RUTHFULLY YOURS

A federal prosecutor handed up indictments Friday in New Jersey’s bridge-closure scandal after a 16-month probe. Gov. Chris Christie wasn’t implicated, but the investigation has damaged his political standing. Many pundits say the bridge closure by aides to punish a political opponent should disqualify Mr. Christie from running for President, though there’s no evidence he knew what his aides were doing.

Voters can make up their own mind, but this also raises the ripe question of disparate political treatment. Specifically, is anyone at Justice or the FBI investigating the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton for accepting foreign donations while she was Secretary of State? The risk of quid-pro-quo corruption involving U.S. foreign policy would seem to be at least as important as commuter inconvenience at the George Washington Bridge.

SAN DIEGO—Move over, Mexico. When it comes to sending immigrants to the U.S., China and India have taken the lead.

China was the country of origin for 147,000 recent U.S. immigrants in 2013, while Mexico sent just 125,000, according to a Census Bureau study by researcher Eric Jensen and others. India, with 129,000 immigrants, also topped Mexico, though the two countries’ results weren’t statistically different from each other.

For the study, presented last week at the Population Association of America conference in San Diego, researchers analyzed annual immigration data for 2000 to 2013 from the American Community Survey.

Wisconsin ranks 40th in the nation for job growth, or so says a recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report. Many in the media and political circles pounced on the release as evidence that the policies of Republican Gov. Scott Walker, a potential presidential candidate, have left the Badger State trailing much of the nation.

But the report failed to give sufficient context to Wisconsin’s job growth. The BLS, along with other reports touting similar results, ranked states based on how much private employment increased over a year.

Why might Wisconsin’s employment increase seem modest? One reason could be that more Wisconsinites than people in many other states already had jobs, which they did. Another wrinkle comes from factors like the energy boom in the upper plains states. In states like Wisconsin not so blessed with shale, job growth can seem comparatively slow.

Let’s look at Wisconsin’s employment growth since Mr. Walker took office. Since February 2011, Wisconsin’s employable population has grown by about 100,000 people, but the number of people employed increased by about 135,000. That means employment outpaced population growth significantly.

As Barack Obama’s presidency stretches into its final quarter, relations between the United States and Israel have reached the breaking point. Having come into office determined to put “daylight” between Washington and Jerusalem, as the president told Jewish leaders in 2009, the Obama administration is now discarding the basic assumptions underpinning the U.S.-Israel alliance. The equities of the Arab–Israeli conflict, the nature of the Iranian threat, the region’s security architecture—all the old certainties have given way to the president’s quest for a rapprochement with the Iranian regime and a new balance of power in the Middle East.

Even as it seeks a regional order that will come at Israel’s expense, however, the White House professes a great love of the Jewish state. Those who doubt this love, administration spokesmen say, are “politicizing” the Israel issue. This raises a critical question: What does it mean to be pro-Israel in the age of Obama?

Anti-Semitism on American college campuses is rising—and worsening. Where does it come from, and can it be stopped?

“I never dreamed that it could come to this!”

In February, a Jewish college student was hospitalized after being punched in the face at a pro-Palestinian demonstration on a campus in upstate New York. His family has insisted on maintaining the boy’s privacy, but other such incidents, some caught on camera, include a male student punched in the face at Temple University, a female student at Ohio University harassed for defending Israel, and a male student at Cornell threatened physically for protesting anti-Israel propaganda. On three successive days last summer, the Boston police had to protect a student rally for Israel from pro-Palestinian mobs shouting “Jews back to Birkenau!” At the University of California-Irvine, this year’s Israel Independence Day festivities were blocked and shouted down by anti-Israel demonstrators. Every year, some 200 campuses now host a multiday hate-the-Jews fest, its malignancy encapsulated in its title: “Israel Apartheid Week.”

The Louis D. Brandeis Center in Washington, founded in 2011 to protect against such intimidation, has reported being startled by the results of its own 2013-14 survey: “more than half of Jewish American college students [have] personally experienced or witnessed anti-Semitism.” The film Crossing the Line 2: The New Face of Anti-Semitism on Campus faithfully captures scenes of the violence that often attends this new academic experience.

No one knows what exactly happened to the deceased Freddie Gray, except that it should not have happened. Between what is outlined in the indictments and what will be proven in court is an unknown abyss. But the more dramatic the short-term exuberance over the sweeping indictments, the more likely the long-term fury when the charges are likely to be substantially reduced or unproven in court.

Almost everyone blames the subsequent Baltimore rioting on some –ism — endemic racism, economic inequality, the lack of jobs, the legacy of slavery, systematic police brutality and insensitivity, the pathologies of the black underclass, the destruction of the black family and on and on. However, most of America, rich and poor, black, white and other, liberal and conservative can more or less chart the conditions that explain a Ferguson or Baltimore — and remain quiet about it. At this point, I don’t think much will change until action follows rhetoric and someone like Barack Obama symbolically puts his kids in the public schools rather than at Sidwell Friends, or some of the loud MSNBC team choose to live, in desegregated style, in the Baltimore inner city, or Apple and Google grandees mentor East Palo Alto gangbangers, or an Al Gore recruits inner-city youth on his green staffs, or a Warren Buffett leads a national effort on the part of plutocrats to invest money in Detroit or Oakland shopping centers.

“It is ridiculous to hope that Islam can or will reform. Leave that Pollyanna-ism to Egypt’s President el Sisi. The only sure way to protect our values – the best the world has ever experienced – is to prevent too many Muslims from coming here. Full stop. End of story.”
If you don’t stand for Western values, as Senator Sinodinis conspicuously failed to do on a recent Q&A, you’ll fall for the blind and pernicious cliches of the multi-culti left. What’s so hard to grasp in the simple and unimpeachable statement that Islam and modernity’s hard-won freedoms are oil and water?

“It is ridiculous to hope that Islam can or will reform. Leave that Pollyanna-ism to Egypt’s President el Sisi. The only sure way to protect our values – the best the world has ever experienced – is to prevent too many Muslims from coming here. Full stop. End of story.”

Place: Balmain coffee shop. Made-up conversation. Circa recently:

“All people should live in peace and harmony with each other; respecting each other’s lifestyles, cultures, religions, and political views.”

“Hold on! How about penis gourds? I don’t want my children subject to men wearing only penis gourds at my local coffee shop, even on the very hottest of days.”

“True enough, there are always limits. How about living in harmony with people whose children might want to cut your head off?”

“Oh, that’s alright, we must be politically correct. Be non-discriminatory and show what well-rounded compassionate people we are.”

MAYBE OBAMA SHOULD BOW TO THE PRESENT KING AS HE DID DURING HIS FIRST VISIT TO THE MIDDLE EAST……RSK
There’s a great line in the latest James Bond trailer. Warning Bond of his ignorance of danger, Mr. White remarks: “You’re a kite dancing in a hurricane.” It’s a perfect analogy for President Obama’s policy in the Middle East: a kite dancing in the spiraling hurricane of sectarian politics. Unfortunately, President Obama isn’t James Bond. And today, with America’s kite lost in the wind, Saudi Arabia’s leaders are reverting to sectarian paranoia. If we decipher the causes of the U.S.–Saudi breakdown, two specific events stand out. First, the American withdrawal from Iraq in December 2011.

That decision led to Iran’s seizure of Iraqi political dialogue and to Iraq’s sectarian fragmentation, delivering it into the hands of ISIS. Second, President Obama’s repeated WMD “red line” impotence in Syria. Repeated, because Assad has repeatedly murdered Syrian civilians with chlorine gas since his Ghouta massacre of August 2013. These two events encouraged the Saudis to believe that President Obama is unreliable and uninterested in their concerns.

Their view has been reinforced by subsequent events. The president’s malleability toward Iran, for example, has been especially problematic. Witnessing Iran’s growing empire of Khomeinism and President Obama’s apparent acquiescence to that endeavor — take Obama’s silence to this week’s capture of a vessel that was under U.S. protection — the Saudis are panicking. The central problem is that while both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are aware of Iran’s aggressive ambitions, each nation has a different conception of America’s deterrent power against Iran. Where President Obama sees American regional strength via the (semi) formidable U.S. military presence in the Gulf, the Saudis see America’s regional weakness via Iran’s political domination in Beirut, Baghdad, Damascus, and now Sana’a, Yemen. And the distinctions seem to reveal something deeper.

Having watched closely the manner in which questions of liberty and power are batted around in the first part of the 21st century — most recently during the disgraceful contretemps that Indiana’s rather tame Religious Freedom Restoration Act provoked across the land — I have come to wonder of late whether the Bill of Rights could be ratified today.

In its classical mode, liberalism requires the citizenry that it serves to respect the crucial distinction that obtains between the principle of a given rule and the consequences that the rule might feasibly yield. Simply put, a country in which the people regard certain individual rights as inviolable axioms of nature — and who accept with alacrity, therefore, that they will often be used for ill — will be a country that boasts protections of those rights within its national charter. A country in which the people are focused primarily on what might be done with those rights, by contrast, will be a country that prefers to elevate and to abide by the whims of transient majorities — or, perhaps, by the discretion of a supposedly enlightened few. In Indiana, we were given an insight into which of these countries the people of the United States would rather live in.

Hill and Bill can’t hide from shady deals exposed in ‘Clinton Cash’

The Clintons have been playing the political press for idiots.

Revealing what they’ve been up to took a little bit of work. It wasn’t obvious. While Bill Clinton was giving a speech about fighting AIDS in Africa, or about educating girls in Asia, reporters simply regurgitated the press release. They didn’t ask: Who’s that shady guy standing next to Bill? What are his interests? How much money has he given to, or raised for, Bill, Hillary and their foundation? And what favorable treatment did the shady guy subsequently receive from Hillary?

When you’re a political reporter, complexity is boring. Curiosity takes work. Asking questions and looking up information can lead to dead ends.

It’s much easier to do gaffe patrol. Go to press conferences. Quote party hacks who call you every day with juicy little observations. Or, when all else fails, simply write down your opinions and call it “analysis” or attribute your thoughts to “critics.”

Thank goodness, then, for Peter Schweizer and his blockbuster expose “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.” (Very rich: The pair have made at least $136.5 million since 2001).

The details of the Clinton operation vary, but the overall M.O. is fairly consistent, he writes.