and the last I bought about 4.5 years ago on a whim, and have since given to my daughter. While the last one has no historical or sentimental significance, I had the first three in high school, so they're players in the story of me.

It's true, they are all rotting in a box somewhere in my basement. But in mid-to-late 80s, Swatches were COOL like nothing else.

There may have been something about the fluorescent 1980s that incapacitated our collective ability to sense how ridiculous it was to wear an Amazing Technicolor Wristwatch.

While I'm sure I was sure back then that the look would never go out of style, the rotting watches in my basement tell a different story. But I digress.

Discovering relics of my earlier life on eBay should be telling me something. Mainly that my expanding forehead refuses to be ignored, or that 13-year old serving bowls are lousy at slowing chronological progress.

It's either that, or that my years as a teen, even when adjusted for inflation, are still 550% to 800% cooler than anything you can get today.

And if not ... at least my watches are.

Here's my first Swatch. When I was in 8th grade, I bought it on Kings Highway in Brooklyn for $25. You can make it yours today for $199.

How much would you pay for this beauty?

I only paid about $35, if I recall correctly. But for you to be seen wearing this legend of luminosity prepare to shell out no less than $195.

Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but, go figure, the Swatch I was given has risen the least in value. I'm sure it has nothing to do with me, more likely that being the least flamboyant of the bunch, it isn't as legit-80s as the serious Swatch collector would prefer.

Bargain basement nostalgia aside, I'm sure the here-and-now price tag of $85 (plus shipping) for this artifact of my senior year is considerably more than what bought it to my wrist.

Feel free to let me know where you were when Swatches were riding high, and their prices somewhat closer to the ground.

US hegemony in peril ... I don't think so

2007-11-18T23:46:00.000-05:00

These days concerned people are all in a tizzy that the US is losing its hold on global leadership.

With the plummeting dollar, precipitous hikes in oil prices, a widening crisis in the banking and credit industry, bipartisan political gridlock, being mired in two unpopular wars, and Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize, it makes sense that the whiners and losers who patiently await America's collapse may be on to something.

Not that it's the first time, but things do look bleak. Yet, I assure you ... with just the shallowest effort of research, even the most Chicken Little among us could see how abundantly, super crystal clear it is that if the US is on the shits creek express, the rest of the world is already there, bobbing in their eponymous current.

Think about it. Who's taking over? The Chinese?

Well, you know how we Americans get all stressed out about stem cell research and the sanctity of fetus cells and all that blah blah blah ... well, the Chinese tend to not get too caught up in that whole debate as they eat aborted fetuses for breakfast.

I'd say that's a disqualifier.

And if not that, their human rights record is. Particularly since the Chinese idea of human rights is the government having the right to decide who gets treated like a human and who doesn't.

The Russians are getting back on their bluster and you'd think they're on deck for the world stage.

Then again, the Russians also have this funny thing about mass murdering large civilian populations every 75 years or so ... and they're due.

While the British are too busy being mortified for the sake of appearances, the French have this thing about going to work, the Canadians are Canadians, the Koreans have this thing about being extraneously Asian, and the arabs have this thing about being unable to decide whether they want to be killing people or having $ex with anima1s.

Is our hold on top of the food chain looking more secure?

Well I had my doubts remembering that people are eying India as an emerging power that could potentially swallow the US tech sector and engineering industries. Then I saw this article (pasted below).

I'm confident there's nothing to fear.

Thieving monkeys 'out of control' in northeast India

Nov 17 04:08 AM US/Eastern

Monkey Menace in India Drives Residents Crazy

Troupes of monkeys are out of control in India's northeast, stealing mobile phones and breaking into homes to steal soft drinks from refrigerators, lawmakers in the region have complained.

"Monkeys are wreaking havoc in my constituency by taking away mobile phones, toothpastes, sipping coke after opening the refrigerators," Hiren Das told Assam state's assembly.

He said the primates were "even slapping women who try to chase them".

"It is a cause of serious concern in my area, with more than 1,000 such simians turning aggressive by the day," fumed Goneswar Das, another legislator representing Raha in eastern Assam.

Assam's wildlife minister, Rockybul Hussain, said the state government has formed a panel to study the problem.

Because of shrinking forest cover, monkeys have increasingly moved into cities elsewhere in India as well.

Last week, around two dozen people were hurt after monkeys rampaged through a New Delhi neighbourhood.

Last month, the deputy mayor of Delhi died when he fell from his balcony after being attacked by monkeys.

Efforts to drive out the animals is complicated by the fact that devout Hindus view them as an incarnation of Hanuman, the monkey god who symbolises strength.

Good luck besting the US in the 21st Century. Better yet, thanks for making it so easy to remain #1.

Kavanah Couture

2007-11-16T11:04:00.000-05:00

From the folks who brought you the Kosher lamp comes a new line of apparel ....

While not a bad idea -- those times I wear a sweater to davening, I do so hate the early stages of gangrene that set in from loss of circulation in my arm, or worse, stretching out my sweater cuffs -- it's how the product is being marketed that makes me wonder what they were thinking.

The copy, while solid at first, left me somewhat speechless:

Why shiver through morning shacharis on those cool, early mornings when you can daven in warm comfort? Put on a T-Sweater™ and you'll be ready to daven in a zip! No need to pull the Sweater over your head, no need to remove your hat or search for your kippah that has become lost in your pullover.

So far so good. Sounds like there's a benefit: why would ANYONE EVER want to remove their hat??? I guess if you're from a certain part of Europe, Hungary, really, pulling a sweater over your head is a major faux paux. To others, not. And while I would feel like a freak unzipping my sleeve to put on my tefillin (Translation: freak = total fag!!), I'm sure there's someone out there who wouldn't.

Just Unzip!

Just unzip and pull back the sleeve. Wow! The sleeve lies flat and stays out of the way, allowing you to put on your Tefillin without interruption. Now you can concentrate on davening while staying warm and looking great.

Wow! The sleeve lies flat (WTF????). And, I'm not sure what interruption I'll be so giddy to avoid, but .... WHOAH!! Hold your ritzuos cowboy.... "Now you can concentrate on davening while staying warm and looking great"

LOOKING GREAT???

Now wait a minute. Chaim Berlin students excluded, I wasn't aware that it was essential to "look great" during davening.

Is it better to look good than to daven good?

And even if the answer is NO, the first claim in the sentence, "Now you can concentrate on your davening ... ," how can you concentrate on your davening when you're busy congratulating yourself on how great you look?

Really, my opinion is worthless. Because it's only a matter of time before R' Elyashiv appears in Kupat Hair junkmail wearing a T-sweater amid page after page of poorly written expressions of orgasmic adulation and festooned with Haskamos from similarly endorsing, otherwise unconscious "gedolim."

Either that, or it will be banned, burned, and immediately thereafter, doubled in price.

Stay Comfortable All Day

After shacarit, keep your T-Sweater™ on. It's comfortable and the zippers are cleverly positioned beneath the arm, remaining inconspicuous. The material of the T-Sweater™ is not too heavy and not too light; the Kosher Innovations team, after extensive testing, selected a 9-gauge knitted acrylic as the most comfortable material in terms of temperature and weight.

After shacarit (sic), keep your T-Sweater™ on:
All-day wear ... I knew there had to be a reason it only comes in gray.

Not too heavy, not too light?
Like Shacharis on Sunday, Tuesday, Wed. and Friday. Like Shalosh Seudos? Like a Gerrer shtreimel?

Extensive testing? Have you heard this, too .... 4 out of 5 dentists with patients who wear tefillin prefer the T-sweater to the T- mock turtle neck, and the T-white, sequined, Elvis jumpsuit.

Kosher Innovations team??
If they're so innovative, then where are my Kosher pork rinds? How about a summer-weight Tallis with air vents on the top? A dripless Havdala candle anyone? Six words: Grease. Resistant. Kosher. Pizza. Shop. Tabletops.

I think that about covers it.

In conclusion, I have to say that I'm not sure if the T-sweater is the product I've waited for my whole life, or at least since my bar-mitzvah. But if looking great while davening is suddenly so important, could that mean that People magazine's 50 Sexiest Baalei Tefillah issue isn't far behind?

Discuss.

Forgive me for gloating ....

2007-10-21T13:01:00.000-04:00

Forgive me for gloating but this is quite possibly the greatest run-on sentence I have ever written:

Where are there "leaders"? Why aren't they walking the streets in sackcloths and ashes on their heads lamenting the state of our coming generations, instead of posing with pushkas like homeless supermodels to shill some bullshit charity created to glom more money for a shiftless useless generation of bearded coat-racks?

For more, go to mochassid.

"You got ID on you?" one cop asked Drimmer.

2007-10-12T10:02:00.000-04:00

The best line (see above) in this insane story (see below) came from a member of New York's Finest. And I'll bet anything he said it with a straight face.

I Love NY. Nude lunatics and all.

WELCOME TO TIMES 'BARE'

HIPSTER'S 'ONLY IN NUDE YORK' MOMENT

By JENNIFER FERMINO

October 12, 2007 --
What a weenie! Tourists' eyes were popping and locals' jaws were dropping yesterday morning when a curly-haired hipster bopped around Times Square in the buff.

Stunned passers-by stopped, stared and snapped pics of Josh Drimmer, 26, during his several-minutes-long naked stroll at the Crossroads of the World.

After stripping to the altogether, he zigzagged back and forth along Seventh Avenue between West 47th and 48th streets in all his glory at around 11 a.m.

"Yo, homeboy's got full-frontal nudity right here!" shouted one witness into his cellphone.

Drimmer is a playwright and Yale alum from Greenpoint, Brooklyn. In 2003, he earned a byline in the Daily News covering a funeral story.

"He was a strange guy," said a man who lived in Drimmer's Yale dorm during freshman year. "He would do weird things. He would eat scraps of food people left around for a couple of hours."

In yesterday's bizarre jaunt, Drimmer first popped up around the Renaissance Hotel, witnesses said. At that point, he was serenely strolling solo in one black sock.

But then he ditched the sock and went the full monty.

He started banging on the locked side door of the Olive Garden Restaurant, but workers there refused to let him in.
The naked-as-a-jaybird jaywalker then crossed Seventh Avenue midblock and barged into Tad's Steakhouse off 47th Street.
To the delight of about a dozen onlookers outside, he jumped up and down on top of the counter inside before being ushered out.

"I want to be on what he's on," said Xavier Sanchez, 23, of Manhattan.

"You don't see this down my way at all," said Pat Purks, a tourist from Bucks County, Pa.

"The Naked Cowboy's always here. What's the difference?" asked one unimpressed woman. The Naked Cowboy - a k a Robert Burck - told The Post he wasn't in Times Square yesterday.

"See what happens?" he said, "One day out and it literally caused some poor soul to go nuts, to keep the nakedness alive."

The strip show ended when the police showed up.

"You got ID on you?" one cop asked Drimmer.

Someone brought over a pile of Drimmer's clothes - which included plaid boxers, a blue polo shirt, and brown ankle-high boots - but he refused to put them on.

Drimmer was taken to Bellevue Hospital for evaluation, police said.

"I have no knowledge" of why this happened, his father said from his Chicago home.

Additional reporting by Erika Martinez

The Material Momzer

2007-09-16T13:32:00.000-04:00

Great News!! The Jewish faith now has it's very own ambassador.

That's right, Madonna, or Esther, as she prefers to be called when playing Jewish dress-up, complete with a red string on her wrist, spent part of Rosh Hashanah with Shimon Peres, during which she revealed that she is the 'Ambassador of Judaism.'

The admission as they were exchanging gifts, he to her, a copy of the old testament, a book we long know that Shimon Peres does not officially believe exists, and she to him, a copy of Dianetics: the Jewish Years, of more commonly known as The Book of Splendor, which is apparently the go-to guide for the Kabbalically Curious.

While her breathtaking claim reminds me of the old pre-adolescent stand-by: "Who died and made you boss?", or how I may have eleven new ways to use the word 'delusional' in a sentence, most of all, I'm just resigned to believe it's only a matter of time before Madonna has be own jBlog. Here's the article:

Madonna: I'm an 'ambassador for Judaism'

By STEVE WEIZMAN, Associated Press Writer

Sun Sep 16, 8:58 AM ET
JERUSALEM - Madonna toasted the Jewish new year with Israeli President Shimon Peres and declared herself an "ambassador for Judaism," local newspapers reported Sunday.

The singer, who is not Jewish, arrived in Israel Wednesday on the eve of Jewish new year to attend a conference on Kabbalah or Jewish mysticism.

Madonna met Peres at his official Jerusalem residence on Saturday evening and the two exchanged gifts, with Madonna receiving a lavishly bound copy of the Old Testament.

She gave Peres a volume of "The Book of Splendor," the guiding text of Kabbalah, inscribed "To Shimon Peres, the man I admire and love, Madonna," the Yediot Ahronot daily reported.

A Peres aide confirmed the meeting but had no details.

"You don't know how popular the Book of Splendor is among Hollywood actors," Yediot quoted Madonna as telling Peres. "Everyone I meet talks to me only about that. I am an ambassador for Judaism."

Madonna, who was raised a Roman Catholic, has taken the Hebrew name Esther, and has been seen wearing a red thread on her wrist in a Jewish tradition to ward off the evil eye.

But her interest in Kabbalah in recent years has been criticized by Orthodox Jews, who say it is an abomination.

Other celebrities who flew in for the Kabbalah conference included movie star Demi Moore and her husband, actor Ashton Kutcher, Rosie O'Donnell and fashion designer Donna Karan. Madonna came with her film director husband Guy Ritchie.

The Haaretz daily quoted Kutcher as telling a group of Israeli businessmen and entertainers on Saturday that Kabbalah had answered fundamental questions in his life and made him a better actor.

Rabbis who specialize in Kabbalah have criticized the interest by non-Jewish celebrities in the subject.

Jewish tradition holds that Kabbalah is so powerful and complicated that only bonafide students may begin to approach it and then only after age 40. Among the elements of Kabbalah are mystical revelations drawn from holy books by recombination of letters and other signs.

Rabbis were particularly incensed by Madonna's song, "Isaac," about the revered 16th-century Kabbalist rabbi Yitzhak Luria, which featured on her 2005 album, "Confessions on a Dance Floor."

During her visit, Madonna plans to visit sites sacred to Kabbalists. It was not known how long she intends to stay.

Madonna paid her first visit to Israel three years ago on another Kabbalah-centered trip.

"I can't believe that I'm celebrating the new year with you in Israel," Maariv newspaper quoted her as telling Peres on Saturday. "It's a dream come true."

Good News: the world is not going to hell in a handbasket

2007-09-11T18:28:00.000-04:00

Just in time for Rosh Hashanah comes an encouraging report comes from the most pessimistic country on this gloomy globe.

A report from AFP -- the global news agency of France -- reveals details from the 2007 State of the Future report, published by the American Council for the Tokyo-based United Nations University, which indicate that despite what Michael Moore and John Kerry would have us believe, the world isn't nearly as miserable a place as originally thought.

The good news seems to rain lollypops and bubblegum on all the usual misery factors:

Fewer cases of newly contracted HIV/AIDS cases in Africa

And more good news from Earth's most dysfunctional continent -- the number of genocidal conflicts in Africa has dropped from 16 in 2002 to 5 in 2007

The number of refugees in the global refugee population is going down

Life expectancy and literacy is going up

What I can't understand is how anything in the world could go right while George W. Bush is president. Maybe the French are lying.

In the meantime, eat your heart out all you liberal crybabies:

Despite many challenges, world faces brighter future: report

Despite daunting challenges posed by global warming, water, energy, unemployment and terrorism, the world faces a brighter future with fewer wars, higher life expectancy and improved literacy, according to a report released Monday.

"Although great human tragedies like Iraq and Darfur dominate the news, the vast majority of the world is living in peace, conflicts actually decreased over the past decade," says the 2007 State of the Future report published by the American Council for the Tokyo-based United Nations University, a global think tank.

It noted that the number of African conflicts fell from a peak of 16 in 2002 to five in 2005 and that the number of refugees around the world is falling.
HIV/AIDS in Africa has begun to level off and could begin to actually decrease over the next few years, although it continues to spread rapidly in Eastern Europe and in Central and South Asia, it said.

Among other global bright spots, the report cited higher life expectancy, lower infant mortality, increased literacy and increases in gross domestic products per capita and in the number of Internet users.

On the negative side, it pointed to hikes in CO2 emissions, terrorism, corruption, global warming and unemployment and a decrease in percentage of voting populations.
Persistent inequality was illustrated by figures showing that two percent of people own 50 percent of the world's wealth while the poorest 50 percent own only one percent.

The income of the richest 225 people in the world equals that of the poorest 2.7 billion or 40 percent of the global population, the report said.
It warned that unless key transnational challenges, including the gap between rich and poor, new or reemerging diseases and organized crime, are met, "the future could be bleak, marred by lack of water and arable land, mass migrations, turbulent climates, economic chaos and other disasters."

Solutions, it noted, include a "global energy development program led by the United States and China, breakthroughs in water desalination and the restructuring of educational systems to boost both individuals and collective intelligence."
More than 2,400 policy-makers, academics, futurists and creative minds from around the world have contributed to State of the Future reports over the past 11 years.
"This is the most vetted, longest lasting, cumulative integrated futures research project in history," said Jerome Glenn, head of the Millennium Project, which each year updates and expands the State of the Future.

"Done on a global basis on behalf of the globe, it (the report) offers collective intelligence for the planet," he added.

Osama goes Hollywood

2007-09-07T05:30:00.000-04:00

Variety -- Osama bin Laden, after a self-imposed, 3-year hiatus, comes frothing back to the video screen this September 11th for an exciting encore of his previous cinematic extravaganzas. This past Thursday, taking Hollywood by sand storm -- and surprise -- Team Osama launched a blizzard of street posters, print ads, word-of-mouth marketing, YouTube videos, and Osama bobble-heads dolls to promite the arrival of his newest video release this coming Tuesday.

"This buzz is no kabull," insists Mr. bin Laden's publicist, Hassam al Kaderka, responding to speculation that Osama's anticipated return was little more than chatter. "You're hearing it from the camel's mouth, Bubbala.”

But famed agent of the extremists and Mr. bin Laden’s long time representation Kahaka bin Addukah el-Derka was tight-lipped about the new video except to describe Osama as “today's most explosive star in the terror biz.”

Those who already reviewed the video say audiences can look forward to a few surprises. One is Osama's new look: his beard, once gray and streaked with goat dung is now jet-black. Osama's face, which always seemed frozen in a perpetual scowl, is now tan and taut.

"Osama has spent these last three years getting in touch with his inner fabulosity," crowed Abudullah el-Sanukaka -- al-Qaida's self-styled skincare guru and munitions expert. "People don't realize that Osama is vee-rry conscious about his appearance. But that dreadful underground air -- I swear, it's like living on a blackhead farm. And those wrinkles -- My Allah, you could lose a dirty bomb in those furrows. It’s no wonder people were out to kill him. All I can say is praised be Allah, may his glory be praised, for Botox.

“I’m not going to say the M-word, you know, Meccasexual,” adds el-Sanukaka, describing Osama’s new focus on being trim, fit, and well groomed, “but he needed a change. Really, those eyebrows -- ouch! Did someone say JI-HAD? Oy! You can just imagine the holy war we had taming those bushy infidels."

When bin Laden appears in his new footage on Tuesday, it will be the first images of him since his last videotape on October 29, 2004 -- just weeks before the U.S. presidential elections. In that appearance three years ago, he said America could avoid another 9-11 style attack if it stopped threatening Muslims.

Insiders say that Osama’s reportedly genuine offer to curb his extremism was less about conciliation and more about career uncertainty. "You’ll recall," says Hollywood film industry analyst Shakawi al Hasawawi, "back in ‘04, though the Coalition was pinching militants like gnats, Muslims all over were riding the wave of beheadings like RPGs. The arab street was rife with speculators just waiting to cash in on rumors of terror network mergers and a new global caliphate. There's no doubt Osama was starting to feel like ninth century’s news.”

But others see a very different picture. "Osama is shrewd -- if not a homicidal maniac,” says Muchammad al Derkaderka, managing director of Wahabibi Partners, a terror financing shell operating as a charity out of Michigan. “Osama is at his best when operating on the fringe -- away from the mainstream. When the average arab on the street is knee-deep in blood-lust, Osama is already exiting stage left.”

Conversely, al Derkaderka believes Osama's unexpected return to the big screen indicates a reverse trend that will bring audiences back to a straight-talking sociopath known to says it like it is -- albeit with absurdly flowery adjectives and preposterous threats of world domination.

“When you're Osama bin Laden, you've been around the mosque a few times,” he says. “You know when to hold them and when to explode them. Tuesday’s video debut says Osama and his management are ahead of the pack and with the surge underway, the electricity is back on and audiences are staying at home, hungry for a feel-good megalomaniacal rant on TV.

Other analysts agree, “There’s no doubt Osama is positioning himself to retake his percentage of audience share,” says Chaim Goldstein, a quantitative researcher in the film and entertainment division at Bear Stearns. "And that can only mean good news for investors."

But shrewd maneuvering and market timing is not the only theory about Osama's announced return. Some attribute his post-Labor Day blitz to pure vanity.

"It’s always about Osama’s monster ego," cackles al-Jazeera gossip editor Suhara al Wahawanuni speculating why bin Laden would have chosen September 11th, of all days, to reappear. "Dollars to dunams, Osama is saying to himself, 'This may have been the summer of George, but now it’s the fall of Osama.' He’s lonely, feels marginalized. Let’s call a shahid a shahid -- he wants attention.”

According to al Wahawanuni, bin Laden must also be seething about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- the impulsively verbose president of Iran, and currently viewed as the wackiest arab in the wadi. “If I’m Osama, she says, I’m thinking ‘Who the perfidious fires of Satan does this guy think he is?’ He knows he's dying of underexposure and needs to be back in the spotlight. It's so obvious and so pathetic.”

Editor of the Pan Arabic Inquirer, Hassan bin Wazakawazari, strongly agrees. "It can’t be more obvious,” he chortles. “The guy dyes his beard black? Coincidence? I think not. I mean, He-llo. When you’re Osama bin Laden, and this Iranian fruitcake is eating your lunch, or course you have to compete. But I think Osama’s best days are behind him. I see commercials for turban starch in his future.”

al Wahawanuni agrees. “It's not that he hasn't had a good run,” she says, “but really, there’s a reason they give out those lifetime achievement awards."

Breaking News: The Sky is Up... Water is Wet... and...

2007-08-30T18:25:00.000-04:00

Possible Remains of Second Temple Found In Jerusalem

Aug 30 04:20 PM US/Eastern

AP -- Remains of the Jewish second temple may have been found during work to lay pipes at the Al-Aqsa mosque compound in east Jerusalem, Israeli television reported Thursday.
Israeli television broadcast footage of a mechanical digger at the site which Israeli archaeologists visited on Thursday.

Gaby Barkai, an archaeologist from Bar Ilan University, urged the Israeli government to stop the pipework after the discovery of what he said is "a massive seven metre-long wall."

Television said the pipework carried out by the office of Muslim religious affairs, or Waqf, is about 1.5 metres deep and about 100 metres long.

The compound, which houses both Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, is located in east Jerusalem, which Israel occupied in 1967 and then annexed. It is the third holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina.

For Jews it as known as the Temple Mount, which they revere as the site of the King Herod's second temple, which was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. It is the holiest site in Judaism.

All that remains today is the temple's Western Wall, or Wailing wall.

An Editorial Fantasy

2007-08-20T14:04:00.000-04:00

I couldn't stop the wave of nausea that hit as I was reading an editorial in a local community paper. The publisher's commentary was nothing more than a vicious blind stab at an entire community of people who moved to a certain area -- accusing them of organized domination through intimidation and manipulation.

To validate his point, the publisher related several stories too fantastic to believe, and on closer scrutiny were revealed as fabrications Full of half-truths, if that much, nasty insinuations and hate filled commentary, the editorial seemed to advance no constructive goal other than to incite different groups of people against one another.

I'm surprised no other bloggers have commented on this egregious tsunami of hurtfulness and anger. Like me, they should appalled when such marinated malevolence worms its way into the public realm.

I hope the author of this editorial will think twice before letting such hated get the best of him ever again. Read on to get a glimpse of his twisted view of the world:

From the Editor's Desk:

(More People Have Died In The Name Of Ruffian Issue)

(Delusional Fantasy Thinly Disguised as) Commentary:

Once upon a time, there was a quiet little neighborhood that was actually five separate towns. These towns was quaint and prosperous. The main street of the town was lined with pretty shops and restaurants that all sold wonderful products and served delicious food. There was always parking, never a double-parked car, and all the citizens courteous, considerate, and ever polite.

Until one day, a gang of wild ruffians from Brooklyn discovered this bucolic burg and and plotted to conquer and enslave its contented residents.

The plan was simple: one by one, the ruffians would buy homes in the community. At first, they would smile and act like the townspeople. They knew they would be treated with mild suspicion at first, but soon they would be accepted. And in time, they were.

Phase two of the plan was a little more complicated ... take over one of the towns. So they began to slowly buy property from unsuspecting villagers through lies, deceit, and veiled threats of violence.

Once they took over one town, before the town residents could protest, they began to take over the next and the next. To inject confusion and fear, the ruffians enacted a plan to pour into the village streets by the thousands, at a set time, on a set day, each week, solely to clog the streets with foot traffic, and incapacitate the village.

By the time the townspeople figured out what was happening, it was too late. On that one day each week the townspeople were left siting in their homes, virtually paralyzed; unable to drive, walk, or shop for they feared coming into contact with the dreaded ruffian hordes.

The ruffians were just getting started. Now, they decided, they would dismantle the main shopping strip one store at a time. They began to drive enormous vehicles along the avenue, stopping indiscriminately, parking their cars within the roadway, and then leaving cars in parking spots for hours on end to eliminate the ease of finding a spot and navigating the shopping district.

Not that there was much shopping once could do. The ruffians, leveraging their effective street-clogging practice placed local establishments in an economic choke hold. After first, simply clamoring inside and around the village's stores and restaurants, causing distruption and unpleasantness, they soon began refusing to patronize the area's increasingly empty stores. One by one, proprietors began closing their shops and restaurants.

The ruffians threatened boycotts, left violent notes on doorways, bullied shop owners to chase away their longtime customers and serve ruffians only, to serve only coarse, expensive ruffian food on the ruffian schedule, and intimidated those who wouldn't cooperate to close their doors and flee in fear of their livelihoods.

For the villagers, that great Carvel ice-cream party that had been their happy lives was being forced to close. Daily, they endured the ruffians who would fight with villagers, destroy their property, and coordinate their continued anarchy by speaking non-stop to one another on cell phones.

Soon ruffian temples began to appear on street corners and tucked away on once-tranquil boulevards. The ruffians would gather at the temples to plot more evil and refused entry to all non-ruffians.

The terrified townspeople began selling their precious homes to the continuous ooze of ruffians arriving from towns and villages they had long ago conquered, to pick on the carcass of the dying town.

Those who remained realized they had no choice but to fight. They gathered in secret one night at the village school to speak of the evil curtain that had descended on their decaying homes and beloved institutions.

They spoke of the old times before the ruffians came, and wept as they recalled the good days of the past while vowing to drive the ruffians away.

But their courageous resolve vaporized when they learned that the ruffians knew of their meeting and plans, and were planning to exact harsh punishment to circumvent any means of revolt by the town residents.

It was the school building, the site of the ill-fated meeting, that would bear the brunt of the ruffian's wrath. The school building, a treasured town landmark, had once stood for all that was right and good inthe little town. Though in its prime it had been a breathtaking edifice, with an elegant colonnaded entrance and spacious, sun-lit interiors, the school building faired poorly since the ruffian onslaught.

Once emerald lawns were now overgrown with weed and littered with rusting cars and discarded election posters. The slate roof had caved in due to an criminally overpriced and underattended repair, the facade was cracked and worn, and the physical plant rendered nearly useless from neglect. But the ruffians had more in store.

within a short period of time, by exploiting local school governance codes and regulations, the ruffians outwitted the simple townspeople and infiltrated their school-governance committees. Once in control, they set out to demolish the entire educational infrastructure to deprive the town's children of education and the opportunity for advancement, or even the chance to flee the area when they were old enough to do so.

Aside from the glee the ruffians took in exacting their painful pound of flesh, they plotted to enslave the ignorant town children to lives of bitter servitude and dull subordination.

The ruffian-infiltrated governing committee promptly dismissed all the teachers and began to sell each school building, one by one, to fellow ruffians who would, in turn, build even more ruffian temples and ruffian schools.

To fool the townspeople into believing they had a chance to save their precious schools, the ruffians invited all town residents to public meetings where the villagers would be invited to speak their minds and possibly sway the ruffian’s harsh treatment of their town's most treasured institution.

Throughout the punishing schedule of public meetings, desperate, supplicating villagers pleaded with their ruffian overlords to consider easing their iron rule. but these meetings began and ended as theater and farce. Powerless town resident would come forward to humbly plead for deliverance to ruffian sneers and mockery, who would flatly refuse every tearful request.

And so it continued. Listless townspeople huddled behind bolted doors and crumbling memories, resigned to live out their bitter lives behind the cracking paint of their rotting homes, in terror of the next ruffian to strip them further of their dignity and possessions.

As the wealth and number of the ruffians grew, they continued to plot new lands to conquer, and new natives to enslave.

Unlike the brutalized people in their wake, the ruffians lived happily ever after.

Bitches and Hos gotta go ...

2007-07-31T08:29:00.000-04:00

Banning words is a slippery slope. Even symbolic bans.

Months ago, after the NY City Council voted to symbolically ban "the N Word", the word formally know as "nigger," I shared my belief that if banning any word was deemed acceptable, even symbolically, then this was just the beginning.

Based on my experiences and observation with the empty theology of Liberal politics I knew that one ban is the ice-breaker on an iceberg just starting to show its tip.

Sure enough, this morning, the New York Sun reports that a NY City Council member has introduced a bill to ban the words "bitch" and "ho."

According to the New York Sun , "The resolution, which would ban two words widely considered sexist and insulting when used to describe women, already has support from 22 council members, its sponsor, Council Member Darlene Mealy of Brooklyn, said yesterday."

Excusing her inexcusable advocacy of legislated censorship and mandating limits on thought and speech in a country that is the antithesis of these crimes, Ms. Mealy said, "I feel this should be it, these three and no more." The "three and no more" refers "to the words covered by her resolution and the slur successfully targeted earlier this year by a council member of Queens."

She's got to be kidding. She has issues with these words because the demented hip-hop culture celebrates and elevates these words in popular songs and everyday street language. Disgraceful, degrading slurs like "nigger", "bitch", and "ho" became popular, not through muttered, offhand remarks by Imus, but by the very people they should most offend. Yes. Should offend. As in "astonishingly does not."

I'm sure this is just the beginning. and I'm sure symbolic bans are the beginning of demands for bans more binding.

As I said earlier, there is a dictionary-full of words that offend, degrade, and dehumanize. And as I said earlier, the risk for uttering these slurs should remain the risk of a broken jaw. not legislated consequences.

For all their dogmatic bluster about civil rights, cultural equality, and right-wing censorship, the real fascists are liberals. Always were, always will be.

Here's the article. If you feel faint, put your head between your legs to increase the flow of blood to your brain. It also may be a good idea to read the article close to a toilet, garbage can, or a plastic bag. You just might puke.

Council Bill Would Ban Two More Slurs

By GRACE RAUH
Staff Reporter of the Sun
July 31, 2007

The City Council is considering a symbolic ban on the words "ho" and "b—ch," five months after it approved a similar ban on the "n-word" that garnered national attention.

The resolution, which would ban two words widely considered sexist and insulting when used to describe women, already has support from 22 council members, its sponsor, Council Member Darlene Mealy of Brooklyn, said yesterday. "I feel this should be it, these three and no more," Ms. Mealy said, referring to the words covered by her resolution and the slur successfully targeted earlier this year by a council member of Queens, Leroy Comrie. "We should be burying these three."

Ms. Mealy said she is concerned that her resolution's two words are featured prominently in popular music and have become less likely to trigger outrage when used in conversation. If approved, her resolution likely would be used to pressure the music industry to remove the words from lyrics and to encourage people to strike them from their speech.

In April, talk show host Don Imus called members of the Rutgers University women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos," prompting a national discussion about the word.

Mr. Comrie, who has become something of a national spokesman against the n-word, said he supports Ms. Mealy's proposal.

"You know, we have to keep the assault on hate speech," he said. "I think the challenge for all of us now is to understand we can stand up and speak against things that are demeaning to us and other people."

Here she is ... Miss Jihad

2007-07-31T01:46:00.000-04:00

This beauty pageant is da' bomb! Try not to ogle the terrorists:

The Wacky Wild World of Chareidim

2007-07-26T20:33:00.000-04:00

As long as Brooklyn Wolf is on the subject of wacky things you see in a Chareidi neighborhood, I decided to share the wealth with a picture I took a few weks ago in Woodbourne. If anyone can tell me what the sign is advertising, I'd be curious to find out. Somehow I doubt the frames they're advertising go the mikvah every morning and wear Rashi and Rabbeinu Tam tefillin.

You GOT to see this ...

2007-07-26T14:56:00.001-04:00

Introducing, Stevie Wonder ... drummer

Let them eat bullets

2007-07-10T07:41:00.001-04:00

The arabs in Gaza are hurtling towards total humanitarian, political, and economic collapse, reports the International Herald Tribune this morning. Since Hamas took over last month, all routes to Israel and Egypt have been effectively sealed, and no money or other supplies have been allowed to enter Gaza, with the exception of emergency staples such as food and medicine.

Due to near total unemployment, 1.1 million of the 1.5 million arabs in Gaza rely on public assistance for any sustenance. There is little hope for imminent industrial expansion and these numbers are expected to grow.

I recall last month, reports in the NY Times and Wall Street Journal of the bustling weapons trade in Gaza, where the abundance of guns and ordinance is so high the market value of these materials has dropped nearly to the point of worthlessness.

In this context, among many others, it doesn't take much to understand that if the Palestinians, as they prefer to be called, would have spent much of the last 7 years building a societal infrastructure of industry, education, transportation, and an efficacious civic and legal framework -- simple, intuitive measures all effective societies must create to thrive -- the arabs in Israel would be doing just fine.

Instead they chose to invest prodigiously in weaponry, terror training, hate indoctrination, corruption, incitement, and murder. As a result, Hamas now rules a wretched society (I use this term loosely) of sociopaths who have a better chance of buying an AK-47 than a loaf of fresh bread.

In no time at all emerged the latest theme in the never-ending blame-Israel game: that Israel must not allow this societal implosion from occurring, because, if anyone, Israel should be punishing the Hamas government, not the people.

The argument is ironic for a number of reasons, namely that it was the Palestinian populace that elected Hamas to their government and are most certainly entitled to sleep in the bed they made. Furthermore, the official terror policy for generations has been that the entire Israeli population (and now, by extension, all of Western society) is culpable for the “sins” of its leadership and military, and therefore fair game.

Also, one of the key proponents for the Gaza siege is Mahmoud Abbas, the Fatah leader, now relegated to ruling the 2/3 of Pan-Palestinia located within the Shomron. In addition to strongly advocating the unrelenting blockade of main connection points between Gaza and Israel proper, Abbas has successfully lobbied the Egyptians to keep their side of the border clamped tight.

As for me, I have no sympathy for the arabian riffraff in Gaza. Let them have their cake and eat it, too. Or, considering this region’s most plentiful natural resource, let them eat bullets.

Why are most suicide bombers Muslim?

2007-07-06T10:25:00.000-04:00

I've long recognized Islam for what it is: a codified cesspool of psychotic depravity manifested through a depraved grouping of twisted, elastic values structured to perpetuate and justify brutality and persecution.

For irrefutable proof, one need look no further than the pot of gold Muslim men are taught awaits at the end of their murderous rainbow: a perpetual orgy with a smorgasbord of 72 virgins.

Meanwhile, all a woman can expect to receive in reward of a life of harassment, servitude and abuse is the dubious honor of being the most desirable member of her harem.

Despicable as it may be to base an entire religious system on the promise of an eternity raping young girls, an Oxford University sociologist now surmises that nearly all terrorists are Muslim because they have follow a religious system that propagates a male population motivated by one insatiable wet dream, for which oversexed Muslims will happily resort to commit the most ghastly acts of inhumanity and violence simply to gain total assurance that their harem awaits, and a fast-track to claiming this despicable reward.

The article below provides an insight into the most degenerate truth of all about Islamic terrorism … that the scourge of unrelenting murder and misery Muslims have brought to the civilized world is due to little more than pent-up sexual frustration.

Suicide missions are not always religiously motivated, but according to Oxford University sociologist Diego Gambetta, editor of Making Sense of Suicide Missions, when religion is involved, the attackers are always Muslim. Why? The surprising answer is that Muslim suicide bombing has nothing to do with Islam or the Quran (except for two lines). It has a lot to do with sex, or, in this case, the absence of sex.

What distinguishes Islam from other major religions is that it tolerates polygyny. By allowing some men to monopolize all women and altogether excluding many men from reproductive opportunities, polygyny creates shortages of available women. If 50 percent of men have two wives each, then the other 50 percent don't get any wives at all.

So polygyny increases competitive pressure on men, especially young men of low status. It therefore increases the likelihood that young men resort to violent means to gain access to mates. By doing so, they have little to lose and much to gain compared with men who already have wives. Across all societies, polygyny makes men violent, increasing crimes such as murder and rape, even after controlling for such obvious factors as economic development, economic inequality, population density, the level of democracy, and political factors in the region.

However, polygyny itself is not a sufficient cause of suicide bombing. Societies in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean are much more polygynous than the Muslim nations in the Middle East and North Africa. And they do have very high levels of violence. Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from a long history of continuous civil wars—but not suicide bombings.

The other key ingredient is the promise of 72 virgins waiting in heaven for any martyr in Islam. The prospect of exclusive access to virgins may not be so appealing to anyone who has even one mate on earth, which strict monogamy virtually guarantees. However, the prospect is quite appealing to anyone who faces the bleak reality on earth of being a complete reproductive loser.

It is the combination of polygyny and the promise of a large harem of virgins in heaven that motivates many young Muslim men to commit suicide bombings. Consistent with this explanation, all studies of suicide bombers indicate that they are significantly younger than not only the Muslim population in general but other (nonsuicidal) members of their own extreme political organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah. And nearly all suicide bombers are single.

Free At Last! Free At Last! Thank God Almighty We're Free At Last (to murder people and beat the shit out of each other)

2007-06-20T22:39:00.000-04:00

Two heartwarming stories about Tuesday's
Juneteenth festivities.

Every June 19th, in fourteen states, Black Americans celebrate Juneteenth to commemorate the announcement of the abolition of slavery in Texas. Evidently, the slaves had been freed one and a half years earlier, but someone forgot to tell them. Surely a reason to celebrate. And so they did.

First, in Austin, during a Juneteenth gathering of 2,000 to 3,000 of our nation's model minority, the driver of a car that hit and slightly injured a little girl was pulled from his car and beaten by a bloodthirsty crowd.

Giving the bloodthirsty crowd the benefit of the doubt, it's safe to say that they would have surely stopped their beating as soon as the man was dead. But fate intervened.

A courageous man, a passenger in the car, got out of the car and approached the mob, urging the savages to stop their attack. They respectfully complied.

Unfortunately for his heroic passenger, they instead proceeded to beat him. To their credit, and thoroughly true to form, they immediately stoppled as soon as he was dead. As for the now-quite-scathed driver, he fled for his life. What a party.

But the party doesn't end there, folks. Moving on to Milwaukee, the celebratory nature of this joyous day in Wisconsin, and the depth of meaning contained within the sacred institution of Juneteenth so poignant, I'll let the news story speak for itself:

Juneteenth Celebrations Turn Violent

"Police were hoping for a peaceful celebration of Juneteenth, which is the celebration marking the end of slavery, but were instead called to the festival area to face a violent breakout.

Officers arrived on Milwaukee's north side in riot gear to deal with a crowd that had gotten out of control.

The festival itself was fairly uneventful, but afterward, participants smashed two cars, and put one of the drivers in the hospital.

Police even had to use their clubs against one woman who tried to hit an officer.

Some people think the violence takes away from the real meaning of Juneteenth.

"I think it should be continued," said Earnestine Rogers. "It shouldn't be stopped because of some youngsters."

It's the second year in a row that violence has broken out at the celebration."

I'm sure if the freed slaves could see what a noble segment of society their worthy offspring would become, they would have either shot themselves, or died of embarrassment.

Then again, the drunken mobs of yeshiva boys who rob, rape, and pillage every year after the Israel Day Parade are no different.

Oh, wait, sorry. That only happens on Dov Bear's warped blog.

A Convenient Excuse

2007-06-18T07:29:00.000-04:00

As the Church Lady used to say, "How Conveeeenient!"

The new UN Secretary General has thought up a convenient excuse for the UN's disgraceful inexcusable inaction relative to the Darfur massacres: Global Warming.

I'm not sure whether to:

a) laugh
b) scream
c) just be happy they're not blaming the Jews

It seems I was all wrong about Global Warming. I thought this Global Farce was cooked up as a convenient way to divert attention from the Democrats' predicted inability to make good on their campaign promises to end the war in Iraq (It wasn't long before the Democratic powers realized that all they were capable of doing was drafting one symbolic (READ: worthless) piece of legislation after another).

But I underestimated the cynicism of the Democrats and dirtbag liberal bureaucrats all over the world. Global Warming was cooked up as a convenient way to divert attention from every horror perpetrated by liberals with their "speak much ... do nothing" political ideology.

I can't understand how I didn't see this coming from the beginning. Soon, liberals and their fascist despot counterparts will be blaming everything on Global Warming ... from poor reading scores in the inner city to higher interest rates to ADHD to raunchy hip-hop lyrics to the idiocy on television to mass murder in Sudan, and well beyond.

Even worse, in case no one realizes, Global Warming is code for "US policies that work to prevent corrupt, savage dictators from having their way with defenseless citizens all around the world," Which, if you read the papers, is apparently a bad thing. The US policies, that is.

So, citizens of the United States ... prepare yourselves. In time, Americans will blamed for every possible ill around this insane globe. No matter what, Global Warming is the cause; ergo, the United States is to blamed. Convenient, indeed.

For some time, I've observed how the United States has become the International Jew: a convenient scapegoat for anything that goes wrong with this world ... no matter how preposterous the claim.

Remarkably, the United States, the greatest, most compassionate, most charitable, and most generous nation in the history of mankind can expect nothing in return but to get shit on again and again.

Sounds familiar. We even have our very self-hating Americans.

Get on line world. You've been given your convenient new excuse to justify every evil that takes place on this crazy, upside-down planet.

I'm sure you'll outdo yourselves again and again with the blame you dish out.

Midwood, You rule

2007-06-14T20:35:00.000-04:00

Krum tagged me, so here goes ....

“Midwood, you rule. Even if Budapest is such a better name. Who else has ten thousand $11 million mansions, all built within 12 inches of each other? How about the one place where the only land more valuable than an $11 million mansion is a 2-hour parking spot on Ave. J. Thank you trend setting ladies of Midwood -- for wearing Gucci to the gym, but robes from Friday to Monday. To show our gratitude, we’ve got something for you. No, not single malt, or a stock tip -- cell phones without annual contracts, so you’re not locked in, unlike your neighbor, uncle, and mechuten doing 6-10 upstate. And with no annual contract, you’re free to move anywhere you want, as long as it’s not out of Brooklyn.

Jblogger Unmaskifier

2007-05-28T11:23:00.000-04:00

Finally ... an effective way to unmask the identities of all the Jbloggers I know.

I took the simple test seen below, and it effectively identified me. Why don't you click the post title and take it yourself. Once you do, it''ll be a snap for me to identify you by your regional accent.

Once I can confirm your geographic locale, I can simply look through your local phone book, and using my extraordinary deductive powers, easily figure out who you are.

But don't worry. I won't tell a soul. And you ... just don't tell Pam Greenbaum.

Here are my results. Let me know yours as soon as possible.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The West
North Central
Boston
The South
The Inland North
Philadelphia
The Northeast
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

When it comes to "it", the OU gets it!

2007-05-14T10:00:00.000-04:00

There's an article today on Arutz Sheva that describes the OU/NCSY's web-based"sexual abstinence program." Though the starry-eyed among us may believe that sexual activity among Orthodox youth is a non-issue, they live in denial at their own risk.

Meanwhile, cynics snort at "right wing" claims that the Internet is the bogeyman of our day, but I unequivocally beg to differ. Need I count the ways?

Putting porn aside, which is a clear and present danger, I am convinced that the instantaneous access the Internet allows to explicit information and perverse influences, most of which are anathema to the values of the Orthodox family, and I'd like to believe Jews in general, has much to do with why of the several therapists and child psychologists I've discussed this issue with, one describes walking in a fog of despair from the frequency and nature of sexual activities and proclivities he hears from teenage patients, while another describes how being a therapist in the frum community today means living with a broken heart.

Dramatic, perhaps, but unwarranted, highly doubtful.

The OU/NCSY sexual abstinence program is geared to deliver frank, honest, and compelling information to Jewish teens, Orthodox or otherwise, about the havoc sexual activity wreaks on teenage lives.

Some may snicker that the OU approach is to create a website, even though the web appears to share much of the blame for today's challenges. But that assessment is disingenuous. No one is moving backward. The net is here and here to stay. But a web-based program that educates teens about abstinence, is at-least providing another of several web-based positive influences.

The article mentions the involvement of Rabbi Hershel Schachter, Rosh Yeshiva (Dean) at Yeshiva University, in appraising and approving the program. The article notes that Rav Schachter made certain and believes the content of the program "[is] straightforward but not so graphic as to render it too unsuitable for observant teens to read."

Of course, just hearing that the OU, with the involvement of YU, spearheaded this timely and courageous program, many in the so-called "heimishe circles" will respond with the same 'Chareidim-don't-have-this-problem if-you-weren't Modern-Orthodox-you-wouldn't-either' pomposity, and the usual head-in-the-sand snark reserved for real-world issues, which, despite directly impacting all Jewish community, are expected will disappear if ignored long enough.

But then, alas, in a few years, we'll read some breathless Yated article describing the historical significance of the Gedolei Hador meeting to discuss when they plan to discuss having a discussion about the solution to the tragic, unforeseen, and newly coined "Blowjob Crisis", or "Homosexual Machleh."

Soon, organizations like Priority-69 or Project S.E.X. will materialize from the ether insisting they and only they have the knowledge and experience to resolve this unprecedented crisis.

Rabbonim will organize perfunctory, community-wide Yomei Tefillot, while opaquely blaming the whole problem on women and their form-fitting Lycra skirts. The Agudah will issue press release after press release, insisting that though it may appear as if they're doing nothing, in actuality, they are hard at work "solving the problem as we speak," though quietly, and behind the scenes.

Torah Umesorah, however, will develop a brilliant, immeasurably effective website that distributes FOR FREE inspired solutions that deal with the problem head-on. But, they'll refuse to reveal the URL in fear that they may appear to be condoning the Internet; the existence of which, as per the binding policy of the Moetzes Gedolos, they cannot officially acknowledge.

And in the flurry or hand-wringing, self-pity, and uncomprehending panic, YU and the OU, long marginalized for their prescient leadership, will remain ignored, in spite of their early contributions.

Their idealistic, but naive leadership, will be left speechless and uncomprehending that an issue they first identified, decisively acted to dissipate, for which they were so strongly criticized, their centerpiece claim of relevancy, has somehow slipped through their fingers into the hands of a system that never acknowledge, much less credit, their visionary work.

But for the time being, while OU/NCSY still holds the moral high ground for doing what's right, let's give them their deserved spotlight by pasting below the article from Arutz Sheva:

NCSY Calls on Jewish Teens: Just Say No

by Hillel Fendel

(IsraelNN.com) The OU's youth organization, saying its advisors are in accurate touch with Jewish teens, announces a new web-based "sexual abstinence program."

NCSY (National Council of Synagogue Youth), the youth organization of the OU (Orthodox Union), has announced a website-based program to convince teenagers that sexual activity before marriage should be avoided in the interests of their physical, emotional and religious well-being.

The announcement of the new program stated that it stemmed from NCYS's deep disturbance at the fact that "teenagers, including Jewish teens, are increasingly engaged in sexual experimentation."

The website-based program (www.negiah.org), uses frank language to convey the risks faced by young men and women engaging in sexual experimentation. Articles are categorized according to four types of risks, as explained by text writer Rabbi Jack Abramowitz: Physical bodily dangers, mental and emotional hazards, negative impacts on one's life; and negative impacts on one's soul.

Explaining his approval of the program and the terminology it employs, OU Executive VP Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, a clinical psychologist, said, "NCSY works with teenagers where they are. Its advisors know the culture of the Jewish adolescent population firsthand, because of the climate of trust and openness that they inspire. I think it is fair to say that they know what is really happening among our teens at least as well, if not better, than many parents, rabbis and educators."

"Engaging in sexual activity before one is truly ready... can have REAL emotional consequences," the website says. "Some of these may pass; others can even affect your marriage years later." These dangers include stress, guilt, loss of self-respect, a sense of betrayal, anger, depression, stunting of personal growth, and regret.

The NCSY leadership has "become convinced," Rabbi Weinreb wrote, "that the only effective response to this troubling state of affairs is a comprehensive educational program in the modality (i.e., the Internet) and language to which our teens best relate. Thus, NCSY has developed this program, aimed to urge sexual abstinence among our children."

The announcement states that Rabbi Hershel Schachter, Rosh Yeshiva (Dean) at Yeshiva University, and Jewish-legal consultant for OU Kosher, approved the program, noting that the language was straightforward but not so graphic as to render it too unsuitable for observant teens to read.

Approval has also been given by medical and mental health professionals, the OU states, including David Pelcovitz, Ph.D. and David Hurwitz, M.D.

NCSY acknowledges that "in our sex-drenched culture, deciding to abstain can be easier said than done. It may be hard, but you will find that abstinence can be far more rewarding than you imagine. Abstinence doesn't just happen by itself, and just saying 'no' isn't much of a strategy. You have to think about it, plan a course of action, and stick to it." The program then provides strategies for success.

Key sections of the program include pregnancy, dangers of disease, how to achieve real commitment without the dangers of sexual experimentation, the correlation between sexual activity and suicide rates, Biblical role models such as Joseph, family purity, and more.

Rabbi Steven Burg, National Director of NCSY, expressed pride that NCSY "is the first organization to address this issue specifically as it pertains to Jewish teenagers."

A shining Jewish Star

2007-05-09T19:41:00.000-04:00

Yesterday’s post on Orthomom led me to think hard about The Jewish Star, a free newspaper distributed in the Five Towns.

What struck me as worthy of contemplation was the satisfying, edifying response The Jewish Star presented in response to the disgraceful scandal du jour from the ongoing Battle of the Boards in Lawrence Public School District 15.

The coverage was legitimately newsworthy, well written, and delivered with clarity and credibility. Best of all, it was consistent with my sensibilities, without preaching to the choir or embarrassingly slanted.

But first the background:

Last week, the Alliance of Lying Paranoid Schmucks (ALPS) a self-appointed lobbying group that claims to advocate on behalf of underprivileged Lawrence public school students, launched an ad campaign accusing Orthodox Jews of baking Passover matzos with the blood of murdered Christian children, spreading the Bubonic plague by poisoning wells in Lawrence, controlling the media, banks, U.S. foreign policy, and global climate, and of being hell-bent on dismantling the Five Towns' public school system.

After Der Stürmer refused to carry the ads, the Nassau Herald gladly offered right hand, bottom corner, front fourth placements, organization rate card, minus 12% for frequency.

Reading about the ads on Orthomom, I felt outraged, humiliated, ashamed, and powerless. It was like being called a Nappy-headed Hebro'.

When Al Sharpton didn't return my phone calls, I remembered that I work to support my family and had no time to picket outside the Herald building. I promptly forgot my outrage and went on with life.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town is The Jewish Star.

Today, though I never would have thought likely, considering the piece of crap rag the paper was as recently as last summer, The Jewish Star is a frum newspaper that, unlike any other frum newspaper I recall, effectively rises above the embarrassing histrionics; meandering stream-of-consciousness analysis; knee-jerk self-hatred; horrifying factual liberties taken in the interest of propping up self-generated faux issues; mono-dimensional self-righteous ranting, and; antiseptic wire service regurgitation that sucks all the joy from the immensely personal and pleasurable experience reading a newspaper should be.

Eschewing all that nonsense, The Jewish Star just sticks to the facts and reports news and interesting topical features that matters to the frum community. And it’s actual news, written for the paper by real people; not prepackaged wire fodder and promotional fluff written, badly, by yeshiva administrators and hack PR agencies.

Now, I’m not sure how I expected The Jewish Star to respond to the unconscionable placement of blatantly anti-religious, divisive, and entirely baseless ads in a well-read local paper. Being that The Jewish Star is owned by the same media company that owns the Herald, had I thought about it, I would probably have expected the coverage to reflect the economically prudent strategy of glossing over the controversy.

Instead, this week, The Jewish Star attacked the ads and those responsible for creating them, reamed the Herald for placing the ads, culled credible denunciations from local politicians, accurately contextualized the ads in a cogent, well-researched editorial, and provided candidate endorsements without resorting to disingenuous fear-mongering and rhetorical whining.

My only possible complaint might be the Amen Corner of pissed-off anti-ad letter writers that appeared on the “Letters to the Editor” page. I wouldn’t have minded seeing at least one mildly supportive letter for the other side.

Then again, just as it’s difficult to find anyone who hates mothers and kittens, it’s unlikely anyone capable of writing a letter would support a hateful ad campaign intended to foment hatred against and fear of a double-digit percentage of Five Towns residents.

The coverage in The Jewish Star effectively encapsulated every angle of the issue, without trivializing the degree of injustice in the name of that journalistic dogma “balance”, or souring its credibility by injecting cowardly potshots and predictable subjectivity.

Furthermore, it isn’t often a frum newspaper takes time to bolster coverage of an issue that is of slam dunk interest to its readership, by seeking objective source quotes, which in this case, consisted of local officials, senators, national educational leaders, even a neighborhood minister.

This type of journalism requires pride of ownership, professionalism, and the self-discipline to research and report facts without editorializing, and when editorializing, to do so without pontification. The Jewish Star seems to have all that.

Getting back to my original point, reading the paper this week, I actually felt a burst of pride, concluding that The Jewish Star’s current incarnation is THE paper the Five Towns, and all working, thinking Orthodox Jews, have waited for … forever to arrive.

And I make this sniveling, hyperbolically sycophantic declaration, not because I’m sniveling, hyperbolic, or sycophantic. It's simply the truth.

By the way, the same way I won’t vote for a candidate simply for having a Jewish last name, I won’t praise a media source simply for being an echo chamber of my thoughts, opinions, and values. Rather, I credit The Jewish Star for making it a policy to respect its readers and the intelligence of this community.

Too much “frum media” panders to the lowest common denominator of the frum community. The results are self-evident.

A frum newspaper that actually is a Kiddush Hashem!?! Now there’s a concept I hope catches on.

Still Wonderin' if I'm a shameless sellout?

2007-05-08T14:22:00.000-04:00

My homage to Eli Gerstner's new album 'Shabichi', that followed a scathing knee-jerk critique has raised the ire of another Jewish music purist, as I was before my embarrassing admission that I think The Yeshiva Boys Choir is just swell.

Here's the comment from my anonymous detractor:

I was with you, until you started fawning over EG. He's the worst of the offenders, in my opinion. And his cookie-cutter style is showing up in Shalsheles, Shalsheles Jr., and every other sub-group he tries to spin off. There's nothing fresh or original about his arrangements, if you listen to any "goyish" pop music from the last 20 years. Jeez. Next thing you know, we'll all be diggy-diggy-da-dumming to oblivion. You need to keep your disgust honed and sharp. Always. Don't let down your guard!

The comment is understandable, and duly noted. In fact, I took the time to write a long response (391 words actually). But since no one reads month-old comments to month-old posts, I figured I'd get more bang out of my buck and make it into a post.

So without further ado, my response, and my third post about Eli Gerstner, which definitely qualifies as some sort of obsession:

Wait a sec. Do you truly believe that I can't tell that EG spends most of his life cherry picking and reworking 80s pop arrangements?

From Bryan Adams to The Jackson Five to Heart to Toto ... to a fault, EG’s stolen it all.

Maybe he changes tempos, but often he lifts entire chord progressions.

But, still, I do admit suspending my typically harsh criticism for a frummy musical arranger. Even though I am well aware that EG orbits in a universe of presumably “acceptable non-goyish” Jewish music that is positively unlistenable.

Not to drone on, but I dry heave just hearing a male choir, syncopated horn filler, pre-packaged guitar riffs, shamelessly contrived oy-yoy-yoying, and every predictable note of every phoned-in song churned out by has-been composers, and talentless hacks with recording studios in their basement.

But EG’s music is different. I'm convinced that it takes a certain kind of genius to write three back-to-back grand slam signature songs.

I find such a feat -- and that I find his music to be, well, musical -- surprising, considering how many times EG's picture has appeared on the cover of Country Yossi magazine.

Yet, he pulls it off with fresh arrangements, highly memorable songs, fantastic choir compositions, and the innate knack to rip off others' songs and convincingly make them his own.

Or maybe I’ve made this odd exception to my otherwise wilting standard for Jewish music because EG and I appear to share a certain shameful predilection: we both like 80s pop. Based on his music, EG’s favorite decade is unquestionably the 80s.

As for me, though relishing my aficionado love for all things Led Zeppelin and U2, and being generally nuts for Green Day, Guns n' Roses, and others... with the same breath I admit listening to online 80s retro stations all day. What can I say? I grew up in the 80s and love the music.

And without realizing it, EG is pandering to my weakness for feel-good musical garbage.

But I’ll go a step further … I can spot the Shwekeys and the Yerachmiel Beguns and every year’s soon-to-be-invisible crop of Chaims, Shloimies, Boruchs, and other no-hit wonders billed as the next "non-goyish-music-that-frum-people-should-be-listening-to" sensation.

I stand by my fawning. With so much about jewish music to detest, if I actually have something nice to say about EG, he must be doing something right.

Let's review what we learned today:

1) I answer my mail (usually, sorry Jameel)
2) I spent much of the 80s in my room listening to the radio
3) Save the 80s pop and my EG fixation, I have same musical taste of every other white guy living on Long Island
4) I have a job that lets me listen to cheesy 80s pop all day long
5) Bad music makes me dry heave
6) I read Country Yossi magazine
7) I know how to use the word 'swell' in context
8) I don't mind if a Jewish music composer steals arrangements from the dreaded 'goyish' music, provided he's good at covering his tracks
9) Did I mention I spent most of the 80s in my room, listening to radio? (we didn't have none of these fancy iPods ... I had a Walkman. It had AM and FM and played tapes. It didn't even have Auto Reverse ... and I liked it. Yeah, I loved it.)

My favorite parade picture

2007-05-07T13:52:00.000-04:00

I went to the Israeli day parade yesterday and enjoyed just about all of it. The 'just about' refers to sitting in traffic for an accumulated 1.5 hours on I-95 South coming from the Whitestone Bridge, and the Henry Hudson Parkway.

Coming from the West Side, my luckiest move was calling a friend who when hearing that at that moment I was eking down 85th Street towards the park, said, "PARK your car anywhere you can and WALK across the park ... If you're trying to make it to the East Side today, you may as well go home." Good advice because we found a dynamite spot a minute or two later and then took a delightful walk across Central Park.

As for the traffic, had I thought about it for a moment, I might have taken the Tri-borough Bridge. But who would believe that the five borough bike tour, the Israeli day parade, typical Sunday traffic, and a stunning cloudless day, which has everyone out of the house, could tie up the local highways...?

But I digress. I had a great spot to stand between 78th and 79th Streets, and saw all the people I was hoping to see. In all, I took close over 485 pictures. I do enjoy the 2 gig card I bought a few months ago.

Looking through my pictures this morning, aside from all the adorable shots of my family, the picture below is my favorite shot of the day. The woman holding the sign was marching with the Halachic Organ Donor Society

I hope you like it, too:

Soneh Yisroel to the Max

2007-05-03T17:31:00.000-04:00

Browsing the web (a delightful alternative to doing actual work) I came across a site which provides convenient and comprehensive assistance to pro-Palestinian activists on how to game the media.

There are many astounding facets to this site. But I found the following list most jaw-dropping of all. It's a list of purposefully-inflammatory and strategically-deceptive alternatives to common phrases referring to Israel:

"Anti-occupation": vs. "pro-Palestinian".

"Apartheid Wall": vs. "security barrier", "fence", etc.

"Collective punishment measures": vs. "security measures".

"Expansion": vs. "natural growth".

"Ehud Barak's ultimatum": vs. "Ehud Barak's generous offers".

"Extra-judicial liquidation": vs. "targeted killing".

"Invasion": vs. "incursion".

"Israeli colonizers": vs. "Israeli settlers".

"Israeli Occupation Forces": vs. "Israeli Defense Forces".

"Israeli withdrawal from illegally occupied land": vs. "Israeli territorial concessions".

"Israeli-only colonies": vs. "settlements".

"Israeli-only roads": vs. "by-pass roads".

"Israeli assault against Palestinian civilians": vs. "military operation".

"Military checkpoints": vs. "checkpoints".

"Occupied Arab Jerusalem": vs. just "Jerusalem". Also, include "Occupied Jerusalem" when talking about the OTs (we often say just West Bank and Gaza when referring to the OTs).

"Palestinian political prisoners": vs. "Palestinian prisoners".

"Palestinian armed resistance": vs. "Palestinian violence".

"Palestinian resistance fighters": vs. "Palestinian militants".

"Palestinian struggle for self-determination": vs. "Palestinian-Israeli conflict", "Palestine-Israel conflict".

"Political assassinations": vs. "crack down on militants".

"Pro-occupation": vs. "Jewish", "pro-Israel", or "pro-Israeli".

"Race-driven concerns": vs. "demographic concerns".

"Random mass detention": vs. "security sweep".

"Siege": vs. "curfew", "town lockdown", "town closure".

"Torture": vs "physical pressure".

"US-financed Israeli military": vs "Israeli military".

"US support of the Israeli occupation": vs "US support for Israel".

Prefacing the list is a series of instructions teaching how to use the inflammatory phrasing in op-ed letters, newspaper articles, and while debating with Israel proponents.

Next is a page that presents methods to blatantly distort and obfuscat verifiable facts. The link is titled, "Things to Harp On ..." The top of the page is headlined with Basic facts to keep in mind, and followed by:

The following are facts and observations that the pro-Israel side has always had a hard time countering rationally. When you engage the other side in a debate, try to make these points and put the other side on the defensive.

The level of planning that went to compiling the list reveals the concerted effort to inject confusion and opacity into the debate of Israel and the Palestinian occupation. If i didn't know better, I'd be stunned.

Here's what little Palestinian activists are taught to harp on:

* Israel allots 85% of the water resources in the occupied territories for Jews and the remaining 15% is divided among all Palestinians in the territories. For example in Hebron, 85% of the water is given to about 500 settlers, while 15% must be divided among Hebron's 120,000 Palestinians?

* More than 80% of Palestinians killed are civilians who had nothing to do with terrorism

* There are no moe than 6,000 Israeli settlers in Gaza, surrounded by 1,000,000 Palestinians, and yet, 25% of Gazan land is set aside for the settlers
Hebron is kept under constant "curfew" -- i.e., Palestinians are physically confined to their homes 23 out of 24 hours -- simply so that Israel can guarantee the security of 450 settlers living among 120,000 Palestinians

* At his most "generous", Ehud Barak offered a Palestinian state composed of 4 disconnected territories, with the proviso that the Palestinian state retain in its midst hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens, and that the settlements where those citizens were to live would be guarded by the Israeli army, with the territory of the army bases being Israeli sovereign territory

* Only two nations in the world oppose the International Treaty on Terrorism: The United States and Israel

* Israel allows anyone who is Jewish to "return" to Israel, even if they, and all of their ancestors going back hundreds or thousand sof years, had never been in Israel, and yet denies Palestinians with valid land deeds to return to their their home towns, their villages, their houses

* Israel has a stated policy of ensuring that its population must retain a Jewish majority: how can Israel be a democracy and yet pursue a race-based policy?

* Israel has been "cracking down" against terrorism for three decades now, and yet to this day suicide bombings continue to take place -- why does Israel continue following a policy that is patently a failure?

* If Israel were serious about a long-lasting peace with the Palestinians, then why did it double the size of its settlments in the occupied territories between 1993 and 2000?

* If Palestinians were only intent on destroying Israel, then why did attacks against Israelis taper off to nothing when Barak seemed to be making progress towards peace?

* If Israel really wanted Arafat to reign in militants, as it says it does, then why does it make it both politically and physically impossible for him to do so by humiliating him, dennouncing him as a criminal, and physically dismantling his security aparatus and the infrastructure of his authority?

* If Israel were really interested in ensuring the security of its citizens, then why does it carry out assassinations, knowing full well that such assassinations will only trigger another wave of suicide bombings and escalate the cycle of violence?

Presented with any of these facts in a non-pressured environment, most clear thinking individuals could easily counter with simple offense such as "Says who?""That isn't true." and "Well, why don't you tell me?" However, in front of a camera or an audience, these non-sequitar assertions could seem pretty unnerving. That's what they bank on.

Finally, pro-palestinian consumers are treated to a deliciously cynical list of
Dates to keep!, which are meant to insure that the twisted basis of the pro-Palestinian debate perpetually spill into newspapers, talk shows, blogs, and mainstream broadcast media.

The list is prefaced with a careful instructions of how to disingenuously present tailor-made arguments, which coincide with specific calendar dates:

An important part of media activism is to anticipate events and dates and be prepared for them. Keeping these dates in mind will help you in the following ways:

(1) Op-ed submissions: opinion editors simply cannot resist a well-written piece that is timely to boot, and to which they are given advance notice.

(2) Foreign desk editors are often simply ignorant about important dates. Telling them weeks in advance about, say, the anniversary of Sabra and Shatilla, and reminding them a few times about it as the date approaches, will put pressure on them to do a story on the anniversary.

(3) Letters the the editors should also mention important dates and make reference to them: for instance, on July 4th, one can write about how the United States is blessed to be independent and free, and how the Palestinians also should be independent and free.

Some of the dates even come conveniently packaged with their own carefully manufactured justification for this expression of righteous rage:

January 19
Martin Luther King day: (1) Drawing parallels between the non-violent resistance in Palestine and MLK, (2) Countering cynical use by the Israel-first people to push fake letter from MLK puporting to equate anti-Zionist with anti-Semitism.

February 23
International Court of Justice (The Hague Court) begins hearings on the Wall (2004).

February 25
The Hebron Massacre (1994).

March 15
Israel declares Abseentee Property Law, expropriating all lands belonging to Palestinian refugees (1950).

March 16
The killing of Rachel Corrie: Make sure that the murder of Rachel Corrie is not ignored. Ask why the US government has refused to investigate on its own what happened to Rachel.

March 28
The 2002 Beirut declaration: Point out that all Arab countries in 2002 offered complete normalization with Israel, with Sharon responding the very next day with his re-invasion of the West Bank and the massacre over the next two weeks of hundreds of Palestinians.

March 30
Land Day: http://www.al-awda.org/landdaycommemorations/ -- An important day with demonstrations around the US.

April 9
Deir Yassin massacre: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article1991.shtml.

April 13
Nablus and Jenin massacres (2002): http://www.al-awda.org/landdaycommemorations/.

April 18
Qana Massacre (1996): http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles18.htm.

April 21(2004):
Date Mordechai Vanunu is scheduled to be released from Israeli prison. http://www.serve.com/vanunu/.

May 11
Israel admitted to UN (1949).

June 2
Creation of the PLO (1964).

June 5
1967 6 day war starts; Israel begins occupation of Jerusalem, West Bank and Gaza Strip, Egyptian Sinai and Syrian Golan Heights (1967).

June 7
Israel bombs Iraqi nuclear facility (1981).

June 8
Israeli fighter jets attack the USS Liberty (1967).

June 28
Israel annexes all of Jerusalem's Old City and announces the beginning of its settlement program (1967).

July 4
US independence day.

July 15
Israel declares the Law of Return, allowing any Jew anywhere to claim Israeli nationality (1950).

July 22
Zionist Irgun Terrorist group blow up the King David Hotel, killing 80 (1946).

August 12
Establishment of the Geneva Conventions (1949).

August 20
UNSC Resolutoin 478 (1980) rejects Israel's annexation of Jerusalem as "a violation of international law and does not affect the continued application of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 12 August 1949 in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since June 1967, including Jerusalem."

August 31
Newly-created Zionist Death Squad "Unit 31", led by Ariel Sharon, launches a nocturnal raid on Al-Bureij refugee camp, randomly shooting homes, slaughtering approx. 50 civilians (1953).

September 3
Israel's state-run TV and radio ban the use of Arabic names of Paletsinians villages and towns, requiring all broadcasters to refer to them by their "Biblical" names (1990).

September 5
The Munich massacre [Keep an eye on how the media is covering this -- and send in a reminder note about the upcoming Sept 16 date for Sabra and Shatila].

September 13
Oslo Accords: [Keep an eye for people wishing to exploit the date: e.g., Arafat betrayed Rabin, etc].

September 16
Sabra and Shatila massacres: http://www.indictsharon.net/ - [Write in beforehand and ask your paper to cover this important event in Palestinian history].

September 17
UN Mediator Count Folke Bernadotte assassinated (1948).

September 28
Start of Alaqsa Intifada (2000)

October 1
Israel bombs Tunisia (1985).

October 14
Qibya massacre (1953).

October 29
Kafr Qasem Massacre (1956).

November 3
1956 Massacre in Khan Yunis (1956).

November 5
The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin (1995): [Highlight that the one terrorist act that highlights the real nature of how violent opposition to peace with the Palestinians is the one committed by an Israeli against his Prime minister].

November 11
President Yasser Arafat dies (2004).

November 15
Palestinian Decalration of Independence issued in Algiers, recognizing Israel within its pre-1967 borders (1988).

September 17
Camp David I (Egypt-Israel) (1978).

Novermber 20
Universal Children's Day: http://www.un.org/Depts/dhl/children_day/.

November 22
1967 UNSC Resolution 242.

November 29
International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People -- http://www.un.org/depts/dhl/palestinian/.

December 9
First intifada begins (1987).

December 10
International Human Rights Day: [Write letter to the editor commemorating this day and urge your paper to cover it].

December 11
Issuance of UN GA Resolution 194 (1948) -- http://www.badil.org/Press/2000/press147-00.html.

December 14
Israel announces unilateral annexation of 500 square miles of Syria (Golan Heights, 1981) in direct violation of UNSC Resolution 478 (1980), which rejects Israel's annexation of Jerusalem as "a violation of international law and does not affect the continued application of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 12 August 1949 in the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since June 1967, including Jerusalem." For full text of UNSC 478, see: http://www.pmwatch.org/pmw/manager/features/display_message.asp?mid=664.

December 15
Industry Minister Ariel Sharon takes an apartment in the middle of the muslim quarter in Jeruslaem's Old City (1987), again in frontal violation of UNSC 478. For information on the illegality of Israel's annexation of Jerusalem, please see: http://www.britishconsulate.org/chancery/from1980.htm.

So, ladies and gentlemen ... this is what the State of Israel is fighting against.

As we've all long suspected, this is nothing more than a campaign to promote the pathological disregard for history, fact, and reason. Using strategic sophistry, perverse people bastardize the media with a calculated campaign of demagoguery and deception. What is their objective? What do they hope to accomplish?

From my side of the table, I can think of no objective short of a desire to vilify Jews, instigate hatred, and promote ignorance.

Ironically, or perhaps this is their true motivation, meddling activists who perpetrate the spread of villainous anti-Israel disinformation do little but reinforce the specious 'facts' which all but guarantee that Palestinians will always remain prisoners of the wretched lives their leaders foisted upon them in 1948, never to merit full membership to civilized society.

SICK TO MY STOMACK ALERT!!

2007-05-01T15:30:00.000-04:00

In general, $70,000,000 is a heck of a lot of money to spend on a propaganda channel. But Al-Hurra was created to acclimate arabs to Western-style media transparency that typically reports news for what it is and accepts divergent opinions without rioting and murder.

That's what it costs to keep Al-Hurrah TV on the air, and though steep, it would be fine if that were what the station was achieving.

But you could just blow a gut to discover that Al-Hurrah is being used to perpetuate the same poisonous rhetoric you can find by tuning in to any Middle Eastern television station, save for those broadcast in Israel.

Al-Hurrah seems to have devolved into a freakish blend of CNN, BBC, and Reuters, and even then on its most dastardly one-sided days.

Programming runs from propagating Holocaust denial myths to recycling Muslim canards about Jews, the imperialistic designs of the West and 9/11 conspiracy baiting (most of which devoted to blaming you know Jew), along with your run-of-the-mill, garden variety hatred, venom, and astounding historical distortions.

The whole venture is nauseating considering this was meant to be a taste of Western society, but actively achieves exactly the opposite. Most mind-boggling of all is that U.S. taxpayers are funding that $70 million budget.

Yes. We are actually paying to propagandize Arab barbarians with the same psychotic sewage they already do a superb job producing on their own.

You'd think they wouldn't need our help.

Ironically, at its inception, the station was doing just fine. A Lebanese native at its helm was developing worthy programs that effectively promoted Western values and authentic journalism. But in time he was replaced with a CNN producer who appears to relish the opportunity to present news, as CNN, even with its own maddening knee-jerk pro-Arab bias, would never stoop to air.

Adding total bewilderment to injury, Karen Hughes, George W. Bush's once trusted cabinet adviser, and now Undersecretary of State and seemingly President Bush's unofficial guide from the side, was appointed to oversee of this abortion of a television station. She was quoted as recently as April 19th praising Al-Hurra and its program manager and seemed unaware of or unwilling to see the disaster it’s become.

I'm getting sick and tired of our society bowing and scraping to prop up the arabs. I think they're hopeless. I think they are genetically hardwired to hate, distort, lie, cheat, steal, corrupt, and complain. In a normal world, their ingrained perversion of a value system would automatically relegate them to scum of civilization status -- this would be validated by the demonstrated, historical fact that everything they touch or do turns to shit.

The lead story of this Sunday's NY Times described the disaster the Iraqis have made of the multi-billion dollar investments in infrastructure, hospitals, municipal buildings, and the like, of which the U.S. footed the bill.

Multi-million dollar buildings, less than a year-old, are crumbling and malfunctioning due to shoddy, half-assed construction (they didn't hire union members to build these buildings, that's for sure), looting, disregard for maintenance, and just plain ignorance or indifference to the value of nation building.

I believe the U.S. had a responsibility to protect its investments; to oversee and manage the construction, security, and long-term maintenance of these buildings. They, too, are at fault for not anticipating and compensating for the sociological incompetents they were ordered to serve.

In all fairness, their inaction is likely the result of cowardly policies enacted to assuage liberal elitist bellyaching about our military’s cruel occupation. Thus, in a gallant, though wrong-headed effort to dispel this exasperating criticism of paternalistic, patronizing micro-management, the U.S. adopted a hands-off policy, which predictably resulted in mayhem and muddle.

The arabs are clearly incapable of policing, governing, educating, or advancing themselves. As a society, they are impervious to reality and refuse to evolve to become rational beings endowed with the logic their blood-starved god so obviously refused them in creation.

And so, much like Jerry Springer and Maury Povich, who mug for ratings by appealing to lay-about, unemployable boobs who sit at home and cheer on daytime television's depravity, the arab populace demands what gets them going. And incredibly, seemingly in the interest of 'giving the people what they want", i.e., a television station that feeds their animalistic tendencies, U.S. taxpayers are left holding the bag to perpetuate the sickness we are at war to eliminate.

The article from the Wall Street Journal is below. Prepare to puke. In fact, I advise you to read it over the toilet or a garbage can with tissues and a bottle of water nearby.

Mad TV

U.S. taxpayers subsidize terrorist propaganda and Holocaust denial in the Arab world.

BY JOEL MOWBRAY

Tuesday, May 1, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

Testifying under oath recently, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice misled Congress in her strong defense of Al-Hurra, the taxpayer financed Arab TV network. It was unwitting, though. She herself was misled.

During the March 21 House Foreign Operations Appropriations subcommittee hearing, Rep. Mark Kirk (R., Ill.) pressed Ms. Rice on the wisdom of providing a platform to Islamic terrorists, citing Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah's Dec. 7 speech, which Al-Hurra aired live. The broadcast speech "went on for 30 minutes," she responded, "followed by commentary, much of which was critical of Nasrallah."

In fact, Mr. Nasrallah's speech was carried in its entirety, roughly an hour and eight minutes. The commentary that followed--a 13-minute phone interview with Wael Abou Faour, a member of Lebanon's governing coalition--was indeed critical of Mr. Nasrallah. He accused the Hezbollah leader of not being anti-U.S. and anti-Israel enough. While Mr. Nasrallah had claimed Lebanon's governing coalition was aligned with the U.S. and had backed Israel during the war last summer, Mr. Abou Faour said that Hezbollah was actually closer to the U.S and added that any Lebanese faction that assisted "the Israeli enemy" should not be allowed to engage in political discussion because "the only place they should be [is] in prison."

The secretary of state's testimony was without doubt delivered in good faith. But the same cannot be said of the information about the broadcast Al-Hurra provided to the State Department.

Unfortunately, there is no practicable way that Foggy Bottom, or anyone else for that matter, can effectively monitor Al-Hurra, which has come under fire since the publication of my story about it on The Wall Street Journal's editorial page in March. The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), the congressionally created independent panel charged with oversight, lacks the ability to conduct even basic auditing, as English transcripts are provided only on request--which rarely happens. Worse, there is no good channel for whistleblowers to communicate with the board without fear of retribution.

With an annual budget now over $70 million, Al-Hurra has for three years served as the centerpiece of America's aggressive post-9/11 courtship of the Arab world. Insiders maintain that the network was fulfilling its mission until it hired former CNN producer Larry Register last November. Mr. Register has not, to his credit, changed Al-Hurra's dedication to showcasing the full range of U.S. politics. The other side of the network, however, has been "gutted," in the words of one staffer. Even though Mr. Register has made some improvements since the March column, Al-Hurra still produces far fewer stories about Arab government corruption and human-rights abuses. (Mr. Register did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.)

Al-Hurra was intended to cut through the anti-West and anti-U.S. propaganda that permeates even mainstream Arab media. Stories in that vein no longer see significant airtime, and nowhere is this more apparent than Al-Hurra's new approach to the Holocaust--the treatment of which in Arab society embodies so much that is wrong in that critical region of the Muslim world.

It is precisely because of Arab society's persistent refusal to accept the existence of such a defining--and indisputable--event in modern history that Al-Hurra dared to do things Al-Jazeera would never fathom, such as interviewing Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and airing the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. But that was under Mr. Register's predecessor, a Lebanese-born Muslim named Mouafac Harb.

Under Mr. Register, Al-Hurra covered the Holocaust denial conference in Tehran last December. But in a stark break from Mr. Harb's era, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the attendees at his conference were treated with unmistakable deference.

Al-Hurra's Dec. 12 report on the gathering included David Duke's praise for Mr. Ahmadinejad, and it took at face value the organizers' demand for Israel "to provide proof and evidence that certifies the occurrence" of the Holocaust. An official running the event was afforded the opportunity to show the open-mindedness of Holocaust deniers: "If we actually conclude with our experts through this meeting that the Holocaust is a real incident we will at that time admit its presence." (Transcript provided by a fluent Arabic-speaking U.S. government employee.)

Also broadcast unchallenged were the remarks of the infamous French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, who informed Arab viewers: "Gas chambers and mass killings of the Jews, in the way that it is pretended (by the Jews), is completely untrue, and an historical lie."

The Al-Hurra reporter stationed in Tehran referred to those who believe Hitler killed six million Jews as "Holocaust supporters." He took a swipe at the handful of conference attendees who didn't deny the Holocaust, by noting that they "didn't enforce their statements with scientific evidence." In closing the piece, he referred to Israel as "the Jewish state on Palestinian lands."

Almost six weeks later, on Jan. 20, Al-Hurra aired a follow-up story on the Neturei Karta, the fringe group of ultraorthodox, anti-Zionist Jews who met with Mr. Ahmadinejad. There was obviously world-wide media fascination with the Jews who ventured to a Holocaust denial forum hosted by the man who wants to wipe Israel off the map. Responsible journalists, though, were careful to provide the necessary context, the most important of which is that the Neturei Karta is a marginal group with world-wide membership, according to its Web site, of "several thousand."
Responsible Al-Hurra was not.

The Neturei Karta were presented as mainstream Orthodox Jews, and Al-Hurra claimed that they number more than one million. The story's angle is clear from the anchor's introduction: "They always put Israeli officials in a bind, who can't seem to understand how Jews can oppose Zionism, or how a Jew can encourage Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his opposition to Israel." Various Neturei Karta members uttered outrageous falsehoods about supposed "Zionist" cruelty, including "torture, detention, [and the] burning of their synagogues." None of these libels were challenged, let alone debunked.

"There is no purpose in doing a soft feature of the Neturei Karta, except to pander to or bolster vicious Arab and Muslim propaganda about Jews, Israel, and the Holocaust," notes Mark Broxmeyer, chairman of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.

In fairness, there's no reason to suppose Mr. Register understood exactly what was being broadcast: He doesn't speak Arabic. Then again, there's no evidence that he bothered, or cared, to learn about the contents. Either way, Mr. Register clearly doesn't grasp Al-Hurra's mission.

Holocaust denial is rampant in the Arab world, even among the educated; there's a widespread embrace of conspiratorial explanations for world events, such as theories about Jews perpetrating 9/11, and notorious forgeries such as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," which is widely sold and read throughout the region. Arab media do not challenge this mindset, but usually indulge it.

Combating this nonsense should be ground zero in our quest to inject truth and information into the Arab world. If we can't do this, how will we ever be able counteract the jihadists who preach to the masses that America is waging war on Islam?

The person tasked with counteracting those jihadists, Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes, is a stalwart supporter of Mr. Register. At an April 19 House Foreign Operations Appropriations subcommittee hearing, after two congressmen gave Ms. Hughes a bipartisan earful about Mr. Register, she responded that she has heard nothing but "high praise" and "rave reviews." Just last Friday, Ms. Hughes went to Al-Hurra's D.C.-area headquarters, signaling that she still backs Mr. Register. Meanwhile, five of the six BBG members--outgoing chairman Ken Tomlinson was the lone dissenter--are ardent Register partisans, voting 5-1 against investigating Mr. Register's questionable editorial decisions.

Key lawmakers don't share such exuberance. Reps. Dan Burton (R., Ind.) and Robert Wexler (D., Fla.) are circulating to fellow House Foreign Affairs Committee members a letter which asks Ms. Rice for an investigation into Al-Hurra. And Rep. Steve Rothman (D., N.J.), who sits on the panel responsible for funding Al-Hurra, has proposed live Internet streaming of the network, full online digital archives, and English transcripts for all programs.

Lack of active oversight and transparency has obviously contributed to the current mess at Al-Hurra. If someone outside Al-Hurra had been able to view the Nasrallah speech merely by going online, for example, Ms. Rice almost certainly would not have been fed false information.

But that's not enough. The people who already monitor the network--its employees--need to be empowered to report dubious decisions without fear of reprisal. Transparency will allow concerns to be investigated swiftly. Employees simply won't come forward, though, if they believe no one in power cares. For that reason, a clear signal must be sent by firing Mr. Register.

After all, if you can't get fired for using U.S. taxpayer dollars to provide a platform for Islamic terrorists and help further Holocaust denial, then wouldn't Congress and the Bush administration be communicating that pretty much anything goes?

Mr. Mowbray is an investigative writer based in New York City.