RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/
The S&P 500 Index closed at 805.22 the day Barack Obama was inaugurated as President. On Friday the Index closed at 1836.25, for a gain of 128% over the past five years, reflecting an annual compounded gain of 18%. Why, then, do so many, including me, feel his policies are bad for the economic well-being of the country?

Over the same time frame – the five years of the Obama Administration – the prices of other asset classes rose as well. Gold (a harbinger of concern) is up 55%, crude oil (which we have in abundance) has risen 164% and copper has doubled. The CBOE Index has more than doubled. Corporate bonds have done exceptionally well, with the yield on High Yield bonds being roughly one third what they were on January 20, 2009. Somewhat contradictorily, the yields on Treasury Bills are half of what they were when Mr. Obama took the oath of office in January 2008. The principal culprit for the rise in asset prices has been interest rates that have been kept exceptionally low by an accommodative Federal Reserve. The consequence is a schizophrenic market, with a mixture of worry and speculation manifested in the rise in the prices of stocks, high yield bonds, gold and oil, while risk aversion is also very much alive, reflected in the exceptionally low yields on short term Treasury Bills.

We all know, of course, that the economic recovery has been feeble and that federal debt is considerably higher than it was five years ago – $5 trillion (or 30%) more today than it was at the end of fiscal 2009. The biggest problem for the economy has been a lack of jobs. While the stated unemployment rate has declined, the more meaningful number, as it actually reflects people working, is the labor participation rate, which has declined from 65.7% in January 2009 to 63% in January 2014, according to the BLS. Each one percent reflects about 1.5 million workers. Average incomes are lower than they were before the recession began. Total employment, as mentioned above, has declined, and income and wealth gaps have widened.

http://americanthinker.com/blog/2014/02/rep_john_conyers_honors_farrakhan_after_denouncing_his_anti-semitism.html
Rep. John Conyers honors Farrakhan after denouncing his anti-Semitism
Thomas Lifson
Rep. John Conyers, one of the founders of the Congressional Black Caucus and widely considered the dean of the African-Americans in Congress, bestowed a great honor on Louis Farrakhan over the weekend, by attending a three hour sermon before a crowd of 18,000 people in Detroit, sitting behind him and thereby implicitly endorsing his hateful message.

Conyers was already well-acquainted with Farrakhan’s hateful messages, having last year publicly condemned him. Caroline May writes in the Daily Caller:

Last May, Conyers attended another Farrakhan speech at the Fellowship Chapel in Detroit where the black nationalist leader said President Obama “surrounded himself with Satan,” talked about “Satanic Jew,” the “Synagogue of Satan,” and the like. Conyers ended up having to condemn his remarks.

“Last Friday, I attended a speech by Minister Louis Farrakhan at Fellowship Chapel in Detroit, Michigan. During this speech, Minister Farrakhan made unacceptable racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic statements, which I condemn in the strongest possible terms,” Conyers said at the time, adding that he believed the Nation of Islam Leader would be focused on Detroit revitalization efforts.

“The fact that Minister Farrakhan has engaged in important charitable work aimed at expanding economic opportunities for underserved communities does not excuse these statements,” he added. “I sincerely offer my apologies to my constituents and others who also may have been offended by the minister’s words.”

But hey, what’s a little Jew-hatred between friends? All is forgiven, to the extent that Conyers was willing to be pictured seated behind Farrakhan as he unleashed his message, less than a year later.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303880604579405450058012742#printMode

John Dingell announced on Monday that he plans to retire from the House of Representatives at the end of this Congress, and his initial parting shot came with unusual ill-grace. “I find serving in the House to be obnoxious,” the 87-year-old told the Detroit News. “It’s become very hard because of the acrimony and bitterness, both in Congress and in the streets.”

The Democrat from southeastern Michigan was first elected in 1955 and never served in the minority until after the GOP sweep of 1994. He was among those who, Congress after Congress, steadily built the modern administrative state with its vast powers to redistribute income and regulate to punish or reward companies.

In his political heyday as Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee in the 1980s, Mr. Dingell liked to boast that his writ extended to every corner of the American economy. He wasn’t far off. Yet when all economic and cultural questions become political, is it any wonder that politics becomes more acrimonious?

Mr. Dingell may have intended his “obnoxious” barb at the tea party and Americans angry with Washington, but most of those people don’t know how to maneuver through the corridors of power. They can’t afford to hire someone from “the Dingell bar,” the name adopted with an almost civic pride by the Washington lawyers who were well paid for representing businesses caught in the Dingell investigative cross-hairs. Many were his former staffers.

The “Dingell method,” another phrase from the era, was to conduct an investigation, selectively leak what his staff found to a newspaper and TV network (double the media points), then haul the poor business targets for a public grilling before the cameras. The journalists would win prizes for the appearance of enterprise. The CEOs would be advised by the Dingell bar to be obsequious and remorseful whether guilty or not. The acrimony was one-sided.

News from the Middle East is full of the threat of Arab revolts “springing” up in Jordan and challenging the rule of King Abdullah II, son of the late King Hussein. The throne in Amman is depicted as the “ancient” Hashemite Dynasty of Jordan. It’s a royal historical scam. There has never, repeat never, been an ancient Hashemite legacy in Palestine, unless 1922 is “ancient” history.

Abdullah I (left), King of Jordan and (right) his brother Feisal 1 of Iraq.

That year the British deeded 82% of Mandated Palestine to the Arabs. King Feisal got Iraq and his kid brother Abdullah Senior (great-grandpa to the present Abdullah) had to be mollified so they gave him Trans Jordan. He was assassinated and his grandson King Hussein, known as “Al-Malik Al-Insan (“The Humane King”), succeeded his father who was Talal the insane, who ruled only for a few months.

Again, check out the family tree which derails the spin of the ancient Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Please note that the family tree is detailed in small print in Arabic, but the English translation has been removed. The Hashemite clan ruled over parts of the Hijaz region of Arabia from 967 to 1925 in unbroken succession. Moreover, the late King Hussein’s branch of the Hashemite family ruled the holy city of Mecca from 1201 until 1925. When Abdullah (the First) took over Jordan, the local nomadic Arab population was totally indifferent. Calvin Coolidge could have been made king and it would not have created much of a stir.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-four-great-waves-of-defense-neglect#ixzz2uQVGZRPI

If an additional $50 billion a year seems like a lot, how much would be the cost to the United States if adversarial nations continue to chip away at the free world until America finds itself either isolated or impotent to effect a reversal as it faces rogue terrorist states armed with the most deadly of weapons?

America’s fourth wave of neglect of its military since the end of World War II may have disastrous geostrategic consequences.

While Congress has passed a temporary slowdown in the decline in American defense spending with a two-year budget framework, the Ryan-Murray budget agreement, which restores $32 billion to the Department of Defense, the projected defense resources available for the next eight years will not allow the United States to protect its own security, let alone that of its allies.

Taken together, as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned[1], previous and projected cuts to military budgets from 2009-2023 threaten dangerously to undermine the stability required for both economic prosperity and relative peace among the world’s major military powers, as well as America’s global standing.

One of the nation’s top defense analysts sums it up: “The reality is, for all its promise, the Ryan-Murray budget agreement still only addresses less than 7 percent of the defense sequester. Much more work needs to be done to lift the specter of sequestration once and for all …”[2].
THE FIRST WAVE OF NEGLECT, 1945-1950

After World War II, U.S. security suffered. The decline in defense spending after 1945 was large, $90 billion down to $14 billion at the beginning of the first year after the war’s end (FY1947 or July 1, 1946). With the end of World War II, support for a strong US military was not a sure thing.

While the Marshall Plan, or European Economic Recovery Plan, did stop a significant portion of the planned expansion of the Soviets into Europe[3], these efforts consisted primarily of significant American economic assistance and the transfer of surplus military equipment to designated countries, with some American personnel transferred for training purposes as well – but without the deployment of American soldiers[4].

Despite the success of the Marshall Plan, however, serious security threats remained in the post-WWII period. The communists threatened to come to power in Turkey and Greece and succeeded in taking power in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 — a move, it was feared, that would imperil the freedom of other states of Europe.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obama-silences-complaining-employers-with-irs

President Barack Obama is using the IRS to silence employers unhappy about Obamacare.

That’s the hidden purpose behind the employer mandate delay announced on Feb. 10. The administration released 227 pages of mind-numbing regulations ridiculously billed as making “the compliance process simpler and easier” for employers. Hidden in the gobbledygook (on pages 125-126) is a requirement that employers sign a statement to the IRS – meaning under penalty of perjury – claiming they have not reduced the number of employees or cut hours to shield themselves from the costs of Obamacare.

The administration called it a mandate delay. Nonsense. The delay applies only to a minuscule fraction of midsize employers (50-99 full-time workers) who currently don’t provide coverage. They’re mostly in retail and hospitality, and they will be allowed to continue not offering it. Their workers (about 1.9 million) plus dependents will either stay uninsured or sign up with Obamacare. The administration is hoping for the latter.

But nine out of every 10 midsize employers already provide coverage, and for them, last Monday’s announcement was about hush money, not delay. They are required to continue providing coverage, and worse, most will have to switch to the costlier Obamacare package of benefits because that’s the only plan for sale. State insurance regulators and insurance companies have already said “no” to renewing noncompliant plans.

The only thing these employers get from last week’s rule change is a “stop complaining” bribe. The Affordable Care Act says employers have to pay a whopping $3,000 each time a worker goes onto the Obama exchanges and gets a taxpayer-subsidized plan. Now the administration is offering to waive that penalty. Employers who want this deal must attest to the IRS that they haven’t laid off workers or cut hours to squeeze under the 99-worker threshold.

King Abdullah of Jordan is displaying discernible signs of panic over the future of his kingdom. Dismissing any notion that it might become an “alternative homeland” for Palestinians, he recently declared to high Jordanian officials: “Jordan is Jordan and Palestine is Palestine and nothing but that, not in the past or the future.”

According to Arutz Sheva (February 24), the Jordanian state news agency Petra reported that in a meeting with his parliamentary leaders the king warned of “talk about the so-called alternative homeland” for Palestinians. “This, God willing, will be the last time we talk about this subject.” There is, apparently, increasing apprehension in Amman lest Secretary of State Kerry’s proposed framework agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority might implicate Jordan. The king is worried that Jordan would be required to accept even more West Bank Palestinians than it already has (now comprising a majority of the population). He is hopeful that any peace agreement will include the transfer of Palestinians from Jordan to the new Palestinian state.

The first indication of concern was back in 2007 with the revocation of Jordanian citizenship of thousands of Palestinians, who were declared to be “stateless refugees.” (Imagine the international outcry if Israel acted similarly toward its own Palestinian citizens.) Further revealing of their precarious status in the Hashemite kingdom, some 340,000 Palestinians are still confined in Jordanian refugee camps.

The king has reason to be worried lest Jordan might become the State of Palestine. History reveals why. Back in 1920, when the League of Nations Mandate to govern Palestine was bestowed upon Great Britain, it cited “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and the legitimacy of grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.” Jews were granted the right of settlement throughout “Palestine,” comprising the land east and west of the Jordan River.

Great Britain, however, retained the right to “postpone” or “withhold” Jewish settlement east of the Jordan. Two years later, with the creation of Transjordan by the British to reward Prince Abdullah of Arabia for his wartime cooperation, Jewish settlement was restricted to the land – all of it – west of the Jordan. That right has never been rescinded. It includes Hebron no less than Tel Aviv.

So it is that Jordanian Palestinians are already at home, east of the Jordan River, which comprises two-thirds of Mandatory Palestine. Surely the resistance of Hashemite monarchs, backed by Bedouin tribes, should not be permitted by the international community to impede Palestinian statehood within the borders of their own national home according to international law.

Jews of European origin tend to think of their roots in the “old country”—if they think of them at all—with nostalgia for a sweet bygone era of people speaking in cutesy Yiddish, wandering around a picturesquely poverty-stricken farming village the way the characters do in Fiddler in the Roof, eating various smoked meats. In fact, the world of 19th-century and 20th-century Jewry in Europe was an extraordinarily complicated, jangly, emotionally fraught, tragic, and soon-to-be-tragic-on-an-unimaginable-scale place and moment in time. This was a historical moment during which a beleaguered, tormented, bedraggled people with no social capital but their connection to an ancient peoplehood and faith made their mark on the world in an almost unimaginably bold cultural ferment.

This hit home, and hard, for me last night in the concert hall at the Kennedy Center, when the remarkable non-profit group Pro Musica Hebraica presented a most unusual evening. The sole performer was Evgeny Kissin, the 42-year-old Jew born in Soviet Russia universally considered one of the greatest living pianists. Kissin played pieces by three almost entirely forgotten Russian-Jewish composers—Mikhail Milner (1886-1953), Alexander Veprik (1899-1958), and Alexander Krein (1881-1953)—as well as a sonata by the far-better known Swiss-born Jew Ernest Bloch (who spent his adult life in the United States and died in Portland in 1959).

That Kissin played magnificently wasn’t surprising. What was surprising was this: Kissin paused twice to recite, entirely from memory and in Yiddish, 11 poems, many of them lengthy—a set by the original “Jewish intellectual,” I.L. Peretz, and the other set by the great modern Hebraist Haim Bialik (who, I only learned last night, also wrote in Yiddish). In a demonstration of the fact that a showman is a showman no matter the medium, Kissin declaimed them in a deep, rich voice with the plummy fervor of a Thomashefsky.

Israel, needless to say, is not an apartheid state. But—in a distinctly Jewish way—it is a state apart.

Just in case the anti-Israel calendar wasn’t crowded enough, “Israel Apartheid Week” began on Monday. On university campuses and at sit-ins in North America and Europe, activists have been showcasing the alleged brutality of Israel toward the Palestinians, persuading the persuadable to connect the Jewish state with the despised whites-only regime of South Africa, and mobilizing support for the “Boycott, Divest, Sanction” campaign that is aimed at turning Israel into an international pariah.

At the University of Toronto, where the event had its genesis in 2005, this week’s attendees are being treated to such elegant nuggets as “Globally Resisting Settler Colonial States through Campaigns & Solidarity,” “Pinkwashing, Homonationalism & Love under the Time of Apartheid,” and, my personal favorite, “Rethinking the Syrian Golan in the Context of Apartheid.” (At this point in their civil war, not even the Syrians know who controls the Syrian side of the Golan.) A few movies and other cultural events make brief nods to actual Palestinians, but for the most part the focus falls relentlessly on the state of Israel and its crimes.

When it began in 2005, the event was simply another among the many campus protests associated with the American war in Iraq and Israel’s supposedly disproportionate measures of self-defense during the second intifada: some flag-waving, some posters, some quaint 60s-style chants. But even as the intifada tapered out, Israel Apartheid Week took off, quickly spreading beyond North American university campuses to cities around the world. Disheveled protest gave way to meticulously planned programs featuring anti-imperialist celebrity speakers and lurid open-to-the-public exhibits of alleged Israeli war crimes. Over the years, studiously avoiding any analysis of the actual dynamics of life in Israel or the territories, the event has stayed on message: Israel treats the Palestinians the way apartheid South Africa treated blacks, forcing them into the equivalent of Bantustans and brutally depriving them of all political and social rights. To judge by recent endorsements garnered from movie actors and pop stars, always a bellwether of politically correct opinion, the movement might be gaining strength.

Which means that it has now, alas, become a dreary necessity to respond to the substance of the allegation. Is there any truth at all to the equation of Israel with South Africa?

“”….This is the creed that I seek to promulgate both now, and forever. The Jewish people are free — and they of right ought to be free. No journalist, academic, professor, statesman, student, or governmental organization can ever take that right away. It is the spirit of that day which resides in me. It is the song that they sung that I will never cease to sing. And I will work to ensure that that song comes to reside throughout all the earth, eternally….”
When addressing contentions that run counter to such normative values as justice, morality, and truth, I believe it is my academic professional duty to analyze the details of the argument in question and illustrate to my audience why such contentions are sub-par, nefarious, and worthy of reproach.

Admittedly, it is difficult to analyze such pieces from a purely academic standpoint when invectives are hurled at me personally — not in a spirit of academic debate, but rather, to malign and denigrate my personal character. Indeed, I am tempted to speak out in an equally hostile tone against those who would attack me in a pejorative manner. However I will attempt to refrain from doing so here as it is my moral duty to be civil both to my enemies and to my friends, and because I do not believe it to be fitting to stoop down to the level of disrespectful persons. It is in that spirit of civility that I write this piece.

On February 22, a gentleman by the name of Richard Silverstein took considerable issue with an article I wrote in the The Times of Israel about the contentions of one Judith Butler, professor at the University of California, Berkley. I find Butler’s analysis regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict lamentably disagreeable.

Silverstein did not point out any possible faulty premises in my column. He did not question the evidence I presented. He did not find I was lacking in my analysis. Instead, to illustrate his (ahem) intellectual prowess, he shared a Facebook status linking to my column and in his commentary, wrote: “They finally did it: found a Negro Zionist: Uncle Tom is dancin’ for joy!”