‘Serious threat to Venezuela’s Jews’
J’POST:
A report by the human rights watchdog of the Organization of American States warns of a possible “threat to the life and physical integrity of the Jewish community in Venezuela” due to the Chavez regime’s violations of the political and human rights of its citizens.
In a lengthy report publicized in late February, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) accused the government of Venezuela of fostering an atmosphere of “political intolerance” and “a climate hostile to the free exercise of dissenting political participation.”
It blasted the prevailing “citizen insecurity” in the country and saved its harshest criticism for “the prevailing impunity affecting cases of human rights violations,” including in cases of police misconduct, abuse of authority, and even torture.
[...]
Immune to Crosses, Garlic, and Silver Bullets, ACORN Rises from the Dead
by Matthew Vadum, NewsReal:
As ACORN gears up to use your tax dollars to influence future elections, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is conducting a “massive” probe of ACORN Housing Corp., a source familiar with the ongoing investigation says.
A spokesman for HUD’s inspector general refused to confirm or deny whether ACORN Housing was being investigated.
[...]
Although ACORN is now converting state chapters into new shell corporations operated out of the same old ACORN offices and staffed by many of the same people, ACORN Housing opted simply to change its name.
ACORN’s latest public relations ruse may give it an opportunity to take in untold millions of taxpayer dollars under cover of darkness just in time to cause trouble during the 2012 election cycle.
The ruse consists of ACORN’s effort to pass off various state chapters as “new” groups supposedly independent of ACORN. In this rebranding charade state chapters are pretending to break away from the national ACORN group and reincorporate themselves as independent organizations.
But ACORN Housing is rebranding itself a little differently. In a marketing-savvy move, ACORN Housing has been rechristened Affordable Housing Centers of America Inc., which allows the entity to continue using AHC as an acronym.
[...]
Wisconsin AG charges five with election fraud, two from ACORN
by Ed Morrissey:
According to Maria Miles, ACORN required employees to register five people in a six-hour period. Over the course of a week, that requirement gradually increased to 20 new registrants in a six-hour period. If they failed to meet their goals on any one day, they would get docked an hour’s pay. If they failed to meet that goal three days in a row, ACORN would fire them.
So instead of getting fired, ACORN workers began registering each other. Not only did that protect their jobs, but one of them began having sex with the supervisor in order to keep from getting fired:
Miles indicated that at one point, Gabriele Robinson began sleeping with their supervisor, Edward Williams. Miles stated she would go to Robinson’s residence and hang out for the day. She stated at the end of the day, Williams signed off as though they had turned in their 20 signatures for that day, giving them their pay. Miles stated that she and Robinson did this at least once a week, and that they received payments for those days when they did not turn in registrations because Robinson was sleeping with Williams.
Miles also advised the agents that the individuals would travel in groups and, if and individual registered a citizen to vote, the other SRDs would tell the citizen, “It doesn’t hurt if you sign this one also.” Thus, multiple SRDs recorded a signature from the same person. Miles stated that they were “all hoodlums” working for ACORN and they all had criminal histories, and that they were going to “do whatever they had to do” to be able to gain their money at the end of the day.
Charming. What a splendid work environment! No wonder James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles found ACORN staffers to be so helpful at promoting prostitution rings.
Update: This comes at the same time that the county DA’s office accuses the police of dragging their feet on these cases:
[...]
The jihad in Nigeria
Melanie Phillips:
Utterly appalling violence by Muslims against Christians in Nigeria where the latest tally after weekend attacks on three mostly Christian villages is some 500 dead. The media have described these events as ‘riots’; I would call this a jihadi pogrom. It is but the latest episode in what the media persist in characterising as inter-ethnic violence, but which is in fact a systematic attempt by Muslims to murder and ethnically cleanse the Christian community. The onslaught is described as ‘retaliation ‘ for violent attacks in Jos last January, in which the majority of the victims were Muslim. But as the Barnabas Fund reports, there is evidence that those January attacks were in fact Christian retaliation against Muslim aggression — in particular on that occasion an attack on a church — which has been going on for years.
[...]
Islamic Assailants Kill Hundreds of Christians Near Jos, Nigeria
CDN:
An uneasy calm prevailed in Plateau state, Nigeria today following the killing of hundreds of Christians early yesterday morning in three farming villages near Jos by ethnic Fulani Muslims.
The mostly ethnic Berom victims included many women and children killed with machetes by rampaging Fulani herdsmen. About 75 houses were also burned.
State Information Commissioner Gregory Yenlong confirmed that about 500 persons were killed in the attacks, which took place mainly in Dogo Nahawa, Zot and Rastat villages.
[...]
Reconciliation Is a Deceptive Distraction from the True Intentions
by SusanAnne Hiller, BG:
Building on a previous post exposing that Harry Reid took the existing House-passed bill, H.R. 3590, entitled the Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009 and replaced the existing bill language, via an amendment, with the Senate’s version of the healthcare bill–creating a new H.R. 3590–the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Engrossed Amendment as Agreed to by Senate).
I stand by my assertion that Reid took H.R. 3590–knowing that all bills that raise revenue must originate in the House per the Constitution–as evidenced by the actual bill text dated December 24, 2009 seen here in a screen shot and his trick:
[...]
On Not Reading The Signature in the Cell: A Response to Francisco Ayala (Part 1)
Stephen C. Meyer:
No doubt it happens all the time. There must be many book reviews written by reviewers who have scarcely cracked the pages of the books they purport to review. But those who decide to write such blind reviews typically make at least some effort to acquire information about the book in question so they can describe its content accurately—if, for no other reason, than to avoid embarrassing themselves. Unfortunately, in his review of my book Signature in the Cell (titled ironically, “On Reading the Cell’s Signature”), eminent evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala does not appear to have even made a search for the crib notes online. Indeed, from reading his review it appears that he did little more than crack the title page and table of contents—if that. As a result, his review misrepresents the thesis and topic of the book and even misstates its title.
The title of my book is not Signature of the Cell as Ayala repeatedly refers to it, but Signature in the Cell.
The thesis of the book is not that “chance, by itself, cannot account for the genetic information found in the genomes of organisms” as he claims, but instead that intelligent design can explain, and does provide the best explanation for (among many contenders, not just chance) the origin of the information necessary to produce the first living cell.
[...]
Indonesia: Forced church closings spike
By Peter Gelling, GlobalPost:
Packed into the living room of a small house here, several hundred Christians, all dressed in their Sunday best, whispered to each other over the sermon.
“But as an Indonesian and as a follower of Christ, we will still worship,” said Pieterson Purba, a visiting pastor, in response to news that local authorities planned to seal off their makeshift church and force them to move. “And with nowhere else to go, we will continue to worship right here in this house.”
A week later, on Feb. 28, an angry mob of fundamentalist Muslims attacked their morning service for the second time, demanding they leave the neighborhood.
“Where should we go?
[...]
One year in and Obama doesn’t have any foreign leader friends
Rick Moran, AT:
It’s a small detail, worthy of discussion only because it highlights a much larger problem. President Obama apparently doesn’t have any close friends among foreign leaders according to this Washington Post piece by Jackson Diehl:
[...]
As I said, this is not an earth shattering revelation. But as one more indication that we have a dangerously naive, arrogant, and perhaps even megalomaniac for a president, it should worry us.
The meltdown of the climate campaign
BY Steven F. Hayward:
It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago—changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more.
The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing calls for a serious shakeup. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the self-serving coalition of environmentalists and big business hoping to create a carbon cartel, is falling apart in the wake of the collapse of any prospect of enacting cap and trade in Congress. Meanwhile, the climate campaign’s fallback plan to have the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the cumbersome Clean Air Act is generating bipartisan opposition. The British media—even the left-leaning, climate alarmists of the Guardian and BBC—are turning on the climate campaign with a vengeance.
[...]
Today’s Revolutionary Aristocracy
The View From 1776:
Liberal-progressives are a self-annointed aristocracy that presumes the right to impose its will upon our nation.
Since the last decades of the 19th century, the United States has suffered slowly escalating conflict between its founding ethos and the ideology of secular socialism, the latter represented by the liberal-progressive elite.
The aim of the conflict initiated by liberal-progressives has been nothing short of revolutionary overthrow, however gradually executed, of the original constitutional structure of the nation and its replacement by an all-powerful, collectivized national government. Such a government reduces the citizenry of the United States to servility under liberal-progressive bureaucrats in Washington, DC. Think, for example, of the Environmental Protection Agency’s unilateral move to usurp regulation of CO2 in the face of majority opposition in Congress, an action that will bureaucratically doom much of the nation’s manufacturing and mining industries.
[...]
Political Agendas Continue to Drive Climate Fiasco
By Dr. Tim Ball:
The greatest scandal connected to global warming is not exaggeration, fraud or destruction of data to conceal the weakness of the argument. It is those who are personally profiting from promoting this fantasy at the expense of the rest of us.
The comment is absolutely wrong because by far the greatest scandal is the continued political exploitation, fraud and destruction of the economy.
Exploitation of global warming underscores a fundamental difference between left wing ideology from communism through socialism, and free market capitalism.
[...]
NYT and WaPo: Muhammad Is the Prophet of God
By Johanna Markind, AT:
If the New York Times views Jesus as “undisputed and therefore preferred,” its current practice regarding Muhammad does not meet the same standard. As a historical personage, Muhammad is, well, at least as “undisputed” as Jesus. Thus his name alone should presumably be preferred. But in fact the paper regularly refers to Muhammad by his religious title, “Prophet Muhammad.”
This is not the exception, but it appears to be the rule in major media today, including:
* A Times article on Yale University Press’ refusal to print the Danish cartoons of “Prophet Muhammad” in a book about the controversy (one reference to “Prophet Muhammad,” one to “the prophet, Muhammad,” and one to “the prophet”).
* Recent Times stories about Iran and Iraq (“Prophet Muhammad” identified as the grandfather of Imam Hussein, whose death is commemorated on the Shiite holy day of Ashura).
* A Times report on the collapse of Christian communities in the Middle East (Muhammad identified as “Prophet Muhammad”).
* A Washington Post article about political unrest in Iran during Ashura (two references to Muhammad, the first as the “prophet Muhammad”).
In short, the foundational figure of Islam is treated with a reverence not meted out to the foundational figure of Christianity or other faiths like Judaism. Newspaper references to Moses do not identify him by titles such as “Prophet” or “Rabbeinu,” “our teacher,” the traditional Jewish honorific applied to him. There could be several reasons for this. Editors may be attempting to educate a non-Muslim readership or to placate Muslim readers and/or reporters.
[...]
-
Archives
- May 2012 (577)
- April 2012 (624)
- March 2012 (635)
- February 2012 (782)
- January 2012 (672)
- December 2011 (519)
- November 2011 (361)
- October 2011 (539)
- September 2011 (500)
- August 2011 (584)
- July 2011 (523)
- June 2011 (451)
-
Categories
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
