RUTHFULLY YOURS

As the country’s focus has pivoted from Ebola to the midterm election, immigration and Iran, the elusive Ebola czar surfaced to say we haven’t seen the last case of the dreaded virus in the U.S.

Last month, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the administration hadn’t ruled out letting Ron Klain show his face to the media.

Earnest stressed that being the response coordinator was a behind-the-scenes job, “and that the need for him to play that coordinating role would limit his ability to make a large number of public appearances.”

Today, Klain appeared on MSNBC to stress “we’re gonna see occasional additional cases of Ebola in our country.”

“But today’s release of Dr. Spencer is a milestone,” the Ebola czar said of the New York doctor who went bowling the night before being admitted to the hospital. “It’s a milestone, obviously, in his treatment. It’s a milestone in showing that our strategy of identifying, isolating, and treating Ebola patients can be successful. It’s a milestone because it’s the first time a hospital other than one of our three nationally specialized centers has successfully treated an Ebola patient. And so, we owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Dr. Spencer, who’s a hero, and to the team at Bellevue, the leadership in New York City for delivering this success today.”

Klain said “we’ve seen an improvement in all aspects of our response” since the death of Thomas Eric Duncan in Dallas.

“We’ve increased our ability to identify risky cases, identify potential cases of Ebola to isolate them. And then we’ve improved our readiness in the health care system to treat those patients and to get them the recovery,” he said.

The czar said the states have the power to follow or reject federal quarantine guidelines, but made clear he disagreed with the quarantine of nurse Kaci Hickox.

The left isn’t known for being a good loser. The Democrats had counted on women to be their ace in the hole in the election. Now lefty media outlets are lashing out at women.

“White women didn’t just fail Wendy Davis — they failed the rest of Texas,” Salon bellows. That would be the rest of Texas which also voted against Davis. “Married white women… failed Wendy Davis,” another lefty site declares.

It never occurs to the left that Wendy Davis might have failed white women and that they might have rejected her because she had nothing to actually offer them.

In the left’s warped tyranny of ideology, their politicians don’t fail the people. The people fail them. Obama and Davis are always right. It’s up to the people to prove that they’re good enough for a Barack Obama or a Wendy Davis. If they are, the media will pat them on the head for voting the right way. If they aren’t, they’ll be blamed for thinking the wrong way and failing their rightful rulers.

East German authorities had warned that the government had “lost confidence in the people”. Now that white voters have lost confidence in the Democratic Party, the Party is announcing that they failed it.

The left doesn’t listen to people. It tells them what to think. If they don’t agree, then they have failed it.

White women are the latest punching bag for the Democratic Party’s humiliating defeat even though the previous election should have been a warning sign that even the white voters that the left treats as its property were drifting away. Romney had won white women in every age group and the Jewish vote had dropped. If the Dems couldn’t rely on the friendlier portions of the white vote, they were in trouble.

White voters felt that Obama and his party had failed them. Exit polls showed no confidence in the future. Instead of trying to connect with them, the Democratic Party doubled down on identity politics sloganeering. Obama had won anyway which proved that white voters didn’t matter. Not when a sizable turnout and a disproportionate voting tilt by minority voters could politically erase a more moderate tilt among white voters. It didn’t matter if you were losing the white vote by 12 percent if you were winning the black vote by 90 percent. The model had worked for Obama, but it didn’t work for his party.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/the-worlds-first-anti-jihad-cartoonist-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang episode was joined by Bosch Fawstin, the world’s first anti-jihad comic book author and illustrator. He is The Eisner Award nominated cartoonist who is the creator of the new comic book series, The Infidel, Featuring Pigman, the superhero who is waging a new war against Islam.

Bosch discussed his creation, “Pigman,” his childhood growing up as a Muslim, the threat we face in Islam, our leadership’s failure to confront the threat, and much, much more:

Mark Tooley is President of the Institute on Religion and Democracy (www.theird.org) and author of Methodism and Politics in the Twentieth Century. Follow him on Twitter: @markdtooley.

The multimillion dollar American Friends Service Committee, with offices in several dozen U.S. cities and 14 other countries, is the nearly century old political advocacy arm of Quakers in the U.S. Rooted in the Quaker pacifist tradition, AFSC advocates a form of “peace” that has aligned it with countless dubious international causes over the decades, usually anti-American, anti-Western and often anti-Israel.

AFSC touts accommodation of Iran, for example, naturally more concerned about U.S. or Israeli military action than about a nuclear armed Iran. And AFSC endorses Palestinian nationalism in ways that of course demonize Israel while minimizing Palestinian terror.

But AFSC offered a somewhat new twist when recently highlighting a young Palestinian-American activist’s solidarity visit to, and arrest in, racially charged Ferguson, Missouri.

“When Mike Brown was murdered in Ferguson my people in Gaza were being slaughtered by Israel in Operation Protective Edge,” explained Bassem Masri on AFSC’s blog.

“The timing of the two events woke up a lot of people. When Mike was killed, much of the media started demonizing him and the protestors, often the same sources that blamed Palestinians for their own deaths in Gaza. People naturally saw the connections.”

Masri, a self-described “pissed off citizen,” said Americans have long “maligned” the Palestinian struggle for liberation, but at least the people of Ferguson now understand their common struggle.

“On those terrible nights in Ferguson when the police were attacking peaceful civilians with tear gas, Palestinians under Israeli occupation offered advice on how to deal with the effects of the gas,” Masri recounted.

“Facing violence from an occupying force, whether in Palestine or Ferguson, forges a mindset that demands resistance and standing up for one’s community. When the police used military tanks and checkpoints to imprison the residents of Ferguson, I was reminded of life in the West Bank where I saw the Israeli military use the same tactics of repression.”

Hamas leaders have urged their followers to use their cars and knives to spill as much Jewish blood as possible. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called on Palestinians to stop Jews from visiting the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the holiest site in Judaism as well as the location of the Islamic Al Aqsa complex, by using “all means” necessary.

The calls for violence by top Palestinian authorities have been enthusiastically answered by thugs in the streets. Six Israelis have been killed in terror attacks in the last thirty days – not by rockets this time, but by cars and knives wielded as murder weapons against Israeli soldiers and civilians alike, including women and children.

On October 22nd, a member of Hamas rammed his car into pedestrians in Jerusalem, killing a three-month-old girl.

Last week, a Palestinian Jerusalem resident also turned his vehicle into a killing machine. An Israeli was killed and 13 others wounded when he aimed his vehicle at a group of people waiting at a light rail station. On the same day, yet another Palestinian ran into and wounded three Israeli soldiers near Jerusalem.

Leaders of Abbas’s party, Fatah, and of Hamas, Abbas’s partners in the so-called Palestinian “unity” government, shrugged their shoulders and said the attacks were perfectly “natural” or “normal” responses to Israeli policies. Indeed, they regard the killers as heroes.

As Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Ron Prosor said to reporters at UN headquarters in New York on November 10th:

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2014/11/piltdown-muslim/
Not known for his sense of humour, Osama bin Laden was said to have enjoyed a hearty chuckle when George W. Bush described Islam as the ‘religion of peace’. Who could blame him? In hoping to the point of delusion that such a creed exists — indeed, has ever existed — the joke is on the West

I remember when Gough Whitlam became Prime Minister, to choose a time not too far distant in the past. I can’t remember Islam figuring in the public debate at the time. Unfortunately, I was also around – although terribly young, you understand — when Egypt took centre stage at the time of the Suez crisis. Anthony Eden likened Nasser to Hitler but not, you might note, to Saladin.

Until its last decade, the whole of the twentieth century insulated the evolving Western mind, generation after generation, from any problem related to Islam. There were devastating world wars, the Great Depression, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and, of course, for forty years, the Cold War and fear of nuclear annihilation. Oil crises, one of which effectively put paid to the spendthrift Whitlam government, came and went. Then, of course, the great moral crisis of our time, global warming, captured the headlines and our attention.

I don’t want to walk through every traumatic event of the twentieth century. It is sufficient to say that the Muslim problem apparently came out of the blue near to the end of the century. As Muhammad and his message have been around since the seventh century it is clear, is it not, that what we are now variously seeing in many places where Muslims are present in large numbers — terrorism, bombings, butchery, beheadings, rapes, enslavement, general mayhem and, almost worst of all, endemic whining — must be aberrant. Some kind of Darwinian chance mutation must have occurred, spawning a violent scolding Islamic lookalike.

Thus, if this explanation has substance, there are two Islams; the genuine and the mutant. To sharpen the distinction between the two, Islam proper has been given the mantle of the ‘religion of peace’, and its aberrant offshoot badged ‘radical Islam’.

It is little wonder that this classification has caught on. It provides enormous relief. It is not hard to see why. After all, we can surely deal with a radical offshoot of Islam in circumstances where most of the 1.6 billion (and rising) Muslims in the world follow the religion of peace.

It also has particular appeal to those on the left who automatically want to see good in ‘the other’, particularly if they have non-white skin. But, really, its acceptance has cut across political boundaries. As the person who breathed life into it; George W. Bush, of course, bought it hook line and sinker. But he is just one among a retinue of fellow-traveller conservative politicians in the Western world.

Secretary of State Kerry’s “peace process” actually put Israelis and Palestinians on a new collision course.

Not a single Palestinian Authority official has denounced the wave of terror attacks on Israel. They, too, are afraid of being condemned by their people for denouncing “heroic operations” such as ramming a car into a three-month old infant.

Kerry and other Western leaders do not want to understand that Abbas is not authorized to make any concessions for peace with Israel. For Abbas, it is more convenient to be criticized by the U.S. and Israel than to be denounced by his own people. Ignoring these facts, Kerry tried to pressure Abbas into making concessions that would have turned the Palestinian Authority president into a “traitor” in the eyes of his people. Abbas knows that the people he has radicalized would turn against him if he dared to speak out against the killing of Jews.

The recent spate of terror attacks in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and the West Bank did not come as a surprise to those who have been following the ongoing incitement campaign waged by Palestinians against Israel.

This campaign escalated immediately after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s last failed “peace process” between Israel and the Palestinians. Kerry’s “peace process” actually put Israelis and Palestinians on a new collision course, which reached its peak with the recent terror attacks on Israelis.

Kerry failed to acknowledge that Palestinian Authority [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas does not have a mandate from his people to negotiate, let alone sign, any agreement with Israel. Abbas is now in the tenth year of his four-year term in office.

Nor did Kerry listen to the advice of those who warned him and his aides that Abbas would not be able to implement any agreement with Israel on the ground. Abbas cannot even visit his private house in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, and he controls less than 40% of the West Bank. Where exactly did Kerry expect Abbas to implement any agreement with Israel? In the city-center of Ramallah or Nablus?

Rabbis became, in essence, the health department of their time.

Much as Jews were accused and attacked for supposedly spreading the plague in the 14th Century because their dietary ad sanitary rituals gave them a slight edge in preventing disease, doctors in West Africa have been attacked on suspicion that they are actually infecting people with the disease rather than combating it.

In an era before antibiotics, blood tests and digital scanning thermometers; In an era before EKG’s, stethoscopes, blood transfusions and even refrigeration; In an era before doctors, science and even a rudimentary understanding of human anatomy, there was the ancient Jewish dietary law of kosher, which continues to offer a lesson for today’s fractured societies of western Africa struggling to contain the Ebola epidemic.

Centuries ago, with an understanding of microbes and hygiene still far in the future, Jews observed that those who ate meat from sick or dead animals would often fall ill and die. Similar woes could result from animals not consumed in a timely way after being slaughtered. While they didn’t know of trichinosis, they also saw that eating pork could be fatal. Shellfish and fish without scales contained a similar lethal threat. The rich and frothy milk of that time could produce gastro illness when served with meat.

While the society was agrarian, life was harsh and painfully short and government was the oppressive rule of hostile royalty, there was an understanding among Jews that certain culinary behavior triggered serious illness. As a result, dietary laws were put into place by an observant community that sought to protect the individual and public health. They were then codified by religious leaders for the purpose of creating a collective societal memory of what the faithful could and could not consume. Rabbis became, in essence, the health department of their time, providing approved animal certification prior to slaughter.

President Obama will set the tone for his final years in office with his looming decision on an immigration executive order. These columns supported reform long before Mr. Obama, and we still do, but if he does act on his own he’s likely to harm the immigration cause and his own legacy.

Liberal activists and Democrats are pressuring Mr. Obama to broaden his controversial 2012 executive action, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which allows immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children to stay in the country and work. The details of his next edict are still secret, but presumably he’d extend the same provisions of his 2012 order to a larger swath of the undocumented population. Perhaps to millions of adults.

The political case from a Democratic point of view—the only kind Mr. Obama seems to understand—goes like this. Republicans will never pass reform, so he has to act by himself to accomplish something before he leaves office. His base will be pleased, and he’ll divide Republicans. The anti-immigration right may even blow a gasket and further alienate Asian- and Hispanic-Americans between now and the 2016 election. What’s to lose?

The answer is plenty. On the merits, Mr. Obama’s executive order can’t come close to fixing America’s broken immigration laws. The most he can do is to legalize the immigration status of several million people. This would let them remain in the U.S., but it wouldn’t offer a green card or path to citizenship. That requires Congress.

An executive order also can’t increase the number of visas, which means it can’t reduce the future flow of illegal immigrants by providing more legal pathways to enter the U.S. So no new science-graduate visas for tech workers, no visas for farm workers to end the labor shortage in agriculture, and no guest-worker program to create a flexible labor market for other jobs in a growing U.S. economy. Mr. Obama is offering amnesty without addressing the root cause of border-crossing economic migration.

As for the politics, we think there’s a good chance Republicans would pass immigration reform in some form in the next two years. The leadership wants to do it, and a majority of the rank and file privately want to vote for it to end the debate. Most realize the growing importance of minority voters to the GOP’s chances of winning the Presidency.

The Piketty-Saez data ignore changes in tax law and fail to count noncash compensation and Social Security benefits.

What the hockey-stick portrayal of global temperatures did in bringing a sense of crisis to the issue of global warming is now being replicated in the controversy over income inequality, thanks to a now-famous study by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, professors of economics at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley, respectively. Whether the issue is climate change or income inequality, however, problems with the underlying data significantly distort the debate.

The chosen starting point for the most-quoted part of the Piketty-Saez study is 1979. In that year the inflation rate was 13.3%, interest rates were 15.5% and the poverty rate was rising, but economic misery was distributed more equally than in any year since. That misery led to the election of Ronald Reagan, whose economic policies helped usher in 25 years of lower interest rates, lower inflation and high economic growth. But Messrs. Piketty and Saez tell us it was also a period where the rich got richer, the poor got poorer and only a relatively small number of Americans benefited from the economic booms of the Reagan and Clinton years.

If that dark picture doesn’t sound like the country you lived in, that’s because it isn’t. The Piketty-Saez study looked only at pretax cash market income. It did not take into account taxes. It left out noncash compensation such as employer-provided health insurance and pension contributions. It left out Social Security payments, Medicare and Medicaid benefits, and more than 100 other means-tested government programs. Realized capital gains were included, but not the first $500,000 from the sale of one’s home, which is tax-exempt. IRAs and 401(k)s were counted only when the money is taken out in retirement. Finally, the Piketty-Saez data are based on individual tax returns, which ignore, for any given household, the presence of multiple earners.