Saturday, June 05, 2010

Soccer Dad

Soccer Dad

Violating history

Posted: 04 Jun 2010 02:10 AM PDT

Robert Mackey of the New York Times, Lede Blog, wrote in Echoes of Raid on 'Exodus' Ship in 1947:

To some Israeli observers, it was impossible to miss the parallels between Monday's killing of pro-Palestinian activists by Israel's military in international waters, as commandos intercepted a flotilla of ships trying to break the Israeli naval blockade on Gaza, and a seminal event in the Jewish struggle for an independent homeland.

To which Seth Lipsky replied (in the not permanently dormant NY Sun) and challenged the NYTimes as an institution:

The one thing the Times failed to credit then was the idea that the real source of hope for the Jews was the prospect of Israel itself. That hope was made clear in the months and years after the voyage of the Exodus in 1947, if it had not been made so clear, at least to some, in the millennia before. So what has the Times learned since then? Is it still blind to the Zionist idea? Will it back the desire of those aboard the Turkish-backed flotilla to get to Gaza 60-some years after it failed to back the Jews who sought to get to Israel? Or will it finally see that there is no parallel between the voyage of the Exodus, which was filled with refugees with no home, and the voyage of the Turkish flotilla, which is part of a war to destroy the home that was finally built to accommodate the exodus from Europe of those Jews who survived the Holocaust and made it to the land they'd been promised?

(Unfortunately, Mackey isn't the only one making such offensive comparisons.)

Stephanie Guttmann, quoting her father, tells us what those running a real blockade endured.

These refugee ships were not elegant cruisers - they were tiny rust-buckets. The human cargo was not made up of Swedish Nobel Laureates or American legislators or activists with time on their hands; they were Holocaust survivors -- thousands of them orphaned children who had been promised homes on Zionist kibbutzes. Often these children didn't know much about Palestine, except that there they would find food, shelter, and a measure of stability, in a world that had turned its back on them.

The Royal Navy would intercept these ships at sea, swarm over the sides, and send most passengers to a detainee camp on the island of Cyprus, which held tens of thousands of people. And because the refugees were not prisoners of war, the camp did not have to meet Geneva Convention standards, so they were housed in tents whose floors were often awash with mud.

I'm too sexy for my job

Posted: 04 Jun 2010 01:40 AM PDT

No. Not me. Her.

A Latina lovely says her bosses at Citigroup canned her for flaunting her ample assets at a midtown bank.

Dangerously curvy Debrahlee Lorenzana contends her ex-bosses at Citibank in the Chrysler Building banned her from wearing sexy outfits or heels deemed "too distracting" for male coworkers.

You can tell that this isn't the New York Times. "Dangerously curvy?"

via memeorandum

Would that make "Right said fired?"

The poisoned fruit of ga resolution 2708

Posted: 04 Jun 2010 01:07 AM PDT

After becoming the 1137th pundit to declare (against all evidence) that Turkey is an ally of the United States, David Ignatius reverts to blaming Israel first in The U.S. needs to keep nudging Israel on a Gaza fix:

The Obama team recognizes that Israel will act in its interests, but it wants Jerusalem to consider U.S. interests, as well. The administration has communicated at a senior level its fear that the Israelis sometimes "care about their equities, but not about ours."

This cautionary message -- that Israel must act as a more reliable and responsible partner -- may be the most important one conveyed this week.

The absurdity of this line of "reasoning" is that when Israel withdrew from Gaza, it was supposed to become a mini-Dubai (as Thomas Friedman put it the other day), instead Israel got a mini-terror state that threatened its southern population. Then Israel watched as the world stood by and refused to allowed Hezbollah, Syria and Iran violate Security Council Resolution 1701 with impunity allowing Hezbollah to stockpile three times the number of missiles at had before the 2006 war with Israel. Given that Israel sees that it can't rely on others for its security, it's not unreasonable for Israel to rely on itself.

And Ignatius shouldn't worry his little head about this. Figthing Hamas - a proxy of Iran - serves America's interests too.

Leon Wieseltier also gets things wrong (via memeorandum)

It is also the inevitable consequence of Benjamin Netanyahu's cunning pronouncement last year that Israel is now endangered by "the Iran threat, the missile threat, and the threat I call the Goldstone threat." The equivalence was morally misleading, and therefore dangerous. Ideological warfare is not military warfare. I have studied the entirety of the Goldstone Report, and whereas I do not doubt (and wrote in this magazine in the days before Goldstone) that Operation Cast Lead caused the unjustifiable death of non-combatants, I also do not doubt that the Goldstone Report, which was nastily indifferent to Israel's security predicament and to the ethical challenges of Israeli self-defense, was an instrument in a broad campaign of delegitimation against Israel--and yet the threat of delegitimation is not like the threat of destruction. It is different in kind. A commando operation is not an appropriate response to an idea. "This was no Love Boat," Netanyahu said yesterday. "It was a hate boat." He is right, but so what? The threat of delegitimation is not a military problem and it does not have a military solution. And the attempt to give it a military solution has now had the awful consequence of making the threat still greater. The assault on the Mavi Marmara was a stupid gift to the delegitimators.

Wieseltier likes to project an image that he's smarter than everyone else. But here he's just being obtuse.

Charles Krauthammer, an astute observer of the situation, writes why delegitimization of Israel is a threat to its existence, concluding Those Troublesome Jews with:

What's left? Nothing. The whole point of this relentless international campaign is to deprive Israel of any legitimate form of self-defense. Why, just last week, the Obama administration joined the jackals, and reversed four decades of U.S. practice, by signing onto a consensus document that singles out Israel's possession of nuclear weapons -- thus de-legitimizing Israel's very last line of defense: deterrence.

The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, 6 million -- that number again -- hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide. For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Zionists -- Iranian in particular -- openly prepare a more final solution.

The campaign to undermine Israel's legitimacy has been going on for some time. The late Jeane Kirkpatrick noted in 1989 in How the PLO was legitimized:

NOT long after Khrushchev articulated these distinctions, the United Nations General Assembly formally adopted them. Where the Charter permitted force by member states only to defend themselves against attack, GA Resolution 2708 XX (1970) created a new category of "legitimate" force which could be used against member states. This new right was confirmed in subsequent resolutions approving the struggle of "liberation" groups against "colonialism" by "all necessary means at their disposal." Step by step the new doctrine was codified in the General Assembly. In 1970, with U.S. and Western support, the General Assembly adopted the "Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Nations" which further expanded the rights of "peoples" and restricted those of states by providing, inter alia, that "all peoples have the right freely to determine without external influences their political status and pursue their economic, social, and cultural development, and every state has the duty to respect this right in accordance with the provisions of the Charter."
Moreover: "Every state has the duty to refrain from any forcible action which deprives peopIe ... of their right to self-determination and freedom and independence. In their actions against resistance to such forcible action in pursuit of the exercise of self-determination, such peoples are entitled to seek and receive support, in accordance with the purposes and principles of the Charter" (emphasis added).
With this declaration, the General Assembly, more clearly and unambiguously than ever, took the position not only that "peoples" had rights superior to those of member states, but that states resisting the rights of "peoples" could themselves become a "threat to peace." The General Assembly thus subordinated the principle of the "sovereign inviolability" of states to the struggle of "peoples" against "colonialism" and put important new restrictions on the right of states to selfdefense.

In 1969 it was the Soviets attempting to delegitimize Israel along with their Arab allies. Now, the Soviet Union is gone but the seeds it planted is bearing poisoned fruits.

Crossposted on Yourish.

Now, mr. president, there is only one question I want to ask you ... and you better have the answer, man ...

Posted: 04 Jun 2010 12:06 AM PDT

Remember this?

Garrett Morris: [dignified, dripping with snooty condescension] Now, I'd like to speak about the subject of a certain Mick Jagger - of the Rolling Stones. ... And I'm going to talk about the song he sang -- a song in which he sings these very words: "Black girls - just want to have sex - all night long." ...

Now, Mr. Jagger, there is only one question I want to ask you -- Jaggs. ... And you better have the answer, man, you better have the answer, since you have besmirched the character of black women. Therefore, here is my question, Jaggs. [pause, takes off eyeglasses, suddenly drops the pose, pleading] Where are all of these black broads, man? ... [huge cheers and applause] Hey, like, where ARE they, baby? You got any phone numbers for me, baby? ... Please send 'em to me. [puts glasses back on, dignified again] Thank you. ... [enthusiastic applause]

The headline, White House, N.Y. Dems: No job offers made in Senate race, made me thing of that. (via memeorandum)

The White House and New York Democrats said Wednesday they didn't play let's make a deal to avoid a contentious Senate primary.

New York Reps. Steve Israel, Carolyn Maloney and Carolyn McCarthy along with former Rep. Harold Ford, Jr. (D-Tenn.) said the White House didn't offer them positions in exchange for forgoing a run against Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.).

Hmmm.

Top of the ticket (via Instapundit).

Already we know that Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak was offered an administration job if he'd self-destruct his primary challenge of Sen. Arlen "Remind Me Again, What Party Am I In Today?" Specter.

Surprisingly, a thorough White House probe of itself found no improprieties in what it called several unpaid-job discussions between Sestak and a secret emissary we'll call Bill Clinton.

Alas, they didn't get their stories straight because Sestak says one conversation occurred with....
...the famous spouse of a federal employee and Obama's minions say several chats were had.

But in the one-party world of Chicago politics that produced the Obama-Emanuel-Jarrett-Axelrod Oval Office cabal, these are meant to be overlooked as the kind of routine, midweek political arrangements that they are back home on Dearborn Street. Seriously, who wouldn't take care of their faux friends in this rough-and-tumble world? It's only taxpayer money.
...
Colorado's Bennet like numerous doomed Democrats this year voted to pass Obama's healthcare bill, which only 61% of Colorado voters now want repealed.

The defiant Romanoff -- hey, it worked for Sestak -- says he had three possible jobs dangled before him if he quit the Bennet challenge courtesy of Jim Messina, who already has an Obama job as Emanuel's deputy.

A trio of suggested, possible, maybe, who-knows, it-might-be-arranged jobs for Romanoff may not actually matter much because Romanoff turned them down and right now former Lieut. Gov. Jane Norton, a Republican, is beating either of them in recent Rasmussen Reports polls.

After hearing all this do you think that maybe one of Sen. Gillibrand's erstwhile challengers might say:

"Hey Mr. President, where are all those government jobs?"

In a related op-ed, A failing grade for the Sestak report, William A Burke and David B. Rivkin Jr. write:

Given that the U.S. Code explicitly proscribes "promises [of] any employment, position, [or] appointment . . . to any person as consideration, favor or reward for," among other things, staying out of any political primary, this standard has been amply met. Indeed, Bauer's own conclusions establish that there is a factual basis to believe Sestak may have been offered a position as an illegal quid pro quo. Nonetheless, Bauer clearly does not believe that anyone violated the law. And he may well be right. Perhaps the position was offered unconditionally. Perhaps Sestak misunderstood. Perhaps even if it was a quid pro quo, the offer does not satisfy the law's requirements for criminal liability. But in the face of doubt on these questions, it is not the counsel's role to make such determinations, particularly when he is opining on the conduct of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, to whom he reports, and a negative conclusion could damage the president for whom he works.

This conflict of interest makes Bauer's numerous lapses in normal investigatory procedure all the more troubling. His report is silent concerning similar job-related discussions last year between Deputy White House Chief of Staff Jim Messina and Romanoff, who is mounting a primary challenge against Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet in Colorado. Any credible investigation would have inevitably focused on whether the alleged job-for-withdrawal scenario was exclusive to Sestak or part of a broader pattern of conduct.

That's something we really ought to know. How many jobs were offered?

Submitted 06/04/10

Posted: 03 Jun 2010 11:58 PM PDT

This week's Watcher's council submissions are UP.

Council Submissions

Non Council Submissions

Read. Enjoy. Be informed.
Posted by Soccer Dad at 4:13 AM

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