Remember the bad old days of segregation and racial hatred? There are those in Israel who would bring back those days – but now the inferiors are women. There is no place for bigotry in any modern state. Here’s a quote to chew on:

“A young woman attracted national attention this month when she refused to give up her seat in the front of an inter-city bus when passengers boarding in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood demanded she move to the back. Despite an Israeli Supreme Court ruling that banned segregation on public buses, ultra-Orthodox women sit in the rear of buses serving their communities, with men in the front.”

Get in the back of the bus girls. Jim Crow is back and you are the new niggers. Next you won’t be allowed to drive a car or go out without a male relative as an escort. Welcome to the 18th century.

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Religious limits on women spur controversy in Israel

By Joel Greenberg

BEIT SHEMESH, Israel — A sign outside a row of synagogues directing women to walk on the other side of the street has turned this town near Jerusalem into a front line of a raging national debate about the imposition of strict social codes by ultra-Orthodox zealots.

A community of 86,000 about a half-hour’s drive from Jerusalem, Beit Shemesh has a growing ultra-Orthodox population. The town has become a cauldron of tension in recent days, with crowds of black-cloaked men assaulting television crews and facing off with police, pelting them with rocks and eggs.

The trigger for the violence was a wave of Israeli media reports about ultra-Orthodox Jews in the town who had put up the controversial sign and hounded local religious schoolgirls, spitting and hurling abuse at them for what they deemed insufficiently modest dress.

The plight of one frightened girl, 8-year-old Naama Margolese, was highlighted Friday in a prime-time television report, along with the sign ordering sidewalk segregation, fueling the debate in Israel over attempts to limit the public visibility of women — a growing trend that has generated an angry backlash.

On Tuesday night, thousands of Israelis gathered in Beit Shemesh to protest religious coercion and the attempts to sideline women. Some held up signs that said: “Exclusion of women is my red line.”

In broadcast remarks hours earlier, President Shimon Peres urged people to attend the rally. “We are fighting for the soul of the nation and the essence of the state,” he said.

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A woman who just flew back home from Las Vegas says an airport security officer confiscated her frosted cupcake because he thought the icing on it could be a security risk.

Rebecca Hains said the Transportation Security Administration agent at McCarran International Airport took her cupcake Wednesday, telling her its frosting was enough like a gel to violate TSA restrictions on allowing liquids and gels onto flights to prevent them from being used as explosives. She said the agent told her the frosting was conforming to the jar it was inside.

“I just thought this was terrible logic,” Hains said Friday.

Hains, who lives in Peabody, just north of Boston, said the agent didn’t seem concerned that the cupcake could actually be explosive, just that it fit some bureaucratic definition about what was prohibited. She said he even offered to let her eat it away from the airport security area.

Hains, a 35-year-old communications professor at Salem State University, said she told the agent she had passed through security at Boston’s Logan International Airport earlier in the week with two cupcakes packaged in jars, gifts from a student. But she said the agent told her that just meant TSA in Boston didn’t do its job.

The TSA, which is entrusted with protecting the nation’s transportation system, was reviewing the situation, agency spokesman Nico Melendez said. Passengers are allowed to take cakes and cupcakes through checkpoints, he said.

Hains ultimately surrendered the cupcake. But she said the situation highlighted a lack of common sense by the agent and the ludicrousness of TSA policies.

“It’s not really about the cupcake; I can get another cupcake,” she said. “It’s about an encroachment on civil liberties. We’re just building up a resistance and tolerance to all these things they’re doing in the name of security, when it’s really theater. It is not keeping us safe.”

By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR

By Daniel de Vise

(Reuters) – Four years after the banking system nearly collapsed from reckless mortgage lending, federal prosecutors have stayed on the sidelines, even as judges around the country are pointing fingers at possible wrongdoing.

The federal government, as has been widely noted, has pressed few criminal cases against major lenders or senior executives for the events that led to the meltdown of 2007. Finding hard evidence has proved difficult, the Justice Department has said.

The government also hasn’t brought any prosecutions for dubious foreclosure practices deployed since 2007 by big banks and other mortgage-servicing companies.

But this part of the financial system, a Reuters examination shows, is filled with potential leads.

Foreclosure-related case files in just one New York federal bankruptcy court, for example, hold at least a dozen mortgage documents known as promissory notes bearing evidence of recently forged signatures and illegal alterations, according to a judge’s rulings and records reviewed by Reuters. Similarly altered notes have appeared in courts around the country.

Banks in the past two years have foreclosed on the houses of thousands of active-duty U.S. soldiers who are legally eligible to have foreclosures halted. Refusing to grant foreclosure stays is a misdemeanor under federal law.

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I recently posted a link to an article that focused on the disinformation that was being disseminated surrounding the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. The basic thesis of the piece was that special interests, through their purchased representatives, were managing the news. The financial benefits to those special interests were being hidden behind a smoke screen of news focused on job creation and the lack of environment risks.

Most of the people who responded to the piece focused on the real problem – the manipulation of the issue to the benefit of what is now being called the 1%. Many picked up on the fact that the special interests would reap profits while the project left the public with the exposure of cost overruns and the cost of cleaning up after environmental disasters. But there was another type of response. What I call political hackery. The roots of these responses are buried deeply  in the re-tribilazation of American society that has occurred during the last several decades. We now have citizens to whom it is more important to be a Democrat or Republican than an American – to whom tribal affiliation trumps national identity.

A Reply I Got:

I presume you will post the same type of article on the propaganda from other perspectives. This was the most unprofessional article I have read in some time. Maybe you should read the pork that was attached to the Health Care Reform Act, all by the way added by Democrats. Every bill ever introduced carry’s with it unrelated pet projects. It is why Reagan insisted on line item vet.

My Response:

Thanks for demonstrating what has gone so wrong with this country. At least your request that I publish “propaganda from other perspectives” seems to recognize that it is all propaganda – just sometimes yours and sometimes theirs. In other words, that you are advocating a propaganda exchange rather then a serious discussion.

Your ‘two wrongs make a right’ formulation is the reason why Americans are disgusted with this ‘it’s all their fault and we are your only salvation’ rhetoric. There’s a reason why politicians and political hacks have approval ratings south of syphilitic whores.

Why isn’t it enough to point out the behavior and the effect that it is having on the social and political fabric of the country? Why is it necessary to reduce attempts at discussion to some adolescent ‘gotcha’ game? “Oh, you think we are bad, take a look at them.” What the hell does the Health Reform Act, which was BTW passed with Republican votes, have to do with the subject of the article? Why can’t people like you focus on real problems instead of asking for ‘balance’ designed to deflect attention and discussion from those very serious problems?

Why? Because political hackery and this mindless partisan bullying is a stain on the flag and constitution. Because the simple-minded are not capable of participating as citizens in a democracy without resorting to tribalistic thuggery. Because their whole world is reduced to ‘us versus them’. In other words, because they are children. Personally, I am not interested in your suggestion that we need to ‘balance’ criticism of one side with criticism of the other.

In my view, this country would be better off identifying those to whom being a Democrat or Republican is more important that being an American and then revoking their citizenship. People who see fellow citizens as the enemy are not Americans. They are domestic terrorists who have, at their core, the intention to undo the work of the founders and putting in its place a new theocracy based on their own authoritarian views of how the country should be run. I prefer my vision of America to yours.

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Add your comment below. Let me know what you think. TP

While the lower tiers of the Republican field jockey for second and third place in the polls, and as mediocre candidates stand poised to enter the race, Mitt Romney has quietly held onto his frontrunner status. In fact, Mitt’s ability to stay on top while not courting scandal and intrigue is a story in itself.

That truth makes the ex-Governor of Massachusetts appear to have the sort of stability that will be required to last the entire election process, which is still in its first rounds.

I’ve written before that Romney is the likely victor of the Republican nomination due to his financial lead, among other things. But his strength also comes from a potential lock on a growing, and solidly conservative slice of the American demographic: Mormons.

Mitt’s status as not a Christian of any mainstream sort, or as not a Christian at all if you ask certain people, make him somewhat unique. Mormonism, the religion of the Church of Latter Day Saints, enjoys relatively high name recognition in this country, due in part to effective outreach. However, how much people know about what exactly its beliefs are, is less well known.

We just had to take a peek.

Before we get into a list of, to be frank, surprisingly odd Mormon beliefs, we should take a moment and ask ourselves if it is fair, or proper, to explorer and examine the religious views of another person, especially an elected official or candidate. I would argue yes. As many religious people will happily tell anyone who will listen that their religious life is the crux of the rest of their existence, to ask what that person believes in a religious sense can provide a window into what they think, and why. And that is perfectly reasonable, especially in the case of someone running for President.

We looked into Mormonism, and have come up with a list of things that made our eyes widen. Every religion has its odd points, but Mormonism has them up front, and on display. Without further ado, Mormonism:

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