RUTHFULLY YOURS

Israeli Air Force hits terror cell in Gaza
Jerusalem Post
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
News
The Israel Air Force on early Tuesday morning struck a terrorist cell which was in the process of planting an explosive device near the border with Central Gaza. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1yEeniyUx

Democratic hopes to recapture House dim
The Hill
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
News
Democratic hopes of recapturing the House are dimming as a series of race-by-race setbacks and economic uncertainty suggest that the 25 seats they need to net might be out of reach. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1yEeE6Wly
Muslim Brotherhood to protest military decrees
BBC
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
News
Members of the Muslim Brotherhood will take part in protests across Egypt to demonstrate against sweeping new powers taken by the ruling military council. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1yEePlD5o
Asians outstrip Hispanics entering U.S. for first time
Associated Press
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
News
For the first time, the influx of Asians moving to the U.S. has surpassed that of Hispanics, reflecting a slowdown in illegal immigration while American employers increase their demand for high-skilled workers, according to an expansive study by the Pew Research Center. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1yEefulOo

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/19/obama%e2%80%99s-quick-illegal-immigrant-fix-ignores-the-problem-of-assimilation/

America’s ward-heeler-in-chief just bought some votes with the policy equivalent of a keg of beer and a slab of bacon. Obama’s memorandum to Homeland Security head Napolitano to stop the deportation of illegal aliens brought here as children and granting them work permits bypassed Congress, that branch of government our quaint Constitution makes responsible for such policy. Obama said so himself last year when he reminded people that he couldn’t “change the law unilaterally” and “We have to pass bills through the legislature and then I can sign it.” But the need to stanch the bleeding from a week of economic bad news for his reelection campaign has given the president Constitutional amnesia. If Obama had been sincerely interested in crafting a legal, bipartisan, permanent solution to this problem, he could have negotiated with Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio, who has crafted a more sensible solution than last year’s Dream Act, and worked through Congress. But the need to throw some goodies to Latino voters in several swing states critical for his own reelection was more important than actually governing according to the Constitution.

Obama’s accompanying rationale for this decision, moreover, was full of unexamined assumptions and sentiments. “These are young people who study in our schools, they play in our neighborhoods, they’re friends with our kids, they pledge allegiance to our flag. They are Americans in their heart, in their minds, in every single way but one: on paper,” Obama said. They “face the threat of deportation to a country that [they] know nothing about, with a language that [they] may not even speak.” They “for all intents and purposes, are Americans. They’ve been raised as Americans, understand themselves to be part of this country.” All those statements are loaded with begged questions that point to the bigger problem we have with immigration both legal and illegal––the question of national identity and national loyalty.

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/303182

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is adapted from An American Son.

It had been quite a ride already. I had gone from a sure loser without a viable way to quit the race to the surging frontrunner. Now the stars had aligned again for Crist. The bickering Florida legislature and an unpopular bill had given him the opportunity to wear the mantle of a post-partisan populist. He made the most of his opportunity and reclaimed the lead in the race for the U.S. Senate. A Rasmussen poll released on May 4 confirmed he had retaken a lead, though by a smaller margin than Crist’s pollster had given him. Making matters worse, a new issue loomed that gave him the perfect platform from which to take command of the race.

The explosion on the Deepwater Horizon had resulted in an uncontainable oil gusher that was pouring fifty-three thousand gallons of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico, threatening Florida’s coastline. Predictably, support among Floridians for offshore drilling dropped dramatically. I was asked by a reporter on May 4 if I still supported off-shore drilling. I responded by acknowledging the horrible threat from the oil spill, and confirmed I still supported offshore drilling. I didn’t believe we could become energy independent without it. Crist saw his opportunity and pounced. Although he had supported drilling in 2008, he was now 100 percent against it. It was a smart political move.

I knew that as long as oil was spewing uncontrolled into the Gulf, offshore drilling would be unpopular. But when the well was capped and the spill contained, over time, support for offshore drilling would increase. People understood the country needed all its energy resources. But in the present crisis, support for drilling, like support for Social Security and Medicare reform, would be a test of principle over politics. My only hope was that voters would give me credit for being serious about the issue and not opportunistic. Time would tell.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/303205/obama-s-bad-dream-rich-lowry

‘Not for the first time, he’s proven himself callow, cynical, and contemptuous of our constitutional order.”

Next time, Congress shouldn’t bother. In another chapter in a long-running battle, it voted in December 2010 on the DREAM Act granting amnesty to illegal immigrants brought here as children. The lawmakers appeared to believe that they were entrusted with determining whether or not the legislation became law.

How quaint. Passage of the DREAM Act wasn’t necessary, and its defeat — by a filibuster in the Senate — was an irrelevance. Despite all the votes through the years, all the competing versions of the bill, all the attempts to find a compromise, Congress was nothing more than a Toastmasters meeting adorned with the trappings of legislative power.

Last week the Obama administration activated the central provisions of the DREAM Act by wielding the most awesome power in Washington — President Barack Obama’s say-so. He must imagine himself as fit for the company of the great lawgivers Hammurabi and Moses on the frieze over the Supreme Court. In one memorandum signed by his Homeland Security secretary, he claimed powers that literally once belonged to kings.

Supporters of the DREAM Act felt compelled to pass an amnesty for certain illegal immigrants for the simple reason that current, duly constituted law makes it illegal for them to be here. The president dispensed with all that by deciding to ignore the law that Congress failed to change. In his capacity as the country’s one-man legislature, he exempts illegal immigrants under the age of 30 who came here when they were young from deportation and authorizes them to work.

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2012/6/19/main-feature/1/brandeis-and-zionism-in-and-out-of-love/e

The Supreme Court is once again poised to define the role of government in American society; and Louis D. Brandeis, the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice, who served on the court from 1918 to 1938, would have recognized the terms of the debate. Brandeis helped shape many of the issues that occupy the 21st century Court, from theories of privacy to questions of the government’s relationship to private corporations. He also helped shape the relationship of American Jews to Zionism.
During the 1910s and 1920s, Brandeis introduced an ideology focusing on the cohesion between American values and Zionist aspirations. He de-emphasized anti-Semitism and the need for aliyah in favor of the social idealism and progressive values he saw at the heart of the Zionist movement. By focusing values such as national self-determination and democracy, Brandeis framed Zionism as a quintessentially American movement. During the critical days of the First World War, Brandeis served as chair of the Zionist executive council. He reorganized its finances and expanded its fundraising, and his stature lent legitimacy to the movement around the world.

There is, however, an untold story of Brandeis’s Zionism. His earliest statements reflect the social ideals of the American Progressive movement. He envisioned the creation of a small state with publicly owned land and “employer-employee democracy.” But what began as an expression of Jewish commitment rooted in social idealism eventually became a fervent political commitment to Jewish nationalism. In fact, three distinct stages can be traced in the evolution of Brandeis’s American Zionist ideology. His first statements in 1905 decried any sort of “hyphenated Americans.” His second phase, which encompassed the majority of his career, found its clearest expression in the intensely progressive Pittsburgh Program of 1918. And his third phase, beginning in the mid-1930s, focused on combating growing anti-Semitism and getting the necessary arms and settlers to Palestine.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/educating-conservatives-about-sharia%E2%80%99s-threat/?singlepage=true
Educating Conservatives About Sharia’s Threat

An ignorant column spurs much-needed discussion.

**=Matthew Schmitz, deputy editor at First Things, wrote an essay titled “Fears of Creeping Sharia” that was published at NRO on Wednesday, June 13.

The piece was striking in its willful ignorance about:

* the intrinsic nature of Sharia itself;

* the frequency and intensity of efforts by mainstream American Islamic organizations to promote Sharia in America (and we now know these are Muslim Brotherhood appendage organizations, who unfortunately do seem to represent the masses as per the only available polling data we have);

* the legal basis for American Laws for American Courts (ALAC)

Schmitz compounded this fundamental ignorance by maliciously spraying charges of “anti-Muslim bigotry” at those who confront Sharia encroachment. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Congresswoman Michele Bachmann were specifically condemned for their alleged role in “dignifying the disreputable anti-Sharia movement.”

Eric Holder, You Have a Problem — on The Glazov Gang
by Jamie Glazov
Dr. Nancy Bonus, Eric Allen Bell and Karla Moxley battle it out on the Fast & Furious scandal.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/06/19/eric-holder-you-have-a-problem-on-the-glazov-gang/

Tucker Carlson: ‘The point is Neil Munro wants his questions answered’ Questions Surround Obama Immigration Change More Troubles At Another Obama Stimulus Energy Company Is President Obama’s immigration move legal? Governor Huckabee and Rep. Gowdy Discuss Fast and Furious and Eric Holder ObamaCare ruling: What’s taking Supreme Court so long? Florida fights for right to […]

http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism

“By any non-race based standard, Eric Holder is a disaster and should quit or be fired.”

Attorney General Eric Holder, who has come under heavy scrutiny for his involvement in matters ranging from Fast and Furious to the New Black Panther voter intimidation scandal, has not been getting proper defense from the White House, according to several black journalists. On Roland Martin’s show on TVOne, Martin asked, “is this White House doing enough to protect the attorney general? And also, where is black leadership? I mean, here you have Eric Holder, who has been — first of all, he was a high-ranking official in the Justice Department under President Bill Clinton. He becomes the black, first African-American attorney general. He has been very aggressive on many issues. But some folks are saying that look, he’s been taken to the woodshed and he is not getting the kind of support that you would think he would be getting.”

Martin isn’t the only one questioning whether the White House has thrown Holder under the bus over his race. MSNBC contributor Karen Finney says that the White House should send out surrogates rather than Holder to protect him. “I think there’s a way to be defending Eric Holder and substantiating the points that he’s making because he’s making some very important points in terms of legal precedents, which we’ve heard it in the past from other administrations. And I think that’s the time when you need other validators on the outside.” The criticism by black journalists of the Obama administration poses a significant threat to Obama’s base. He has thus far been able to uphold his support in the black community largely by appeals to racial solidarity – hence his African-Americans for Obama campaign group, as well as commercials that appeal solely to the black demographic. But if he begins to be perceived as a sell-out on other black administration members, he may find himself in the uncomfortable position of having to defend his lack of support for black politicians like Eric Holder and Cory Booker.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-bedlam-of-statism

IS statism bipolar? Schizophrenic? Autistic? Obsessive-compulsive? Multi-phobic? Inherently dysfunctional? Psychotically antisocial? A form of dementia? A narcissistic personality disorder? A kind of panic or anxiety disorder? Just plain maladaptive? Or all of the preceding? This column will enter the mad house of statism and explore its various wards.

John David Lewis, in his masterpiece about the means and ends of war, Nothing Less Than Victory, cites both Ludwig von MIses and Ayn Rand on etatism and statism or fascism.

In Omnipotent Government, von Mises notes that etatism denotes those political systems that “have a common goal of subordinating the individual unconditionally to the state, the social apparatus of compulsion and coercion.” (Lewis, p. 44)

Quoting from Rand’s column, “The Fascist New Frontier,” Lewis cites Rand:

The dictionary definition of fascism is: “a governmental system with strong centralized power, permitting no opposition or criticism, controlling all affairs of the nation (industrial, commercial, etc.), emphasizing an aggressive nationalism . . .” [The American College Dictionary, New York: Random House, 1957.]

Of statism, she also wrote:

If the term “statism” designates concentration of power in the state at the expense of individual liberty, then Nazism in politics was a form of statism. In principle, it did not represent a new approach to government; it was a continuation of the political absolutism-the absolute monarchies, the oligarchies, the theocracies, the random tyrannies-which has characterized most of human history.

Lewis continues:

Statism applies to any government with such power, whether a primitive tribal ruler, a theocratic council, or a communist or fascist dictatorship – including a democracy unrestrained by fundamental laws – each of which swallows the lives and fortunes of individuals without regard for their rights. The identification of such governments as statist is relatively new, but the practice is of enormous antiquity (as Lewis demonstrates in his chapter on the Theban Wars against the Spartan slave state).