RUTHFULLY YOURS

One tongue-in-cheek question that began circulating after Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic quoted an anonymous American official bad-mouthing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week is: “How do you say ‘chickenshit’ in Hebrew?”

The Israeli media did not bother too much with the translation, mostly using the English phrase and providing a few parenthetical synonyms for “cowardice.” They did, however, devote endless discussion to the significance of such an expression of disdain toward Netanyahu coming from the Obama administration.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu responded by setting the record straight about his illustrious military history, and pro-Israel commentators at home and abroad juxtaposed this with President Barack Obama’s past as a dope-smoking radical.

What neither Netanyahu nor his defenders emphasized, though, was the paradoxical nature of the slur. On the one hand, the Israeli leader is ostensibly a wimp because he will not take risks for peace. On the other, he is hesitant to go to war, and missed the opportunity to bomb Iran.

Oh, and he cares about keeping his job — unlike, say, every politician who ever lived.

In other words, nothing Netanyahu does or does not do is acceptable to the Capitol Hill crew.

Ironically, this latest display of hostility from Washington gave a boost to Netanyahu’s popularity. Even his opponents had to admit that calling the prime minister “chickenshit” was distasteful.

Where the political divide lies is over the issue of whom to blame for the ever-souring relations between the U.S. and Israel. The left side of the spectrum is faulting Netanyahu for “provocations,” such as housing construction. The Right is reiterating its mantra that Netanyahu should ignore the admonitions of an anti-Israel White House and State Department, and safeguard the interests of his own people.

With midterm elections just days away, it is worth considering money in politics and attempts to curb speech. Both Parties want money out of politics…but only that which flows to the other. There has been no Court decision in recent times that has upset Democrats so much as Citizen’s United in 2010. The irony is that their reasoning is illiberal. Their objection had to do with the fact that the Court considers corporations to be similar to unions and other political entities. Democrats, naturally, see nothing wrong with public sector unions feeding the machine that is essentially collusion between those unions and favored politicians – jobs for votes and money.

According to the FEC (Federal Election Committee), $5.3 billion was spent in 2012 on federal elections, double what had been spent a decade earlier – a rate of increase that is roughly triple the rate of inflation. Numerous attempts to curtail spending on elections have failed. Placing limits on spending inevitably favor incumbents – individuals, supported by taxpayers, over whom they exercise power and from whom they are increasingly alienated.

More importantly, when we rue the amount of money spent on political campaigns we unwittingly support efforts to curtail speech. Certainly we do not want the process to become any more corrupted than it already is, but that is why we have federal anti-bribery laws that prohibit quid pro quo dealings between officeholders and donors. If anything, existing rules should be enforced more aggressively. Congress should mandate full disclosure of all contributors that donate to political campaigns, including those to PACs and so-called “dark pools.” That would make it easier for federal attorneys to prosecute incidences of political bribery, and would have the secondary, beneficial consequences of providing greater transparency and would likely reduce overall campaign spending.

I may think George Soros is foolish and mistaken in his political beliefs (which I do), but he has every right to spend his money as he wishes. In like manner, the Koch brothers have every right to express their opinions. When Senator Harry Reid refers to them as “un-American,” it is he who is acting un-American, as he seeks to bend the Constitution in his favor.

The effect of this brouhaha has been to raise the spectre of limiting speech. Like most federal bureaucracies, the FEC has been expanding its reach. Recently Vice Chairperson Ann Ravel announced her intent to forge new rules regarding on-line political speech. Under current rules, any political content that is not posted on-line for a fee is not subject to regulation. However, half the six members of the FEC wish to subject all blogs and internet postings, with political content (presumably including this one), to FEC-mandated controls.

To be honest, the name Jeffrey Goldberg is new to me. Wait. Not quite true. In my neighborhood back in Montreal, especially around St. Urbain Street, there were quite a few Goldbergs and one or two of them may even have been named Jeffrey, as in Jeffrey Goldberg.

All of them, I later learned, even the ones who were up to no good at the poolroom on Fairmount Street, turned themselves into great physicians. (Who knew?)

So we are talking about somebody else, a Jeffrey Goldberg from New York who became a journalist. So from now on when we say Jeffrey Goldberg we are referring to a journalist who originally made a name for himself, Jeffrey Goldberg, by taking part in blogging shameful innuendos about Sarah Palin, otherwise known as deranged Sarah Palin syndrome.

But that was before – though still the same Jeffrey Goldberg when we wonder how come he is suddenly so famous?

Everywhere you look, it’s Jeffrey Goldberg. What did he say? What did he do? Did he discover the cure for some disease?

No, that would be Jeffrey Goldberg from Montreal.

This Jeffrey Goldberg – did he find a way to end war? No. Did he find a way to start a war?

Maybe he did, and this too takes some doing.

Each day another damning detail emerges about President Obama’s deliberate assault on every facet of America’s institutions and the potentially dire effects on Americans. With the burgeoning host of diseases now entering the U.S., courtesy of Barack Hussein Obama, what impact does this onslaught have on the blood supply and its quality? Let’s consider the witch’s brew now facing America’s health care system.

Judicial Watch uncovered Obama’s stealth operation to “actively formulate plans to admit Ebola-infected non-U.S. citizens into the United States for treatment within the first days of diagnosis.” Yet it is “unclear who would bear the high costs of transporting and treating non-citizen Ebola patients.” In fact, “the plans include special waivers of laws and regulations that ban the admission of non-citizens with a communicable disease as dangerous as Ebola.”

Bryan Preston notes that the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report or MMWR, “is the Centers for Disease Control’s premiere journal for reporting and tracking infectious diseases in the United States.” And, yet, the MMWR for the week ending October 4, 2014 made no mention of the Ebola case in Dallas. Puzzling, indeed, since Ebola is a viral hemorrhagic fever and the CDC specifically lists it as a notifiable disease in a 2010 report.

And as we have come to expect from the least transparent administration, the “Obama administration has shunned multiple requests to respond to the report exposing its secret plan to admit Ebola infected foreigners into the United States.”

Then there are the illegals coming from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador with their myriad collection of diseases, many of which have not been encountered in this country. Dengue fever occurs in Central and South America and has led to 1/2 million hospitalizations and 25,000 deaths. According to Winton Gibbons in his article entitled “Blood Screening/Transfusion Future Product Market Concepts” of September 2013, “[o]nly 13% of low income countries have a national hemovigilance system to monitor and improve safe blood transfusion.”

Which brings me to Dengue fever. Dengue is endemic in more than 110 countries. According to a June 2011 article entitled “Dengue antibodies in blood donors,” the authors conclude that “the results of the current analysis show that the introduction of quantitative or molecular serological methods to determine the presence of anti-dengue antibodies or the detection of the dengue virus in blood donors…should be established so that the quality of blood transfusions is guaranteed.” And while the authors assert that “the current research suggests that blood donors were not actively infected with the dengue virus…it is well known that methodologies for virus detection also include the more efficient viral RNA and NSI antigen investigations for the dengue virus which eliminate the immunological window period. The current study may not have identified anti-dengue IgM antibodies [.]” It should be noted that while a testing kit has been produced that can identify Dengue within 15 minutes at an 80 percent success rate, there is no vaccine available for Dengue Fever.

The global demonization of Israel and the Jewish people is gathering terrifying pace and ferocity, not least on university campuses.

The global demonization of Israel and the Jewish people is gathering terrifying pace and ferocity, not least on university campuses.

During last summer’s war in Gaza, the Western media uncritically promulgated as truth the inflammatory Hamas lie that Israel was willfully killing Palestinian children and most of Gaza’s war casualties were civilians.

The result was an eruption of hatred and violence against Diaspora Jews in Britain and Europe.

Galvanized by this rout of reason, Palestinians have felt emboldened to ratchet up their incitement against Israel.

So Mahmoud Abbas has been inflaming the violence and rioting that has been escalating in Jerusalem by making false and incendiary claims that Israel was attempting to desecrate the Aksa Mosque.

On Western university campuses, the demonization of Israel and intimidation of Jewish students has similarly shifted onto an even more intense and vicious level.

According to a report by the Anti-Defamation League, more than 75 anti-Israel events have been reported on US college and university campuses this autumn, more than twice as many as last year and accelerating after Operation Protective Edge.

Yehudah Glick has spent the better part of the last 20 years championing the right of Jews to pray on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem – Judaism’s holiest site. On Wednesday night, the Palestinians sent a hit man to Jerusalem to kill him.

And today Glick lays in a coma at Shaare Zedek Medical Center.

Two people bear direct responsibility for this terrorist attack: the gunman, and Palestinian Authority President and PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas. The gunman shot Glick, and Abbas told him to shoot Glick.

Abbas routinely glorifies terrorist murder of Jews, and funds terrorism with the PA’s US- and European-funded budget.

But it isn’t often that he directly incites the murder of Jews.

Two weeks ago, Abbas did just that. Speaking to Fatah members, he referred to Jews who wish to pray at Judaism’s holiest site as “settlers.” He then told his audience that they must remain on the Temple Mount at all times to block Jews from entering.

“We must prevent them from entering [the Temple Mount] in any way…. They have no right to enter and desecrate [it]. We must confront them and defend our holy sites,” he said.

As Palestinian Media Watch reported Thursday, in the three days leading up to the assassination attempt on Glick, the PA’s television station broadcast Abbas’s call for attacks on Jews who seek to enter the Temple Mount 19 times.

While Abbas himself is responsible for the hit on Glick, he has had one major enabler – the Obama administration. Since Abbas first issued the order for Palestinians to attack Jews, there have been two terrorist attacks in Jerusalem. Both have claimed American citizens among their victims. Yet the Obama administration has refused to condemn Abbas’s call to murder Jews either before it led to the first terrorist attack or since Glick was shot Wednesday night.

The inaugural session of the Abu Dhabi Strategic Debate took place last week, with scholars coming from around the world to participate in two days of discussion on a plethora of topics. Hisham Melhem, the Washington bureau chief for Al Arabiya News, subsequently published a lengthy summary of the proceedings on Al Arabiya’s website, and reading it, I was struck by the absence of certain topics one might expect to feature prominently. Egypt, Iran, oil, ISIS, Turkey, Russia, the U.S., and Islamic extremism were all there. But in 1,700 words, the Palestinians weren’t mentioned once, while Israel appeared only in the very last paragraph–which deserves to be read in full:

Finally, it was fascinating to attend a two day conference about the Middle East in times of upheaval in which Israel was mostly ignored, with the only frontal criticism of her policies delivered by an American diplomat.
And this explains a lot about the current U.S.-Israel spat. President Barack Obama entered office with the firm belief that the best way to improve America’s relations with the Muslim world was to create “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel, and for six years now, he and his staff have worked diligently to do exactly that. Nor was this an inherently unreasonable idea: Even a decade ago, Arab capitals might have cheered the sight of U.S. officials hurling childish insults at their Israeli counterparts.

The problem is that the Arab world has changed greatly in recent years, while the Obama administration–like most of Europe–remains stuck in its old paradigm. Granted, Arabs still don’t like Israel, but they have discovered that Israel and the Palestinians are very far down on their list of urgent concerns. The collapse of entire states that were formerly lynchpins of the Arab world, like Syria, Iraq, and Libya; the fear that other vital states like Egypt and Jordan could follow suit; the rise of Islamic extremist movements that threaten all the existing Arab states; the destabilizing flood of millions of refugees; the fear of U.S. disengagement from the region; the “predicament of living in the shadows of what they see as a belligerent Iran and an assertive Turkey” (to quote Melhem)–all these are far more pressing concerns.

And not only has Israel fallen off the list of pressing problems, but it has come to be viewed as capable of contributing, however modestly, to dealing with some of the new pressing problems. Last month, Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute published his impressions from a tour of the Mideast, including of Israel’s deepening strategic relationships with Egypt and Jordan. “Indeed, one of the most unusual moments of my trip was to hear certain Arab security officials effectively compete with one another for who has the better relationship with Israel,” he wrote. “In this regard, times have certainly changed.”

At the conclusion of the latest installment of the endless Arab war against Israel, the leaders of Hamas simultaneously accused Israel of “genocide” against the residents of Gaza and took to the streets, dancing, ululating, and jubilating in celebration of their “victory” over the Zionist enemy. That is to say, what the novelist Thane Rosenbaum called Hamas’s “civilian death strategy”—deliberately bringing about the greatest possible number of Arab (as well as Jewish) deaths—had achieved a political triumph in the court of world opinion.

What is naively called the “Arab-Israeli conflict” has a deep-seated pathological fanaticism at its core. American secondary school students will learn nothing about it from a new curriculum that amounts to a regimen of crude indoctrination depicting Israel as the devil’s very own experiment station, black as Gehenna and the pit of Hell. But this is what a duo of Washington State Palestinophiles named Ed Mast and Linda Bevis, founders of the local Palestine Solidarity Committee, have been promoting with passionate intensity for some time.

In early October, Bevis appeared, by invitation, at the Washington State Council for the Social Studies, the annual meeting of the state’s social studies teachers, to preside over a workshop in which she could recommend the Bevis and Mast curriculum as a replacement for the material in currently used textbooks. (The conference’s keynote speaker was a zealous Israel-hater named Jen Marlowe, stalwart of the “Jenin Freedom Theater.”) Bevis is a regular at similar conferences and held forth a week later at the “Teaching for Social Justice” gathering in Portland. At least three schools are known to have adopted her materials; Bevis has not divulged the names of schools where she has been active.

The tawdry character of the Bevis and Mast curriculum is inherent in its bizarre title: “The Palestine Teaching Trunk.” Its designers noticed that the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center had packaged materials relating to the Holocaust in one of the trunks used by Jews who were shipped off to the death camps of Europe. But how dare the Jews monopolize all that beautiful Holocaust suffering which other groups, and none more so than the Palestinian Arabs, would very much like, ex post facto, to claim for themselves? And so it came to pass that Bevis and Mast collected their own CDs and sacred relics of the “Palestinian cause” into an online “trunk.”

Goldwater fought in 1971 to stop US funding of the United Nations after the People’s Republic of China was admitted to the organization. He said:

“I suggested on the floor of the Senate today that we stop all funds for the United Nations. Now, what that’ll do to the United Nations, I don’t know. I have a hunch it would cause them to fold up, which would make me very happy at this particular point. I think if this happens, they can well move their headquarters to Peking or Moscow and get ‘em out of this country.”

What would he say of the UN today? Well I don’t know if he cussed but “international chickensh-ts” sounds about right.

P.S. When my husband and father voted for Goldwater in 1964 I was appalled….that was then…rsk

The former Secretary of State and New York Senator, Mrs. Hillary Clinton, has informed the American people that businesses do not create jobs.

In providing Americans with a rather interesting economic perspective of how people get hired, the former First Lady then went on to let Americans know that “trickle-down economics” not only doesn’t work, but it has failed spectacularly. I suppose this is meant to mean there is somehow a connection between the policy of trickle-down economics and how jobs are either created or not created. That’s important as there are 20-24 million Americans that need full-time jobs.

It is unclear to what era of American economic life she was referencing, but as far back as America under President Calvin Coolidge we had unemployment below 3%, a balanced budget, growing personal income, and in fact the generation of budget surpluses with a top tax rate on income that had been reduced to 28%.

Maybe the answer to Mrs. Clinton’s riddle lies elsewhere.

Under President John F. Kennedy, the top tax rate was reduced from over 90% to 70%, and subsequently, in the years following, as the President then said before a Detroit audience at the prestigious Economic Club “a rising tide lifts all boats” as millions of new jobs were created.

That does look like a failure.

What about President Ronald Reagan? He reduced top tax rates from 70% to first 50% and then in 1986 to 28%. Both tax rate reductions were part of an across the board tax rate reduction and reform which grew the US economy between 1983-89 by some 18+ million new jobs.

And between 1993-2000, the US economy grew by another 21 million jobs, with capital gains taxes being reduced in 1996 along with companion legislation calling for a balanced budget and welfare reform.

What failed?

The former Secretary of State then references President William Clinton’s administration by saying the former President had a secret–he brought arithmetic to Washington as opposed to apparently all other administrations.