RUTHFULLY YOURS

The important-sounding Foreign Affairs Council of the European Union has recently reiterated “its strong support for Ukraine’s unity, sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity.”

Poor, destabilized, post-putsch Ukraine is to be congratulated for receiving something none of the 28 countries that actually belongs to the EU ever does: support for its sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity. (“Unity” is a more complicated matter, given the EU’s reflexive pox on separatist movements that might prefigure the breakup of the EU itself.) As the world’s pre-eminent transnational entity since the breakup of the USSR, the EU is all about eradicating its members’ sovereignty, independence and borders.

This, of course, is not something most Americans are aware of. When we hear talk of “Europe” vs. Russia, or the importance of extending “European values,” most Americans typically envision our longtime allies as they used to be – sovereign and independent within historical national borders. Their dedication to the democratically enshrined rights of their citizens as guaranteed for more than half a century, mainly by U.S. power, is beyond question.

It shouldn’t be. Anyone who thinks the bureaucratically grotesque and anti-democratic superstate model hit the junk heap of history with the USSR in 1991 needs to look more closely at the bureaucratically grotesque and anti-democratic Brussels monolith.

For starters, the elected members of the European Parliament may not introduce legislation or even introduce the repeal of legislation. Instead, they may (and frequently do) rubber stamp legislation for their member-states – much, as leading Soviet dissident leader Vladimir Bukovsky has pointed out, in the tradition of the old Supreme Soviet. All legislation and decision-making come from the unelected members of the EU’s executive body, the European Commission, which Bukovsky has compared to the old Politburo. (Some of the 28 EU commissioners are even former Communist apparatchiks.) Little wonder Bukovsky has dubbed the EU the “EUSSR.” With co-author Pavel Stroilov, Bukovsky documented 1980s-era discussions between Western and Soviet leaders recorded in Soviet archives that foreshadow the rise of the collectivist European superstate in a 2004 booklet titled “EUSSR: The Soviet Roots of European Integration.”

The fruits of this cross-pollination are now quite visible. For example, the London Telegraph reported this month that Viviane Reding, the (unelected) vice president of the European Commission, announced that “an EU Bill of Rights that overrides British laws is becoming a ‘reality.’”

NOW….The National Organization of Whiners should take note of this….but they are too busy getting the vapors over perceived “victimhood”…..rsk

As of 1996, if you were a woman, you could be a pilot in the Israeli air force. As of this year, you can keep being one even if you’re pregnant.

The Times of Israel reports that “the IAF…has opened the skies to pregnant pilots and navigators” and that “transport plane pilots will be allowed to fly until the 25th week of pregnancy.”

It was in 1995 that an Israeli woman named Alice Miller, who was already a civilian pilot and an IAF officer, petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court to strike down the IAF’s ban on female pilots. In 1996 the court ruled in her favor, and since then about 35 women have received their wings from the IAF.

It’s part of a general trend where more and more women are filling combat roles in the Israel Defense Forces. About 3% of its combat soldiers are now women, including 70% of the Caracal infantry battalion, 10% of the artillery corps, and 6% of the Border Police. Also this year the IDF appointed Oshrat Bachar as its first-ever female battalion commander.

One might think all this would make Israel a hero of the feminist left. But you’d be more likely to stumble upon an Israel Apartheid Week exhibit on a campus than see the left give Israel credit for much of anything these days.

It is not that women in combat roles are something new in Israeli history. In the prestate period and the 1948-1949 War of Independence, there was not much choice; the community was under Arab attack and outnumbered, and there simply weren’t enough men.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/obamacare-number-games-how-many-enrollees-really/?print=1

It has been a triumphant month for liberal journalists who have lived and died with the fortunes of the Affordable Care Act since its passage in March 2010. Ezra Klein and Jon Cohen have declared victory, describing an amazing recovery for the program and for President Obama since the dark days of near-total failure among people trying to sign up on the federal exchanges in October and November.

To listen to Obamacare supporters, Kathleen Sebelius leaves her post as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services with her head held high, as her legacy now includes shepherding across the finish line a major expansion of health insurance for low-income, previously uninsured Americans. Howard Dean says [1] the Republicans would be foolish to attack Obamacare in this year’ s campaign, now that the program has achieved so much success

Carl Sagan spoke [2] of “billions and trillions”; now the president and the Obamacare support media can talk of millions and millions newly insured.

But how many millions?

Prior to the opening of the exchanges in October 2013, President Obama claimed that the ability of families to keep children on their health insurance policies through age 26 had already added three million people to the ranks of the insured. This claim appears to be nonsense. Avik Roy — one of the few journalists who has actually been examining the data and drawing his own conclusions rather than regurgitating or looking to justify each of the administration’s assertions — estimates that the actual number of newly covered young people [3] is less than one-third of the number claimed, and perhaps far less.

In fact, the percentage of uninsured Americans aged 18 to 24 has not changed at all from 2008 — prior to the economic collapse — through 2013. And of course, the change in policy did not come free. Roy estimates that family plans now cost $160 to $480 a year more due to the new coverage — and that is for all families, including all those without children who are newly covered. Also, as with all the other “free things” offered on the screening side due to Obamacare, none of it is free as someone else has to pay for them.

Nothing says Passover as clearly as Moses’ exhortation from the Book of Leviticus: “Proclaim liberty throughout the Land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”
That powerful phrase of highest nobility breathes through every thought in America’s twin founding papers, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

That’s what we’re all about. Or so it used to be. Times change. People change.

America’s anthem also takes its cue from that line in the Hebrew Bible. But…

Land of the free? Ask Dinesh D’Souza, the writer/filmmaker who faces jail-time for displeasing Obama.
Home of the brave? Ask women’s rights champion Ayaan Hirsi Ali who was honored and finally dishonored from Brandeis University because she displeased Radical Islam and its cohorts on the Left.

Logically, given Islamic sensitivities, the next step at Brandeis has to be the bonfire of the vanities: book burning. Surely there are plenty of books throughout our PC-afflicted universities that are objectionable and fail to meet Sharia standards.
Note that on whoring with terrorists, Brandeis is not alone. See here how a former president at Penn State came to a Halloween party dressed as a suicide bomber.

Without much effort you will find that brainless and gutless university leaders are the rule, not the exception. But Brandeis has become something special. Columns keep being written. Letters keep streaming in. People are fearful that “Brandeis” may be a snapshot of our future.
If Brandeis came to test America about its resolve to fight the forces of intolerance, hello? We lose.

The Case of PA Accession to International Conventionsnstitute for Contemporary Affairs, founded jointly with the Wechsler Family Foundation

Derailing the Peace Process

The enthusiasm with which the international community appears to encourage and pamper the Palestinians, and to play along with their attempt to accede to international conventions, under the flawed illusion that there exists a sovereign state of Palestine, will only serve to encourage the Palestinian leadership in its refusal to return to a negotiating mode in order to reach a final status agreement with Israel, solving all the relevant and outstanding issues that can be solved only through negotiation. As such, the Palestinian leadership assumes that the international community will go along with any Palestinian demand, thereby obviating any need for negotiation and agreement. This international pampering of the Palestinians, and utter ignoring of international law and solemn commitments, as well as the massive prejudgment of issues that should remain on the negotiating table, in effect signals a serious turning point in the peace process and raises the question whether there is any hope for progress in its present format.

Book publisher Simon & Schuster releases new title and full description of the former Secretary of State’s upcoming book

Hillary Clinton’s upcoming memoir has an official title and book jacket

Simon & Schuster announced on Friday her tome will be titled, “Hard Choices,” and unveiled the cover which features the former Secretary of State in a black and white portrait with a serious Mona Lisa smile.

The book is due to hit bookstores June 10th as political insiders continue to speculate on the former first lady’s presidential ambitions.

Read the full description of the upcoming memoir:

“All of us face hard choices in our lives,” Hillary Rodham Clinton writes at the start of this personal chronicle of years at the center of world events. “Life is about making these choices, and how we handle them shapes the people we become.” In the aftermath of her 2008 presidential run, she expected to return to representing New York in the United States Senate. To her surprise, her former rival for the Democratic Party nomination, newly elected President Barack Obama, asked her to serve in his administration as Secretary of State. This memoir is the story of the four extraordinary and historic years that followed, and the hard choices that she and her colleagues confronted. Secretary Clinton and President Obama had to decide how to repair fractured alliances, wind down two wars, and address a global financial crisis. They faced a rising competitor in China, growing threats from Iran and North Korea, and revolutions across the Middle East. Along the way, they grappled with some of the toughest dilemmas of US foreign policy, especially the decision to send Americans into harm’s way, from Afghanistan to Libya to the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

By the end of her tenure, Secretary Clinton had visited 112 countries, traveled nearly one million miles, and gained a truly global perspective on many of the major trends reshaping the landscape of the twenty-first century, from economic inequality to climate change to revolutions in energy, communications, and health. Drawing on conversations with numerous leaders and experts, Secretary Clinton offers her views on what it will take for the United States to compete and thrive in an interdependent world. She makes a passionate case for human rights and the full participation in society of women , youth, and LGBT people. An astute eyewitness to decades of social change, she distinguishes the trendlines from the headlines and describes the progress occurring throughout the world, day after day.

Secretary Clinton’s descriptions of diplomatic conversations at the highest levels offer readers a master class in international relations, as does her analysis of how we can best use “smart power” to deliver security and prosperity in a rapidly changing world–one in which America remains the indispensable nation.

An undergraduate pro-life group at Yale University has been rejected for membership in the community service umbrella organization.

Choose Life at Yale (CLAY), spent the past year as a provisional member of Dwight Hall, and organization that calls itself the “Center of Public Service and Social Justice” and enjoys 501(c)(3) nonprofit status.

But the social justice organization voted Wednesday to deny CLAY full membership, which would entail access to Dwight Hall’s funds, meeting rooms, service vehicles, and many other resources. CLAY had one minute to present its case for membership, followed by no deliberations whatsoever. Immediately after the presentation, one representative from each of the 96 member organizations of Dwight Hall voted. The exact tally is unknown to those outside of Dwight Hall, but a majority of which voted against the pro-life group.

On the day before the vote, one of the student leaders of Dwight Hall wrote an op-ed in the Yale Daily News that asked fellow student leaders to reject CLAY’s petition for membership. Andre Manuel argued that the vote was not a matter of free speech but of a difference in opinion over the definition of “social justice.” According to Manuel, a group that denies reproductive rights cannot have a claim to an organization that promotes social justice.

While it is true that CLAY promotes pro-life activism. For instance, there are annual trips to the March for Life in Washington, D.C. CLAY recently hosted its first annual conference, with focuses on constitutional implications of abortion law, interfaith dialogue, and pro-life feminism.

But the group’s work is not limited to such activism. In recent years, with the opening of a nearby crisis pregnancy center, CLAY members have devoted themselves to volunteering and serving mothers in their time of material, emotional, and spiritual need.

In a heated exchange last week, Ibrahim Hooper – national spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) – issued a put up or shut up kind of challenge to his organization’s critics.

Hooper was pressed by Fox News host Megyn Kelly about CAIR’s record of failing to condemn terrorist groups like Hamas and Hizballah and other questionable positions. Hooper tried to deflect, blaming “Internet hate sites” for fueling “hate-filled smears against CAIR, which was founded in 1994.

“Please find something that CAIR has done or said in those 20 years that you find either extreme, objectionable, intolerant, whatever,” Hooper said.

Don’t mind if we do.

We’ve documented CAIR’s dubious record for years, noting in a 2009 report that the group responds to the very kind of specific examples Hooper demands to see by issuing ad hominem attacks against the messenger.

So, in a decidedly-less funny tribute to Late Show host David Letterman’s pending retirement, here are the IPT’s top 10 examples of “extreme, objectionable, intolerant, whatever” actions by CAIR. Together, they undermine CAIR’s credibility as a mainstream, reliable arbiter in the debate about terrorism, extremism and the treatment of Muslims in America:

You’ll have to provide your own drumroll.

10. Using civil rights instruction to scare the daylights out of Muslims and drive a wedge between the community and the FBI.

“Undistinguished, hawkish, corporate, opulent, for sale — Hillary Clinton is like a caricature of a Republican. As long as she can obscure that fact from the Democratic masses, from the anti-corporate doves whose social progressivism is far more strident than her own, she will be able to maintain the illusion of the impregnable frontrunner. But nothing lasts forever. Either Clinton will realize this soon, and spend out her days relaxing and cooing over her grandchild. Or she will realize it later, the hard way, sometime in 2016.”

Hillary Clinton may end up deciding that she wants to spend the 935 days until Election 2016 making corporate speeches and spoiling her grandchild. Recent events have exposed weaknesses in Clinton’s supposedly impregnable armor, gaps through which a Democratic or Republican challenger could damage, perhaps even defeat her. The bad headlines to which she has been subjected are enough to make anyone — anyone who isn’t a Clinton — think twice about running for president.

Look at the polls. This week’s Fox News poll has Clinton’s favorable rating at its lowest point in six years. She is at 49 percent favorable, 45 percent unfavorable — similar to her 47/46 favorable/unfavorable rating when she ended her last presidential campaign.

More important than the individual results, however, is the trend. Since leaving office as secretary of state, Clinton’s favorable rating has been on a downward trajectory. And this is before the rigors of a campaign, before a Biden or a Warren or an O’Malley or a Cuomo or a Schweitzer or a Sanders throws a punch or two, before Christie, Bush, Rubio, Walker, Jindal, Paul, Kasich, Ryan, Perry, and Pence go for the Cobra Clutch Bulldog. A shoo-in? So was The Undertaker.

Already Clinton is finding it difficult to articulate a rationale for her presidency, to pronounce a record of achievement on which to base a campaign. In an appearance this month at the Women in the World Summit, she had trouble naming her proudest accomplishment as secretary of state. It is a question that her strongest supporters, in her party and in the media, cannot answer. “Hillary Clinton Struggles to Define a Legacy in Progress,” read the headline in Thursday’s New York Times. “Mrs. Clinton is striking a delicate balance,” the paper reports, “when discussing a job that would be a critical credential in a presidential race.” The last secretary of state to become president was James Buchanan. He gave us the Civil War.

Clinton, the Times goes on, wants “credit for the parts of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy that have worked,” while “subtly distancing herself from the things that have not worked out.” Imagine that. “The things that have not worked out” compose quite a list. What Hillary Clinton wants is to have it all, to enjoy the fading residual glow of President Obama’s halo without having to answer for all of the messes he will leave behind. Her friends tell the Times that her upcoming memoir, for which she was reportedly paid $14 million, will provide an opportunity to “provide her view of WikiLeaks, Benghazi, and smaller missteps like the Russia reset button.” It will provide an opportunity, in other words, to offer a generous helping of self-serving and exculpatory spin.

The administration still wants civilian prosecution, but the Bureau’s leak investigation is legit.
It is no secret that the Obama administration believes Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 plotters should be given a civilian criminal trial in New York City, not a military commission in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The president pulled the plug on military commissions at the start of his first term (only to reinstate them later). The Justice Department announced in 2009 that KSM & Co. would be tried in Manhattan, provoking vigorous protest by the public and Congress that prompted the administration to back down. Attorney General Holder has repeatedly said the case should be in civilian court — even claiming that if the transfer to Manhattan from the military justice system had gone according to his plan, the terrorists would already be convicted and facing the death penalty.

I haveresponded to the attorney general’s claims on other occasions (including observing how brazen it is for someone who has spent years — both in and out of government — undermining military commissions to complain about how long the commission is taking). I’ve also opined that the attorney general’s maneuvering of two al-Qaeda conspiracy cases into civilian court in Manhattan strategically benefited the defense lawyers at Gitmo: They can now argue that the government is violating fundamental fairness by trying their clients in military court while other defendants charged with the exact same conspiracy have enjoyed the enhanced due process of civilian prosecution.

But is the Justice Department trying to get the case to civilian court by willfully sabotaging the ongoing military commission?

That is the suspicion of a number of family members of those killed in the 9/11 atrocities. It has been stoked by the revelation this week that the FBI has been investigating the Gitmo defendants and their legal representatives for possible intelligence leaks — a revelation that appears to have taken the military prosecutors and the presiding judge by surprise, stoking fears that the commission trial process could be imperiled.