Barney Frank v Harvard Student

Although this video is quite famous, I had never seen it before and I suspect many of you have also never seen it. As I watched it, I was fascinated by it, but thought I would not post it until I saw the last two minutes.

For those who have not heard of it, this is Joel Pollak, current candidate for Congress in Illinois' 9th Congressional district, going at it with Congressman Barney Frank (D-Ma), who is currently in a pitched battle to save his seat in a race with another bright, young conservative named Sean Bielat. I have endorsed both Pollak and Bielat. Pollak was a student at Harvard Law School at the time this video was made.

Watching Barney squirm was entertaining, but I'm posting this because of the questions Greta van Sustern asks Pollak in the last two minutes, and the answers that he gives. More below the fold.

Let's go to the videotape.



Did you pick up those last two minutes there? Joel Pollak could have been writing my political biography. I was a Democrat until I got to law school in 1980 (although, unlike my parents, I could not bring myself to support George McGovern in 1972, the first vote I ever cast for President was for Jimmy Carter in 1976). The 1980 election and the way the Leftists at NYU Law argued about it turned me into a conservative Republican. In fact, all of the Orthodox Jews walked around NYU that fall with Reagan buttons in Hebrew - we knew that if Jimmah was re-elected, Israel would be sold out.

A couple of years in yeshiva in Israel convinced me to make aliya (immigrate to Israel) rather than going into politics in the US, but listening to Joel describe his political evolution gave me a real sense of deja vu.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem

Burqa Ban Debate Becomes Violent in France

Ni Putes Ni Soumises (NPNS – Neither Whores Nor Submissives), an international human rights organization that advocates on behalf of women’s rights as universal human rights without compromise, organized an open public meeting on the anticipated French burqa ban in Montreuil, a suburb of Paris, France, on Tuesday, May 18, 2010, at 7:30 pm. The meeting was held in an elementary school in Montreuil. Ni Putes Ni Soumises representatives had canvassed the city earlier in the day, to spread awareness of the event. The President of Ni Putes Ni Soumises, Ms. Sihem Habchi, was present, along with a number of local elected government officials and Ms. Lubna Al Hussein, the Sudanese journalist and women’s rights activist who risked 40 lashes of the whip for wearing pants in Khartoum. Approximately 150 persons attended the debate, including a number of Islamists who attempted to shout down anyone expressing support for the public burqa ban in France. A handful of veiled women were present and gave testimonials, including one woman in niqab (the face veil that will be included in the anticipated ban).

Hostilities began almost immediately. The gulf that exists between the pro and anti-burqa ban camps could not have been more apparent. When the women’s rights activists and elected officials spoke, they spoke of the creation of a safe, egalitarian and secular public space in which all citizens enjoy equal rights and equal protection under the law. They spoke of women’s rights and the importance of ensuring gender equality and gender desegregation in a secular, democratic republic.

When the anti-burqa ban contingent spoke, they spoke only of Islam amid accusations of anti-immigrant racism. They defended the burqa as a tenet of Islam, as indicated in the Quran and supported by the Sunnah in the Hadith.

The secularists refused to address the tenets of Islam as wholly irrelevant. The Islamists interpreted this refusal as bigotry. The heated debate erupted in violence, which resulted in only minor injuries, but which provided further evidence of the utter incompatibility of democratic governance and religion. The police arrived. They detained the remaining participants for some time, but the perpetrators had already fled the scene.

Many persons expressed that their participation in the truncated debate had served to increase their support for the ban on identity obscuring face coverings in public in France.

Time to Strike Back Harder

Time to Strike Back Harder

Sayings Assembled by Rob Kall, Opednews.com

Speak out in acts; the time for words has passed, and deeds alone suffice.
Whittier

We are so enamored of mental tranquility that we stop short at any semblance of a truth, and go to sleep in the clouds.
Joubert

Great things are done when men and mountains meet;
This is not done by jostling in the street.
Blake, Gnomic Verses

Without contraries (there) is no progression.
Blake, Marriage of heaven adn hell.


"Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks."
Brooks, Phillips


"He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper."
Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolu tion in France

Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.
Carlyle, Thomas

True contentment is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it.
G.K. Chesterson

The response to incongruities is one of the highest manifestations of the cerebral process.
Norman Cousins, Head First

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
Norman Cousins

"It is circumstances which show what men are. Therefore, when a difficulty falls upon you, remember that God, like a trainer ofwrestlers, has matched you with a rough young man. For what purpose? you might ask. So that you may become an Olympic Conqueror; but it is not accomplished without sweat. ...no man has had a more profitable difficulty than you have had, if you choose to make use of it as an athlete would deal with a young antagonist."
Epictetus

We only go where we need to go or go where we want to go because we overcome obstacles.
And I'm still overcoming obstacles today.
Danny Glover

We encounter the grinding wheels that sharpen our mental blades many places in life. Adversity, school, parents, spiritual guides, books, experience are all sharpening teachers. As we grow older, to stay sharp we must find new grindstones to whet and sharpen our potential and keep us at our brightest, most penetrating best.
Kall, Robert


What is the heaviest thing... that I may take it upon me and rejoice in my strength.
Nietzsche

What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In thedifficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.
Rainer Maria Rilke

*"I love to hear of worthy foes."
Scott, Sir Walter., LADY OF THE LAKE, canto 4, st.8

I am at my very best when the circumstances get dangerous.
Ted Turner

The human race built most nobly when limitations were greatest and therefore when most was required of imagination to build at all. Limitations seem to have always been the best friends of architecture.
Frank Lloyd Wright

Risks are the spice of life, and this is the kind of moment that a test pilot lives for. THe butterflies are fluttering, but you feed off fear as if it's a high-energy candy bar. It keeps you alert and focused.
You accept risk as part of every new challenge; it comes with the territory.Chuck Yeager, Yeager
Chuck Yeager, Yeager

Where the willingness is great, the difficulties cannot be great.
Niccolo Machiavelli

"Challenges make you discover things about yourself that you never
really knew. They're what make the instrument stretch - what makes you go
beyond the norm." -Cicely Tyson


We triumph without glory when we counquer without danger.
Corneille Le Cid, ii.,2. (1606-1684)

There are no gains without pains.
Benjamin Franklin

Happiness is the full use of your powers along lines of excellence in a life affording scope.
John F. Kennedy

When you're green you're growing, and when you're ripe, you rot.
Ray Kroc (McDonalds founder)

Accept the challenge so that you may feel the exhilaration of victory.
George S. Patton

Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.
Theodore Roosevelt

One thing obtained with difficulty is far better than a hundred things procured with ease.
Talmud, Avoth d' Rabbi Nathan, Ch 3

What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.
Rainer Maria Rilke

In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences, and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.
E.M. Forster

Few moments are more pleasing than those in which the mind is concerting measures for a new undertaking.
Samuel Johnson

Whenever you are confronted with an opponent. Conquer him with love.
ghandi

Outdrawn by a Penitent Pedophile

Susan Jacoby, Los Angeles Times

^{Talking to ourselves: Americans are increasingly close-minded and unwilling to listen to opposing views}

As dumbness has been defined downward in American public life during the last two decades, one of the most important and frequently overlooked culprits is the public's increasing reluctance to give a fair hearing -- or any hearing at all -- to opposing points of view.

A few years ago, I delivered a lecture at Eastern Kentucky University on the history of American secularism, and was pleased, in the heart of the Bible Belt, to have attracted an audience of about 150. The response inside the hall was enthusiastic because everyone there, with the exception of a few bored students whose professors had made attendance a requirement, agreed with me before I opened my mouth.

Around the corner, hundreds more students were packing an auditorium to hear a speaker sponsored by the Campus Crusade for Christ, a conservative organization that "counter-programs" secular lectures at many colleges. The star of the evening was a self-described recovering pedophile who claimed to have overcome his proclivities by being "born again." (And yes, it is a blow to the ego to find oneself less of a draw than a penitent pedophile.)

It is safe to say that almost no one who attended either lecture on the Kentucky campus that night was exposed to a new or disturbing idea. Indeed, virtually everywhere I speak, 95% of the audience shares my political and cultural views -- and serious conservatives report exactly the same experience on the lecture circuit.

Whether watching television news, consulting political blogs or (more rarely) reading books, Americans today have become a people in search of validation for opinions that they already hold. This absence of curiosity about other points of view is the essence of anti-intellectualism and represents a major departure from the nation's best cultural traditions.