Displaying the most recent of 89710 posts written by

Ruth King

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Medals for U.S. Humiliation Iran honors the commanders who captured U.S. sailors.

By on February 1st, 2016

In other news from the receding tide of war, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has given medals to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards who recently captured and humiliated American sailors.

Iran state media reported Sunday that the Supreme Leader had awarded the Fath, or Victory, medal to the head of the Revolutionary Guards navy and four commanders who were involved in seizing two U.S. Navy boats in January. The two patrol boats were seized after they somehow entered Iran’s territorial waters. The Pentagon hasn’t publicly explained what happened, but the Revolutionary Guards have said they believe the boats entered their waters by mistake.

The Guards released the boats and crew, but not before deliberately embarrassing the sailors, the Navy, and the U.S. by broadcasting photos of the Americans in captivity, including the one nearby of the U.S. sailors on their knees with their hands behind their heads under armed Iranian guard.

Secretary of State John Kerry initially hailed the return of the sailors as a sign of the great new era of U.S.-Iran cooperation in the wake of the nuclear accord. “I think we can all imagine how a similar situation might have played out three or four years ago, and the fact that today this kind of issue can be resolved peacefully and efficiently is a testament to the critical role diplomacy plays in keeping our country safe, secure, and strong,” Mr. Kerry said.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Refugees Made Homeless by Boko Haram Violence Die at Jihadists’ Hands At least 60 people, many of them children, killed in northeastern Nigeria By Gbenga Akingbule and Drew Hinshaw

By on February 1st, 2016

Suspected Boko Haram members stormed a refugee encampment in northeast Nigeria, killing at least 60 people, many of them children burned to death in makeshift homes.

The attack spotlighted the Islamist insurgency’s brutal punishment of those fleeing its violence.

The assault began on Saturday night in the small town of Dalori, which houses a camp for Nigerians and other West Africans made homeless by the group’s violence, said a military spokesman, Col. Mustapha Anka. Several suicide bombers ran toward the camp’s gates while gunmen on motorcycles traversed the area firing assault rifles, he said.

The terrorists dressed in military fatigues, as Boko Haram fighters often do, said a survivor, Maina Bukar. Several of them set fire to mud-brick homes with families trapped inside. “I had to run and hide,” he said.

Many of the dead were children, Mr. Bukar said, adding that he helped recover 60 bodies. His account matches that of another survivor, cited by the Associated Press, who described hiding in a tree as Boko Haram militants firebombed homes below him. Three suicide bombers, all women, then ran into a group of people fleeing to a nearby village, the AP reported.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Benjamin Netanyahu Slams French Proposal on Palestinian Statehood Israel’s prime minister said it would reward Palestinian intransigence By Rory Jones

By on February 1st, 2016

TEL AVIV—Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday criticized a French proposal to recognize Palestine as a sovereign state, calling it an incentive for the Palestinians not to compromise in negotiations to resolve their long-running conflict.

France said Friday it would recognize the State of Palestine if one last attempt to bring the two sides together through an international conference failed. Mr. Netanyahu told a weekly cabinet meeting Sunday the proposal meant France effectively supported the Palestinian leadership.

“This will be an incentive for the Palestinians to come and not compromise,” he said.

He reiterated that Israel was prepared to enter direct negotiations with the Palestinians but without preconditions or terms dictated by the international community.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said France would try to convene an international event with the Israelis, the Palestinians and Arab states to start negotiations on a peace agreement.
Palestinian officials welcomed the proposal by France and called on other countries to pressure Israel to cease building of settlements on the land it captured after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and on which Palestinians want to build a future state.

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM, POLITICS Comments turned off

Trump and the Obama Power Temptation A history of using lawsuits or government to silence critics and rivals raises the question: How would he behave in office? By Kimberley A. Strassel

By on February 1st, 2016

Of all the Republicans campaigning in Iowa, perhaps none is campaigning harder than Ben Sasse, a Republican senator from Nebraska. Mr. Sasse isn’t running for president. He’s running against Donald Trump. The particular focus of his opposition deserves a lot more attention.

Mr. Sasse is a notable voice in this debate. He’s a heavyweight conservative—a grass-roots favorite, the furthest thing from the “establishment.” Before winning his Senate seat in 2014, he had never held elected office. He was the president of Midland University in Fremont, Neb., when he decided that he had to try to get to Washington and help restore the constitutional vision of the Founders.

Which is his point in Iowa: “We have a President who does not believe in executive restraint; we do not need another,” said Mr. Sasse in a statement announcing that he would campaign with Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and other “constitutional candidates.” On Twitter, Mr. Sasse issued a string of serious questions for Mr. Trump, including: “Will you commit to rolling back Exec power & undoing Obama unilateral habit”?

That’s a good question for every Republican candidate. President Obama has set a new lawless standard for Washington that might prove tempting for his successor from another party. Why suffer Democratic filibusters when you can sign an executive order? Why wait two years for legislation when you can make it happen overnight? The temptation to cut constitutional corners would be powerful given the pent-up conservative desire for a Washington overhaul.

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The American Taliban and the Assault on Memory by David Goldman

By on February 1st, 2016

The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, by Michael Walsh. Encounter Books, 2015. 222 pages. $US 23.99

Western culture has been under attack by enemies within since the leveling collectivism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Michael Walsh observes in The Devil’s Pleasure Palace. But something new and horrible emerged in the 1960s, when the cult of Critical Theory gained a beachhead at American universities, and began a long march through the institutions that culminates in today’s Orwellian witch-hunt against politically- incorrect thought.

The subversives of the past at least preserved the memory of the past. The composer Richard Wagner used the techniques of Western classical music to pervert the way we hear music, but the accomplishments of his predecessors remain embedded in is work. James Joyce may have turned Homer’s Odyssey into pornographic bathos, but he demanded that we read Homer. Thomas Mann’s 20th-century Faust character, the composer Adrian Leverkuhn, wanted to “take back Beethoven’s 9thsymphony,” but even the act of subversion elicits the memory of the original.

Not so the children of the Frankfurt School, the motley collection of German Marxist-Freudian-Nihilists who migrated to America during the 1930s and invented what the academy calls “critical theory,” a nihilistic reduction of all thought to political categories. They set the tone for the radicalism of the 1960s, and their students now rule the major universities.

They are the American Taliban and ISIS, who set out to destroy the monuments of the past. Their objective is to erase the old order so thoroughly that it ceases to persist even in our cultural memory. Not only offending texts, but the names of flawed historic figures (for example Cecil Rhodes at Oxford) must be erased. Like Goethe’s Mephistopheles, they are spirits that only deny, who believe that “everything that comes to be goes rightly to its ruin.”

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Haunted by the Bomb -Perry helped introduce GPS and stealth innovations to the U.S. military. But not all military problems have a technological fix. By Gabriel Schoenfeld

By on February 1st, 2016

Not long after the end of World War II, William J. Perry, age 18 and already on his second enlistment, was shipped off to Japan as part of America’s occupation army. Arriving in Tokyo, he saw that the “once great city was decimated—virtually every building made of wood was destroyed by firebomb attacks. Survivors were living in vast wastes of fused rubble, existing on meager rations.” For the young Mr. Perry, witnessing such horror was a “transformational experience”; and he understood that the destruction wreaked by dropping thousands of conventional bombs on Tokyo, as awful as it was, had been exceeded at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His encounter with the effects of modern war was to lead to a lifetime devoted to protecting America from the fearsome weapons of the nuclear age, recounted now in “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink,” an engrossing memoir and, along the way, a concise guide to some of the most intractable national-security perils confronting our country.

In 1954, while finishing a Ph.D. in mathematics at Penn State, Mr. Perry assumed the title of senior scientist at Sylvania’s Electronic Defense Laboratories in California, a firm established by the Army to devise defenses against Soviet nuclear-armed missiles. The expertise he acquired there was to make him a participant in some of the Cold War’s most terrifying moments. Thus when Nikita Khrushchev installed nuclear weapons in Cuba in October 1962, Mr. Perry was summoned to Washington, where for eight harrowing days he prepared reports for the president on the technical aspects of the weapons themselves.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Syria’s Phony Peace Talks- Assad bombs with impunity while Islamic State gains ground.

By on February 1st, 2016

Regarding the Syrian peace talks that began over the weekend in Geneva, allow us to raise two questions: What peace—and what talks?

The regime of Bashar Assad is intensifying its longstanding “starve or kneel” policy against besieged enclaves containing an estimated half a million people. The regime has also scored recent battlefield victories against moderate opposition forces, aided by a combination of Russian air power, Hezbollah ground fighters and Iran’s elite Quds Force.

Meantime, the Institute for the Study of War reports that Islamic State (ISIS) has responded to its recent losses in Iraq by launching a fresh offensive in eastern Syria to consolidate control of the Euphrates River valley, while the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front is gaining strength in Aleppo, once Syria’s commercial capital. Neither ISIS nor Nusra are at the talks, and they will continue to fight regardless of what comes out of Geneva.

Also not represented are Kurdish forces, which have been the most effective ground fighters against ISIS but were excluded due to Turkish sensitivities.

Instead, the opposition is represented by an umbrella group backed by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia called the High Negotiations Committee, which is demanding that the regime lift its starvation sieges and end air strikes as a precondition to “proximity negotiations”—so named because the two sides won’t agree to sit in the same room. But the opposition’s diplomatic leverage has fallen with its battlefield fortunes, so any deal it might strike in Geneva would have little effect inside Syria.

Continue reading →
POLITICS Comments turned off

Vetting Donald Trump by Donna Gardner see note please

By on February 1st, 2016

This column is from 2015 and exposes the hypocrisy of the so called “family values” of the Reverend Jerry Falwell Jr. rsk
I well understand the frustration that Americans feel with Obama and with Congress. I feel the same frustration. I also know from history that whenever there is a vacuum of leadership, someone will fill that void; and when people get to the desperation level where they feel they have no control, they will latch on to anyone who appears to offer them that leadership.

Remember that Obama promised Change, and the public latched on to him. Obama has certainly brought Change – in fact so much Change that the Great American Way is becoming almost unrecognizable!

Donald Trump has used the same approach by resoundingly convincing people that he will bring Change, and he has wisely chosen the areas in which a large percentage of Americans desperately want Change such as unlawful immigration and the disastrous deal with Iran.

Trump, who knows he must lean to the right to get elected in the Primaries, has even gone so far as to name conservatives Trey Gowdy as his Attorney General and Sarah Palin to serve in some official capacity in a Trump administration. Would he really follow through on these appointments if he ended up in the White House?

Of course, we must also remember that Donald Trump floated Oprah Winfrey (a New Age spiritualist) as his possible Vice President back in 1999 when he was considering a run for President as a member of the Reform Party. He justified his choice by saying that she was talented and was a friend of his — as if that qualifies a person to be Vice President who is a heartbeat away from the Presidency.

Donald Trump has also stated that Bill Clinton is his favorite President. What does this say about Trump’s judgment when he excuses the philandering and disrespectful way that Bill Clinton has treated multiple women? How could Trump possibly heap praise on Bill Clinton who is involved up to the gills with possible corruption at The Clinton Foundation and its questionable practices?

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

Tenured Thugs and Thieves By Kevin D. Williamson

By on January 31st, 2016

Professor Melissa Click of the University of Missouri criminally assaulted an undergraduate student and, though local prosecutors were slow to move on the case — there was video of the incident, and the facts were not in question — she eventually was charged with third-degree assault. She will not be convicted of a crime, and, so far, her tenure-track position is safe.

Ironies abound. Click, a professor of Lady Gaga studies (no, really), enjoyed an appointment in Mizzou’s journalism department, which for mysterious reasons is highly regarded. The undergraduate she assaulted was a student journalist going about his proper business, covering a campus protest of which Professor Click was one instigator.

The subject of what protest was, in part, “white privilege,” which the protesters held up in contrast to the purportedly rough and unfair treatment that African Americans, particularly young men, receive at the hands of the police.

Which brings up the obvious question: What do we imagine would have happened to a young black man who criminally assaulted a white female college professor — and then, as Professor Click did, attempted to instigate mob violence against her? On campus? On video?

There would have been handcuffs, at least. He almost certainly would not have been given the option of performing 20 hours of community service in exchange for deferred adjudication, which is the deal Professor Click is getting from Columbia’s shamefully cowardly prosecutor, Steve Richey. He would not be, as Professor Click is, on track to a lifetime sinecure from which he effectively cannot be fired.

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

Glenn Reynolds: To reduce inequality, abolish Ivy League -from November 2015

By on January 31st, 2016

The problem of “inequality” looms over America like a storm cloud. According to our political and journalistic class, inequality is the single biggest problem facing our nation, with the possible exception of climate change. It is a desperate problem demanding sweeping solutions. President Obama calls it the “defining challenge of our time.” Hillary Clinton says we’re living in a throwback to the elitist age of “robber barons.” Bernie Sanders says inequality is the result of a “rigged economy” that favors those at the top while holding down those at the bottom.

In that spirit, I have a modest proposal: Abolish the Ivy League. Because if you’re worried about inequality among Americans, I can think of no single institution that does more to contribute to the problem.

As former Labor secretary Robert Reich recently noted, Ivy League schools are government-subsidized playgrounds for the rich: “Imagine a system of college education supported by high and growing government spending on elite private universities that mainly educate children of the wealthy and upper-middle class, and low and declining government spending on public universities that educate large numbers of children from the working class and the poor.

“You can stop imagining,” Reich wrote. “That’s the American system right now. … Private university endowments are now around $550 billion, centered in a handful of prestigious institutions. Harvard’s endowment is over $32 billion, followed by Yale at $20.8 billion, Stanford at $18.6 billion, and Princeton at $18.2 billion. Each of these endowments increased last year by more than $1 billion, and these universities are actively seeking additional support. Last year, Harvard launched a capital campaign for another $6.5 billion. Because of the charitable tax deduction, the amount of government subsidy to these institutions in the form of tax deductions is about one out of every $3 contributed.”

Continue reading →