RUTHFULLY YOURS

Frankly I am a tad tired of conservative reflexively shrieking about any and all efforts to confront immigration. They roasted Governor Rick Perry for offering state education to the children of illegals, they roasted then President Bush (Dubya) for promoting guest worker visas. They are properly angered at President Obama for flouting the constitution, but they hide behind the spurious notion that immigrants who do construction and landscaping and housekeeping jobs are taking those menial jobs away from Americans. Oh really? Try and get some stone masons, mowers, heavers and hoers among the legal youth.

Why don’t conservative candidates put their minds together and come up with serious and humanitarian proposals to deal with the problem? I, for one would welcome the debate, and for starters let’s do away with hyphenation. We are Americans who learn and speak English. I, for one, don’t consider myself a Polish-Jewish-Hispanic Citizen….just American.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ The main weapon that progressives wield against traditionalists is their ability to break down the values that make up their worldview by challenging norms of behavior and thought, with the goal of using cultural friction to slowly replace traditional values and mores with their own. This is a weapon that progressives have explicitly disavowed […]

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=2091

The Arab springboard

It is not for nothing that jihadists refer to the U.S. as the “Great Satan” and to Israel as the “Small Satan.” What the U.S. and the Jewish state have in common is so profound and unmistakable that radical Islamists have recognized and felt threatened by it from the get-go. Using Quranic texts and the “hadith” (oral traditions) to support their aim to kill or convert all Jews and Christians to Islam, they have little trouble explaining their aversion to the key countries that base their legal and moral systems on the Ten Commandments.

But this is only their theological justification for hating the West in general and the U.S. and Israel in particular. Their religious zeal in actually trying to carry out what they believe their prophet, Mohammed, had in mind for them comes from a combination of fear and envy.

What they fear is freedom. It is also what they envy.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303836404577474312596058338.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSec

STEPHENS IS A CHARMING, ARTICULATE AND THOUGHTFUL JOURNALIST….BUT MIRED IN OPTIMISM ABOUT A TWO STATE SOLUTION WHICH HE RECENTLY FORECAST “IN THIRTY YEARS”….AND NOW AGAIN,

“The good news is that Egyptians may have a wider conception of freedom in 30 years or so, about the same amount of time it took Khomeinism to lose the masses in Iran. In 30 years, too, the Greeks may have a better appreciation of the notion of responsibility, both personal and political. As for what remains of the liberal democratic world, maybe the weekend elections will be a reminder of another famous political maxim: “A republic—if you can keep it.”……OH PULEEZ! RSK

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. Everyone knows who said this, and everyone thinks it’s true. But is it, really?

After last weekend I’ve begun to have my doubts. In Egypt, the ruling military junta reacted to the apparent victory of Muslim Brotherhood presidential candidate Mohammed Morsi by stripping the presidential office of its powers. That came just days after Egypt’s top court dissolved the Islamist-dominated parliament, which had been freely elected only a few months ago.

How arbitrary. What an affront to the Egyptian people. Now let’s hope it works.

Then there’s Greece, which also had an election over the weekend. The Greeks are supposed to have made the “responsible” choice in the person of Antonis Samaras, the Amherst- and Harvard-educated leader of the center-right New Democracy party. Responsible in this case means trying to stay in the euro zone by again renegotiating the terms of a bailout that Greeks cannot possibly repay and will not likely honor.

Yet the more depressing fact about the election is that Mr. Samaras didn’t even get 30% of the vote. The rest was divided among the radical-left Syriza (27%), the socialist Pasok (12.3%), the anti-German Independent Greeks (7.5%), the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn (7%), the center-left Democratic Left (6.2%) and, finally, the good old Communist Party (4.5%).

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.”