RUTHFULLY YOURS

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All the news that’s fit to ignore

Problems always loom larger when close at hand, so there is perverse reassurance to be drawn from the fact that The Age, SMH and ABC have not been alone in surrendering their news and opinion pages to ideologues and the moral arrogance of green-left activism. On the other side of the world it seems The New York Times, which fancies itself as a journal of record, is every bit as prey to close-minded arrogance as its antipodean counterparts.

Here is the Times latest environmental editor, Adam Bryant, explaining that it will be a long time between drinks before he allows climate sceptics to make their case in any story that he oversees:

“Claims that the entire field of climate science is some kind of giant hoax do not hold water, and we have made a conscious decision that we are not going to take that point of view seriously.”

That doesn’t mean he is opposed to debates of the approved, science-is-settled variety:

“…there is a huge amount of legitimate debate and uncertainty within mainstream science. Scientists are pretty open about not being sure how bad things will get, or how quickly.”

That would seem a case of dumb arrogance, rather than blinkered bias, if not for Timesman Bryant’s cited example of what, exactly, represents respectable, solid, unimpeachable science: Australia’s very own catastropharian David Karoly!

If Bryant was on the ball as a reporter, rather than a bawler of warmist refrains in the climate-catastrophe chorus, he might have come across the odd mention of Karoly-style settled science — settled, that is, in that it his paper claiming Australia has never been hotter in the past 1000 years had to be withdrawn and has since sunk without trace, along with the $300,000 of taxpayer money that paid for it.

Bryant’s views on the way, ahem, serious journalism must report warmism and other topics can be read via the link below.

Few topics fuel as much reader attention as climate change. Adam Bryant recently became editor of The Times’s expanded team covering the environment. We asked him how he is approaching the position.

http://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/10/27/steering-the-climate-change-coverage/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=1

Apparently the hatchet-wielding maniac who assaulted two New York City policemen in Queens had ambitions in addition to his twisted jihadist sympathies. Attacker Zale Thompson’s father told the New York Post that killing white people was also on would-be murderer’s agenda.

“He wanted white people to pay for all that slavery and all that racism,” said father Ralph Thompson. “I think he committed suicide — and he was taking one of y’all with him.” Asked if “one of y’all” referred to whites, Thompson answered in the affirmative. “He just said, ‘They have to pay for all their unfairness,’” the father explained. “Unfairness for the way they treat black people.”

Zale Thompson assaulted three white and one light-skinned Hispanic police officers while they posed for a photograph on Jamaica Avenue in Queens. White officers Kenneth Healey, 25, and Joseph Meeker, 24, were struck by the hatchet. Meeker was cut on the arm, and rookie cop Healey was struck on the back of his skull, nearly killing him. The other two officers on the scene shot Thompson dead. Sadly, innocent bystander LaToya Jones, 29, was also shot and might be paralyzed.

Thompson’s 2013 comment on Google+ revealed the animus to which his father referred. “It’s ok for white people to draw pictures of a white jesus, and then colonize Africa, and enslave the negro in America, wipe out the native American, and invade the middle east,” he wrote. “They call black people racist for rejecting the oppression they suffered from whites. Listen, when black people have colonized the entire continent of Europe, enslaved its people, and sold them into bondage to foreign lands, then you can call them racist.”

Additional comments were uncovered by the SITE Intelligence Group, an entity that monitors extremist activity. On Facebook and YouTube, Thompson characterized Christians as “aggressive and violent” and chastised the “Christianized Negro” for adhering to the faith “his slave master gave him.” He was apparently the commenter named Zale Thompson who also offered his opinion on a YouTube video entitled, “Uprise of the Khilafah (Caliphate) World Wide”:

If you’re looking for “perfect” muslims who never make any mistakes in their Jihad, then you will be looking in vain! If the Zionists and the Crusaders had never invaded and colonized the Islamic lands after WW1, then there would be no need for Jihad! Which is better, to sit around and do nothing, or to Jihad fisabeelallah (for allah’s sake)!

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/geert-wilders-on-fighting-the-islamization-of-free-societies-on-the-glazov-gang-1-1/

This week’s special episode of The Glazov Gang was joined by Geert Wilders, the founder and leader of the “Party for Freedom” — which is currently the fourth-largest party in the Dutch parliament. Mr. Wilders is best known for his brave stance against, and truth-telling about, Islam. He is the author of Marked for Death: Islam’s War Against the West and Me.

He came on the program to discuss: “Fighting the Islamization of Free Societies.”

Don’t miss it!

Chaya Zissel Braun was murdered on her first trip back from the Western Wall where the indigenous Jewish population of Israel continues to pray in the shadow of the shrine established there by the Muslim conquerors from which the racist Muslim settlers rain down rocks on the Jewish worshipers.

The three-month old baby girl died when a Muslim terrorist rammed a car into a crowd hurtling her into the air and headfirst onto the pavement. Her death did not take place in isolation. It was not caused by a tiny minority of extremists. Her blood was spilled on the street for the Islamization of Jerusalem.

The Islamization of Jerusalem is an international cause. It does not just come out of Gaza City or even Ramallah. Nor Doha or Istanbul. The politicians and diplomats of every major country demand the Islamization of Jerusalem. When they talk about a Palestinian State with its capital in Jerusalem what they are really demanding is the restoration of the Muslim ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem in 1948.

They demand it with words and boycotts, but the Muslim settlers on whose behalf they cry for the Apartheidization of Jerusalem are writing their murderous demands with the blood of little girls.

The baby girl was murdered to Islamize a city. She died as the Israeli soldiers had died reunifying Jerusalem after the Arab Legion had ethnically cleansed the Jewish population and as ordinary Jerusalemites had died at the hands of Jordanian snipers searching the city for Jewish and Christian targets. The victims of those years of Muslim occupation included Yaffa Binyamin, a 14-year-old girl sitting on the balcony of her own house, and a Christian carpenter working on the Notre Dame Convent.

Voting by illegal aliens and other non-citizens is so prevalent throughout the nation that it gave us Obamacare, according to a disturbing new study.

And if illegal voting by non-citizens, who tend to support Democratic Party candidates and who heavily supported President Obama, could tip the scales in the 2008 congressional elections, it can do so again in congressional elections next week and in the presidential contest in 2016. In 2008 one report estimated that as many as 2.7 million non-citizens were registered to vote nationwide.

The academic report, to be published in the December issue of Electoral Studies, continues the ongoing demolition of the Left’s narrative that voter fraud is a figment of paranoid Republicans’ imagination. Democrats cling religiously to their mantra that voter fraud doesn’t exist or is of little consequence because they have difficulty competing electorally without vote fraud. Fraud helps Democrats eke out victories in close races, which helps to explain their vehement opposition to commonsense electoral integrity measures like purging dead people from voter rolls or requiring photo ID for voting.

The findings of Jesse Richman and David Earnest, two political science professors at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., confirm that voter fraud is commonplace and widespread, something that honest, as opposed to engaged or left-wing, scholars have known for years.

“In spite of substantial public controversy, very little reliable data exists concerning the frequency with which non-citizen immigrants participate in United States elections,” the authors write.

The academics got their data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) which contains what they term a “large number of observations (32,800 in 2008 and 55,400 in 2010) [that] provide sufficient samples of the non-immigrant sub-population, with 339 non-citizen respondents in 2008 and 489 in 2010.” Using CCES data from 2008, they tried “to match respondents to voter files so … [they] could verify whether they actually voted.”

Although non-citizen participation “is a violation of election laws in most parts of the United States, enforcement depends principally on disclosure of citizenship status at the time of voter registration,” they write. This new study “examines participation rates by non-citizens using a nationally representative sample that includes non-citizen immigrants,” a first in voting studies, they claim.

This whole Bill Maher controversy is as illuminating as it is entertaining. Bill Maher was a darling of the Left when he was criticizing Christianity, but now that he has turned his gimlet eye to Islamic supremacism, the foes of free speech have turned against him with venom. Maher is scheduled to give the fall commencement address at the University of California-Berkeley, but Muslim students there have begun a petition drive to get him canceled.

The Daily Californian reported Sunday that

the Change.org petition was authored by ASUC Senator Marium Navid, who is backed by the Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian Coalition, or MEMSA, and Khwaja Ahmed, an active MEMSA member. The petition, which urges students to boycott the decision and asks the campus to stop him from speaking, has already gathered more than 1,400 signatures as of Sunday.

Anticipating that this petition would be outed as the fascist endeavor it is, Navid explained:

“It’s not an issue of freedom of speech, it’s a matter of campus climate. The First Amendment gives him the right to speak his mind, but it doesn’t give him the right to speak at such an elevated platform as the commencement. That’s a privilege his racist and bigoted remarks don’t give him.”

The campaign against Maher is called “Free Speech, Not Hate Speech.”

“Free Speech, Not Hate Speech”: this is the mechanism that today’s Leftist and Islamic supremacist authoritarians are using to shut down any free and open discussion of how Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and oppression. This slogan was thrown at me last May when I spoke at Cal Poly; I responded (as you can see toward the end of this video) by pointing out that “hate speech” is in the eye of the beholder, and the one who is granted the power to determine what is or isn’t “hate speech” has been given extraordinary control over the public discourse, such that any opinions disliked by the ruling elite can be stigmatized and ruled out of bounds by means of this label.

Congress should have more partisanship about ideas and less about the legislative process.

‘What day is it?”

“It’s today,” squeaked Piglet.

“My favorite day,” said Pooh.

As a proud member of the “don’t just do something, sit there” school of politics, I don’t fret much about partisanship and gridlock. Partisanship and gridlock aren’t bugs of our constitutional system, they’re features. And while everyone likes to see their preferred policies sail through Congress, on the whole I think we’ve been well served by those features for two centuries.

That said, in the spirit of compromise so lacking in Washington, I would like to offer a suggestion for how to fix the alleged dysfunction in Washington: Let’s have more partisanship about ideas and less about process.

You have to wonder if Harry Reid feels like an idiot yet. For years now, the Senate majority leader has been cynically protecting Democratic senators — and President Obama — from difficult votes. The rationale was pretty straightforward. He wanted to spare vulnerable Democrats named Mark — Arkansas’s Mark Pryor, Alaska’s Mark Begich and Colorado’s Mark Udall — and a few others from having to take difficult votes on issues such as the Keystone XL pipeline, EPA rules, and immigration reform.

The problem for the Marks and other red- or swing-state Democrats is that, having been spared the chance to take tough votes, they now have little to no evidence they’d be willing to stand up to a president who is very unpopular in their states.

Thanks to Reid’s strategy of kicking the can down the road, GOP challengers now get to say, “My opponent voted with the president 97 percent of the time.” Democrats are left screeching “war on women!” and “Koch brothers!”

But it isn’t really neutral after all.

Going along with society’s current theme of mushing both sexes into one androgynous, confused, mass of human flesh and chromosomes, two women have created gender-neutral underwear. Finally!

The collection is called Play Out and the designers, Abby Sugar and Sylvie Lardeux, desired to create “lesbian-inspired” underwear. BuzzFeed declared the collection “the world’s first gender-neutral underwear collection.” A staff writer on the popular website enthused that designing these undergarments “was a way to break out of a constrictive gender binary.”

The collection’s patterns are clearly intended to attract both men and women, but how can they possibly fit both sexes? After all, the primary purpose of underwear is to keep the parts that differentiate males and females safe and covered and, despite the LGBTQ movement’s protests to the contrary, those parts are different and thus require different casings. Surprise! The world’s first gender-neutral underwear collection is not that neutral.

If you were to visit Play Out’s online store, you would immediately see something curious on the main page. While almost every other online clothing store has categories for “men’s” and “women’s” clothes, you would expect the gender-neutral underwear website to have one category, or maybe none at all. However, at the top of the page is a list for “Underwear” and another one for “Men’s Underwear.” How can this collection be truly neutral then?

Decisions on immigration, Iran and other hot issues that were delayed for political reasons will be coming soon.

With the midterm elections looming, the White House has delayed controversial decisions and appointments. That makes sense politically. The administration doesn’t want to force Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Michelle Nunn, who is running for the U.S. Senate in Georgia, or other embattled Democrats to defend presidential actions right now, or worse, to oppose them publicly. But as soon as the voting is done (perhaps after runoffs in Louisiana and Georgia), several big shoes will drop. Here are the most likely ones.

1) Immigration. How many millions will the president let in? On what terms? One hint: The Department of Homeland Security recently ordered more than four million green cards and visas for next year and says it might order another 29 million for future years. The cards would give immigrants who are here illegally the right to continue living and working in the U.S. legally—and perhaps receive a variety of federal and state benefits. Should the president unilaterally issue these cards, there will be a brutal debate over the wisdom of this policy, whether it extends to welfare benefits, and whether the president has the constitutional authority to issue so many cards without specific congressional approval.

2) The next U.S. attorney general. The president wants a crusader on progressive causes and a reliable firewall to protect him, just as Eric Holder has done. Rumor has it that he wants Labor Secretary Tom Perez, who has been the point man on racial preferences.

Mr. Perez’s most controversial, and constitutionally questionable, position is his support for “disparate impact” as a measure of discrimination. According to this theory, if fewer blacks or Hispanics are hired than their percentage of the “relevant” population, then the employer must have discriminated, even if all hiring procedures were fair and racially neutral. If the president nominates Mr. Perez, expect a nasty confirmation fight. Even if the president nominates someone less controversial, tough hearings are almost certain.

Mr. Kyl, former Republican senator from Arizona, is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and senior counsel at Covington & Burling LLP. Mr. Moore is chief economist at the Heritage Foundation.

The ripple effect of the president’s tax hikes is swamping take-home pay.

The curse of the U.S. economy today is the downward trend in “take-home pay.” This is the most crucial economic indicator for most Americans, but when President Obama said in a recent speech at Northwestern that nearly every economic measure shows improvement from five years ago, he conspicuously left this one out.

Most workers’ pay has not kept up with inflation for at least six years. Even as hiring picked up over the past year, wages and salaries have inched up by 2%, barely ahead of inflation. This probably explains why half of Americans say the recession never ended. They are experiencing what Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen last week described as “stagnant living standards for the majority.”

Why aren’t wages rising? There are several reasons, including that many jobs today don’t pay as well as the ones lost during the recession. ObamaCare has made health insurance more expensive for businesses—as the nation’s biggest employer, Wal-Mart , recently reported—and that takes a bite out of take-home pay. Yet one factor is often overlooked: the tax increase on “the rich” at the beginning of 2013.

How could higher taxes on the top 2% or 3% hurt the middle class? Part of the answer is that when upper-income Americans spend their money on vacations or cars, they are taxed only once, after they earn it. But if they put their money to work by, for example, building out a family business, they got socked a second time by higher investment taxes. And this discourages the investments that grow the economy.

Although the Obama administration argues otherwise, these tax hikes were not minor. The tax rate on capital gains for high-income earners shot up to 23.8%—20% plus the 3.8% ObamaCare investment surtax. Ditto for the tax on dividends. So taxes on business investment rose by nearly 60% in 2013 and are nearly 20% higher than in the Clinton years.