At a small dinner party last night, our host glided lightly over the activities of the Supreme Court this past week in order to canvass the table’s thoughts about who the candidates might be for the 2016 presidential election. The usual names percolated through the sands of our discussion. My suggestion that Hillary Clinton’s candidacy was by no means a sure thing was met with friendly disbelief. The Democrats do not have another plausible candidate, ergo, the Hillary is it. I still have my doubts. The aging activist clearly has health issues and is so festooned with scandal—not to mention her utter lack of accomplishment as a senator or secretary of State—that even James Carville must be worried. “No, no,” it was explained to me. “The Hillary is it. It doesn’t matter what she’s done. Someone could turn up a video of her selling Libyan women and children into slavery and she would still get the nomination. It’s not her against the other chap (or, as it may be, the other lass), it’s their team against ours, blue against red. American politics are increasingly polarized, which means they are increasingly nasty. What matters is power, not principle.”
Fresh off a victory lap in the Rose Garden where the #LOVEWINS president narcissistically defined agreeing with him as “love,” President Obama segued from LGBTQ rights into racial rancor and Biblical misrepresentation during a eulogy where he also defined “God’s grace” as agreeing with him.
Taking to the pulpit at slain Charleston Emanuel A.M.E. Church’s pastor and state Senator Clementa Pinckney’s going-home celebration, Barack ‘Can you say Amen’ Obama assumed a black-preacher cadence and began the eulogy by “Giving all praise and honor to [a] God” whose Word the president normally revises with as much liberality as he does the U.S. Constitution.
Wily, crafty, and well done, the president’s torturous twisting of Scripture was rivaled only by Chief Justice John Robert’s opinion on Obamacare.
After a perfunctory acknowledgement of the slain pastor’s wife, daughters, and church family, the president cracked a few self-deprecating jokes before diving headlong into a discourse on racial and progressive politics.
During the 1920s, ‘30s, ‘40s, most people who followed the politics and events dealing with Palestine and the Jewish Homeland or Israel well understood that the land across the Jordan River (south of Syria) was the eastern portion of the Palestine Mandate. Might the discussion of establishing an additional state or two in what was western Palestine (now Israel, plus Judea-Samaria/West Bank, and Gaza) be expanded to consider an additional state in eastern Palestine?
The overall Palestine Mandate was allocated to Great Britain by the League of Nations in the early 1920s. It was to be homeland of the Jews (during biblical and Second Temple times) and a home to Arabs. Virtually immediately the Brits broke up the Palestine Mandate area into two zones (east and west) divided by the Jordan River, the Dead Sea, and the Arava – the dry deep rift that ran south from the Dead Sea to the sea.
The top suspect in the beheading of a businessman that French authorities are calling a terrorist attack took a “selfie” photo with the slain victim and sent the image via WhatsApp to a Canadian mobile phone number, officials said Saturday.
French investigators were working to determine the recipient’s identity, but weren’t able to immediately confirm media reports that it was an unspecified person now in Syria, where the radical Islamic State group has seized territory, the security officials said.
The revelation added a macabre twist to an investigation that has not turned up a solid link to radical or foreign groups, but has revived concerns about terrorism in France less than six months after deadly attacks in the Paris area.
Top suspect Yassine Salhi, a truck driver with a history of radical Islamic ties, as well as his sister and wife remained in police custody in the city of Lyon, a day after he allegedly crashed a truck into a U.S.-owned chemical warehouse and hung his employer’s severed head on a factory gate, officials said.
One of the officials said the selfie was forwarded via WhatsApp, the globally popular instant messaging system owned by Facebook, to a phone number in Canada. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing.
No group immediately claimed responsibility. The severed head appeared to mimic Islamic State’s practice of beheading prisoners and displaying their heads for all to see, and came days after the militants urged attacks during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. French authorities say Salhi had links to radical Salafists in the past.
Sinirlioglu, a career diplomat, happens to be one of President Erdogan’s most senior confidantes — a smart diplomat with no Islamist sentiments.
If the terribly destroyed fences between Ankara and Jerusalem are to be mended, this is a good time to start the work.
For Turkey’s Islamist government, breaking up with Israel, a credible regional ally until 2009, was a calculated move. Then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s famous Davos tirade against Israel’s then President Shimon Peres was the beginning of Turkey’s willing road accident with the Jewish state: a systematic campaign based on anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic rhetoric and action that would capture votes at home and help Turkey powerfully emerge with its neo-Ottoman ambitions on the Arab Street. It did, leaving no appetite in Ankara for détente — at least, until June 7, 2015.
James McConnell’s prosecution is one of a growing number of examples in which British authorities — who routinely ignore incendiary speech by Muslim extremists — are using hate speech laws to silence Christians.
“My church funds medical care for 1,200 Muslim children in Kenya and Ethiopia. I’ve no hatred in my heart for Muslims… I believe in freedom of speech. I’m going to keep on preaching the gospel. I have nothing against Muslims, I have never hated Muslims, I have never hated anyone. But I am against what Muslims believe. They have the right to say what they believe in and I have a right to say what I believe.” — James McConnell, Pastor.
“Since the Islamic State took over, it [Mosul] has become the most peaceful city in the world.” — Raied Al-Wazzan, Executive Director, Belfast Islamic Center. Al-Wazzan is now trying to leverage the controversy over McConnell’s remarks to shame local politicians into providing him with free public land to build a mega-mosque.
An evangelical Christian pastor in Northern Ireland is being prosecuted for making “grossly offensive” remarks about Islam.
ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
TB skin patch wins Gates award. (TY Atid-EDI) Israel Technion’s Professor Hossam Haick has won a Gates Foundation award to help development of a sensing plaster that can detect tuberculosis biomarkers on the skin. Professor Haick is already famous for his nanotech breath analyzer that detects cancer.
http://focus.technion.ac.il/news_story.asp?id=361
Universal flu vaccine heads for clinical trials. Israel’s BiondVax has received FDA approval of its application to proceed with clinical trials of its universal Multimeric-001 flu vaccine (M-001).
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/biondvax-announces-fda-acceptance-of-ind-application-for-its-investigational-universal-flu-vaccine-507856431.html
50 young spines straightened. The Israeli ApiFix system has now been used to correct scoliosis (deformed spines) in 50 adolescents since the minimally invasive system was approved for marketing in Europe in 2013.
http://trendlines.com/apifix-reaches-50-patient-milestone/
CuPID prevents falling. The CuPID project, co-directed by Tel Aviv University’s Dr. Anat Mirelman, has developed a smartphone app to help Parkinson’s sufferers who have a common symptom called Freezing of Gait (FoG). The CuPID app uses sensors on the shoes and alerts the wearer audibly, if they are likely to fall.
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/israeli-researchers-smartphone-app-may-help-parkinsons-patients-video/2015/06/25/
Treating gastro problems with newborns. (TY Atid-EDI) Israeli biotech Nutrinia develops treatments for intestinal failure in preterms, infants and adults. Its NTRA-9620 treatment has just been granted orphan status by the US FDA. http://www.nutrinia.com/
Crowdsourcing platform for insomniacs. Israel’s Sleep ASAP (Art Science Awareness Platform) is described as “Waze for the sleep-deprived”. The sleep-management organization educates sleep-strugglers about getting a pill-free good night’s sleep, and is launching meetups in the USA, Canada and Australia.
http://www.israel21c.org/headlines/waze-for-the-sleep-deprived/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLihVjH35JM
Internet tool to analyze genes. Dr Yuval Tabach of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has developed an Internet tool that will allow any investigator, physician or patient to analyze a gene according to its evolutionary profile. It will help identify genes associated with genetic diseases and cancer.
http://new.huji.ac.il/en/article/27065
$5.5 million donation for Israeli healthcare. Beneficiaries of the latest donation from the Helmsley Trust include Ezra LeMarpeh which is building a medical rehabilitation center in Sderot; the JNF, for a medical center in NW Negev’s Halutza community; and United Hatzalah, for its central dispatch center.
http://www.jpost.com/Business-and-Innovation/Health-and-Science/55-million-from-Helmsley-Trust-to-benefit-three-Israeli-health-projects-406489
1. There is no conservative party There is a Republican Party. The purpose of the party and its politicians, much like that of its Democratic counterpart, is to obtain money and privileges for its major donors. That doesn’t mean that its members don’t have other ideals and agendas, but Republican politicians who rise high enough come from an urban and suburban establishment that is more liberal than its base. Expecting them to care as much about your issues as you do is unrealistic.
They will only do the right thing insofar as it helps them
A. Get control of money
B. Advance their careers
C. Become popular
And this is a good thing. It means that they’re controllable. It means that the Democrats are also controllable. And this is how the left took over the Democratic Party.
The only way to interact with the large body of politicians is through the carrot and the stick. The “destructive” Republican saboteurs the establishment complains about, whatever their motives, are serve as the stick, undermining and sabotaging efforts to conduct business as usual.
The Tenth Amendment reads:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
See anything in the Constitution about defining marriage? See anything there about being forced to establish a health insurance exchange?Those are two items of state determination that fell by the wayside last week.
First, states, according to the bill as written, had the option of participation in the Affordable Care Act by deciding whether or not to establish a “state exchange,” thus qualifying the citizens of that state for federal subsidies.
Second, the 16 states that did not honor same-sex marriage are now instructed by the federal government to do so.
The landmark Supreme Court decisions are bulk-discounted this week, so here’s this hour’s. In my conversation with Hugh Hewitt yesterday, I said:
As you know, Hugh, I’m not a believer in Supreme Courts that are as supreme as America’s Supreme Court is.
But here they are redefining an institution that pre-dates the United States by thousands of years with gay abandon. Ireland held a referendum to approve same-sex marriage a few weeks ago. I would not have voted as my fellow Irishmen did, but I can respect their decision. Likewise, I can respect those legislatures from Belgium to Uruguay where the people’s representatives, accountable to their electors, have voted to introduce gay marriage by law. But a system where, in effect, Anthony Kennedy gets to decide for 300 million whether he can divine a right to same-sex nuptials that its drafters cannily left tucked discreetly in some or other subordinate clause of the US Constitution is to torture that document beyond rational meaning – even before John Roberts started doing his “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘state’ states” routine. In other words, American republican constitutionalism has itself become as meaningless as Obamacare or the definition of marriage. Why don’t we just cut to the Twitter version?
