Zandar's Thought Of The Day

With Friends Like These
I’m sure you’ve heard the mantra that “Turkey is a good friend to the United States and a staunch NATO ally.” It’s grown a bit strained and threadbare over the last decade or so, but it’s still the official line for both American political parties and the permanent Bureaucracy in the State Department. If the world were sane, the following brief article from ANSAmed would put a stake in the heart of this meme once and for all. But the world is not sane, and thi...

Focus on four federal pro-life bills
In coming days and weeks pro-lifers will be asked to contact their congresspersons to support four pro-life bills. I’m going to list them now, because getting piecemeal calls to action down the road may become confusing and overwhelming. But boiling it down, we’re being called to focus on these four: 1. HR 2, Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act : Repeal of ObamaCare. You can call on this one now; it’s moving fast. Plan is to vote on it January 12. Go here to see list ...

Arizona immigration law goes viral
Twenty-five states are considering “copycat” Immigration laws similar to the one passed in Arizona last year. And with 680 new Republican legislators elected in the 2010 GOP landslide, including control of both houses and the governorship in 15 states (16 if you include Nebraska’s unicameral legislature), a good number of them are expected to pass and be signed into law. Georgia, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Tennessee all have “some co...

Conservatives issue demands to Republicans
WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 (UPI) -- A coalition of conservative Activists issued a statement Thursday warning Republican leaders in the U.S. Congress to keep their promises. The group of 47 included longtime fiscal and social Conservatives like Phyllis Schlafly of the Eagle Forum, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist and former Attorney General Edwin Meese III, The Hill reported. They laid out an eight-point plan that includes cutting Government Spending to the ...

What are Cabinet secretaries really for? Ask Andrew Cuomo
What are Cabinet secretaries really for? Ask Andrew Cuomo So what are Cabinet secretaries good for? Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) knows. Andrew Cuomo pictured in 1999. (Post) Speaking Wednesday during his first State of the State address, Cuomo recalled his years in Washington as secretary of housing and urban development, saying he was grateful to get out of New York. "I needed it," Cuomo told an Albany audience of lawmakers and everyday New Yorkers. "I was one of those people who thought the New...

The Manhattan Project Of Illegal Immigration
Dare to think big! While President Obama couldn’t find much in the way of shovel-ready Depression-style projects to embark on when he took office, America does have a project going on that Victor Davis Hanson sums up with a World War II-era phrase that Paul Krugman would likely sympathize with: The United States — ad hoc, often nonchalantly, without much debate or discussion — is currently engaged in one of the largest, most ambitious attempts at foreign aid and nation building in it...

Video: Navy Captain Owen P. Honors and the raunchy video that got him fired
Heavily bleeped by the paper that put this out you may find this offensive. Make your own judgment about this video Captain Honors, the XO of the USS Enterprise made for his Navy crew. Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Google Buzz Please Support COMMON CENTS by doing your Christmas Shopping here. Thank You!! ...

Analysis: Facebook ignites Bubble 2.0 chatter
San Francisco (Reuters) - Remember Webvan? The online grocer, whose initial public offering in March 2000 was among the most hotly anticipated during the dot-com boom, is now viewed as one of the greatest disasters of the era. Fast forward 11 years and the feeding frenzy around Facebook and its exponentially expanding valuations are conjuring fears of a Bubble 2.0. Goldman Sachs Bankers have offered their private wealth clients less than a week to decide whether they want to hand over $2 millio...

'Life In A Day': Documentary By Oscar-Winning Director Filmed By Thousands Of YouTube Users
A Teaser Trailer has been released for the first-of-its-kind documentary "Life in a Day," set to premiere on January 27th at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. The film, directed by Oscar winner Kevin Macdonald and produced by Ridley Scott, uses thousands of clips from YouTube users around the world, all shot on July 24, 2010. This particular clip, shot by Toniu Xou and Patricia Marinez, shows a young girl climbing a human castle in the town of San Jaume dels Domenys in the Spanish province of ...

Michigan Ground Report
More fearful yet is Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of Rahm Emanuel, who Obama has made a health policy advisor at the Office of Management and Budget and a member of the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research.  Ezekiel has stated that the Hippocratic Oath gets in the way of doctors doing what is “right for society”.  According to Ezekiel, what is right is not providing care to sick infants and the elderly.  This will cut down on “costs” an...

JONAH GOLDBERG: Keep Your Laws Off My Body. Im something of a product of my times. In the 1980
Jonah Goldberg: Keep Your Laws Off My Body. “I’m something of a product of my times. In the 1980s and 1990s I heard a lot of putatively honest liberals insist that the one zone of life that was absolutely sacrosanct was our own bodies. The state simply had no business getting involved in ‘our bodies.’ Admittedly, this was mostly the Rhetoric of Abortion. . . . Flash forward to today and pretty much the entire edifice of Liberalism insists that our bodies — what we put int...

alicublog
SERVICE ADVISORY. Sorry to have dropped off the grid again, friends, but the past few days have been a challenge. My Harlem sublet came to an end, and none of the tickets I had out on a follow-up came through, so I was obliged to lodge with an old friend in Inwood, way up by Fort Tryon. It is a fascinating, hideous neighborhood. Here is a picture of an orange-seller on Dyckman, sweeping away the foul remnants of the late storm so that her customers can come right up to her, instead of flinging c...

A Contraceptive Culture
Matt Steinglass agrees with Megan about adoption. But he takes her to task over Birth Control: It's true that birth control is reasonably widely available in American drug stores. But the rate of usage of birth control is much lower in the United States than in Western Europe and the rest of the developed world. Hence, unsurprisingly, America's rates of teen Pregnancy and unwanted Pregnancy are much higher than in most other developed countries, as is America's rate of Abortion. Ra...

Shockingly, Women Need Contraceptive Services.
The Guttmacher Institute has updated its report on the need for contraceptive services at both the national and state levels in 2008. While the number of women of childbearing age has remained steady, the number of women seeking contraceptive services has risen 6 percent since 2000. That's mirrored in the rise in the number of women who need publicly-funded reproductive services. A lot of it is driven by a rise in the need among women of color. Publicly-funded clinics helped avoid more than 400,...

Ill Take Things That Are Not Right For $1,000, Alex.
Via my friend, science writer (The Carbon Age) and twitterer Eric Roston (@eroston) I just learned of the Tom Ford-edited issue of French Vogue featuring Fashion-porn pictures of female child models.* The girls are real Children—one is said to be six years old—presented in the clothes, Makeup and poses that suggest the sexual agency and availability of much older women. Beyond a kind of weary sorrow/rage at the thought that someone’s going there yet again, the pictures crysta...

Jivin Js Life Links 1-6-10
The Pipeline looks something like this: A projection of $14.5B in contraceptive revenue is made, companies push to produce, approve and market the next big drug, Bayer sends out a “Youth Truck” to assess the prospective customers and get Ugandan Children familiar with the idea of prescription Birth Control (while women in the west see more and more ads), and Planned Parenthood and Marie Stopes have their clinics, those philanthropic beacons of family planning, write the prescriptions...

Jivin Js Life Links 1-5-11
Is it homicide if a woman tries to kill her unborn child in utero but the child is born and later dies from her pre-birth actions? That’s apparently what happened recently in Indianapolis when a mother ate rat poison a week before giving birth:Police said Monday that the infant’s death has been ruled a homicide due to poison. The 34-year-old mother allegedly told friends she swallowed rat poison Dec. 23. Officer Kendale Adams says investigators believe it was intentional. He doesn&#...

Pro-Life News: Jeb Bush,Chris Christie, CEDAW, Abortion, Florida
Trenton, NJ — In a hypothetical field of 2012 Republican Presidential Candidates, the only one who would beat President Barack Obama is pro-life New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, according to a new Zogby International poll. Despite those results and the recent Election Day Republican landslide, Christie said Obama should not be worried - he’s not running. “I’m sure the president is resting easy…knowing that the only person who’s beating him in the poll...

Intolerance is a Good Thing When it Comes to Abortion
I was watching the news last night and there was a report about words that are overused and should be left out of our daily conversations.  Apparently someone compiled a list of words that are just way overused and suggested we drop them from our vocabulary. This report made me think of words that I believe are overused in the wrong manner, or in a way that is actually destructive.  The word that came to my mind first was tolerance, a word which I believe can actually be deadly. Tolera...

Funding backstory on MTVs abortion special
Last week both Bryan Kemper and I speculated the program may have been funded by Abortion proponents, since it ran commercial free and admittedly involved the pro-abort group Exhale in the process. The person with whom I have been emailing dispelled that theory. Although  s/he could not provide documentation, s/he told me what s/he knew from being in the room for some of the planning and production. Interesting stuff. The insider told me No Easy Decision was not its own show or series but p...

Obama Renominates Pro-Abortion Lower Court Judicial Picks
They’re back. Four of the pro-abortion Activists President Barack Obama nominated for federal judicial posts that Republicans have already turned down before are headed back to the Senate. Obama officially renominated more than 40 people for judicial posts on Wednesday and the Senate will hold new hearings on them, including two judges who have drawn strong opposition from the pro-life community: Edward Chen and Goodwin Liu as well as District Court nominees Louis Butler and John McConnell...

Virginia Doctor at Catholic Hospital Accused of Doing Abortions
A Virginia doctor who works at a Catholic Hospital has been accused, again, of moonlighting as an Abortion practitioner and doing abortions at a local center. Dr. Richard Willard works as an OB-GYN at the Bon Secours Depaul Medical Center, but he is reportedly under “careful review” by Hospital officials because of a complaint that he does abortions at Planned Parenthood on Newtown Road. Lynne Zultanky, the Secours Director of Corporate Communications, told WAVY that the Hospital is ...

Abortion rights group launches anti-Boehner effort
The Abortion rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America on Wednesday launched a new web site called StandUpToBoehner.org. The site allows supporters to take an oath to support Abortion rights and have their location pinpointed on a map of the U.S. The organization characterized the launch as "the latest phase in our ongoing public-education program focusing on Boehner's anti-choice efforts." Boehner has pledged to be the most pro-life Speaker in history. Source: https://thehill.com/blogs/healthwatc...

Lawmaker files bill to exclude abortion coverage
A Florida lawmaker has filed a bill to exclude Abortion coverage from policies obtained through Health Insurance exchanges. States are required to set up the exchanges to provide coverage under the federal health care overhaul beginning in 2014. Last year, the Republican-dominated Legislature passed a similar ban on Abortion coverage as part of a bill requiring women to have ultrasounds before getting abortions. Then-Gov. Charlie Crist vetoed it. Health News Florida reports that led Rep. Matt Ga...

Alabama Pro-Life Advocates Win Free Speech Ruling on Abortion
For the last 13 years, Law Enforcement officials in Birmingham, Alabama have arrested peaceful pro-life Activists for praying and sharing the pro-life message on a public sidewalk outside a local Abortion business. But a new legal ruling presents a victory for free Speech and a win for the pro-life message. Until last October, it had been a decade since anyone praying for an end to abortion, distributing  information about Abortion alternatives, or providing individual offers of help to wom...