#3
See also DAILY KOS > SAUDI ARABIA + ITS MODERNIZED ICBM PROGRAM. KSA may had originally got 'em from CHINA, but now these have been replaced by PAK BM systems.
* WAFF > PRINCE WARNS SAUDI ARABIA OF APOCALYPSE. Prince TURKI ABDUL AZIZ AL-SAUD warns KSA ROYAL FAMILY to either REFORM [democraticize] OR STEP DOWN = ABDICATE POWER; OR ELSE RISK/INDUCE OVERTHROW VIA POTENS VIOLENT COUP OR MASS REVOLUTION [regime change].
#4
Don't the Saudis have a battalion of Pakistan's SSG stationed there to protect the Royal Family? BTW aren't the SSG trained for using nuke weapons including the Chinese ICBMS that Saudi own?
Wouldn't it be likely that on top of the Saudi ICBM are sitting Pakistani nukes?
Turkey's prime minister gave the show away years ago, when he proclaimed that "democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off."
In the United States, we don't seem to me to share the same sense of urgency. We view ourselves as a huge and relatively self-sufficient country, in control of our own destiny. We have time to sort out our priorities, to decide what to do, and to do it. There are elements of truth in those propositions, but the time we have is growing short. Restoring our fiscal position, dealing with Social Security and health care obligations in a responsible way, sorting out a reasonable approach toward limiting carbon omissions, and producing domestic energy without unacceptable environmental risks all take time. We'd better get started. That will require a greater sense of common purpose and political consensus than has been evident in Washington or the country at large.
#1
Accepting reality-based reality is a good first start.
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obamacare, and half the federal government, and ALL of the federal debt need to cease to exist.
Ironically, Obama's Obamacare may actually restore much of our economy, unintentionally, because it kills both Medicare and Medicaid. Then if Obamacare is overturned by the courts, we as a nation are rid of three gigantic millstones.
Then, if there is some way we can kill Social Security, we are halfway home. The other half is to renounce the national debt.
#3
#2 If we gut Medicare and Medicade we won't need to repudiate the debt. Posted by Nimble Spemble
All who cannot faithfully serve the oligarchy must die. Kill the unborn and permit the old to die upon retirement. Soylent green wafers and bottled water for the non-oligarchic privileged class foot soldiers.
Why is it that the president would talk to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions, but he thinks that, in the middle of arguably the biggest domestic crisis of his presidency, it's a waste of his time to have a conversation with the head of British Petroleum?
Posted by: Mike ||
06/09/2010 08:29 ||
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#1
Time to start seizing ships. They'll think twice if it's a financial loser. Remember how all the suicide bombing dried up after Saddam wasn't around to give $50,000 to the family of any "Palestinian" suicide bomber?
#2
Don't get the IDF involved - issue letters of marque and pay out prize money when a ship is captured trying to run the blockade. Prisoners optional, but pay for them too.
Private enterprise will do a good job if properly incentevized.
#3
I like the letters of marque idea. However, the prisoners should be exchanged to the Somali pirates for ships they have captured. They can then hold the prisoners hostage.
#5
"I wonder who wouldwe'd have to pay to get George Galloway?"
FTFY, 'moose. No charge, buddy. ;-p
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
06/09/2010 15:53 Comments ||
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#6
Worked last time.
Funny. Turks didn't participate last year. Then Erdogan met with Ahmadinejad last October, and they made joint statements on "palestine." Then the IHH - who were often at odds with Turk security forces, all of a sudden are heros, whose Mavi Marmara flew the Turkish flag.
What do you smell?
Posted by: Omerelet Oppressor of the Jutes7800 ||
06/09/2010 16:53 Comments ||
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Unlike Prime Minister Netanyahu, who reportedly caused President Obama to become "livid" over the timing of an apartment-building announcement, Palestinian President Abbas comes to the White House this week knowing there is nothing he could possibly do that would offend the President.
The Palestinian Authority's terrorist-atrocity celebration coinciding with Vice President Biden's visit triggered no rebuke. Nor does the PA's crude anti-black racism seem to bother our allegedly thin-skinned president.
Shortly after PA-controlled media depicted presidential candidate Obama as an ape in the summer of 2008, Obama rewarded Mahmoud Abbas with a meeting in Ramallah (so much for his opposition to "racial profiling"). One week earlier, Abbas and his Fatah Party had celebrated the freedom and the deeds of released serial killer Samir Kuntar, whose murder victims included a 4-year-old girl, whose head he bashed in.
Continued on Page 49
#1
ION TOPIX > US CAN NO LONGER IGNORE + ETHIOPIA: KENYA'S MELES ASKS FOR GREATER WORLD SUPPORT FOR SOMALIA + WESTERN-BACKE KENYAN STATE ASKS US IMPERIALISTS FOR GREATER [US-Inernational] MIL INTERVENTION IN SOMALIA.
#2
Little mystery here. Petty clan and sibling rivalry, nothing more. The first Muslim president and his ME pals remain united against the infidels and arch enemy Israel.
#3
back in 2006-8 there were a number of hip hop or jazz radio stations that featured daily diatribes about how Prez W was allowing genocide in Darfur to get rid of the black man.
Now that Obama is in power, most of the talk is gone. What their still is blames corporate America (or the Jews or the white elite or..) for the Darfur situation.
Posted by: lord garth ||
06/09/2010 7:47 Comments ||
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#4
You'll be hearing from our lawyers about that headline.
#7
Why would anyone side with the group that exterminates them?
Ask the Jews. Especially the Leftist US Jews who supported Obama and others of that ilk. These idiots would act surprised when the little fascists on the left march them into the extermination camps.
NEVER AGAIN.
Posted by: No I am The Other Beldar ||
06/09/2010 11:15 Comments ||
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By David Harsanyi A few months ago, a picture appeared in The Denver Post. On a local college campus -- an alleged stronghold of free inquiry and debate -- a leftist student, protesting some perceived injustice, was holding a sign that argued: "Hate speech is not free speech!" This is the distillation of the "if I don't like it you can't say it" argument -- the assertion of the "right" not to be offended...
Ms Thomas was paid a great deal for her speechifying over the years, as were her employers. It wasn't anything like free.
Perhaps this earnest twentysomething had not fully thought through her illiberal position on "tolerable" political speech. Perhaps she was part of that broader movement that sees "hate" everywhere among its ideological opponents. Either way, it's tragic that so many young people misunderstand the idea of open debate and free speech -- or simply devalue liberty. They do value liberty, but to them the concept involves them not having to leave other people alone. We live in a self-centered age.
Regardless, this argument is a strawman, having nothing to do with the employment of a professional opinion-holder, who is prevented by no one from airing her opinions when she is off the clock.
Some people accept that certain things cannot -- rather than should not -- be said. There's the distinction, and it's a distinction that's too subtle for many to grasp. It started with good intentions: calling people "niggers," "kikes," "wops," "beaners" and such is pure bad manners. Since we now live in an age where gents don't have to mind their language in the presence of ladies some alternative mechanism was needed for the enforcement of that single permissible branch of good manners. That was the genesis of political correctitude, involving as it did the progressive bluing of the national nose. The illusion is that if you can control the speech you can control the thought behind it.
And that, beyond the obvious attacks on free speech (fairness doctrines, higher education, etc.) is a more slippery concern. Which brings me to Helen Thomas' now infamous and career-ending comment in which she helpfully suggested that the Jews get "the hell of out Palestine." "Is this the face that sank a thousand ships?"
True, I find some comfort in knowing that this unprofessional crackpot will never haunt a president, common sense or the public again. But I wince at the rapidity of her demise. And I feel a nagging anxiety about a journalist losing her job over nothing more than a controversial statement. She's in the same company as Howard Cosell, Jimmy the Greek, and various other violators of speech codes, intentional or otherwise.
The profession of journalism lives by its claim to being fair and balanced, even though it's not. So it cannot be seen to be so very unfair and unbalanced.
"She should lose her job over this," former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said before Thomas gave in to a forced retirement. "As someone who is Jewish, and as someone who worked with her and used to like her, I find this appalling." Had the same remark been made by someone less repugnant that Helen it actually might have gone without comment. What would the reaction have been if the perpetrator had been Howard Fineman? Michael Barone? Bill O'Reilly? Different in the case of each, is my guess, ranging from shrug to surprise with a pause in the middle for "I didn't know he thought that way." Each would have been employed at the end of the day, none being as offensively batty as Helen.
Cliff May, president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and former roving reporter for Hearst (which syndicated Thomas' column), in a letter urged the company "strenuously" to "cut all ties" with Thomas "as quickly as possible." He was part of the purely figurative mob that was armed with verbal pitchforks and printed torches...
It seems an odd reaction, especially for conservatives, who are accused regularly of thought crimes and hate speech by outfits like Media Matters, which are in the business of smearing and discrediting those who disagree with them. But we ink-(and increasingly digitally-) stained wretches are in the business of viewing with alarm, pointing accusing fingers, and flinging figurative offal at each other. The views, points and flings work in both directions. Occasionally there's a casualty on our side, sometimes we get one on their side. There are times when battle is joined so closely we're not sure whose eye our figurative thumb's in. This is known as freedom of press. It is the antithesis of the poorly reasoning girly in the first paragraph.
But an opinion -- in Thomas' case, an ugly opinion that in all probability is more common than some people might believe -- is no more than the strength of the logic behind it. Having expressed the opinion, the lady is obliged to defend it. Being unable to defend it she chose to retire from the fray, to spend more with her pets or her family or whatever she spends time with.
As a regular defender of the moral right of Israel to fight the theocrats and fascists that Thomas embraces, I never thought she was very credible or articulate on the topic, and she is unworthy of the over-the-top reaction from critics. She has been tolerated even by those on the same side for many years now, as it has become increasingly obvious that she's an offensive loop-loop. The reaction was to the totality of Helen, not only to her remarks, which were barely more offensive than much of her behavior in the past few years.
The reaction was to the video of her statement spreading virally on the internet, thanks to the cleverness of the BigJournalism.com team. Ms Thomas has said worse over the years, according to anonymous colleagues, without consequences.
Nevertheless, at this point in her career, the 89-year-old was still a columnist for Hearst newspapers. A columnist offers provocative views. You don't have to like Thomas and you don't have to read her columns, but having a disdain for Jews in general or Israel in particular is hardly the most offensive thought that's kicking around. That's approximately what I just said. Quod erat demonstrandum.
Though I don't hold an earthly stake in debates over God, Bill Maher's ludicrous anti-Catholic rants or a tome from a polemist like Christopher Hitchens (who condemns all religion as a dangerous farce) might be "appalling" to rather large swaths of the public. Are certain topics off the table? The difference is that Hitchens defends his arguments, whether one agrees with the defense or not. Maher hides behind his status as a "humorist" which somehow lessens the amount of mental effort he's required to spend on his defense. You kind of expect the funny guy to be a dumbass, though there's also a certain surprise that the dumbass isn't funnier. But maybe that's just me, since he hasn't been dumped for his own collection of gaffes. Helen had run out of mental steam and reached the point where her remarks sounded merely witchy mean. She had a reputation as a crotchet. She had probably expected them to be ignored, which they may well have been had she not made them to a rabbi. Hitchens or Maher bitching out a monseigneur would likely be taken with less understanding than their usual fulminations.
Mr. Maher attempted to transfer from cable television to, I think, NBC. He was not a success, and quickly fled to HBO, where the smallness of his audience is not an issue.
Of course, I am not suggesting that Thomas has a birthright to sit in the front row at a White House press conference (a situation that hasn't made sense for at least three decades), or that anyone has an inalienable right to pontificate about the world for a newspaper chain or anyone else. As long as the newspapers are held privately they should be able to do what they want with their employees. And there's nothing to stop Helen from continuing to publish even further into her dotage. All she needs to do is sign up with the Huffington Post or Salon or the New Republic. Or she could download a very good program perfectly free from Word Press, who would even host it for her for free. There is no monolithic state press organ to maintain blacklists and to conduct public purifications of opinion.
And, no, I can't mourn the loss of Helen Thomas' detestable opinions. But, at the same time, I can't help but feel some trepidation about the ease in which some voices -- in this case, one voice that is probably more honest than others of similar ideological disposition -- can be expelled from the conversation simply for offending.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/09/2010 11:11 ||
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Why do so many people completely miss the point?
Leftists want to use government authority to punish speech they don't like -- they whine about "hate speech" but given their tendency to ignore antisemitism, anti-white, and anti-male speech, the reality is they seek to ban dissent from their positions.
Conservatives don't want government involved. We want the free speech promised in the Constitution. That doesn't mean there are no consequences, just that the consequences are not brought about by government force. Thomas was abandoned by people free to continue their associations with her; that's fine. Her rights were not trampled, and neither were theirs.
I suspect what ticks Harsanyi off is that Helen was found a pariah for venting her Judenhass.
Posted by: Rob Crawford ||
06/09/2010 12:21 Comments ||
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#2
So - the left wants consequences for anything it labels "hate speech," but only if it comes out of an unapproved, say conservative or Republican mouth. One set of rules for thee and a different set for me. Ever was it thus...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
06/09/2010 12:27 Comments ||
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#3
Harsanyi's a conservative columnist. I think in this case he's missing the fact that this is the way it's supposed to work. Having a Ministry of Information to pull her journalist's license would be the way it's not supposed to work.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/09/2010 13:56 Comments ||
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#4
Meanwhile, the Rabbi who nailed Thomas has been deluged with Antisemitic hate mail, which he is posting to his website. FOX News has picked up on the story as well.
#5
Helen Thomas is free to hold whatever views she wants to about Jews, and to express them as often and as forcefully as she likes. The rest of us who disagree with her are free to point out what a repulsive, hateful, and morally indefensible statement it was, and what a rotten person she is, and refuse to buy her books or hire her to give speeches or otherwise do business with her.
Hearst Newspapers, and Nine Speakers, and anyone else with whom she is associated is free to decide that they don't want to be associated with her any longer.
See. Freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom all 'round. The only consequences Helen Thomas is facing are the results of other adults exercising their freedoms.
Posted by: Mike ||
06/09/2010 14:23 Comments ||
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#6
I went to the link and looked at some of the Rabbi's hate-mail. I could only bear to scroll through the first twenty or so, and I don't know which was more distressing - the sheer unbridled hate, or the almost complete illiteracy of the people sending it. Six of one, half-dozen of the other, I suppose.
#7
What makes the Helen T case different from, and more problematic than, other cases of nastiness from media figures is the ambiguity of her position. Was she a reporter, or an opinion columnist? If the latter, then she should be cut some slack. Clearly, there are "pundits" and broadcast blowhards who say offensive things every day, and no one's harmed by their bile. If Helen had the graveyard spot on Air America-- which has about the same audience as the drivetime slot-- no one would care.
The problem is that Helen was for decades given pride of place as the public's champion, the agent of the public's right to know, inside the White House, speaking truth to The Man. For the grande dame of the WH press corps to voice race hatred is a bit like a grand diva having a wardrobe malfunction at opening night at La Scala. It's not the speech in particular but the sheer ugliness of it-- in a place where decorum and tact are essential. My $0.02, anyway.
#9
What doesn't seem to be mentioned is that the rabbi was there with his young son and son's friend. Ms Thomas was so pleased with herself for emitting her opinion at the White House during a celebration of Jewish-American accomplishment, directly to unsuspecting children.
#12
According to the work of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the power of the Jews would not allow a Helen Thomas into the journalism biz.
Actually, because of the leftist bias of the media, a bigot like Thomas could spout her anti Israel, anti US, leftist crap year after year after year winning award after award after award
Posted by: lord garth ||
06/09/2010 19:55 Comments ||
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...it was clear from the first that this presidentsingle-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrivalwas wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans' leader, a man of them, for them, the nation's voice and champion. Mr. Obama wasn't lacking in concern about the oil spill. What he lacked was that voiceand for good reason.
Those qualities to be expected in a president were never about rhetoric; Mr. Obama had proved himself a dab hand at that on the campaign trail. They were a matter of identification with the nation and to all that binds its people together in pride and allegiance. These are feelings held deep in American hearts, unvoiced mostly, but unmistakably there and not only on the Fourth of July.
A great part of America now understands that this president's sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.
One of his first reforms was to rid the White House of the bust of Winston Churchilla gift from Tony Blairby packing it back off to 10 Downing Street. A cloudlet of mystery has surrounded the subject ever since, but the central fact stands clear. The new administration had apparently found no place in our national house of many rooms for the British leader who lives on so vividly in the American mind. Churchill, face of our shared wartime struggle, dauntless rallier of his nation who continues, so remarkably, to speak to ours. For a president to whom such associations are alien, ridding the White House of Churchill would, of course, have raised no second thoughts.
Far greater strangeness has since flowed steadily from Washington. The president's appointees, transmitters of policy, go forth with singular passion week after week, delivering the latest inversion of reality. Their work is not easy, focused as it is on a current prime preoccupation of this White Housethat is, finding ways to avoid any public mention of the indisputable Islamist identity of the enemy at war with us. No small trick that, but their efforts go forward in public spectacles matchless in their absurdityunnerving in what they confirm about our current guardians of law and national security....
It was why this administration tapped officials like Michael Posner, assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Among his better known contributions to political discourse was a 2005 address in which he compared the treatment of Muslim-Americans in the United States after 9/11 with the plight of the Japanese-Americans interned in camps after Pearl Harbor. During a human-rights conference held in China this May, Mr. Posner cited the new Arizona immigration law by way of assuring the Chinese, those exemplary guardians of freedom, that the United States too had its problems with discrimination....
It is no surprise that Mr. Posnerlike numerous of his kindhas found a natural home in this administration. His is a sensibility and political disposition with which Mr. Obama is at home. The beliefs and attitudes that this president has internalized are to be found everywherein the salons of the left the world overand, above all, in the academic establishment, stuffed with tenured radicals and their political progeny. The places where it is held as revealed truth that the United States is now, and has been throughout its history, the chief engine of injustice and oppression in the world.
They are attitudes to be found everywhere, but never before in a president of the United States. Mr. Obama may not hold all, or the more extreme, of these views. But there can be no doubt by now of the influences that have shaped him. They account for his grand apology tour through the capitals of Europe and to the Muslim world, during which he decried America's moral failuresher arrogance, insensitivity. They were the words of a man to whom reasons for American guilt came naturally. Americans were shocked by this behavior in their newly elected president. But he was telling them something from those lecterns in foreign landssomething about his distant relation to the country he was about to lead.
Posted by: Mike ||
06/09/2010 09:04 ||
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Well put. Obama's not un-American; in fact, he's almost a perfect representative of an American type that's ubiquitous in US college towns and neighborhoods like Hyde Park IL, Cambridge, Ann Arbor, Berkeley, Madison etc: the cringing American, the one who puts the welfare of nameless global children above that of his own kids, the type, per Hitchens, who if they found a snake in their child's room would call PETA rather than reach for an axe.
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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.
A few months ago, a picture appeared in The Denver Post. On a local college campus -- an alleged stronghold of free inquiry and debate -- a leftist student, protesting some perceived injustice, was holding a sign that argued: "Hate speech is not free speech!"
