One should not conclude that Obama favors criminal violence, but rather that the popular response to Jay Z’s evocation of felonious rage is so great that Obama finds it convenient to exploit it. http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/10/21/jay-zs-american-fascism/?singlepage=true Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen moechte: I can’t eat enough to puke as much as I […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304402104579149420879742530.html Fifty-four Iraqis were killed and another 70 injured Sunday when two suicide bombers blew themselves up in a Baghdad cafe. But you probably didn’t catch the news. The tree falls in the forest, the country collapses in the desert, and the question remains the same: Does either of them make a sound if nobody […]
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304402104579149582888128734?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop ‘More than a website” is the latest defense of the Affordable Care Act’s painful rollout, and liberals are partly right. ObamaCare has larger ambitions than the basket case called Healthcare.gov and the 36 federally run insurance exchanges. But building the website was supposed to be the easy part. The health law’s fiasco of a […]
http://www.nysun.com/foreign/how-a-terror-attack-against-our-marines-30-years/88466/
This was one of the most shameful episodes of the Reagan administration. Furthermore, it was subsequently learned that the wounded were to be air-lifted to Israel’s highly advanced and state of the arts trauma hospitals, but Weinberger nixed that and the wounded had to endure a three hour flight to Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany, prolonging their pain and suffering and possibly altering their prognosis….rsk
When suicide bombers strike, the shadowy men who dispatch their charges then step back to gauge the response. Thirty years ago Wednesday, after one of the costliest acts of terror ever committed against America, Washington sent out the worst possible message to terrorists around the world. They were watching and listening.
Early on Sunday morning, October 23, 1983, when our Marines were still asleep in their cots at the Beirut International Airport, a truck driven by an Iranian, Ismail Ascari, and filled with explosives crashed into their barracks. The blast was so huge that witnesses said the four-story building actually lifted into the air before it came crashing down.
The blast killed 220 Marines, more than any day since Iwo Jima — 18 sailors, three soldiers and six civilians. Almost simultaneously, a second suicide truck bomber blew up a nine story building on the other side of the airport killing 58 French paratroopers.
The Americans and French were in Beirut as part of an international peacekeeping force sent to quell the violence from the Lebanese Civil War. Once a beautiful and tranquil country, Lebanon descended into a living hell after the P.L.O. arrived, having been kicked out of Jordan by King Hussein in 1970. This tipped the fragile balance between Arab Christians and Muslims. Soon they were fighting each other as well as the Israelis, who entered in 1982 to stop PLO terror raids.
“Which brings us to the point about the Tea Party. It — or “they,” in that it’s not really a party — may have lost the latest engagement in the battle of the budget and the debt. But in our view they have opened up an inspiring vista. We’ve been beating this drum for a while. The heroes of the Tea Party these days are not the kind of troublemakers and yahoos of the kind the Left lampoons on the right.On the contrary, the feature of the Tea Party heroes is that they are exceptionally well-educated. Senator Cruz is a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law School. He clerked for the Chief Justice of the United States. Senator Lee, the son of a solicitor general of America, was a star at Brigham Young University and clerked on the Third Circuit for a future Supreme Court Justice, Samuel Alito. Rand Paul is a physician who learned economics at the knee of his father, who goes home at night and reads the principles of political economy that guided the Founders.”
Editorial of The New York Sun | October 21, 2013
http://www.nysun.com/editorials/taking-sides-in-the-gop/88463/
In respect of the power struggle inside the Republican Party, on which side is the Sun? Is it on the side of Senator Cruz or on the side of Senator McCain? Is it on the side of Karl Rove or on the side of Sarah Palin? Is it on the side of Governor Christie or of Senator Paul? We wouldn’t want to suggest that there are great throngs hanging on this question. But for the record, in the rift that is rending the Republican Party, the Sun is on the side of George Washington.
We speak of him as the personification of the constitutional founders. Few of our political loyalties are personal. Our base is the Constitution, at the drafting of which Washington presided. The more we study it, the more we savor the great cases that have been brought down from the high court, the more it seems that this is the ground on which to stand. In the political posturing, constitutional principles are what for what we look, references to it are for what we listen.
Constitutional thinking can be detected but rarely in the Democratic Party palaver. The Democrats are carrying on their crusade with scant reference to or reverence for the Constitution. When they do reference it, they too often do so in a glancing way, a point we marked when, in the midst of the budget crisis, President Obama blandly asserted that of “all the responsibilities the Constitution endows to Congress” there are two that “should be fairly simple.” They are “pass a budget, and pay America’s bills.”
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4028/world-council-of-churches Who needs the WCC any more? Would the world, let alone Middle East Christians, be better off without it? The World Council of Churches (WCC) in Geneva claims to represent and serve 345 churches worldwide. What has it done to help the persecuted churches in Iraq, Syria and Egypt? Or the flood of Syrian […]
http://mosaicmagazine.com/supplemental/2013/10/before-pastor-hagee/
The following comments are a historical footnote to Robert Nicholson’s splendid essay, “Evangelicals and Israel.” Addressing himself to American Jews, he rebukes them for being distrustful of the millions of evangelical Christians who have been staunch supporters of the Jewish state and the Jewish people. But he also rebukes the growing minority of evangelicals who have recently withdrawn that support and are now actively hostile to Israel and Jews.
Two years ago, I was provoked to write The People of the Book: Philosemitism in England from Cromwell to Churchill, in a similarly critical mode, reproaching the present-day English (not English Jews) for betraying their own evangelical tradition, which was so respectful of the Jewish religion and people and so enthusiastic in favor of a Jewish state, and for succumbing to an anti-Israel fervor very nearly indistinguishable from anti-Semitism.
Evangelicalism was at its height in England in the early 19th century, with Lord Ashley (later the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury) its most prominent and vigorous champion. “An Evangelical of the Evangelicals,” he described himself. It was evangelicalism that prompted both his zeal as a social reformer (of factories, education, and child-labor practices) and as a “missionary,” as he saw it, to and from the Jews. “Who will be the Cyrus of Modern Times,” he inquired in his diary in 1826, “the second Chosen to restore the God’s people?” (Cyrus, king of ancient Persia, permitted the exiled Jews to return from Babylonia to the land of Israel.)
Ashley was all of twenty-five and a newly elected member of Parliament when he took upon himself that role. A decade later, he helped organize the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews (the Jews’ Society, as it was known), one of whose aims, and soon its principal aim, was “encouraging the physical restoration of the Jewish people to Eretz Israel—the Land of Israel.” Two years later, he persuaded Lord Palmerston, then the foreign secretary, to appoint a British vice-consul to Jerusalem. “What a wonderful event it is!” he exulted. “The ancient city of the people of God is about to resume a place among the nations.”
