Malala Yousafzai: Pakistan activist, 14, shot in Swat

Published October 9, 2012 | By Iowadawg

This is why the taliban, islamic jahidists, and others like them are just pure freaking ass savages! To go and shoot a 14 year old girl. But then, these are savages who think nothing of killing and maiming kids of any age. I say, screw afghanistan and pakistan. Get out of there and let the freaking savages kill each other. Send no more money to either country forever. Maybe some ammo so they can keep killing each other?

14-year-old peace activist shot in Pakistan

BBC News: A 14-year-old rights activist who has campaigned for girls’ education has been shot and injured in the Swat Valley in north-west Pakistan.

Malala Yousafzai was attacked on her way home from school in Mingora, the region’s main town.

Nominated for an international peace award, she came to public attention in 2009 by writing a diary for BBC Urdu about life under the Taliban.

Photo: Malala Yousafzai pictured on March 26, 2009 in Peshawar, Pakistan (Photo by Veronique de Viguerie/Getty Images)

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Democrats do not like free speech!

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NAACP Tries to Kill the Golden Goose

The last 75 years have seen remarkable civil rights progress. As Jesse Jackson would put it, African-Americans have gone from the outhouse to the White House. Foremost in this campaign has been the NAACP (and its closely aligned Legal Defense Fund). Cataloging this progress might fill an entire library.

But, successes acknowledged, like all successful, long-lived organizations, the NAACP faces what is sometimes called the March of Dimes problem (the March of Dimes once fought polio). In a nutshell, what’s an organization to do after it has accomplished nearly all of its goals? (The March of Dimes turned to birth defects after helping conquer polio.)

This is hardly easy, and finding a new cause to energize the troops and sustain donations can, alas, lead to ill-advised quests. Unfortunately, this is exactly what now transpires in New York City, where the NAACP (along with multiple other civil rights organizations) has filed a complained with the U.S. Department of Education claiming that the two-and-half-hour multiple choice exams for two of the city’s academically elite schools violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act since blacks and Hispanics are admitted far below their proportion in the city (two-thirds of the admitted students are Asian).

Here are the facts. As in all cities, New York City high schools range in academic rigor. Eight high schools limit their enrollments to the very top, and two, Stuyvesant and Bronx High School of Science, admit students solely on tests measuring verbal and mathematical skills. Critically, the exclusive use of these tough tests is legally protected by a 1971 state law, so everything else, from grades to letters of recommendation, counts for naught (the other elite schools have more leeway).

The City once tried to make these schools more racially and ethnically diverse while still upholding the law by establishing a pre-high school program limited to blacks and Hispanics. This program was ruled unconstitutional. In the 2012-13 school year, for example, only two percent of the 967 students offered admission to Stuyvesant were African-American.

So, what does the NAACP argue? These tests, it is claimed, are racially discriminatory despite the veneer of objectivity. In their words, the tests are “unjustified, [and have a] racially disparate impact.” Moreover, it is asserted that these tests have never been shown to predict a student’s academic potential even though many of these schools’ graduates go on to distinguished careers (Attorney General Eric Holder is one such graduate). The complaint further adds that diversity suffers from an overwhelmingly white and Asian student body.

Is the NAACP still advancing the African-American civil rights agenda? A little thought will demonstrate the opposite — if successful, this complaint will make matters worse, especially for poor blacks and Hispanics. Consider the opportunity costs, all the lawyer fees and data-collection — money that could be better-spent on tutoring smart kids within hailing distance of passing the test. Less obvious, but perhaps of greater long-term consequence, is the tactic of beseeching unelected Washington bureaucrats to reverse laws enacted by a democratically elected state legislature. Surely if the NAACP’s argument is as strong as claimed, they should lobby the state legislature in Albany, where the policy can be openly debated. After all, this is far more democratic than seeking a Washington bureaucrat’s fatwa. And what if new, less sympathetic bureaucrats come into power if Romney wins? Is this any way to run education?

But ultimately of greater consequence is what can happen to the city when top academically oriented high schools are subverted by racial quotas. Clearly, despite all the rhetoric about academically talented blacks and Hispanics being deprived of an important pathway to success, the academic quality of Bronx Science and Stuyvesant will suffer, and, of the utmost importance, those now admitted thanks to quotas will not substantially benefit. It is bizarre to insist that youngsters who struggle with intermediate calculus will suddenly get smarter if put in a classroom with those anxious to move on to advanced calculus. This is learning by osmosis. If anything, stereotypes about blacks and Hispanics being challenged by tough academics will only be strengthened. These newly diversified schools may also have sacrifice advanced instruction in favor of remedial courses to boost black and Hispanic graduation rates.

In second term, Obama will allow UN to tax Americans

By Dick Morris

It should come as no surprise that President Obama will raise taxes if he is re-elected. But here’s the shocker: He will invite the United Nations to tax Americans directly. And the proceeds would go directly to the Third World. In this way, Barack Obama will, indeed, realize the dreams of his father.

In our new book, “Here Come the Black Helicopters: UN Global Governance and the Loss of Freedom,” Eileen and I describe how there is now pending in the U.N. all kinds of plans to tax Americans and redistribute their wealth – not to other Americans – but to other countries. These taxes will not be like our U.N. dues paid by a vote of our Congress. Nor akin to foreign aid which we choose to give. They would be mandatory levies imposed by treaty on American citizens. And, since they would be enumerated in a Treaty – not an act of Congress — only the president and the Democratic Senate need be on board. The Republican House has no role in the Treaty-making process.

(Of course, we do not believe that actual black UN helicopters will land in our midst to take over our country. But we use the symbolism to warn that the liberal, bureaucratic elites in the UN, enabled by Obama and Hillary, mean to create global governance to override American self-rule and independence).

Here is what we say in “Black Helicopters” that Obama, Hillary, and the UN are planning for us:

A “Robin Hood” tax on financial transactions. Every time you buy or sell a stock or a bond or exchange money while travelling, you’d be hit with a financial transactions tax (a percentage of your transaction) that would go to the UN.
A global tobacco tax with the funds to flow to the World Health Organization (WHO).
A UN-imposed tax on billionaires all over the world. And don’t delude yourself for a moment that it is only the 1600 current billionaires who will be hit. Once the precedent of a UN tax on US citizens is approved, it will gradually grow downwards to cover more and more Americans. Again the funds will go to the UN.

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Did you know that he was a REPUBLICAN? Odd aint it, that today so many of those who say they follow Martin Luther King are democrats, the party that started the KKK, jim crow laws, and more.

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Old Interview Sheds New Light on Obama’s Debate Flop

In February 2001, Julieanna Richardson, as part of an oral history on black Americans called “History Makers,” interviewed Barack Obama at length.

Although the 10,000-plus-word interview offers no Eureka moments, it does help demystify Obama’s debate failure and deepens the doubt that he uniquely authored his own memoir, Dreams from My Father. Kudos to attorney Barron Sawyer for bringing this interview to light.

Richardson seems to capture the 39-year-old state senator as he was — cautious, ambitious, and more than a little vain. Given his ambitions, Obama confined his discussion to topics that would not derail his political career. When asked about his influences, for instance, he did not mention Frank Marshall Davis, his communist mentor from Hawaii, or any of the other communists and fellow travelers he cited in Dreams, like Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, W.E.B. DuBois, and Frantz Fanon.

Off the cuff, here as always, Obama did not impress. His vocabulary was pedestrian, his syntax uninteresting, his thinking more or less off-the-shelf, and his use of the phrase “you know” maddening. True, people write in a different style from how they speak, but usually not that different. The reader of Dreams had a right to expect more from “the best writer to occupy the White House since Lincoln” than this interview offers.

These limitations would not even be an issue if Obama and his acolytes acknowledged them. Before Wednesday, they did not. Based on little more than Dreams and his ability to read well, Obama supporters thought Obama a genius and did not shy from saying so. Obama shared their opinion. “I had learned as an organizer to be able to articulate a position and express myself in clear ways that served me well as a law student and, ultimately, as a lawyer as well,” he told Richardson.

That talent was not exactly evident to Wednesday’s debate audience. To the dispassionate observer, it never has been evident. Obama was not “off his game” in Denver. That was his game. As a student of Obama, I was not at all surprised by the outcome. I had been predicting it.

Complicating Obama’s debating posture was his inability to express his truest sentiments. As he told Richardson, he had long been asking himself, “… how do we bring about more just society? You know, what are the institutional arrangements that would give people opportunity?” He had learned as a boy in Indonesia that the wealthy were not “smarter or more able” than the poor, but rather “craftier, stronger or luckier, or more ruthless.”

As Obama matured, he projected what he saw in Indonesia to America and came to see that the “racism in the United States is just one expression of sort of a broader set of injustices that you see around the world.” Unable to voice his core beliefs in the debate, Obama lacked a true organizing principle around which to order his thoughts. This problem will plague him in the foreign policy debate as well, perhaps even more.

The social philosophy on display in the interview did not vary much from that expressed in Dreams, at least not in content. The real difference was in tone. Absent in the interview was any hint of the anger that prompted Dinesh D’Souza to title his book on Obama The Roots of Obama’s Rage. In Dreams, Obama proved particularly eloquent on the subject of angry black males, himself included. Phrases like “full of inarticulate resentments,” “knotted, howling assertion of self,” “unruly maleness,” “unadorned insistence on respect,” and “withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage” laced the book.

In Dreams, Obama recounted any number of personal racial slights as well. On one occasion a tennis coach touched Obama’s skin to see if the color rubbed off — and this in Hawaii, mind you. On another mystifying occasion, Obama barely refrained from punching out a white school chum because the kid made a sympathetic allusion to Obama’s outsider status. On a few occasions, he scolded his mother for romanticizing the black experience, and then, of course, he chastised his grandmother, first in the book, and later before the world, for daring to let a black panhandler intimidate her.

It is unlikely that the real Obama ever felt this way. He told Richardson that his childhood in Hawaii was “idyllic” and that “the image that [he] had of being a black American was almost exclusively positive.” He added that “all the children around me were of some mixture, and so I was not unusual or untypical in Hawaii.” He mentioned not a single racial affront.

Friendly biographer David Remnick conceded that Obama “darkens the canvas” in Dreams and that many of the grievances recited were “novelistic contrivances.” Biographer David Maraniss said much the same thing, telling Ben Smith of Buzzfeed that Obama falsified his bio largely to portray himself as “blacker and more disaffected” than he really was.

What neither biographer asked, however, was whether Obama darkened the canvas of his own accord. There is overwhelming evidence, in fact, that he had help. As I relate in my book, Deconstructing Obama, that evidence leads to neighborhood editor and terrorist emeritus, Bill Ayers. Skin color aside, Ayers and Obama had much in common. Both grew up in comfortable white households; attended idyllic, largely white prep schools; and have struggled to find an identity as righteous black men ever since.

Honey, I Shrunk the President

Maybe there’s something to be said for clean living after all. Although Mitt Romney is closer in age to the venerable Jim Lehrer than to the callow Barack Obama, it was the Republican nominee who came across in last night’s debate as energetic and vigorous. And if Obama looked put upon when the cameras were on, imagine what he must’ve come home to. You spent our anniversary doing WHAT?!

About the private reaction of Obama’s wife, of course, we can only speculate. But many of his lovers went public with their devastation: “I don’t know what he was doing out there,” wailed Chris Matthews. “He had his head down, he was enduring the debate rather than fighting it.” One expected Matthews to burst into song: “The thrill is gone baby / The thrill is gone away / You know you done me wrong baby / And you’ll be sorry Election Day.”

Even better was Andrew Sullivan: “Look: you know how much I love the guy. . . . But this was a disaster for the president for the key people he needs to reach, and his effete, wonkish lectures may have jolted a lot of independents into giving Romney a second look. Obama looked tired, even bored; he kept looking down; he had no crisp statements of passion or argument; he wasn’t there.” Cue Shania Twain: “So you got the brain but have you got the touch / Don’t get me wrong, yeah I think you’re all right / But that won’t keep me warm in the middle of the night.”

We could spend hours quoting disparaging reviews of Obama’s performances from journalists who were never as head-over-heels as Matthews and Sullivan, but we like to pretend as if we have space constraints, so we’ll just take one representative example, also from the Daily Beast, where our friend Tunku Varadarajan writes: “My God, in the four years that we’ve seen him in the White House, I don’t think we’ve ever seen the president so flaccid, so dull-brained, so jejune, so shifty, so downcast.”

This columnist has to disagree. Obama’s lame performance last night seemed typical to us. We can think of a few occasions in which we’ve seen the president less flaccid, less dull-brained, less jejune, less shifty, less downcast. But only a few.

But these qualities–or, to put it another way, this lack of quality–was harder than usual to miss last night because of the contrast with the highly effectual Romney. One reason it came as such a shock to Obama is that it was the first time in his career that he shared a debate stage with a serious opponent.

Think about it: John McCain was feeble. Alan Keyes, whom Obama beat in his 2004 Senate campaign, was crazy. All the Democrats who ran in 2008 were preposterous except Hillary Clinton, and she, as a beneficiary of nepotism, was highly overrated as a politician. He used Chicago-style dirty tricks to dispatch his original opponent in 2004, as well as the state senator he replaced back in the 1990s. The test he failed last night is one to which he had never been put.

But the journalists who are pointing the finger at Obama have three fingers pointed back at themselves. Instead of challenging the president, the press corps–with a few honorable exceptions, like ABC’s Jake Tapper and the guys from Univision–have spent the past four-plus years puffing him up and making excuses for him. The American Spectator’s Jeffrey Lord explains:

The great James Taranto . . . long ago posited what is called the “Taranto Principle.” In short, it means that the liberal media so coddles liberal politicians that they have no idea how to cope outside that liberal media bubble. . . .

Barack Obama has been so totally coddled by the liberal media that he looked absolutely shell-shocked in this debate. Stunned, unhappy, angry, sour–and at some points genuinely incoherent.

Romney has had nowhere near that kind of treatment. He had serious opponents in the primaries–all of whom in their own way forced him to confront his ideas in a serious fashion. Conservatives were on his heels. The Obama media never let up. The man went through the political equivalent of boot camp.