April 22, 2012
Peggy Noonan
Posted by Mike Lief at 07:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 21, 2012
Jon Lovitz
http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2012/04/12/jon-lovitz-tweet-exposes-anti-semitic-prank-by-3-teenage-girls-gets-them/?intcmp=obnetwork
Comedian Jon Lovitz used Twitter to expose three teenage girls behind an anti-Semitic prank on his friend's daughter.
"Some coward & idiot left this on a friend's doorstep, yesterday. This is an insult to all of us," he tweeted on April 5, attaching a photo of the vandalism, which showed swastikas drawn with maple syrup on the sidewalk of his friend's house, and a pile of feces on his doorstep.
Lovitz' friend's daughter was classmates with the girls who perpetrated the act. The girls admitted they were behind the vandalism, but since their work was not permanent, the police said they could not press charges.
Lovitz, 54, then tweeted a photo of the girls.
“Let them be famous as Jew haters. Pls RT,” he wrote to his 28,000 followers. ("RT" stands for "retweet.")
Unlike the police, the girls' school could take action, and expelled all three.
“UPDATE!!!! The three girls who vandalized my friends home with swastikas and dog crap, have been expelled from their school permanently,” Lovitz tweeted April 9.
While the girls were not charged, police are investigating one of their mothers, who allegedly drove the girls to and from the home they vandalized.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2012/04/12/jon-lovitz-tweet-exposes-anti-semitic-prank-by-3-teenage-girls-gets-them/?intcmp=obnetwork#ixzz1sgjds3Mx
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This is why the death penalty exists
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/01/20/female-ark-prison-guard-killed-checking-on-inmate/?intcmp=obinsite
Published January 20, 2012
Associated Press
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – A convicted murderer stabbed a female guard to death at an east Arkansas prison Friday while she was investigating whether he had an unauthorized pair of shoes, a prison spokeswoman said.
Sgt. Barbara Ester, 47, was stabbed in the side, abdomen and chest at about 12:30 p.m., said Shea Wilson, a spokeswoman for the Arkansas Department of Correction. Ester died about 3 p.m. at a hospital in Memphis, Tenn., about 40 miles away.
Ester, a 12-year veteran of the correction department, was a property officer who investigated whether inmates had contraband items. Wilson said the guard had received a report that Johnson had a pair of contraband shoes.
"This is obviously very difficult for the department when something tragic like this happens," Wilson said. "Our thoughts and prayers are with Sgt. Ester's family. These officers — it's a tight-knit workplace. They look out for each other and are there together for a lot of hours of the day, so this is very difficult for everyone."
Wilson said the prison was locked down after the attack and that the inmate, Latavious Johnson, was being moved to the state's maximum-security unit at Varner. She said all the other inmates have been accounted for. Prison officials haven't said specifically what Johnson used during the attack, only that it was an object that had been sharpened.
Johnson, 30, was serving a life sentence for first-degree murder out of Jefferson County. He was sentenced in 2000 for killing his father. Prosecutors said Johnson was 18 at the time of the crime.
Wilson said Johnson had had several disciplinary infractions, including one this week for not obeying orders, but hadn't previously attacked a guard.
"We will move him to the supermax (prison) so he will be out of that environment ... He needed to be out of that environment," Wilson said.
Arkansas State Police and the prison's internal affairs staff were investigating the stabbing. Wilson said authorities would turn over their information to prosecutors, who will determine whether to file charges against the inmate.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/01/20/female-ark-prison-guard-killed-checking-on-inmate/?intcmp=obinsite#ixzz1sgjEs9dO
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April 17, 2012
Public Education: Crippling the future
Bill Whittle takes on public education -- and what it's done to the post-war generations of Americans.
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April 14, 2012
A word on the United Nations, its anti-Israel jihad, and the gullibility of the West
Brit Pat Condell offers a bracing dose of straight talk on the festering chancre of anti-semitism that is the United Nations. That the United States continues to host this collection of lunatics -- and pay the lion's share of its budget, too! -- is a disgrace. Whatever illusions I had of the useful role the U.N. could play -- burnished during my time studying there 25 years ago -- vanished long ago, along with the last vestiges of the organization's moral compass.
Here's Condell on the charge that Israel is an "apartheid state":
[T]he only apartheid you'll find in the Middle East is in Arab countries who won't allow their Palestinians to integrate, denying them the most basic of human rights and condemning them to generations of misery and resentment because they need the refugee camps to remain permanently, festering like open sores, to gain sympathy from the gullible West, and to con millions of good-hearted people here into supporting their religious war of hatred against Jews, all Jews. Indeed, the Hamas Charter specifically calls for the killing of all Jews, just in case anyone was in any doubt.
It's remarkable that pro-Palestinian Western liberals insist that Israel negotiate with Hamas and simply ignore the terrorist organization's explicitly-stated goal (the extermination of Jews) as nothing more than a rhetorical flourish.
Condell then turns to charges that Israel is an outlaw nation, refusing to abide by the United Nations' democratically-generated decrees:
Why would the Israelis ignore dozens of resolutions forced through by a cartel of anti-semitic Bronze Age barbarians who would destroy their country and everyone in it, including women and children, given half a chance? Beats me. I guess they must be fascists.
Well, who are those nations that dominate the debate, that hold Israel up before the international community, to be pilloried for its moral failings, whilst the United States and the West mutter and mumble with downcast eyes?
Among its many failings, the United Nations encourages Islamic religious hatred and racism to dress itself up in the language of human rights, repeatedly allowing its human rights council to be steamrollered in this regard by a cartel of 57 mainly dictatorships and theocracies known as the Organization of of Islamic ... something or other. They keep changing it, and I can't be bothered to keep up.
I don't really care what they call themselves; it's enough to know what they are, and that's brutal barbaric Islamic hell holes, that nobody in their right mind would choose to live in, and whose own human rights records are not only worse than Israel's, but immeasurably worse.
Countries like Iran, where they execute children; Sudan, where they practice slavery and casual genocide; Pakistan, which is supposed to be a democracy, but which is actually a dictatorship of religious ignorance, violence and fear, and where every year a thousand women are murdered by members of their own family. And of course Saudi Arabia, the black hole of Islamic barbarism, the world's leading source of terrorist funding, and the absolute moral anus of the universe.
These are some of the countries behind the blizzard of resolutions directed at Israel, countries that belong on the high moral ground the way that a rattlesnake belongs in a lunch box, countries united by a virulent religious hatred of Jews for being Jews.
These are the loudest voices at the United Nations, so of course the Israelis ignore them; it would be suicidal not to.
When it comes to Israel, the United Nations is a crooked court with a jury full of hanging judges, and it doesn't get any more corrupt than that.
[...]
In attacking Israel over and over, while ignoring the real human rights violators, not only the Islamic barbarians, but the North Korean and the Burmas of this world, the United Nations has shown itself to be nakedly partisan and to be effectively an enemy of Israel, and as I see it, unless youre an idiot or a Western liberal, you don't take orders from your enemies.
Here's where Condell touches on an issue that most Americans would find just as mysterious:
[F]rankly, I'm baffled as to why the Americans still tolerate this disgusting travesty on their soil, and pay all its bills. They should kick it out of the country and tell it to relocate to Tehran or Islamabad, where the Organization of Islamic Fascists can go ahead and pass all the fancy resolutions they like.
What do we gain from hosting the United Nation? Prestige? Honor? Influence?
If anything, by continuing to allow the U.N. to make a mockery of human rights and democracy on our own soil, thanks to a structure that gives dictatorships and rogue regimes the same number of votes in the General Assembly as those nations that don't hang homosexuals, stone rape victims, execute political opponents or condone terrorism, the United States lends an air of legitimacy to the organization that it clearly no longer warrants, and does not deserve.
And we damn well ought not pay for the privilege.
Posted by Mike Lief at 09:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 08, 2012
Remembering Mike Wallace: Compelling TV -- and an unsettling glimpse of amorality
Col. George Connell, USMC, gives Mike Wallace a look of complete and utter contempt during an episode of Ethics in America.
Mike Wallace passed away this weekend, best known for his five decades of pugnacious interviews on CBS' 60 Minutes. Characterized by one of his fellow hosts as an avuncular interviewer, someone who could get away with asking the kinds of questions that would earn anyone else a punch in the mouth, I'm afraid that the most indelible memory I have of Wallace is quite different, ironically courtesy of PBS, in a show I first saw back in the mid-to-late '80s.
James Fallows wrote a piece for The Atlantic Monthly on why the public hates the media, and later expanded it into a book on the same topic. The piece recounted how Wallace believed himself a journalist first, an American second, if at all.
In the late 1980s, public television stations aired a talking head series called Ethics in America. For each show, more than a dozen prominent thinkers sat around a horseshoe-shaped table and tried to answer troubling ethical questions posed by a moderator.
From the respectability of the panelists to the super-seriousness of the topics, the series might have seemed a good bet to be paralyzingly dull. But the drama and tension of at least one show made that episode absolutely riveting.
This episode was sponsored by Montclair State College in the fall of 1987. Its title was "Under Orders, Under Fire," and most of the panelists were former soldiers talking about the ethical dilemmas of their work. The moderator was Charles Ogletree, a professor at Harvard Law School, who moved from expert to expert asking increasingly difficult questions in the law school's famous Socratic style.
During the first half of the show Ogletree made the soldiers squirm about ethical tangles on the battlefield.
[...]
Then Ogletree turned to the two most famous members of the evening's panel: Peter Jennings of World News Tonight and ABC, and Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes and CBS. Ogletree brought them into the same hypothetical war. He asked Jennings to imagine that he worked for a network that had been in contact with the enemy North Kosanese government. After much pleading, the North Kosanese had agreed to let Jennings and his news crew into their country, to film behind the lines and even travel with military units. Would Jennings be willing to go? Of course, Jennings replied. Any reporter would -- and in real wars reporters from his network often had.
But while Jennings and his crew are traveling with a North Kosanese unit, to visit the site of an alleged atrocity by American and South Kosanese troops, they unexpectedly cross the trail of a small group of American and South Kosanese soldiers. With Jennings in their midst, the northern soldiers set up a perfect ambush, which will let them gun down the Americans and Southerners, every one.
What does Jennings do? Ogletree asks. Would he tell his cameramen to "Roll tape!" as the North Kosanese opened fire? What would go through his mind as he watched the North Kosanese prepare to ambush the Americans?
Jennings sat silent for about fifteen seconds after Ogletree asked this question. "Well, I guess I wouldn't," he finally said. "I am going to tell you now what I am feeling, rather than the hypothesis I drew for myself. If I were with a North Kosanese unit that came upon Americans, I think that I personally would do what I could to warn the Americans." Even if it means losing the story? Ogletree asked. Even though it would almost certainly mean losing my life, Jennings replied. "But I do not think that I could bring myself to participate in that act. That's purely personal, and other reporters might have a different reaction."
Immediately Mike Wallace spoke up. "I think some other reporters would have a different reaction," he said, obviously referring to himself. "They would regard it simply as a story they were there to cover."
"I am astonished, really," at Jennings's answer, Wallace said moment later. He turned toward Jennings and began to lecture him: "You're a reporter. Granted you're an American"-at least for purposes of the fictional example; Jennings has actually retained Canadian citizenship. "I'm a little bit at a loss to understand why, because you're an American, you would not have covered that story."
Ogletree pushed Wallace. Didn't Jennings have some higher duty, either patriotic or human, to do something other than just roll film as soldiers from his own country were being shot?
"No," Wallace said flatly and immediately. "You don't have a higher duty. No. No. You're a reporter!" Jennings backtracked fast. Wallace was right, he said. "I chickened out." Jennings said that he had gotten so wrapped up in the hypothetical questions that he had lost sight of his journalistic duty to remain detached.
As Jennings said he agreed with Wallace, everyone else in the room seemed to regard the two of them with horror.
Retired Air Force general Brent Scowcroft gestures as he tells Wallace it was simply wrong to stand and watch as your side was slaughtered. "What's it worth?" he asks Wallace bitterly. "It's worth thirty seconds on the evening news, as opposed to saving a platoon."
Retired Air Force general Brent Scowcroft, who had been Gerald Ford's national security advisor and would soon serve in the same job for George Bush, said it was simply wrong to stand and watch as your side was slaughtered. "What's it worth?" he asked Wallace bitterly. "It's worth thirty seconds on the evening news, as opposed to saving a platoon."Ogletree turned to Wallace. What about that? Shouldn't the reporter have said something? Wallace gave his most disarming grin, shrugged his shoulders and spread his palms wide in a "Don't ask me!" gesture, and said, "I don't know." He was mugging to the crowd in such a way that he got a big laugh-the first such moment of the discussion. Wallace paused to enjoy the crowd's reaction.
"I feel utter contempt. Two days later, they're both walking off my hilltop -- they're 200 yards away -- and they get ambushed and they're lying there wounded, and they're gonna expect I'm gonna send Marines up there to get them. They're just journalists. They're not Americans. Is that a fair reaction? Can't have it both ways. But I'll do it. And that's what makes me so contemptuous of them. And Marines will die, going to get a couple of journalists."
A few minutes later Ogletree turned to George M. Connell, a Marine colonel in full uniform, jaw muscles flexing in anger, with stress on each word, Connell looked at the TV stars and said, "I feel utter . . . contempt. " Two days after this hypothetical episode, Connell Jennings or Wallace might be back with the American forces--and could be wounded by stray fire, as combat journalists often had been before. The instant that happened he said, they wouldn't be "just journalists" any more. Then they would drag them back, rather than leaving them to bleed to death on the battlefield. "We'll do it!" Connell said. "And that is what makes me so contemptuous of them. Marines will die going to get ... a couple of journalists."The last few words dripped with disgust. Not even Ogletree knew what to say. There was dead silence for several seconds.
Then a square-jawed man with neat gray hair and aviator glasses spoke up. It was Newt Gingrich, looking a generation younger and trimmer than when he became Speaker of the House in 1995. One thing was clear from this exercise, he said: "The military has done a vastly better job of systematically thinking through the ethics of behavior in a violent environment than the journalists have."
Fallows summarized the moral failure, the abyss at the professional (and I'd argue, personal) core of the two newsmen, in as devastating a critique as I've ever read.
Peter Jennings and Mike Wallace are just two individuals, but their reactions spoke volumes about the values of their craft. Jennings was made to feel embarrassed about his natural, decent human impulse. Wallace was completely unembarrassed about feeling no connection to the soldiers in his country's army considering their deaths before his eyes as "simply a story."
In other important occupations people sometimes need to do the horrible [and a soldier on the panel] had thought through all the consequences and alternatives, and he knew he would live with the horror for the rest of his days.
When Mike Wallace said he would do something horrible, he didn't bother to argue a rationale. He did not try to explain the reasons a reporter might feel obliged to remain silent as the attack began -- for instance, that in combat reporters must be beyond country, or that they have a duty to bear impartial witness to deaths on either side, or that Jennings had implicitly made a promise not to betray the North Kosanese when he agreed to accompany them on the hypothetical patrol ... He relied on charm and star power to win acceptance from the crowd.
Mike Wallace on patrol with the North Kosanese, cameras rolling while his countrymen are gunned down, recognizing no "higher duty" to interfere in any way and offering no rationale beyond "I'm with the press" -- this is a nice symbol for what Americans hate about their media establishment in our age.
That's not the epitaph I'd wish for myself, but it's one that Wallace seemed comfortable earning.
My condolences to his family.
Requiescat in pace.
Posted by Mike Lief at 01:28 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
Mentone Memories
http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/22631-Mentone-Ave-Jamaica-NY-11413/32205541_zpid/
http://www.laureltonnewyork.net/laureltonmemories.html
July 17, 2008
Dear Skip,
If you ever decide to have a contest for the oldest memoirs I am probably in danger of winning it. My name is Annette Henkin Landau. I moved to Laurelton in 1931 when I was 10 years old. (All you geniuses from PS 156 can do the arithmetic yourselves.) I lived at 226-31 Mentone Ave. with my parents (Ben and Bess Henkin) and my siblings, Howard and Sena (now Blatman). Our cousins, the Goldbergs (Lenore, Irwin, Joel) lived next door. Our houses were (and still are) attached to each other but not to anyone else. We all went to PS 156. I remember the Principal, Mr.Joseph Baron, Mrs.Hedderman, Mrs. McArthur, Mrs. Weinberger, Mrs.David, Ms.Vaillant, Ms. Mulhall, Ms. Merriam, & the Domestic Science teacher, Ms.McKay. I graduated in 1933, went to Jamaica H.S. (Andrew Jackson did not yet exist), and graduated in the first graduating class of Queens College in 1941. I grew up to be an English teacher, a librarian, a sometimes published writer, and a mother of three.
I married Philip Landau in 1942. He lived at 227-04 138th Ave., went to Far Rockaway High School and NYU. He died in 1987 after having famously managed he Sherry-Netherland Hotel in Manhattan for 35 years.
Some time in the 1980's New York magazine ran a contest about growing up in New York neighborhoods. I submitted an article called "Growing Up American: Laurelton in the 1930's." It got an honorable mention. I always thought I had had a magical childhood in Laurelton (I am so pleased that so many other Laureltonians did too), and I still like the article, so I am attaching it
to this letter in hopes that you won't think it too long for the Laurelton website. (It runs about 6 pages, but it does concern material that seems not to have appeared before.)
I moved to California a few months ago and would be happy to hear from Laureltonians past, present, and future.
Annette Henkin Landau Email Address: ahlandau@dslextreme.com
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