![[happy-new-year.jpg]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWZnwMOJ55bBzmBpPXMiQ3_Yy2vdNdxCwN-zA0R7eXF0Y_hwuqsQzj7JrMLkjRKpdIEp_sAru9SGlacyT1U70KtdMwZWApEnzWyvNEdiMvlvw-zaCPl90QegbacMnhic2Kf0fc/s1600/happy-new-year.jpg)
FRENCH JOURNALIST: ...Don't you think that by trying to eradicate terrorism in Chechnya you are going to eradicate the civilian population of Chechnya?
VLADIMIR PUTIN: If you want to become an Islamic fundamentalist and be circumcised, come to Moscow. We are multiconfessional. We have very good specialists. I can recommend one for the operation. He'll make sure nothing grows back.
Attorneys general from 13 states penned the top two Democrats in Congress Wednesday requesting they remove extra Medicaid funds directed toward Nebraska.
The attorneys general, all Republicans, say that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) tacked on extra Medicare funds to the Senate bill to buy the vote of holdout centrist Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) on healthcare legislation.
The state officials, led by South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster, say that the provision is unconstitutional and ask that Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) remove it as to avoid a lawsuit.
"We ask that Congress delete the Nebraska provision from the pending legislation, as we prefer to avoid litigation," they wrote. "Because this provision has serious implications for the country and the future of our nation’s legislative process, we urge you to take appropriate steps to protect the Constitution and the rights of the citizens of our nation."
Critics, who have dubbed the funds as the "Cornhusker Kickback," say that the $100 million deal is emblematic of Washington wheeling and dealing and that it is not fair to other states who have to use their own funds to pay for the Medicaid expansion included in the healthcare overhaul.
I was born and grew up in San Francisco. My very earliest memories of the City just predate the advent of the hippies. At that time, the City was a solid amalgam of working class people, middle class people, and a nice handful of the very, very rich. Barring the inevitable slums (and all cities have them), San Francisco was a well-maintained, fairly safe place. Trips downtown (usually triggered by a visit to the doctor in the medical building at 450 Sutter) always ended with a visit to the beautiful City of Paris department store to admire the rotunda (which you can still see in the new Nieman Marcus on the same site), a stop at the marble bathrooms in I. Magnin’s (where Macy’s stands now), and treats at Blum’s Restaurant. Women and men still wore hats in public places, and the women usually wore gloves too. The sidewalks were clean, and there were no beggars.
I remember, too, when the hippies came along. Initially, at least from a child’s point of view, it was kind of fun. During the Summer of Love in 1967, colorfully dressed young people would be dancing in Golden Gate Park, waving banners, blowing bubbles and handing out flowers to all who passed by. Of course, when they left the Park at the end of these pretty love-ins, the grass was torn to shreds, the flower beds were destroyed, and a few overdosed teens always lay scattered in the detritus left behind. Soon, though, the magic (such as it was) vanished, and all that was left behind was the miserable slum that was the Haight Ashbury.{...}
The hippies weren’t just an aberration. They were the beginning of a deep rot that set into the City. Some of them remained as anchors for the homeless who still pepper San Francisco’s streets, making those streets unsafe or just very, very unpleasant for ordinary people. Others reformed their lifestyles, but kept their Leftist, SDS influenced politics. They grew up, got jobs, bought homes, and became people of influence in the City. Their influence wasn’t immediately obvious. During the 1970s, the City just drifted along. Self-realization and self-actualization and general self-involvement hit the middle class with a bang, with the result that everyone was running around seeking his bliss, pausing only periodically to do some navel gazing.
The City’s gays, contrary to the film Milk, weren’t in a perpetual state of political activism during the 1970s. Instead, they were glorying in the hedonism that was part-and-parcel of escaping the dark closet in which they’d lived for so many years. I can’t say that I blame them — it was a giddy feeling to be free to express a long-hidden sexuality — but the results were deleterious. It’s not healthy for a City to have a neighborhood that’s dedicated to sex, a rather obvious principle that is entirely separate from the fact that the Castro and its myriad bathhouses proved to be perfect Petri dishes for a burgeoning fatal disease that would soon sweep the world.{...}
The City had also lost what limited control it once had over the worst neighborhoods in town. Nowhere was this more apparent to me than in the area surrounding the venerable Cow Palace. Admittedly, that area was never a very nice one, but I remember as a child going frequently to events at the Cow Palace, going to gymnastic meets at the neighborhood schools, dining on delicious Middle Eastern food at a family-owned restaurant, and visiting people’s houses in the area. Although I didn’t have the vocabulary at the time, looking back I would characterize the neighborhood as lower working class. By the late 1980s, it was just plain scary, with the housing projects dominating and blighting the area. (The worst of those housing projects, incidentally, became so unsustainable that the City eventually destroyed them in an effort at urban renewal. Those that remain are still appalling.) {..}
As we enter the second decade of the 21st Century, I find myself in the City more and more often. I don’t visit the well-maintained spots that still charm tourists, though. Instead, my children’s activities take me to parts of town other than the little Potemkin neighborhoods, neatly preserved for the tourists or the affluent liberals concerned with preserving lovely enclaves for themselves. On these journeys, consistently, I am appalled by what I see. The City has morphed into a crazy combination of anarchy and Leftist totalitarianism, all neatly wrapped into a package called “political correctness.” This matters, not just because we’re witnessing the death of what used to be one of the most beautiful, desirable cities in the world, but because it perfectly represents the American Leftist paradigm. In other words, San Francisco is the future of American Leftism, and it’s a very scary future indeed.
The U.S. Treasury said today it will inject another $3.8 billion into troubled lender GMAC, part of a deal that will boost the federal government’s stake to 56% and attempt to staunch the company’s losses from bad mortgages.
All of the money injected by the Treasury will essentially go to shoring up GMAC’s ResCap unit, the arm best known for ditech.com and other housing-boom related mortgage offers that crashed as housing prices withered over the past couple of years. GMAC said the move, along with a $3.3 billion write-down in mortgages at ResCap and Ally Bank, should allow it to explore a sale or other action for ResCap.
"By protecting the financial performance and strength of our core automotive finance operations, we expect to increase the pace at which we can fully repay the U.S. taxpayer,” said GMAC Chief Executive Officer Michael A. Carpenter.
The money comes on top of $12.5 billion that the U.S. Treasury had previously invested in GMAC to keep it afloat as the lender of choice for car buyers and dealers at General Motors and Chrysler
GMAC will become the sixth company the U.S. has taken control of in the past two years.
Public-private mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, auto manufacturers General Motors and Chrysler and the largest commercial insurer in the U.S., American International Group.
"As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of Sept. 11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.
“He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core Al Qaeda-trained terrorists still there, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,’ we won’t be at war. But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe. Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency — social transformation — the restructuring of American society. President Obama’s first object and his highest responsibility must be to defend us against an enemy that knows we are at war."
I was walking through a deserted downtown on Christmas Eve with a friend, past the lonely, gray Treasury Building, past the snowy White House with no president inside.
“I hope the terrorists don’t think this is a good time to attack,” I said, looking protectively at the White House, which always looks smaller and more vulnerable and beautiful than you expect, no matter how often you see it up close.
I thought our guard might be down because of the holiday; now I realize our guard is down every day.{...}
Before he left for vacation, Obama tried to shed his Spock mien and juice up the empathy quotient on jobs. But in his usual inspiring/listless cycle, he once more appeared chilly in his response to the chilling episode on Flight 253, issuing bulletins through his press secretary and hitting the links. At least you have to seem concerned.{...}
Citing the attempt of the Nigerian’s father to warn U.S. authorities six months ago, the president intoned: “It now appears that weeks ago this information was passed to a component of our intelligence community but was not effectively distributed so as to get the suspect’s name on a no-fly list.” {...}
In his detached way, Spock was letting us know that our besieged starship was not speeding into a safer new future, and that we still have to be scared.
Heck of a job, Barry.
At the check-in counter the passengers’ passports and tickets are closely examined. A ticket without a sticker from the security checkers will not be accepted. At passport control passengers’ names are checked against information from the FBI, Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), Scotland Yard, Shin Bet, and Interpol databases. Luggage is screened and sometimes hand searched. In addition, bags are put through a decompression chamber simulating pressures during flight that could trigger explosives.El Al is the only airline in the world that passes all luggage through such a chamber. Even at overseas airports, El Al security agents conduct all luggage searches personally, even if they are supervised by government or private security firms.
IDF troops overnight Friday eliminated three Al Aksa Brigade terrorists who on Thursday murdered Shavei Shomron resident Rabbi Meir Chai as he was driving from his home to the town of Einav. The three terrorists were identified as Anan Subeh, 33, Raed a-Sarkaji, 38, and Raghsan Abu Sharah, 39 whose brother is considered a top terrorists in the group. All three have been involved in a string of previous terror attacks.
According to reports, IDF troops entered the center of Shechem early Saturday morning and surrounded the houses where the terrorists were holed up. Two of the three were killed when they refused the soldiers' call to surrender, while the third was killed in a gunbattle.
During the funerals of the three men, all veteran members and leaders of Fatah's armed wing, the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, thousands of Palestinians chanted slogans accusing the PA of collusion with Israel and calling for an end to security coordination with Israel and the dismantling of the PA.
For several hours during the funerals, which took place in Nablus, it seemed as if the PA and not the IDF had killed the three men. It was, in the words of a local journalist, "one of the biggest anti-Palestinian Authority demonstrations" in many years.
The relationship between the PA and local Fatah activists has always been tense. Nablus and its surrounding refugee camps, especially Balata refugee camp, has long been a stronghold for disgruntled Fatah militiamen who occasionally vent their frustration against the PA leadership and security forces.
For years during the second intifada, Nablus, the largest Palestinian city in the West Bank, was controlled by dozens of Fatah gunmen and thugs who imposed a reign of terror on wealthy clans.
Many local families did not hide their satisfaction when IDF troops raided the city during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002 and killed or arrested scores of Fatah gunmen, including the infamous Ahmed Tabouk, one of the leaders of the Aksa Martyrs Brigades.
In the context of its efforts to restore law and order to the city, the PA offered four years ago to recruit many of the gunmen to various branches of its security forces if they agreed to lay down their weapons.
The PA also managed to persuade Israel to stop pursuing those gunmen who agreed to hand over their weapons and abandon violence.
In return, the PA took on itself the mission of holding the "pardoned" gunmen in one of its security installations for a limited time and as a first step toward granting them total freedom of movement.
Most of the Fatah gunmen who complied were added to the PA's payroll, but not all were happy with the arrangement. Some complained that the PA had broken its promise to appoint them to senior positions in its security forces, while others said that their salaries were too low. Others complained that despite their agreement to surrender their weapons and open a new page in their lives, Israeli security forces were continuing to target them.
Friends and relatives of the Fatah operatives who were killed in the recent IDF operation accused the PA of failing to fulfill its "commitments" to give them more money and good jobs. Some did not rule out the possibility that the Fatah cell that murdered Rabbi Meir Chai last week had received money from an "outside" party, such as Hizbullah or even Hamas.
In the past, there were a number of cases where Fatah militiamen in the West Bank openly admitted to receiving funds from Hizbullah. The gunmen justified their action by arguing that the PA had failed to "compensate" them for the "sacrifices" they made in the fight against Israel.
The killing of the three men is now being exploited by leading figures in Fatah to incite against the PA leadership in Ramallah. One of the main instigators is Husam Khader, a charismatic and extremely popular Fatah operative from Balata who has long been attacking the PA and its security forces, accusing them of financial and moral corruption and collaboration with Israel.
Khader and another senior Fatah operative, Kadoura Fares of Ramallah, are convinced that continued cooperation with Israel on security matters would eventually turn Palestinians against the PA leadership. The two, along with many of their followers in Fatah, believe that a third intifada is on its way, but that this time it would be directed against the PA and not Israel.
Section 2c of the United States International Organizations Immunities Act is the crucial piece.
Property and assets of international organizations, wherever located and by whomsoever held, shall be immune from search, unless such immunity be expressly waived, and from confiscation. The archives of international organizations shall be inviolable. (Emphasis added.)
Inviolable archives means INTERPOL records are beyond US citizens' Freedom of Information Act requests and from American legal or investigative discovery ("unless such immunity be expressly waived.")
Property and assets being immune from search and confiscation means precisely that. Wherever they may be in the United States. This could conceivably include human assets - Americans arrested on our soil by INTERPOL officers.
Context: International Criminal Court
The importance of this last crucial point cannot be understated, because this immunity and protection - and elevation above the US Constitution - afforded INTERPOL is likely a precursor to the White House subjecting the United States under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). INTERPOL provides a significant enforcement function for the ICC, just as our FBI provides a significant function for our Department of Justice.
We direct the American public to paragraph 28 of the ICC's Proposed Programme Budget for 2010 (PDF).
29. Additionally, the Court will continue to seek the cooperation of States not party to the Rome Statute and to develop its relationships with regional organizations such as the Organization of American States (OAS), the Arab League (AL), the African Union (AU), the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), ASEAN and CARICOM. We will also continue to engage with subregional and thematic organizations, such as SADC and ECOWAS, and the Commonwealth Secretariat and the OIF. This will be done through high level visits, briefings and, as appropriate, relationship agreements. Work will also be carried out with sectoral organizations such as IDLO and INTERPOL, to increase efficiency.
The United States is not a party to the Rome Statute - the UN treaty that established the International Criminal Court. (See: Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court)
Bookworm Room – Barack Obama and Interpol
Dr. Melissa Clouthier – More On President Obama’s Executive Order
A dispute is rumbling between Israel and the US Consulate in Jerusalem after a US diplomatic car allegedly tried running over a Defense Ministry security guard recently at an IDF checkpoint in the West Bank. The car had been stopped after the occupants refused to present identification papers.
Israel is also furious that one of the consulate cars was found to have transported a Palestinian without permits between Jerusalem and the West Bank.
The identification of American diplomats from the consulate at IDF checkpoints has been a major sticking point for several years.
In January 2008, the Civil Administration of Judea and Samaria filed complaints with the Foreign Ministry after both US Security Coordinator Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton and then-consul-general Jacob Walles refused to roll down their windows or open their car doors and show identification papers at a checkpoint.
However, Israel's ire reached a new level after an incident on November 13 in which a five-car convoy of consulate vehicles with diplomatic plates arrived at the Gilboa crossing.
According to a detailed official Israel Police description of the incident obtained exclusively by The Jerusalem Post, the drivers refused to identify themselves or open a window or door. The drivers, according to the report, purposely blocked the crossing, tried running over one of the Israeli security guards stationed there and made indecent gestures at female guards.
The entire incident was documented by cameras at the crossing.
Following the incident, the head of the police's Security Department, Lt.-Cmdr. Meir Ben-Yishai, convened a meeting on November 18 at police headquarters in Jerusalem with the regional security officer at the consulate, Tim Laas. Also present were officials from the Defense Ministry and the Foreign Ministry, and the regional security officer at the US Embassy in Tel Aviv, Dan Power.
According to a protocol of the meeting, obtained by the Post, Ben-Yishai said he assumed the drivers of the consulate vehicles had received permission to act the way they had. He said that in the future, if a diplomatic car did not stop and identify its passengers "immediately," it would not be allowed to pass the checkpoint.
Ben-Yishai described additional violations by consulate workers, and referred to at least one case in which a female Palestinian without appropriate documentation was found in a diplomatic car. Defense officials told the Post that there had been other similar cases in the past.
"We view this as an attempt to illegally transfer someone," Ben-Yishai said, according to the official police protocol.
Ben-Yishai also said the drivers of the cars, from east Jerusalem, hid their Israeli identity cards and put stickers over their names on their consulate-issued identity cards, since, as they claimed, "they are in a diplomatic vehicle and cannot be touched."
He added that police had filed a complaint with the Foreign Ministry and were conducting their own investigation to identify the driver who had tried running over the Israeli security guard.
While Power apologized for the incident and tried
smoothing things over, Laas angered Ben-Yishai, according to the protocol, when he said it was unacceptable for "simple guards" to inspect senior diplomats.
Laas said the communication needed to be between the guard and the driver, since "we can't know who the guard is."
This was understood by those present as
indicating his lack of trust in Israeli guards.
"This situation is being misused, and as proof in the latest incident, they refused to identify themselves and even tried smuggling a Palestinian without permission," Ben-Yishai said, according to the protocol. "The security guards at the crossings are licensed and are authorized by me, and that is how they should be treated. They are not 'simple guards‚' as Tim Laas called them."
Laas claimed that the Palestinian woman who had been in the car served as a translator for Dayton and the consul and that she had been returning with the team to Israel. He said it was possible that there had been a mishap with her papers.
Since the beginning, climate change skeptics have said that the hysteria of the man-made global warming movement, aside from being based on manifestly shoddy and often dishonest science, was in fact a Leftist political gambit. The Communists, having failed to win the world over with a Cold War had regrouped and were seeking to win it over with a warm war. By targeting Western (that is, capitalist) nations as the evildoers in the world’s imminent boiling destruction, and then playing on the fear, guilt and ignorance of those same Western nations, the Communists . . . er, global warming saviors . . . announced a solution: the West should give up its wealth by transferring it en masse to poor nations. The West should also give up its lifestyle, by abandoning electricity, gas and even toilet paper. The West, in other words, should give true meaning to global warming by engaging in self-immolation.
The last month, though, has seen this Communist-inspired house of cards collapse as quickly as the Soviet bloc did back in 1989. First came ClimateGate, which revealed to the whole world the fact that the most ardent climate “scientists” were, in fact, ideologues who cared little about science, and a great deal about achieving a political goal. They lied about their data, destroyed their facts, and systematically set out to muzzle and destroy anyone who disagreed with them.
People are confused about the war. The situation is difficult to resolve even for those who are here. For most of us, the conflict remains out of focus, lacking reference of almost any sort. Vertigo leaves us seeking orientation from places like Vietnam—where most of us never have been. So sad are our motley pundits-cum-navigators that those who have never have been to Afghanistan or Vietnam shamelessly use one to reference the other. We saw this in Iraq.
The most we can do is pay attention, study hard, and try to bring something into focus that is always rolling, yawing, and seemingly changing course randomly, in more dimensions than even astronauts must consider. All while gauging dozens of factors, such as Afghan Opinion, Coalition Will, Enemy Will and Capacity, Resources, Regional Actors (and, of course, the Thoroughly Unexpected). Nobody will ever understand all these dynamic factors and track them at once and through time. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that a tiger doesn’t need to completely understand the jungle to survive, navigate, and then dominate. It is not necessary to know every anthropological and historical nuance of the people here. If that were the case, our Coalition of over forty nations would not exist. More important is to realize that they are humans like us. They get hungry, happy, sad, and angry; they make friends and enemies (to the Nth degree); they are neither supermen nor vermin. They’re just people.
But it always helps to know as much as you can. This will take much time, many dispatches, and hard, dangerous work. Let’s get started.
I want to wish each and every one of you a merry and joyous Christmas...this is a special time of year and may it be blessed for all of you and yours.
Shomron Regional Council head Gershon Masika also criticized the government for not doing enough to ensure the safety of the settlers in the West Bank.
"Following a long period of calm, and despite our warnings, they opened the main checkpoint between Shavei Shomron and the West Bank city of Tulkarem. The government of Israel prefers to upkeep the lifestyle of Palestinian rather than that of its own citizens," said Masika.
Kedumim Regional Council head Hananel Durani added that "this murderous attack is the direct result of the government's weakness, the construction freeze and the turning of defense resources against the Jewish people." {...}
Sarah Eliash, a resident of Kedumim settlement, knew the family well. "Meir Avshalom Hai's wife, Elisheva, is currently on maternity leave with a 2-month-old baby," Eliash told Ynet.
Shavei Shomron spokeswoman, Menora Chazani, told Ynet the Hai was the childrens' Rabbi, and used to teach them Talmud and Torah in kindergarten.
"He would buy the children sweets and surprises, and teach them to sing. The kids admired him, and still do," Chazani said
