RUTHFULLY YOURS

Overcoming initial doubts, ‘Seinfeld’ became a hit with writing of unparalleled wit and a complete lack of timidity

It’s impossible to think of a television comedy that has rooted itself as deeply in the culture as “Seinfeld” has—no small irony given the grave doubts initially raised about its prospects for success. It was, the chief executive of NBC Entertainment objected when the show was under consideration, “too New York, too Jewish.” Initial tests of its appeal were discouraging.

Still, by the time the series ended its extraordinary nine-year run in 1998, advertisers were paying, as Advertising Age reported, virtually a million dollars a minute for airtime, the sort of rate usually commanded by the Super Bowl but never before by any regularly scheduled TV program. NBC itself was prepared to pay an astronomical sum for a 10th season if Jerry Seinfeld had agreed, but there would be none. The show (which began streaming in its entirety on Hulu this week) ended with a finale in which the by then world-renowned quartet—Jerry, George, Elaine, Kramer—was hauled into court and given a year in prison for callous indifference to humanity.

For the second time in three years, Chief Justice John Roberts has rewritten the Affordable Care Act in order to save it. Beyond its implications for health care, the Court’s 6-3 ruling in King v. Burwell is a landmark that betrays the Chief’s vow to be “an umpire,” not a legislator in robes. He stands revealed as a most political Justice.

The black-letter language of ObamaCare limits insurance subsidies to “an Exchange established by the State.” But the Democrats who wrote the bill in 2010 never imagined that 36 states would refuse to participate. So the White House through the IRS wrote a regulation that also opened the subsidy spigots to exchanges established by the federal government.
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Chief Justice Roberts has now become a co-conspirator in this executive law-making. With the verve of a legislator, he has effectively amended the statute to read “established by the State—or by the way the Federal Government.” His opinion—joined by the four liberal Justices and Anthony Kennedy—is all the more startling because it goes beyond normal deference to regulators.

Wilma Mankiller, was the first female chief of the Cherokee Nation….rsk

On June 18, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced that Alexander Hamilton would be replaced or diminished on the $10 bill by 2020. In the place of America’s first treasury secretary would be an as yet unannounced woman.

This decision was as disgraceful as it was bizarre. Though Lew said that the currency redesign was simply part of a scheduled update for the purpose of honoring the 100th anniversary of universal women’s suffrage, nobody expected the father of the American financial system to get the boot. Fortunately, there have been a chorus of voices from all parts of the political spectrum that have expressed anger and opposition to this unfathomable decision to remove the great Founding Father from our currency.

1. “Israelis are more satisfied with their lives than the OECD average,” according to the OECD’s (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) annual “Better Life Index.” Only Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland and Finland ranked ahead of 5th place Israel, among the 34 OECD members, as well as Brazil and Russia. The rating is based on 22 variables, such as education, health, life expectancy, average income, housing and general satisfaction. Israel’s high ranking defies its geo-political neighborhood, but is a derivative of its inherent state of mind: optimism, patriotism, family and communal responsibility and attachment to roots (Israel 21st Century, June 10, 2015).

2. “Israel was rated by expats as the most dynamic country in the world,” according to “InterNations,” the largest network for people who work and live abroad (The Huffington Report, June 12, 2015).

3. The June 15, 2015 issue of the Economist Intelligence Unit praises Israel’s economic performance, expecting a 3.4% growth in 2015 and rising in 2016, declining unemployment [currently at 5%], steady inflation (1.3%), an export surge in 2015, a narrowing 2015 trade deficit and a 2019 trade surplus, larger natural gas production/export, robust private consumption and expanding current account surplus (3% of GDP in 2014, 5.2% – 2015 and 7.4% -2019).

It’s De Blasio Time, and madmen with machetes are on the loose.
Twenty-three prior arrests, including menacing someone with a machete five years ago, and this madman is still walking the streets? Seeing a passerby’s video of Sook Yeong Im, a pretty young Korean tourist, lying on the 40th Street sidewalk after crazy career criminal Frederick Young, 43, had twice slashed open her arm with his viciously honed weapon—exposing muscle fiber and sending blood spurting everywhere—brought back in an instant the knot of fear New Yorkers carried in their stomachs in the pre-Rudy Giuliani era, when out-of-control crime was killing not just one person every four hours, 365 days a year, but also was killing Gotham itself. That the assault occurred in Bryant Park at 11:30 on a sun-drenched early-summer morning, as the victim was looking for a seat after her yoga class, seemed to unravel just about every gain that the tireless efforts of thousands over 20 years had achieved to make New York once more the capital of the world. Suddenly, it seems we’re back to Son of Sam or the Wild Man of West 96th Street.

It is not too many centurions, particularly 100-year-old-plus writers, whose vision of the world is as relevant today as it was when first shared with the public over half a century ago. It is this vision of Orwell, the X-ray view through the cant, platitudes and lies to that ugliest of human drives, the lust for powers absolute, that still distinguishes the British writer, born 112 years ago this week on June 25, 1903. He was only 46 when he died on January 21, 1950. It is his frightening acuity that keeps him not only in the pantheon but even within the orbit of contemporary consciousness.

This is testament not only to Orwell’s talents, but to the unhappy state of the human race. The totalitarian drive, cloaked in cant, platitudes and lies, is more vigorous than ever before, which explains why it is that Orwell’s Cassandra cries resonate to this day. Frankly, how much better to live in a world where Orwell gathers dust on the shelf, an antique with nothing to say to us. But that, of course, would be a state of ordered liberty.

New York state is investing $500 million from the Buffalo Billion, plus an additional $250 million from other sources, to build a 1.2 million-square-foot manufacturing facility on part of the old site of Republic Steel in south Buffalo.
The Buffalo Billion program championed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo is a bold and costly experiment in economic development that is beset by secrecy and politics, and banking on a company with a history of losing money.
The program — hailed in Buffalo but resented across much of the rest of New York — has been promoted as both a catalyst for rejuvenating the western New York economy and a model for other upstate regions.
But the management of the Buffalo Billion by the Cuomo administration has raised eyebrows — and concerns — in some quarters.
Consider:
•One of Cuomo’s largest campaign contributors from the Buffalo area has been awarded contracts to develop two of the three facilities that will house companies recruited to set up shop in Buffalo. The state’s original solicitation for a developer to build a massive solar panel manufacturing plant included a requirement that might have limited the pool of respondents to just one firm, LPCiminelli, whose owner has contributed $96,500 to Cuomo’s campaign during his two races for governor. The state later relaxed the requirement, but awarded the contract to Louis Ciminelli’s firm anyway.

About this illustration: A non-exhaustive Internet search indicates that the illustration (above) may well be the cover of a 1960 comic book for Catholic schools published by the Catechetical Guild. Whatever it is, the cartoon beautifully captures a conventional fallacy regarding the Cold War: namely, that while “domino”-nations fell to Communism the world over, the good ship USA remained secure, fighting off the external foe. Even if the USA is headed toward the “Red Iceberg” in the picture, Uncle Sam and the republic are still the same as ever. Sure, a single Hiss or a pair of Rosenbergs might pop up from time to time, but, systemically speaking, Communist subversion, Communist influence, are what happened Over There. Not here. Never here.

American Betrayal, of course, argues that the evidence overwhelmingly reveals this idea to be so much “court history” in critical need of revision.

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Allen Weinstein, renowned expert on Soviet espionage in America and co-author of the landmark study, The Haunted Wood, died this week. He was 77.

Jews Against Themselves is about the new forms taken by Jewish apostasy in an age when Jewish existence is threatened more starkly and immediately than at any time since the Hitler era.

I have not attempted a systematic taxonomy of all the species of Jews arrayed under the genus “enemies of Israel,” a monumental task that would require an encyclopedia to include the following: Jewish progressives against Israel; Jewish queers against Israel; Haredim against Israel; Holocaust survivors against Israel; children of Holocaust survivors against Israel; Jewish Voice for Peace; grandchildren of Holocaust survivors against Israel; survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto against Israel; J Street; Jewish postmodernists against Israel; Jewish Berkeley professors against Israel; post-Zionists against Israel; Jewish members of MESA (Middle East Studies Association) against Israel; Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods (JBIG, also called, seasonally, London’s Jewish Christmas carolers against Israel); and so on and on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

Juan Cole, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, claims right-wing Jews and an “Islampohobic network” were “a key influence” to Dylann Roof’s rampage that killed nine people at a black church in Charleston, S.C.

“The Muslim-hatred of the Geert Wilders and Marine LePens in Europe, for which Daniel Pipes, and Pamela Geller, and the whole Islamophobic network are cheerleaders and enablers, was a key influence on Dylann Roof, according to his manifesto,” Cole writes on his popular blog, Informed Comment.

But as The College Fix points out, and one commenter noted, Roof’s manifesto makes no mention of Pipes, Geller, Wilders, Muslims, or Islam.

Cole then pivots to where Roof would have found “that white Europeans are being victimized by immigrants,” citing one of his older posts about Anders Breivik, who killed 77 youths in Norway in a 2011 attack, as The College Fix reports.