RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324063304578525850909628878.html?mod=opinion_newsreel
A ruling against the NYPD’s successful ‘stop, question and frisk’ policy would be sure to inspire lawsuits in other cities.

A racial-profiling lawsuit over the New York Police Department’s “stop, question and frisk” policies is now in the hands of a judge whose decision is expected within weeks. Many New Yorkers watched the two-and-a-half-month trial nervously, concerned that a ruling against the NYPD by U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin could spell an end to a police practice that helped the city achieve an astonishing drop in violent crime.

But non-New Yorkers would do well to worry about the case too. A decision against the NYPD would almost certainly inspire similar suits by social-justice organizations against police departments elsewhere. The national trend of declining crime could hang in the balance. And the primary victims of such a reversal would be the inner-city minorities whose safety seems not to figure into attempts to undermine successful police tactics.

New York-style policing—including the practice of stopping, questioning and sometimes frisking individuals engaged in suspicious behavior—ought be the city’s most valued export. Since the early 1990s, New York has experienced the longest and steepest crime drop in the modern history of policing. Murders have gone down by nearly 80%, and combined major felonies by nearly 75%. No other American metropolis comes close to New York’s achievement. Bostonians are twice as likely to be murdered as New Yorkers, and residents of Washington, D.C., three times as likely.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324634304578535823045836956.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

With the Senate beginning debate this week on the immigration reform bill, border security will be one of the most contentious issues. Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) argues at every opportunity that “immigration reform hinges on border security,” and he isn’t wrong. But physical control of the border can go only so far in preventing illegal immigration. At least as important is finding a way for immigrants to work here legally. That’s where a guest-worker program is crucial.

The U.S. workforce is changing. Americans are having smaller families, and birthrates are well below replacement level. Baby boomers are retiring: 10,000 leave the workforce every day. Younger workers coming up behind them are much more educated than earlier generations. In 1950, according to the Census Bureau, 56% of U.S. workers were high-school dropouts. Today, the figure is less than 5%.

The result is that the pool of people available to fill low-skilled jobs has shrunk dramatically. It is not so much that the native born don’t want to work as busboys, farmhands or nurse’s aides. But the overwhelming majority of Americans are now overqualified for these jobs and have other options. Meanwhile, less-skilled immigrants with no family in the U.S. have no way—no access to a visa program—to enter the country legally and work in year-round jobs. This is why so many immigrants have flowed into the country illegally in recent decades and remain here, underground.

The challenge facing Congress is to create a better system—one that works for willing immigrant workers and willing employers, replaces the current illegal influx with a legal labor force, and protects the rights of Americans who are looking for low-skilled jobs.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/06/college_president_gives_his_blessings_for_illegal_act.html

In the Spring 2013 Lehman Today magazine of Lehman College, a CUNY 4-year college located in the Bronx, New York, one learns that Melissa Garcia-Velez, class of 2014, has been “advocating for the rights of undocumented immigrant youth” since early in her freshman year. In 2010, Garcia-Velez “stepped up to create the Lehman DREAM Team, the first student-run support group for undocumented students on campus.”

As a result of her efforts, her advocacy work “quickly turned into a bigger effort to advance civic engagement throughout the Lehman College community.” Consequently, she was “awarded the prestigious Newman Civil Fellowship, which honors inspiring college student leaders who are actively involved in solving challenges facing communities across the nation.” How ironic that at the Newman Civil site, the vision statement reads as follows (emphasis added):

Campus Compact envisions colleges and universities as vital agents and architects of a diverse democracy, committed to educating students for responsible citizenship in ways that both deepen their education and improve the quality of community life. We challenge all of higher education to make civic and community engagement an institutional priority.

Garcia-Velez, from Bogotá, Colombia, moved to New York at the age of eight. As an undocumented student, she went to high school in the United States. Then she volunteered for a non-profit organization called New York Cares and College for Every Student to help low-income students attend and graduate from college.

Il Giornale, June 10th, 2013
http://www.fiammanirenstein.com/articoli.asp?Categoria=5&Id=3200

When a soldier falls, the withdrawal from missions is demanded. In truth, troops lack support

War is an easy topic: it is known to be unbearable, irrational, as it randomly and perversely hits. Our young man killed two days ago should have come home within the progressive disengagement plan expected for most of the NATO ISAF troops by January 2014. War is ugly, so the most natural instinct is to turn your shoulders to it especially when one of ours dies protecting not his home, his family, but a remote home and family, while senseless accusation of domination tower on him and his comrades-in-arms.

The instinct to leave gets as more compelling as the war is not going well, as it warps as opposed to your own plans. Which occurred to a great extent in Afghanistan: the Taliban are still an enemy to Karzai; he, at his turn, wouldn’t have held on without the decisive Western support. The ethnic and religious factions of this country are in great number against the Pashtuns who represent the central force with the Northern Alliance of Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras, the recipients of the NATO support. The Taliban, as April 5th nears, i.e. the date of the scheduled presidential elections, will rage clutching knives between their teeth and will bear good arguments due to the rulers’ corruption. Not to mention the appetites of Islamist and nuclear Pakistan, which is unrelentingly pushing on the border. Whereas Afghanistan, in NATO’s plans, should have been left in the best of the conditions in order to face its own future. Yet, all of this does not say much about this war.

The mission will leave from eight to thirteen thousand troops deployed. The outgoing troups doesn’t want to leave a cloud of dust behind them, but an invincible idea, i.e. the absolute interdiction to practice terrorism. The war fought in Afghanistan originates in the darkness of the burnt crater of Ground Zero, of the Pentagon hit, of a burnt field in Pennsylvania. After September 11, the world found itself embroiled in a defense war against terror. The intervention in Afghanistan through the operation Enduring Freedom, denied terror the right to possessing a huge background, to have an entire state ruled by the Taliban where Al Qaeda might have set its general staff.
This operation succeeded, terrorism did not spread out without boundaries in the United States nor in our continent; a consistent number of terror operations were thwarted, Bin Laden was eliminated, and so other commanders of his. Nowadays, although the Taliban did not disappear, we have at least a society which, thanks to our military, has the certainty that 28 NATO countries, along with another 22 countries which joined in, care to ensure its development, its freedom, its liberation for the relentless Islamist threat.
We should not decrease now the sense of the great dedication thanks to which 53 of our italian soldiers sacrificed their lives. It’s not fair at all to hint each time that it might have been better not being there. On the contrary, what comes to mind is that they did not enjoy what is essential during wars, i.e. a constant ideology support from their belonging societies, be it Obama’s United States or our Italy, where yesterday incidentally our government reacted with dignity, or France which withdrew its troops (it did deploy them in Libya and would like to send them to Syria), to constantly reiterate the profound meaning of NATO’s presence in Afghanistan.

Imam: Pope Must Say ‘Islam is Peaceful’ to Renew Ties With Islam http://www.jewishpress.com/news/imam-pope-must-say-islam-is-peaceful-to-renew-ties-with-islam/2013/06/12/ The Muslim leader of al-Azhar offered to renew ties with the Vatican, but strongly suggested Pope Francis start off by proclaiming that Islam is a peaceful religion. A Coptic organization has suggested that Muslim leaders are the only ones who can make […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/350799/rand-pauls-heres-crime-act-andrew-c-mccarthy

The notorious “civil rights” lawyer William Kunstler, in addition to his work on “political” cases (i.e., anti-American radical-leftist and terrorist cases), gladly made himself available to mobsters, too — after all, someone had to pay the bills. Invited to a dinner once after a job well done for a mafia don, he hoisted a glass to the assembled capos and button men, toasting them, “Here’s to crime!”

Gleeful crooks across the country could be giving the same toast if Senator Rand Paul gets his way. The self-styled libertarian Republican from Kentucky, firmly in his father’s tradition of overreaction to imagined constitutional violations (or, perhaps I should say, violations of an imaginary Constitution) is outraged by reports that the Defense Department’s National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting “metadata” on phone calls of millions of Americans. He has responded by introducing an absurd piece of legislation he calls the “Fourth Amendment Restoration Act of 2013.”

Naturally, the bill is unacquainted with the Fourth Amendment — either the one given to us by the Framers or even the one enlarged over time by Supreme Court jurisprudence. I use the word “naturally” advisedly. Senator Paul’s proposed law asserts: “The collection of citizen’s [ACM: I take it he means citizens’] phone records is a violation of the natural rights of every man and woman in the United States.” A citizen’s “natural right” to telephone-usage records that are actually the property of third-party service providers? I wonder what St. Augustine would have made of that.
Not content to contort natural law, Paul then works his magic on positive law. He alleges that collection of records of telephone activity (but not the content of phone conversations) is somehow “a clear violation of the explicit language of the highest law of the land.”

By “highest law of the land,” Paul is referring to the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment. The senator apparently did not read the Fourth Amendment before cutting and pasting it into his bill. It requires (in relevant part) that “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, shall not be violated.” Perhaps Senator Paul will edify us on how it is “clear” that a phone record, owned and possessed by a telephone service provider (not the customer), qualifies as the person, house, paper, or effect of the customer, such that the government’s acquisition of it violates the Fourth Amendment. The federal courts have consistently, emphatically rejected this implausible suggestion, holding that government’s collection of phone records does not even implicate the Fourth Amendment, much less violate it.

Maybe Senator Paul would tell us that this is just the muck those crazy left-wing judges have made of the Constitution. But what Paul is advocating is a Constitution even more warped than the “organic” one progressive jurists have contrived. His proposal bears no resemblance to the Constitution of the Framers.

Mr. Walpin is the author of the recently published The Supreme Court vs. The Constitution (Significance press 2013)

The Supreme Court has long recognized that “the primary function of government … is to render security to its subjects, [with] any mischief menacing that security demand[ing] a remedy.” In simple language, that means that our government has the responsibility to imprison those who have committed crimes endangering people, such as murder or rape. Taking them off the streets saves many innocent persons from being the victim of such crimes because, even as Attorney-General Holder vouched, “[m]ost crimes in America are committed by people who have committed crimes before.”It is logical and human nature that someone who has already committed a rape is more likely to commit another one, particularly after having gotten away without prosecution, than one who has never done so.

Thus it was not surprising that the Supreme Court, on June 3, 2013, sustained a jury verdict finding the defendant Alonzo King guilty of rape on incontrovertible evidence: The defendant’s DNA had matched the perpetrator’s DNA found in the rape victim.

What is surprising, and not boding well for future rulings on clearly guilty criminals who should be taken out of circulation, is that the Court vote was only 5-4,

and thus but one vote away from ordering this rapist released back to society to commit another rape on an innocent victim.

The four dissenters never disputed that King was clearly shown to have performed this 2003 rape after breaking into the woman’s home, armed with a gun, with his face concealed, thus carefully hiding his identity from the victim. It was unlikely that he would ever have been apprehended and connected to this rape, except that, in 2009, six years later, King was arrested for assault with a shotgun. As part of the regular Maryland booking procedure for serious offense, along with fingerprinting and photo, his DNA sample was taken by applying a cotton swab to the inside of his cheek. That DNA was found to match the DNA taken from the 2009 rape victim.

The 4-Justice dissent would have reversed the rape conviction, and allowed King to go free, because they claimed that swabbing King’s cheek to get a DNA sample was an illegal search, with any evidence learned as a result of that swabbing to be excluded. Obviously, excluding the DNA evidence meant that King would not be connected to the rape that he committed.

  http://unitedpatriotsworldwide.com/vinienco/2013/06/11/needed-denouncement-muslim-anti-christian-violence/ ‘Racism’ or Extinction, by Dan Calic ‘Racism’ or Extinction, by Dan Calic: Once again we hear voices crying out that Israel is a “racist” state. Should we be surprised? Not really. Why is it that every other group of people can have at least one national homeland where they are the clear majority? Yet, if […]

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/55791 John Forbes Kerry was sworn in as the 68th Secretary of State of the United States on February 1, 2013. Kerry now is set, since assuming office, to embark on his fifth visit to Israel and to the so-called Palestinian Authority to push for a Two-State-Solution. But this is yet another appalling euphemism which […]

http://nsroundtable.org/as-we-see-it/intra-terrorist-competition/

The nature of weapons flow into Gaza has changed in recent months, with an apparent dip in quantity and rise in quality, according to a senior officer in the IDF (see below).

With ties to Iran in shambles (Hamas publicly broke away from Iran, which for years had funneled arms through Sudan north to the Sinai Peninsula and into Gaza), Hamas in Gaza has been quiet ABOVE ground. Beneath it, however, smuggling of higher-quality weaponry is in full swing. [Quite the industrious bunch, aren’t they?]

Meanwhile, the lack of military aid (from Iran) and the shift away from the radical Hezbollah-Damascus-Iran axis “has rankled the more militant members of [Hamas],” who wrote a letter to Hamas “political leader” Khaled Mashaal, calling for “a rehabilitation of ties with Hezbollah and Iran” and starkly criticizing Hamas’s ties to Qatar and the Gulf State’s recent $400-million gift to Gaza.

Ya gotta love this intra-terrorist competition. Not to mention the piety of the tunnel diggers pictured below…