Monday, June 28, 2010

Judge Martin Feldman, American Hero

He may be overturned or forced to recuse himself by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, but Louisiana federal judge Martin Feldman, a Reagan appointee, has joined Chris Christie and Harry Alford in In General Counsel's roster of American heroes for trying to prevent the Obama administration from totally destroying the economy of the states that border the Gulf of Mexico:
The Obama administration’s efforts to suspend deepwater oil drilling were dealt another setback in court on Thursday when the federal judge who struck down the administration’s six-month moratorium refused to delay the decision’s effects.
The Interior Department petitioned Judge Martin L.C. Feldman of the United States District Court in New Orleans to grant a stay of his decision, which lifted a ban on new drilling projects and on work on the 33 rigs already in place in the Gulf.
But Judge Feldman said he was denying the delay for the same reasons he gave for his June 22 decision: that the moratorium was doing “irreparable harm” to the businesses in the gulf that depend on drilling activity and that the government had not given sufficient basis for the moratorium.
The White House imposed the moratorium in May, about a month after a fatal explosion and fire on April 20 on the Deepwater Horizon rig, which left an undersea well spewing crude oil into the gulf. The moratorium, intended to give time for improvements in rig safety measures, was “blanket, generic, indeed punitive,” the judge ruled.
Update: On July 9, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld Judge Feldman's ruling while the government's appeal is pending. The case before the Fifth Circuit is on the fast track for a late August hearing.

Supreme Court Upholds Second Amendment Gun Rights

If a Supreme Court nomination proceeding falls in the woods, and no one hears it, does it make a sound? With all that is going on in the news cycle, the Elena Kagan confirmation hearings have become almost an afterthought (the same thing occurred with the Sotomayor confirmation). The Democrats have the votes for confirmation, so it's pretty much just political theater.

When it comes to who gets appointed to lifetime positions in the federal judiciary, elections have consequences as the old chestnut goes. Absent the unforeseen, another liberal will unfortunately join the High Court. Democrats have a history of trashing the judicial nominations made by Republican presidents, but Senate Republicans don't play that same loathesome game.

In the meantime, you don't have to be a gun owner to applaud the Supreme Court's decision that upheld the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding U.S. citizens for what the Court called "the core lawful purpose of self-defense."
The Supreme Court ruled for the first time Monday that the Second Amendment provides all Americans a fundamental right to bear arms, a long-sought victory for gun rights advocates who have chafed at federal, state and local efforts to restrict gun ownership.
The court was considering a restrictive handgun law in Chicago and one of its suburbs that was similar to the District law that it ruled against in 2008. The 5 to 4 decision does not strike any other gun control measures currently in place, but it provides a legal basis for challenges across the country where gun owners think that government has been too restrictive. 
Writing for the 5-4 majority in McDonald v. Chicago, Justice Alito ruled that the Second Amendment "is fully applicable to the States."
Two years ago, in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U. S. ___ (2008), we held that the Second Amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms for the purpose of self-defense, and we struck down a District of Columbia law that banned the possession of handguns in the home.The city of Chicago (City) and the village of Oak Park, a Chicago suburb, have laws that are similar to the District of Columbia’s, but Chicago and Oak Park argue that their laws are constitutional because the Second Amendment has no application to the States. We have previously held that most of the provisions of the Bill of Rights apply with full force to both the Federal Government and the States...
Our decision in Heller points unmistakably to the answer. Self-defense is a basic right, recognized by many legal systems from ancient times to the present day, and in Heller, we held that individual self-defense is “the central component” of the Second Amendment right...
In sum, it is clear that the Framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment counted the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Plainclothes Dutch Officers Try to Curb Anti-Semitic Street Violence

Undercover cops will try to thwart anti-Semitic violence in the Netherlands. Helen Thomas said that the Jews should "go home." Which--given the situation in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe--leads to the logical question: What happens if they are already home?

Paul Belien explains in Hudson New York:
"Decoy Jew" is a new phrase in the Netherlands. Jews are no longer safe in major Dutch cities such as Amsterdam. Since 1999, Jewish organizations in the Netherlands have been complaining that Jews who walking the Dutch streets wearing skullcaps risk verbal and physical attacks by young Muslims. Being insulted, spat at or attacked are some of the risks associated with being recognizable as a Jew in contemporary Western Europe.
Last week, a television broadcast showed how three Jews with skullcaps, two adolescents and an adult, were harassed within thirty minutes of being out in the streets of Amsterdam. Young Muslims spat at them, mocked them, shouted insults and made Nazi salutes. "Dirty Jew, go back to your own country," a group of Moroccan youths shouted at a young indigenous Dutch Jew...
In an effort to arrest the culprits who terrorize Jews, the Amsterdam authorities have ordered police officers to walk the streets disguised as Jews. The Dutch police already disguise officers as "decoy prostitutes, decoy gays and decoy grannies" to deter muggings and attacks on prostitutes, homosexuals and the elderly. Apparently sending out the decoys has helped reduce street crime....
The deployment of "decoy Jews", however, is being criticized by leftist parties such as the Dutch Greens. Evelien van Roemburg, an Amsterdam counselor of the Green Left Party, says that using a decoy by the police amounts to provoking a crime, which is itself a criminal offence under Dutch law.
Belien says that Jews are in particular bailing on the city of Antwerp, which has (or had) a large Jewish community, for Israel, America, or the U.K.

What is more offensive--anti-Semitic criminals or the leftists that for some weird reason feel the need to pander to them? And how long would the Socialists or the Greens last under a totalitarian theocracy?

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Top Chef Serves Up Some Propaganda


Bravo Network's hit reality show Top Chef, starring culinary judges Padma Lakshmi and Tom Colicchio (and based in D.C. this time around) usually provides fun, entertaining, and apolitical content. But last night's unusually boring installment came garnished with some political propaganda revolving around "underfunded" public school cafeterias and efforts to encourage students to eat more healthy fare.

What Jonah Goldberg writes at NationalReviewOnline is almost exactly what was going through our mind during the episode:
But Holy Crisco Batman, the agitproppy sermonizing of the whole thing was infuriating: The crocodile tears, the quivering lips, the personal testimonials about how passionate the chefs are about the issue, the righteousness about our poor underfunded schools. But what was worse was the ignorance and innumeracy. Watching the show, you'd have no idea that DC public schools are among the best funded in the country ($25,000 or so per pupil – on par with DC’s most expensive private schools). The problem is they are among the worst run...If kids are getting bad meals in DC public schools it's not because they're being starved for resources it's because the teacher's unions and bloated bureaucrats running the schools are, quite literally, stealing food from the mouths of poor children.
According to Top Chef, schools get a mere two dollars and change per student per meal. So the contestants were given 2 bucks and change per student to cook a nutritious meal for fifty kids...Here's the problem. No one bothered to mention the fact that the schools buy in bulk at the wholesale level...But they kept using this low per-student amount to make it sound like the only reason public schools don’t serve more nutritious food is because school cafeteria’s are underfunded. And they may be underfunded, but the fault doesn’t lie with American taxpayers whose consciousness needs to be raised. They pay more than enough already. The fault lies with incompetent bureaucrats, greedy unions and cowardly politicians.
As Goldberg adds, no one watches Top Chef for political grandstanding. Just the opposite. The intense competition among the "cheftestants" is supposed to provide an escape from all that. And this is only the second episode of the program's D.C.-based seventh season. We may wind up with a case of indigestion.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Court Rejects Free-Speech Challenge To Anti-Terror Law

Guess which recently appointed "moderate" was on of the dissenting justices in this case?
The Supreme Court on Monday upheld a law that makes it a crime to provide "material support" to designated foreign terrorist groups, even when the support involves training or advice on humanitarian activities.
The 6-3 decision marked the first time the high court had looked at restrictions on free speech in U.S. anti-terrorism policy since the 9/11 attacks. Monday's decision strengthens the hand of government to block any form of support, no matter how peaceful or seemingly benign, to foreign terrorist groups.
The majority emphasized that it was endorsing restrictions on coordinated work with foreign terrorist groups but not on any independent work a humanitarian organization might do on its own.
It is a federal crime to knowingly provide material support or resources to an entity designated by the U.S. State Department as a foreign terrorist organization. Real-world question: What kind of rational, responsible group or individual would render "peaceful or seemingly benign" help to a terrorist group in the first place?

In Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, Chief Justice Roberts writing for the majority (which included retiring Justice Stevens) explained that...
Such support frees up other resources within the organization that may be put to violent ends. It also importantly helps lend legitimacy to foreign terrorist groups—legitimacy that makes it easier for those groups to persist, to recruit members, and to raise funds—all of which facilitate more terrorist attacks...Providing foreign terrorist groups with material support in any form also furthers terrorism by straining theUnited States’ relationships with its allies and undermining cooperative efforts between nations to prevent terrorist attacks...
The Preamble to the Constitution proclaims that the people of the United States ordained and established that charter of government in part to “provide for the common defence.” As Madison explained, “[s]ecurity against foreign danger is . . . an avowed and essential object of the American Union...” We hold that, in regulating the particular forms of support that plaintiffs seek to provide to foreign terrorist organizations, Congress has pursued that objective consistent with the limitations of the First and Fifth Amendments.

Shakedown At The Border?

What's the best use of Justice Department resources when you have a border overrun by drug gangs, human traffickers, potential terrorists, and other violent criminals? Well, it is to sue the state of Arizona, of course, over SB 1070, even though the Arizona law is a mirror image of federal immigration law.

In the meantime, RedState.com broke the story that per U.S. Senator Jon Kyl, Obama is using border security as a bargaining chip to get comprehensive, so called, immigration reform through the Congress. Sen. Kyl says the administration is holding its constitutional duty to secure the border "hostage" for political reasons. The idea that this administration would politicize national security as if it's merely another shakedown, another Chicago-style deal like the "cornhusker kickback" or the "Louisiana purchase," speaks for itself. Here's the video featuring Sen. Kyl at a town hall meeting:The White House has denied the senator's claim, but Kyl, who has no reputation for grandstanding, isn't backing down.

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Weekend At Barry's

The irony: The White House criticizes BP's lame CEO for attending a yacht race while Obama heads to--where else--the golf course.

Canada Free Press columnist Judi McLeod has an interesting take:
Is the soon to be 49-year-old President Barack Obama himself a victim of the Leftwing’s Public School Emasculation of the Schoolboy? How about British Petroleum chief honcho, Tony Hayward, 57?
Both Peter Pan boy types display little sympathy for those left to live lives in disaster zones.
We all know how it takes months for Obama to tear himself away from shooting hoops and playing golf in times when tragedy strikes...
The left’s emasculation of the entity known as the schoolboy was in full swing when Obama and Hayward went to school.
Metrosexuals and pantywaists who graduated this system are long on poetic double speak, short on decisive action...



Why Is The FCC Trying To Regulate The Internet?

Even well-meaning people sometimes put too much faith in government oversight. While the private sector can be corrupt, government bureaucracy combines corruption with incompetence. In an attempt to circumvent the courts, the Federal Communications Commission launched a rulemaking that would ultimately allow it to regulate Internet service providers as if they were public utilities. Despite all the high-minded political rhetoric from the supporters of so-called "Net neutrality," the end game, unfortunately, is control over content, a clear violation of the First Amendment. As noted on HotAir.com, "Only a government that fears open-source communication would see the Internet as a failing enterprise in need of top-down government control."

The American Spectator sums up this latest power grab as follows:
Under the Obama Administration's plan, the FCC would be able to enforce so-called "net neutrality" rules, allowing the federal government to set how broadband and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) manage the networks. By bringing broadband and the Internet under FCC regulatory oversight, the FCC would also be able to impose policies related to speech or online business models.
Reason.tv released this video in opposition to the FCC's initiative:



And Americans for Prosperity came out with this video:

"Obama Snoozed, Oil Oozed"


We've blogged previously about the huge media double standard when it comes to Bush vs. Obama, but Boston Herald columnist and talk show host Howie Carr really nails it in today's edition:
...Criticizing Bush - the highest form of patriotism. Criticizing Obama - hate speech. Who caused Bush’s problems? - Bush. Who causes Obama’s problems? - Bush.
...Bush playing a rare round of golf - complete video coverage, showing his utter indifference to the suffering of the American people.
Obama playing one of his endless rounds of golf - only still photos allowed, yet another glowing indication of our dashing president’s youth and physical fitness.
...Bush tapping the phones of foreign terrorists with congressional authority - fascism. Obama’s continuing attempts to rein in free speech on the Internet - good public policy.
...Popular Bush-era rhyme - Bush lied, people died. New rhyme - Obama snoozed, oil oozed.
 Related posts:
Media Bias and The Sounds of Silence--And Crickets
Part II: Media Bias and The Sounds of Silence--And Crickets

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Socialized Medicine: It is What it Is

As the entire right-of-center blogosphere has repeatedly warned, government intervention into the healthcare insurance system (with all its faults) will only make things far worse. Just look at the decrepit nature of the British national health service. The Washington Post notes that while Obama repeatedly insisted that Americans who like their current coverage would be able to keep it, this is apparently untrue even under the administrations own estimates. Investor's Business Daily explains:
Internal administration documents reveal that up to 51% of employers may have to relinquish their current health care coverage because of ObamaCare.
Small firms will be even likelier to lose existing plans.
The "midrange estimate is that 66% of small employer plans and 45% of large employer plans will relinquish their grandfathered status by the end of 2013," according to the document.
In the worst-case scenario, 69% of employers — 80% of smaller firms — would lose that status, exposing them to far more provisions under the new health law. ..
Draft copies of the document were reportedly leaked to House Republicans during the week and began circulating Friday morning. Rep. Bill Posey, R-Fla., posted it on his Web site Friday afternoon...
In a statement, Posey said the document showed that the arguments in favor of ObamaCare were a "bait and switch."
The White House plans to spend $125 million on a propaganda campaign to convince properly skeptical Americans about the alleged benefits of heathcare reform, so called, "amid growing signs Democrats are failing to get political traction on the issue."

Justice Department Lacks WMD Preparation

The Obama Justice Department is unprepared for just about everything except politicizing the war on terror, so this New York Times report should come as no surprise:
The Justice Department’s inspector general has concluded that the department is not fully prepared to respond to a terrorist attack involving an unconventional weapon.
In a report issued on Tuesday, the inspector general said that none of the law enforcement agencies within the department, other than the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had operational response plans in place to deal with such an attack.
The report determined that other than F.B.I. specialists, the department’s staff receives little training on how to respond to a biological, chemical, nuclear or radiological attack; that there is no central oversight plan in place for such a crisis; and that the management of the department’s plan is “uncoordinated and fragmented.”

Saudis Green Light Bombing Raid On Iran's Nuclear Facilities


One of the most under-reported stories is that the nations in the Middle East don't want Iran to get nukes either. For various reasons, these countries view Iran as a regional menace. Since this doesn't fit the media's simplistic narrative, it gets ignored, however. If Israel winds up taking unilateral military action--something which would ignite a huge international crisis--many countries would bitterly denounce Israel publicly while applauding privately. And if this story from the Times of London is accurate, Saudi Arabia is on board:
Saudi Arabia has conducted tests to stand down its air defences to enable Israeli jets to make a bombing raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities, The Times can reveal.
In the week that the UN Security Council imposed a new round of sanctions on Tehran, defence sources in the Gulf say that Riyadh has agreed to allow Israel to use a narrow corridor of its airspace in the north of the country to shorten the distance for a bombing run on Iran
 To ensure the Israeli bombers pass unmolested, Riyadh has carried out tests to make certain its own jets are not scrambled and missile defence systems not activated. Once the Israelis are through, the kingdom’s air defences will return to full alert.
We're hoping  somehow, some way, that this situation can be resolved peacefully, but given the international community's fecklessness when it comes imposing real sanctions on Iran, sadly it seems unlikely.

FBI has the Goods on ACORN Vote Fraud


We've often wondered about kind of algorithms need to be used to take vote fraud into consideration when polling organizations giv election predictions. After all, with corrupt organization like ACORN doing their bidding, phantom voting is big part of the Democrats' "get out the vote" effort. That's why they fight tough and nail (using absurd, made-up reasons) against laws that would simply require a photo ID to cast a ballot.

Via The Daily Caller, evidence has apparently come to light about ACORN vote fraud in St. Louis:
The radical activist group ACORN “works” for the Democratic Party and deliberately promotes election fraud, ACORN employees told FBI investigators, according to an FBI document dump Wednesday.
The documents obtained by Judicial Watch, a watchdog group, are FBI investigators’ reports related to the 2007 investigation and arrest of eight St. Louis, Mo., workers from ACORN’s Project Vote affiliate for violation of election laws. All eight employees involved in the scandal later pleaded guilty to voter registration fraud...
One employee told the FBI that ACORN headquarters is “wkg [working] for the Democratic Party.”
According to one report, an ACORN employee said the purpose of “[f]raudulent cards” was “[t]o cause confusion on election day to keep polls open longer,” “[t]o allow people who can’t vote to vote,” and “[t]o allow to vote multiple times.”
The organization is in the process of re-branding in many states which is not good news for anyone who believe in fair elections.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

The International Community and Terrorism: An Inconvenient Truth

Thanks to videos widely disseminated over the Internet, every fair-minded person now knows what really went on between Israeli soldiers and the so-called peace activists aboard the Gaza freedom flotilla. But for anyone who tuned in late, Mona Charen on NationalReviewOnline provides some essential background information:
The effort to destroy the Jewish state has many fronts. One front is in Iran, where the maniacal regime that has repeatedly promised to “wipe Israel off the map” marches inexorably toward a nuclear bomb. Another is in Gaza, from which Hamas has lobbed 10,000 missiles into Israeli cities. Yet another front, the most insidious, is comprised of the propaganda arm of the Palestinian movement. And this front thrives for only one reason — the complicity of the world press and the so-called “international community.”
Fact: Israel imposed a blockade of Gaza to prevent weapons from reaching the radical Islamic regime there that continues to make war on Israeli civilians. Egypt too has blockaded the strip, hoping to choke off weapons to Hamas, which it views as a threat.
Fact: Humanitarian relief is delivered to Gaza from Israel on a daily basis. During the first three months of this year, 94,500 tons of supplies were transferred to Gaza from Israel, including 48,000 tons of food products; 40,000 tons of wheat; 2,760 tons of rice; 1,987 tons of clothes and footwear; and 553 tons of milk powder and baby food for the strip’s 1.5 million inhabitants. Representatives of international aid groups and the United Nations move freely to and from the Gaza Strip.
Fact: Upon learning of the intentions of the Gaza flotilla, the Israeli government asked the organizers to deliver their humanitarian aid first to an Israeli port where it would be inspected (for weapons) before being forwarded to Gaza. The organizers refused. “There are two possible happy endings,” a Muslim activist on board explained, “either we will reach Gaza or we will achieve martyrdom.”
Fact: The flotilla ignored multiple instructions from Israeli navy ships to change course and follow them to the Israeli port of Ashdod...
Fact: The flotilla’s participants included the IHH, a “humanitarian relief fund” based in Turkey that has close ties to Hamas and to global jihadi groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Chechnya, and elsewhere, and which has also organized relief to anti-U.S. Islamic radicals in Fallujah, Iraq. A French intelligence report suggests that IHH has provided documents to terrorists, permitting them to pose as relief workers...
Fact: When Israeli commandos rappelled down ropes to the deck of the Mavi Marmara, they were assaulted and beaten with metal poles and baseball bats by the Palestinians on board.
On PajamasMedia, Phyllis Chesler writes the following:
...Yes, I am talking about how our world well has been poisoned by brazen, crazy lies about Israel and about the Israeli Defense Forces. These lies come at us day after day, week after week, year after year, and they do not stop coming. The world is saying, as if in one voice: Jews, Israelis: Stop. Do not defend yourselves. You are defending a state that is not supposed to exist; its extermination or dissolution will alone bring peace to the Middle East, peace between America and the Muslim world, prosperity and the end of civil, tribal, and ethnic wars everywhere....
What an irony. Jews were ceaselessly persecuted when we did not have a state of our own. Today, the continued persecution of Jews everywhere is being justified on the basis of how much “trouble” Israel causes the world...
We now do understand that the passengers on board one ship, the Mavi Marmara, came to fight, to kill, and to die. Some were definitely Turkish mercenaries, hired to do the Turkish prime minister’s bidding—or perhaps Iran’s bidding. Many had ties to known terrorist organizations. We also know that there were important tactical, practical, and life-saving reasons that the IDF stopped the boat while it was still in international waters. And we know that IDF soldiers rappelled onto the boat with paintball guns on their backs, expecting as little resistance as was met on all the other boats. Yes, perhaps Israeli Naval Intelligence failed to factor in the possibility that this boatload was “loaded for bear,” that the IDF soldiers would be met with a fierce battle at sea. Why, and whether this is really so, remains an open question, an open wound, really. But we also know that no Israeli soldier died, or was successfully kidnapped. And we know that only nine of the six hundred or more flotilla passengers were killed.
Chelser's piece also contains what is supposedly a grisly first-hand account from an Israeli commando.

High-profile lawyer (and super liberal) Alan Dershowitz calls out the United Nations for its strange obsession with Israel while turning a blind eye to real atrocities committed around the world:
 There is only one answer - because Israel has long been singled out for public scrutiny and opprobrium by the United Nations in particular and the international community in general.
This is not to say that Israel has always been blameless. It foolishly took the bait and allowed itself to be provoked into overreacting to a well planned provocation by so-called "humanitarians," who love only those who hate the Jewish state. The best proof that the flotilla had little to do with providing humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza and everything to do with breaking Israel's entirely lawful military blockade of a terrorist enclave, is Hamas' refusal to accept the food and medicine that Israel removed from the captured boats. The leaders of the flotilla admitted that their object was the same as Hamas' - not to provide humanitarian assistance to Gaza but rather to break the military blockade that is designed to keep rockets and other anti-personnel weapons from the hands of Hamas terrorists.
Israel should have been smarter in its efforts to enforce its blockade, but it did nothing illegal - and what it did do certainly doesn't warrant being singled out for the stigma of an international investigation.  
If the United Nations is to get into the business of ordering and conducting international investigations, it must establish neutral and objective criteria for when such an investigation is warranted. These criteria must be equally applicable to all nations, and not merely to the Jewish nation.
Primary among the criteria must be "the worst first." Under that rule, investigations must be conducted in the order of the seriousness of the offense, not the unpopularity of the offender...
The second neutral criteria should be the capacity of the accused nation to investigate itself and to be subjected to domestic scrutiny and criticism. Here too Israel fares must better than most. It has an activist Supreme Court, a free and aggressive press and a responsive political system. It doesn't need dictatorial tyrannies telling it how to defend its citizens.
For international law to have any credibility, it must be applied neutrally, objectively and fairly to all nations. Singling out Israel for special scrutiny and investigation, while far more serious offenders and offenses are ignored, is incompatible with the rule of law.
If Helen Thomas and her friends get their way, and Israel (the only functioning democracy in the Middle East where every citizen regardless of ethnicity or religion/non-religion enjoys individual rights) becomes ethnically cleansed, would all the turmoil and instability in the region instantly get resolved? Our gullible and lazy news media seems to think so.

Napolitano, Obama at Odds Over Arizona Licensing Law

Janet Napolitano, the placeholder at the Homeland Security Department, is as you know the former governor of Arizona. While she opposes Arizona Senate Bill 1070 and just about anything else involving actual border security, as governor she signed a law that gave her state the authority to suspend or terminate business licenses of those employers who hire illegal aliens. Federal law does not preempt states from imposing licensing restrictions on those business who hire undocumented workers.

Her new boss, however, wants the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out the measure, even though it was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, considered the most far-left appellate panel in the federal system. "The Obama administration apparently worries letting that law stand would leave in place a precedent that states have a legitimate role in enforcing immigration laws – a notion the administration fiercely opposes," FoxNews.com reports.

Monday, June 7, 2010

Helen Thomas, Racist

Over his long career (which is still going strong), talk show host Bob Grant used to say that liberals are the ultimate hypocrites. Liberals (esp. liberal journalists, although that may be redundant) are the ones always labeling others racists, when it's obvious what they're all about. One of them, Helen Thomas, resigned her position with the Hearst News Service after her "controversial comments" about Israel went viral (and viral is a good word for it) on the Internet. Her retirement came with a lame apology.

Many thoughtful bloggers have weighed in on this so-called journalist's loathesome comments. William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection had this to say:
The Islamist-Leftist Coalition repeatedly seeks to delegitimize Israel by claiming that Israelis are Europeans who should go back home. This racial component is key to portraying Israelis as European racists and denying the legitimacy of Israel through coalitions with "people of color."
But the portrayal of Israel as a European implant is false.
In the immediate aftermath of Israel's War of Independence (after the Arabs rejected the U.N. partition plan which would have created the first Palestinian state ever), approximately 850,000 Jews fled or were expelled from Arab and other Muslim countries, with the majority going to Israel.
What happened in 1947-1949 was an exchange of populations, with roughly equal numbers of non-Jewish Arabs leaving what now is Israel and the West Bank, and Jews leaving Arab and Muslim countries to go to Israel.
Those Jewish refugees from Muslim countries, and their descendants, now account for roughly half of Israel's population. Israel also went to great lengths to rescue the Ethiopian and Yemeni Jewish communities, among others.
William Katz, the editor of Urgent Agenda wrote, in part, the following:
Helen Thomas's disgusting call for Israeli Jews to "go home" to Poland and Germany, where the Holocaust took place, is even more sinister than it seems. Remarks like that are part of an international campaign to delegitimize the state of Israel by denying that Jews have a history there. But many of the same forces behind this campaign are also militantly anti-Christian. After all, if Jews have no history in Israel then, by definition, Christianity was never invented, since there could not have been a Jew named Jesus.
And Neo-Neocon added this:
Thomas’s reference to Germany and Poland as the original “home” of the Jews of Israel also expresses, among other things, her adherence to the false and misleading anti-Israel party line that Israel is composed of European Jews, which ignores the vast numbers of Jews from Arab countries who have settled there since its founding. And her particular mention of Poland as the Jewish “home” made me think of the complex yet ultimately sorrowful history of the Jews in that country...Where did that small number of surviving Polish Jews go? The answer, for quite a few, was “Israel”—the only country on earth that was/is bound to take them. But for the Helen Thomases of the world, the Jews must leave there as well—that is, if they are allowed to live at all.
Historian Victor Davis Hanson offers this perspective:
Of course, Thomas doesn’t care that nearly half the Israelis are of Middle Eastern heritage, that many Israelis can claim a family residence in “Palestine” longer than her own in the United States, that a Jewish presence in Israel dates to the dawn of recorded history, that many of Israel’s older generation were ethnically cleansed from cities like Baghdad and Cairo after the 1967 war, or that her views are in sync with the Hamas charter and Iranian promises. Note also that Thomas is not concerned with occupation in such places as Tibet, Cyprus, or Ossetia; such human-rights violations as Turkey’s treatment of the Kurds; such violence on the high seas as the North Korean attack, Iran’s hijacking of a British ship, or the pirates off Somalia. All these are mere abstractions — unless they involve the Jews.
Addendum: On the American Spectator website, Aaron Goldstein points out that "Never mind that Gaza and the West Bank were under Egyptian and Jordanian control from 1948 to 1967, respectively. Isn't it curious that no one was advocating Palestinian statehood while Egypt and Jordan were occupying those territories?"