All Posts Tagged With: "No"

U. S. Presidential Elections Will Dictate Timing Of Israel’s Attack on Iran.

When Israel’s Shaul Mofaz talks, Washington listens . . . very carefully. “It is a race against time,” he said recently about stopping Iran’s nuclear bomb building, “and time is winning.” For Israel, time runs out before the U.S. elections on Nov. 4. After that Barack Obama may be the next president of the U.S. and Israeli powers fear he may disassociate himself and the U. S. from any Israeli military action against Iran.”

The Iranian born Mofaz, 60, is now deputy prime minister was chief of staff of Israel’s armed forces, and maybe it’s next prime minister. He is a tough bird. Mofaz took part in the legendary rescue mission in Uganda (1976); fought in the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War, and the 1982 Lebanon War rising from paratroop brigade commander to chief of staff.

There is little confidence that Russia or China will allow sanctions strong enough to work to be exacted against Iran. Iran knows it and believes if it stalls a little longer a new, inexperienced and weaker U. S. administration will render the issue moot buying enough time to arm itself with nuclear weapons rendering Israel and the U. S. impotent against it.

Despite angst in the Persian Gulf — Iran with a nuclear weapon, said Mr. Mofaz, will “deepen and strengthen the global terrorist threat.” Therefore, he explained, Israel will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear capability, “because Israel is not prepared to face a second Holocaust.” Holocaust, of course, evokes the memory of Hitler’s “final solution” that killed 6 million Jews, and is now seen in Israel as a mammoth Iranian sword of Damocles.

In 1933 Adolf Hitler came to power, the world ignored the paranoid rants in “Mein Kampf” about the Jewish peril, a preview of coming horrors Hitler published nine years before. Mofaz likens that to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s inflammatory utterances on the stump, say Jews, and are tantamount to talking about a final solution for the Jewish homeland.

If polls show John McCain with a substantial lead in the fall, a new Israeli government, led by Mr. Mofaz or, following elections, by Mr. Netanyahu, will know it can count on U.S. support. Sen. Joe Lieberman, a close friend of and adviser to Mr. McCain, agrees with the neocon refrain: Only one thing worse than bombing Iran is an Iranian bomb. If Obama leads Israel feels it will have to act sooner than later. Obama’s visit failed to impress Israelis.

Excerpted and edited from an article by Arnaud de Borchgrave

Washington DC Residents have started applying to own and keep a firearm for home protection.

Police in the District of Columbia will begin registering residents for handguns Thursday now that the district’s 32-year-old ban has been lifted. Besides obtaining paperwork to buy new handguns, residents also can register firearms they’ve had illegally under a 180-day amnesty period. It comes after the District of Columbia Council approved new firearms legislation Tuesday and as officials grudgingly comply with last month’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down the city’s ban on handguns. Though residents will be allowed to begin applying for handgun permits, city officials have said the entire process could take weeks or months.

Business is steady at the Blue Ridge Arsenal gun shop and range in nearby Chantilly, Va. but Washington DC residents must endure a process designed to be long and tortured. Handguns, as well as other legal firearms such as rifles and shotguns, also must be kept unloaded and disassembled, or equipped with trigger locks ? unless there is a “reasonably perceived threat of immediate harm” in the home. By and large citizens who pass an police background check can own a handgun for personal protection if it has a capacity of less than 12 rounds.

2^nd Amendment advocates and other members of the gun-grabbing - dog nut groups as described by Barack Obama will almost certainly file lawsuits against the Washington DC City Council for what they say is obstructionism. Washington DC earned the infamy of America’s “murder capitol” during the 30-year ban, and was more dangerous than living in Baghdad during the height of the Iraq War.

Maverick Lieberman Calls for Maverick McCain Election

“…I really have been there and done that,” Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Conn) told ABC News. “I am not a candidate. I am not interested in doing it. I hope John [McCain] is elected president. I’m going to work hard to do that. And I think the best thing I can do to help him be the great president I think he’s capable of being is to be Democratic senator working across party lines to get things done.” Born Joseph Isadore “Joe” Lieberman he is serving his fourth term in the US Senate. In 2000 he became the first Jewish VP candidate on Al Gore’s ticket and ran for the Democrat Presidential nomination in 2004. His “conservative” views put him on the outs with the Democrat party, and he lost its nomination for reelection in 2006 before being reelected as a third party candidate as “Connecticut for Lieberman.” He caucuses with Democrats and is officially an “independent Democrat” and openly supports John McCain to the chagrin of many Democrats.

A few years ago, when I was involved in a humor writers’ workshop, I noticed that my submissions were getting fewer and fewer laughs from the other participants and the director.

The puzzling part was that my friends outside the workshop, who often figured in the stories I was writing, were laughing themselves senseless over them. Finally the director told me I’d never make it as a humor writer because I hadn’t had the bitter, crushing experiences that the other members of the group had been through. Essentially he told me to give up.

Then I noticed that I could watch the Humor Channel for a half hour and not even smile. I wondered what the audience thought was so funny: “When I want to get rid of a guy I’m dating, I just tell him, ‘You know, I really, really love you, and I want to marry you and settle down and have your children.’ Sometimes they leave skid marks.” I noticed that one film that was reputed to be falling-down hilarious featured, shall we say, a flatulence contest, with one contestant having to leave the room because he has soiled himself. Then I noticed the frequency with which toilets were appearing in children’s cartoons, along with kids getting covered with green mucus shot from some sort of monster’s nostrils.

Around the same time, I asked one of the world’s greatest humorists whether he knew another comedian who lived in the Santa Barbara area. He told me he had met him once, at a party, and when my friend began wisecracking with him, the response was a snotty, “Are you auditioning for me, _____?”

I mentioned that incident to my brother, who replied, “You have to realize that all comedians have their demons.”

My humorist friend told me that after his first performance at a Las Vegas casino the owner had entered his dressing room and informed him that he needed to put some dirty jokes into his routine. Everyone else was doing it, he said, and a clean routine just wasn’t going to make it. My friend told him, “Look, I’ve never operated that way and I’m not going to start now. You can break my contract if you want, but I won’t do it.” The owner kept him on, but only grudgingly.

Early in the last century, Max Eastman said that laughter results when something that would otherwise be unpleasant is placed in a “play frame.” Sixty years ago that meant Mollie, of Fibber McGee and Mollie, read a newspaper report of a PTA meeting and said, “That meeting must have been a disgraceful, drunken affair. It says Mr. _____ made a motion from the floor, and the chairman didn’t even recognize him.” Drunkenness at a PTA meeting would be very disturbing, but the play frame consists of Mollie’s misunderstanding of Robert’s Rules of Order, and her comment is funny without any bitterness or cynicism in it. In the case of the female comedian I’ve quoted above, though, the humor lies in the double entendre of the skid marks, which places a play frame around a truly bitter experience that is common in this generation.

A large percentage of people today walk around with a glum, humorless expression on their faces, and when they do laugh it tends to be a bitter, cynical kind of laughter. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think many of these are the kids who were raised to believe the world revolved around them; they were a pampered, spoiled generation, but when confronted with the reality of a cruel world they reacted with exacerbated paranoia. I saw a graffito that read, “There is no gravity. The earth sucks.”

This is reflected much of today’s music as well. The music of “the greatest generation” was full of humor, as was early rock and roll. Think of the big band number that proclaims, “I’ve got a gal in Kalamazoo, zoo, zoo, zoo, zoo,” or Silhouettes on the Shade. It was a light, playful kind of humor, suited to kids who were enjoying what was good in their adolescence, while a large part of the music that is produced today is characterized by what a writer in the Atlantic magazine calls “apocalyptic nihilism.” He found that a considerable percentage of the young people he was dealing with had given up on the future, not only for themselves but for the world itself, so there was nothing left to strive for; there were no values worth upholding. Is that what we see reflected in those dull, lifeless faces?

It was no coincidence that our fascist enemies in World War II were a particularly humorless lot, as was our communist enemy in the Cold War. It was disconcerting to them that we could be faced with incredibly grim circumstances and still laugh uproariously at them and ourselves. Even with the inhumanly heavy burden that was on his shoulders, Winston Churchill reacted to some young officer’s criticism of his ending a sentence with a preposition by retorting, “This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.”

Neither is it a coincidence that the preponderance of great comedians of the 20th century were Jewish. The Jews have faced inconceivable hardships throughout many centuries, and the survivors have made it in large measure because they knew how to laugh in the midst of otherwise hopeless circumstances. An old friend of mine, Kurt Rosenbalm, who lost his entire family at Auschwitz, once watched me cross a four-lane street full of heavy traffic without breaking stride. In his Henry Kissinger accent, he deadpanned, “Let me see you do that again.” That is perfect humor; he pretended that I was implying I had supernatural powers. Our society is not in any Holocaust, at least not yet, and it might be a good time to evaluate what sort of attitude towards life will allow us a good bellylaugh once in a while.

Fifty-three percent (53%) of Americans say that the federal government should not help out homeowners who borrowed more than they could afford – 29% disagree; 17% are not sure. The Bush administration is finalizing details of a plan to rescue thousands of homeowners at risk of foreclosure by helping them refinance into more affordable mortgages backed by public funds, government officials said.