an “undertaking” “undertaken” greater than the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima, to stop North Korea from obliterating the south, to confront the Soviet Union over its missiles in Cuba, to send troops to recover Kuwait, or to conduct the surge in Iraq?I'll add some:
an “undertaking” “undertaken” greater than the decision to resupply Israel in 1973 despite threats from the Soviet Union, to drop special forces into an Afghanistan controlled by the Taliban, to send Doolittle's Raiders over Tokyo, to launch the Berlin Airlift, or to land troops at Normandy?The list could go on and on, but not if you think history started with Barack Obama's election (except for the bad stuff which started with Bush).
A senior Egyptian general admits that "virginity checks" were performed on women arrested at a demonstration this spring, the first such admission after previous denials by military authorities.Just think what would have happened to these women had they been suspected of being Jewish or Israeli.
The allegations arose in an Amnesty International report, published weeks after the March 9 protest. It claimed female demonstrators were beaten, given electric shocks, strip-searched, threatened with prostitution charges and forced to submit to virginity checks.
At that time, Maj. Amr Imam said 17 women had been arrested but denied allegations of torture or "virginity tests."
But now a senior general who asked not to be identified said the virginity tests were conducted and defended the practice.
"The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine," the general said. "These were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters in Tahrir Square, and we found in the tents Molotov cocktails and (drugs)."
The Palestinian Authority announced on Thursday that Spain has decided to recognize a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines before September. A spanish diplomat told Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath that Spain would support making the state of Palestine a UN member.
The announcement came as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas met in Cairo on Monday, under the auspices of Egyptian authorities, with Ramadan Shallah, Secretary-General of the Islamic Jihad organization, and his deputy, Ziad Nakhleh.How nice. The PA made the announcement while Abbas was meeting with the leader of one of the most hardline rejectionist terrorist groups. Let me guess, it will not end with the "1967 lines."
I did not send Twitter crotch picSomeplace Bill Clinton was heard to mutter, "Well, Weiner'll just have to win, then."
Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah met with Syrian President Bashar Assad in order to discuss reforms in Syria, the Lebanese daily al-Akhbar, identified with Hezbollah, reported on Monday.The Hezbollah chief recognizes that promises of reform will be what saves the Assad regime. Indeed, Obama himself has stated that Assad save his regime if he establishes political reforms.
Nasrallah "held more than one meeting with President Assad to discuss reforms in Syria", the report says. But Assad "did not require encouragement to proceed with reforms, as he himself presented many ideas", it was quick to add.
33. Two incidents occurred in the class that required the other students to take notice.
34. The first student, who sat middle of the class in the second row, raised her hand as we had just finished a case. The issue was, as I recall, referencing another note in the casebook that dealt with racial profiling and the latitude that officers have in making their determinations whether to stop or not.
35. Professor Connell had gone over the note and discussed the statistics that pointed to blacks being heavily targeted by police. The student raised her hand. When called upon, the student started her response, in an aggressive tone, with the words "I don't know what you agenda is ... " Her comments lasted about 45 second to a minute, to which Professor Connell replied, "If you can tell me what I have said that makes you think I have an agenda, I will gladly respond to your question." The student continued with her tone and Professor Connell said that we were going to move on.
36. I have been with this student in other classes and her approach, at times, is to take personal the topics at hand. When such a situation arises, her tone and aggressiveness to attack the situation that is very personal to her is similar to what occurred on that day.
37. On a separate day, Professor Connell had opened the floor for a question he had posed. A student, sitting two to three rows behind me, was called on to answer the question. The student asked a question and Professor Connell asked her to answer his. Her response to this request was "You never answer mine. Why should I answer yours?"' The situation was awkward for the class who had seen tension from these two students build over the semester. Professor Connell did not continue the tirade, but simply stated "That when you answer my question first, I will answer yours." and then moved on to another student on the opposite side of the room.
38 . I am currently in class with this student. Unfortunately, her comments in response to the professor's question or the general topic at hand, tends to start with "1 believe" or " I think." and never addresses the question posed or the topic at hand . I have no issue with this person, but the consistency that a [sic] the train of subtantive learning gets derailed when she participates is too consistent to not notice.The charges against Connell have a similar feel to a Media Matters or Think Progress story, in which sentences or clauses from sentences are presented without any context or out of context and spun into a tale of supposed racism by people with an agenda.
"Rather, she revived and extended an old American phenomenon: the tradition of middlebrow self-improvement that many observers assumed had died in the anti-authority turmoil of the 1960s.While anything but radical, this achievement was nonetheless remarkable. ....Oprah-ism doesn’t foster nuance or critical thinking. Yet even at its most philosophically ridiculous, it does manifest a singular, and characteristically American, virtue: It moves forward. The past, it affirms, is over and cannot be changed. What matters now is what happens next."
When I asked the man if I could take a picture of his truck, he tried to give me a copy of the pocket Constitution. "Already have one, my good man - you give that to someone who needs it." Then I gave him a card for theohioproject.com - always a treat running into fellow conservatives in a blue county like mine!The small bumper sticker says "What part of Europe are you from? The part whose ass we saved, or the part whose ass we kicked?"
“40′s” is a slang name for 40oz malt liquor bottles. But Obama drank from a pint glass (not a bottle) of beer that doesn’t come in 40oz bottles. Why did Bolling say Obama was “chugging 40′s”? As even some of Bolling’s Facebook commenter note, it’s an eyebrow-raising choice of words, given the beverage’s long-time association with African American stereotypes.I'm not so sure Think Progress is correct about this.
The Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan has announced he will institute a rule that 30 per cent of all election candidates must be women.
Parties who refuse to follow that edict will lose half of their state funding.
Group of Eight leaders will give "strong support" to U.S. President Barack Obama's call for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal to be based on the 1967 borders, the French Press Agency AFP reported on Friday.But since G-8 statements must be unanimous, Canada insisted on taking out the reference to the 1967 borders in a bold move of support for Israel:
Diplomats involved in Middle East discussions at the G8 summit said Canada had insisted that no mention of Israel's pre-1967 borders be made in the leaders' final communique, even though most of the other leaders wanted a mention.Can you imagine. Harper disrespected my President. Waiting for outrage and indignation in the Salons of The Atlantic.
"The Canadians were really very adamant, even though Obama expressly referred to 1967 borders in his speech last week," one European diplomat said.
Canada's strong backing for Israel was cited by diplomats last year as one reason why Canada failed to win a rotating two-year seat on the United Nations Security Council.
[Stephen] Harper has made is position on Israel very clear, saying last year: "When Israel, the only country in the world whose very existence is under attack, is consistently and conspicuously singled out for condemnation, I believe we are morally obligated to take a stand."
Palestine’s admission to the United Nations would pave the way for the internationalization of the conflict as a legal matter, not only a political one. It would also pave the way for us to pursue claims against Israel at the United Nations, human rights treaty bodies and the International Court of Justice....
The State of Palestine intends to be a peace-loving nation, committed to human rights, democracy, the rule of law and the principles of the United Nations Charter. Once admitted to the United Nations, our state stands ready to negotiate all core issues of the conflict with Israel. A key focus of negotiations will be reaching a just solution for Palestinian refugees based on Resolution 194, which the General Assembly passed in 1948.The pressure from U.N. recognition has led to many chicken-little outcries that Israel must give in now, or else.
Palestine would be negotiating from the position of one United Nations member whose territory is militarily occupied by another, however, and not as a vanquished people ready to accept whatever terms are put in front of us.
The Palestinians cannot circumvent the UN Security Council to avoid a likely US veto if they try to join the United Nations as a sovereign state later this year, a top UN official said on Friday.
But the official made clear a US veto would not put the issue of Palestinian statehood and UN membership to rest.
Some Arab diplomats in New York have suggested it would be possible for the Palestinians to bypass the UN Security Council and go straight to the 192-nation General Assembly to win approval for a planned UN membership application.
The UN charter says that new members are admitted by the General Assembly on the recommendation of the 15-nation Security Council, where the United Sates, Britain, France, China and Russia are permanent members with veto powers.
The current president of the General Assembly, Joseph Deiss of Switzerland, was asked by reporters if there was a way for the Palestinians to become a UN member state if its application was vetoed by the United States, which opposes the idea. Deiss said, "No."The big caveat is that a permanent U.N. member would have to exercise its veto power. That's us.
"Indeed, by ignoring history, the modern age is free to interpret war as a failure of communication, of diplomacy, of talking—as if aggressors don’t know exactly what they’re doing. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, frustrated by the Bush administration’s intransigence in the War on Terror, flew to Syria, hoping to persuade President Assad to stop funding terror in the Middle East. She assumed that Assad’s belligerence resulted from our aloofness and arrogance rather than from his dictatorship’s interest in destroying democracy in Lebanon and Iraq, before such contagious freedom might in fact destroy him. For a therapeutically inclined generation raised on Oprah and Dr. Phil—and not on the letters of William Tecumseh Sherman and William Shirer’s Berlin Diary—problems between states, like those in our personal lives, should be argued about by equally civilized and peaceful rivals, and so solved without resorting to violence."
According to a January 8, 2010, email from Neal Katyal, former Deputy Solicitor General (and current Acting Solicitor General) to Brian Hauck, Senior Counsel to Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli, Kagan was involved in the strategy to defend Obamacare from the very beginning:
On March 21, 2010, Katyal urged Kagan to attend a health care litigation meeting that was evidently organized by the Obama White House: “This is the first I’ve heard of this. I think you should go, no? I will, regardless, but feel like this is litigation of singular importance.”Subject: Re: Health Care Defense:Brian, Elena would definitely like OSG [Office of Solicitor General] to be involved in this set of issues…we will bring in Elena as needed. [The “set of issues” refers to another email calling for assembling a group to figure out “how to defend against the…health care proposals that are pending.”]
In another email exchange that took place on January 8, 2010, Katyal’s Department of Justice colleague Brian Hauck asked Katyal about putting together a group to discuss challenges to Obamacare. “Could you figure out the right person or people for that?” Hauck asked. “Absolutely right on. Let’s crush them,” Katyal responded. “I’ll speak with Elena and designate someone.”Kagan needs to step aside from consideration of any matters involving Obamacare. Unlike the hyper-ventilated accusations against Clarence Thomas because of his wife's political activities, the conduct here involves Kagan personally and the subject matter of the litigation.
As you may know, I've been heavily involved in the election integrity work around the WI Supreme Court race.
In the next few days, we need a cadre of people to help with a very specific project: reading the minutes (the official record) of the recount from all 72 counties. Do you think some of your readers would help with this? JoAnne Kloppenburg has until Monday to decide whether or not to seek a judicial review. We need people who can commit at least three hours to this project between now and Saturday, so we can pull together their findings and get them to the campaign in time to inform their decision.
We're trying to document that enough votes were affected by irregularities to call the outcome of the election into question and indicate the need for judicial review. How are we doing that? By going through the minutes (official record) of the recounts for as many counties as possible, documenting the number of votes affected by each irregularity....I e-mailed the author asking whether she was working with the Kloppenburg campaign or coordinating the efforts, but have not heard back yet.
The Kloppenburg campaign is aware of our project. We are not coordinating it with them. Velvet Revolution works on issues election integrity, not specifically in support of any candidate or campaign. While we will share our findings with the campaign and hope that the hundreds of irregularities we are documenting will be considered by the campaign in their decision about whether or not to seek judicial review, we believe this project is important regardless of the campaign's decision. The voters of Wisconsin need to know what really happened in this election, and the whole country needs to understand how vulnerable to incorrect results our election system currently is.--------------------------------------------
Would you like to volunteer?
The only remaining question is whether this perverse and ultimately self-defeating policy is born of genuine antipathy toward Israel or of the arrogance of a blundering amateur who refuses to see that he is undermining not just peace but the very possibility of negotiations.Is it really all or nothing, or some combination of lack of the emotional connection a majority of Americans feel towards Israel (but not "antipathy") combined with the arrogance of someone who thinks he can cause the seas to stop rising?
Syrian security forces fired at two protests in the eastern province of Deir al-Zor on Friday as demonstrations demanding the removal of President Bashar Assad swept the tribal area, residents and activists said.While many worry about what would happen if Assad was toppled, I'm less concerned. Unlike Egypt under Mubarak and Jordan, Syria has been a cause of trouble in the region for decades, and Assad has the blood of hundreds of American soldiers on his hands as Syria served as a conduit for foreign fighters to enter Iraq.
In the city of Albu Kamal on the Iraqi border, protesters burned pictures of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, whose speech in Beirut this week in support of Assad infuriated demonstrators, activists and a tribal leader in the province told Reuters by phone, adding security forces had withdrawn from the streets of Albu Kamal.
As the stunning and overwhelming response to Prime Minister Netanyahu in Congress showed, Israel matters in American politics like almost no other country on earth. Well beyond the American Jewish and the Protestant fundamentalist communities, the people and the story of Israel stir some of the deepest and most mysterious reaches of the American soul. The idea of Jewish and Israeli exceptionalism is profoundly tied to the idea of American exceptionalism. The belief that God favors and protects Israel is connected to the idea that God favors and protects America.
It means more. The existence of Israel means that the God of the Bible is still watching out for the well-being of the human race. For many American Christians who are nothing like fundamentalists, the restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land and their creation of a successful, democratic state after two thousand years of oppression and exile is a clear sign that the religion of the Bible can be trusted.Read the whole thing.
Being pro-Israel matters in American mass politics because the public mind believes at a deep level that to be pro-Israel is to be pro-America and pro-faith. Substantial numbers of voters believe that politicians who don’t ‘get’ Israel also don’t ‘get’ America and don’t ‘get’ God. Obama’s political isolation on this issue, and the haste with which liberal Democrats like Nancy Pelosi left the embattled President to take the heat alone, testify to the pervasive sense in American politics that Israel is an American value.
