Obama's Press Conference

Gary Fouse
fousesquawk


President Obama's press conference yesterday was another glaring example of his petulance and arrogance. First, he started off by blaming the Republicans for not caving in on the debt ceiling debate in Congress. He also skirted the edge of reality by claiming that he has "been here" in Washington ready to assist in negotiations or whatever he says he is doing. I guess golf outings count as "being here" in his view. The President also took a swipe at those evil rich people and oil companies, who need to pay more taxes.

“Before we ask our seniors to pay more for health care, before we cut our children’s education,” he said, “it’s only fair to ask an oil company or a corporate jet owner that has done so well to give up that tax break that no other business enjoys.”

As if cutting off deductions for corporate taxes will raise that trillion or so dollars we need.

Isn't it ironic that politicians talk about having to pay our bills when they are spending money that we don't have in the first place? My Dad always told me, "don't incur the bills if you don't have the money". That's why I never got that Mercedes Benz when I was in high school. Seemed to make sense at the time, so I settled for my Dad's hand-me-down 41 Ford.

As for his authorization to continue hostilities in Libya beyond 60 days without congressional approval, he pointed out that no US military personnel have been killed -yet. Therefore bombing a country from off shore ships is not hostilities, I guess. Not that I would mind if one of those missiles landed on Ghaddafi's head, but that hasn't happened yet. But, of course, we have to protect those Libyan civilians from harm at the hands of Ghaddafi's troops, which brings up the question of why we don't have to do the same in Syria. Oh well. Apples and oranges I Guess.

Obama the born again state's righter also praised the decision of the state of New York in approving gay marriage. That's the way things should work, said the President (since the decision was the one he wanted-God only knows what his reaction would have been had the decision gone the other way.) Yet, the President stopped an inch short of saying he now supported gay marriage. His position is "evolving".

But it was another "historic" press conference as the President once again signaled how intransigent he is. Fox News treated it with the respect it deserved. Instead of having any discussion about it, they switched immediately to the Casey Anthony trial in Florida.

CAIR No Longer Tax-Exempt

Gary Fouse
fousesquawk


Here is something good that happened while I was away; CAIR has lost its IRS tax-exempt status (pending appeal) for not filing the necessary reports for three years. The below report is by the Investigative Project on Terrorism.


http://www.investigativeproject.org/2990/cair-loses-irs-status



One can only wonder how that one slipped through the watchful eyes of the Obama administration. I wouldn't be surprised if wunderkind Tim (Turbo-Tax ) Geithner gets marching orders to rule in CAIR's favor in the appeal.

Now that the unindicted co-conspirators at CAIR have lost their tax-exempt status (pending appeal), look for them to take one of two roads. Either they claim victim status as is their wont or they refuse to say anything about it. (You won't find it on their website.)

Silly me for wondering. Here is the statement from spokeshole Ibrahim Hooper.


http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/06/23/cair-stripped-tax-exempt-status-by-irs/


"This is a technical paperwork issue that we're dealing with with the IRS -- as 275,000 other groups, including the AARP and major universities," Hooper said, before suggesting that reporting on its lost status was part of an effort to spread anti-Muslim "hate."

Of course.

Yelena Bonner, Dead at 88

By Findalis of Monkey in the Middle

It is with sorrow that I announce the departure from this world of a champion of Human Freedom and Human Dignity: Yelena Bonner 88, widow of Andrei Sakharov.

Yelena G. Bonner, the Russian human rights activist who was the widow of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei D. Sakharov and came under repression by the secret police, died of heart failure in Boston on Saturday, according to the Associated Press.

Mrs. Bonner, decorated for valor and wounds during World War II, was 88. She had been hospitalized since Feb. 21, her daughter Tatiana Yankelevich told the AP.

Mrs. Bonner was a founder of one of the most active rights groups in the Soviet dissident movement of the 1970s, the Helsinki Monitoring Committee. The organization, which for a time disbanded in 1982 after most of its members were jailed for political crimes against the state, sought to publicize Soviet violations of human rights guarantees made when Moscow signed the 1975 Helsinki Agreement on European Cooperation and Security.

The Helsinki Act recognized Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe in return for Soviet assurance to nurture fundamental freedoms, such as free speech, assembly and religion.

The Helsinki Act caused numerous unofficial rights groups to form, and they became an unusual phenomenon in the life of the Soviet capital in the mid-1970s. There were groups delving into invalids' rights, religious oppression, political abuse of psychiatry, workers' rights and emigration demands.

Mrs. Bonner signed hundreds of zayevlenie, or statements, supporting victims of KGB reprisals. She and her husband traveled through Siberia and remote parts of Russia, visiting courtrooms and jails to aid imprisoned activists.

By the decade's end, however, many activists were in prison or labor camps. The luckier were expelled from Russia or sent into internal exile far from Moscow. Mr. Sakharov was arrested in January 1980, and was confined to Gorky, 250 miles east of Moscow. Mrs. Bonner had a special status as wife of Mr. Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb. She was allowed to travel to Moscow until May 1984, when the KGB detained her in Gorky on allegations she had committed anti-state crimes.

During a period of reform under Mikhail Gorbachev, the couple was allowed to return to Moscow in 1986, where they pressed on with their calls for greater freedom and revived the monitoring committee.

Mrs. Bonner’s activism entered a new phase after Mr. Sakharov died in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed two years later.

She went on to promote human rights in the post-Soviet era by challenging President Boris Yeltsin’s and President Vladi­mir Putin’s government.

When a petition circulated in 2010 calling for Putin to step down, Mrs. Bonner was among the first to sign it.

Mrs. Bonner was physically striking, with a robust frame, a no-nonsense voice deepened by years of chain-smoking acrid Russian cigarettes. She frequently wore heavy wool shawls, accentuating her swarthy features.

Born Feb. 15, 1923, Mrs. Bonner's father was Gevork Alikhanyan, an Armenian Bolshevik revolutionary who once was party chief in Armenia. Her mother, Ruf Bonner, was the daughter of a Jewish family born into Siberian exile.

Stalin's secret police arrested and shot her father in 1937, then sent her mother to slave labor camp as “the wife of an enemy of the people.” Elena and her younger brother lived with relatives for years. She became a Red Army nurse during World War II. She was badly wounded during the siege of Leningrad and almost lost her eyesight later when a German plane strafed the medical train on which she was tending wounded soldiers.

After the war, she married Ivan Semyonov, a doctor, and they had two children. Mrs. Bonner lived in Iraq for two years as part of a Soviet medical team there. She was divorced in the early 1960s and married Mr. Sakharov a decade later.

Mrs. Bonner’s activism prompted threats against her family, leading her mother, son, daughter and two grandchildren to move to Boston in the 1970s, according to the Associated Press. In the mid-1980s, she visited the city for medical treatment and then returned home.

In increasingly poor heath, she spent more time on her visits to Boston in recent years, according to the AP. Her daughter said her remains will be cremated and buried next to her husband, mother and brothers in Moscow.

Full Story

In May of 2009 I wrote how she condemned the world's silence about Gilad Shalit while condemning Israel for every imaginary action the Arabs accuse them of.  She spoke at the Oslo Freedom Forum and said this:

And yet I still think (and some will find this naïve) that the first tiny, but real step toward peace must become the release of Shalit. Release - and not his exchange for 1,000 or 1,500 prisoners who are in Israeli prisons serving court sentences for real crimes.


Returning to my question of why human rights activists are silent, I can find no answer except that Shalit is an Israeli soldier, Shalit is a Jew. So again, it is conscious or unconscious anti-Semitism. Again, it is fascism.


Thirty-four years have passed since the day when I came to this city to represent my husband, Andrei Sakharov, at the 1975 Nobel Prize ceremony. I was in love with Norway then. The reception I received filled me with joy. Today, I feel Alarm and Hope (the title Sakharov used for his 1977 essay written at the request of the Nobel Committee).


Alarm because of the anti-Semitism and anti-Israeli sentiment growing throughout Europe and even further afield. And yet, I hope that countries, their leaders, and people everywhere will recall and adopt Sakharov’s ethical credo: “In the end, the moral choice turns out to be also the most pragmatic choice."

Ever the voice of freedom, she will be missed.

My prayers and thoughts are with her family at this time of sorrow for them.

An Israeli Fable

By Findalis of Monkey in the Middle

I received this in my inbox and thought you would love to read it.

Iran has crossed the nuclear threshold and is testing its Shihab-3 long-range missile. King Ahmadinejad has just delivered a TV address in which he celebrates Iranian invincibility and lets it be known that he has no intention of sparing the Zionist entity. The United States has issued a carefully-worded reproof while at the same time extending the hand of peace and assuring its allies that containment, sanctions and dialogue remain the best policies under the circumstances. But no one in Israel sees a silver lining in a mushroom cloud and all prepare for the inevitable. Fearing abandonment from above, the rabbis raise their voices as one, in humble prayer to the God of Israel.

And lo! their prayers are miraculously answered, for the Lord has taken pity on His suffering people at last and His heart has softened. An iridescent rainbow arches across the sky and suddenly the Heavens open and a golden stairway reaches from Jerusalem to the empyrean. A Voice is heard over all Israel commanding, “Come, My people! Hearken to My Word!” And one by one, family by family, neighborhood by neighborhood, religious and secular, scholar and laborer, leftist and rightist find themselves in Jerusalem, as if Time had contracted to an eternal instant, and all proceed to climb the golden staircase into the Lord’s beneficent embrace.

A silence covers the land. A heavenly wind arises, the earth begins to shake, and cities, villages, farms and buildings vanish as if they had never been. Not even a Starbucks remains. In the twinkling of an eye gardens, groves, orchards, greenhouses, vineyards, every cultivated field, all the work of industrious Jewish hands turn back to desert and malarial swampland, leaving only desolate hamlets and clumps of shriveled lemons and puckered olives. Bewildered Palestinians, foreign journalists, NGOs and European plenipotentiaries look about in stunned disbelief for there is nothing there any longer to slake their enmity—except locusts, mosquitoes, drought and barrenness, as it was before the great aliyah. Even the tree and the stone are perplexed at the disappearance of the Jew hiding behind them, sheltering from Abdullah who is equally nonplussed.

At the same time, the world’s infrastructure collapses. Every Israeli invention that has ever been adopted by mankind—cell phone components, computer algorithms, firewalls, voice mail, wireless LAN, search engines, SMS (texting), video platforms, desalination plants, insect control methods, agricultural drip technologies, medical applications, chemical discoveries and more, indescribably more—cease to exist. The world is bereft. The nations send up a plaintive wail. The General Assembly disbands for lack of a purpose. The United Nations Human Rights Council packs up and goes home, as does the Organization of the Islamic Conference. There is nothing left for them to do. In despair, men look about for someone to blame but find only themselves and their cankered resentments. Even Iran has begun to tremble.

The Jews in Heaven look down and are overcome with sorrow. They plead with the Lord to forgive erring humankind but His heart has now hardened. Men will reap the desert, winnow the dust and harvest destitution. Then the gates of Heaven close, although the jubilant strains of Havah Nagilah sung by the choir of angels can still be discerned, growing ever fainter.

King Ahmadinejad sits forlornly on his throne, pining for the bomb he would lovingly stroke before bedtime to inspire his dreams. It too has evaporated. Beside him, the Hidden Imam, the Mahdi, who has chosen this moment to make his long-deferred appearance, with a mixture of fury and resignation addresses the hapless monarch. His words echo in King Ahmadinejad’s ears.

“Why couldn’t you wait, you idiot?”

Be careful of what you wish for, you might get your wish.

Why Weiner Should Resign

Gary Fouse
fousesquawk


Now that Anthony Weiner has raised the white flag of surrender on the fact that he did, in fact, send lewd pictures of himself and lied to cover it up, the next great battle is convincing him that he should resign his office. Yesterday, he said he would not resign, and if precedence means anything among Democrats, chances are he won't. Yet, there are several reasons why he should.

First of all, there is still a possibility that he was not completely truthful even yesterday at the New York press conference. He says he did not use government resources to send those images. Yet, it appears that in at least some, the images were sent from his office.

He says there was no actual infidelity in the physical sense. That remains to be seen.

He also tried to downplay his actions in the famous Seattle bulge picture by saying he sent it as "a joke". There is no delicate way to say this, but let's just say that erections tend not to occur during moments of humor and vice-versa.

But the biggest concerns about Weiner are that when it comes to issues of judgement and credibility, he has lost both. The lack of judgement in a congressman sending lewd pictures of himself to young women he has never met speaks for itself. In doing so, he left himself open to blackmail. How could he think that none of these women would ever come forward? In terms of credibility, this is the man who let his minions and friends in the media spread the story that he had been hacked. Two names were mentioned as hackers for over a week as Weiner let it happen. You may think that Andrew Breitbart is a self-promoting bottom-feeder, but he was not guilty of hacking. His story was true, and in fact, it appears the worst of Weiner's photos, the most explicit, have not been released, which is yet another reason why Weiner would be wise to just go away. Weiner lied repeatedly to the media both in groups and individually in separate interviews. How can he ever be believed again?

Yet, he knows that Bill Clinton survived. He knows that Ted Kennedy survived. He knows that Charles Rangel survived, as well as other Democrats. The most he will get from the House Ethics Committee is probably a censure. Big deal.

Republicans are somewhat correct in stating that their own miscreants resign when discovered, while Democrats stick it out. Mark Foley and Chris Lee come to mind. Yet, they should not crow too much. Within the Senate, Larry Craig and David Vitter, both Republicans, are still there. They both should have resigned, but they did not.

At some point, the public needs to know that their elected officials are not all a bunch of egotistical, power-hungry jerks who think they can live under a different set of rules than the rest of us. The honorable thing for Anthony Weiner to do would be to resign from Congress. At this point, it appears he will not do so unless his fellow Democrats in the House force him to. That is because Anthony Weiner is not an honorable man. Forget the pictures; they are but a sexual peccadillo. It looks like Weiner's character flaws go deeper than sex.

June 6 1944, as reported by CNN

By Findalis of Monkey in the Middle

NORMANDY, FRANCE (June 6, 1944) Three hundred French civilians were killed and thousands more were wounded today in the first hours of America's invasion of continental Europe. Casualties were heaviest among women and children. Most of the French casualties were the result of artillery fire from American ships attempting to knock out German fortifications prior to the landing of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops.

Reports from a makeshift hospital in the French town of St. Mere Eglise said the carnage was far worse than the French had anticipated, and that reaction against the American invasion was running high. "We are dying for no reason, "said a Frenchman speaking on condition of anonymity. "Americans can't even shoot straight. I never thought I'd say this, but life was better under Adolph Hitler."

The invasion also caused severe environmental damage. American troops, tanks, trucks and machinery destroyed miles of pristine shoreline and thousands of acres of ecologically sensitive wetlands. It was believed that the habitat of the spineless French crab was completely wiped out, thus threatening the species with extinction. A representative of Green Peace said his organization, which had tried to stall the invasion for over a year, was appalled at the destruction, but not surprised. "This is just another example of how the military destroys the environment without a second thought," said Christine Moanmore. "And it's all about corporate greed."

Contacted at his Manhattan condo, a member of the French government-in-exile who abandoned Paris when Hitler invaded, said the invasion was based solely on American financial interests. "Everyone knows that President Roosevelt has ties to 'big beer'," said Pierre LeWimp. "Once the German beer industry is conquered, Roosevelt's beer cronies will control the world market and make a fortune."

Administration supporters said America's aggressive actions were based in part on the assertions of controversial scientist Albert Einstein, who sent a letter to Roosevelt speculating that the Germans were developing a secret weapon -- a so-called "atomic bomb". Such a weapon could produce casualties on a scale never seen before, and cause environmental damage that could last for thousands of years. Hitler has denied having such a weapon and international inspectors were unable to locate such weapons even after spending two long weekends in Germany. Shortly after the invasion began, reports surfaced that German prisoners had been abused by American soldiers. Mistreatment of Jews by Germans at their so-called "concentration camps" has been rumored, but so far this remains unproven.

Several thousand Americans died during the first hours of the invasion, and French officials are concerned that the uncollected corpses will pose a public-health risk. "The Americans should have planned for this in advance," they said. "It's their mess, and we don't intend to help clean it up."

That is exactly how the MSM, especially anti-West media groups like MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS and ABC would have reported this day.

This is the true story:

D-Day 6/6/44

In Memory of those who fought for freedom and in condemnation of a press that misuses that sacrifice.

Take Action Now!

By Findalis of Monkey in the Middle

Support Security Assistance for Israel 

Please urge your members of Congress to support the U.S. commitment of $3.075 billion in security assistance for Israel for fiscal year 2012. Congress must stand by America's commitments to Israel, particularly at a time of turmoil in the Middle East.

Sign the petition here and let your elected officials in Washington know how you feel, and how you will vote.

Let your voice be heard!!!!!

Ward Churchill to Get Hearing Before Colorado Supreme Court

Gary Fouse
fousesquawk

Ex-Professor Ward Churchill

A picture is worth a thousand words.



Misfit ex-professor Ward Churchill is back in the news again, unfortunately, now that the Colorado Supreme Court has agreed to hear his case against the University of Colorado for firing him 4 years ago. The below report comes from the Denver Post.

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_18175567


Churchill sprang into notoriety after 9-11, when he called the victims in the World Trade Center "little Eichmann's". However, it wasn't that that got him fired. The university determined that he had committed plagiarism in some of his writings. That is a big no-no in academia.

Of course, no one really knows how this joker became a professor in the first place. Like singer Wayne Newton, he is pretty much a one-trick pony (Dankeschoen). Anything connected to America and capitalism is bad. This is what Colorado University students were exposed to in Churchill's classes. ("Power to the People and "America sucks").


Of course, Churchill isn't the only misfit professor in academia. In contrast, they pretty much grow like weeds in the humanities, history, political science and especially in these mushrooming Middle Eastern Studies departments. (Thank you, Saudi Arabia.)

The other issue deserving of mention here is tenure. Once these clowns acquire tenure, it is very hard to get rid of them. The other is freedom of speech or academic freedom, which applies liberally to teachers but not so liberally to students who have different points of view.

What Churchill said about the "little Eichmann's" was, indeed, protected by the principle of academic freedom. In other universities, you will find professors who think the Holocaust was a myth, 9-11 was an inside job, and the moon is made of green cheese. These loons are in classrooms as we speak spreading their garbage-or better yet, sitting in their offices doing "research" while graduate assistants with similar ideas actually teach the classes. That is the benefit of being a tenured professor. Many universities would actually prefer you do research and publish "stuff" rather than actually be in the classroom.

None of which I have to worry about. First of all, I am no professor, don't even have a PhD. Tenure? Hardly. I am an adjunct reacher at UC-Irvine, which is a fancy term for part-time teacher. I work on a quarterly contract, which has been renewed for 13 years since I am pretty much a part of the family at the UCI-Ext (not the UCI Administration). I don't carry my beliefs into the classroom, and I actually teach my classes personally. Any research I have done is on my own time and dime. As for free speech, I have to say that UCI has respected my exercise of free speech at campus events like the annual Muslim Student Union's circus and what I say in public or here on Fousesquawk. As any regular reader of this blog knows, I have often criticized UCI, other UC campuses, and the current UC president. I have not been punished in any way.

Ward Churchill was and is an ideologue who brought embarrassment to CU because of what he said and according to the university itself, his plagiarized writings. In my opinion, CU was correct in getting rid of this clown. I hope the Colorado Supreme Court feels likewise

True Friends of Israel

By Findalis of Monkey in the Middle

The Emergency Committee for Israel has come out with a new ad that hits President Obama for (what else?) his stand on Israel.

ECI Thanks Israel's True Friends



Hat Tip Israel Matzav