RUTHFULLY YOURS

The outrage over the kidnapping of nearly 300 schoolgirls by the Nigerian jihadist gang Boko Haram reeks of Western hypocrisy and moral idiocy. Boko Haram has for years been slaughtering Christians – up to 2500 this year alone – and burning churches in a classic Islamic jihad against infidels. These depredations apparently weren’t enough to get the group designated a terrorist organization by Hillary Clinton’s State Department. But this indifference to what under international law is a genocide has been indulged as well by our celebrities and the mainstream media, who rarely mention that the group is specifically targeting Christians, and before the girls were kidnapped displayed little interest in the suffering of those Christians. So why this sudden attention?

The recent burst of self-indulgent selfies tweeted by millions, including celebrities and the First Lady, and the sentimental news coverage all reflect the fashionable and selective obsessions of our political and cultural elite and those who ape their fashions. First there is the need to display what Alan Bloom called “conspicuous compassion” for distant misery and suffering. Especially fashionable are compassion and pity for people in the Third World, the display of what Pascal Bruckner called the “tears of the white man” shed for all those victims of Western crimes like colonialism, imperialism, and global capitalism. Like Veblen’s conspicuous consumption, photogenic public displays of compassion, “outrage,” and “concern” for global suffering function like a designer label, indicating one’s moral superiority and finely calibrated sensitivity to oppression and suffering. Of course, ignored in all this emotional bluster and self-indulgence is any understanding of why this atrocity is happening, or the motives and aims of the perpetrators, information that would be important if we were really serious about doing something about it other than morally preen for the cameras.

Next is the despicable selectivity about which victims deserve our outrage. Why haven’t the thousands of Nigerian Christians already slaughtered by Boko Haram been worthy of this same uproar as the kidnapped schoolgirls? Of course suffering children are always triggers of easy sentiment and emotion – “I want to reach out and save those kids,” Obama said at Steven Spielberg’s house, at the same time he pretty much implied he wasn’t about to actually do anything. But plenty of children have already been raped and killed by Boko Haram, and many more are dying in Syria, Sudan, Egypt, and numerous other venues. Maybe the fact that the Nigerian girls are destined to be slave-wives – as Robert Spencer points out, a practice legitimate under Islamic doctrine and law – fires up leftists, who are always ready to decry a “war on women” and privilege the travails of females over every other kind of oppression and suffering. People who think that a sorority girl who gets drunk at a party and has sex with an equally drunk fraternity brother has been the victim of “sexual assault” are not going to miss this opportunity to highlight the sexist “patriarchy” and the universal rottenness of men.

NEVER AGAIN, AGAIN

Steven Spielberg threw a Holocaust party and everyone, from Samuel L. Jackson to Kim Kardashian, was invited.

The gala evening for his Shoah Foundation began with a few jokes. Conan O’Brien’s, “I called all my Jewish writers into my office and asked them for some Shoah jokes” really killed. Bruce Springsteen played “Dancing in the Dark” whose lyrics “you can’t start a fire without a spark” couldn’t possibly have been more appropriate considering that the literal meaning of Holocaust is “Sacrifice by fire.”

Obama slipped in after his DNC fundraiser with Barbara Streisand and Jeffrey Katzenberg to shake hands with a bunch of studio heads, Jewish and non-Jewish, and accept an award as Ambassador for Humanity. There was no explanation as to what an Ambassador for Humanity does. Maybe he reaches out to space aliens. Or tries to commune with fish.

Last summer, Obama had forced Israel to release the murderer of Isaac Rotenburg, an elderly Holocaust survivor who had escaped a death camp and reached Israel, only to be killed by a member of Palestinian Authority leader Abbas’ Fatah party.

Flanked by Spielberg and Springsteen, Obama told an audience of notables such as Kim Kardashian, Tyler Perry, Tom Cruise, Samuel L. Jackson and Robert Downey Jr. about the importance of Holocaust survivors and how he would like to help the Nigerian girls kidnapped by an Islamic terrorist group that his administration fought to keep off the terrorist list, but he just can’t.

It’s hard to find the time to fight Nigerian Islamic terrorists when you’re so busy forcing Israel to free Islamic terrorists.

Cruise had delivered the introduction to the 2005 event at which Steven Spielberg appointed Bill Clinton as Ambassador for Humanity. Last year George Clooney, currently marrying a woman eager to defend every Muslim thug and terrorist, became Ambassador for Humanity. Before that it was the CEO of Walt Disney, the CEO of Comcast and Spielberg’s pal Jeffrey Katzenberg.

To be appointed Ambassador for Humanity you have to run a Hollywood studio or be a top Democrat. If Hillary Clinton isn’t named Ambassador for Humanity next year, it will only be because the world ended.

There was no word on whether Tony Kushner was in attendance. Kushner, Spielberg’s longtime collaborator, had called the rebirth of Israel a “mistake” and accused Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and museum, of a “Zionist agenda”.

Spielberg had handed over the story of the PLO massacre of Israeli athletes to Kushner who turned it into an indictment of Israel and a defense of the terrorists. Munich was a work of historical revisionism justifying the murder of Jews and demonizing those Jews who fought back from a filmmaker who had built the “serious” phase of his career on exploiting the Holocaust.

Responding to the backlash, Spielberg called critics “right-wing fundamentalists” and said that, “people who are important to me” see the movie correctly, including, “Liberal American Jews.”

Now Spielberg is working on yet another Jewish themed project with Kushner.

Dear Ed,

May I call you Ed? You can certainly call me Roger.

I know you’ve been taking a lot of flak for that Tweet you made the other day — “Gay people were really the ones being persecuted in Hitler’s Germany [1]” — some calling you about as sensitive as Attila the Hun and wondering why NBC Universal would allow such a bizarre personality to represent them in public, sort of like asking Donald Sterling to host their morning show.

And I realize too that you quickly deleted the Tweet after a deluge of responses from normal human beings.

But, even with all that, I just wanted to say thank you, sir, for my family and for myself!

You see you have solved the mystery of why my grandmother’s Uncle Lennie, “the bachelor,” was incinerated at Auschwitz. Unfortunately, his sexual preference did not appear on ancestor.com [2]. But now we know.

It’s clear from your writing that Lennie’s Jewish identity would not have been enough, even though, as I’m sure you are aware as a prestigious political commentator at MSNBC, some recent investigators, including a French priest [3], have asserted that the stratospheric number of Jewish dead could actually be revised upwards.

And then, as you also must know, there are many groups besides Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, among them Poles, Slavs, Serbs, gypsies, Soviet POWs, some leftists (although the Nazis began as a left-wing party), the mentally and physically disabled and, of course, gays. Hitler was, in his way, an equal opportunity genocidal maniac.

Here’s everything you need to know about immigration reform: last year the Obama administration released 36,000 criminal aliens into the United States population. The jailbreak was deliberate and included 193 murderers.

The Center for Immigration Studies obtained the information and released a report documenting the number and nature of the crimes committed by the aliens.

If 36,000 criminal aliens walking around your community wasn’t enough, Obama’s Department of Homeland Security is aiming to make it even easier for aliens to be released from detention. That’s what the groups agitating for immigration reform are demanding. That’s what the groups are likely to get.

The 2013 jailbreak included rapists, kidnappers, arsonists, burglars, sex offenders, and car thieves. That’s merely for 2013.

The criminals that Obama administration policies set free are unlikely ever to be deported. Detained aliens facing deportation are highly unlikely to ever be deported once they are set free into the general American population. They don’t show up for their deportation hearings, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement doesn’t have the manpower or money to hunt down tens of thousands of criminal aliens.

That’s a heaping helping of criminality the Obama administration just introduced into America.

After five years of Obama, it’s clear and undeniable that his presidency repeatedly takes the side of lawless criminals over law-abiding Americans. This is a common philosophy that runs through multiple Obama policies, ranging from attacks on the police, to nominating Debo Adegbile for a top Justice Department post, to failing to prosecute election criminals who supported President Obama, sometimes six times in one election.

Releasing 36,007 alien criminals into America is just the latest example of this philosophy. Never before has America suffered under a president so aligned with the depraved and malignant.

Boko Haram is a violent Salafist group that emerged in predominantly Muslim northeast Nigeria in the early 2000s. (Salafism is a Sunni Muslim reform movement that seeks return to the mores of the first generations of Muslims — the Salafiyya or the companions of Mohammed.)

There are reports that it got seed money from Osama bin Laden, and it has long been known to have al Qaeda ties, but how closely it actually works with al Qaeda — as opposed to loud displays of ideological support — is the subject of some debate in the U.S. government. This debate is reflective of general confusion and incoherence in American counterterrorism policy.

The ideological glue that holds Islamist groups together is Islamic supremacism, which is directly derived from a strict, literal interpretation of Muslim scripture, coupled with a belief that the “golden age” of Islam was the time of the first generations — Mohammed and his immediate companions and descendants — to which Muslims must return if they are ever to overcome the corrupting influence of the West. (Boko Haram actually means “Western education is ‘haram’ or forbidden.”)

Nevertheless, our government adamantly refuses to acknowledge the Islamic doctrinal underpinnings of Islamic supremacism. Consequently, the disconnect: Boko Haram is quite clear that its goal is to impose sharia law and join al Qaeda’s global jihad. Its targets include churches and Western symbols, and its current leader, Abubakar Shekau, is quoted threatening the United States in 2010: “Do not think jihad is over. Rather jihad has just begun. America, die with your fury.” Yet, the Obama administration long refused to designate it as a terrorist organization — at the insistence of the State Department under Hillary Clinton, over the objections of other government agencies. (The State Department finally listed Boko Haram as a terrorist organization after John Kerry took over for Mrs. Clinton.)

Brig. Gen. (ret.) Uzi Eilam is an octogenarian who served as the director general of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission from 1976 until 1985.

Last Friday Eilam gave a head-scratching interview to Yediot Aharonot’s Ronen Bergman in which he claimed that Iran’s nuclear weapons program is a decade from completion. He said it is far from clear that the Iranians even want a nuclear arsenal. He accused Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of cynically exaggerating the threat from Iran in order to strengthen himself politically.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Eilam’s interview was his absolute certainty in his judgment.

Eilam, who hasn’t had any inside knowledge of nuclear issues since 1985, would have us believe that he knows better than active duty Israeli intelligence chiefs and US intelligence directors about the status of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. He even thinks he knows better than the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Israel assesses that Iran already has sufficient quantities of enriched uranium to produce five atomic bombs. As Netanyahu has said, the interim nuclear deal the US and its allies signed with Iran last November only delays Iran’s bomb making capacity by six weeks.

In January, James Clapper, the director of US national intelligence, agreed with Israel’s assessment. In testimony before the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence Clapper said that Iran is already a nuclear breakout state. In his words, “Tehran has made technical progress in a number of areas – including uranium enrichment, nuclear reactors and ballistic missiles – from which it could draw if it decided to build missile- deliverable nuclear weapons.”

Clapper argued that this doesn’t matter because the US’s monitoring capabilities are so trustworthy and advanced that Iran wouldn’t be able to put nuclear weapons together without the US noticing.

Unfortunately there is no reason to believe Clapper is right. Indeed, Netanyahu said as much to US National Security Advisor Susan Rice when she repeated Clapper’s claim during her visit to Israel last week.

They have to share more.

That’s the general opinion about the rich these days, and it seems to apply in special force when it comes to a certain kind of rich: the rich involved in medical innovation. Sometimes the issue is simply tax revenues from admired companies. When, for example, Pfizer recently announced its plans to move to London to reduce its tax bill, brothers Representative Sander Levin (D., Mich.), and Senator Carl Levin (also D., Mich.) promptly joined forces to back new legislation that would force Pfizer to share its revenues by blocking the companies’ move.

The New York Times branded Pfizer’s move a “tax dodge,” a way of suggesting Pfizer’s behavior is sleazy. But of course the loss of tax revenues isn’t all that the resenters resent. They resent the wealth of the rich scientists, who care for their families with “concierge doctors” in special clinics no one else knows about. The critics also resent the loss of intellectual capital that occurs when the rich decamp — and that, legitimately. As President Obama pointed out when he created the Brain Initiative to keep science and science money stateside: “We can’t afford to miss these opportunities while the rest of the world races ahead.” But what if rich pharma did share? And what if it shared not only patented drugs but also something far more precious, its innovating brain?

That exhilarating possibility is the essence of a new state-by-state drive involving experimental drugs, “The Right to Try.”

Herewith, the basics. For decades now the Food and Drug Administration has maintained an onerous and slow approval process that delays the debut of new drugs for fatal diseases, sometimes for years longer than the life span of the patients desperate to try them. Attorneys and scholars at the Goldwater Institute of Arizona have crafted legislation for the states that would allow terminally ill patients to try experimental drugs for cancer or degenerative neurological diseases earlier. These “Right to Try” bills are so scripted that they overcome the usual objection to delivery of such experimental drugs: safety. Under “Right to Try,” only drugs that have passed the crucial Phase 1 of FDA testing could be prescribed, thereby reducing the possibility of Thalidomide repeat. Second, only patients determined to have terminal cases would be eligible to purchase the drugs, making it harder to maintain that the drug will jeopardize their lives.

Representatives in Colorado, Louisiana, and Missouri approved the “Right to Try” measure unanimously. Citizens of Arizona will vote on the effort to circumvent the FDA process this fall.

Why Jeb Bush’s Turn May Not Come-Unlike his father and brother, he’s made no effort to woo the GOP base. By Jonah Goldberg

What is happening to the Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram is tragic. The sinking of the Titanic, the fall of Saigon, the British defeat at Gallipoli, the Dred Scott decision — tragedies all. You can go on all day and all night listing terrible calamities and even lesser injustices, misfortunes, and other evidence that life isn’t fair. But you will probably collapse from exhaustion before you reach Jeb Bush’s difficulty becoming the third President Bush.

The New Yorker cartoons write themselves. Bush, in all his blue-blazered glory, sitting next to, well, just about anyone at a bar (or standing in front of the Pearly Gates, or lying on a psychiatrist’s couch, or visiting the complaints department) lamenting that he never got his turn. Or maybe he’d wear a shirt saying, “My Dad and My Brother Lived at the White House and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.”

Of course, that’s not actually all Bush got. He was a successful two-term Florida governor (a much tougher job than being governor of Texas, particularly for a Republican). He has a lovely family. He’s made a bundle in the private sector, and he’s a respected voice in lots of policy debates. But he hasn’t checked the last and most important box on his to-do list.

And I doubt he ever will.

It’s well known that Republicans tend to pick the candidate whose “turn” it is. Except for 1964 and 2000, the guy who came in second the last time or who in some way was perceived as next in line got the nomination. Barry Goldwater was a special case because of the rise of the conservative movement and the sense that JFK’s assassination made LBJ unbeatable.

George W. Bush was a special case for completely different reasons. There really wasn’t anyone next in line that year, but “Dubya” came the closest because the GOP felt his dad had been robbed in 1992 by Bill Clinton (and Ross Perot).

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/dear-chairman-gowdy-america-is-counting-on-your-backbone

Your investigation is a huge relief to millions of Americans like me who have wondered and agonized over the past almost-two years about the actual events that happened before, during and after the September 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi, Libya, that resulted in the horrific murders of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, information officer Sean Smith, and embassy security personnel and former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.

Another State Department employee, diplomatic security agent David Ubben, was gravely injured while under attack with Woods and Doherty, but like other survivors he has been forbidden by the Obama Administration from speaking publicly about his ordeal.

However, as reported by Catherine Herridge of Fox News, when the late Florida Congressman Bill Young met Ubben at Walter Reed Medical Center last summer, he said that Ubben “emphasized the fact” that the attack on the Benghazi compound “was a very very military type of operation…they had knowledge of almost everything in the compound…they knew where the gasoline was, they knew where the generators were, they knew where the safe room was, they knew more than they should have about that compound.”

Will the Select Committee include the testimony of Ubben and the other muzzled victims and will it explore who sabotaged the Americans by revealing to the terrorists “more than they should have known about the compound”?

Of course, neither your Select Committee nor my letter to you would have seen the light of day if the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch had not been successful in their Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, which revealed “the smoking gun” e-mail in which Benjamin J. Rhodes, then-White House Deputy Strategic Communications Adviser laid out several goals for U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to meet on the five Sunday-morning TV shows she was scheduled to appear on, chief of which was: “To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.”

According to Dick Morris, former advisor to President Bill Clinton, a full day and a half before Rhodes sent his email advising Susan Rice to blame the Benghazi attacks on the video, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used the identical language in a statement of her own.

This suggests, Morris says, “at the very least, a close coordination between and White House and Hillary Clinton to deceive the American people about the true nature of the attack in Benghazi. And it may also be evidence that Hillary Clinton engineered that decision immediately following the attacks. Was the cover-up Hillary’s idea?”

In addition, Morris is emphatic in saying that the CIA talking points were in no way related to the White House talking points, which seem to have been made up out of whole cloth.

Will the Select Committee vigorously investigate the allegation that this 19-month cover-up was instigated by Hillary Clinton? Alternatively, will you get to the bottom of who exactly created the fiction of the video?

“Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.” – Ayn Rand, 1963*

At the end of Ayn Rand’s prophetic 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, a judge who is on strike with other producers against a future, nightmarish state of America (echoes of Obama) and has disappeared with them into a Rocky Mountain sanctuary, is at work. Before him is a “copy of an ancient document [the Constitution]. He had marked and crossed out the contradictions in its statements that had once been the cause of its destruction. He was now adding a new clause to its pages: ‘Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade…'”

I am sure that Rand scoured the Constitution for its virtues and flaws, and very likely read books on its history. But I am not so certain she ever did a study of state constitutions. One of the contradictions she does not allude to in the novel is the authority which that “ancient document” bestowed on the states at ratification to “regulate” their economies, production, and trade, which power the federal government was prohibited, in many instances, from interfering with. Had that issue occurred to Judge Narragansett, he might have added another clause: “Congress shall have the power to nullify states’ laws abridging the freedom of production and trade within their boundaries….” Or words to that effect.

James W. Ely, Jr., wrote a gem of a history of the Constitution that focuses almost exclusively on the treatment of property rights, from colonial times to the present, The Guardian of Every Other Right: A Constitutional History of Property Rights. It is one of the handiest and briefest digests of the history of property rights vis-à-vis federal and state courts and legislative acts I’ve come upon, written in clear, succinct language. For anyone imbued with the ambition to tackle The Federalist, the Constitutional Convention debates, and the papers of Founders such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, Ely’s book can serve as a nonpareil introduction to the subject of property rights in a political context.

Ely underscores on virtually every page that not only was Congress guilty of violating individuals’ property rights by abridging the freedom of production and trade, but that, for the longest time, it was the states that were the greater and more frequent violators and usurpers.