MFS - The Other News

                      Afternoon Posting.

• HT:HotAir.Judiciary Committee taking up confirmations of controversial bench nominees.Jeff Sessions is ringing the alarm bells on Judiciary Committee hearings set to take place today for five Barack Obama nominees to the federal bench. The Senate, which has few days left on its pre-midterms legislative calendar, wants to quietly move these five picks to floor votes while Republicans will still have difficulty blocking their confirmations. In at least two of the cases, and perhaps all five, people may want a better look at these appointments, which one can see here and now, as the hearing is already underway for a whole slate of nominations.Sessions’ office released the following criticisms of the five appointments he opposes.Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• After Delhi's disgrace, the shame: Child labourers pictured working on construction sites in frantic effort to get Commonwealth Games stadiums ready.CNN find dozens of incidents involving children of seven and younger Save The Children 'concerned' .English athletes arrive to prepare for next week's events.India was yesterday building its chaotic Commonwealth Games venues with the toil and sweat of the country's children.Distressing pictures show children apparently as young as seven carrying hods and buckets as part of the Delhi's desperate bid to complete construction ahead of the opening ceremony a week tomorrow.The images, released by CNN, drew criticism from Save The Children. 'We are concerned about reports of young children working on construction sites,' said the charity.Read and see the full story here.Click here for comments.

• Russian-US crew fails to returns to Earth.Two Russians and a US astronaut aborted a return to Earth on Friday when their space capsule failed to separate from the International Space Station.”This situation has never occurred before,” a spokeswoman at Russian Mission Control near Moscow said, as space officials scrambled to determine the cause.Russia's space agency chief Anatoly Perminov told reporters at Mission Control that Dyson, Alexander Skvortsov and Mikhail Korniyenko's return to Earth after nearly six months in space had been rescheduled for Saturday.Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• HT:PajamasMedia.Mainstream Islam Rejects Freedom of Conscience.The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) will be meeting in Chicago later this month, sponsoring a program promoting values antithetical to the U.S. Constitution.This principle of freedom of conscience is also upheld in Article 18 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which further makes explicit the fundamental right to change one’s religion: Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship, and observance.Islamic Rulings:the issuance of such “rulings” by a so-called council of Muslim jurists in North America — antithetical to the protection of freedom of conscience enshrined in American law — is mirrored by the overwhelming refusal of mainstream Islamic organizations to sign a simple, unequivocal pledge composed and distributed one year ago by ex-Muslims living in America:To repudiate the threat from authoritative Sharia to the religious freedom and safety of former Muslims.Sadly, the OIC may find fertile grounds for any planned Islamization campaign in America, spearheaded by like-minded American Muslims.Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• Soros revealed as funder of liberal Jewish-American lobby.The Jewish-American advocacy group J Street, which bills itself as the dovish alternative to the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) lobby, has secretly received funding from billionaire George Soros despite previous denials that it accepted funds from the Hungarian-born financier and liberal political activist.Tax forms obtained by The Washington Times reveal that Mr. Soros and his two children, Jonathan and Andrea Soros, contributed a total $245,000 to J Street from one Manhattan address in New York during the fiscal year from July 1, 2008 to June 30, 2009.Mr. Ben Ami in past interviews has described J Street as President Obama's "blocking back" in Congress, with the group billing itself as the lead Jewish-American group supporting elements in the Israeli political spectrum who favor negotiating a lasting two-state peace deal with the Palestinians.Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• Examiner Editorial: Obamacare is even worse than critics thought!Six months ago, President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rammed Obamacare down the throats of an unwilling American public. Half a year removed from the unprecedented legislative chicanery and backroom dealing that characterized the bill's passage, we know much more about the bill than we did then. A few of the revelations.If you wonder why so many American voters are angry, and no longer give Obama the benefit of the doubt on a variety of issues, you need look no further than Obamacare, whose birthday gift to America might just be a GOP congressional majority.Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• Meet the Muslim Superheroes who are Ready to Indoctrinate American Kids.In the Islamic world, cartoons have a more sinister purpose. In Iran, on Al-Quds Day, Iranian TV schedules are filled with cartoons about evil Israelis with red eyes, shooting and murdering innocent doe-eyed Palestinians. For older kids, the heroes fight back, and even get martyred in the cause of Allah. Al-Quds day, named after the Arab term for Jerusalem and initiated by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1983, is a time for Iranian media to reinforce Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic propaganda.Muslims comprise only one and a half percent of the American population, but be prepared for the latest exercise in Muslim propaganda and toy promotion – “The Ninety-Nine”. This began life as a series of printed comic “super-hero” characters, each one representing one of the Ninety-Nine names of Allah.Muslims represent 1.5 % of the American population, but the President speaks almost 100 % of the time on their behalf?Reads the full story here.Click here for comments.

• HT:IslaminEurope.Rotterdam: Top official has links to radical Turkish organization.A top official in Rotterdam, Bilal Taner, is in contact with a Turkish radical-Islamist organization, which is fiercely anti-Israeli and anti-American, openly supports the Hamas terror organization and glorifies martyrdom for Jihadists.The warm personal connection with Rotterdam senior adviser Bilal Taner was recently clarified when he was extensively congratulated in an orthodox-religious manner on the Haksöz Haber website for the birth of his daughter. This website serves as a platform for radical Islamists, anti-Israeli and anti-American authors.The radical Turkish movement reject societies which are not based on the Koran.In the German-language American Jewish Committee 2006 report "Antisemitism - Made in Iran" (Antisemitismus - Made in Iran) it says: "The goals of Haksöz include uniting Muslims in the battle against Israel and the United States".The orthodox-religious congratulations to 'our brother in Rotterdam' is signed by prominent members of the Turkish Hasöz Haber movement. Several of the congratulations to the Rotterdam policy official come from important activists who were passengers on the Mavi Marmaris, one of the ship in the flotilla which recently tried to break through the Gaza blockade. The attempt ended in a bloody encounter with the Israeli navy where several people were killed. The dead activists are honored as martyrs by Haksöz.Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• Obama team uses flimflammery to inflate job numbers.Are you a financial adviser? You may not know it, but you've got a green job. Are you a wholesale buyer? You've got a green job, too. Or maybe you're a newspaper reporter. You, too, have a green job -- at least according to the Obama administration.For months, Republican Sen. Charles Grassley has been pushing the administration to substantiate its claims of having created nearly 200,000 green jobs. More fundamentally, Grassley has asked Labor Secretary Hilda Solis to state clearly what a green job is. So far, he hasn't gotten an answer.Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• HT:AmericanThinker.'DREAM Act' Threat Remains.Senator Harry Reid launched a sneak attack by adding the "DREAM Act" to the Defense Authorization Bill. Although the Defense Bill was temporarily sidelined Tuesday, most expect it to be revived at a later date. The Act will allow students who have lived in America for five years to obtain a green card after they attend college or serve in the military. This is nothing more than an amnesty program that gives citizenship to these illegal immigrants. The "DREAM Act" is sending the wrong signal that the way you become an American is to break the law. Congressman Bilbray is frustrated and upset and wants to make it clear that "Harry [Reid] is desperate and is in a tight election. However, there should be some issues more important than politics."Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• 'Great flotilla' group mounts anti-Israeli campaign.Organizers of next Gaza aid sail mount display featuring Israeli premier clutching bloody knife, skeleton of Israeli soldier with Palestinian children coming out of its mouth in efforts to rally support for journey. Foreign Ministry: Campaign heinous.The future flotilla is expected to reach the area in early October, carrying hundreds of anti-Israeli activist from Europe. Organizers launched the media campaign in London, last week.Displays including skulls embedded with the Star of David and Palestinian flags are expected to be shown throughout the journey.Organizers claim the flotilla will include 12 vessels carrying 5,000 activists, but Israel says only a few hundreds are expected to actually arrive."Just as the Marmara terror ship was not carrying so much as one ounce of humanitarian aid for Gazans... this sail and others like it aim to breach a hypothetical blockade and ease 'mass hunger' which is nothing more than the figment of an anti-Israeli campaign." Gaza, he concluded, "Longs not for the end of an Israeli occupation, but for the end of Hamas occupation, which has plunged it into great darkness." Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• Stephen Colbert Testifies in Congress, in Character.Stephen Colbert testified in a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing on immigrant farm workers this morning (video here, not embeddable). The hearing got off to an awkward start when Democratic Rep. John Conyers asked the comedian to leave the hearing. Colbert responded, seemingly concerned, that he had only agreed to testify at the request of subcommittee Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren, who then asked him to stay.A sampling of his satiric offerings:-"I don't want a tomato picked by a Mexican. I want it picked by an American, sliced by a Guatemalan, and served by a Venezuelan, in a spa, where a Chilean gives me a Brazilian.-"I'm not a fan of the government doing anything. But I've got to ask, why isn't the government doing anything? ... Like most members of Congress, I haven't read the bill."Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• Ground Zero Imam Ordered To Pay Union City.Rauf was ordered to pay $12,960 to city authorities who were fired up after having to front the ten days worth of pay earned by the officer keeping fire watch while the imam made repairs ranging from faulty fire alarms to moldy bathrooms and bedbugs.Over 200 health and fire code violations were found in the building, and Rauf has until Oct. 9 to fix them. Union City is suing the religious leader for ignoring some 30 tenant complaints from 1996 to 2010.Rauf’s lawyer said the complaints were all addressed in 2007 and that the suit is a political move in retaliation to his client’s hotly-contested plans to build a mosque in New York City’s financial district.Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• HT:GatewayPundit.Vatican Official: “Islam Will Sooner Or Later Conquer Majority of Europe”.Europe will grow more “Islamicized” if Christian Europeans do not start having more children, and going back to Church, a senior Vatican official said this month. Msgr. Piero Gheddo, a famous missionary and an official with the Vatican’s Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions, told Zenit news service that Europe’s indigenous inhabitants have abandoned Christianity and are becoming “paganized.”“The fact is that, as a people, we are becoming ever more pagan and the religious vacuum is inevitably filled by other proposals and religious forces,” said Msgr. Gheddo, who founded AsiaNews, the Christian missionary news service. As religious practice diminishes in Christian Europe, “indifference spreads; Christianity and the Church are attacked.”Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• HT:The Volokh Conspiracy.Speech Hostile to Gays Constitutionally Unprotected, Speech Hostile to Whites Constitutionally Protected?Perhaps Republican Party v. White, which applies to judicial candidate speech the highly speech-protective “strict scrutiny” test is the right test for speech by sitting judges. Perhaps Pickering v. Board of Education, which applies to government employees a much less speech-protective balancing test is the right test for speech by sitting judges. But I saw no explanation from Justice Graves, or from the opinions he joined, of why Pickering should have been applied as to the hostile-to-gays speech in Wilkerson but not to the hostile-to-whites speech in Osborne.As I mentioned, perhaps there is a good explanation for Justice Graves’ conclusions in these cases. But it would be good, I think, if the Senators asked Justice Graves what that explanation might be.Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• Catholic school 'could be run by mosque'.A Roman Catholic primary school faces being taken over by a mosque following a sharp rise in the number of Muslim children.Sacred Heart primary in Blackburn could become the first Catholic school in Britain to be converted into an Islamic faith school following a dramatic change in the pupil population.More than nine-in-10 of the school's pupils were Catholic a decade ago but that number plummeted to just three per cent this year.The local diocese admitted the school – which must have a Catholic head teacher and devote 10 per cent of the timetable to Christian-based religious education – was no longer “serving the needs” of the community.Under current legislation, the local council must effectively run a competition to find a new organisation to run the school.Blackburn’s Masjid-e-Tauheedul Islam mosque, which already runs a girls’ secondary school in the town, is among a series of organisations expressing an interest.Hamid Patel, principal of the Tauheedul Islam Girls’ High School, told the Times Educational Supplement: “Given that most of the pupils are Muslim it makes sense for us to engage with the school.“We will need more information on the expectations of the local authority, but if the community and the school want us to be involved, then, yes, we are interested.”The disclosure comes amid rising demand for Islamic state schools.Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• HT:AstuteBloggers.Libs claim anti - Muslim discrimination is up - But it's creeping Sharia in legal garb.In 2009, workplace discrimination against Muslims rose 20 percent to a record 803 claims, according to federal data cited in the New York Times.We sat down with the author of the article, Times labor and workplace reporter Steven Greenhouse, along with Arsalan Iftikhar, an Muslim- American international human rights lawyer and founder of themuslimguy.com, to discuss why these numbers have increased and what could be the cause.Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• Larry Elder: Australian Muslim cleric calls for a beheading. Who cares?What happens when an Australian(!) Muslim cleric calls for the beheading of a Dutch politician?Not much.What happens when an American pastor no one ever heard of threatens to burn a Koran?It ignites an international outcry.Bottom line: Barbarity in the name of Islam is not even remotely condemned to the degree that the West condemns insensitivity by cartoonists, politicians and anti-Islam clerics.Why? A denunciation of Muslim practices suggests a superiority of American values and culture. The left finds the very notion objectionable.Conclusion : It is a bizarre and dangerous double standard that allows a Pastor Jones to become more notorious than a Feiz Muhammad.Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• Pakistan's Supreme Court, Government On Collision Course.Conspiracy is a frequently uttered word in Islamabad these days, with the Pakistani capital awash in talk of a return to military rule and every political move being interpreted as a power grab.In recent days, senior members of the governing coalition have been talking about a "judicial coup," in which the country's courts would oust politicians and form power by judicial processes, paving the way for an eventual military takeover. Friction between the Supreme Court and the civilian government is high in the wake of the court's directive to reopen corruption cases against President Asif Ali Zardari in Switzerland. Given a deadline of September 24 to reply, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani dutifully refused to obey it.Gilani signed a government document presented to the Supreme Court on September 24 that reiterates the president's immunity from prosecution while in office and that, as supreme commander of the armed forces, he cannot be subjected to court proceedings in a foreign country. The document was leaked to the press, despite the government's request that it be kept secret, adding to the discord between the two bodies.Read the full story here.Click here for comments.

• Soldier who served in Afghanistan refused council house 'for not being local while he was overseas'.But Afghan family given a £1.2m house by their local authority.A father-of-two who served in Afghanistan has been denied a council house because he has not been living in his local area while serving in the forces.Lance Corporal Craig Baker, 26, completed two tours of duty in the war-stricken region before he decided to leave the Army to spend more time with his sons.But the former soldier, who grew up in Bracknell, Berkshire, has been denied a council property for his family because he 'does not have a local connection'. It is in sharp contrast to an Afghan family who were given a £1.2 million seven-bedroom house by their local authority just 30 miles away in 2008.And he accused the local authority of discriminating against him because of his service background.Simon Hendey, chief officer of housing for Bracknell Forest Council, denied that Craig Baker was discriminated against because he was a soldier.Hmmmm....option go back to Afghanistan trow away British passport and come back as a refugee,housing insured?Read the full story here.Click here for comments.