Welcome to Minnesota's very own taxpayer-funded compulsory prayer Madrassa.

Recently, I wrote about Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA), a K-8 charter school in Inver Grove Heights. Charter schools are public schools and by law must not endorse or promote religion.

Evidence suggests, however, that TIZA is an Islamic school, funded by Minnesota taxpayers.

TIZA has many characteristics that suggest a religious school. It shares the headquarters building of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, whose mission is "establishing Islam in Minnesota." The building also houses a mosque. TIZA's executive director, Asad Zaman, is a Muslim imam, or religious leader, and its sponsor is an organization called Islamic Relief.

Students pray daily, the cafeteria serves halal food - permissible under Islamic law -- and "Islamic Studies" is offered at the end of the school day.

Zaman maintains that TIZA is not a religious school. He declined, however, to allow me to visit the school to see for myself, "due to the hectic schedule for statewide testing." But after I e-mailed him that the Minnesota Department of Education had told me that testing would not begin for several weeks, Zaman did not respond -- even to urgent calls and e-mails seeking comment before my first column on TIZA.

Now, however, an eyewitness has stepped forward. Amanda Getz of Bloomington is a substitute teacher.

...

"The prayer I saw was not voluntary," Getz said. "The kids were corralled by adults and required to go to the assembly where prayer occurred."

Read the whole thing.

Captain Ed has a good piece explaining the difference between voucher systems which permit taxpayer-refunded money to be used for parochial education, and an explicitly religious school directly funded by the state itself.

If the former, which isn't really "state" funding of religious education, gets the left's panties in such an awful bunch, how can it be that the latter, which is in fact a clear comingling of mosque and state, causes them no upset whatsoever?

Perhaps it's that they're not so much against the state sponsorship of religion, but state sponsorship of one particular religion and only that religion.

Thanks to Alice H.

Posted by: Ace at 09:47 AM | Comments (44)
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Yes, Hitler tried "Zionist policies" and failed at them.

Meanwhile, over at BarackObama.com, which appears to be the official campaign site and is paid for by "Obama for America, a "community blog" makes the following nuanced points:

Obamanism is the cure for Clintonitis that has devastated America and I hope Jews all over US rally around Obama and support him to win both the nomination and the Presidency because after he wins, he would help the Jews and Israel as well as settle the Middle East problems.

However, if Jews betray Obama and he loses, Africans worldwide would consider it a betrayal to the whole African people and will never forgive world Jewry.

In retaliation, (eye for eye, remember!) Africa would consider expelling all Jews from Africa who have been mining African Gold and Diamond and enriching themselves for many centuries.

It was African gold and diamond that built international finance, trade and banking that the Jews (Rothschild, Warbug, Rockefeller and others) dominate.

It was African gold and diamond that built Jewish banks and wealth worldwide.

Thousands of years ago, when Jews were starving and nearly perished in Palestine, they took refuge in Egypt, Africa.

If Egypt and Africa did not feed the Jews, perhaps there would be no Jews today.

Jews also took all Egyptian and African science, technology and religious knowledge that have helped them to develop themselves and to get to where they are today: on top of most of the industries and corporations all over the world.

Jews owe Africa and Africans everything they have today because if Africa did not shelter them when they were homeless and starving, they would not be here today.

If Africa did not give them their religion, Judaism and science and technology of the ancient astronaut Anunnaki's gods, they probably would have not prospered.

If Jews betray Africans by betraying Obama, there would be grave consequences that would shake the foundation of Earth.

Let Jews remember who their best friend is!

"Best friend" of the Jews -- yes, indeed, Jews, do not forget who your "best friend" is. You know, he's the guy maligning you and threatening you. A bosom chum.

That reference to "ancient astronaut Anunnaki's gods" may seem to tip this as a joke, but I don't think so. Louis Farrakhan preaches that the Bible is much concerned with silver spaceships:

The Honorable Elijah Muhammad told us of a giant Motherplane that is made like the universe, spheres within spheres. White people call them unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Ezekiel, in the Old Testament, saw a wheel that looked like a cloud by day but a pillar of fire by night. The Hon. Elijah Muhammad said that that wheel was built on the island of Nippon, which is now called Japan, by some of the original scientists. It took 15 billion dollars in gold at that time to build it. It is made of the toughest steel. America does not yet know the composition of the steel used to make an instrument like it. It is a circular plane, and the Bible says that it never makes turns. Because of its circular nature it can stop and travel in all directions at speeds of thousands of miles per hour. He said there are 1,500 small wheels in this mother wheel which is a half mile by a half mile (800 by 800 m). This Mother Wheel is like a small human built planet. Each one of these small planes carry three bombs.

This is I guess pure guilt by association. It's unlikely that anyone at the website knows about this antisemitic rant with its lunatic references to spacemen and alien tech.

I point it out not to indict Obama per se but to make the general point that the left fancies itself as crusaders for tolerance, but there is one minority it doesn't mind seeing bashed: Jews, of course. The dirty little secret that the MSM hushes up is that antisemitism is rampant on the left, and the left winks at it, because the left considers such folks political allies and many on the left are in fact "anti-Zionist," by which we mean just plain old Jew-hatin', themselves.

Thus endless scrutiny of the right for racist "code words" while simply ignoring overt, in-your-face, non-"code word" antisemitism from the left.

Neither of these jokers, the KosKid nor the Farrakhanite, are prominent, of course. They're nobodies. But they are very representative nobodies -- screeds like this pop up almost daily -- and no one ever seems to take the left to task when it's trading in one of the most vile and ancient forms of bigotry there is. Suddenly a bit of ethnic hatred is "understandable" in "context."

Hell, Obama's big national security adviser blames the Jews in New York and Miami for warmongering and preventing peace in the Middle East.

Does anyone take note of that? Nope. Just rightwing blogs. The left and the MSM (but I repeat myself) apparently find that sort of statement either entirely unobjectionable or at least forgivable... "in context," of course.

Thanks to Kent for that.

A Scrubbery! Well, the blog post has been zapped. Of course, I took screenshots yesterday and Double Plus Undead took more today. He's uploading them now. I'll link the screenshots when he's got them up.

Up Now: Screencaps of the zapped post at DoublePlusUndead.

Zapping it isn't enough. How about posting it, guys, and specifically repudiating and condemning it?

But Obama doesn't like doing that. He likes playing a double game, Arafat-like, of making vague declarations "distancing" himself from this sort of crap while not being too sharp in his condemnation -- he doesn't want to alienate his nuttier supporters.

Like his pastor, for example.

And speaking of Obama's double-game: Here archliberal Joel Klein admits that Obama (and Hillary) are promising to bug out of Iraq while secretly planning on staying.

For those who asked why Obama's real politics, as opposed to his record and rhetoric, matter, there you go. A big Obama booster is admitting Obama is lying to one group of voters.

Well, is Klein right? Is Obama serious about a catastrophic bug out or does he really intend to fight Al Qaeda in Iraq? We don't know, do we?

Because he's not really saying.

That's where his genuine, real political make-up comes in.

And it's my guess that Klein is wrong, and that Obama believes the typical leftist position, that terrorism is only due to Zionist and Western imperialism and that if we just correct our own behavior the flowers of peace will bloom.

Still, it's interesting that the nicest thing Klein can say about his boy's Iraq policy is that he's lying to us.

Thanks to CJ for that.

Posted by: Ace at 07:03 AM | Comments (105)
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Red baiting now? Can I sink any lower?

Probably.

I don't consider this particularly low, though. Barack Obama has been swimming in a sea of left radicalism all his life, from his communist dad to his firebrand America-hating preacher to his terrorist buddy Bill Ayers.

Barack Obama is very vague about his actual politics and few have bothered asking. Now comes a well-nigh conclusive case that the "Frank" referred to in Dreams From My Father is in fact Frank Marshall Davis, a noted member of the Communist Party USA.

Horne, a history professor at the University of Houston, noted that Davis, who moved to Honolulu from Kansas in 1948 "at the suggestion of his good friend Paul Robeson," came into contact with Barack Obama and his family and became the young man's mentor, influencing Obama's sense of identity and career moves. Robeson, of course, was the well-known black actor and singer who served as a member of the CPUSA and apologist for the old Soviet Union. Davis had known Robeson from his time in Chicago.

As Horne describes it, Davis "befriended" a "Euro-American family" that had "migrated to Honolulu from Kansas and a young woman from this family eventually had a child with a young student from Kenya East Africa who goes by the name of Barack Obama, who retracing the steps of Davis eventually decamped to Chicago."

...

Dr. Kathryn Takara, a professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who also confirms that Davis is the "Frank" in Obama's book, did her dissertation on Davis and spent much time with him between 1972 until he passed away in 1987.

If it's relevant that some Republicans have belonged to the Federalist Society -- or even done as little as show up for the debates they host -- how can it not be relevant that Barack Obama's political education, paternal, "spiritual," and now academic as well, is all straight out of Karl Marx?

Obama's probably not a communist. But he's consistently sought the hard left for his political mentors. Politics, as they say, is the art of the possible, and so far the possible has been merely racking up the most liberal voting record in the US Senate. But his real impulses and his real agenda seem to be more to the left of even that record.

Thanks to Checkers McBamp.

And His Wife, Of Course: Nom de Blog points out Michelle Obama's pie analogy, made in her recent North Carolina trip:

Most Americans, [Michelle Obama] said, don't want much.

"They don't want the whole pie," she told the women. "There are some who do, but most Americans feel blessed just being able to thrive a little bit. But that is becoming even more out of reach."

After law school, she and Barack were beset by loans they'd still be paying had her husband not written two best-sellers, "The Audacity of Hope" and "Dreams From My Father."

Those debts early in their marriage, she said, equips her husband to better understand the problems many Americans face.

Should she become first lady, she said she'd focus on family issues.

"If we don't wake up as a nation with a new kind of leadership...for how we want this country to work, then we won't get universal health care," she said.

"The truth is, in order to get things like universal health care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more."

A choice nugget there is Michelle Obama's implication that she and Obama's law school debts were somehow unfair. Presumably her notion of a "revamped education system" includes the idea of free higher education, to be paid for by... well, by the great bulk of the country which isn't pursuing advanced degrees but is instead in the workforce providing for their families.

I'm defensive about this because I have internalized it since childhood that pointing out red connections = McCarthyism = badwrong. But while I've internalized that, I'm not finding it especially plausible as I think about it.

Why shouldn't we inquire about a presidential candidate's likely hidden agenda? Is it just the communist/socialist agenda that's specially protected?

The man is running on judgment. I don't trust his and there's good reason to not trust it. And he's running on conveniently-vague "change." I'd sort of like to know what sorts of change he's actually thinking of.

It's one thing to say a Hollywood screenwriter's politics are irrelevant to his capacity to work in the field of his choosing. I find it hard to accept that a politician's politics are similarly irrelevant to his fitness for the office of President of the United States.

By Slublog. The Russian motto is "Yes, we can."

Posted by: Ace at 05:50 AM | Comments (125)
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No, not McCain's spit-second misspoken word, immediately corrected.

I mean Obama confusing Iraq and Iran.

U.S. AMBASSADOR TO IRAQ RYAN CROCKER: Senator, as I said in my statement, we have no problem with a good, constructive relationship between Iran and Iraq. The problem is with the Iranian strategy of backing extremist militia groups and sending in weapons and munitions that are used against Iraqis and against our own forces.

OBAMA: Do we feel confident that the Iraqi government is directing these -- this aid to these special groups?

Do we feel confident about that, or do we think that they're just tacitly tolerating it? Do you have some sense of that?

ZOMFG!!! ZOMFG!!! He's too stupid to tell the difference between Iraq and Iran!!! And he never even corrected himself!!

EPIC WIN!!! EPIC WIN!!111!!!

HE MUST RESIGN HIS CANDIDACY FOR PRESIDENT IMMEDIATELY!1!1!!

Anyone think Osama's -- oops, I mean Obama's; sometimes people accidentally say or write the wrong word in a pair of similar and closely-connected words -- gaffe will get the attention that McCain's own ZOMFG!! EPIC WIN!!11 EPIC WIN!!11!!! quarter-second "gaffe" is getting?

Here's the vid. The Obama boner -- or "Oboner," as I will so cleverly term his latest in a long line of miscues in contemporaneous speaking -- occurs at 1:12-1:14.

Thanks to Liberrocky for the "Oboner."

Incidentally, in responding to an Alice H. tip today, I wrote "Thanks Alas" rather than "Thanks Alice."

Good thing I'm not running for president, or else the MSM and Media Matters (but I repeat myself) would find that an unforgivable mistake as well.

How This Happens: Perhaps this is obvious -- or should be -- but I'll explain it to the MSM, because I was just talking about this phenomenon recently-- the typo, typed or actually spoken, of a rhyme or similar world substituted for the right one.

I know nothing about brain functions except how my own works. And how others' work, too, because they say this is exactly what accounts for it.

Your brain has a lot of routine-function processing power. Let's call this your Stupid Brain. Your Stupid Brain is good for mundane tasks, so long as they're simple and do not not require much minding from your smart brain, or Active Brain.

When you write or speak quickly, your Active Brain is actually putting sentences and thoughts together. But your Active Brain is actually usually 1 to 2 seconds and maybe five to ten words ahead of your Stupid Brain. When your Active Brain figures out what it wants to say, it dumps the thought to the Stupid Brain and trusts the Stupid Brain to execute its orders properly. So while you're actually speaking or writing, your Active Brain has actually moved on further into the sentence or paragraph and isn't actively engaged anymore in the actual process of communication.

Actual communication of thoughts is left to the Stupid Brain.

Thus a "Thanks Alice" -- a perfectly simple executable communication order from the Active Brain -- gets garbled as "Thanks Alas" by the Stupid Brain actually doing the typing as the Active Brain has already moved on to more interesting thoughts (in this case, porn, most likely).

McCain was already on the next thought with his Active Brain as his Stupid Brain fumbled "Sunni" and went for the closely related and basically similar word "Shiite." Ditto Obama asking whether or not the "Iraqi government" funds special terrorist groups attacking itself -- his brain had moved on ahead in the sentence leaving his Stupid Brain to parse between Iraqi and Iranian.

This crap is so obvious I'm disgusted I have to explain it. Everyone in the MSM knows this. They make their jobs writing and they know how brain-fart typos occur. They know they mean to write "conscious" but somehow the fingers trip out the word "conscience" anyhow, or vice versa.

Or even, for me, "concussion" on occasion. The Stupid Brain does the best it can, after all.

And yet here were are.

I wrote a long time ago that the media attempts to portray every single Republican candidate as Stupid, Crazy, Evil, or Out of Touch (Old) or combinations thereof. Every single one.

Eisenhower: Stupid, Out of Touch (Old)

Nixon: Crazy and Evil

Ford: Stupid, Out of Touch

Reagan: Crazy, Stupid, Evil and Out of Touch (Old) (the first recorded four-fer! -- but then Reagan broke the mold, didn't he?)

Bush the Elder: Out of Touch (Old), mildly Stupid

Dole: Out of Touch (Old)

Bush the Younger: Crazy, Stupid, and either Evil or Out of Touch depending on whether you believe his evil actions are by conscious design or due his being puppetted by Cheney and Rove

And now it begins with McCain. Opening gambit: Out of Touch (Old), with band striking up the first cautious notes of "Crazy" and "Stupid" as well.

They've invested too heavily in the St. John myth to call him Evil. At least at the moment.

But give them time.

Their Stupid Brains are always at work.

Posted by: Ace at 05:20 PM | Comments (76)
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I held off on this all day, but if the Big A deems it newsworthy, I guess it is.

I guess my take is contrarian. Not about punishing these thuggish girls pretty severely. Obviously they deserve that. Do a man's crime, do a man's time. That's what Berreta said, and he murdered his wife and got away with it, but that's another issue.

But... this is being portrayed as some sick New Jack Crime, the pack beating only for the purpose of being posted on YouTube. Even as this juicy Brave New Online World angle is being pushed, the MSM admits... mostly it was motivated by typical "you dissed me" crap (the dissing occurred on a MySpace page, of course).

So it's not really true that the beating was motivated entirely, or even mostly, by a desire to become an Internet star. It was motivated by the same old nonsense that's been motivating school violence since they had 1) schools and 2) violence.

The internet thing? An added bonus, at most, and sure, an attempt to become a star via a dubious path. But that doesn't seem to be the real motivation here. Public humiliation is and always has been a big part of the beat-down, hasn't it?

The one thing about truly public humiliation -- beating someone up in front of a live crowd -- is that the situation tends to limit the amount of damage that can be inflicted. Someone, hopefully, will eventually step in to stop the beating. In this sort of ambush situation, with look-outs making sure no one will interrupt a group beating, there's nothing to stop it except the perps' own consciences. And yet they'll still reap their public humiliation, too.

On the other hand, there is something positive to be said about thugs videotaping their own crimes, too.

Posted by: Ace at 04:36 PM | Comments (113)
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See what happens when an improv group turns a typical Little League baseball game into a major sporting event complete with mascots, fans, Jumbotron, and even an appearance by the Goodyear blimp. Best of all, the players and their parents have no clue what is going on.

Best Game Ever from ImprovEverywhere on Vimeo.

Posted by: Open Blog at 03:53 PM | Comments (22)
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The Mets held an internet poll to determine their new 8th inning song.

Pranksters, especially from Fark.com, voted in massive numbers for the rickroll, Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up. (That link isn't a rickroll, by the way, that's an article about the situation.)

Now the Mets are saying, of course, that internet voting would only help choose the song.

Everyone knows that internet voting is easily rigged by well-motivated morons with nothing but excess time and short breaks between downloading porn.

Thanks to DaveR.

Posted by: Ace at 02:16 PM | Comments (22)
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I'm sure this is a really bad idea.

The quintet will perform in public for the first time in 14 years when they appear on U.S. morning show Today on May 4, but the group's first full show will take place at New York radio station Z100's annual Zootopia concert two weeks later.

You know what one of the few good things about this stage of my life is?

I don't know anything about these dorks and I never did.

Of course, the bad thing is, even dead broke they probably have more money than me.

That guy on the right is giving Keith Richards a run for his money. He'll probably wind up being the New Kid That Can't Be Killed By Conventional Weapons.

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 01:28 PM | Comments (38)
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Worthies all, even the people I never heard of, which, to be honest, was most of them.

But 1 and 2? Awful.

David Cross is on the list. I hate him, kinda-sorta, for generally being a prick and his smug self-regard which estimates himself to be be far funnier than he is. (Though, concededly, he is funny -- just not on the level he seems to believe he is.)

But his nutjob friends hate him for selling out, whatever the fuck that is, by appearing in Alvin in the Chimpmunks. He actually had to apologize to these idiots and explain the reason for taking the part (um, he wanted to buy a nice house in upstate NY; I think that can be summed up as simply "for the money").

He's a fucking clown, people. Clowns don't sell out, they just get gigs. If he weren't halfway decent at clowing he'd be working fucking birthday parties, morons.

Another Dick I Never Heard of: Some jerkoff I never heard of says he can help women love their own flawed bodies, but behind the scenes he reduces them to tears. (Caution: Boobies at next click, and not really super-nice boobies either.)

Posted by: Ace at 12:31 PM | Comments (67)
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He also accuses J-Mac of using laser-guided bombs back in 'Nam, which, if true, would mean that John McCain is in fact industrialist genius Tony Stark.

In the Charleston Gazette Sunday, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-WV, who has endorsed Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., said that Sen. John McCain “has a temper” and, according to the story, “believes McCain has become insensitive to many human issues.

“McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they [the missiles] get to the ground? He doesn’t know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues.”

He's now apologized for his remarks, claiming "of course" he "respects" McCain's "honorable" service.

Apart from that bit about not caring about murdering people, of course. I guess he respects all the other callous murderers in the AF and Navy aviation corps just as much.

Supportin' the troops, supportin' the troops.

If you stay in school, you'll do well; if you don't, you'll end up Senator Jay Rockefeller, semi-retarded inbred-WASP in the one of the world's cushiest Daddy-Got-Me jobs.

LauraW... writes:

"Jay, I bet you can't say anything so outlandish and retarded that it actually causes conservatives to defend McCain."

--"You're ON."

Yep.

Posted by: Ace at 10:57 AM | Comments (143)
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