February 12th, 2012 - 11:11 pm
Two articles, one from the New Republic and the other from the New York Times, examine the recollections of Mimi Alford, who was a 19-year old intern when JFK had his way with her.
Both articles focus not upon JFK’s infidelity — that is old news — but with his shallow callousness. In one revealed instance the President told Alford to give his press aid a blow job while he watched, which she dutifully did. It was an act so vile that the aide remonstrated with the Kennedy.
Afterwards, Alford says she was “deeply embarrassed,” and as she climbed out of the pool she “could hear Dave speak in as stern a tone as I ever heard him use with his boss. ‘You shouldn’t have made her do that,’ Dave said. ‘I know, I know,’ I heard the President say. Later, a chastened President Kennedy apologized to us both.” Alford believes that Kennedy showed “his darker side … when we were among men he knew. That’s when he felt a need to display his power over me.”
The NYT article focuses on another incident, the day before Kennedy flew off to his destiny in Dallas. Mimi Alford had decided to get married, and told her fiance about her relationship with JFK. By mutual agreement the couple decided to put the incidents in the past. To begin anew. Nobody knows whether JFK would have let the newly married Alford alone.
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February 11th, 2012 - 3:28 pm
The Weekly Standard looks at what hacked data shows about the Syrians. Readers have a choice before proceeding. Do you want to laugh or to cry?
Here’s laugh.
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February 11th, 2012 - 1:07 pm
Hugh Tomlinson of the Times, reporting from Riyadh, says Saudi Arabia will acquire nuclear weapons within weeks of a successful Iranian atomic effort. Citing Saudi government and military sources, Tomlinson wrote that “warheads would be purchased off the shelf from abroad, with work on a new ballistic missile platform getting under way to build an immediate deterrent, according to Saudi sources … The Times has learnt that commanders of Saudi Arabia’s Strategic Missile Force have been actively considering the missile platforms on the market.”
The likeliest source of such weapons, according to Western sources interviewed by the Times, is America’s staunch ally and loyal friend, Pakistan, which has recently been in high dudgeon over questions about its moral integrity.
Pakistan is the most likely vendor of warheads to Riyadh, according to Western officials.
Saudi Arabia is believed to have shouldered much of the cost of Pakistan’s nuclear program and bailed out Islamabad when it was sanctioned by the West after its first nuclear test, in 1998.
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February 10th, 2012 - 2:48 pm
Among recent news stories are instances of people talking back, openly challenging the received wisdom in surprising ways. For example, Karen Handel calls Planned Parenthood a “gigantic bully“ for pushing abortion on the Komen foundation.
The bishops of the Roman Catholic church finally nerved themselves to openly clash with the president in a public space, according to the New York Times:
Seven months earlier, they had started laying the groundwork for a major new campaign to combat what they saw as the growing threat to religious liberty, including the legalization of same-sex marriage. But the birth control mandate, issued on Jan. 20, was their Pearl Harbor. …
“Never before,” Archbishop Dolan said, setting the tone, “has the federal government forced individuals and organizations to go out into the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience. This shouldn’t happen in a land where free exercise of religion ranks first in the Bill of Rights.”
A prominent supporter of global warming has recanted his belief in public. “I feel duped on Climate Change,” said former German environment senator Fritz Vahrenholt. “He wants to break a taboo. ‘The climate catastrophe is not occurring,’ he writes in his book ‘Die Kalte Sonne’ (The Cold Sun), published by Hoffmann and Campe, which will be in bookstores next week. … While books by climate heretics usually receive little attention, it could be different in Vahrenholt’s case. ‘His fame,’ says Marotzke, ‘will ensure that there will be a debate on the issue.’”
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February 10th, 2012 - 12:09 pm
“If Hitler invaded Hell,” Winston Churchill once remarked, “I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” Alliances make strange bedfellows, not from love, but out of shared enmity. The appearance of David DeGraw, a spokesman for the 99% Movement and Mark Meckler, one of the founders of the Tea Party Patriots at the Dylan Ratigan show, was notable in that they agreed the common enemy was a predatory elite in Washington. Of course, each defines ‘enemy elite’ in different political terms. But the significance of their superficial agreement lies in that the idea that Washington is the problem is now going mainstream.
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February 9th, 2012 - 1:25 pm
Michelle Singletary at the Washington Post says that whether or not America achieves President Obama’s goal to “once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world” depends on how much the taxpayer is willing to spend. “To reach Obama’s goal, we have to decide, as a matter of public policy, whether college is a right or a privilege.”
She believes it is a right. Otherwise only the rich will be able to go to college in this era of rising educational costs. Singletary writes:
There are those who will decry even asking if college is a right or a privilege. Nonetheless, the question must be asked and answered.
If going to college is a right and vital to our nation’s economic standing, then government will have to do more to make it affordable for all. If it’s a privilege, only the nation’s wealthiest families will one day be able to send their children to college. Or are we damning a large percentage of our citizens to burdensome student loans, leaving them to conclude college isn’t worth it?
But if Singletary were to reflect, what she probably means is that the lifestyle that graduation from college is meant to afford is what she desires as a right. What is the point of making a college education a “right” if it doesn’t make an economic difference? One of the “we are the 99 percenters” recently held up a hand-lettered sign which complained that all her master’s degree qualified her for was work as a housekeeper.
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February 9th, 2012 - 9:17 am
Lee Smith’s article at Tablet Magazine discusses what Newt Gingrich called “the ‘Obama Hostage Crisis.’” Egypt is planning a show trial for 19 American NGO organizers; and they have plenty of public support in the Cairo streets.
A December Gallup poll showed that 71 percent of Egyptians oppose U.S. economic aid of any sort, and that 74 percent oppose “direct U.S. aid to Egyptian civil society organizations.” … It’s worth noting how these December poll numbers track in parallel to last March’s constitutional referendum. That vote gave the Egyptian electorate a choice: Either vote on a few amendments to the 1971 constitution and push ahead to elections, or write a new constitution, a process that would delay elections.
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February 9th, 2012 - 8:49 am
Eastman Kodak, founded by George Eastman in 1880, is exiting the camera business after finding itself unable to compete with Japanese camera makers. Although it was one of the pioneers in digital imagery, it was trapped by its lucrative film market into a technological dead end. The Rochester-based company will focus on inkjet printers. Closing the camera business will mean the loss of an unknown number of jobs — and perhaps an even greater number of pensions.
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February 8th, 2012 - 9:00 am
Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis, an officer who “served in Operation Desert Storm, in Afghanistan in 2005-06 and in Iraq in 2008-09″ and “legislative correspondent for defense and foreign affairs for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas”, recently concluded, after spending a year in Afghanistan gathering data for a report on equipment, that the whole operation had become a fraud.
He echoed the assessment of Anthony Cordesman’s conclusion that the war was being reported to fit a political template, while in the meantime doing little or nothing to achieve any tangible goal. Cordesman wrote, “Since June 2010, the unclassified reporting the U.S. does provide has steadily shrunk in content, effectively ‘spinning’ the road to victory by eliminating content that illustrates the full scale of the challenges ahead. They also, however, were driven by political decisions to ignore or understate Taliban and insurgent gains from 2002 to 2009, to ignore the problems caused by weak and corrupt Afghan governance, to understate the risks posed by sanctuaries in Pakistan, and to ‘spin’ the value of tactical ISAF victories while ignoring the steady growth of Taliban influence and control.”
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February 5th, 2012 - 8:10 pm
When 15-term Dan Burton announced his intention not to run for another term, he described it with all the easy assurance of a movie superstar who had finally tired of the game. It was an impression only slightly marred by the fact that everyone around him had expected him to run.
“It has been an incredible honor to serve Hoosiers, first as a state representative and state senator at the Indiana State House and then to serve my constituents as a member of Congress,” he said in a statement. “I want to thank all of those who have given me the great honor to serve in the legislative branch of government for all of these years.”
The announcement caught many by surprise.
Joshua Gillespie, a spokesman at Burton’s Indianapolis office, said the congressman made the announcement on “his own accord” without informing his staff. He said to call it a surprise would be an “understatement.”
“None of us in the office were expecting this,” he said.
The Chillico Gazette, however, tells a darker tale. According to Deidre Sheshgreen, their Washington Bureau correspondent, Burton was forced out by the machinations “a shadowy group called the Campaign for Primary Accountability, which bills itself as a ‘non-partisan’ group dedicated to ‘leveling the playing field in primary elections’.”
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