Month: June 2008

WATERTOWN (Combined Sources)–Rep. Peter Koutoujian and the Armenian Heritage Foundation (AHF) announced Friday that plans to develop a park memorial recognizing victims of the Armenian genocide on the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway have been formally approved by the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority Board.

The park proposal presented by the AHF will now proceed with final design and construction. The public process and approval is the result of an eight-year campaign to design a park to commemorate immigrant groups who migrated to the Boston area as well as acknowledge those ancestors who sought refuge from the Armenian Genocide.

The inclusion of the genocide memorial has been a source of heated debate for years, with city planners raising concerns about politicizing the greenway with a bevy of monuments and memorials to various historical causes.

But the agreement reached Friday will create a memorial sculpture that recognizes the contributions of all immigrant groups and makes special mention of the mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during World War I.

“For eight years, we have worked to make this moment a reality. This park would not have been possible without the support of the Armenian-American community, the residents of the North End, and the leadership of Governor Deval Patrick,” said James Kalustian of the Armenian Heritage Foundation. “Thanks to years of hard work and commitment from our community, this park and its significance was realized and fully supported by the Patrick Administration.”

“As a member of the Armenian-American community, I am truly honored to be a part of this historic endeavor,” said State Representative Peter Koutoujian, who was the original proponent of the park. “My grandparents came to America from Armenia in search of a better life. This park will serve as a beautiful dedication to their experience and the experiences of all immigrants who helped to make the city of Boston–and our nation great.”

The Armenian Heritage Park, a gift to the City of Boston and the Commonwealth from Massachusetts Armenian-Americans, is for all to enjoy. The Park is consistent with key themes of the Greenway: to acknowledge the history of Boston as a port of entry for immigrants worldwide, and to celebrate those who have migrated to Massachusetts shores and contributed to the richness of American life and culture.

The park, which is near Christopher Columbus Park in the North End, will include a labyrinth of grass and granite stone with a single jet of water at its center. It will also feature a 16-foot-diameter reflecting pool.

The proposed wording on the sculpture reads, in part: “Boston and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts have offered hope and refuge for immigrants seeking to begin new lives. . . . The sculpture is offered in honor of the one and one-half million victims of the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1923.”

“May it stand in remembrance of all genocides that have followed, and celebrate the diversity of the communities that have re-formed in the safety of these shores.”

The Armenian Heritage Park will be constructed at no expense to the taxpayer, and cared for and maintained in perpetuity.
——————————————————————————–

From:Fevziye Manizade [mailto:[email protected]]
Subject: Fellow Pilot Cindy (McCain) for President.

Maybe she can talk her husband out of supporting General Aviation user fees.

This is an interesting  article as not much was known about her.  She was on Leno the other night  and it was an interesting interview.  It turns out that she is a  character as she is or has been a race car driver and is also a pilot.  She flies John around the country to his rallies.  After hearing  that about her and reading this I now have a lot of respect for  her.

Election 2008: Cindy Hensley McCain has been disparaged as a  trophy wife, a Barbie, an heiress with fancy purses, even the Paris Hilton of politics But there’s more to the picture than meets the eye.
Yes, Mrs.  McCain is the perfectly coifed blonde standing dutifully behind the senator  during his speeches. And yes, she wears stylish clothing and carries a Prada  purse. And it’s true she doesn’t say much. But feminist critics who write her  off as a ‘stand-by-your-man’ shrinking violet are selling her short. In many  ways, Cindy McCain stacks up sturdier than Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama.  And she’d make a more impressive first lady.
Mrs. McCain: More than  meets the eye.

While Obama’s wife has been hating America , complaining  about the war and undermining our troops serving in Afghanistan , McCain’s  wife has been worrying about her sons who actually are fighting or planning to  fight in the war on terror. One, in fact, was until a few months ago deployed in Iraq during some of the worst violence. You don’t hear the  McCain’s talk about it, but their 19-year-old Marine, Jimmy, is preparing for  his second tour of duty. Their 21-year-old son, Jack, is poised to graduate  from Annapolis and also could join the Marines as a second lieutenant. The  couple made the decision not to draw attention to their sons out of respect  for other families with sons and
daughters in harm’s way.
Cindy also  says she doesn’t want to risk falling apart on the campaign trail talking  about Jimmy who was so young when he enlisted she had to sign consent  forms for his medical tests before he could report for duty and potentially upsetting parents of soldiers who are serving or have been killed.

The  McCain’s want to make sure their boys get no special treatment. Same goes for  their five other children, including a daughter they adopted from Bangladesh .  During a visit to Mother Teresa’s orphanage there, Cindy noticed a dying baby.  The orphanage could not provide the medical care needed to save her life. So  she brought the child home to America for the surgery she desperately needed.  The baby is now their
healthy, 16-year-old daughter, Bridget.

Though  all seven McCain children including two Sen. McCain adopted from his first marriage are supportive of their father, they prefer their privacy  to the glare of the campaign trail. Another daughter, Meghan, 23, helps him behind the scenes.

Cindy McCain not only cherishes her children, but  also her country, which in an election year filled with America-bashing, is a  refreshing novelty. She seethed when she heard Michelle Obama’s unpatriotic  remarks that she only recently grew proud of America . ‘I am very proud of  my country,’ Mrs. McCain asserted.
She also may be tougher than the  other women in the race. While Hillary thinks she’s come under sniper fire on  mission trips abroad, Cindy has actually seen violence. She witnessed a boy  get blown up by a mine in Kuwait during a trip with an international group  that removes land mines from war-torn countries.

Mrs. McCain also is a  hands-on philanthropist. She sits on the board of Operation Smile, which  arranges for plastic surgeons to fix cleft palates and other birth defects.  She also has helped organize relief missions to Micronesia .

During a  scuba-diving vacation to the islands, Mrs. McCain took a friend to a local  hospital to have a cut treated. She was shocked, and saddened, by what she  saw. ‘They opened the door to the OR, where the supplies were, and there were  two cats and a whole bunch of rats climbing out of the sterile supplies,’ she  recalled. ‘They had no X-ray machine, no beds. To me, it was devastating  because it was a U.S. trust territory.’ As soon as she returned home, she arranged for  medical equipment and teams of doctors to be sent to treat the island children.

Michelle Obama may contribute to CARE, which fights  global poverty and works to empower poor women. Cindy sits on its board.

While the Democrat women talk about helping the poor and needy, Cindy McCain actually rolls up her sleeves and does it. Who’s the out-of-touch elitist?
 
Fran

23 Haziran 2008, Pazartesi
THE AMERICAN

By Michael Rubin Friday, June 20, 2008

Sometime this summer, Turkey ’s Constitutional Court will decide whether Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) violated the “principles of a democratic and secular republic” that undergird the Turkish constitution and should be barred from politics. Across the Turkish political spectrum, most officials expect the Court to rule against the AKP, thus dissolving the party and banning Erdoğan and his closest aides for at least five years. 

Although the prime minister, Foreign Minister Ali Babacan, and influential AKP advisers have tried to depict this as the unjust outgrowth of a dispute over headscarves in public universities—and perhaps even a “judicial coup”—the case is legitimate. 

Erdoğan’s supporters often point to his embrace of the European Union accession process as proof of his liberalism. But Erdoğan has used the EU accession process to unravel Turkey ’s system of checks and balances. He cares little for EU institutions. When the European Court of Human Rights upheld a ban on headscarves in public schools—the same ban that the Turkey’s own Constitutional Court later upheld—Erdoğanchastised the European justices for applying civil law to a religious matter, declaring, “It is wrong that those who have no connection to this field [of religion] make such a decision…without consulting religious scholars.” 

Europe ’s encouragement of Turkish reforms has been important. In a mature democracy, the military should remain aloof from politics. Brussels should be applauded for pressuring Turkey to reform its National Security Council to give the powerful body a civilian majority with a civilian head. By failing to encourage the creation of an alternate check-and-balance mechanism to replace the military’s traditional role as guardian of the constitution, however, the EU committed diplomatic malpractice. Erdoğan seized the opportunity to run roughshod over Turkish secularism and democracy. 

Indeed, despite its self-description as secular, liberal, and democratic, the AKP is quite the opposite. Babacan ordered Turkish officials to remove references to secularism from Turkey ’s position paper ahead of EU negotiations over education policy. Domestically, the AKP has placed religion above the law. Turkey has long regulated supplemental Koran schools, ensuring instructor qualifications and imposing minimum age requirements to prevent indoctrination. When Saudi mullahs fanned out across Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia to promote a radical version of Islam, they largely bypassed Turkey . No longer. Not only did the AKP loosen limits upon the religious schools, but it also eviscerated the penalties for violations, leading some illegal madrassas to begin advertising openly. 

As he consolidates power, Erdoğan has become the Turkish Vladimir Putin. Upon taking office, Erdoğan sought to lower the mandatory retirement age for public servants from 65 to 61, which effectively allowed his party to appoint almost half of the nation’s prosecutors and judges. With patronage appointments, the prime minister transformed technocratic bodies such as the Savings Deposit Insurance Fund (TMSF), an entity empowered to seize private businesses and media outlets, into virtual party wings. The TMSF today is staffed almost entirely by appointees transferred from Saudi-based financial institutions. 

Placement in key ministries and government departments used to depend on success in civil service exams. Erdoğan imposed a subjective interview process that enabled him to choose political loyalists. The practice spread to state-owned industries; Turkish Airlines, for example, began quizzing employees on the Koran. Women have suffered the most. As analyst Soner Çağaptay observes in Newsweek, “under the AKP, women are largely excluded from decision-making positions in government and the workforce, relegated to the confines of their homes.” 
The AKP has even resorted to wiretapping the conversations of its political rivals. Late last month, Vakit, an Islamist paper close to the AKP, published a wiretap conversation between the opposition’s deputy leader and a governor. This episode, which the media have called “ Turkey ’s Watergate,” has sent chills through the secular elite. 

The AKP has also sought to diminish the power of Turkey ’s independent judiciary. In May 2005, AKP co-founder and parliamentary speaker Bülent Arınç said that if the Constitutional Court continued to declare AKP legislation unconstitutional, the AKP might simply dissolve it. When the Danıştay, the country’s supreme administrative court, ruled against the previous government’s seizure of a bank and Erdoğan’s transfer of its European subsidiary to a political ally, the prime minister ignored the ruling. 

Contrary to AKP claims, this summer’s Court decision will not mark the end of Turkish democracy, but rather its rebirth. Erdoğan, too, will begin a new chapter. Even if he is banned from politics, a quirk in Turkish election law would allow him to seek office as an independent. In other words, Erdoğan could conceivably wind up presiding over other AKP alumni as an independent prime minister. 

Here, the issue is less ambition than immunity. When Erdoğan leaves parliament, he will face a multitude of corruption charges. While compiling his immense wealth, he has refused to give a full financial disclosure. As the clock runs out on his premiership, Erdoğan has dispensed with even the appearance of legality. He has used the AKP’s parliamentary majority to suppress investigation of a recent TMSF deal in which an opposition newspaper and television station were sold to an Erdoğan ally after the prime minister interceded illegally. On June 18, Habertürk’s Fatih Altaylı reported that the Austrian energy firm OMV has submitted an affidavit swearing that Erdoğan told OMV the way to unfreeze a $3 billion energy project would be to dump its longtime Turkish partner and work instead with his son-in-law. Perhaps it should not be a surprise, then, that Erdoğan has used what could be his last weeks as prime minister to appoint political loyalists to the Sayıştay, Turkey ’s supreme court of accounts and audits, which will soon investigate his conduct. 
Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.