RELATED: "Death Threats Against Bush at Protests Ignored for Years."
“On a psychological level, I think we’ve seen, over the past generation or more, 40 years or more, that Israel has been the victim of a campaign that grows stronger with each passing year to isolate it and to delegitimize it internationally, to try to argue that Israel has no right to exist and no right to defend itself. For the past decade or so, the United States has really been the last stalwart who has refused to engage in this kind of demonization of Israel. So from psychological perspective, Israel feels very dependent on the United States as its only ally in this political war that’s being fought against it, that’s being fought against the very notion of Jewish nationhood and of Jewish national rights in the land of Israel. And so the idea that the United States will abandon Israel—and the Obama administration almost continuously has this threat over Israel’s head, like a Sword of Damocles, saying, ‘If you don’t do what we demand that you do, then we’re going to stop vetoing anti-Israel resolutions in the U.N. Security Council, and a whole host of other areas where the United States has traditionally sided with Israel, in the U.N. and other international forums…’”Lots more at the link, and a podcast too.
A group of human-rights organizations is pressing WikiLeaks to do a better job of redacting names from thousands of war documents it is publishing, joining the list of critics that claim the Web site's actions could jeopardize the safety of Afghans who aided the U.S. military.Freakin' Assange has blood on his hands. Folks should give him up to the Taliban.
The letter from five human-rights groups sparked a tense exchange in which WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange issued a tart challenge for the organizations to help with the massive task of removing names from thousands of documents, according to several of the organizations that signed the letter. The exchange shows how WikiLeaks and Mr. Assange risk being isolated from some of their most natural allies in the wake of the documents' publication.
The human-rights groups involved are Amnesty International; Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, or CIVIC; Open Society Institute, or OSI, the charitable organization funded by George Soros; Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission; and the Kabul office of International Crisis Group, or ICG.
The groups emailed WikiLeaks to say they were concerned for the safety of Afghans identified as helping the U.S. military in documents obtained by WikiLeaks, according to several of the groups. WikiLeaks has already published 76,000 of the documents and plans to publish up to 15,000 more.
Some of the already published documents included names that critics including the Pentagon claim could lead to harm for Afghans seen as helping the U.S. war effort. The Pentagon last week demanded that WikiLeaks hand over all the classified Afghan war documents it has.
"We have seen the negative, sometimes deadly ramifications for those Afghans identified as working for or sympathizing with international forces," the human-rights groups wrote in their letter, according to a person familiar with it. "We strongly urge your volunteers and staff to analyze all documents to ensure that those containing identifying information are taken down or redacted."
In his response to the letter signed by the human-rights organizations, Mr. Assange asked what the groups were doing to analyze the documents already published, and asked whether Amnesty in particular would provide staff to help redact the names of Afghan civilians, according to people familiar with the letter.
An Amnesty official replied to say that while the group has limited resources, it wouldn't rule out the idea of helping, according to people familiar with the reply. The official suggested that Mr. Assange and the human-rights groups hold a conference call to discuss the matter.
Mr. Assange then replied: "I'm very busy and have no time to deal with people who prefer to do nothing but cover their asses. If Amnesty does nothing I shall issue a press release highlighting its refusal," according to people familiar with the exchange.
Later, WikiLeaks posted on its Twitter account: "Pentagon wants to bankrupt us by refusing to assist review. Media won't take responsibility. Amnesty won't. What to do?"
In an email Monday, WikiLeaks declined to comment on the exchange with the human rights groups.
Taliban representatives have said publicly that they are searching the documents and plan to punish people who have helped U.S. forces.
THE HAGUE — Actress Mia Farrow told a war crimes court on Monday that she had heard supermodel Naomi Campbell say she had been given a "huge diamond" by Charles Taylor when he was Liberia's president.RELATED: At Wall Street Journal, "Doth Naomi Campbell Protest Too Much?"
Campbell told the Special Court for Sierra Leone last week she had been given "dirty looking pebbles" after a 1997 dinner in South Africa, but did not know if they were diamonds from Taylor, on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
In court on Monday, Farrow said the British model had joined a group of guests at breakfast after the charity dinner, hosted by South African president Nelson Mandela, and had started relating something that had happened overnight.
"She said in the night she had been awakened by men knocking at her door and they had been sent to her by Charles Taylor, and they had given her a huge diamond," Farrow said, adding that Campbell had been "quite excited" about it.
Farrow told the court Campbell had said she would give the diamond to the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund, adding that "it was a sort of an unforgettable moment".
Taylor is charged with 11 counts of instigating murder, rape, mutilation, sexual slavery and conscription of child soldiers during wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone in which more than 250,000 people were killed. He denies all the charges.
Defence lawyer Courtenay Griffiths questioned Farrow's recollection and also her impartiality, because of her active campaigning for justice for the victims of Africa's wars.
The former manager of Mandela's Children Fund charity, Jeremy Ratcliffe, has said he received a number of uncut diamonds from Campbell, and handed them to South African police on Thursday after Campbell's testimony.
Prosecutors are seeking to link the gems to Taylor to prove allegations, which he denies, that he received diamonds from rebels in Sierra Leone and used them to buy weapons.
Prosecutors showed Farrow Campbell's testimony from last week and a U.S. media interview in which she denied saying the diamonds were from Taylor, or denied getting diamonds at all.
They were a disparate group of American altruists who had long cared for the poor and ailing, thrown together on a mission to provide medical help in the most daunting and needy of places.RELATED: "Afghan driver for slain aid volunteers being held by authorities." More at Blazing Cat Fur, along with the press release from the International Assistance Mission.
Last week, the six Americans were among 10 volunteers shot to death in a remote swath of Afghanistan while returning from an aid mission, a tragic end to their years of risk-laden service in the war-ravaged and impoverished nation.
Tom Little [pictured above], for one, remained in Afghanistan through its brutal civil war in the 1990s, talking his way through checkpoints manned by various ethnic militias, and saving the lives of co-workers who might otherwise have been dragged from the car and killed.
Colorado dentist Thomas Grams often traveled with a bodyguard and told friends how he'd persuaded a tribal leader to bring his mother in for a dental exam by agreeing that she'd peel back as little of her burka as possible.
"He was just there out of kindness," Katy Shaw, a friend of Grams, said Sunday, her voice catching. "I can't get my arms around why someone would do that to a group of people trying to be helpful."
The Taliban has claimed responsibility for the ambush in a rugged, isolated valley, which also killed two Afghan men, a German woman and a British woman working with the International Assistance Mission. The Taliban accused the Christian group's volunteers of proselytizing and spying for Western military forces, which the charity vehemently denied.
The charity team, which had been providing eye care and other health services to villagers, had hiked over a steep mountain pass into neighboring Nuristan province, where insurgents had been battling Afghan and Western forces. Police theorized that the assailants might have followed them back from there.
Two other Afghan members of the group escaped the massacre: an interpreter who had left before the ambush and a driver who told police he recited verses from the Koran as he pleaded for his life. Afghan authorities are still questioning the driver about his account of the incident, and police said it would take two days for investigators to reach the scene of the killings.
The Western military condemned the attack as part of a pattern of insurgent behavior that exacerbated the suffering of Afghan civilians.
"This is something the Afghan population has to face," said Brig. Gen. Josef Blotz, a spokesman for NATO's International Security Assistance Force. "Because of these brutal, indiscriminate and absolutely deranged tactics and activities of the Taliban, international aid workers and nongovernmental organizations can't do their job, which is so necessary for this country" ....
Another victim, Cheryl Beckett [pictured above], 32, was a former senior class president in Ohio with a sharp sense of humor and a strong Christian faith, said her grandmother Jean Fink. Both characteristics helped the aid worker power through the last six years, with Beckett educating Afghan villagers in nutritional gardening and mother-child health, and herself in the local languages.
A federal judge in San Francisco ruled Wednesday that President Obama is a bigot. And not just the president. Joe Biden as well, and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sandra Day O'Connor. And maybe you, too.Great essay. More from Ed Whelan at National Review.
The judge didn't put it that way, of course. Technically, he ruled that an amendment to California's Constitution violated the U.S. Constitution by defining marriage as a union of one man and one woman. That amendment was approved by voters after a state court declared that a similar statute violated the state Constitution. The amendment then was challenged in federal court as a violation of the U.S. Constitution.
This was a strange ruling. The U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1971 that an identical challenge to the traditional definition of marriage was meritless. Nor has the Supreme Court ever suggested that its 1971 decision was wrong. Wednesday's ruling relied primarily on a constitutional doctrine that forbids laws having no conceivable rational purpose or no purpose except to oppress a politically unpopular minority group. After a lengthy trial, the judge found that the people of California must have adopted the traditional definition of marriage because of moral or religious contempt for homosexuals and their relationships.
It was a strange charge to make against the people of California. California has the most progressive domestic partnership law in the nation, which gives same-sex couples all the same substantive rights and privileges available to married couples. Why would the judge think that the only possible reason for favoring the traditional definition of marriage was bigotry? He reasoned that every other possible explanation for the voters' decision was so ridiculous that only anti-gay feelings were left.
The success of nuclear deterrence may turn out to be its own undoing. Nuclear weapons helped keep the peace in Europe throughout the Cold War, preventing the bitter dispute from engulfing the continent in another catastrophic conflict. But after nearly 65 years without a major war or a nuclear attack, many prominent statesmen, scholars, and analysts have begun to take deterrence for granted. They are now calling for a major drawdown of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and a new commitment to pursue a world without these weapons.More at the link.
Unfortunately, deterrence in the twenty-first century may be far more difficult for the United States than it was in the past, and having the right mix of nuclear capabilities to deal with the new challenges will be crucial. The United States leads a global network of alliances, a position that commits Washington to protecting countries all over the world. Many of its potential adversaries have acquired, or appear to be seeking, nuclear weapons. Unless the world's major disputes are resolved -- for example, on the Korean Peninsula, across the Taiwan Strait, and around the Persian Gulf -- or the U.S. military pulls back from these regions, the United States will sooner or later find itself embroiled in conventional wars with nuclear-armed adversaries.
Preventing escalation in those circumstances will be far more difficult than peacetime deterrence during the Cold War. In a conventional war, U.S. adversaries would have powerful incentives to brandish or use nuclear weapons because their lives, their families, and the survival of their regimes would be at stake. Therefore, as the United States considers the future of its nuclear arsenal, it should judge its force not against the relatively easy mission of peacetime deterrence but against the demanding mission of deterring escalation during a conventional conflict, when U.S. enemies are fighting for their lives.
Debating the future of the U.S. nuclear arsenal is critical now because the Obama administration has pledged to pursue steep cuts in the force and has launched a major review of U.S. nuclear policy. (The results will be reported to Congress in February 2010.) The administration's desire to shrink the U.S. arsenal is understandable. Although the force is only one-fourth the size it was when the Cold War ended, it still includes roughly 2,200 operational strategic warheads -- more than enough to retaliate against any conceivable nuclear attack. Furthermore, as we previously argued in these pages ("The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy," March/April 2006 [1]), the current U.S. arsenal is vastly more capable than its Cold War predecessor, particularly in the area of "counterforce" -- the ability to destroy an adversary's nuclear weapons before they can be used.
Simply counting U.S. warheads or measuring Washington's counterforce capabilities will not, however, reveal what type of arsenal is needed for deterrence in the twenty-first century. The only way to determine that is to work through the grim logic of deterrence: to consider what actions will need to be deterred, what threats will need to be issued, and what capabilities will be needed to back up those threats.
The Obama administration is right that the United States can safely cut its nuclear arsenal, but it must pay careful attention to the capabilities it retains. During a war, if a desperate adversary were to use its nuclear force to try to coerce the United States -- for example, by threatening a U.S. ally or even by launching nuclear strikes against U.S. overseas bases -- an arsenal comprised solely of high-yield weapons would leave U.S. leaders with terrible retaliatory options. Destroying Pyongyang or Tehran in response to a limited strike would be vastly disproportionate, and doing so might trigger further nuclear attacks in return. A deterrent posture based on such a dubious threat would lack credibility.
Instead, a credible deterrent should give U.S. leaders a range of retaliatory options, including the ability to respond to nuclear attacks with either conventional or nuclear strikes, to retaliate with strikes against an enemy's nuclear forces rather than its cities, and to minimize casualties. The foundation for this flexible deterrent exists. The current U.S. arsenal includes a mix of accurate high- and low-yield warheads, offering a wide range of retaliatory options -- including the ability to launch precise, very low-casualty nuclear counterforce strikes. The United States must preserve that mix of capabilities -- especially the low-yield weapons -- as it cuts the size of its nuclear force.
Our basic argument is that alliance behavior and other forms of strategic interaction are different in the global system than in continental systems. States’ highest priorities are to provide for their territorial and constitutional integrity. The greatest threats to those interests come from large armies that can cross territorial frontiers, seize and occupy territory, take or destroy resources, depose political leaders, and impose new political structures and social systems. Dominant continental powers devote their resources to building armies that facilitate the defense of their frontiers and the expansion of regional territorial empires. They pose threats to other great powers as well as to less powerful states, and other great powers often respond by forming defensive alliances, building up their own military capabilities, or both.Readers can just plug in the United States as the hypothesized model case and you'll get the picture.
Maritime powers have smaller armies, fewer capabilities for invading and occupying, and fewer incentives to do so. They pose significantly weaker threats to the territorial integrity of other states, particularly to other great powers, but greater threats to each other than to leading land-based powers. All of this reduces the incentives of land-based powers to balance against the leading global maritime power, even if the maritime leader is considerably stronger than all the rest. Thus, in 1915 Norman Angell addressed the issue of “why the world does not fear British ‘marinism’ and does fear German militarism” by arguing that “‘marinism’ does not encroach on social and political freedom and militarism does.”
Maritime power is not based on navies alone, but also, as Alfred Thayer
Mahan recognized, on economic strength, and the leading sea power is usually the leading economic power in the global system. This is as true of the United States today as it was of Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. Indeed, the principal reason maritime powers develop their navies is to protect and expand trade, just as the principal reason land powers develop their armies is to protect and possibly expand territory. Leading sea powers also create international regimes to protect their positions of economic and naval dominance. They have evolved into leading air and space powers since the twentieth century, thereby technologically updating the means by which they control “the commons” so critical to predominance in the global system. Thus the distinction is not just between land-based military power and seabased naval power and the different threats imposed by armies and navies, but even more important, the larger distinction between the threats posed by territorial hegemony over land and people and by economic hegemony over markets. Economic dominance does not necessarily require political control, certainly not over other great powers, as Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher recognized in their concept of the “imperialism of free trade.” Political leaders and their peoples may resent both the lack of fair access to distant resources and markets and poor terms of trade, but these resentments pale in comparison to the threat of physical invasion and imperial dominance posed by land-based hegemons.
Unlike land-based empires, dominance in markets and on the seas does not generally involve infringements on the territorial sovereignty of other leading powers in more developed areas, and sea powers have historically shown little interest in getting involved in territorial disputes on the continent. The classic illustration is Britain. As balance of power theorists have long recognized, Britain’s primary interests lay in expanding its markets and investment opportunities overseas. Its primary interests on the European continent lay not in increasing its power and influence, but only in preventing any single state or combination of states from gaining control of a disproportionate amount of the resources on the continent, which could then provide a basis for challenging Britain’s maritime dominance. This is the classic role of the offshore balancer, which many attribute to the United States with respect to both Europe and Asia in the contemporary system.
Given these differences between the perceived threats associated with naval and economic dominance, on the one hand, and regional territorial hegemony, on the other, we expect high concentrations of land-based military power to generate counterbalancing coalitions of other regional great powers, but we do not expect high concentrations of sea power to have a comparable effect in generating counterbalancing coalitions against the leading global power. In fact, given the public goods often provided by leading economic states, we argue that high concentrations of sea power are likely to be associated with a lower likelihood of balancing by continental great powers, and that great powers are more likely to ally with predominant sea powers than to ally against them. Great powers ally with predominant sea powers to secure military or diplomatic support against threats posed by the dominant land power or another traditional rival, gain economic benefits by associating with the leading economic power and the global system it has helped create, or reap a share of the spoils from being on the winning side of an anticipated war.
Hiroshima, on that day, there was no panic, only ghastly stillness, the quiet of death. People moved slowly along the roads like ghosts covered with dust and ash who fell dead as they walked. By the river people were bleeding from their faces or hands and died without weeping. People trapped under fallen houses called patiently, meekly, "Help, if I may ask." In Hiroshima on that day, half the doctors were killed. At the hospitals between three and ten thousand people came each day for help, and each day, 2,000 of them died. They were buried together, because there were too many to bury separately.
As readers know, I don't doubt for one second that the atomic attacks on Japan were necessary and saved lives. I'm not immune from the sentiments of peace activists, however, especially the Japanese who lived through the holocaust. That said, Amy Goodman interviewed the filmmakers, and as always, it's extremely fascinating to see once more how the United States is portrayed by the communist left as evil incarnate. See, "Film Suppressed: The US Government Hides Hiroshima Nagasaki Footage For Decades."
For decades now, we’ve watched lying, sanctimonious, superior, left-wing celebrities step into the political arena to sling their toxic nonsense without ever having to face an opponent. We’ve also watched lying, sanctimonious, superior, left-wing race baiters win the day with an equally toxic divisiveness and the hollow promise of ”just give in on this one and we’ll stop calling you racist.”Well, no more. We know who we are, we know who the real racists are, we know this president and congress are both stunningly incompetent, and we can’t wait to vote.
So out of ideas is the other side — which is perfectly represented by MSNBC and Garofalo — that the Dallas Tea Party was able to effectively ridicule and expose their breathtaking hypocrisy and intellectual bankruptcy using only their own words.
Racial blackmail doesn’t work anymore. The left is losing the last play in their playbook and in the immortal words of the boss: “You can go to hell.”
As time goes on,
I realize
Just what you mean
To me
And now,
Now that you're near,
Promise your love
That I've waited to share
And dreams
Of our moments together
Color my world with hope of loving you
At the State Department, which presumably will be spending taxpayer money on Rauf's tour, I have yet to receive confirmation or any other information about his program, despite three days of my repeated requests by phone and e-mail. Apparently it is taking a while for State's Bureau of Public Diplomacy to get "clearance" to release any details of this particular public outreach effort, though Rauf's wife says it has been in the works for months.Rauf's wife is Daisy Khan, now coming under fire for her "ignorance" of Con Ed's half-ownership of Park Place. And Rossett continues on why the State Department tour is problematic:
All this comes at a moment when Rauf and his partners in New York are preparing to raise $100 million to build a 13-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero. A Manhattan Landmarks committee gave the necessary approval on Aug. 3 to tear down the old Burlington Coat Factory building already purchased for $4.85 million by a real estate developer partnering with Rauf. That building is so close to Ground Zero that on the morning of the Sept. 11 attacks parts of one of the hijacked planes damaged its roof. On that lot, the Islamic center project is now cleared to roll forward, once the money rolls in.
In May the English-language website of Asharq Al-Awsat reported that Rauf, in a London interview, had said his Islamic center will be financed by donations both from Muslims in the U.S. and from Arab and Islamic countries. Asked recently how this might work in detail, Kahn said she doesn't know; all plans are still in flux while a new entity to handle the Islamic center project "is being formed."Damn straight.
To some of the defenders of this project, such specifics don't matter. New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg this week said he doesn't care where the $100 million comes from; he sees it as none of the government's business. If the only criterion here is that Rauf and his partners comply with the minimum due diligence and disclosure required by law, Bloomberg has a point.
But to a great many Americans, it quite likely does matter where the money comes from. For one thing, there is always the potential for the preferences of big donors to sway the behavior of nonprofit ventures. Countries such as Saudi Arabia are not known for full-throated support of American values and freedoms.
For another, the current uproar over the project is testimony all by itself that to many Americans, the site of the World Trade Center is freighted with symbolism. That may not always register as a matter of law, but it does matter. Ground Zero is both the geographic and symbolic heart of the attacks in which Islamist terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001, murdered almost 3,000 Americans.
Of those 19 terrorists, 15 were from Saudi Arabia and two were from the United Arab Emirates; the others were Egyptian and Lebanese. If Rauf wishes to raise money from the part of the world that raised these terrorists, especially from Saudi Arabia or the UAE, then within normal constraints of U.S. law, he is entitled to do so.
But if Rauf's aim is truly, as he says, to build bridges, reach out and promote harmony in America, then punctuating his Ground Zero project with a summer swing past fonts of Islamic oil money seems an odd way to go about it. With emotions rubbed raw among some families of Sept. 11 victims, with arguments boiling over the "bridge-building" project Rauf himself set in motion, it would seem far more fitting for him to spend his time in America, answering, not least, the many questions he has repeatedly deflected about the money.
Islam doesn't just hijack planes, it hijacks the things that mean something to people. The great cities of the world are littered with relics of the Muslim occupation of their sacred places. Jerusalem, Delhi, Constantinople and Alexandria all testify to the Muslim predilection for taking over other people's sacred places, and turning them into mosques. It wasn't enough for Muslims to conquer Jerusalem and subjugate its inhabitants. No, they also had to take the holiest place in Judaism and build a mosque on top of it. Similarly it wasn't enough for them to conquer and rename Constantinople, they also had to turn the Hagia Sophia into a mosque. These are not exceptions to the rule. In Asia, the Middle East and Europe, there are numberless examples of the same thing ...Powerful.
Ground Zero is not only the central point of the Muslim massacre of 3000 people. It is also the central point of the memory of that massacre. The area is the place where people come to remember what happened. To see, to hear and to pay tribute to the dead. Which is exactly why Muslims are determined to hijack it for their own purposes, with a highly visible mosque and their own 9/11 museum that will feature a radically altered version of history. What they are after is the equivalent of putting up a Holocaust Revisionism museum outside the Holocaust museum ...
At Ground Zero, all Americans realized that Islam was an inescapable question that they must grapple with. It is a powerful symbol. And symbols are dangerous. People will fight and die for symbols, as they will not for cold hard facts. It is why the left has tried to hijack it using the IFC. They failed. Now where they failed, the Islamists intend to succeed. And just as the IFC was backed by Bloomberg, so too the Ground Zero mosque is being backed by Bloomberg. It's why the media and liberals are shouting down all criticism of the Ground Zero mosque. Islam and the left both want to suppress the real history of September 11. They want Americans to forget who did it, and instead feed them excuses about "American foreign policy" and of course those omnipresent Jews, who are really to blame for it all ....
The Great Lie told and retold over and over again for the last 9 years, is that Islam was not responsible for 9/11. That lie has been repeated over and over again. It has permeated our culture. It has filled our media. The politicians have echoed it. Books and articles are written that treat it as something every reasonable person understands. Islam had nothing to do with 9/11. Not a damn thing.
The Ground Zero mosque is that lie made flesh. It is that revisionist history given physical form, turned into brick and mortar, steel and cement, raised up to the sky, to look down mockingly on the Ground Zero construction site itself, and the people who come there to reflect and remember. It mocks their memories. It mocks the dead. Its arrogance is the same as that of the Muslim burners of the Great Library of Alexandria, of Hanan Ashrawi claiming there was no Jewish connection to Joseph's Tomb, or Anwar Al-Awlaki, who had advised the 9/11 hijackers, telling reporters after the attacks that Islam opposes terrorism. It is an act of beheading, not of flesh, but of identity. It takes a blade and saws at the neck of a culture, cutting off its head through lies and deceit.
* "Ground Zero Mosque Would Desecrate the Memory of 9/11 Victims."RELATED: At NYT (FWIW), "Battles Around Nation Over Proposed Mosques."
* "Dishonest Imam Rauf in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Qatar for Ground Zero Mosque Money."
* "A Muslim victim of 9/11: 'Build your mosque somewhere else'."
* "Dershowitz vs. Hanson on the ADL and the Ground Zero Mosque."
* "Why won't the Left defend Christians as fiercely as it defends Muslims?"
I can't recommend this enough. About 3/4 of the way through I found myself watching with tears running down my face.And that's Bob Parks of the National Advisory Council at the second video below:
They were tears of pride, and oddly, hope. To the extent that there is something called the black community, they should be proud to embrace Americans like these.
That we live in a world that ridicules and demonizes men and women of such caliber strikes me as unbearably sad.
"I think with the Tea Party, we are going to hear the 'N-word' a lot in the next few weeks and months," Parks said.
"That 'N-word' is November. And I very much look forward to hearing it."
See also, "Journalists Versus Black Conservatives":
This press conference affords us an opportunity to see something pretty rare in today’s liberal-dominated political environment: reporters asking adversarial questions.RTWT.
Since liberals dominate the executive and legislative branches in 2010, and come pretty close to dominating the judicial branch, most of the “journalistic” activity we get to see in press conferences is softball questions, admiration and adulation from reporters.
But when it’s conservatives facing the questions, get ready for the kind of tough questions legend tells us reporters used to ask as a part of their job.
Get black conservatives at the podium and you’ll see downright hostile questioning. That’s what happened on Aug. 4 when several black Tea Party supporters (including some Tea Party headliners) came together at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. to refute the liberal charges of racism against the Tea Party movement.
The video starts with Joyce Jones of Black Enterprise brought up the discredited claim that Rep. John Lewis was spit on and called racist names at a health care protest in Washington D.C. several months ago. Apparently no dearth of evidence matters when the charge is “racism” against the most powerful political force ever to oppose liberalism.
Fresh off making headlines for possibly ending his hall of fame career, Brett Favre is suddenly making news for something far more sensational.No doubt Stacy's raking in the Google in the traffic with his reporting.
According to an article at Deadspin, the quarterback may have sent a slew of graphic photos - namely shots of his private parts - to model Jenn Sterger.
Sterger, who works at the sports show "The Daily Line," allegedly received the images on her phone while she was working as a sideline reporter for the New York Jets in 2008.
Sterger claims Favre, who is married, sent her numerous graphic pictures and flirty voicemails but she rejected his advances.
The report lacks any hard evidence. Deadspin blogger A.J. Daulerio says Sterger didn't want the publicity that the story would fuel. However, she finally agreed to "go on the record with her tales of Favre's creepy cell phone stalking."
Sterger has posed for Maxim and Playboy and wrote a column for Sports Illustrated called "Confessions of a Cowgirl."
Deadspin editor-in-chief A.J. Daulerio knew his post about legendary NFL quarterback Brett Favre sending X-rated crotch shots to a sexy TV sports personality would get a lot of hits - but he says he's surprised by the number of critics who say the outrageous sports website crossed an ethical line.Folks might not remember, but A.J. Daulerio first broke the Erin Andrews nude video scandal in summer 2009. Sports columnist Jason Whitlock hammered Deadspin, "JASON WHITLOCK COMMENTARY: Erin Andrews Nude Video Scandal: Whose Fault?" Daulerio apologized here: "Sometimes This World Is A Horrible Place To Live."
Daulerio reported Wednesday that model, actress and TV host Jenn Sterger told him that Favre had sent her inappropriate and explicit pictures of his himself, but it is not clear that Sterger gave her full consent for Deadspin to use what had previously been an off-the-record account.
"What irks me a little bit is when people put us in the same category as The New York Times or you guys," Daulerio said, referring to the Daily News. "We've run rumors and innuendo from the get-go. That's what we do."
Friday was “Hiroshima Day,” when people of the peace movement give speeches condemning the Americans who killed 140,000 people when President Truman ordered the A-bomb dropped over Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and another 80,000 on Aug. 9, when he OK’d a second bomb released over Nagasaki.That's fascinating. (More at the link.)
They’re entitled to their opinion. But for me, Friday was “Harry Truman Day.” I am grateful to the “buck stops here” president who saved a million Americans and millions more Japanese by dropping two A-bombs.
Without Truman’s forceful action, I probably would not be here. The day the war ended in the Pacific, Aug. 15, 1945, Fay C. Sweeny, the American lieutenant who would become my father, was on the SS Monterey, a ship of the Matson Line headed to the Philippines from Europe. He had recently finished slogging through France and Germany to help end the “Thousand Year Reich.”
I have the ship’s newsletter framed in my rec room. The headline reads, “War is Over!” Dad wrote the latitude and longitude of the ship’s position when the end came. All on board knew one thing, he told me years later.
They would not have to invade Japan and die.
“Operation Downfall” was planned to start in October 1945. Dad told me the War Department estimated more than 1 million Americans would be killed or wounded. Tens of millions of Japanese would die, for they had vowed to fight to the death. This included civilians committing mass suicide, something U.S. Marines had witnessed on a small scale in their island-hopping campaign in the South Pacific.
