You may or may not have noticed that I haven't been posting a lot recently. I've been finishing up a book that I'm publishing independently through Wheatmark, Inc.
The subject of the book: me!! Or, more accurately, my Pakistani-American journey, and what it tells me about how differing cultures and' [...]
Oh well. Barack Obama may still end up being a great president, but he's struggling a bit. Earl is right that Afghanistan is the war he always wanted, and there should be no surprise there.
But the disappointment, for me, comes from two sources.
One involves how Obama is positively Bushy [...]
I teach a couple of courses at the university on the media. My students want to learn about the news and what makes something newsworthy. So when they came into the classroom and saw that the lead item of my agenda was the Tiger Woods saga, [...]
Barack Obama is the left wing's version of Ronald Regan. He is going to be this generation's Teflon President. His ratings may be down, but he will probably ride it out and drive off into a sunset in glory. Even so, there are many things he has not followed [...]
Earl, kiddo, you have to remember that Tiger Woods is only part black. The other parts are Asian, white and Native American, so maybe the media is aiming at those parts instead. Besides, everyone knows that if it's salacious then the media will go out after it. Let's take a [...]
The war in Afghanistan is no longer the Bush legacy; it is now Obama's. Ironically, he made it his own by delivering a speech that, save for one paragraph about having too long ignored and under-resourced Afghanistan, could have been delivered by George W.
With neither a fireside chat's intimacy' [...]
Only the most hopelessly naïve, star struck or a true believer could have ever thought that President Obama would not dump massive numbers of fresh troops into Afghanistan the first chance he got. He said or strongly inferred that escalation of the Afghan war was in his cards on two [...]
The movie theater was showing previews for two movies about the Apocalypse and a post-apocalyptic world.
I was being assaulted by the cacophony and chaos of exploding cars, disintegrating planets, and screaming people, while ducking the crashing and exploding computer-generated rubble flying towards me. I [...]
Beat em' when they're down and beat em' again for good measure before they can get up. The beat down supposedly is not the American way of dealing with those who are down. The ground rules radically changed the moment Tiger Woods did life threatening damage to a' [...]
The great hope was that President Obama would have the courage and political sense to do what JFK did forty six years ago. Kennedy told the generals no to their demand for escalation in Vietnam. It wasn't easy. The Pentagon had drawn up plans for the massive military ramp up,' [...]
Imagine the all too imaginable and there had been an attempt on President Obama's life. Since threats to Obama are 400% higher than against any other president, you'd think security would be pretty tough. You'd be wrong. Party crashers got in, got past the Secret Service, the [...]
I would be happy to leave God out of this. I would be happy even to leave out arguments about who got there first and has maintained a presence. We, in fact, do not go over these issues with other states. We're not giving America back to Native Americans. The' [...]
Jonathan and Gail-Tzipporah are concerned that a critical mass of Palestinians isn't serious about peace with Israel. They may be right. I spoke to a Palestinian college student in New Jersey recently who said a two-state solution would be wrong, because only a return to her family's pre-1948 home would' [...]
The problem in making peace in the Middle East is neither geographical nor intellectual. Were there a will for peace, both sides know how to carve up the borders and exchange land in Israel for West Bank towns. They know how to tie Gaza and the West Bank together with [...]
There are those who get upset just from looking in another person's direction. The mere mention of the other guy's name, the sight of his hair is enough to send them into a tailspin and launch them into convulsions.
And so it goes with the Palestinians and the Israelis. [...]
The universal wisdom is that there is absolutely no chance that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed can get anything but a swift conviction and the death penalty. The wisdom also says that it matters not whether the trial is in New York, another American city, or on the moon. No jury anywhere [...]
The release of the U.S Preventive Services Task Force's recommendation to curtail routine annual mammogram screenings for breast cancer is terrible news for nearly everyone--except the insurance companies. Eliminating annual screening for women in their 40s and making screening every other year for women in their 50s is ill-conceived and' [...]
I know that I'm considered a reliable supporter of President Obama, having been in his camp since before Iowa. However, I think he and Atty. General Holder are wrong to bring Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and his band of plotters and murderers here for trial in' [...]
Some have speculated that an upside of terrorist trials in New York is that the accused will lose their aura of super-villainy amidst the drudgery of the American judicial system. That is good both for Americans and for those who the terrorists seek to recruit. Their "cosmic war" would seem [...]
When the electoral public elected the Obama Administration under the moniker of change, they did not mean the chance to let them lose on the public to do whatever they want. And this applies to their decision to hold the 9/11 terrorist trials in New York City.
First off, [...]
In September, 2008, Oprah Winfrey was the reigning queen of daytime TV chatter. She flatly said no to any talk about then Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin gracing her set. Oprah made no effort to square having then presidential candidate Obama on her show twice with her cold shoulder [...]
It looks like the politically correct brigade is out, and this time their ship has docked at Brookstone, a gift shop at Boston's Logan Airport.
Peter Vadala, a deputy manager at the store, was their latest casualty. The 24 year-old was tending to his duties when in walked a' [...]
If the shooting at Fort Hood teaches one thing, it is this: The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
Hassan gave signals early on that he was a few cards short of a deck, meaning that it was merely a matter of time before he did something crazy. In this [...]
My two-year-old nephew Nicholas is as sharp as they come.
He sees a Starbucks logo and immediately says, "Robbie's coffee," recognizing his uncle's favorite brew. He sees a Mercedes logo and says, "Gramma's car."
He saw the Ft. Hood shooter on TV and immediately said to [...]
What does this terror and tragedy mean, and what does it not mean?
(Note: This is a second look at this delicate but important topic)
The shooting rampage at Fort Hood was an act of terror, but we should not feel terrorized or lash out against Muslims. We should also not [...]
President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, key House and Senate Democratic and Republicans, and most importantly the major pharmaceuticals and private insurers know one thing, and they've known it from the start of the health care debate. And that's that the senate not the' [...]
I was in the Midwest yesterday, speaking to a college group about tensions between Muslims and the West, and I argued that Muslims in the U.S. tend to assimilate much more fully than in Europe. A short while later I heard about Nidal Malik Hasan at Ft. Hood. I felt [...]
Last week the website of the terrorist group," Al Qaeda in Arabia", published an article imploring the faithful to "attack any crusaders wherever you find one of them, like at the airports of the crusader Western countries that participate in the wars against Islam, or in their living compounds, trains" [...]
Make no mistake Tuesday's GOP surge was about President Obama. The dumbest thing that progressives, liberal Democrats and much of the media did following Obama's election a year ago was to gloat and smugly declare the GOP dead. The silly line repeated incessantly was that the GOP has been reduced [...]
Democrats lost the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey. Certainly not good news for either Democrats or the White House. It is, however, not terrible or catastrophic news. Two highly flawed Democrats lost. Deeds, of Virginia, ran a bad and stridently negative campaign, and Corzine had raised taxes and spent [...]
The latest snafu started when Dr. Hena Zaki, a Muslim doctor went for a job interview and was told she couldn't wear her headscarf to work at the clinic. Then, being nice, the personnel workers realized it was part of her religion and apologized for it.
And this is why' [...]
There will be no criminal charges against the police who waded into a crowd of mostly innocent demonstrators, reporters and news crews. We the People, however, have been charged $13 million. Egged on by some cowardly troublemakers who threw bottles, the police advanced with abandon, swinging [...]
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n his spicy, tantalizing, tell-all inside the belly of the Obama campaign book, Obama campaign manager, David Plouffe says that Obama toyed with picking Hillary Clinton as his VP running mate and then junked it because hubby Bill posed too many complications. In less polite terms the thinking among [...]
What's in a name? More than meets the bank account, according to businessman Larry Whitten. The hotelier, who recently bought a hotel in Taos, New Mexico is requesting that his Hispanic employees speak English in front of him and in some cases Anglicize their names. This would mean that Jose' [...]
In June 2007 presidential candidate Barack Obama told a New York crowd that much of the big money influence peddling in Washington is illegal and that he'd crack down on it once in office. Five months later in an Iowa speech he was even blunter. He warned corporate lobbyists' [...]
The problem with the criminals is that we have been playing patty cake with them for too long, being too friendly and making too nicety-nice. Take the case of the fifteen year-old Richmond, California girl who was gang-raped and beaten on a bench outside a school dance. All but one [...]
A young high school girl is raped in Richmond California following a dance. This is truly terrible. She was not, however, simply raped; she was gang raped. This is yet worse by an unimaginable factor. But this isn't the end of the tragedy, only a beginning. There were witnesses. No,' [...]
The talking heads are debating if the Obama White House's attack on Fox News Cable is good politics or bad. They are arguing this, as the their wont, as a horse race and contest. But there is a far more serious Constitutional issue here.
Right now the Supreme [...]
I've disagreed with Earl in the past when he said that the White House's war on Rush Limbaugh is counterproductive. But I do believe the White House's war on Fox is counterproductive.
Fox has a conservative but still more mainstream audience than Limbaugh. The administration is beginning to look' [...]
President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and a parade of House and Senate Democrats should get academy awards for their play act on the public heath care option. It's as dead as a doornail. Yet, the principal players still tease the public with their talk about it. The public option [...]
It looks like al Qaida has been working for the Supreme Court. Maybe they're answering phones, riding the dumbwaiters or adding things to the water cooler. Otherwise, why else would the highest court in the land uphold the "one free swerve" law that strips police of the right to' [...]
Over at Come on Feel the Nuys (despite the success of Part of Sherman Oaks to annex my Part of Van Nuys, the blog name remains, and I can't seem to' [...]
If we're intent on and comfortable with the current charade of storefront medical marijuana dispensaries doing the wink-wink/nod-nod as they supply pot to anybody savvy enough to get a dubious prescription from an equally dubious MD (and arrive bearing cash), then by all means we should proceed' [...]
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Even we conservatives have moments when the lines begin to cross, and we think we are going to move over to the other side. And so it is with the pot shop debate.
Even though I think that Mary Jane should be legalized about as much as [...]
I remember the good old days when marijuana was a semi-secret sin. It was a drug, sure, but it was also an act of rebellion against parents, the government and "the man." It was naughty, but in the California culture of the 60s, it wasn't evil. It' [...]
The same day a fourth grade student asked President Obama why do people hate him a Gallup survey found that far more people like Hillary Clinton than Obama. The question and the poll implicitly asked and answered the youngster's troubling question. Obama is plainly not liked by a lot [...]
Maybe I missed something, but where is this recovery that all, or nearly all, the economists claim has started? Home foreclosures are still at record highs. One out of ten able bodied workers are out of a job, and if the government didn't futz the figures by pretending that' [...]
After careful study, it appears that either a group of crazed aliens have descended upon our planet or that "The Lord of the Flies" has been raising our children again. At one time, it would have been the stuff of which B-movies are made, but it is now our [...]
I agree with Jonathan that not enough has changed in how we "do business," as it were.
I believe that Obama and Bernanke and others have helped us avoid the economic collapse that the best experts feared early this year. No one really knew where the worst downward spiral in [...]
Gail-Tzipporah Saunders, Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Jonathan Dobrer, Rob Asghar
