RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/4867/features/how-the-sinai-peacekeeping-force-staged-a-military-coup-in-fiji/?print

It sounds like the plot of a Hollywood black comedy. A tiny, poor, but democratic country decides to help its young men get jobs and see the world by joining international peacekeeping forces in the Middle East. The young soldiers serve in Lebanon and the Egyptian Sinai, return home, stage a coup, and set up a military dictatorship.

Except that it really happened. To Fiji.

Fiji is a Pacific archipelago that became independent in 1970 with a population of about 600,000. There were 300,000 Indo-Fijians, 255,000 Melanesian-Fijians, and 45,000 others. The Indo-Fijians had arrived as plantation labor at the end of the nineteenth century, but by the 1970s they ran most of the islands’ businesses. When Britain left, it bestowed on Fiji a constitution that protected both the rights and the traditional power structure of the Melanesian minority; courts judged Melanesians according to traditional laws, chiefs had seats in the Upper House of Parliament, elected seats in parliament were allocated by community, and the Prime Minister was a scion of a Melanesian chiefly family.

For almost twenty years, the island was held up as a “model multiethnic postcolonial democracy.” The reality was that Fiji was peaceful because of an informal understanding that Melanesian Fijians would run the government while Indo-Fijians ran the economy.

But in 1987 the Indo-Fijian majority elected an Indo-Fijian prime minister and the Melanesian Fijian minority responded with a coup d’état. The Economist, which had lauded Fiji’s multi-ethnic democracy, suddenly perceived that democracy in Fiji had “a hollow center: it did not include letting an election mean that you might have to hand over power to the opposition.”

The coup was led by Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka, who had served with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) and with the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) in the Egyptian Sinai. The civilian politicians were no match for the Colonel and his peacekeeping veterans from the Middle East, where Fiji has had a battalion deployed since the mission began in 1982.

To put this in its remarkable perspective, one must know that other Pacific Island nations don’t even have a military. Even in Fiji, aside from the policing activities of the coast guard, the armed forces have only two functions: to serve in international peacekeeping missions, and to stage coups d’état and run corrupt military dictatorships at home. In that last capacity, they have demonstrated particular panache. But if the United Nations had not inspired the creation of a Fijian army, Fiji would never have had a military coup.

There were lots of valid reasons for sending young men to serve in international peacekeeping forces. Fiji is a small place with few jobs, and the young people were leaving. Peacekeeping was honorable work, and the peacekeepers’ families could hope that they would come home after they had seen the world. But the program also appealed to Fiji’s pride in its traditional, if obsolete, warrior culture. For the Melanesian-Fijians who volunteered (few Indo-Fijians enlisted), it reinforced a self-image as warriors in much the same way that service in the IDF reinforces the warrior identity of Israeli Bedouin.

The Republic of Fiji Military Forces are a big deal in Fiji. Their numbers grew as the United Nations sent Fijians to Iraq, Sudan, and other conflict zones. When the Sinai Battalion gets stopped at a Bedouin roadblock, or a foreign diplomat says a nice word about them, it makes headlines in Fiji.

Fiji has had two new constitutions since the 1987 coup, a 1990 version written by the group that led the military coup, and a 1997 constitution featuring a preferential voting system designed to produce a democratic and bi-national state.

The 1997 constitution went into effect in 1999 and Mahendra Pal Chaudhry, grandson of an Indian contract laborer, was elected prime minister.

Having lost the election, ethnic Melanesians took to the streets overturning the automobiles and wrecking the businesses of Indo-Fijians. They installed Commodore Frank Bainimarama, a veteran of the Sinai MFO, at the head of a military government.

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/315029

Congressman-for-Life Charles Rangel (D., N.Y.) recently waded into the enduring controversy over Vice President Joseph Biden’s August 14 remarks in Danville, Va. That’s when Biden notoriously used a southern accent to tell a largely black audience that, if elected, Mitt Romney is “going to put y’all back in chains.” Biden and his defenders claim that the Veep innocently referred to Republican aspirations to unshackle banks. Doing so, somehow, would slap manacles on all Americans — not just the black folks standing before Biden in the final capital of the Confederacy (black population: 48 percent).

“Was he [Biden] talking about slavery?” Rangel asked last Thursday on The Perez Notes radio show. “You bet your ass he was. Was he using the vernacular? Yes, he was. Did he think it was cute? Yes, he did. Was it something stupid to say? You bet your life it was stupid.”

Rangel now joins former Virginia governor Douglas Wilder as a prominent Democrat who has rejected Biden’s side of this still-simmering story. “Biden’s remarks brought race into the campaign and they were not necessary,” Wilder told CNN on August 17.

Biden’s comments were just a bizarre and crude effort to scare black people into voting Democrat, again. After all, if Biden is telling the truth, how would deregulating banks put Americans “back” in “chains?” Before the 2007–8 financial meltdown, banks did not hold Americans in chains. Au contraire. Fueled by the federal Community Reinvestment Act, loose money from the Federal Reserve Board, and the boisterous encouragement of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, many banks promiscuously approved mortgages — even for dodgy borrowers with little prospect of repaying their loans. So, come 2013, there would be no “chains” into which banks could put Americans “back,” even if a President Romney cremated the Dodd-Frank law in a giant bonfire on the National Mall.

While one may disagree with Romney, his running mate Paul Ryan, and every Republican on Capitol Hill, the notion that the GOP is itching to re-enslave blacks is an outrageous, disgusting lie that utterly mutilates American history. As most students learn in junior high school, abolitionists launched the Republican party to end slavery. Republicans defeated the Confederacy and then spent Reconstruction trying to incorporate blacks into American society. Democrats fought them at every turn.

Democrats opposed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which bans slavery, and the 14th Amendment, which guarantees every American equal protection under law, regardless of race. Unwilling to limit their anti-black hate to Capitol Hill, Democrats founded the Ku Klux Klan as, in essence, the party’s militant wing. In the 1920s, Democrats defeated the GOP’s federal anti-lynching legislation. Led by West Virginia’s Robert Byrd — a one-time Exalted Cyclops in the KKK who recruited 150 new Klansmen — Senate Democrats filibustered the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Republicans broke that filibuster and moved that landmark legislation to President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s desk for signature.

President Ronald Reagan named General Colin Powell to be America’s first black national security adviser and authorized the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday.

After President George W. Bush appointed not one but two black secretaries of state (Powell and Condoleezza Rice), a freshly inaugurated President Obama and Senator Richard Durbin (D., Ill.) ended the Washington, D.C., school-voucher program. Thousands of young, black Washingtonians were relegated to lives of ignorance and poverty once Obama and Durbin had derailed this Underground Railroad out of the ghettoes of the nation’s capital.

Against this backdrop, Americans were startled to hear Touré, the mononymous co-host of MSNBC’s The Cycle, remark on August 16 that Romney was using “racial coding” to effect the “niggerization” of Obama. So, how does Touré contend that Romney “niggerized” Obama? According to Touré, Romney said that Obama is running an “angry” campaign. Romney and his supporters had chided Team Obama’s class-warfare rhetoric, criticized claims that Romney is a “felon” who has paid no taxes in a decade, and condemned a pro-Obama super-PAC commercial that blames Romney and Bain Capital for speeding the cancer death of the wife of a steel-mill employee.

“That really bothered me,” Touré said on live TV regarding a Romney campaign appearance. “You notice he said ‘anger’ twice.”

That’s right. What could be more “niggerizing” than uttering the word “anger” twice (!) in reference to Barack Obama?

After all, only black men get angry. (You should see the rage on my face right now.) “Anger” apparently is a “dog whistle” word that only whites can hear. How odd, then, that a black man like Touré deciphered this “racial code.” Perhaps Toure’s otherwise-Negroid eardrums can discern a few of the kilohertz that only Caucasians can perceive.

Romney’s super-high-pitched statement helped him telegraph this vital secret to white voters in swing states:

Barack Obama is black!

This shocking news surely will drive white bigots by the tens of millions into the loving arms of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/106512/you-are-probably-worse-you-were-four-years-ago In March, the Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez shocked a lot of people by calculating that during the first year of the recovery from the 2007-2009 recession, incomes for the top one percent grew by 11.6 percent while incomes for the bottom 99 percent grew a mere 0.2 percent. (All figures here are in “real […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/08/semi-tough_love_from_ny_times_public_editor.html

In his farewell column as public editor of the New York Times, diplomatically but clearly told the paper it has drifted off in a liberal bubble, serving a group of like-minded people, and losing credibility as a result:

I also noted two years ago that I had taken up the public editor duties believing “there is no conspiracy” and that The Times’s output was too vast and complex to be dictated by any Wizard of Oz-like individual or cabal. I still believe that, but also see that the hive on Eighth Avenue is powerfully shaped by a culture of like minds – a phenomenon, I believe, that is more easily recognized from without than from within.

When The Times covers a national presidential campaign, I have found that the lead editors and reporters are disciplined about enforcing fairness and balance, and usually succeed in doing so. Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism – for lack of a better term – that this worldview virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.

As a result, developments like the Occupy movement and gay marriage seem almost to erupt in The Times, overloved and undermanaged, more like causes than news subjects.

Stepping back, I can see that as the digital transformation proceeds, as The Times disaggregates and as an empowered staff finds new ways to express itself, a kind of Times Nation has formed around the paper’s political-cultural worldview, an audience unbound by geography (as distinct from the old days of print) and one that self-selects in digital space.

It’s a huge success story – it is hard to argue with the enormous size of Times Nation – but one that carries risk as well. A just-released Pew Research Center survey found that The Times’s “believability rating” had dropped drastically among Republicans compared with Democrats, and was an almost-perfect mirror opposite of Fox News’s rating. Can that be good?

The newspaper’s executive editor, Jill Abrahamson, is not accepting the critique:

“In our newsroom we are always conscious that the way we view an issue in New York is not necessarily the way it is viewed in the rest of the country or world. I disagree with Mr. Brisbane’s sweeping conclusions,” Abramson told POLITICO Saturday night.

“I agree with another past public editor, Dan Okrent, and my predecessor as executive editor, Bill Keller, that in covering some social and cultural issues, the Times sometimes reflects its urban and cosmopolitan base,” she continued. “But I also often quote, including in talks with Mr. Brisbane, another executive editor, Abe Rosenthal, who wanted to be remembered for keeping ‘the paper straight.’ That’s essential.”

Rick Moran points out the obvious flaw in Abrahamson’s rationalization:

Mr. Brisbane also shares that “urban and cosmopolitan” worldview mentioned by Abramson – an excuse for denigrating those as ignorant rubes who hail from anywhere outside the New York-Boston-Philadelphia-Washington axis.

The Times cannot hear the truth Brisbane has spoken, not without questioning foundational beliefs animating their work lives and sense of self. The paper will drift further and further into an echo chamber, perhaps a viable course in this time of revolutionary technological change. But it has proven that as an institution it is not a purveyor of objective coverage, but rather an ideological organ. Nothing wrong with that, if only they didn’t rather comically pretend otherwise.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444358404577605233123916096.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Paul Ryan’s critics and the architects of ObamaCare reveal their real vision for health care: coercion.

The liberal assault on Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform has often been ugly, but that’s not to say it hasn’t been instructive. While ripping Mr. Ryan, ObamaCare’s intellectual architects have been laying out in more detail their own vision for the future of American health care. It’s a vision that all Americans should know about before they go to the polls in November.
***

No one did more to sell the Affordable Care Act than Peter Orszag, the former White House budget director who claimed during 2009-2010 that as much as a third of health spending is “waste” that doesn’t improve outcomes. But now that he’s repaired to Wall Street and writes an online column, he’s deriding the idea that better incentives can reduce costs and sneering at the “health-care competition tooth fairy.”

So get a load of Mr. Orszag’s Tinker Bell alternative, which he called the “most important institutional change” after ObamaCare passed in 2010: the Independent Payment Advisory Board composed of 15 philosopher kings who will rule over U.S. health care.

Who are these Orszag 15? Well, nobody knows. The board was supposed to be up and running by the end of September, but the White House is avoiding naming names for Senate confirmation until after the election. No one knows, either, what this group of geniuses will propose, but that too is part of the grand Orszag plan.

ObamaCare included dozens of speculative pilot programs that are supposed to make health-care delivery and business models less wasteful. Mr. Orszag’s payment board is then supposed to apply the programs that “work” to all of U.S. medicine through regulation, without Congressional consent or legal appeal. Seriously.

It doesn’t take a mythical childhood metaphor to mock this theory. Mr. Orszag’s style of central planning—in what was already the heaviest regulated U.S. industry before ObamaCare—has failed over and over again in Medicare since the creation of the fiat pricing fee schedule in the 1980s.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444358404577607610201699468.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

Student opinion at elite schools is showing ‘diversity.’ The faculty is another matter.

“Thus, the current Guide to the First Year at Harvard alerts incoming students to orientation programs in diversity designed to build connections within and across “nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, physical ability, and religion.” Characteristically and tellingly absent from the list is political or intellectual diversity.”

Four years ago at the beginning of Harvard’s school term, I was going over an assignment with a freshman when she confessed that she was feeling guilty—because she was working for the Obama campaign. I assumed she meant that her campaign work was taking too much time from her studies, but she corrected me: She was feeling guilty because she supported John McCain.

So why, I asked, was she working for his opponent? She answered: “Because I wanted so badly to get along with my roommates and with everyone else.”

Few of us survive adolescence without some conflict of the kind experienced by this freshman and dramatized by Tom Wolfe in his novel “I Am Charlotte Simmons” (2004): the conflict between the demands of new surroundings and the moral beliefs and values one brings from home. Every environment dispenses its conventional wisdom, and swimming against the current is always hard. But our freshman’s predicament was driven by an exaggerated impression of “everyone else.”

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3309/germany-integration-turkish-muslims Integration may even be unattainable if the younger generation of Turkish-Germans increasingly continues to embrace Islam. Nearly half of all Turks living in Germany say they hope there will be more Muslims than Christians in Germany in the future, according to a new survey of Turkish-German mores and attitudes. The study also shows that […]

http://townhall.com/columnists/dianawest/2012/08/24/wake_up_gop_and_quit_ostracizing_todd_akin/print Prediction: If the GOP establishment doesn’t follow Republican Rep. Todd Akin’s example with a big, fat apology — to Akin — the whole party goes down in flames come November. I don’t mean every Republican will lose, but there is great political peril in not sealing the hole in Republican armor that has opened […]

WHAT BETTER EVIDENCE IS THERE FOR THE FAILURE OF THE LIBERAL MEDIA TO SERIOUSLY VET SOMEONE THAN THE SORDID STORY OF JOHN EDWARDS? RSK

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/315013/original-birthers-victor-davis-hanson

The Left went apoplectic over Romney’s recent joke about birth certificates — perhaps a tit-for-tat shot across Obama’s bow for the prior week’s presidential evocation of the old story of Romney’s dog on top of Romney’s car. But if pundits wish to be so angry at the birther joking, then they should go after the original birthers, who may have started the myth — the literary agency Dystel & Goderich, which for over 16 years in their promo bio listed Obama as Kenyan-born — 1991–2007 — without any apparent complaint or questioning by those who read it. That fabrication was an odd thing to do for two reasons: One, authors are customarily asked to submit biographical information to their agents and publishers, and often periodically update and edit that information in catalogues, promo material, and booklets; and, two: The Kenyan-born reference disappeared abruptly in 2007, without any explanation, right about the time that Senator Obama began his campaign for the presidency.

Many have interpreted those strange events not as a simple “slip,” but as the lame fudging of either the agents, or the author, or both, to construct a suitably exotic birthplace for Obama that might emphasize the cross-cultural themes of his autobiography — a hypothesis strengthened by revelations that a great number of the key stories of Dreams from My Father were fictionalized, bearing little semblance to what actually happened.

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2012/08/14/report-from-rome-berlusconi%E2%80%99s-comeback
Report From Rome: Berlusconi’s Comeback?
Ah, Italian politics . . . This scene reminds me of my native Serbia: corruption, sleaze, scandals, cushy jobs for the boys, and dramatis personæ that changes but little from one decade to another. There’s also the same resentment at various dictates coming from the German-dominated European Union—of which Italy (unlike Serbia) is a member, but an institution many Italians now see as a hostile foreign entity.

After nine months in power, Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti is in trouble. His non-partisan government of technocrats was effectively appointed on orders from the European Commission last November to sort out the country’s messy finances, which his predecessor Silvio Berlusconi was deemed unable to do. Berlusconi did not put much of a fight—which he could have done—and in retrospect we can see why. Within weeks Monti had to introduce hugely unpopular emergency austerity measures intended to restore market confidence, which included raising taxes by over twenty billion Euros ($25bn), increasing retirement age (which for many civil servants was a cushy 59!), and introducing tough new measures to curb tax evasion, a national sport if there ever was one. The assumption in Rome was that a reciprocal package would be put together in Brussels (with a blessing from Berlin, of course) to allow new liquidity into Italian economy to encourage growth and restore market confidence.