RUTHFULLY YOURS

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When Defamatory Politics Masquerade as Art

The Death of Klinghoffer, an opera that aims to create sympathy for the terrorist hijackers of the Achille Lauro, returns to the New York Metropolitan Opera tonight. Edward Rothstein, reviewing the piece when it first opened in 1991, had some nice words for the conductor and the singers. But he also found the music “either atmospheric or emotionally elementary” and the message, delivered through a contrastingly “empathetic evocation of the [Palestinian] intifada” and mockery of the terrorists’ Jewish victims, politically rigged and morally repugnant. In Rothstein’s summary:

The work itself turned out to be more about its intended reception than about its subject, more a matter of pitch than substance. Without historical insight, without profound revelation of character, without the advertised symmetry [between Jews and Palestinians], without even a coherent libretto and convincing score, The Death of Klinghoffer becomes simply another monument to an avant-garde that is repeating old political and aesthetic gestures while acting as if it is daringly breaking new ground.

September 7, 1991
Review/Opera; Seeking Symmetry Between Palestinians and Jews

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
All through Thursday night’s New York premiere of the much-awaited “Death of Klinghoffer,” one knew exactly what the creators wanted a listener to think:

Setting the story of the 1985 Palestinian hijacking of a luxury cruise ship and the killing of a wheelchair-bound American Jew not on an ocean liner but in an Erector Set of scaffolding and ramps would treat yesterday’s newspaper reports as mythic, ritualistic repetitions of timeless struggles.

Telling the story in highly stylized language (by Alice Goodman) and music (by John Adams), using formalized gestures developed by Peter Sellars, having Mark Morris choreograph his dancers with hyperbolic poses and frenetic movements would raise audiences’ reactions above knee-jerk notions.

In the mid 1960s – around the time I was married and beginning to have children – the counterculture movement moved into high gear. Almost from the first battle at la Drang Valley in the Central Highlands in late 1965, the Vietnam War divided the country. A few anti-war protestors became as violent as those they were protesting against. Civil Rights and Women’s Rights were in full swing. The “pill” was in common usage. Through the haze of marijuana, amid the sniffing of cocaine and dropping of acid, free love made its entrance. Woodstock symbolized that time. Women threw away their bras, as a right of passage, failing to anticipate that a later passage into middle age would require those undergarments for comfort’s sake.

What, I wonder, would former hippies, those who were then young, free-thinking and living in communes and places like Haight Ashbury, feel about Berkley’s requirement that students today give up their sexual freedom? On whose side would Mario Savio appear? Before engaging in any sexual activity, like kissing, necking or something more intimate, California’s new law says that consent must be agreed to in advance.

Consent can “come in the form of a smile, a nod or a verbal ‘yes,’ as long as it is unambiguous, enthusiastic and ongoing” – a statement that itself is ambiguous. The Bill goes on: “A lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent, nor does silence mean consent.” So much for what we remember of “no’s” morphing into “yes’s,” as petting got heavier! Would a text message be more definitive? Exactly how far will the party of the first part allow the party of the second part to go, before the party of the first part cries out: “This is sexual harassment!”

California Bill SB 967 was passed by the legislature and signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown on September 29th. Berkley defines sexual consent (generally aimed at women) as agreeing to three ‘pillars’: “Knowing exactly what I am agreeing to; expressing my intent to participate; deciding freely and voluntarily to participate.” Formal consent must be received at each step, or it must have been decided in advance, which puts a damper on the instinctual nature of love making. Just imagine Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in “Indiscreet:” As Ms. Bergman falls passionately into Mr. Grant’s arms, he suddenly remembers, so asks, “Have you signed your consent forms?” If she, panting, answers “Yes,” Mr. Grant would then be required to ask, “Are doing this of your own free will?” I suspect the movie would lose some of its spontaneity, even if Ms. Bergman retorted, “Look, Stupid, just get on with it!”

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/palestinian-state-recognition-the-unfolding-disaster?f=puball

n a spectacular display of ignorance, moral illiteracy and malice, the Swedish parliament voted in favor of unilaterally recognizing a Palestinian state in early October. Then, on October 13th, a group of backbench British MPs succeeded in obtaining a symbolic, non-binding vote in the British House of Commons to the effect “that the Government should recognize the state of Palestine alongside the state of Israel as a contribution towards supporting a negotiated two-state solution”. Similar parliamentary votes on Palestinian statehood are expected shortly in Ireland, Spain, Denmark, France and Finland.

These votes disregard the realities of the conflict. If the Palestinians would recognize Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people (which would mean acknowledgment of the character and permanence of Israel); accept demilitarization of Gaza and the West Bank; change their culture of hatred by amending their founding documents that proclaim their intention to annihilate Israel; forego their unconditional and non-negotiable position on their absolute “right of return” to Israel; cease incitement against Jews and Israelis in their schools, newspapers, mosques, media, summer camps, TV programming and educational system; cease portraying Palestine on their maps as including the State of Israel; cease their acts of murderous violence across Israel; cease justifying violence against Israelis as a legitimate form of political action; cease naming tournaments, marketplaces and streets after Palestinian “martyrs” whose claim to fame is that they murdered Jewish “occupiers” of Palestine (meaning Israelis); cease firing thousands of rockets into Israeli population centers; cease building terrorist tunnels into Israel for the sole purpose of kidnapping and murdering Israeli civilians; cease encouraging Islamists to continue efforts aimed at preventing Jews (“settlers”) from visiting the Temple Mount – the holiest site in Judaism and the location of the ruins of the two Temples of Jerusalem; cease referring to Jews as “the descendants of apes and pigs”; cease providing payments to the families of suicide bombers; cease embracing as ‘heroes’ released Palestinian terrorists who murdered Israelis; cease attempting to bring war crimes charges against Israeli officers and officials at the International Criminal Court; cease insisting that the UN Security Council impose a deadline for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank; cease playing the victim on the international stage and begin taking responsibility for their own failures, and cease promoting the apartheid, racist idea that any future Palestinian state will be “Jew-free” (as Mahmoud Abbas said in 2010), ……… then recognition of a Palestinian state based on a two-state solution would become feasible.

At this moment in time and for the foreseeable future, however, there is no serious evidence that the Palestinian leadership (be it Fatah or Hamas or both) want a state of their own that will live in peace with Israel as a Jewish state which rests on land they consider to be a sacred part of the Islamic ummah. In fact, there is ample evidence that they will treat anything they get as a staging ground for further attacks on Israel until it has been annihilated or subjugated to Islamic rule.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/sending-the-us-military-against-the-ebola-contagion-a-cautionary-note

by THE HONORABLE EDWARD TIMPERLAKE

American combat veterans, from fighting an enemy or a disease, should always be concerned about a grateful nation not protecting them.

A generation of Vietnam Veterans were ignored and allowed to die alone waiting in the dark during their end of life years.

So active duty military and their families have every right to be concerned when the Government finds a new mission for them involving new risks.

With respect to putting the US Government front and center in helping the troops who were exposed to Agent Orange and environmental factors causing Gulf War illness one visionary DVA Secretary said not on his watch.

On May 11, 1989 DVA Secretary Derwinski held a news conference and sided with America’s Veterans; he stopped the US Government legal case that was denying disability compensation to Vietnam in-theater veterans based on exposure to Agent Orange (AO). The Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA) were very appropriately aggressive in support of USG taking full responsibility to address the adverse health effects of Agent Orange.

Consequently, prior to his action there was little to no motivation for Vietnam Veterans to apply for disability compensation based on exposure to Agent Orange because the VA rejected AO service-connected disability requests. Also, many in those days had justified distaste for the government.

This past month’s media coverage of the protests in Hong Kong omits an important source of tension between the miniscule territory and its huge northern neighbor: Birthright Citizenship. Like the US, Hong Kong is one of the few areas of the world that has some form of this rather nonsensical practice. I worked in Hong Kong for 7 years and I know from friends and colleagues there that the explosion of anger over the past several weeks includes not only the recent political meddling from Beijing but also serious social and cultural tensions related in part to Hong Kong’s immigration policy vis a vis the mainland Chinese.

Under current law, any mainland Chinese can secure permanent residence for their children in Hong Kong if they simply cross the border and give birth within the territory. As a result, those from the mainland, but born in Hong Kong, become entitled to receive generous future welfare benefits, attend superior local schools and travel internationally with much greater ease. This along with the swarm of mainland Chinese that now frequently move and travel to Hong Kong, bringing alien habits with them like spitting and eating in public, has earned them the title of “locusts” by many of Hong Kong’s citizens.

“Birth tourism” from the mainland took off following a decision from Hong Kong’s highest court in 2002 that interpreted the “right to abode”-clause in the territory’s constitution to award permanent residency status to Hong Kong-born children of non-resident mainland Chinese. Soon after the decision, Hong Kong’s hospitals (some of the best in the world) became flooded with “birth tourists” from the mainland. By 2012, one in every three births in the territory was going to mainland Chinese parents – While I lived there (2005-2012), one short-term rental apartment block in my neighborhood was usually almost completely taken up by pregnant mainland wives waiting to give birth – Usually resilient Hong Kongese snapped and protested that the abuse from the northern Chinese not only strained medical resources but also endangered the lives of the other Hong Kong patients.

The practice was finally curbed (but not completely halted) when Hong Kong hospitals became so stretched that doctors, medical staff and taxpayers organized in the streets and forced the government to make mainland mothers prove they were married to Hong Kong men. That Hong Kong’s top-notch schools and nearly free medical care could end up being handed over to foreign “locusts” who contributed nothing to the system was too much to bear for the hardworking local citizens.

The struggle for Kobani, the Syrian Kurdish town on the border with Turkey where the Kurdish forces alone are battling the barbaric hordes of the Islamic State, aka ISIS, is reminiscent of the Polish uprising in Warsaw against the Nazis in August, 1944. While the Polish Home Army fought courageously against the might of the superior armed Nazis, the Soviet Union’s Red Army stood by across the River Vistula, which divides Warsaw, watching the merciless slaughter of Polish civilians and the destruction of the city.

The Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan, like the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin before him, showed no consideration for the lives of innocent Kurdish civilians already butchered by the sadists of the Islamic State mercenaries. For those still alive in Kobani, unless rescued by outside intervention or supplied with heavy arms and ammunition, will also die a gruesome death. Turkish tanks, in the meantime, are ensconced on the crest overlooking Kobani. They can help save the remaining Kurds should Erdogan give them the order to fire on the ISIS fighters. But, just as Stalin wanted the Nazis to decimate the Polish nationalist Home Army, Erdogan is wishing for ISIS to destroy the Syrian Kurds.

What is puzzling in all this is the role the U.S. is playing. In his September 10, 2014 speech, President Obama said that, “military advisors are needed to support Iraqi and Kurdish forces with training, intelligence, and equipment.” Hitherto, there has been no supply of equipment or training of the Kurds. In fact, the Obama administrations blind support for a unitary Iraqi state led by Shiite ruled Baghdad government is in contradiction with the realities on the ground. The Shiite-led Iraqi army folded in the face of the jihadi ISIS guerrilla offensive, and in the process, abandoning U.S. supplied heavy weapons including tanks, armored cars, Humvees, etc. The Kurdish Peshmergas alone hold the line against ISIS, and they are not getting the promised arms because the U.S. has long insisted that all sales of U.S. weapons must go through Iraq’s central government, despite Kurdish complaints that Baghdad had deprived them of promised military equipment and financial support.

Washington has not overruled Baghdad on issuing direct shipments of arms to the Kurds. The Iraqi government has demanded that all shipments to the Kurds arrive first in Baghdad. Iraqi officials have regularly blocked or delayed these shipments to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Erbil. Moreover, U.S. State Department regulations bar the KRG from purchasing U.S. made weapons without “end-user certificates” issued by Baghdad. According to the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy, “Baghdad is bent on wielding this authority to prevent the KRG from developing antitank and antiaircraft arsenals.”

At a conference last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Janet Yellen recycled a shopworn Democrat talking point about the supposed crisis of income inequality and stalled economic mobility. “The extent and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concerns me,” Yellen said, going on to wonder “whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation’s history,” especially “equality of opportunity.”

Like the mythic “war on women,” this progressive sound bite is misleading and duplicitous, based on statistical sleight of hand. Worse yet, it is a pretext for more and more government expansion and intrusion into the economy, and for more and more redistribution of income through entitlement programs. It makes one wonder what one of the most powerful government officials impacting the economy, supposedly a politically neutral technocrat, is doing recycling Democratic campaign slogans.

The “income inequality” claim depends on ignoring numerous data that contradict it. For one thing, it glosses over the mobility among the 5 income cohorts over time, assuming that the same people are rich or poor year after year. But as Stephen Moore and James Pierson point out, “In America they [the rich] don’t generally stay rich for long. A few years ago the Department of Treasury examined what happens to the wealth of families across several generations. Guess what: the poor got richer and the rich got poorer. The incomes of poor households rose 80 percent from 1987 to 1996 and then more than doubled from 1996 to 2005. The richer people were at the start of this period, the more income losses they suffered in subsequent years.”

The Treasury study indeed confirms this mobility, finding that between 1996 and 2005 over half of taxpayers moved to a different income quintile. Half of taxpayers in the bottom quintile in 1996 moved to a higher income group in 2005. Meanwhile, only 25% of the richest 1/100 of 1% in 1996 were still that rich in 2005. This mobility has indeed stalled, but not for “several decades,” as Yellen claimed, and not because of the sinister machinations of the wealthy. Its cause rather is the sluggish economic growth after the recession ended 5 years ago, and the blame for that in large part falls on Obama and the Democrats’ regulatory overreach, trillion-dollar deficits, “you didn’t build that” anti-business rhetoric, and redistributionist economic policies. Get the feds out of the way of the economy so it can grow, and we will see income growth and mobility again.

The “income inequality” meme ignores other facts as well. It focuses only on “money income,” neglecting the value of government transfers like Medicaid, Electronic Benefit Transfer cards (formerly known as food stamps and welfare checks), emergency-room health care, Section 8 housing subsidies, and the Earned Income Tax Credit, all of which boost the buying power of the statistical poor and lower middle class. For the middle class, “money income” ignores the value of employer-provided fringe benefits such as health care. As for the rich, “money income” ignores the highly progressive taxes they pay to fund those government programs. As Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution writes, “To disregard the impact of transfers and progressive taxation on the distribution of income and family well-being is to ignore America’s most expensive efforts to lessen the gap between the nation’s rich, middle class, and poor.”

However the US campaign against ISIS goes, the beneficiaries will be its Sunni Muslim allies who are also doubling as our allies. While on the surface ISIS appears to have cut all ties, threatening even former allies like Turkey and Qatar, underneath the surface the pragmatic connections remain as strong as ever.

Terrorism is the fire of the Muslim world. Everyone plays with it and everyone gets burned. The trick is burning someone else with it first.

Americans still think of the relationship between terrorist groups and countries as servant and master. However it’s often more like feeding a rabid dog and then luring it into your neighbor’s yard. It’s less about direct control of a terrorist group and more about maneuvering it to reshape the political and military environment that your enemies and allies operate in.

That’s why Al Qaeda and Iran, religious enemies, could still occasionally cooperate.

The current campaign against ISIS is a typical example. By empowering ISIS, the Sunni Muslim oil states dragged the United States into an alliance with the bands of Islamic Jihadists commonly known as the Free Syrian Army. When the West balked at intervention even after reports of WMD use, the smart money went to ISIS. By turning Al Qaeda into a major regional threat, the United States would be dragged into the conflict and then forced to make common cause with the Free Syrian Army anyway.

When that still didn’t happen on schedule, mass murder and rape by ISIS did the trick. Now the Kurds have been forced out of their neutral position and into an alignment with the Sunni rebels. Western countries have gotten deeper into an alliance with the Free Syrian Army which will ultimately force them into a NATO intervention in Syria to protect the FSA. That was always the endgame. ISIS was the means.

The ISIS gamble was a dangerous one, especially under Obama, but now it’s beginning to pay off.

IS A $1 BILLION PAYROLL Enough- to Safe
Guard the Health of American Citizens?

“Taxpayers paid out $6 billion in salaries and $25 million in bonuses to an elite corps of health care experts at the Center for Disease Control since 2007.”
Adam Andrzejewski
Chairman American Transparency, OpenTheBooks.com

Can the elite group of doctors and health care professionals at the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention safeguard the health of the nation?

It’s an open question and the results so far do not inspire confidence…

But, payroll resources are certainly not a problem. Since 2007, data at OpenTheBooks.com, shows over $6 billion in total salaries and $25 million in “performance bonuses” flowed to the approximately 10,000 CDC employees. Total CDC payroll costs increased by 38% since 2007 and even during the federal wage freeze $12 million in bonuses flowed.

Review our CDC Cash Compensation Report by City 2007-2013 click here

Amongst the findings:

1. #1 Bonus of $63,845 went to the Donald Shriber, Deputy Director of Policy & Communication at the Center for Global Health in 2011.

2. CDC Employee Counts Up By a Quarter since 2007. The gross number of CDC employees increased from 8,325 in 2007 to 10,213 in 2013- this is an all-time high.

3. $1 Billion in total payroll at CDC in 2013, that’s up from $726,000,000 in 2007- that’s a 38% increase in total payroll spending.

4. $21.504 Million in 2013 salaries flowed to the Top 100 Highly Compensated Executives at CDC.

5. Isn’t it time to fire the Interior Decorators, Gardeners, other extraneous employees at CDC. Millions of dollars of salaries and bonuses have flowed into positions such as these since 2007.

Rep. Henry Waxman testified at yesterday’s congressional hearings that the overall CDC budget was cut or impacted during sequester, but it’s just not the case with the pay and perks to CDC employees. Cash compensation and number of employees have all increased from 2007-2013 and stand at an all-time high.

The CDC must simply do their jobs: Protect the health of citizens.

For the Good of America

Matthew Tyrmand
Deputy Director, American Transparency

Barack Obama isn’t running merely the worst American presidency since James Buchanan’s, but the worst imaginable presidency in this day and age. And every single Senate Democrat is thoroughly complicit in Obama’s horrendous record.

Is there a single Obama initiative that has actually worked as advertised, or even one that has improved the lives of most Americans or improved the U.S.’s standing in the world? Surely there must be a small success or two, somewhere, but everywhere we look, we see failure and calamity. And in almost every case, the disaster has been aided and abetted by Senate Democrats such as Tom Udall, Kay Hagan, Jeanne Shaheen, Mary Landrieu, Mark Udall, Mark Warner, Mark Begich, and Mark Pryor. (One might say Senate Democrats have been “off their Marks.”)

For the so-called stimulus act of 2009, Obama promised hundreds of thousands of “shovel-ready jobs.” There were instead, approximately . . . none. The president later tried to turn his own prior promise into a punch line, quipping, at a meeting of his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, that “shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.” Hilarious. What’s not so funny is that every Democratic senator voted for the bill. It blew deficits and the debt through the roof, gave oodles of taxpayer dollars to favored insiders who produced nothing for it, and did nothing to stop (and possibly worsened) the rise in unemployment from 8.3 percent to 10 percent. It took three full years before unemployment dipped below what it was when Obama took office.

Obamacare, famously enacted with the vote of every Democratic senator, has limited patient choices (including taking away the chosen insurance plans of as many as 5 million Americans, who saw their policies canceled as a direct result of Obamacare); jacked up premium prices by an average of 202 percent; imposed more than a trillion dollars in new taxes, including on medical-device companies, that have resulted in many thousands of job losses and a slowdown in medical innovation; trampled on religious liberty and the rights of conscience; driven people crazy with a bollixed website; added potentially $6.2 trillion to federal deficits; and destroyed as many as 2 million jobs.

Obama’s jihad against fossil fuels resulted in the rapid doubling of gasoline prices (and they stayed that high until a minor recent abatement). Its Consumer Products Safety Commission, Environmental Protection Agency, National Labor Relations Board, and other astonishingly interventionist regulators have put a wet blanket on jobs, inconvenienced consumers, and even interfered with yard sales and tried to outlaw outdoor Christmas lights. (Ever the Grinch, Obama also is taxing Christmas trees.)