It’s Saturday, September 24th, 2011….and here’s the Gouge!

First up, peace personified!

Abbas accuses Israel of ethnic cleansing

Mahmoud Abbas delivers fiery anti-Israel speech at UN, accuses Jewish state of ethnically cleansing east Jerusalem; FM Lieberman walks out during address, blasts Palestinian leader’s ‘speech of incitement’

“They talk to us about the Jewish state, but I respond to them with a final answer: We shall not recognize a Jewish state,” Abbas said in a meeting with some 200 senior representatives of the Palestinian community in the US, shortly before taking the podium and delivering a speech at the United Nations General Assembly….

….Meanwhile, Hamas said Friday that Palestinians should liberate their land, not beg for recognition at the United Nations, firmly rejecting President Abbas’ quest for statehood. Speaking hours before Abbas was due to ask formally that the UN recognize a Palestinian state, senior Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said this would not bring independence. “Our Palestinian people do not beg for a state. …States are not built upon UN resolutions. States liberate their land and establish their entities,” Haniyeh said.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4126571,00.html

More telling still, as James Taranto relates, the “Palestinian” leaders view the welfare and lives of their own people with only slightly less contempt than they show for Israelis:

You DO Have To Live Like A Refugee

How seriously should one take the Palestinian Authority’s request for the U.N. to grant statehood without peace with Israel? Not very, we’d say, especially after reading this piece in the Daily Star of Beirut, Lebanon:

Palestinian refugees will not become citizens of a new Palestinian state, according to Palestine’s ambassador to Lebanon.

From behind a desk topped by a miniature model of Palestine’s hoped-for blue United Nations chair, Ambassador Abdullah Abdullah spoke to The Daily Star Wednesday about Palestine’s upcoming bid for U.N. statehood.

The ambassador unequivocally says that Palestinian refugees would not become citizens of the sought for U.N.-recognized Palestinian state, an issue that has been much discussed. “They are Palestinians, that’s their identity,” he says. “But . . . they are not automatically citizens.”

This would not only apply to refugees in countries such as Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and Jordan or the other 132 countries where Abdullah says Palestinians reside. Abdullah said that “even Palestinian refugees who are living in [refugee camps] inside the [Palestinian] state, they are still refugees. They will not be considered citizens.”

In other words, the statehood drive is a fraud. Its purpose is not to resolve the conflict but to keep it alive. Why does America continue giving money to these hucksters?

Or hesitate even for an instant in our once-unwavering support for Israel?!?  To mangle the words of the great Winston Churchill, Israel may well be the worst country in the Middle East….except for all the others!

In a related item:

Ahmadinejad: It’s Not Too Late To Fix U.S.-Iran Relations

And we know just the team….

….dumb enough to do it….and with no strings attached!

Next up, the Progressivism and its inevitable Thought Police march on:

Texas School Punishes Boy for Opposing Homosexuality

An honors student in Fort Worth, Texas, was sent to the principal’s office and punished for telling a classmate that he believes homosexuality is wrong. Holly Pope said she was “absolutely stunned” when she received a telephone call from an assistant principal at Western Hills High School informing her that her son, Dakota Ary, had been sent to in-school suspension.

Dakota was in a German class at the high school when the conversation shifted to religion and homosexuality in Germany. At some point during the conversation, he turned to a friend and said that he was a Christian and “being a homosexual is wrong.” “It wasn’t directed to anyone except my friend who was sitting behind me,” Dakota told Fox. “I guess [the teacher] heard me. He started yelling. He told me he was going to write me an infraction and send me to the office.”

Dakota was sentenced to one day in-school suspension – and two days of full suspension. His mother was flabbergasted, noting that her son had a spotless record, was an honor student, volunteered at his church and played on the school football team.

Officials at the high school did not return calls for comment. However, the Fort Worth Independent School District issued a statement that read: “As a matter of course, Fort Worth ISD does not comment on specific employee or student-related issues. Suffice it to say that we are following district policy in our review of the circumstances and any resolution will likewise be in accordance with district policy.”

After a meeting with Pope and her attorney, the school rescinded the two-day suspension so Dakota would be allowed to play in an upcoming football game. “They’ve righted all the wrongs,” said Matt Krause, an attorney with the Liberty Counsel. “This should have no lasting effect on his academic or personal record going forward.” Pope contacted the Liberty Counsel immediately after her son was punished.

“I told the school that he should never have been suspended for exercising his Constitutional rights,” Krause told Fox News Radio. “The principal is sincere in trying to do the right thing and hopefully they will tell the teacher, ‘Do not do that anymore.’ He won’t be pushing his agenda.”

Krause called the incident “mind blowing” and said the teacher had frequently brought homosexuality into ninth grade classroom discussions. “There has been a history with this teacher in the class regarding homosexual topics,” Krause said. “The teacher had posted a picture of two men kissing on a wall that offended some of the students.” Krause said the picture was posted on the teacher’s “world wall.” “He told the students this is happening all over the world and you need to accept the fact that homosexuality is just part of our culture now,” Krause said.

The school district would not comment on why a teacher was discussing homosexuality in a ninth grade German class.

We don’t know what’s worse; that the teacher’s still employed….or that the school administration didn’t nip this obvious obscenity in the bud.

Wake up and smell the coffee America; the Left is about as interested in the Constitution in general, and the Bill of Rights in particular, as the “Palestinians” are in peace.  Liberals hold one truth to be self-evident: we need them in control; we WANT them in control….and if we don’t, we’re ignorant Neanderthals that don’t know what’s good for us!

And since we’re on the subject of enough is enough….

Texas Prisons End Special Last Meals for Inmates After ‘Ridiculous’ Request

Way to spoil it for everybody else, douche pump.

For more on the subject of capital punishment, here’s the latest from Jonah Goldberg:

Why Death Penalty Opponents Can’t Win

 On Wednesday, two men were lawfully executed. Both insisted they were innocent. If you’ve been watching the news or following Kim Kardashian’s tweets, you’ve likely heard of one of these men, Troy Davis.

The other death penalty “victim,” Lawrence Russell Brewer, was until this week the more significant convicted murderer. Brewer was one of the racist goons who infamously tied James Byrd to the back of their truck and dragged him to death in Texas. The case became a touchstone in the 2000 presidential race because then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush had refused to sign a “hate crimes” law. The NAACP ran a reprehensible ad during the presidential election trying to insinuate that Bush somehow shared responsibility for the act.

Regardless, Brewer claimed that he was “innocent” because one of his buddies had cut Byrd’s throat before they dragged his body around. Forensic evidence directly contradicted this. Brewer’s own statements didn’t help either. Such as, “As far as any regrets, no, I have no regrets. … I’d do it all over again, to tell you the truth.”

Brewer, festooned with tattoos depicting KKK symbols and burning crosses, was “not a sympathetic person” in the words of Gloria Rubac of the Texas Death Penalty Abolition Movement.

Which is why we didn’t hear much about him this week. Instead, we heard a great deal about Davis. Many people insist Davis was innocent or that there was “too much doubt” about his guilt to proceed with the execution. Many judges and public officials disagreed, including all nine members of the Supreme Court, who briefly stayed the execution Wednesday night, only to let it proceed hours later. (Think about it: what does it tell you when Justices Sotomayor, Ginsburg, Kagan and Breyer all passed on the opportunity to impose their enlightened personal views on Georgia’s backward criminal justice system?!?)

There are many sincere and decent people — on both sides of the ideological spectrum — who are opposed to the death penalty. I consider it an honorable position, even though I disagree with it. I am 100 percent in favor of lawfully executing people who deserve the death penalty and 100 percent opposed to killing people who do not deserve it.

When I say that, many death penalty opponents angrily respond that I’m missing the point. You can never be certain! Troy Davis proves that! But he proves no such thing. At best, his case proves that you can’t be certain about Davis. (No….no; as Ann Coulter’s brilliant piece pointed out, one can only be uncertain about Davis if one refuses to recognize the facts!)  You most certainly can be certain about other murderers. If the horrible happens and we learn that Davis really was not guilty, that will be a heart-wrenching revelation. It will cast a negative light on the death penalty, on the Georgia criminal justice system and on America.

But you know what it won’t do? It won’t render Lawrence Russell Brewer one iota less guilty or less deserving of the death penalty. Opponents of capital punishment are extremely selective about the cases they make into public crusades. Strategically that’s smart; you don’t want to lead your argument with “unsympathetic persons.” But logically it’s problematic. There is no transitive property that renders one heinous murderer less deserving of punishment simply because some other person was exonerated of murder.

Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people including 19 children. He admitted it. How does doubt (Which we must again emphasize exists only in the minds of those so blind they will not see!) in Troy Davis’ case make McVeigh less deserving of death?

We hear so much about the innocent people who’ve gotten off death row — thank God — because of new DNA techniques. We hear very little about the criminals who’ve had their guilt confirmed by the same techniques (or who’ve declined DNA testing because they know it will remove all doubt). Death penalty opponents are less eager to debate such cases because they want to delegitimize “the system.”

And to be fair, I think this logic cuts against one of the death penalty’s greatest rationalizations as well: deterrence. I do believe there’s a deterrence effect from the death penalty. But I don’t think that’s anything more than an ancillary benefit of capital punishment. It’s unjust to kill a person simply to send a message to other people who’ve yet to commit a crime. It is just to execute a person who deserves to be executed.

Opponents of the death penalty believe that no one deserves to be executed. Again, it’s an honorable position, but a difficult one to defend politically in a country where the death penalty is popular. So they spend all of their energy cherry-picking cases, gumming-up the legal system and talking about “uncertainty.”

That’s fine. But until they can explain why we shouldn’t have a death penalty when uncertainty isn’t an issue — i.e. why McVeigh and Brewer should live — they’ll never win the real argument.

On the Lighter Side….

Finally, Best of the Web details the Lonely Life of Botanists, courtesy of blogress Ann Althouse:

“It’s of absolutely no agricultural or economic significance, but it is a previously unrecognized biological entity and, as such is intellectually interesting.‘–University of Wisconsin-Madison botanist Robert R. Kowal, talking like a professor about the new flower he found on an island in Lake Superior.”

This evokes memories of a scene in Animal House:

“I’m not joking….this is my job!”

Magoo