A lady struts and worries and sleepwalks and shakes her cell phone……
Out, damn’d E-mail! out, I say!—One; two: why, then
’tis time to do’t.—Hell is murky.—What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our
power to account?—
Even Democrats and union workers support RTW legislation. Governor Scott Walker (R., Wis.) is about to give every woman in his state the right to choose . . . whether or not to join a union. He will sign legislation today that will make Wisconsin America’s 25th Right to Work (RTW) state. Of course, that right also will apply equally to men. Walker’s signature will extend to private-sector employees the same protections that he and Wisconsin’s legislature provided government workers through Act 10 in 2011: Union membership will be a choice rather than a condition of employment. Dues will be paid voluntarily, not vacuumed automatically from workers’ wages, even before they see their paychecks. This news will put Walker in the national limelight as this week dawns. Heading toward 2016, this new RTW law will help Walker burnish his conservative credentials even further.
He already can point to a long list of successes beyond wholesale labor reforms. Among them: cutting $2 billion in state taxes, converting a $3.6 billion deficit into a $517 million surplus, expanding school choice, requiring voter ID cards, and terminating taxpayer subsidies for Planned Parenthood. Walker accomplished these things not in a Republican stronghold like Arkansas or Texas, but in a state that last went Republican for president in 1984, when Ronald Reagan was on the ballot. The Badger State is the birthplace of government-worker unions and the late U.S. senator “Fighting Bob” La Follette, father of what liberals now call Progressivism. As Mike Flynn observed February 28 on Breitbart.com: “Politically, Walker isn’t bringing coals to Newcastle.” A Wisconsin RTW law would be like Democrats implementing a 25 percent state income-tax rate in Alabama.
The controversy isn’t just about Iran. It’s also about America’s role in the world. ‘Even if Israel has to stand alone, Israel will stand.” So said Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the conclusion of his bitterly debated speech to Congress about the Iranian threat. He then offered a qualifier: “But I know that Israel does not stand alone. I know that America stands with Israel.” Both lines elicited standing ovations from lawmakers, but only one was categorically true: The White House, quite obviously, did not stand with Netanyahu’s Israel. And it is the reality of this divide, not merely the substantive disagreements that fill it, that ultimately lies at the heart of this controversy.
America’s policy toward Iran in part reflects a broader goal of geopolitical distancing that repudiates — at the expense of its closest allies — the nation’s historical role as the world’s indispensable superpower. In its stead, the White House has embraced a quixotic strategy of multilateral diplomacy untethered to economic or military pressure — and rooted in the assumption that the projection of American power enflames radical regimes rather than deters them. This approach poses a problem for weaker allies — such as Israel — that have long relied upon the projection of American strength as a key plank of their national-security strategies. Suddenly, for them, Pax Americana seems rather distant. Suddenly, they feel very much alone. ***** Long before Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech kindled a partisan conflagration, an Israeli prime minister ascended the dais of the U.S. House of Representatives and offered a gentle warning about future disagreements.
We are halfway there: On Friday, the state assembly of Wisconsin voted to make the state the 25th to pass right-to-work legislation, and Governor Scott Walker is expected to sign the bill with some satisfaction. That’s 25 down, 25 to go. (Our optimism is not so unanchored as to consider the sorry case of the District of Columbia.) Right-to-work laws end the practice of union bosses’ enriching their organizations through a legal variety of extortion under which all workers are required to pay the equivalent of union dues, whether they wish to be represented by a particular union or do not.
The traditional position of Democrats, toward whose campaign coffers a great deal of that money is destined, is that this practice is necessary to ensure “fairness” — that workers enjoy the unions’ protection whether they want it or not. But the correct term for an arrangement like that isn’t “fairness” — it is “protection racket,” and Governor Walker’s signature will put an end to this particular brand of racketeering. A great deal of attention is being paid, and will be paid, to what this means for the presidential aspirations of Wisconsin’s governor, who confronted and trounced entrenched public-sector interests and then trounced them again when they tried to recall him.
The latest PLO and Fatah campaign is not directed only against settlement products. Rather, it is targeting anything made in Israel, as apart of an “anti-normalization” movement, whose goal is to thwart any encounters between Israelis and Palestinians, including peace conferences.
While some Israelis, Americans and Europeans are talking about the need to revive the peace process after the March 17 elections in Israel, the Palestinians are clearly moving in a different direction.
“We are headed for confrontation with Israel.” — Mahmoud Aloul, senior Fatah official.
The Palestinian Authority’s strategy now is to intensify its campaign to isolate and delegitimize Israel in the international community, and promote all forms of boycotts of Israelis and Israeli goods; to force Israel to make concessions through international pressure and through campaigns of boycott and divestment.
In memory of Larisa Bogoraz, Elena Bonner, Yuri Glazov, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, Anatoly Marchenko, Anna Politkovskaya, Andrei Sakharov, and Galina Starovoitova.
“Bitches always hate decent people.”
– Boris Nemtsov
Boris Nemtsov anticipated his own death. He had long become one of czar Putka’s most vocal opponents, one whose voice could not be silenced. He spoke in the name of that Russian democratic tradition that culminated in the collapse of Bolshevism and the first stage of the Yeltsin regime, with all its dilemmas and contradictions. He wrote relentlessly against the oligarchic-FSB-style corruption embodied by the Putin regime; he was actually working on an explosive text on this very topic when he was eliminated in a mafia-like hit. As Yevgenia Albats – the editor of the “Novoye Vremya” magazine – points out, Russia has gone into a stage of full-blown war between the friends and the enemies of the rule of law and of open society.
Nemtsov symbolized a type of politician perhaps only comparable with Zoran Djindjic, the Serbian Prime Minister assassinated in 2003. He was despised by the economic and political mafias, seeing as he identified with civil society and its aspirations. In a recent article in the “Washington Post,” Charles Lane, a member on the newspaper’s editorial board, accurately points out that we find ourselves in the midst of a global counterrevolutionary offensive. The aim is to abolish the great democratic achievements brought about by the revolutionary wave that began in 1989.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/jamie-glazov/why-obama-boycotted-netanyahus-speech-on-the-glazov-gang/
This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Aaron Shuster (Writer/Producer), Ari David (Host, The Ari David Show Podcast) and Barak Lurie (Host, Barak Lurie Show).
The guests gathered to discuss Why Obama Boycotted Netanyahu’s Speech, analyzing who a Radical-in-Chief really wants to impress.
The guests also focused on The Myth of “Israeli Apartheid”:
Originally published by Defining Ideas.
The slow-motion crisis of the European Union is the big story that rarely gets the attention it deserves. Even an event like the recent terrorist attack in France that left 17 dead is often isolated from the larger political, economic, and social problems that have long plagued the project of unifying the countries of Europe in order to harness its collective economic power, and to avoid the bloody internecine strife that stains its history.
On the economic front, the E.U.’s dismal economic performance over the last six years was summed up in a December headline in Business Insider: “Europe Stinks.” The 2008 Great Recession exposed the incoherence of the E.U.’s economic structure, particularly its single currency, which is held hostage by the diverse economic policies of sovereign nations. The data tell the tale. The E.U.’s GDP grew 1 percent in 2013, anemic compared to the U.S.’s 2.2 percent. In December 2014, unemployment in the E.U. averaged 11.4 percent, while in the U.S. it was 5.6 percent. We are troubled by our labor force participation rate of 62.7 percent, a 36-year low. But in the E.U., it was 57.5 percent in 2013. Our recovery from the recession may be slow by our historical standards, but it is blazing compared to the E.U.’s.
When Julissa Magdalena Maradiaga-Iscoa rammed her car into a police vehicle while trying to drive through the Miami airport entrance and was then arrested after shouting in Arabic about a bomb, the media did its best to get all the important details right.
The AP made sure to mention that she was driving a silver Toyota. It failed to mention that she was Muslim or that her Facebook page describes her as a Shaheeda, a holy warrior, a term Muslims use to refer to their terrorists. A few American media outlets did report that she was an illegal alien, but only the Spanish language ones told their readers that she had converted to Islam.
Such minor details have become the first casualties of the War on Terror.
That Maradiaga-Iscoa chose to rename herself Shaheeda Hadee tells us more about her state of mind than the color of the car that she was driving. The make of her car is far less important than that her social media likes and follows included Zakir Naik, who said “Every Muslim should be a terrorist.”
“It is only natural that the competing camps should offer these divergent views. The case, however, is not an “either … or” situation. It is perfectly reasonable to believe both that Menendez may be guilty of corruption offenses and that his political opposition on Iran is factoring into the administration’s decision to charge him. Put another way, if Menendez were running interference for Obama on the Iran deal, rather than trying to scupper it, I believe he would not be charged.”
The speculation that Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) is about to be indicted on corruption charges is well informed enough that Menendez found it necessary on Friday to launch a preemptive self-defense in the media.
Sen. Menendez is suspected of influence peddling on behalf of Salomon Melgen, a Florida ophthalmologist and major donor Menendez describes as a longtime family friend. In 2012 alone, when Menendez was seeking reelection to the Senate, Melgen contributed $700,000 to his and other Democratic campaigns.
In addition, the Washington Post reports, sources claim Melgen has done Menendez various other favors, not least providing prostitutes (including minors) while Menendez stayed at a friend’s Dominican resort home, an allegation the senator vigorously denies. Beyond that salacious aspect of the case, the FBI is investigating whether money and other favors from Melgen induced Menendez to intervene on his behalf in at least two significant transactions: (a) pushing the the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency to favor a Melgen-backed company in the acquisition of screening equipment for Dominican Republic ports; and (b) pressuring then-Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and other top officials to resolve a Medicare billing dispute to Melgen’s advantage.
