See New York Times, "Fury in Israel at Remark Linking Gaza to Toulouse."
And see Israel Matzav, "Ashton claims her remarks were 'grossly distorted'." Not.
Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education - from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
GETTYSBURG, Pa. — It may seem an odd choice, holding a rally here in Pennsylvania to “celebrate” the results of the Republican presidential primary in Illinois.
Rick Santorum’s staff said that he came here Tuesday night for a symbolic connection to the Land of Lincoln, as Gettysburg is “the very place President Lincoln gave his most poignant and passionate defense of freedom and the American spirit.”
But Mr. Santorum also came here to plant the flag. The Pennsylvania primary is not until April 24, but it is essential that Mr. Santorum, who represented the state for 16 years in Washington, win here if he is to have any hope of moving forward, particularly after his loss Tuesday night in the Illinois primary.
Despite the loss, Mr. Santorum sounded defiant Tuesday night while speaking to supporters in Gettysburg, saying he would press on.
“We have five weeks to a big win,” he said of the Pennsylvania primary, and he returned again to the theme of his parents and grandparents who worked in the mines, “men and women who worked and scraped and clawed so their children could have a better quality of life.”
While early polling in Pennsylvania shows him leading Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul in the popular vote, he has cause for concern in the more important contest for the state’s 72 delegates.
They can vote for anyone at the party’s nominating convention in August in Tampa, Fla. Some are in fact uncommitted, but many have connections to the state party and the establishment, which leans toward Mr. Romney.
By coming here Tuesday, Mr. Santorum could focus on trying to trying to persuade some of those uncommitted delegates to commit to his side.
“This will give him a chance to sit down around the table and say, ‘Let’s go through the list of who we’ve got lined up and who we have to go back to and revisit and work on,’ “ said one person close to the Santorum campaign who spoke on the condition that he not be identified. “There will be assignments from tonight, ‘Go back to visit with people, talk to your guys,’ and Rick will be reaching out to folks.”
A new poll of likely Republican voters in Louisiana shows former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum is poised to win a plurality in Saturday's primary election while Pelican State voters struggle to accept national frontrunner Mitt Romney's candidacy.And here's that WWL-TV poll, "Santorum leads GOP candidates in La., exclusive WWL-TV poll shows."
The poll, conducted by Magellan Strategies BR, found that Santorum leads in Louisiana with 37 percent of the vote. Romney trails in second with 24 percent.
Santorum's 13 percent lead reflects his strengthening foothold in Louisiana. According to a March 8 to 10 poll by WWL-TV, Santorum lead the candidates with 25.4 percent of the vote, topping Romney's 21 percent by a much slimmer margin earlier in the month.
Furthermore, the Magellan Strategies BR poll found that Santorum leads not only among both male and female likely Republican primary voters in Louisiana but also leads among all age groups and in all six congressional districts.
Also at London's Daily Mail, "Two French police hit in shoot-out as armed officers hunting Toulouse serial killer storm house." And New York Times, "French Police Execute Raid on Toulouse Jewish School Shooting Suspects."A French police special forces unit hunting an anti-Semitic serial killer launched a pre-dawn raid on Wednesday on a house where a man claiming Al-Qaeda ties was holed up, police sources said.
The suspect is thought to be a 24-year-old man who had previously travelled to the lawless border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan which is known to house al-Qaeda safehouses, one of the officials told AFP.
Two police were slightly wounded as the operation got underway, led by officers investigating three attacks by a lone gunman in which three off-duty soldiers, three Jewish school children and a rabbi were killed, he said.
A source close to the inquiry told AFP a 24-year-old suspect had exchanged words with the RAID team and had declared himself to be a member of Al-Qaeda, the armed Islamist group founded by late Saudi extremist Osama bin Laden.
"He was in the DCRI's sights, as were others, after the first two attacks," an official said, referring to France's domestic intelligence service, adding: "Then the criminal investigation police brought in crucial evidence."
French Interior Minister Claude Gueant had arrived at the operation site, in the Croix-Daurade district of the southwestern city of Toulouse, scene of two of the shooting incidents over the previous nine days, he said.
Illinois Republicans delivered a decisive victory to Mitt Romney in the state's presidential primary Tuesday, crushing Rick Santorum in what amounted to the first big-state head-to-head contest among the front-runners for the GOP nomination.Continue reading.
With 98 percent of the state's precincts reporting, unofficial results showed the former Massachusetts governor with 47 percent of the vote to Santorum's 35 percent. The other two candidates in the race, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul, made only token campaign efforts in Illinois and were trailing badly.
Even more important for Romney, he swamped Santorum by winning 39 of the 54 elected delegates up for grabs in the state. Santorum had only five, though votes were still being counted in several Downstate congressional districts where he ran strongest.
"What a night. Thank you, Illinois. What a night. Wow!," Romney said to supporters at his victory party at a Schaumburg hotel shortly after 8 p.m. "Tonight we thank the people of Illinois for their vote and for this extraordinary victory."
Savoring a victory in President Barack Obama's home state, Romney framed the general election as a "defining decision" for the American people. "This election will be about principle. Our economic freedom will be on the ballot. ... It's time to say this word: enough."
In 2010, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel called the settlement of Ariel, which stretches deep into the West Bank, “the heart of our country.” Through its pro-settler policies, Israel is forging one political entity between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — an entity of dubious democratic legitimacy, given that millions of West Bank Palestinians are barred from citizenship and the right to vote in the state that controls their lives.I think the phrase "useful idiot" was invented for people like Beinart.
In response, many Palestinians and their supporters have initiated a global campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (B.D.S.), which calls not only for boycotting all Israeli products and ending the occupation of the West Bank but also demands the right of millions of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes — an agenda that, if fulfilled, could dismantle Israel as a Jewish state.
The Israeli government and the B.D.S. movement are promoting radically different one-state visions, but together, they are sweeping the two-state solution into history’s dustbin.
It’s time for a counteroffensive — a campaign to fortify the boundary that keeps alive the hope of a Jewish democratic state alongside a Palestinian one. And that counteroffensive must begin with language.
Jewish hawks often refer to the territory beyond the green line by the biblical names Judea and Samaria, thereby suggesting that it was, and always will be, Jewish land. Almost everyone else, including this paper, calls it the West Bank.
But both names mislead. “Judea and Samaria” implies that the most important thing about the land is its biblical lineage; “West Bank” implies that the most important thing about the land is its relationship to the Kingdom of Jordan next door. After all, it was only after Jordan conquered the territory in 1948 that it coined the term “West Bank” to distinguish it from the rest of the kingdom, which falls on the Jordan River’s east bank. Since Jordan no longer controls the land, “West Bank” is an anachronism. It says nothing meaningful about the territory today.
Instead, we should call the West Bank “nondemocratic Israel.” The phrase suggests that there are today two Israels: a flawed but genuine democracy within the green line and an ethnically-based nondemocracy beyond it. It counters efforts by Israel’s leaders to use the legitimacy of democratic Israel to legitimize the occupation and by Israel’s adversaries to use the illegitimacy of the occupation to delegitimize democratic Israel.
Having made that rhetorical distinction, American Jews should seek every opportunity to reinforce it. We should lobby to exclude settler-produced goods from America’s free-trade deal with Israel. We should push to end Internal Revenue Service policies that allow Americans to make tax-deductible gifts to settler charities. Every time an American newspaper calls Israel a democracy, we should urge it to include the caveat: only within the green line.
But a settlement boycott is not enough. It must be paired with an equally vigorous embrace of democratic Israel. We should spend money we’re not spending on settler goods on those produced within the green line. We should oppose efforts to divest from all Israeli companies with the same intensity with which we support efforts to divest from companies in the settlements: call it Zionist B.D.S.
Supporters of the current B.D.S. movement will argue that the distinction between democratic and nondemocratic Israel is artificial. After all, many companies profit from the occupation without being based on occupied land. Why shouldn’t we boycott them, too? The answer is that boycotting anything inside the green line invites ambiguity about the boycott’s ultimate goal — whether it seeks to end Israel’s occupation or Israel’s existence.
For their part, American Jewish organizations might argue that it is unfair to punish Israeli settlements when there are worse human rights offenses in the world and when Palestinians still commit gruesome terrorist acts. But settlements need not constitute the world’s worst human rights abuse in order to be worth boycotting. After all, numerous American cities and organizations boycotted Arizona after it passed a draconian immigration law in 2010.
The relevant question is not “Are there worse offenders?” but rather, “Is there systematic oppression that a boycott might help relieve?” That Israel systematically oppresses West Bank Palestinians has been acknowledged even by the former Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, who have warned that Israel’s continued rule there could eventually lead to a South African-style apartheid system.
Boycotts could help to change that. Already, prominent Israeli writers like David Grossman, Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua have refused to visit the settlement of Ariel. We should support their efforts because persuading companies and people to begin leaving nondemocratic Israel, instead of continuing to flock there, is crucial to keeping the possibility of a two-state solution alive.
A couple of months ago, it looked as if the California State University trustees' remedial lessons in public relations were paying off. Now, it's obvious they still don't get it.More at the link.
Responding to the outcry over the San Diego State president's huge raise, the public university system's board of trustees approved a policy in January that limits executives' base pay to 10 percent more than their predecessors' salaries.
The move drew cheers all around. Critics in the state Legislature backed off. Students, tired of paying higher and higher fees while campus presidents got higher and higher pay, might even have begun to think university leaders were sensitive to their plight.
But now there's this.
Meeting in Long Beach this week, the CSU trustees are scheduled to consider proposals to give 10 percent salary hikes to two new campus presidents.
Mildred Garcia, appointed president of Cal State Fullerton, would receive $324,500 in base pay (10 percent more than predecessor Milton Gordon made, and also 10 percent more than she got when she ran Cal State Dominguez Hills). Garcia also would receive housing at Fullerton's official presidential residence and a $12,000-a-year car allowance.
Leroy Morishita, the new president of Cal State East Bay, would receive $303,660 (10 percent more than predecessor Mohammad Qayoumi made, and 10 percent more than his own salary as interim president). Morishita also could count on allowances of $60,000 a year for housing and $12,000 for a car.
In other words, having set that 10 percent limit on raises, the people who run CSU are determined to wring every penny out of it.
Do they realize 10 percent is a ceiling, not a requirement?
Over the past few weeks, anti-Israel activists have trumpeted their right to engage in offensive, even hateful anti-Israel speech during the so-called “Israel Apartheid Week” or “Hate Week.” Insisting on their own freedom to indulge in anti- Israel speech, college activists staged high-profile if unevenly attended events around the world, most notably at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. When pro-Israel speakers attempt to speak, however, these anti-Israel protesters often take the role of censors. On many university campuses, protesters try to shut down any event that is sympathetic to Israel. Fortunately, these efforts sometimes backfire.More at the link.
Over the years, many lectures by Israeli officials and supporters have been canceled, delayed, or obstructed in the face of rambunctious protests. Last year, Ambassador Michael Oren’s presentation at the University of California at Irvine was notoriously disrupted by a dozen protesters who were eventually prosecuted for disorderly conduct.
Lately, such incidents have multiplied in a concerted effort to shut down pro-Israel activities. The goal of such protests is not merely to disrupt, embarrass, or discomfort pro-Israeli speakers but to silence them. “Ultimately,” as an activist at the University of Michigan admitted, “our goal is to prevent [pro-Israel speakers] from even arriving on campus in the first place and we feel confident that we will be able to accomplish this....”
This strategy was displayed recently at the University of California at Davis, where a handful of protesters disrupted a February 27 presentation on “Defending the Israeli Image,” featuring a former member of the Israeli Defense Forces and a Druse woman whose father and brother had fought in the IDF. The loudest of the protesters, an Indian man, called an IDF veteran a child molester and accused him of rape. The heckler announced, “I will stand here and heckle you until you leave... my only purpose is that this event is shut down.”
The heckler repeatedly demanded that security officials arrest him, taunting the crowd: “Remove me! Remove me! ...I would love to be arrested.” Despite this plea, campus security permitted the disruption to continue for quite some time, telling retired faculty member George Rooks, “We have been instructed by our superior not to stop hecklers, and if you try to stop the hecklers, we have been instructed to close down the program.” Finally, after the disruption became prolonged, the security officials escorted the heckler out of the room.
Under pressure from the Amcha Initiative, a pro-Israel group co-founded by University of California professors Tammi Rossman- Benjamin and Leila Beckwith, the university leadership finally condemned the disruption as “reprehensible.”
“Attempting to shut down speakers is not protected speech,” wrote UC President Mark Yudofin an open letter to the UC community. “It is an action meant to deny others their right to free speech.”
After Monday’s shooting at the Ozar Hatorah school, MK Yaakov Katz (National Union) reiterated calls for French Jews to come to Israel. France’s Jews, and the Jews of Europe in general, are acutely conscious of the threats they face. Jewish schools, synagogues and other easily identifiable Jewish institutions are under tight security. The attack in Toulouse will undoubtedly add to European Jews’ feeling of vulnerability.
But while aliya is an honorable and desirable act, it is not the only answer to European Jewry’s predicament. Inflammatory campaign rhetoric in France’s presidential elections must be toned down. The delegitimization of Israel should be aggressively combated. And above all, the security of Jews in France and elsewhere in Europe should be carefully guarded.
It was shortly after 8am on a leafy street in a quiet suburb of Toulouse and children were being dropped off at the gates of the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school.
The dark motor scooter pulled up and a man described as "determined and athletic" dismounted. Without removing his helmet or saying a word, he opened fire.More at the link.
Witnesses described how the gunman aimed at whoever was in his path, first shooting Jonathan Sandler, 30, a rabbi and teacher, along with his two sons, Aryeh, six, and Gavriel, three, as they waited for a minibus to take them to their nursery. All three are dead.
Then, when his 9mm weapon jammed, the killer switched to a .45-calibre gun, entered the school gates and chased children as they fled for cover.
He shot a 17-year-old pupil, who is now fighting for his life in hospital, and then cornered eight-year old Miriam, the daughter of the school principal, Yaacov Monsonego. He put the gun to her head and shot her.
As pupils ran from the large courtyard into salmon pink school buildings, the killer turned, mounted his scooter and sped off, plunging a nation into shock at the worst anti-Semitic atrocity on French soil in decades.
MOLINE, Ill. — With the Republican nominating fight turning into a protracted slog for delegates that could potentially last all the way to the convention, Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann, made an appeal on Sunday morning to a coveted group of swing voters in an effort to win the Illinois primary: women.That wouldn't be my advice to Romney.
“I love it that women are upset, too, that women are talking about the economy, I love that,” Mrs. Romney said at a pancake breakfast here. “Women are talking about jobs, women are talking about deficit spending. Thank you, women.”
The Romney campaign is seeking to repair the political damage with women voters that advisers acknowledge has been inflicted by the Republican nominating fight.
In February, women were evenly divided between Mr. Romney and his chief rival, Rick Santorum. But in the most recent New York Times/CBS News national poll, among Republican primary voters, 41 percent of women backed Mr. Santorum and 27 percent favored Mr. Romney.
Mr. Romney is often introduced by his wife at political events, but her role has taken on greater meaning as the campaign looks ahead to independent voters, particularly women, who polls show have been put off by the candidates’ rightward shift on immigration and social issues.
“I’m glad that he’s married, and has been married to the same person for a long time and has children,” said Dawn Parker, 51, a secretary from Freeport, Ill. “As a woman, I like that. I like that he’s a family man, a father and a grandfather.”
Still, Ms. Parker said that she had not yet made up her mind for the primary on Tuesday, but that Mr. Romney was “a possibility.”
While women are hardly monolithic in their politics, the Romney campaign is urgently trying to shift the conversation back to the economy from more divisive social issues.
The former Pennsylvania senator, who is known for his strongly held social conservative beliefs, said he is the best messenger for Republicans.That theory will get its biggest test this November if Romney is nominated. Democrats will already be safe on ObamaCare with a Romney candidacy, and now the former Massachusetts Governor is surrendering on social issues. And I hate to say, it, but Romney's even conceded the economy to Obama, so what's he going to have to campaign on?
"When we nominate moderates, when we nominate Tweedledum versus Tweedledee, we don't win elections. We win elections when there are clear contrasts and bold choices and that is what we are going to do in this election," Santorum said.
"And that is why we believe that ultimately we will be the nominee," he said.
Today’s high-earning women are justly proud of their paychecks — I explore the rise of the female breadwinner in this week’s TIME cover story — but they still often feel that men will be intimidated rather than attracted to them as potential mates. They think their success will seem too threatening and be held against them. As a result, some women in the dating pool devise camouflage mechanisms. A young ob-gyn working in Pittsburgh tells men she meets that she “works at the hospital, taking care of patients” — subtly encouraging the idea that she’s a nurse, not a doctor. When a university vice president in south Texas was on the dating market, she would vaguely tell men she worked in the school’s administrative offices and avoid letting them walk her to her car for fear they would see her BMW. “I want them to give me a chance,” says the Pittsburgh doctor. “I want them to at least not walk away immediately.”Read that full cover story at Time.
But a growing body of research shows that while there may have once been a stigma to making money, high-earning women actually have an advantage in the dating-and-marriage market. In February 2012, the Hamilton Project, a Brookings Institution initiative that tracks trends in earnings and life prospects, found that marriage rates have risen for top female earners — the share of women in the very top earning percentile who are married grew by more than 10 percentage points — even as they have declined for women in lower earning brackets. (The report also suggested that the decline in those lower brackets may be because women can support themselves and are dissuaded from marriage by the declining earnings of men.)
We got the first indication of a major shift back in 2001 with a study by University of Texas at Austin psychologist David Buss that showed that when men ranked traits that were important in a marital partner, there had been a striking rise in the importance they gave to women’s earnings and a sharp drop in the value they placed on domestic skills. Similarly, University of Wisconsin demographer Christine Schwartz noted in a 2010 study in the American Journal of Sociology that “men are increasingly looking for partners who will ‘pull their own weight’ economically in marriage” and are willing to compete for them.
Now that women are poised to become the major breadwinners in a majority of families within the next generation, this research suggests that men will be just as adaptive and realize what an advantage a high-earning partner can be. Men are just as willing as women to marry up, and life is now giving them the opportunity to do so. So, women, own up to your accomplishments, buy him a drink, and tell him what you really do.
Rick Santorum invested a fair amount of precious, time and resources into campaigning for Sunday’s Puerto Rico Republican presidential primary. But it turned out to be a poor use of scarce resources for the GOP challenger at a time when he could least afford it. Mitt Romney cruised to a landslide victory in the Commonwealth. Romney won all 20 delegates up for grabs as residents of the island turned out in relatively strong numbers. Despite promoting himself as the senator from Puerto Rico, whatever hopes the Pennsylvanian might have had in Puerto Rico were probably sunk when he asserted that the island must adopt English as its official language if it wants statehood. With about 40 percent of the vote counted, Santorum was getting less than 10 percent, the sort of result he might have gotten without bothering to show up there last week as he did.That's all great, no doubt. See Fox News, "Romney wins in Puerto Rico while focused on Illinois." And at Chicago Sun-Times, "Romney backers here looking ahead with an eye on the rear-view mirror":
Romney can now brag that he has the ability to generate support for Hispanic voters even though none of this who turned out on Sunday will have the ability to vote for him in November. But no matter how you spin the result, the delegates he won gets him a bit closer to the nomination. Just as important, the win gives him an extra touch of momentum heading into the pivotal Illinois primary on Tuesday.
If Mitt Romney and his supporters weren’t worried about Tuesday’s GOP presidential primary election in Illinois, they would not be spending so much time and money here.RealClearPolitics has Romney holding a solid lead in Illinois, so he should be fine. But there's still a lot of talk about a prolonged campaign (and perhaps even a brokered convention), so no doubt Romney's gonna be sweating under the collar for some time.
Romney even cut short a campaign trip to Puerto Rico after an appearance Saturday morning. The U.S. territory holds its primary Sunday, and he had planned to spend the weekend there.
Most of Illinois’ Republican establishment signed on to Romney’s campaign back when they assumed he’d have the nomination all wrapped up by now.
Even if more conservative options such as Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich were still in the mix at this point, Illinois — with its history of electing moderate Republican governors and senators — was supposed to be a firewall against conservative uprisings.
"Feel It Still"
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