At the same time people of diverse faiths are coming together on the issue of the contraceptive mandate, it seems there’s a divisive battle raging between Jewish organizations and the Presbyterian Church (USA). The problems between the two faith groups center upon charges from the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA), among other groups, that allege that the Presbyterians, through their Israel-Palestine Mission Network (a missions arm), have made anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish statements.
An allegedly anti-Israel screen shot of an image that was purportedly posted on the IPMN-PCUSA Facebook page (Image Credit: CAMERA)
Another alleged screen shot from the IPMN-PCUSA Facebook page (Image Credit: CAMERA)
Another alleged screen shot from the IPMN-PCUSA Facebook page (Image Credit: CAMERA)
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Jewish Groups Accuse Presbyterian Church of Facilitating Anti-Israeli & Anti-Semitic Sentiment
‘To Stop the Multiplication of the Unfit’ by Michelle Malkin Creators Syndicate Copyright 2012 If you aren’t creeped out by the No Birth Control Left Behind rhetoric of the White House and Planned Parenthood, you aren’t listening closely enough. The anesthetic of progressive benevolence always dulls the senses. Wake up. When a bunch of wealthy white women and elite Washington bureaucrats defend the trampling of religious liberties in the name of “increased access” to “reproductive services” for “poor” women, the ghost of Margaret Sanger is cackling. As she wrote in her autobiography, Sanger founded Planned Parenthood in 1916 “to stop the multiplication of the unfit.” This, she boasted, would be “the most important and greatest step towards race betterment.” While she oversaw the mass murder of black babies, Sanger cynically recruited minority activists to front her death racket. She conspired with eugenics financier and businessman Clarence Gamble to “ hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities ” to sell their genocidal policies as community health and welfare services. Outright murder wouldn’t sell. But wrapping it under the egalitarian cloak of “women’s health” — and adorning it with the moral authority of black churches — would. Sanger and Gamble called their deadly campaign “The Negro Project.” In other writings, historian Mike Perry found, Sanger attacked programs that provided “medical and nursing facilities to slum mothers” because they “facilitate the function of maternity” when “the absolute necessity is to discourage it.” In an essay included in her writing collection held by the Library of Congress, Sanger urged her abortion clinic colleagues to “breed a race of thoroughbreds.” Nationwide “birth control bureaus” would propagate the proper “science of breeding” to stop impoverished, non-white women from “breeding like weeds.” Speaking with CBS veteran journalist Mike Wallace in 1957, long after her racist views had supposedly mellowed, Sanger again revealed her true colors : “I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world — that have disease from their parents, that have no chance in the world to be a human being practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they’re born. That to me is the greatest sin — that people can — can commit.” Sanger also elaborated on her anti-Catholic animus, telling one of Wallace’s reporters that New York Catholics had no right to protest the use of their tax dollars for birth city birth-control programs: “ (I)t’s not only wrong, it should be made illegal for any religious group to prohibit dissemination of birth control — even among its own members.” When Wallace pressed her (“In other words, you would like to see the government legislate religious beliefs in a certain sense?”), Sanger laughed nervously and disavowed the remarks. Fast forward: Five decades and 16 million aborted black babies later, Planned Parenthood’s insidious agenda has migrated from inner-city “birth control bureaus” to public school-based health clinics to the White House — forcibly funded with taxpayer dollars just as Sanger championed. Several undercover stings by Live Action, pro-life documentarians, have exposed Planned Parenthood staff accepting donations over the years from callers posing as eugenics cheerleaders who wanted to earmark their contributions for the cause of aborting minority babies. “We can definitely designate it for an African-American,” a Tulsa, Okla., Planned Parenthood employee eagerly promised. What has cheap, easy and unmonitored “choice” for poor women in inner cities wrought? Nightmares like the Philadelphia Horror , where serial baby-killer Dr. Kermit Gosnell and his abortion clinic death squad oversaw the systematic execution of hundreds of healthy, living, breathing, squirming, viable black and Hispanic babies over 4 decades — along with several minority mothers who may have lost their lives in his grimy birth control bureau. City and state authorities looked the other way while jars of baby parts and reports of botched abortions and infanticides piled up. Beltway Democrats who now bray about their concern for “women’s health” were silent about the Gosnell massacre and countless others like it in America’s ghettos. Why? The Obama administration is crawling with the modern-day heirs of the eugenics movement, from Planned Parenthood golden girl Kathleen Sebelius at the Department of Health and Human Services to the president’s prestigious science czar John Holdren — an outspoken proponent of forced abortions and mass sterilizations and a self-proclaimed protege of eugenics guru Harrison Brown, whom he credits with inspiring him to become a scientist. Brown envisioned a government regime in which the “number of abortions and artificial inseminations permitted in a given year would be determined completely by the difference between the number of deaths and the number of births in the year previous.” He urged readers to “reconcile ourselves to the fact that artificial means must be applied to limit birth rates.” He likened the global population to a “pulsating mass of maggots.” Listen carefully as this White House dresses its Obamacare abortion mandate in the white lab coat of “reproductive services” for all. The language of “access to birth control” is the duplicitous code of Sanger’s ideological grim reapers.
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‘To Stop the Multiplication of the Unfit’
Well, she wasn’t quite perfect, but far superior to anyone else in my opinion. See The Hill , ” Rep. Michele Bachmann thinks that America missed its opportunity with ‘the perfect candidate’ ,” and CNN, ” TRENDING: Bachmann says she was the ‘perfect candidate’ .” (Via Memeorandum .) I’m pictured with Congresswoman Bachmann last April at David Horowitz’s West Coast Retreat in Palos Verdes. She hadn’t announced her candidacy yet, but I was certain she’d be candidate and I backed her from the start. No, she wasn’t perfect. But I thought she best represented my interests in the race, and I do agree with her contention that no other candidate was as consistently opposed to President Obama and the ObamaCare debacle as she was.
AP – People rarely pick a fight with Dirty Harry. But Chrysler’s “Halftime in America” ad featuring quintessential tough guy Clint Eastwood has generated fierce debate about whether it accurately portrays the country’s most economically distressed city or amounts to a campaign ad for President Barack Obama and the auto bailouts.
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‘Halftime in America’ ad creates political debate
(AP)
AP – President Barack Obama’s call to shrink the military, shut bases and cancel weapons to meet the demand for budget cuts tests the resolve of lawmakers who came to Washington determined to slash the deficit.
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Defense cuts test lawmakers’ resolve on deficits
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‘May Divorce Be With You’: SNL Does Gingrich‘s ’Moon Colony’
I saw ” Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close .” I went yesterday afternoon. I was intrigued by this film from the moment I saw the preview, just days before Christmas. It came out in limited release in order to qualify for the Academy Awards. It opened Christmas Day. Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock star, and of course that had something to do with my interest. Tom Hanks is probably my favorite actor, and I say probably because I don’t really rate actors all that much. Hanks is on the left of the spectrum politically, but he’s not progressive in the sense of the mainstream Democrat Party establishment today. Hanks is what a “liberal” used to be — someone patriotic who believes in the positive role of America in the world in the defense of freedom. I imagine Hanks is also “liberal” in the old sense of believing that governmental institutions can leaven markets and help solve collective action problems (while not specifically attempting to destroy capitalism). And of course, Hanks’ advocacy for the memory of the World War II generation is a major contribution to contemporary American life. So it was no surprise to me that he’d be playing a lead role in a film which takes the September 11 attacks as the foundation of the story. I went into the movie with only the vaguest details of the story, since I frankly just skimmed the reviews in the most obligatory manner at the time. I knew I wanted to see it for the reasons stated above. Now that I have I confess to being more profoundly moved than I thought I’d be, and I say that with the confession that I did expect to be moved a little bit. I’m a hopelessly emotional sap when it comes to stuff like this. I think I’ve mentioned it before but the movies are the only place where I’ll really cry. I don’t get that emotional most other times. But the movies sometimes open me up and I wish I’d brought a box of tissue. This movie doesn’t really have that one emotionally devastating scene where you can’t hold it in any longer. The gushy scenes kind of ratchet up until the film’s crescendo toward the conclusion. I was wiping my eyes a little by that time, but it wasn’t a gusher or anything. Mostly I was just amazed at how well the story was all tied together. The main character is Oskar, the 11-year-old boy who loses his dad (Thomas, played by Hanks) on 9/11. Thomas was in one of the towers, caught above the impact zone 100 stories or so near the top of the skyscraper. Thomas calls home and leaves messages on the answer machine. Oskar’s school is closed because of the emergency and he comes home to hear the his father’s voice. It’s hard early in the movie to figure out how significant those taped messages are, but it’s a powerful scene when we learn what happened. Oskar is beyond precocious. He and his dad play together like best friends and Thomas designs games and adventures to challenge his son and help build his character. It’s a love story between a boy and his father. There’s some craziness in the pacing of the movie. The flashbacks between the present and the past are hard to separate temporally since the flashbacks only flash back a year to two before the present. And parts of the movie seem improbable: Oskar finds a key that belonged to his dad and he’s convinced the key holds some magical significance. No doubt it’s closure, but most 11-year-olds probably wouldn’t be able to walk across all of New York City to track down the people, hundreds of people, who might have an answer to the mystery. (What does that key open?) But movies sometimes require a willing suspension of disbelief, and this one is so realistic in other respects — and we love and trust the actors so much already — that it’s not hard to do. It’s a great film. It’s nominated for best picture, although I can’t say it’s the best of 2011, having only seen one or two others that were nominated. However, it’s a much more powerful movie than “War Horse” (which I saw a couple of weeks back and meant to write something about but procrastinated). There’s an emotional closeness to “Extremely Loud” that’s at once both endearing and devastating. “War Horse” was much less intense in that regard, although it’s a great movie that deserves a nomination. So with that, I was a bit caught off guard (although not surprised, actually) at progressive hate-blogger Scott Lemieux’s attack on the movie, at the communist Lawyers, Guns and Money , ” Extremely Loud and Incredibly Shitty? “: This was truly a banner year for terrible movies…. But I was interested to see several critics in the New York survey mentioned Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close . About 15 seconds into the first time I saw the preview it was clear that it was going to be a major threat to be the Academy’s middlebrow doorstop of choice. And that was before I knew it had been directed by Stephen Daldry, the homeless man’s Lasse Hallström and the most obvious choice to produce the kind of kitschy “serious” films that simulate content without having any. It’s based on a prominent bad novel using one horrible historical event as a backdrop, and also invokes two other horrible historical events while telling you nothing you didn’t already know about any of them or about anything else. It has an annoying precocious kid, who encounters Noble African-Americans. It has Tom Hanks. I mean talk about your Oscar bait. So did it get nominated? Oh, yes, and I can’t imagaine anyone thinks this is surprising. Has anyone seen it? Could anything be as bad as it looks? All that and Lemieux hadn’t even watched the film. And the “several critics” mentioned are those cited at a New York article on the year’s worst movies. Reading those, along with Lemieux’s response, it’s not hard to figure out that these people simply can’t stand that September 11th is used as an historical anchor to a movie about family, grief, and recovery. Progressives think the U.S. deserved 9/11 and they hate the institution of the family. Why on earth would they give a fuck about a film that features these things as the subject matter? Perhaps read the LGM comments there as well, at least to get a feeling of what radical leftists think about cinema and annual Oscar pageant overall. These losers aren’t representative — not of regular Americans, of course, but not of people in the movie industry either. “Extremely Loud” got great reviews, or at least great reviews in respectable sources. Here’s Betsy Sharkey, at the Los Angeles Times , for example: “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” is a handsomely polished, thoughtfully wrapped Hollywood production about the national tragedy of 9/11 that seems to have forever redefined words like unthinkable, unforgivable, catastrophic. It has also redefined our expectations of filmmakers who try to examine the still aching wound — and perhaps explains why most films about 9/11 haven’t resonated with audiences. Mindful of that, director Stephen Daldry has taken great care in looking at it through the eyes of a precocious New York City boy in a film filled with both sentiment and substance. Finding the right balance was critical to making any adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s provocative novel work. But this is a filmmaker who’s equally sensitive and bold in handling films with heavy emotional and political content as he has in “Billy Elliot,” “The Hours” and “The Reader,” all of which earned him Oscar nominations. He’s up to the task again with “Extremely Loud,” which opens Sunday. Like the novel that inspired the film, screenwriter Eric Roth (“Munich”) has brought things back to ground zero through the story of one family torn asunder by the World Trade Center attacks. So it seems a smart choice to put two quintessentially heartland stars in Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock at its center. It makes acceptance easier, offense harder. Keep reading . Manohla Dargis is more critical in her review at the New York Times , ” A Youngster With a Key, a Word and a Quest .” She writes: In truth, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” isn’t about Sept. 11. It’s about the impulse to drain that day of its specificity and turn it into yet another wellspring of generic emotions: sadness, loneliness, happiness. This is how kitsch works. It exploits familiar images, be they puppies or babies — or, as in the case of this movie, the twin towers — and tries to make us feel good, even virtuous, simply about feeling. And, yes, you may cry, but when tears are milked as they are here, the truer response should be rage. Okay. Right. We should have rage. Personally, it’s enraging that we’ve had so few films of this caliber dealing 9/11 that we should bemoan kitsch and demand rage. That’s progress. In any case, Mandelyn Kilroy has an approving review at Philly Buzz , where she notes, it’s “a must-see movie, just make sure to pack the tissues.” That’s good advice.
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‘Extremely Loud’
