http://www.wsj.com/articles/after-fleeing-the-nazis-a-legacy-that-wont-run-dry-1466722996 How does one overcome almost unimaginable horror and trauma? For Holocaust survivors Howard and Lottie Marcus, the healing came, in part, from the hope that they could help to provide refuge for other Jews who might find themselves at risk. But after restarting their broken lives in America, this modest couple could never have […]
Any day now the Supreme Court will rule on President Obama’s go-it-alone executive action protecting millions of undocumented persons against deportation. However it comes down, the decision will again inflame this bitterly divided nation; it will also remind moody Republicans why they must absolutely vote for Donald Trump.
Heads-up to Republicans queasy about Trump: there is no question – none at all – that Hillary Clinton’s picks to fill the seat of deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and other judges who may shortly retire would embed and extend President Obama’s progressive agenda for decades to come. If voters don’t like Obama’s single-handed upending of our immigration laws, his push towards Big Labor, or if they disagree with his purposeful extermination of U.S. fossil fuels industries, Donald Trump is their only choice.
Related: Here’s Why the GOP Dug in Its Heels on SCOTUS Nominations
Justice Ruth Ginsberg is 83 years old, Anthony Kennedy is two months away from turning 80, Clarence Thomas is nearly 68 and Stephen Breyer is 77. All could retire in the next four to eight years. Including Scalia, 3 right-leaning or conservative justices are likely to leave the court; were Hillary Clinton to nominate their replacements, there would be a 7-2 leftist majority on the court. Only Samuel Alito (age 66) and Chief Justice John Roberts (61) would tilt right. If Clinton picks candidates in their fifties, we’re talking decades of liberalism spilling from the bench.
Supreme Court Nominations By President | InsideGov
Over the past seven years, the Supreme Court has proved critical in confining an overreaching president. A Republican majority in the House and Senate has barely slowed President Obama’s legacy quest. Nor has the unpopularity of many of his priorities. Twice – in 2010 and 2014 — Obama was rebuked at the voting booth, in historic numbers. It deterred him not a whit.
The only brake on his go-it-alone presidency has been the Supreme Court. When Obama used a faux senate recess in 2012 to appoint three liberal commissioners to the National Labor Relations Board, the Court unanimously ruled (two years later) that he had violated the Constitution. This was a serious slap on the wrist, but also a speed bump, preventing that board from rapidly tilting our labor laws in the direction of France – that is, making our country all but uncompetitive.
London, England — I have been in England for only one-and-a-half days, and it is already clear to me that the Brexit debate has by no means represented business as usual. Customarily, British political affairs are milquetoast affairs, with little of the vitriol or panache that marks American politics. This one, though, is different. It is bitter. It is bad-tempered. And, for want of a better word, it is rude. All told, the British seem thoroughly fed up with the proceedings in general, and even more fed up with those who disagree with them as to the ideal outcome. Whatever happens tomorrow, reconciliation will be a protracted affair.
Almost all of my more cosmopolitan friends are for Britain’s staying in, and, when I express the opposite view, have a tendency to condescend. “Really?” they ask, eyebrows raised. “Really?” And then, their irritation rising, they look at me with a sort of detached fascination, as if I had just suggested putting erotically shaped ice cubes into the Pinot Noir. One woman, who has been a friend since we were both eleven, told me over coffee that I should reconsider my position because “all the smart people” are pro-Remain. Another, an extremely sharp pediatrician whom I would trust with my life, has been berating her pro-Brexit siblings for “canceling out” the “sensible votes” that she and her husband hope to cast. The charges of smugness, it seems, have not been overblown.
Nor, I notice, have the reports of reticence from the other side. Perhaps because they are expecting precisely the reaction I got, the Leavers of my acquaintance tend to start their explanations with an apology. “I’m sorry,” they say, “but . . . ”; “I just think that . . . ”; “I understand that this is tricky, however . . . ” Such is the cultural power of the BBC and the political class — both of which have done their level best to make Brexit seem outré — that some people I speak to pretend that they are on the fence when they are clearly not, and relax only when I volunteer that I’m pro-leaving and have been for as long as I remember. “Oh,” they say with a furtive look around, “well in that case.”
On the train from Huntingdon to London, I see these divisions in full bloom. Almost everyone is reading a newspaper — it feels a little as if I’ve stepped backwards in time, to the 1950s — and their choices betray their politics. Running my eyes across the carriage, I feel as if I am attending a bizarre, hyper-ecumenical protest march, at which anybody with a strong, 40-point-font opinion is welcome. From seat level, the front pages resemble low-slung protest signs: “Leave!” “Remain!” “Leave!” “Remain!” “Leave!” It is possible, I suppose, that the people sitting behind these slogans are less sure of their views than it appears, but you certainly wouldn’t know it from their conversations with each other, full as they are of hard-headed assurances and mild exasperation at any expression of dissent. The phrase, “no, but you see” is used a lot, along with the insistence — repeated as if by rote and used by both sides — that “they are just trying to scare you.” On the surface it is all very polite, as Britons typically are. But there is an edge this time — an edge I haven’t seen for a long time.
When one contemplates the radical anti-Israel Left in Israeli academia, Bar-Ilan University (BIU) is not ordinarily the school that jumps to mind. Bar-Ilan is nominally an Orthodox religious school, although lots of secularists and non-Jews study and teach there. Bar-Ilan has fewer tenured anti-Israel leftists than do other institutions, but nevertheless it does have a few. Probably the worst is Menachem Klein from the BIU political science department.
Klein is one the leading Bash-Israel academics who has a special passion for the idea of dividing Jerusalem and removing Israel from its sacred shrines. The 64-year-old was the academic fig leaf for the anti-Israel “Geneva Initiative” of Yossi Beilin and the Far Left. When he was denied an academic promotion a while back, he publicly denounced Bar Ilan University as a thuggish institution.
A member of the board of B’tselem, Klein seems to have never met an anti-Semite he does not like. He favors Israeli leftists negotiating peace with Palestinians, by surrendering to their demands.
In recent years, Klein has devoted his energies to resuscitating the old Stalinist myth about Arab-Jewish euphoria before the rise of Zionism and especially the silly pseudo-history around the notion of the “Arab Jew.” Invented by a small group of Israeli Stalinists led by Tel Aviv University sociologist Yehouda Shenhav, these people claim that Oriental Jews are actually Arabs of the Mosaic persuasion. Never mind the proportion who would slap you silly if they hear you calling them Arabs of any sort. Shenhav has promoted his view that Asian Jews are Arabs in numerous articles and his book, The Arab Jews: Nationality, Religion and Ethnicity, won rave reviews from Arab extremists and from PLO front groups.
Last June 8—four days before the terror attack in Orlando—two Palestinian terrorists from the West Bank opened fire in a Tel Aviv café, killing four and wounding six.
Tel Aviv mayor Ron Huldai, a member of the left-wing Labor Party, was quick to respond—by blaming Israel.
Saying that Israel was “maybe the only country in which another people is under occupation and in which these people have no rights,” Huldai continued:
We can’t keep these people in a reality in which they are occupied and expect them to reach the conclusion that everything is all right and that they can continue living this way…. I know the reality and understand that leaders with courage need to aspire to reach [an agreement] and not just talk about it.
Considering that Huldai is a public official, mayor of a major city, it is putting it mildly to say that his words were full of ignorance and distortions. Israel is not an occupier in the West Bank. There are, however, numerous occupied peoples in the world. Palestinians in the West Bank have the prerogative to elect their own government and many other rights. The large majority of Palestinians—and certainly the terrorists among them—reject any Israeli claim to any land. So many attempts—by Israeli, American, and other leaders—to reach an agreement with the Palestinians have been turned down cold that any realistic Israeli leader understands that, at least for the time being, it’s an impossible goal.
But beyond those points, there’s another: shooting up people in a café is a crime, known as murder. No claim of political grievance is exoneration for murder. That point is widely understood in civilized societies—though not by the mayor of Tel Aviv.
Huldai’s words, which sparked fury, would be less significant if they were an aberration. Unfortunately, statements of that ilk are typical of the Israeli left—including, amazing as it may seem, in the case of left-wing politicians seeking to gain public favor.
Ehud Barak, a lifelong Laborite, is a former prime minister and defense minister. Before leaving politics in 2013, he was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s defense minister for four years. He was seen as Netanyahu’s close ally and fellow hawk on the Iranian issue, and worked hard—even dividing his party at one point—to keep Netanyahu’s coalition in power.
In a speech on June 16, Barak—who, as Netanyahu’s defense minister, had warned steadily that time was running out to stop Iran’s nuclear program—said that Israel faced “no existential threats.” He went on to accuse Netanyahu of “Hitlerizing” all threats to Israel, saying:
Hitlerization by the prime minister cheapens the Holocaust…. Our situation is grave even without [comparisons to] Hitler….
Every drop in the polls or bit of blunt talk from Donald Trump ignites another explosion of Trump Derangement Syndrome from Republican pundits and politicians. And every time such Republicans open their mouths, they strengthen the perception that they are an out of touch elite having more in common with the Democrats with whom they share the same university credentials and tony zip codes. So they confirm the very suspicions that have driven much of Trump’s support.
It doesn’t help that too many Republicans use the same loaded language and share the same assumptions of the progressives. For example, the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens wrote a whole column on the historical parallels with the 1930s, linking Trump to Italian fascism. In the Washington Post, the Brookings Institute’s Robert Kagan explained “this is how fascism comes to America.” More recently, NRO’s Jay Nordlinger meditated on whether the “F-word” applies to Trump, and concluded, “I’m not sure.”
The remoteness of the chance that America could move that far right leaves the topic of Trump’s fascistic tendencies a mere device for tarring Trump with the fascist brush. Everyone knows that “fascist” is the left’s favorite insult, and its use depends on massive ignorance of historical fascism, the differences between authoritarian and fascist regimes, and the distinctions between Italian fascism and German Nazism. But it’s an effective smear, at once tainting the target with the excesses of Nazism, but containing little content other than the speaker’s ideological dislike of whatever he is branding “fascist.” It should be a tenet of conservativism to respect the integrity of language and history, and not to indulge the linguistic dishonesty that defines progressive propaganda.
Then there’s the flap over Trump’s remarks about the judge who is hearing the suit over Trump University. House Speaker Paul Ryan, currently the lodestar of anti-Trump Republicans, called Trump’s charges that the judge might be biased toward him “the textbook definition of a racist comment.” Sure it is, if your “textbook” is the Progressive Lexicon of Orwellian Smears.
Editor’s note: Credit goes to Dr. Bob Shillman for the title of this article.
Hillary Clinton’s bizarre claim that billionaire businessman Donald Trump will cause a recession if elected to the presidency was overshadowed yesterday as Trump took deadly aim at the pathological liar’s horrifying public service track record.
For her part, Clinton glibly dismissed Trump.
“As I said yesterday in Ohio, Donald Trump offers no real solutions for the economic challenges we face,” Clinton said in a speech to the faithful in Raleigh, N.C. “He just continues to spout reckless ideas that will run up our debt and cause another economic crash.”
Around the same time, Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, laid into “Crooked Hillary” with a vigor and focus that Americans haven’t seen for a while. Trump’s speech, in which he accurately described Clinton as a “world-class liar,” was very well received and is making left-wing pundits nervous — for good reason.
Unlike Trump’s address, Clinton’s speech was a carefully constructed alternate reality held together by a tissue of leftist lies. Clinton’s oration was an economically illiterate catalog of hoary Marxist cliches, or as Dr. Bob Shillman quipped, “liar, liar, pantsuit on fire.”
Clinton offered a vague outline of her disastrous socialistic economic agenda, largely a continuation of President Obama’s anti-growth policies and tainted as it is by a focus on so-called social justice objectives at the expense of economic growth and individual rights.
She spoke nonsensically of “growth that’s strong, fair, and lasting … that reduces inequality, increases upward mobility, that reaches into every corner of our country.” To keep her union thugs happy, Clinton vowed to “say no to bad trade deals and unfair trade practices, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership,” and no to the “assault on the right to organize and bargain collectively.”
Ignoring the fact that she served front and center in a radically left-wing administration that over the last nearly seven and a half years has presided over the weakest economic recovery since the Great Depression, Clinton promised “to make this economy work for everybody … building it from the ground up, from every home and every community, all the way to Washington.”
Leftists like Hillary enjoy anthropomorphizing inanimate objects and abstract concepts because they can’t win policy arguments on the merits. They prefer fabricating monsters they can slay.
WASHINGTON — The White House confirmed today that North Korea conducted more “provocative actions” in “a flagrant violation of their international obligations.”
“U.S. Strategic Command did, in fact, detect and track what we assessed were two North Korean missile launches yesterday. The missiles were tracked over the Sea of Japan, where initial indications are that they fell,” press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters at the daily briefing. “NORAD was also monitoring the launches and determined that they did not pose a threat to North America.”
“But I do think that the impact of these provocations will be to only strengthen the resolve of the international community that has such serious concerns with North Korea’s behavior,” he added.
South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported that, of the test launches of the two Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missiles, at least one appeared to have been unsuccessful.
Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said the first missile was launched at 5:58 a.m. and was unsuccessful, followed by a second launch at 8:05 a.m. “The second Musudan-like missile flew about 400 km,” the JCS said without elaborating. “South Korea and the United States are carrying out an in-depth analysis on it.”
Yonhap cited military sources saying that the first missile “burst into pieces in the air after flying some 150 km.”
“The South Korean military reportedly concluded that the second missile soared to an altitude of some 1,000 kilometers, which could indicate the country has improved the performance of the Musudan missile’s engine,” the news agency added.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is believed to have watched the launches.
Pyongyang began testing the Musudan this April.
Washington’s response?”The United States will do what we have done in the past, which is work with the international community, particularly our allies in South Korea and Japan,” Earnest said. “We’ll also continue our ongoing dialogue with the Chinese and the Russians about what additional pressure can be applied to the North Koreans. And the key here will be to continue to work with our allies and partners to address this destabilizing threat in Northeast Asia.” CONTINUE AT SITE
For those of you who may still be laboring under the illusion that we live in something resembling the antiquated notion of a constitutional republic, allow me to enlighten you about how things have changed since your high school government class. Here’s how the legislative branch works now:
When the Democrats are in power they get everything they want, even if it means ramming through legislation in the middle of the night and twisting the rules until they are virtually unrecognizable. When the Republicans are in power, the Democrats still get everything they want because the Republicans basically just hand it to them to avoid being called racists or misogynists. When they don’t get what they want, Democrats throw temper tantrums and hold their breath until they get what they want. Either way, they win. Always.
This is definitely not how I learned it in government class, but trust me, this is how it works now.
Right now, House Democrats, led by 1960s civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis, are staging a childish sit-in—Occupy-style—on the floor of the House because Republicans won’t cave fast enough on taking away our Second Amendment rights. (Don’t worry, Trump will be here to do it soon enough…I heard his surrogate say it on CNN tonight!) Despite the fact that the terrorist who shot up the nightclub in Orlando wasn’t on the no-fly list, the Twilight Zone-dwellers in the Democratic Party are sure, so very sure, that preventing people on the no-fly list from buying guns would have stopped the attack. (What was that Reagan said about Democrats knowing so many things that aren’t so?)
Democrats Can’t Even Get ‘Gawker’ to Support Their Stupid Sit-In
If you’re envisioning Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. when you picture this House sit-in in your mind, you’d be way off. Think a slumber party with a bunch of 7th grade girls. Our well-paid members of Congress are enjoying Starbuck’s, Chinese food, and taking many, many selfies with their friends (I wouldn’t be surprised if there are manis and pedis too!). They’ve also sent out for pillows and blankies, because you definitely need pillows if you’re going to sit on that luxurious carpet all night.
As a long-time resident of Connecticut, I have been patient and respectful while my representatives in Congress have railed against “gun violence” and called for new and sweeping restrictions on gun ownership. The Newtown, Connecticut, incident was tragic and, politics aside, recognition of the tragedy was appropriate and necessary.
But now they have gone too far. Senator Chris Murphy has been focused on expanding gun control to the exclusion of everything else. He led a filibuster in the Senate to highlight his position — fair enough. But after the gun-control proposals were voted down, Murphy accused Republicans of “sell[ing] weapons to ISIS.” Connecticut’s other senator, Richard Blumenthal, has been a less visible but equally engaged activist for increased gun restrictions. Congressman Jim Himes and other Connecticut representatives walked out of a moment of silence for Orlando in the House of Representatives, saying that silence mocks the victims.
To these legislators, the Orlando incident was little more than an opportunity to revive the memory of Newtown and once again advance their gun control agenda.
These people need to understand some basic truths:
1. Citizens have a natural right to own a gun. This is an unalienable right — by virtue of our right to life, liberty, and property — to defend family, self, and possessions.
2. The right to “keep and bear arms” is not granted to citizens by virtue of the Second Amendment. It is not bestowed upon us by government or by our elected representatives. Rather, it is a fundamental citizen right, and therefore one that government is morally obliged to protect for all citizens.
3. The Second Amendment exists to protect citizens from precisely the gun-rights abuses we are seeing from government today. It exists to prevent our representatives from interfering with our fundamental human right to keep (own) and bear (carry) arms, and all else that gun ownership entails (such as access to ammunition and indemnification of gun manufacturers).
4. When I need to defend my family and possessions, the police will surely be far away. Our town police force is capable and competent, the department is certified to high standards, but the town is sprawling, the force is modest, and response times are long. My representatives in government will be even farther away in the event of trouble.
