From the Jersusalem Post: “Israel once came close to securing the release of convicted Pentagon spy Jonathan Pollard, but the American security services pulled the plug on the move at the last moment, President Shimon Peres said on Wednesday. During a tour of Safed, the president said that before the last-minute change, it seemed that the US had finally agreed to free the spy. Peres was probably referring to 1998’s Wye River negotiations. He noted that Washington was being ‘surprisingly stubborn”’ on the Pollard issue, adding that nevertheless, Israel was doing everything possible in order to bring about his release.” Yes, … 
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On the occasion of John Podhoretz being appointed editor of Commentary magazine, which his father, Norman, edited for a quarter century or so, leftie writer Eric Alterman summed it up best: “Neocons excel at two things: helping to start dishonest, counterproductive, ruinous Middle East wars and getting their children cushy jobs, no matter how far the fruit has fallen from the proverbial tree ...” 
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On the twentieth anniversary of “Black Monday,” when approximately $1 trillion of “value” in a grievously over-valued stock market went up in smoke, the headlines (via Drudge) evoke an ominous déjà vu: “‘The fear is back,’’ said Thomas Roth, head of U.S. government bond trading in New York at Dresdner Kleinwort, one of the 21 primary securities dealers that trade directly with the Fed. ‘Where there’s smoke there’s fire, and people are just running back into Treasuries.’ ”... ‘Everybody is exposed,’’ said Jerry Webman, head of fixed- income in New York at OppenheimerFunds Inc., which manages about $220 billion.” … 
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The 50th anniversary of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is being celebrated by her partisans, and they are many – myself among them. Rand’s novel of what happens when “the men of the mind” go on strike is the second most widely-read text in the US, just below the Bible. To the dismay of her more enthusiastic admirers, this popularity doesn’t indicate total agreement with her “Objectivist” philosophy so much as it is a tribute to the author’s talent for telling a rip-roaring fasten-your-seatbelts story.   Atlas Shrugged is full of so many plot twists and turns, and some really cinematic scenes, … 
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OK sports fans. This is it. Everyone one of you can now be president.  All you have to do is kick a bearded Palestinian towelhead out of Lincoln Center and you’re in. Rudy Giuliani brags that he’s a more decisive leader than anyone else running for the top job because he kicked Yassir Arafat out of a United Nations- sponsored concert. “I didn’t hesitate,” says the warrior,  “I made decisions.” This is great stuff. Although there are persistent allegations that Giuliani is a habitual user of body waxing—as was Arafat—“America’s mayor” is proud to have done a Bollinger and thrown Arafat … 
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If you’ve ever been around when some sewage tank backed up and the cascade of merde flowed in rivers, it’s as good a time as any to be glad it was Hercules, not you, who got the task of cleaning up the Augean stables.  Trouble is, granting the malodorous sludge in which, ah, the “culture” has forced us all to swim these past forty years, it’d be nice should a god drop by to take it on, though this may be a labor only the real One can handle.  Alas, He seems disposed to let it keep doing, so to say, … 
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We are truly living in a Bizarro World: I’m watching MSNBC, where Pat Buchanan is defending Larry Craig, while obvious dyke Rachel Maddow is calling for his head. Craig, says Rachel, should be thrown out of the Senate—not, she hastens to add, for soliciting an undercover police officer for sex in a public bathroom, but for “hypocrisy.” So, if, say, Barney Frank had been caught in the same sort of foot-tappin’ stall-peeping behavior, then he wouldn’t suffer any such sanctions, because, you see, he is “out”—and votes the “right” way. Was there any compassion for the obviously conflicted and hurting Craig … 
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Something interesting happened as I was waiting on Sunday for a train at Penn Station in Manhattan. The experience was so amusing and so utterly revealing that I still can’t dislodge it from my mind. A lady was sitting across from me in the waiting room reading what turned out to be a copy of Norman Podhoretz’s latest ravings on the subject of Islamofascism. My fellow-traveler looked like someone in her late fifties, was recognizably Jewish, and given the size of the baubles on her bejeweled fingers, seems to have benefited from her husband’s decision to trade on the margins. … 
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Since it was being put to work as such wonderful agitprop for the Ziocons, aka the “neocons”, I had assumed that “the clash of civilizations” mania springing from Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington’s 1996 book of the same name, was a “neocon” concept. My conclusion was admittedly a jump, but it seemed self-evident. After all, the phrase was first used by Princeton Professor Bernard Lewis in 1990 in the Atlantic Monthly article, “The Roots of Muslim Rage”. Lewis was to move on and became “perhaps the most significant intellectual influence behind the invasion of Iraq” and a recipient of the Irving Kristol … 
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New York - Mayor Michael Bloomberg is as gruesome a fellow as they come. Mind you, he’s not as bad as Governor Eliot Spitzer, but then not every public official is a habitual body waxer. These men share, alas, an affinity for foul play, hypocrisy and cowardice, among other virtues. No sooner did Spitzer win the governorship, than he stuck the tax rotweilers on the states’s Majority Leader because the latter wouldn’t play ball. When President Nixon tried to do that he lost his job. Spitzer hasn’t even been censured. Bloomberg, in the meantime, calls himself America’s greenest mayor, but he’s … 
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