RUTHFULLY YOURS

Obama recently decided to effectively suspend enforcement of immigration law and unilaterally legalize huge numbers of illegal aliens. But one of his minions is sending around letters threatening states who refuse to accept his army of Syrian migrants, at least 13% of which poll as supporting ISIS. That means out of his first 10,000 Syrians, over a thousand would be ISIS supporters.

States are required to provide “assistance and services … to refugees without regard to race, religion, nationality, sex or political position” according to the Refugee Act of 1980, the letter points out.

“States may not deny ORR-funded benefits and services to refugees based on a refugee’s country of origin or religious affiliation,” the letter states. “Accordingly, states may not deny ORR-funded benefits and services to Syrian refugees.” States that do not comply with these terms are subject to “enforcement action, including suspension or termination.”

According to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, discrimination based on race or origin is against the law in all programs that receive federally-funded assistance, the letter adds.

Of course immigration policy precisely discriminates against immigrants based on their country of origin or religious affiliation, since the latter is used to determine quotas, while the former is used to verify claims of religious persecution.

Obama is claiming that the Civil Rights Act applies to immigration policy at the State level, but not the Federal level.

This is a new level of lawlessness even for Obama.

A popular meme on some sites is that the Statue of Liberty was “originally a Muslim woman”. Like a lot of viral memes, this is a myth.

The a grain of truth to the story is that the meme picked up on the interesting historical footnote that one of the earlier projects of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi was a large woman holding up a torch and symbolizing Egypt’s progress. The giant statue would have been titled, “Egypt or Progress Carrying the Light to Asia”.

Since Egypt’s ruler had no money, the project went nowhere.

Bartholdi at the time was somewhat obsessed with Ancient Egypt. It was ancient Egypt that interested him rather than Islam. The statue was meant to celebrate Egyptian civilization rather than Islam.

In any case the idea that “Egypt” became the Statue of Liberty is a myth. How do we know that?

Here’s what Bartholdi had to say about it, “At that time my Statue of Liberty did not exist, even in my imagination, and the only resemblance between the drawing that I submitted to the Khedive and the statue now in New York’s beautiful harbor is that both held a light aloft. Now how is a sculptor to make a statue which is to serve the purpose of a lighthouse without making it hold the light in the air?”

“From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia . . . could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.” — Abraham Lincoln

The winning streak enjoyed by campus activists this fall was violently interrupted by the recent terrorist attacks in Paris. Some activists were sufficiently annoyed by their ejection from the limelight that they took to Twitter to complain under the hashtag “F***Paris.”

The most obvious irony stemmed from the fact that some of the same protesters who griped about media coverage of their antics — even declaring First Amendment-free zones — suddenly whined when the cameras turned to bloodshed in the heart of Europe.

But there’s a deeper irony. In the aftermath of the Paris attacks, fueled by a cynical media strategy directed by the president himself, the national conversation turned quickly from Barack Obama’s foreign-policy failures to the bigotry and insensitivity of the Republican party. There’s no denying that Donald Trump made this an easy pivot for the Beltway Brahmins. But left unnoticed in the clamor is the dismaying disconnect between the conversation elite liberals want to have and the one being pushed by their left-wing shock troops on the ground.

The jihad waged by radical Islam rips at France from within. The two mass-murder attacks this year that finally induced President Francois Hollande to concede a state of war are only what we see.

Unbound by any First Amendment, the French government exerts pressure on the media to suppress bad news. We do not hear much about the steady thrum of insurrection in the banlieues: the thousands of torched automobiles, the violence against police and other agents of the state, the pressure in Islamic enclaves to ignore the sovereignty of the Republic and conform to the rule of sharia.

What happens in France happens in Belgium. It happens in Sweden where much of Malmo, the third largest city, is controlled by Muslim immigrant gangs — emergency medical personnel attacked routinely enough that they will not respond to calls without police protection, and the police in turn unwilling to enter without back-up. Not long ago in Britain, a soldier was killed and nearly beheaded in broad daylight by jihadists known to the intelligence services; dozens of sharia courts now operate throughout the country, even as Muslim activists demand more accommodations. And it was in Germany, which green-lighted Europe’s ongoing influx of Muslim migrants, that Turkey’s Islamist strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan proclaimed that pressuring Muslims to assimilate in their new Western countries is “a crime against humanity.”

So how many of us look across the ocean at Europe and say, “Yeah, let’s bring some of that here”?

None of us with any sense. Alas, “bring it here” is the order of the day in Washington, under the control of leftists bent on fundamentally transforming America (Muslims in America overwhelmingly support Democrats) and the progressive-lite GOP, which fears the “Islamophobia” smear nearly as much as the “racist” smear.

For the past week, Black Lives Matter protesters in Minneapolis have been competing for headlines with the terror attacks in Paris. If not for the latter, events surrounding the shooting death of another black male suspect during an altercation with police might have attracted the same level of attention as similar incidents around the nation.

The situation in Minneapolis is not ideal for the Black Lives Matter movement. The “victim” in this case isn’t particularly sympathetic, an alleged domestic abuser with prior arrests. Nevertheless, the local Black Lives Matter chapter has proceeded as if he were “executed” in cold blood by a malicious police department.

Joining a bipartisan panel of politicos from the area on the “Wrong About Everything” podcast this past weekend, I sought to understand the cultural context which produces these protests. The panel included Republican lobbyist and rural city council member Mike Franklin, Black Lives Matter activist and nonprofit professional Carin Mrotz, Democratic National Committeeman and local SEIU president Javier-Morillo-Alicea, and yours truly — Republican activist and suburban city council member Walter Hudson.

Just 100 years ago, Einstein announced his General Theory of Relativity. Four decades later, I used it to calculate the rate of a clock orbiting the Earth. It has turned out to be of importance for the GPS system, which depends on accurate clocks in navigation satellites.

Einstein and the General Theory of Relativity (GR)

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed (“Without Albert Einstein, We’d All Be Lost”), Robbert Dijkgraaf (director of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study) reminds us that on Nov. 4, 1915, Albert Einstein, working alone in wartime [World War-I, 1914-18] Berlin, submitted the first of four scientific papers that would change the course of physics and our view of the Cosmos: “His general theory of relativity (GR) is perhaps the greatest achievement of a single human mind.” Although it made Einstein the most famous scientist in history, he did not live to see the full impact of his ideas. He did not foresee earth satellites, lunar landings, or the application of GR to GPS, the Global Positioning System of navigation satellites.

As Dijkgraaf writes:

“Only now, a century later, are we gathering apples from the tree he planted: black holes that tear stars apart … ; cosmic gravitational lenses that distort images of faraway galaxies, as if seen through a funhouse mirror. And perhaps the biggest wonder of all: a comprehensive and detailed understanding of the evolution of the universe. Amazingly, in just 100 years, humankind has uncovered 13.8 billion years of cosmic history.

How far would you go to get a drug that could save your child’s life? Across an ocean? That is exactly what the federal government is forcing some American families with dying children to do.

In 2012, when Diego Morris was 11 years old, he was diagnosed with a deadly cancer in his leg called osteosarcoma. Doctors at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., removed the tumor, but the prognosis was poor. There was a significant risk that even extensive chemotherapy after surgery would not prevent the cancer from returning.

Fortunately, a team of doctors at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City had developed a revolutionary new drug, mifamurtide (MTP), that can prevent osteosarcoma from coming back. A study by Dr. Eugenie Kleinerman of MD Anderson and Dr. Paul Meyers of Sloan Kettering showed the drug resulted in a 30% reduction in the osteosarcoma mortality rate at eight years after diagnosis.

The drug was approved in 2009 by the European Medicines Agency and is currently the standard of care in Europe, Israel and many other countries. In 2012 it received the prestigious Prix Galien Award, the gold medal for pharmaceutical research and development in the United Kingdom.

Sylvia Thompson is a black conservative writer whose aim is to counter the liberal spin on issues pertaining to race and culture.
If you are behind, you are not leading. You are either following or being left behind. Barack Obama is neither leading nor following; he is orchestrating the destruction of this country.

I think many Americans have had it up to the gills with pundits, spokespeople, and politicians trying desperately to excuse Obama’s deficiencies by claiming he is “leading from behind,” particularly in regard to foreign policy.

This ridiculous characterization is “political speak.” The people who describe Obama’s behavior this way fear lodging negative comments against him because he is, in their view, the “first American black president.” Technically, he is not. He is the first mixed-race American president (allowing for the possibility that other presidents may have had mixed heritage without being aware of it).

The distinction is worth noting in my view. The first black president will be an American black whose ancestors were brought to this country and who has lived the American black experience.

Be that as it may, the weak and the gullible continue to hide behind the “first black president” canard. Political operatives think that this reality absolves them of their duty to remove him from office, as the Constitution requires.

World leaders are astutely aware of what Obama is all about. Our traditional enemies recognize that it’s time to take advantage of his deliberate weakening of America’s global strength. They can now jockey for positions of control, before he is removed. Allies must determine in the interim how best to protect their countries from mutual enemies because Obama has effectively abandoned them.

More than four dozen U.S. intelligence analysts formally filed complaints that their honest intelligence evaluations regarding the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and al-Qaida’s branch Al Nusra Front in Syria were altered by superiors to prop up President Barack Obama’s false proclamations that he and his “national security team” are winning the war.

As previously reported in the Conservative Base, Fox News’ Chief Intelligence Correspondent Catherine Herridge was informed by her anonymous but reliable source, who is an associate of the CENTCOM intelligence analysts, that they were instructed to avoid negative reports. In fact, they received two emails saying the analysts needed to “cut it out” and “toe the line,” when submitting reports.
In an earlier report published by the Conservative Base, it was reported that some of the intelligence community’s top analysts informed the Pentagon’s official watchdog that their reports have been systematically edited to backup President Obama’s — and his national security team’s — false narrative in which they claimed the air campaign against ISIS is more successful than it actually is.

Gratitude has been a prominent theme of National Review’s ​ since the beginning. Bill Buckley wrote a book bearing the title “Gratitude,” and his attitude was infectious. One indicator of what a remarkable man WFB was is that so many people feel such sincere gratitude for having known him, even if it was only through his work. I won’t embarrass my friends and colleagues by enumerating their gifts and charms here, but I am grateful to know them, and to share in National Review’s work.

Thanksgiving even more than Independence Day puts me in mind of the American idea; July 4 is about the American mode of government and political liberty, but Thanksgiving is about the much older American nation, which precedes the Declaration of Independence. Thanksgiving is about the weird ancient America, the religious fanatics and explorers and utopians and opportunists who came to what were then savage shores to freeze (the Mayflower landed in November) and starve and fight for — what?