RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

Even some Democrats in Congress have come to the conclusion that after the brouhaha over Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech before Congress, President Obama wants to radically downgrade the long American special relationship with democratic Jewish Israel — and perhaps has a dislike of the idea of Israel. Add up the administration’s initial disparagement on the matter of Israeli settlements, untoward administration remarks during the Gaza War, its assumptions that a future autonomous West Bank had a right to insist on becoming Judenfrei, its downplaying the Iranian nuclear threat, John Kerry’s various editorializing about Israeli supposed overreactions, the constant hectoring of Israel, and rumors of a slowdown in military aid to Israel during the Gaza war, and so on and so on.

These acts seem to fit into a prior landscape of the administration’s anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli supposed slips, gaffes, and smears.

There is a tendency in Washington to miss the forest for the trees; the result often being different from what was intended. An example was Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which, in the words of Thurgood Marshall, stated that the Constitution should be “colorblind.” Brown overturned Plessy v. Ferguson’s (1896) “separate but equal” doctrine. While that was the right decision, an unintended consequence was that Brown led to affirmative action. The “colorblind” nature of the law was considered by some as too constraining on minorities. Today some conservative African-Americans, like Jason Riley, Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele, claim affirmative action has done more harm than good. Others see it as a new form of discrimination.

Changing mores have likewise affected attitudes toward the family. Cultural changes and laws now ensure that women have control over their own bodies and most states allow gays to marry. Both movements have merit, and I support them. But a consequence has been a decline in the nuclear family. There has been an increase in cohabitation, one-parent households and the number of children born out of wedlock. Data from the Census Bureau confirms those trends and shows that poverty is most common in single-parent families. Forty-five percent of children living with a single mother live below the poverty line, as do twenty-one percent of children living with a single father. In contrast, only thirteen percent of children living with both parents do so. Are correlation and causation the same? Empirical studies suggest that they are

Congress’s entire Benghazi investigation, we now know, was based on an incomplete record.

Hillary Clinton has made some disingenuous statements over her political career, but none remotely compare to the tweet she issued Wednesday night: “I want the public to see my email,” she said. This requires—how to say it—a willing suspension of disbelief.

Mrs. Clinton was referring to the gracious permission she had just bestowed upon the State Department to release her email correspondence as the nation’s former top diplomat. She’s only in a position to grant such favors because it turns out all of her correspondence as Secretary of State was conducted on private email, run out of a server she alone controlled. The Clinton camp has spent this week explaining that none of this was untoward, that no laws were broken, and that she’s being transparent.

But three quarters of a million soldiers lost their lives, and the nation nearly extinguished itself.

The shooting will have been over for a century and a half this spring, but the casualties keep mounting. As recently as a decade ago the best estimates of the soldiers killed in the Civil War put the number at 600,000; today’s scholarship has increased the toll to three quarters of a million. That was 2.4% of the American population when the war began. As James M. McPherson observes in his brisk and engrossing book, “The War That Forged a Nation,” if the same percentage of Americans were killed in a war today, “the number of war dead would be almost 7.5 million.”

But the appalling mortality rate is hardly the only reason the war lives on in our culture. Mr. McPherson sees the war as lying at the heart—and the midpoint—of the American past, a terrible clarification of the ideals on which the country had been established in 1776. “Founded on a charter that had declared all men created equal with an equal title to liberty,” the author writes, America had by the 1850s “become the largest slaveholding country in the world,” an irony that vexes us even today, so long after Appomattox.

The partisan default in cases of alleged political corruption is for everyone of the opposite party or philosophy to pile on. So it speaks volumes about the lost credibility of President Obama ’s Justice Department that last week’s leaks to the media that federal charges are being prepared against Democratic Senator Robert Menendez has produced skepticism across the ideological divide.

It’s impossible to judge the charges without a formal indictment, and Mr. Menendez is from New Jersey, which rivals Chicago as a laugh line about political corruption. The stories say Mr. Menendez will be charged with using his office to aid a friend and donor, Florida eye-doctor Salomon Melgen, with federal business. Mr. Menendez responded by saying, “I have always conducted myself appropriately and in accordance with the law.”

The skepticism results from the politicized nature of Eric Holder ’s Justice Department as well as previous abuses in its Public Integrity Section. Recall the indictment of the late Senator Ted Stevens in the middle of his re-election campaign in 2008. His conviction was set aside after a judge found the prosecution had withheld “significant” exculpatory evidence.

After the earthquake in 2010, the Clintons’ outsize influence in the small nation increased.

The Clinton Foundation lists the Brazilian construction firm OAS and the InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB) as donors that have given it between $1 million and $5 million. Those relationships are worth learning more about.

OAS has been in the news because it is caught up in a corruption scandal centered on Brazil’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras. In November Brazilian police arrested three top OAS executives for their alleged roles in a bribery scheme involving inflated contracts and kickbacks. OAS denies the allegations. Closer to home the 2013 OAS donation to the Clinton Foundation deserves attention because of the power that Bill Clinton has in Haiti, where OAS has been awarded IDB contracts.