Four blasts ripped through a government-controlled district close to a military officers' club in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, killing at least 40 people and wounding more than 90 on Wednesday, opposition activists said.
The attacks within minutes of each other struck the main Saadallah al-Jabiri Square and a fifth bomb exploded a few hundred metres away, state television said, on the fringes of the Old City where rebels and forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have been fighting.Continue reading.
"Five minutes after the first explosion a second bomb exploded. A third exploded ten minutes after that," a state television reporter said. "There was a fourth car bomb which exploded before engineering units could defuse it."
The station also broadcast footage of three dead men disguised as soldiers in army fatigues who it said were shot by security forces before they could detonate explosive-packed belts they were wearing. One appeared to be holding a trigger device in his hand.
Rebels fighting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad announced last week a new offensive in Aleppo, Syria's largest city and commercial hub of 2.5 million people, but neither side has appeared to make significant gains so far.
The explosions also came a week after rebels bombed military command buildings in the heart of Damascus and clashed with security forces for several hours.
For his Wednesday-night debate with President Obama, Mitt Romney has been advised to be tough but affable. He should put his warm and caring side on display, while picking apart the president's record and rebutting dubious statements by Mr. Obama. "I'd be tempted to go back to that wonderful line by Ronald Reagan, 'There you go again,'" Mr. Romney said last week.Continue reading.
The advice is good, but even if Mr. Romney follows it scrupulously, he is not likely to dominate the debate. His performance won't be commanding enough to give his campaign the momentum it needs. His chances of defeating Mr. Obama on Nov. 6 will suffer.
Mr. Romney should do in the debate what he hasn't done in his speeches, media appearances or TV ads—in other words, in his entire campaign. He must make a forceful case that America's survival as a prosperous and respected nation is at stake. In that context, the election becomes an urgent choice between a national turnaround and further decline. The Romney advertising has been especially sorry at drawing that distinction. The generally bland commercials feel like they could have run at any time in the past 40 years.
Voters understand that America is in trouble. For years, they've told pollsters the country is headed in the wrong direction. Today they're even more gloomy. At every focus group I've heard about recently, they agree with the notion that their children will be worse off than they are. A Fox News poll in August found that by nearly a 2-1 ratio voters think American civilization is in decline. In short, faith in the American Dream has tanked.
According to a Rasmussen poll last week, 15% of likely voters are uncommitted or willing to change their vote. "One of the distinguishing features of those potentially persuadable voters is that they don't see the choice between Romney and Obama as particularly significant," Mr. Rasmussen said. "Just 28% say it will be very important which man wins."
Like a wide receiver in football, Mr. Romney needs to create separation between himself and his opponent. If they're quibbling over the legitimacy of Mr. Obama's $4 trillion deficit-reduction plan or whether Mr. Romney's tax proposal is revenue neutral, the advantage will go to the incumbent. Mr. Romney can prevail in those arguments without coming any closer to winning the presidency.
The Republican challenger needs to go where Mr. Obama cannot go. What's required are ideas, initiatives and policies commensurate with America's moment of peril. This means, first of all, embracing the conservative reform agenda: entitlement reform, overhaul of the tax code, curbs on spending, an unhampered economy, regulatory relief, consumer-driven health care, a welfare state that doesn't promote dependency, a revitalized civil society.
An American compound in Libya is invaded by al Qaeda terrorists and an American ambassador is purportedly tortured before being killed. Muslim mobs attack American embassies in 27 countries chanting,”Death to America.” The White House response? A statement blaming the outrages on a filmmaker in the United States, along with apologies to the Muslim world.More at the link.
The American economy languishes with millions unemployed in the worst times since the Great Depression. Yet the president spends his first years in the White House focusing on a plan to create a trillion-dollar socialized health care system opposed by a majority of Americans. Then he campaigns for re-election on a platform blaming rich Americans for the economic woes.
What’s going on here?
The answer lies in a famous statement the president made on the eve of his election, when he told a crowd of cheering supporters: “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” These are not the words of a traditional, pragmatic-minded American politician. A practical politician attempts to address problems and fix them, not to fundamentally transform an entire nation. Transforming nations is what radicals aspire to do. But Mr. Obama’s actions in the past four years — beginning with putting Obamacare in front of the economic crisis — are nothing if not radical.
Radicals are sometimes referred to as “liberals in a hurry.” They share goals but not means. Both Mr. Obama and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, expressed early sympathy for the Occupy Wall Street movement, whose rage at the American social order quickly turned violent and destructive.
But while Mr. Obama and Mrs. Pelosi may pursue their agendas through the traditional process of democratic government, ends still determine means. The radical nature of the goals they pursue does have consequences, the first of which is to divide the nation in an hour when they should have been uniting it.
In a national crisis such as America faced in 2009 when 800,000 of us were losing our jobs every month, traditional leaders would have regarded their first task as one of rallying the country on a common agenda and bringing Americans together. Instead, Mr. Obama and Mrs. Pelosi put their radical agenda first — passing a massive health care bill, the most transformative legislation in American history, and passing it over the opposition not only of Republicans but even of Democratic voters in Massachusetts, who elected Republican Scott Brown to cast a vote against it.
Far from pursuing national unity to solve the crisis, Mr. Obama put his goal of transformation in front of everything. In order to achieve the change he wanted, he shut out the congressional Republicans in drafting his revolutionary legislation, and then disregarded the majority of Americans when they rejected his plan, defeating Democrats in special elections in New Jersey and Virginia — states that he had won. His radical goals caused Mr. Obama to squander his political capital on a divisive campaign in the first two years of his administration that has changed and embittered the political landscape, and that has persisted for four years and could continue.
Of the Obama election effort dominated by themes of class envy and conflict, a longtime liberal and Democrat, Mortimer Zuckerman, the publisher of U.S. News & World Report, has said: “It is a dishonest, divisive campaign. It’s discouraging of enterprise. It does the opposite of uniting the country to deal with the current economic crisis.”
It must be hard being Barack Obama. Midway through his opponent’s latest calamity, the president last week sat down for a grilling by the five friendly ladies on The View, the daytime television chat show. At the start of what can be described as a gentle conversation, Mr Obama joked that he was mere “eye candy” for his hosts. The news media complained that Mr Obama only very rarely makes himself available for their more probing questions. But of course, smart politicians go to where the voters are. Whether he’s slow jammin’ with Jimmy Fallon or conceding a kiss to the First Lady at a sports game, the president knows what most people respond to. Mitt Romney, on the other hand. But I digress.Continue reading.
There can be little doubt that Mr Obama is a lucky candidate. This time four years ago, John McCain reminded everyone of his advancing age and dubious health by selecting a running mate who thought Africa was a country. After the financial meltdown, Mr McCain then made the rash error of calling for a suspension of the campaign. Mr Romney is on the verge of a similar fate.
Given the latest polls, which show Mr Obama with six- to 10-point leads in the key swing states, Republican donors are debating whether to divert cash to the congressional election, where they could at least hold up the firewall against Mr Obama. Paul Ryan, meanwhile, is looking for ways to salvage his credibility as a future White House contender. Such are the rumours that disorient failing campaigns.
So far, Mr Obama has played along mostly as a bystander. Staff at the president’s Facebook-style headquarters in Chicago may dispute that description (their targeting techniques are light years ahead of their rivals in Boston). But Mr Romney has inflicted most of the damage on himself. Last week he had the decency to admit it. “That’s not the campaign,” Mr Romney said in response to the fallout from of his infamous “47 per cent” remark at a private fundraiser. “That was me, right?”
Yet there are reasons to pause before agreeing with the comedian Jon Stewart’s declaration that Mr Obama is “the luckiest dude on the planet”. For one, debating is not Mr Obama’s strong point...
"In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad."Well, that's the progressive left for you.
So reads an advertisement that went up a week ago in New York City subway stations. Sponsored by Pamela Geller's American Freedom Defense Initiative, the ads were meant to provoke, and they did. Denunciations poured in, activists plastered "racist" and "hate speech" stickers over the ads, and an Egyptian-American activist even got herself arrested after spray-painting one poster pink.
Establishment opinion quickly rallied to a consensus. As the Washington Post put it, while the words could be read as "hateful," "an offensive ad" nonetheless has the "right to offend." A rabbi summed up the media orthodoxy in the headline over her column for CNN: "A right to hate speech, a duty to condemn."
Certainly that's one way to read this ad. Then again, most Americans probably read it the way it is written: Israel is a civilized nation under attack from people who do savage things in the name of jihad. Whatever the agenda of those behind this ad might be, the question remains: What part of that statement is not true?
Ah, but the use of the word "jihad" inherently indicts all Muslims, say the critics. There are millions of peaceful Muslims for whom jihad means only a spiritual quest. So why do so many people associate jihad with murder and brutality?
Might it be because violence is so often the jihadist's calling card? Might it be that some of these killers even incorporate the word jihad into the name of their terror organizations, e.g., Palestinian Islamic Jihad? That may not be the exclusive meaning of jihad, but surely it is one meaning—and the one that New York subway riders are most likely to bring to the word.
The same goes for "savage." Exhibit A is Oxford's online dictionary, which defines a savage as "a brutal or vicious person." There are innumerable Exhibit Bs, but let me invoke one of the most powerful.
This is a Reuters photo that ran on the New York Times front page for Sept. 1, 2004. It shows an Israeli bus after it had been blown up by a suicide bomber. Neither bloody nor gory, the photo is nonetheless deeply disturbing, because it shows the lifeless body of a young woman hanging out a window.
The Times news story added this detail about the reaction to that attack. "In Gaza," ran the report, "thousands of supporters of Hamas celebrated in the streets, and the Associated Press reported that one of the bombers' widows hailed the attack as 'heroic' and said her husband's soul was 'happy in heaven.' " What part of any of this is not savage?
Might it be because violence is so often the jihadist's calling card? Might it be that some of these killers even incorporate the word jihad into the name of their terror organizations, e.g., Palestinian Islamic Jihad? That may not be the exclusive meaning of jihad, but surely it is one meaning—and the one that New York subway riders are most likely to bring to the word.
The same goes for "savage." Exhibit A is Oxford's online dictionary, which defines a savage as "a brutal or vicious person." There are innumerable Exhibit Bs, but let me invoke one of the most powerful.
This is a Reuters photo that ran on the New York Times front page for Sept. 1, 2004. It shows an Israeli bus after it had been blown up by a suicide bomber. Neither bloody nor gory, the photo is nonetheless deeply disturbing, because it shows the lifeless body of a young woman hanging out a window.
The Times news story added this detail about the reaction to that attack. "In Gaza," ran the report, "thousands of supporters of Hamas celebrated in the streets, and the Associated Press reported that one of the bombers' widows hailed the attack as 'heroic' and said her husband's soul was 'happy in heaven.' " What part of any of this is not savage? ....
What a curiosity our new political correctness has made of our public spaces. Let your sex tape loose on the Internet and be rewarded with your own TV show; photograph a crucifix in a jar of urine and our museums will vie to exhibit it; occupy someone else's property and you will be hailed by the president for your keen social conscience.
But call people who blow up, behead and mutilate "savage"—and polite society will find you offensive.
LOS ANGELES — The battle to curb labor’s political clout has moved from Wisconsin to California, where wealthy conservatives are championing a ballot measure that would bar unions from donating to candidates. Labor leaders describe it as the starkest threat they have faced in a year of nationwide challenges to diminish their once-formidable power.Well, it's good to see the thug union idiots quaking in their boots, although it's a poorly designed initiative, as I noted previously.
The measure, Proposition 32 on the November ballot, would prohibit both unions and corporations from making contributions, but the corporate provision is far less stringent than the one aimed at unions, analysts said. If passed, it would also bar unions from using automatic payroll deductions to raise money for political campaigns, a major source of labor’s political funding.
“This would be a big deal for unions if it passes since it would largely cut off their participation in state and local California politics,” said Daniel J. B. Mitchell, a professor emeritus at the U.C.L.A. Anderson School of Management.
The prospect that Proposition 32 could become law in an overwhelmingly Democratic state that has a rich history of union activism has alarmed labor leaders. A victory here, they argued, would pave the way for similar efforts across the nation.
“This is intended not to hobble us, this is intended to eviscerate us,” said Art Pulaski, the head of the California Labor Federation. “If they can do it in California, they can do it everywhere and anywhere.”
Half of all U.S. adults now have a mobile connection to the web through either a smartphone or tablet, significantly more than a year ago, and this has major implications for how news will be consumed and paid for, according to a detailed new survey of news use on mobile devices by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) in collaboration with The Economist Group.Continue reading.
At the center of the recent growth in mobile is the rapid embrace by Americans of the tablet computer. Nearly a quarter of U.S. adults, 22%, now own a tablet device-double the number from a year earlier. Another 3% of adults regularly use a tablet owned by someone else in their home. And nearly a quarter of those who don't have a tablet, 23%, plan to get one in the next six months. Even more U.S. adults (44%) have smartphones, according to the survey, up from 35% in May 2011.
News remains an important part of what people do on their mobile devices-64% of tablet owners and 62% of smartphone owners say they use the devices for news at least weekly, tying news statistically with other popular activities such email and playing games on tablets and behind only email on smartphones (not including talking on the phone). This means fully a third of all U.S. adults now get news on a mobile device at least once a week.
Mobile users, moreover, are not just checking headlines on their devices, although nearly all use the devices for the latest new[s] updates. Many also are reading longer news stories - 73% of adults who consume news on their tablet read in-depth articles at least sometimes, including 19% who do so daily. Fully 61% of smartphone news consumers at least sometimes read longer stories, 11% regularly.
And for many people, mobile devices are adding how much news they consume. More than four in ten mobile news consumers say they are getting more news now and nearly a third say they are adding new sources.
These findings and others in this report build upon a comprehensive study conducted by PEJ and The Economist Group a year ago that provided an in-depth look at news consumption on tablets among early adopters. The new report, which is based on a survey of 9,513 U.S. adults conducted from June-August 2012 (including 4,638 mobile device owners), probes mobile news habits more deeply across the wider population of users, looks at smart phone use as well, and examines the financial implications of those habits for news.
There is so much that is heinous about Brittany being used for political gain in this way, but let’s start with the obvious thing, which is that neither Mitt Romney nor anybody running for office under the Republican banner is suggesting doing anything that would hurt her.Continue reading.
This is absurd. Obama's use of a retarded girl to counter Romney's 47-percent argument is a complete non sequitur. Althouse acknowledges as much, but goes on to say, in effect, that she doesn't care. Why? Because she's a woman. Which is even more of a non sequitur.Lots more comments at the link.
Just vote for Obama already. Waving the bloody shirt of an exploited retarded girl makes you look, um, retarded.
