RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304315004579383002400688612?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

There is a worthwhile debate to be had over whether state laws that disenfranchise felons should be changed or even eliminated. There can be an interesting discussion of how the history of such laws affects that debate. But you would not have known that from Eric Holder’s treatment of the subject in a Feb. 10 speech at the Georgetown Law Center in Washington.

The U.S. attorney general told us that statistics can be read to show that felon disenfranchisement laws actually promote recidivism. He said that such laws, which vary from state to state, are rooted in outdated notions going back to colonial days (when no one did any voting). He said that they were used during Reconstruction intentionally, and have been used since (whether intentionally or not is left hanging in the air) to deny the vote to blacks—who make up a larger percentage of those convicted of felonies than they do of the general population.

The statistical argument derives from a recent study in Florida that showed a lower recidivism rate for felons whose right to vote had been restored than for those whose right hadn’t. However, there is more going on here.

Florida has had, and indeed has broadened, a system that requires felons to go through an application process before their voting rights are restored. Obviously, those who are motivated to navigate such a process self-select as a group less likely to repeat their crimes. Suggesting that the automatic restoration of voting rights to all felons would lower recidivism is rather like suggesting that we can raise the incomes of all college students if we automatically grant them a college degree—because statistics show that people with college degrees have higher incomes than those without them.

The history suggested by the attorney general is just as deeply flawed. A clue to the flaw lies in his failure to call for a federal law barring state felon disenfranchisement statutes. Why would an administration given to bold legislative action at the federal level—given to bold action even without legislation—shrink from calling for such action here?

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/371248/print

America is unraveling at a stunning speed and to a staggering degree. This decline is breathtaking, and the prognosis is dim.

For starters, Obama now rules by decree. Reportedly for the 27th time, he has changed the rules of Obamacare singlehandedly, with neither congressional approval nor even ceremonial resolutions to limit his actions. Obama needs no such frivolities.

“That’s the good thing about being president,” Obama joked on February 10. “I can do whatever I want.” In an especially bitter irony, Obama uttered these despicable words while guiding French president François Hollande through Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson — a key architect of America’s foundation of limited government.That very day, Obama decreed that the Obamacare mandate for employers with 50 to 99 workers would be postponed until 2016 (beyond an earlier extension to 2015), well past the November 2014 midterm elections. This eases the pressure on Democrats, whose campaigns would suffer if voters saw their company health plans canceled due to Obamacare’s unnecessary, expensive, mandatory benefits — e.g. maternity coverage for men.

So, by fiat, Obama has postponed the employer mandate. When Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) effectively tried to do this through legislation last fall, Democrats virtually lassoed and branded him.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/371268/print

This month, America celebrates the birthday of one of the country’s earliest business innovators and large-scale entrepreneurs.

During America’s existence as a British colony and then a young nation — when communication and transportation faced challenges, to put it mildly — this businessman built an enterprise with international reach. He built a mill that ground 278,000 pounds of branded flour annually that was shipped throughout America and, unusual during colonial times, exported to Europe. And in the 1790s, late in his life, he built one of the new nation’s largest whiskey distilleries.

You might also know him from some of his political and military achievements. As commander of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, he led the nascent American nation to a hard-fought victory for independence. Then, a few years later, he became the new nation’s first president.

That’s right, this entrepreneur was none other than George Washington. Had he never led the Continental Army to victory over the British or become president, he would still have had the distinction of being one of America’s most successful early business leaders. As National Review senior editor Richard Brookhiser has written in his book George Washington on Leadership: “[Washington’s] agribusiness and real estate portfolio made him America’s richest man. . . . He was the Founding CEO.”

ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF A CULTURAL INSTITUTION THAT BOWS TO VULGAR AND BIGOTED POLITICAL CORRECTNESS….RSK

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/new-york-public-library-hosts-tribute-to-anti-semitic-and-homophobic-racist-911-truther/print/

It’s all right because it’s the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (and no, it’s not named after a Jewish donor, that would have been too much) and the anti-Semitic, racist homophobe in question was also the Poet Laureate of New Jersey… until the position had to be abolished to get rid of his hateful presence.

We’re talking about Amiri Baraka aka LeRoi Jones. The author of such timeless verses as “Youth ended, I shall try/My gain or loss thereby/Leave the fire ashes, what survives is gold.”

Oh sorry. That’s Robert Browning. This is Amiri Baraka. “I got the extermination blues, jew-boys. I got the Hitler syndrome figured.”

This is also Amiri Baraka. “The fag’s death they gave us on a cross… they give us to worship a dead jew and not ourselves.”

And also, “We are all beautiful (except white people, they are full of, and made of shit).”

And let’s not forget, “Come up, black dada / nihilismus. Rape the white girls. Rape / their fathers. Cut the mothers’ throats.”

Or, “Most American white men are trained to be fags.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/venezuelans-taking-it-to-the-streets/print/ “Venezuela and its revolution will endure under the proven leadership of Vice President Maduro.” (Sean Penn, March 5, 2013.) This is to say nothing of the “proven” –and particularly, the enduring–”leadership” of Maduro’s colonial overlords in Havana, of whom Sean Penn is also extremely fond. “I had the privilege to introduce my children to comandante […]

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/how-al-qaeda-is-winning-the-war-on-terror/print/ There are two ways of looking at Osama bin Laden’s death. One is to see his end surrounded by wives, pornography and unanswered messages to Al Qaeda leaders who were no longer taking orders from him as the fall of the leader of a failed movement. The other is to see his death in […]

HOW ASTUTE IS OUR PRESIDENT? HE FINALLY NOTICED A HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATION BY A TYRANT WHO HAS BEEN GUILTY OF CORRUPTION, MASSACRE, TORTURE, RAPE AND PILLAGE FOR TWENTY FIVE YEARS …..RSK

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/02/16/obama-warns-uganda-of-complicated-relationship-if-president-signs-anti-gay-bill/?print=1

President Obama threatened Sunday that U.S. relations with Uganda could be on the rocks as President Yoweri Museveni was poised to sign a bill that hands down a sentence of life in prison for many same-sex acts.

Originally dubbed the “kill the gays bill” for its death penalty provisions, the legislation was passed in the Ugandan parliament in December with the capital punishment reduced to life imprisonment.

Also receiving prison time under the bill would be those who don’t report gays to the government or any organizations or individuals that support gay rights. Ugandans can also be sentenced for attempted homosexual acts or same-sex activity committed outside the country.

A government spokesman tweeted Friday that Museveni would sign the bill after studying it since its passage.

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2014/02/16/sympathy-for-the-european-devil/?print=1

European Parliament President Martin Schulz provoked an uproar last week in a speech before Israel’s Knesset, citing in passing a Palestinian claim that Israelis get four times as much water as Arabs in Judea and Samaria. The Jewish Home party delegation (led by my favorite Israeli politician, Naftali Bennett) walked out on the German politician in protest; Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz called the protest “disproportionate.” In this case I think Steinitz is right: Schulz is not an anti-Semite. He’s the sort of German who loves Israel in a peculiarly German way. By and large, Germans do not hate Israel; on the contrary, they love to love the Israeli left. They really, truly, sincerely want to be philo-Semitic (that brings to mind the old definition of a philo-Semite: an anti-Semite who likes Jews). The Germans are post-Christian and post-nationalist. In more than forty years of traveling (and occasionally living) in Germany I have not met a single German who can abide religion, except for full-time clergy. Their experience of nationalism, like the experience of most Europeans, has been unrelentingly horrible. They cannot help but identify with the “post-Zionist,” existentially addled Angst of the Israeli Left.

Zeruya Shalev, the Israeli novelist who dissects the disordered lives of disappointed utopians, is a bestseller and a cultural icon in Germany. Her last book was the subject of a gushing review by Adam Kirsch, book critic for the Jewish webzine Tablet and a stalwart at The New Republic. Every major German news publication has profiled or interviewed Ms. Shalev. In 2011, the popular weekly Stern asked her whether the then-ongoing “social justice” protests portended a “New Israel,” that is, an Israel more to the liking of Stern and Ms. Shalev; the Israeli writer was hopeful. The German interviewer simply took for granted that Stern’s readers would identify with the lefty literati against the Netanyahu government. Shalev writes the sort of introspective fiction that I find less tolerable than gum surgery; the great Israeli novelist in my view was the Nobelist S.Y. Agnon, whose masterwork Only Yesterday is not available in German translation. It is a wrenching, difficult book first published in Hebrew in 1945, and I am not surprised that the German public would avoid it. Today’s Germans have sensibilities hardly distinguishable from those of Adam Kirsch and prefer the Freudian meanderings of Ms. Shalev. (Of course, I’m the wrong person to ask about such things. I don’t like fiction.)

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/in-their-own-words

In an unusual move, one of the suspects in the 2012-13 Via Railway terror plot has been allowed to give an interview to the Canadian National Post. That interview is remarkable because it explains the jihadist motivations behind the plot in clear and unambiguous language that leaves no room for doubt about “why they hate us.” Those who would confront and defeat this hate and the terror plots it inspires would do well to listen to the words of Chiheb Esseghaier.

Esseghaier was a Tunisian doctoral student at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, a branch of the Université de Quebec and a landed immigrant who’d come to Canada in 2008. His travel to Zahedan, in eastern Iran, caught the attention of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), which launched a complex investigation that eventually led to the unraveling of a joint al-Qa’eda-Iran plot to blow up a passenger train over the Niagara River gorge. Esseghaier and fellow suspect, Raed Jaser (from the United Arab Emirates), were arrested in the conspiracy and now face terror charges in Canadian court. Over the months since their April 2013 arrest, Esseghaier has made a number of court appearances as well as public statements, of which the recent National Post interview includes just the latest.

Although thanks to good intelligence and police work, Canada to date has been spared the kind of horrific terror attacks that have made headlines elsewhere in the West (Burgas, London, Madrid, U.S.), there have been jihadist attempts, including the August 2010 Ottawa Parliament plot and the earlier 2006 Toronto 18 plot. National Post coverage of the Via Railway terror plot has been extensive and its multiple reports quoting the very vocal Esseghaier are revealing, even though it is clear the Post itself doesn’t understand what he’s been trying to tell them. Faced with the reality that their country, too, is a target, Canadians have been struggling to make sense out of Esseghaier’s simple pronouncement: “I am a Muslim.” The so-called “experts on extremism” consulted by the National Post weren’t much help: Prof. Lorne Dawson, ex-director of the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society, opined that Esseghaier’s views were “very comparable to what one might hear from a strident anti-abortion activist coming from a Christian perspective.”

THIS GARBAGE WAS PUBLISHED IN (AL)-HA-ARETZ, ISRAEL’S EQUIVALENT OF A PORNO DAILY WITHOUT THE PICTURES. AND, SPEAKING OF PICTURES, EVA ILLOUZ IS THE PRESIDENT OF BEZALEL ACADEMY OF ART AND DESIGN- ONE OF THOSE ISRAELI CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS THAT RECEIVES A GREAT DEAL OF FUNDING FROM GENEROUS WEALTHY PATRONS WHO DEVOUTLY AVOID POLITICS. THIS RANT IS ARTLESS AND DESIGNED TO MALIGN ISRAEL AND SHE SHOULD BE DISMISSED AS PRESIDENT… RSK

http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/.premium-1.572880

47 years a slave: A new perspective on the occupation: Very few struggles in history have centered on how a nation should treat a third group of people, but there are strong parallels between black slavery and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

Open Haaretz on any given day. Half or three quarters of its news items will invariably revolve around the same two topics: people struggling to protect the good name of Israel, and people struggling against its violence and injustices.

An almost random example: On December 17, 2013, one could read, on a single Haaretz page, Chemi Shalev reporting on the decision of the American Studies Association to boycott Israeli academic institutions in order to “honor the call of Palestinian civil society.” In response, former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers dubbed the decision “anti-Semitic in effect, if not in intent.”

On the same page, MK Naftali Bennett called the bill to prevent outside funding of left-wing NGOs in Israel “too soft.” The proposed law was meant to protect Israel and Israeli soldiers from “foreign forces” which, in his view, work against the national interest of Israel through those left-wing nonprofits (for Bennett and many others in Israel, to defend human rights is to be left-wing). The Haaretz editorial, backed by an article by regular columnist Sefi Rachlevsky, referred to the treatment of illegal immigrants by the Israeli government as shameful, with Rachlevsky calling the current political regime “radical rightist-racist-capitalist,” because “it tramples democracy and replaces it with fascism.” The day after, it was the turn of Alan Dershowitz to call the American Studies Association vote to boycott Israel shameful, “for singling out the Jew among nations. Shame on them for applying a double standard to Jewish universities.”

This mudslinging has become a normal spectacle to the bemused eyes of ordinary Israelis and Jews around the world. But what’s astonishing is that this mud is being thrown by Jews at Jews. Indeed, the valiant combatants for the good name of Israel miss an important point: the critiques of Israel in the United States are increasingly waged by Jews, not anti-Semites. The initiators and leaders of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement are such respected academics as Judith Butler, Jacqueline Rose, Noam Chomsky, Hilary Rose and Larry Gross, all Jews.

If Israel is indeed singled out among the many nations that have a bad record in human rights, it is because of the personal sense of shame and embarrassment that a large number of Jews in the Western world feel toward a state that, by its policies and ethos, does not represent them anymore. As Peter Beinart has been cogently arguing for some time now, the Jewish people seems to have split into two distinct factions: One that is dominated by such imperatives as “Israeli security,” “Jewish identity” and by the condemnation of “the world’s double standards” and “Arabs’ unreliability”; and a second group of Jews, inside and outside Israel, for whom human rights, freedom, and the rule of law are as visceral and fundamental to their identity as membership to Judaism is for the first group. Supreme irony of history: Israel has splintered the Jewish people around two radically different moral visions of Jews and humanity.

If we are to find an appropriate analogy to understand the rift inside the Jewish people, let us agree that the debate between the two groups is neither ethnic (we belong to the same ethnic group) nor religious (the Judith Butlers of the world are not trying to push a new or different religious dogma, although the rift has a certain, but imperfect, overlap with the religious-secular positions). Nor is the debate a political or ideological one, as Israel is in fact still a democracy. Rather, the poignancy, acrimony and intensity of the debate are about two competing and ultimately incompatible conceptions of morality. This statement is less trivial than it sounds.