http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/paranoid-style-revisited?f=puball Alan Wolfe, the professor of political science at Boston College, has written a reprise of Richard Hofstadter’s 1965 book Paranoid Style In American Politics for the October 25th edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Hofstadter in the 1950’s attempted to explain the inner workings of the political mind, i.e., the conservative mind. For […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/breaking-news-supreme-court-to-take-another-crack-at-obamacare The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to referee another dispute over President Barack Obama’s health care law, whether businesses can use religious objections to escape a requirement to cover birth control for employees. The justices said they will take up an issue that has divided the lower courts in the face of roughly 40 lawsuits […]
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/environmentalism-is-the-new-racism/print/ At the heart of all the left’s political agendas is wealth redistribution. That is as true of the Global Warming eco-scam as it is of anything else. The left knows that idealism is a puny force compared to the power of profit. It may employ the slogans of idealism, recruiting college students to wave […]
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/obamas-munich/print/ The interim agreement negotiated by the Security Council and Germany with Iran is a serious advance toward what Winston Churchill called the Munich agreement: “a total and unmitigated defeat” and a “disaster of the first magnitude.” Nothing in the agreement guarantees that Iran will fulfill its promises, or that inspectors will be allowed access to all […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/11/america_as_the_protector_of_putin_assad_and_khamenei.html When protests broke out in Syria in late 2011, Russia hoped for a short, nasty war as a matter of Russian national interest — just enough to put the Muslim Brotherhood and assorted Sunnis in their place. Violence from its own Sunni Muslim population has plagued Russia for decades. Saudi Arabia took over the defeated nationalist […]
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304655104579165800736157752?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion
In the fall of 1621, some 50 of the Puritans who had left the Old World in search of religious freedom sat down in their tiny thatched hamlet of Plymouth with their Wampanoag neighbors to feast on turkey, venison, corn and cod. They also gave thanks for surviving their first terrible New England winter, whose cold and privation had carried off half their community.
Continual waves of pilgrims fleeing religious persecution would follow them across the sea. Their sense of providential escape from foreign oppression stayed vividly alive in the American memory, and ultimately helped guide the Founding Fathers to make a revolution and fashion a new kind of government.
Many commentators, most eloquently Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal, draw a parallel between the appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1938 and the appeasement of Iran at Geneva. There is another, more chilling parallel: Iran’s motive for proposing to annihilate the Jewish State is the same as Hitler’s, and the world’s indifference to the prospect of another Holocaust is no different today than it was in 1938. It is the dead’s envy for the living.
Dying civilizations are the most dangerous, and Iran is dying. Its total fertility rate probably stands at just 1.6 children per female, the same level as Western Europe, a catastrophic decline from 7 children per female in the early 1980s. Iran’s present youth bulge will turn into an elderly dependent problem worse than Europe’s in the next generation and the country will collapse. That is why war is likely, if not entirely inevitable.
In this historic confluence of dates, Thanksgiving and Chanukah, this is a reflection worth pondering….and pondering again…..rsk
The Pew survey, like the various more specific surveys of the Jewish community that come out from time to time, has told everyone in the Jewish organizational world what they already know. There is nothing in the survey that hasn’t been predicted, belabored and denied for decades. If its meaning had to be summed up in a single sentence, it would be that there can be no religion without revelation, no community without culture and no continuity without all of these.
It really is that simple which is why so many insist on making it so complicated.
What the Pew survey really says is that there are really two Jewish communities in America. One that is an actual structured community and the other uses that name but is a community in name only. Most of the responses go right past that obvious point to arguing about semantics, theology and the number of Jews who can dance on the head of a pin.
Daniel Gordis had a passionate and moving piece on the decline of Conservative Judaism that is also fundamentally wrong.
Gordis states, “What really doomed the movement is that Conservative Judaism ignored the deep existential human questions that religion is meant to address.” That confuses religion with philosophy. Religion does address existential questions, but it does so through faith.
The F-word, “Faith” only appears once in Gordis’ entire essay. “Non-Orthodox Judaism is simply disappearing in America. Judaism has long been a predominantly content-driven, rather than a faith-driven enterprise, but we now have a generation of Jews secularly successful and well-educated, but so Jewishly illiterate that nothing remains to bind them to their community or even to a sense that they hail from something worth preserving.”
Gordis hits the point and then drives away as quickly as he can. American Judaism is content-driven, but its content has to be driven by faith or the content has no integrity.
When Obama decided to turn his campaign into a permanent Super PAC, he was stabbing the Democratic Party in the back. But he was doing it to them before they did it to him.
Organizing for America gave him an independent source of power and influence at the expense of the Democratic Party. Obama was carelessly draining money and energy out of his own party because whatever common interests he had with a political party, that for all its leftward swing was still too conservative for his taste, were about to be fractured during his second term.
The Democratic Party might have been satisfied if he had retained his 2008 halo in 2015. But that was never going to happen. No matter how much the media slobbers over a politician, the voting public, at least those parts of it that don’t have Hope posters and Obama holograms hanging on their walls, eventually needs a break and someone to blame.
Even vice presidents turn on their own presidents once they begin running for office. Gore tried running as the antithesis of Bill Clinton at a time when everyone had grown sick of him and his scandals. Gore was just a less successful and even more hypocritical version of Bill Clinton; but the Democratic Party tried to build him an image as a stiff and serious fellow who spent a lot of time deep in thought and might be awkward at parties; but wouldn’t cheat on the entire country.
The Democratic Party already has an Anti-Obama in waiting. Hillary claims to be experienced where Obama was inexperienced and savvier about the practical details of getting things done.
The “Ready for Hillary” image is as phony as Gore’s serious ethical look; but it’s also a shot across Obama’s bow telling him that he’s going under the bus before the next election. With OFA, Obama, whose allegiance has always been to the left, not to anything as reactionary as an American political party, decided to throw them under the bus first.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, claimed victory over the United States Sunday shortly after a historic nuclear agreement was reached in Geneva between the Islamic Republic and the 5+1 world powers.
Under the agreement, Iran, in return for sanctions relief, will keep much of its nuclear infrastructure, is limited to enriching uranium to the five percent level for six months, will convert its highly enriched uranium of 20 percent to harmless oxide and will allow more intrusive inspections of its nuclear plants by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which will be limited to only agreed-on facilities.
Fars News Agency, the media outlet of the Revolutionary Guards, reported that Khamenei in a statement thanked President Hassan Rouhani and his negotiating team for their achievement in Geneva.
“I thank God that… the new government… was able to legitimize the Iranian nation’s nuclear program on the international stage and take the initial step in a way that the nuclear rights and the enrichment rights of the Iranian nation are acknowledged by world powers where before they had tried to deny them, and (the agreement will) open the way for future big strides in technical and economic progress,” Khamenei said.
Rouhani, speaking at an event for families of “martyred” Iranian nuclear scientists, said Iran will continue its nuclear progress. “No matter whether the world wants it or not, this path (to nuclear capability) will, God willing, continue to the peak,” he said.
