(CHICAGO)(January 27, 2006) America's media have been full of hand wringing. It's enough to make you invest in a towel factory. The New York Times says "In the Mideast, A Giant Step Back." The Chicago Tribune says "It may shatter the prospects for peace..." The Chicago Sun-Times opines "Wrong turn ...for peace..." Is it really that bad? Not at all.

As usual, the conventional wisdom and the mainstream media have it all wrong, almost exactly backwards.

Jan 24, 2006

Why the West will attack Iran
By Spengler

Why did French President Jacques Chirac last week threaten to use non-conventional - that is, nuclear - weapons against terrorist states? And why did Iran announce that it would shift foreign-exchange reserves out of European banks (although it has since retracted this warning)? The answer lies in the nature of Tehran's nuclear ambitions. Iran needs nuclear weapons, I believe, not to attack Israel, but to support imperial expansion by conventional military means.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition
And we'll all stay free!

What Phone Numbers Can I Register?
10. Can I register my cell phone on the National Do Not Call Registry?

Yes, you may place your personal cell phone number on the National Do Not Call Registry. The registry has accepted cell phone numbers since it opened for registrations in June 2003. There is no deadline to register a home or cell phone number on the Registry.

You may have received an email telling you that your cell phone is about to be assaulted by telemarketing calls as a result of a new cell phone number database; however, that is not the case. FCC regulations prohibit telemarketers from using automated dialers to call cell phone numbers. Automated dialers are standard in the industry, so most telemarketers don’t call consumers on their cell phones without their consent."

Annoying someone via the Internet is now a federal crime.

It's no joke. Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.

To grease the rails for this idea, Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, and the section's other sponsors slipped it into an unrelated, must-pass bill to fund the Department of Justice. The plan: to make it politically infeasible for politicians to oppose the measure.

The tactic worked.

This ridiculous prohibition, which would likely imperil much of Usenet, is buried in the so-called Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act. Criminal penalties include stiff fines and two years in prison.

There are perfectly legitimate reasons to set up a Web site or write something incendiary without telling everyone exactly who you are.

Think about it: A woman fired by a manager who demanded sexual favors wants to blog about it without divulging her full name. An aspiring pundit hopes to set up the next Suck.com. A frustrated citizen wants to send e-mail describing corruption in local government without worrying about reprisals.

"Jan. 6 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. employers added 108,000 workers in December, capping a year in which the economy shook off the effects of hurricanes and surging energy prices to gain more than 2 million jobs.

The unemployment rate fell to 4.9 percent from 5 percent and labor costs rose, the Labor Department said today in Washington. The December gain followed figures showing 71,000 more jobs than first reported for November and October.

The U.S. gained workers each month in 2005."

But look more deeply into the matter, and you realize that the sound of feminist silence about the savage fundamentalist Muslim oppression of women has its own perverse logic. The silence is a direct outgrowth of the way feminist theory has developed in recent years. Now mired in self-righteous sentimentalism, multicultural nonjudgmentalism, and internationalist utopianism, feminism has lost the language to make the universalist moral claims of equal dignity and individual freedom that once rendered it so compelling. No wonder that most Americans, trying to deal with the realities of a post-9/11 world, are paying feminists no mind.

To understand the current sisterly silence about the sort of tyranny that the women's movement came into existence to attack, it is helpful to think of feminisms plural rather than singular. Though not entirely discrete philosophies, each of three different feminisms has its own distinct reasons for causing activists to "lose their voice" in the face of women's oppression. continue...