ISRAEL, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Israel’s Judicial System Is The Dream Of The American Left By: David Harsanyi

Posted By on March 28th, 2023

https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/27/israels-judicial-system-is-the-dream-of-the-american-left/

No constitution. No limiting principles of governance. Entrenched leftist judges who get to appoint their own successors in perpetuity. Courts that offer arbitrary, expedient, constantly evolving, sometimes contradictory rulings to block laws passed by duly-elected, center-right governments. An attorney general empowered to bar elected leaders from participating in national debates. Sounds like a progressive paradise.

This is the reality of the Israeli high court, which is likely imbued with more power than any other in the Western world. It is not always wrong. It is not always nakedly partisan. But it has power to act as a judicial dictatorship, and often does.

And after Benjamin Netanyahu’s government proposed reforming this insane system — procedural reforms that would be in place no matter who was in power — the left acted as the contemporary left always acts when it doesn’t get its way. It got hysterical. The mass protests that erupted were hardly “spontaneous,” though, contrary to many reports in the establishment media. Most of the demonstrations were organized by Israel’s biggest unions and egged on by foreigners. Because a less powerful judiciary threatens the center-left’s power.

A country without a constitution or bill of rights, and only a single house of parliament — one that, by the nature of the system, is controlled by the prime minister (or vice versa) — will struggle to maintain any genuine checks and balances. The direct democratic character of Israel’s government, one that American progressives would like to emulate, gives both too much power to the prime minister and too much power to fringe parties the prime minister needs to keep in line to rule. It’s a dysfunctional mess.

But the nation’s judicial system is even worse. Israel’s political system was created by leftists who envisioned a one-party state. From its inception, the nation’s socialists suppressed — sometimes violently — political opposition. And in the 1950s, a ruling Labor Party preempted the opposition from infiltrating the courts by empowering judges to veto appointees to the bench. This created a self-perpetuating, generationally cocooned judiciary that functions without any set of cohesive legal principles or oversight.

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The USA is experiencing a crisis of faith — in itself By Vivek Ramaswamy

Posted By on March 28th, 2023

https://nypost.com/2023/03/27/the-usa-is-experiencing-a-crisis-of-faith-in-itself/

I’m the first millennial Republican to run for US president. If you ask most people my age what it means to be an American today, you get a blank stare in response. Faith, patriotism, family and hard work are disappearing. 

A recent Wall Street Journal survey reveals that young people in particular are responsible for driving this trend: 59% of Americans age 65 and older say that patriotism is “very important” to them, compared with only 23% of adults under age 30. The survey observed a similar gap with respect to interest in religion, hard work and having children. 

This is sad but unsurprising. Our nation’s higher-education institutions reliably sing their America-bashing chorus: Recently Stanford University deemed the term “American” to be “harmful language.” 

National identity 

Even more disturbingly, the “America is bad” ilk has slinked its way into our elementary schools under the auspices of equity and social justice. Students in classrooms across America today are taught to apologize for our country’s history rather than to be proud of it. Critical race theory and gender theory pervades K-12 education, where children are taught to identify themselves as members of an “oppressor” or “oppressed” category based on their skin color and sexual preferences. 

Public schools endlessly celebrate “diversity” as our strength without reminding students of what binds us together as one people. 

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Another Train Carrying Hazardous Materials Derails. What’s Going On? By Matt Margolis

Posted By on March 28th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/03/27/another-train-carrying-hazardous-materials-derails-whats-going-on-n1681823

Move over “died suddenly,” because “train carrying hazardous materials derails” is quickly becoming the most common story to pop up in our news feeds.

As per local reports, a train belonging to Canadian Pacific, consisting of 70 cars transporting hazardous materials, derailed late Sunday night in North Dakota, approximately one mile southeast of Wyndmere in Richland County at around 11:15 p.m.  According to the report, 31 of the 70 cars derailed, and some were found to be leaking petroleum used in the production of asphalt. No injuries have been reported.

Officials said crews will wait for the cold weather to solidify the leaked material, which is expected to transform into a gel.

Related: Three Train Derailments and a Developing Bio-Disaster — Where Are the Eco-Harpies?

As worries about railroad safety persist in the United States, the recent incident in North Dakota is the latest in a string of train derailments.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Ron DeSantis Notches Another Huge Win By Stephen Green

Posted By on March 28th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2023/03/27/florida-man-desantis-makes-universal-school-choice-a-reality-n1681850

The anti-progressive pathogen known as universal school choice spread to Florida today, as Gov. Ron DeSantis put his signature on the state’s House Bill 1.

DeSantis said at the signing that the new law represents “the largest expansion of education choice not just in the history of this state, but in the history of these United States.” Florida is generally ranked well in education, “despite” — please notice the scare quotes — spending less per pupil than almost any other state.

The new law ensures “eligibility of the state’s Florida Tax Credit Scholarship and Family Empowerment Scholarship to any resident of Florida” eligible for K-12 public education, according to Click Orlando.

“At the end of the day,” DeSantis also said, “we fundamentally believe that the money should follow the student and it should be directed based on what the parent thinks is the most appropriate education program for their child.”

Under the law, new Education Savings Accounts will give families up to $8,000 to spend on education outside the public school system. The amount is based on need, with families of four earning under $51,000 (or 186% of the poverty line) getting dibs on voucher dollars. The second tier of funds goes to families whose incomes do not exceed 400% of the poverty line.

DeSantis was on a roll against critics of universal school choice: “There were some that said, ‘Oh, you know, parents… don’t know what they’re doing. They shouldn’t be involved.’ You hear these crazy arguments, but I can tell you if you talk to most teachers, if a parent is engaged in the student’s education, the student is going to do much better.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Scourge of Jewish Self-Division, or The ‘Court Jews’ Are Busy at Work By David Solway

Posted By on March 28th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2023/03/27/the-scourge-of-jewish-self-division-or-the-court-jews-are-busy-at-work-n1681976

I have seen these people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people. (Exodus 32:9).

EXCERPTS

The Jewish epic across the wilderness of history may be described as divide and be conquered. Surah 59:14 of the Koran tells us something very true about us Jews: “There is much hostility between them: their hearts are divided…” It seems that the wise counsel of Judaism’s great sage Maimonides in the Mishneh Torah has no resonance for the backsliders: “All of Israel and those who are joined to it are to each other like brothers. If brother shows no compassion to brother, who will show compassion to him?”

Who, indeed? We see the sorry spectacle of division acting itself out today in the violent civil protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to reform a hard-core, self-appointing, Leftist Supreme Court, which regularly thwarts the will of legitimate right-wing governments. It was on this platform that Netanyahu was elected by a massive majority of the vote. But the Left is good at civil disruption. There have been resignations and firings of dissident members of the government and raging animosity against the prime minister for his perceived temerity in trying to overhaul the judicial system and redress a long-festering political sore. The Left is having none of it. Netanyahu’s critics argue that the plan is pushing Israel down a path to autocracy, a path they themselves appear to be treading.

Similarly, Melanie Phillips remarks that Netanyahu is reacting against the anti-democratic rule of an interventionist judicial activism, a system in which “judges have substituted politics and ideology for law,” superseding duly elected parliaments. Seen from a larger perspective, the demonstrations and irruptions express the principle of “liberal universalism that…would prefer rule by judges” who promulgate universal laws determined by the globalist Left over rule by an elected government administering the laws of the nation. Military and security professional Ben Kerido aptly comments in The Western Standard that “Israeli protests against Netanyahu resemble the American radical Left.” What we are observing, in my estimation, is another manifestation of the Court Jews at work.

This history of self-estrangement, political strife, and cultural rupture has been played out from the biblical era through the centuries of religious factionalism and reciprocal ex-communication culminating in our own epoch. The legacy of the celebrated Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and the equally acclaimed Jewish political writer Hannah Arendt, who could never forget their German patrimony and were corrosively suspicious of the Zionist project, has been broadly and unambiguously noxious. In the present moment we observe their offspring, that is, left-wing “peace activists,” liberal rabbis, “post-Zionist” intellectuals, power nabobs, social ingratiators — in other words, Court Jews — who strive to erode the Jewish character of the state of Israel and so deprive it of its legitimacy. The Jewish Left, as it dances around the golden calf of a utopian project, represents perhaps the gravest danger to the survival of the country.

Thus, its adherents pursue their fugitive merit, ignoring the rain clouds until they are drenched and catch pneumonia, as the 19th-century Jewish philosopher Max Nordau put it.

These are the “degraded” Jews whom the great Jewish patriot Vladimir Jabotinsky denounced. They are reminiscent of the spies that Moses sent out to reconnoiter enemy territory, ten of whom on returning compared themselves to frail grasshoppers before the fearsome Anakim and recoiled from their destiny (Numbers 13: 33). They do not understand, in the words of Nurit Greenger, that “Israel is the last station in the Jews’ Via Dolorosa” and that “beyond this station is the Jews’ final crucifixion,” nor do they realize how profoundly they themselves are at risk. They have forgotten that the Jewish sense of security is always a false sense of security, that over the past 2,000 years, as Melvin Konner points out in Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews, Jews have been expelled from 94 countries. They do not think to ask themselves why the future should be any different.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Man Who Stabbed Rand Paul Senate Aide in Broad Daylight Had Just Been Released from Prison By Victoria Taft

Posted By on March 28th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2023/03/28/man-who-stabbed-rand-paul-senate-aide-in-broad-daylight-had-just-been-released-from-prison-n1682037

A staffer for Republican Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was stabbed “in broad daylight” by a man who had just been released from prison the day before. The unidentified staffer is in serious condition in a D.C. hospital.

Washington, D.C., has been growing more unsafe by the day because of local policies that reward criminal acts instead of punishing criminals. And this reality is getting better known because Capitol Hill workers are becoming more frequent victims of the Democrat-run city’s laissez-faire attitude about crime. Indeed, it nearly required a literal act of Congress and a presidential decree to get the woke city council to back off yet another easy-on-crime bright idea to reduce penalties for robberies and carjackings.

The New York Post reported that “the attack occurred on the same street as, and less than a mile away from, Rep. Angie Craig’s (D-Minn.) apartment building, where she was attacked by a crazed suspect with a long rap sheet inside the building’s lobby elevator last month.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Will the White House dump Fed Chair Jerome Powell?

Posted By on March 28th, 2023

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3920055-will-the-white-house-dump-fed-chair-jerome-powell/

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wants to oust Jerome Powell. Last week she went after the Federal Reserve chair, saying in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press”: “My views on Jay Powell are well-known at this point. He has had two jobs. One is to deal with monetary policy. One is to deal with regulation. He has failed at both.”

It is hard to disagree with the Massachusetts senator, though Powell is certainly not the only one responsible for bringing us to the brink of recession. Democrats recklessly spent too much, heedless of the overheating economy, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has been AWOL throughout; and bank supervisors did a lousy job preventing problems even as alarm bells rang.

But Powell is in the driver’s seat and is coming under increased scrutiny. Democrats, worried that a recession could hurt them badly in the elections of 2024, need a scapegoat. But it’s not just Democrats who are critical of Powell’s actions.

Ed Hyman, Wall Street’s top economist and a generally optimistic fellow, wrote clients a cryptic message last week titled: “Not Good.” His email alert came the day after Powell announced another rate hike, of 25 basis points. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Employers Need to Put the Squeeze on Woke Intolerance Young people like the Stanford students who heckled Kyle Duncan should be unemployable. Gerard Baker

Posted By on March 28th, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/employers-need-to-put-the-squeeze-on-woke-intolerance-stanford-law-school-duncan-steinbach-free-speech-13f4ed90?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Stanford Law School’s career services website boasts the kind of professional opportunities the school’s graduates can expect when they venture beyond the safe spaces of the palm-speckled campus.

Ninety-seven of the nation’s top 100 law firms employ Stanford graduates as partners; 92 have Stanford alums as attorneys. For 48 consecutive years Stanford graduates have clerked on the Supreme Court. Microsoft, Google, Cisco and many other top firms have employed a graduate as general counsel.

So my question to the senior partners of law firms, corporate chief executives, judges and others who will employ these privileged people is: Do you stand with Jenny Martinez or do you cower behind Tirien Steinbach? Do you want your institutions to be places where the law is respected as the authority that mediates our disputes is blindfolded or are you going to continue to connive at the transformation of the law into a tool of the new identity-class struggle? Are you going to keep facilitating the degradation of the most basic of our freedoms—speech—or will you begin the long struggle against the controlling zeitgeist of totalitarianism?

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Netanyahu announces freeze of judicial reforms PM officially announces that the judicial reform legislation will not be advanced during this Knesset session

Posted By on March 28th, 2023

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/369298

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered an address to the nation this evening (Monday) on the government’s planned judicial reforms.

“There is an extreme minority that is ready to tear our country into parts. It tends towards violence. It ignites fire. It threatens to harm elected officials. It talks about civil war. And it calls for insubordination, which is a terrible crime,” Netanyahu said.

“The State of Israel cannot exist without the IDF, and the IDF cannot exist with insubordination. Insubordination by one side will bring about insubordination on the other side. Insubordination is the end of our state. Therefore I demand that our security forces and the IDF’s commanders to oppose the phenomenon of insubordination. Not to contain it, not to understand it. To stop it,” he said.

“For three months, I have called for dialogue. I also said that I would leave no stone unturned in order to reach a solution. Because I remember, we remember, that we are not facing enemies: we are facing our brothers. I say here and now: we must not have a civil war.

“We are now on a path towards a very dangerous collision in Israeli society, which jeopardizes the basic unity between us, and such a crisis obligates all of us to act responsibly.

“Out of national responsibility, out of a desire to prevent a rift in the nation, I have decided to postpone the second third reading of the law in this session of the Knesset in order to give time to try to reach a wide agreement on the legislation in the next session of the Knesset. This way, we will bring about a reform that will restore the balance which has been lost, while maintaining and even strengthening human and individual rights,” he declared.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Who Says That Chance Rules in the Affairs of Men? Our foresight is always an adventure, practiced at the pleasure of the unpredictable. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on March 27th, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/26/who-says-that-chance-rules-in-the-affairs-of-men/

Some years ago, while driving into Boston to attend a conference on “Changing and Unchanging Values in the World of the Future,” I noticed a billboard advertising not the latest consumer gadget but a sage observation attributed to Winston Churchill.  “The farther backward you can look,” it said in large black letters, “the farther forward you are likely to see.” 

It seemed more than a coincidence that the conference I was attending was at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University.  Had some representative of that institution contrived to place Churchill’s fortifying admonition at the city gates?

I was disappointed to learn that the message had been arranged, not by the Pardee Center, but by some other civic-minded entity or individual. Nevertheless, if Churchill’s observation is not the motto of the Pardee Center, perhaps it should be.

The past does not provide a window overlooking the future, exactly; nothing short of clairvoyance can promise that. Nor is it even quite true, as George Santayana famously remarked, that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (I recently had something to say about that in this space.)

History is not a form of prophylaxis. But knowledge of history does acquaint us with the permanent moral and political alternatives that mankind confronts in its journey through time.

It reminds us, for example, how regularly tyranny masquerades as virtue, how inhumanity is apt to cloak itself in the rhetoric of righteousness. (This is not, as St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians reminds us, a new insight: “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness; whose end shall be according to their works.”)

Above all, perhaps, knowledge of history can serve to temper our presumption. As I reflected on Churchill’s observation and the subject of the conference, I was struck anew by the large quota of optimism that language budgets into our lives.