RUTHFULLY YOURS

What a bizarre spectacle. Assuming he did not lie during his marathon news conference last week, the feeding frenzy surrounding New Jersey governor Chris Christie will be remembered as one of those incredibly odd moments of elite journalistic hysteria that are difficult to explain to people who weren’t there or didn’t get it.

I’m not referring to the scandal itself; that’s easy enough to understand. What Christie’s team did was outrageous and deserves as much foofaraw and brouhaha as the New Jersey media can muster.

What’s harder to grok is the hysteria at the national level.

For starters, there have been countless greater outrages at the state level that have received far less national coverage. (Indeed, there have been national scandals under President Obama that have received less intense national coverage.) Since 1961, four Illinois governors have ended up in jail, and with the exception of Rod Blagojevich, few have received comparable media attention.

Meet the Press dedicated 33 minutes to the New Jersey scandal, including a grilling of Reince Priebus, head of the Republican National Committee, as if Christie were Nixon during Watergate (a comparison ostensibly serious people have made).

As recently as 1998, New York State’s Republican party controlled the governorship, a United States Senate seat, and the mayor’s office in Manhattan. Today, it is greatly diminished, with its sole beachhead of influence in the state senate, where it shares a majority with four independent Democrats.

In contrast, the Working Families party (WFP), a 15-year-old left-wing, union-fueled group with just 20,000 members, now holds the whip hand over much of the dominant Democratic party in New York — and is already spreading its wings to other states. The WFP not only was a major force behind Bill de Blasio’s victory for mayor last November; it dominated the rest of the election, too. “They propelled all three citywide officials in New York City into office, and have a huge chunk of the city council allied with them,” says Hank Sheinkopf, a leading Democratic consultant who has worked for Hillary Clinton. “They are a real force.”

In New York, the WFP’s power is magnified by state laws that allow minor parties to cross-endorse major-party candidates, which has given rise to a number of influential third parties. (Incidentally, one such upstart, the Conservative party, provided the ballot line for WFB’s mayoral campaign in 1965 and his brother’s successful Senate campaign in 1970.) But cross-endorsements are especially crucial in New York City: Rudy Giuliani won the mayoralty in 1993 only by running on the lines of both the Republican party and the heavily left-leaning Liberal party. He rewarded the Liberals with patronage jobs and hefty pay increases for their teachers’-union allies. Mike Bloomberg won in 2001 only by having both the Republican- and Independence-party lines, and in 2009 he even actively negotiated with Working Families for their endorsement, until his representative admitted “the price was too high.”

Joshua Mitchell’s Tocqueville in Arabia [3] is a many-sided book. Part memoir, part geopolitical analysis, part rumination on the souls of the young – focus your reading one way and Mitchell proposes an understanding of the Middle East based on the spiritual sociology of Alexis de Tocqueville. Focus your reading another way and he offers a teacher’s commentary on the tastes and mental habits of elite university students in Qatar, Iraq, and the United States. Taken together, this short book honors and inhabits Tocqueville’s method and voice, illuminating the essence of liberal modernity by the lights of the Middle East and the inner consciousness of the Arab world by the prospect of a dawning modernity.

Mitchell is uniquely situated to his task. A professor of political theory at Georgetown University’s main campus in Washington, D.C., he helped set up Georgetown’s satellite campus in Doha, where he served as an academic dean. From 2008-2010, he was the acting Chancellor of the American University of Iraq, where he sought to bring the liberal arts to an embattled land in search of revitalization. Tocqueville in Arabia invites readers along with Mitchell in these travels, comparing American and Middle Eastern reactions to his classroom teaching in the history of political thought. The spirit that animates Mitchell’s book is grounded in the premise that if you really want to know what a civilization holds dear, see what it teaches its young. The mental and moral nourishment that one generation gives to the next tells more about its fundamental commitments than any other indication. Because education most clearly reveals a culture’s true commitments and worldview, the educator’s insight rivals that of the social scientist.

https://twitter.com/andrewbostom/status/423412535316840449

http://youtu.be/R4pT95hk2gg

“Perhaps the most horrifying realization is that there may be no way to detect and to stop school shooters like Lanza.What the media has not reported and will never report are the facts about what will work to deter and to stop school attacks: doing away with “gun free” school zones and allowing willing school staff to carry concealed handguns.Lanza, from the beginning to his suicide, was vulnerable to return fire. In fact, at many points, armed school staff would have had significant advantages in cover, concealment, and superior knowledge of the facility.”

After Newtown, President Obama and gun control advocates were shocked to discover — yet again — that sweeping anti-gun legislation would fail miserably. The nation rejected their pointing to guns as the explanation for the massacre. Obama has since been reduced to speechifying and exploiting the parents of Sandy Hook victims; his political arm — Organizing for Action — has barely made a ripple in the political pond.

The people of Newtown have asked the rest of the world to be kind, and to leave them alone.

The Danbury Judicial District state’s attorney, Stephen J. Sedensky III, issued his report on the shooting on November 25, 2013. As one might expect, the facts as revealed in his report bear little resemblance to the media and Obama’s narrative regarding the massacre.

(Media/Obama talking points in bold.)

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Adam Lanza and his mother had strong ties to Sandy Hook Elementary School that caused him to attack there. While Lanza attended the school — he happened to live in the neighborhood — nearly a decade earlier, he had no discernible ties to the school thereafter. It’s possible his mother did a little volunteering at the school when Lanza attended, but she was never employed there. The most likely possibility is Lanza chose Sandy Hook merely because he was familiar with it and it was close to his home.

Representative Darrell Issa blasted Tuesday what he called a questionable U.S. criminal investigation into the screening of Tea Party groups by the Internal Revenue Service, saying that anonymous leaks had harmed the inquiry.

Issa, a California Republican who has led congressional probes into the matter, criticized Attorney General Eric Holder and the Justice Department after a media report that federal authorities didn’t plan to pursue criminal charges in the case.

“These revelations further undermine the credibility of the Attorney General Holder and the Justice Department under his leadership,” Issa and Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, said in a statement released late Monday night. “Given the circumstances, there is little reason for the American people to have confidence in this investigation.

Lieutenant-Commander Steven Mackenzie, who has died aged 95, played a notable part in the covert operations of the Inshore Patrol Flotilla for the Secret Intelligence Service and SOE; he subsequently served with MI6 in Europe, the Far East and Latin America.

In March 1942, at Falmouth, Mackenzie took command of Le Dinan, usually known by its registration number, N51, a 65ft Concarneau fishing trawler, with Lewis guns mounted amidships and a crew of eight. The mission (code-named “Marie Louise”) was to extricate Colonel Rémy and bring him and his wife and children back to England under the noses of the Gestapo who were hunting them.

Rémy was the field name of Col Gilbert Renault, head of the Confrérie de Notre Dame, which was to become one of the most important of all the Free French intelligence networks in enemy-occupied France.

At a secluded anchorage at New Grimsby in the Scilly Isles, the hull, bulwarks, deckhouse and masts of N51 forsook their naval grey and were repainted in shades of green and brown. A registration number, a Breton name and French flags on either bow were added. Sten guns, pistols and grenades were put aboard, and revolver and small arms practice shoots were held on the shore.

After several failed attempts, the party sailed in June 1942. Mackenzie’s First Officer was Daniel Lomenech, a Frenchman who knew the Breton coastline well. They had an RAF escort until they were half way across the Channel, but there followed three nerve-racking hours of unescorted sailing before dark, crossing an area forbidden to fishing vessels; a sighting by a German air patrol would mean an attack.

“The medium is the message,” Marshall McLuhan said. The days of the medium however are being left far behind.

The newspaper, the radio and the television set that coiled together into the media to provide a bewildering array of information and entertainment have been infinitely complicated and simplified. The day when the last newspaper runs off the last printing press, the last radio broadcast fades into a hum of static and the last television signal winks out is not that far away. The internet is a true media,

The internet through the desktop, the television set and the mobile device is capable of duplicating the mediums we knew, but it also ushers in unlimited competition. Every medium was limited in the amount of content that it could or would provide. There were only so many pages in a newspaper, radio and television could only be experienced in real time and only as many programs as would fit into a broadcasting schedule on a single channel. Everything had limits. The internet has few limits.

The only meaningful hard limit on the internet is the human attention span. Content isn’t quite infinite, but it easily surpasses what any single person could even begin to take in. The sheer amount of options alone exceed the available time to enumerate them at any given moment. Technological limits have been proven to be soft limits. But there’s only so much human attention to go around.

A President who thinks that extending unemployment compensation “creates jobs” is so out of touch with reality that it should come as no surprise that Obama has the worst record of unemployment rates since the days of the Great Depression in the 1930s.

The latest employment figures for December showed that the economy only added 74,000 non-farm jobs, the fewest in three years! The government claims that the unemployment rate dropped 0.3%-the first time in 60 months that it dropped below 7%. And the official rate is bogus. The government only counts people as unemployed only if they are actively looking for work.

As of October 2013, The Wall Street Journal reported that “The U.S. now has 90.6 million ‘non-institutionalized’ men and women over the age of 16 not working-an all-time high. That’s 10 million above the 80.5 million when President Obama took office. With total unemployment at 144.3 million, for every three Americans over the age of 16 earning a paycheck there are two who aren’t even looking for a job. That’s an ugly portent for American prosperity.”

In a September 2013 edition of Investor’s Business Daily, Betsey McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York and author of “Beating Obama-Care”, wrote that “After 4-1/2 years of the Obama presidency, an unprecedented number of Americans have given up looking for work, wages are stagnating, low-wage earners are suffering most and the U.S. is fast becoming a nation of part-time workers.”

The following draft press release was provided to this reporter in confidence by a well-placed source within the Obama Administration. Candace de Russy)

Democrats in Congress are enthusiastic about the new “Affordable Citizenship Act” which President Obama introduced by Executive Order at midnight on New Year’s Eve. All existing citizens of the U.S. except those who work for the government will soon have received letters in the mail informing them that their current citizenship has been cancelled. This is due to the exciting new grandfathering clauses in the new Act which are designed to improve the U.S. citizenship experience for all human beings throughout the world.

Automatic Re-Granting of Citizenships

As President Obama will explain in a forthcoming TV address, persons who have lost their citizenships can simply reapply for one of the new and better citizenships on offer at the broken.gov website and at the Acorn Citizenship Fairness Offices (ACFOs) which have been set up in DMV locations throughout the country.

The new Act replaces the existing system with three new levels of citizenship, Platinum, Green and Gold.