RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://thehill.com/opinion/op-ed/292243-opinion-path-to-information-first

Recent congressional actions — ObamaCare, TARP, economic stimulus, the GM bailout, among others — have surely taught us that we suffer when we do not know the facts that should be the foundation of good and productive legislation.

The recent Senate Gang of Eight immigration plan has highlighted that even “border security” is not properly understood, much less coherently defined. However, another leg of immigration reform — the nature and treatment of the illegal/undocumented immigrant population in the U.S. — is even less-known. While sweeping proposals concerning this shadow population have been jawboned for decades, tautologically, we are in the dark.
The number 11 million (down from a previously fantasized 12 million) is often bandied about without any credible basis. Instead, a number is insinuated by one or more “authorities” and taken as fact and repeated without question.

Studies that attempt to estimate our homeless population are notoriously disputed and arrive at grossly varying conclusions. Methodologies for estimating the shadow population of illegal/undocumented are, by definition, even more dubious. Results can only be more questionable as innumerable unfounded assumptions about the group’s makeup are added.

Instead of guesswork, Congress should consider an interim approach to get the facts before it crafts comprehensive legislation. It should qualify a new class of immigrants — let’s call them “Q-1s”— who, within six months of the law’s enactment, come out of the shadows and truthfully file information that will enable us to understand them.

This would include facts about their entry into the country, job history, race, religion, likelihood of assimilation, taxes paid and unpaid, health data, family members here or looking to enter, and so forth. In exchange for truthfully coming forth, these Q-1s will be immune from prosecution for their illegal entry pending a comprehensive reform. This may be considered a temporary, conditional amnesty by some, a start down the road to resolution by others.

Proactively creating this group would accomplish much. First, it would allow lawmakers to more fully understand the population they seek to address. Presumably, a different treatment would, and should, be afforded a group of 4 million than one of 11 million or even 25 million. Similarly, specific age dispersion, health status and education levels should command more cost-efficient and better targeted features in any final legislation.

The Q-1 filing would give the illegal/undocumented greater responsibility for deciding his future by requiring him to make a critical choice: whether to cooperate with Congress or to again evade laws and stay in the shadows. The population afforded any benefits is self-determined; those who receive benefits are those who helped. While their coming forward won’t assuage the anger of all citizens who wish to see existing laws fully enforced, it would give the Q-1 deserved recognition for courageously acting first.

http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2013/04/08/violence-and-mainstream-islam/ Against the backdrop of 20,651 jihadist attacks since 9/11/2001, and the hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Dhaka, Bengladesh (hat tip Jihad Watch) on the march this past week, demanding the execution of “atheist bloggers” for “blaspheming” Islam, I was re-reading V.S. Naipaul’s second brilliant travelogue account of Asian Islamdom, circa 1995,  Beyond Belief. […]

“Hillary Clinton Mulls Running for President”….. is a runner up.

“The Obama’s On Vacation”…up there near the top.

“America Threatened by (fill in the names….Iran, North Korea, Russia, Taliban, al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood…Lichtenstein) State Department Urges Caution.”…pretty close.

But the all time winner is:

“U.S. Secretary of State (fill in any names —-William Rogers, Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance, Warren Christopher(twice), Edward Muskie, George Shultz, James Baker, Madeleine Halfbright, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry ) Headed to the Middle East to Jump Start the Stalled Peace Process”

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/islam-is-anti-peace?f=puball In view of the fact that the Quran (the holy book of Muslims) contains atrocious passages (see below) which incite to killing mostly innocent people – Muslims and non-Muslims – and in view of the fact that it’s Muslim extremists who are terrorizing their societies and the whole world, in particular in Afghanistan, Pakistan, […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/sarah-conly-totalitarian-by-proxy The stereotypical image of an ambitious tyrant is of Adolf Hitler haranguing crowds of rapt Germans, or of machismo-obsessed Benito Mussolini addressing his adoring audiences in a belligerent, hands-on-hips, jutting jaw pose. To their sole credit, they could deliver their calls to totalitarianism without the benefit of Teleprompters. Then we have the less hysterical, […]

White Girl Bleed a Lot — on The Glazov Gang
by Frontpagemag.com
Actor Basil Hoffman, Podcast host Ari David and Czech defector Borek Volarik discuss black mob violence across the country — and the media’s silence about it.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/leaving-the-totalitarian-left-on-the-glazov-gang/

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ryan-mauro/a-florida-megachurch-pastors-islamist-associations/ Pastor Joel C. Hunter of Florida’s Northland Church is under fire for his stance against the state’s proposed legislation based on American Laws for American Courts. He chose a peculiar individual to help make his case: Atif Fareed, former chairman of the Council on American-Islamic Relations-Florida. The influence of Pastor Hunter is not to […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/humberto-fontova/beyonce-and-jay-z-bankroll-castros-racist-tyranny/

Beyonce and Jay-Z celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary in Havana last week as official guests of a regime busily beating and arresting black civil rights activists known as the “Rosa Parks Civil Rights Movement.”

Indeed the Stalinist/Apartheid regime hosting the superstar couple murdered more political prisoners per capita in its first three years in power than Hitler’s murdered in its first six and jailed political prisoners at a higher rate than Stalin’s during the Great Terror. Among these victims were (are) the longest-suffering black political prisoners in modern history of the human race.

In fact, the superstar black couple’s visit coincided with a wave of racist repression by Cuba’s lily-white rulers. Cuba’s black human-rights activists are being beaten, arrested and tortured at a rate that sets a ten-year record for racist torture and terror in the Castro family fiefdom, which is really saying something.

Heartbreakingly, as mentioned above, many of these Cuban human-rights activists admire the U.S. civil rights movement, unaware that the current standard-bearers of this movement—far from championing their cause—actually champion their torturers:

“Viva FIDEL!—VIVA CHE!” yelled Jesse Jackson while arm-in-arm with Fidel Castro at the University of Havana in 1984.

“He [Raul Castro] is one of the most amazing human beings I’ve ever met!” gushed chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus Emanuel Cleaver upon visiting the Castro family fiefdom three years ago. And on and on.

As Beyonce and Jay-Z lived it up around Havana, every penny they spent lands in the pocket of the regime currently beating and arresting Cuban blacks peacefully protesting under the banner of the civil rights leaders the U.S. superstars claim to venerate. Cuban dissident Sonia Garro has spent the past two Easters in Castro’s dungeons without even being charged. She was beaten, arrested– and beaten again– for the crime of carrying flowers in a peaceful religious demonstration honoring other peaceful Cuban blacks murdered by Castroite firing squads.

Not far from the Havana vacation haunts of Beyonce and her (Che-Guevara worshipping) husband Jay-Z, black political prisoners languish in KGB-designed dungeons for such crimes as publicly quoting the works of Martin Luther King Jr. and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. Among these prisoners is Dr. Elias Biscet, an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience who was awarded (obviously in absentia) the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bush in 2008.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

There are two basic human responses to an assault. I will protect myself or I will make the world a better place. The first deals with the risk of an attack. The second with your feelings about the world. The first leaves you better able to cope with an attack. The second makes you feel better about the world that you live in.

The Jewish response to the Holocaust fell into these two categories. Never Again and Teach Tolerance. And the two responses were segmented by population.

Never Again became the credo of Israel and Teach Tolerance became the credo of the Western Diaspora.

There were many Israelis who believed in teaching tolerance and many Western Jews who believed in self-defense, but for the most part the responses were structural because the divide between Nationalists and Universalists predated the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was a transformative event, but only to a degree, the responses to it came out of earlier debates that had been going on for several generations. Before the Holocaust, the pogroms had led to the same fork in the road between a collective struggle for a better world and national self-defense. The current debates about Israel revisit that old argument.

To the Nationalists, the Holocaust was not an unexpected event. Nationalist leaders like Jabotinsky had warned that it was coming. To the Universalists however, it was an inexplicable event because it challenged the entire progressive understanding of history as a march to enlightenment. Violent bigotry was a symptom of reactionary backward thinking, not something that modern countries would engage in. There might be anti-semitism in Berlin, but there wouldn’t be mass murder. That was for places like Czarist Russia, but not for the enlightened Soviet Russia or Weimar Germany.

The Holocaust dissolved that mirage of a better world. It was a mugging in broad daylight on the biggest street of the biggest city in the world. Its message was that the world had not changed and that human beings had not magically become better people because Berlin had a subway and phone calls could be made across the Atlantic.

The Holocaust did not heal the divide between the Universalists and the Nationalists; it deepened it. The Universalists still insisted that a better world was coming and that the Holocaust made it more urgent for us to work toward it, while the Nationalists saw the world as a cycle of civilizations that had to be survived, with no respite, except for the religious who awaited a final transformation of the world and everything in it.

Israel was the issue, but the real issue was what a Jewish State symbolized; a turning away from the great dream of the Brotherhood of Man for another reactionary ethno-religious state. To many liberals, Israel’s existence is coded with the dangerous message that Jews are no longer committed to the great humanitarian revolution and the dream of a better world. That they would rather cling to a narrow identity and a narrow territory than melt into a borderless brotherhood of man.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/americas-enemies-are-calling-obamas-bluff/ Obama, Kerry and Hagel thought that they had a plan for putting North Korea back in the box. North Korea had conducted a nuclear test in February, violating once again the various understandings that had been worked out. But agreements and understandings, written or oral, had never meant much to the repressive regime which […]