President Obama and his administration told Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas during a meeting last week the U.S. foresees the creation of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, according to a top PA official speaking to WND.
"The American administration was very friendly to the position of the PA," said Nimer Hamad, Abbas' senior political adviser.
"Abu Mazen (Abbas) heard from Obama and his administration in a very categorical way that a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital is in the American national and security interest," Hamad said.
Another PA official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told WND today that Obama informed Abbas he would not let Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "get in the way" of normalizing U.S. relations with the Arab and greater Muslim world
The Obama administration won the case last month, but moved to dismiss the charges on May 15.
The complaint says the men hurled racial slurs at both blacks and whites.
A poll watcher who provided an affidavit to prosecutors in the case noted that Bartle Bull, who worked as a civil rights lawyer in the south in the 1960's and is a former campaign manager for Robert Kennedy, said it was the most blatant form of voter intimidation he had ever seen.
In his affidavit, obtained by FOX News, Bull wrote "I watched the two uniformed men confront voters and attempt to intimidate voters. They were positioned in a location that forced every voter to pass in close proximity to them. The weapon was openly displayed and brandished in plain sight of voters."
He also said they tried to "interfere with the work of other poll observers ... whom the uniformed men apparently believed did not share their preferences politically," noting that one of the panthers turned toward the white poll observers and said "you are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker."
(And why isn't there more outcry about it? CBSNBCABCWaPoNYTMSNBCCNN, why aren't you doing your jobs and investigating this? - Roland)
A toothbrush, TelePrompTer and the nuclear football - they are the essentials for a traveling President. But as Barack Obama packs for this week's historic trip to the Mideast and Europe, there is something he definitely ought to leave at home: grating apologies for America's past.
None is needed. Genuine pride in representing America will do just fine.
Our nation has no peer in liberating people from the grip of tyranny, especially in the regions Obama will visit. That's a fact of history and the President of the United States ought to take every opportunity to say so.
He certainly could say it in Egypt, where he plans to give what he called a "message about how the United States can change for the better its relationship with the Muslim world."
In every trial — every single trial — judges solemnly instruct American citizens who are compelled to perform jury duty that they will have a sworn obligation to decide cases objectively — without fear or favor. If a person is unwilling or unable to do that, if the person believes he or she has a bias or prejudice, especially one based on a belief that people are inferior or superior due to such factors as race, ethnicity, or sex, the person is not qualified to be a juror. Indeed, prospective jurors are told that they are not qualified if they harbor even the slightest doubt about their ability to put such considerations aside and render an impartial verdict. If the judge or the lawyer for either side senses bias, the juror is excused "for cause"...Here is the standard instruction:
You have two duties as a jury. Your first duty is to decide the facts from the evidence in the case. This is your job, and yours alone. Your second duty is to apply the law that I give you to the facts. You must follow these instructions, even if you disagree with them…. Perform these duties fairly and impartially. Do not allow sympathy, prejudice, fear, or public opinion to influence you. You should not be influenced by any person's race, color, religion, national ancestry, or sex
Would Judge Sotomayor be qualified to serve as a juror? Let's say she forthrightly explained to the court during the voir dire (the jury-selection phase of a case) that she believed a wise Latina makes better judgments than a white male; that she doubts it is actually possible to "transcend [one's] personal sympathies and prejudices and aspire to achieve a greater degree of fairness and integrity based on the reason of law"; and that there are "basic differences" in the way people "of color" exercise "logic and reasoning." If, upon hearing that, would it not be reasonable for a lawyer for one (or both) of the parties to ask the court to excuse her for cause? Would it not be incumbent on the court to grant that request?
(Additionally, the American Bar Association's Model Code of Judicial Conduct, Canon 4, clear states that a judge shall conduct all of the judge’s extra-judicial activities so that they do not cast reasonable doubt on the judge’s capacity to act impartially as a judge. When she said that she believed that she could make better decisions based on her "experience" as a latina woman than a white man, she proved that she's incapable of acting impartially. She must be disqualified. - Roland)
The manager of a prominent Nashville hotel cancelled a contract with a conservative foundation to hold a conference this weekend on radical Islam, apparently after learning that the group would feature a keynote address by controversial Dutch parliamentarian and filmmaker, Geert Wilders.
Muslim groups succeeded in preventing Wilders from screening “Fitna,” his 15-minute movie on radical Islam, in the House of Lords this February, on claims it was insulting to Muslims, and dogged him during a recent U.S. tour as well.
Thomas A. Negri, managing director of Loew’s Vanderbilt Hotel and Office complex in Nashville, told Newsmax on Wednesday that he had taken the extraordinary step of cancelling the conference at the last minute “for the health, safety and well-being of our guests and employees.”
The fate of Detroit isn’t a matter of economics. It’s a tragic romance, whose magic was killed by bureaucrats, bad taste and busybodies. P.J. O’Rourke on why Americans fell out of love with the automobile.
The 76-year-old holds up four fingers. "Every four minutes there is a protest with more than 100 people." Mr. Bao cites a report that estimates China sees 100,000 protests per year, up from 80,000 three years ago.
"Using the police to resolve disputes has become so common, it's as normal as eating a meal or drinking tea," he continues. "So how many 'little Tiananmens' are there? How many little Deng Xiaopings are there?" He juts his head forward and stares at me, waiting for an answer.
Mr. Bao believes that an official reassessment of Tiananmen is crucial for China's long-term stability. "You have to say it clearly: It's not a good system, it's a bad system. It has to be stated that the people who were killed [on June 4] were good people, and they shouldn't have been killed. . . . We must announce that Tiananmen was a criminal action. That soldiers, from now on and forever, cannot oppose the common people. This gun cannot be pointed at the people."
Get ready folks: America is about to own a car company. As of Monday, we the taxpayers will own more than 70 percent of GM. Whether the company will be formally renamed Government Motors remains to be seen. But that’s what it will be.
Instead of putting the failed car enterprise into bankruptcy six months ago -- where Carl Icahn or Wilbur Ross could have bought it -- the Bush administration chose Bailout Nation. Under Team Obama, that bailout has morphed into full-scale government ownership. Twenty-billion dollars of TARP money is already invested in GM, with another $50 billion on the way.
The war being waged against the West also is a war against modernity. For nearly a thousand years, Islam reigned supreme in much of the world. However, with the coming of the modern era -- generally seen as beginning in the 18th century -0 Christendom outpaced the Muslim world by almost every measure. Islamists believe the destruction of modernity is necessary if Islam is to regain the power to which it is entitled.
Epiphanies are a dime a dozen among congressional Democrats as they discover urgent new reasons to experience the almost erotic pleasure of commandeering other people's money. For example, freshman Rep. Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat whose district includes Disney World, was recently there and was inspired. The world, he realized, would be a sweeter place if Congress mandated that all companies with 100 or more employees provide a week of paid vacation
THE world trembled last year as a terrible prospect loomed: The next vice-president of the US might be a complete moron.
According to David Marr, speaking on the ABC's Q&A, Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin was "thick as a brick". Marr based this on verbal stumbles from Palin, such as the time she described two Christian preachers as "decent white folk" - only to discover that the men were black.
That sort of blunder can destroy a political career. Just as well, then, that Palin didn't actually say it. Marr did, however, in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Anyway, smart people were relieved when Palin's White House bid failed. But what if John McCain and his dimwitted running mate had been elected? Right now we'd be listening to some of the most spectacularly stupid speeches ever made.
It’s a lovely thing when the conventional wisdom proves to be so spectacularly wrong. The entire Democratic party, not to mention the media establishment, simply took as a given that suave, charming, effulgent, numinous president Barack Obama would mop the floor with grumpy, truculent, sardonic former vice-president Dick Cheney. And yet, on almost every issue he has championed since he left office, Cheney has won the debate or at least put the White House on the defensive. From the closing of Gitmo and the placement of terrorists in domestic prisons, to the release of the torture memos and the aborted release of prisoner-abuse photos, Cheney holds the higher ground politically, or in the polls, or both.
“Ah, for those carefree days, when my motto was “C’est Mon Pere Qui Paie” - it’s my father who pays - how have they gone by so quickly and weren’t they sweet… but alas, a return to New York and the reality of having to earn a living. An $80,000 starting salary, a fortune by French socialist standards, I will soon be king of the “Big Apple” and dining on caviar and champagne. WHAT! An incremental federal tax of 25%, state tax of 6.85%, city tax of 3.65%, my half of social security 6.2% and don’t forget 1.45% for Medicare - what’s left for me, only 57% and I have to pay $2,000 for a studio apartment. C’mon Pops you can help out with the rent? Oh, I’m a little short this week, you think you can give me a couple of hundred?”
Appearing on Fox News' Glenn Beck program, actor Craig T. Nelson blasts runaway government spending and abuses being levied upon taxpayers and future generations of taxpayers, and suggests that the only way to get the attention of those in charge is to starve them of the thing they need most to operate...tax revenue.
Taxpayers are on the hook for an extra $55,000 a household to cover rising federal commitments made just in the past year for retirement benefits, the national debt and other government promises, a USA TODAY analysis shows.
The 12% rise in red ink in 2008 stems from an explosion of federal borrowing during the recession, plus an aging population driving up the costs of Medicare and Social Security.
That's the biggest leap in the long-term burden on taxpayers since a Medicare prescription drug benefit was added in 2003.
The latest increase raises federal obligations to a record $546,668 per household in 2008, according to the USA TODAY analysis. That's quadruple what the average U.S. household owes for all mortgages, car loans, credit cards and other debt combined
Barack Obama's great uncle offered some blunt language as to why his nephew is visiting the memorial at the former Buchenwald concentration camp next week during his trip to Europe and the Middle East.
“This is a trip that he chose, not because of me I'm sure, but for political reasons,” Charles Payne told the German magazine Spiegel. “Perhaps his visit also has something to do with improving his standing with (German Chancellor) Angela Merkel. She gave him a hard time during his campaign and also afterwards.”
Fidel Castro criticized former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney for defending American interrogation methods against terror suspects, saying in comments published Wednesday that torture should never be used to extract information.
Last week, I called the Justice Department to inquire about an unusual decision they made to dismiss default judgements in a voter intimidation lawsuit the government filed under the Bush administration against the New Black Panther Party.
You remember the case of the menacing NBPP thugs who threatened voters at a Philly precinct. I blogged about it many times since the fall.
The Bush DOJ filed suit against Malik Shabazz and two of the local NBPP radicals who were on site — one with a billy club. None of them filed an answer to the lawsuit, putting them all into default. I am told this is the easiest way to win a lawsuit. But instead of taking the default judgment that DOJ is entitled to against all of the defendants, the department last week dismissed the lawsuit against two out of the three defendants. As Election Journal (which broke the story with exclusive video of the intimidation) notes, one of the individual defendants who was dismissed, Jerry Jackson, “is an elected member of the Philadelphia Democratic Committee and was a credentialed poll watcher.”
According to a legal source familiar with DOJ procedures, dismissing a lawsuit won by default is unheard of.
Memorial Day 2009, however, marks the first of what may be 25 Memorial Days that Army Ranger 1st Lieutenant Michael Behenna will spend behind bars in Ft. Leavenworth. In March of this year, Behenna was sentenced to 25 years for killing known Al Qaeda operative Ali Mansur. Behenna has maintained, and forensic evidence supports, that the killing occurred in self-defense.
And so within hours of posting my Gregalogue, a bilious blogger did what bilious bloggers do best: call me a racist. Which is awesome, because it proves my point. In the world of racial politics, all you have to do is call someone a racist, and you win!
There appears to be a side to the Chrysler bankruptcy that has the look of an ugly partisanship not seen in this town since Tricky Dick was in the White House composing his enemies list and checking it twice every night while watching the evening TV newscast.
Bloggers on the Right side of the Blogosphere are up in arms over data suggesting that President Barack Obama’s White House auto industry potentates are targeting for closure Chrysler dealers with records of contributing either to Republicans like Sen. John McCain or to other Democrats in the 2008 presidential primary.
Posts at RedState, Reliapundit, American Thinker, Gateway Pundit, Joey Smith and Doug Ross pointed initially at the remarkable number of closed Chrysler dealerships whose owners happen to have been contributors to Obama opponents, mainly Republicans.
As columnist Michelle Malkin reports, La Raza seeks to inculcate young people with its worldview by funding a number of charter schools that advocate ethnic separatism and anti-American, anti-white attitudes.
With regard to national security concerns, La Raza has strongly opposed most of the U.S. government’s post-9/11 counterterrorism efforts, alleging that they have “undermined” the rights of “noncitizen Latinos.”
For example: La Raza was a signatory to a March 17, 2003 letter exhorting members of the U.S. Congress to oppose Patriot Act II on grounds that it “contain[ed] a multitude of new and sweeping law enforcement and intelligence gathering powers … that would severely dilute, if not undermine, many basic constitutional rights”; it has endorsed the Community Resolution to Protect Civil Liberties campaign, a project that tries to influence city councils to pass resolutions to be non-compliant with the provisions of the Patriot Act; it endorsed the December 18, 2001 “Statement of Solidarity with Migrants,” which was drawn up by the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights and called upon the U.S. government to “end discriminatory policies passed on the basis of legal status in the wake of September 11″; and it endorsed the Civil Liberties Restoration Act of 2004, which was designed to roll back, in the name of protecting civil liberties, vital national-security policies that had been adopted after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
NCLR’s major policy positions also include the following:
Sotomayor “is one of only three federal appellate judges in America to issue a court opinion saying that the Second Amendment does not apply to states,” warns Former Ohio secretary of state and gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell.
Citing the Maloney v. Cuomo case, Blackwell concludes, “that means if Chicago, or even the state of Illinois or New York, wants to ban you from owning any guns at all, even in your own house, that’s okay with her.”
A local pastor and his wife claim they were interrogated by a San Diego County official, who then threatened them with escalating fines if they continued to hold bible studies in their home, 10News reported.
Broyles said, "The county asked, 'Do you have a regular meeting in your home?' She said, 'Yes.' 'Do you say amen?' 'Yes.' 'Do you pray?' 'Yes.' 'Do you say praise the Lord?' 'Yes.'"
The county employee notified the couple that the small bible study, with an average of 15 people attending, was in violation of county regulations, according to Broyles.
I spent the Memorial Day weekend with Rahm Emanuel. No, I wasn't hanging out at the beach with President Obama's chief of staff. Rather, I spent the weekend reading Naftali Bendavid's The Thumpin': How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution.
Emanuel's tenure as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during the 2006 election cycle is the model Republicans must attempt to reverse-engineer if they hope to regain power in Washington anytime soon. And Republicans are never going to succeed if they listen to those who tell them the reason they've been losing elections is that the GOP is too "mean-spirited."
God save us from liberal "empathy." After President Barack Obama announced his empathetic Supreme Court nominee this week, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, we found out that some people are more deserving of empathy than others.
For example, Judge Sotomayor apparently "empathized" more with New Haven, Conn., government officials than with white and Hispanic firefighters who were denied promotions by the city on the basis of their race.
Let's hope she's as empathetic to New Haven residents who die in fires fought by inferior firefighters as a result of her decision.
After the wind blows down the teleprompter of Vice President Biden at the Air Force Academy graduation he joked "what am I going to tell the President when I tell him his teleprompter is broken? What will he do then?"
(Joe Biden. The gift that just keeps on giving. - Roland)
President Nicolas Sarkozy's desire to appoint an outspoken climate-change sceptic to a new French super-ministry of industry and innovation has drawn strong protests from party colleagues and environmentalists.
Claude Allègre argues that global warming is not necessarily caused by human activity. Putting him in charge of scientific research would be tantamount to "giving the finger to scientists", said Nicolas Hulot, France's best-known environmental activist.
The government's stake in the company originally was to be 50 percent, according to GM's regulatory filings. But it now could be as high as 69 percent. The Canadian government also could get equity for up to $8 billion in aid for the automaker.
The UAW disclosed Tuesday it agreed to take a much smaller 17.5 percent stake in GM, plus a warrant for 2.5 percent more to partially fund the $20 billion that GM must put into a trust that will start paying retiree health care costs next year.
From Politico: White House press secretary Robert Gibbs issued a pointed warning to opponents of Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court nomination Wednesday, urging critics to measure their words carefully during a politically charged confirmation debate.
“I think it is probably important for anybody involved in this debate to be exceedingly careful with the way in which they’ve decided to describe different aspects of this impending confirmation,” Gibbs said.
He was replying to a question from CBS’s Chip Reid about a blog post by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich accusing Sotomayor of imposing identity politics on the bench and declaring: “A white man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. A Latina woman racist should also withdraw.”
In 2001, then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer drew criticism in the press for suggesting Americans “need to watch what they say” in the overheated aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
But earlier in the newscast, CBS reporter Priya David failed to make a connection between a socialist and Sotomayer's views. As the quote from Sotomayer's college yearbook was enlarged, David concluded her review of the judge's life story:
Her past also offers a hint of what's ahead. From her Princeton University yearbook, Sotomayor's chosen quotation: “I am not a champion of lost causes, but of causes not yet won.”
David didn't name the author of the quote, but the image showed: “Norman Thomas.” That would be the same Norman Thomas who was the Socialist Party presidential nominee from 1928 through 1948 (and also the grandfather of Newsweek's Evan Thomas).
Neither ABC or NBC mentioned or showed the yearbook page and/or quote. Beliefnet, the MRC's Rich Noyes noticed, pointed out that the White House distributed yearbook page image to the news media.
(The GOP needs to stand up and obstruct Sotomayor and every nominee that Obama sends up that thinks like her. If they won't step up now, then, in my view, the party's finished. They're useless to anyone. Except maybe the Democrats. - Roland)
With Liberty and Tyranny, Levin turns on a bright light in the darkness that conservatives find themselves in. While we’re living through a crisis of confidence, Levin leads by sharing what he’s learned about the land he loves through years of political, policy, and legal experience and study. “I do not have all the answers,” he writes, with an honest humility that conservatism and public policy and politics could use more of. Levin does not claim to be the “referee” among conservatives. And he doesn’t feel the need to remake conservatism in his own image. He has simply written a book on conservatism for people who want to know it still exists, should exist, needs to exist, and remains relevant to their lives.
In Liberty and Tyranny Levin offers advice for every American, encouraging parents and grandparents to raise young patriots, “a generation of new conservatives,” “to believe in and appreciate the principles of the American civil society and stress the import of preserving and improving the society.”
What he offers in Liberty and Tyranny is both educational and concrete. Liberty and Tyranny provides a blueprint for conservative action with ideas on taxation, immigration, and more. As a call to conservative action, Levin writes in his final chapter: “Republicans seem clueless on how to slow, contain, and reverse the Statist’s agenda. They seem to fear returning to first principles, lest they be rejected by the electorate, and so prefer to tinker ineffectively and timidly on the edges. As such, are they not abandoning what they claim to support?” This is something Mark Levin cannot be accused of.
The justices uphold the same-sex marriage ban but also rule that the 18,000 gay couples who wed before the November vote will stay married. The decision is sure to spark another ballot box fight.
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