RUTHFULLY YOURS

Twenty-five years after the Velvet Revolution, his warnings about passive foreign policy resonate.

On Nov. 17, a bust of Václav Havel, writer, Communist-era dissident and president of the Czech Republic, will be unveiled in the U.S. Capitol. On that day nearly 25 years ago, students took to the streets of Prague, triggering mass demonstrations that brought down the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, as the Czech Republic was then known.

Havel, who died in December 2011, was a modest man. He might have gotten a laugh out of such a pompous event. When bidding farewell as president in February 2003, he had this to say: “It all happened so suddenly that I did not even have time to properly consider whether or not I was up to the task.” And yet he oversaw epochal events both at home and abroad and in many ways he was an active participant.

No sooner was he sworn in on Dec. 29, 1989, than President Havel had his foreign-policy mettle tested as he coped with the far-reaching repercussions of the Iron Curtain coming down. The former Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe were mired in domestic political and economic woes. They also found themselves in a geopolitical void as the Soviet Union fragmented, and simmering ethnic tensions in the Balkans cast another shadow over the future.

Havel was acutely aware of the ills and wrongs of the world. While to some he may have seemed a naive idealist, he was convinced that noble ideals should guide his country’s foreign policy to help it stay on a righteous path.

Drawing on his own experience of living under and relentlessly fighting against a suffocating Communist regime, President Havel had a powerful story with which to capture the world’s imagination. He represented the power of ideas and personal courage to stand for what one believes is right and just despite seemingly insurmountable odds. He went on to demonstrate that such ideals have a proper place in international politics and diplomacy.

Shortly after his election, Havel appeared before a joint session of the U.S. Congress on Feb. 21, 1990, to deliver an analysis of developments in Czechoslovakia and neighboring countries. Despite many challenges and difficulties consuming the governments of states formerly in the Soviet sphere to put their Communist past behind them, Havel stressed that these countries would have to become less inward looking.

Sometimes we wonder if President Obama has even the vaguest idea how a private economy works. The latest reason to doubt came Friday in Burma, where Mr. Obama was asked at a press conference about the Keystone XL pipeline, which has been waiting for approval for the length of his Presidency. The pipeline would allow oil to flow from Canada all the way to the Gulf Coast.

In off-the-cuff remarks, Mr. Obama managed to insult our great northern neighbors while suggesting that the project would be no help to U.S. workers or consumers. “Understand what this project is: It is providing the ability of Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land, down to the Gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else. It doesn’t have an impact on U.S. gas prices.”
Someone should tell the President that oil markets are global and adding to global supply might well reduce U.S. gas prices, other things being equal. A tutor could add that Keystone XL will also carry U.S. light oil from North Dakota’s Bakken Shale. So even if he thinks that bilateral trade only helps Canada, he’s still wrong about Keystone.

“If my Republican friends really want to focus on what’s good for the American people in terms of job creation and lower energy costs,” the President added, “we should be engaging in a conversation about what are we doing to produce even more homegrown energy.” Mr. Obama routinely entreats Congress to spend taxpayer money on “infrastructure” to create jobs, yet he implies that the 1,179-mile Keystone infrastructure project won’t create jobs. Perhaps (see editorial above) Mr. Obama really does think the American people are stupid.

A well known phenomenon in the animal kingdom is that when taking over a new pride, a lion will sometimes kill all the cubs. We don’t know exactly what kind of feeling drives him in this bloody act, but there’s obviously a lack of attachment. Suffice it to say the problem can be summed up thus: it’s not his family.

America’s pride is falling. And few things illustrate this better than the open-borders mentality that has allowed foreigners to bring diseases — most notably Ebola but also EV-D68 and others — into our country.

There was a time when a threat such as Ebola would have inspired travel bans reflexively. Not today. In this enlightened age, Barack Obama and underlings such as CDC director Tom Frieden tell us, with a straight face, that such measures just wouldn’t work. They also claim that banning commercial flights would frustrate efforts to aid Ebola-affected nations and thus increase the long-term chances of an epidemic in the U.S.

Space constraints preclude me from exploring every detail of their argument, but the bottom line is that it’s fallacious. A travel ban combined with a policy of issuing no visas to citizens from affected nations, a prohibition against entry by any foreign national holding a passport with a stamp from one of them, and a mandatory quarantine for Americans returning from such countries absolutely would work. No, it wouldn’t reduce the chances of more Ebola cases reaching our shores to zero, but such a requirement is unreasonable. We can’t eliminate all murder, but we still see fit to minimize it by having necessary laws, police and a criminal-justice system.

As for aid, it goes without saying that medical professionals and other emergency workers would be granted travel clearance and that charter and military planes could ferry them where they needed to go. Moreover, we’ve isolated Americans who contracted Ebola, and no one claims it prevented us from giving them sufficient treatment.

In fact, the arguments against common sense and the common good are so obviously flawed that it’s clear they are not reasons, but rationalizations. So what really explains our leaders’ common senselessness? National Review’s Mark Krikorian put it well last month:

Why are so many people reluctant to recognize the malignity in Barack Obama’s character and actions?

Opportunities repeatedly have been overlooked by the media and even by many blog news sites to more properly assess the true motivations of President Barack Hussein Obama, based on his character, policies, behavior and public mien. The scandal that has erupted over MIT economics professor Jonathan Gruber’s remarks during a panel discussion about the machinations behind getting Obamacare drafted, and then enacted in Congress and signed by Obama, can serve as an important guide to what Obama is “all about.” Judicial Watch focuses on the “transparent” contempt Gruber has for Americans on Family Security Matters:

The esteemed college professor who served as one of Obamacare’s key architects has admitted that a “lack of transparency” helped the administration pass the disastrous healthcare law, which is facing a number of legal challenges.

It’s a scandalous confession for an administration that has repeatedly vowed to be the most transparent in history. The information comes straight from Jonathan Gruber, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) economist who served as a technical consultant to the Obama administration during the Affordable Care Act’s (Obamacare) design. Gruber was recorded during a panel and the video recently surfaced and has been making the rounds on the internet.

“This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes,” Gruber says. “If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in – you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed… Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass…” (Italics mine)

Gruber’s bragging – and, incidentally baring his decrepit, rotten soul about how he helped to push through the intentionally deceitful ACA – serves as an overture to an assessment of Obama’s own soul. Let us count the ways Obama has been spared – nay, let off the hook – by contemporary assessments of his character, his motives, and his means and ends. He has been called these things, even by his own supporters, by critics hesitant to pass the final judgment on him:

The California Israel International Business summit, held by the
California Israel Chamber of Commerce on Oct. 22. Photo: California
Israel Chamber of Commerce.

JNS.org – The “start-up nation”—a nickname Israel earned due to its
population’s knack for innovation—is increasingly exporting its
culture of entrepreneurship to America.

A 2012 Pew Research Center study showed that as many as 330,000
native-born Israelis were living in the United States, while other
estimates peg the total current population of Israeli
Americans—including the descendants of those born in Israel—at between
500,000 and 800,000. There are a number of reasons why an Israeli
might decide to come to the U.S., but for those who are innovators,
entrepreneurs, or businesspeople, the move is often based on
necessity. The relatively small market of Israel, a country that is
roughly the size of New Jersey, leaves Israeli companies thirsting for
opportunities outside of the Holy Land.

http://www.humanrightsvoices.org/?h=1

Video: Today’s UN: Syria compares Israelis to Nazis

UN Human Rights Council gives Sudan a veto over “independent expert” investigating Sudan

Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, wanted by the ICC for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity

VIDEO: Shocking evidence of how UN Human Rights Council deals with Iran

VIDEO: China, Human Rights & the UN: The story not discussed on Obama’s Trip

Suicide Bombing at Nigerian School Leaves 47 Dead

http://www.humanrightsvoices.org/

UN GENERAL ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE ADOPTS 9 RESOLUTIONS IN 1 DAY CONDEMNING ISRAEL, 9 TIMES MORE THAN ANY OTHER STATE

http://www.un.org/press/en/2014/gaspd576.doc.htm

Fourth Committee, Concluding Work, Sends Raft of Resolutions to General Assembly on Information, Israeli Practices Committee, Middle East Refugee Relief Agency

Concluding its work for the session, the Fourth Committee (Special Political and Decolonization) today approved 12 draft resolutions and three draft decisions, on special political missions, information, Middle East and organization of work, bringing to 28 the total number of draft texts it forwarded to the General Assembly for adoption.

Among those approved today was Draft B on United Nations public information policies and activities. Prior to action on the text, the Committee Secretary presented an oral statement anticipating that the activities to be undertaken — particularly in the area of achieving parity of information products in all six official languages — in the biennium 2016-2017 in line with the Department’s biennial programme plan for that period, would entail nearly $14 million in additional resources for the period.

As operative paragraph 22 was brought to a recorded vote, several speakers expressed surprise, considering that the text had been agreed by consensus and in good faith during the Committee on Information session, held earlier in the year. Some regretted that the Secretariat had come out with a request for additional funding, when the text had been explicit that no new costs would be incurred.

The Committee decided to retain the paragraph in the resolution by a vote of 116 in favour to none against, with 48 abstentions, and then approved the wide-ranging draft as a whole without a vote. It also approved Draft A, on information in the service of humanity, and a related draft decision on increasing membership of the Committee on Information, both without a vote.

In Scathing Letter to Obama, Former FBI Assistant Director Slams Holder as “Chief Among Antagonists” in Ferguson
As the Senate prepares to hold confirmation hearings for new Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch and as outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder continues to allocate Department of Justice resources to the situation in Ferguson, former FBI Assistant Director and Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund President Ron Hosko has sent a scathing letter to President Obama detailing the damage done to the relationship between law enforcement and DOJ over the past six years.

“The hyper-politicization of justice issues has made it immeasurably more difficult for police officers to simply do their jobs. The growing divide between the police and the people – perhaps best characterized by protesters in Ferguson, Mo., who angrily chanted, “It’s not black or white. It’s blue!” – only benefits members of a political class seeking to vilify law enforcement for other societal failures. This puts our communities at greater risk, especially the most vulnerable among us,” Hosko wrote in the letter exclusively obtained by Townhall. “Your attorney general, Eric Holder, is chief among the antagonists. During his tenure as the head of the Department of Justice, Mr. Holder claims to have investigated twice as many police and police departments as any of his predecessors. Of course, this includes his ill-timed decision to launch a full investigation into the Ferguson Police Department at the height of racial tensions in that community, throwing gasoline on a fire that was already burning. Many officers were disgusted by such a transparent political maneuver at a time when presidential and attorney general leadership could have calmed a truly chaotic situation.”

In Ferguson law enforcement officials are bracing for violence and riots ahead of a Grand Jury decision about whether to prosecute Police Officer Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown. Wilson says he shot Brown in self-defense after Brown went for his gun during a struggle in the police car. According to an official autopsy, Brown was shot at close range and had gun powder residue on his hand, indicating the struggle in the car did in fact happen and that Brown reached for Wilson’s gun.

Executive amnesty would kill an already fragile American economy, according to former Immigration and Naturalization Service officer Michael Cutler, who discussed on Newsmax TV’s “America’s Forum” Friday how American jobs would be lost should President Barack Obama resort to such action.

“We’re worried about jobs. Why don’t we talk about the need to liberate jobs? When you realize that we’re admitting more authorized foreign workers into the U.S. every month than the number of new jobs being created.”

“If we enact any kind of massive amnesty program, the money wired out of the U.S. would skyrocket as it is between $125 billion and $200 billion being wired from our economy to other countries,” Cutler said.

“India globally gets the greatest amount of remittance of the high tech workers. We have American kids going to schools, getting the degrees and getting every qualification they need and being passed over by people from other countries who work for a lot less money. Americans are being laid off by Silicon Valley.”

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Silicon Valley and politicians who argue that the U.S. needs to substantially increase the number of H-1B visas may not be considering the impact that would have on the American workforce.

“Silicon Valley last month laid off 18,000 American high tech workers,” Cutler said. “Does it sound like we have a shortage?

“When politicians say that we need to bring in foreign workers because the schools in the U.S. don’t turn out the engineers and programmers and so forth, then in the next sentence what do they tell us? Foreign students going to those schools should be having their green cards stapled onto the diplomas. The immigration laws used to be the primary responsibility of the labor department. That’s how we built the middle class. This is about protecting American jobs and American lives and it’s time the politicians went back to the fundamental idea of protecting America and Americans.”

The most important component of immigration enforcement is in the interior, something Cutler said the United States is severely lacking.

“You need to have enough agents from within the interior enforcing our laws not only to arrest illegal aliens, but to conduct the fraud investigations and to make sure there’s integrity to the system,” he explained. “This is like playing baseball right now without having anybody take the outfield. Right now there are seven million immigration agents, half are dong customs work. New York City has 40,000 police officers. What do you think will happen to New York’s crime rate if we had 3,000 cops instead of 40,000? We really need to have thousands of more agents, more immigration judges, and more immigration lawyers. We admit more than a million lawful immigrants every year. How many more do you want to admit?”

America is a country of 50 Border States, he argued, and the way to adequately measure how secure the borders are is to look at the price and availability of heroin and cocaine.

The Free Speech Movement seems to have evolved into its opposite, a censorship by others or of oneself, disguised as political correctness.

Bazian is in the forefront of the movement to prevent Bill Maher from speaking on campus. Bazian himself however, seems to like being unrestrained when he wants to speak.

Apparently to Bazian, Jewish money promotes undue influence, but Saudi money has no Wahhabi fundamentalist strings attached. Maybe Bazian should ask whether there is something in Islam that causes so many of its adherents to cast non-Muslims as “the other.”

The organized Muslim groups have not exactly embraced Freedom of Speech or Assembly as primary values.

Each year, the University of California hosts a lecture in honor of Mario Savio. On December 2, 1964, Mario Savio stood on the steps of Berkeley’s Sproul Hall and launched into an unrehearsed speech, often considered one of the best 100 of the century. The speech would make him the voice of what became known as the Free Speech Movement.

Throughout Berkeley, the Free Speech Movement [FSM] represented a strong part of Berkeley’s historic and cultural identity.

The FSM, however, seems to have evolved into its opposite, a censorship by others or of oneself, disguised as political correctness. It is an ideology that makes sensitivity to the feelings of the “previously excluded” trump basic rights.

The tension between what the FSM was and what it became has now come to a head in the most recent of Berkeley’s conflicts over the role of free speech. The conflict arose from the invitation to television personality Bill Maher to give the address for this December’s graduation.