RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/375629/print

Political Washington is having a great deal of fun following the contentious divorce of “super-lobbyist couple” (as the Washington Post put it) Tony and Heather Podesta, which should be organized under the headline “Lifestyles of the Rich and Odious.” Matthew Continetti and others have chronicled the usual assortment of high-class problems — skirmishing over the multimillion-dollar Kalorama mansion, allegations of unauthorized lock-changing at the couple’s home in Venice, questions about the disposition of their 1,300-piece art collection (“I don’t know why it is, but I have artworks where the women have no heads,” he says), her new relationship with the cinematic auteur behind the fourth installment in the Griswold family’s “Vacation” franchise (Vegas Vacation, in case you’re wondering), and a great deal more.

Divorce is always a little bit sad, though its sting is diminished by repetition — it is his second marriage, her third — and by the absence of children. The nastiness is sometimes delicious: Mr. Podesta, who brought to the relationship wealth that included not only homes and art but overseas vineyards, archly notes that before taking his name the future Mrs. P. was earning only $55,000 a year: “Ms. Podesta has used Mr. Podesta’s name and reputation to advance her own business and interests,” his legal filings argue. Her own lawyers, not content for her husband’s legal team to make her look like a scheming climber, declared that the two “strategically cultivated their public image, and worked to build the ‘Heather and Tony Podesta’ brand for the success of their shared enterprise.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/375671/print PRIMARY CHALLENGES SERVE THE GOOD PURPOSE OF KEEPING INCUMBENTS HONEST TO CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLES….THEY SPARK DEBATE AND HIGHLIGHT ISSUES….BUT FUND IS RIGHT…SOME TEA PARTY CHALLENGES HAVE BEEN DISASTROUS….RSK Tea-party conservatives have become so suspicious of the primary recommendations of establishment GOP figures such as Karl Rove that they dismiss them out of hand. That’s wrong. […]

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4873/desmond_tutu_s_climate_change_boycott_madness
Desmond Tutu’s climate change boycott madness
If, heaven forbid, Desmond Tutu’s having chest pains and calls the emergency services for help, perhaps he’ll tell them not to send a fosil-fuelled ambulance. His arguments are very silly, but very revealing

If there’s a fashionable political bandwagon to jump on, you can bet your boots these days that one-time anti-apartheid figurehead Desmond Tutu will jump on it.

He’s already well known for that most cliched of all political causes for the vacant-minded and desperate — irrational hostility against the State of Israel. Now he’s on the climate change bandwagon. And guess what he’s calling for? “Boycotts, divestment and sanctions.” Sound familiar?

But this time it’s against fossil-fuel energy companies. To save the earth, you understand.

If, heaven forbid, he’s having chest pains and calls the emergency services for help, perhaps he’ll tell them not to send a fosil-fuelled ambulance. If he’s relying on medics on bicycles one hopes he doesn’t live at the top of a hill.

But apart from the lack of perspective, it’s the absolutism of his message that really leaves one shocked (though not overly surprised given the antics of most other alarmists). Savour this from his piece in Thursday’s Guardian:

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/04/13/for-unproven-theory-scientists-propose-unproven-solutions/

What’s even more dubious than claims of catastrophic warming? Claims that scientists know what to do about it.

The IPCC released a report warning that unless a “rapid shift” to green energy is undertaken, we’re all going to die…or, something.

And even that may not be enough. The group is saying that we “might even need to enlist controversial technologies that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.”

We’ll get started right away on those gigantic atmospheric scoops to remove all those offensive greenhouse gases.

It’s more of the same from the IPCC, with a little more hysteria to get our juices flowing.

USA Today:

“There is a clear message from science: To avoid dangerous interference with the climate system, we need to move away from business as usual,” said Germany’s Ottmar Edenhofer of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who co-chaired the IPCC report, the third in a series released in the past year. The Working Group III report, written by 235 scientists from 57 countries, looks at myriad ways to fight climate change and serves as a potential road map for policymakers who plan to negotiate a new climate treaty next year in Paris.

“If we do nothing, temperatures will continue to rise,” co-author Leon Clarke, a scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, said from Berlin after wrapping up a week of discussions there to finalize the report’s wording. “It’s not necessarily a phaseout of fossil fuels,” he said, but rather “a phaseout” of power plants and other facilities that don’t capture the carbon they emit.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/asians-derail-affirmative-action-in-california/?print=1

The express train hurtling to return racial preference admissions to California — in the form of State Constitutional Amendment 5 [1], which if placed on the ballot and approved by voters would have overturned Prop. 209 —has just been derailed [2] by an outburst of opposition from Asian Americans.

The eruption of opposition caught SCA 5’s Democratic sponsors by surprise and caused a crucial three Asian American senators to withdraw their support, depriving the measure of the two thirds senate majority required to place an initiative on the ballot. “Prior to the vote on SCA 5 in the Senate,” Senators Ted Lieu of Torrance, Carol Liu of La Canada Flintridge, and Leland Yee of San Francisco wrote [2] Assembly Speaker and lead sponsor John A. Pérez, “we heard no opposition to the bill. However, in the past few weeks, we have heard from thousands of people throughout California voicing their concerns about the potential impacts…. As lifelong advocates for the Asian American and other communities,” they added, “we would never support a policy that we believed would negatively impact our children.” (Or at least never again, a skeptic might observe.)

The three changed their minds, the San Francisco Chronicle reports [3], ”when they started hearing from Asian American constituents who feared that giving preferences to African American and Latino students would make it harder for their children to get into competitive University of California campuses.”

Feared? That’s rather like saying Jewish parents in the early 20th century feared that Jewish quotas would make it harder for their children to be admitted to Ivy League schools. Of course lowering admission standards for some students based on race or ethnicity inevitably raises the barrier for those of unpreferred races and ethnicities. And in fact, not just in logic, the passage of Prop. 209 prohibiting racial and ethnic preferential treatment produced a dramatic surge in the admission of Asians to selective California campuses.

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/our-psychodramatic-campuses/?print=1

Dartmouth College students recently staged an overnight sit-in the office of their president Philip Hanlon. They had over seventy demands. Apparently, they grew out of their alleged suffering at the hands of “racist, classist, sexist, heterosexist, trans-homophobic, xenophobic, and ablest structures.”

Translating into English, the students elaborated [1], “Our bodies are already on the line, in danger, and under attack” — suggesting conditions similar to the teen-aged Marines who stormed Fallujah in November 2004, or perhaps the iron-workers who tip-toe on girders 1,000 feet above Manhattan, or an acquaintance of mine whose work clothes reveal that he pumps out quite messy rural cesspools. As redress for their suffering, the oppressed students issued Orwellian calls to ban particularly hurtful vocabulary, to create new faculty positions based entirely on race, and to ensure gender-neutral student housing.

Most of the students represent the .01% of American society. They can enjoy their four- to five-year hiatus from the American rat race, either due to wealthy parents or to charity in the forms of grants that allow them to pay the $60,000 per year plus in room, board, and tuition. Again, most Americans either do not have such money or access to such money to afford the quarter-million-dollar “under attack” Dartmouth experience.

President Hanlon apparently felt the students’ pain of what they had called “micro-aggressions,” [2] or the day-to-day psychodramatic angst that these young elites feel that are their own versions of the world of the Wal-Mart checker, the roofer in Delano who nails in 105 degree August heat, or the tractor driver who has disked half-mile long rows day in and day out on the farm. If you have never done such things, and you have $60,000 a year to spend on Dartmouth, then I suppose you could conceivably dream up a micro-aggression of being tortured to read woman for womyn, or having to use either the boys’ or girls’ bathroom.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=16867

WATCH: Will Israel’s flag fly on the moon in 2015?

Israel Hayom Insider panelists Ruthie Blum and Steve Ganot talk about SpaceIL, the Israeli entry to Google’s Lunar X Prize competition • Will the Israeli initiative succeed in landing a robot on the moon by the end of next year?

Israeli non-profit organization SpaceIL aims to land Israel’s first robot on the moon as part of Google’s Lunar X Prize competition.

The robot is to be the size of a washing machine and to travel on lunar surface using Israeli nanotechnology.

Is this just a feel-good story or will it have a ripple effect on Israeli students and schools?

As Jews convene around the Seder table this week, perhaps we should say, “Next year on the moon.”

Deadly Virus’s Spread Raises Alarms in Mideast Saudis Defend Approach to MERS Outbreak, Even as Cases Increase http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303887804579499831393801054?mod=trending_now_1 Saudi Arabia on Sunday confirmed a surge of cases of a deadly virus in the kingdom over the past two weeks, even as it tried to counter criticism that it wasn’t doing enough to contain the outbreak. […]

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304058204579495892859564688?mg=reno64-wsj

In the Arab world throwing a shoe is considered an insult, and George W. Bush famously had one hurled at him during a Baghdad press conference in 2008. Less explicable was the pump thrown at Hillary Clinton last week during a speech at a Las Vegas casino.

“Is that somebody throwing something at me? Is that part of Cirque du Soleil?” Mrs. Clinton quipped after dodging the projectile. “My goodness, I didn’t know that solid waste management was so controversial.”

Mrs. Clinton ought to pay a visit to New Jersey, but—hold on: solid waste management? Yes, Mrs. Clinton was speaking at the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries convention. According to the trade group’s ller Coaster, she told the crowd that “#recycling can stimulate the economy/ offering real value/ helping economic recovery.”

This insight cost the recyclers north of $200,000 or $250,000, Mrs. Clinton’s reported per-gig speaking fee. The speech was part of a whirlwind West Coast jaunt last week that included talks at the Marketing Nation Summit and the Western Health Care Leadership Academy, the annual confab of the California medical provider lobbies.

Speaking tours are routine for politicians looking to build a personal fortune by cashing in on their celebrity—and in the honest-living department, patronizing trade associations beats her husband’s doings with Ron Burkle and the Riadys of Indonesia. Since leaving the State Department, Mrs. Clinton has also spoken in front of clients of Goldman Sachs,

yeoldecrabb.com

Belatedly in this instance, in our search to solve the mystery of the Obama Administration’s policy formulation process, highly touted The New Yorker extended interviews by David Remnick are found wanting. A little more Obama, a little less Remnick should have been the order of the day! But there must be anecdotal origins to these quotes. In fact, for the most part they hardly seem “quotable” and suggest having gone through the mill of the White House speechwriters.

Still, as with reading during the 2008 presidential primary the President’s autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, one looks for the kernel which set off Remnick’s ubiquitous fawning..

The question posed is whether the motivation behind the Obama Administration’s disasters is ideological or sheer lack of knowledge/executive experience?.

If anyone had any doubt about the complexity of such an inquiry, that question was thrown into bold relief by the passage and attempted implementation of Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010. [Note the shortcut to passage of a measure to order one sixth of the economy without a single Republican vote, speaking of lack of inter-Party cooperation.]

Obamacare, according to sources close to the President was conceived as the historic legacy of this presidency, and it is likely to be its only one, for better or for worse. It is the quintessential example of our problem: what government-subsidized National Public Radio recently called “difficulties” of the website rollout is still inconceivable. In an era when modest startup businesses can hire IT expertise for a song, how could the U.S. government fail so spectacularly with a $93-million budget — a minimal estimate by its advocates? [We may never know how much was actually spent on the original and the continuing attempts at rescue.] How could our late unlamented Secretary of Health and Human Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius have presided over such a disaster? [Maybe there is something “wrong in Kansas” if she could have not only held the governorship but eight years as the state’s insurance commission!]

Corruption/incompetence? The incredible costs suggest that possibility. Or do we have to go to conspiracy theories, i.e., that since the President and most of his coterie of health care advisers have always expressed preference for total federal government control [let’s skip the euphemism “single payer”], did they intend just such a catastrophe so that, ultimately, the country would throw up its hands and out of sheer frustration collapse into that equally disastrous U.K. template?