If you want to know just how bizarre the Moslem clerical view of women is, consider this concise item from the Associated Press:   CAIRO, EGYPT — Al-Azhar University, one of Sunni Islam’s most prestigious institutions, ordered one of its clerics Monday to face a disciplinary panel after he issued a controversial decree allowing adults to breast-feed.   Ezzat Attiya had issued a fatwa, or religious edict, saying adult men could breast-feed from female work colleagues as a way to avoid breaking Islamic rules that forbid men and women from being alone together.   In Islamic tradition, breast-feeding establishes a … 
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The Middle East now faces a disaster that goes far wider than Gaza. Above it all stands the disaster of Iraq. The real significance of the Gaza debacle is that America and Britain have lost all influence in the Middle East and both the American and British leaders are totally discredited. Now the West’s worst fears are about to be realized. A militant Islamic mini-state will emerge from the chaos in the Gaza Strip. Let’s take it from the top.    Fatah, a secular party, was founded in the 1950’s. Now led by president Abbas, it accepted Israel’s right to exist … 
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Recently the poster advertisement at the bus stop on 8th and Pennsylvania Avenue, SE, a mile from the Capitol, had a spring make-over. Bye-bye went one of the mysterious city-wide tributes to Nancy Pelosi. (“Congratulations, Madame Speaker” read the slogan above the over-stretched visage of the underprivileged daughter of the late mayor of Baltimore. There was no attribution to the ad’s benefactor, a mystery pondered to no avail by Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, among others.). In its place appears a more ambiguous…tribute? “You’ve worked hard to where you’ve gotten,” reads the ad, which depicts a macho-preppy black male straddling … 
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My longtime friend Richard A. Viguerie issued a press release congratulating grassroots America for killing the Immigration Bill. I hope Richard is right. I fear he is not.  In all of the years I have been here I never have known a time when the establishment really wants something that the establishment cannot obtain it. And the establishment really wants this bill. Some critics point to the need for cloture, saying that proponents have too far to go before they can proceed with debate. Wrong. If the Republicans point to those amendments upon which they insist there be a vote, if … 
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I kissed a top FBI agent flush in the mouth while in my cups at Elaine’s last week, and lived to write about it. And it was a stolen kiss, at that. They’re the best kind, now that I’m old enough to see how corny is a prelude to a kiss at my age. I was on my way to the loo when I saw Elaine, the proprietor, talking to the agent. I was introduced and I used a variation of the old Mae West joke, “Is that a gun you’re carrying,  or do you like my girlfriend?” Then I grabbed … 
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An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.—George Bernard Shaw     Step back and look at the big picture. The farther you step back, the bigger the picture gets. Step back too far, and the world becomes a reductio ad absurdum, resulting in a kind of Buddhism. My departed friend Charles Bukowski wrote in one of his many poems, “We cannot acquire too much…there are laws we know nothing of.” What prompts this avenue of thought is a gloomy editorial not too long ago in Capitol Hill Blue by its founder, Doug Thompson, out of Washington, D.C. Every … 
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It is axiomatic that an uncontrolled influx of immigrants, as now exists at the Mexican Border, and legal immigration through presently accepted chain-immigration policies,  with no language requirements or assimilation into the culture, will change the status of the host nation to that of the immigrants. In other words, if America kept its doors open, as at present, the Third World would continue to send its millions to the United States until a balance were reached when America would join the Third World itself. Family reunification permits a newly naturalized citizen to bring members of his extended family to the host … 
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James Boswell writes in his Life of Johnson, “A gentleman who had been very unhappy in marriage, married immediately after his wife died: Johnson said, it was the triumph of hope over experience.” I know exactly what he meant. My marriage collapsed January 30. It was sudden and complete. I fought hard to save it and did all the things one expects of rejected men. I begged, pleaded and cajoled. I sulked, raged and sought refuge in drink. I became an object of pity by asking my friends the same question my partner refused to answer: Why am I the only … 
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Kent - To this beautiful New England village near the New York-Connecticut border, home to the great designer Oscar de la Renta and his wife Anette, both very old friends of mine. Two even older friends, Reinaldo and Carolina Herrera, were already there, making it a perfect house party. The de la Renta house is a jewel. Beautifully manicured rolling lawns, grand old trees and topiaries amid thick woods remind one of Oxfordshire, but the plumbing works, the furnishings are priceless and the staff impeccable. Lots of dogs, yes, but without moths stuck on the windows, no mud or urine stains … 
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On an Internet site called American Rhetoric, one can hear the famous State of the Union oration delivered by President Roosevelt on 6 January 1941 and known as “The Four Freedoms” speech.  A cynically minded pacifist might argue that the actual point of the speaker’s exertions, veiled though it is in patriotic badinage, is to persuade the Congress that “sacrifice means the payment of more money in taxes.”  I would argue that the President’s address is a good illustration of Remy de Gourmont’s mot to the effect that the mind of a civilised man is a museum of mutually contradictory fictions. … 
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