LatmaTV

These guys don’t get nearly enough love and attention in America.

Seriously, Syria?

Forbes — A group of hackers aligning themselves with Anonymous have leaked a series of e-mails from members of the Syrian government, including an exchange between the press advisor to President Bashar al-Assad advising him ahead of an interview with ABC News’ Barbara Walters that the “American psyche can be easily manipulated.” The e-mails were shown to a reporter at Israel’s Haaretz newspaper and published on its website earlier today. … On the same day the hackers also published a list of 78 e-mail addresses and passwords from the Syrian government and the URL of the webmail server they shared. That list was published on Pastebin. (A surprising 33 of the 78 e-mail addresses used passwords that were either “12345” or “123456” …

… The group of hackers are partly based in Israel, according to one source within Anonymous, who also believes they used relatively simple hacking methods to gain access to the Syrian mail servers. … A second set of e-mails from the hackers, also published by Haaretz today, showed an exchange between British Member of Parliament George Galloway and Assad’s media adviser. …

It’s Up To You, New York, New York!

If Obama can’t make it there, he can’t make it anywhere…

Republican candidate Bob Turner has won the special election to finish the term of resigned-in-disgrace Representative Anthony Weiner (D). This is a historic victory, against a Democrat (David Weprin) with twenty years of elected experience and good personal popularity numbers, in a very Democratic district (thrice the number of registered Democrats as registered Republicans, and held by a Democrat for over ninety years). There’s only one reason why Turner even had a chance, much less managed to win decisively: Barack Obama. The special election was turned into a referendum on Obama’s jobs performance (and overt hostility to Israel), leading the electorate to crossover and vote against the Democrat to “send a message” to the President. There is no other way to interpret the results; but Lord knows the Democratic spinmeisters are still trying.

Naturally, this being a race that the Democrats really didn’t want to lose (because of the implications for Obama, and for next year’s elections) – Ah, who the Hell am I kidding? Because this was a race containing a Democrat candidate, there was naturally chicanery involved. Non-regular (absentee and provisional) ballots are being impounded by a court order because of “gross incompetence” on behalf of the Board of Elections, citing “absentee ballots being mailed to dead people and people who did not request them.” Fortunately, Turner’s support was not only above the margin of error, it was also above the margin of Democratic fraud.

In an unrelated story, Shekina Pena of Lansing, Michigan, was charged with registering voters by giving them marijuana.

CNN — A woman who operates a medicinal marijuana clinic in Lansing, Michigan, has been charged with breaking the state’s election law after allegedly doling out free marijuana to those who registered to vote, officials said Tuesday. Shekina Pena, 34, was charged Monday with a misdemeanor after authorities said she tried to influence voters with pot, considered a “valuable consideration,” according to a statement from Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette. … Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson argued that Pena’s intent was clear. “They offered their customers marijuana in exchange for voter registration. They also supplied a slate of their preferred candidates. This goes beyond election shenanigans.” …

Michigan Election Law prohibits the provision of anything of value in order to induce or influence the manner of voting (MCL 168.931(1)(a)). Such violations are misdemeanors punishable by up to 90 days in jail and/or a $500 fine.

The Obama Downgrade, Alphabetically

This one is by Bret Stephens at the WSJ (H/T: HillBuzz) and contains an entry for every letter of the alphabet. I’m just going to quote a few of my favorites, but you should read the whole thing.

A	is for the Arab world, and our standing in it: This year, Zogby International found that 5% of Egyptians had a favorable view of the U.S. In 2008, when George W. Bush was president, it was 9%. Wasn’t Obama supposed to make the Arab world love us?
D	is for—what else—the federal debt, which grew to $14.3 trillion this month from $10.7 trillion at the end of 2008. D is also for the dollar, which has lost almost half its value against gold since Aug. 2008.
E	is for energy. The average retail price of a gallon of gas hovered near the $1.80 mark when Mr. Obama was inaugurated. It has since more than doubled. E is also for ethanol, the non-wonder fuel the U.S. continues to subsidize to the tune of $5 billion a year.
G	is for Guantanamo, which remains open, and for Gadhafi, who remains in power, and for Greece, which offers a vision of America’s future if we don’t reform our entitlement state.
I	is for Israel, a Middle Eastern country the president claims to support even as he routinely disses its prime minister, seeks to shrink its borders and—why not?—divide its capital. I is also for insane, for all the Jews who vote for Obama’s reelection next year.
J	is for jobs. In November 2008, president-elect Obama promised he would create 2.5 million jobs by 2011. By October 2010 the economy had shed 3.3 million jobs. For the seventh time, he’s now claiming to have shifted his attention to creating jobs.
M	is for Mexico, a country that manages 5.4% unemployment and 4.2% annual growth even as it fights a war against the drug cartels. Obama, meanwhile, is arming those cartels.
Q	is for QE2, the most disastrous experiment in monetary policy since Fed Chairman William Miller’s low-interest rate policy crashed the dollar in 1978. There is talk of QE3 coming soon.
T	is for taxes, which Mr. Obama would like to see raised for “millionaires and billionaires”—curiously defined as people making $200K and up.
X	is for Liu Xiaobo, an example of what a deserving winner of the Nobel Peace Prize looks like. X is also for Xanax, likely to be remembered as the drug of choice of the Obama years.
Z	is for zero, which is the likelihood that one of the current GOP hopefuls will defeat Mr. Obama in 2012. I hope this is wrong, but I fear it isn’t.

(Comments in red by yours truly.)

Happy Birthday Israel, and Many More!

Jews in Space (Coming in 2012)

Forbes — If all goes according to plan, by December 2012 a team of three young Israeli scientists will have landed a tiny spacecraft on the moon, explored the lunar surface, and transmitted live video back to earth, thereby scooping up a $20 million prize (the Google Lunar X Prize), revolutionizing space exploration, and making the Jewish State the third nation (after the U.S. and Russia) to land a probe on the moon. And they’re doing it in their spare time. The three engineers – Yariv Bash (electronics and computers), Kfir Damari (communication systems), and Yonatan Winetraub (satellite systems) all have high-level day jobs in the Israeli science and technology world, and also both teach and study. They all had heard of the Google Lunar X Prize independently, before being introduced by mutual friends who, as Yonatan puts it “thought we were all crazy enough to do it, so we should meet each other.” By the end of November 2010 they had sketched together a novel plan to win the prize and submitted it to organizers. Only on December 21 (10 days before the December 31 deadline) did they set about raising the $50,000 entry fee. “Like good Israelis we left it to the last minute,” Yonatan laughs. … As to why they got involved? “Three reasons,” say Yonatan, “Creating national pride, really putting Israel on the map as a start-up nation by doing something only the superpowers have done, and reigniting Israeli interest in science.” …

“So Much for NASA’s Muslim Outreach,” commented WeaselZippers, linking to this article. (I have my own comments about NASA’s muslim outreach.) I don’t see any muslim team names in the contenders to probe the Moon God; but then, there’s already widespread “knowledge” in the Muslim world that Neil Armstrong heard the Muslim call to prayer on the (airless and soundless) Moon (in Mohammed’s own voice, according to some) and converted to Islam on the spot. So, I suppose they can still claim to have been there first…

I Hate That Bumper Sticker…

…however, it works if you chop off the first two characters and just keep the “exist” part.

You Gonna Get Groped

Continuing the Fly the Sexual Abuse Skies topic (check the comments there for several updates), we only have one piece of good news: Muslims are not going to get a religious exemption to TSA screenings. Apparently even our government is incapable of breaking that far from reality (at least, not after the recent elections). As it turns out, there’s no law requiring airports to use TSA security personnel; so Minneapolis airport has apparently hinted that it’s considering private screeners instead of TSA. Not that this is a cause for optimism, since private screeners would be unlikely to be too different or more effective than the TSA. If they actually tried common-sense procedures (including profiling) they’d be sued back into the stone age by Islamic groups like CAIR (who’ve only recently left the stone age and thus know the way). They’d certainly never be able to adopt the procedures used by Israel which make them the safest in the world without requiring airport security to physically count the number of testicles each man is carrying.

(Picture H/T: Iowahawk)

Former TSA security director Mo McGowan admits that the Fourth Amendment is being violated but insists “we’re going to have to do it” anyway. The TSA is actually investigating John Tyner, threatening fines over $10,000, for refusing to be searched and leaving the airport. Others are bringing suits against the TSA:

“In one shocking incident, TSA goons pulled down woman’s blouse, exposing her breasts, and laughed about it.”

And this is all before the latest expansion of TSA procedures which allows them to put their hands down your pants. As someone observed, we’ve been getting screwed by the government for years – now they’re finally giving us foreplay.

Israelis Try To Start Their Own Tea Party

PajamasMedia — The turnout at its inaugural rally wasn’t great – only 100 activists showed up – but Israelis displaying piles of tea bags and “Say No to Obama” signs were still an unusual and interesting sight. The newly anointed Israeli Tea Party movement has adopted the symbols of the American Tea Party movement to express their dissatisfaction with both the Middle East policy and the economic philosophy of the Obama administration. But the focus of the inaugural event was addressed to both Washington and Jerusalem – it was a call for the U.S. president to stop pressuring Israel on the issue of renewing a settlement freeze, as well as a message to the Israeli government to resist that pressure. Said Likud MK Danny Danon, a member of the group of Likud activists behind the Tea Party initiative: “We are here today to send a very clear message to Mr. Obama: Stop bullying our prime minister!” …

This is not too surprising a development; after all, one of the defining things about the American Tea Party is their aversion to government pork.

Israel-Bashing Backfires

Michel Gurfinkiel at Pajamas Media has written that “The Obama administration’s decision to treat an ally like a rogue state seems to have backfired.”

Vice President Joe Biden landed in Israel on March 8 … Then, news broke, from an Israeli Interior Ministry source, that Israel was going to build 1600 housing units in Ramat Shlomo, a neighborhood in northern Jerusalem that the Obama administration sees as part of East Jerusalem, i.e., an “occupied Palestinian territory.” … It looked a bit like an Israeli blunder, or even a provocation, since Netanyahu had agreed to Obama’s request, some six months earlier, to freeze for some time any settlement building in the West Bank, if not in East Jerusalem. … However, it became clear very soon that there was no Israeli decision at all to expand Ramat Shlomo. … There was only a green light, at a very subordinate bureaucratic level at the Ministry, to review a housing project, without any kind of government commitment. … Clearly, there was an attempt, at some very high level in the Obama administration, to draw political benefit from the Ramat Shlomo announcement. And maybe to engineer such an announcement in the first place. … Either accidental or premeditated, the lynching of Netanyahu, Israel, and Oren probably had something to do with the AIPAC conference taking place from March 21 to March 23. Most American Jews – 77 percent of them – voted for Barack Obama in 2008. Many wonder today if this was the right move. Disappointment may lead to defection, a very bad prospect in a midterm election year. Hence the solution: to turn Netanyahu into a mere provocateur who insults the United States, and Obama into a true friend of Israel. However, the whole operation seems to have backfired. The more people thought about it, the more it was President Barack Obama who insulted Israel – and the American people. Not the other way around. Obama is now willing to meet Netanyahu in the wake of the AIPAC conference. Quite a change of tune from a fortnight ago.

This article, which I merely summarized (read the whole thing!) does a good job in exposing the Obama administration’s dishonesty and hypocrisy in their reaction to Israel’s insult; that hypocrisy is even more blatant if you consider the context (which Gurfinkiel did not get into) of the various other “insults” against America and/or Israel which all happened this month, which did not cause President Obama’s Administration or Hillary Clinton’s State Department to shriek up to DefCon One. These include Russia and Iran continuing to move forward on their nuclear ties, increased terrorist activity against Israel (much of which appears to have been caused by Obama’s gambit, to the point where many in and out of Israel are referring to the “Obama Intifada“), and so forth. One could also speculate that the good press Obama had hoped (in vain) to gain from his Israel-bashing might have helped to balance or distract from all of the negative attention that ObamaCare was getting at the time. In any event, the truth is out, and Israel knows who she can trust and who she can’t. Hopefully American Jews are also learning this lesson on the way to midterm elections in November.

Magic hate ball: Barack and Hillary’s foreign policy machine.

Israel Update

Obama’s attack on Israel has backfired. Many people speculated that Obama was attempting “regime change” on ally, either attempting to get the current government replaced en masse or at least to pressure them into replacing one or more members. However,

Most Israelis – especially those in the center and left – have rallied around Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. Judging by the media – especially television talk shows – Netanyahu’s popularity has soared following the rebuke from Hillary Clinton. Even those who usually berate him have come to his defense. American Jewish leaders and Congress are also pushing back against Clinton’s hysteria and Obama’s stern reprimands. … To then call Jewish neighborhoods – in Jerusalem – “settlements,” to dispute the right of Israel to renovate a synagogue in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, to scold Israel for wanting to enforce building codes and demolish illegal Arab buildings built in an historic, archeological park, is beyond appalling. To use Hillary’s word, it’s “humiliating.” And to paraphrase her again, it is a deliberate attempt to humiliate the Jewish people. …

On the other hand, all that Obama has to do is stall and delay Israel until his new “partner in peace” Iran achieves nuclear capability. Israel is the only one with the spine and common sense to want to stop Iran from going nuclear, and Obama will do everything in his power to block Israel – including blocking the delivery of bunker-buster bombs to Israel.

Officials said the U.S. military was ordered to divert a shipment of smart bunker-buster bombs from Israel to a military base in Diego Garcia. … Officials said delivery of the weapons was held up by the administration of President Barack Obama. Since taking office, Obama has refused to approve any major Israeli requests for U.S. weapons platforms or advanced systems. Officials said this included proposed Israeli procurement of AH-64D Apache attack helicopters, refueling systems, advanced munitions and data on a stealth variant of the F-15E. “All signs indicate that this will continue in 2010,” a congressional source familiar with the Israeli military requests said. “This is really an embargo, but nobody talks about it publicly.”

Indeed, Obama is even arranging to block the Iran sanctions bill, which passed Congress with rare (these days) “massive bipartisan backing”.

…congressional leaders have bottled up a hugely popular Iran sanctions bill that passed both houses with overwhelming support. At precisely the moment that the Islamic Republic is expanding and perfecting its nuclear capabilities, the highest levels of the US government have stalled on one of the few remaining mechanisms for peacefully resolving the impasse, and thus have abdicated their responsibilities to Israel, the subjugated Iranian people, and the rest of the free world. … The House of Representatives passed the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act by a 412-12 vote, signaling the body’s prodigious bipartisan resolve to stifle Iran’s nuclear progress. … All that remained for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, to make the bill a law was to “reconcile” the slightly different language in the separate Senate and House versions into a single piece of legislation. But instead, Reid and Pelosi have bottled up the measure and refused to allow a blending of the bills. Why? Because the Obama administration asked them to.

While they’re willing to “deem” a health scare bill to be passed without even allowing a vote, they’re blocking the passage of a bill which really was passed, and by an overwhelming majority. Of course, one can always count on anti-semetic idiot Jimmy Carter to provide comedy relief by claiming that the Obama administration is still “too attuned to Israel’s sensitivities.” One wonders exactly how far Obama would have to go against Israel before Carter would be happy. One hopes we will never find out.

Shocka! Allah is a Zionist

Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi, secretary general of the Italian Muslim Assembly, presents the Quranic argument for Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel (H/T: WriterMom); first, for Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem:

In August 2002, the Yasser Arafat-appointed “mufti of Jerusalem and the Holy Land,” Ikrima Sabri, told the Western media that “there is not even the smallest indication of the existence of a Jewish temple in Jerusalem in the past. In the whole city, there is not even a single stone indicating Jewish history.” … In making such statements, Sabri and Arafat not only blatantly denied history, archeology, and the teachings of the Bible, but they also denied the words of the Quran. From the time of the Revelation of the Noble Quran until recently, all Muslims unanimously accepted that the Haram as-Sharif, or Holy Esplanade, on which the Dome of the Rock today stands is the same place where Solomon’s and Zorobabel’s Temples once stood. As a matter of fact, Haram as-Sharif, the Sacred Area of Temple Mount, includes a place called Solomon’s Standpoint, or Maqam Sulayman … Accepting that Solomon’s Temple was in Jerusalem is compulsory for every Muslim believer, because that is what the Quran and the Islamic oral tradition, called the Sunnah, teach. In the Quran, Surah Bani Isra’il (the Chapter of the Children of Israel), verses 1-7, we find a description of Solomon’s Temple and of how it was destroyed twice by the enemies of the Jewish people… Not only were Arafat’s minions and heirs in Jerusalem attempting to rewrite the history of Arabs and Jews in the region as told by others; they were also attempting to rewrite the history of Arabs and Jews in the region as told by Islamic Arab sources, too.