Statement from Florida Representative Allen West:

President Obama is …very adept at promulgating deceptive language masquerading as policy, actually just insidious political gimmickry. This “tax policy” is an example as well as today’s speech on his “energy policy” shall be. Here is the bottom line, last night it took 70 dollars to fill the tank of my 2008 H3 Hummer…

Just how much more are Americans supposed to put up with?

Satan-slayer.

A community in Maryland has suspended negotiations over a sister-city agreement with Beit Shemesh following violence in the Israeli city against women by haredi Orthodox residents.

Montgomery County, which is home to a large Jewish population, was at the end of the process to ink the sister-city arrangement with the Jerusalem suburb when disturbances by haredim outside a Modern Orthodox girls’ school and other assaults on women in the area were reported internationally.

Negotiations over a sister-city relationship began in 2007, according to the Washington Post.

Gevalt. Who knew that UD‘s own Montgomery County, Maryland, was after linking arms with the most woman-phobic city this side of Kunduz!

Think of the sister-city events she’ll miss because of the suspension of negotiations: Stoning women wearing half-sleeves, forcing women to sit in the back of buses, erasing images of women from public signage, making women worship behind blind walls, AND (UD was looking forward to this most of all) spitting on eight-year-old girls as they walk to school and calling them stinking whores! Where the hell else but in UD‘s almost-sister-city can you get fun like that? Subsidized by the government?

From Andrew Sullivan:

Oklahoma legislators introduced a bill yesterday that says “the life of each human being begins at conception.” But state Sen. Constance Johnson, a Democrat, decided that the bill, SB 1433, didn’t go far enough to protect unborn children. Johnson added an amendment to the bill, posted online by The Lost Ogle, that says life actually begins at ejaculation: “However, any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child.”

From Virginia:

Irked by abortion bill, Va. senator adds rectal exams for men

The state Senate this afternoon gave preliminary approval for legislation that would require pregnant women to undergo ultrasound imaging before an abortion, but not before rejecting a Democratic senator’s attempt to add what she described as “a little gender equity” to the bill. Democrat Janet Howell of Fairfax County proposed requiring men to undergo a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before getting prescriptions for erectile dysfunction drugs such as Viagra. “This is a matter of basic fairness,” Howell said…. “It’s requiring [women] to have unnecessary medical procedures, it’s adding to the cost and it’s opening them up for emotional blackmail,” she said on the Senate floor today.

And now Mississippi:

Mississippi State Rep. Steve Holland, a Democrat, introduced a bill in the state’s lower chamber calling for the part of the Gulf of Mexico that borders his state to be renamed the “Gulf of America.” A local Latino GOP organization called on Holland to withdraw the measure. “If this bill passes the legislature and is signed into law, perhaps it is time to rename the Mississippi River,” wrote Bob Quasius, Café Con Leche’s president, in the letter. “After all, sharing a name with a state that wants to rewrite maps out of disdain for Mexicans would be a disgrace to the rest of the nation.”

Tunisians rally to hold back the Salafist tide.

Of course women were at the forefront of this protest, since they have the most to lose. Salafists have already occupied a university, demanding an end to its no-burqa policy (they were eventually made to leave).

Among them, many Muslims.

Israel’s haredim.

Longtime readers may recall UD‘s encounter two summers ago with a Las Vegas law firm or company or whatever they were (they don’t seem to exist, much, anymore).

The guy who did her was Coons.

… who came to her door two summers ago with legal papers. But life is strange.

[Yocheved] Horowitz views the campaign in Beit Shemesh by the extremist Sicarii, who made headlines last week after grown men spat at an 8-year-old girl whom they believed was not dressed modestly enough, as yet another misinterpretation of the Torah. “The Sicarii are insane …”

A haredi woman who sat in the front of a gender-segregated bus in Israel makes the distinction between religious and insane – a distinction without which no state can function.

France isn’t quite there yet, if we are to go by the comments of a judge who, on sentencing a man to six months in prison (the man called his wife’s midwife a rapist, damaged the delivery room in a rage, and then punched the midwife when she moved aside a bit of his wife’s burqa to make her more comfortable), said:

Your religious values are not superior to the laws of the republic.

Non, non, non. Sociopathic violence is not any kind of religious. It is insane.

… under the heading democracy (along with commentary about the burqa, you can, when you click on this category, read all of UD‘s posts about the subject at hand – violent fanatics, and their threat to Israeli democracy) has jumped to the mainstream American media.

All countries contain cults of demented and dangerous people. Some countries, with one thing and another, cultivate such cults. In the case of Israel, a vague sense of these people being authentic Jews is in play. (“Because Israel was conceived as a Jewish state, the Israeli citizen has been exceptionally compliant to the demands of groups claiming to champion the continuity of that people…”) Political expediency – coalition building – is also in play. In the Israeli population, fear is no doubt a factor. The lunatic haredi core is capable of enormous violence.

Whatever the toxic brew, Israel has ignored its fanatics to the point where it has created a threat to the nation. Now everyone is paying attention.

Havel’s anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women’s rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.

Neil Clark, The Guardian.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

With a millionaire paying burqa fines in Europe, and a consortium of Israeli millionaires proposing to pay for private buses in which women will be forced to enter by a back door and to sit in the back, an intriguing new market in oppression seems to be opening up.

In the burqa model, governments stand to make huge sums; the Israeli model is pure free market capitalism.

Crucial to the success of both models is the enforcement of laws against the oppression of women, as well as a continued enthusiasm for crushing women.

The future looks bright.

…. writes Katha Pollitt in an essay today about Christopher Hitchens.

And yet I’ll take Hitchens’ seriousness about women’s persecution over Pollitt’s thoughtless nonchalance any day. In an essay attacking a number of European countries for banning the burqa, Pollitt writes “religion is what people make of it.”

Uh, no. As Hitchens points out, “Mormons may not have polygamous marriage, female circumcision is a federal crime in this country, and in some states Christian Scientists face prosecution if they neglect their children by denying them medical care.” Turns out there’s a state involved here too; religion (as the haredim of Israel are beginning to notice) is not only what you make of it, but what you and the state make of it.

Had Pollitt bothered to do the most basic kinds of reading and thinking, she’d perhaps have concluded something like this:

[W]e have no assurance that Muslim women put on the burqa or don the veil as a matter of their own choice. A huge amount of evidence goes the other way. Mothers, wives, and daughters have been threatened with acid in the face, or honor-killing, or vicious beating, if they do not adopt the humiliating outer clothing that is mandated by their menfolk. This is why, in many Muslim societies, such as Tunisia and Turkey, the shrouded look is illegal in government buildings, schools, and universities.

Israel: The madness metastasizes.