[6/28/07]

[Joel Rosenberg - novelist] 12:15 am [permalink]
Bolton: Iran Sanctions Won't Work - Amb. John Bolton, the recently retired top Bush administration diplomat at the United Nations, warns time is fast running out to stop Iran's nuclear weapons program and that he worries about the safety of Israel....excerpts from his interview with The Jerusalem Post: "Sanctions and diplomacy have failed and it may be too late for internal opposition to oust the Islamist regime, leaving only military intervention to stop Iran's drive to nuclear weapons, the US's former ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday. Worse still, according to Ambassador Bolton, the Bush administration does not recognize the urgency of the hour and that the options are now limited to only the possibility of regime change from within or a last-resort military intervention, and it is still clinging to the dangerous and misguided belief that sanctions can be effective. As a consequence, Bolton said he was 'very worried' about the well-being of Israel. If he were in Israel's predicament, he said, 'I'd be pushing the US very hard. I am pushing the US [administration] very hard, from the outside, in Washington'....Bolton [was] witheringly critical of the ongoing diplomatic contacts with Teheran, which he said were merely playing into the hands of the regime. 'The current approach of the Europeans and the Americans is not just doomed to failure, but dangerous,' he said. 'Dealing with [the Iranians] just gives them what they want, which is more time....We have fiddled away four years, in which Europe tried to persuade Iran to give up voluntarily,' he complained. 'Iran in those four years mastered uranium conversion from solid to gas and now enrichment to weapons grade....We lost four years to feckless European diplomacy and our options are very limited.'"

[6/27/07]

[Julia Gorin pundit/comedian] 12:05 am [permalink]
What Would Cameron Diaz’s Cuban Father Think? Cameron Diaz apologized for wearing in Peru that olive green bag emblazoned with a red star and the the Mao slogan “Serve the People”. The AP report noted that “in Peru the slogan evokes memories of the Maoist Shining Path insurgency that fought the government in the 1980s and early 1990s in a bloody conflict that left nearly 70,000 people dead.”

It’s pretty funny that she picked one of the only non-commie/non pro-commie Latin-American countries to wear a commie bag in. Almost anywhere else south of the border, it wouldn’t have caused much of a stir. This was her apology: “I sincerely apologize to anyone I may have inadvertently offended. The bag was a purchase I made as a tourist in China and I did not realize the potentially hurtful nature of the slogan printed on it.”

Excuse me?

It was just a “purchase as a tourist — in China”? And…she didn’t know that China is a communist totalitarian country? It takes a world traveler to be this dumb. [Gorin Glob]

[6/26/07]

[Julia Gorin pundit/comedian] 12:05 am [permalink]
We’ve Been too Global about Global Warming Scientist Implicates Worms in Global Warming:

Jim Frederickson, the research director at the Composting Association, has called for data on worms and composting to be re-examined after a German study found that worms produce greenhouse gases 290 times more potent than carbon dioxide. (Worms are being used commercially to compost organic material and is in preference to putting it into the landfill.)

So here all this time we’ve been trying to have a global outlook on global warming, to see the big picture, when all we needed was the worm’s eye view. [Gorin Glob]

[6/25/07]

[Streetsweeper] 12:05 am [permalink]
Streetsweeper's Cinema Sweepings: Missing Heart Nightmare in Karachi by Frederica Mathewes-Green - On January 23, 2002, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped on the streets of Karachi, Pakistan. Some weeks later a horrifying videotape arrived, documenting that he had been beheaded. In those intervening days, his wife Mariane and a team of friends and investigators tried desperately to find him, adding up the scarce clues that might enable them to save his life. It was nightmarish in a way we can hardly imagine. A Mighty Heart gives us a 100-minute tour of that nightmare.

The flaw in this expertly made movie is that that’s all it gives us. But first, give director Michael Winterbottom his due: He has effectively every means at his disposal to keep the audience just as tense and frustrated as the characters. (It’s a challenging task because, after all, we already know how the story turns out). The images he shows us appear in exaggerated contrast, so that things we’re trying to look at are concealed by shadows or lost in whitish glare. Interior scenes have an unpleasant fluorescent hue, and the colors look as exhausted as the characters. Often enough, we’re being awoken in the gray dawn, or sitting with the characters through endless eye-glazing hours tapping at laptop computers. The collision of urgency with hopelessness is a particularly miserable feeling, and Winterbottom makes sure we feel it keenly. [more at National Review]

[6/22/07]

[Streetsweeper] 12:05 am [permalink]
Streetsweeper's Opinion Sweepings: Finally, Good News From Iraq by Richard S. Lowry Nearly every day we hear of another horrific explosion in Iraq and watch the horrible aftermath on our televisions. On June 13th we heard that the revered Golden Mosque in Samara had been bombed, again. It was only a little over a year ago that the Askari Mosque was destroyed on February 22, 2006 by Al Qaeda bombers. The two remaining minarets were destroyed in the second attack. Al-Askari is now all but rubble. But this latest attack has provided Americans with an unintended insight.

For those of us who are carefully monitoring the events in Iraq on a daily basis, the Iraqi reaction in the aftermath of this second bombing has provided the first tangible indication that the surge is working. [more at CaliforniaRepublic]

[6/21/07]

[Streetsweeper] 12:05 am [permalink]
Streetsweeper's Cinema Sweepings: Boots on the Screen Sgt. Kyle Hausmann-Stokes puts the soldier’s life on film. By Peter Suderman - On a dusty landscape, camouflaged soldiers run in formation, then abruptly flatten themselves down on the ground to take cover and pop off shots from their rifles. A heavily armed chopper swoops overhead, and a man with a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher fires off a round into the air. In a flurry of speedy, MTV-style cuts, more tanks and soldiers whiz by, all set to the sounds of mid-‘90s heavy-metal acts Filter and Disturbed. No, it’s not a recruiting commercial, and it’s not a Hollywood production about Iraq (if only!).

It’s a homemade combat video called “Stryker Combat Rotation” made by Army Sgt. Kyle Hausmann-Stokes, a young man who, at 24, has managed to be both a soldier and a filmmaker, and has made it his mission to tell troop stories on the big screen. And with a showing of one of his films at the recent G.I. Film Festival in Washington, D.C., and a coveted spot in the film-production program at University of Southern California (USC), he’s got a real shot. But first, he’s heading to the front.

Hausmann-Stokes looks like a lot of other young men his age: clean cut, spiked hair, khaki pants, a white button-up. But he speaks with a confident-but-understated voice beyond his years; undoubtedly, it’s the almost three years of military service in him talking. [more at National Review]

[6/19/07]

[Streetsweeper] 12:05 am [permalink]
Streetsweeper's Cinema Sweepings: Mexicans Do Jobs the Kids from Bel Air Shouldn’t Have to Do Just don’t start writing scripts, Jose. By David Kahane

Out here in California, we’re a little puzzled by the kerfuffle back east over “comprehensive immigration reform,” whatever that is. The great internecine ruckus among Chimpy McHitler, John McCain, Trent Lott, Lindsey Graham, Jon Kyl, Mitch McConnell, and a bunch of other senators not named Feinstein or Boxer means absolutely nothing to us. Why, just the other day some senator from Wyoming named Craig Thomas apparently died and we all said: Who? Anything the Republican party — almost extinct in the Golden State — wants to do to sink itself nationally is just fine with us...

...On the other hand, should any of our new immigrants actually want to work in industries that are, shall we say, reserved for, you know... us... the Writers Guild of America would take a very dim view of that. [more at National Review]

[6/15/07]

[Julia Gorin pundit/comedian] 12:05 am [permalink]
In a Sentence, Kostunica Says it All “United States of America has to find another way to express its devotion and love for Albanians, other than rewarding them with Serbian territories.” — Serbian President Vojislav Kostunica, June 11 [Gorin Glob]

[6/13/07]

[from our friends @Mediacrity] 12:01 am [permalink]
The Times Laments "America in Decline" The New York Times Monday has a front page article on the last episode of the HBO series The Sopranos. But, this being the Times, it was more than just a review--it was an attack on America.

The decline and fall of the Sopranos — Tony; his wife, Carmela; and the rest — served as a parable of America in decline, yet week to week the series was also just a gangsters’ tale, with lots of graphic sex, gruesome violence and most of all a sense of humor.

Note the totally unnecessary reference to "America in decline." That may be Alessandra Stanley's personal opinion (she is a Times reporter, so what do you expect?), but it has no place in a TV review unless you are Counterpunch, the Daily Worker, or the New York Times.

This is not the first time the Times has allowed the political radicalism of its arts critics to creep into their articles.

Two years ago, I pointed out that architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff did the same thing in an article on Ground Zero. He used that platform to attack America as "a society that has turned its back on any notion of cultural openness" and "an empire enthralled with its own power."

If you have a problem with this, don't bother to complain to the newly appointed Empty Suit, "public editor" Clark Hoyt. His inaugural column, on Sunday, follows the Barney Calame tradition of serving as a public relations conduit for Times editors.

The subject of his column was the Times' failure to put the JFK terror plot on page one. Hoyt tackled the subject in Calamesque fashion by interviewing the editors and swallowing their excuses.

Don't worry, Clark. Just two more years before you can go back to your divan. [go to Mediacrity blog]

[6/12/07]

[Streetsweeper] 12:05 am [permalink]
Streetsweeper's Cinema Sweepings: Waitress By James Bowman Let's stipulate at the outset that there probably are husbands as loathsome Earl (Jeremy Sisto) who are married to wives who are as sweet as Jenna (Keri Russell), the central characters in Adrienne Shelly's Waitress. There may be even more loathsome husbands married to even sweeter wives -- though Jenna is said to be "the queen of kindness and goodness." But portraying such a lopsided relationship in a movie can have only one purpose, which is to manipulate the emotions of the audience. And those emotions can only be of the coarsest and can only number two: pity and moral indignation. For some, it's true, there is a certain voyeuristic pleasure to be had from indulging themselves in -- indeed, wallowing in -- such feelings, and they will make up the film's natural audience. But those who demand more sophisticated pleasures, even from so slight a confection as Waitress, are likely to lose patience with it pretty early on. [more at American Spectator]

[6/6/07]

[Found in the ebag] 12:01 am [permalink]
File Under: It's About Time From Daniel Pipes - CAIR's Legal Tribulations Federal prosecutors have named CAIR and two other Islamic organizations, the Islamic Society of North America and the North American Islamic Trust, as one of the "unindicted co-conspirators and/or joint venturers" in a criminal conspiracy to support Hamas, a designated terrorist group.

In a filing on May 29, prosecutors described CAIR as one of 53 "individuals/entities that are/were members of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood's Palestine Committee and/or its organizations." They listed ISNA and NAIT as two of seven "entities who are and/or were members of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood." Josh Gerstein of The New York Sun reports that spokesmen for CAIR did not respond to requests for comment.

This development occurred in connection with the trial, scheduled to start on July 16 in Dallas, of five officials (Shukri Abu-Baker, Mohammad El-Mezain, Ghassan Elashi, Mufid Abdulqader, and Abdulraham Odeh) of the now-defunct Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, accused of sending funds to Hamas. This court filing listed some 300 individuals or organizations as co-conspirators.

What is an unindicted co-conspirator? Someone by and about whom hearsay is permissible in the courtroom. Here is a definition by legal journalist Stuart Taylor, discussing an entirely unrelated case:

The prosecutor is saying in essence in court … that we believe this man was part of the criminal conspiracy, along with the people who are on trial. We haven't indicted him but the relevance of that for the purposes of the trial is that [it] lets them get in more evidence about the unindicted co-conspirator's … out-of-court statements than they otherwise could. It's a way around the hearsay rule. … For example, if they want … one of their witnesses, to talk about what [a person] said to him, ordinarily that would be barred by the so-called hearsay rule. You can't … testify in a trial about what somebody else said out of court. That rule has a lot of exceptions. One of the exceptions is if the person who you're trying to quote … is named by the prosecution as an unindicted co-conspirator, then you can talk about what he said out of court.

Substitute "organization" for "man" and "person" and this description applies to the situation of CAIR, ISNA, and NAIT.

Comments: (1) CAIR being named as an unindicted co-conspirator complements the fact that many of its staff and associates are associated with terrorism, as I have documented in this entry.

(2) It is only logical that CAIR, whose origins lie in the Islamic Association for Palestine, which was founded by Hamas, be legally investigated in connection with Hamas.

(3) This may be the first time since 1994 that the press could not find a CAIR spokesman for a comment. And in its daily "American Muslim News Briefs" sent out today, CAIR conspicuously does not mention its own predicament.

(4) If it turns out that there is substance to the CAIR-HLF connection, then CAIR will be caught out by the changed political and legal environment since 9/11. Put simply, Islamists can no longer get away with they what could before then. (I elaborated this in a different context at "Nike and 9/11.")

(5) Whatever the future brings, this designation will hang as a permanent albatross around CAIR's collective neck.