Something tells me Jews aren’t interested in shortening their life span to less than 24 hours.

(The Cable) - The right of Jews to return to the Arab and predominantly Muslim countries they fled from or were kicked out of over several decades could be “on the table” as part of the Middle East peace negotiations, according to a senior White House official.

Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security advisor for communications and President Barack Obama’s chief speechwriter on foreign policy, talked about what’s known as the “Jewish right of return” during an off-the-record conference call with Jewish community leaders on May 20, only one day after Obama’s major speech on the Middle East. A recording of the call was provided toThe Cable.

In response to a question asking why there is a great deal of focus on the Palestinian refugee issue but almost no focus on the Jews who departed Arab lands, Rhodes declared that the Israelis and Palestinians should negotiate on the Jewish right of return to Arab and Muslim countries and that the United States could play in role in mediating that issue.

Here’s the full exchange:

“While Palestinian refugees have concerns that are understandable and need to be dealt with in the peace process, there was no reference in the president’s speech to the approximately one million Jewish refugees that emerged from the same Middle East conflict. I’m talking about Jews from Arab and Muslim countries who were forced out of their homelands where they had lived for centuries,” said B’nai B’rith International Director of Legislative Affairs Eric Fusfield.

“The international community has never acknowledged their rights and their grievances,” Fusfield continued, “[C]an the U.S., as the peace process move forward, play a role in advancing the rights and concerns of these Jewish refugee groups and help ensure that as refugee issues are dealt with… that the focus will not just be on one refugee group but on all refugee groups emerging from the same conflict?”

Rhodes responded: “Certainly the U.S., in our role, is attuned to all the concerns on both sides to include interests among Israel and others in Jewish refugees, so it is something that would come up in the context of negotiations. And certainly, we believe that ultimately the parties themselves should negotiate this. We can introduce ideas, we can introduce parameters for potential negotiation.”

Because teaching girls to read and write is “un-Islamic.”

(Guardian) — Taliban gunmen have killed the headteacher of a girls’ school near the Afghan capital after he ignored warnings to stop teaching girls, government officials have said.

Khan Mohammad, the head of the Porak girls’ school in Logar province, was shot dead near his home on Tuesday, said Deen Mohammad Darwish, a spokesman for the Logar governor.

“He was killed because he wanted to run the school,” Darwish said.

Mateen Jafar, the education director in Logar, about an hour’s drive from the capital, Kabul, said Mohammad had received several death threats from the Taliban warning him not to teach girls.

Jafar said Mohammad’s son was wounded in the attack.

Education for women was banned by the Taliban government from 1996 to2001 as un-Islamic. There are periodic attacks against schoolgirls, their teachers and school buildings.

And Saudi men are allowed to beat women because the Koran (which is the sole source of law) permits it.

(AFP) — A campaign has been launched on Facebook calling for men to beat Saudi women who drive their cars in a planned protest next month against the ultra-conservative kingdom’s ban on women taking the wheel.

The call comes as activists are demanding the release of Manal al-Sharif, a Saudi woman who was jailed for defying the ban.

The page, titled “The Iqal Campaign: June 17 for preventing women from driving,” refers to the Arabic name for the cord used to hold on the traditional headdress worn by many men in the Gulf, advocating the cord be used to hit women who dare to drive.

It has drawn over 6,000 “likes” on the popular social networking website.

Some on the page proposed distributing boxes of Iqals to youths and encouraging them use them to hit women who participate in the June 17 protest.

One joked about the price of Iqals going up due to men buying them before the protest.

Your tax dollars hard at work, funding leftist drivel masquerading as research.

DURHAM, N.C. (USA Today) — For decades, mainline Protestants have been beset by bad news: declining numbers, aging membership, waning cultural influence.A new study from Duke University Medical Center, however, gives these Protestants one reason for cheer: they seem to have larger brains than born-again Christians, Roman Catholics and the religiously unaffiliated.

The study, which examined the hippocampus region of the brain, found that Protestants who did not have a “born again” experience had significantly more gray matter than either those who reported a life-changing religious experience, Catholics, or unaffiliated older adults.

The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Templeton Foundation, included at least twoMRI measurements of the hippocampus region of 268 adults between 1994 and 2005.

It found an association between participants’ professed religious affiliation and the physical structure of their brain. Specifically, those identified as Protestant who did not have a religious conversion or born-again experience — more common among their evangelical brethren — had a bigger hippocampus.

…The hippocampus is an area buried deep in the brain that helps regulate emotion and memory. Atrophy or shrinkage in this region of the brain has long been linked to mental health problems such as depression, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

So why would born-again Protestants, Catholics and those with no religious affiliation have a smaller hippocampus?

Researchers speculate it may have something to do with the stress of belonging to a minority group. Chronic stress floods the brain with hormones that, over time, may damage the hippocampus.

Sociologists of religion, meanwhile, aren’t buying it. They say the researchers’ theory flies in the face of U.S. religious demographics. While it’s true that evangelicals are a minority, they’re a sizable one — 40% of the U.S. population, according to Gallup Polls — and not exactly a stressed-out minority, especially in the South.

“There are probably more born-again Protestants than non-born-again Protestants, and just about as many Catholics as either born-again or non-born- again Protestants,” said David Roozen, sociologist of religion at Hartford Seminary.

I can’t think of a better way to prove to Israelis that America loves you then Dems and Republicans uniting in opposition to Barack Obama.

(The Hill) — Senate Democrats are expected to support a resolution intended as a rebuff to President Obama’s call for basing Middle East peace talks on the 1967 Israeli-Palestinian borders.

It would be a rare rebuke of the president by the upper chamber and a sign that Democrats are worried about the impact of last week’s speech on the U.S.-Israel relationship and pro-Israel constituents.

Democrats in both chambers are scrambling to fix the damage caused when Obama called for the 1967 borders and land swaps as a basis for peace.

Some Democrats have tried to downplay the rift, but Israel’s strongest supporters in Congress say there’s no denying that Obama made a tactical mistake in handling the relationship.

“I wish that the president had not made the speech on Thursday, particularly not made it — I gather — without much consultation” with Israel, said Sen. Joe Lieberman (Conn.), an Independent who caucuses with Democrats. “So I think it was a tactical mistake.”

Lieberman said he was reassured by the president’s follow-up speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on Sunday but thinks additional steps need to be taken.

He is working with Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) on a resolution that would show broad consensus within Congress that the 1967 Israeli-Palestinian borders are not only “indefensible,” as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated, but also contrary to U.S. national security interests.

Because what could be better for business if you’re a car company than killing off your only product?

MICHAEL MOORE: The auto thing is a good example too of where I wish Obama would just, if he would just ratchet it up another notch. Yes, he saved the jobs of all my friends back in Michigan.  But now that we sort of control the car companies, let’s get them doing mass transit. Let’s get them doing things that are going to save this planet.  Because the internal combustion engine is not going to get us to the 22nd century. That’s just not going–we’re not going to have a planet. That has to stop. And I just thought: gee, we have this power. You know, you can do things.

Via Newsbusters

I can think of someone else who deserves to die.

(Daily Tech) — New details about the Wikileaks story raise serious questions about site’s journalistic legitimacy

In a special by the Public Broadcasting Service, entitled WikiSecrets, people close to the drama will open up about what happened in the months leading up to the arrest of Bradley Manning and in the months after.  The special offers a rich picture, with diverse commentary.  Among the recap of previous coverage there’s some new developments — serious questions about Wikileaks‘ behavior which the site’s staunchest supporters will doubtless dismiss the claims as conspiracy.

…Mr. Assange has publicly stated that the site was very careful in redacting details that might endanger lives and that it only published when it was sure no one would be endangered.  He dubbed this a ”harm-minimization process”

But PBS cites “insiders within the organization” as accusing Mr. Assange of only considering redactions as an afterthought and performing them in haste before publication.

The special contains an interview with Mr. Assange’s former right-hand man and Wikileaks spokesperson, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who has called out his former ally claiming he behaved negligently.  Mr. Domscheit-Berg claims that Mr. Assange only agreed to redact parts of the 90k logs with four hours left before publication.  The results were sloppy redactions, that may have exposed and harmed U.S. allies.  Mr. Domscheit-Berg recalls being shocked and “horrified” by the media reporting that Wikileaks possibly endangered lives.

David Leigh of England’s Guardian newspaper has leveled a shocking accusation against Mr. Assange in the special.

He recalls a meeting he was invited to about the publication of the war memos.  He remembers pleading with Assange to redact the names of tribal elders and U.S. informants who were exposed cooperating with the U.S. and could be the subject of deadly retribution.  He comments, “Julian was very reluctant to delete those names, to redact them. And we said: ‘Julian, we’ve got to do something about these redactions. We really have got to.’”

“And he said: ‘These people were collaborators, informants. They deserve to die.’ And a silence fell around the table.”

Keep reading…

HT: Watcher

No surprise, the UK is easily the most anti-Israel country in Europe.

Via ABC News’ Jake Tapper

Good grief.

(Daily Mail) – Soap giant Dove has landed itself in hot water after an advert for one of its products appeared to suggest it can change a user’s skin colour.

The promotion, for Dove VisibleCare Creme Body Wash – a £2.69 product that is available in Boots – features a ‘before’ and ‘after’ skin chart behind a black woman, possibly a Latina and a blonde – all wrapped in towels – standing beside each other.

The caption reads: ‘Visibly more beautiful skin from the most unexpected of places – your shower.’

But critics are in a lather over the ad, accusing Dove of implied – and albeit unintentional – racism.

Under the headline ‘Dove body wash turns black women into Latino women, into white women’, one blogger wrote: ‘At least, that’s what one could possibly infer by the left-to-right before and after progression in this ad for Dove VisibleCare.

Keep reading…

Arab Spring!

(AINA) — Amid the upheavals in Egypt since January, reports have begun to emerge of a surge in disappearances of Coptic girls.

One priest in Cairo estimates that at least 21 young girls, many as young as 14, have disappeared from his parish alone.

In most cases, when a Christian girl who disappears is found by her family, she has been converted to Islam and married. The Coptic authorities, have even set up a series of refuges in monasteries to handle the growing numbers of girls who wish to return to their families, many of whom are not accepted by their family of origin.

But a worse problem for these women is that their conversion to Islam is irreversible.

Religion is stated on Egyptian ID documents and even though secular law provides for reversions, under the growth of sharia they are very difficult, except for those affording legal advocacy.

Keep reading…

Because he said so, that’s why.

(RCP) – MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell talks about basic, in his terms, socialism in the U.S. “Socialism doesn’t mean that we’re against making a profit; it just means that government takes over certain things like hospitals, the prisons and the military and schools that shouldn’t be run for profit,” Lawrence O’Donnell explained.

Lawrence O’Donnell explains why he believes “socialism hater” Bill O’Reilly is actually a socialist too.

Screw checks and balances, she has a nondescript meeting to attend.

(WSJ) — White House adviser Elizabeth Warren, in a heated House hearing Tuesday, touted the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as a vital new financial-markets cop while Republican lawmakers slammed the agency as a powerful financial regulator with too few checks and balances.

The Harvard professor also rejected one House Republican’s accusation that she gave misleading testimony to Congress in March and was lying about her schedule.

Mr. McHenry and Ms. Warren also got into a spat over how long the hearing should run. Ms. Warren said the committee had agreed to end the 1:15 p.m. hearing at 2:15 p.m. so she could make it to a meeting.

The lawmaker accused her of making up the agreement.

“You might want to have a conversation with your staff,” Ms. Warren replied.

HT: Ed M.

As it should be.

WASHINGTON – A top goal of the nation’s most influential national Tea Party group is to stop Mitt Romney from winning the Republican nomination for president.

Interviews with top officials at FreedomWorks, a Washington-based organizing hub for Tea Party activists around the country, revealed that much of their thinking about the 2012 election revolves around derailing the former Massachusetts governor.

“Romney has a record and we don’t really like it that much,” said Adam Brandon, the group’s communications director.

FreedomWorks is led by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) and Matt Kibbe, an economist and former Capitol Hill aide. More than 30 employees, as well as a fresh class of several interns, work out of spacious seventh floor offices near the U.S. Capitol. The group knows they cannot impose their will on the fiercely independent conservative organizers fueling the Tea Party. But they say the activist base is just as anti-Romney as they are.

Kibbe said in an interview that FreedomWorks has no plans at the moment to endorse an opponent of Romney’s in the primary. But others in the organization made clear they will devote considerable resources toward helping whoever emerges as the most viable Republican in the primary other than the putative front runner.

Brendan Steinhauser, who travels around the country meeting with activists as FreedomWorks’ top liaison to the grassroots, said most people he talks to are “definitely trying to stop Romney.”

“I don’t think I’ve met any groups or any local activists that like him or want him to be president,” Steinhauser said. “They just don’t believe he’s authentic. That’s the biggest problem in addition to the health care thing.”

Keep reading…

Shadiest. President. Ever.

(Washington Examiner) - Question: What do the following have in common? Eckert Cold Storage Co., Kerly Homes of Yuma, Classic Party Rentals, West Coast Turf Inc., Ellenbecker Investment Group Inc., Only in San Francisco, Hotel Nikko, International Pacific Halibut Commission, City of Puyallup, Local 485 Health and Welfare Fund, Chicago Plastering Institute Health & Welfare Fund, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee, Teamsters Local 522 Fund Welfare Fund Roofers Division, StayWell Saipan Basic Plan, CIGNA, Caribbean Workers’ Voluntary Employees’ Beneficiary Health and Welfare Plan.

Answer: They are all among the 1,372 businesses, state and local governments, labor unions and insurers, covering 3,095,593 individuals or families, that have been granted a waiver from Obamacare by Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius.

All of which raises another question: If Obamacare is so great, why do so many people want to get out from under it?

More specifically, why are more than half of those 3,095,593 in plans run by labor unions, which were among Obamacare’s biggest political supporters? Union members are only 12 percent of all employees but have gotten 50.3 percent of Obamacare waivers

Keep reading…

Don’t fret Joplin, Obama will get there sometime next week.

Note: David Cameron really, really, really sucks at ping pong.

Via Breitbart

I wonder how he’ll feel when he finds out Bibi got a whopping 29 standing ovations from Congress?

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s parameters for a peace deal, outlined in a speech to the U.S. Congress on Tuesday, fell far short of what is needed to resume negotiations, Palestinian officials said.

Nabil Shaath, an aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said Netanyahu’s insistence on keeping key parts of the territories the Palestinians want for their state is a “declaration of war against the Palestinians.”

That’s one hell of a disconnect.

(Washington Times) — Call it history’s conservative curse.

According to a University of Miami study, those historical rankings of American presidents that pop up every year or so are significantly weighted in favor of Democrats, thanks to the liberal leanings of academia.

Political science professor Joseph E. Uscinski, one of the study’s authors, said the new analysis shows that the overwhelmingly liberal academic community consistently ranks Republican presidents about 10 spots lower than the public would.

“I don’t think anyone is surprised,” Mr. Uscinski told The Washington Times. “Among the political scientists and historians that I work with, Democrats outnumber Republicans 8 to 1.”

What was eye-opening, he said, was the stark difference between the historians’ assessments of Republicans and the grades given by the public.

“On average, all the Republicans get the short end of the stick,” he said. “But the one it impacts the most is [Ronald] Reagan. It’s often difficult for people to fathom why he’s ranked as low as he is.”

Keep reading…