RUTHFULLY YOURS

Political analysts still are arguing over why the Democratic party was washed away in the midterm election. Since 2008, ascendant progressives had been crowing over a fresh mosaic of energized minorities, newly franchised immigrants, single young urban women, greens, gays, and — less often mentioned — upscale professionals and the 1-percenter super-wealthy.

These groups were united by their support for the expansion of entitlements, higher taxes, neo-isolationism, amnesty, opposition to any restrictions on abortion, curbs on carbon-energy development, and gay marriage. But what really held them together was Barack Obama. His exotic name, his racial background, his leftwing ideology, and his Ivy League training appealed to each of these diverse groups. Without him on the ballot — as in 2010 and 2014 — most of these identity groups apparently were not energized enough to turn out in sufficient numbers to make up for middle-class voters turned off by progressive rhetoric and the by-any-means-necessary distortions to achieve its ends.

Indeed, a cynic would sum up the unlikely liberal coalition as a bridge over the middle class. Wealthy, influential progressives had enough capital and income to support new efforts at government redistribution, higher taxes, and the sort of green projects that, at least in the short term, would slow the economy and cost blue-collar jobs — but not really affect the 1 percenters’ own livelihoods much.

At the other end, the underclass welcomed expansions of federal entitlement programs and the idea of an activist state guaranteeing an equality of result for the less-well-off, with the taxes to pay for it all falling on someone else.

Note that the new progressive coalition was largely abstract. In their own personal lives, the upscale denizens of Santa Monica, Chevy Chase, and the Upper West Side did not put their children in diverse public schools, much less live among undocumented immigrants or give up their Mercedeses and Volvo SUVs for fleets of Priuses. None promised to take two fewer trips by jet each year.

Our political discourse, national and international, is filled with total dishonesty and it is time we called them on it.

For Iran and the 5+1 does not take a year and a half. If Iran was not working on nuclear weapons, they would reach an agreement in a month and would allow inspectors to go anywhere they want. They do neither; So it is only reasonable and the safe thing to believe that they are working on nuclear weapons. For the Obama administration to keep giving Iran more time only leads to the conclusion that the Administration expects them to have nuclear weapons and is willing to delay them , not stop them.

The Administration is proposing a 10 year agreement. How convenient for Iran. What is being proposed is a Hudna. To agree to a Hudna is to tell them that we won’t attack them and they won’t attack us for 10 years unless the Iranians feel strong enough to attack us. It they have nukes, they will feel strong enough to wage nuclear war.. President Obama went to a madrasa as a youngster. There is no reason to believe that he does not know what a Hudna is and what danger it poses to us.

The Administration does not condemn Muslim violence and genocide against non-Muslims, or Muslims of another sect. However, if a non-Muslim attacks a Muslim it is roundly condemned by the Administration. A case in point is the Hamas war of 2014. Israel attacked a UNWRA school used to store Hamas rockets and/or launch rockets against Israel. Israel is condemned for the attack while Hamas and UNWRA are not attacked for their actions.

Geneva Convention IV

Article 28 of the 1949 Geneva Convention IV provides: “The presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations.”

Convention (IV) relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, Geneva, 12 August 1949, Article 28.

https://www.icrc.org/customary-ihl/eng/docs/v2_rul_rule97

Congressional Black Caucus Chair: ‘Unwritten Rule That Black Lives Hold No Value’ By Paula Bolyard
Rep. Marcia Fudge: “You may kill Black men in this country without consequences or repercussions.”

On Monday Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH) called the grand jury’s decision not to indict officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown a “miscarriage of justice.”

In a statement released through the Congressional Black Caucus, which she chairs, Fudge said the decision not to indict Wilson “is a slap in the face to Americans nationwide who continue to hope and believe that justice will prevail.”

“This decision seems to underscore an unwritten rule that Black lives hold no value; that you may kill Black men in this country without consequences or repercussions,” Fudge said. “This is a frightening narrative for every parent and guardian of Black and brown children, and another setback for race relations in America.”

“My heart goes out to Michael Brown’s loved ones, and to the loved ones of all the Michael Browns we have buried in this country,” Fudge said.
Last week, G.K. Butterfield, (D- District 1 N.C.) the incoming chair of the Congressional Black Caucus — and former Superior Court judge — said that a crime “probably was committed” in the shooting and he warned that “if [grand jurors] turn their backs on justice …there will be pushback from those who are concerned about it — and I’m one of those who’s concerned about it. There will be pushback. We will be asking questions.”

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/11/islamism_islamofascism_and_islam.html Yes, the majority are not terrorists.  They are worse! Passive aggressors might be a better description for most of the silent Muslim majority. Words matter. Alas, neologisms come into the language all the time, especially when the drama index is high. Ironically, polemicists on the Right and Left abhor words like Islamism. Liberals think […]

It is official: Obama has now ushered in the Age of the Dictator for America. This man is, in essence, acting as emperor of this country. Despite the will of the American people, despite the outright illegal usurpation of rights that the president of the United States does not possess, Obama has changed the landscape of this country forever.

For those who would counter that Reagan and Bush Sr. afforded amnesty, Mark Krikorian ably refutes this assertion. Unlike previous situations, there have been no “foreign crises in the illegals’ home countries and thus [this] is not relevant to the current discussion.” In fact, Reagan’s and Bush’s moves were cleanup measures “for the implementation of the once-in-history amnesty that was passed by Congress.” But Obama’s move is “directly contrary to Congress’s decision not to pass an amnesty.”

With every move, Obama chips away at the very foundation of America. As one who knows too intimately what a dictatorship looks like, Cuban dissident Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo has written that “[t]hat’s what totalitarianism is all about: the State as an imitation of God.”

In effect, this bullying and total disregard for the law mirrors what Obama is doing concerning discipline in the schools. Society is now expected to accept out-of-control behavior by black students and simply do nothing about it. Consequently:

… ‘[w]hat this means is that whites and Asians will get suspended for things that blacks don’t get suspended for, because school officials will try to level punishments despite groups’ different infraction rates,’ predicted Hans Bader, a counsel at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Bader is a former official in the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, and has sued and represented school districts and colleges in civil-rights cases.

This is the double standard that Obama is so fond of. He does not have to abide by Obamacare; he does not have to abide by the Constitution; he is above the law simply because of his race. His lies are accepted because to make him accountable is to be racist. Whether it is a 15-year-old student wreaking havoc in a classroom or a 53-year-old president trashing the Constitution, race trumps rules.

I agree with every word ….all this sudden flurry of accusations reminds one of the spurious allegations of child molestation debunked by Dorothy Rabinowitz, and the “recovered memory” which led to accusations of parental sexual abuse….rsk

Those who are certain that numbers don’t lie and that the 15 women who have come forward to accuse Bill Cosby of drugging and molesting/raping them stand as evidence of truth should be reminded that 37 people claimed to be afflicted by witches in the 1692 Salem Witch Trials. This doesn’t mean that Bill Cosby is innocent of the charges but it does mean that this isn’t a class action suit and that the details of each of these experiences may differ significantly enough to not be proof of anything. As of now, we are listening to women tell about events that happened as far back as four decades ago, a long enough time for anyone to forget or re-interpret the past. Some of these women accepted money from Cosby, often over a long period of time. Some, like Janice Dickinson, made a career out of bedding famous men and bragging about that in interviews and books. Many of these women admitted that they were hoping for acting jobs on Cosby’s popular tv show. There was never a shortage of female groupies who considered sexual experiences with entertainers as trophies for their collection or women who aspired to careers in show biz who were perfectly comfortable with the requirements of the casting couch.

Gertrude Himmelfarb is the author, most recently, of The People of the Book: Philosemitism in England, from Cromwell to Churchill.

It was by chance that my first reading of Culture and Anarchy with my students coincided with the centenary of its publication. But it was not by chance that I chose to read it then, in 1969, at the height of the culture war. Anticipating that war by more than a century, Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) wrote a passionate defense of culture—high culture, we would now say—against the prevailing low culture that he saw as tantamount to “anarchy.”
Arnold’s culture is high indeed. It is nothing less than the pursuit of “sweetness and light” (Jonathan Swift’s epigram for beauty and intelligence), “total perfection,” “the best which has been thought and said,” and the “right reason” that comes from the “best self” rather than the “ordinary self.”

His countrymen, unfortunately, were animated by quite the opposite principle: “doing as one likes” and “saying what one likes.” Perhaps out of deference to John Stuart Mill, Arnold did not cite On Liberty to that effect (the book had appeared, to great acclaim, only a decade earlier). Instead, he quoted a Mr. Roebuck, a Liberal member of Parliament who was fond of asking, “May not every man in England say what he likes?”—asserting that this was the source of England’s greatness. To which Arnold replied that culture requires that “what men say, when they may say what they like, is worth saying—has good in it, and more good than bad.” Anything short of that is an invitation to anarchy, for it lacks “the much wanted principle” of authority that governs the culture as well as society.
Culture and Anarchy (1869) was not well received. One critic mocked the author as the “prophet of culture,” another as the creator of a “new religion called Culture .  .  . a sort of Eleusinian mystery,” still another as an egotist who wanted to “make the world a more agreeable place for Mr. Matthew Arnold to live in by multiplying images of Mr. Matthew Arnold.” Rejecting his conception of culture, they also denied the charge of anarchy—denied, in effect, that there was a culture war.

A century later, my students, in the midst of their culture war, recognized in Arnold’s culture the oppressive great-books mentality they were battling in the university. So far from rejecting the charge of anarchism, the more militant of them accepted it. What Arnold praised as authority, they denounced as authoritarian, and what he decried as anarchy, they took to be liberty at its best—the perfect liberty that was the antithesis of the perfect culture he celebrated.

An innocuous political cartoon in The Indianapolis Star about Obama’s executive order on illegal immigration caused an uproar among those whose feelings were hurt. Shall we say they have “thin skins”?

In an act of craven political correctness, The Indianapolis Star altered, then withdrew an allegedly “racist” or “bigoted” cartoon from its website. Yesterday, November 23rd, the New York Times crowed:

The Indianapolis Star removed a cartoon from its website over the weekend after readers complained that the drawing was racist for depicting an immigrant family climbing through a window to crash a white family’s Thanksgiving dinner.

The newspaper should not have published the cartoon, the paper’s executive editor, Jeff Taylor, said in a statement on Saturday. The cartoon, by the artist Gary Varvel, featured a white father unhappily telling his family, “Thanks to the president’s immigration order, we’ll be having extra guests this Thanksgiving….”

“This action is not a comment on the issue of illegal immigration or a statement about Gary’s right to express his opinions strongly. We encourage and support diverse opinion,” Mr. Taylor wrote. “But the depictions in this case were inappropriate; his point could have been expressed in other ways.”

Come again? It was not a comment on the “issue of illegal immigration”? Are my eyes deceiving me? It was actually about a bar mitzvah that was being crashed by clowns? Maybe it was a psychedelic rendition of Alice in Wonderland crashing the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party?

The cartoon was not about Obama nixing the Keystone Pipeline. It was about Obama’s executive order granting permanent status to five million illegal immigrants, who will be supported by American taxpayers’ expense, and eligible for most “entitlements” and privileges. That’s the father’s unspoken implication. But then, what does he know? He’s just another “stupid” American voter.

A few hours before announcing his new immigration policy, President Obama received an opinion blessing its legality from the Office of Legal Counsel. Regrettably, the OLC’s made-to-order legal analysis is shockingly flawed in five major respects.

First, the OLC justified the policy as a prioritization of government’s “limited resources.” But the executive order does more than prioritize. It rewrites existing law. Illegal immigrants won’t be deported if they aren’t a threat to national security, public safety or border security. Beyond these three categories, deportation may be pursued only if it serves an “important federal interest.”

Under current law, by contrast, anyone entering the U.S. illegally is a “deportable alien” who “shall, upon the order of the Attorney General, be removed.” The president’s policy transforms an entire category of aliens deemed deportable into two different categories, whereby some are deportable and some aren’t. This is a shift in kind, not merely degree.

A president prioritizing resources would do what previous presidents have done: enforce the entirety of immigration law, while allowing prosecutors to make case-by-case determinations. By announcing a global policy of nonenforcement against certain categories, Mr. Obama condones unlawful behavior, weakening the law’s deterrent impact, and allows lawbreakers to remain without fear of deportation. As he puts it, “All we’re saying is we are not going to deport you.” These individuals are no longer deportable, although Congress has declared them so.

Second, the OLC incorrectly concludes that the president’s plan involves case-by-case scrutiny. The OLC admits “a general policy of nonenforcement that forecloses the exercise of case-by-case discretion poses ‘special risks’ that the agency has exceeded the bounds of its enforcement discretion.” It argues, however, that there are no “removable aliens whose removal may not be pursued under any circumstances.” And although the policy “limits the discretion of immigration officials . . . it does not eliminate that discretion entirely.”

About the best that can be said about Monday’s agreement to extend the Iran nuclear negotiations for another seven months is that it’s better than the bad deal that so many in the West seem eager to embrace. Meanwhile, the U.S. and its European partners are giving Tehran more time and money to get closer to the nuclear threshold.

The talks have already been going for nearly a year and were formally extended once in July. Speaking in Vienna on Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry said “new ideas surfaced” in recent days to justify the extension. If a breakthrough is so close, then why seven more months?

The answer is that the mullahs still aren’t budging on the decisive questions, but the Administration can’t bring itself to admit failure and face up to the consequences of having to impose tighter sanctions or perhaps take military action. President Obama and his advisers would rather give themselves another few months in hopes they can come up with new concessions that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei might finally accept.

Mr. Obama told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that no one should worry in any case because the interim deal “has definitely stopped Iran’s nuclear program from advancing” during the negotiations. Mr. Kerry was even more emphatic, insisting that “the interim agreement wasn’t violated. Iran has held up its end of the bargain. And the sanctions regime has remained intact.”