Archive for May 16th, 2016
One big list: Hillary achievements in last 25 years
Mostly bad news?
Long before “Benghazi” and her email server, there was “Whitewater” and “the Rose Law Firm” and “Vince Foster.”
For those of us following her, we were promised scandal after scandal after scandal. And if no actual evidence ever turned up, well, that just proved how deviously clever she was.
So today I’m performing a public service on behalf of all the voters. I went back and re-read all the criticisms and attacks and best-selling “exposés” leveled at Hillary Rodham Clinton over the past quarter-century. And I’ve compiled a list of all her High Crimes and Misdemeanors.
Here they are:
1. When she was first lady, she murdered White House lawyer Vince Foster and then dumped his body in a park.
2. She drove Vince Foster to commit suicide through her temper tantrums.
3. She was having an affair with Vince Foster.
4. She’s a lesbian.
5. Chelsea isn’t Bill Clinton’s child.
6. She murdered Vince Foster to cover up that she once bought a tract of undeveloped land in Arkansas and lost money.
7. She murdered Vince Foster to cover up her role in firing the White House travel department.
8. After she murdered Vince Foster, she ransacked his office in the middle of the night and stole all the documents proving her guilt.
9. When Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas, she was a partner in the state’s top law firm, and it sometimes did work involving the state government.
10. She once invested in commodities futures on the advice of a friend and made $100,000, proving she’s a crook.
11. She once invested in real estate on the advice of another friend and lost $100,000, also proving she’s a crook.
12. Unnamed and unverifiable sources have told Peggy Noonan things about the Clintons that are simply too terrible to repeat.
13. The personnel murdered at Benghazi make her the first secretary of state to lose overseas personnel to terrorism — apart from Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, George Schultz, Dean Rusk and some others.
Marj Henningsen shared a link.
14. Four State Department staff were murdered at Benghazi, compared with only 119 others murdered overseas under every secretary of state combined since World War II.
15. She illegally sent classified emails from her personal server, except that apparently they weren’t classified at the time.
16. She may have cynically wriggled around the email law by “technically” complying with it.
17. She once signed a lucrative book contract when she was a private citizen.
18. Donald Trump says she “should be in jail,” and he’s a serial bankrupt casino developer in Atlantic City, so he should know.
19. Former House Majority Leader Tom Delay says his “law-enforcement sources” tell him she is “about to be indicted” — and if a man once convicted of money laundering and conspiracy doesn’t have good law-enforcement sources, who does?
20. She’s a hard-left radical who wants to break up the nuclear family.
21. She’s a conservative “mousewife” who refused to break up her own family.
22. She’s in favor of single moms.
23. She refused to be a single mom.
24. When she was first lady of Arkansas, she pandered to conservative voters by dyeing her hair.
25. Before that, she totally insulted them by refusing to.
26. She’s a frump.
27. She spends too much money on designer dresses.
28. She has “cankles.”
29. She has a grating voice.
30. She yells into the microphone.
31. She spent 18 years in Arkansas and some of the people she knew turned out to be crazy rednecks and crooks.
32. She’s in the pay of the mafia.
33. She’s in the pay of the Chinese government.
34. She’s in the pay of the Wall Street banks.
35. In order to suppress the billing records from her time at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, she cleverly packed them up and took them to the White House rather than shredding them.
36. When she handed over the documents to public officials, they couldn’t find any evidence she’d committed any crimes, so she must have doctored them.
37. Congress spent tens of millions of dollars and six years investigating her investment in the Whitewater real-estate project, and, while they didn’t actually find anything, they wouldn’t have spent all that money if there weren’t something there.
38. By cleverly hiding all evidence of her crimes in the Whitewater affair, she caused Congress to waste all that taxpayers’ money.
39. When she ran for senator of New York, she was still a fan of the Chicago Cubs.
40. She once said the Clintons were thinking of adopting a child, and they didn’t follow through.
41. She was photographed holding her hand near her mouth during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
42. She’s got brain damage.
43. She’s old.
44. She’s really ambitious and calculating, unlike all the other people running for president.
45. She secretly supported Palestinian terrorists, Puerto Rican terrorists and Guatemalan terrorists.
46. She secretly supported a group that wants to give Maine back to the Indians.
47. She’s a secret follower of “radical prophet” Saul Alinsky.
48. She did her law degree at Yale, and it’s a well-known “socialist finishing school.”
49. When she was young, she did things to build up her résumé rather than just for their own good.
50. When Bill was president, she “allowed” him to keep people waiting.
51. She’s married to a sex addict.
52. She’s an enemy of traditional marriage.
53. She didn’t divorce her husband.
54. His philandering is her fault because she is too strong, and too weak, and too frumpy, and too fat, and too cold.
55. She’s hostile to women who fool around with her husband.
56. A divorced taxi driver in Florida told me that if Hillary is elected president, “women will take over everything.”
57. She insulted Tammy Wynette.
58. When they left the White House, she and Bill bought a big house in New York that they couldn’t afford.
59. She sometimes calls her staff during dinner, even when they’re out at a restaurant.
60. She claimed there was a “vast right-wing conspiracy” against her husband, and it turned out there was nothing but a bunch of tycoons financing private investigators, and some fake think tanks and books and news sites and stuff.
61. When she got married, she didn’t “stay at home and bake cookies.”
62. She supported the Iraq war because she’s a secret foreign-policy conservative.
63. She’s a secret foreign-policy radical with a plan to impose worldwide “radical social experimentation” through the World Bank.
64. She is secretly plotting to let children sue their parents for making them take out the garbage.
65. She looked bored during the Benghazi hearings.
66. Oh, yeah — and she totally has a vagina.
At what cost, this Israel…?
Posted on: May 16, 2016
What cost, this Israel…?
Much had been argued about the creation of Israel and the ensuing 1948 ethnic cleansing of non-Jewish Palestinians.
Most had become a desensitised academic debate. A lifeless abstract portrayal failing to depict what it really meant for one to be a refugee without a country.
On this 68th commemoration of the Nakba (catastrophe), I wanted to show what it meant to one Palestinian refugee.
On May 15, 1948, Zionist Jews danced and firecrackers burst over the streets of New York celebrating the founding of Israel. About the same time, and on the other side of the world, Zionist terrorists’ mortar exploded in the middle of Jebal Al Luz (mountains of almonds) burning homes and forcing civilians to flee their village.
In the middle of the night, Abu Musa carried his physically disabled blind mother on his shoulders. His wife, Um Musa picked up their infant baby Musa and joined a throng of refugees escaping for their lives.
Abu Musa’s family hid in a ditch on the outskirts of their village. The morning sun exposed the scattered refugees hiding in nearby bushes and under trees.
Sorties after sorties, Zionist planes strafed the area pushing the villagers further north towards Lebanon. Under heavy gun fire, panicking civilians ran in all directions.
Abu Musa picked up his newborn son and ran for his life. Um Musa followed in his footsteps. Panting for air an hour later, Abu Musa realised he had left his blind mother behind.
Zionist forces continued to bomb from air and ground. Abu Musa attempted to go back, but all was in vain. The next day and during a lull in the Zionist terrorist bombardment, Abu Musa went looking for his mother. But she was nowhere to be found.
He came across local villagers who returned to check on their properties. They told him they had just buried the remains of what had appeared to be an elderly woman. Her body ripped apart by animals.
“Was my mother eaten alive by wild animals? Or had she been murdered by Zionists?” Those questions haunted Abu Musa all his life. The loss of his country and mother were just the start of his lugubrious life until his death in the mid-1990s.
Abu Musa ended up settling in the same camp as my parents. In addition to baby Musa, he had three more children in the camp, two boys and a girl.
Musa, who had left Palestine as an infant, joined the revolution in the early 1970s and returned to Palestine. He was murdered by the Israeli army and was buried in an unmarked grave. Abu Musa, who did not see his mother’s corpse, was unable to see or bury his eldest son either.
A short time after losing Musa, Abu Musa became disabled. I made it a point to call on him whenever I visited the camp. It broke my heart during the last visit before his death as I watched him crawling out of the bathroom like a little baby. I knelt down and kissed him; he kissed me back and then asked, “Who are you, my son?”
Calamity was a continuum to this one refugee.
In the early 1990s, his youngest son Kamal was murdered while he was on his way to school in Tripoli, Lebanon. He was butchered in the year he would have graduated from high school.
For Israel, Abu Musa and the other Palestinian refugees like my parents were dispensable nuisances.
In a 1948 foreign ministry study, Israel predicted the refugees “… will waste away. Some will die but most will turn into human debris and social outcasts … in the Arab countries.”
To Israel’s chagrin, the grandchildren from Abu Musa’s surviving son and daughter did not turn to “human debris.”
Sixty-eight years later, Abu Musa’s progenies are more determined to find and bury their great-grandmother’s remains, in their original village
Habib Battah added 4 new photos. ·
The term Nakba “not found” today on CNN The New York Times Washington Post BBC News #NakbaDay
Mr Kanj (www.jamalkanj.com) writes regular newspaper column and publishes on several websites on Arab world issues.
He is the author of “Children of Catastrophe,” Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America. A version of this article was first published by the Gulf Daily News newspaper.
Zeinoun Naboulsi with Khodor Salameh and 39 others. ·
عائد إلى فلسطين…
Meaning of Life? Again? What George Lucas has to say
By Maria Popova
When a frustrated young woman asked the most brilliant man in the world why we’re alive, Einstein responded in five poignant lines.
This question — at the heart of which is a concern with the meaning of life — has since been answered by many other great minds:
For David Foster Wallace, it was about going through life fully conscious;
for Carl Sagan, about our significant insignificance in the cosmos;
for Annie Dillard, about learning to live with impermanence ?;
for Richard Feynman, about finding the open channel;
for Anaïs Nin, about living and relating to others “as if they might not be there tomorrow”;
for Henry Miller, about the mesmerism of the unknown; and
for Leo Tolstoy, about finding knowledge to guide our lives.
But one of the most profound answers comes from legendary Star Wars director George Lucas.
In The Meaning of Life: Reflections in Words and Pictures on Why We Are Here (public library) — that remarkable 1991 anthology that gave us timeless meditations on existence from a number of luminaries — Lucas uses an autobiographical anecdote as the springboard for a larger meditation on the meaning of life and our best chance for reaching its fullest potential:
When I was eighteen I was in an automobile accident and went through a near-death experience. I was actually taken away from the scene, presumed dead, and it wasn’t until I reached the hospital that the doctors revived my heartbeat and brought me back to life.
This is the kind of experience that molds people’s beliefs. But I have found that most of my conclusions have evolved from observing life since that time.
If I’ve come to know anything, it’s that these questions are as unknowable for us as they would be for a tree or for an ant.
Like John Updike, who argued that “the mystery of being is a permanent mystery”, and like John Cage, who believed that “the world, the real is not an object [but] a process,”
Lucas considers the just-is nature of life:
Scholars who have studied myth and religion for many years and have connected all of the theories spawned over the ages about life and consciousness and who have taken away the superficial trappings, have come up with the same sensibility.
They call it different things. They try to personify it and deal with it in different ways.
But everybody seems to dress down the fact that life cannot be explained. The only reason for life is life. There is no why. We are.
Life is beyond reason. One might think of life as a large organism, and we are but a small symbiotic part of it.
Lucas arrives at a conclusion rather similar to Alan Watts’s ideas about the interconnectedness of all life and writes:
It is possible that on a spiritual level we are all connected in a way that continues beyond the comings and goings of various life forms.
My best guess is that we share a collective spirit or life force or consciousness that encompasses and goes beyond individual life forms. There’s a part of us that connects to other humans, connects to other animals, connects to plants, connects to the planet, connects to the universe.
I don’t think we can understand it through any kind of verbal, written or intellectual means. But I do believe that we all know this, even if it is on a level beyond our normal conscious thoughts.
If we have a meaningful place in this process, it is to try to fit into a healthy, symbiotic relationship with other life force.
Everybody, ultimately, is trying to reach a harmony with the other parts of the life force.
And in trying to figure out what life is all about, we ultimately come down to expressions of compassion and love, helping the rest of the life force, caring about others without any conditions or expectations, without expecting to get anything in return. This is expressed in every religion, by every prophet.
The Meaning of Life is superb in its entirety. Sample it further with answers from Carl Sagan, John Cage, Annie Dillard, Stephen Jay Gould, Arthur C. Clarke, and Charles Bukowski.
Adonis Diaries 