Welcome to the Watcher’s Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the ‘sphere, and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council.Then we vote on the best two posts, with the results appearing on Friday.
Historically, this is the time, between mid May and Memorial Day, when most Americans begin to perk up their eyes and ears, do a gut check and start to focus on presidential elections.
It’s early days, but I don’t think it’s any accident that a CBS/NY Times poll, no less, shows Mitt Romney slightly ahead of President Obama and ahead among women, a sign that the Democrat’s ‘War against Women’ campaign may have fallen flat.Considering how much polls from the alphabet network and the dinosaur media routinely oversample Democrats, this is an encouraging sign. Especially since Scott Rasmussen, a far more reliable pollster shows a similar result.
Again, the margin’s narrow, it’s very early days and this could very well be a temporary reaction to President Obama’s cynical endorsement of same sex marriage. Or it could be that Governor Romney is starting to pull ahead.Certainly confidence in the Obama economy remains low, and that still appears as though it’s going to be the main issue in this election.
Keep in mind that the polls in question might very well have been rigged the other way for an important reason – to scare and energize President Obama’s base with the idea he might not be re-elected.
You can, too! Want to see your work appear on the Watcher’s Council homepage in our weekly contest listing? Didn’t get nominated by a Council member? No worries.
Simply head over to Joshuapundit and post the title a link to the piece you want considered along with an e-mail address ( which won’t be published) in the comments section no later than Monday 6PM PST in order to be considered for our honorable mention category, and return the favor by creating a post on your site linking to the Watcher’s Council contest for the week.
It’s a great way of exposing your best work to Watcher’s Council readers and Council members. while grabbing the increased traffic and notoriety. And how good is that, eh?
Welcome to the Watcher’s Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the ‘sphere, and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council.Then we vote on the best two posts, with the results appearing on Friday.
The above is a photo of Harvard professor, self-styled ‘consumer activist’ and Massachusetts Democrat Senate Candidate Elizabeth Warren in her secret minority Identity as Chief Spreading Bull.True to form, she’s dressed in the war bonnet of a Lakota rather than the tribe she *cough* claims to belong to, but then that’s part of the fun.
By now, most of you know that Princess Dances-With-Marxism has claimed to be a Native American throughout her career, taking advantage of ‘diversity’ to get affirmative action bennies at the University of Houston, Rutgers, and of course, Harvard University where she was eagerly hired as a professor..(‘Quick,let’s hire her…we don’t have one of those.’)
Oddly enough, no one ever asked Warren for proof until recently, and the best that our friend Minni-blah-blah was able to provide was an 1884 genealogical document that might prove that her great, great great grandmother was Cherokee. As the genealogist who found it said ‘This needs more research’.
If this document is accurate, that would make Elizabeth Warren all of 1/32nd Cherokee Indian. Based on that criteria, President Obama is an Arab Muslim and I’m the lost heir to the throne of Lithuania.
This week, RightTruth and The Pirate’s Cove took advantage of my generous offer of link whorage and earned honorable mention status with some killer pieces.
You can, too! Want to see your work appear on the Watcher’s Council homepage in our weekly contest listing? Didn’t get nominated by a Council member? No worries.
Simply head over to Joshuapundit and post the title a link to the piece you want considered along with an e-mail address ( which won’t be published) in the comments section no later than Monday 6PM PST in order to be considered for our honorable mention category, and return the favor by creating a post on your site linking to the Watcher’s Council contest for the week.
It’s a great way of exposing your best work to Watcher’s Council readers and Council members. while grabbing the increased traffic and notoriety. And how good is that, eh?
Welcome to the Watcher’s Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the ‘sphere, and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council.Then we vote on the best two posts, with the results appearing on Friday.
Ah, the OWS movement..back again like a rancid smell you thought you’d gotten rid of in spring cleaning. Together with pals from the SEIU and other radical groups, they used the old Communist holiday of May Day to exercise their usual tyranny over other people’s rights to travel, work, buy and sell.
There was an old saying..I believe it came from Ben Franklin – that one person’s rights ended at the next man’s nose. Sadly, a lot of people seem to have forgotten that, with the result that everyone’s miserable.
However, after thinking about it, I came up with a solution that ought to make everybody as happy as rats in a cheese factory. It’s amazing what you can accomplish by simply giving people what they want.
You can, too! Want to see your work appear on the Watcher’s Council homepage in our weekly contest listing? Didn’t get nominated by a Council member? No worries.
Simply head over to Joshuapundit and post the title a link to the piece you want considered along with an e-mail address ( which won’t be published) in the comments section no later than Monday 6PM PST in order to be considered for our honorable mention category, and return the favor by creating a post on your site linking to the Watcher’s Council contest for the week.
It’s a great way of exposing your best work to Watcher’s Council readers and Council members, while grabbing the increased traffic and notoriety. And how good is that, eh?
Welcome to the Watcher’s Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the ‘sphere, and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council.Then we vote on the best two posts, with the results appearing on Friday.
Holy Gaea! Another Earth Day has come and gone. This cartoon (merci pour le lagniappe, Gerard) makes the salient point that the entire global warming,Gaea worshiping nonsense is merely the Left’s version of the worst excesses of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages – with the antics of Pope Gore and today’s scams like carbon trading and Solyndra in place of the sale of indulgences, benefices and paid for dispensations for the well heeled making it a perfect parallel.
Talk to any of these True Believers and disagree with what amounts to their religion and many of them would happily burn you at the stake as a heretic in a nanosecond if they weren’t worried about increasing their personal carbon footprints! Besides, it’s a lot more lucrative for them to simply tax you into oblivion and use the money for their much more deserving selves and their personal pet projects.
On another subject, this week’s contest is dedicated to Levon, who just made the passage. Rest in peace, dear soul.
You can, too! Want to see your work appear on the Watcher’s Council homepage in our weekly contest listing? Didn’t get nominated by a Council member? No worries.
Simply head over to Joshuapundit and post the title a link to the piece you want considered along with an e-mail address ( which won’t be published) in the comments section no later than Monday 6PM PST in order to be considered for our honorable mention category, and return the favor by creating a post on your site linking to the Watcher’s Council contest for the week.
It’s a great way of exposing your best work to Watcher’s Council readers and Council members. while grabbing the increased traffic and notoriety. And how good is that, eh?
The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for this week’s Watcher’s Council match up.
Even taking into consideration the normal high level of quality in both the Council and Non-Council entries, this was a tough call with some exceptional pieces to choose from, and the close vote tally reflects it.
For instance, we had a tie this week in the Council category which I, as Watcher have to break.
A few Council members weighed in this week on the attack by the Obama Campaign on Ann Romney and stay at home moms, but top o’ the stack was Bookworm Room’sThe real threat that the Ann Romneys of the world represent to the statist Left. Aside from being an excellent dissertation in its own right, it earned mentions from Instapundit, Hot Air, Powerline and Legal Insurrection.
Then with a completely different type of piece we had our favorite milblogger, The Mellow Jihadi with an account of a conversation with an amazing marine, An Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Korea, and Vietnam Vet.
How would you like to have to choose between ‘em? Hmmmm? And in the middle of a computer failure? But that, after all , is what I get paid the big bux for.
I loved The Mellow Jihadi’s piece, because it reminded me of conversations I’ve had with some of our warriors that I will never forget. But I ended up coming down on the side of Bookworm’s effort, because she was able to state so clearly and brilliantly exactly why the Left truly hates stay at home moms. Here’s a slice:
For the last many years, I have been the single most important influence on my children. Yes, they go to school (public school, yet); and yes, they both have thriving social lives; and yes, I’ve been unable to insulate them from a Leftist pop culture that is hostile to traditional norms and to conservatives generally, but I’m still the most important person. Of all the influences in their lives, I am the one who is most present, most consistent, and most trusted. I’m sure they’ll pull away as they get older, and they may even rebel, but I’ll still be that little voice in their brain, imparting facts, values, and analyses.
I am the counterweight to the state. Therefore, I am dangerous. I am subversive simply by existing. My love for my children is a dominant force that works its way into their psyches and that trumps the state-run schools and the state complicit media world. Some mothers, of course, are entirely in sync with schools and media. They happily reinforce the statist message. But those of us who don’t are a powerful anti-statist force and we must be challenged.
The Left’s problem with Ann Romney transcends her husband’s wealth, her (and his) Republican identification, and her decision to work for her children, rather than for a paying employer. The Left’s problem with Ann Romney is that she represents the triumph of the individual. No wonder they hate her so much.
In our non-council Category, the winner was Michael Totten for The Lost City submitted by Joshuapundit. It’s an amazing travelogue/reminiscence of Beirut that will make you almost feel like you’re there.
I normally don’t mention second place winners in either the Council or non-Council categories in my intro, but I’m going to make an exception this time.
What do you do if you’re a young Israeli child who comes home and finds your parents and three of your siblings, including a nine-month-old baby butchered on the Sabbath by ‘Palestinian’ murderers without even the dignity given to animals? How do you cope with it and go on with your life? And if you are a religious person, how do you process it and what questions do you ask of G-d? Read Jewish Mom. Com’s Their Second Childhood: A Visit with the Fogel Orphans submitted by yours truly to find the answers. It will move you.
Ok, enough blathering. Here are this week’s full results. Only New Zeal was unable to vote this week, but was not affected by th e2/3 vote penalty:
This powerful image came from my fellow Watcher’s Council member Snoopy the Goon who writes an awesome blog called Simply Jews. The photo was forwarded to him from a friend, Dick Stanley. I am not sure of the artist, but it speaks volumes in a simple image.
And the following speech by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon goes with the picture and is far more powerful than anything I could possibly write (H/T David Gerstman). David also provides the translation of the caption on the picture:
“Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day 5772
(5772, being the Hebrew/Jewish year)”
And let us not forget what the horrors and millions of people that were never born because of the same hatred that festers in Iran and much of the Middle East today.
Pray with and stand with Israel, our only friend in the Middle East. And pray that America supports their decision that will have to be made to prevent another Holocaust.
Here at Gruenewald railway station, on these platforms, on 39.11.42, three children of the Bobkar family – Maly, Hala and Abraham – stood here by themselves.
Perhaps the two older sisters held their seven-year-old brother by the hand.
They stood here without mother or father and the train came. The transport number was #23, the destination was Auschwitz, they were among the first. The Wansee Conference had taken place not long before, on the other side of the forest.
Thus, author and historian Dr. Fania Oz-Salzburger describes, in her book Israelis, Berlin, the last journey of the Bobkar children, to their deaths. The three children joined thousands of men, women and children who were brutally uprooted from their daily lives and sent – starting in October 1941 – from Berlin to the Lodz, Warsaw and Riga ghettos and – starting in August 1942 – directly to Auschwitz.
55,000 Jews from Berlin were sent from this station to the deaths. Out of 75,000 Berlin Jews, approximately 60,000 were murdered in the death camps. Only about 6,000 Berlin Jews survived. The dates when they were sent, the destinations and the numbers of those who were sent, all of these are stamped on the platform and sear the heart.
History is ironic – and we find in it signs. Eighteen Jews were sent from here to Thereisenstadt in the final group on 27.3.45. Eighteen Jews – in Hebrew, 18 is the numerical value of the letters that make up the word “chai” or “life”. Thus, here at Gruenewald, the living and the dead intertwined.
I come here today from the Land of Israel where I was born, in which I live and for which I have fought all my life. Maly, Hala and Abraham Bobkar were from my age group when they set out from here on their last journey. The same historical process which scattered my people across the entire globe and founded the Zionist movement is what led to the fact that they, and not I, were on transport #23.
Today, 56 years after the final group was sent from platform #17 at Gruenewald, we must remember, more than ever, that the State of Israel’s right to defend itself is a major right and obligation which has been given us in order to prevent the recurrence of the events we recall as we stand here on this platform.
We must remember that the Jewish people have one small state in which we have the right and the power to defend ourselves with our own forces, and we must daily thank the Almighty for this.
It is the right of the Jewish people, after years of suffering and privation, to be the masters of our fate and to let no one control the fate of our people. We will preserve this right more than anything.
In the quiet that prevails here, which allows a short respite from the flow of troubles, I am committed, as a man, as a Jew, and as the Prime Minister of the State of Israel, to ensuring the future of the Jewish people, of each and every Jew, in the country and around the world. I do not forget, even for a moment, that every time we find ourselves obliged to realize our right to defend our security – we will do so vigorously and with courage.
Maly, Hala and Abraham Bobkar will never return from that journey, just as six million Jews – including 1.5 million children – will not. We must see to it that Jewish children will never again depart on such journeys.
Ah….April is the cruelest month, they say. But if it is, nothing’s surer except that you’ll read about all of it right here like you will nowhere else.
Welcome to the inner sanctum of the Watcher’s Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the ‘sphere, and the longest running group of its kind in existence anywhere. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the entire Council.Then we vote on the best two, with the results appearing on Friday in this very space.
This week’s contest is fondly dedicated to The Dark Lord…long may he continue to punish our enemies.
You can, too! Want to see your work appear on the Watcher’s Council homepage in our weekly contest listing? Didn’t get nominated by a Council member? No worries.
Simply head over to Joshuapundit and post the title a link to the piece you want considered along with an e-mail address ( which won’t be published) in the comments section no later than Monday 6PM PST in order to be considered for our honorable mention category. and then return the favor by creating a post on your own site linking to the Watcher’s Council contest for the week.
It’s a great way of exposing your best work to Watcher’s Council readers and Council members, while grabbing the increased traffic and notoriety. And how good is that, eh?
The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for this week’s Watcher’s Council match up.
As a number of commentators have said (including yours truly)if someone isn’t willing to look at tort reform, they’re not serious about controlling the riding costs of healthcare.
My wife is a family doctor working in a small rural practice owned by a regional hospital. While she has not yet been sued for malpractice she knows many doctors who have, and while the vast majority of these suits never reach court they still inflicted many sleepless nights and higher malpractice premiums on the innocent doctors. She recognizes that everything she does may have to be justified someday so that if she is forced to testify she can explain the rationale of her treatment. This is the essence of defensive medicine.
The American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation in partnership with Consumer Reports has announced Choose Wisely, an educational initiative recommending physicians avoid 45 unnecessary tests and procedures the group believes are performed unnecessarily. These include routine EKGs and Stress Tests as well as prescribing antibiotics for minor ailments such as mild sinusitis. Oncologists are also encouraged not to perform cancer screens on breast cancer and prostate cancer patients diagnosed with non-metastatic forms of these cancers.
But as the New York Times article states, these recommendations are controversial and there is fear among some patients and doctors that they will be applied too broadly. The newspaper quotes Dr. Eric Topol, chief academic officer of Scripps Health who says, “These all sound reasonable, but don’t forget that every person you’re looking after is unique…This kind of one-size-fits-all approach can be a real detriment to good care.”
As a resident of the great state that raised John Edwards to the heights of power on the backs of doctors he sued for malpractice, I’m skeptical over this recommendation for a number of reasons. Dr. Topol makes an excellent point. Those who aren’t health care practitioners may fail to understand that patients often do not present with clear cut symptoms. There is a finite number or reasons your car won’t start in the morning such as the battery is dead, the tank is empty or the ECM needs replacement. But the human body is infinitely more complex. What may present as back pain from too much Pilates can turn out to be bone cancer that had metastasized from the esophagus, as happened to my father-in-law. The chronic tickle in the back of the throat that drove my mother-in-law crazy for months, turned out to be an atypical and rare form of breast cancer. Both were dead within months of their initial complaints both were misdiagnosed by their primary care physicians, though it is unlikely in either case the proper diagnosis would have mattered much. But both cases of cancer could have been treated had they been detected early. Obviously doctors cannot perform these tests on everyone because it would take too much time and cost too much, but this decision should be left to the judgment of the doctor and not interfered with by the government, an insurance company or a non-elected body such as the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation.
These recommendations will no doubt be cheered by insurance companies and the government (since Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare make the government a de facto insurance company I’ll lump it together with the likes of Kaiser Permanente and Blue Cross for the rest of the article.) Insurance companies can now refuse to pay for these tests or at the least requiring doctors jump through time-consuming and money-losing hoops such as requiring pre-authorization to do them. The article claims that as much as 1/3 of the $2 trillion spent on health care in the USA is unnecessary, so imagine the savings to their bottom lines these companies will enjoy by cutting nearly $700 million from their payments. The problem with this figure is that it’s like the old saying about half of marketing dollars being wasted, but no one knows which half. Because it is impossible to accurately determine which person needs a test and which doesn’t it will be impossible to reap the savings hinted at in these recommendations.
In our non-Council category, the winner was Sultan Knish for One Hundred Broken Mirrors submitted by The Political Commentator, a fascinating look at how history repeats itself and how America looks to the countries we’re trying to ‘sell’ our brand of democracy to.
Here are this week’s full results. New Zeal Gay Patriot and Simply Jews were unable to vote this week.
The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for this week’s Watcher’s Council match up.
This weekend is a celebrates hope and freedom, with the beginning of Passover starting tonight and Easter Sunday coming afterwards. This linkage is entirely appropriate, since Jesus had come to Jerusalem for the Passover ceremonies and the famous Last Supper was a Passover seder…the ritual meal where Jews all over the world retell the story of the Exodus, celebrate their G-d-given freedom and eat the unleavened bread, matzoh, to commemorate their ancestor’s journey and deliverance from bondage and slavery.
The story of the Resurrection is a story of freedom too…freedom of the soul, and a promise of eternal life to believing Christians who understand what the rolling away of the stones means for them.
Both holidays change their dates on our calender from year to year Passover because it is based on the centuries old Hebrew calender, and Easter because the early Church fathers determined that Easter is always celebrated on the Sunday immediately following the Paschal Full Moon date of the year, which always occurs after Passover.
However, it’s rare that the two holidays occur this close together, and in this momentous year, I likewise see in that a sign of hope for the future.
I and my brothers and sisters on the Watcher’s Council wish you and yours Chag Pessach Sameach and a blessed Easter.
There’s an old quote of Neville Chamberlain, circa 1938 concerning Nazi Germany’s attempt to swallow Czechoslovakia, which he referred to as “a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing. ”
According to an ENI report, the government of Sudan has declared that all whose “parents, grandparents or great grandparents [were] born in the South Sudan or [who] belong to any southern ethnic group” are no longer citizens of Sudan and must leave the Sudan by April 8..or else.
There’s more to this than meets the eye, of course.
The Sudan has always been a borderland between Arab and black African, between slavemaster and slave. And increasingly, between Muslim and Christian. During the decades long jihad by the Sudan between the early 1980 and today against the black Africans to the east in Darfur and in the south, conservative estimates put the death toll at over 2 million.The Sudan’s President Omar Al-Bashir has already been indicted by the International Criminal Court for genocide, something the Arab League has thumbed their collective noses at, with al-Bashir is able to freely attend meetings and travel all over the region without fear of arrest. The charges he was indicted for, the mass rapes, the slavetaking, the wanton murders make what’s going on now in Syria look like a particularly sedate bridge party.
In July 2011, the jihad officially ended when the largely Christian South Sudan achieved independence, although sporadic attacks by al-Bashir’s military and aircraft still continue in places like the Nuba Mountains and along the South Sudan borders.
Due to the discord caused by the breakaway, al-Bashir is under pressure to turn the Sudan into a extremist fundamentalist, Muslim Brotherhood ruled Islamist state.
The key figure involved is a Muslim cleric by the name Hasan al-Turabi, who leads the Sudanese branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Turabi is an interesting figure, rather like our old friend the late and unlamented Imad Mugniyeh in that he has the ability to transcend the usual Sunni/Shiah divide and stay on good terms with a lot of different players and factions.
In our non-Council category, the winner was Victor Davis Hanson with a piece that may very well become a modern classic, The New Anti-Semitism submitted by Joshuapundit.
Here are this week’s full results. Only New Zeal was unable to vote this week, and only New Zeal was affected by the 2/3 vote penalty:
The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for this week’s Watcher’s Council match up!
This week was an important one in the history of our beloved Republic. The Supreme Court of the United States heard arguments for a ruling they’ll make in June or so on ObamaCare’s constitutionality. It will determine whether the tide of Big Government continues sweeping our freedoms before it or whether the turning of the tide has started.
This week’s winner, Joshuapundit’s The Supreme Court Begins Hearing Arguments On ObamaCare was an attempt at examining the key issues at stake and giving the reader a preview of how the Court might rule and why. Here’s a slice:
President Obama’s solicitor general, Donald B. Verrilli Jr. also said the case should move forward, saying, “This case presents issues of great moment, and the Anti-Injunction Act does not bar the court’s consideration of those issues.”
He also argued that the penalties in ObamaCare aren’t a tax, which is interesting because one of his main defenses for the individual mandate is that it’s legal and constitutional because – wait for it – it falls under congress’s authority to levy taxes!
Justice Scalia as usual was quick to see the innate hypocrisy: “Today you are arguing that the penalty is not a tax. Tomorrow you will be back and arguing that the penalty is a tax.”
The individual mandate,the vile heart of ObamaCare is scheduled for arguments tomorrow, and as Justice Scalia pointed out, that’s exactly the position Verrilli is going to be in.
Where might the Court ultimately go on this?
They could certainly uphold the law as written, ruling that Congress had the power to enact this law, no matter how the public feels about it. This would endorse the continued distortion of the Commerce Clause and uphold the individual mandate as part of Congress’s power to impose taxes. The court would basically be telling the American people that elections have consequences and that the remedy is to vote out the lawmakers if you want an unpopular law repealed.
Another possibility is that the SCOTUS could find the individual mandate unconstitutional and thus overturn the entire law because the statute doesn’t have a “severability clause” — standard language the Democrats somehow forgot to include that says if one part of the law is overturned, the rest of it is still in force.To me, that would be an absolutely hilarious and appropriate finish. As then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously said, “You have to read the bill to see what’s in it.”
In our non-Council category, the winner was an old Watcher’s Council favorite, Sultan Knish with It Doesn’t Matter If You’re Black or White submitted by The Noisy Room. It’s a refreshingly honest look at the race issues surfacing in the Treyvon Martin case. Definitely give it a look.
Here are this week’s full results.Only New Zeal was unable to vote this week, but was not affected by the 2/3 vote penalty:
Welcome to the Watcher’s Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the ‘sphere, and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council.Then we vote on the best two posts, with the results appearing on Friday.
You can, too! Want to see your work appear on the Watcher’s Council homepage in our weekly contest listing? Didn’t get nominated by a Council member? No worries.
Simply head over to Joshuapundit and post the title a link to the piece you want considered along with an e-mail address ( which won’t be published) in the comments section no later than Monday 6PM PST in order to be considered for our honorable mention category, and return the favor by creating a post on your site linking to the Watcher’s Council contest for the week.
It’s a great way of exposing your best work to Watcher’s Council readers and Council members. while grabbing the increased traffic and notoriety. And how good is that, eh?
Welcome to the Watcher’s Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the ‘sphere, and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council.Then we vote on the best two posts, with the results appearing on Friday.
Ah, March Madness. Am I referring to roundball, the Republican primaries, the faux ‘war on women’ or the price of gas? The state of the world in general? Something else? Take your pick.
This week’s contest is dedicated to the memory of Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his two young sons Arye and Gabriel, and Miriam Monsonego ( H”YD).
You can, too! Want to see your work appear on the Watcher’s Council homepage in our weekly contest listing? Didn’t get nominated by a Council member? No worries.
Simply head over to Joshuapundit and post the title a link to the piece you want considered along with an e-mail address ( which won’t be published) in the comments section no later than Monday 6PM PSTin order to be considered for our honorable mention category, and return the favor by creating a post on your site linking to the Watcher’s Council contest for the week.
It’s a great way of exposing your best work to Watcher’s Council readers and Council members. while grabbing the increased traffic and notoriety. And how good is that, eh?
The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for the first Watcher’s Council match up of 2012, carved eternally in the akhasic records of cyberspace.
Perception frequently comes from which end of the telescope you’re looking through, as this week’s winner, The Mellow Jihadi for Me and a Pakistani Captain Chat , a sort of virtual conversation if you will. Here’s a slice:
Pakistan. Are they our friends? Do we have the same goals in mind? Can we partner together? Can we trust them? Are they doing enough to combat their jihadi issue? An interesting write-up in Marine Times touches these questions:
The wind was howling and the snow outside their bullet-pocked bunker lay knee-deep as the men of the 20th Lancer armored regiment bedded down for the night, nearly 8,000 feet up a mountain on one of the world’s most inhospitable borders.
They cheered themselves up by singing songs. Their commander gazed at photos of his 4-year-old daughter on his computer. But as the men chatted, it became clear that they were feeling a bit underappreciated.
Why did the West accuse Pakistan of not pulling its weight in the war on terror, they asked. Hadn’t large numbers of their comrades died at the hands of Islamist militants? Why else were they in this hellish place if not to keep them at bay?
“They say we aren’t doing enough,” said their commander, Capt. Imran Tanvir. “What more can we do?”
Well Capt. Tanvir, let’s chat about Abbottabad, Osama bin Laden’s little summertime retreat. How unlikely is it that no one was aware of Osama in a town that is home to a major military academy, Pakistan’s Westpoint:
In our non-Council category, the winner was Victor Davis Hanson’sWe Give Up submitted by The Watcher. It’s a sobering look at our efforts to use various startegies to deal with the Muslims world and how they’ve failed. A worthy read.
Here are this week’s full results. New Zeal was unable to vote this week, but was not affected by the 2/3 vote penalty:
My friend and fellow Watcher’s Council member Rob has some interesting news up at his blog JoshuaPundit.
Seems that a number of advertisers who pulled their ads because of Rush’s comments about the woman planted by the Obama administration to stir up contraception anger now want to come back.
Rush said no.
Rob has the details and the letter Limbaugh sent them here.
Welcome to the Watcher’s Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the ‘sphere, and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council.Then we vote on the best two posts, with the results appearing on Friday.
Ah yes, it’s St. Patrick’s Day…back when I was a single gentleman, this used to be one of my favorite holidays, for reasons best left to the imagination.
At any rate, it’s a day to celebrate the extraordinary Irish and have a marvelous time at it…and maybe get a glimpse of a vision of your own pot o’ gold.
Here’s a little music to put you in the right spirit..
You can, too! Want to see your work appear on the Watcher’s Council homepage in our weekly contest listing? Didn’t get nominated by a Council member? No worries.
Simply head over to Joshuapundit and post the title a link to the piece you want considered along with an e-mail address ( which won’t be published) in the comments section no later than Monday 6PM PST in order to be considered for our honorable mention category, and return the favor by creating a post on your site linking to the Watcher’s Council contest for the week.
It’s a great way of exposing your best work to Watcher’s Council readers and Council members. while grabbing the increased traffic and notoriety. And how good is that, eh?
The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for the first Watcher’s Council match up of 2012, carved eternally in the akhasic records of cyberspace. And of course, our thanks to the Independent Sentinel for the above killah graphic!
Once again, we have some important biz to take care of. This Saturday is very special..the birthday of our good friend Hube from The Colossus of Rhodey!! Check out this fine spread!
And, we have music…
Hube, mi querido amigo, nuestra amistad continúa creciendo a medida que pasa el tiempo – al igual que Tequila añejo, suave pero con un gran tiro!
Happy Birthday Hube…many more.
Ah yes, to business:
There has been a virtual hurricane of speculation going on about a possible strike on Iran’s rogue nuclear weapons program by Israel, who take Iran’s threats of annihilation quite seriously. This week’s winner, Joshuapundit’s Israel And Iran – Dancing With Armageddon takes a look at the tension between Israel and the Obama Administration over an Israeli strike, why the Israelis feel like this president has been less than forthright and honest with them, what an actual strike by Israel might involve, and the possibilities for its success. Here’s a slice:
In the past few days, there have been major high level efforts by the Obama Administration and the British government to talk Israel out of pre-emptive strike on Iran’s rogue nuclear facilities.
President Obama’s National Security Adviser Tom Donilon failed in three days of talks with Israeli PM Netanyahu, Israeli Defense Minister Barak Ehud and IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz to convince them to give sanctions and negotiations more time to work.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague delivered the same message to Israel. In a BBC interview, he said Britain was focusing on pressuring Iran through diplomatic means.
“I don’t think a wise thing at this moment is for Israel to launch a military attack on Iran,” he said. “I think Israel like everyone else in the world should be giving a real chance to the approach we have adopted on very serious economic sanctions and economic pressure and the readiness to negotiate with Iran.”
The back story is very different.
The Israelis are livid over what they see as President Obama’s betrayal in starting – again- to engage with Iran in back channel diplomacy in exchange for the U.S. and the EU postponing sanctions until July, with the likelihood of further postponements in exchange for more talks. The Israelis had already agreed to hold off to give sanctions time to work, only to find out later that President Obama was using the waiver Congress gave him in the sanctions legislation to postpone any meaningful action.
This movie has played out many times before in the over 7 years or so the West has known about Iran’s nuclear program, with ‘talks’ spinning into months while the regime simply buys time. The Iranians have no intention of seriously being diverted from making nuclear weapons, because they know that’s where the regime’s ultimate security lies. They’ve taken note of how differently President Obama has reacted to Kim Il Sung North Korea and Moamar Khaddaffi in Libya.
The new proposal the Iranians are now taking their time to study allows them to continue enriching uranium to 5% in any quantity, provided they promise not to build an Iranian nuclear weapon.
This was the backdrop behind PM Netanyahu’s remarks in Cyprus on February 15, where he blasted both Iran and by extension, the Obama Administration, saying that sanctions “haven’t worked” and that a regime which attacks diplomats having nuclear weapons “is something of enormous concern for the United States and for Israel.”
According to what I’m hearing from several sources, the discussions with Donilon were fairly strained. The Israelis see this new back channel proposal to Iran from the Obama Administration as a clear violation of guarantees made to Israel regarding Iran and sanctions, especially since it allows Iran to continue nuclear enrichment as well as the hardening and dispersal of its nuclear facilities. Once the talks are underway, the Israelis understand that they can again be spun out for months, and that there would be no way of stopping Iran’s progress towards weaponization during the negotiations until it was too late for Israel to do anything about what they correctly regard as an existential threat.
In our non-Council category, the winner was Andrew McCarthy’s NRO commentary on Why Apologize to Afghanistan? submitted by The Noisy Room. It examines the effect of President Obama’s apology over the burning of Q’urans used by Taliban prisoners to send secret messages with.
Here are this week’s full results. New Zeal was unable to vote this week, but was not affected by the 2/3 vote penalty:
Third place *t* with 1 1/3 votes -Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I./The Catholic New World – What Are You Giving Up For Lent? submitted by Rhymes With Right
Welcome to the Watcher’s Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the ‘sphere, and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council.Then we vote on the best two posts, with the results appearing on Friday.
You can, too! Want to see your work appear on the Watcher’s Council homepage in our weekly contest listing? Didn’t get nominated by a Council member? No worries.
Simply head over to Joshuapundit and post the title a link to the piece you want considered along with an e-mail address ( which won’t be published) in the comments section no later than Monday 6PM PST in order to be considered for our honorable mention category, and return the favor by creating a post on your site linking to the Watcher’s Council contest for the week.
It’s a great way of exposing your best work to Watcher’s Council readers and Council members. while grabbing the increased traffic and notoriety. And how good is that, eh?
The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for the this week’s Watcher’s Council match up, entered into the cosmic archives.
BUT…before we get to that, we have some important business to take care of.
Deep in the heart of Texas ( well, North Texas anyway) lives a live wire conservative blogger and a molder of young minds, together with his Darling Democrat and his Apolitical Pooch…yes, it’s Greg at Rhymes With Right’s Birthday! So I figured we’d put on some ‘cue.
Actually, the big day occurs on Saturday, but since I’ll be offline, I thought it would be appropriate to celebrate on the Wow page today.
What’s it been now pardner..five,six years of us getting in each other’s faces and throwing ideas at each other? I wouldn’t have missed one bit of it.
One parting thought..just think, if you’d have been born four days later in a leap year, you’d have 25% less birthdays and be 25% younger!
Have an absolutely wonderful birthday,and many more to come.
Ah yes, this week’s results..
What does it mean when a great university makes a mockery of itself and its own purported raison d’être? . How does it look when a place once noted for outspoken anti-Semitism in the past experiences a back to the future moment? As this week’s winner, Joshuapundit’s Harvard Endorses Israel’s Destruction reveals, it looks like this:
According to the “Vision and Goals” of the conference, as outlined by its website:
“To date, the only Israel/Palestine solution that has received a fair rehearsal in mainstream forums has been the two-state solution. Our conference will help to expand the range of academic debate on this issue. Thus, our main goal is to educate ourselves and others about the possible contours of a one-state solution and the challenges that stand in the way of its realization.”
When you who’s speaking and who’s not,what the conference is about becomes painfully obvious.
The Harvard student groups involved include student groups including, Students for Justice in Palestine, the Palestine Caucus, the Arab Caucus, the Progressive Caucus, the Association for Justice in the Middle East, and members of the radical Jewish Voice for Peace. Speakers will include Ali Abunimah, the Executive Director of the Electronic Intifada; Dalit Baum, of the BDS organization Coalition of Women for Peace; Ilan Pappe, a radical left Israeli academic who makes a nice living lecturing in Europe about how evil the country he was born in is and whose main claims to fame were fabricating the story of a ‘massacre’ at a place called Tantura that was proven in court never to have occurred and popularizing a phony quotation to make it seem like Israel leader David Ben -Gurion endorsed the expulsion of Israel’s Arabs ; Marc Ellis, Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Baylor University, who makes a fetish out of equating Zionism with old fashioned colonialism and Israel’s treatment of the ‘Palestinians’ to the Nazi treatment of Jews and is now desperately trying to avoid being fired; and Hamas apologist Diana Buttu.
And of course,as a main attraction, there’s the Kennedy School’s own Stephen Walt, co-author of the factually challenged anti-semitic trophe The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. When he’s not busily engaged in poisoning the minds of America’s future foreign policy establishment, Professor Walt writes putrid little pieces for Foreign Policy shilling for Mein Kampf, which echoes his own book in repeating the dark fairy tales of a Jewish Fifth Column and fantasizing about a second Holocaust. He’ll go over huge, I’m sure.
All of these individuals and groups have something in common. They all see Israel as an “apartheid state,” guilty of the “ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population.” And they all want a final solution in which Israel disappears by any means necessary as quickly as possible. And yes, the last sentence is exactly what I meant, because to these people a ‘one state solution’ means the murder and ethnic cleansing of Israel’s Jews, nothing less.
Nor is this going to be just a bunch of speakers. This is being billed as an ‘activist’ conference, as opposed to one with an academic or research framework. It’s rife with a number of how-to workshops on deligitimizing Israel. And needless to say, not a single pro-Israel voice is going to be heard.
I want to emphasize once again that Harvard University and the Harvard Kennedy School in no way endorses or supports the apparent position of these student organizers or any participants they include. We hope that the final shape of the conference will be significantly more balanced.
No, they’re not endorsing it or supporting it – all they’re doing is allowing it to use university property, letting the organizers use the Kennedy School logo and helping fund it!
In our non-Council category, the winner was the one and only Mark Steyn for Contraception Misdirection submitted by Joshuapundit, a masterful look at a few issues involved in the contraception controversy that seems to have escaped a lot of people. Do read it.
Here are this week’s full results. New Zeal was unable to vote this week, but was not affected by the 2/3 vote penalty:
Welcome to the Watcher’s Council, a blogging group consisting of some of the most incisive blogs in the ‘sphere, and the longest running group of its kind in existence. Every week, the members nominate two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council.Then we vote on the best two posts, with the results appearing on Friday.
It has always saddened me that two of our greatest presidents,one who risked everything to create our beloved Republic and another who gave his all to save it should have to ‘share’ a day to honor them while others who arguably contributed far less have a day all to themselves to honor them because it’s politically expedient. That’s particularly true in my home state, where someone who was essentially a mere labor racketeer is so honored.
And let’s not even mention another president born this month who in living memory saved this nation from decay and defeat by sheer force of his principles, character and personality.
This goes beyond the question of a mere day off.As I’ve often written,usually vis a vis the people who identify themselves as ‘Palestinians’, you can tell a great deal about a people by whom and what they honor and hold up as heroic.
You can, too! Want to see your work appear on the Watcher’s Council homepage in our weekly contest listing? Didn’t get nominated by a Council member? No worries.
Simply head over to Joshuapundit and post the title a link to the piece you want considered along with an e-mail address ( which won’t be published) in the comments section no later than Monday 6PM PST in order to be considered for our honorable mention category, and return the favor by creating a post on your site linking to the Watcher’s Council contest for the week.
It’s a great way of exposing your best work to Watcher’s Council readers and Council members. while grabbing the increased traffic and notoriety. And how good is that, eh?
