POLITICS Comments turned off

Jeb Bush Apologizes to France — France Is Not Impressed, and Neither Are GOP Voters By John Fund

Posted By on November 6th, 2015

Jeb Bush admits he “screwed up” during last week’s GOP debate, fumbling an attack against Marco Rubio. “I just gotta get better,” he told reporters in New Hampshire. Then he proceeded to prove he wasn’t getting better, by apologizing to the French for his debate jab against the length of their work week.

Bush campaign officials went to some effort to paint the apology as partly in jest, having it reported that Bush delivered it with mock solemnity. But the words of the apology were quite serious and, more importantly, the French took the apology completely seriously and reported it as such.

Apologizing to the French will not score Bush any points with the GOP primary electorate. It may show he is a gentleman, but it also shows he lacks the killer instinct of his father and brother when they ran for president In 1988, George H. W. Bush would pointedly refer to Pete du Pont, his GOP primary competitor, as “Pierre” during debates. In 2004, Jeb’s brother made sure Democratic nominee John Kerry was ridiculed for his closeness to the country seen as having spurned the U.S. after 9/11.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

369 US House members urge PA president Abbas to quit incitement by Yoni Hersch

Posted By on November 6th, 2015

Lawmakers: “Unless immediate action is taken to end incitement, bring the situation under control, this escalating violence — including stabbings, shootings and other terrorist acts — will undermine the prospects of a two-state solution.”

A letter signed by 369 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, Republicans and Democrats alike, calls on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to condemn the recent violence in Israel and renew direct peace negotiations.

The lawmakers asked Abbas to end incitement, continue security cooperation with Israel and agree to renew peace talks without conditions.

The letter directly accuses Abbas and other Palestinian Authority figures of making inflammatory statements and false claims that have increased tensions.

“Unless immediate action is taken to end incitement and bring the situation under control, this escalating violence — including stabbings, shootings and other terrorist acts — will undermine the prospects of a two-state solution,” reads the letter initiated by Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.), the House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, and New York Rep. Eliot Engel, the top Democrat.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Palestinian ‘recognition’ is a bloody lie by Ruthie Blum

Posted By on November 6th, 2015

It is not nice to be amused while Israelis are being stabbed, stoned and run over by frenzied young terrorists. But how can one keep a straight face when hearing the Palestinian Authority’s spin the situation?

With a little charisma-coaching, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas could be a stand-up comic; he’s already got an international audience applauding his primitive discourse. Imagine the gigs he would get if he polished his act.

One routine the terrorist-in-a-tie needs to hone is his song-and-dance about canceling the Oslo Accords — the 1993 agreement between his predecessor, PLO chief Yasser Arafat, and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, for which the two received the Nobel Peace Prize.

This was funny enough by itself, since peace was the one element of the treaty establishing the PA that eluded the whole process. Furthermore, only the Palestinian side benefited from it. Arafat received accolades, along with lots of land. Formerly a terrorist pariah, he was suddenly granted full-fledged legitimacy as a player on the world stage. Even the Second Intifada — the suicide-bombing war he launched after blowing up negotiations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2000 at Camp David — did not rob him of his ill-deserved peace prize.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi Defense: It Depends on What the Meaning of ‘Lied’ Is By Ian Tuttle

Posted By on November 6th, 2015

Bill Clinton’s famous defense, “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” was not a Heideggerian musing. It was the most obvious example of the linguistic trapdoors that the Clintons regularly install to slither out of countless corners. Now, following Marco Rubio’s charge during last week’s Republican debate that Hillary Clinton lied about the Benghazi attacks, Clinton’s defenders are highlighting those escape hatches — and using them as evidence of her honesty.

“Last week, Hillary Clinton went before a committee,” Rubio said at the debate:

She admitted she had sent e-mails to her family saying, “Hey, this attack at Benghazi was caused by al-Qaeda-like elements.” She spent over a week telling the families of those victims and the American people that it was because of a video. And yet the mainstream media is going around saying it was the greatest week in Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It was the week she got exposed as a liar.

The next morning Rubio faced a testy Charlie Rose, who goggled at the charge (“You called Hillary Clinton a liar, senator.”), then tried to shift the blame to fluid CIA intelligence. Rubio stood by his comments and added: “There was never, ever any evidence that [the attack] had anything to do with a video.”

BOOKS Comments turned off

Opinion // Obama’s Distorted Views on Israel: By Peter Berkowitz

Posted By on November 6th, 2015

The president’s quest for even-handedness is misguided and dangerous.
Speaking at Harvard University in October, Secretary of State John Kerry asserted that “a massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years” has triggered “an increase in the violence because there’s this frustration that’s growing.” In the effort to clarify Kerry’s remarks—since, in fact, the rate of construction has declined—State Department spokesman John Kirby advanced the old moral equivalence argument. “Frustration on both sides,” he said, has led to the current violence. To clarify his clarification, he added that “individuals on both sides” are “guilty of acts of terror.”
The Obama administration’s formulaic reactions to the recent outbreak of terror in Israel disguise the deeper causes of Palestinian attacks while obscuring the crucial long-term steps needed to build decent relations between Israel and the Palestinians. And they reflect the administration’s tendency to exaggerate Israel’s responsibility while underestimating that of the Arab world and Iran for the turmoil that has swept the region—a tendency that has helped worsen things all over the Middle East.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Civil Rights Fall Further Down the Rabbit Hole By Marilyn Penn

Posted By on November 6th, 2015

An adolescent high-school student with all the biological parts of a male and none of the biological parts of a female declares himself to be a girl, is called by his female name at school, is allowed to play on the girls’ athletic team and to change inside the girls’ locker room with the small proviso that this be done behind a curtain. This apparently is not sufficiently sensitive to the boy/girl’s needs – I can’t use a pronoun without knowing this person’s preference for that loaded word as pronouns are war zones at the moment. Despite the wholesale capitulation of the school to all the aforementioned demands of this student, the Office for Civil Rights of the Dept of Education has insisted that standing behind a curtain or showering separately is outright discrimination and a challenge to this student’s identity.Unless the Illinois school removes the curtain and allows total access to the girls’ facilities, it stands in danger of losing all of its Title IX funding.

MEDIA Comments turned off

MARILYN PENN: THE TIMES HAS A HISSY-FIT

Posted By on November 6th, 2015

Dedicated to the cause of destroying the boundaries that nature has created, the NYT finally jumped the shark in its lead j’accuse editorial of Nov 5th (In Houston, Hate Trumped Fairness,NYT) Those of who still believe that men and women belong in separate but equal public bathrooms are guilty now of the future suicide of a transgender teenager who won’t be able to pee in the designated toilet of the opposite sex. Think about the excrutiating mental anguish for such a person. I can relate to it, along with most other women who wait in long lines outside the ladies’ room in a theater looking longingly at the men’s room as it remains respectfully under-used.

The Times is spitting mad that voters in Houston exercised their democratic right to defeat a law that would have allowed transgenders access to bathrooms matching their subjective views of what gender they are, regardless of their visible plumbing equipment. There is a classic comic scene in which Joey Bishop is caught in his marital bed with another woman. He looks at his furious wife and quickly questions: “Who are you going to believe, me or your eyes?”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Reagan a No-Facts Zone By George Will

Posted By on November 6th, 2015

Donald Trump is just one symptom of today’s cultural pathology of self-validating vehemence with blustery certitudes substituting for evidence. Another is the fact that the book atop the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list is a tissue of unsubstantiated assertions. Because of its vast readership, Killing Reagan: The Violent Assault That Changed a Presidency by Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly and his collaborator Martin Dugard will distort public understanding of Ronald Reagan’s presidency more than hostile but conscientious scholars could.

Styling himself an “investigative historian,” O’Reilly purports to have discovered amazing facts that have escaped the notice of real historians. The book’s intimated hypothesis is that the trauma of the March 1981 assassination attempt somehow triggered in Reagan a mental decline, perhaps accelerating the Alzheimer’s disease that would not be diagnosed until 13 years later. The book says Reagan was often addled to the point of incompetence, causing senior advisers to contemplate using the Constitution’s 25th Amendment to remove him from office. Well.

Reagan was shot on the 70th day of his presidency. In the next 2,853 days he produced an economic boom and the Cold War’s endgame. Among O’Reilly’s “explanations” for Reagan’s supposed combination of creativity and befuddlement are: He was brave; “on his bad days, he couldn’t work” but on good days “he was brilliant”; Nancy Reagan was in charge; it was “almost miraculous.”

When Reagan’s unsatisfactory chief of staff Don Regan was replaced by Howard Baker, a Baker aide wrote a memo that included slanderous assessments of the president from some disgruntled Regan staffers. This memo, later regretted by its author, became, O’Reilly says, the “centerpiece” of his book. On this flimsy reed he leans the fiction (refuted by minute-by-minutes records in the Reagan Library) that, in O’Reilly’s words, “a lot of days” Reagan never left the White House’s second floor where he watched “soap operas all day long.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Pitting Science against Religion By Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry —

Posted By on November 6th, 2015

The thought that most frequently pops into my head when I read diatribes by militant atheists is “Why won’t you read a book?”

Of course, put thus, the thought is implausible. The militant atheists who get interviewed in newspapers presumably have read books. Christopher Hitchens had certainly read a lot of books. But there are good books and there are bad books, and then there are necessary books. And, clearly, they haven’t read any of the books that should, in a cultured society, be presumed necessary for participation in public debate.

Take the theoretical physicist and public speaker Lawrence Krauss. Krauss is, in a way, a perfect example, because he doesn’t even pretend to be a philosopher — unlike, say, Daniel Dennett or Richard Dawkins. Krauss recently received the 2015 Humanist of the Year award and delivered himself of a speech attacking religion; before that, he wrote a piece for The New Yorker that went viral, calling on scientists to attack religion.

Krauss’s belief — and it is a belief — is that religion and science are competing ways of explaining the world. Religion is based on dogma, and science is based on doubt, and those two are, at the end of the day, incompatible. One must win. I’ll let you guess which side Krauss is on.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Imagining a World without Polls By Jonah Goldberg

Posted By on November 6th, 2015

What if the polls just stopped working?

Admittedly, this needs work as a plot device for a Stephen King novel. But for politics, it might be pretty awesome.

This week, businessman Matt Bevin won a stunning upset in the Kentucky governor’s race. It was only the second time in more than four decades that a Republican took the governor’s mansion in the Bluegrass State. Bevin’s margin of victory: nine percentage points.

Bevin’s win was big political news for a lot of reasons. Kentucky’s state health-care exchange, Kynect, was supposed to be the shining success story of Obamacare. Bevin vowed to dismantle it, a fatal mistake according to many inside-the-Beltway types.

The results in Kentucky — along with state-senate elections in Virginia — also demonstrated that however successful Barack Obama has been as a president, he’s been terrible for the Democratic party. On his watch, Democrats have lost more than 900 seats in state legislatures, 12 governorships, 69 congressional seats, and 13 Senate seats. The GOP, according to the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, has full or partial control of 76 percent of state legislatures.