"Tel Aviv has always been a bastion of pluralism, tolerance and openness, and no one will succeed in hurting the city's character. Our city will continue to be a home for the gay community, and we will fight for the right of every person to live his life in the city according to his beliefs and conscience," – Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai.
I would have thought the New York Times could do more with its own staff than a few sentences of reportage.
NIAC notes how previous advocates for engaging Iran are now holding off while the hawks are suddenly calling for talks:
Why the role reversal? Many in Washington believe engagement is a pointless exercise and are eager to impose sanctions and/or bomb Iran. The perma-skeptics of diplomacy think we should impose an artificial deadline, rush to engage, and then run headlong into Iran’s political paralysis. Their plan would have us miss the deadline, sanction Iran as much as possible, and then lobby for the U.S. to bomb Iran when sanctions fail to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Rock Creek, California, 7 am
John McWhorter wonders what we will take away from the latest Teachable Moment:
Any lesson we were supposed to learn from Gates-gate directly is, at this point, too thin to register meaningfully as details have come out. […] Officer Justin Barrett tossing off messages calling Gates a “banana-eating jungle monkey” – you couldn’t write this thing better — could be seen as teaching us something: that casual racism is still with us. But didn’t we already know that? The racism of interest is that which deprives people of their rights. To seek a society where there is no racism whatsoever of the parochial barstool sort is to seek a society where no one passes gas. I apologize for the vulgarity, but I consider the analogy precisely correct. There will be no society of Homo sapiens where occasional eruptions of the Barrett sort are unknown: we are animals.
McWhorter then gets to what he says is the real culprit of racial injustice in America: a War On Drugs that disproportionately targets minorities.
NIAC translates:
“we were…..revolution…..velvet matches……I’m sorry the interrogator’s hand writing is not readable."
The bromance was deeper than we thought.
A reader writes:
I am a self employed environmental risk manager who depends on the trading of commercial and industrial real estate, so suffice it to say that my business has been nearly destroyed.
My focus over the past three months has been visiting clients of all cloth in an effort to stay in touch and learn how different segments are coping with extreme market conditions. What I have found gives me some hope that this economy will eventually emerge stronger.
Most conversations begin with some lamentations about the cliff that we have gone off, but always move towards discussing what steps they are taking to be more competitive and what new areas can be explored. It seems as though everyone I have met have been engaging in serious brainstorming for new innovations. Staff meetings have taken on a new imperative and no longer represent an hour long discussion with no results.
In every building in every city in the country, there are groups of individuals who are committed to finding news ways of conducting business and new ways to succeed. Below the surface out there, much dynamic thinking is being done and one would have to think that this will eventually pay dividends for businesses small and large.
This is the first I've heard of "fire-safe cigarettes" since I've never smoked tobacco. I have no idea how bad they taste, but my instinctive sympathy lies with this long-time reader (and one of my favorite emailers) about the fag-bashing (pardon my English) of the health and safety killjoys:
We Missourians who choose to smoke got our latest – and unspeakably vile – taste of this neo-totalitarianism which the Puritan killjoys Trojan-horsed into law: the so-called "Fire-Safe Cigarettes" that taste worse than shit. Actually they don't taste like shit, they taste like dirty pennies and burned plastic. This vile taste stays, it clings even after you brush your teeth, even after you've slept overnight and again brushed your teeth, and it sickens you to your stomach. There was just one diabolical purpose behind the Trojan horse "FSC" cigarette, and that was to enable the busy-bodies to reach beyond their already successful efforts to ban smoking in public places (and in some jurisdictions, even in citizens' own homes) to stick their foul killjoy hands, their very distaste for liberties they don't approve of, into the very mouths of people who choose to smoke. I no longer enjoy living in and I no longer want to live
in these United States.
I'd actually prefer to live in Red fucking China where you can at least buy a decent smoke instead of a cigarette that, well, doesn't smoke (you can't even call cigarettes "smokes" anymore) and that tastes like some mad cruel totalitarian alchemist's vile compound.
The killjoys have done their right-alienating job very well indeed: now they've reached their killjoy-fouled hands into people's formerly free mouths. All in the pursuit of uniformly super-efficient, completely infatilized, helpless, utterly dependent human bodies to serve the state as efficiently as they can be compelled to serve it. These new Puritans are also leading instigators among the people who will make Mammon-damned sure that pot is never decriminalized or legalized – after all, pot serves no efficient purpose, it doesn't promote uniformity or productivity, and – Heaven forfend – people might enjoy smoking it.
A report that Obama is going to turn to Congress if he must.
Yes: there's a third birth certificate! A reader writes:
"Dreams from My Father" tells us that Barack Obama Sr. already had a Kenyan wife and children who were living in Kenya when he met Stanley Ann Dunham in Hawaii and that Obama Sr.'s dad back in Kenya was not one bit happy about his son's second and concurrent wife being a white American.
So the birthers ask us to believe that Barack Obama Sr., a University of Hawaii student, took his teen-aged American wife to Kenya during summer break, when she was 8 or 9 months pregnant, when his father was disgruntled about the whole thing, when his Kenyan wife and kids would probably have been part of the welcoming committee, while he was a student without a lot of money to pay for a lot of flying around, so she could have the baby there, half a world away from her home and her mother, and then they could go right back to Hawaii so he could start school again in fall semester the following month. And what exactly would have been the point of doing so?
Well, the alternative is that none of that stuff is true because Barack Jr. just made it up when, as a recent law school grad., he wrote "Dreams from My Father". He made it all up to throw everybody off the scent during his future Presidential bid. In reality his Kenyan grandfather was ecstatic about his parents' marriage, there was no Kenyan wife and there were no Kenyan half-siblings, Obama Sr. was a jet-setter with plenty of cash to fly them around the globe and Stanley Ann Dunham's parents thought it was exciting to have their 18 year old daughter give birth half a world away from home (and near her husband's other wife and kids). But, of course, if he had said all THAT in his book…then people would have suspected that he was born in Kenya!
And so Barack Jr., who knew that he he was disqualified from being President by the fact of his Kenyan birth, nevertheless thought he could get away with it and spent years and tears and a whole lot of money trying to get a job that he knew he could be disqualified for at the drop of a birth certificate, with those lies in "Dreams from my Father" being the first nefarious step.
I think that's the current theory, but I got lost in the weeds of this a while back. I trust FactCheck.
The Dish 