The House Ways and Means Committee says that, despite the IRS’s promises to destroy the donor lists it demanded from tea-party and other conservative groups, it has discovered those lists in the case files it has reviewed in the course of its investigation into the targeting scandal. A Ways and Means Committee source tells […]
http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/novelists-view-world/2013/sep/18/engelhards-guide-writing-world-gone-berserk/ NEW YORK, September 18, 2013 — Tips on writing, from any writer, should be ignored. But here we go anyway because the world needs you. 1. Keep it simple. SEE RELATED: ENGELHARD: Salinger is back and PBS has got him 2. Write for yourself. If you do not trust yourself, write for your best […]
www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/article3872885.ece Across the Middle East today there is a sourness and a sense of abandonment because the old order has been broken and not replaced. It is Israel that feels the disappointment most strongly: the United States, a staunch protector since 1948, seems to be slipping away in its clumsy rush to disengage from the […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/358665/print
There is little left to be written about the discordant integration of reality television and The Gong Show that President Obama, Secretary of State Kerry, and their collaborators produced over the past three weeks over Syria. Like an unpredictably bouncing American football, this story moved in diagonals and backward and forward until the target became peacemaker, the villain the benefactor, and the means to achieve the end shrank “unbelievably” and then vanished, as the wrongdoer surrendered the forbidden weapons he claimed not to have to those who denied he had used them and had probably supplied them in the first place. And then, the presidential entourage launched a Twitter and spin offensive vastly more complicated than anything that the commander-in-chief, after he abdicated that role to the Congress, had contemplated asking, unsuccessfully, for the Congress, which had no constitutional standing to do anything of the kind, to authorize.
Even if history were ransacked to produce a greater sequence of fiascos in a place more frequently occupied by effective foreign- and security-policy specialists, it could not do so, and we would have to plunge deep into comic fiction to find a precedent. Weekly Standard editor William Kristol was on the right track when he linked his comments on Syria to a video of “the other Marx,” the one with the silent brother. (It is time for Chico to complain about “the sanity clause,” as he did in A Night at the Opera.) It has come to this.
Lamentations and fault-finding have had a well-deserved innings, but I am scouring these events for something positive. It seems that this process makes it less likely that embattled Syrian president Bashar Assad will revert to this sort of weapon again. He may have come fairly close to a tiny retaliation from the United States, and in the event that he gasses his own civilian population again, there is a respectable chance that Obama will not abdicate as commander-in-chief; that all the imbeciles in Congress who lined up at television and broadcasting studios like food-stamp applicants to say that they did “not want to go to war” — as if that were what launching a couple of cruise missiles at no risk to those who fire them actually involved — will not obstruct him; and that the commander-in-chief will actually command that something proportionate and effective be done to punish what his secretary of state has already emptied his rhetorical clip describing as, inter alia, “a moral obscenity,” and so forth.
In that sense, enlisting the Russians, even in this charade of a contrived handover (or hand-back) of chemicals of potential mass murder, is probably a more effective deterrence to recidivism by Assad than the pathetic tokenism that the commander-in-chief was beseeching the reluctant fantasist warriors in the Congress to approve would have been. And having conferred, preposterously, the role of peacemaking deus ex machina on Vladimir Putin, the administration has endowed the Kremlin with a vested interest not to allow itself to be made a fool of by its protégé. Assad could probably reasonably infer that Putin, given his nostalgic KGB-alumnus ethos, might not be as philosophical about appearing to be an asinine stooge to the whole astonished world, as President Obama has, and that the consequences of casting Putin as one could be hazardous to Assad’s health. Putin’s former oligarchic partners in the pillaging of Mother Russia regularly come to a violent end, in the highest tradition of almost all the old Bolsheviks (except Stalin, of course, ex officio as executioner). And even the Russian leader’s frequent lapses into professed Christian religiosity for the benefit of gullible Americans (such as George W. Bush) do not mean that he would, if provoked, scruple to assist Assad into the Great Beyond so many of the Syrian president’s co-religionists claim to crave.
And there are some positive aspects to Putin’s op-ed piece in the New York Times on September 9. First, I must strenuously congratulate the Times on obtaining and running the piece; it is very newsworthy and interesting and every newspaper or other media outlet in the world would be happy to run anything by the president of Russia in such circumstances. The incompleteness of my editorial admiration of the Times is well known to anyone who cursorily looks at what I write about current events, but the complaints directed against it on this subject are just priggery and humbug.
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4152/muslim_veil_ruling_nonsense_upon_stilts That’s Jeremy Bentham’s line. And it’s a good one. But what was an English court thinking of in its ruling over the Muslim niqab? Did English law from Magna Carta die today? The English utilitarian political philosopher Jeremy Bentham famously (and mischievously) described natural law related predispositions towards societal governance as “nonsense upon stilts”. […]
Congregation Berith Sholom of Troy, NY, the Empire State’s oldest continually occupied synagogue. Credit: Paul Foer. http://jewishvoiceny.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=5290:travel-to-upstate-ny-the-oldest-synagogue-in-the-state-awaits-you&catid=117:travel&Itemid=30 The city of Troy, NY (population 50,129), is just a few miles upriver from the state capital of Albany and is known as the birthplace of Sam Wilson, a meatpacker on whom the iconic image of “Uncle Sam” […]
http://pjmedia.com/blog/pjm-exclusive-watching-syrias-civil-war-from-the-israeli-border/ Last week I took the opportunity to travel to the Golan Heights with Israeli strategic intelligence analyst Avi Melamed [1] (listen to my podcast with Avi [2] from last week) to get an up-close view of the Syrian civil war from the Israel/Syria border in the Golan. There were only modest security concerns, although mortars and […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/fact-fiction-faith-and-fighting-terror-the-need-for-knowledge?f=puball “You’ll fold like a bad soufflé,” sharia scholar Stephen Coughlin wittily analogized in discussing the “main battle” by Islamists to undermine an enemy “in the preparation stage” before an attack. Coughlin was speaking in the Canon House Office Building at the panel “What Has Gone Wrong with American Mideast Policy?” hosted by the Endowment […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obamacare-will-question-your-sex-life
Be careful about sharing your medical secrets with Uncle Sam.
Are you sexually active? If so, with one partner, multiple partners or same-sex partners?”
Be ready to answer those questions and more the next time you go to the doctor, whether it’s the dermatologist or the cardiologist and no matter if the questions are unrelated to why you’re seeking medical help. And you can thank the Obama health law.
“This is nasty business,” says New York cardiologist Dr. Adam Budzikowski. He called the sex questions “insensitive, stupid and very intrusive.” He couldn’t think of an occasion when a cardiologist would need such information – but he knows he’ll be pushed to ask for it.
The president’s “reforms” aim to turn doctors into government agents, pressuring them financially to ask questions they consider inappropriate and unnecessary, and to violate their Hippocratic Oath to keep patients’ records confidential.
Embarrassing though it may be, you confide things to a doctor you wouldn’t tell anyone else. But this is entirely different.
Doctors and hospitals who don’t comply with the federal government’s electronic-health-records requirements forgo incentive payments now; starting in 2015, they’ll face financial penalties from Medicare and Medicaid. The Department of Health and Human Services has already paid out over $12.7 billion for these incentives.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/why-syrias-chemical-weapons-agreement-will-succeed
Much of the current debate on Syria centers on whether Assad will in fact give up his chemical weapons. Not to worry. The chemical weapons agreement will be a resounding success.
This is not because all or most of the weapons themselves will be found and destroyed. The odds are high that critics are right in suspecting Assad will lead inspectors on a dance similar to that pioneered by Saddam Hussein. It will be a success because it is in the interest of all parties to the agreement to pretend that it is. Obviously it is in Russia’s interest, since Putin presides over the entire scheme, at the center of the world stage like Jimmy Carter who knocked heads together to cobble together the Camp David agreement. It is in Assad’s interest to appear compliant because while the U.S. focuses on chemical weapons, he is free to pursue the war (with growing Iranian help on the ground) by conventional means.
Now that Assad is signing the Chemical Weapons Convention, there is a new party to the agreement, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). The OPCW is charged with implementing the Convention and its Executive Council will have its own interests in claiming that everything possible is being done. (There seems to be general agreement that it is virtually impossible for Syrian stockpiles to be destroyed by the middle of 2014, as the agreement stipulates.) Investigative journalist Claudia Rosett points out that Iran, Assad’s determined ally, holds a seat on the Executive Council and on all three of its main subsidiary bodies and Iranians are on the staff of the OPCW. While the OPCW is not part of the UN, Rosett notes drily that it replicates many of that body’s failings.
Above all, it is in the interests of the Obama administration, the supposed monitor of plain dealing – “this is not a game,” says Secretary Kerry sternly – to claim the agreement is working. Obama declares “If diplomacy fails the United States and the international community must be prepared to act.” But Putin has already declared force is off the table at the UN even if Syria fails to comply so the “international community” won’t be acting. (Even Obama’s chief ally Francois Hollande now talks of “sanctions” if Syria fails to comply.) And the last thing Obama wants to do is to go back to Congress for authorization to strike without UN backing. Putin rescued him at the last moment from humiliating defeat in the House of Representatives and perhaps in the Senate as well. And now that Obama has gone to Congress, to strike without its authorization is even more problematic.
