RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/370634/print

When anyone says it’s a “do-nothing Congress,” they are only half right. It’s actually a do-nothing Senate.

In this Congress, the House has passed and sent over to the Senate 253 bills. In stark contrast, the Senate has sent to the House 63 bills. The Senate produces only one quarter of what the House does.

I am not saying that passing bills is in and of itself an unalloyed good. (See the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare.) But if you want to determine who is doing the actual work of legislating, counting bills is where you start.

From the House Natural Resources Committee, on which I serve, we have passed six bills opening up American energy that would create over 1 million new jobs, lower gasoline and electricity prices, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and help lower our national debt by generating over one billion dollars in new revenue. These bills are now stalled in the Senate.

The U.S. Senate has become a productivity graveyard. President Obama signed only 16 Senate bills into law in 2013. Since summer, while House Republicans have allowed minority Democrats to offer 71 recorded amendments, Senate Democrats have allowed Republicans only four.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/370702/print Vegas, Baby — “Eggs are expensive, sperm are cheap.” That’s a plain-English approximation of Bateman’s principle, which holds that in a species with two sexes, the members of the sex that invests less biologically in reproduction will end up competing, sometimes ferociously, over the members of the sex that invests more. Because healthy men can […]

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304181204579369012564233246?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLESecond Chain-link fencing is all that protects the U.S. from a major disaster. Tens of thousands of cyber attacks on the power grid are troubling, though so far they have rarely caused damage. More alarming is news of an old-fashioned armed attack on a physical location that proved the vulnerability of the grid. Last April, […]

A high-profile sex-abuse report is an attempt to bully the church into bowing before the altar of Turtle Bay. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303650204579372622361332560?mod=Opinion_newsreel_1 In the name of protecting children,the United Nations is now preaching to the Vatican. A report on the Holy See—released by a U.N. committee last week to much media fanfare—alleged that tens of thousands of […]

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304104504579372971308988130?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

It’s impossible to read Woody Allen’s reply to charges that in 1992 he molested his and Mia Farrow’s 7-year-old adopted daughter, Dylan, without being struck by its haunting echoes of the words of countless people accused of such crimes. He had thought that the charges were so ludicrous he didn’t think of hiring a lawyer, he reported in an op-ed for the New York Times on Sunday. He had believed that “common sense would prevail.” He had “naïvely thought the accusation would be dismissed out of hand.”

It was a kind of naïveté evident in virtually every person known to me who had been falsely charged in the high-profile sex-abuse cases that had swept the country in the 1980s and early 1990s—people convicted and sentenced to long prison terms on the basis of testimony from children coaxed into making accusations. Accusations made, at ages 5, 6 or 7, that many of them would continue to believe fervently were true, into adulthood.

Though dazed when confronted with such accusations in 1984, the Amirault family of Massachusetts, owners of the Fells Acres nursery school, never doubted even when they were arrested that everything would soon be cleared up. Violet Amirault, school head, marveled that at age 60 she was suddenly supposed to have turned into a sexual molester of children.

It was said of Kelly Michaels, a young New Jersey schoolteacher convicted in 1987 of molesting 20 children, that it had done her no good with jurors that she had seemed calm, and lacking in urgency, as she answered questions, as though she were an onlooker at the proceedings. But what the jurors had seen—and some resented—was typical of the falsely accused, who had all led normal law-abiding lives. Many were unable to absorb the reality that they were suddenly accused of frightful crimes they could never have imagined committing.

For a visionary rabbi in London, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 signified nothing less than the advent of the messianic era.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/tesserae/2014/02/abraham-isaac-kook-receives-the-call/?mode=print

On November 2, 1917, Britain endorsed the creation of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine. The news, contained in the document thereafter known as the Balfour Declaration, hit Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook like a thunderbolt.

A committed if decidedly unconventional Zionist, Rav Kook was then living in London, serving as the rabbi of an immigrant Orthodox community, continuing to elaborate the complex and dazzlingly original ideas that would fill volumes of philosophical, theological, and mystical writing, and building the reputation that would in time propel him to the position of founding chief rabbi of Jewish Palestine and one of the most enduringly influential shapers of modern Zionism and Jewish thought.

Born in Russia in 1865, Kook had begun life as a child prodigy, educated almost from infancy to scholarship and religious leadership. As a young man, in addition to mastering Talmud at the famed Lithuanian yeshiva of Volozhin and elsewhere, he studied secular philosophy and Hebrew with adherents of the Jewish “Enlightenment.” Broad as his interests were, however, and voracious as was his appetite for revolutionary ideas, Kook had taken almost no part in the early stirrings of Jewish nationalism. It was not until the early years of the 20th century that he emerged as a supporter of Zionism, and even then with reservations. In particular, he was skeptical of the secular brand of political Zionism promoted by Theodor Herzl, contending that a Zionism divorced from religion, and from a sacred reading of Jewish history, was destined for failure.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/misleading-cold-war-analogy_778816.html Jerusalem The Israeli debate over Iran’s nuclear program is, perhaps oddly, not yet heated. For now, the action is with the Americans: Israelis watch the negotiations nervously and without confidence, but there is little sense of impending doom—or impending war. Opinion polls show that Israelis think Iran is building toward a weapon, not toward […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/us-is-going-bankrupt-one-city-at-a-time?f=puball Time to start watching U.S. cities go bankrupt. Prior to Detroit, there was Stockton, California, and, according to Stephen Moore, now the chief economist with the Heritage Foundation, there are more than sixty of the largest cities that “are plagued with the same kinds of retirement legacy costs that sent Detroit in Chapter 9 […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/ongoing-threats-to-free-speech?f=puball The Obama administration and other liberal proponents of “net neutrality” were dealt a significant blow last month when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia decided that 2010 FCC regulations on Internet providers were invalid. However, conservatives should remain alert to one caveat: the ruling affirmed a Federal Communications Commission right […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obamas-hobbyhorse-gender-equality On Jan. 28, 19 U.S. senators and 91 members of the House of Representatives, all Democrats, filed briefs with the Supreme Court supporting the Obama administration’s legal war against Hobby Lobby, a family-owned chain of craft stores providing health insurance to employees but refusing to cover morning-after pills, such as Plan B and Ella, […]