New Helmet Blocks Rifle Shots: You may need it after this morning’s links
What IS Alliance for Justice?
From our brief inquiry into some left-wing groups, we've learned a few things. First, they share many of the same donors. Second, they often pursue the same agenda ("Get the Koch brothers!") And, while they talk an awful lot about "transparency" and the menace of "anonymous donors," their own disclosure is limited, at best.
San Francisco gets better and better: The gold-painted table that belonged to the city's first openly gay supervisor is part of an inaugural exhibit at the GLBT History Museum, the first of its kind in the nation.
Israel Peace Week
Mad As Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right: Some critics just see the book as a collection of what’s been written elsewhere. I haven’t read the book but this review at the New York Times is interesting. Seems like a good way to recap the 70s to now:
Mr. Sandbrook’s not daring thesis in “Mad as Hell” is that during the ’70s a “new kind of populism” became “the most powerful political and cultural force” in America. “The notion of the virtuous citizen locked in battle against big government, big business and a decadent elite,” he writes, “was the single most compelling theme of the 1970s.”… “One of the biggest mistakes liberals ever made,” he writes, “was to underestimate their adversaries as kooks, eccentrics, losers, blindly lashing out against progress and modernity.”
Believe it or not, it's morning in America, again
FLASH: Bird Dog sends this architectural photo from his 5 AM walk while on vacation. He enjoys his mornings in America.
Harvard Smackdown--The Lady Doth Too Much: Mrs. Obama’s blunders expose the folly of First Lady activism
Photos of President Obama’s grudging waves: he doesn’t seem to give a sh*t
Blackmailing Quadaffi to blackmail England: it worked to free the Lockerbie bomber
Libyans Failed by Left Orientalism:
Nowadays the late American literary critic Edward Said passes for a moral authority on the historical relations of the Arab and Western worlds, and every single month a multitude of clever, ambitious, wind-sniffing young academic researchers pay homage to his memory. Said fitted himself perfectly to the needs of our era: though his entire adult life was spent in Manhattan, he purported to present the authentic voice of Arab victimhood to an intelligentsia yearning to reject everything their own countries stood for, as an act of spiritual self-purification. Like his soulmate Noam Chomsky, Said presented a political perspective of almost child-like simplicity: the West, in its domineering ignorance, was forever doomed to "other" the Orient, and to treat it as its inferior, even while Said and his disciples blissfully "othered" the Middle East themselves, as a sepulchre of Arab suffering, in a mirror-image of those they deplored. Said's acolytes are probably less familiar with the articles he wrote over many years for the Egyptian state press - articles devoid of the criticism of any existing Arab government; (least of all Mubarak's); and which reduce all the problems of the Arab world to the actions of those two familiar pantomime villains, the US and Israel. You will not be surprised to hear that Said had nothing whatever to say about Libya's absurd Mussolini imitator, Gaddafi - except to heap abuse upon the US when it responded to the colonel's various terrorist provocations.
…Instead, like any good Orientalist, he wanted the Arab world to remain pre-modern, atavistic, romantic - a figure out of his own fervid imaginings. You can search Said's articles in vain for the words now on the lips of young people across the region: democracy, freedom, women's rights. Instead, like earlier colonialist bromides they are souvenirs of pure social and political reaction.
Our absurd obsession with Israel is laid bare:
Far from being a cause of the revolution, antagonism to Israel everywhere served the interests of oppressors. Europeans have no right to be surprised. Of all people, we ought to know from our experience of Nazism that antisemitism is a conspiracy theory about power, rather than a standard racist hatred of poor immigrants. Fascistic regimes reached for it when they sought to deny their own people liberty.
The UN needs to explain why it is so friendly toward despots
Should Americans be cheering on the Arab revolutionary wave?
How Al Qaida Works
2008, 2012 electoral demographics
The fierce moral urgency of WTF
Latest liberal meme to excuse Obama’s quiet ineffectualness: “stealth freedom enthusiast.”
Human Rights Watch solicited funds from Saudi Arabia, touting its anti-Israel creds. Libya too?
Tool to psychoanalyze tweeters
Gov. Walker won’t back down:
For us to balance the $3.6 billion deficit we have, not only now, but to insure we can continue to do it in the future, so our kids don't inherit the same dire consequences, we've got to have assurances. And over the past two weeks even after they made those promises we've seen local union after local union rush to their school boards, their city councils, their technical school boards and rush through contracts in the past two weeks that had no contribution to the pension and no contribution to health care.
Oscar Swag Bags to Result in $100k Income to Celebrity Presenters
Obama Throwing in the Towel on the Constitution
AP, NYT Inflate Perception of Non-Madison Saturday Pro-Union Crowds
How labor caught on in government work, and why its time is up.
Now, get to work
