RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

I thank the four respondents to my Mosaic essay for their perceptive remarks. Their comments provide me with a welcome opportunity to clarify parts of my analysis about the Jewish situation in contemporary France.

In “The Ferment that Feeds Anti-Semitism in France,” Michel Gurfinkiel, a well-known specialist in this area, rightly highlights the constantly rising numbers of the French Muslim population—especially in the youth cohort under twenty-four—of whom 27 percent admire or approve of the barbaric Islamic State (IS). This is in itself a frightening statistic. He also notes that although a few French Muslim leaders did condemn recent jihadist brutalities, the rally they organized after the beheading of a French hiker in Algeria found little echo within their own Muslim constituency.

Equally troubling is the escalation of intra-Muslim violence on European soil. Earlier this month, in the center of Hamburg, Salafists savagely attacked a peaceful Kurdish demonstration. Although this act of violence had no Jewish dimension, the Islamist fanaticism that drove it also happens to be the most lethal element in the “new anti-Semitism.” Unfortunately, we can expect more proxy wars of this kind, sometimes wholly unrelated to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, in an already fragile European Union.

I am less persuaded than is Gurfinkiel by the explanatory force of French geographer Christophe Guilluy’s somewhat schematic distinction between an “Elite France” (pro-globalist, pro-Europe, and prospering in the big cities) and a “Peripheral France” made up of losers in the globalization sweepstakes who are utterly neglected by the establishment. There is no doubt that such a polarization does exist in France; indeed, it has been present in various permutations throughout much of modern French history, alongside the partly related anti-Jewish and anti-American trends on the far Right and Left. True, too, this “periphery” is currently a pillar of support for Marine Le Pen’s National Front. Yet the ressentiment of the “poor whites,” although not at all dead, strikes me as having lost much of its former potency as an active ingredient in contemporary French anti-Semitism in particular. It does, however, retain some potential for a future populist mobilization against the “Islamicization” of France, should things become more violent in the cities.

President Obama promised Americans this afternoon that “we are going to solve this particular problem” of Ebola “just like we’ve solved every other problem.”

Obama delivered remarks on the lawn of the White House before boarding Marine One, en route to Wisconsin to campaign against Gov. Scott Walker.

He said he’d just spoken with some of the disaster response team in West Africa, who are “doing what it takes to make sure that medical personnel and healthcare workers from all countries have what they need to get the job done.”

“And the good news is that it’s starting to have an impact. Based on the conversations that I had today with them, they’re starting to see some progress in Liberia and the infrastructure is beginning to get built out. That’s thanks to the incredible work and dedication of folks from the United States who are leading the way in helping Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone,” he said.

The president said Americans need to be “vigilant” about the disease on the home front, with “new monitoring and movement guidance” from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “that is sensible, based in science and tailored to the unique circumstances of each health worker that may be returning from one of these countries after they have provided the kind of help that they need.”

Tomorrow he’ll meet with some healthcare workers who’ve returned from West Africa or are about to go. Obama said they’ll talk about the support efforts as well as “how our policies can support the incredible heroism that they are showing.”

“Of the seven Americans treated for Ebola so far, all have survived. Right now, the only American still undergoing treatment is Dr. Craig Spencer, who contracted the disease abroad while working to protect others. And we should be saluting his service,” he continued. “…We have to keep leading the global response. America cannot look like it is shying away because other people are watching what we do.”

“We got to make sure that those workers who are willing and able and dedicated to go over there in a really tough job — that they’re applauded, thanked and supported. That should be our priority. And we can make sure that when they come back, they are being monitored in a prudent fashion,” Obama said in a dig at New Jersey’s quarantine of a nurse recently returned from Sierra Leone. “But we want to make sure that we understand that they are doing God’s work over there. And they’re doing that to keep us safe.”

Who’s ‘Chickensh*t’? The Goldberg Variation By Roger L Simon

Israeli “media” is reporting that Obama/Kerry can’t stand Netanyahu. Another great reason to like Bibi!!! pic.twitter.com/hWGmtcQY6Z [1]

— Zvi Lando (@zlando) October 26, 2014 [2]

In an already much talked about article for The Atlantic, “The Crisis in U. S. – Israeli Relations is Officially Here [3],” Jeffrey Goldberg quotes a senior administration official accusing Benjamin Netanyahu – among a long list of unpleasant things — of being a “chickensh*t.”

Never mind for a moment the absurdity of an (of course anonymous) Obama official calling the Israeli PM a coward when Netanyahu has been personally under fire in two wars [4], volunteering for the second after having been wounded by a gun shot in the first (his brother, as many will remember, was killed during the raid on Entebbe — both Netanyahus were in Sayeret Matkal [5]) at approximately the time the official’s boss Barry was lulling on a balmy Hawaiian beach smoking “choom” with his gang. What’s the right word for this? Hypocrisy is a bit weak, isn’t it? Or is it simply the desperate rumblings of a failed administration?

In any case, Goldberg was a “good boy” for transmitting it and I hope he gets another opportunity for a “hard-hitting” interview with POTUS [6]. I further hope the author achieves his ambition and restrains those bellicose Israelis from renting or buying apartments in Arab East Jerusalem. After all, the Arab countries have been so welcoming to their Jewish populations. Oh, wait… they’re Judenrein, barely a single Jew in evidence. And Abu Mazen has refused ever to have Jews living within a future Palestinian state. My mistake. Never mind again. I’m sure Goldberg omitted all this by accident.

Actually, ninety percent of his article is on the level of dog bites man. We all know Obama et al don’t like the Israelis, not just their prime minister and his supposedly loose-lipped defense minister Yaalon, and probably a whole host of other officials of the Jewish state, not to mention a vast percentage of the Israeli populace. This opprobrium on Obama’s part has been going on for a long time, even before he took office. (Remember the still mysterious Khalidi tape [7]?)

But there is something of importance in Goldberg’s article. Like me (we’re on paragraph 5 here), he buried his lede. I learned about this through a tweet by Brian Faughnan [8]: Buried lede in that piece on Bibi: WH thinks Iran’s nuke program pretty damn far along. Faughnan is referring to the following from Goldberg:

What are we to make of sexual behavior on campus? On the one hand, schools do their best to facilitate sexual activity between adolescent students by providing co-ed housing and bathrooms, frat parties and an atmosphere encouraging them to feel like independent and mature adults. Until the students realize that they aren’t, and that like all other relationships in the real world, sexual ones are fraught with misunderstandings, complications, differing interpretations and ulterior motives. At that point, the school steps in and attempts to act as judge and jury as to what happened between two individuals who have contrasting accounts of an experience that one calls rape.

MIT has just released the results of its highly praised survey on sexual assault revealing that among respondents, 17% of women and 5% of men claim to have been sexually assaulted. Let’s begin by noting that only 35% of the 11,000 undergraduates bothered to respond and that of those, the number drops to 11% of females and 2% of males when asked about actual rape. Let’s focus on the women since the percentage of men who experienced sexual assault as a problem is minimal enough to ignore. Included in this survey were questions about whether individuals had heard sexist remarks, comments about people’s bodies, tales of sexual exploits or offensive digital messages. If you’re a sentient woman in 2014 and if you ride the subway, work in an office, attend a party or simply chat with your friends, you would probably answer yes to all of the above. Is speech now to be included in sexual assault? Are we to conclude that it’s ok for schools to provide housing that encourages sexual congress but pretend to be offended at insensitive speech?

What are co-education and feminism about without the assumption that women are not too delicate to withstand inappropriate remarks? These can be ignored or answered but they hardly deserve a separate category of speech, especially one that is labeled “assault.” Faculty and administrators will allow protesters to call for the destruction of an entire country during the annual Israel Apartheid Week – pointing proudly to the sanctity of freedom of speech; shall they now wimpishly retreat to hide behind a separate code for sexual inuendo?

WE KNOW IT IS BAD WHEN EVEN THE ADL NOTICES…..BUT IT BLAMES THE INCREASE ON THE AFTERMATH OF THE 50 DAY GAZA WAR….WHAT DRIVEL…THAT WAR WAS AN EXCUSE FOR THE WELL ORGANIZED AND FUNDED ARAB/MUSLIM ANTI-SEMITISM TO CONDUCT STREET THEATRE FOR ITS ENDLESSLY SIMMERING JIHAD….RSK

ZOA’s Susan Tuchman said: “If there’s a single Jewish student on any college campus afraid to be openly Jewish and to say that he or she loves and supports Israel, then that’s something all of us need to speak out against.”

The Anti-Defamation League issued an important report on Monday, Oct. 27, finding a dramatic increase in anti-Israel activity, compared to last year. The ADL attributes the increase to the aftermath of the 50-day Gaza war this past summer.

According to the ADL, this fall semester there have already been 75 anti-Israel events reported on U.S. college campuses. In the same period last year, there were only 35 such events.

The problem is even more alarming than the ADL’s report suggests.

It is certain there are more incidents that are either never reported or at least not reported to whatever source the ADL used for its calculations. The “full report” on the ADL website does not explain how the information was gathered or what definitions were used to determine whether certain activity would be included.

When contacted for her reaction to the ADL report, Susan Tuchman, the head of the Zionist Organization of America’s Center for Law and Justice explained that while the numbers mentioned in the ADL press release may not sound enormous, just yesterday she received “phone calls from three different students on three different campuses” with problems serious enough for them to raise with a lawyer.

Tuchman made an even more important point, as well.

Most Jewish college students are fortunately having a positive experience on their campuses. But the ZOA is contacted so frequently by students feeling threatened and harassed on their campuses, that it’s a mistake for any of us to minimize the problem of campus anti-Semitism. What’s particularly troubling is that Jewish students are facing problems on campuses with large Jewish populations, where one would think these problems wouldn’t exist.