If the Peach Stole the Journal Cream

May 5th, 2012 admin

Why wait for Rupert Murdoch to complete his purchase of Dow Jones and let him ruin its Wall Street Journal? As long as the paper is doomed to the editorial mediocrity that is Murdoch’s hallmark, the staff should torch the joint before he gets a chance to sully it. And sully it replica herve leger, he will. A story on Page One of today’s Wall Street Journal illustrates how Murdoch and his praetorian guard shaped “coverage decisions that advanced the interests of his sprawling media conglomerate.”

As satisfying as dynamiting Journal headquarters just as Murdoch arrives to take custody might be, I recommend a subtler strategy of creative destruction. The peach-colored Financial Times, one of the Wall Street Journal’s competitors, should raid the Journal and in one swoop steal 100 of its best reporters and editors.

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If poaching of a few of the Wall Street Journal’s 700 reporters and editors by Condé Nast’s Portfolio is considered news, imagine the stir the pillaging of the Journal newsroom by the FT would create. Grand talent raids are common in the law biz, where ambitious firms cripple competitors by looting, say, an entire tax division, and having the defectors bring their clients with them.

The London-based FT moves about 140,000 copies a day in the United States compared to the Wall Street Journal’s 2 million. The FT could stand to win hundreds of thousands of new readers if it made a highly visible raid on the Journal—none of this one-or-two-Journal-staffers-at-a-time stuff—and promised to uphold the pre-Murdoch Journal’s reputation for excellence, accuracy, and integrity.

If you estimate an average head-count cost of $200,000-$250,000 for each purloined Journalist replica herve leger, the FT would be adding $25 million or so to its editorial budget. That looks like a lot, but it’s far from the $5 billion Murdoch has bid for all of Dow Jones. Of course, many of the Journal’s most talented will be booking departures upon the arrival of Rupert Murdoch. But if a great mass of them left at the same time for the FT,the raid could cut into Journal circulation. I imagine the FT placing full-page ads in the New York Times business section like this:

Do you miss reading Wall Street Journal All-Stars David Wessel, Walt Mossberg, Amy Marcus, Greg Ip, John Harwood, and Monica Langley? They—and others—have found a new home at the Financial Times. Why don’t you join them?

Who, exactly, should the FT steal? We can agree to disagree about specific names. Some of the people on my list might not be on yours. And nobody should feel slighted if they’re not on my list, as the point of this exercise is to demonstrate that the Bancrofts don’t make the Journal what it is, the people who work there do. If Murdoch succeeds in acquiring the Wall Street Journal but is denied its best journalists, his prize will be hollow. Not being the sentimental sort, I wouldn’t mind if he started running Lotto and Page 3 girl photos in the Murdoch Street Journal, just as long as I could get Journal-style journalism elsewhere.

And so, to the list.

First among the first:If the FT raiding party doesn’t capture David Wessel, the Journal’s Washington deputy bureau chief and economics columnist (“Capital”), it shouldn’t bother to return. Also marked for abduction: Special-projects editor Mark Maremont and his Boston wrecking crew (Steve Stecklow, James Bandler, and Charles Forelle).  They won this year’s public service Pulitzer for their stock-options stories. Monica Langley and Laurie P. Cohen are a pair of investigative aces that can beat anybody else’s full house. Roger Thurow sustains the Journal’s tradition of great feature writing.

They’ve got the beat:Susan Pulliam and Randall Smith can be trusted to put the Street in the Wall Street Journal. Daniel Golden hauled in a 2004 Pulitzer for his education stories. Amy Dockser Marcus’ work on health and medicine won a 2005 Pulitzer. Dennis K. Berman makes the dangerous world of murders and acquisitions—I mean, mergers and acquisitions—safe to read. For politics and government coverage, I admire David Rogers and John Harwood. For the Fed, Greg Ip. Glenn Simpson excels on the weird-money beat. Karen Richardson beats the hell out Warren Buffett.

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Ocean Conservation It’s as British as Fish and Ch

May 19th, 2012 admin

Britain once ruled the waves; now the people of the United Kingdom are determined to save the ocean environment. That was the take-away message from a function held at the iconic Selfridges department store on Oxford Street last night.

Over the last decade there has been a revolution in attitudes to the ocean that has seen the UK emerge at the global forefront of marine conservation. Today, standing up for ocean life is as British as fish and chips. And anyone who views the situation differently risks not only being out of tune with community sentiment, but transgressing national values.

From the ground breaking journalism of Charles Clover (whose book and film The End of the Line did so much to make people aware of the scale of the ecological crisis of over-fishing); to celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s multi-award winning Fish Fight (which managed to make both the tinned tuna industry and Europe’s Common Fisheries Policy (‘the CFP’) not only compelling viewing but the subjects of popular outrage); to the magisterial work of Professor Callum Roberts of York University and the Marine Programme of Prince Charles, the UK has led the way in spreading the message about the plight of the marine environment and the widespread collapse of fish stocks.

Fishermen themselves have got in on the act. Ultimately, there should be no better guardian of the marine environment than a local fisherman who uses low impact gear, because his livelihood and way of life depends on healthy fish stocks. Doing it tough in the UK under rules currently loaded against them, these guys combine greater sustainability with higher levels of employment and community embeddedness, to provide top quality fresh-caught local fish for seaside towns. It’s the kind of fishing we need – and it is a world away from the corporate money and high impact destructive gear down at the big end of the wharf

Seeking to keep the trust and faith of their customer base, UK retailers have led the world over the last decade in cleaning up supply chains and improving the sustainability of fish for sale. Iconic stores like M&S, Waitrose and Sainsburys have been out in front – but while there is still work to be done, the whole UK retail sector now takes seafood sustainability seriously. It is the cultural shift that is the key: in the United Kingdom being committed to best practice in seafood sustainability is now widely understood as a fundamental test of corporate values.

Then in 2011, in what the Independent called ‘one of the most successful environmental campaigns in years’, the entire tinned tuna sector in the UK (the second largest in the world, after the USA) was transformed to become the most sustainable on earth.

And it was in May last year – and under the personal leadership of Alannah Weston – Selfridges embarked on an extraordinarily ambitious promotion of ocean conservation in a six week blue blitzkrieg known as ‘Project Ocean’. Apart from raising money directly for marine conservation projects, Selfridges’ Project Ocean led to the establishment of the UK Marine Reserve Coalition, a powerful alliance of leading NGOs dedicated to campaigning for large scale marine reserves.

The event at Selfridges last night was to mark the one-year anniversary of the launch of Project Ocean, and it fell to Professor Jonathan Baillie What Are The Best Tattoo Guns, the Director of Conservation at ZSL, to tell the story of the United Kingdom’s emergence as a (soft) great power of marine conservation.

‘The United Kingdom owes everything to the seas that surround us; it is no wonder that this country is emerging as a champion of marine conservation.’

Progress is indeed being made and even the politicians are getting in on the act. Although the issue remains justly controversial, there is no doubting the sheer statistical reality that in April 2011 What Are The Best Tattoo Guns, the UK Government created the largest marine reserve on earth, followed recently by the creation of new marine protected areas (a lesser form of protection than a true no-take marine reserve) around the UK Overseas Territory of South Georgia & South Sandwich Islands.

Of course there is still an enormous amount of work to do. Endangered species are still being served in some London restaurants. Grievously unsustainable seafood products do still appear in some UK stores. Far less than 1% of the UK’s coastal waters are protected as no-take marine reserves. Europe’s fisheries remain in a state of stark decline. Under pressure from climate change, deep-water petroleum extraction and the bloated global fishing industry among other threats, the fate of the world’s oceans has never hung more grimly in the balance. But in the United Kingdom at least, there is now real determination to do something about it.

Another speaker at Selfridges last night, my colleague Willie Mackenzie, talked of the forceful advocacy that is needed from the UK’s current fisheries minister, Richard Benyon, in relation to the CFP, which is undergoing a once in a decade reform process.

Courtesy of Hugh’s Fish Fight, Benyon is in the spotlight like no fisheries minister ever before and he knows that his political success or failure will be judged on his ability to deliver effective reform of the CFP.

But so long as he is striving for a radically reformed CFP that puts sustainability first, Minister Benyon should rest assured in knowing that he has his country behind him.

 

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Stalking the Elusive Cord-Cutter Pay TV Grew Last

May 17th, 2012 admin

Web video is awesome because it gives you so many great viewing choices, without having to pay for TV.

So why did the number of pay-TV subscribers increase in just the last three months?

They didn’t grow much — a modest 422,000 subscribers, for a very modest 0.2 percent growth rate — but they still grew.

Those numbers come from Bernstein Research’s Craig Moffett, a longtime skeptic that “cord-cutting” is a real and pervasive problem for the cable guys (at least for now). It’s not the first time he’s shown evidence of barely-there growth for cable TV — last quarter, for instance, he gathered similar numbers.

But his numbers do conflict with other reports that show evidence of cord-cutting. Earlier this month, for instance, Nielsen said that pay-TV subscribers had shrunk by 1.5 million in 2011.

The easiest way to reconcile Moffett’s numbers with other reports is to note that almost all of the analyst’s data comes from the publicly traded pay-TV providers themselves — like Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon — in the reports they offer up to shareholders. Most of the other stuff you’re seeing comes from polls and surveys.

Here’s his data. You’ll need to click the image to enlarge it:

But what about all of you folks who tell me, over and over, that you’ve ditched cable for some kind of combo of Netflix, Hulu Office Visio Key, Apple TV, or even pirate streams? Surely I’ll hear from some of you again, just as soon as I publish this.

And I believe you folks Windows 7 activation key, too. I can certainly imagine many scenarios where tech-savvy people — and even not-that-tech-savvy people — are able to satisfy their video urges without paying for a TV subscription. But my operating theory, for now Windows XP Key, remains my vegan analogy: “They’re real, and they’re out there. They’re particularly notable in certain places like New York, the Bay Area and college towns. And they over-index at certain Web gathering places, like this one. But McDonald’s sales are still chugging along.”

 

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Brooklyn NY – Orthodox Man Sentenced 20 Years To L

May 17th, 2012 admin

Brooklyn replica watches, NY – A sicko father of four will serve 20 years to life in prison after pleading guilty today to preying on a pair of kids for years.

Registered nurse Michael Sabo sheepishly admitted that he took advantage of a boy, starting in 2001, when the child was five years old.

Sabo pleaded guilty as jury selection was set to start in a criminal trial that could have put him behind bars for hundreds of years. Both of his young victims were set to testify against him.

The 38-year-old creep was busted in 2010 when authorities found hundreds of revolting kiddie porn images on his home computer.

Sabo’s perversion became exposed when a rabbi tracked down the family of the boy, whose image had ended up on a vile Russian kiddie porn website.

The boy was tied up but clothed in the photo, which showed Sabo’s hand and his home in the background. Authorities then found the filth on Sabo’s computer, which included raunchy videos, images of naked children downloaded from the Internet and shots of the deviant dad in the nude.

Defense lawyer replica watches, Jeffrey Schwartz pleaded for mercy before Judge Vincent DelGiudice replica watches, saying, “One can argue that he is a victim,” because of abuse Sabo may have suffered as a kid.

“There’s a lot of sadness on both sides,” Schwartz said.

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Sabo initially faced other charges that were dismissed because the family of a third alleged victim did not want the child to testify against him.

 

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French economy stalls, posing challenge for Hollan

May 17th, 2012 admin

PARIS (Reuters) – France’s economy stalled in the first quarter as household consumption flatlined, businesses pared back investment and exports slowed, underlining the challenge facing Socialist President Francois Hollande as he takes office on Tuesday.

It may add to his drive to push the euro zone to adopt growth as well as austerity policies.

The euro zone’s second-largest economy posted zero growth in the first three months of the year Tattoo Ink For Sale, the INSEE national statistics institute said, after an anemic expansion of just 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter, revised down from 0.2 percent.

While the data indicated France’s nearly 2 trillion euro economy avoided recession, it painted a grim outlook for 2012 and strengthened Hollande’s case for a shift away from austerity in Europe towards more growth orientated policies, ahead of a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel later in the day.

“There was no good surprise,” said Philippe Waechter, chief economist at Natixis Asset Management. “There was weak consumption, no investment.”

The zero percent growth figure was in line with the forecast of a Reuters poll of 31 economists and showed France’s economy returning to stagnation after just two consecutive quarters of positive growth.

Its weak performance was cast in sharp relief by better-than-expected growth in Germany, where the economy expanded by 0.5 percent in the first quarter, bouncing back more strongly than expected from a small fourth-quarter contraction.

Growth in household consumption, the motor of France’s economy, picked up slightly to 0.2 percent after 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter.

But capital investment fell 0.8 percent, after growing 1.3 percent in the fourth quarter, amid reports of companies struggling to access credit and holding back capital spending until after the April-May elections which gave France its first Socialist president since 1995

Net trade contributed a negative 0.1 percent to growth, as imports grew by 0.7 percent due to demand for refined petroleum products. Export growth slowed to 0.3 percent Tattoo Ink, amid weakness in southern European economies.

Restocking by companies provided a slender 0.1 percent boost to overall GDP growth.

“Export growth slowed a Tattoo Gun, probably due to weak demand from France’s main trading partners (Italy and Spain), which absorb around 15 percent of exports,” said Joost Beaumont, senior economist at ABN Amro.

“Meanwhile, companies put investments on the shelf, most likely reflecting the uncertain economic outlook as well as tight lending conditions,” he added.

Beaumont predicted these negative factors would remain in place, resulting in a slight contraction in second-quarter GDP. Thereafter, a fragile recovery would take hold, restrained by the need for ongoing fiscal consolidation in France and the economic weakness in its trading partners in southern Europe.

Hollande forecasts growth of 0.5 percent this year and 1.7 percent for 2013 but some expect him to lower these forecasts at July’s extraordinary session of parliament to review the budget.

Despite becoming the figurehead for the fight-back against austerity in Europe, Hollande has pledged to respect France’s EU commitment to cut its deficit to 3 percent of GDP by 2013, from 5.2 percent at the end of the year.

He aims to balance the budget by the end of his five year mandate – something no French president has achieved since 1974.

(Additional reporting by Jean-Baptiste Vey and Brian Love. Editing by Jeremy Gaunt.)

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Meron – Government Rebuilding Kohanim Pathway Afte

May 17th, 2012 admin

(ARIEL SCHALIT / File Photo AP) Tattoo Kits Supplies

Meron – Only three and a half months after demolishing a pathway for kohanim (priests) at the tomb of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai on Mount Meron, the government is rebuilding it at a high cost, despite the fact that the local rabbi believes it to be completely unnecessary.

The Tourism Ministry has apparently succumbed to pressure by an extremist Hassidic group Tattoos Ink, Toldot Avraham Yitzhak, and has allocated NIS 600,000 to quickly build the pathway before the annual Lag Ba’omer festivities at the site, expected to draw half a million participants.

The pathway was built last year without a permit – but with government funding – and was recently demolished after a legal battle. Now Tattoo Tubes, hurried construction to rebuild it is being carried out without fulfilling conditions laid out by the local planning committee. Furthermore, many religious leaders, including Rabbi Meir Stern, the Meron Rabbi for the past 50 years, say there is absolutely no need for the pathway, and that there is no basis whatsoever to the Hassidic group’s claim that there are sepulchres on the main road leading to the tomb. If that was true, kohanim would be unable to use the main road, according to Jewish law, because they cannot be in close proximity to the dead.

 

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What Would British Fascism Look Like

May 16th, 2012 admin

It has been reported that the National Front (NF) is planning on fielding 35 mayoral and local election candidates in May, the largest number it has put up for election since 1983.

An outfit that most of us thought had disappeared in the 1980s has re-emerged due to splits that are currently ravaging the British National Party (BNP).

All being well of course, NF candidates will take a thorough battering at the polls next month. Fortunately, the economic crisis that began in 2008 has not yet been marked by the racial tensions that characterised large economic crises of the past.

And yet, were a far-Right government ever to win power in Britain – and never get too complacent, for a Searchlight poll last February found a staggeringly high number of voters who said they would be prepared to vote for party of the far-Right if it renounced violence – what might it do in its first year of power?

This is pure speculation of course, but interesting all the same, I think.

Isolationism

Recent wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are often simplified into a Left/Right question: if you are on the Left you were against them, if you are on the Right you supported them. This is crude and misleading. In the tradition of isolationism, the British far-Right is concerned with foreigners only when they directly threaten the national interest. This includes foreigners dying at the hands of barbaric regimes.

The far-Right believes barbarism to be a product of uncivilised peoples or cultures which cannot exist in this country unless imported from the outside. A far-Right government would see its role only as the protector of the British people from this perceived threat.

The first year in power of a far-right government would most probably see a withdrawal from NATO, an exit from the European Union and an end to all overseas aid spending. Foreign massacres would be dismissed as “savagery”. Actual military spending, however, would be doubled.

Which leads me neatly on to…

The worship of monarchy and the armed forces

One of the problems a government of this sort would have is that although the British people like pomp and ceremony Buy Karen Millen Dresses, they don’t much go in for compulsory pomp and ceremony. People of the Left recoil at widespread enthusiasm for the Royal Family, while forgetting that a good deal of it is based on little more than a detestation of the political class. The Royals are quite obviously establishment figures – they are the establishment – but when set against politicians there is a widespread belief that they are somehow less a part of the ruling class than Parliament is. Such a dynamic only works, however, so long as the monarchy is not viewed as an extension of the government.

With regard to the military Discount DKNY Clothes, huge hostility would be whipped-up, with the aid of the media, towards any figure who publicly criticised military spending or the increasing deployment of troops to quell internal unrest and break strikes. Such people would be branded “unpatriotic” and denounced as Communists. Several military figures would probably enter the Cabinet within the first year of government.

The economy

Initial nationalisations would see elements of the far-Left align themselves with the new government in the manner of previous alliances with “anti-imperialist” movements abroad. A renegade former Labour MP is perhaps the most prominent Left-spokesperson for the new regime, playing up the Government’s anti-American credentials while ignoring the widespread suppression of minority rights.

During unrest the army is drafted in. This is incredibly popular until the children of the middle classes feel the brunt of it. They are protesting at the general decline in living standards brought about by UN sanctions imposed for Britain’s treatment of religious minorities. Great fanfare is now made in the press about the “great British tradition of protest”.

The minimum wage is abolished along with the right to strike. State intervention in the economy increases albeit unaccompanied by any understanding, let alone indictment, of capitalism as a system. The living standard of workers falls while foreign investment is scared away.

Immigration

All immigration from “culturally foreign” countries – a catch-all term conveniently catching almost all non-whites -is brought to an end. Large numbers of people leave the country, including thousands of white Britains with non-white spouses. Discrimination against non-whites is not enshrined in law but institutional racism is ignored. Racial theorists are regularly given a voice in the media and an atmosphere of general hostility is whipped-up towards Muslims in particular.

A distinction is created in the public mind between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ minorities on an arbitrary basis. Wealthy non-white businessmen occasionally line-up alongside the Government to denounce recent immigrants, who they describe as work-shy and lazy.

The government imposes quotas for white players on English Premier League football teams.

Culture

The BBC is told to impose a strict limit on the number of non-white people in its soap operas. LGBT characters are categorically banned. There is a new trend toward jingoist documentary making and revisionism about the British Empire. Most BBC programming harks back to a world that no longer exists and probably never did. The most popular TV entertainment show is Top Gear.

Widespread rioting and looting of Muslim areas breaks out when England are knocked out of the football World Cup by Iran. The government, backed by a formerly prominent member of Ukip, labels all Arabs ‘cheats’, not realising that Iran is not in fact an Arab country.

An attempt to severely limit abortion causes a split in the Cabinet as some members see it as a potentially effective way of controlling the poor. Homosexuality is outlawed and an attempt is made to re-introduce Victorian sexual morals. The attempt fails when half the cabinet are found to have been having affairs and the wife of a working class minister is found to have once posed in Escort Readers’ Wives.

In London, Saturday mornings see uniformed Right-wing militias parading in Hyde Park. The militias are regularly purged due to widespread homosexual activity. Animal rights charities report an increase in donations and the most recent census indicates an unprecedented rise in the number of vegetarians.

 

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Flame Out

May 15th, 2012 admin

The Washington Postleads with a preview of what we can expect to hear when Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker testify before Congress today and tomorrow. It’s hardly a surprise to reveal they’ll both talk up recent security gains in Iraq, but the paper highlights how even Republicans who have been largely supportive of the war effort are likely to express more impatience with the pace of progress than when Petraeus and Crocker testified in September. USA Todayleads with, and the Los Angeles Timesfronts, a look at how San Francisco police are preparing for big protests Wednesday when the Olympic torch will make its only public appearance on North American soil. In Paris yesterday, the torch relay turned into a chaotic scene as demonstrators forced officials to snuff out the flame five times and cancel the last leg of the relay.

The Wall Street Journal leads its world-wide newsbox with President Bush’s announcement that he’s sending a Colombia free-trade agreement to Congress, which gives lawmakers 90 legislative days to approve or reject the deal. The New York Timesleads with a look at how rising inflation in Asia is threatening to bring to an end the era of cheap imports to which Americans have become accustomed. Inflation in developing countries is nothing new, but some are warning it will be felt more deeply in the United States this time around, particularly because prices are rising at a time when the value of the dollar is continually decreasing. The LAT leads locally with a grand jury transcript that reveals a guard at an Orange County jail was watching Cops and writing text messages while a prisoner was beaten to death by other inmates. Overall, the grand jury found that prisoners were allowed to use violence and pretty much run the jail while deputies took naps, watched television, and played video games.

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The Post highlights, and USAT also mentions inside, that money is likely to be a central point of discussion at the Petraeus and Crocker hearings. Several lawmakers have recently said that they don’t understand why the United States continues to pay for many of Iraq’s bills when the country has $30 billion in reserves and an economic growth rate of 7 percent. USAT notes that some lawmakers are pushing for future money commitments to be made in the form of loans. “It doesn’t make any sense when they’re making surpluses that we would continue to invest our money in Iraq for their infrastructure,” Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson said. The recent offensive in Basra is also likely to figure prominently at the hearings as lawmakers have said they want to ask Petraeus to assess how the Iraqi security forces performed in the fight. As a general rule, lawmakers seem ready to focus on the bigger picture for Iraq that goes beyond the gains in security. “The debate over how much progress we have made in the last year may be less illuminating than determining whether the administration is finally defining a clear political-military strategy,” said Republican Sen. Richard Lugar.

Iran is also likely to figure prominently at the hearings, and the WSJ says it “might end up sharing center stage.” Beyond the fact that Petraeus will bring up how Tehran is helping the Mahdi Army, the hearings will also give the three presidential candidates an opportunity to talk about their different views on how to approach Iran, which “is emerging as a hot-button campaign issue Tattoo Supplies,” says the WSJ. The paper warns that the issue could be a difficult one for Sen. John McCain. While talking about Tehran’s influence could help him make the point that U.S. troops shouldn’t be withdrawn quickly, it could also convince voters that he’s eager to take military action against Iran.

The LAT off-leads the latest from Iraq, where three U.S. soldiers were killed yesterday as the fighting between Shiite militias and Iraqi and American soldiers continued to intensify. The paper points out that “at least 18 U.S. service members have been killed in and around Baghdad since March 25″ and characterizes the fighting as “some of the most intense since January 2007.” Thousands of Sadr City residents continued to flee the area in an attempt to escape the fighting. The NYT fronts a look at the increasing divisions in Iraq as a result of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s offensive against the militias. Yesterday, Maliki said Muqtada Sadr’s party would be banned from the upcoming elections unless the Mahdi Army is disbanded. In some ways the offensive has been good for Maliki’s political power because he’s gained new allies, not only from Sunni and Kurdish lawmakers but also from rival Shiites who “resent” Sadr. These alliances could help Maliki pass new laws, but the crackdown has also given rise to a new bloody chapter in the Iraq war. New figures show that the number of attacks in Baghdad more than doubled in March.

In case there was any doubt that the Olympic torch will be met by protesters Wednesday, activists made it abundantly clear yesterday when three people climbed the Golden Gate Bridge and unfurled pro-Tibet banners (both the LAT and NYT front large pictures of the banners). The LAT says San Francisco police are increasingly concerned they won’t be able to control the demonstrators, who are not exactly being discouraged by politicians. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said people “should show how displeased they are” and even Sen. Hillary Clinton got into the mix by calling on President Bush to boycott the opening ceremony in Beijing. Meanwhile Tattoo Supplies, the Chinese media have censored most images of the demonstrations while trumpeting the success of the relay. When the protests are mentioned, officials are quick to blame a few Tibetan separatists.

Democratic leaders are against the Colombia free-trade deal, so most think it has very little chance of passing, particularly in an election year. So, why present it now and risk defeat? The LAT says the administration is taking a gamble, knowing that “waiting would accomplish nothing, and the clock is running out on his opportunities.” But the WSJ suggests there could be another motive and points out that the effort could help Bush portray Democrats as mere puppets of their union supporters. This could help Republicans in the upcoming elections, particularly among business groups that have increasingly been turning to the Democratic Party. The WSJ also notes that the possibility that the legislation will fail is raising fears in several countries that have pending trade deals.

The Post fronts a little self-promotion by noting that the paper won six Pulitzer Prizes. The NYT reefers the news and points out that it’s the second-highest number of Pulitzers that a newspaper has won in a single year (the NYT won seven in 2002). The WP won the public service medal for its stories on the poor treatment that veterans received at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the national reporting award for the four-part series on Vice President Cheney. The Post also won the breaking news award for its coverage of the Virginia Tech killings. The NYT shared the investigative reporting prize with the Chicago Tribune and also won an award for explanatory journalism. The fiction Pulitzer went to Junot Diaz for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Bob Dylan was awarded a special citation for his “profound impact on popular music and American culture.”

Charlton Heston was apparently an “avid newspaper reader,” who would have his assistant spread out the paper around the pool. Heston not only wrote dozens of letters to the LAT but also frequently called up editors to share his opinions. Today, the LAT publishes excerpts from some of his letters and TP’s favorite is one from 1999, where Heston writes about how he was having a conversation “with a stunningly beautiful, famous star” at “one of those silly ‘A-list’ parties” about the divisions inside the United States. The actress was surprised when Heston told her she had her “Latin backward” and he proceeded to explain that e pluribus unum means “from many one” and not the reverse. ” ‘No kidding?’ she said, amazed. ‘Well … whatever.’ And there you have it. We live, increasingly, in a ‘well, whatever’ nation. God help us all.”

 

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Can Israel Survive for Another 60 Years

May 14th, 2012 admin

A military parade marking Israel’s 60th anniversary

It’s somehow absurd and trivial to use the word Israel and the expression 60 th birthday in the same sentence or the same breath. (What is this, some candle-bedecked ceremony in Miami?) The questions before us are somewhat more antique, and also a little more pressingly and urgently modern, than that. Has Zionism made Jews more safe or less safe? Has it cured the age-old problem of anti-Semitism or not? Is it part of the tikkun olam—the mandate for the healing and repair of the human world—or is it another rent and tear in the fabric?

Jewish people are on all sides of this argument Replica Christian Audigier Clothing, as always. There are Hasidic rabbis who declare the Jewish state to be a blasphemy Herve Leger sale, but only because there can be no such state until the arrival of the Messiah (who may yet tarry). There are Jewish leftists who feel shame that a settler state was erected on the ruins of so many Palestinian villages. There are also Jews who collaborate with extreme-conservative Christians in an effort to bring on the day of Armageddon, when all these other questions will necessarily become moot. And, of course, there are Jews who simply continue to live in, or to support from a distance, a nerve-racked and high-tech little state that absorbs a lot of violence and cruelty and that has also shown itself very capable of inflicting the same.

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I find that no other question so much reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his aphorism about the necessity of living with flat-out contradiction. Do I sometimes wish that Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann had never persuaded either the Jews or the gentiles to create a quasi-utopian farmer-and-worker state at the eastern end of the Mediterranean? Yes. Do I wish that the Israeli air force could find and destroy all the arsenals of Hezbollah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad? Yes. Do I think it ridiculous that Viennese and Russian and German scholars and doctors should have vibrated to the mad rhythms of ancient so-called prophecies rather than helping to secularize and reform their own societies? Definitely. Do I feel horror and disgust at the thought that a whole new generation of Arab Palestinians is being born into the dispossession and/or occupation already suffered by their grandparents and even great-grandparents? Absolutely, I do.

The questions of principle and the matters of brute realism have a tendency (especially for one who does not think that heaven plays any part in the game) to converge. Without God on your side, what the hell are you doing in the greater Jerusalem area in the first place? Israel may not be the rogue state that so many people say it is—including so many people who will excuse the crimes of Syria and Iran—but what if it runs the much worse risk of being a failed state? Here I must stop asking questions and simply and honestly answer one. In many visits to the so-called Holy Land, I have never quite been able to imagine that a Jewish state in Palestine will still be in existence a hundred years from now. A state for Jews, possibly. But a Jewish state …

Israeli propaganda for a long time obscured this crucial distinction. If all that was wanted was a belt of Jewish territory on the coast and plains, such as that which was occupied by the yishuv in pre-state days Buy Karen Millen Dresses, the international community could easily have agreed to place it within the defense perimeter of “the West” or the United Nations or, later, NATO. Aha, say the Zionists Herve Leger gown sale, the bad old days are gone when we were so naive as to rely on gentiles to defend us. Very well. But also mark the sequel. Israel is now incredibly dependent upon non-Jews for its own defense and, moreover, rules over millions of other non-Jews who loathe and detest it from the bottom of their hearts. How long do you think the first set of non-Jews will go on defending Israel from the second lot and from their very wealthy and numerous kinsmen? In other words Marc Jacobs Dresses sale, Zionism has only replaced and repositioned the question of anti-Semitism. For me, the Israeli family is not the alternative to the diaspora. It is part of the diaspora. To speak roughly, there are three groups of 6 million Jews. The first 6 million live in what the Zionist movement used to call Palestine. The second 6 million live in the United States. The third 6 million are distributed mainly among Russia, France, Britain, and Argentina. Only the first group lives daily in range of missiles that can be (and are) launched by people who hate Jews. Well, irony is supposed to be a Jewish specialty.

That last point, however, brings me to my own closing observation. It is a moral idiot who thinks that anti-Semitism is a threat only to Jews. The history of civilization demonstrates something rather different: Judaeophobia is an unfailing prognosis of barbarism and collapse Bandage dresses sale, and the states and movements that promulgate it are doomed to suicide as well as homicide, as was demonstrated by Catholic Spain as well as Nazi Germany. Today’s Iranian “Islamic republic” is a nightmare for its own citizens as well as a pestilential nuisance and menace to its neighbors. And the most depressing and wretched spectacle of the past decade, for all those who care about democracy and secularism, has been the degeneration of Palestinian Arab nationalism into the theocratic and thanatocratic hell of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, where the Web site of Gaza’s ruling faction blazons an endorsement of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This obscenity is not to be explained away by glib terms like despair or occupation, as other religious fools like Jimmy Carter—who managed to meet the Hamas gangsters without mentioning their racist manifesto—would have you believe. (Is Muslim-on-Muslim massacre in Darfur or Iraq or Pakistan or Lebanon to be justified by conditions in Gaza?) Instead, this crux forces non-Zionists like me to ask whether, in spite of everything, Israel should be defended as if it were a part of the democratic West. This is a question to which Israelis themselves have not yet returned a completely convincing answer, and if they truly desire a 60th, let alone a 70th, birthday celebration, they had better lose no time in coming up with one.

 

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Are these things really worth it- What if you made

May 14th, 2012 admin

Hybrids definitely do work — we’re not refuting that — how well they work is open to debate Discount Emilio Pucci Dresses, however Cheap Herve Leger v neck, especially in light of the revisions to EPA mileage numbers. So Cheap Hale Bob Dresses, let’s examine the Prius. Amazingly engineered vehicle Emilio Pucci Dresses sale, that’s for sure. The way they got all those different systems to work as a team and perform smooth handoffs between functions is pretty incredible. We’re not going to bother with the electric powertrain portion of it for now. Have you ever poked around the gasoline engine in the Prius? Interesting stuff Cheap Herve Leger v neck, lots of little tweaks to boost efficiency. We’re wondering, having looked over the Prius DKNY Dresses sale, whether you could realize most of the gains without the batteries and motor.

More after the jump

 

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REPORTMore foreign automakers skipping Tokyo Motor

May 14th, 2012 admin

As of Thursday, Porsche and Maserati are the latest two brands to pull out of the biennial Tokyo Motor Show. That brings the tally to 22 foreign brands sitting out the Japanese showcase Replica Herve leger strapless, leaving Hyundai Herve Leger sale, Ferrari Marc Jacobs Dresses sale, and Lotus to duel for import honors. Said a show spokesman Buy Missoni Dresses, “It is unprecedented to see such a large number of carmakers not coming to the motor show. It’s disappointing.”

And even though Japan’s 14 domestic makers are expected to show in force Discount Herve leger strapless, the country’s four largest truck makers have said they won’t be coming. At least one report has said there will be half as many cars this year as there were two years ago. As with the other brands that have decided to pass on this year’s show Discount Christian Audigier Clothes, Porsche and Maserati cited the cost of attendance.

[Source: Taiwan News]

 

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