Maybe not so peaceful, actually. See Los Angeles Times, "LAPD too violent, some Occupy L.A. protesters allege."
Also, "Occupy LA: LAPD clears nation’s largest remaining Occupy camp."
Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education - from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
Also, "Occupy LA: LAPD clears nation’s largest remaining Occupy camp."
Every Democratic nominee in the past two decades has won Pennsylvania — and Obama did so by a comfortable margin in 2008 — but the state has grown less hospitable to Obama in the past three years. Republicans swept the 2010 midterms, winning the governor’s seat, a Senate seat and five congressional districts, including the 11th District, where Obama will appear on Wednesday.Unemployment was 8.1 percent in October, and higher in some parts of the state, like Scranton, with a 9.7 percent jobless rate. The state's gonna need a jobs miracle for Obama to have a prayer. See New York Times, "Obama Is Facing a Replay of ’08 Hurdles in ‘Hillary Country,’ Pa."
Yet unlike other similarly challenging states — Ohio and Florida — where Democrats think they can lose and still win overall, Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral college votes are still key to almost any path to 270 electoral college votes. “It’s hard to figure out a scenario for a Democrat to win the presidency without carrying Pennsylvania,” former Democratic governor Ed Rendell, a prominent Obama supporter, said. “It’s not impossible, but it’s very, very hard.”
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said he decided it was time to evict Occupy L.A. protesters from the City Hall lawn after learning that there were children staying there.More at the link.
Given the smattering of assaults and other incidents reported at the camp, “the chaos out there could produce something awful,” he said in an interview with The Times.
The mayor, a former union organizer and president of the Los Angeles chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said he and LAPD Chief Charlie Beck jointly made the decision to allow overnight camping on the lawn in hopes of charting a “different path” with protesters. That was, he said, in part because he respects many of their views.
Iranians stormed two British Embassy compounds in Tehran, bringing to mind the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran by Iranian students on Nov 4 1979.More at the link.
Here are details of that siege.
* Students helped spearhead the overthrow of the US-backed Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in the 1979 Islamic revolution. The Shah, who was already gravely ill, sought refuge overseas.
* Exiled cleric Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran in triumph to seal victory for a revolution whose mantra was "Death to America".
* Student activists in co-ordination with radical clerics stormed the U.S. embassy, taking 90 hostages. Fifty-two were held captive for 444 days with the students demanding the extradition of the deposed Shah from the United States.
* The siege prompted then U.S. President Jimmy Carter to freeze Iranian assets and sever all diplomatic ties with Tehran.
* On April 25, 1980, a US commando mission to rescue the hostages was abandoned in the desert with the loss of eight American lives when a helicopter collided with a tanker aircraft, politically damaging President Carter.
The shopping season's biggest online holiday was more popular than ever yesterday as consumers rushed to the Web for exclusive Cyber Monday deals.RELATED: At New York Times, "A Shopping Day Invented for the Web Comes of Age."
Online traffic was up 43% from last year, says content delivery network Akamai, and online sales were up 18% over Cyber Monday 2010 as of 9 p.m. ET, says IBM Smarter Commerce, a Web performance analytics firm for 500 of the largest retail websites.
Matt Shay, CEO of the National Retail Federation, says sales on Cyber Monday and over the long weekend show retail is "providing a needed shot in the arm to our nascent recovery."
After a flurry of eviction threats, street protests and court maneuvering, Occupy L.A. remained standing on the City Hall lawn Monday evening — prompting debate about the caution displayed by city leaders seeking to avoid violent clashes seen in other cities.
Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said Monday he remains committed to the restrained approach, noting that the encampment has shrunk by about 150 tents in recent days and that police have so far managed to avoid aggressive confrontations with protesters.
Officers will clear the camp when they can "do it effectively and efficiently and with minimal force," he said. Time is on the department's side, Beck added.
UCLA's Rick Neuheisel Era, ushered in with great fanfare four years ago, will end Friday night, adding another twist to an already unusual Pac-12 Conference football championship game.More at the link.
Neuheisel was fired Monday morning, but he will be allowed to coach in the title game. If the Bruins beat eight-ranked Oregon in Eugene, they are off to the Rose Bowl — without their coach of the last four seasons.
"We're certainly going to be playing for him," UCLA linebacker Sean Westgate said.
Offensive coordinator Mike Johnson will be the interim coach after Friday.
The West could just sit back and watch this slow-motion catastrophe unfold. But doing so runs the risk of deepening fissures, in particular between Alawites (a Shiite offshoot) and the majority Sunnis, that could take decades to heal. We also run the risk that regional players will become more deeply embroiled in backing competing sides in what is fast becoming a Syrian civil war. If parts of Syria slip outside anyone’s control (as occurred in Iraq from 2003 to 2007), they could become havens for Sunni extremists such as al Qaeda.
On the other hand, if Assad goes, it will be a historic opportunity for a strategic realignment that takes Syria out of the Iranian camp and denies Hezbollah its main source of supply. It is almost certain that any Sunni regime that succeeds Assad will not be as close to Tehran as he has been. And, if we help bring about Assad’s downfall, we will have leverage with his successors that we would otherwise lack.
In some ways the current moment recalls the Balkans of the early 1990s—another situation where the West (and in particular the United States) tried to ignore a human-rights catastrophe but eventually intervened. That intervention stopped the killing and produced a delicate but durable peace accord. Might outside intervention be equally successful in Syria? It very well could be, which is why, despite the understandable reluctance in Washington to mount another Libya-style operation, it is time to start thinking seriously about what can be done to hasten Assad’s downfall. Obama has done a good job so far of isolating and sanctioning Syria, but more action is necessary.
WASHINGTON — The NATO air attack that killed at least two dozen Pakistani soldiers over the weekend reflected a fundamental truth about American-Pakistani relations when it comes to securing the unruly border with Afghanistan: the tactics of war can easily undercut the broader strategy that leaders of both countries say they share.
The murky details complicated matters even more, with Pakistani officials saying the attack on two Pakistani border posts was unprovoked and Afghan officials asserting that Afghan and American commandos called in airstrikes after coming under fire from Pakistani territory. NATO has promised an investigation.
The reaction inside Pakistan nonetheless followed a now-familiar pattern of anger and tit-for-tat retaliation. So did the American response of regret laced with frustration and suspicion. Each side’s actions reflected a deepening distrust that gets harder to repair with each clash.
The question now, as one senior American official put it on Sunday, is “what kind of resilience is left” in a relationship that has sunk to new lows time after time this year — with the arrest in January of a C.I.A. officer, Raymond Davis, the killing of Osama bin Laden in May and the deaths of so many Pakistani soldiers.
From San Diego -- The premise that a higher being doesn't really care about football games continued to be challenged Sunday.Also, from Kate Shellnutt, at Houston Chronicle, "Tebow popularity fueled by football fanatics, evangelical faithful."
Tim Tebow won another one. He led the Denver Broncos to a tie in regulation and a win in overtime. We aren't sure whether he is magical or mystical. We don't know when, or if, he will start multiplying loaves and fishes. Right now, we just know he wins.
This time, at the end of five quarters of National Football League action — well, that's too strong a word, but more on that later — it was the San Diego Chargers who had to genuflect before him.
These days, when Tebow takes a knee, it isn't a football term.
After the 16-13 win, completed when Tebow led his team from its 43-yard line with 2 minutes 31 seconds left in overtime, to the San Diego 19, from where kicker Matt Prater could end the game from 37 yards, Tebowmania was even more alive and well. Picture a snowball rolling downhill.
There is an aura of the surreal to this. Is he real or is he Memorex?
Tebow has won five of his six starts, and the Broncos are now 6-5. Sunday's success meant that Tebow has led Denver on scoring drives in either the fourth quarter or overtime 11 times in the Broncos' last seven games. The most frightening sight for NFL opponents now is Tebow with the ball, the score in reach and the clock ticking down.
Now that Kyle Orton has been cast from DenverEden, God will be particularly protective of Timmy because, Notre Dame or no Notre Dame, nobody wants to see Brady Quinn placing his hands near another man’s manparts. Not even Touchdown Jesus.Oh, hilarious, right? Well not as "funny" as racist TBogg's racist black sexual stereotype slam on Herman Cain as a "jungle boogie black stud" who has "Sexed Up Every Woman In America Including Your Mom." Racist TBogg spices up the post with some white go-go boot betties looking to go down on a big bad black Cadillac-drivin' Shaft-style mofo. And of course the URL there is "Herman Cain's Business Card."
This newspaper endorses Newt Gingrich in the New Hampshire Presidential Primary.Continue reading.
America is at a crucial crossroads. It is not going to be enough to merely replace Barack Obama next year. We are in critical need of the innovative, forward-looking strategy and positive leadership that Gingrich has shown he is capable of providing.
He did so with the Contract with America. He did it in bringing in the first Republican House in 40 years and by forging balanced budgets and even a surplus despite the political challenge of dealing with a Democratic President. A lot of candidates say they're going to improve Washington. Newt Gingrich has actually done that, and in this race he offers the best shot of doing it again.
As cities rousted Occupiers, liberals claimed the movement has already succeeded by calling attention to income inequality. But all it's really done is give the left an excuse to recycle bogus class-warfare claims.Continue reading.
Soon after Mayor Bloomberg cleared the Occupiers out of New York's Zuccotti Park, Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein reassured his fellow liberals. "The movement has already scored some big wins," he wrote, because it has "changed the national conversation." The evidence? The press has written lots of stories about income inequality lately.
Of course, counting news stories proves nothing. The liberal media love the Occupy crowd and what it stands for, and so it generously flooded the zone with adoring coverage, while carefully covering up the movement's violence, depravity and anti-American radicalism.
But then again, almost nothing that's been written or said about the Occupy movement and its main issue has been true.
Also at HotAir Pundit, "Occupy San Diego Enter Walmart on Black Friday (Video)," and Occupy Dallas splattered blood to protest animal fur products, "Downtown Neimans Now a Little Less Festive After Protestors Throw Fake Blood on Windows."
Who says history has to be about dead men and a dreary assortment of dates and names?Right.
For countless students and teachers, the Occupy L.A. encampment at City Hall has become a living classroom, a place to put a contemporary twist on topics such as the causes of the Great Depression and the limits of the 1st Amendment.
On a recent afternoon, students from at least three schools joined the colorful milieu of protesters — playing ball, posing with pet roosters and sounding off about corporate greed — to interview them about their aims.
Cleveland High School student Ryan Janowski, for instance, asked hard questions about whether the movement's leaderless structure would impede its progress.
Classmate Christopher Berry sniffed the aroma of marijuana and wondered whether a few "dignified leaders" might help protesters gain wider public acceptance.
The students are part of Cleveland's humanities magnet program, which is exploring class differences in America and comparing the Occupy movement with 19th century transcendentalism.
"It fits in with everything we're doing," said Rebecca Williams, an English literature teacher at the Reseda school. "It's a real-life movement — history in the making."
British embassies in the eurozone have been told to draw up plans to help British expats through the collapse of the single currency, amid new fears for Italy and Spain.
As the Italian government struggled to borrow and Spain considered seeking an international bail-out, British ministers privately warned that the break-up of the euro, once almost unthinkable, is now increasingly plausible.
Diplomats are preparing to help Britons abroad through a banking collapse and even riots arising from the debt crisis.
The Treasury confirmed earlier this month that contingency planning for a collapse is now under way.
A senior minister has now revealed the extent of the Government’s concern, saying that Britain is now planning on the basis that a euro collapse is now just a matter of time.
“It’s in our interests that they keep playing for time because that gives us more time to prepare,” the minister told the Daily Telegraph.
Update: Last month I posted in support of my friend Donald Douglas who runs the American Power blog, who has, for years, been under relentless attack by hateful leftists who have even gone so far as to try to get him fired from his job - simply because they disagree with his political opinions. Donald has a new post up today describing the fact that the blog dedicated in its entirety to attacking him, could not even leave him alone on Thanksgiving Day. The comments section there includes some snide remarks about his marriage. How very sad that some people apparently have nothing better to do, on a day dedicated to reflecting on all of the things for which one should be thankful, than to pick at a man over every single thing he ever writes on his blog, and then bitch about it when that man discusses the relentless attacks. But then again, Thanksgiving is an American holiday, and gratitude is something expressed by people who actually have functioning souls, so I suppose this should not be surprising.Let's set the record straight: RACIST REPSAC3 is a stalking hate blogger. RACIST REPSAC3 is lying. No one "attacked" him. I don't even link him. He stalks my blog like a troll. And the coward blows a fuse when his hatred and harassment are called out. The fascisitic vampire is kicked to the curb by my high standard of moral right. It's like a crucifix to evil. Recall the context to Zilla's update: I mentioned why I don't publish my wife's name at the blog. I indicated that Walter James Casper III and his horde of fascistic henchmen would threaten her, given the chance. These are the same people who published my workplace information, launched campaigns of workplace intimidation, alleged that I was a child pedophile --- the allegations going all the way to the California Attorney General's Office --- harassed me personally at my blog and by email, and now they're making sexualized references about my wife. Obviously, nothing good would come of them getting a hold of my wife's phone number (which they indicated they'd like to do) or her work information. They'd kill her if they could. That's what I believe, given the unreal campaign of hate and intimidation that's been sponsored already by RACIST REPSAC WALTER JAMES CASPER III and his fascistic band of progressive totalitarians.
Bjerke Upper Secondary School in Oslo filled one of the three general studies sets solely with pupils with immigrant parents, after many white Norwegians from last year's intake changed schools.
The controversy over the decision has highlighted the unease in Norway over how to integrate the 420,000 "non-Nordic" citizens who immigrated between 1990 and 2009, and who make up 28 per cent of Oslo's population.
"This is the first time I've heard about this, and it is totally unacceptable," Torge Ødegaard, Oslo education commissioner, said on Friday, before pressuring the school to inform parents that the three classes would now be reorganised. The letter to parents read: "Such a division of the students is not in accordance with the requirements of the Education Act. The school regrets this error."
But Robert Wright, a Christian Democrat politician and former head of the city's schools board, struck back, arguing that the authorities had been wrong to block the move. He also said that other Oslo schools should start to segregate classes to prevent a situation of "white flight" developing.
"I think we have to try this to see how it's functioning," he told The Daily Telegraph. "Bjerke School has come up with a radical solution to a real problem, but the politicians have just said 'no'."
RABAT, Morocco — A moderate Islamist party appeared Saturday to have won the first election under Morocco’s new Constitution, according to partial election returns announced by the government.Right. What a scam.
The Justice and Development Party won a plurality of the vote, requiring the king to choose a prime minister from the party and giving it the right to lead a coalition government.
The new Constitution, drafted by King Mohammed VI in response to pro-democracy protests last spring, still reserves important powers for the king, including over military and religious matters, and remains a far cry from the constitutional monarchy demanded by the protesters. But the government will be Morocco’s first popularly elected one, with the power to appoint ministers and dissolve Parliament.
The vote on Friday also made Morocco the second North African country after the Arab Spring to choose a moderate Islamist government. Tunisians gave a plurality to a similarly inclined party last month.
RELATED: At London's Daily Mail, "Victoria's Secret model Candice Swanepoel pares down the glitz for topless photoshoot."
Murder threats by #OWS-ers and the media does not report the story. Instead they will make up, out of whole cloth, Jared Loughner's motives or point to my colleagues and me when jihadists do what they have been commanded to do. Pure fiction. But pure fact repels the media elites and cultural rapists like the silver cross to Dracula.Exactly.
Again and again the media aids and abets the criminal, subversive anti-American destroyers - so vested are they in the take down of this great nation. The daily reports of violence, sexual attacks, disease in the #OWS movement are rampant and still they promote this pox on humanity.
The call to prayer quiets in the minaret as Mohammad Abbas, a street protester turned candidate for parliament, steps out of a decrepit elevator and hurries to his office. He's still learning the art of politics but he can spin a sound bite better than most of his elders. Ask away:Continue reading.
Facebook activists?
"They sit in air-conditioned rooms but don't touch real Egyptians."
Young Islamists?
"Not yet strong enough to influence change."
The Muslim Brotherhood?
His eyes narrow, the banter hushes.
Abbas joined the Brotherhood, the Arab world's largest Islamic movement, when he was in college. But the group that brought the 27-year-old closer to God and honed his social conscience booted Abbas out in July when he made clear that his ambitions for a new Egypt were much different from those of his mentors.
The Brotherhood's moderate Freedom and Justice Party and its more conservative Islamic allies are likely to win big in parliamentary elections Monday; no other organizations are as disciplined or as connected to the masses. But the Brotherhood's unity, which buttressed it for decades against bans and repression by Hosni Mubarak's police state, is splintering as both young and established voices break away.
With about 6,000 candidates running for 498 seats, the elections are a crucial test for the Arab world's most populous nation. The outcome, along with a presidential election scheduled for next year, will reveal whether Egypt emerges as a democratic inspiration in a region clamoring for change or slips back into a military-dominated autocracy where only the faces and illicit bank accounts have changed.
LONDON — It is a story made to order for the sensation-hungry tabloid newspapers that have millions of avid readers in Britain: a roll call of A-list celebrities and crime victims pouring out — day by day, live on the Internet — the personal miseries they say they have endured in seeking to protect the everyday normality of their private lives.
But this time, for the tabloids, it is a story with a bitter twist. For what is happening in a courtroom at the Royal Courts of Justice has amounted to a turning of the tables, through the medium of a government-appointed inquiry into the “culture, ethics and practices” of British newspapers, that has turned into a legal soap opera in which the villains have emerged as the tabloids themselves.
The high court judge leading the inquiry, Sir Brian Leveson, has called the sessions that began this week, relayed live on the inquiry’s Web site, a “right of reply” for victims of tabloid excesses. He has refused requests by the newspapers’ lawyers for the right to cross-examine the witnesses, and issued a formal warning to the mass-circulation papers not to strike back against those testifying with new articles that invade their privacy or damage their reputations.
One of those taking advantage of the platform was Sienna Miller, 29, a New York-born actress who lives much of the year in London and found herself a target of intense tabloid scrutiny when she was dating the actor Jude Law. One of the inquiry’s most arresting moments came on Thursday when she described her experiences with London’s “relentless” paparazzi, and described being spat at, verbally abused and subjected to dangerous car chases while trying to elude them.
“I felt like I was living in some sort of video game,” Ms. Miller said. “For a number of years, I was relentlessly pursued by 10 to 15 men, almost daily.”
“I would often find myself — I was 21 — at midnight running down a dark street, alone, with 10 big men chasing me, and the fact that they had cameras in their hands meant that was legal,” she added. “But if you take away the cameras, what have you got? You’ve got a pack of men chasing a woman, and obviously that’s very intimidating.”
Setting foot into a screening of “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1,” the latest installment in the hit film series about the romance between a mortal girl and a sparkly vampire boy, may induced an unexpected kind of overstimulation: a few viewers say they have experienced epileptic seizures that, The Guardian reports, could be a result of rapidly changing colors in the film’s climactic childbirth scene.
Brandon Gephart of Roseville, Calif., who attended a showing of “Breaking Dawn” with his girlfriend, Kelly Bauman, was taken to a hospital following the scene in which the newlywed Bella (played by Kristen Stewart) delivers the daughter of her vampire husband, Edward (Robert Pattinson), as red, white and black strobes flash on the screen. “He was convulsing, snorting, trying to breathe,” Ms. Bauman told the Sacramento affiliate of CBS News.
Dr. Michael G. Chez, a pediatric neurologist, said the incident might have been a result of a genetic predisposition to photosensitive epilepsy. “It’s like a light switch going off, because it hits your brain all at once,” he told CBS. “The trouble with theaters, it’s dark, the lights flashing in there is more like a strobe light.”
See, "My Life as a White Supremacist."
No one can forget how Timothy McVeigh set off a bomb in front of a federal building in Oklahoma City in April 19, 1995, killing 168 people including 19 children under the age of 6. FBI efforts to avert another outrage have taken on increased importance in recent years, as fears of Islamic terrorism, a sour economy, expanded federal powers under the Patriot Act, and the nation’s first black president have swelled the ranks of extremist groups. Since President Obama’s election, the number of right-wing extremist groups—a term that covers a broad array of dissidents ranging from white supremacists to antigovernment militias—has mushroomed from 149 to 824, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Alabama-based civil-rights group.See what I'm saying?
“What we’re seeing today is a resurgence,” says Daryl Johnson, the former senior domestic terrorism analyst for the Department of Homeland Security. In 2009, the department issued a report warning that “right-wing extremism is likely to grow in strength.” And because today’s extremists, unlike their predecessors, have at their disposal online information—bomb-making instructions and terrorist tactics—as well as social-networking tools, the report said, “the consequences of their violence [could be] more severe.”
The report, which was quickly withdrawn after an outcry from conservatives, seemed prescient months later when an 88-year-old gunman opened fire on visitors at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Last year, nine members of the Hutaree, a Christian militia, were arrested in a plot to kill police officers in Michigan. In January, Jared Lee Loughner, an Army reject, was charged with going on a shooting rampage in Tucson, Ariz., killing a federal judge, among others, and severely wounding Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Earlier this month, the FBI arrested four men of pensionable age in Georgia for allegedly plotting to attack federal buildings and release biological toxins on government employees.
Just a quick note of praise to you: I know many on here share with me, a personal thanks for your continued great posts in Americanpower; your vigilance against the far-Left university professors that sow misguided and misrepresented seeds of dissent in the vulnerable minds of our youth. As a conservative professor you are unique in California, essential. You are an important element in sanity vs. Utopianism, capitalism against socialism; and a reminder of the importance of democratic and family values; and every now and again we must thank you for what at times is a thankless job. Like you always say, "It's tough out here!"And for the record, deranged stalker Walter James Casper III put on the snake charm in Zilla's comments. "Stand Against Evil - Never Let it Win." I've spoken to Zilla about it and she's not fooled. She knows James Casper is all about evil and the Devil's program is built on stealth, lies and deceit. Those are words that describe the unbridled hatred of ultra-ASFL Walter James Casper III. See: "Justina Jensen and Walter James Casper III," and "Continuing Lies by Cowardly Hate-Blogger W. James Casper in Left's Demonic Workplace Intimidation Campaign."
Since Obama came into office, he has followed the Left's ideological guidelines of ending the fight against and seeking to appease America's worst enemies. This is why he has supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. This is why he turned a blind eye to the Islamists who dominated the opposition to Gaddafi. This is why he has sought to appease Iran and Syria. This is why he supports the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition. This is why he supports Turkey's Islamist government. And this is why he is hostile to Israel.Both RTWT.
The emails paint a clear picture of scientists selectively using data, and colluding with politicians to misuse scientific information.No kidding?
An early kickoff to the holiday shopping season appeared to pay off for retailers, who bet correctly that extended late-night hours would draw even more bargain hunters to the annual Black Friday extravaganza.RELATED: From Reuters, "Midnight Black Friday start likely to become norm."
The shopping frenzy, although marred by a pepper spray incident at a San Fernando Valley Wal-Mart, bodes well for increased consumer spending as the year draws to a close. It would be the latest in a series of modest improvements to an economy still trying to shake free from the lingering effects of the devastating recession of 2007-09.
"People have had so many years of recession that they want to spend money and feel good about themselves," said Ron Friedman, a retail expert at advisory and accounting firm Marcum in Los Angeles. "And many people have set money aside and are paying off their credit cards more, so people can spend a little bit more than last year."
This is a make-or-break season for retailers, and they pulled out the stops. Wal-Mart rolled out some of its sale items to shoppers at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day. Other major chains including Target, Best Buy, Macy's and Kohl's all opened at midnight for the first time.
ONE thing about life in New York: wherever you are, the neighborhood is always changing. An Italian enclave becomes Senegalese; a historically African-American corridor becomes a magnet for white professionals. The accents and rhythms shift; the aromas become spicy or vegetal. The transition is sometimes smooth, sometimes bumpy. But there is a sense of loss among the people left behind, wondering what happened to the neighborhood they once thought of as their own.Continue Reading.
For Sophia Goldberg, change has meant the end of a way of life.
On a recent morning Ms. Goldberg sat in her tidy seventh-floor living room, surrounded by needlepoint portraits stitched by her own hands, and sighed over the changes immediately around her.
Ms. Goldberg, 98, lives in a 19-story apartment house in Flushing, Queens, one of two neighboring buildings that were erected for survivors of the Holocaust. When she moved there in 1978, she said, her neighbors formed a tight community of predominantly Jewish refugees like her who had fled to the United States from Austria or Germany.
“We had parties,” Ms. Goldberg said, her voice barely above a whisper. “We had card games. It was our people. We had Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur in our apartment.”
Now, she said, “It’s completely changed — I have no neighbors here.”
For Ms. Goldberg, the transformation has been steady and overwhelming. Of the 326 residents in her building, now only 31 are Holocaust survivors, and only 7 of them are German or Austrian.
The new neighbors are friendly enough. But she said: “We do not talk. We say hello, goodbye. But that’s it. They don’t speak German. They don’t speak English. They speak Russian and Chinese. Sometimes they just shake their heads.”
As the busiest retail weekend of the year begins late Thursday night, the differences between how affluent and more ordinary Americans shop in the uncertain economy will be on unusually vivid display.Right. Kids are unpleasant. Can't afford a babysitter. Give me a break.
Budget-minded shoppers will be racing for bargains at ever-earlier hours while the rich mostly will not be bothering to leave home.
Toys “R” Us, Wal-Mart, Macy’s, Kohl’s, Best Buy and Target will start their Black Friday sales earlier than ever — at 9 and 10 p.m. in some instances — with dirt-cheap offers intended to secure their customers’ limited dollars. A half a day later, on Friday morning, higher-end stores like Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue and Nordstrom will open with only a sprinkling of special sales.
The low-end and midrange retailers are risking low margins as they cut prices to attract shoppers, while executives at luxury stores say that they are actually able to sell more at full price than in recent boom years.
“We’re now into a less promotional environment than we were before the recession,“ said Stephen I. Sadove, chairman and chief executive of Saks. In the third quarter, for instance, Saks reduced the length of an annual sale to three days from four, and excluded the high-margin category of cosmetics from another regular sale.
Retail analysts are expecting a decent holiday season, with many estimating that sales will increase about 3 percent over last year, with contributions from shoppers across income levels. Yet the Friday after Thanksgiving, the kickoff to the highest-revenue weeks for stores, is expected to lay bare the increasingly parallel universes of retailing in America, the analysts said.
“Those in a more modest income situation are the people who are going to the Wal-Marts and the Best Buys and the Targets at 8, 9, 10, 11 p.m. with little kids in tow because they can’t afford a baby sitter,” said Craig Johnson, president of Customer Growth Partners, a retail consultant firm. “It’s a very unpleasant shopping experience, frankly, for a lot of people.”
In a spectacular case of bad timing and even worse judgment, Vogue magazine published a glam profile of President Bashar al-Assad’s wife last March, just around the time her husband’s regime started brutalizing unarmed regime protestors. Deeming Asma al-Assad “the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies,” the puff piece glossed over the dictatorial essence of the Assad dynasty and missed altogether the fact that it was about to experience the heavy weather of the Arab Spring.Also, at Telegraph UK, "The UN intensifies pressure on Syria as Turkey compares Bashar al-Assad to Hitler."
Assad has cast himself as the only thing standing between order and a sectarian bloodbath, denouncing the unarmed protestors as “saboteurs” and “terrorists” while unleashing snipers, tanks, artillery, and even naval gunfire against unarmed civilians, killing, according to the UN’s very conservative estimates, more than three thousand and imprisoning ten thousand more since March 2011.
The apple does not fall far from the dictatorial tree. In February 1982, Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, killed an estimated twenty thousand civilians in putting down a rebellion in Hama (now, understandably, a hot spot in today’s insurgency). The massacre gave rise to the phrase “Hama Rules,” which became shorthand for extreme brutality. But Assad the younger faces a much broader and more determined opposition than his father ever did, and the trajectory of his slow-motion downfall is becoming increasingly clear. So much so that the question in Syria today is not only how to get rid of the tyrant, but what the nation will look like when he’s gone.
ABC News disclosed last night that arrested New York City terror suspect Jose Pimentel “spent much of his time on the Internet… and maintained a radical website called TrueIslam1.” TrueIslam1 has a number of sections, most of them handed over to Islam and jihad. There are two only sections that deal straightforwardly with politics: one labeled “Politics” and one labeled “The U.S.A.”Continue reading.
Both sections have different articles and both of course still contain plenty of Islamic theology – ergo the concept of political Islam – but they have one thing in common. They both have links to free downloads of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s book The Israel Lobby. Other than those links there doesn’t appear to be any overlapping content between the two sections. Apparently, Pimentel thought Walt and Mearsheimer’s feverish opus was something that needed to be read and distributed...
Walt’s paranoid worldview and its concomitant conspiratorial images are the stuff of ancient anti-Jewish bigotry. They seem to resonate deeply with online and offline jihadists, who give them priority of place next to tracts calling for genocidal warfare. And unlike Geller and Spencer, Walt has an entire media industry helping him make anti-Semitism respectable. On that last point, see Lee Smith’s Tablet Magazine expose from last year.
American troops marked their last Thanksgiving in Iraq Thursday with turkey, stuffing and a rocket fire alarm.These folks deserve our everlasting thanks.
Fewer than 20,000 American troops remain in Iraq at eight bases across the country. All of the forces must be out of Iraq by the end of this year, and American soldiers have been busily packing up their equipment and heading south.
Many of the bases no longer have civilian contractors making meals for them, so the troops have been eating prepackaged meals.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Most Americans spent Thanksgiving snug inside homes with families and football. Others used the holiday to give thanks alongside strangers at outdoor Occupy encampments, serving turkey or donating their time in solidarity with the anti-Wall Street movement that has gripped a nation consumed by economic despair.Oh, please.
In San Francisco, hundreds of campers at Justin Herman Plaza in the heart of the financial district prepared turkey dinners that were handed out by volunteers, church charities and supporters of the movement against social and economic inequality.
Across the bay in Oakland, where protesters and police previously clashed when an Occupy encampment was broken up, occupiers enjoyed a Thanksgiving feast outside City Hall with music and activist speakers, including Clyde Bellecourt, co-founder of the Minnesota-based American Indian Movement.
And in New York, Occupy organizers distributed Thanksgiving meals at Zuccotti Park, where the protest movement began on Sept. 17 before spreading nationwide. Protesters were evicted from the park on Nov. 15.
"So many people have given up so much to come and be a part of the movement because there is really that much dire need for community," said Megan Hayes, a chef and organizer with the Occupy Wall Street Kitchen in New York. "We decided to take this holiday opportunity to provide just that — community."
As other Republican candidates have stumbled their way toward the presidential primaries, Mitt Romney has put together what would seem to be all the elements of a winning campaign: an effective staff, a robust treasury and smooth, knowledgeable performances both in debates and on the trail.Steadiness and constancy.
But for months, the threshold of support for the former Massachusetts governor hasn't inched above a quarter of Republican voters in national polls. For many GOP voters in early primary states, hesitation about Romney comes back to one thing: their perception that he has routinely molded his views to suit the political mood, with ambition his overriding principle.
"He's not a person we could trust to lead our country," said Angela Cesar, a 41-year-old Republican from Ypsilanti, Mich., who said Romney had changed his position on too many issues. "He's going to be listening to voices outside. I want someone who can hear his own voice — a clear voice."
Steve Holroyd, a 54-year-old chef from Rye, N.H., was initially attracted to Romney's candidacy, but now describes him as evasive: "The more I listen to him, the more he just kind of flip-flops and doesn't know where he stands on anything."
Romney's advisors say the argument that their candidate is a political contortionist will not resonate because voters are concerned about the economy — and little else. But in his failed 2008 bid, when the issue was raised — as now — by opponents, it hit its mark not because of the issues involved but because of what Romney's flip-flops suggested about his character.
The campaign demonstrated sensitivity to the problem in this race: Romney has strongly defended the health insurance mandate that he instituted in Massachusetts, even though it is reviled by GOP voters, rather than reverse himself on it. Romney's aides have also leveled charges of flip-flopping at GOP rival Rick Perry and at President Obama, who Romney strategist Stuart Stevens said has "a new slogan and a new mission every day."
Asked about the criticism during a recent Michigan debate, Romney said: "I think people understand that I'm a man of steadiness and constancy."
"Sympathy for the Devil "
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