RUTHFULLY YOURS

Why would an American president oppose something that would improve Americans’ lives?

Speaking from Burma November 14, President Obama explained why he is inclined to veto the Keystone-pipeline bill: “My government believes that we should judge this pipeline based on whether or not it accelerates climate change or whether it helps the American people with their energy costs and their gas prices,” he said. “And I have to constantly push back against this idea that somehow the Keystone pipeline is either this massive jobs bill for the United States, or is somehow lowering gas prices.”

The president’s comments were truly remarkable. The Keystone pipeline is a real, and huge, infrastructure project that would pay for itself, without taxpayer funding. Furthermore, its purpose is to allow oil from Canada and North Dakota to reach the world market more economically. Therefore it would facilitate U.S. economic growth in several ways:

1. It would help the development of oil production in North Dakota directly. This would produce jobs and income in North Dakota, increase tax revenue, and improve America’s balance of payments and energy security.

2. It would help the development of Canadian oil production directly, and therefore increase income in Canada. The Canadian economy is really a subset of the North American economy, as there is direct division of labor on the production of many goods across the border, and the vast majority of Canadian imports are bought from the United States. Canadian oil also helps improve American energy security, as it is not vulnerable to being cut off by the vagaries of radical Muslim politics or even world war.

3. Helping oil from Canada and North Dakota reach the world market serves to lower the global price of oil. The U.S. produces 7 million barrels of oil per day at present, but uses 18 million barrels per day. We are thus the largest net importer of oil in the world, and anything that serves to lower the price of oil benefits the United States. Thus, as a general rule we should want oil production from every country in the world to find an easy path to the world market. If Tajikistan needs assistance getting its oil to the market, we should see what we can do to help out.

I am sympathetic to the desire of Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) to invalidate President Obama’s promised executive order conferring amnesty on millions of illegal aliens. And, like most of his fellow Republicans, and maybe even some Democrats, Senator Paul wants to believe Congress has the power to stop the president short of impeaching him. Nevertheless, his suggestion that lawmakers have the power to void presidential action simply by directing the president not to take that action is wrong.

Senator Paul floated this idea in an interview with Sean Hannity on Monday. He purported to base it on the Supreme Court’s famous steel-seizure case, Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer (1952), which he construes as holding that “the president cannot expressly do something that Congress is telling them [sic] not to do.”

In Youngstown, the justices invalidated President Truman’s executive order directing government agents to seize (and the Commerce Department to operate) American steel mills when a labor dispute threatened to disrupt supply during the Korean War. With due respect to Senator Paul — and recognizing that the time constraints of a short TV interview can make it very hard to outline a legal theory — Youngstown does not say what he seems to think it says.

First of all, Congress did not direct the president to do or refrain from doing anything in the steel-seizure case. Instead, Truman issued an executive order, the aggrieved companies sued, and the Court invalidated the order.

It is true that part of the rationale for invalidating the order was the absence of statutory authority for the president’s seizure of the mills. Senator Paul is obviously equating this statutory silence with an express congressional denial of seizure authority. That is a dubious proposition, to say the least. As illustrated by the various Youngstown opinions (including Justice Robert Jackson’s concurrence, which is better known than the majority opinion), it is often unclear what silence means: Sometimes it’s a green light, sometimes a red light, and sometimes . . . it is just silence.

Runaway crime has been replaced by rogue executive power.

Whether your metric is the use of the executive branch’s awesome investigative and prosecutorial powers to punish the administration critics, the stonewalling and misleading of congressional investigations, or the racially discriminatory enforcement of civil rights laws in violation of the Constitution’s equal-protection principles, the Obama Justice Department is the most politicized in the nation’s history.

But the conversion of the rule of law from a foundation of ordered liberty to a political weapon may have at least one silver lining. Growing public alarm over the abuse of executive power spotlights some wayward prosecutorial practices that have been building for decades. Among them is civil forfeiture. It has devolved from a useful tool for defunding major criminal enterprises to a dangerous gutting of due process for ordinary Americans.

Like many government initiatives that grow harmful owing to inevitable mission creep, forfeiture seemed like a fine idea at the start. That was the early 1970s, when the nation faced a record crime wave driven by organized crime and narcotics-trafficking gangs. These enterprises can be very difficult to prosecute: Key leaders are insulated, witnesses are afraid to come forward and lavish profits enable mobsters and kingpins to hire top-flight lawyers and corrupt judicial processes.

Civil forfeiture was one clever way of attacking the problem. Rather than targeting the thugs through criminal prosecution, the civil approach targeted the instrumentalities that facilitated crime and the assets that were its proceeds — either cash or the things that money can buy. Although government prosecutors brought the cases, they were civil in nature, not criminal. That meant the “defendant” was the asset itself (e.g., a car, a bank account, a trove of jewelry), not the person whose suspected criminal activity generated these assets.

This was a coup for prosecutors because the burden of proof in civil cases is significantly lower: The case if proved by a “preponderance of the evidence” (basically, prosecutors must show merely that guilt is more likely than not), rather than the daunting “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard applicable for criminal conviction. Moreover, there was great risk for the owner of ill-gotten gains subject to criminal forfeiture: By challenging the seizure of his property, he could end up providing investigators with valuable information about himself that could help build a criminal case.

The current halachic prohibition against ascending the Temple Mount originates in the Ottoman period.

For millennia, the site of the First and Second Temples has been the subject of a halachic (Jewish law) question: where are Jews permitted to walk on the Temple Mount? Rabbis agree that because of the sanctity of the Temple, Jews must not enter the area where the Temples stood. They differ, however, about where the Temples were located, and whether the prohibition applies to the specific site of the Temples, or to the entire Temple Mount.

The First and Second Temples were small buildings, about 50 meters square, which contained an inner sanctuary, the Holy of Holies, into which the High Priest entered once a year, on Yom Kippur. The Temple Mount is nearly 1,500 square meters, and entering the golden Dome of the Rock, a Muslim shrine, and its surrounding area – around 200 sq.m. – is forbidden.

It is recorded that Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides/Rambam, 1135-1204) prayed on the Temple Mount at a synagogue that had remained from an earlier (pre-Crusader) period. Rabbi Moses ben Nachman (Ramban) wrote that he prayed on the Temple Mount when he arrived in Jerusalem in 1267.

The current halachic prohibition against ascending the Temple Mount originates in the Ottoman period and was restated during the Mandate period by chief rabbis Avraham Ha-Cohen Kook and Isaac Herzog, and halachic authorities like R’ Yisrael Meir Kagan (author of “Hafetz Hayim”). Their position was consistent with the Ottoman and British governments’ and Wakf (Islamic Authority) policy of excluding Jews from the Temple Mount and restricting access to and use of the Western Wall.

There is a hagiography ” The Theory of Everything” starring wonderful and talented Eddie Redmayne on the life, the loves and the tragedy of dear Professor Hawking. Here is an essay that says it all by David Solway. Also check out Marilyn Penn’s review http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/2014/11/16/the-theory-of-everything-big-holes-in-hawkings-life/
Stephen Hawking’s Moral Black Hole Posted By David Solway

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2013/05/20/stephen-hawkings-moral-black-hole-posted-by-david-solway/

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-solway/stephen-hawkings-moral-black-hole/print/

There has been considerable fallout of late regarding world-renowned cosmologist Stephen Hawking’s refusal to attend Israel’s Fifth Presidential Conference this coming June, on the grounds of Israeli malfeasance toward the Palestinians. Whatever one’s view of the Jewish state, there should be little doubt that the physicist’s decision to boycott the event is both intellectually indefensible and morally suspect, and raises the question of how mental agility and moral folly can co-exist in the same person.

As several commentators have indicated, his position is intellectually indefensible since Hawking evinces no knowledge of the history of the Middle East, ludicrously compares Israel to apartheid South Africa, and seems wholly unaware of the provably fraudulent nature of the Palestinian narrative. Palestinian revisionism has falsified the historical record in practically every conceivable respect. The data are readily accessible and no genuine scholar or thinking person can deny them and still retain a modicum of integrity. At the same time, his attitude is morally suspect owing to the fact that Hawking, who suffers from motor neuron disease, would have been rendered mute without the advances and advantages of Israeli medical breakthroughs. Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, director of Shurat HaDin–Israel Law Center, called Hawking’s boycott hypocritical. “His whole computer-based communication system runs on a chip designed by Israel’s Intel team. I suggest that if he truly wants to pull out of Israel, he should also pull out his Intel Core i7 from his tablet.”

Paving the way for Islamic State in Israel

During morning prayers at a Jerusalem synagogue on Tuesday, two Arabs with massacre on their minds entered the premises armed with guns and axes. They managed to kill four worshippers and wound several others before being shot down by police.

Immediately this was reported in the media as a revenge attack for the death of an Arab bus driver (employed by the Israeli company, Egged) on Sunday night. A forensic examination, conducted on Monday in the presence of an Arab coroner, showed that the deceased had hanged himself. But his parents insisted he was murdered by Jews. Riots ensued.

But then, mass protests against perceived Israeli crimes have been going on for months. Each is given a specific label, but they are all part of what I would call the “Temple Mount Intifada.”

This latest war of attrition against Israel was ostensibly caused by a movement of Jews who wish to alter the status quo and be allowed to pray at the Temple Mount. But Muslims, who have free rein to worship at the Al-Aqsa mosque, consider this an assault.

They rationalize their rejection of religious coexistence by denying a Jewish connection to the site.

“Temple denial” is a term coined by Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs head Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.N. and current foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In his 2007 book, “The Fight for Jerusalem: Radical Islam, the West, and the Future of the Holy City,” Gold called the attempt on the part of Palestinian Liberation Organization chief Yasser Arafat to delegitimize Israel by rejecting Jewish claims to the holy city.

Since then, Gold has shown how Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has picked up where Arafat left off, continuing the campaign to cast aspersions on Israel’s connection to Jerusalem in general and to the Temple Mount in particular. Indeed, Abbas and other PA figures have taken many opportunities to assert that if there was a Jewish Temple 2,000 years ago, it was located in Nablus.

November 24, 2014, looms as a strategic date in world history. At that time, a deadline for a deal with Iran will be reached. And, even though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, among others, has said “no deal is better than a bad deal,” it appears as if President Obama’s team and the so-called P5+1 group – the U.S., Britain, France, Russia, and China, plus Germany – are seeking any deal rather than no deal.

There is no surprise at the rising confidence of the Iranian government. Without the slightest fanfare or notice by the international press, Shia rebels supported by Iran captured the capital city of Sana’a in Yemen. This extraordinary geostrategic move gives Iran entrance to the Red Sea. Along with its command of the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, Iran will be in a position to control the sea lanes surrounding the Arab world.

With Beirut, Baghdad, Damascus, and Sana’a under Iranian control and influence, the dream of a Shia Crescent appears as a reality. Moreover, with Yemen on the door step of Saudi Arabia, Iran has an ideal staging area for attacks against its main Sunni rival.

Through its virtual silence, the United States is complicit in these actions. Since Mr. Obama will not deploy U.S. ground forces in the war against ISIS, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards is considered a surrogate army, even though no one in the U.S. State Department will admit to the concession. Iran’s role as a putative “stabilizer” in the roiling Middle East offers it enormous latitude at the Vienna negotiating table where a decision will be made about Iran’s nuclear capability.

Despite a bipartisan U.S. Congressional declaration opposing any deal that permits Iran to have or develop nuclear weapons, it appears as if the negotiating team representing the U.S. and most of the Europeans are willing to split the difference. In other words, there is a growing consensus that if Iran agrees not to weaponize its missiles at its Parchin military base, it would be allowed to retain enough enriched uranium to build a bomb at a later date. That’s what I have described as the “Japanese solution,” i.e. Article 9 in the Japanese Constitution prohibits the development of nuclear weapons, but it does not prohibit the storage of fissile material that could be used for nuclear weapons.

There are several ways to see the National Cathedral’s decision to host Islamic Friday prayers this week.

First, the facts. The service is the brainchild of the Rev. Canon Gina Campbell, the Episcopal cathedral’s director of liturgy, and South African Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool, a Muslim, who is delivering the sermon. Invitation-only guests include Masjid Muhammad of The Nation’s Mosque, representatives of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS), the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).

That’s some roster if playing “Spot the Muslim Brotherhood Front” is a hobby. Clearly, it’s not the professionals’ pursuit. On being quizzed by the Daily Caller, for example, cathedral spokesman Craig Stapert had no idea that two of the invited groups were unindicted co-conspirators in the landmark Holy Land Foundation Hamas-financing trial.

A kewpie doll to the reader who can pick out the unindicted co-conspirators in the cathedral’s guest list (ISNA and CAIR — right!). A cigar to anyone who knows the name of the man who is both ISNA president and ADAMS executive director (Mohamed Magid). And which group tops the “list of our organizations and the organizations of our friends” in the Muslim Brotherhood document explaining the “Civilization-Jihadist Process” underway in the U.S.?

Here’s another hint. The U.S. government entered this “Explanatory Memorandum” into evidence during the 2009 Holy Land Foundation trial. It explains that the organization’s secret “work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by (Westerners’) hands and by the hands of believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” The answer, of course, is ISNA.

Speaking of the Muslim Brotherhood, here’s a bonus question: Where did the first delegation of Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to visit the U.S. make a beeline from the airport to visit? The residence of South Africa’s Ebrahim Rasool, reports South African news site City Press.

Conservative media, noting the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas links of the cathedral invitees, quickly dubbed the prayer service “Islamist,” which they define as a radical fringe separated from Islam’s vast mainstream by the “Islamist’s” adherence to sharia.

Modern feminism is getting embarrassing. There’s a reason why so few women identify as feminists: It’s less a true “women’s movement” than the public face of hysterical leftist intolerance — combined, of course, with utterly bizarre (and bizarrely stupid) ideas.

While I had numerous brushes with extremist feminists in law school — women who declared that all (heterosexual) sex was rape and often responded with literal screams to classroom speech they didn’t like — it all felt fashionably fake. Surely no one took that level of extremism into the real world, did they? Then my wife encountered a lesbian couple in Ithaca, N.Y., who was raising their child to be “genderless.” They refused to call him a boy or girl, allowing him to “choose his gender” identity during his teenage years. And, apparently, they are not alone.

Most people — including most liberals — believe that kind of behavior is insane. NPR, by contrast, writes a glowing profile of women raising their “boychicks.” It’s hard to craft a more nauseating self-parodic paragraph than this self-identified “queer-identified male-partnered monogamist’s” description of her son:

She describes her boychick, born in March 2007, as a “male-assigned at birth — and so far apparently comfortable with that assignment, white, currently able-bodied, congenitally hypothyroid, cosleeper, former breastfed toddler, elimination communication graduate, sling baby and early walker, trial and terror, cliched light of our life, and impetus for the blog. Odds are good he will be the most privileged of persons: a middle class, able bodied, cisgender, straight, white male.”

The true insanity is not that there are crazy people in this world — there always are (I can tell some stories after 45 years in church) — but that modern feminism actually strives to elevate the crazy, the stupid, and the just plain hysterical into the realm of actually relevant cultural and political commentary. Consider these examples:

1. A woman (who likely identifies as a feminist herself) quite sensibly writes that college girls should drink responsibly as a form of defense against sexual assault, and other feminists call her a ”rape denialist.”

The last #but long gasp of the Obama administration is characterized not so much by deceit and incompetence as by growing chaos. Everything appears to be coming apart. The chariot of state now veers up and down with a terrified Phaethon clueless at the reins. Whether it is ISIS, Ebola, Putin, or Obamacare, the common strain is not simple incompetence, but a maladroitness born of intolerant ideological fundamentalism.

Have our government agencies ever seemed more corrupt or useless or both, staffed by political cronies and leftist zealots? What ever happened to the old IRS, GSA, VA, Secret Service, NSA, NASA, EPA, or Justice Department? All seem now mere appendages to a larger agenda of fundamentally transforming America.

We are mired in the slowest recovery in modern times, alleviated only by recently falling oil prices, which came despite, not because of, the president’s efforts. Fiscal sobriety is now redefined as a $600 billion annual deficit rather than the usual $1 trillion, again brought about by efforts other than Obama’s own. Yet the president has an unfortunate habit of taking credit for the good that he opposed and fobbing off on others responsibility for the bad that he embraced. There is interest in watching Obama’s press conferences, but mostly in appreciating how ingeniously he serially blames others for his own blunders.

Our foreign policy is such a wreck that it makes the mess of the Carter administration seem inspired in comparison. Europe is pouting because it finally, after a half-century, found what it wanted in Obama, and yet it rues the fact that he is turning the United States into Europe — without a United States left to protect either. By Putin’s sheer force of malice and Obama’s paralysis, Russia is now sowing havoc from its borders to the Mediterranean. China is hesitant only to the degree that it cannot quite fathom whether such presidential ineptness could be real, or whether it is instead some intricate American feint designed to entice a cocky Beijing into overstepping its bounds.

Failed Marxism characterizes a Latin America that not long ago looked northward for help in making the transition to free-market democracy. There is little left to be said about a Middle East that now bears no resemblance to what it was prior to 2009 — an estranged Israel, a duplicitous Turkey, all labor for naught in Iraq, Iran smiling its way to a bomb, Syria as a desert, Libya from “lead from behind” to Benghazi, and on and on.