Friday, February 29, 2008
Thursday, February 28, 2008
The Woman Who Wrote Shakespeare
THE DARK LADY: THE WOMAN WHO WROTE SHAKESPEARE
The Dark Lady Players, a New York Shakespeare company are about to demonstrate that the author of the Shakespearean plays was a black, Jewish woman, Amelia Bassano Lanier (1569-1645). This is the most recent authorship theory to have been accepted by the Shakespearean Authorship Trust chaired by Mark Rylance.
Lanier was the first woman in England to publish a book of original poetry, Salve Deus (1611), and for a decade was mistress to Lord Hunsdon, the man in charge of the English theater. A Marrano Jew of Venetian-Moroccan origin, she was identified in 1973 as the 'dark lady' of the Sonnets. Her literary signatures have now been found on seven of the plays.
In March 2008, at ManhattanTheaterSource, 177 MacDougal Street, New York, the Dark Lady Players are providing two public demonstrations of the Jewish religious allegories that underpin the plays, together with a lecture by their Artistic Director, John Hudson on the Shakespearean Authorship. There will also be a free screening of the Dark Lady Players' production of Midsummer Night's Dream; A Comic Jewish Satire, which was first performed at the Smithsonian Institution in 2007 as part of the Washington Shakespeare Festival.
The discovery of these Jewish allegories in the plays, known as the Atwill-Hudson Discovery, definitively shows that their author was Jewish. It also confirms the cutting edge New Testament scholarship described in Joseph Atwill's book Caesar's Messiah (Ulysses Press, 2005), which is beginning to attract increasing attention.
For more information
www.darkladyplayers.com
www.caesarsmessiah.com
www.theatresource.org/
www.shakespeareanauthorshiptrust.org.uk/
See news story 28 February 2008
http://www.njjewishnews.com/njjn.com/022808/ltKosherBard.html
Press contact; Daniela Amini
(646) 414-1659
daniela575@rcn.com
The Dark Lady Players, a New York Shakespeare company are about to demonstrate that the author of the Shakespearean plays was a black, Jewish woman, Amelia Bassano Lanier (1569-1645). This is the most recent authorship theory to have been accepted by the Shakespearean Authorship Trust chaired by Mark Rylance.
Lanier was the first woman in England to publish a book of original poetry, Salve Deus (1611), and for a decade was mistress to Lord Hunsdon, the man in charge of the English theater. A Marrano Jew of Venetian-Moroccan origin, she was identified in 1973 as the 'dark lady' of the Sonnets. Her literary signatures have now been found on seven of the plays.
In March 2008, at ManhattanTheaterSource, 177 MacDougal Street, New York, the Dark Lady Players are providing two public demonstrations of the Jewish religious allegories that underpin the plays, together with a lecture by their Artistic Director, John Hudson on the Shakespearean Authorship. There will also be a free screening of the Dark Lady Players' production of Midsummer Night's Dream; A Comic Jewish Satire, which was first performed at the Smithsonian Institution in 2007 as part of the Washington Shakespeare Festival.
The discovery of these Jewish allegories in the plays, known as the Atwill-Hudson Discovery, definitively shows that their author was Jewish. It also confirms the cutting edge New Testament scholarship described in Joseph Atwill's book Caesar's Messiah (Ulysses Press, 2005), which is beginning to attract increasing attention.
For more information
www.darkladyplayers.com
www.caesarsmessiah.com
www.theatresource.org/
www.shakespeareanauthorshiptrust.org.uk/
See news story 28 February 2008
http://www.njjewishnews.com/njjn.com/022808/ltKosherBard.html
Press contact; Daniela Amini
(646) 414-1659
daniela575@rcn.com
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Simple remedy for domestic-spying deadlock
Simple remedy for domestic-spying deadlock
by P. A. Triot
Among today’s headlines is one that defies belief: “Bush threatens to veto intelligence bill.”
It seems the occupant of the White House isn’t pleased with the version of the bill offered up by the House of Representatives––mainly because of what that version does not contain.
What’s missing from the House version is a provision that telecommunications companies are not granted immunity from prosecution or private lawsuits for cooperating with government agencies who break the law by illegal eavesdropping on U. S. citizens.
First, let’s give some perspective to this matter.
The fourth amendment to United States Constitution––one of the 10 amendments that constitute the Bill of Rights––reads:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Of course, any high schooler can tell you that the U. S. Constitution is the supreme law of the land and, for the most part, it has served this country well for 207 years.
Since that is the case, the U. S. Congress has no authority to simply give the president permission to conduct activities that violate the people’s right to be “secure in their person, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”
Please understand that any legislation that does an end-around the fourth amendment to the U. S. Constitution is unconstitutional on its face.
In fact, the Foreign Intelligence Security Act (FISA) of 1978, which allows the government to obtain a warrant three days after the wiretap spying has begun, when held up to the fourth amendment standard, probably is unconstitutional itself.
Now, look at the current so-called intelligence bill.
Both the House and Senate version of the bill authorize the president to engage in wire-tapping of all telecommunications (including all telephone conversations, e-mails or any other means of electronic activity) of all the people in the world––Americans and foreigners––without first obtaining warrants to do so from a federal judge, not even the FISA court.
What is the FISA court, you ask? Why the FISA court is a secret federal court that is held in a secret location that was created by the FISA bill in 1978 to approve requests for search warrants (and wire-taps, etc.).
Since its inception, the FISA court has blocked fewer than 10 requests from federal investigators for search warrants, of the unknown thousands of requests it has processed.
Let’s review what we have.
1. The law that Congress passed a little more than a year ago gave the president authority to conduct searches without first obtaining a search warrant. That law is unconstitutional by any standard. The original law expired after one year (which date was passed about a week ago).
2. Congress is now trying to pass an extension to that unconstitutional law. Of course the extension itself is unconstitutional.
3. The president objects that the House of Representatives does not want to immunize telecommunications companies from liability for assisting the government in engaging in unconstitutional activities.
Obtaining search warrants has been a cornerstone of our society for 207 years. It’s more American than apple pie.
The solution the president is as clear as the hand in front of my face. All he has to do is:
GET A SEARCH WARRANT!
P. A. Triot is a retired jounalist.
William F. Buckley Dead At 82
NEW YORK — William F. Buckley Jr., the erudite Ivy Leaguer and conservative herald who showered huge and scornful words on liberalism as he observed, abetted and cheered on the right's post-World War II rise from the fringes to the White House, died Wednesday. He was 82.
His assistant Linda Bridges said Buckley was found dead by his cook at his home in Stamford, Conn. The cause of death was unknown, but he had been ill with emphysema, she said.
Editor, columnist, novelist, debater, TV talk show star of "Firing Line," harpsichordist, trans-oceanic sailor and even a good-natured loser in a New York mayor's race, Buckley worked at a daunting pace, taking as little as 20 minutes to write a column for his magazine, the National Review.
Yet on the platform he was all handsome, reptilian languor, flexing his imposing vocabulary ever so slowly, accenting each point with an arched brow or rolling tongue and savoring an opponent's discomfort with wide-eyed glee.
"I am, I fully grant, a phenomenon, but not because of any speed in composition," he wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1986. "I asked myself the other day, `Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time?' I couldn't think of anyone."
Buckley had for years been withdrawing from public life, starting in 1990 when he stepped down as top editor of the National Review. In December 1999, he closed down "Firing Line" after a 23-year run, when guests ranged from Richard Nixon to Allen Ginsberg. "You've got to end sometime and I'd just as soon not die onstage," he told the audience.
"For people of my generation, Bill Buckley was pretty much the first intelligent, witty, well-educated conservative one saw on television," fellow conservative William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, said at the time the show ended. "He legitimized conservatism as an intellectual movement and therefore as a political movement."
Fifty years earlier, few could have imagined such a triumph. Conservatives had been marginalized by a generation of discredited stands _ from opposing Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal to the isolationism which preceded the U.S. entry into World War II. Liberals so dominated intellectual thought that the critic Lionel Trilling claimed there were "no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation."
Buckley founded the biweekly magazine National Review in 1955, declaring that he proposed to stand "athwart history, yelling `Stop' at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who urge it." Not only did he help revive conservative ideology, especially unbending anti-Communism and free market economics, his persona was a dynamic break from such dour right-wing predecessors as Sen. Robert Taft.
Although it perpetually lost money, the National Review built its circulation from 16,000 in 1957 to 125,000 in 1964, the year conservative Sen. Barry Goldwater was the Republican presidential candidate. The magazine claimed a circulation of 155,000 when Buckley relinquished control in 2004, citing concerns about his mortality, and over the years the National Review attracted numerous young writers, some who remained conservative (George Will, David Brooks), and some who didn't (Joan Didion, Garry Wills).
"I was very fond of him," Didion said Wednesday. "Everyone was, even if they didn't agree with him."
Born Nov. 24, 1925, in New York City, William Frank Buckley Jr. was the sixth of 10 children of a a multimillionaire with oil holdings in seven countries. The son spent his early childhood in France and England, in exclusive Roman Catholic schools.
His prominent family also included his brother James, who became a one-term senator from New York in the 1970s; his socialite wife, Pat, who died in April 2007; and their son, Christopher, a noted author and satirist ("Thank You for Smoking").
Monday, February 25, 2008
Israeli Child, Two Others, Wounded by Palestinian Rocket Attacks
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Thursday, February 21, 2008
Why John McCain Owes The New York Times a Thank You Card
Why John McCain Owes The New York Times a Thank You Card
The Republican Right is already howling over the bombshell dropped by The New York Times on John McCain, the GOP's all-but-official nominee. It's an outrage, they say. A deliberate torpedo. A liberal media smear.
Sorry, but these guys have got it backwards. The Times, in fact, couldn't have found a moment more favorable for Johnny Mack to let this fearsome cat out of the bag. If McCain could have personally chosen when to have this story break, it would have been right about now.
Not to say that the well-researched piece that broke late Wednesday evening isn't any candidate's nightmare. It's not only a detailed run-down of McCain's awfully close friendship with a pert and well-connected lobbyist thirty years his junior; the Times also does an admirable job of rehashing the Senator's long record of cozying up to the same sort of lobbyists against whom he repeatedly rails in public.
So what's my beef? The timing, folks. The timing. Everyone who knows anyone has been hearing about this story for some months. Back in December, Matt Drudge got wind of it from inside the Times and teased it at the top of his site. We all waited, but the shoe never dropped.
Under what is said to be intense pressure from McCain and prominent D.C. criminal attorney Robert Bennett, who was hired to help deal with the matter, the Times capitulated and held off on publishing the story - offering no explanation, then or now. And if you read through the piece just published, there doesn't seem to be any new information that the Times couldn't have had two months ago.
So what, you ask? Just one small detail: In the intervening weeks between the moment when the Times was first going to publish the story and finally did publish the story, the same New York Times endorsed John McCain! And while he's described in the endorsement editorial as a "staunch advocate of campaign finance reform" he's tagged in this Wednesday's news piece as having accepted favors from those with matters that came before the very committee he used to push that reform. And many, many other favors.
More importantly, if the Times had published its expose when it first had it over Christmas, it would have preceded all of the Republican primaries and caucuses. To say it would have changed the dynamic of the GOP race is perhaps the understatement of the decade. You can bet Mitt Romney and even Mayor Rudy are up late tonight gnashing their teeth and pounding their heads against the wall over this one.
So should Republican voters. They've been seriously toyed with by the paper of record. The Times gives them McCain. And then, only after it's too late to reconsider, it takes him away. McCain might, indeed, be seriously wounded by this week's revelations. If they had come out two months ago, he would have been reduced to a political asterisk, a footnote alongside Tommy Thompson and Tommy Tancredo.
Yes, we know how the Times will plead: innocent. There's a clear division, you see, between the news side and the editorial pages of the paper. Tut tut.
More like a clear division between the real and the surreal.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Dallas D.A. Releases New JFK Documents
Dallas D.A. Releases New JFK Documents
CBS News Interactive: JFK Remembered
DALLAS (CBS) ― There's new information about Jack Ruby and the JFK assassination today.Monday morning, Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins displayed to the public previously unseen documents related to the case.
Watkins said the documents have been locked in a safe in the D.A.'s office for decades, but have never been shown to the public until now.
In a Monday morning news conference about the documents, Watkins said today is an "interesting and historic day for Dallas County."
He said he learned of safe a year ago, not long after he took office. Watkins said that every Dallas County D.A. since the assassination has known about the contents of the safe. All have kept it secret.
After learning what was in the safe, Watkins said his staff determined that they had to catalog it. He said his staff members are still going through the documents, and said it would take some time to finish the job.
After archiving the documents for the last year, Watkins said there are two things in particular that will raise eyebrows.
The first is a $1 million movie contract signed by former DA Henry Wade, the prosecutor in the Ruby trial. Watkins said the contract would have made Wade a rich man if the movie had been produced.
The other is a highly suspect two-page transcript, allegedly of a conversation between Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald, dated Oct. 4, 1963. The transcript reads in part:
Oswald: You said the boys in Chicago want to get rid of the Attorney General.
Ruby: Yes, but it can't be done ... it would get the Feds into everything.
Oswald: There is a way to get rid of him without killing him.
Ruby: How's that?
Oswald: I can shoot his brother.
Ruby: You mean the President?
Oswald: Yes, the President.
Ruby: But that wouldn't be patriotic.
Oswald: What's the difference between shooting the Governor and in shooting the President?
Ruby: It would get the FBI into it.
Oswald: I can still do it, all I need is my rifle and a tall building; but it will take time, maybe six months to find the right place; but I'll have to have some money to live on while I do the planning.
According to the document, Ruby goes on to tell Oswald that no one must ever know the money for the job came from the Mafia. Ruby adds not to get caught or else he would have to kill Oswald.
No claims have been made that the alleged conversation ever took place.
CBS station KTVT-TV in Dallas was first to report the existence of the documents, in a story published Sunday morning.
Watkins said that he was not "lending his authority" to whether the documents are authentic or fake. He said he was releasing the documents because the people of Dallas County "should have access to this information."
Watkins also displayed documents from other district attorneys that he said showed the poor state of race relations in Texas during the 1960s.
Watkins said no decision has been made about what will become of the documents. He said his staff is talking to the Sixth Floor Museum and other groups.
Other items were also in the safe. Two sets of brass knuckles and a pistol holster were part of the trove and on display Monday morning. Watkins said all three belonged to Ruby and were taken from him when he was booked into the jail after killing Oswald. He said the holster held the gun that was used to shoot Oswald.
Dallas DA: Jack Ruby docs 'too important to keep secret'
Dallas DA: Jack Ruby docs 'too important to keep secret'
The Dallas County District Attorney's Office has announced the discovery of a trove of documents relating to the assassination of John Kennedy.
Among the documents is an alleged transcript of a conversation between Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, planning the assassination together on behalf of the Mafia. This document has aroused the greatest amount of interest but has also been described as "highly suspect."
Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins explained at a news conference on Monday morning that the documents were found in a safe about a year ago -- soon after he took office -- and that his staff have been examining and cataloging them ever since. Previous DA's had decided not to reveal the information, but Watkins said his administration is devoted to openness and felt it was "too important to keep secret."
"It will open up the debate as to whether there was a conspiracy to assassinate the president," Watkins stated.
Ruby, the owner of a Dallas burlesque club, shot Oswald while he was in police custody two days after the November 22, 1963 assassination. The transcript has Oswald telling Ruby, "the [Mafia] boys in Chicago want to get rid of the Attorney General [Robert Kennedy]. ... There is a way to get rid of him without killing him. ... I can shoot his brother."
The curator of a Dallas museum devoted to the assassination has pointed out that Oswald is known to have been elsewhere on October 4, the alleged date of the conversation. The safe also contained a 1967 contract with the then-district attorney for a movie about the assassination, and the DA's assistant has suggested that the transcript was part of a proposed movie script.
This video is from Fox's Fox News Live, broadcast February 18, 2008.
Egypt rounds up Palestinians to deport to Gaza
Egypt rounds up Palestinians to deport to Gaza
ISMAILIA, Egypt (Reuters) - Egyptian police have rounded up some 500 Palestinians in north Sinai in the past four days and plan to deport them back into Gaza shortly, Egyptian security sources said on Monday.
The Palestinians are some of at least 3,000 left inside Egypt after hundreds of thousands of Gaza residents crossed the border in January to seek relief from the Israeli blockade.
Egyptian police are holding 500 of the Palestinians at a youth hostel in the provincial capital El Arish in readiness for repatriation, one security source said.
Police have been raiding furnished apartments and chalets in north Sinai in search of Palestinians, the source added.
But other Palestinians are staying with relatives and friends in El Arish, the nearby town of Sheikh Zuweid and in the border town of Rafah, he said.
The Egyptian government held talks last week with the Palestinian Islamic movement Hamas, which runs Gaza, but the two sides have not announced any agreement for the border to reopen.
On Sunday Egyptian police found 100 kg (220 lb) of explosives in three sacks buried in sand near Sheikh Zuweid, the security sources added.
Caches of arms and explosives often turn up in the area, some of them destined for smuggling into Gaza through tunnels.
Israel has repeatedly complained about the smuggling but Egypt says it is doing what it can with the limited number of personnel it is allowed to deploy along the border.
With the Egyptian border resealed early this month, most residents of Gaza are again trapped inside the narrow coastal and trade with the outside world is severely restricted.
(Reporting by Yusri Mohamed; Writing by Jonathan Wright)
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Patriarchy:1000, Hillary:0
Patriarchy:1000, Hillary:0
Ever since I wrote an article in the Washington Post ten days ago, I've been getting love letters from women and super-smart men and brickbats from the Hillary-Haters. Unfortunately the Hillary-Haters are in charge. They monopolize the networks, the newspapers, the talk shows -- both radio and TV. They are crossing their legs for fear of castration. They are wearing the body armor our troops never got. Or got too late to matter. They are determined that a woman will not prove herself competent as Commander in Chief.
What's their ammunition? Oh, it's simple. They call her Mrs. Clinton, not Ms. or Senator. They pull out those nutcrackers in the shape of her supposed thighs. They complain about her ankles -- too thick. They complain on Fox TV that "White women are the problem" -- (idiot boy Kristol, the brain-damaged scion of Irving who rose through nepotism like our unelected "president"). Then they say she has "baggage" -- which could mean wrinkles, or her husband, or her daughter Chelsea whom they say she is "pimping." Then they say she never divorced Bill -- as if it's anyone's business. Then they moon over Obama's rhetorical style. Then they make it appear that she's a drone or a worker bee and has no royal jelly. Or else she has royal jelly and is queen bee. And that's her problem.
If Bill defends her, he's a pimp. If he doesn't, he's a creep. If Chelsea campaigns, it's cynical. If Obama trots out those cute little girls Michelle gave birth to, he's a family man. If Michelle attacks Hillary, it's news. If Hillary attacks Michelle -- well she can't because that would be racist. All we need now is a black woman in this race -- Maya or Oprah or Toni or Gayle or Donna -- any of whom would be a far better president than the one we've still got (not to mention his surrogate Dad, Dick Cheney, his co war-criminal). You couldn't attack Oprah or Maya or Toni or Gayle or Donna because of their color. Wow -- what an idea! Oprah for President. I'd definitely vote for that. I adore Maya Angelou as both person and poet. Toni Morrison is a genius and a true progressive. Gayle King is an executive, mother, communicator. Donna B. is a spokeswoman on CNN. Oprah -- well, she's Oprah -- way beyond having a last name.
Let me tell you about the Hillary-Haters who fill my inbox, they can't spell. They also believe in witchcraft. They believe HRC boils eye of newt with unborn baby's hair and little Jewish children not yet circumcised. They think she had a child with Vince Foster (even though Chelsea looks much like Bill and even his mother), then murdered him. They think she will leave Iraq, not leave Iraq, give us universal health care, not give us universal health care, sanction the killing of fetuses, not sanction the killing of fetuses, defend Israel, not defend Israel, end the Death Tax, not end the Death tax.
Honey, they are all mixed up. But they know they hate. And not just her -- but lots of people and things and ideas.
Ho hum. We've seen this all before in the United States of Amnesia (Gore Vidal's brilliant phrase). Remember Geraldine Ferraro -- tarred with the brush of her Italian-American husband, whom they claimed was a mafioso? Remember Bella Abzug, attacked for her hats (which covered too large a brain)? Remember Eleanor Roosevelt, attacked for her teeth? Remember Victoria Woodhull (the first woman to run for president) "hanged" as a whore? Remember Emma Goldman rode out of town on a rail -- for being Jewish, liking to dance and supporting the rights of the working classes?
Perhaps you know the history. Most likely you don't. They'd rather you didn't know it. Hence trillions for guns and pennies for education. The military industrial complex needs your boys and your girls in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan. But there's no one to guard the "homeland" -- a nice Hitlerian locution. Perhaps they'd rather you didn't know that every great empire -- from Persia to Greece to Rome -- fell when it spent more on war than on its people. This is history, kids. But we don't read history any more. History begins with Britney and ends with Paris.
I give up. If I have to watch another great American woman thrown in the dustbin of history to please the patriarchy, I'll move to Canada -- where they live four years longer than we because they have universal health care. Or Italy -- where Berlusconi played at being Mussolini but life is sweet anyway and people take vacations in August and at Chanukah (Christmas or Diwali or Kwaanza) and Passover (Easter).
Ok folks, stick your heads in the sand like Maureen Dowd who thinks we're not against women but just against Clinton "baggage." Or Barbara Walters who seems to have forgotten how viciously she was attacked when she got her first million dollar contract -- worth only half a million in Euros today.
Or Oprah who forgets she wasn't always Oprah -- I knew her when she had two names. She was always really smart, but she used to identify with women. And now she's joined the Obamarama. I get it. I understand. People want their own color in the White House (pun intended). And nobody said Barack wasn't brilliant.
But the truth is, we have no idea what he stands for. At least I don't. All we have are soundbites and attacks on "the" Clintons. But I guess the great American Amnesiate prefers it that way. And they always get what they deserve in the White House. Last time it was Dubya -- the dumb son of the CIA who showed them by never heeding their warnings. We lost Al Gore to sound bites about his nerdiness. Then we lost him again to hanging chads in Florida. We lost Adlai for being too intellectual. They used to say "egghead" in the olden days. And we lost Kerry to touch screens in Ohio and to election officials later indicted and tried and convicted. I didn't like him anyway. I especially hated his not returning fire at the Swiftboaters, and that stupid salute at the Democratic convention where Barack was born from the head of Athena.
Flip Flop, Flop Flip. This is the nature of our political dialogue. Might as well vote Repugnican as Democratic -- though I never have in my whole life. They're all just pols who secretly pledge to ignore fifty three percent of the population. And guess what? The fifty three percent is resigned to it. We don't like it. We wish it were otherwise. But we adore our sons and grandsons and husbands and fathers and grandfathers -- not to mention our nephews whom we happily nepotize.
One of my nephews works for Hillary. I bet his heart is breaking too.
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Erica Jong