RUTHFULLY YOURS

Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov disappeared from public view in early May, 1984 after he had begun a hunger strike to get permission for his wife, Yelena Bonner, to travel to the U.S. for heart surgery. In the Soviet paradise, wanting one’s anti-Soviet wife to live, and, worse still, to be saved by evil capitalist surgeons and not by the holy surgeons of the Soviet utopia, was, clearly, an exercise in abnormal psychology.

Sakharov was undoubtedly “mentally ill.” No wonder, therefore, that Soviet authorities forcibly confined him in a closed ward of the Semashko Hospital in Gorky, where he was force-fed and given drugs to alter his state of mind. This is how Soviet authorities believed they would get the Soviet dissident to not only stop caring about his wife, but to also make a public recantation about his abnormal anti-Soviet views – a gambit in which they ultimately failed.

Toward the end of September 2012, Barack Obama finally came to New York City after skipping it during the 9/11 anniversary. He had made it out to the city the previous week for a celebrity fundraiser and an appearance on Letterman[1] [3] and then back again for a taping of The View while turning down a meeting with Netanyahu who did not have a talk show or an envelope filled with money.[2] [4]

The next day, while at least one of the Americans killed in Benghazi had yet to be buried,[3] [5] he declared at the UN General Assembly, “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”[4] [6]

That statement also encompassed the agenda of the Benghazi killers, the terrorists who would attack Charlie Hebdo and the “Draw the Prophet” contest in Texas along with all the murderous censors of Mohammed determined that the future should not belong to those who slander their holy warlord.

It was Obama’s only mention of “Islam” in a speech addressing the brutal murder of four Americans by Islamic terrorists in a terror campaign targeting American diplomatic facilities on the anniversary of the original 9/11 attacks in Benghazi. The 9/11 attacks, like so many others, had begun with a cry of “Allahu Akbar.”[5] [7]

Last month I reported here exclusively at PJ Media on the rapidly escalating number of Islamic terror-related arrests this year, noting that we were on pace to surpass the number of arrests for 2013 and 2014 combined (48) before the halfway point of the current year next week.

In fact, that is exactly what has happened. At present 53 suspects have been arrested or involved in Islamic terror-related incidents with law enforcement since the beginning of the year.

This is top among reasons why Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said just a few days ago that this is “the highest threat level we have ever faced in this country.”

Here are the additional cases since I reported last month, beginning with the most recent:

Shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in King v. Burwell on Thursday, President Obama made a statement that began, “Five years ago, after nearly a century of talk, decades of trying, a year of bipartisan debate — we finally declared that in America, health care is not a privilege for a few, but a right for all.”

That phrase, “we finally declared,” is perhaps more telling than the president meant it to be — a tacit admission that what congressional Democrats did by passing the Affordable Care Act in 2010 was something less than create new law. They expressed a desire, declared their desire to be law, and told the Department of Health and Human Services and the Internal Revenue Service to make it so.

Thus, when 34 states declined to set up a health-insurance exchange in accordance with the ACA, and HHS was obliged at the last minute to cobble something together in all those states, the IRS simply declared that an exchange “established by the state” could also refer to something quite different: an exchange established by HHS. It was a convenient and seemingly painless way to solve a problem that had cropped up. If subsidies were allowed only on exchanges created by states (as the ACA rather plainly stated) and not on those set up by HHS, then millions of people would not be able to afford very expensive ACA-compliant health coverage. You need subsidies to afford those plans, after all. Something had to be done. So the IRS took care of it and the Supreme Court said, okay.

I​ n a blistering dissent from the majority in King v. Burwell this morning, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said President Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement should be called “SCOTUScare” rather than Obamacare, in light of how many times Chief Justice John Roberts has intervened to protect the law from a crippling legal defeat.

Scalia argued that Roberts rewrote the law twice in 2012, and has now done so a third time in his King decision, which allows the IRS to continue providing subsidies to people who purchase insurance in the federal government’s health-care exchange.

“The somersaults of statutory interpretation they have performed (‘penalty’ means tax, ‘further [Medicaid] payments to the State’ means only incremental Medicaid payments to the State, ‘established by the State’ means not established by the State) will be cited by litigants endlessly, to the confusion of honest jurisprudence,” Scalia wrote in his dissent. “And the cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.”

It’s been stabbed in the back, set on fire, drowned, and buried six feet under. But like the traditional horror-movie slasher, the Democratic party’s favorite political trope is slowly clawing its way back to the surface.​

In other words, the “War on Women” is back. Despite its inability to turn out Democratic voters in 2014, Hillary Clinton’s team is digging up the strategy this election cycle. If early barbs are any indication, Republican candidates should prepare for a vicious, scorched-earth campaign that eschews critiques on equal pay and abortion for comparisons to rapacious jihadists. Whether the intensified attacks will prove more effective with a woman at the helm remains an open question.

A recent hit by Hillary’s campaign manager on two GOP hopefuls shows that the Clinton camp is already putting on the brass knuckles. At a New York City women’s summit in April, as part of a larger comment touching on women’s liberty worldwide, Hillary seemed to suggest that Americans with a religious objection to abortion should be forced to surrender to progressive views on the subject. “Far too many women are denied access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth, and laws don’t count for much if they’re not enforced,” she said. “And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs, and structural biases have to be changed.”

David and Jonah are obviously right that the immoral rules of engagement (ROE) the commander-in-chief has imposed on our troops have encouraged Islamic State jihadists to endanger civilians – not that terrorists need much encouragement in that regard. As David observes, this turns the laws of armed combat on their head.

I’ve been venting about this for a number of years now. The driving purpose of international humanitarian law is the protection of civilians. What makes honorable combatants honorable, and what triggers the international-law protections they are owed if captured, is their adherence to venerable standards requiring that they, among other things, identify themselves as soldiers, carry their weapons openly, and confine their combat operations to legitimate military objectives.

The Supreme Court’s breathtaking upholding of the constitutionality of Obamacare’s exchanges wasn’t the only case they got badly wrong Thursday. In both cases, ordinary Americans may be hurt in ways they don’t yet realize.In its second case yesterday, the Supreme Court had to decide the scope of the Fair Housing Act, a law passed in 1968 that makes it unlawful to discriminate on the basis of race and other factors in connection with the sale or lease of housing. The question before the court was: Can you be found guilty of racial discrimination if you never engaged in policies that had any intent to discriminate?

It is a desperate attempt by the French government to buy a few more days of quiet from its Muslim community, especially from the members of the Muslim Brotherhood and the terrorist organizations to which it gave birth — all waiting for the order to run riot through the streets of France.

If it succeeds, may Allah prevent it, it will lead to an ISIS and Hamas takeover of every inch of Palestinian soil from which Israel withdraws if coerced by the initiative.

It is evidently too frustrating and unrewarding just to sit in the U.N. and not think of some project supposedly to spread beneficence that could make your country look important to the other 190 members — even if this beneficence is lethal to its recipient.

This week’s Supreme Court ruling sets up the 2016 presidential election perfectly for Republicans.

The one fun part of this week’s Supreme Court decision on ObamaCare is that it has given the country a new way to evaluate everything Democrats say. Take Barack Obama’s pronouncement Thursday that the court’s ruling in King v. Burwell means “the Affordable Care Act is here to stay.”

Those words are pretty clear. Mr. Obama surely meant them. Yet all we have to do is give them the old Roberts High Court treatment, and—voilà!—we discover the exact opposite meaning. Far from putting this debate behind us, the ruling has freed Washington to take it up. Now that the long months of waiting silently and expectantly for the court’s decision are over, debate on ObamaCare is about to explode in a way not witnessed since 2010.