LONDON — Here she is, The Amateur. It's a quaint notion these days, deemed unrealistic by most, crazy by some. How does a world-class modern athlete—thriving in a potentially lucrative sport—escape the seductive grasp of professionalism, with its paychecks and sponsors and perquisites?Well, she deserves to cash in at some point. But she's so wholesome it's ridiculous.
Isn't pro the way to go? Who among us would not bite the apple? Who could resist the Wheaties box, the lime-colored sports car and the fresh-built mansion with a private screening room serving hot-buttered popcorn?
Especially if we were 17.
But so far Missy Franklin has resisted. She is the exception, not because she wanted to make some kind of grand statement about sports, but because she likes who she is right now. She's the teenage superstar happy to still be a teenager—living in the town she grew up, swimming for her high school team, getting coached by the same coach who has guided her since she was a 7-year-old Starfish.
She hasn't crossed that bright line. Franklin is due to graduate high school in 2013, and she says she wants to swim in college, where NCAA rules prohibit her from taking the cash.
But wowzers, it's gonna be so much cash.
Because Franklin is suddenly cast in one of the most high-profile, remunerative roles in sport: the Olympic sensation. Monday night in London, Franklin won her first gold medal, in the 100-meter backstroke. Now the 6-foot-1 Franklin isn't a could-be from Colorado with the size 13 feet, a future star on the rise.
She's here, fully arrived, the bona fide thing.
Mitt Romney was accused of racism after he appeared to suggest that Israelis were richer than Palestinians because of their cultural and religious superiority.
Struggling to regain momentum after a troubled trip to London, where he criticised Olympic preparations, the Republican presidential candidate has stirred up further ill-feeling. He ended the Israeli leg of his world tour on Monday facing Palestinian charges that he promoted "extremism, violence and hatred".Horrible. Just horrible. An utter abomination. How could you, Mitt Romney?!!
As he prepared to stoke yet more controversy on Tuesday in Poland with a speech hostile to Russia, Mr Romney demonstrated what critics see as a penchant for causing offence abroad at a fundraising breakfast in Jerusalem.
Attempting to bestow praise on his Jewish audience, he told them that Israel was more prosperous than the Palestinian territories because of its culture and the "hand of providence", seen by some Palestinians as a reference to God.
"As you I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognise the power of at least culture and a few other things," he said.
HANCOCK FIELD AIR NATIONAL GUARD BASE, N.Y. — From his computer console here in the Syracuse suburbs, Col. D. Scott Brenton remotely flies a Reaper drone that beams back hundreds of hours of live video of insurgents, his intended targets, going about their daily lives 7,000 miles away in Afghanistan. Sometimes he and his team watch the same family compound for weeks.RTWT.
“I see mothers with children, I see fathers with children, I see fathers with mothers, I see kids playing soccer,” Colonel Brenton said.
When the call comes for him to fire a missile and kill a militant — and only, Colonel Brenton said, when the women and children are not around — the hair on the back of his neck stands up, just as it did when he used to line up targets in his F-16 fighter jet.
Afterward, just like the old days, he compartmentalizes. “I feel no emotional attachment to the enemy,” he said. “I have a duty, and I execute the duty.”
Drones are not only revolutionizing American warfare but are also changing in profound ways the lives of the people who fly them.
Colonel Brenton acknowledges the peculiar new disconnect of fighting a telewar with a joystick and a throttle from his padded seat in American suburbia.
When he was deployed in Iraq, “you land and there’s no more weapons on your F-16, people have an idea of what you were just involved with.” Now he steps out of a dark room of video screens, his adrenaline still surging after squeezing the trigger, and commutes home past fast-food restaurants and convenience stores to help with homework — but always alone with what he has done.
“It’s a strange feeling,” he said. “No one in my immediate environment is aware of anything that occurred.”
BEIRUT, Lebanon — As the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s government grinds on with no resolution in sight, Syrians involved in the armed struggle say it is becoming more radicalized: homegrown Muslim jihadists, as well as small groups of fighters from Al Qaeda, are taking a more prominent role and demanding a say in running the resistance.Keep reading.
The past few months have witnessed the emergence of larger, more organized and better armed Syrian militant organizations pushing an agenda based on jihad, the concept that they have a divine mandate to fight. Even less-zealous resistance groups are adopting a pronounced Islamic aura because it attracts more financing.
Scores of foreign jihadists have crossed into Syria from Turkey in the past two weeks, some of them telling Syrians that they are planning to travel to Aleppo to join a decisive battle against regime troops.This reminds me of Caroline Glick's piece the other day. Frankly, the Obama administration won't resist a Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Syria, so don't expect a big push back against the rising jihadist presence in the country. As Caroline noted:
Syrian residents and a Turkish smuggler interviewed by the Guardian say many of the men have come from the Caucasus, while others had arrived from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Gulf Arab states.
According to locals who have dealt with them, the new arrivals embrace a global jihadist worldview that sets them apart from most leaders in the armed Syrian opposition and is stirring deep discontent among the rebel leadership.
With Syria's civil war still raging throughout the country, the world media is rife with reports about Syria's Christians fleeing their towns and villages en masse as Islamists from the Syrian opposition target them with death, extortion and kidnapping.The administration has kowtowed to Russia, while Islamists mount a murderous campaign of ethnic cleansing. And it's not just because of the Obama regime's cluelessness (although there's plenty of that). If the Islamists take over in Syria the administration can claim a hat trick: Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria.
Anderson Cooper closed one of five segments of his weeknightly CNN show that he recently devoted to attacking principally Rep. Michele Bachmann with a genuflection towards an iconic newsman, Edward R. Murrow. He deployed against her the gauntlet Murrow threw down to Sen. Joseph McCarthy in March 1954: “The line between investigating and persecuting is a [very] fine one.” If anyone has stepped over that line, however, it is Cooper himself, rather than the Minnesota congresswoman.Continue reading.
Night after night during the week of July 16th, the host of “Anderson Cooper 360” failed to meet even the most basic standards of investigative journalism. The irony is that, in his ill-concealed persecution of Mrs. Bachmann, Cooper has serially engaged in precisely the practices he pillories her and others for allegedly using, by his account, to destroy the reputation of the Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a Muslim-American woman named Huma Abedin. Let us count the ways...
Actually, it's a big dirty secret.It's an excellent essay. Continue reading.
I could not help but notice, over the past few years, the right wing blogosphere's silence on jihad and Islam. When I started blogging back in 2004-2005, there were literally scores of counter-jihad blogs in an already crowded field. Seven years later, it is a paltry few, save for Jihadwatch, Creeping Sharia, and political bloggers like Logan's Warning, IOTW, American Power blog, Zilla, .....
Big Fur Hat over at iOwntheWorld has figured it out: the blogger being discussed below is Weasel Zippers. Zip and I had once been friendly and actually had been planning to meet again for lunch when he wrote me and asked me to stop linking his posts at Jihad Watch, because then when Pamela Geller would link my posts, a link to his site would show up at Atlas Shrugs, and he didn't want to have anything to do with her because of her exposure of Rick Perry's Islam curriculum. When I responded incredulously, he grew progressively more abusive, finally ending up by repeating the Leftist/Islamic supremacist smear that I was responsible for the Norway murders. He still does cover jihad issues at Weasel Zippers, but not in a way that would trouble anyone who buys the propaganda line, purveyed by both Leftists and Fox, that Islam is a Religion of Peace that has been Hijacked by a Tiny Minority of Extremists.Check Robert's post for the links.
The premise behind the political anger being stirred up against Chick-Fil-A is basically from kindergarten: if you don't agree with me, you're hateful and you hate me. But in the world of adult responsibility, the very basis for freedom of conscience—intellectual and religious freedom—is freedom of contradictory expression. What demagogues today call "hatred" and "intolerance" is actually the essence of freedom: people being able to hold and advocate their own views, unmolested, no matter how much others dislike those views.RTWT. And also Larry Schmidt, in the letters at USA Today:
It seems as if people on the left don't approve of free speech unless it is in line with their beliefs. They call for boycotts of companies that espouse opinions other than their own. This has got to stop. This is the United States of America, where everyone has the right to free speech.Right.
By resisting almost any change aimed at improving our public schools, teachers unions have become a ripe target for reformers across the ideological spectrum. Even Hollywood, famously sympathetic to organized labor, has turned on unions with the documentary "Waiting for 'Superman'" (2010) and a feature film, "Won't Back Down," to be released later this year. But perhaps most damaging to the unions' credibility is their position on sexual misconduct involving teachers and students in New York schools, which is even causing union members to begin to lose faith.Continue reading.
In the last five years in New York City, 97 tenured teachers or school employees have been charged by the Department of Education with sexual misconduct. Among the charges substantiated by the city's special commissioner of investigation—that is, found to have sufficient merit that an arbitrator's full examination was justified—in the 2011-12 school year...
