RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the midst of the Veteran’s Administration scandal, has America forgotten that the U.S. military has a very special advocate who has worked tirelessly to help military families? And what a bang up job that woman has done.

For years now, our very own First Lady has appeared on shows like Oprah and Nightline and broadcast her undying dedication to getting military families the multifaceted support they need – none of which she’s done, but that’s beside the point. One would think that after all the effort she’s invested, at some point the FLOTUS would have caught wind that military veterans were languishing for months on waiting lists at VA hospitals without proper care.

But she didn’t.

In 2011 Mrs. Obama and Dr. Jill Biden launched Joining Forces, which the first lady’s White House web page described as:

A nationwide initiative that mobilizes all sectors of society to give our service members and their families the opportunities and support they have earned, and to raise awareness of military families’ unique needs as pertains to employment, education and wellness.

That same year, a humble FLOTUS told Oprah Winfrey that she is moved by military families’ “willingness to sacrifice without complaint.”

Clearly, the qualities Shelley admired hadn’t inspired her quite enough to find out what those who served this nation REALLY need, because with a minimum of effort Mrs. Obama would have uncovered the injustices being inflicted upon brave veterans by the Veterans Administration.

What better venues than the talk show circuit for the commander-in-chief’s wife to share the plight of gravely ill ex-military waiting months for the VA to provide healthcare? Instead, clueless Michelle told Oprah that it’s hard to get the message of the military out because “they never ask for help.”

Charting liberal hypocrisy is now old hat. From academia to the Sierra Club, elite progressives expect to live lives that are quite different from what they envision for the less sophisticated. No one believes that Elizabeth Warren would wish affirmative action to work for everyone in the way that she herself subverted it. Nor would we expect Warren not to be in the 1 percent that she so scolds — any more than we would assume that Al Gore would not leave a carbon footprint as large as those of thousands of the less environmentally sensitive put together.

First lady Michelle Obama recently lamented that “many young people are going to schools with kids who look just like them.” And she added: “And too often those schools aren’t equal, especially ones attended by students of color, which too often lag behind.” But that anguish should not mean that the Obamas have put or would put their children in the inner-city public schools the way President and Mrs. Carter did with Amy.

The message from Silicon Valley to Chevy Chase is that the public schools are being abandoned by the wealthy and that the new apartheid is a bad thing — and, by deploring both that fact and those who contribute to it, one exempts oneself from any worry about doing precisely what is being castigated.

It would be otherworldly to expect Paul Krugman, now studying marketplace inequality as a new professor at City University of New York, to not be making 75 times more than a part-time teacher of one class at CUNY — which is one class more than Professor Krugman will be teaching. We are not surprised that Joseph Stiglitz, world-famous economist and consultant on the sources of inequality, is an academic entrepreneur who has made a 1 percenter income by speaking at $40,000 a pop to wealthy groups, governments, and other concerned entities on growing inequality and why a few privileged insiders make more in an hour than the many make in a year

Europe’s sceptics are divided about their scepticism

It is only really in the UK, Denmark and the Czech Republic that euroscepticism reaches an existential, constitutional level. If we have made progress, it has merely shown how far there is to go.

We have all seen the results and the hyperbole: ‘Earthquake’, ‘Shock’, ‘Revolution’. None of us should be surprised at this: the last Euro-elections were in 2009, as Europeans were wondering how to deal with the new economics of recession.

This time, Europe has lived through depression, the near collapse of the euro, the deeply unpopular German-driven austerity and in many places social unrest.

The pollsters had also forecast it: the Electionista survey, out last week, predicted big eurosceptic gains in the four largest countries, with not much going on in Spain or Poland. It is worth looking at the four most populous nations because they paint a very confused picture.

Germany has 96 seats (out of 751in total) and the eurosceptic party Alternative for Germany (AfD) seems to have got around 7% of the vote, giving it only a modest representation. Mrs Merkel won comfortably.

In France the elections were won by Marine Le Pen’s Front National, which easily beat the centre-right UMP. The ruling socialists came a dismal third.

In the UK, Nigel Farage’s UKIP beat the opposition Labour, leaving the governing Conservatives in third place. A mirror image of France. Or is it?

And what to say about Italy, where I live? The Electionista forecast showed eurosceptic parties getting 26 out of Italy’s 73 seats, a slightly higher proportion than in the UK. But it lists the parties as the Northern League and Beppe Grillo’s 5-star movement.

Chris Christie rose to national prominence in 2010 in part on his reputation for taking on unpopular battles, entrenched interests, and vocal critics at town-hall meetings across his heavily Democratic state.

But the governor’s decision last Wednesday to renominate for tenure the state’s chief justice, Stuart Rabner, a Democrat, has led several conservatives to denounce him for backing down from a fight over judicial nominations and giving up on a campaign promise to reshape the state’s top court. Together with his deference to the New Jersey State Bar Association and his failure to push for tort reform in a notoriously litigious state, the controversy over the renomination opens up a gaping vulnerability in a potential 2016 nomination battle. The governor would face a field of candidates from more conservative states who have been able to tackle these issues with greater ease, and who have done so with great success.

The reappointment of Rabner, who cleared the way for the legalization of same-sex marriage in New Jersey, was to some conservatives a sign of flagrant disregard. The conservative activist L. Brent Bozell III, chairman of the political-action committee ForAmerica, accused Christie of “flip[ing] his middle finger at conservatives” and said the governor is assuming, erroneously, that conservatives will be willing to overlook the issue if he mounts a presidential bid in 2016. “He is divorced from reality,” Bozell said in a statement.

Christie also drew the ire of Daryn Iwicki, the director of Americans for Prosperity’s New Jersey branch, who called his move “disastrous news for taxpayers” and predicted it would have “untold consequences on the state for years to come.”

The Rabner reappointment was part of a compromise Christie reached with state-senate Democrats that put an end to a simmering war over judicial nominations. It allowed Christie to nominate a Republican judge, Lee Solomon, to a seven-year term on the court in exchange for Rabner’s renomination. Rabner, a friend of Christie who served as his deputy in the U.S. attorney’s office, has been chief justice since 2007. With tenure, he will remain on the bench until 2030.

On the campaign trail in 2007, Christie said none of the state’s supreme-court justices, including Rabner, had the traits he would look for in selecting a justice. “On the New Jersey Supreme Court right now? No,” he said in response to a question about whether any of the justices fit his criteria. “I want someone who is extraordinarily bright, and I want someone who will interpret laws and the Constitution, not legislate from the bench.”

Bill Palatucci, a senior adviser to Christie, cautions against a rush to judgment. He points out that Rabner, who was appointed to the bench by Democratic governor Jon Corzine, has had to recuse himself from a number of cases over the past seven years, and Palatucci says some conservatives are jumping to conclusions. “People should hold their views on the chief justice until we get a longer track record and until we see where he comes down on many issues,” he says.

The New Jersey Supreme Court, which since the late 1960s has amassed increasing powers, has long been the object of conservative ire. Conservative legal scholars say that the court, which is deeply involved in the state’s education and housing decisions, is the root of New Jersey’s fiscal problems. Steven Malanga of the free-market Manhattan Institute called it “the court that broke New Jersey”; others, like the conservative Federalist Society, have emphasized that remaking the court is a prerequisite for addressing the state’s nagging budgetary problems — including, right now, the $2.7 billion budget shortfall that is causing the governor major political headaches. They had high hopes that Christie would do so.

New Jersey has an idiosyncratic system for supreme-court appointments under which justices are appointed by the governor for an initial seven-year term and may then be reappointed for tenure. Governors have for decades operated under a gentlemen’s agreement to maintain a political balance on the seven-member court, ensuring that there are no more than four members of one political party.

‘There’s a deal of ruin in a nation,” said Adam Smith — and that goes double for a continent. Sunday’s elections for the European parliament were an important stage on the road to ruin, which has now been traveled for almost 60 years, but they did not signal arrival at the final destination. From the standpoint of both its founders and its critics, that destination is a federal European state, and the transport system taking us there is the so-called “functionalist” theory of integration. Under this theory, Europe is supposed to be integrated function by function — coal and steel production, trade diplomacy, trade in goods and services, legal rules, police functions, defense, foreign policy, currency, etc., etc. — until its peoples and governments wake up one morning and realize that, Hey, we’re living in the same state/country/nation/polity/whatever. Isn’t that great! Henry Kissinger will be phoning any minute to congratulate us.

The single most vital missing ingredient in the functionalist recipe, however, is a European demos. “European” is no more than a geographical expression. There are Frenchmen, Germans, Brits, Italians, and Dutchmen, but there is no European people united by sentiment, common fellowship, language, historical institutions, the mystic chords of memory, and a sense of overriding vital mutual interests. There is the “vanguard” of a possible future European people in the form of those politicians and bureaucrats who go by the name of Eurocrats. But vanguards are no guarantee of a successful future demos, as the dissolutions of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia illustrate horribly.

Without a demos, however, functionalism eventually fails to function. It runs into a crisis and it finds that it cannot call on the loyalty of its citizens to solve it. Indeed, its creates a crisis by removing powers from its constituent governments that the citizens would prefer at home. Eventually it provokes a rebellion. And that is what arrived on Sunday.

For the first 30 or so years of its existence, the European Union (which went under various aliases, such as European Economic Community, for much of the period) mainly pursued activities that were either mildly beneficial (e.g., reduced barriers to trade) or temporarily soothing (e.g., agricultural subsidies) or remote from everyday experience. Most of the crises that European countries experienced in this period, such as the Soviet threat, were unrelated to its existence. It rumbled on functionally. Most people lived their lives without thinking much about the EU.

CAMPAIGN LOGO: KEEP YOUR DOCTOR-CHANGE YOUR SENATOR

Monica Wehby M.D. (R) Challenger
http://www.monicafororegon.com/

HEALTHCARE
In 2009, while Obamacare was rolling down the legislative pike, Monica was a prominent opponent of the ACA. She was enlisted to be in a television commercial which ran across the nation warning people about the dangers of that bill. Monica got a lot of hate mail for that ad campaign and had to change her home phone number, but every one of her predictions has come true.
150,000 people have had their health insurance plans cancelled in Oregon. Premiums have increased. Medicare Advantage benefits for our state’s seniors have been cut. The Obama administration is constantly changing its rules and regulations and delaying its mandates. As one person she met on the campaign trail told her, “The Affordable Care Act has made my health insurance un-affordable.”
This system is so flawed that it needs to be repealed and replaced with a patient-centered, market-based approach like the one Monica outlined in November of 2013 that increases access that is actually affordable. It’s radically different from what the President and Jeff Merkley forced through on a partisan basis.
FOREIGN POLICY
Monica believes in the idea that the best way to keep America and the world safe is by keeping America’s military strong and unrivaled. As Teddy Roosevelt said, “Walk softly, but carry a big stick.” Dr. Wehby will do everything possible in her capacity as our U.S. Senator to strengthen our armed forces and protect our freedoms. Monica also believes that the bond between the United States and Israel must remain rock solid. We must always stand by our strongest allies, especially in a region that is going through such turmoil. As the nuclear negotiations proceed with Iran we must be ever mindful that whatever deal is struck does not jeopardize the security of Israel.
IMMIGRATION
Dr. Monica Wehby believes that before we make any reforms to our immigration system that we must secure the border. Border security must be the immediate priority. Monica is also against amnesty for those who came here illegally. That simply isn’t fair to the people who came here through the proper channels. Dr. Monica Wehby also believes that we need to increase the amount of H1B visas for skilled workers. It doesn’t make any sense to train and educate these workers in the U.S. and then force them to take the skills they learned here to another country. We also need a verification system that allows employers to check a new employee’s legal status, whether it is E-Verify or a new online application, is needed so that employers can comply with our national immigration laws. Dr. Monica Wehby also believes we should work with Oregon’s agriculturists to develop a temporary guest worker program that works.
GOVERNMENT AND NATURAL RESOURCES
Monica has traveled all across Oregon meeting with farmers, fisherman, ranchers, miners, and loggers. These hard-working Americans have seen their industries and their jobs decimated by a federal government they believe is not on their side. She spoke to one miner with tears in his eyes who related the long story of how the government has regulated his industry out of business.
Dr. Wehby believes that we need leaders in D.C. who will take a truly balanced approach when it comes to protecting our state’s jobs and natural resources. The Federal government telling our state we can’t use our timber resources is like telling Texans they can’t drill for oil. One logger said to Monica that he feels like a man starving to death in the middle of a grocery store. There is a human cost to over-regulation that comes from a federal bureaucracy in Washington D.C. that doesn’t seem to care about the impact that their policies have on working families.
The people who live in these areas have been good stewards of their lands for generations. They are not looking to harm the environments they live in. They just want an honest partner in D.C. that isn’t looking to take away their right to work.

What is the origin of the false belief—constantly repeated—that almost all scientists agree about global warming?

Last week Secretary of State John Kerry warned graduating students at Boston College of the “crippling consequences” of climate change. “Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists,” he added, “tell us this is urgent.”

Where did Mr. Kerry get the 97% figure? Perhaps from his boss, President Obama, who tweeted on May 16 that “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” Or maybe from NASA, which posted (in more measured language) on its website, “Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities.”

Yet the assertion that 97% of scientists believe that climate change is a man-made, urgent problem is a fiction. The so-called consensus comes from a handful of surveys and abstract-counting exercises that have been contradicted by more reliable research.

One frequently cited source for the consensus is a 2004 opinion essay published in Science magazine by Naomi Oreskes, a science historian now at Harvard. She claimed to have examined abstracts of 928 articles published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and found that 75% supported the view that human activities are responsible for most of the observed warming over the previous 50 years while none directly dissented.

Ms. Oreskes’s definition of consensus covered “man-made” but left out “dangerous”—and scores of articles by prominent scientists such as Richard Lindzen, John Christy, Sherwood Idso and Patrick Michaels, who question the consensus, were excluded. The methodology is also flawed. A study published earlier this year in Nature noted that abstracts of academic papers often contain claims that aren’t substantiated in the papers.

Another widely cited source for the consensus view is a 2009 article in “Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union” by Maggie Kendall Zimmerman, a student at the University of Illinois, and her master’s thesis adviser Peter Doran. It reported the results of a two-question online survey of selected scientists. Mr. Doran and Ms. Zimmerman claimed “97 percent of climate scientists agree” that global temperatures have risen and that humans are a significant contributing factor.

At the United Nations, it’s a pretty reliable rule that when something looks bad on the surface, there’s worse rot beneath. That’s no accident. It’s a natural product of UN secrecy, bureaucracy and membership freighted with unfree states. Mix those elements together, and they yield a moral compost heap in which bad policy and bigotry flourish. By the time something troubling sprouts into plain view, it has already set down a massive root structure within the UN hothouse.

For the past six years, one product of this mulch was the UN Human Rights Council’s sponsorship of Richard Falk as a special rapporteur for what the UN Human Rights Council is pleased to call “the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.” This has been a lopsided anti-Israel mandate since its conception, and Falk with great zeal translated it into a platform for attacking Israel and the U.S. That made waves in the U.S. last year when Falk blamed America for the Islamist terrorist bombings of the Boston Marathon. More than two dozen members of Congress called for the UN to fire Falk. As it turned out, the UN Human Rights Council (reborn in a 2006 flurry of “reform” from the irredeemably corrupt UN Commission on Human Rights) has no procedure for firing a special rapporteur, [1] nor does the UN require its rapporteurs to divulge such niceties as other sources of funding and support. Falk carried on until his term expired this month, only to be replaced by a candidate with a similar anti-Israel record, Indonesia’s Makarim Wibisono [2]. So far, so bad.

But neither is the Falk connection entirely gone. The UN Human Rights Council has now appointed, as another of its special rapporteurs, none other than Richard Falk’s wife — Hilal Elver [3]. She shares her husband’s work, agenda and predilection for 9/11 conspiracy theories, Israel trashing and so forth. You can read more about her on the web site of Geneva-based UN Watch, which called her UN appointment “bizarre, nepotistic, and politically driven.” UN Watch in its online briefing [4]includes a link to Elver’s application for the post, complete with “self-disqualifying answers, non-sequiturs, and more than 20 spelling mistakes.” Her specific post is special rapporteur “on the right to food,” a post which UN Watch notes was initiated by Cuba and “first held by Jan Ziegler, founder and recipient of the Muammar Qaddafi Human Rights Prize.”

To this I’d add, if the UN’s aim is to ensure that people around the globe have enough to eat, the real project should be the right to freedom — the point being that free people have a far better record of ensuring all can eat well than do oppressed people whose “right to food” is overseen by state planners and UN rapporteurs. But campaigning for freedom to choose is not an agenda that would generate much business for the UN or its deep bench of cronies.

Instead, the UN has now empowered Elver to jet around the globe, traveling under the UN flag, reporting back to the UN Human Rights Council and the General Assembly in New York, spreading her agenda on anything she might deem relevant to ” food.” Her position as rapporteur is unpaid, but her expenses are picked up by the UN (which means almost one-quarter of her tab will be bankrolled by U.S. taxpayers).

If we were living in normal times, the following scandals and failures — without going into foreign policy — would have ruined a presidency to the point of reducing it to Nixon, Bush, or Truman poll ratings.

Think of the following: the Fast and Furious scandal, the VA mess, the tapping of the communications of the Associated Press reporters, the NSA monitoring, Benghazi in all of its manifestations, the serial lies about Obamacare, the failed stimuli, the chronic zero interest/print money policies, the serial high unemployment, the borrowing of $7 trillion to no stimulatory effect, the spiraling national debt, the customary violations of the Hatch Act by Obama cabinet officials, the alter ego/fake identity of EPA head Lisa Jackson, the sudden departure of Hilda Solis after receiving union freebies, the mendacity of Kathleen Sebelius, the strange atmospherics surrounding the Petraeus resignation, the customary presidential neglect of enforcing the laws from immigration statutes to his own health care rules, the presidential divisiveness (“punish our enemies,” “you didn’t build that,” Trayvon as the son that Obama never had, etc.), and on and on.

So why is there not much public reaction or media investigatory outrage?

In one sense there is: an iconic, landmark president was ushered into office with a supermajority in the Senate and a solidly Democratic House, at a time the public felt angry over the Iraq war and the 2008 financial meltdown. Six years later, Obama’s poll ratings bottomed out at about 43%. He lost the House in 2010, and he probably will see the Senate gone in 2014. But that said, amid such failure Obama will never descend to 30% approval ratings, and that again bring to mind the question: why?

Obvious answers:

1) His record support among minorities will not change since 70-90% of various hyphenated groups see the Obama tenure as long-overdue representation of their own interests — economic, ethnic, and symbolic. It does no good to cite rising unemployment rates among African-Americans or a deterioration in household income among Latinos. The point is that Obama feels their pain, even if his policies helped cause it. In this view, expecting blacks, to take one example, to defect from Obama would be as if right-wing rural Texans would have abandoned Bush in 2006, or the Malibu set would have given up on Clinton during Monicagate. In short — unlikely.

2) The media is not just overwhelmingly hard left, but hard left with a chip [1] on its shoulder [2] that its own views are neither accepted by the majority nor usually implemented by government.

All the above scandals and embarrassments would have ruined a Bush, given that such mishaps would have been headlined daily in the New York Times (e.g., “VA, Benghazi, AP, NSA, IRS overwhelm sinking Bush administration”) or Washington Post (“Bush Cabinet Paralyzed by Scandal”).

For the media, Obama is not Jimmy Carter or even Bill Clinton whom they overwhelmingly supported [3]. He is quite different — the first gold-plated liberal president since FDR [4], and probably the last for a while, intent on fundamentally transforming the United States, by redistributing income [5] and accumulated wealth, and recalibrating the American profile [6] abroad.

The media believes that both are socially just and long overdue. Why then nitpick a president on details, when his intentions are noble? Extraordinary ends sometimes require tawdry means. Note here: when Obama leaves office, and should he be replaced by a Republican president, then we will see a press playing catch-up, intent on restoring its shattered image by exposing cabinet members who violate the Hatch Act and the insidious revolving door [7] between Wall Street/ banking and White House billets. But for now, the media is invested in seeing Obama as a once-in-a-lifetime emissary of its own politics [8].

On the view that there’s a silver lining to most things, consider the European election results. Yes, fascism is back, officially, ugly as ever. But at least Americans might be spared lectures from the bien-pensant about the crudeness of U.S. politics vis-à-vis Europe’s.

Now, whenever I hear about the National Front, I’ll reach for my Second Amendment.

Many are the blameworthy in this disgrace to a continent, but let’s start with the most blameworthy: the French electorate. Last week, Jean-Marie Le Pen, National Front founder and the party’s hyena in winter, suggested a method for how Europe could solve its “immigration problem”: “Monseigneur Ebola,” he said, “could sort that out in three months.”

One in four French voters cast their ballots for the National Front, edging out the center-right UMP and trouncing the governing Socialists. On election night Sunday, Mr. Le Pen’s daughter and current party leader, Marine Le Pen, declared: “Our people demand just one politics. The politics of the French, for the French.” What’s French for Ein Volk ?

Ms. Le Pen is supposed to be softer and smoother face of her father’s party, but the evidence of that is hard to see. Last month she paid a visit to Moscow, lambasted the European Union for declaring a “Cold War” on Russia and embraced separatism in Ukraine. As for Vladimir Putin, she praised him in a recent interview as a “patriot” who “upholds the sovereignty of his people” and defends “the values of European civilization.”

Values, presumably, such as invading and intimidating neighbors, stuffing ballot boxes, jailing dissidents and attempting to restore the reputation of the Soviet Union.

The Kremlin has also made overtures to Hungary’s Jobbik party, which took nearly 15% of the vote in last week’s election, as well as to Greece’s Golden Dawn, which got 9.4%. These parties aren’t neo-fascist, in the early Benito Mussolini mold. They’re neo-Nazi, in the late Ernst Röhm mold. Golden Dawn marches under a swastika-like banner. As for Jobbik, when the World Jewish Congress held a meeting in Budapest last year, the party organized a rally to denounce “the Israeli conquerors, these investors, [who] should look for another country in the world for themselves because Hungary is not for sale.”