Friday, February 06, 2009

Karl's Weekend Reading

This week's face of evil - Samira Ahmed Jassim

James Taranto at the WSJ summarizes this week's discovery in Iraq - Samira Ahmed Jassim, a 50 year old woman who identified likely female suicide bombers, arranged for their rape, then recruited them in their state of despair. As many as 80. AP Story link. In related news, it was determined in an autopsy that a male suicide bomber in Algeria was also raped. It is suspected the rape-to-suicide recruitment method is gender-neutral. Pajamas Media Link. James' reaction from his Thursday Best of the Web post:

A Muslim woman is arranging for Muslim men to rape Muslim women in order to shame those Muslim women into committing suicide for the purpose of murdering other Muslim men, women and children. And all of this is done in the name of Islam.


The stimulus liberal commie pork bill is causing our leader a bit of unexpected stress. Charles Krauthammer comments on the CHANGE from Hope/Change to Fear/Socialism in only two weeks. The Fierce Urgency of Pork, Washington Post.

It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.
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After Obama's miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell -- and that this president told better than anyone.

I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks.