CNNs senior editor of Middle East affairs, Octavia Nasr, posted a message on her Twitter account on Sunday in which she expressed sadness at the death of Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, described by terrorism analysts as the spiritual mentor of Hizbullah.
Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah... One of Hezbollahs giants I respect a lot, Nasr wrote.
Nasrs remarks drew fire from the Honest Reporting media watchdog, which asked on its Web site, Is Nasr a Hezbollah sympathizer? This is disturbing enough given that the group is designated a terrorist organization by the US and is committed to the destruction of Israel.
And which of Fadlallahs individual views does Nasr admire? CNN did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
Although described by sections of the Western media as a firebrand-preacher-turnedmoderate, Fadlallah went on record as praising the massacre of eight Israeli students at Mercaz Harav Yeshiva in Jerusalem in 2008, according to Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs researcher Shimon Shapira.
In his sermon during Friday prayers, Fadlallah declared, The heroic operation in Jerusalem proved that the mujahedeen in Palestine are able to hit the Zionists hard. His remarks were carried by Hizbullahs television network, Al-Manar, Shapira said in a 2008 article for the JCPA.
In March of that year, Fadlallah told Al-Manar that Israel had inflated the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust, in an interview translated and made available by MEMRI.
Zionism has inflated the number of victims in this holocaust beyond imagination.
They say there were six million Jews not six million, not three million, or anything like that...
But the world accepted this [figure], and it does not allow anyone to discuss this, the ayatollah said. OK, so it was one. The intent was there. And there are huge fields that are feet-deep in discarded ashes. Do the math.
Ely Karmon, senior researcher at the Institute for Counter Terrorism at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center, told The Jerusalem Post on Monday that Fadlallah was an extremist figure who had continued to exert major influence on Hizbullah even after distancing himself from the organization due to a dispute over its subservience to Iran.
Karmon carried out an in-depth study into Fadlallahs Web site in 2000 and compared it to Hizbullahs.
Every Friday, he would publish his sermon online, which carried both a religious and a political message. Two days later, the same messages would be published by Hizbullahs Web Site. He continued to influence Hizbullah... He remained fiercely anti-American and anti-Israel, Karmon said.
#2
"Breaking: CNNs Octavia Nasr Leaving Network After Controversial Tweet" She's toast, according to Medialite.com
Posted by: Big Thruger4575 ||
07/07/2010 16:52 Comments ||
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#3
HotAir:
The memo from Parisa Khosravi, senior VP of their International unit, makes it clear that this was no resignation:
I had a conversation with Octavia this morning and I want to share with you that we have decided that she will be leaving the company. As you know, her tweet over the weekend created a wide reaction. As she has stated in her blog on CNN.com, she fully accepts that she should not have made such a simplistic comment without any context whatsoever. However, at this point, we believe that her credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised going forward.
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/07/2010 17:38 Comments ||
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#4
context, yeah, that was the problem
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/07/2010 17:38 Comments ||
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#5
For a senior editor for an international news organization she doesn't seem all that bright.
Most people that have Twitter accounts...shouldn't.
#9
yeah, that's what I want on my career epitaph: "many tweets supported him"
another reason to support cremation
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/07/2010 22:20 Comments ||
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#10
However, at this point, we believe that her credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised going forward.
Just forward? How about everything she's done in the past, too? Is that somehow magically exempt?
This "correct" grammar is the result of some braindead medieval halfwit grammarian who mixed apples and battleships. There is only one committee regardless of the number of people on it. Do we say the dresser are in the corner - why not? It has multiple drawers. Was Queen Victoria wrong when she said "England expectS every man to do his duty"?
I'm with Chruchill who, when corrected for ending a sentence in a preposition said " This is the kind of arrant pedantry up with which, I will not put!"
OK, I'm gonna go off and hyperventilate now....
Posted by: Crith Prince of the Poles9712 ||
07/07/2010 14:17 Comments ||
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#3
Grammar Nazis have no chance against the uniform insignia Nazis. That is, who does he think he can fool, running around with the two oak leaf, one pip lapel insignia of an SS-Brigadefuhrer?
So, the equivalent of a US Brigadier General is now going door to door? The youngest SS-Brigadefuhrer in the SS is going to lower himself to doing Gestapo or Polizei work?
#5
gorb: Apparently you have never attended a serious Civil War reenactment. Long, drawn out, tooth clenching arguments over uniform minutiae. When too many people show up for the reenactment, they will cull the herd with uniform inspections.
I rather liked this show, and was making fun of the whole -Nazi thing. They could have even spread it out anachronistically, using Internet jargon, incorrectly.
#6
Wow, that was tedious. I only got about halfway through it.
"The committee are meeting".
That's British usage, Prince. You're fighting a losing battle there.
My peeves are "most" for "almost", and "one of the only..." NO, if it's "only" there is ONE, only. You mean "one of the few..." How hard can it be to remember "few"?? These wouldn't bug me if I didn't see them in major media outlets.
#7
I rather liked this show, and was making fun of the whole -Nazi thing.
I know, 'Moose. I included one of my rare smileys there just to make sure you knew I was kidding about your kidding.
No, I've never been to any Civil War reenactment stuff. Sounds like you could get into some serious fistfights with buffs who disagree with the decisions. I've been to antique car tournaments, though. Same sort of thing. Watching the judges argue about details like whether or not the casting flash should have been ground off or not can make a person wish he had a Luger with a single hollowpoint bullet handy.
#1
The National Academy of Sciences, in its official journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has just published a list of scientists whom it claims should not be believed on the subject of global warming. I am number 38 on the list. The list of 496 is in descending order of scientific credentials.
circling the wagons in lieu of scientific debate
Posted by: Frank G ||
07/07/2010 17:51 Comments ||
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#2
Uh, uh, "PJM" = PEDRO JOSE MENDIOLA = LADY GAGA = LADY JAJA/JOJO at PENN STATE???
#3
PJM is Pajamas Media, JosephM. Serious analysis on a variety of issues by a collection of some of my favourite bloggers, with posts averaging about 2 pages long. The Instapundit is connected to them. I check them out about once a week.
The future of ObamaCare is unfolding here: runaway spending, price controls, even limits on care and medical licensing.
President Obama said earlier this year that the health-care bill that Congress passed three months ago is "essentially identical" to the Massachusetts universal coverage plan that then-Gov. Mitt Romney signed into law in 2006. No one but Mr. Romney disagrees.
As events are now unfolding, the Massachusetts plan couldn't be a more damning indictment of ObamaCare. The state's universal health-care prototype is growing more dysfunctional by the day, which is the inevitable result of a health system dominated by politics.
In the first good news in months, a state appeals board has reversed some of the price controls on the insurance industry that Gov. Deval Patrick imposed earlier this year. Late last month, the panel ruled that the action had no legal basis and ignored "economic realties."
In April, Mr. Patrick's insurance commissioner had rejected 235 of 274 premium increases state insurers had submitted for approval for individuals and small businesses. The carriers said these increases were necessary to cover their expected claims over the coming year, as underlying state health costs continue to rise at 8% annually. By inventing an arbitrary rate cap, the administration was in effect ordering the carriers to sell their products at a loss.
Mr. Patrick has promised to appeal the panel's decision and find some other reason to cap rates. Yet a raft of internal documents recently leaked to the press shows this squeeze play was opposed even within his own administration.
In an April message to his staff, Robert Dynan, a career insurance commissioner responsible for ensuring the solvency of state carriers, wrote that his superiors "implemented artificial price caps on HMO rates. The rates, by design, have no actuarial support. This action was taken against my objections and without including me in the conversation."
Mr. Dynan added that "The current course . . . has the potential for catastrophic consequences including irreversible damage to our non-profit health care system" and that "there most likely will be a train wreck (or perhaps several train wrecks)."
Sure enough, the five major state insurers have so far collectively lost $116 million due to the rate cap. Three of them are now under administrative oversight because of concerns about their financial viability. Perhaps Mr. Patrick felt he could be so reckless because health-care demagoguery is the strategy for his fall re-election bid against a former insurance CEO.
The deeper problem is that price controls seem to be the only way the political class can salvage a program that was supposed to reduce spending and manifestly has not. Massachusetts now has the highest average premiums in the nation.
In a new paper, Stanford economists John Cogan and Dan Kessler and Glenn Hubbard of Columbia find that the Massachusetts plan increased private employer-sponsored premiums by about 6%. Another study released last week by the state found that the number of people gaming the "individual mandate"buying insurance only when they are about to incur major medical costs, then dumping coveragehas quadrupled since 2006. State regulators estimate that this amounts to a de facto 1% tax on insurance premiums for everyone else in the individual market and recommend a limited enrollment period to discourage such abuses. (This will be illegal under ObamaCare.)
Liberals write off such consequences as unimportant under the revisionist history that the plan was never meant to reduce costs but only to cover the uninsured. Yet Mr. Romney wrote in these pages shortly after his plan became law that every resident "will soon have affordable health insurance and the costs of health care will be reduced."
One junior senator from Illinois agreed. In a February 2006 interview on NBC, Mr. Obama praised the "bold initiative" in Massachusetts, arguing that it would "reduce costs and expand coverage." A Romney spokesman said at the time that "It's gratifying that national figures from both sides of the aisle recognize the potential of this plan to transform our health-care system."
An entitlement sold as a way to reduce costs was bound to fundamentally change the system. The larger questionfor Massachusetts, and now for the nationis whether that was really the plan all along.
"If you're going to do health-care cost containment, it has to be stealth," said Jon Kingsdale, speaking at a conference sponsored by the New Republic magazine last October. "It has to be unsuspected by any of the key players to actually have an effect." Mr. Kingsdale is the former director of the Massachusetts "connector," the beta version of ObamaCare's insurance "exchanges," and is now widely expected to serve as an ObamaCare regulator.
He went on to explain that universal coverage was "fundamentally a political strategy question"a way of finding a "significant systematic way of pushing back on the health-care system and saying, 'No, you have to do with less.' And that's the challenge, how to do it. It's like we're waiting for a chain reaction but there's no catalyst, there's nothing to start it."
In other words, health reform was a classic bait and switch: Sell a virtually unrepealable entitlement on utterly unrealistic premises and then the political class will eventually be forced to control spending. The likes of Mr. Kingsdale would say cost control is only a matter of technocratic judgement, but the raw dirigisme of Mr. Patrick's price controls is a better indicator of what happens when health care is in the custody of elected officials rather than a market.
Naturally, Mr. Patrick wants to export the rate review beyond the insurers to hospitals, physician groups and specialty providerspresumably to set medical prices as well as insurance prices. Last month, his administration also announced it would use the existing state "determination of need" process to restrict the diffusion of expensive medical technologies like MRI machines and linear accelerator radiation therapy.
Meanwhile, Richard Moore, a state senator from Uxbridge and an architect of the 2006 plan, has introduced a new bill that will make physician participation in government health programs a condition of medical licensure. This would essentially convert all Massachusetts doctors into public employees.
All of this is merely a prelude to far more aggressive restructuring of the state's health-care marketsand a preview of what awaits the rest of the country.
After an Independence Day holiday weekend, it's time to focus on another declaration of independence that is gaining converts across the country. Independent voters are the largest and fastest-growing segment of the electorate.
They determine who wins and loses elections, but independents too often get ignored in the narrow partisan analysis of American politics. It's time for that to change -- and in the run-up to the midterm elections I'll be writing regular columns for CNN.com on the state of independents.
The current snapshot has a clear message: Democrats should be afraid, very afraid.
A new Gallup Poll shows that independent voters are leaning decisively toward Republicans in this year's midterm elections by a 12-point margin. To put this shift in perspective, independents voted for Democrats by a 17-point margin in 2006, when they took control of both houses of Congress. President Obama won independents by 8 percent in 2008. In both cases, independents provided the margin of victory, repudiating play-to-the-base orthodoxy peddled by most political consultants.
Some Democrats may try to find comfort in the belief that national polls are lousy indicators of local races. But in the 60 most competitive House races analyzed by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for NPR, independents are leaning toward the GOP by a tsunami-like 50 percent to 29 percent in Democratic swing districts.
There's just no way for liberals to spin this as good news, especially because liberals are outnumbered by both centrists and conservatives in these swing districts -- and perceptions of the Democrats as being "too liberal" is at the highest percent since their Waterloo year of 1994.
Independents have risen to record levels in reaction to the increased polarization of the two parties. But they do not represent a split-the-difference approach to politics: They tend to be closer to Republicans on economic issues and closer to Democrats on social issues. They've been deficit hawks since the days of Ross Perot. It's the unprecedented government spending amid unified control of Washington that has them swinging toward the GOP in search of checks and balances.
This continues a trend that has placed Republicans on the winning edge of statewide elections since Obama's election in 2008. Independent voters swung the election to Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie -- both Republicans in states where independent voters outnumber Democrats or Republicans. Independent voters just became a majority in Phoenix, Arizona -- and they remain the majority in the pivotal presidential primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire, as well as swing states like Colorado.
This fall, an independent candidate for Senate -- Charlie Crist -- now leads the polls in Florida, where independent voters have increased from roughly 400,000 20 years ago to 2.5 million today. Four independent candidates for governor are making an impact along the East Coast -- Maine's Eliot Cutler, Massachusetts' Tim Cahill, Rhode Island's Lincoln Chafee and Florida's Bud Chiles. By the end of 2010, I'd predict that we'll have at least one new independent governor and a new independent in the U.S. Senate.
The revolt of the independents should be a wake-up call to both parties -- a new CNN poll shows that 59 percent of independent voters are angry at both parties. One glimmer of hope for Democrats comes from the same poll, in which more independents said Republicans were "responsible for the country's current economic problems" than Democrats. Nonetheless, the Gallup Poll shows that neither party fills the American people with confidence -- in fact, favorable views of Democrats and Republicans are near all-time lows.
Roadblocks are still regular features of life for most independents, however, especially on the local level. Colorado state Rep. Kathleen Curry is a case in point. She'd served four terms as a Democrat and earned enough respect to serve as speaker pro-tem. But at the end of 2009, Curry formally declared her independence, saying that neither party fit her beliefs: "I have to vote my conscience and for my district -- and that isn't always in step with party leadership," Curry said. "I'm really not a partisan person."
She figured that she'd provoke some opposition from the party establishment, but believed her reputation among her fellow citizens would carry the day. She didn't think that she'd be blocked from the ballot. But that's what happened.
A local judge declared that she hadn't been officially independent long enough to run free of party labels -- despite her supporters gathering enough qualifying signatures. Now, Curry's name won't appear on the ballot in November and she will have to get enough write-in votes for re-election. If that's not a high enough degree of difficulty, she also is limited by Colorado law from raising campaign contributions by half the amount allowed to partisan candidates running under the Republican or Democratic banner. It's a case of one woman challenging the partisan establishment.
The deck is stacked against independents and in favor of professional partisan politicians. But more and more candidates as well as voters are declaring their independence.
Our government seems to have forgotten that the parties are not the purpose of our politics, but middlemen. As George Washington himself once said, "I was no party man myself, and the first wish of my heart was, if parties did exist, to reconcile them."
#1
The real fear goes all the way back to statehouses. With the census wrapping up, voter discontent that spills over to the ballot effecting statehouses means that Trunks will get to gerrymander redraw districts* they wouldn't normally have had a voice in. This could be a twofor.
* regardless of who wins, it'll end up in the courts anyhow, but it gives the edge and the pocketbook to those sitting.
#4
Yep, Bright one. Maybe even against who's in, which currently happens to be mostly Dems. I think that's even why Zero is President - he was the most 'not Bush' candidate.
#6
The other problem for independents is that the label doesn't really signify any coherent platform or set of policies. Are independents mainly focused on fiscal conservatism? Or are they primarily disaffected conservatives who oppose RINOs and who care intensely about the f-p and social agenda as well as the fiscal issues?
More likely is that they're a mishmash of disaffected Dems, Repubs, and hybrid or schizo voters who are conservative on some issues ("No to socialized medecine!") and liberal on others ("Don't touch my medicare!").
Pretty hard to build any kind of coherent movement out of such a sprawling and internally contradictory crew.
#7
"Do they appreciate just how manipulated they were by the media back in '08?"
Some do, but my sense of it is that most do not. They seem quite content to swallow the pabulum dished out by the liberal media without any attempt at skepticism. Too much work, I suppose.
Posted by: Dave D. ||
07/07/2010 18:42 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
CNNs senior editor of Middle East affairs, Octavia Nasr, posted a message on her Twitter account on Sunday in which she expressed sadness at the death of Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, described by terrorism analysts as the spiritual mentor of Hizbullah.
