http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303289904579195993572716498?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond The White House recently whispered out the back door that President Obama would not appear in Pennsylvania next Tuesday at the ceremonies for the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The political betting had been that this was a big-speech venue whose glow Mr. Obama would not want to miss. The higher-road expectation […]
Emerging Details Give Heirs Who Thought Works Were Lost Long-Awaited Evidence
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303559504579196291106825648?mod=WSJ_hpsMIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond
Martha Hinrichsen got a call last week she thought she’d never receive: Within a vast trove of recovered wartime art, German authorities had found a drawing records show belonged to her Jewish grandfather.
Now the 65-year-old retired music publisher is one of many heirs of Holocaust victims who are digging through yellowed files and painful family histories to research potential claims to the cache of Nazi-confiscated art.
“Who would ever think I’d need to go back through all this?” Ms. Hinrichsen said of the onionskin invoices and letters that make up 75 trunkloads of family archives she keeps in a storage locker two miles from her home in Southbury, Conn.
Since 1945, she said her family had worked steadily to successfully reclaim their ornate, three-story home in Leipzig as well as their music-publishing business, which were confiscated by the Nazis during the war from her Jewish grandfather, Henri Hinrichsen. But the case of his still-missing art had grown cold until a friend told her she had read about the lost drawing, by 19th-century German artist Carl Spitzweg.
As details have emerged in the past week about the roughly 1,400-piece collection found in a Munich apartment, descendants of collectors and ordinary citizens who lost art during World War II were stunned to hear that pieces they thought were forever gone still existed. Some, who have been fighting for decades to reclaim art lost to the Nazis, now have the concrete evidence that they’ve been waiting for.
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4353/the_eu_s_climate_change_agenda_costs_us_dear_in_energy_prices Politicians have assumed that most people in the EU agree with global warming theory. They have assumed that people will therefore buy into the “solution”, burning less fossil fuel, and paying extra for this Europe has a problem. Dear energy makes European industry much less competitive, at a time when Asia is challenging and […]
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4351/the_british_church_s_love_hate_relationship_with_israel I wrote last week about a major British historical denomination consulting the wider church on whether it should continue to boycott Israeli settlement produce, something it resolved to do in 2010.Three days later I sat in a university lecture hall in London at a joint Christian/Jewish “Night to Honour Israel”, led by the Zionist […]
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4053/eu-regulations The European Union and its supporters say the bans are necessary to improve the energy efficiency, environmental friendliness and health standards of the 28-member bloc. European Commission Regulation No. 1677/88, “Class I” and “Extra class” cucumbers are allowed a bend of 10mm per 10cm of length. “Class II” cucumbers can bend twice as […]
When Obama Said He’s “Sorry” — on The Glazov Gang
Basil Hoffman, Ann-Marie Murrell and Monty Morton unravel the president’s peculiar apology about his ObamaCare lie.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/when-obama-said-hes-sorry/
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/nov/10/editorial-heroic-and-politically-correct/
The publishers of comic books are obsessed with the politically correct. Diversity and quotas are more important than dispatching evil. Spider-Man has been reimagined as a black Hispanic teenager. The Green Lantern is out of the closet. Early next year, Marvel Comics rolls out a Muslim superheroine.
Ms. Marvel is a teenage girl, Kamala Khan, with a shape-changing superpower. She will need it to dodge bullets in her new hometown of Jersey City, N.J., and assassins in her native Pakistan, where a real-life teen superheroine, Malala Yousafzai, was targeted for death by the Taliban for merely advocating sending girls to school.
Most comic-book readers are male, but this comic is different. Instead of the usual heroine with bust and gams, like Wonder Woman, Ms. Marvel is fully covered in a modest red-and-black costume (with a yellow lightning bolt). Her face is shrouded not by a Saudi-style niqab full-face veil, but by a mask similar to Batman’s sidekick Robin.
Ms. Marvel, unlike her paper-and-ink comrades, won’t advocate for “truth, justice and the American way.” If she wants to find a place on newsstands in Muslim countries, she’ll have to be careful not to anger militant Islam, even if she takes on the Great Satan. She can take her cues from Secretary of State John F. Kerry, who traveled to Saudi Arabia last week to mend fences and promptly climbed atop one. When reporters asked him what he thinks of the growing protests of Saudi women demanding the right to drive a car, he replied that he’s all for equality except when he isn’t. “We embrace equality for everybody, regardless of gender, race or any other qualification,” he says. “There’s a healthy debate in Saudi Arabia about this issue, but I think that debate is best left to Saudi Arabia.”
Bill Clinton, other Democrats distance themselves from Obamacare
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/nov/12/undercover-video-adds-obamacare-rollout-woes/
In a startling rebuke to President Obama, former President Bill Clinton and other Democrats picked apart Obamacare on Tuesday as privacy concerns about the program’s website multiplied and a video investigation suggested fraudulence among volunteers helping people enroll for government subsidies.
Mr. Clinton called on the president to make good on his repeated and emphatic promise that Americans who like their health insurance plans can keep them. The former president said Mr. Obama should take that step on behalf of consumers whose policies were canceled, “even if it takes a change in the law.”
SEE ALSO: Obamacare enrollment well short of expectations: report
The White House said Mr. Obama is considering a “range of options” but didn’t commit to Mr. Clinton’s proposal. In a reminder of Mr. Obama’s on-again, off-again relationship with Mr. Clinton, the president’s spokesman pointed out that Mr. Clinton tried and failed to enact universal health care.
The highly public rebuff prompted open speculation that Team Clinton has begun to distance itself from Mr. Obama in preparation for a presidential bid by Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016. “And so starts the Clinton team slowly walking away from the train wreck that is the Obama presidency,” said John Feehery, a Republican strategist in Washington.
Lanny Davis, who was an adviser in the Clinton White House, called such talk “speculation” but said Mr. Obama should heed the increasing call of Democrats to change the health care law.
“A lot of Democrats that I’ve talked to all day are saying just do it — make the fix,” Mr. Davis said. In a column to be published in The Hill newspaper Thursday, Mr. Davis argues that Mr. Obama “might be well advised to admit to trying to do too much too soon in a 1,000+ page ObamaCare bill, passed by an almost entirely partisan vote in 2010 — and revert back to a step-by-step approach to increase required coverage over a longer period of time, in effect reinstating the guarantee that if you have insurance, you can keep your policies.”
“Such a mid-course correction could be a compromise worth trying — saving not only public support for ObamaCare but perhaps the Democratic control of the U.S. Senate in the 2014 elections as well,” he writes.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/363781/render-unto-seizure-mark-steyn
In the year 1215, Magna Carta provided a freeman of England with the right to a trial in a fixed, local law court, and protected him from being “amerced [fined] for a slight offence, except in accordance with the degree of the offence; and for a grave offence he shall be amerced in accordance with the gravity of the offence, yet saving always his contentment; and a merchant in the same way, saving his merchandise” – i.e., even for a “grave offence,” a man shall not be deprived of the ability to make his living.
Four-fifths of a millennium later, a 21st-century American merchant does not enjoy the rights of his 13th-century English forebear. The Economist reports on yet another case of “civil forfeiture” by the corrupt and diseased IRS – a Michigan grocery store owned by the Dehkos family:
Fairly often, someone takes cash from the till and puts it in the bank across the street. Deposits are nearly always less than $10,000, because the insurance covers the theft of cash only up to that sum.
In January, without warning, the government seized all the money in the shop account: more than $35,000. The charge was that the Dehkos had violated federal money-laundering rules, which forbid people to “structure” their bank deposits so as to avoid the $10,000 threshold that triggers banks to report a transaction to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
This is a quintessentially Washingtonian form of shakedown. First, they pass a stupid law that has the effect of making millions of routine, law-abiding transactions appear suspicious (in this case, deposits over $10,000). Then, the vast bloated support state of the Republic of Hyper-Regulation adjusts accordingly (in this case, insurers who’ll cover a mugging of $9,975 decline to cover one of $10,037). But by then, just to cover themselves coming and going, Washington has passed another stupid law making it an additional crime to avoid committing the original crime (thus, “structuring” your deposits to avoid the $10,000 threshold).
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/363818/print Indulge me if you will, and join me in imagining that Obamacare has taken the calamitous path of the Hindenburg and ended up as little more than a smoldering warning against hubris. Imagine, that is, that enrollment rates have remained dangerously low; that the risk pools consist largely of the elderly and the sick; […]
