This week's syndicated column:

With so many assaults on the boundaries of governance and sovereignty in the news lately, reflecting on the career of writer and Hollywood director Nora Ephron, who died this week at 71, may seem off-topic. But upon reading through many glowing Ephron appreciations, I realize that in her work lies another broken boundary. It is a cultural one, and every bit as significant as lines on the map or in the Constitution.

In a scene from her most famous movie, “When Harry Met Sally” (1989), Ephron brought to mainstream, predominantly female audiences the spectacle of a professional actress (Meg Ryan), not a porn prop, performing an extended impression of an orgasm in a crowded delicatessen. It was supposed to be the ultimate put-down of her crass male companion (Billy Crystal). Was this merely a smart update of the onscreen battle of the sexes once famously waged by Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy? Or had we become party to something darker? Either way, America...

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From Politico via Drudge:

Democratic National Committee Exective Director Patrick Gaspard, on the news that the SCOTUS had upheld Obamacare:

"It's constitutional. Bitches."

I find it difficult to regard the Supreme Court decision on Arizona immigration law as just another controversial or disappointing highest court decision. There is something almost post-apocolyptic and certainly pre-totalitarian when, to invoke Justice Scalia's dissent, the Court has ruled that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforcing it. Yes, as Scalia put it, it "boggles the mind." It also conjures up truly alarming comparisons with "justice" as meted out by kangaroo courts, show trials and other horrors of totalitarian dictatorships.

We understand such criminal acts of going through the motions as sham procedures that have no intention of upholding the rule of law, but rather go forward to entrench an ideology or regime or, usually, both. It is shocking, therefore, to see even a pale reflection of such things in this ruling, the perfect endpiece...

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Yesterday, Hamid Karzai told the Afghan parliament two things:

(1) "Corruption has reached its peak in Afghanistan" --



and (2) Afghanistan expects to receive another $4 billion from the West at a donor summit next month in Japan.

Lemme tell ya, so long as money is involved -- any amount of money -- corruption will never reach its peak in Afghanistan. Which means we Westerners should zip our change purses and pony up no more than is needed to fly our Afghan-based citizens home. Every additional dime and dollar, million and billion is a waste.

There is an added danger in supporting the grotesquely expensive Afghan habit:...

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This week's syndicated column:Less ↑

Are we watching the meltdown of Barack Obama, soon to become a radioactive pile from which voters will run come November? Or are we instead witnessing the stirrings of a kind of political phoenix heretofore unseen in American history?

By any traditional measure, news in the past week or two alone should sink Barack Obama’s chances for a second term. First, Obama biographer Stanley Kurtz reported new and definitive proof that, as a 34-year-old embarking on his political career, Obama belonged to the anti-capitalist – indeed, socialist – New Party, a phase of his political development he has not only never repudiated but also has hidden from the American people. By any traditional...

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The Washington Post's Dana Milbank has earned the PrObamedia Laurels this week (or, at least, this morning -- competition is fast and furious) for blaming decreasing poll numbers measuring American confidence in the presidency not on Barack Obama's presidency but on ... "conservative leaders" and ... Tucker Carlson!

Milbank writes:

Under the Obama presidency, however, conservative leaders are encouraging the vulgarity if not joining in, by heckling the president from the House floor.

To decipher: "Conservative leaders" = one Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC), who in January 2010  famously shouted  "You lie!" during SOTU when Prez O did  indeed lie to the effect that health care for illegal aliens would not be funded under Obamacare. (It is.) Extra credit question for Dana Milbank: What debases the presidency more -- lying to the American people in the carefully...

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Is -- as the echoes tell us after AG Holder's on-target contempt citation from the House Oversight Committee -- Obama having a "bad week"? Or, when we fold in the practically already forgotten Rose Garden Amnesty for "the children," is constitutional government itself under assault? And how would the Oracle at Delphi interpret the growing list of Democrats (hailing from four states, four US Reps. one US Senator and a state governor) who have announced they will not be going to the Democratic Convention in Charlotte in September? I don't remember that EVER happening before. Either a blowout is coming ... or a big blow. Batten down the hatches.

Spc. Jarrod Lallier was 20 years old when three Afghan policemen fired on his unit in Afghanistan, killing the Spokane, Washington native and wounding nine other soldiers. The gunmen are still at large. Lallier returned to the United States in a flag-draped coffin on Tuesday.

Another American killed by Afghan "allies" -- the grim toll that General Dempsey likes to dispense with as "additional risk."

RIP.

From the Spokesman-Review:

Spc. Jarrod Lallier always knew he wanted to serve his country. “He said that since he was a little boy,” said his mother, Kim Lallier. “As his mom, I always tried talking him out of it. As he grew up, we knew it was even a stronger conviction.” Lallier, a graduate of Mead High School, was killed in Afghanistan when men in Afghan police uniforms turned their weapons...

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... a few stories of note:

Staunch support from the White House, the State Department, and the past three ambassadors to Iraq notwithstanding, Brett McGurk, Prez O's choice for US ambassador to Iraq, withdrew his nomination from consideration on Monday, one day before a scheduled vote in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Friday's column opposing McGurk's nomination is here.

Cliff Kincaid has a terrific column out reminding us of what is likely the main, staggering reason classified information has been gushing from the White House: President Obama, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and top presidential...

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One day, we may look back on the criminal charges the Army has brought against SFC Walter Taylor as the very worst abuse of prosecutorial discretion of the wars that began 11 years ago. The highly regarded and seasoned non-commissioned officer has been charged with negligent homicide, which the US Army claims was committed during an enveloping attack in Afghanistan somewhere along the so-called Highway of Death between Kabul and Kandahar. In an eternity of four seconds, SFC Walter Taylor decided to fire upon what turned out to be civilians in a car, killing a woman and two young people, her son and her niece.

The basic facts from the must-read account in the LA Times:

His convoy was reeling from a roadside bomb, his fellow soldiers were engaged...

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This week's syndicated column:

Does “character” count? How about the more archaic notion of “reputation”? Not in the Obama administration, now standing tall behind what in Washington parlance is called the “troubled” nomination of Brett McGurk to be U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

McGurk’s nomination foundered last week after the surfacing online of a tawdry series of private emails between McGurk, then married and the top U.S. negotiator of the U.S.-Iraq security agreement, and Gina Chon, then a Wall Street Journal reporter based in Baghdad. Their subjects? Sex and sensitive information, and the pair’s mutually titillating practice of horse-trading both. If I think back to my Victorian novel class in college, I find the perfect word for what the 2008 exchanges reveal about the temperament and judgment of the man whom the administration and...

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Chic "European" couture on a Brussels street in Molenbeek

---

The Brussels neghborhood of Molenbeek has been in the news lately, as the video below vividly explains. Back in 2008, I visited the Muslim enclave by car, not foot, because it was too dangerous to stroll the Olde-Worlde-meets-Casbah streets as non-Islamic "foreigners" -- in Europe's "capital"!

I took a lot of pics, which are here.

Even before six GOP Senators asked President Obama to withdraw the odious McGurk (above) as his "uniquely qualified" nominee to be ambassador to Iraq (what took them so long), Peter van Buren volunteered for the job:

From van Buren's blog We Meant Well:

With the McGurk nomination in trouble, despite State claiming he is uniquely qualified, prudent planning suggests State should have a replacement in the wings. I hereby volunteer and submit I too am uniquely qualified.

1. I spent a year in Iraq and screwed up most of what I tried to do, like McGurk. Advantage: McGurk, he was there longer and messed up a lot more things.

2. Unlike McGurk, there are no sweaty messages in my email archives. As part of its dirt-digging investigation into me because of my book and this blog, the State Department reviewed years of my emails, as well as my old travel vouchers and credit reports. They did not find anything worth punishing me over. Advantage: me.

3. As I already work...

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Yesterday, I went on with Peter Boyles of Denver's KHOW for a frank discussion of the Obama eligibility saga.

Audio here.

... I don't know.

What I do know is that Obama's life "story" reeks of fraud, as independent investigators pull chunks and shards of evidence from the Obama deep, attempting to piece them together as a way through what should be a clear roadmap of a man's early life but is instead a maze of purposeful deception. It is a maze thick with irony beginning with the notion that the same man who wrote two (count 'em, two) autobiographical volumes before age 47 won't release one single document attesting to his identity, his family, his education, his travels, his careers. (No, I don't count the dodgy computerized images that have appeared, presto, before our eyes, high-tech-smoke-and-mirrors style.) It is a maze whispering with rumors as well, sometimes leading to dead ends, as, for example -- AND THIS IS A CORRECTION TO A STORY POINT THAT CAME UP DURING MY APPEARANCE WITH FRANK...

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Almost exactly three years ago, President Obama addressed "Muslims around the world" from Egypt's al-Azhar U in Cairo. He said he "consider[ed] it part of [his] responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear."

As Geert Wilders writes in his must-read book Marked for Death: "I remember thinking, But what if these so-called `negative stereotypes of Islam' are the truth?-- will you denouce people for telling the truth? And if violent Islam is really just a `negative stereotype,' then why have I had to live like a virtual prisoner for more than four years [now more than seven years] due to threats from Muslims?"

Among America's elites, such questions don't even break the surface stillness.This is due to the de facto rule in the US of Islamic laws against "slander" which have been embraced, duck-to-water-style, by these same elites. In accordance with sharia, "Islamophobia" has become the target of their ire, much as "anti-anti-Communism"...

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If Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood candidate for president Mohammed Mursi (above) wins, Egypt's capital moves from Cairo to Jerusalem. So stated a leading Islamic leader, Safwat Hagazy, during a recent campaign rally as Mursi and MB head honcho Mohammed Badei looked on.

Outrageous? Fantastic? Not in Muslimworld. As crack Islamic law expert Stephen Coughlin pointed out to me today, the 2008 charter of the Organization of the Islamic conference similarly calls for OIC's "permanent headquarters" to be moved to Jerusalem after the city's "liberation."

Article 21 of the OIC Charter:

The Headquarters of the General Secretariat shall be in the city of Jeddah until the liberation of the city of Al Quds so that it will become the permanent Headquarters of the Organisation.

Al Quds is the Islamic name for Jerusalem.

The OIC is the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (it used to be known as the Organization of the Islamic  Conference). With 56 Islamic member states represented...

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After the publication of a series of base and ignoble emails on the State Department server between Brett McGurk, a senior advisor to the last several US ambassadors in Iraq, and Wall Street Journal reporter Gina Chon attesting to sexual frustration (McGurk's), sexual self-gratification (McGurk's), sexual/journalistic favors (quid pro quo?) and more, the Obama administration is still supporting this junior-high-school-level-gross-out as being "unqiuely qualified" to be the next US ambassador to Iraq.

McGurk, not incidentally, is also believed to be one of two US diplomats videotaped while engaged in sexual activity on the roof of Saddam Hussein's palace in Baghdad. Oh, and by the way, McGurk was married to someone other than either the diplomat on the roof or the reporter at the time. But gosh...

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Today I spent one full radio hour on Secure Freedom Radio with the suave and dauntless Frank Gaffney discussing the Great American Taboo: the question of whether Barack Obama is constitutionally eligible to be president; the continuing investigation into his vanishing, morphing, secret paper trail; the abject abdication by our lawmakers to uphold the Consitution and the integrity of the presidency; and the craven self-censorship of the media from Left to Right to cover any of the above. 

Listenhere  . Follow this link to listen to the full 53-minute-conversation.

UPDATE: I have since learned that Senate-candidate Obama did not tell Senate-candidate Keyes during a debate that being born in Kenya didn't matter since he wasn't running for president, a point that comes up in the interview. Not true.

...

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This beheading of a convert from Islam to Christianity in Tunisia didn't make the State Department's human rights report.

CNS reports:

The U.S. State Department removed the sections covering religious freedom from the Country Reports on Human Rights that it released on May 24, three months past the statutory deadline Congress set for the release of these reports. The new human rights reports--purged of the sections that discuss the status of religious freedom in each of the countries covered--are also the human rights reports that include the period that covered the Arab Spring and its aftermath. Thus, the reports do not provide in-depth coverage of what has happened to Christians and other religious...

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This week's syndicated column:

Earlier this spring, President Obama’s attorney Alexandra Hill went to court in New Jersey over a challenge to her client’s eligibility to appear on the 2012 presidential primary ballot.

New Jersey citizens, represented by attorney Mario Apuzzo, made two claims: that Barack Obama has not proved he meets the conditions for presidential eligibility (namely, that he is a “natural born citizen”), and that the proof Obama released attesting to his bona fides (an Internet image of his long-form birth certificate) is fraudulent.

Hill’s argument? A presidential candidate has no obligation under New Jersey state law to prove his eligibility, period.

Administrative Law Judge Jeff Masin agreed with Hill and ruled in Obama’s favor. He further asserted that, absent such an obligation, the Internet image of Obama’s birth certificate – the same image Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse investigators believe to be a forgery – is “legally irrelevant.”

...

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Today's Washington Times reports on the unusually crowded US Senate primary in California in which 24 candidates, including 78-year-old Sen. Dianne Feinstein, are vying for the top two ballot spots. After Feinstein, the second strongest candidate appears to be Dr. Orly Taitz (above), a dentist and lawyer who has become nationally known for a series of court challenges to Barack Obama's eligibility to serve as president.

The Times:

Orly Taitz merged as the No. 2 vote-getter. Mrs. Taitz, 51, has better name recognition than most others as a national leader of the so-called “birther” movement, and some robocall polls show her finishing second to Mrs. Feinstein.

A lawyer and a dentist, Mrs. Taitz has filed numerous lawsuits challenging President Obama’s eligibility to run for president on state ballots, contending that he was not born in the United States.

The president, responding to persistent questions from billionaire Donald Trump, in April 2011 released an online copy of...

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This week's syndicated column:

Back in 2001, Britain’s political parties signed a fantastic pledge. They agreed to say nothing to “stir up racial or religious hatred, or lead to prejudice on grounds of race, nationality or religion.”

This gag order did more than keep the parties polite. Vital issues – from massive immigration and multiculturalism to their eradicating effects on British civilization – were officially banned. Thus, such concerns became impermissible thoughts. Not that such issues weren’t already thoughtcrime, as George Orwell would have put it. But this unprecedented pledge turned “violators” into political lepers.

I thought of that elite code of cowardice this week when a London judge sentenced a 42-year-old British secretary named Jacqueline Woodhouse to 21 weeks in jail. Her crime? An expletive-laden rant about immigration, multiculturalism and the disappearance of British civilization. Not in so many words. But that was the unmistakable gist of Woodhouse’s...

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