RUTHFULLY YOURS

Israel—and Sunni Arab states of the Middle East led by Saudi Arabia—watched with trepidation on Wednesday as the P5+1 countries and Iran reconvened in Geneva for another round of nuclear talks.

British foreign secretary William Hague spoke of narrow differences and a historic deal being in reach. “It is the best chance for a long time,” he told an Istanbul news conference, “to make progress on one of the gravest problems in foreign policy.”

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov—whose country is not exactly a foe of Iran, having helped it build its Bushehr nuclear reactor—said: “We hope the efforts that are being made will be crowned with success at the meeting that opens today in Geneva.”

In a sort of prelude to this lovefest, on Tuesday Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif released a YouTube video in which he said:

For us, nuclear energy is about securing the future of our children, about diversifying our economy, about stopping the burning of our oil, and about generating clean power.

In other words, meet the new, hip, enlightened Iran, second to none in its concern for clean power and diversity.

Zarif did not explain why, if those are Iran’s innocent aims, it has been spending billions of dollars for decades in developing bomb-grade uranium, a reactor for making plutonium bombs, intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear triggering devices, and so on. But sometimes diversity and clean power come with certain accoutrements.

CNN’s Chris Cuomo — son of former NY Gov. Mario Cuomo (Democrat) — had a heated interview with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz today. Cuomo tries lecturing Cruz on bipartisanship, only to have Cruz lay down some facts.

Cuomo begins by lecturing Cruz on what senators do. Cruz, an accomplished lawyer who has argued cases before the United States Supreme Court, doesn’t appreciate the Democrat talking down to him.

“You don’t think you have a responsibility as a U. S. senator to do better than [opposing Obamacare] in terms of offering a solution for what to do next?” Cuomo badgered Cruz.

Cruz fired back: “Well, I appreciate your trying to lecture me in the morning, thank you for that.”

Cuomo appeared to be trying to drag the Republicans into helping bail the Democrats out of the mess they alone have created with Obamacare.

Cruz did offer a solution, but not one that Cuomo is apt to like: “The way to fix that is to stop this broken law. It was broken at the outset, and all of the bills that have been proposed by the Democrats, they’re designed to be political Band-Aids. Their effort is to cover their political rear ends, not to fix the problem, and the common-sense, reasonable thing to say is this thing isn’t working.”

After that, Cuomo suggested that Cruz should learn to work with Democrats. The problem for Cuomo is that Cruz already has. Cruz reminded Cuomo that he is co-sponsoring a bill on military sexual assault with Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). Cuomo mocked Cruz, calling that his “Green Eggs and Ham” moment, referring to a few minutes out of Cruz’s marathon speech opposing Obamacare before its disastrous rollout. Cruz reminded Cuomo that it was Obama who refused to negotiate prior to the government shutdown that has been blamed on Cruz.

“Throughout the ObamaCare fight, throughout the shutdown, I was reaching out to Democrats saying, ‘Let’s work together to provide meaningful relief for the millions of people who are being hurt because of ObamaCare,’” Cruz said. “And what President Obama and the Democrats said is we will not negotiate, we will not compromise. In fact president Obama invited all of the Senate Republicans over to the White House in the middle of the shutdown. Well all sat there. He called us in a room and said, ‘I called you over here to tell you I’m not going to negotiate, I’m not going to compromise on anything.’ That’s not reasonable. That’s not how you get anything done.”

Chris Cuomo went full partisan hack against Cruz, never acknowledging that Obamacare is not working and that because it is a Democrat law, the Republicans have no responsibility to bail Democrats out of the consequences for pushing it.

Pressure is growing on House Speaker John Boehner to appoint a select committee on Benghazi.

So far, 178 Republican House members have called for a select committee with broad powers to investigate the killing of Americans in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. Three out of every four Republicans on the committees currently with jurisdiction, recognizing the failure of the current process to obtain answers, have asked for a select committee to be appointed by Speaker Boehner.

These numbers easily satisfy the “Hastert Rule,” as a super-majority of the GOP conference wants House leadership to chart a new, more aggressive course.

Currently, five committees “investigating” Benghazi are limited by each committee’s unique jurisdiction. The Foreign Affairs Committee, for example, can’t talk to Department of Defense witnesses. The Armed Services Committee can’t talk to State Department witnesses or review State Department documents. And the Intelligence Committee won’t let anyone talk to CIA witnesses.

As Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) noted, “Americans from across the political spectrum recognize that not only are they not being told the truth [about Benghazi], but they feel Congress needs to change its approach to the investigation by creating a special committee.”

A select committee is part of regular House order, and would solve all the shortcomings of the status quo.

Benghazi has highlighted the shortcomings of the status quo, especially if House leadership takes a passive approach toward the Obama administration. More on that later.

The Obama administration is altering its language like there’s no tomorrow.

The Obama administration once gave us “man-caused disasters” for acts of terrorism and “workplace violence” for the Fort Hood shootings. Now it has trumped those past linguistic contortions by changing words to mask the Obamacare disaster.

The president and his advisers apparently knew long ago that millions of the insured would face cancellations or premium hikes once Obamacare was fully implemented. Yet to get the 906-page bill passed, they had to convince the public of the very opposite scenario. So they repeated ironclad guarantees that no one would lose their coverage or doctors — “period!”

Now the administration explains the deception by going after both the ethics of the insurers and the intelligence of the previously insured. That task required language to be altered. The newly canceled health plans are suddenly rebranded by the administration as “subpar.” Only in autumn 2013 is the supposedly unaware public told that, years ago, “bad apple” insurance companies sold them “substandard” plans.

According to Obama, millions of Americans were once ignorant or uninformed, and thus will soon be pleased about their cancellations: “So the majority of folks will end up being better off. Of course, because the website’s not working right, they don’t necessarily know it.”

By that logic, the legions of Obama supporters who desperately sought and won exemptions from Obamacare are not “better off” now, but those stuck with it will be?

The arguments in its favor are emotional appeals and distortions of economic reality.

The perennial fight over the minimum wage is once again in bloom, and the usual arguments will be rehearsed on both sides. Those against raising the minimum wage will cite Economics 101: Raise the price of something and demand will go down. Those in favor of raising the minimum wage will harrumph in the face of economics and declare that their opponents, and economics, hate poor people.

The purpose of this fight is not to hash out economic questions related to low-income people. The purpose of the fight is the fight: There is no minimum wage high enough to keep the Democrats from introducing an increase next year, because the point of bills hiking the minimum wage is to force Republicans to vote against them, which provides Democrats with a moment of cherished political theater. They do not give a fig about poor people — as everybody knows, the real minimum wage is $0.00, and more Americans today are making that than at any time in recent memory, which is what is meant by “record low workforce-participation rates.”

But let’s pretend like those pushing the new increase are not a gaggle of cynical charlatans building their political power on the backs of the poor and the unemployed and examine their arguments.

Why would you want to raise the minimum wage? A few possibilities:

1. Minimum-wage workers are worth more than we pay them. That is a meaningless statement; labor, like apples and oranges and widgets, is worth what you can sell it for. If you believe that we have a large supply of low-wage workers who are secretly more skilled and productive than they let on, you have to assume that everybody in the question — the workers, their employers, their employers’ competitors — has somehow overlooked that fact, but that our ingenious friends in Washington have special insight into the conditions of people they have never met and markets they have never operated in. That’s fanciful.

2. Slight variation: You might want to raise the minimum wage because you think that markets can set prices for most things but not prices for labor. This is contrary to pretty much all of the economic evidence in existence on the question, so maybe you want to refine that and argue instead that markets may do a pretty good job of setting prices for labor, but they don’t do a good job of setting prices for labor when those laborers are at the lower end of the market. Another way of saying this is that you believe that low-income people are too stupid and hopeless to negotiate appropriate, market-value wages for themselves, and that the vast majority of businesses that employ minimum-wage labor are operated by people too stupid to see that there’s a lot of higher-value labor out there for the taking that they are simply too thick to avail themselves of. But that isn’t really an argument for a higher minimum wage; it’s an argument for a more generous food-stamp program. It’s sort of uncomfortable to argue that low-income people are too stupid to see after themselves, but that is, after all, the assumption behind things like Medicaid and Section 8 housing vouchers and food stamps — if low-income people could be trusted to make appropriate choices about things like health care and housing, we could just give them money and let them make their own decisions about whether they need an extra $1 in health care or an extra $1 in groceries. In any case, it’s not likely that that millions of low-income people are too dumb and shiftless to seek higher wages but are smart and enterprising enough to compete for those higher-wage positions.

This “Knockout Game” is deadly and not a game.

We heard from the President, the Attorney General, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and the media about the death of Trayvon Martin. The President made a big fuss when professor Gates was mistakenly detained while breaking into his own home. We are told that having voter ID will disenfranchise minorities.Why aren’t we hearing from these people about this deadly activity? ….Jan Mel Poller

It’s an infuriating example of political correctness: Most of New York City’s media outlets have sanitized the nature of a spate of unprovoked attacks upon hapless pedestrians — all recent victims of the so-called “knockout game.” There have been injuries and several deaths among men, women, and youngsters, as they suffered walloping “sucker punches” by roving black youths in New York City and elsewhere.

The knockout game involves an unmentionable subject for most in the mainstream media: black-on-white violence. To a lesser extent, Asians and Hispanics have been targeted as well. They’re white enough, it seems, for black youths playing the knockout game.

For those unfamiliar with the knockout game, it’s how some black youths amuse themselves, especially in urban settings. The goal: use a single devastating punch to knock a hapless victim unconscious. And when they succeed, they invariably react with merriment and laughter, as videos capturing the mayhem have revealed. Could racism be motivating these black youths? Nobody in the mainstream media dares suggest that this might be fueling the black mob violence in what President Obama said would be a post-racial era.

QUISLINGS….RSK

In recent days the University of Haifa in northern Israel, where I am employed, has come under intensive criticism because the “legal clinics” operated by its School of Law are assigning law students the task of counseling and defending convicted Arab terrorists and mass murderers of Jews. The president of the university issued a statement defending the activities of these clinics. The dean of the law school, together with the head of the clinics, went on the attack and denounced those who criticize the clinics’ practice of counseling and defending terrorists. The dean, Prof. Gad Barzilai, is a radical who is active in leftist “human rights” groups and involved in academic politicization in Israel. (Barzilai was a defender of the Department of Politics at Ben Gurion University – the worst anti-Israel agitprop center in the country – when an international panel of experts called for shutting it down). Barzilai claims that all criticism of the law school for its involvement with terrorists is politically motivated. In particular he denounced the Zionist student movement Im Tirtzu for criticizing the law school. Several faculty members at the university called for filing SLAPP suits against the students to silence them, and one anti-Israel faculty extremist complained that the clinics were not defending the terrorists enough. Im Tirtzu claims that 80 percent of the cases taken on by the University of Haifa’s legal clinic for “prisoner rights” involves Arab terrorists and spies. One involved a terrorist and convicted rapist seeking a furlough. Dean Barzilai insists the law school is simply devoted to “repairing society” and defending the “weakened populations” of Israel. In the past, the law school prohibited the singing of Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, at its graduation ceremonies, claiming it would offend the sensitivities of Arab students. On a discussion list for faculty members in the University of Haifa, I posted the following as a response to the statement from the dean of law: To: The Segel-Plus Discussion List From: Prof. Steven Plaut Re: Some more Ideas for the Law Clinics to Achieve Social Justice and Help the Weak Date: November 13, 2013 I am sure we are all grateful for the amazing statement distributed by the Dean of Law and the head of the “law clinics” in the school of law. It is chock full of impressive claims and arguments.

Much of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s economic revival strategy is still on the drawing board, but earlier this month he helped his cause by abandoning Tokyo’s 2009 pledge to reduce the country’s carbon emissions by 25% from 1990 levels by 2020.

Mr. Abe’s announcement came as world potentates meet in Warsaw for more talks on global carbon reductions. Tokyo isn’t entirely giving up. But its new carbon target—a 3.8% cut from the 2005 level of emissions by 2020—amounts to allowing emissions 3% higher than the 1990 level.

One reason for the shift is politics. The 2009 target was set by Democratic Party of Japan Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama. Although Mr. Abe had supported carbon reductions during his first stint as prime minister in 2007, his Liberal Democratic Party, which traditionally enjoys strong industrial support, has little political capital invested in the DPJ’s pledge.

Mr. Abe has also promised to revive economic growth, a goal incompatible with strict emissions limits. Deep carbon cuts would require sharply higher energy costs—already high in Japan—via some combination of cap-and-trade, direct carbon taxation and subsidies for renewables. And while the Japanese public still generally favors some action on climate change, specific steps have grown less popular.

The ObamaCare train wreck is plowing through the White House in super slow-mo on screens everywhere, splintering reputations and presidential approval ratings. Audiences watch popeyed as Democrats in distress like Senators Kay Hagan, Mary Landrieu and Mark Pryor decide whether to cling to the driverless train or jump toward the tall weeds. The heartless compilers of the Washington Post/ABC poll asked people to pick a head-to-head matchup now between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. Mitt won. This is the most amazing spectacle of mayhem and meltdown anyone has seen in politics since Watergate.

No question, it’s tough on Barack Obama. But what about the rest of us? For many Americans, the Obama leadership meltdown began five years ago.

In fall 2008, the U.S. suffered its worst financial crisis since the Depression. That wasn’t Barack Obama’s fault. But five years on, in the fall of 2013, the country’s economy is still sick.

Unemployed middle-aged men look in the mirror and see someone who may never work again. Young married couples who should be on the way up are living in their parents’ basement. Many young black men (official unemployment rate 28%; unofficial rate off the charts) have no prospect of work.

Washington these days kvetches a lot about what Healthcare.gov is doing to the Obama “legacy.” Far worse than ObamaCare, though, is that the 44th president in his second term presides over a great nation that is punching so far below its weight that large swaths of its people have lost heart.

For five years, news stories have chronicled the social and economic deterioration in America of people with no jobs or weak jobs.

When scholars of Islam, quoting the words and teachings of their prophet, openly assert that the blood of non-Muslims is cheaper than the blood of Muslims, this is not even deemed worth reporting by Western media or condemned by Western politicians

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4372/muslim_blood_superior_to_infidel_blood

Arguing that Muslim blood is more precious than infidel blood, Muslim clerics in and out of Sudan are outraged because a Sudanese court has condemned a Muslim man to death—simply because he murdered American Diplomat John Granville on January 1, 2008.

A 2009 report offers context:

The court had sentenced the men [originally four] to death in June for killing Granville and his driver in January 2008, but the sentence was cancelled in August after [his Muslim driver] Abbas’s father forgave the men.

Under Islamic law, the victim’s family has the right to forgive the murderer, ask for compensation (fedia) or demand execution.

Granville’s mother, Jane Granville, at the time had asked for the men’s execution, but her letter was rejected because it was not notarized.

The judge said the sentence was confirmed because Granville’s family, from Buffalo, in northern New York State, had requested it.