#2
As a woman you have the right to be flogged, stoned, killed, be a splodadope, or produce lots of little splodadopes. Now shut up and be quiet until called upon.
#3
To Mohammad and company, a woman is simply a life support system for a womb. They are well taken care of - much like a goat or a cow - and have about as much rights.
The investment bank, which has now been subpoenaed to appear before the FCIC as a result of its alleged actions, has also been accused of mischief-making' with regards to its conduct towards the commission after sending it 20m separate documents. The FCIC has a staff of 50.
The accusations came from Phil Angelides, chairman of the FCIC, which is charged by the US Congress with finding the root causes of the crisis and outlining steps to ensure it does not happen again.
It is the latest black mark against the bank, which is accused by the US Securities and Exchange Commission of securities fraud in relation to the alleged mis-selling of derivatives, a charge the bank denies.
Mr Angelides appears infuriated with Goldman's tactics, suggesting that the bank is involved in a very deliberate effort to run out the clock'. The FCIC must close its investigation and deliver its report to Congress by the end of this year.
We did not ask them to pull up a dump truck to our offices to dump a bunch of rubbish,' Mr Angelides continued during a conference call following the issue of the subpoena. We should not be forced to play 'Where's Waldo?' on behalf of the American people.'
It is understood that Goldman delayed responding to the FCIC's very specific requests for certain documents relating to the use of derivatives and other matters for months, and then changed tactic and delivered some five terabytes of information in the past three weeks.
When asked why the bank might delay its involvement, the FCIC's vice-chairman Bill Thomas said: They may have more to cover up than maybe we thought or they told us they did.'
Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman's chairman, appeared before the FCIC alongside other senior bankers at the start of this year, and is likely to do so again as a result of the subpoena.
A Goldman spokesman said the bank has been committed' to providing the information the FCIC requested.
#1
Fine Goldman Sachs $1 billion for contempt of Congress. Or pass a law that renders that particular Pig Man incapable of operating. Or sic the Department of Justice on them, but wait, the AG is too busy persecuting physicians for antitrust as opposed to where the most damage has been done.
#2
F--- my victims, he said, loud enough for other inmates to hear. I carried them for twenty years, and now Im doing 150 years.
Spoken like a true hero of our time. Funny, but I seem to recall the Wall St thieves of the 1980s-- Ivan Boesky, Martin Siegel, for ex.-- were devastated by their convictions and their shame, and turned to religion (Boesky) and uhmble good works (Siegel).
Our age truly is f***ed up. The con is all that matters.
Look at who we elected president: a race-pimping con artist with no particular expertise, or skill, or insight, into anything other than how to ride his lifestory to the WH.
The Swiss National Bank came into the FX market again today after the E/CHF broke another critical milestone of 1.38
Tyler Durden did a piece and discussed how quickly the benefits of the intervention evaporated. He pointed to the fact that in less than two hours the E/CHF was below the intervention levels.
JPM wrote a report that summed up the critical issues. Their report was very bearish for the E/CHF. Their argument is that the Swiss have now spent 1/3 of GDP in currency intervention and they have accomplished nothing. The conclusion is that the Swiss will be forced to stop and let the Euro to float to a much lower level.
The 7/7 bombings in London, in which Islamists killed 52 and injured 700, prompted British authorities to work with Muslims to avoid future violence.
However, rather than turn to anti-Islamist Muslims who reject the triumphalist goal of applying Islamic law in Europe, they promoted non-violent Islamists, hoping these would persuade coreligionists to express their hatred of the West in lawful ways. This effort featured Tariq Ramadan (b. 1962), a prominent Islamist intellectual. For example, London's Metropolitan Police partially funded a conference that Ramadan addressed, and Prime Minister Tony Blair appointed him to an official working group on tackling extremism.'
Deploying an Islamist may have seemed like a original and clever idea but it was neither. Western governments have been allying without success with Islamists for decades. Indeed, they have been allying with Ramadan's own family.
Posted by: ed ||
06/08/2010 15:39 ||
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Left-wing activists described the year leading up to Barack Obama's election as exhilarating, empowering and exciting.
Now, if you ask progressives gathered for the America's Future Now conference in Washington, D.C., about the first year and a half of his presidency, they say:
"Frustrating."
"Sobering."
"Brutal."
At least, those were the reactions of, respectively, union activist Nick Weiner, University of Minnesota political science professor Dara Strolovitch, and Steve Peha, who heads an education reform consultancy.
"I had hoped for something different," Peha explains. "I had hoped for the president who ran for office, and not so much the one who's in office."
Peha says he's a pragmatist he knows that campaigning and governing are different. But "what I wish is that President Obama had worked a little less for his ideal of bipartisanship and a little more for the people who elected him," he says.
This is the prevailing feeling at this week's America's Future Now conference. And no one is hiding it.
"It seems like yesterday, doesn't it? Barack Obama was going to take office, he was going to change the world and we would just go home and hit the couch," liberal blogger and pundit Arianna Huffington said during the conference's very first panel of speakers.
The head of the Campaign for America's Future, which runs this conference, called the new White House an uncertain trumpet. For example, its financial reforms, he said, are too timid and too readily compromised.
And "the handling of BP has been atrocious at best," added Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, the head of Green for All.
While trying to keep positive, speaker after speaker showed deep frustration with how things have gone so far.
The audience of about a thousand is pretty sparse compared with past years, and their conversations sound less like a movement and more like therapy.
In fact, when the audience was asked to discuss the central problem at their tables, they were told the essential question was "Is it him or is it us?"
Activist Marquis Jones' answer: "It's definitely us. I mean, we can't look at our elected officials and feel like it's their responsibility. We put them in office to be a representation of us, so it is our responsibility to make sure that they're fulfilling those obligations."
But Bob Kuttner, the editor of the liberal magazine American Prospect, had a different answer.
"We criticize [Timothy] Geithner; we criticize [Lawrence] Summers; we criticize [Rahm] Emanuel; we criticize the oil companies; we criticize Wall Street; we criticize everybody but Obama," he said. "Because we feel a little bit goosey about criticizing Obama."
Kuttner said progressives must hold Obama accountable. Piecemeal accomplishments are not enough, he said, to keep the movement going.
"If he doesn't do more on jobs, and on mortgage relief, and on a handful of things that affect regular people where they live, it all goes down the drain in the midterm," he said. "And then the moment is lost and the crazies take over."
That is the greatest fear of the progressives at the conference: losing completely the momentum and promise they felt just 18 months ago.
So if 2008 saw a dramatic romance between Obama and the left, it appears the honeymoon is now well over. Progressives hope that some new goals and a little therapy will hold the marriage together.
#2
What? Not even half way through his term and already a wash-out even with the ones who voted him in?
Worst part is for you lefties, you think he gives a darn about you, anyway? You were just his usefull idiots. He feels the same about the boot licking media, whom he now calls in sarcastic tones "talking heads" and "all the hype they generated". Your marriage is a big flop, losers.
#4
Face it, dupes: you rallied behind an identity politics pro, a lifelong empty suit who before coming to DC had never held a serious job in his adult life.
Things would be so much easier with a one-party state. What progressives liberals need to do is eradicate opposition, then Obama can rule without interference.
#6
Time for a new political class in this country.
No more "progressive" lawyers or identity politics-pushers, or Bushes, or Clintons or any of the other rank little political dynasties scattered across almost every city and state in the nation these days.
If we were governed only by reasonably intelligent, non-wacko straight-talking, no-BS non-lawyers and non-MBA types, we'd be in far better shape than we are now. Even lefty types like Wyden and Feingold tend to be more rational and more open to suasion than the lobbyist-pimping professional pols in the GOP.
#7
-Make public sector employee unions illegal and a lot of this takes care of itself, lex. Dynasties require loyal footsoldiers. Remove them, and the dynasties wither on the vine.
-Break the back of the Ivy League grip on power. Competence is more important than the "brand" of the degree.
-In a related way, America, ESPECIALLY the cultural and academic elite, must come to grips with the fact that BHO is an affirmative action hire and AA doesn't work. There are dozens of excellent, talented minorities in this country who could do BHO's job better than he ever could, but they couldn't get elected because they don't have degrees from the "right" schools or don't have the expected left-of-center politics that the academic mandarins demand. The progressive elites tried an experiment. They wanted to show the world that if you took an average to slightly more than average person (in terms of intelligence) with no real-world skills, sent him to "all the right schools" and let him mix with "the quality" (meaning themselves, of course), and sent him out into the world, he'd be highly competent at problem solving and leadership. Their premise is extreme nurturism, the idea that if you send unqualified people to the right schools and they rub shoulders with other elites and form "connections", that this will, by osmosis, make the unqualified highly competent. It doesn't. All it produced was a slick teleprompter reader who could parrot all of the NPR-elite talking points and who was known as a "good guy" among said elite because he went to one of "their" schools and was part of "their" club. (Think Jim as a "king" in Huckleberry Finn and the plantation owner's acceptance of him as an equal by virtue of that claim to nobility.)
BHO's inability to lead and solve problems are prima facie evidence of the fallacy of this extreme sort of nurturism. It's not 2006 any more. Americans right now don't care if you went to a self-styled "best" school or not, they want competence and problems solving skills of the type that can only be found by those who are successful in the military of the private sector. Give me someone who went to a community college but can fix something. Where you went to school is irrelevant.
And that scares the elite more than anything, because the basis of their status is called into question.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
06/08/2010 5:58 Comments ||
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#8
"And then the moment is lost and the crazies take over."
That's it? You're progressive or crazy? So how did the 'progressives' win at the ballot box? And why whill they lose at mid-term? Those 'crazies' elected the same guy for two terms?
Maybe there's a large group that are neither progressive or crazy. Perhaps some of them didn't vote for 0 because he was progressive, but only because he wasn't Bush. Perhaps you are blinded by your arrogance.
Posted by: Bobby ||
06/08/2010 6:01 Comments ||
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#9
That should read "military OR the private sector".
PIMF.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
06/08/2010 6:07 Comments ||
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#10
There are dozensmany millions of excellent, talented minorities in this country who could do BHO's job better than he ever could ....
#14
What 'bad boys' are for far too many women, the slick politic is for too many in the general population. Their modus operandi and results are strikingly similar. What's even more amazing is in both cases their followers go running back to them rationalizing that it had to be something the rube did that made it all so messy rather than acknowledge the base corruption of the perp or life style.
#15
Making public unions illegal would be an excellent start.
I was musing about voting on the drive in as well. Maybe limit voters to only those that pay taxes (excemptions will be for retired, disabled, etc.) so basically if you don't put into the system, you don't get to vote on how it is run.
#18
"We criticize [Timothy] Geithner; we criticize [Lawrence] Summers; we criticize [Rahm] Emanuel; we criticize the oil companies; we criticize Wall Street; we criticize everybody but Obama," he said. "Because we feel a little bit goosey about criticizing Obama."
A little buyer's remorse showing? Yeah, can't criticize BO because it would be racist--no matter that his policies, if anyone can identify what they are, suck. He has been too busy running for office during the last year and a half to do much but screw things up. Let's hope the progressives nah liberals nahstateists nah communistists have a bad day at the polls in November; otherwise the country is headed towards big trouble.
#22
President Obama won't you rescue me? The question many of the left are asking. The truth is, those of the right and other persuasions ask the same of their affiliates and leadership. The balance, over time, is something of a 'ying and yang'. Each point of view influences the other, and hopefully the median is somewhat near the desired outcome. For most all, this 'feels' very unsatisfactory. And I agree. Yet, are the established power structures pliant enough to allow for a political 'maverick' to yield enough influence for significant changes? It appears not - no matter what your idealogical preferences.
Agreed. His utterances on interstate relations are simply fatuous, he has no grasp of economics, zero management skill, and even in his sole area of (supposed) experience, the law, he has repeatedly made a hash of simple criminal and conlaw concepts.
His one area of distinction is in analyzing, pondering on, and writing elegant essays on the grand subject of his Most Amazing Lifestory.
We have elected a lightweight, poetic narcissist to lead the free world through the worst sh*tstorm anyone under 70 can remember. Heaven help us.
#25
These people are pissed because Obama hasn't been radical-left enough.
Well guess what leftus, all those college surveys, community dudes and dudettes, talks with professors, all that info was gathered ran through a computer formula points given to words and chatch phrases and processed, sliced, and bulk wrapped into Obama's presentation team. You were studied and sold a product by the machine you trust.
#26
no mo uro: Make public sector employee unions illegal and a lot of this takes care of itself, lex. Dynasties require loyal footsoldiers. Remove them, and the dynasties wither on the vine.
Absolutely true, and utterly necessary, but American federalism falls down here. I doubt this can even be done legally in more than a few states in the union. Indiana's one, as Mitch D has shown, but I don't see it happening in the worst offender states-- CA, NY, NJ, IL, MI etc, compared to which Indiana's small potatoes.
If anything, the states are even MORE screwed up, more inept, more incompetent and more fiscally ruined than the federal government.
(btw, this, plus the fact that free markets need a strong regulatory apparatus to function effectively (if you don't believe me, try doing business in a place where rule of law and regulatory bodies are weak), explains why I'm not a conservative).
We don't need a conservative party. We need a new political class altogether.
As to your bias against Ivy Leaguers, I don't see the logic. There are plenty of very capable, sensible, experienced Ivy League/elite grads-- Mitch Daniels for starters (Princeton '70, Georgetown Law), or, among the punditry, Dr. Krauthammer (Harvard Med School)-- and plenty of dopey or loony-tarian conservatives/populists who went to third-rate schools. Mickey Kaus would make a superb senator; he's a Harvard Lw-educated journalist-turned-blogger.
Basically, we need sober, mature grownups who are not professional pols, who don't need the job, who have a clear grasp of national interests and power politics and who have a basic grasp of how you create wealth.
#27
People in flyover land are a little suspicious of Ivy league educated-MBAs and lawyers. These folks gravitated to Wall Street and government in the 1990s and basically turned both upside down. A lot of people lost a lot of money because they trusted these people; in many cases they lost their life savings.
no mo uro makes a lot of points which reflect what many people think. Being an Ivy league graduate doesn't preclude someone from knowing anything but it certainly doesn't insure that they know more than anyone else. As no mo uro said there are many schools that are not Ivy league that turn out competent people, able people. I've kicked around engineering schools for about 25-30 years. Interviewers have told me they like people who have good communication skills, can work with others, have good analytic skills/problem solving skills. All that said, an engineer coming out right out of college is not particularly useful for several years. We had an engineering/MBA program and the same can be said of that.
The companies that have survived often hire someone who can improve their position, i.e. someone who can do something. Experience is important. Being able to show what you are able to do for an organization is important. Computer specialists, electronics technicians, mechanics, etc. are often the people who are most needed.
A man whom I admire very much is now aging. He flew the Burma Hump during WWII. He returned here and started a company which has been highly successful. He once told me that he would rather hire an engineer than an MBA. I asked him why and he said the MBAs are not particularly useful to him.
#1
Some prejudices are tolerated by elites in this country. Examples: One can regularly smear political conservatives as know-nothings; Evangelical Christians as believers in a fantasy; Roman Catholics for their church's stand against abortion and birth control; and Republicans as greedy people who care only about profit and power. Bill Maher regularly serves up a menu of these prejudices on his HBO program. Comedy Central is working on a cartoon series mocking Jesus Christ, but altered a sketch featuring the Prophet Muhammad for fear of a Muslim backlash. Some prejudices must be controlled. One prejudice seems to be gaining a certain cachet. Like a volcano, it occasionally erupts to reveal what has been churning below the surface. That prejudice is anti-Semitism...
So, the bigotry, antisemitism, and racism that liberals are so fond of railing about for others is found within themselves.
#2
There was no reason to spike this column. It was not hate-fired vitriol. It was just an opinion by Cal about Helen Thomas and her *ahem* unfortunate remarks. Now Cal Thomas' column will go round the internet like Jack the Bear.
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
06/08/2010 12:03 Comments ||
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#3
Boy how the definition of "spiked" has been changed by the internet. Putting the dead in dead-tree media...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
06/08/2010 12:13 Comments ||
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#4
It is downright bizarre that this column was spiked. By most any measure it is tame. It is limited to just Thomas as well, while it could have indicted so many others for just as grievous displays, and who weren't fired over it.
Jesse Jackson and his "Hymietown" comment.
"You cannot go to a 7-11 or Dunkin Donuts unless you have a slight Indian Accent." - Senator Joe Biden
"Is you their black-haired answer-mammy who be smart? Does they like how you shine their shoes, Condoleezza? Or the way you wash and park the whitey's cars?" -- Left-wing radio host Neil Rogers
"Blacks and Hispanics are too busy eating watermelons and tacos" to learn how to read and write." -- Mike Wallace, CBS News
"You f*cking Jew b@stard." -- Hillary Clinton to political operative Paul Fray
"White folks was in caves while we was building empires... We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it." -- Rev. Al Sharpton
#5
Of course there was a reason to spike the column: Mr. Thomas defined antisemitism as Jew-hatred. This reflects the historical fact that the term was invented as a polite replacement for the crass German word Judenhass ("Jew hatred"). This removes the popular antisemitic rationalization that Arabs are also semites, and therefore incapable of antisemitism or are therefore equally victims of it.
Revealing such shibboleths is simply not done, my dears.
Osama bin Laden's hiding place was pinned down for the first time Monday, June 7, by the Kuwaiti (newspaper) Al-Siyassa Monday, June 7, as the mountainous town of Savzevar in the northeastern Iranian province of Khorasan, 220 km west of Mashhad.
He is said to have lived there under Tehran's protection for the last five years, along with Ayman Al-Zawahiri and five other high-ranking al Qaeda leaders.
Intelligence sources disclosed Monday night that Turkish prime minister Recep Erdogan and his intelligence chiefs are well aware that Bin Laden and Zawahiri are hiding in Iran.
The leak to the Kuwait paper was intended to show the Obama administration that the Turkish leader's ties with Iran had grown intense enough for him to be fully in the picture of Iran's secret sanctuary for the authors of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.
Savzevar (alt. Sabzevar), a small town of about a quarter of a million inhabitants, is connected by road to Tehran and Mashhad and has a small airport. A center for producing grapes and raisins, its location is remote and difficult to access because it is enclosed by lofty mountains and a salt desert 50,000 square kilometers in area.
On May 13, American intelligence sources reported in detail that senior al Qaeda operatives living in Iran had been allowed to leave the country through Syria to orchestrate terrorist attacks on American targets. Among them was Saif al-Adel, who is believed to have been assigned with planning an attack on the world soccer games opening in South Africa on June 12.
Those sources noted that Saif al-Adel had received his instructions directly from Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri but did not reveal knowledge of their presence in Iran. Sabzevar, Iran, is quite visible on Google maps.
#2
Not always. They put out three types of stories. The first are generic press releases from someone else. These tend to be reliable. The second are likely official leaks from Israeli government agencies. These are so-so. The third group are opinion pieces and wishful thinking, which are terribly unreliable.
In this case, the cite a Kuwaiti newspaper. Unfortunately it is in Arabic. But it is likely that their translation is accurate, even if the source is questionable. They also quote US intel sources that are verifiable.
So on a scale of 1 to 10, I would give this a five or six. The information, if true, is possible, not farcical. It is based in the present, not speculating about the future. Third, it is the sort of thing Israeli intelligence would want to leak to the Internet.
So, again, all told, the article cred is about a 5 or 6.
#9
ION WAFF > GUARDIAN.UK > [Erdogan] TURKEY IS CALLING FOR JIHAD AGZ ISRAEL, as strongly inferred by PAST TURKISH HISTOIRE + ONGOING FLAG(S)-WAVING POPULAR PROTESTS AGZ ISRAEL after Israel's attack on the Gaza Aid flotilla???
* SAME >[Strongest yet] NEW UN SANCTIONS AGZ IRAN EXPECTED WITHIN 24 HOURS.
Lest we fergit, IRAN > IMPOSITION OF NEW HARSH SANCTIONS AGZ IRAN + NUCPROGS IS AKIN/TANTAMOUNT TO A [US-Israeli]DECLARATION OF WAR AGZ IRAN.
...Helen Thomas was an unreadable and unread columnist, and the only time she generates so much traffic that it crashes the site is the announcement that her career's self-destructed. That tells you a lot about American newspapering right there. Good thing two columnists didn't say something dumb or the site could have been out for weeks....
...A guy with a flip camera just took out one of the most storied names in American journalism. Presumably US newspaper managements have been assured by Obama, Pelosi, Frank et al that that bailout's a-comin' any day now. The alternative is that they're inept timeserving mediocrities too dullwitted even to know they're going over the falls....
Posted by: Mike ||
06/08/2010 06:56 ||
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#1
You see how fast it happened?
She made the statements and was recorded saying them with her picture talking... right there.
And then bingo she's gone back to Poland in what...three days, was it?
It can happen that fast and the MSM gets it under the belt deep and quick. And their guts drop on their shoes. That fast.
It can happen to you. It can happen to Obama just as quick if he slips and someone records it and you cant deny it happened or shut the camera off.
Elites dont control things, the MSM isnt all powerful, and all it takes is in and out and get an artery. They got Helen Thomas in an artery.
But it can happen to anyone up there in the private halls of power....there are more of us than there are of them.
#2
This story is one of Andrew Breitbart's Big Journalism plays.
Friday morning I received an email from a friend, Rabbi David Nessenoff which provided me my first look at the video of the now famous explosive interview with Helen Thomas. David had sent the video to a friend at a newspaper who didnt think it was a big story. My response to David was, give me a few hours and the video would become viral, and given some luck the video would have a half of million views before the end of the weekend (there were a million).
I quickly posted it on my site The Lid, wrote it up for Big Journalism, gave it to Scott Baker who posted it on Breitbart TV , and sent out tweets and emails to most of the large sites. Before I left on a five hour car ride to my brothers house for the weekend the video was posted on the Big sites on the net. By the end of the day it was on radio and TV and the calls Thomas head were all over the place.
And for the curious, here is the interview in full -- all almost two minutes of it -- not just the exerpt we and Mr. Steyn have seen. It was posted last night just before midnight. I'm afraid I don't know how to post YouTube videos.
#3
TW-
I just now threw up a post embedding the video...not sure if someone else beat me to it.
To embed, if the embed code is not visible, mouseover the arrow in the lower-right corner of the player & click on the icon above to expose the embed code, copy the full code, paste into the RB window & preview to verify.
If I'm missing some RB parameters to correctly do this, someone please correct me...I've seen no comments to the contrary regarding my embeds. Knowing the desired size parameters would be helpful, as opposed to always relying on that which was encoded in the original.
#4
Thank you, logi_cal. I just published it -- you were indeed the first. I'm going to save your post, so next time I might be able to do it myself. :-)
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.
