RUTHFULLY YOURS

Wisconsin Recall Sputters

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/09/wisconsin-recall-sputters/

That sound you hear may be the sputtering of Wisconsin Democrats and public-sector unions’ campaign to oust Republican Gov. Scott Walker. On Tuesday, Democrats went to the polls to choose a candidate to square off against Walker in next month’s recall election. But the union-led opposition’s hopes that the standard bearer would be a Big Labor darling were dashed with the election of Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, rather than the unions’ preferred candidate, Democratic operative Kathleen Falk. Falk’s defeat marks only the latest setback for a recall campaign that is increasingly running out of steam.

The differences between Barrett and Falk are small but politically significant. Though they both pledged to eliminate Walker’s restrictions on collective bargaining for most state workers, they disagreed on the methods. Falk took the more union-friendly approach, assuring her supporters that she would veto any budget that didn’t restore collective bargaining. That promise earned her the endorsements of the state’s leading public-sector unions, including the state chapter of the AFL-CIO and the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state’s biggest teachers union.

Barrett refused to go as far as Falk. While he is also committed to restoring collective bargaining, he has said that he would do so by introducing the issue in a special legislative session. The latter is particularly unattractive to unions because it would require Republican support for the legislation. Barrett’s victory in the Tuesday primary means the unions’ dreams of restoring collective bargaining through gubernatorial fiat have been shattered.

Yet another setback for the unions is that their efforts to turn the recall into a referendum on collective bargaining appear to have failed. While union activists and organizers still see collective bargaining as the dominant recall issue, Wisconsin’s voters, among them many Democratic primary voters, disagree. Polling of primary voters conducted by Marquette University found that over half of those who voted in Tuesday’s primary favored Barrett’s compromise-seeking approach on collective bargaining over Falk’s and the unions’ demands that it be reinstated without debate. Collective bargaining has also faded as a galvanizing issue. Increasingly, the recall has come to resemble a general election, where the main focus is on standard issues like jobs and unemployment. Doom-saying from Democrats and their union allies notwithstanding, challenging the unions over collective bargaining has not fatally diminished Walker’s political prospects.

Anti-Semitism Is Racism Posted By Daniel Greenfield

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/09/anti-semitism-is-racism/print/

Islam is not a race. Even though Islamophobia has become the great obsession of the politically correct elites of the Western world– there is nothing innate about Islam. One is not born a Muslim and there is no double helix of DNA that intertwines with the Koran. Muslims are followers of a belief system and no belief system should be above criticism or reproach.

Jews however are a race, a fact that has been known for thousands of years and has been backed up by genetic evidence in modern times. A fact that has been dismissed by liberals who are eager to denounce racism except when it comes to the one particular race that they have given themselves permission to hate.

By embracing the Islamophobia narrative, the left prioritized combating discrimination against a belief system over combating discrimination against a race, reversing its past position that racial prejudice is worse than any other form of prejudice because it persecutes an innate aspect of the individual, rather than an external adopted one. And when the two were in conflict over the racist aspect of the ideology, it chose the ideology and its racism.

Leftist and Islamic persecution of Jews and the common alliance of the two groups have made it necessary for the left to ignore or even legitimize displays of Anti-Semitism. The supremacy of these two ideologies over the rights and humanity of the most persecuted racial minority in the world are the toxic ingredients in the “New Anti-Semitism” which has revived Anti-Semitic racial prejudice as a progressive value.

American and European elites have become obsessed with protecting a single religion from any criticism, even when that religion comes burdened with an ugly legacy of racism that believes the Jewish people are its eternal enemies who must be destroyed in an apocalyptic Islamic genocide that concludes with every rock crying out, “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him!”

The rocks have remained silent, but left-wing newspapers have taken up the call in their place. Jewish store windows are smashed, synagogues burned, schools attacked and children murdered, while the media ignores, justifies, whitewashes and even occasionally praises these crimes. Every other news story from the Middle East is either an attack on the Jewish State or a celebration of the Muslim Brotherhood and its plans for a genocidal theocracy stretching across the region and eventually across the world.

Attacks reminiscent of the work of Goebbels’ pet propagandists regularly make their way into the pages of The Guardian and Time Magazine as part of the Leftist-Islamic alliance against the Jews. Warnings about growing Anti-Semitism are ridiculed or dismissed while Islamophobia is treated as a grave threat, even though crime statistics clearly show a far higher numbers of attacks on Jews contrasted with a fairly insignificant numbers of attacks on Muslims.

The left cannot deny the hate crimes statistics, so instead it chooses to ignore them. The artificial reality bubbles sent up by its media empires clamor about the manufactured crisis of Islamophobia, while claiming Anti-Semitism is largely overblown, a tool that it insists Jews use to silence Muslims and leftists. The same elites who claimed that McCarthyism was worse than the Gulags, now claim that Islamophobia is worse than Anti-Semitism.

Criticize the affiliates of the genocidal Muslim Brotherhood and the cry of “Islamophobia” goes up from the disciples and propagandists of a group that was inspired by Mohammed and Adolf Hitler. And the media immediately takes up their call. No sooner does a Muslim leader, from Ahmadinejad to Raed Salah, make an Anti-Semitic statement than a thousand columnists rush to claim that he was mistranslated, misquoted or misunderstood.

Israel stands at the critical intersection of this debate. The Jewish claim to the land is based on the history of its people while the Muslim claim to the land is entirely ahistorical. Islam is a religion, not a people, and its claim to the territory rests on religious supremacy through a trip taken by Mohammed on a flying horse. The fiction of an ancient “Palestinian people” was a temporary convenience that is being set aside by Hamas leaders looking to join Gaza together with a Muslim Brotherhood run Egypt.

The struggle between Israel and the Muslim world is a struggle between a people and an ideology, just as the struggle between Israel and the left is a struggle between a people and an ideology. Islam and the left both represent transnational ideologies and as an ethno-religious group, the Jews remain an obstacle for the transnationalists of Islam and the left.

http://times247.com/
North Korea showing signs of new provocation
Washington Free Beacon
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
News
U.S. intelligence agencies are closely monitoring North Korea for signs the Kim Jong-un regime is set to conduct a new military provocation that could trigger another conflict on the Asian peninsula. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1uMwOZTQw

Arab world views unity deal as ‘cold-blooded’ politics
The Times of Israel
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
News
Arab world views unity deal as ‘cold-blooded’ politics
The Arab world is intently following the Israeli political developments, with many spokespeople and commentators viewing the unity of Benjamin Netanyahu and Shaul Mofaz as a cynical maneuver by desperate politicians. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1uMw0u29z
Obama reaps unauthorized donations
Daily Caller
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
News
President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign has some unwilling, defrauded donors, including David Newman, who found a $15 charge from the “Obama For America” campaign on one of his debit cards. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1uMwDyniW

: http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012/05/08/doj-defends-employee-comment-that-mississippi-is-disgusting-and-shameful/

DOJ Defends Employee Comment that Mississippi Is ‘Disgusting and Shameful’

The United States Department of Justice has defended comments by an employee who called Mississippi “disgusting and shameful.” This same employee reviews photo voter identification laws throughout the south for approval from her position in the DOJ Voting Section.

PJ Media first reported on comments made by Voting Section employee Stephanie Gyamfi toward the citizens of Mississippi:

On her Facebook page, Voting Section supervisory civil rights analyst Stephanie Celandine Gyamfi says about the people of Mississippi:

“Disgusting and shameful. Hey, that should replace the state motto: ‘Mississippi: Disgusting and Shameful’. . . forget the Magnolia State motto.”

On Tuesday, Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann held a press conference in response to the PJ Media story and demanded that Gyamfi be removed from all reviews of state election laws under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Three Mississippi congressmen (Nunlee, Harper, and Palazzo), sent a letter to the DOJ demanding the same.

Voting Section Chief Christopher Herren on Tuesday said that the comments by Gyamfi were “personal” in nature. Yet then the resources of the Department of Justice were deployed to defend the comments.

“The department maintains Gyamfi is a respected employee.”

Justice Department officials told WLBT-TV in Mississippi that the comments were “taken out of context” and were defensible because they related to an ugly incident at the University of Southern Mississippi. During that incident, some students taunted an opposing Hispanic basketball player.

Of course Gyamfi’s comments were not confined to her opinions about the handful of Southern Mississippi students. No, the bigotry extended to all Mississippians. All of Mississippi was sufficiently “disgusting and shameful” to warrant replacing the state motto with “Mississippi: Disgusting and Shameful.”

http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-fbis-muslim-outreach-follies/?print=1

When FBI Director Robert Mueller testifies today for a House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing [1], undoubtedly he will be questioned about the FBI’s ongoing “Islamophobia” purge [2].

Specifically, members of Congress are concerned about the FBI’s continued secrecy [3] regarding the identity of the three outside subject matter experts (SME) the bureau brought in to help with the purge (two other SMEs from inside the FBI assisted). One reason for congressional skepticism about the FBI’s use of these outside SMEs is that the bureau has an extensive history of failure when vetting Muslim outreach partners.

In June 2002, Director Mueller took fire [4] for a speech to the American Muslim Council (AMC), which his spokesman described [5] as “the most mainstream Muslim group in the United States.” During his speech Mueller asked the group [6] for their help in fighting terrorism. But the head of AMC at the time was Abdurahman Alamoudi, who was videotaped [7] in October 2000 delivering a speech just yards away from the White House, proclaiming: “I have been labeled by the media in New York as being a supporter of Hamas. We are all supporters of Hamas. I wish they added that I am also a supporter of Hezbollah.”

That same year, AMC board advisor and former acting President [4] Jamil Al-Amin was arrested for murdering a Georgia police officer. Alamoudi was arrested [8] in 2003 in a Libyan assassination plot targeting the Saudi crown prince, and was later identified [9] by the U.S. Treasury as one of al-Qaeda’s top fundraisers [10] in the United States.

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/05/here_comes_the_made-in-china_cadillac.html
Here Comes the Made-in-China Cadillac

By Howard Richman & Raymond Richman

It’s déjà vu all over again! GM again caves to Chinese pressure. In September it was the electric car. In April it was the Cadillac.

The Chinese government made its latest move in December. That’s when The Guardian reported that the Chinese government raised its already high 25% tariff upon American-made vehicles, concerned that increasing numbers of big-engine cars were being purchased by Chinese consumers:

General Motors faces the greatest impact, almost 22% extra on some sports utility vehicles (SUVs) and other cars with engine capacities above 2.5 litres. Chrysler faces a 15% penalty, while a 2% levy will be imposed on BMW, whose US plants make many of the cars it exports to China.

Existing taxes and duties already push up the cost of US imports by 25%, and the new levies make it even more expensive for Chinese consumers to buy American.

Now we learn what they were after. In a May 2 Huffington Post commentary (“Commies in Cadillacs: GM Turns Chinese”), economists Peter Navarro and Greg Autrey reported that GM will build its luxury cars in China instead of exporting them to China. They began:

General Motors announced this week that it will start building the Cadillac XTS, CTS and ATX in China in an attempt to keep up with the insatiable demand for luxury consumption by that nation’s nominally Marxist elite. It seems that Communist Party princelings and their crony capitalist clients just can’t get enough Caddies, not to mention the BMWs, Ferraris and Lamborghinis.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/299418/bury-my-affirmative-action-program-wounded-knee-mark-steyn

In my weekend column, I was inclined to give Elizabeth Warren, Harvard Law School’s sole tenured Native American, the benefit of the doubt that she was 1/32nd Cherokee. But it turns out I’m wrong. She’s 1/32nd Cherokee-forcible-remover:

Not only is it unlikely that Elizabeth Warren’s great-great-great grandmother was Cherokee, it turns out that Warren’s great-great-great grandfather was a member of a militia unit which participated in the round-up of the Cherokees in the prelude to the Trail of Tears.

If I understand the diversity enforcers, identity-group quotas are necessary to help correct historical injustices. In this case, Harvard Law School chose to help correct historical injustices against the Cherokees by hiring a descendant of one of the perpetrators to play their token Injun. Maybe it was a choice between her or that Klansman who passed himself off as “Little Tree” and wrote Oprah’s favorite heartwarming fake-Cherokee memoir.

In related news from London’s Metropolitan Police:

Blacklist Is Blacklisted: Met Bans Word Over Claims It Is Racist… And Staff Have To Say ‘Red Listed’

Redlisted? Hey, welcome to Elizabeth Warren’s world…

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

“In a conflict they take the path of least resistance. In Israel the path of least resistance means bowing to international pressure, making more concessions, handing over Jerusalem and ignoring Iran. If Netanyahu does this, then he will likely seal Israel’s fate and will become one of the last prime ministers of the State of Israel.
Netanyahu’s political maneuverings show that he is a political survivor, the great unknown is whether his principles have also survived. And whether Israel will survive him.”

Thirteen years after he was sent packing by Bill Clinton’s political consultants and a phony third party, Bibi Netanyahu has become a political survivor. The awkward politician constantly under siege by the media and at the mercy of domestic political squabbling, has become a veteran of Israel’s turbulent politics.

Netanyahu owes most of his success to a dysfunctional political climate. in which there is no one left to replace him. The old generation of leaders is gone and even a notoriously fickle Israeli electorate would not trust most of his rivals to make them dinner, let alone run a country. Displaced by Sharon, he learned the game of coalitions from him and has ably exploited the rivalries and petty careerism of the Knesset lineup to stay in office. With Barak by his side and Peres shaking hands with foreign dignitaries, the transformation is almost complete.

Netanyahu’s electability allows him to exploit the less electable, flipping through ministers and coalition partners like a game of cards. A deeply divided and thoroughly corrupt Knesset has no shortage of partners willing to dance with him for a ministry and the perks of power. With no one positioned to take down Netanyahu, his is the only game in town and everyone knows it.

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/299324 The Cleveland Five are a sad-sack collection of wannabe terrorists if there ever was one. The amateurish young men who plotted to destroy a bridge outside Cleveland last week give the impression of needing the attention of a guidance counselor as much as a federal prosecutor. But there’s no mistaking the seriousness of their […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/299388

“In other words, I worry that Vladimir Putin, the Iranian theocrats, the North Korean apparat, the Chinese central committee, the Muslim Brotherhood, and all the others who detest the United States have sized up Barack Obama. For 40 months they have acknowledged that his postracial image and his youthful charisma, as David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs rightly insisted, threw them for a loop — for a while. And that “for a while” is now ending, replaced with a new belief abroad that the more Obama talks about himself and his team, and the more emphatic he becomes with his “Make no mistake about it” and “Let me be perfectly clear” vacuities, the more he can at first safely be ignored, and then, quite soon, safely be taken advantage of.”

Former president Bill Clinton just appeared in a reelection television commercial for President Barack Obama. At one point, Clinton weighs in on the potential consequences of Obama’s decision to go ahead with the planned assassination of Osama bin Laden. He smiles and then pontificates, “Suppose the Navy SEALs had gone in there . . . suppose they had been captured or killed. The downside would have been horrible for him [Obama].”

There is a lot that is disturbing about Clinton’s commentary — and about the fact that such an embarrassment was not deleted by the Obama campaign. Clinton offers unintended self-incrimination as to why in the 1990s he did not order the capture of bin Laden when it might well have been in his power to do so — was it fear of something “horrible” that might have happened to his fortunes rather than to our troops? And, of course, such crass politicization of national security and the war on terror is exactly what Barack Obama accused the two Clintons of in the 2008 Democratic primaries. We also remember that Obama on several occasions chastised George W. Bush for supposedly making reference to the war on terror for political advantage, though he never did so in as creepy a fashion as Clinton. And aside from the fact that Barack Obama promised never to “spike the football” by using the SEAL mission to score campaign points, only a narcissistic Bill Clinton could have envisioned the death or capture of Navy SEALs not in terms of those men’s own horrible fates, but only as political “downside” for an equally narcissistic Barack Obama.