RUTHFULLY YOURS

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).

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/history-of-tomorrow

Let me state at the outset that my tea leaves are no more refined than anyone else’s. However, we are in the midst of potential earth shattering events that are worthy of speculation, events that are likely to shape our national destiny for decades. I am persuaded Mitt Romney wins the next election in large part because there isn’t a victory narrative President Obama can develop. Thirty eight consecutive months of over 8 percent unemployment is in itself a scenario for defeat, notwithstanding all of the rationalizations the president will offer.

An Israeli air armada is likely to attack Iran in the next few months (before the November election). President Netanyahu has allowed President Obama to try negotiations and sanctions, but neither has offered sufficient pressure on Iran to forego its nuclear weapons ambitions. Since an Iran with nuclear weapons represents a potential holocaust too grim to imagine, the Israeli president is left with no other option.

Despite deflationary pressures that have kept prices in check, inflation is likely to rear its ugly head next year as the Europeans proceed to monetize their debt leading to a contagion that cannot be contained on the other side of the Atlantic. Moreover, the U.S. has amassed more than $5 trillion in debt since 2009 suggesting that currency increases may soon be coruscating through the financial bloodstream.

http://spectator.org/archives/2012/06/18/barack-ogobbledygook/

“First, regardless of his own beliefs, the president will say whatever he thinks people want to hear, and he will continue to say it in the kind of dumbed-down sub-English that he thinks will rally his sorry constituency of class-warfare victims. And second, if he does win in November, it won’t be on the strength and power of his oratory. In fact, Barack O’Gobbledygook is probably the most overrated orator in world history.”

A President who can’t be bothered with basic grammar (or mere coherence).

Some of us live in the past. Others — if you go by one of Barack Obama’s remarks in a speech last week — have been living most of their adult lives in the future. At a fund-raising event in Philadelphia, he said:

There’s (sic) still too many people who are out of work, too many homes underwater, and middle-class families that still don’t have the confidence that the future for their kids and grandkids are (sic) going to be brighter than their futures have been (sic).

This president gets the right agreement between noun and verb only half the time. For the sake of consistency it might be better if he got it wrong all the time. He would then say: There’s still too many people who’s out of work, too many homes that’s underwater, etc. And then there is the howler about the past-tense futures, which is another kind of solecism.

Earlier in the day, Obama spoke, and misspoke, to graduating students at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. Among other things, he said:

So my expectation is that somebody in this auditorium is going to figure out new sources of energy that help not only make us more energy independent, but also deals (sic) with problems like (sic) climate change.