RUTHFULLY YOURS

Not quite….in congress the majority of the Republican, and about 20 Democrat incumbents are on to this ruse and on to the fig leaf offered by amending a requirement that the government have environmental oversight. This is a big economy and energy issue and will play a large role in November 2014…..rsk

“The Koch brothers may get the media attention, but the billionaire getting the most political bang for his buck is Tom Steyer. The hedge-fund politico has pledged to raise $100 million to help Democrats keep the Senate, and on Friday he received a major return on his investment when the State Department again delayed its decision on the Keystone XL pipeline.

State’s excuse is that it wants to wait on the outcome of a legal challenge in Nebraska, but that’s no reason for the federal government not to declare itself. Earlier this year State’s latest environmental review found no net climate harm from the pipeline, which would take oil from Alberta to refineries on the Gulf Coast. State found that the oil sands will be developed even if the Keystone XL isn’t built.

The real reason for the delay is Democratic politics. Mr. Steyer and the party’s liberal financiers are climate-change absolutists who have made killing Keystone a non-negotiable demand. But the White House doesn’t want to reject the pipeline before November because several Senate Democrats running for re-election claim to favor it. We say “claim” because Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu and others can’t even get Majority Leader Harry Reid to give them a vote on the floor.

So Senate Democrats get to have it both ways. They can benefit this year from the riches of Mr. Steyer, who pronounced himself well pleased by the delay. But they can also run in support of the XL pipeline and the thousands of new jobs it would create. Then President Obama can formally nix it next year.

Intellectuals fretting about income disparity are oddly silent regarding the decline of the two-parent family.

Mr. Maranto is a professor in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, where Mr. Crouch is a researcher.

“Suppose a scientific conference on cancer prevention never addressed smoking, on the grounds that in a free society you can’t change private behavior, and anyway, maybe the statistical relationships between smoking and cancer are really caused by some other third variable. Wouldn’t some suspect that the scientists who raised these claims were driven by something—ideology, tobacco money—other than science?

Yet in the current discussions about increased inequality, few researchers, fewer reporters, and no one in the executive branch of government directly addresses what seems to be the strongest statistical correlate of inequality in the United States: the rise of single-parent families during the past half century.

The two-parent family has declined rapidly in recent decades. In 1960, more than 76% of African-Americans and nearly 97% of whites were born to married couples. Today the percentage is 30% for blacks and 70% for whites. The out-of-wedlock birthrate for Hispanics surpassed 50% in 2006. This trend, coupled with high divorce rates, means that roughly 25% of American children now live in single-parent homes, twice the percentage in Europe (12%). Roughly a third of American children live apart from their fathers.

Does it matter? Yes, it does. From economist Susan Mayer’s 1997 book “What Money Can’t Buy” to Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart” in 2012, clear-eyed studies of the modern family affirm the conventional wisdom that two parents work better than one.

“Americans have always thought that growing up with only one parent is bad for children,” Ms. Mayer wrote. “The rapid spread of single-parent families over the past generation does not seem to have altered this consensus much.”

I was reading a recent copy of one of Britain’s popular newspapers, the Daily Express, when a particular item caught my eye.

The highly respected writer, Niall Ferguson, warned that, “President Obama’s policy of non-intervention, or, as he puts it, his being “resolved only to avoid being George W Bush,” resembles the incoherent foreign policies of British Liberals a century ago before the First World War.”

Ferguson was opining that despite the swirling tensions in the ever perilous Middle East and the current hostilities between Russia and the Ukraine, the real powder keg that could ignite a potential World War Three lies in the Far East as Japan and China fight over ownership of five uninhabited islands and three barren rocks.

Japan calls the territory the Senkaku Islands, and is using an ever increasing number of naval ships and warplanes to guard them while at the same time trying to involve the US.

On the other hand, China views the “nationalisation” of what it calls the Diaoyu Islands by the Japanese in 2012 as a serious provocation and will do whatever is necessary to assert its sovereignty.

The real danger is that if war were to break out between China and Japan, the US is bound by treaty to come to the aid of Japan. This would be another red line for Obama but following his experience with Syria, it is unclear how he would act, if indeed at all.

Brad Williams, a professor of Asian and International Studies at the City University of Hong Kong, made comparisons of the Sino-Japan tensions to those that led to the First World War; known as the Great War.

“Japan’s Prime Minister, Shinzi Abe,” Professor Williams said, “probably sees China as a modern-day imperial Germany that is prone to aggressive behavior. That, of course, could trigger conflict despite the deep economic inter-dependence between the two countries.”

Indeed, Japan has stated that the tensions are similar to those between England and Germany before World War One – the war to end all wars.

At the end of Part One of this column, I asked: Was the law was on the government’s side and not on Cliven Bundy’s? What kind of law is it? And how is it being enforced throughout the country?
Few sitting politicians have remarked on the Bundy/BLM standoff. However, Christopher Agee, in his Western Journalism article of April 18th, “Obama Accused by Congressman of Illegal Action at Bundy Ranch,” reported:
Immediately after what many considered a victory against a tyrannical federal agency, a number of leftist voices – most notably, Sen. Harry Reid – indicated the action against this family will continue. In response, Texas Republican Rep. Steve Stockman sent a letter to Barack Obama, Department of the Interior Sec. Sally Jewell, and BLM Director Neil Kornze, laying out his position that any such action by the agency would violate the U.S. Constitution….

He cited the limited powers granted to the federal government, noting the bureau has no “right to assume preemptory police powers, that role being reserved to the States,” and explained “many federal laws require the federal government to seek assistance from local law enforcement whenever the use of force may become necessary.”
The letter included a section of the U.S. Code — 43 U.S.C. Section 1733, Subsection C — stating exactly that point. [Emphasis Stockman’s]
“When the Secretary determines that assistance is necessary in enforcing Federal laws and regulations relating to the public lands or their resources he shall offer a contract to appropriate local officials having law enforcement authority within their respective jurisdictions with the view of achieving maximum feasible reliance upon local law enforcement officials in enforcing such laws and regulations.”

The local law enforcement authority in this instance is the Sheriff of Clark County, Nevada, Douglas C. Gillespie, who, apparently intimidated by the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) as the protesters were not, refused to intervene and demand that the illegal BLM vigilantes leave.
Gillespie, however, conspicuously took a back seat to BLM forces during the standoff.

All historical analogies are odious, some dead white man – probably a Frenchman – has said. Obviously, he meant that times change, the cast changes, the nuances change, the world moves on, and no geopolitical situation really replicates an earlier one. Some historiographers go even further; they say that for all these reasons there are not, indeed, any “lessons” from history, George Santayana notwithstanding. Still …

It’s good intellectual fun to make comparisons and sometimes we learn a little by playing a game in which we compare those former events with the contemporary happening. Of course, one problem is that our reconstruction of earlier events is often skewed if not downright wrong. For, obviously, if for no other reason, we view them in the context of the present. Again, still…

That’s the case now examining Vladimir Putin’s blatant aggression and attempted subversion of Ukraine as a sovereign state. It has become the cliché of clichés to see his program of violating internally accepted borders as the same route to war the totalitarian dictatorships took before World War II. But Putin is no Adolph Hitler, nor certainly no Josef Stalin. He has neither their talent for villainy and he heads an even more fragile economy, and indeed a political union coming apart at the seams. Yet his use of stratagems those 20th Century international outlaws used is all too obvious. One even is tempted to go along with the Polish official who said it was hard to believe Putin’s speechwriters hadn’t actually plagiarized an earlier Hitler model.

So that begs the question are we on the eve of a general war such as broke out in 1939?

The year 1938 was more than usually momentous for European history, and indeed for the whole world so Euro-oriented as it was in the last century. Among the many events were two dramatic crises that captured the headlines:

Trying to head off another catastrophe like The Great War from which the Europeans have never fully recovered because of the enormous loss of life, a deal was made at a conference in Munich between the Western allies and Hitler. War was temporarily averted.

Daniel Mael on “Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Brandeis and Double Standards” — on The Glazov Gang
A TruthRevolt warrior confronts the leftist Gestapo on his campus.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/daniel-mael-on-ayaan-hirsi-ali-brandeis-and-double-standards-on-the-glazov-gang/