RUTHFULLY YOURS

It is December 2008 in Nicosia, the sun-drenched capital of Cyprus. A stocky Russian approaches a young American: “Do you know the way to the federal post office?” he asks. Except it’s not a question; it’s a prearranged password. And the American isn’t a tourist: He’s a recently discharged U.S. Army infantryman offering to sell secrets to Russians on behalf of his disgraced father, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer. Moments later, the American is being driven in a sleek sedan along ancient streets toward the Russian Embassy. Soon after that, he’s flying home to Eugene, Ore., bearing $12,000 in crisp new $100 bills.

So begins Bryan Denson’s engaging “The Spy’s Son,” a noirish thriller that happens to be true.

Sidney Blumenthal has served in many roles for Bill and Hillary Clinton, from political Svengali to opposition hit man. So it was probably inevitable that the man who whispered to reporters that Monica Lewinsky threw herself on Bill Clinton would eventually show up in Hillary’s State Department email imbroglio, and in ways that illuminate the Clinton family mores.

The New York Times reported Monday on email records showing that Mr. Blumenthal was on the payroll of the Clinton Foundation at the same time he was being paid by groups helping Mrs. Clinton’s presidential run, at the same time he was advising a U.S. business seeking Libyan contracts, at the same time he was secretly advising Secretary of State Clinton about Libya. Every top American diplomat apparently needs a good man Friday who no one else knows about.

Asian-Americans are rebelling over evidence that they are held to a much higher standard, but elite colleges deny using quotas.
Here’s hoping the next stage of the affirmative-action debate in higher education finally has arrived.

Last year’s Supreme Court decision upholding Michigan’s ban on racial preferences in public-university admissions included a passionate dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who argued that such policies benefit “racial minorities,” by which she means blacks and Hispanics. Nowhere in Justice Sotomayor’s 58-page opinion will you find any mention of how affirmative action affects Asian-Americans, the fastest-growing racial group in the country. The omission is common among defenders of campus double standards for favored minorities, and it’s starting to annoy an increasing number of Asian-Americans. This is progress.

Thanks to friend R. Lipsky for this….rsk

Saudi Arabia has started advertising for eight new executioners to deal with the escalating number of death sentences being issued in the country.

An advert was posted on the country’s civil service jobs portal calling for “religious functionaries” with no special qualifications for “executing a judgment of death”, Sputnik reported on Monday.

According to a downloadable pdf application form for the advertised job, apart from carrying out executions – usually carried out by beheading -the position would also involve carrying out amputations on people convicted of lesser offences.

I used the verb “stupefying” to describe a long process in our nation’s schools that has produced several generations of Americans, dumbed down and resulting in more than half who are functionally illiterate, nor can do math, and, as a recent headline reported “Student’s Results in Social Studies Stagnate.”

“U.S. middle-school students’ performance on social studies didn’t improve much between 2010 and 2014, federal test scores released Wednesday (April 29) show, underscoring concerns about the uniformed citizenry and workforce.” When it comes to U.S. history, the share of students scoring at or above proficiency last year was 18%, up one percentage point from 2010. In other words, over 80% failed to have a grasp on the subject, critical to every citizen’s understanding of U.S. history, its Constitution, and governance.

Ellsworth Toohey, the arch-villain of Ayn Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead, meets with Peter Keating, an arch-compromiser, second-hander, and betrayer of what few personal values he had, and who has just won a lucrative architectural contest. Toohey’s chief focus, however, is not Keating, but Howard Roark, the novel’s hero. Toohey has never met him, but fears him and is planning to destroy his career in architecture and see him jailed and taking orders from his moral inferiors.

Toohey – whose physical appearance Rand had modeled on the British socialist Harold Laski – “…spoke with a kind of cautious precision. The sounds of his voice were small and dry and final, like the cracks of matches being broken.” At one point in their conversation, which Keating senses has taken an odd turn, Toohey asks him several questions about Roark.

The Democrats can run, to paraphrase Muhammad Ali’s rebuke of a timid opponent, but they can’t hide. Hillary Clinton is turning her campaign into a game of hide-and-seek, and the party is terrified. Some leading Democrats are beginning to say out loud what they have said privately for weeks.

What she thought would be a cake walk to Philadelphia and the 2016 nomination is beginning to look like a cornbread walk, and cornbread has no icing.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired Communications Ministry Director-General Avi Berger.

On Monday, Zionist Union and opposition leader Isaac Herzog posted a rant about this on his Facebook page. “[Netanyahu] is waging a war on the media with all his might,” he wrote.

Later that day, Herzog addressed the move during a Zionist Union faction meeting, calling it “reminiscent of Israel’s neighbors who long ago forgot the role of the media.” And then he specified one such neighbor.

“Perhaps Netanyahu doesn’t like [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, but he is undoubtedly learning his tricks,” Herzog said, warning the prime minister not to tamper with Israel’s freedom of the press.

It is not clear why Netanyahu dismissed Berger so abruptly. There are two main rumors circulating that, if true, provide partial answers.

The first surrounds the semi-scandal surrounding Netanyahu’s failure to give former Communications Minister Gilad Erdan a portfolio in the new government. Erdan, a long-time Netanyahu loyalist and Likud party front-runner, was expected to receive a choice post. When he got none, many eyebrows were raised. Berger, whom Netanyahu just sacked, was appointed by Erdan in October 2013.

The BDS movement has arguably become a major source of intolerance in Australian society as has also been the case in the UK and USA.

The presentation to be made tomorrow is entitled “How the BDS destroys prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace and reconciliation”.

By any reasonable judgement, the month of March 2002 was a particularly horrific episode in the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During that awful period, there were eight separate suicide attacks by Palestinian Islamic terrorists on Israeli civilians resulting in the deaths of 63 people and many hundreds injured. The final straw was the attack on the Passover Seder in Netanya’s Park Hotel which killed 30 people and injured 140. This attack provoked the Israeli invasion of the leading West Bank cities known as Operation Defensive Shield in an attempt to destroy the terror networks, and stop the carnage.

Yet it was precisely at this point that the international campaign for a boycott of Israel commenced. Two UK academics Steven and Hilary Rose proposed a boycott of all Israeli academics and academic institutions. Their initiative was copied in May 2002 by two Australian academics John Docker and Ghassan Hage, both of whom had a long-time record of hardline criticism of Israel. Their boycott petition, which was signed by 90 Australian academics, was based on the binary opposites of good and bad nations, and made the following key points:

While the Palestinians are rightly requested to reign in their extremists, the Israelis have elected their extremists to power’;
Israel has perpetrated ugly murder, rampages, systematic crimes of war, and an anachronistic act of colonization in the West Bank and Gaza;
Israel is impervious to moral appeals from world leaders;
While some academics and intellectuals in Israel oppose the government and some also are involved in cooperative Israeli/Palestinian research projects, the vast majority have either supported the Israeli Army onslaught on the Palestinians, or failed to voice any significant protest against it;
As with boycotts against apartheid South Africa, international action is now required to stop the massacres perpetrated against the Palestinian people;
We call for a boycott of research and cultural links with Israel. We urge our colleagues not to attend conferences in Israel, to pressure our universities to suspend any existing exchange or linkage arrangements, and to refuse to distribute scholarship and academic position information.

She backs workers’ right to join unions, yet served cheerfully and lucratively on the board of a mega-retailer whose policy it is to foil labor organisers at every turn. What principles does the likely Democratic contender hold dear? No one, least of all the candidate, appears to have a clue.

Amidst a crescendo of emotional and misdirected idealism, Americans set a new benchmark for identity politics in 2008, when they elected a presidential candidate whose chief qualification was neither experience nor notable intelligence but the mere colour of his skin. What ensued has been a string of unmitigated public policy failures, the quadrupling of America’s debt and the erosion US power and influence in the world’s most hostile regions. An optimist would hope American voters have gained a bitter wisdom from their Obama indulgence, but if they have learned nothing and succumb to the tantalizing temptation of electing yet another token, this time on the basis of gender rather than race, the only explanation will be that the attraction of Mrs Clinton’s XX chromosomes far outweigh her decades of dizzying inconsistency.