RUTHFULLY YOURS

In one of the great rhetorical reaches of all time, Financial Times columnist Edward Luce recently wrote of the paradox that America’s first Black President has presided over the biggest drop in African-American wealth since the Great Depression – a true statement. However, he added the following: “By no honest reckoning can Mr. Obama be blamed for the decline in black America’s fortunes. Yet the facts are deeply unflattering.” It read like an apology, but I am unsure to whom.

The facts are not just “unflattering,” they are condemning. Under Mr. Obama’s watch, the rich have become richer and the poor, poorer. Asset prices have boomed, while wages for non-white households have declined 10%, since 2009. The economy has limped along because of the underlying strength of American entrepreneurship and because of fracking that gave new life to the oil and gas industry – a technology that Mr. Obama did his best to shutter. Around the world, we are more disliked in the Middle East than we were when George Bush was President. Our relations with our European allies have sunk, and the “re-set” with Russia has been to increase the animosity between our countries.

With Mr. Obama, Harry Truman’s “buck” slithers past like a snake through the grass. He is a master of ducking responsibility for all unpleasant consequences of his policies: Blame Republicans in the House, blame Mitch McConnell, blame the Koch Brothers, blame the Maliki government, blame accountants (for tax inversions), blame the video, blame social media (for fomenting fears of terrorism), blame the media (for his slumping poll numbers), blame Bush (for everything!) He is the Teflon man. His acolytes in the press see-no-evil and hear-no-evil; so they neither speak-no-evil nor write-no-evil. One senses that fear of offending does not allow principles of accountability to apply. Mr. Obama’s supporters, in this regard, reflect an unspoken racial prejudice. It should make no difference what race, gender, religion or culture one is, one should always be held accountable for the ideas one espouses, the actions one takes and the results one gets.

The economy did receive a bit of good news a couple of weeks ago when unemployment dropped below 6%, the lowest point since the summer of 2008. But at the same time, the Labor Department noted that the labor force participation rate also fell to a 36-year low of 62.7%. Total non-farm workers in the U.S., as of last month, were preliminarily stated as 139,435 – about 5.5 million more people employed than when Mr. Obama took office in January 2009. While those numbers get touted by the Administration, what is omitted is that if the labor force participation rate were the same today as it had been in January 2009 (65.7%), and one accounts for the increased population there would be approximately 8.0 million more Americans working today.

The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia ruled that ten year old girls can be married off, because in his words, “Good upbringing makes a girl ready to perform all marital duties at that age.” The Mufti, who also called for destroying churches in the Arabian Peninsula, is descended from Mohammed Wahhab who gave birth to Wahhabism and whose descendants have controlled the Saudi religious establishment, and through it Islam around the world.

However for all his power and influence, the Mufti is blind and hasn’t seen a thing in the last half century years; an apt metaphor for his entire religion.

Saudi Arabia, the heartland of Islam, still tries and executes witches. What sort of religion can come out of a place that marries off ten year old girls and murders old women on charges of witchcraft? The sort that flies planes into skyscrapers, murders teenage girls for using Facebook and bases its entire society on a ladder with Muslim men at the top, Muslim women a few rungs below and everyone else somewhere at the bottom.

The Saudis are not an aberration, they are Islam in its purest and truest form. That is why Al Qaeda was founded by a Saudi and why Saudis, the wealthy citizens of a wealthy kingdom, are its best recruits. It is not poverty or oppression that moves them to kill, but wealth and privilege.

This is where Islam originated, whose brutality and cunning spread it across the world, whose clans killed each other, then killed or enslaved minority groups, and then embarked on a wave of conquest that destroyed countless cultures and left behind the seeds of hate of the wars we are fighting today.

Bashar al-Assad’s departure from power would illustrate to all countries in the world that that a regime unwanted by Turkey would not survive.

Both of Prime Minister Davutoglu’s references to Muslim prayers seem to symbolize his strong, inner desire for “conquest:” the “conquest” of Jerusalem by the Palestinians, and the downfall of al-Assad and the establishment of a Sunni, pro-Turkey regime there.

The Turkish interior minister was right when he said that legitimate states have a right to use proportionate violence when they face violence. But he is wrong to think that this right can only be enjoyed by his own country.

At the end of 1998, Turkey threatened to take military action against President Hafez al-Assad’s regime in Syria unless Damascus immediately stopped harboring Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the violent Kurdish separatist group, PKK. Al-Assad decided not to take the risk. And the Turks, in cooperation with the U.S., finally captured their public enemy No. #1 in Kenya, brought him to court and sentenced him to life. In a war-torn region, a war had been averted.

A decade or so later, the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (now president) and his foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu (now prime minister), declared al-Assad Jr., Bashar, and heir to the elder al-Assad’s throne, their country’s best regional ally.

Erdogan once said al-Assad was more than an ally: he and his wife, Asmaa, were the Erdogans’ family friends. Visa restrictions between the two countries were removed; bilateral trade boomed; joint cabinet meetings were held; and Turkey became the first NATO member to have joint military exercises with Syria.

The House of Commons is filled with people who would like to flaunt their anti-racist credentials… and show they are tough on terrorists. Yet here they were trying to will into existence a state which in the words of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, speaking last year, “would not see the presence of a single Israeli — civilian or soldier — on our lands.” It is a pre-Mandela apartheid they are willing into existence.

“Our enterprise extends far beyond Palestine: Palestine in its entirety, the Arab Nation in its entirety, and the entire world.” — Mahmoud al-Zahar, speech, 2010. It is what the proxies and officials of al-Qaeda and Iran have said in European capitals for years and what they say every day.

All efforts to stop the mad rush to declare Palestine a state, without the Israel’s agreement as assured under international law, are dismissed as “Israeli propaganda.” The idea that sensible people can sensibly object is washed away.

On Monday night British Members of Parliament passed a motion by 274 to 12 saying, “That this House believes that the Government should recognize the state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel as a contribution to securing a negotiated two-state solution.” It comes only weeks after the Swedish Parliament passed a similar unilateral motion.

Before coming to the alarming parts of this, let me break the good news. The motion is non-binding, having been proposed not by the government but by backbench MPs. Secondly the coalition government officially made it a “matter of conscience” vote, though behind the scenes advised its own MPs to stay away and so abstain from the vote. Thirdly the UK government announced in advance of the vote that if the result of the vote was a passing of the motion then the UK government would not accept the vote as in any way binding.

The Obama High Command today issued a press release to inform the uninformed that it had now vanquished one of the major obstacles in the campaign to do something about ISIS: they found a name for the operation. Inherent Resolve. Could they have submitted a request to the ivory towers of academia to come up with a name for the operation that could possibly be less understood by the American public? It is doubtful that our assembled politically correct camp leadership could have done better than the focused circle of sycophants surrounding our C in C.

Take a microphone and a camera out in the streets and interview everyday folks as to their interpretation of “Inherent Resolve.” If you can find one in a hundred who knows both words and is familiar with their usage, you will have done quite well. Float that same term through faculty lounges across the country, and you will likely get a lot of approving nods and grunts of acceptance. Why is that? Well, it has the inherent capability of meaning whatever its creators want it to mean. That was likely the goal of those inside the administration who came up with this indefinable tag for an apparently pointless attempt to stem militant jihadists in their fervent drive to create a Muslim caliphate in the very regions this same ineffectual administration so recently abandoned, walking away from the battlefield, arrogantly proclaiming victory while the enemy cleverly lay low and rebuilt their martial capabilities.

What is a more laughably foolish way to initiate a battle campaign than to burden the efforts of your engaged warriors with a label that is inherently based upon your previous lack of resolve, and therefore absolutely laughable to your enemies? And to the world?

I’m an old combat infantryman who has no problem with an enemy who hates me with a deadly determination to destroy me. But I swear to all of you out there, I cannot support a commander in chief and his politically correct administration who subject our nation in general and our military in particular to this sort of international ridicule.

Kerry : Defaming Islam is as Bad as Rape By Daniel Greenfield

The Islamic State is Un-Islamic. But so is Islam.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry harshly condemned the treatment of women by the arch-terrorist organized death squad known as ISIS.

Kerry is horrified that ISIS “takes credit for the abduction, enslavement, rape, forced marriage and sale of several thousand Yezidi and other minority women and girls.”

“Just as despicably, ISIL rationalizes its abhorrent treatment of these women and girls by claiming it is somehow sanctioned by religion. Wrong. Dead wrong.”

“ISIL does not represent Islam and Islam does not condone or honor such depravity. In fact, these actions are a reminder that ISIL is an enemy of Islam.”

I don’t really see that ISIS’ supposed defamation of Islam is as bad as rape. Western elites are stuck in permanent hysteria over supposed Islamophobia, but the sale and rape of women and girls is a lot worse than any supposed insult to Islam.

Furthermore the Islamic State is not insulting Islam. Its religious scholars know Islam far better than a scholar of windsurfing like Kerry does. Kerry released a press release in response to an ISIS magazine explaining the Islamic basis for their actions.

If Kerry were really capable of debating the issue, he would have responded with citations from the Koran instead of hot air.

Obama’s approval ratings and MSNBC’s viewer ratings are in a close race to the bottom of Death Valley. It’s only a question of which set of obnoxious hipsters with a head full of bad policy ideas and no real life experience will be fired first; the Maddow crew or the White House staff.

The progressive pajama boy era is over. The asexual messenger bag toting wonk has met an ISIS Jihadist and run home to its non-traditional family. Liberalism isn’t over, but its contenders are trying to butch up their act. The second coming of Hillary is accompanied by bellicose rhetoric about Putin and Syria. Leon Panetta, her gnomish errand boy, is sneering at Obama as an egghead too busy dithering about what not to do to be able to actually do anything about ISIS.

Democrats are adjusting to a new reality of less nuance and more centrist politics. So is MSNBC.

If Obama loses the Senate, then his leftist backers also lose their death grip on the Democratic Party. And that’s why they’re panicking so badly. Progressives proved that money and media bias could let them get away with anything. But then they lost in 2010, barely hung on in 2012 and are heading for a beating in 2014. If they can’t buy the Senate now, the Democratic Party will have to correct its course.

A sober analysis of the Big Billionaire Left shows that they were good at getting Obama elected, but not much else. Like the USSR, they could pour a lot of energy and capital into inefficiently getting one big thing done, but they aren’t much good at doing a lot of little things. Their hijacking of democracy ran into trouble the moment they tried to push past the White House. It was only the White House’s hijacking of democracy by trying to function as a unilateral dictatorship of pen and phone that extended their influence beyond their initial defeat in 2010. And that came with its own price in popularity.

Obama’s arrogance isolated him politically. He insisted on running everything and is stuck with the bill. In countless speeches he demanded more power and authority; his sinking approval ratings reflect the growing willingness of even his own supporters to hold him responsible for his unilateral policymaking.

As the election approaches everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong. Not only did Obama’s aggressive efforts to stoke racial unrest on the border and in Ferguson to turn out the minority voters who generally sit out midterm elections backfire, but the resulting messes deepened the popular impression that he was in over his head. Now instead of pivoting from Global Warming to a minimum wage to some offensive thing that some local Republican somewhere said, the media is stuck in an Ebola-ISIS cycle that reminds Americans on a daily basis that everything really is out of control.

The stock-market turmoil is fresh evidence that the central bank must return to market-based monetary policy.

The Federal Reservehas been a crucial bulwark of America’s market economy. Yet with interest rates near zero since the 2008 financial crisis and the Fed now controlling huge swaths of the financial industry, a central-banking approach I call “post-monetarism” has settled in. It’s built on the absurd view that zero rates promote growth and that regulators can replace markets—an immodest dogma that has hammered growth.

In the past, the Fed set boundaries on the banking system mainly by adding and subtracting bank reserves. Banks made new loans if they had enough reserves on deposit at the Fed and thought the loan would be profitable. In the 1960s the eventual Nobel laureate and father of monetarism, Milton Friedman, linked steady growth in money and market-based pricing to faster economic growth.

Under post-monetarism, the Fed has created a massive excess of bank reserves, nearly $3 trillion, to fund its bondholdings. It counteracts the transmission into the economy using huge interest payments to banks and sweeping regulatory controls that have turned the Fed into a superpowerful fourth branch of government. That’s diametrically opposed to Friedman’s deeply American insight that a central bank, if it has to exist, should be modest, and that monetary policy should be predictable and simple enough that businesses concentrate on profits and employees rather than central bankers’ economic forecasts and speeches.

Financial markets have become giddy—but not the old-fashioned way, by sharing in the nation’s rising prosperity. This time, median incomes fell as financial markets rose. The Fed has imposed near-zero interest rates on small savers, channeling trillions of dollars in low-cost credit to Fed-selected beneficiaries, especially governments and large-scale corporate borrowers. The result is helpful for the rich but has been toxic to small businesses and median incomes because underpriced credit goes to well-established bond issuers—not known for job creation—at the expense of savers and small business loans.

The Fed has in effect become the king of banks, able to violate the liquidity, leverage, capitalization and regulatory standards imposed on private banks. America’s financial industry faces a morass of litigation, huge fees and arbitrary capital requirements when they step out of line, while the Fed has piled up a record maturity mismatch—risky short-term debt to fund long-term assets. The Fed’s debt has reached 78 times its equity capital.

The Fed is the kingmaker for the mortgage industry, where it has become one of the world’s biggest mortgage holders, building up the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at the expense of the private mortgage industry.

The process of bringing skilled immigrants to the U.S. via H-1B visas and putting them on the path to eventual citizenship has been a political football for at least a decade. It has long been bad news for those immigrants trapped in this callous process. Now the U.S. economy is beginning to suffer, too.

Every year, tens of thousands of disappointed tech workers and other professionals give up while waiting for a resident visa or green card, and go home—having learned enough to start companies that compete with their former U.S. employers. The recent historic success of China’s Alibaba IPO is a reminder that a new breed of companies is being founded, and important innovation taking place, in other parts of the world. More than a quarter of all patents filed today in the U.S. bear the name of at least one foreign national residing here.

The U.S. no longer has a monopoly on great startups. In the past, the best and brightest people would come to the U.S., but now they are staying home. In Silicon Valley, according to a 2012 survey by Duke and Stanford Universities and the University of California at Berkeley, the percentage of new companies started by foreign-born entrepreneurs has begun to slide for the first time—down to 43.9% during 2006-12, from 52.4% during 1995-2005.

The brain drain from this dysfunctional skilled-immigrant policy has begun. Some of the most thoughtful alarms have been raised by Vivek Wadhwa, the author of “The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent” (Wharton, 2012).

Mr. Wadhwa, who teaches at Duke and Stanford, is particularly worried about the so-called STEM disciplines—science, technology, engineering and mathematics. “Companies like Alibaba and Tencent are a warning signal that it is almost too late,” he tells me. “Either we get back to picking off the best and brightest STEM talent in the world, or someone else will.”

Would the Metropolitan Opera offer a work called ‘The Death of Martin Luther King Jr.’ with racist views in support of the assassination?

The Metropolitan Opera in New York will open its new season Monday by presenting John Adams ’s opera “The Death of Klinghoffer. ” The organization’s decision to mount the production has already spurred protests, with more to come.

A too-brief summary: In 1985 Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old disabled man, and his wife, Marilyn, were passengers on an Italian cruise ship, the Achille Lauro. The ship was hijacked by Palestinian terrorists, who shot Klinghoffer in the head and threw him overboard in his wheelchair.

John Adams is a serious artist, recognized as a leading creator of modern operas. “The Death of Klinghoffer,” first produced in 1991, contains a running debate between the killers—who voice a number of undisguisedly anti-Sematic slurs in the course of justifying their conduct—and their victim. Protesters are demanding that the opera be canceled; defenders couch their position, as has the New York Times , in terms of artistic freedom or—as one letter-writer to the Times put it—of helping us “understand the anger, frustration and grievances of other people.”

So, in Joan Rivers ’s much repeated phrase, can we talk? Some things are easy. Mr. Adams’s opera is protected by the First Amendment and so is the Metropolitan Opera in its decision to offer it. It would be a gross and obvious constitutional violation if government sought to bar the opera from being publicly produced or imposed any punishment for doing so.

Beyond that, canceling any public artistic performance because it expresses unpopular or even outrageous views is dangerous. I represented the Brooklyn Museum when then-New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in 1999 sought to shut it down because he viewed some of its art—I use his language now—as “sick,” “disgusting” and sacrilegious. I argued then, successfully, that the mayor’s conduct violated the First Amendment.

But the controversy over the Adams opera cannot be dealt with by simple reference to the First Amendment or artistic freedom. Those who direct the Metropolitan Opera made a choice when they decided to offer Mr. Adams’s opera, and it is altogether fitting that they be publicly judged by that choice.