RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/8/book-review-the-supreme-court-vs-constitution/

The Constitution is under attack on two fronts. On one, proponents of ever-expanding central government see little in the Constitution that limits federal authority. On the other, the same politicians and interest groups champion broad, often newly discovered “constitutional rights” whose protection curtails the traditional power of state and local governments to enact laws intended to protect the public health, safety and welfare.

In “The Supreme Court vs. The Constitution,” Gerald Walpin’s focus is on judicial interpretations of the Bill of Rights that have circumscribed these long accepted “police powers” of state and local governments. His thesis is that our country is ill-served by Supreme Court decisions based more on the personal social, and political views of the justices than on the carefully chosen words of the Constitution.

Mr. Walpin takes his charge from Justice Samuel Alito Jr., who remarked in 2011 that “ordinary citizens should know more facts about the Constitution.” Accordingly, the author intends his book to provide “all Americans, including the overwhelming number who are not lawyers, with a simple, but not simplistic, understanding of what is happening to our Constitution.”

A harsh critic of what most would call “judicial activism,” Mr. Walpin makes clear such activism is not a phenomenon always associated with either the political “right” or “left,” or with a particular political party. Thus, he quotes President Obama’s attacks on legal challenges to Obamacare as inviting unacceptable “judicial activism,” and recalls President George W. Bush’s lament that “some judges give in to temptation and make law instead of [simply] interpreting.” The author even reminds us of President Lincoln’s warning that “decisions of the Supreme Court” could deprive “the people” of their right “to be their own rulers.”

http://www.meforum.org/3637/israel-jewish-majority

VERY WELCOME DEVELOPMENT BUT NOT ENTIRELY NEW….AMBASSADOR (RET.) YORAM ETTINGER WAS THE PIONEER IN ISRAELI CENSUS STUDIES THAT PROVED THE “DEMOGRAPHIC DOOMSDAYERS” WRONG. FOR TOO LONG SOME PARTISANS OF ISRAEL WERE WRINGING THEIR HANDS ABOUT AN POTENTIAL ARAB MAJORITY THAT WOULD PRECLUDE A “DEMOCRATIC” ISRAEL. EVENTS ON THE GROUND INCLUDING JUDEA AND SAMARIA HAVE PROVEN THEM WRONG EXACTLY AS ETTINGER PREDICTED…..RSK

Growth trends and population forecasts have played a significant role in the political landscape of the Middle East, especially over the thorny question of Israel and the disputed territories. The notion that the Jewish majority of Israel is in danger of being swamped by Arab fertility has repeatedly been used as a political and psychological weapon to extract territorial concessions from the Israeli government. In September 2010, U.S. president Barack Obama referred to the so-called “hard realities of demography” that threaten the survival of the Jewish state.[1]

Such a conclusion is wrong. Analysis of long-term demographic developments leads to quite the opposite conclusion: In the long run, a strong Jewish majority, not only in the state of Israel—as this author projected almost twenty-five years ago[2] and the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics recently reaffirmed[3]—but also in the Land of Israel[4] is quite possible.
Middle East Population Annual Growth

It is useful to analyze the processes among world populations in general and in the Middle East and the Arab world in particular. Such scrutiny helps to determine whether demographic trends within the Jewish and Arab population groups living in the Land of Israel differ or resemble the general tendencies observable within the global population over the last sixty plus years, the same general time frame as that of the state of Israel.

Beginning in 1966, the annual population growth in the Middle East rose consistently until it peaked at 3.24 percent in 1980[5] when it began to ebb—at a faster pace than in the developed world.[6] In the subsequent thirty-two years, the Middle East population increase has gone down by more than a half, to 1.45 percent in 2012 (see Figure 1).

http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=328453 Israel’s military leadership failure to notice, let alone grasp the strategic implications of, regional and international developments is not new. It has been going on for at least 40 years. During his visit to Israel in March, US President Barack Obama compelled Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to apologize to his Turkish counterpart for the […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4014/islamist-turks-germany The alignment of a German Islamist party with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP tends to demonstrate that an AKP campaign to penetrate and, ultimately, dominate German Turks has begun in earnest. Germany’s federal election, held on September 22, had two new consequences, one reported widely in global media — the failure of the […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4012/spain-mosques “The rules of the city and the country are mandatory for everyone, and Mollet del Vallès will be uncompromising toward any kind of radicalism or blackmail.” — Josep Monràs, Mayor of Mollet del Vallès, Spain Police in Spain have forcibly removed Muslim activists from an illegal mosque in a small town in Catalonia, an […]

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/10/brain-gain/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=b8d77633e1-Mosaic_2013_10_11&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-b8d77633e1-41165129

www.globes-online.com
The news that two of the 2013 Nobel Prize winners are Americans with Israeli pasts hit Israel just when it was discussing emigration in general and the brain drain in particular. According to the partisans of the brain drain argument, Israel as a country, and its academic institutions, do not offer good enough prospects to keep people who have alternatives. The lack of university positions, small research budgets, and a country that can be hard to live in drive the best of us abroad.

The counterargument has it that what people call the “brain drain is nothing more than the natural development of an academic career. When Omri Casspi plays in the NBA and Yossi Benayoun plays for Liverpool, we do not call this a brain drain. It is natural that researchers with lofty goals will seek to achieve them in the most valued and best-networked places with the biggest budgets. The fact that Israeli universities have succeeded in retaining five Nobel laureates is proof of the opposite of a brain drain.

So is there or isn’t there a brain drain? According to the Ministry of Science and Technology, in 2011, 5% of Israeli academics had spent at least three years abroad. According to the Taub Institute, in 2007-08 (the worst years of the university budget crisis, which has since ameliorated) 29 lecturers from Israel were overseas for every 100 who stayed in the country. In comparison, 1.1 per 100 Japanese faculty members and 3.4 per 100 of French faculty members were in the US at that time.

Ministry of Science Chief Scientist Ehud Gazit told “Globes”, “Israel has no brain drain like in other countries. The example of Arieh Warshel is indicative: he wanted to stay here, he prefers Israel. If he had a post, he’d stay. A real brain drain occurs when educated people don’t want to live in the country, but many Israeli scientists actually want to come back.”

“Globes”: So what’s the problem?

Gazit: “We’re the country with the largest number of scientists per capita, but in terms of positions, we’re somewhere in the middle. That’s the problem. As a result, about 1,000 top faculty members in foreign universities are Israelis. Many of them would return if they had a job.”

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/obamadontcare-on-the-glazov-gang/print/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by intellectual Michael Chandler, Conservative TV and Movie Star Morgan Brittany and Filmmaker Orestes Matacena (“Two de Force“).

This week the Gang discussed ObamaDon’tCare:

Part I:

Don’t miss Part II of this special episode which shed light on Netanyahu vs. Iran. The discussion occurred in Part II (starting at the 12:50 mark) and focused on when Israel will have to make its move against the Mullahs’ bomb. The dialogue was preceded by an analysis of Republicans are Jihadists? — which analyzed how the Left uses the words against its political opponents that it never dares utter about Islamic terrorists.

Part II:

To watch previous Glazov Gang episodes, Click here.

To sign up for The Glazov Gang: Click here.

In the spring of ’48, the collision of wills between the free world and the red slave empire of the east came to a head in Berlin.

The Communist strategy had been to push forward, to violate the spirit of the agreements and then the letter of the agreements while claiming to be the aggrieved party. Their takeovers in Eastern Europe baffled a West that could not believe the Reds would show such poor sportsmanship.

Had the USSR waited a little longer, a weary United States would have withdrawn. Instead Stalin decided to humiliate the United States and demonstrate its impotence in international affairs.

The Berlin Blockade was a siege in all but name. Beyond the sheer fact of food and coal being cut off to a city of millions were a thousand minor humiliations by Soviet officials designed to break the will of their enemies to resist.

That was their mistake. And it’s a mistake that the left often makes.

The barricades around the Lincoln Memorial and the WW2 Memorial, the traffic cones blocking the view of Mt. Rushmore and the sawhorses around Old Faithful are no Berlin Blockade, but they come out of the same meanness of spirit and the same motives.

The petty harassment extended to a 24-hour blockade of an inn that had tried to stay open and rangers arriving to block Old Faithful every time it erupted. There are few moments that sum up the meanness of spirit of the Obama Blockade as well as a park ranger angrily telling senior citizens to get back on the bus and stop taking photos because they are engaging in forbidden “recreating”.

The Obama Blockade has no valid justification. Like the Berlin Blockade, it is about power and control.

No one actually has to go to the Lincoln Memorial or the WW2 Memorial or any of the other national monuments that were closed off. They are places that Americans assumed they could always go because they were part of their national heritage. It never occurred to them that they would be shut down.

The Pisgah Inn, the Cliff House, the Claude Moore Colonial Farm or any of the other private non-profits or restaurants on Federal land run themselves. It takes more resources to shut them down, to blockade them, than it would to let them keep on operating.

But it’s not about what’s easier. The Communists picked a fight over Germany’s future currency. The current fight is over ObamaCare. But ObamaCare, like the Communist Ostmark, is about more than its substance—it’s also about control.

The siege of America, unlike the siege of Berlin, is virtual; but it also depends on seizing control over the distribution of vital necessities. In Berlin, that meant food and coal. In America, that’s health care.

The question is will you agree to ObamaCare, just as in Berlin the question was whether you would get a Soviet ration card, fill your wallet with Ostmarks and submit to a Soviet takeover. The Communists assumed that cutting off food would force the residents of Berlin to use Soviet ration cards and currency.

They were wrong.

http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/assimilationist-liberals-reap-what-theyve-sown/2013/10/10/ The recent study of U.S. Jews by the Pew Research Center reports that 58 percent of American Jews marry non-Jews. Since few of those who intermarry are Orthodox, the percentage rises to 71 percent when Orthodox Jews are taken out of the equation. The fact is, American non-Orthodox Jews are intermarrying their way into […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/gestapo-tactics-meet-seniors-at-yellowstone

The most outrageous yet?

Below is the horrendous, Uncle-Sam-shameful story of tourists who happened to be visiting Yellowstone as the shutdown took effect. Ordered out of the park (the tour bus guide had paid $300 the day before to enter), ordered not to stop (even at restrooms) along the road out of the park, ordered mid-snap not to take pictures of a herd of bison — Stop “recreating,” said the armed ranger — they were then locked in under armed guard at The Old Faithful Inn, ajacent to the famous geyser — around which the feds erected barricades to prevent them even from seeing it!

What I want to know is how it is that the park rangers slip so easily into thug-fascist-mode? And, more important, When do we say stop? I wish I had a boat to join the flotilla that retired Navy Capt Ross who is trying to organize to reopen the waterway Obama illegally closed in Florida.

As the tour guide put it: “The national parks belong to the people. This isn’t right.”