Saudi womanhood behind the wheel at last!
By Sissy Willis of sisu
According to Wikipedia, “Women are forbidden to drive in Saudi Arabia per a 1990 fatwā (religious ruling).” So what’s a Sharia-compliant gal to do when she wants to run down to the mall to pick up a few things but there’s no male relative to chauffeur her? Share the joy of the monarchy’s “First Woman Driver (Sharia Approved).” It may not be quite up to speed with Female Formula One, but in its way “Saudi Arabia’s Sharia-Approved Car for Women!” refuels the venerable woman-driver joke with a fresh burst of energy. Enjoy the ride!
Fox News Stands Behind Beck’s Latest Soros Attacks While Jewish Groups See Anti-Semitism
Last week, Glenn Beck did extensive segments on his radio and television shows targeting his chief boogeyman, liberal philanthropist George Soros. Beck charges that Soros is a “puppet master…notorious for collapsing economies and regimes all around the world.” Beck wants viewers to believe that the United States is next, citing Soros’s views on the value of the dollar: “Not only does he want to bring America to her knees, financially, he wants to reap obscene profits off us as well.” According to Beck, this is all a scheme of Soros’ to form a accused Soros of running a “shadow government.” But Beck took his attacks much further, outrageously claiming that Soros — who is Jewish — “help[ed] send the Jews to the death camps.”
As many commentators have noted, Beck’s attacks have a distinctly anti-Semitic tone. Writing in the Daily Beast, Michelle Goldberg notes Beck’s episodes on Soros have a disturbing echo of historical anti-Semitic narratives of Jews controlling banking institutions in a shadowy plot for world domination:
In classic anti-Semitic narratives, Jews control both the elites and the masses; they’re responsible for the communist revolution and the speculative excesses of capitalism. Their goal is to undermine society so that they can take over. Through the lens of anti-Semitism, social division, runaway inflation, and moral breakdown all make sense because they all have the same cause. Nazi propaganda called Jews drahtzieher—wire-pullers. They constitute a power above and beyond ordinary government authority. “There is a super-government which is allied to no government, which is free from them all, and yet which has its hand in them all,” Henry Ford wrote in The International Jew.
Yesterday, the Anti-Defamation League harshly criticized Beck for his portrayal of Soros’ past in holocaust-era Germany as “completely inappropriate and offensive.” Likewise, Simon Greer, president and CEO of Jewish Funds for Justice, also slammed Beck: “His portrayal of Soros today as the ‘Puppet Master,’ as the special was called, evokes anti-Semitic stereotypes from the ‘devaluer of many currencies’ to ‘advocate for one world government’ from ‘anti-American’ to ‘thinks he’s smarter than the rest of us.’”
Yet despite this condemnation from major Jewish groups, Fox News continues to stand by Beck. A spokesman said yesterday that “information regarding Mr. Soros’s experiences growing up were taken directly from his writings and from interviews given by him to the media, and no negative opinion was offered as to his actions as a child.” In reality, when he was 14, Soros was protected from the Nazis by pretending to be a Christian boy, and was once present when a Jewish family had their possessions taken. Goldberg argues that Beck’s claim about Soros aiding the Nazis is an attempt to “inoculate himself against charges of anti-Semitism.”
This is not the first time Fox News executives have faced unrest among the Jewish community about Beck’s views. Yahoo’s The Upshot reported in August that Fox executives had to meet with three Jewish leaders who were uncomfortable with Beck’s repeated, thematic references to Nazis and the holocaust.
Fox’s defense of Beck now is especially curious considering that in the past, the network has repeatedly touted the ADL’s views on issues convenient to Fox News. Anchor Megyn Kelly did a segment loudly overplaying the ADL’s nuanced opposition to the mosque at Ground Zero, for example.
Of course, it’s possible that Fox News executives are fine with Beck’s cavalier attitude towards the holocaust and other things that might offend Jewish groups. Earlier this year, Beck claims a Fox executive told him he was the “key” to averting an “economic holocaust.”
Conservative Movement Leaders Discuss 2011 Agenda Behind Closed Doors
Another indicator of the changing of the guard in Washington came yesterday as dozens of representatives and leaders from conservative groups convened for a private meeting in the suburbs of Virginia. Representatives of a wide variety of Tea Party groups, mainstream conservative think tanks and right-wing media outlets came together to talk about the future of the conservative movement, TPMmuckraker has learned.
The agenda indicates that they attempted to hash out some of their priorities for the legislative agenda in the upcoming Congress, which will feature a GOP-controlled House for the first time in four years.
The hush-hush meeting was sponsored by the Conservative Action Project (CAP), an offshoot of the Council for National Policy.
Reagan-era Attorney General Ed Meese, the head of the CAP (not to be confused with the liberal Center for American Progress), was scheduled to address the summit, which drew attendees with speeches from Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Rep. Tom Price (R-GA). Press secretaries for both members did not respond to requests for comment about their remarks.
Republican strategist Kellyanne Conway was also on the summit agenda, along with Edwin Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, and former Rep. David McIntosh (R-Ind.). Press representatives for Conway and Feulner did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment, but a secretary for McIntosh confirmed that he was speaking at the summit.
A group discussion was to focus on the outcome of the election and the future of the conservative movement. Attendees were also invited to discuss economic, social and national security issues, judicial nominations and state elections and issues.
Organizations scheduled to be represented at the meeting included the National Organization for Marriage, the Media Research Center, Susan B. Anthony List, the Heritage Foundation, 60 Plus Association, the Federalist Society, the Family Research Council, Americans for Tax Reform, Concerned Women for America and the Tea Party Patriots.
Employees of the American Spectator, the Washington Examiner and Human Events were also invited, as were John Fund of the Wall Street Journal and Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review Online (Lopez told TPMmuckraker she did not end up attending).
Republican House and Senate staffers from the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Republican Conference made the guest list alongside conservative luminaries like Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Republican super-lawyer Cleta Mitchell, ATR’s Grover Norquist, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, RNC chair candidate Ken Blackwell, American Values President Gary Bauer and David Keene, the chairman of the American Conservative Union.
Frank Gaffney, the president of the right-wing Center for Security Policy who has raised fears over the imposition of Sharia law in America, attended the meeting, his secretary confirmed.
Kevin Gentry of Koch Industries — the oil and gas company which has funded Tea Party groups — was also invited, but declined to tell TPMmuckraker whether he attended, instead referring calls to Koch’s PR shop.
Patrick Pizzella, a former Bush administration official who is the only paid member of the Conservative Action Project, was out of the office and at a CAP event, according to the individual who picked up his phone. An e-mail to Pizzella was not immediately returned.
Conservative Movement Leaders Discuss 2011 Agenda Behind Closed Doors
Another indicator of the changing of the guard in Washington came yesterday as dozens of representatives and leaders from conservative groups convened for a private meeting in the suburbs of Virginia. Representatives of a wide variety of Tea Party groups, mainstream conservative think tanks and right-wing media outlets came together to talk about the future of the conservative movement, TPMmuckraker has learned.
The agenda indicates that they attempted to hash out some of their priorities for the legislative agenda in the upcoming Congress, which will feature a GOP-controlled House for the first time in four years.
The hush-hush meeting was sponsored by the Conservative Action Project (CAP), an offshoot of the Council for National Policy.
Reagan-era Attorney General Ed Meese, the head of the CAP (not to be confused with the liberal Center for American Progress), was scheduled to address the summit, which drew attendees with speeches from Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Rep. Tom Price (R-GA). Press secretaries for both members did not respond to requests for comment about their remarks.
Republican strategist Kellyanne Conway was also on the summit agenda, along with Edwin Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, and former Rep. David McIntosh (R-Ind.). Press representatives for Conway and Feulner did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment, but a secretary for McIntosh confirmed that he was speaking at the summit.
A group discussion was to focus on the outcome of the election and the future of the conservative movement. Attendees were also invited to discuss economic, social and national security issues, judicial nominations and state elections and issues.
Organizations scheduled to be represented at the meeting included the National Organization for Marriage, the Media Research Center, Susan B. Anthony List, the Heritage Foundation, 60 Plus Association, the Federalist Society, the Family Research Council, Americans for Tax Reform, Concerned Women for America and the Tea Party Patriots.
Employees of the American Spectator, the Washington Examiner and Human Events were also invited, as were John Fund of the Wall Street Journal and Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review Online (Lopez told TPMmuckraker she did not end up attending).
Republican House and Senate staffers from the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Republican Conference made the guest list alongside conservative luminaries like Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Republican super-lawyer Cleta Mitchell, ATR’s Grover Norquist, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, RNC chair candidate Ken Blackwell, American Values President Gary Bauer and David Keene, the chairman of the American Conservative Union.
Frank Gaffney, the president of the right-wing Center for Security Policy who has raised fears over the imposition of Sharia law in America, attended the meeting, his secretary confirmed.
Kevin Gentry of Koch Industries — the oil and gas company which has funded Tea Party groups — was also invited, but declined to tell TPMmuckraker whether he attended, instead referring calls to Koch’s PR shop.
Patrick Pizzella, a former Bush administration official who is the only paid member of the Conservative Action Project, was out of the office and at a CAP event, according to the individual who picked up his phone. An e-mail to Pizzella was not immediately returned.
No illegal alien pilot left behind
No illegal alien left behind
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010
Chalk up another Code Red Elmo moment for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. While Islamic terrorists groom suicide bombers starting in kindergarten, the grownups in charge of protecting America can’t seem to reach an elementary level of competence.
The “good” news: Hindsight-driven bureaucrats at DHS moved to ban high-risk cargo from Yemen and Somalia this week after a global air scare involving makeshift printer/toner cartridge-bombs. The bad news: More than nine years after the 9/11 jihadist attacks, untold numbers of high-risk flyers have been able to board, ride and pilot American planes — some with Transportation Security Administration approval to boot.
Outside Boston, one shady flight school provided single-engine pilot lessons to at least 33 illegal immigrants from Brazil. But clear counter-terror rules ban illegal aliens from enrolling in U.S. flight schools. Clear counter-terror regulations require TSA to run foreign flight students’ names against a plethora of terrorism, criminal and immigration databases. Head-scratching airport security officials were at a loss last week to explain how dozens of these illegal alien students eluded their radar screen when the agency “performs a thorough background check on each applicant at the time of application” and checks “for available disqualifying immigration information,” the Boston Globe reported.
A cluebat for the Keystone Kops: No matter how DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano might spin it, the “system” is not “working” in any sense of either word.
Whistleblowers have warned for years about the gaping holes in both the TSA’s and the Federal Aviation Administration’s foreign pilot screening systems. In 2005, aviation safety inspector Edward H. Blount of the Alabama Flight Standards District Office sent a letter to the TSA warning of federal policies that were “fostering illegal flight training by foreign individuals” in the U.S. on improper visas. Blount reported that he and another investigator were told by a TSA official that the agency was “not going to look at the visa status” of pilot applicants.
The next year, TSA issued a backside-covering memo shirking responsibility and instead pointing fingers at the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of State for neglecting to follow up on rigorous immigration status checks for foreign pilots.
In 2008, ABC News discovered that thousands of foreign nationals were able to enroll in flight schools despite the strict flight security rules. “Some of the very same conditions that allowed the 9-11 tragedy to happen in the first place are still very much in existence today,” one regional TSA officer warned. “TSA’s enforcement is basically nonexistent,” former FAA inspector Bill McNease told the network. The matter was kicked upstairs to DHS higher-ups in Washington. And there it gathered dust.
Compounding those persistent gaps are the myriad ways the open-borders lobby has undermined secure identification. Homeland security officials were warned years ago about the use of bogus Mexican matricula consular cards by illegal aliens boarding planes. American banks have pandered to the pro-amnesty lobby in search of illegal alien customers; the financial industry championed the use of the matricula consular cards as identification despite widespread fraud, inability to verify validating documents and lack of any central database. Dozens of municipalities have incorporated consular cards as “valid” ID for illegal aliens, and three states still issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. Open-borders ideologues populate every corner of the Obama administration, from DHS to the Department of Justice, where civil rights division head Thomas Perez has long crusaded for illegal alien licenses.
These comprehensive failures are partly attributable to incompetence, partly attributable to industry pressure and partly attributable to the intentional undermining of the very immigration laws Congress passed after 9/11 — laws specifically designed to prevent future alien hijackers like the 9/11 monsters from so easily exploiting the homeland security lapses that allowed them to live and train here for years unencumbered even after their temporary visas had expired.
As I reported in the aftermath of the would-be Christmas Day bomber fiasco last year, data are only as good as the people entrusted to collect, process and use the information to protect national security. Without the ability to share and access the information across numerous agencies, the data are useless. There is still no functional interoperability among an alphabet soup of national security and criminal databases — including NAILS, TECS, CLASS, VISAS VIPER, TUSCAN, TIPPIX, IBIS, CIS, APIS, SAVE, IDENT, DACS, AFIS, ENFORCE and the NCIC. The Senate raised questions about understaffed efforts to modernize some of these databases last spring. They’re still waiting for answers.
As usual, the homeland security moppets under fire stress that they found no links to terrorism among the immigration law-breaking flight students outside Boston. This misses the gobsmackingly obvious point that, despite billions of dollars and years of bureaucratic expansion, our homeland security infrastructure cannot yet provide adequate protection against unauthorized, unscreened, undocumented and unwanted intruders — terror-related or not. That is not a consolation. That is an indictment.
Amidst Criticisms of Fed Action, President Obama Urges G-20 Leaders to Get Behind Plans for US Economic Growth
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — Amidst criticisms that the US is trying to ‘devalue its way back to prosperity,’ President Obama wrote a letter to G-20 leaders arguing that the world needs the American economy to recover –indeed, that the US dollar’s strength and global economic health hinge upon it.
Political Punch
EPA years behind in determining risks of hundreds of toxic chemicals
The Environmental Protection Agency is years behind in determining the health the risks associated with exposure to hundreds of toxic chemicals, according to a new report from the Center for Progressive Reform.
Despite an effort by the Obama administration to streamline the process for risk assessments under the EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), which evaluates the risk to human health of a number of contaminants, progress is still slow, the report says.
The EPA completed nine risk assessments of toxic chemicals last year and hopes to complete nine this year. While that’s “an improvement” from the Bush administration, “it would still take approximately 55 years to complete all of the assessments that EPA program offices need to complete statutory responsibilities,” a CPR statement says.
Risk assessments under IRIS are essential for determining the long-term consequences of exposure to certain environmental contaminants. Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), chair of the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Technology, put it this way in CPR’s statement on the report: “We can’t wait for clusters of rare cancers or birth defects to tell us the consequences of a chemical exposure.”
Here are some highlights from the report:
- “Thirty-two hazardous air pollutants (HAPs) regulated under the Clean Air Act are not listed in IRIS at all, and 77 are listed but lack inhalation values, hampering the EPA’s ability to conduct residual risk assessments to provide an ample margin of safety.”
- “Three of 71 contaminants regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act are not listed, and neither are 64 of the 156 substances nominated to the Contaminate Candidate List, slowing EPA’s ability to develop enforceable standards for drinking water contamination.”
- “Eighty-seven of the 275 substances frequently found in Superfund sites and identified by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry as “high profile” have not been assessed.”
The Numbers Behind Reid’s Victory
The Hotline: “CNN’s exit polls show that men and white voters broke for Angle by significant margins. Angle carried white voters by a 53 percent to 41 percent margin and men by a 48 percent to 46 percent margin. Reid made that up among women (53 percent), African Americans (78 percent), Latinos (68 percent) and Asians (79 percent). Even though white voters made up 72 percent of the vote and Reid only carried 41 percent of that block, those large margins among other ethnic groups carried him to victory.”
Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire
The Tech Behind CNN’s Election Coverage
As noted earlier, I thought CNN had the best all-around coverage of Election 2010. It seemed the most professional (especially compared to the left-wing fever swamp at MSNBC) and it had the coolest graphics.
Fast Company has a fascinating behind the scenes look at the technology behind CNN’s coverage.
The Violent (and Drunken) Truth Behind ‘Restoring Sanity!’
After my appearance on “Geraldo” this weekend, lefties have been demanding that I provide video evidence of unruly activity at this weekend’s “Restore Sanity” rally. It’s cute. They think they’re calling my bluff. They’re like Rudy: they’re so little, but they try so big. The truth is that there were more incidents that had occurred, but to protect the privacy of innocent people involved, they could not be included in the piece. So hopefully the mild assault, myriad vulgarities and attempted theft should suffice!
I think the perfect embodiment of this video, is the Conservative dame’s reaction to a young, liberal, hipster stealing her energy drink. “That was mine sir. Please don’t steal. Thank you.” Being polite to thieves? Insanity makes a comeback!
