RUTHFULLY YOURS

New York’s storied opera house could become the latest victim of union grubbiness.

The fat lady will sing — but only in strict keeping with the work rules set out by the American Guild of Musical Artists.

The Metropolitan Opera has a labor problem. Personnel expenses account for $200 million of the financially struggling Met’s $327 million budget.

In the interest of survival in an era more attuned to Keeping Up with the Kardashians than Le Nozze di Figaro, the Met wants to reduce its labor costs by 16 percent by getting the unions to accept commonsensical work rules and less generous pension and health benefits. The unions say no and accuse the Met of waging war on their families.

The storied but precarious institution could see its next season disrupted in the labor discord. The Met’s general manager, Peter Gelb, warns that without union flexibility, the very existence of the world-famous, 130-year-old opera is at risk.

Well, if worst came to worst, at least the Met’s singers and musicians could make a go of it at the New York City Opera. No, wait, it shut its doors for the last time last year.

It doesn’t take an opera aficionado to realize that the 21st century isn’t the 19th, and opera is an embattled art form. Unfortunately, the Met is locking horns with a force, the unions, that has proven adept at helping to drive struggling industries into the ground.

A New York Times editorial recently noted that orchestra members, who on average make $200,000 a year, get 16 weeks off with pay. The American Federation of Musicians Local 802 shot back that it is really only ten weeks of guaranteed time off with pay. Touché.

Under the current rules, the base pay for chorus members, who also make on average $200,000 a year, covers four performances a week. The members get paid extra for rehearsals — even if they haven’t sung in four performances that week.

They also earn overtime for singing in any opera over four hours, which makes Richard Wagner the best thing that ever happened to a Met singer’s paycheck. His Parsifal clocks in at five hours and wasn’t performed last season, in part because of the extra labor costs.

With his legislative agenda stalled and his approval ratings at new lows, President Barack Obama has been spending more time in recent weeks away from the White House, traveling the country and cultivating the image of a pool-shooting, beer-drinking regular guy.

Midway through his second term, a six-year itch has set in as Mr. Obama increasingly has been talking about gridlock on Capitol Hill and the confines of the White House. His advisers say the president has “cabin fever,” and that he simply wants to be able to go for a walk.

The antidote has been a series of choreographed outings—among them eating a burrito bowl at Chipotle and picking up barbecue in Austin, Texas—aimed at connecting Mr. Obama with average Americans.

The outreach comes as Mr. Obama’s hope of passing any of his major legislative initiatives has faded. Against that backdrop, field trips could serve a dual purpose: boosting Mr. Obama’s spirits and potentially his popularity.

The strategy has the potential to backfire, though. Republicans have argued that he should be focused on a set of escalating foreign challenges and on immigration issues—not on fun excursions. GOP lawmakers and even some Democrats criticized the president for traveling to Texas last week but not going to the border.

Israel’s enemies deliver an unwitting favor.

From time to time Israel and her supporters should give thanks for having as enemies the Palestinians and their supporters.

As of midday Monday, Hamas had fired more than 1,000 missiles at Israel, aimed more or less indiscriminately, without inflicting a single Israeli fatality. It isn’t every enemy whose ideological fanaticism, however great, is exceeded by its military and technological incompetence.

It’s true that much of the incoming fire has been shot down mid-flight by Israel’s Iron Dome, but Hamas must have seen that coming since the defense system was first deployed during the last round of fighting in 2012. It’s as if the French had concluded from the Battle of Agincourt that the English long bow wasn’t as effective as advertised and would surely fail against a more determined cavalry charge.

Alongside Hamas in Gaza there is the rump regime of Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank. Mr. Abbas is supposed to be a bystander in this conflict. But he made his sympathies known when, within a day or two of the fighting and with fewer than 50 Palestinian fatalities, he accused Israel of “genocide” and “war against the Palestinian people as a whole.”

“Shall we recall Auschwitz?” he added.

I sometimes wonder whether supporters of the Palestinian cause—at least those capable of intellectual, if not moral, embarrassment—cringe a little at the rhetorical flourish. Bashar Assad, in whose court Palestinian leaders bowed and scraped for a decade before the current uprising, used chemical weapons against the Palestinian refugee town of Yarmouk a year ago and then starved out the remaining residents. More than a quarter-million Palestinians living in Syria for decades have also been made refugees by Mr. Assad’s assaults.

Much of the reporting on the fighting between Israeli forces and those of the Hamas terrorist network describes various parts and parties as “increasingly irrelevant.” It’s a term that is generally applied well, but not widely enough. It deserves greater breadth and judgment in its application. There are those who are highly relevant, increasingly irrelevant, and entirely irrelevant. Let’s begin with the last category.

Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas was increasingly irrelevant to the possibilities of renewed war, but with the formation of his “reconciliation” government with Hamas terrorists, Abbas has been demoted to utter irrelevance. He has no power to speak for the Palestinians, no ability to enter into a cease-fire agreement with the Israelis. His powers are a nullity: he can make noises in the international press, which should ignore him. It would, but for the fact that the media would have to admit Abbas’s irrelevance in reaching out to interview the Hamas leaders. It is, for now, more consistent with the media narrative that Palestinians are victims and Israelis evildoers, to keep up the pretense that Abbas is still a leader of his people.

On the other hand, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is entirely relevant to the conflict. Netanyahu has chosen — correctly, on moral, factual, and strategic grounds — to do as much damage to Hamas in the Gaza Strip as can be done by the highly-capable Israeli military. Netanyahu knows, as Tony Blair admonished Israel this week, that he cannot entirely stamp out Hamas because it exists as a political and ideological entity, not only a terrorist force. But he can destroy vast parts of its networks, its command structure, and its rocket arsenal.

The fact that the Israelis have used the “knock on the roof” tactic (a smoke bomb dropped on a roof to warn of imminent air attack on the building) — and have been dropping leaflets and making phone calls to individual Gazans warning of impending attacks — proves that Israel is doing everything it can to avoid civilian casualties. Hamas is reportedly forcing people back into buildings they attempt to flee, but hasn’t been able to stem the tide of people warned by leaflet drops who are crowding the roads out of the northern area of the Gaza Strip.

The Israelis will almost certainly send a large ground force into the leaflet-drop area in the next day. They will attack Hamas assets, especially rocket stockpiles and launchers, and leave when the job is done.

Gazan “journalists,” news media, and random individuals handy with cell phones are so proficient at taking pictures of the victims of Israeli “aggression” that they ought to be hired by Hollywood. At the drop of a drone, they’re there to pass off heartstring-pulling photos of dead Gazan children, who were not yet old enough to throw rocks at Israeli civilian cars, or don suicide vests, or kidnap Israeli soldiers or teenagers, or sneak into Israeli settlements to slaughter whole families with razors and butchers knives, or riot in the West Bank.
Many of the photos they send West and which are gobbled up by the news media also show weeping fathers cradling dead sons in their arms, either in the street or in a doctor’s office, or a bunch of guys carrying a flag-draped casket purportedly holding the body of a dead child, surrounded by an angry and fist-shaking weeping mob.
These on-the-spot recorders of Israeli “atrocities” are the Muslim paparazzi of pity, Islam’s ambulance-chasing ghouls. The pictures they take are either staged, filched or recycled from other theaters of Mideast conflicts, or too outrageously phony to be believed – except by Western “journalists” and news editors, such as the one of a boy leaping over the body bags of children supposedly and recently killed in the Syrian Houla massacre by bombs or rubber bands, except that the bags contain the bones of people found in a desert near Bagdad. Broadcast by the BBC in 2012, the photo dates to 2003.
The Telegraph story of May 27th, 2012, “Syria massacre in Houla condemned as outrage grows,” quoted the photographer, Marco di Lauro for Getty Images, who took the picture in 2003:
“One of my pictures from Iraq was used by the BBC web site as a front page illustration claiming that those were the bodies of yesterday’s massacre in Syria and that the picture was sent by an activist. Instead the picture was taken by me and it’s on my web site, on the feature section regarding a story I did In Iraq during the war called Iraq, the aftermath of Saddam.
“What I am really astonished by is that a news organization like the BBC doesn’t check the sources and it’s willing to publish any picture sent it by anyone: activist, citizen journalist or whatever. That’s all. ”
Well, he shouldn’t be so astonished. The BBC, which has maintained an anti-Israel grudge for a long time, wouldn’t really be concerned about the strength of any attribution. When it comes to pushing propaganda, it has never been too fastidious in checking sources. Fantasy and bias overrule facts. We want this to be evidence of Israeli brutality. The BBC isn’t the only news outlet that’s in a hurry to condemn or indict Israel or dictators its editors don’t at the moment happen to like. There is our own CPB or PBS – and MSNBC, and CNN, and ABC and CBS, and NBC itself. Anything that will help convey the idea that Muslims are always the victims of someone’s policies or Israeli cruelty.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. – Preamble, U.S. Constitution

9/11 was a clarion call to many Americans who were shocked to find themselves brutally attacked on their own soil that beautiful September morning. Seemingly out of nowhere this offensive made no sense to the average thirty something man or woman, who might best be described as a soccer mom or weekend warrior concerned with working hard to raise a family and live out the American dream. This was a tear in the veil through which we viewed our world. Where was this coming from? All eyes focused on our president who slowly began to explain what had happened and how we would deal with this seemingly new threat to our comfortable existence.

Over the next decade and a half, many in our society awakened out of their lethargy and began to pay greater attention to world and domestic affairs. This meant that our elected leaders would face greater scrutiny in what was to become known as “New Media”. Dissatisfaction with status quo wheeling and dealing led to the “tea party” movement. This is a response to the “progressive movement” which exerts powerful influence on the republican and democratic parties, our education system, our fundamental institutions and our culture.

Today, within American society, an ideological war is being fought on three fronts: 1) between those who believe in big government (government knows best) and those who believe in limited government (less government means more freedom), 2) those who want the United States to become more isolationist vs. those who want our country to remain involved in world affairs, and 3) those who believe national sovereignty backed with capable power will protect our interests and those who believe in a world government and redistribution of wealth, power, and influence.

We are at a pivotal moment in time, not unlike the decade immediately following our independence from England. In the next decade, we could irreversibly change our political system (which many take for granted) to one in which we yield our inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence) to the ascendance of a political oligarchy made up of entrenched politicians and unelected bureaucrats who are above the law. The better alternative would be to ensure that our citizenry understands the rationale behind our rule of law and the overarching importance of maintaining the integrity of the U.S. Constitution in order to preserve our position as a world power and continue to facilitate a domestic environment conducive to economic and social mobility. Only with this awareness can each generation ordain it as stated in the preamble.

Bill Ayers’ recent appearance on Megyn Kelly’s Fox News program appears to be part of a systematic campaign to whitewash the activities of the communist terrorists who were murdering policemen and FBI agents during the 1960s and 70s, and to set the stage for their release and rehabilitation.

Kelly was unprepared for the interview and failed to consult prominent experts on the case, such as former FBI agent Max Noel. “I’m extremely disappointed, as are a number of us who actually worked the WUO [Weather Underground Organization] case on a daily basis, in your attempt to ‘confront him’ without availing yourself of the knowledge that those of us who actually worked the case could have given you,” Noel said in a message to Kelly. The former FBI agent, who arrested the UNABOMBER and has co-authored a sensational new book[1] about that case, was a member of the Weatherman Task Force in San Francisco, where Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, were operating.

Noel has sensational details about how the Weather Underground constructed its bombs in order to kill people, not just damage property. This information, if publicized on “The Kelly File,” would have exposed Ayers as the crazed and committed communist he truly is. As a result of this glaring omission, Ayers succeeded in coming across as simply an aging “anti-war activist” or “radical” who carried things a little too far with bombings that caused some property damage but killed no one.

This is as big a lie as Ayers’ claim made to Kelly that he didn’t know Barack Obama very well, even though he helped him launch his political career in Chicago. “I knew him as well as he knew 10,000 other people,” Ayers said. “Today, I wish I knew him much better and I wish he’d listen to me.”

But the evidence indicates that President Obama, or at least his Attorney General Eric Holder, is listening.

Left unsaid on “The Kelly File” show was the critical fact that many of Ayers’ comrades are still in jail or prison, waiting for Democratic politicians such as President Obama and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to grant pardons or clemency. Some have already been released, with no significant press attention devoted to the pattern that is developing.

Ayers and Dohrn could themselves be charged in the Park Police Station case, in which Police Sergeant Brian V. McDonnell was killed. But apparently they are quite confident that this will never happen as long as President Obama and Eric Holder are running the Justice Department.

A hardline policy of turning away boat people at sea is having dramatic results but provoking middle-class outrage, writes Nick Cater in Sydney

THE Australian immigration department’s website posts its blunt advice to would-be settlers in 17 languages: “No way. You will not make Australia home.”

Lieutenant-General Angus Campbell, dressed in battle fatigues, stares grimly at the camera in an online video warning would-be refugees not to trust people smugglers who claim that the fortress Australia policy is a sham.

“The rules apply to everyone — families, children, unaccompanied children, educated and skilled,” he says. “There are no exceptions.”

Before Tony Abbott was elected prime minister last September, Campbell commanded Australian forces in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Now he heads Border Protection Command and is in charge of Operation Sovereign Borders, a mission to prevent “illegal maritime arrivals” stepping foot on his country’s soil.

Campbell’s area of operation encompasses the entire Indian Ocean, where two asylum seeker boats were intercepted in June near the Cocos Islands, halfway between Sri Lanka and the Australian mainland.

Last Sunday 41 asylum seekers from one vessel were transferred into Sri Lankan custody from an Australian border protection vessel off the port of Batticaloa.

Plans to organise a similar transfer for 153 asylum seekers on the second boat have been temporarily halted by an injunction from the High Court in Canberra.

Lawyers hired by activists have mounted a challenge, claiming Australia is breaching its obligations under the United Nations refugee convention.

“The guards don’t run the prison, Islam does.” — Tommy Robinson, upon his release from prison.

“The state is finding it harder to do its most basic duty, which is to protect the public.” — UK Home Secretary Theresa May.

The court heard how he doused his wife with gasoline and set her on fire. His defense attorney told the jurors, “He wasn’t being listened to, he wasn’t being obeyed.”

Tablighi Jamaat — a fundamentalist Islamic sect opposed to Western values such as democracy and equal rights, but committed to “perpetual jihad” to spread Islam around the world — is fighting a no-holds-barred battle to build a massive mosque complex in West Ham, a neighborhood in the East London Borough of Newham.

Critics say that attracting investments from Muslim investors is spurring the gradual establishment of a parallel global financial system based on Sharia law.

Islam and Islam-related issues were omnipresent in Britain during the month of June 2014. They can be categorized into three broad themes: 1) The British government’s growing concern over Islamic extremism and the domestic security implications of British jihadists in Syria; 2) The continuing spread of Islamic Sharia law in all aspects of British daily life; and 3) Ongoing questions of Muslim integration into British society.
1. Islamic Extremism and Syria-Related Threats

The dramatic rise of the Sunni militant group the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [ISIS] in June added a new sense of urgency to the ongoing debate over how to prevent British jihadists from carrying out terrorist attacks in the UK upon their return from fighting in Syria.

British Prime Minister David Cameron warned on June 17 that British citizens and other Europeans fighting alongside Islamist insurgents in Iraq and Syria posed the biggest threat to Britain’s national security.

Britain’s top counter-terrorism officer, Cressida Dick, on June 22 told the BBC that roughly 500 Britons have now gone to fight in Syria. Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s The World This Weekend, Dick warned that British jihadists represent a “long-term” terrorist threat that British police will be dealing with for “many years.”

The Beltway fixture that Republicans have placed in charge of the House judiciary committee—i.e., the committee that, by its own description, functions as “the lawyer for the House of Representatives,” and claims an “infrequent but important role in impeachment proceedings”—is ignorant when it comes to the Constitution’s impeachment standard.

Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R., Va.) took to one of the Sunday shows to demonstrate his cluelessness. After explaining that “the Constitution is very clear as to what constitutes grounds for impeachment of the president of the United States,” he proceeded to mangle that very clear standard, opining that President Obama “has not committed the kind of criminal acts that call for that.”

In point of fact, no “criminal acts” are necessary before a president may be impeached. The very clear standard the Constitution prescribes calls for impeachment upon the commission of treason, bribery, or high crimes and misdemeanors. Treason and bribery are, of course, well known criminal acts. As I illustrate in Faithless Execution, “high crimes and misdemeanors” is a term of art borrowed from British law. It does not refer—at least, not necessarily—to criminal acts that violate the penal code. Instead, it captures what Hamilton, in Federalist No. 65, described as:

the misconduct of public men, or in other words from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.

The concept conveyed by “high crimes and misdemeanors” is executive maladministration, whether out of imperiousness, corruption or incompetence. In that sense, it is more redolent of military justice offenses than criminal acts that violate the penal code. Like a soldier, one who owes fiduciary responsibility is liable for acts that would not be considered criminal wrongs if committed by an ordinary civilian. Dereliction of duty, conduct unbecoming, profound deceitfulness, and the failure to honor an oath, to take a few obvious examples, would qualify as high crimes and misdemeanors even if they might not be indictable offenses if committed by one in whom high public trust was not reposed.

As I further relate in Faithless Execution, what the Framers were most concerned about was presidential misconduct that undermined our governing framework, particularly the separation of powers: