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When Johnny Young looks at La Tijera School, he sees more than the gleaming new facade of steel and stucco, the technology lab outfitted with 36 desktop computers, the fitness center with spinning cycles, treadmills and weights.These are the families that need excellent public education systems, and the schools are failing. But read the rest of that article. The district is bad hands. Even the teachers' union supports a state takeover.
The Inglewood school board president sees salvation for his beleaguered district, the most financially precarious in California.
Socked by state funding cuts and declining enrollment, the Inglewood Unified School District is expected to go broke by May. Inglewood is one of seven school districts in the state that projects red ink through next year and is closest to the brink of bankruptcy, according to state fiscal management officials who work with troubled schools.
Without quick action, the Los Angeles County education office recently wrote, there is a "strong potential" that the state will have to bail out Inglewood with an emergency loan. That would trigger the California Department of Education to fire the superintendent, sideline the school board and take over district management until the loan is repaid, which could take 20 years.
But Young is confident that such drastic measures won't happen, and projects like the new La Tijera School are one reason why. He predicted that the $24-million state-of-the-art campus that opened in January, paid for with a construction bond, will attract hundreds of new students. And new magnet programs and publicity drives at other schools should bring in even more, he said. More students means more state funding — about $5,200 per pupil.
"We are very optimistic we will come out of this and avoid a state takeover," Young said.
But a long road of hurdles lies ahead.
Estela Ponce reflects on one of the district's biggest challenges. Like hundreds of other parents, Ponce moved her three children from Inglewood schools to charter campuses.
She said her two older children were not being prepared for college; her daughter, now a senior, was getting A's at Inglewood High School but scoring below basic on state standardized tests. When asked why, she said, her daughter blamed poor teachers.
Ponce's third child was attending Centinela Elementary, a district school that surpassed the goal of 800 on state standardized tests last year. But she put him in a charter last fall after his highly regarded second-grade teacher was moved to another grade. Ponce said too many teachers at Centinela couldn't control their students and set low academic standards
"They don't provide the education my child deserves," she said.
Schools from New York's Columbia to Chicago's Roosevelt University are offering courses on the "Occupy" movement. This has inspired some derision from the right, but I think that derision is misplaced. There is much that a course on the Occupy movement might profitably cover. Here are some possible lessons....RTWT.
2) Bourgeois vs. Non-Bourgeois Revolutions: A Comparison and Contrast. The Occupy movement left its major sites—McPherson Square in D.C., Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, Dewey Square in Boston—filthy and disheveled. By contrast, the tea party protests famously left the Washington Mall and other locations cleaner than they found them, with members proudly performing cleanup duties....
4) Scapegoating and anti-Semitism in mass economic-protest movements. The Occupy movement began as an assault on "the 1%," a shadowy elite of bankers and financiers charged with running the world for their own benefit. Within a few months, the Anti-Defamation League was noting that anti-Semitic statements and sympathies seemed surprisingly widespread within the Occupy encampments. Compare with other such movements that led to similar results. Are such developments inevitable? If so, what strands in Western (and perhaps non-Western) culture account for this?
5) The Fragility of Public Health. Young and healthy upper-middle-class Americans, when huddled into encampments without modern sanitary facilities, developed a number of diseases, ranging from scabies to lice to tuberculosis, with surprising rapidity. In addition, populations of rats and other vermin exploded. What lessons can be learned about the fragility of public health, and the complacency bred by modern sanitation? Are we similarly complacent in other areas?
If you're a Republican in New York or another big city, you may be anxious or even terrified at the prospect that Rick Santorum, the supposedly unelectable social conservative, may win the GOP presidential nomination. Jeffrey Bell would like to set your mind at ease.Continue reading.
Social conservatism, Mr. Bell argues in his forthcoming book, "The Case for Polarized Politics," has a winning track record for the GOP. "Social issues were nonexistent in the period 1932 to 1964," he observes. "The Republican Party won two presidential elections out of nine, and they had the Congress for all of four years in that entire period. . . . When social issues came into the mix—I would date it from the 1968 election . . . the Republican Party won seven out of 11 presidential elections."
The Democrats who won, including even Barack Obama in 2008, did not play up social liberalism in their campaigns. In 1992 Bill Clinton was a death-penalty advocate who promised to "end welfare as we know it" and make abortion "safe, legal and rare." Social issues have come to the fore on the GOP side in two of the past six presidential elections—in 1988 (prison furloughs, the Pledge of Allegiance, the ACLU) and 2004 (same-sex marriage). "Those are the only two elections since Reagan where the Republican Party has won a popular majority," Mr. Bell says. "It isn't coincidental"....
In Mr. Bell's telling, social conservatism is both relatively new and uniquely American, and it is a response to aggression, not an initiation of it. The left has had "its center of gravity in social issues" since the French Revolution, he says. "Yes, the left at that time, with people like Robespierre, was interested in overthrowing the monarchy and the French aristocracy. But they were even more vehemently in favor of bringing down institutions like the family and organized religion. In that regard, the left has never changed. . . . I think we've had a good illustration of it in the last month or so."
He means the ObamaCare mandate that religious institutions must provide employee insurance for contraceptive services, including abortifacient drugs and sterilization procedures, even if doing so would violate their moral teachings. "You would think that once the economy started looking a little better, Obama would want to take a bow . . . but instead all of a sudden you have this contraception flap. From what I can find out about it, it wasn't a miscalculation. They knew that the Catholic Church and other believers were going to push back against this thing. . . . They were determined to push it through, because it's their irreplaceable ideological core. . . . The left keeps putting these issues into the mix, and they do it very deliberately, and I think they do it as a matter of principle."
Michael Klarman wants everyone to think there's widespread support for gay marriage. Then why have voters rejected it in every state where it has been on the ballot, including recently in Maine and twice in California?Exactly.
"In the few states in which it is allowed, it was the result of backroom maneuvering — such as in Massachusetts, where the legislature won't allow its residents to vote on the issue, or California, where judicial fiat has now overturned two elections.
"Because the public won't cooperate, Klarman cites polls that suit his opinion that gay marriage is inevitable. This reflects a mind-set that shows contempt for the democratic process.
If you insist that Rick Santorum is un-electable at this point, but call yourself a Republican - which I don't btw - then you are wasting your time in the wrong party and may as well go Independent. I did when I left the Democrats and haven't joined another one since. But given these numbers, there is no valid argument in suggesting Santorum would not be an acceptable nominee for the GOP, any more than one can say that about Romney at this point.RTWT.
But if you are a conservative looking at these numbers and saying Santorum can't win, then you may as well give it up, or stop calling yourself a conservative, because you don't believe enough in what you profess to believe in to even fight for it when called. You assume conservatism is a loser out of the gate. Frankly, I don't believe that, which is why I became one in my twenties. I believe it not only can win in America but must for America to remain strong. And I am always willing to fight to put that assumption to the test.
Is any place less safe than a safe house? In the entire lexicon of movie locations, is any setting more likely to be visited by chaos and destruction on a biblical scale? Not very likely.And see Kurt Loder's review at Reason.
So it's no surprise that the Denzel Washington-starring "Safe House" is a take-no-prisoners action extravaganza that doesn't stint on either bullets or brutal hand-to-hand combat. It also shows how much can be done with a business-as-usual CIA-thriller script when it's bolstered by effective acting and expert direction.
That directing is courtesy of Swedish filmmaker and top-drawer mayhem manipulator Daniel Espinosa, who's been one of the hottest new names in Hollywood since his last film, 2010's "Snabba Cash" ("Easy Money"), unofficially made the high-echelon studio rounds though it has yet to show itself on American theatrical screens. Even without "Snabba" as a reference point (it's been acquired by the Weinstein Co. with no firm release date set), it's easy to see what action junkie executives saw in Espinosa.
Working with the top-flight team of cinematographer Oliver Wood and editor Richard Pearson, both of whom have "Bourne Supremacy" credits, Espinosa has given "Safe House" an unmistakably stylish and unsettling tone, characterized by probing camera work, quick and edgy cutting and a fine ability to keep audiences off-balance and wondering when they'll get a chance to catch their next breath.
"Safe House" is grateful for all this pizazz because its David Guggenheim script is filled with standard-issue elements all pointing to the not exactly original notion that the intelligence community is a hotbed of corruption whose operatives eat betrayal for breakfast. Who knew?
Reporting from Washington — An immigrant from Morocco armed with a jammed automatic weapon and wearing a suicide vest packed with what he thought were explosives was arrested Friday near the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, officials announced.And see Pamela as well, "Devout Muslim Homicide Bomber Targeted US Capitol Building, Synagogues, and Military Installations in the Cause of Islam."
Amine El Khalifi, 29, who allegedly had overstayed his visa after arriving in the U.S. when he was 16, was charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction against government property. FBI agents had been closely monitoring him for more than a year in an undercover sting operation.
An affidavit described El Khalifi strutting around a hotel room with the gun and vest, watching himself in the mirror as he practiced how to pull the trigger and detonate the vest bomb by calling a cellphone number.
He also allegedly discussed hitting military targets near the Pentagon and a restaurant during the crowded lunch hour in Washington. But eventually he settled on the Capitol, authorities said, planning to shoot his way inside and detonating the bomb. He reportedly told undercover FBI agents he “would be happy killing 30 people.”
He appeared briefly in federal court in nearby Alexandria, Va., where most of the investigation was handled, but did not enter a plea. He faces life in prison sentence if convicted.
A foundation created to help needy students at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College paid its director tens of thousands of dollars in bonuses, membership fees at exclusive private clubs and a $1,500 monthly car allowance, according to interviews and records reviewed by The Times.Yeah, that's amazing alright. And there's still more at the link.
The Trade-Tech Foundation paid a $5,000 initiation fee at the California Club in downtown Los Angeles for Executive Director Rhea Chung.
It also paid for other membership fees for her, including the L.A. Philharmonic at $2,300 a year and the Central City Assn. at $8,000 annually. The foundation covered more than $9,000 for Chung's golf outings in the last two years. Records show she played on Christmas and the Fourth of July.
Problems at the foundation sparked two internal audits as well as an inquiry by the L.A. County district attorney's Public Integrity Division, which is looking into whether any funds at the foundation were misappropriated.
The college district placed Chung on administrative leave Jan. 17, and officials said they were also looking into allegations that foundation checks were forged. Officials did not identify the target of that probe.
Records show Chung's pay and expenses dwarfed the amount the foundation gave out in scholarships to students, which was $43,350 in the 2011 fiscal year and $105,400 in the first half of the current year. Chung is one of a handful of employees paid by the foundation, which last year reported $610,481 in income, primarily from events and donations.
Faculty and students are questioning why more of the money raised by the foundation was not going to help the 17,000 students at the school, at a time when community colleges are dealing with higher fees and budget cuts. The downtown L.A. campus, which trains people in skills like welding and fashion design, serves the poorest population of any college in the L.A. Community College system and one of the poorest in the nation.
In an interview at the California Club, Chung denied any wrongdoing and said all her expenses and bonuses were approved by the foundation board and college president.
She defended her golf outings and club memberships, saying they helped her meet business leaders who might make donations to the foundation. Chung maintained that Trade Tech President Roland "Chip" Chapdelaine had been informed at "every step of the way" and had signed her checks.
Chung, who holds a doctorate in education from USC, had been Chapdelaine's executive assistant before she was appointed head of the foundation and acting associate dean of advancement, community and government affairs at the college in 2009.
"I'm an individual who's been working hard at these projects that [Chapdelaine] asked me to do. We made a mark as an organization," she said. "…It's too bad that he doesn't see the value of the work that's been done."
How does an underfunded candidate defend himself against a big onslaught of negative attack ads? Newt Gingrich tried leveraging the media attention received from going nasty and personal in response and ended up flaming out in Florida and a string of caucuses in the last three weeks. Rick Santorum has decided to use humor to just attack the attack in a new ad running called “Rombo”.Lots more at the link.
Late last month, Gallup published a summary of President Obama’s job approval ratings for 2011. The pollster’s findings were stunning: Eighty percent of Democrats approved of the president’s performance through 2011, as did just 12 percent of Repub-licans. The difference between these two numbers—Gallup calls it the “party gap”—was a whopping 68 points.Interesting.
This is not a novel development. Of the 10 largest party gaps in the poll’s storied history, 8 have occurred during the Obama and George W. Bush presidencies. Indeed, we have seen a very strong party gap in recent presidential elections as well. Obama won 89 percent of Democrats and 9 percent of Republicans in 2008, for a party gap of 80 points; the party gap for Bush in 2004 was 82 points. This is a stark shift from relatively recent political history. Richard Nixon’s party gap in 1972 was 54 points; Jimmy Carter’s in 1976 was 69 points; Ronald Reagan’s in 1984 was 67 points; and even Bill Clinton’s in 1996 was 71 points.
How do we account for this increasing polarization? Much of it has deep roots. From roughly the time of the Civil War to the Great Depression, the two parties were strictly regional coalitions built not on grand ideological divisions but on old antipathies from the battlefield. The Democrats usually won the South and the big Northern cities, while the Republicans typically won most everything else. This meant that both parties had liberals and conservatives in their ranks. Consider, for instance, the tumultuous decade of the 1910s. The Democrats had in their coalition conservative Tammany Hall and the borderline radical William Jennings Bryan; the Republicans had Nelson Aldrich, the machine boss of Rhode Island, and Robert La Follette, the premier progressive of Wisconsin.
This all began to change in the 1930s, when FDR worked to rebuild the Democratic party as a progressive coalition. Roosevelt destroyed Tammany Hall in favor of Fiorello LaGuardia, a nominal Republican and strong progressive.
Rick Santorum is surging in national polling. As Ed Morrissey notes, in a two-man race, Santorum beats Mitt Romney among Republicans by a sweeping 55% to 34% margin. In other words, ouch.More at the link.
But while many pundits suggest that Santorum has a real chance to win the nomination, so long as Newt Gingrich stays in the race, that seems increasingly unlikely. Romney currently leads the delegate count by a count of 123 to 72; Newt Gingrich has 32 delegates, and Ron Paul has 19. Santorum isn’t on the ballot in Virginia (49), or more crucially, in Indiana (46), which is a winner-take-all state. The other winner-take-all states are Arizona (29, and presumably a Romney win), Michigan (30, for Santorum), Puerto Rico (23, likely to go Romney), Maryland (37, likely Romney), Washington, D.C. (19, Romney), Wisconsin (42, a toss-up, but probably Romney), Delaware (17, Romney), California (172, a toss-up, but likely Santorum), Utah (40, Romney). When you count all that up, Romney picks up 302 delegates to Santorum’s 202. If Romney wins California, of course, he blows Santorum out of the water.
What we’re looking at, then is a presumptive lead for Romney of 151 delegates. In the other, proportional states, Romney just needs to run relatively even with Santorum – which he will, since he has large leads in some of the most populous states, like New York and Massachusetts.
Nicolas Sarkozy promised to keep France “strong” like a “captain at the heart of a storm” if it re-elected him as President, as he finally launched his campaign after weeks of false suspense over his candidacy.
For what’s its worth that’s what CNN is reporting. Allahpundit over at Hot Air is already throwing in the towel. Boy, we really have a bunch of freaking wimps on our side.
BANGKOK — An apparently botched bomb plot in the Thai capital put Iranian fingerprints on the latest of a string of attacks that have raised U.S. and Israeli warnings of a heightened threat of terrorism sponsored by Tehran.Continue reading.
Three explosions tore through a bustling Bangkok neighborhood Tuesday, wounding four bystanders and blowing off the legs of a bomber who Thai police said was an Iranian national. A second Iranian passport holder who fled the scene was detained at the city's international airport, Thai police said.
The blasts follow alleged plots in India and Georgia on Monday, and in Azerbaijan and Thailand last month, which Israel has blamed on Iran or its Lebanese militant ally, Hezbollah. Iran denied involvement in Monday's incidents and didn't comment on the Bangkok blasts.
The State Department on Tuesday moved closer than it has this year to pointing the finger at Iran. The attacks "serve as a reminder that a variety of states and nonstate actors continue to view international terrorism as a legitimate foreign policy tool, which we consider reprehensible," said State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland.
The accusations come as Iran faces growing international pressure. On Tuesday, senior European and American officials said the European Union was moving as early as this month to ban blacklisted Iranian entities from using a clearing system for international financial transactions, a move that would drastically cut Tehran's ability to access the global financial system.
Women, if you’re at a conference where you’re learning to be a future politician or wish to succeed in the business of politics, dress the part. No, you don’t have to be in a business suit with pearls. However, modesty is a minimum. So:I don't know, but I suspect that young people raised well by their parents already know this. My son for example is a young gentlemen who respects his girlfriends and hangs with a good crowd. But in four or five years, if he's out at a CPAC-like conference, I'm not going to blame him if he's looking for a good time --- and if that means notching a bedpost, well, you only live once. Frankly, young people are looking for action, and I'd be surprised if this notion of no hitting on hotties at CPAC finds a huge audience with the hip crowd. Indeed, I think I'm with Dan Riehl on the more on the libertarian side of things. Either way, have fun, be responsible and dress nice --- and most of all, keep a perspective on things. Sure the goal is marriage and family, but one doesn't have to detour to the monastery beforehand.
1. No cleavage. That’s right. Cover that up. I say “no” in absolutist terms because women will show a tiny bit and that’s okay, but really, in a business environment where ideas are the priority, a dude thinking about your ta-tas is counter-productive.
2. Skirts no more than three finger-widths above the knee. Why do I even have to write this? Well, because someone is allowing these girls out of the house with mini-skirts that reveal too much.
3. Save the stilettos for Saturday night on a date with your boyfriend.
4. Bend at the knee. No, I don’t want to see your butt.
Young women, you degrade your own value by dressing and then acting the ho.
I cannot even tell you how many girls have told me that all they want is to get married and have babies. They do not seem to make the connection that a young man is not interested in getting married and making babies with a girl who is so easy as to have a one-night stand over a CPAC weekend (or any other weekend.)
You know what a guy thinks when you slut-it-up? He thinks: If she’ll do that with me, she’ll do that with anyone.
This is not politically correct advice, mind you. Young ladies at college are encouraged to embrace their sexuality and flaunt it on the one hand (empowerment!) or to be tough, gruff and make-up free (man’s world!) to be taken seriously.
A successful woman can be tough and beautiful, modest and stylish, smart and sexy while still being chaste and having expectations of men.
The conservative movement means conservative values–promoting behavior that will lead to a sound society. Family is at the basis of this. Sexuality, and the self-management of it, is at the core of family.
A man who will use self-restraint, respect a woman, honor her enough to not pressure for sex–is a man who will more likely be faithful in marriage, work and life.
Likewise, a woman who sees herself as more than a sex-object and realizes she doesn’t need to be a man in order to be worthy, who carries herself with confidence and modesty, will attract men who want to get married and make babies.
Husbands and wives take note: If Valentine's Day expectations aren't met, your mate might soon be looking elsewhere for a little romance and appreciation.Continue reading.
That may sound like a cautionary tale, but for Noel Biderman and others who have founded dating websites for married people, it's a lucrative business.
"The day after Valentine's Day is one of our biggest days of the year," says Biderman, founder and CEO of Ashley Madison, a 10-year-old site that unapologetically caters to "discreet" encounters for the married or otherwise attached. "People are disappointed by their spouses' lack of effort, and they feel especially undervalued when there is a societal expectation of romance. Certain days of the year act as litmus tests for many people in relationships."
Websites designed to facilitate cheating appear to be thriving; some earn tens of millions of dollars a year, and competition is growing. In addition to Toronto-based Ashley Madison, there's a growing crop of copycats that equate affairs with romance, passion and adventure.
Whether these sites promote cheating or just facilitate it is up for debate.
"People are going to cheat regardless of whether Ashley Madison is there or not," says sociologist Diane Kholos Wysocki of the University of Nebraska-Kearney, who has surveyed the site's members for her latest research. "There's a bigger social issue going on — people aren't taking care of their marriages.
"It's not so much that they're going to these cheating websites because the sex is greater or the person is more beautiful. It's because the person is giving them attention they're not getting at home."
There was a time, not long ago, when the surest path to modeling stardom was down the runway of a top designer’s show, when it would have been unthinkable to find among the industry’s top ranks a swimsuit girl whose main claims to fame were ad campaigns for Guess jeans and Beach Bunny Swimwear.And leftists generally, who have attacked this blog ferociously not the least because of all the Rule 5.
But that was before social media altered the paths to fame.
Unlike the many little-known beauties now on view at New York Fashion Week — women seldom identified by more than one name (Agata, Hanaa, Frida, Joan) — Kate Upton, just 19 and resembling a 1950s pinup, but with the legs of a W.N.B.A. point guard, has arrived on the scene as a largely self-created Internet phenomenon.
It is not just that she has a respectable Twitter following (170,000 people at last count), or a YouTube video with over 3 million viewers, or marketing potential perhaps best measured by her rocketing from obscurity to No. 2 on a list of the world’s 99 “top” women compiled by AskMen.com, an online magazine with 15 million readers. (Sofia Vergara, of the ABC sitcom “Modern Family,” is No. 1.)
Less than a year after Ms. Upton, curvaceous and rambunctious, posted a video of herself at a Los Angeles Clippers game doing the Dougie, a dance popularized in a hip-hop tune by Cali Swag District, she finds herself in one of the most coveted positions in the modeling business.
Joining an elite club of modeling powerhouses — brand names like Cheryl Tiegs, Tyra Banks and Heidi Klum — Ms. Upton was announced Monday night on David Letterman’s show as the latest cover girl for Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue, the circulation and advertising behemoth that has long been equally the dream book of adolescent males and the bane of feminists.
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama called on Congress Monday to enact new taxes on the wealthy, restructure the tax code and approve short-term spending measures as part of an election-year budget plan aimed at boosting job growth and helping the middle class.Continue reading.
Mr. Obama's $3.8 trillion budget for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1 was quickly dismissed by congressional Republicans and GOP presidential candidates as a political document that fails to seriously tackle the nation's growing debt.
The proposal "isn't really a budget at all; it's a campaign document," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said. "Once again, the president is shirking his responsibility to lead and using this budget to divide."
The budget underscores the White House's bet that it can convince voters in November that increased spending in the short term is needed to jolt the economy before steps are taken to shrink the federal deficit in the long term. "At a time when our economy is growing and creating jobs at a faster clip, we've got to do everything in our power to keep this recovery on track," Mr. Obama said at a community college in northern Virginia.
The budget projects the deficit will exceed $1 trillion in 2012 for the fourth straight year, meaning Mr. Obama won't meet his promise to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term.
Mr. Obama proposed generating $1.7 trillion in new revenue over 10 years largely by ending Bush-era tax cuts for families who earn more than $250,000, restoring the estate tax to its 2009 level and limiting subsidies for oil and gas companies.
He also for the first time proposed raising the tax rate households making more than $250,000 a year pay on dividends, from 15% to as much as 39.6%. The White House said the measure would generate $206 billion in revenue over 10 years.
Here’s pretty much all you need to know about Obamanomics: In 2011, the Obama White House suggested raising the top dividend tax rate to 20 percent from 15 percent. Keeping the dividend rate at a relatively low level, the White House said, “reduces the tax bias against equity investment and promotes a more efficient allocation of capital.” Makes sense, right? Basic economics.Continue reading.
Yet in his brand-new, 2013 budget, Obama calls for taxing dividends as ordinary income, essentially raising the top rate all the way to 39.6 percent. And then when you tack on the 3.8 percentage point Obamacare surtax — and an additional 1.2 percentage point itemized deduction phase-out for high-end taxpayers — the rate rises to 44.6 percent.
So apparently Obama is now in favor of a greater bias against equity investment (and in favor of debt) and promoting less efficient allocation of capital. And this helps create an economy “built to last” in some way?
Of course, it doesn’t. Not at all. More like “built to fail.” Then again, Obama’s new budget isn’t about economic growth or cutting debt or creating a “built to last” economy. The Obama campaign is built around the idea of reducing inequality. So in his budget, Obama takes the populist whip to the wealthy and to business ...
Rick Santorum’s support among Tea Party Republicans and white evangelicals is surging, and he now has pulled into a virtual tie with Mitt Romney in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. In polling conducted Feb. 8-12, 30% of Republican and Republican-leaning registered voters favor Santorum while 28% favor Romney. As recently as a month ago, Romney held a 31% to 14% advantage over Santorum among all GOP voters.More at the link.
Santorum is now the clear favorite of Republican and GOP-leaning voters who agree with the Tea Party, as well as white evangelical Republicans. Currently, 42% of Tea Party Republican voters favor Santorum, compared with just 23% who back Romney. Santorum holds an almost identical advantage among white evangelical Republican voters (41% to 23%).
Anti-Semitism’s newfound respectability is not unprecedented. Indeed, the fact that anti-Semites have been given power over the definition of anti-Semitism reflects the very origins of the term. Coined in late 19-century Germany, anti-Semitism was not intended as a descriptor for a troubling social trend—like racism, or the more recent Islamophobia—but as the positive organizing principle of an emancipatory political movement.RTWT at the link.
While the Jews and their allies regard anti-Semites as propelled by hatred, anti-Semites regard themselves as a fraternity bound by a message of universalist love. “This book is above all a book for friends, a book that is written for those who love us,” wrote Edouard Drumont, one of the founders of France’s Ligue Antisemitique, and an especially shrill voice behind the false allegations of treason against Alfred Dreyfus, in his Le Testament d’un Antisemite. Atzmon expresses himself with similar pretensions: “When you talk about humanity, you talk about a universal system of values promoting love for one another.” Rather than being anti-moral, the moral sensibility of anti-Semitism resides in its presentation of the Jews (or “Jewishness” or “Judaism”) as the barrier to a society founded upon love. What seems at first glance to be a material battle is really a spiritual one.
With this understanding, we can better appreciate a rare modification in the nature of anti-Semitism in our own time. I say rare, because, as a framework for interpreting the world, anti-Semitism resists innovation. Charles Maurras, another French anti-Semite, took great delight in hawking a worldview that “enables everything to be arranged, smoothed over, and simplified.”
The modification rests upon a distinction between what I call bierkeller and bistro anti-Semitism. Bierkeller anti-Semitism—named for the beer halls frequented by the German Nazis—employs such means as violence, verbal abuse, commercial harassment, and advocacy of anti-Jewish legal measures. Certainly, the first and second generations of modern anti-Semitic publicists and intellectuals had no qualms about this sort of thuggery. Since the Second World War, though, this mode of anti-Semitism has waned sharply, along with the tendency to use the word anti-Semite as a positive means of political identification.
Bistro anti-Semitism, on the other hand, sits in a higher and outwardly more civilized realm, providing what left-wing activists would call a “safe space” to critically assess the global impact of Jewish cabals from Washington, D.C., to Jerusalem. Anyone who enters the bistro will encounter common themes. These include the depiction of Palestinians as the victims of a second Holocaust, the breaking of the silence supposedly imposed upon honest discussions of Jewish political and economic power, and the contention—offered by, among others, Mearsheimer’s co-author, Stephen Walt, of Harvard—that American Jewish government officials are more suspect than others because of a potential second loyalty to Israel.
To this list we can now add the assault upon what Atzmon calls the “Holocaust narrative.” This type of revisionism doesn’t deny that the Nazis killed Jews, but it redistributes a good deal of the blame among the victims. Additionally, it disputes the conclusion of mainstream Holocaust historians that total elimination was the goal of the Third Reich’s Jewish policy.
The ragtag Occupy Wall Street encampments that sprang up in scores of cities last fall, thrusting “We are the 99 percent” into the vernacular, have largely been dismantled, with a new wave of crackdowns and evictions in the past week. Since the violent clashes last month in Oakland, Calif., headlines about Occupy have dwindled, too.Well, there you go: "replace the type of government we have now."
Far from dissipating, groups around the country say they are preparing for a new phase of larger marches and strikes this spring that they hope will rebuild momentum and cast an even brighter glare on inequality and corporate greed. But this transition is filled with potential pitfalls and uncertainties: without the visible camps or clear goals, can Occupy become a lasting force for change? Will disruptive protests do more to galvanize or alienate the public?
Though still loosely organized, the movement is putting down roots in many cities. Activists in Chicago and Des Moines have rented offices, a significant change for groups accustomed to holding open-air assemblies or huddling in tents in bad weather.
On any night in New York City, which remains a hub of the movement, a dozen working groups on issues like “food justice” and “arts and culture” meet in a Wall Street atrium, and “general assemblies” have formed in 14 neighborhoods. Around the country, small demonstrations — often focused on banks and ending foreclosure evictions — take place almost daily.
If the movement has not produced public leaders, some visible faces have emerged.
“I’m finally going to make it to the dentist next week,” said Dorli Rainey, a Seattle activist. “I’ve had to cancel so many times. It’s overwhelming.”
Ms. Rainey, who is 85 and was pepper-sprayed by the police in November, has been fully booked for months. On a recent Thursday, she joined 10 people in Olympia, Wash., who were supporting a State Senate resolution to remove American soldiers from Afghanistan. She led a rally near Pike Place Market against steam incinerators, which the protesters complain release pollution in the downtown area. In March, she plans to join Occupy leaders in Washington for events that are still being planned.
“People have different goals,” Ms. Rainey said. “Mine is, we’ve got to build a movement that will replace the type of government we have now.”
The way things are going in the GOP presidential primary, there's now an outside chance that California's 169 delegate votes — the most of any state in the nation — could come into play.More at that top link. That's interesting that folks are switching to Democrat affiliation at this late date. It's not your mother's party, as Andrew Breitbart remarked at CPAC, not by a long shot.
Who knew?
It seemed, way back when, that Mitt Romney was a safe bet to make it to the dance with President Obama in November. Then Newt Gingrich came on like the bull terrier he is, followed by a surprising surge from Rick Santorum. If the seesaw ride continues, it could even make California's June 5 primary relevant for once.
So whom do California conservatives like?
My poll may have a wide margin of error, scientifically speaking, but I did zigzag my way through the heavily Republican Central Valley one day last week, asking that very question.
"Gingrich," said Joe Rebella, owner of Fresno's Whirlwind Car Wash, where the sign says "you'll see a whirl of difference."
Romney comes off as "wishy-washy," said the carwash man, who isn't exactly "conservative" with a capital C. He said he's voted for Democrats and Republicans, but business at the Whirlwind has been worse than ever since Obama took office. About a year ago, Rebella lost a big prize when Fresno City Hall stopped having him wash its fleet of cars because of budget troubles.
OK, but given the GOP gospel of ever-smaller government, does Rebella really think he'd get the city fleet back under a President Gingrich?
In the tiny farm town of Pixley, south of Tulare, I strolled into the True Romance Tattoo parlor, because how could I not?
"I'm a convicted felon," said the owner, Josh Richardson, explaining why he won't be voting in June or November. But if he could, he'd definitely vote Republican, on gun-rights issues alone.
OK, swell.
His grandpa, James Crawford, said he had switched party affiliation from D to R that very morning because Obama is nothing but "promises, promises, promises." Crawford plans to vote for Romney in the primary because Gingrich is nothing but a politician and lobbyist.
OK, but with so many people suffering through a rough economy, does it bother Crawford that the fabulously rich Romney said he didn't care about poor people, or that he paid 13.9% in taxes on dividends while lots of working folks paid twice as much?
"No," said Crawford. "That's the way it's set up."
A specter is haunting America — the specter of violence that challenges the notion of civil discourse and threatens our democracy. Embodied by the Occupy Wall Street rabble and its imitators, and shamefully abetted by far too many Democratic elected officials, what once masqueraded as “dissent” is now unmasked as partisan thuggery.I like how Walsh is riffing on the Communist Manifesto, which begins, "A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism."
Announcing his support for Commissar Sebelius’s edicts on contraception, sterilization, and pharmacological abortion, that noted theologian the Most Reverend Al Sharpton explained: “If we are going to have a separation of church and state, we’re going to have a separation of church and state.”Continue reading.
Thanks for clarifying that. The church model the young American state wished to separate from was that of the British monarch, who remains to this day supreme governor of the Church of England. This convenient arrangement dates from the 1534 Act of Supremacy. The title of the law gives you the general upshot, but, just in case you’re a bit slow on the uptake, the text proclaims “the King’s Majesty justly and rightfully is and ought to be the supreme head of the Church of England.” That’s to say, the sovereign is “the only supreme head on earth of the Church” and he shall enjoy “all honors, dignities, pre-eminences, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, immunities, profits, and commodities to the said dignity,” not to mention His Majesty “shall have full power and authority from time to time to visit, repress, redress, record, order, correct, restrain, and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, offenses, contempts, and enormities, whatsoever they be.”
Welcome to Obamacare.
The president of the United States has decided to go Henry VIII on the Church’s medieval ass. Whatever religious institutions might profess to believe in the matter of “women’s health,” their pre-eminences, jurisdictions, privileges, authorities, and immunities are now subordinate to a one-and-only supreme head on earth determined to repress, redress, restrain, and amend their heresies. One wouldn’t wish to overextend the analogy: For one thing, the Catholic Church in America has been pathetically accommodating of Beltway bigwigs’ ravenous appetite for marital annulments in a way that Pope Clement VII was disinclined to be vis-Ã -vis the English king and Catherine of Aragon. But where’d all the pandering get them? In essence President Obama has embarked on the same usurpation of church authority as Henry VIII: As his Friday morning faux-compromise confirms, the continued existence of a “faith-based institution” depends on submission to the doctrinal supremacy of the state.
