RUTHFULLY YOURS

“~Laura Rosen Cohen spent the eleventh hour with the General Wingate Branch 256 of the Royal Canadian Legion. If you don’t know who Orde Wingate was, you should: he was a brilliant (if personally eccentric) military commander during the Second World War, and a great friend to the Jews. (His website is not terribly user-friendly, but do persevere.) The ceremony in Toronto was as you’d expect – “O Canada”, “God Save The Queen”, “The Last Post” – but this part of Laura’s report saddened me and would have dismayed Wingate:

The children at the Jewish day school had just finished their own school ceremony.Unfortunately, but understandably there were security concerns that prevented them from participating in the outdoor ceremony. Parents were apprehensive. So this makes me angry and sad as well. Jewish schoolchildren in Canada cannot participate in a public, outdoor ceremony to honour veterans because-well, don’t we all know because why?

Every single child and every single staff member in that building had a poppy on. Every. Single. One.

“Don’t we all know why?” asks Laura. Some do, some don’t, and far too many, like Avi Benlolo, the head of Toronto’s Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre, can’t even bring themselves to say the word.

So much of Jewish life in Britain and Europe has now been forced indoors, out of sight, behind security fences. How depressing to see the same phenomenon taking root in Toronto. So Canadian schoolchildren who would have loved to participate in the Remembrance Day observances are unable to, while, elsewhere in Ontario, schoolchildren who are free to participate in the ceremonies have no interest in doing so.”

It is a mystery to me why certain things catch metaphorical fire while others don’t. Making the promotional rounds for my new book The [Un]documented Mark Steyn, I swung by The Steve Malzberg Show today for two quick segments. In the first, I talked about Obama’s ultimatum to Congress to pass “comprehensive immigration reform” in the lame-duck session before all the newly elected chaps arrive in January. And I said that I thought it was constitutionally unseemly for the President to demand major transformative legislation from a bunch of representatives and senators who no longer enjoy the confidence of the people and are on their way out the door.

I would have thought that might have made for an interesting soundbite hither and yon. But in the second segment with Steve I made some entirely unexceptional remarks responding to Erin Burnett’s drearily predictable reaction to Ben Stein’s equally unexceptional remarks on race, and that’s what seems to have tickled everybody’s controversy meter. Here’s what I said:

The reaction of CNN to what Ben Stein said to you is fascinating, because that is the characteristically stupid parameters in which we are allowed to talk about race. Eric Holder and everyone is always pawing for national conversations on race, by which they mean people like [CNN host] Erin Burnett get to beat up on anyone who actually says anything honest or truthful or refreshing or anything that does not prostrate itself before the pack of the usual grievance-mongers like the disgusting Al Sharpton and the disgusting Jesse Jackson.

The New York Times wants you to believe Team Clinton considers the midterms a win for her.

In the old Soviet Union, Kremlinologists would read the state party newspaper Pravda not so much for the news it contained, but to glean what the commissars wanted readers to believe the commissars were thinking. The closest we have to that in America is the New York Times. Obviously, it’s not a state organ, and there are many fine journalists there, but it does play a similar role for the Democratic party, often reporting less on what Democrats actually think and more on what Democrats want readers to believe is the current state of Democratic thinking.

Two days after the midterm Democratic Götterdämmerung, Team Clinton let it be known that it thinks the election was good news for it. “Midterms, for Clinton Team, Aren’t All Gloom,” proclaimed the understated headline in the Times.

“A number of advisers saw only upside for Mrs. Clinton in the party’s midterm defeats,” reports Amy Chozick. There’s no mention of any advisers seeing a downside. Indeed, a few sentences later, Chozick tells us there is a “consensus . . . among those close to Mrs. Clinton that it is time to accelerate her schedule.”

“In many ways,” Chozick continues, “Tuesday’s election results clear a path for Mrs. Clinton. The lopsided outcome and conservative tilt makes it less likely she would face an insurgent challenger from the left.”

Maybe it’s true that that there is a silver lining for Hillary Clinton in the shellacking her party took last week. Maybe her ineffective stumping for Democrats means nothing. Maybe a 17-percentage-point loss for putative Clinton Democrat Mark Pryor in Clinton’s home base of Arkansas is a blessing in deep, deep, deep disguise. Maybe the staggering indifference of the Democratic coalition of young people and minorities on display last week is proof that they are really just husbanding their voting energies for 2016. And maybe the fact that the “war on women” shtick proved as stale as a 1980s sitcom catchphrase is irrelevant for a candidate so invested in her gender.

But the notion that this monumental rebuke of Clinton’s party, and the administration she served in, amounts to an unambiguous Clinton win invites many to ask, “What you talkin’ ’bout, Hillary?”

Post-election analysis falls somewhere between amusing and clueless.

In the amusing camp are Democratic strategists who intone that more Democrats would have won if only more people had voted. The gods surely blush with envy.
And of course, there’s the conventional wisdom that Democrats always suffer in midterms because they lack “intensity,” meaning they don’t care, and that presidents are always unpopular in their sixth year in office.

So much for insight.

Next we visit the clueless camp where professional pundits gather. The consensus here is that the election wasn’t a mandate for Republicans to overhaul government. I confess that I was one of these, but (mark your calendars) I was wrong. There is a difference between warning victors against the end-zone prance, as many of us wrote , and denying that Republicans were hired to do a job.
There’s also no denying that the midterms were a referendum on President Obama. The president prefers to say they were a referendum on his policies, which is perhaps an easier pill to swallow. But Obama is his policies, which happen to rub many Republicans (and at least a few Democrats) the wrong way.

Moreover, people don’t like being insulted and misled, as many feel they have been by this administration. This is not just a feeling but a demonstrable fact, especially vis-a-vis the Affordable Care Act. And it’s not just the far-right fringe who object to the strategic misrepresentations along the way.

These obfuscations include telling the American people that they could keep the insurance they had if they liked it and also writing the law in such a way that the ACA’s mandate to purchase government-approved insurance was not a “tax,” despite the Internal Revenue Service’s role in policing its compliance.

The keep-your-insurance ruse is history now, but the memory still lingers in the minds of voters, who, contrary to what the Obama White House thinks, are not stupid. There’s no dishonor — and it certainly isn’t stupid — to not understand the ACA. The then-Democratic-controlled Congress that passed the thing didn’t even understand it. I’d wager that most still don’t.

Washington, as usual, is marveling at itself — focused on the impact of the GOP wave that has given Republicans control of the U.S. Senate and an expanded majority in the House.

But the real story is the GOP tsunami in the states that has given Republicans greater control of state governments than at any time in almost a century.

While President Obama has downplayed Tuesday’s Senate results, arguing that Democrats were fighting on GOP ground, Republicans also picked up governorships from Democrats in liberal strongholds like Massachusetts, Maryland and Illinois, as well as in Arkansas. Result? The number of GOP governors has risen from 21 to 31 since Obama took office (32 if Gov. Sean Parnell holds on in Alaska) — just short of the all-time high of 34 Republican governors in the 1920s.

Voters have also given those governors Republican legislatures to enact their agendas. When Obama first took office, Republicans held just 3,220 state legislative seats. After Tuesday’s vote, the number stands at 4,111 — a net gain of nearly 900 seats on Obama’s watch. Thanks to the 291 state legislative seats Republicans added in 61 chambers across the country last week, there are now more Republican state legislators than at any time since 1920.

Put another way: In 2008, the GOP controlled just 36 state legislative chambers. It soon will control 69 — and voters have given the GOP total control of state government in nearly half the country. In 2008, Republicans held both the legislature and governors’ mansion in just eight states. Today, the number is 24. By contrast, Democrats now control both the legislature and governor’s office in just seven states, down from 15 before the 2014 election. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, that is the lowest number of states Democrats have controlled since 1860.

The GOP gained control of the Senate Tuesday night, taking hold of the legislative agenda in that chamber. Here are three of the policies Republicans are likely to tackle as they take the reins in January 2015. (Julie Percha/The Washington Post)

This is more than an anti-Obama swing of the political pendulum. A conservative revolution has been taking place in the American heartland. And that revolution will have lasting consequences in a number of areas.

Since 2010, when the Democrats lost their majority in the House and their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, President Obama’s ability to pursue legislative changes has ground to a halt. With the Republicans taking control of the Senate in January, we can expect to see many more headlines blaring that the “do-nothing Congress” has passed the fewest laws in decades. But that gridlock hasn’t halted the president’s plans to implement his policies. In fact, he claims it has strengthened his power to act alone — if Congress won’t act, he can, and will.

President Obama routinely cites Congress’s obstinacy regarding his agenda as justification for a series of executive actions that suspend, waive, and even rewrite statutes. His frustration is understandable, but his response is not justifiable. Brazenly maneuvering around the lawmaking function of Congress is an affront to the constitutional order.

There is nothing new about congressional gridlock. It is perhaps worse than ever today, but partisan impasses are not novel. There is also nothing new about presidents’ creatively reinterpreting the law in order to justify executive policies. What is new is the relationship between these two factors — invoking gridlock as a justification for redefining executive authority. This disruptive constitutional philosophy poses a threat to our separation of powers. It establishes a precedent for this and future presidents to permanently blur the lines between the executive and legislative prerogatives.

Generally, when a president suffers a congressional setback, he has two choices: advance a more moderate compromise proposal that can get past the political roadblock, or table the issue. Yet, since 2010, the president has chosen a third path: act as if Congress supported him, and proceed with his agenda unilaterally. He has done this with his unconstitutional recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, his unilateral modifications to the Affordable Care Act, his unprecedented expansion of immigration authority via Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and many other actions.

Chelsea Clinton’s Idea of Rebelling Against Her Parents: Getting a Private Sector Job By Bryan Preston

This gushing, cringeworthy conversation — it’s not an interview — between Katie Couric and Chelsea Clinton is hard to watch:

Couric asks Chelsea, “Was it hard growing up the child of famous and rich people, who happened to control the country for 8 years?”

Chelsea, displaying no imagination whatsoever, cannot even envision life being any other way. Cannot conceive of such a thing.

But she did rebel against her presidential parents.

“I certainly spent my 20s rebelling, for me. Like, working in the private sector and trying really hard to care about things that my parents didn’t care about,” Chelsea said.

Chelsea Clinton just admitted that her parents really don’t care about the private sector. She also adds that working in the private sector taught her things that she did not learn around the Clinton dinner table.

We continue.

“But ultimately, I am my parents’ daughter and ultimately cared most about what they cared most about.”

Write your own jokes.

As the country’s focus has pivoted from Ebola to the midterm election, immigration and Iran, the elusive Ebola czar surfaced to say we haven’t seen the last case of the dreaded virus in the U.S.

Last month, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the administration hadn’t ruled out letting Ron Klain show his face to the media.

Earnest stressed that being the response coordinator was a behind-the-scenes job, “and that the need for him to play that coordinating role would limit his ability to make a large number of public appearances.”

Today, Klain appeared on MSNBC to stress “we’re gonna see occasional additional cases of Ebola in our country.”

“But today’s release of Dr. Spencer is a milestone,” the Ebola czar said of the New York doctor who went bowling the night before being admitted to the hospital. “It’s a milestone, obviously, in his treatment. It’s a milestone in showing that our strategy of identifying, isolating, and treating Ebola patients can be successful. It’s a milestone because it’s the first time a hospital other than one of our three nationally specialized centers has successfully treated an Ebola patient. And so, we owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Dr. Spencer, who’s a hero, and to the team at Bellevue, the leadership in New York City for delivering this success today.”

Klain said “we’ve seen an improvement in all aspects of our response” since the death of Thomas Eric Duncan in Dallas.

“We’ve increased our ability to identify risky cases, identify potential cases of Ebola to isolate them. And then we’ve improved our readiness in the health care system to treat those patients and to get them the recovery,” he said.

The czar said the states have the power to follow or reject federal quarantine guidelines, but made clear he disagreed with the quarantine of nurse Kaci Hickox.

The left isn’t known for being a good loser. The Democrats had counted on women to be their ace in the hole in the election. Now lefty media outlets are lashing out at women.

“White women didn’t just fail Wendy Davis — they failed the rest of Texas,” Salon bellows. That would be the rest of Texas which also voted against Davis. “Married white women… failed Wendy Davis,” another lefty site declares.

It never occurs to the left that Wendy Davis might have failed white women and that they might have rejected her because she had nothing to actually offer them.

In the left’s warped tyranny of ideology, their politicians don’t fail the people. The people fail them. Obama and Davis are always right. It’s up to the people to prove that they’re good enough for a Barack Obama or a Wendy Davis. If they are, the media will pat them on the head for voting the right way. If they aren’t, they’ll be blamed for thinking the wrong way and failing their rightful rulers.

East German authorities had warned that the government had “lost confidence in the people”. Now that white voters have lost confidence in the Democratic Party, the Party is announcing that they failed it.

The left doesn’t listen to people. It tells them what to think. If they don’t agree, then they have failed it.

White women are the latest punching bag for the Democratic Party’s humiliating defeat even though the previous election should have been a warning sign that even the white voters that the left treats as its property were drifting away. Romney had won white women in every age group and the Jewish vote had dropped. If the Dems couldn’t rely on the friendlier portions of the white vote, they were in trouble.

White voters felt that Obama and his party had failed them. Exit polls showed no confidence in the future. Instead of trying to connect with them, the Democratic Party doubled down on identity politics sloganeering. Obama had won anyway which proved that white voters didn’t matter. Not when a sizable turnout and a disproportionate voting tilt by minority voters could politically erase a more moderate tilt among white voters. It didn’t matter if you were losing the white vote by 12 percent if you were winning the black vote by 90 percent. The model had worked for Obama, but it didn’t work for his party.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/the-worlds-first-anti-jihad-cartoonist-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang episode was joined by Bosch Fawstin, the world’s first anti-jihad comic book author and illustrator. He is The Eisner Award nominated cartoonist who is the creator of the new comic book series, The Infidel, Featuring Pigman, the superhero who is waging a new war against Islam.

Bosch discussed his creation, “Pigman,” his childhood growing up as a Muslim, the threat we face in Islam, our leadership’s failure to confront the threat, and much, much more:

Mark Tooley is President of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (www.theird.org) and author of Methodism and Politics in the Twentieth Century. Follow him on Twitter: @markdtooley.

The multimillion dollar American Friends Service Committee, with offices in several dozen U.S. cities and 14 other countries, is the nearly century old political advocacy arm of Quakers in the U.S. Rooted in the Quaker pacifist tradition, AFSC advocates a form of “peace” that has aligned it with countless dubious international causes over the decades, usually anti-American, anti-Western and often anti-Israel.

AFSC touts accommodation of Iran, for example, naturally more concerned about U.S. or Israeli military action than about a nuclear armed Iran. And AFSC endorses Palestinian nationalism in ways that of course demonize Israel while minimizing Palestinian terror.

But AFSC offered a somewhat new twist when recently highlighting a young Palestinian-American activist’s solidarity visit to, and arrest in, racially charged Ferguson, Missouri.

“When Mike Brown was murdered in Ferguson my people in Gaza were being slaughtered by Israel in Operation Protective Edge,” explained Bassem Masri on AFSC’s blog.

“The timing of the two events woke up a lot of people. When Mike was killed, much of the media started demonizing him and the protestors, often the same sources that blamed Palestinians for their own deaths in Gaza. People naturally saw the connections.”

Masri, a self-described “pissed off citizen,” said Americans have long “maligned” the Palestinian struggle for liberation, but at least the people of Ferguson now understand their common struggle.

“On those terrible nights in Ferguson when the police were attacking peaceful civilians with tear gas, Palestinians under Israeli occupation offered advice on how to deal with the effects of the gas,” Masri recounted.

“Facing violence from an occupying force, whether in Palestine or Ferguson, forges a mindset that demands resistance and standing up for one’s community. When the police used military tanks and checkpoints to imprison the residents of Ferguson, I was reminded of life in the West Bank where I saw the Israeli military use the same tactics of repression.”