RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/371412/shrinking-imperialist-president-jonah-goldberg

Of all the time-honored failings for which we criticize sitting presidents — by “we” I mean pundits, academics, and other members of the chattering phylum — two charges stand out: imperialism and shrinkage. Usually it’s one or the other.

When the president is unpopular or when he’s lost control of his agenda or when he just seems inadequate to the demands of the job, the headline “The Incredible Shrinking Presidency” proliferates like kudzu. When the Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006, The Economist proclaimed “The Incredible Shrinking Presidency” of George W. Bush on its cover. Barack Obama has been diagnosed with presidential shrinkage many times, including in Politico, the New York Times, and my own National Review.

The flip side of the shrinking presidency is the imperial presidency, something we’ve been fretting about, by name, since at least Franklin Roosevelt and in principle since the Founding.

Politically, what is remarkable is that Obama seems to be doing both at the same time. His “Year of Action” — intended to dispel that lame-duck scent — is simultaneously Caesar-like and pathetic. (Maybe the presidential seal should depict that dude from the Little Caesars pizza commercials?) Last week, he announced that he would unilaterally raise the minimum wage for federal contractors seeking new work. Only 1 percent of the workforce makes the minimum wage, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and vanishingly few of them work for the federal government. This probably explains why the White House wouldn’t give an actual number when asked how many people his bold action would benefit.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/ukraine-in-flames/print/Putin’s stooges ruthlessly crack down on Ukrainians’ cry for freedom and independence.

Parts of the Ukrainian capital were on fire last night as protesters battled security forces of that nation’s repressive government — months after it announced Ukraine would align itself with Russia instead of the European Union.

After a late-night pow-wow with opposition figures Vitaly Klitschko and Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych blamed the violent episodes on opposition leaders, but added that it was still “not too late to stop the conflict.”

Activists took over City Hall in Kiev yesterday and anti-riot police moved into Independence Square. BBC reports that at least 18 people were killed Tuesday, including seven police officers, in the worst outbreak of violence in weeks.

Many Ukrainians came to the main protest camp, the Maidan, to support activists who have reportedly been trained to defend barricades from riot police. Supporters had to walk because authorities completely shut down Kiev’s metro, claiming that there is a danger of “terror acts.” It was the first time the metro was shuttered since Ukraine declared independence in 1991.

The explosion of anger comes a month after four anti-government protesters were killed in central Kiev.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/9-out-of-10-saudi-men-say-eyeshadow-on-women-causes-sexual-assaults/

Why are Saudi men attacking women? According to 9 out out of 10 Saudi men, it’s all about the eyeshadow. It has to be the eyeshadow since there’s not much else you can see of a traditional Saudi woman’s face.

In entirely unrelated news…

“The flash memory of mobile phones taken from teenagers showed 69.7% of 1,470 files saved in them were pornographic and 8.6% were related to violence,” said report author Professor Abdullah al-Rasheed.

Whew. I would have thought it would be the other way around.

Saudi Arabia was the only country to generate more searches than Pornistan for an animal, coming in at position 1 for ‘fox sex’. They also finished second or third for a good number of the abovementioned animal terms.

Probably the foxes were wearing too much makeup.

Far be it from me to criticize Islamic culture, but maybe this situation can be resolved by building a giant fence around Saudi Arabia and not letting any Saudi men leave. The Saudi women and the foxes will however be provided with sanctuary in a saner place. Like maybe Somalia.

A survey conducted by the King Abdul Aziz Centre for National Dialogue in Saudi Arabia shows that Saudi men blame women for the rising rate of molestation in the Gulf. The poll surveyed 992 men and women.

Ironically, in a country where women are required to wear full-face and body coverings in public, over 86% of men said that excessive makeup was the main cause of the increase in public molestation of women.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/the-islamic-grinch-who-stole-the-olympics-on-the-glazov-gang/This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Ann-Marie Murrell, the National Director of PolitiChicks.tv, Tommi Trudeau, the Producer of Groovy Foods, and Nonie Darwish, the author of The Devil We Don’t Know.

The Gang gathered to discuss A Day in the Life of Trying to Sign Up for ObamaCare. The dialogue occurred in Part II and focused on Tommi Trudeau’s harrowing odyssey in the eerie world of the “Affordable Care Act.“ The segment also involved an analysis of The Lawless Presidency.

In Part I, the Gang discussed The Islamic Grinch Who Stole the Olympics, gauging why the Olympics strike at the heart of Islamic ideology — and why jihadists yearn to annihilate them. The segment also dealt with Jihad Migrating to Red States With Obama’s Blessings, analyzing why the president is easing immigration requirements for those linked to terror.

Watch both parts of the two-part episode below:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/fjordman/the-folly-of-open-borders/print/

Ceuta is one of two small Spanish enclaves in North Africa, the second being Melilla. They provide the only possible entry to European territory without leaving Africa. Ceuta is separated from the Iberian Peninsula by the Strait of Gibraltar, and lies at the strategically important boundary between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. 1300 years ago, Muslims used it as a staging ground for their invasion of the Iberian Peninsula and their aggressive inroads into Europe. The tide took centuries to turn, but in 1415 the Portuguese conquered Ceuta. This event marked the beginning of half a millennium of European dynamism and global expansion.

It is ironic that Ceuta is now once again at the front lines. This time we are witnessing the retreat and decline of Europe, and the demographic expansion of Africa and the Islamic world. As one member of Spain’s maritime rescue services commented in late 2013: “It has been a very busy summer, because we’re now also rescuing Africans who not only cross in a toy boat but haven’t even spent money on buying proper oars.”

Apart from scaling the fences at Ceuta and Melilla, other common routes into Europe are by boat, sometimes via Spain’s Canary Islands off the Atlantic coast of North Africa, but more frequently to Mediterranean islands such as Italy’s Lampedusa. Some also enter Europe from the east, via the Greek islands. Greece has a huge problem with illegal immigrants, many of them Muslims coming from as far east as Afghanistan.

The tiny island of Malta, which is a member of the EU, has already received tens of thousands of illegal immigrants coming in by boat. Many of the arrivals hail from the poorest and most war-torn parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Their arrival constitutes a heavy burden for such a small nation.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303491404579390523100612640?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTSecond

A billionaire environmentalist threatens to target a Senate Democrat with negative ads.

GLOBAL-WARMING ACTIVISM HEATS UP
Tom Steyer made a fortune as a hedge fund manager at Farallon Capital, in part from investments related to fossil fuels. But now that he’s sitting atop a pile estimated at $1.5 billion, he’s been aggressively seeking to prevent others from making a living from such energy sources. Mr. Steyer has funded a media campaign against approval of the Keystone XL pipeline and leads a political organization called NextGen Climate Action.
And although Mr. Steyer is now among the most visible environmental activists in the country, he still maintains a significant footprint upon the landscape. The New York Times reports on a recent meeting at his 1,800-acre California ranch, at which the former hedgie urged other enviro-donors to join with him to assemble $100 million to spend on the 2014 elections.
Interestingly, the group is considering political attacks on not just Republicans, but even Louisiana’s Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Democrat facing a tough re-election campaign. It’s true that she has posed as a friend of the oil and gas industry in her state. But we wonder how aggressively Mr. Steyer and his pals will attack Ms. Landrieu with control of the Senate hanging in the balance.

Mr. Steyer also aspires to have an impact beyond this fall’s elections, and specifically to broaden support for his cause. The Times notes: “In their advertising and research, Mr. Steyer and his aides have sought to craft appeals that would reach beyond affluent white liberals on the coasts.” Good luck with that.
Meanwhile, whatever happens in this fall’s elections, President Obama has embarked on a new plan to administratively slow U.S. development of shale gas while simultaneously creating new subsidies for green energy. Yale Law professor Donald Elliott explains.
And speaking of President Obama, in California he introduced global warming as an explanation for government policies that are routing water away from farmers and toward a fish called the delta smelt.

http://www.thejerusalemconnection.us/blog/2014/02/17/past-present-and-future.html

By one of those odd coincidences, I had just finished watching Clint Eastwood’s movie on the rise to power of J. Edgar Hoover when I came across the following commentary, written by J. R. Nyquist in his blog titled, The Time Traveler’s Lesson. It is of an imaginary interrogation by Hoover himself of a man taken into custody by the FBI in 1964 claiming to be from the future and describing America in 2014.

Hoover, back in 1964, upon hearing the time traveler’s description explodes in outrage, finding the account the most egregious nonsense he has ever heard. No doubt, Hoover concludes, this man’s description of life in the United States 50 years hence is an unmitigated hoax or the man is certifiable insane. But what is it that the time traveler describes?

“America in the future will be led by a black man with an Arabic name mentored as a youth by a suspected Communist subversive named Frank Marshall Davis.

“The time traveler explains that the leading social question of 2014 is gay marriage. Hoover angrily asks if the NASA thinks this is funny; to play such a practical joke on the FBI?

“Neither does Hoover credit the time traveler’s absurd claim that the national debt is more than $17 trillion in 2014, or that Venezuela and Nicaragua have been quietly taken over by Fidel Castro’s friends, that Zimbabwe, Angola, South Africa and the Congo are in the hands of African Communists, that North Korea possesses nuclear weapons. None of this is believable. None of it makes any sense to someone living in 1964 during the Cold War.

http://www.steynonline.com/6101/hath-not-a-jew-eyes

When my troubles with the Canadian Islamic Congress and the “human rights” commissions began up north, I quickly learned something my comrade Ezra Levant was already well up to speed on – that Canada’s “official Jews” (as he calls them) were among the most useless people on the planet. Under Bernie Farber, for example, the Canadian Jewish Congress was obsessive about the last three neo-Nazi losers living in their mum’s basement and contributing unread blog posts to obscure “white supremacist” websites. But it had nothing to say about the broad-daylight mass Jew-hatred and, indeed, brazen incitement to murder of large groups of people parading through downtown Calgary, Toronto and Montreal. Farber & Co were cardboard warriors, capable only of fighting the battles others had already won long ago.

And so it goes for America’s “official Jews”:

Anti-Defamation League chief Abe Foxman believes that anti-Semitism is at its height since the Holocaust, and threatens the lives of Jews all around the world.

He got that right. He got everything else wrong:

“Europe is where the Jewish people have paid the highest price for anti-Semitism, and it’s sort of an old-new phenomenon,” he said, defining it as “nationalists, anti-government people, neo-fascists, neo-Nazis of anti-immigration and anti-government coming together with a glue and cement of anti-Semitism. I think it’s a serious threat to Jewish life.”

Is it really possible in 2014 even for the capo di tutti capi of official Jews to be so blind? Foxman is either the most wicked dissembler or, to be more charitable, he reflects merely the blinkered parochialism of America’s liberal Jewish elites. Unlike the head of the ADL, I have no special interest in or responsibility for the welfare of the Jewish people, but I have been to Toulouse, Antwerp, Malmö and the old Jewish East End of London, and I know what I have seen there.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-horowitz/downplaying-the-holocaust-arthur-hays-sulzberger-and-the-new-york-times/print/

Abetting the Holocaust: Arthur Hays Sulzberger and the New York Times

Posted By David Horowitz

As the New York Times enables the anti-Jewish axis created by Islamic Nazis in the Middle East who are preparing a new Holocaust of the Jews, it is important to remember that this is nothing new and has happened before. Take ten minutes to view this talk, posted below, by Anna Blech: ”Downplaying the Holocaust: Arthur Hays Sulzberger and the New York Times.”

Anna Blech won first prize at the New York City History Day competition for her research paper, “Downplaying the Holocaust: Arthur Hays Sulzberger and The New York Times.” For this paper, she also was awarded The Eleanor Light Prize from the Hunter College High School Social Studies Department and membership in the Society of Student Historians. Anna’s paper on anti-slavery sentiment in pre-Civil War children’s literature was published in The Concord Review. Anna was a finalist at the 2013 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, where she won third place in microbiology for her project, “Reinventing Antibiotics.” She has received national and regional Scholastic Writing awards, mostly for her one-act musical comedies, and she is an active member of the Hunter theater community.

http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/02/18/new-york-times-column-on-anti-zionism-a-reminder-of-its-own-publisher%E2%80%99s-past/
New York Times Column on Anti-Zionism a Reminder of its Own Publisher’s Past
JNS.org – The New York Times raised some eyebrows in the Jewish community last week with a lengthy feature about four self-described religious Jews who oppose Israel. In an apparent attempt to legitimize Jewish anti-Zionism, the article stressed that Zionism “was not always the norm among American Jews” and that it was only “the persecution of European Jews [which] turned many American Jews into Zionists.”

Interestingly, one of the most famous “religious Jews” who opposed Zionism did not change his mind even after the Holocaust. That was the Times’s own publisher from 1935 to 1961, Arthur Hays Sulzberger.

Sulzberger was a devout adherent of classical Reform Judaism. In his view, Jewish identity should consist only of religious beliefs, not any sense of peoplehood, nationalism, or ethnic affiliation. He even rejected the existence of Jewish war veterans organizations on the grounds that they were examples of “Ghetto living.”

As Prof. Laurel Leff explains in her critically acclaimed book, “Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper,” Sulzberger instructed Times editors to bury news of the Nazi genocide on the back pages, and to tone down or eliminate references to the fact that the victims were Jews. Sulzberger worried that if the Times reported what was happening to the Jews in Europe, someone might accuse it of being a “Jewish newspaper.”