***
Jotta A – Brazilians Got Talent 2011
^^^
Carly Rose Sonenclar – The X Factor (USA)
***
Sunday, September 23, 2012
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
The Romney Tapes
***
Let Them Eat Crab Cake
by Maureen Dowd
SEPT. 18, 2012
Oh, for the days when we
thought Mitt Romney didn’t stand for anything.
As a secret video from a Boca
Raton fund-raiser with high rollers in May shows, Romney in private stands for
so many bizarre things that it’s hard to tell what’s crazier — his domestic
policy or his foreign policy.
Less than 50 days before the
election, we learn that Romney may have given up on half of America and on Mideast
peace.
In a reply to a fat cat at
the $50,000-a-plate dinner, he wrote off 47 percent of the country as
deadbeats, freeloaders and “victims” who feel they’re entitled to stuff — stuff
like basic sustenance.
“Well, there are 47 percent
of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” he said. “All
right? There are 47 percent who are with him. Who are dependent upon
government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has
a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they’re entitled to health
care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.”
The candidate, who pays so
little in taxes relative to his income that he has to hide tax returns and
money in Switzerland and the
Cayman Islands, then added, condescendingly:
“These are people who pay no income tax.”
“So my job is not to worry
about those people,” he blithely concluded. “I’ll never convince them that they
should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” What kind of
presidential candidate shrugs off wooing whole groups — we’re talking many
seniors and white-working-class voters in battleground states who are, if he
actually knew what he was talking about, his own natural constituencies?
A “stupid and arrogant” one,
as Bill Kristol, the editor of The
Weekly Standard, put it.
Conservatives knew that
Romney was no Reagan, but the tape left many Republicans and Obama strategists
gobsmacked. One top Democrat called it “a treasure trove of stupid answers.”
On Fox News Tuesday, Neil
Cavuto gently asked Romney if he had “prematurely” presumed that he couldn’t
get all of those voters. Mitt’s rambles to the donors, released by Mother Jones
magazine and, in a bit of poetic justice, unearthed by Jimmy Carter’s grandson,
were a stunning combination of wrong facts, callous sentiments and dumb
politics.
He seemed to have bought into
the warped canard that some conservatives inside and outside of Congress have
pushed: that the president and Nancy Pelosi were nefariously hooking people on
unemployment benefits so they’d get addicted and vote Democratic to keep the
unemployment bucks flowing like crack.
It’s literally rich: Willard,
born on third base and acting self-made, whining to the rich about what a great
deal in life the poor have.
We thought Romney was secretly moderate, but it turns
out that he’s secretly cruel, a social Darwinist just like his running mate. [emphasis added]
You’d assume that it would be
hard now for Romney to resume bashing President Obama for demonizing and
pandering on class warfare, with lines like he’s been using on the trail: “he
and his allies are pushing us all even further apart by dividing us into
groups.”
But, even as Mitt was
spitefully demonizing and dividing in Boca, he remained cardboard-cutout
un-self-aware, musing: “The thing which I find most disappointing about this
president is his attack of one America
against another America.”
This is the absolute height of cluelessness.
At another point in the
video, Romney once more showed his foreign policy jejuneness, questioning the
workability of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, which
is U.S. policy endorsed by W.
Mr. Sunshine said he
sometimes felt “that the Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in
establishing peace — and that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to
accomplish.”
He continued: “You hope for
some degree of stability, but you recognize this is going to remain an unsolved
problem,” adding, “And we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately
somehow, something will happen to resolve it.”
Wow. That’s leadership. He
said a former secretary of state had called him to suggest that after the
Palestinian elections there might be a prospect for a settlement, but that “I
didn’t delve into it.”
After months of doggedly
trying to seem more likable, sharing his guilty pleasures like Reese’s Peanut
Butter Cups and Snooki, Romney came across as a mean geek, a Cranbrook kid at the country club smugly
swaddled in class disdain. He thinks being president is his manifest destiny.
His father didn’t make it, so he will — no matter what far-out conservative
positions he must graft on to in order to do it.
We’re in search of the real
Romney. But, disturbingly, so is he.
One thing we have to give
Mitt, though: He is, as advertised, a brilliant manager. He’s managed to ensure
that President Obama has a much better chance of re-election.
***
Saturday, September 15, 2012
Martin Bashir Rips Romney’s Politicization of US Diplomats Murdered in Libya
***
Martin Bashir | Aired on September 13, 2012
Bashir: Mr. Romney, you owe diplomats who
risk their lives an apology
Martin Bashir lashes into
Mitt Romney’s twin campaign themes – misrepresentation and refusal to apologize
– and challenges Romney to apologize for using the American embassy tragedy to
score cheap political points against President Obama.
***
Romney on Israel – Is This Presidential Material?
***
Israeli Fallout
by Eric L. Lewis
SEPT. 13, 2012
It should go without saying,
but apparently does not, that the tragic crisis unfolding in the Middle East calls for sober statesmanship rather than
political posturing. The jihadist murder of the American ambassador to a newly
liberated Libya; the carnage
unleashed by the Assad regime on the Syrian people; the emergence of a Muslim
Brotherhood regime in Egypt;
the conundrum of Iranian nuclear ambitions — the region presents decades worth
of complex challenges telescoped into real time.
Responding to these
challenges, Mitt Romney mixes crude political theater with neocon bromides.
Attacking President Obama for supposedly apologizing to Islamic
radicals, he appears unable or
unwilling to understand the responsibilities of a president trying to deal with
a volatile situation while Americans are in harm’s way.
Romney shows no respect for
diplomacy in general. He declares that “God did not create this country to be a
nation of followers” and maintains that “in an American century, America leads
the free world.” His surrogates repeatedly
mock President Obama’s “apology tour” and his unfortunate “leading from behind”
formulation on Libya.
His principal advisers, John Bolton and Dan Senor, are part of a neocon hard
core that opposes any policy that would diminish American sovereignty or
freedom of action. Yet faced with the vexing issue of whether the Middle East
should be further roiled by an Israeli attack on Iran in an attempt to stop its
nuclear program, Romney is willing to outsource that decision to Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Speaking earlier this week, Netanyahu said that if the Obama administration
was unwilling to set fixed red lines that Iran
could not cross, it “has no ‘moral right’ to restrain Israel from taking military action
of its own.” The fundamental moral and political issue here, however, is
whether it is the sovereign prerogative of the United States to make the decision
of whether to start a regional war, a war that will certainly require American
resources and may well require American troops to finish.
The threat to international
security posed by the Iranian nuclear program should not be underestimated and
the Obama administration takes the threat seriously. It continues to keep all
options on the table, but believes that there is additional time for sanctions
to work. Romney is apparently prepared to delegate to Netanyahu the decision to
start a conflict that the United States military believes is, at best,
premature, that is unlikely to be fully effective, that will send oil prices
skyrocketing, that will further destabilize Lebanon and Syria (and possibly the
shaky governments in Libya and Egypt), and that will be likely to consolidate
domestic support for a deeply unpopular Iranian regime. But the question in the
presidential campaign is not whether attacking Iran now or later is a good idea,
but whether a decision with enormous geo-strategic consequences should be made
by the American president or by the leader of an ally dependent upon American
power.
Strong, even passionate,
supporters of Israel
should be troubled by the prospect of an Israeli government not only ignoring
the policy choices of its powerful ally but also willing to intrude into
American domestic politics in an attempt to influence or override the
president’s foreign policy. Imagine, for example, that South Korea decided it was going to invade North Korea to destroy its nuclear facilities,
potentially triggering a war on the Korean
Peninsula that could bring in China and
possibly other countries in the region. Indeed, South Korea could take its policy
argument directly from Mitt Romney’s Web site:
A nuclear weapons capability
in the hands of an unpredictable dictatorship with unknown leadership and an
unclear chain of command poses a direct threat to U.S. forces on the Korean
Peninsula and elsewhere in East Asia, threatens our close allies South Korea
and Japan, destabilizes the entire Pacific region, and could lead to the
illicit transfer of a nuclear device to another rogue nation or a terrorist
group.
But Mitt Romney is not
suggesting an attack on Pyongyang and he
certainly is not offering carte blanche to Seoul.
Analogous situations would be
equally untenable. If India
decided that, once and for all, it refused to live under the threat of an
unstable and nuclear-armed Pakistan
and intended to invade, we would never tell them it was up to them. If Taiwan had feared an attack from China across the Formosa
Strait during the early 1970s, would Richard Nixon and Henry
Kissinger have told them it was their call rather than ours whether to launch a
surprise attack? Even to put the question shows the absurdity of a superpower’s
acquiescing to allies on critical questions of war and peace in a nuclear age.
To be sure, Israel is a special ally, but that does not
entitle it to make the decision on matters where United States interest and power
are inextricably and centrally engaged. It is inconceivable that the United States
would permit another ally dependent on American funds and American defense
systems to take such a decision unilaterally. It is also inconceivable that we
would permit another foreign government to intervene directly and forcefully in
our political process to garner popular support for its policies over the
objections of the administration.
Yet senior Israeli officials
take the view that the Israeli government believes it can defy American wishes
and bypass the president. According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, “Ehud Barak says that if Israel were to act now against U.S. wishes, the U.S. Congress would still favor
Israel over Iran.”Michael
Oren, Israel’s ambassador to
Washington, who was appointed by Netanyahu,
says “the American people and Congress would support Israel
right now if it were engaged in a war with Iran.” Netanyahu and Obama appear
to recognize that airing their toxic relationship publicly is to neither one’s
advantage and both have been walking back stories that Obama refused to meet before
the approaching United Nations meetings in New York. They have both called attention to the hourlong telephone conversation they
had this week. Attitudes in Israel are fluid, and Defense Minister Barak appears to have moved against an imminent attack (or maybe he hasn’t — as I said, the situation is fluid), but it
is remarkable that senior officials of a foreign government would suggest that
the president’s judgments could be bypassed and foreign policy should be
subject to Congressional or popular choice.
The Romney campaign seems to
think that all of this is just fine. “If Israel
has to take action on its own, in order to stop Iran from developing that
capability, the governor would respect that decision,” says Dan Senor, Romney’s senior national security adviser and
someone widely tapped as a future national security adviser in a Romney
administration. Romney expresses a similar view, stating blandly, “Prime
Minister Netanyahu always has to do what he feels is in the best interests of
his own nation.” In his convention address, he accused President Obama of
threatening to throw Israel
“under the bus.” Apparently, Romney thinks Israel should drive the regional bus, leaving
the United States
to deal with any crashes.
It is American policy to
support Israel’s right to
exist within secure borders, and the United States has supported its
ally with billions of dollars and sophisticated weaponry. That support
should earn reciprocal cooperation and respect for American policy from its
ally, not to mention non-interference in its domestic politics.
Despite all his talk about
American power and sovereignty, Mitt Romney seems willing to let someone else
decide whether to start what may be the first potential regional war of the new
“American century.” That is not real leadership; it is dangerous pandering and
a strong indication of a prospective president without a genuine foreign policy
compass. Once again, we are left with the question of whether Romney means what
he is saying and whether he would govern sensibly. But as we have learned
to our great detriment over the last decade, the Middle
East is no place for loose talk or lazy thinking.
Eric Lewis is
a partner at Lewis Baach PLLC in Washington.
***
Sunday, September 9, 2012
Terror of the Gay Tokoloshe
***
Terror of the gay dwarfish African incubus
by Dan Roodt
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To most people outside South Africa in
developed countries, our life here must seem bizarre. After all, nowhere in
Europe or the United States would you drive your children to school and see
that the country’s largest newspaper, the Daily Sun, has got “Terror of the gay
Tokoloshe” as its frontpage story for the day.
Probably you do not even know
what a Tokoloshe is. Ever since I was a child I was intrigued to see that most
black people in South Africa,
especially women, place their beds on bricks. Apparently if one’s bed is high
enough, the Tokoloshe cannot reach you while you are sleeping. So from my
earliest years as I became aware of the peculiar differences between blacks and
whites, I was brought under the impression that the Tokoloshe played an
important role in the lives of blacks.
More black people in South Africa
use so-called “traditional medicine” than the Western kind. The government has
even institutionalised witchdoctors which are now called “traditional healers”
or simply “healers”. At one point I read somewhere that one might also claim
from health insurance for visiting a healer who will give you a concoction called
“muti” that might contain all kinds of bizarre ingredients. In the northern
parts of the country, there is even traffic in human body parts for making
“strong muti”.
Being Africans of a slightly
different kind, we Afrikaners jocularly refer to the more regular Eurocentric
medicine that we take as “muti” too, especially to children. “Come on, drink
your muti,” one would tell one’s son or daughter, referring to cough mixture or
a tablet made by some branded pharmaceutical company.
Sometimes we Afrikaners call
our children “Tokolos” as a term of endearment. Otherwise, we often joke about
the Tokoloshe, saying things like: “The Tokoloshe is going to catch you.” But
of course, unlike black Africans, we lack any real belief in his existence. To
us he is merely a mythological creature like Zeus or Spiderman.
Wikipedia has a few lines on
the Tokoloshe, but it mostly omits his sexual proclivities. From
what I remember, the Tokoloshe especially preys on single women as they are
more likely to be amenable to his advances, especially in dreams. It is also
through one’s dreams that the ancestors communicate to the living. Normally,
witchdoctors or sangomas or nyangas as they are also called, are “called” by an
ancestor to their profession.
I once heard a story of an
African investment banker in Johannesburg
being called to become a witchdoctor. He went missing for six weeks and arrived
back at the bank with an animal bladder on his head. Afterwards there was some
discussion as to whether he could discuss corporate finance with clients while
wearing the bladder, which he was not allowed to take off.
The Daily Sun’s story has a
charm of its own and is in a way politically correct. No doubt it will speak to
people for whom gay rights are a burning issue as even the little African
incubus may be gay, it seems. Considering that there is currently a whole
hullabaloo in the United
States about the Republican senatorial
candidate’s petite phrase about “legitimate rape”, “the terror of the gay
tokoloshe” brings a whole new dimension to discussions of rape.
According to the Daily Sun’s
report, Mr. Isaac Malope (51) has already spent R200 000 (about $25 000) on
muti to defend himself against a gay Tokoloshe who comes to rape him every
night while he is asleep next to his wife Constance Mazibuko (43).
Isaac Malope told the Daily
Sun’s reporter, Alex Nkosi: “Every night he comes between me and my wife and
rapes me over and over. When he leaves, I no longer have energy for my wife and
even if I try to get an erection, nothing happens.
The only time when I manage
to get an erection is if I fast for seven days and ask God for it. But it only
lasts for a day and then it is back to hell. I have been to many different
sangomas but they have failed to solve the problem.”
Mr. Malope has even travelled
from South Africa to Nigeria to
consult a well-known prophet there, to no avail.
The couple are now asking the
Daily Sun’s readers for help, giving the following number in Pretoria to dial: 012 424 6251.
PRAAG – Pro Afrikaans Action
Group
See also:
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Fort Lee, NJ – Ethnic Diversity of a NYC Neighborhood
***
Close to the City, but With a Life of Its Own
by VERA HALLER
Sept. 7, 2012
DIVERSE AND AFFORDABLE Fort Lee’s Main
Street features potted flowers and a V.F.W. post.
But the Bergen County
borough also has the ethnic diversity of a New York City neighborhood.
AFTER 13 years in a house in Oradell, N.J.,
Florence Fleischman and her husband, Glenn, were ready to return to high-rise
living. In May, the couple moved back to the same Fort Lee
apartment building where they had lived as newlyweds and raised two children,
now teenagers, through toddlerhood.
“My husband and I were ready
to downsize and get closer to the city, and the kids didn’t need that yard
anymore,” said Ms. Fleischman, a lawyer. “It’s a nice community and an easy
place to live.”
That assessment might not be
the impression of Fort Lee held by many New
Yorkers, who know it as a tangle of arteries, toll plazas and traffic they pass
entering and leaving the city. It is the western terminus of the George Washington
Bridge, which feeds into
major highways such as Interstate 80, the New Jersey Turnpike and the Palisades Interstate Parkway.
But the borough of 35,345
residents on 2.5 square miles is more than that. Radiating to the north and
south of the bridge are neighborhoods, shopping strips and a small-town Main Street with
hanging flowerpots, a post office and a V.F.W. post.
Fort
Lee
has the suburban feel of a New Jersey town with the ethnic diversity of a New York City neighborhood. Some residents call it the city’s
sixth borough. Kenneth Kang, 26, said proximity to Midtown Manhattan, where he works in finance, was the main reason he
bought a one-bedroom condominium here. Another factor was the area’s cultural
diversity.
According to the 2010 census,
38.4 percent of Fort Lee’s population is
Asian. Nearly a quarter of the residents are Korean. Along Main Street, a hardware store and pharmacy
share space with a Chinese restaurant, a new Korean chicken place and an Asian
bakery. In the Linwood
Plaza strip mall, space
formerly filled by a Kings supermarket now holds a Korean Super H Mart.
Fort Lee, which is a borough
in Bergen County, expects big changes in its
downtown business area in the next couple of years. Two ambitious development
projects have been approved by the Fort Lee Planning Board for empty lots — 16
acres of dirt and weeds — just south of the bridge.
On the eastern lot, SJP Residential Properties plans to build the Modern, two 47-story towers, each with 450 rental
apartments. The project includes a restaurant, park and space for a municipal
museum and theater. Work is expected to start in October, the company said in a
statement.
Construction also is expected
to start this fall on the western half of the site, where the Tucker Development Corporation plans Hudson Lights, a complex of retail stores, apartments and a
hotel.
Some residents raised
concerns during the approval process that the developments would exacerbate
traffic and lead to overcrowding at schools, but community leaders said they
were needed to revitalize Fort Lee’s downtown.
Ila Kasofsky, a Fort Lee
councilwoman and an associate broker of Prominent Properties Sotheby’s
International Realty, said many residents leave town to shop, heading to Whole
Foods and Target in Edgewater or to malls in Paramus.
The new developments “will become the center of business and life in Fort Lee,” she said
WHAT YOU’LL FIND
The tall apartment buildings
that rise from the bluff overlooking the Hudson River are Fort
Lee’s most visible form of housing. The buildings — a mix of
co-ops and condos — have views of the city and amenities like parking and
concierge services.
Ms. Fleischman bought a
three-bedroom co-op in Mediterranean
Towers West, where years earlier, she had
met her husband at the outdoor pool. She was visiting her mother, who still
lives there, and her husband was a resident.
The transition back has gone
well. She and her husband have shorter and less expensive commutes to the city.
The children enjoy the building’s gym.
Fort Lee also has neighborhoods like Coytesville, north of the
bridge, made up of single- and multifamily houses on small lots. Also on that
side of town is Linwood
Park, a 1,170-unit co-op
complex consisting of low brick buildings on a tree-filled campus. The units
are affordable (a two-bedroom co-op can be had for around $200,000, according
to Nelson Chen of the Chen Agency) and are served by express bus service to Manhattan.
To the south of the bridge
are other neighborhoods with single-family homes. The Palisades is a leafy area
with older Capes and bungalows and larger,
newly constructed homes. Abbott
Boulevard, tree lined with a grassy median strip,
is a popular jogging route.
Closer to the river is the
Bluff, Fort Lee’s most exclusive neighborhood, with some stunning properties
built directly on the cliff overlooking the Hudson. The area has an eclectic mix of older
colonials and Tudors and newer Mediterranean-style villas. On the aptly named Arcadian Way,
passers-by can peek through gates to multimillion-dollar homes with sweeping
lawns and unobstructed views of Manhattan’s
skyline.
WHAT YOU’LL PAY
The housing market in Fort Lee is unusual for its extreme range in selection
and price. In late August, the New
Jersey Multiple Listings Service showed 496 Fort
Lee properties, including a studio just north of the bridge for
$39,900 and a three-bedroom house in the Bluff for $3.4 million. In the middle,
listings included a five-bedroom 1950s contemporary for $748,888 and a
one-bedroom condo in a high rise for $388,000.
According to Mr. Chen, the
median price of houses sold in Fort Lee
through August was $245,000, versus $283,000 in 2009 and $290,000 in 2008. Ms.
Kasofsky said that as housing prices have come down, properties were moving.
“The inventory that has been priced realistically has sold,” she said.
Ms. Kasofsky said the market
for rental properties was active as well. She recently helped a couple with
three young children find a six-bedroom home for $6,500 a month, giving them
significantly more space for their money than the apartment they had been
renting on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
But Mr. Chen noted that real
estate deals alone were not enough to bring a New Yorker over the bridge. “A
true New Yorker doesn’t move to Fort Lee,” he
said. “They’ll live in a studio apartment if that’s all they can afford to be
in the center of it all. The people who move to Fort Lee like the pace of New Jersey with the easy access to Manhattan.”
He said Fort Lee also is home
to a number of New Jersey
commuters who find it convenient because of the highways that pass through the
town.
WHAT TO DO
An outing often consists of a
meal at one of Fort Lee’s many ethnic
restaurants. But there are also ways to burn off the Korean barbecue and dim
sum dumplings. Residents have easy access to Palisades
Interstate Park for hiking along the Hudson, and the Fort Lee Historic Park has additional trails and overlooks. A point of
pride among residents is the Jack
Alter Fort Lee Community Center with its full schedule of
classes, concerts and outdoor movies in the summer. A Sunday farmers’ market is
held at the community center during the warmer months. Fort
Lee also recently got its first dog run.
THE SCHOOLS
The Borough of Fort Lee has a
single school district with four elementary schools numbered 1 through 4, the Lewis F. Cole Middle School and Fort Lee High School, which has 981 students. Its average SAT scores,
according to the New Jersey State Department of Education 2011 School Report
Card, were math 557, verbal 515 and essay 538. According to the report card,
the scores were higher than the statewide average of 517, 493 and 496.
THE COMMUTE
Fort Lee is served by several
New Jersey Transit bus lines, some ending at the Port Authority bus terminal in
Midtown and others that cross the George Washington Bridge to the Port
Authority bridge terminal at West 178th Street. There, riders can transfer to
the A subway train and city buses. According to the New Jersey Transit
schedule, morning rush-hour buses to Midtown take about 45 to 55 minutes. A
monthly bus pass from the intersection of Main Street and Anderson Avenue costs $136 and single
rides are $4.25.
Another option is the NY
Waterway ferry from Edgewater; a monthly pass is $293.75 and single rides
$10.25. The Fort Lee Parking Authority runs a shuttle bus to the ferry from the
main municipal lot during rush hours.
THE HISTORY
Fort Lee, named after Gen.
Charles Lee, was fortified in 1776 during the British campaign to control New York City and the Hudson River.
When Fort Washington,
across the Hudson, fell in November of that
year, American troops retreated across the river, scaling the Palisades cliffs
to Fort Lee, where Gen. George Washington began the army’s retreat across New Jersey. Exhibits at
the visitors’ center at Fort Lee
Historic Park
describe the Revolutionary War events.
***
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