DON’T MESS WITH ISRAEL’S “IRON DOME”
Israel’s Iron Dome
The Iron Dome system intercepted about 90 percent of the rockets fired at Be’er Sheva, Ashdod and Ashkelon, including three on Sunday morning.
Despite the rocket barrage, Israel kept open the Erez Crossing for passengers and employees of international organizations operating in Gaza. Kerem Shalom was open for the delivery of 200 truckloads to Gaza residents.
Its deployment this past weekend appears to have defeated Hamas, at least for the time being. The terrorist organization has been talking with the new regime in Egypt for another ceasefire after failing to inflict mass casualties or property damage on Israel.
The problem with the Iron Dome is its cost and the lack of enough systems to defend all of Israel. The United States is providing funds to Israel to buy more of the made-in-Israel systems, each one of which costs more than $100 million.
The Iron Dome has been able to defend Israel’s three most populous southern cities, but if Hamas unleashes longer-range missiles that can reach Rehovot, Kiryat Gat and Kiryat Malachi, closer to metropolitan Tel Aviv, the IDF would lack enough systems to cover everyone. Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Sunday morning that expanding the system should be a national emergency project.
In addition to the defensive action of deploying the Iron Dome, the IDF also has taken the offensive against terrorists.
It targeted two members of the Popular Resistance Committee terror organization on Friday. The squad was responsible for planning a combined terror attack that was to take place via the Sinai Peninsula and the Israel-Egypt border.
In response to the ensuing rocket and missile bombardment from Gaza, the Israel Air Force targeted several weapons manufacturing facilitates and terrorist cells preparing to launch missiles.
Comments »AAA EU countries “possibly have better” say when replacing Juncker
But hey, if the other nations don’t like that, they are welcome to try financing their own budgets on their individual credit ratings…
Comments »ATHENS (Reuters) – Euro zone countries with a top credit rating might have a bigger say in talks to replace Jean-Claude Juncker as chairman of the bloc’s finance ministers, a Greek newspaper quoted German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble as saying on Saturday.
Asked in an interview in weekly To Vima whether Juncker’s successor would have to come from a triple-A country, Schaeuble said: “Member states that observe the euro zone’s fiscal rules and are rewarded for this by the rating agencies and the market will possibly have better chance to promote their candidates for the post.”
Schaeuble declined, however, to make further comments, saying he did “not want to talk publicly about possible candidates” or “make speculations on the issue”.
Four out of the euro zone’s 17 countries currently have a top credit rating: Germany, Finland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
Juncker’s term as head of the so-called Eurogroup expires in June and he has said he does not want to keep the job.
Schaeuble reiterated in the interview that there is no guarantee that a second bailout plan for Greece, due to be approved by euro zone finance ministers next week, will work. “No-one can’t rule out that Greece won’t need at some point by then (2020) a third package,” he told To Vima.
He also dismissed any notions that Germany was using the euro zone crisis to dominate Europe.
“Drawing the conclusion that we want to dominate Europe is really, just foolish”, he said. “I can assure you that Germany has neither the intention nor the power to impose such a dominance”.
Christie: “Damn, Man, I’m Governor, Could You Just Shut Up for a Second?”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0ALALQoodU&feature=player_embedded
Comments »Obama’s Mentor Bell: ‘I Lives To Harass White Folks’
Obama: “Open your hearts and open your minds to the words of Prof. Derrick Bell”
Link to Bell’s “white folks” comment.
Comments »Highway Bill With Keystone Pipeline Fails to Pass in the Senate
Panetta Tells Congress He Doesn’t Need Their Approval For War
He looks to the international community instead.
Comments »Shocker: “Game Change” creators gave $200,000 to Democrats, $0 to Republicans
In case the official statement of SarahPAC didn’t make it clear enough that the creators of HBO’s “Game Change” had little desire to hear or tell the Republican side of the story of the 2008 election, the news now is that the film’s top stars and executives have collectively donated more than $200,000 to Democrats and Democratic causes, but have given Republicans and Republican-leaning causes $0. The Hollywood Reporter notes the contributions of several leading minds behind the movie:
- Ed Harris, who plays Sen. John McCain, has given $9500 to Democratic candidates, and since 1998, the actor has also donated $11,975 to liberal special-interest groups like MoveOn.org, Emily¹s List and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. His donations to Republicans and conservative causes: Zero.
- Woody Harrelson, who stars as Steve Schmidt, chief strategist for McCain-Palin, has given $4,300 to Democratic candidates, and donated $3,500 to liberal causes like GreenVote and the Hollywood Women¹s Political Committee. Republican anc conservative donations: Zero …
- Producer Tom Hanks has given away over a hundred grand to the Democratic party, and since 1994, Hanks has also donated $36,500 to liberal causes like Midwest Values Pac, founded by Democratic Sen. Al Franken. Republican and conservative donations: Zero.
- Julianne Moore, who stars as Palin, donated $2,250 to the Democrats, and $7,500 to special-interest groups like the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic White House Victory Fund. To Republicans and conservative causes: Zero.
The film’s co-executive producers have also made significant contributions. This comes as no surprise; it would be far more newsworthy if a Hollywood cast and crew gave primarily to Republicans. Still, it underscores a need for conservatives to play a larger part in the crafting of the cultural narrative. If we object to Hollywood’s dramatic rendering of the McCain/Palin campaign, we should kick ourselves that we didn’t think to render it dramatically first.
Read the rest here.
Comments »Obama Forced His Students to Read Bell at University of Chicago Law School
By Charles C. Johnson
Barack Obama made his own students at the University of Chicago Law School read some of Derrick Bell’s most radical and racially inflammatory writings.
In 1994, Barack Obama taught a course at the University of Chicago Law School entitled, “Current Issues in Racism and the Law.” The reading list and syllabus for that class were made available by the New York Times in 2008, though there seems to have been little analysis of its content by Jodi Kantor, the Times’s Obama correspondent.
Obama routinely assigned works by Bell as required reading, including Bell’s racialist interpretations of seminal civil rights laws and cases. No other scholar’s work appears as often in the syllabus as Bell’s does.
Obama relied particularly heavily upon Bell’s major work, Race, Racism, and American Law (1973). Now in its sixth edition, the book lays out Bell’s Critical Race Theory, which is based on the Alinskyite presumption that all of law is a construct–not of justice, but of power exercised by whites against blacks.
(Obama appears to be diagramming just such a presumption in a famous photo from his campaign that ran in The Times and accompanied a piece written by Kantor on Obama’s stint as a law lecturer. The title of the diagram, “relationships built on self-interest,” links corporations, banks, and utilities, as part of a “power analysis.”)
Perhaps most interesting was Obama’s decision to include and to require the introduction to Bell’s controversial 1992 book, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism, which relied on manufactured stories (or, as Bell called them, “allegories” or “fables”) meant to portray the allegedly structural racism of American society.
In a September 24, 1992 interview with C-Span’s Brian Lamb, Lamb quoted this paragraph from Bell’s book and asked Bell for comment.
Black people will never gain full equality in this country. Even those Herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary peaks of progress, short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance. This is a hard-to-accept fact that all history verifies. We must acknowledge it, not as a sign of submission, but as an act of ultimate defiance. (p. 12, italics in original)
“That, if I had to put down my whole thirty five years working in this [field] is [my view] reflected… If you read nothing else, I think that reflects my experience,” Bell told Lamb.
That is what Obama wanted his fellow students at Harvard, and the students he taught at Chicago, to understand–and believe.
Contrary to media spin, Obama did not encounter radical racialist professor Derrick Bell in a youthful flirtation with radicalism.
Obama befriended Bell as an adult, and he used Bell’s work to indoctrinate his own students about race and the law.
Alex Jones: “The Republic is Collapsing”
Don’t tell investors.
Obama’s Lobbying Kills Latest Keystone Bill: Senate Short Four Votes
By ERICA MARTINSON and DAN BERMAN | 3/8/12 4:41 PM EST
Thursday’s squeaker of a Senate vote on the Keystone XL pipeline serves both as a warning to President Barack Obama that a majority of both houses of Congress supports the pipeline and as encouragement to Republicans to keep pushing the issue.
Obama had personally lobbied Senate Democrats with phone calls urging them to oppose an amendment to the highway bill that would fast-track the Canada-to-Texas oil pipeline. And as it turned out, he needed every bit of their help.
In all, 11 Democrats joined 45 Republicans to support the pipeline. Only the fact that 60 votes were needed for passage saved the White House from an embarrassing defeat.
Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) wryly congratulated Obama on his lobbying efforts.
“That was very strong work by President Obama himself, making personal calls to Democrats,” Lugar said. “He understood that a majority of the American public and a majority at least of the Senate are strongly in favor of this project.
“So I suppose you give credit to the president for once again blocking something, but I don’t think the president really wants to do that indefinitely,” he added.
“We got a majority in the Senate,” said amendment sponsor Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.), who noted that two senators — Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and John Thune (R-S.D.) — were absent. “So we would have had 58 votes had all Republicans been able to be here.”
Republicans promised that the issue, which has been a staple of the campaign trail since Obama first attempted in November to punt the decision until 2013, will not go away.
“We’re very close to the 60,” Hoeven said. “It’s hard to say exactly which members maybe would have supported without White House intervention, but I think the important thing is that the support is there, and the support is there because the public wants this to happen.
“The pressure is just going to increase on the administration to get this project done,” Hoeven added.
The 11 Democrats who crossed party lines to support the amendment were Max Baucus of Montana, Mark Begich of Alaska, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Jon Tester of Montana and Jim Webb of Virginia.
Landrieu said she was not among those getting a call from Obama. And she was not surprised to see 10 Democrats join with her to cross party lines.
Read the rest here.
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Who Was Derrick Bell? (Thomas Sowell Explains)
Wikipedia’s Definition For ‘Critical Race Theory’ Changed
CNN Anchor Fed Wikipedia Definition of ‘Critical Race Theory’ During Breitbart Interview
CNN’s Soledad O’Brien’s venomously sarcastic interview with Breitbart.com editor-in-chief Joel Pollak culminated with her throwing out her definition of “Critical Race Theory” in the heat of her interview over the Obama/Bell Tapes released last night. Pollak had already requested that O’Brien define the term more than once, and at the 1:45 mark in the video below, she finally does. One problem–O’Brien’s definition appears to be lifted almost word-for-word from a wikipedia page, presumedly hurriedly communicated to Soledad in the midst of her interview.
A quick google search of O’Brien’s exact phrasing, in quotes, returns the Critical Race Theory wikipedia page as the first entry. Read and decide for yourself:
Soledad O’Brien: “Critical Race Theory looks into the intersection of race and politics and the law.”
Wikipedia entry on Critical Race Theory: “Critical Race Theory (CRT) is an academic discipline focused upon the intersection of race, law and power.”
O’Brien’s fumbling to come up with a response occurred when she attempted to challenge Pollak’s definition of critical race theory:
Soledad O’Brien: “That is a complete misreading of critical race theory. As you know, that’s an actual theory, and you could google it and someone would give you a good definition of it. So that’s not correct. So keep going.”
Joel Pollak: “In what way is it a critical misreading? Can you explain to me? Do you know what critical–Explain to your readers what critical race theory is.”
Soledad O’Brien: “I’m going to ask you to continue on. I’m just going to point out that that is inaccurate. Keep going.”
Pollak once again asked that she define it, at which point she inserted the wikipedia-esque response. See the video below.
Later in the video, O’Brien can be heard deflecting another question from Pollak, saying “You know what, someone was talking in my ear, so I couldn’t hear what you said.”
Source: Rebelpundit
Related: Video
Comments »Senate to Vote on a Key Highway Bill That Could Fast Track the Keystone XL Pipeline
CNN Anchor Implodes Over Breitbart Video
So funny.
Comments »Obama Misinforms U.S. Public About Meeting with Netanyahu: Promises Bunker Busters To Israel If Netanyahu Delays Iran Invasion Until After US Elections
The IRS is Going After Conservative Groups Seeking Tax Breaks as Non Profits
“A battle is brewing between politically-oriented nonprofit organizations and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) about whether the groups deserve tax-protected status. Although such groups support both major political parties, it is the wealthier conservative groups, such American Crossroads and those affiliated with the Tea Party, that are up in arms.
Under the U.S. tax code, 501(c)(4) groups are tax-exempt because their purpose is “social welfare.” They are allowed to engage in a certain amount of political activity, but politics cannot be their primary focus. American Crossroads, co-founded by Karl Rove, and Priorities USA, backed by President Barack Obama, claim that they are apolitical social welfare organizations, a description that elicits snickers—at best—from independent observers. The IRS believes that these faux-social welfare groups should pay taxes.
According to the IRS, “The promotion of social welfare does not include any unrelated business activities or intervention in political campaigns on behalf of or in opposition to any candidate for public office.”
Also at issue is the suspicion that corporations are donating to political super PACs and then deducting their contributions as business expenses.”
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