RUTHFULLY YOURS

In 2002, a group of Harvard students and faculty circulated a petition calling for the university to divest from corporations that do business with Israel. Lawrence Summers, then Harvard’s president, rejected the petition. In response to today’s renewed calls to boycott Israel on college campuses, including Harvard, and the American Studies Association’s boycott of Israeli universities, Summers addresses the issue once more:

January 29, 2015
I am delighted to help inaugurate this forum on academic freedom. Academic freedom is essential if universities are to succeed in their missions of creating and disseminating knowledge. Universities excel when they are governed by the authority of ideas rather than the idea of authority. And more perhaps than at any other moment in history, the work of universities–transmitting knowledge and values from one generation to the next, and creating new knowledge — determines the future of nations.
It speaks to the importance of universities in the life of nations that George Washington very much wanted to devote his farewell address to a proposed American national university until he was dissuaded from the idea by Alexander Hamilton, not because Hamilton did not like the idea but because he thought the farewell address was the wrong occasion for its presentation. So Washington instead bequeathed a substantial part of his not inconsiderable fortune to the proposed university.

In a column for NRO earlier this week, we wrote about the tax proposal currently being put forward by Senators Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Mike Lee (R., Utah). We admire both senators and think their plan has some great components — particularly the reforms to the corporate tax code. But, as we wrote in our column, the plan fails to do enough to promote economic growth, instead emphasizing “pro-family” initiatives such as a greatly expanded child tax credit. People are inherently entrepreneurial and need to be offered the same hope that corporations would get under the Rubio-Lee plan.

Responding to our column with two blog posts, National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru defends the expanded child credit and accuses us of being inconsistent in our criticism of the Rubio-Lee plan. The core of Ponnuru’s criticism is that we call for a much lower top marginal tax rate while opposing the child credit and wanting to “keep a bunch of tax breaks.”

In remarks at the Detroit Economic Club on Wednesday, Bush, a top-tier candidate in the early presidential going, offered an answer: Maybe.

The former Florida governor laid out the contours of what he called “the defining challenge of our time” — a growing “opportunity gap” and six years of economic stagnation — and called for the Republican party to turn its attention to the middle class and the poor. Detroit itself, mired in bankruptcy, is a symbol of that decline.
Bush was himself — serious, sober, and stiff — as he pledged to offer a “new vision” and a “plan of action” that departs from the one that’s been on offer the past six years from the White House — and mainstream Washington Republicans.
But the speech was heavy on lofty phrases and light on specific details. Those will have to wait: He promised “a mix of smart policies and reforms” in the coming months.
“I’m not sure the average person listening to that speech would’ve thought wow, this person is a really different kind of Republican,” says Jim Pethokoukis, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributor to National Review Online. “There wasn’t anything startling there in substance.”

The president’s disastrous foreign policy is as much a product of his own vanity as anything else.

Members of the Obama administration have insisted that the Taliban are not terrorists. Those responsible for the recent Paris killings are not radical Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood is largely secular. Jihad is a “legitimate tenet of Islam.” And “violent extremism,” “workplace violence,” or “man-caused disaster” better describe radical Islamic terrorism. Domestic terrorism is just as likely caused by returning U.S. combat veterans, according to one report by a federal agency.

What is the point of such linguistic appeasement?

The word “appeasement” long ago became pejorative for giving in to bullies. One side was aggressive and undemocratic; the other consensual and eager to avoid trouble through supposedly reasonable concessions.

But appeasement usually weakened the democratic side and empowered the extremist one.

The architect of appeasement — for example, Neville Chamberlain, former prime minister of Great Britain — was predictably a narcissist. Chamberlain believed that his own powers of oratory, his insights into reason, and his undeniably superior morality would sway even a thug like Adolf Hitler.

The courage and sacrifice of today’s Christian martyrs should not go unnoticed and unappreciated. One such heroic figure, the 94-year-old Roman Catholic bishop Cosma Shi Enxiang, has recently died in Chinese custody, according to an official government statement, reported on February 2 by an independent Catholic news service focusing on Asia. His generation felt the brunt of Chinese Communist cruelty, but his death as a religious prisoner reminds us that religious repression in China is far from over.

Altogether, since 1954, Bishop Shi was held captive for over 40 years by the Communist government for his religion, making him one of the longest serving political prisoners of our age. (I intend in no way to minimize the suffering of Nelson Mandela and Alexander Solzhenitsyn by pointing out that Mandela was imprisoned by South Africa’s apartheid government for 27 years, and that Solzhenitsyn was forced to spend eleven years in the Soviet gulag.)

Genocides happen when the civilized world shuts its eyes and does nothing while some gang of barbarians slaughters human beings by the thousands. Civilized silence promises safety to the killers and demoralizes their victims.

Samantha Power, Obama’s U.N. ambassador, has made a career criticizing U.S. government passivity in the face of genocide. She has written Pulitzer Prize-winning books like A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.

Now she has been U.N. ambassador – a major power position in the Obama administration, the most powerful political job she is ever likely to have to do what she wants.

What has Dr. Power done about genocide? What has she actually done to stop, or even to complain in public about, groups and regimes that thirst after genocide, like Iran, ISIS, the Taliban, the Wahhabi priesthood of Saudi Arabia, the mass killing rulers of the Sudan? What about Boko Haram killing, enslaving, and selling children in Nigeria? What about the Kenya massacres? What has she done?

“What should concern everyone who places value on life and religious freedom is that the murderers are not lunatics. They are calculated, savvy and entirely convinced they are following the commands of their religion. If they continue to attract adherents in the Middle East, and even in east London or Paris, the world is in trouble.”

The video of ISIS barbarians burning to death a Jordanian pilot sure makes one empathize with Israel. Thirty years ago, Israel was an oasis of sanity surrounded by nation-states essentially hostile but essentially tamed. Now, Israel is surrounded by an exploding movement of bloodthirsty ISIS murderers. Contrary to what President Obama would have you believe, the I in ISIS doesn’t stand for International.

What is exploding around Israel in the Middle East is now a modern death cult. Only in a culture as warped and backwards as the Middle East could a video of a human being burned alive in a cage attract supporters. Yet the American left wailed about Abu Ghraib for months.

ObamaCare Architect Gruber Wants to Tax Americans by Weight

Socialized medicine. It’s like a totalitarian dictatorship run by a million bureaucrats based on ideas from control freaks.

If you let it through the door, you’re giving it permission to terrorize you any way the sociopaths running it can think of. And they can think of a lot of ways.

Jonathan Gruber, long credited as the architect of ObamaCare, once discussed the necessity of taxing fat people by body weight in order to fight obesity.

“Ultimately, what may be needed to address the obesity problem are direct taxes on body weight,” Gruber wrote in an essay for the National Institute for Health Care Management in April 2010, just months after helping design ObamaCare with the president in the Oval Office and during the period in which he was under contract as an Obama administration consultant.

“While it is hard to conceive of this approach being a common public policy tool in the near term, such taxation may be happening indirectly through health insurance surcharges,” he wrote. “Currently, employers may charge up to 20 percent higher health insurance premiums for employees who fail to meet certain health-related standards, such as attaining a healthy BMI.”

“The new health reform legislation increases this differential to 30 percent, with the possibility of rising to 50 percent. Results of programs that use differential premiums to impose direct financial penalties for obesity will bear watching in the future.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/islam-a-house-of-cards-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Michael Loftus, host of The Flipside With Michael Loftus, Morgan Brittany, a conservative TV and movie star, and Tommi Trudeau, host of Politics Tonight With Tommi Trudeau.

The Gang discussed Islam: A House of Cards?, analyzing why Islam’s guardians behave as if even a tiny bit of criticism will bring the whole structure down. The discussion was also focused on Hijab Day at NP3 High School, Michelle Obama’s “No” to Hijab in Riyadh, A Day in the Life of a Dissident Reporter in Obama’s America, and much more.

Homeland Security attempted to tackle the immigration crisis by cobbling together a bill, H.R. 399, the Secure Our Borders First Act of 2015 that would purportedly secure the US/Mexican border in increments that would ultimately bring a semblance of security to that dangerous border that at present is little more than a speed bump.

Those increments would be years apart. For example, while this bill requires that a biometric departure system would be a part of the measures to be implemented in conjunction with border security, this component of the bill would not have to be in place for seven years.

Let’s put this lunacy into proper perspective. On December 7, 1941 the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor. Almost 3,000 Americans lost their lives.

In just 44 months the United States, working with its allies including Russia, an ally of questionable loyalty, we won the war and defeated the Nazis and the Axis Powers. In order to accomplish this incredible achievement, the United States designed and constructed then-revolutionary fleets of a wide array of aircraft and ships. America’s “Greatest Generation” invented and rushed brand new weapons into production, including the world’s first atomic bombs.