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Mark Steyn writes about the latest Exodus.
As far as the media were concerned, the murder of Jewish schoolchildren in Toulouse and a black teenager in Florida were the same story — literally: Angry white male opens fire on “the other,” his deeply ingrained racism inflamed by the tide of toxic right-wing hate infecting our public discourse. Alas, in Florida, the angry white male turned out to be a registered Democrat and half Hispanic — or, as the New York Times put it, a “white Hispanic,” a descriptor never applied by its editors to, say, Sonia Sotomayor or Gloria Estefan or indeed any other person living or dead. And in Toulouse the angry white male turned out to be yet another Muhammad.
Oh, well. Better luck next time, although the pickings seem likely to get thinner: Pitch the Western world a decade or two down the road, riven by an ever-more-fractious tribalism between blacks, Hispanics, and Muslims, and the one surviving nonagenarian neo-Nazi white supremacist will be at the retirement home. But it’ll still all be his fault.
The Toulouse assumptions were particularly deluded. If the flow of information is really controlled by Jews, as the Reverend Jeremiah Wright assured his students at the Chicago Theological Seminary a year or two back, you’d think they’d be a little better at making their media minions aware of one of the bleakest stories of the early 21st century: the extinguishing of what’s left of Jewish life in Europe. It would seem to me that the first reaction, upon hearing of a Jewish school shooting, would be to put it in the context of the other targeted schools, synagogues, community centers, and cemeteries. And yet liberal American Jews seem barely aware of this grim roll call. Even if you put to one side the public school in Denmark that says it can no longer take Jewish children because of the security situation, and the five children of the chief rabbi of Amsterdam who’ve decided to emigrate, and the Swedish Jews fleeing the most famously tolerant nation in Europe because of its pervasive anti-Semitism; even if you put all that to the side and consider only the situation in France . . . No, wait, forget the Villiers-le-Bel schoolgirl brutally beaten by a gang jeering, “Jews must die”; and the Paris disc-jockey who had his throat slit, his eyes gouged out, and his face ripped off by a neighbor who crowed, “I have killed my Jew”; and the young Frenchman tortured to death over three weeks, while his family listened via phone to his howls of agony as his captors chanted from the Koran . . . No, put all that to one side, too, and consider only the city of Toulouse. In recent years, in this one city, a synagogue has been firebombed, another set alight when two burning cars were driven into it, a third burgled and “Dirty Jews” scrawled on the ark housing the Torah, a kosher butcher’s strafed with gunfire, a Jewish sports association attacked with Molotov cocktails . . .
Here’s Toulouse rabbi Jonathan Guez speaking to the Jewish news agency JTA in 2009: “Guez said Jews would now be ‘more discreet’ about displaying their religion publicly and careful about avoiding troubled neighborhoods. . . . The synagogue will be heavily secured with cameras and patrol units for the first time.”
This is what it means to be a Jew living in one of the most beautiful parts of France in the 21st century. …
Now that the Supreme Court’s polls are up, Ross Kaminsky wants to know if the president thinks the attack worked for him.
On Monday, polling company Rasmussen released results of a survey of likely voters showing that in less than one month the percentage of Americans who rate the Supreme Court’s job performance as good or excellent has spiked up 13 points, from an all-time low of 28 percent to a two-and-a-half year high of 41 percent. This time frame includes the Court’s hearings on Obamacare as well as the thinly-veiled Obama warning to the Court not to strike down his signature law.
In other words, now that Americans have been reminded what the Court is there for, they are more positive about its theoretical and actual function.
In the Rasmussen poll, the change in opinion of the Court among Republicans has gone from 29 percent favorable to 54 percent favorable. Not surprisingly, Democrats aren’t on board the Supreme Court favorability train: Rasmussen doesn’t give the numbers but says that Democrats’ “views of the court are largely unchanged.”
Most important politically, “among voters not affiliated with either of the major political parties, good or excellent ratings for the court have increased from 26% in mid-March to 42% now.”
Also among the poll results — and more bad news for Democrats — twice as many Americans believe that the Supreme Court “does not limit the government enough” (30 percent) as those who think it “puts too many limitations on what the federal government can do” (15 percent).
How does picking that fight feel now, Mr. President? …
Victor Davis Hanson says the president reveals himself in unscripted moments when there is no teleprompter to guide him.
… His lack of judgment is not evident on the teleprompter, but is only fully illustrated when he is off it and his more extreme ideas are candidly expressed.
All presidents reveal glimpses of themselves through gaffes and off-the-cuff candor. Richard Nixon’s various paranoias were most evident on the secret White House audiotapes. Reagan’s anti-Soviet feelings were behind his open-mike joke “We begin bombing in five minutes.” When George W. Bush blurted out “Dead or alive” or “Bring ’em on,” the impromptu bombast seemed to reflect his cowboy image.
Such revelations are all the more striking in Obama’s case since rarely has a president’s ideology been so at variance with his public persona. His real views have been gleaned mostly from unguarded moments when he talks confidently without prompts — and therefore sounds conniving and shallow.
We learn about Obama’s views toward Israel not from campaign speeches, in which he soars with platitudes to raise money from the Jewish community, but when he is caught on an open mike with French president Sarkozy rudely ridiculing Israeli prime minister Netanyahu, or in a leak about snubbing the Israeli leader at the White House, or in a statement by the Palestinian foreign minister to the effect that administration officials had advised the Palestinian leadership to “sit tight” during the present election year — until Obama no longer need face the electorate and thus its displeasure for forcing concessions upon the Israelis.
For all the talk about the need for federal courts to audit errant state immigration legislation or to strike down the Defense of Marriage law, Obama does not believe in either an inactive or an active judiciary, only in one that parrots his own ideology. When jurists do this, they become sober and judicious; when they might not, then we hear an impromptu screed that Supreme Court justices are “an unelected group of people” who should not “somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law” — “an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”
Are we worried about Obama’s naïveté in dealing with the Russians on arms control, short-changing the Poles and Czechs on missile defense, and not quickly dropping the failed reset diplomacy? We should be, but we know that only because we have ignored his scripted rhetoric about Russia and listened instead to his embarrassing gaffe when he was caught on another open mike assuring President Medvedev that after the election our president would be more flexible with Putin, in a fashion that most Americans would find disturbing. ….
Three cheers for Debbie WasserFace. She supported an aide who was embarrassed by a six year old Facebook mistake. Jonathan Tobin has the story.
We don’t often have occasion to say anything complimentary about Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. In her designated role as President Obama’s attack dog, Rep. Wasserman Schultz has made a specialty of taking cheap shots at her opponents. When not attempting to demonize Republican positions on the deficit and entitlements, she has even stooped to blame conservatives for the shooting of Gabriella Giffords. But as unfair as she has been to those on the other side of the aisle, that doesn’t justify treating Wasserman Schultz or anyone on her staff in a similar manner. And that is exactly what happened to Danielle Gilbert, a DNC staffer who has been pilloried lately for some silly pictures she posted to her personal Facebook account six years ago when she was in college. But despite reports of pressure from the White House, Wasserman Schultz has refused to dump Gilbert. To that we can only say, good for her.
It is true the picture in which Gilbert is seen kissing money and referring to herself and some friends as “Jewbags” was in poor taste. But the posting by Gilbert, who is the daughter of prominent Jewish contributors to the Obama campaign and now works as the DNC’s outreach liaison to the Jewish community, was a joke and nothing more. …
We found an intelligent discussion about gasoline prices in Mining.com.
Gasoline consumption in the United States has been dropping for years. In the last decade, vehicle fuel efficiency has improved by 20%, and the combination of that shift and a weak economy of late has pushed gasoline demand to its lowest level in a decade.
At the same time, US oil production is at its highest level in a decade. Deepwater wells in the Gulf of Mexico and horizontal fracs in the Bakken shale have turned America’s domestic oil production scene around. After 20 years of declining production, US crude output rates started to climb in 2008 and have increased every year since.
With production up and demand down, the basics of supply and demand indicate that oil prices should be falling. Americans should be paying less at the pump.
Instead, the average US price at the pump reached US$3.80 per gallon on March 5, after 27 consecutive days of gains. That’s 26.7¢ above the old record for March 5, set last year. The price of gasoline has climbed 32¢ or 9.3% since February 1; analysts expect prices to continue rising, reaching a national average of something like US$4.25 per gallon.
What gives? Is it all about Iran? Are speculators manipulating the market? Do any politicians have good ideas on how to “fix” the high cost of gasoline? And is there relief on the horizon?
What gives is a combination of forces. Rising tensions in the Middle East are part of the problem, but so are deficiencies in North America’s oil infrastructure that are causing price discrepancies across the nation. Some of the refineries being forced to pay premium prices for oil are shutting down, and that limits gasoline supplies in parts of the country. Speculation is also a factor, as it is an ingrained part of the market, but it is not the driving force behind America’s fuel-price problems.
If you’re wondering, there aren’t any politicians with novel, sound ideas on how to reduce fuel prices. Newt Gingrich’s promise to bring prices below $2.50 a gallon is as attainable as Michelle Bachmann’s plucked-out-of-the-air promise of $2 gasoline.
Thankfully though, there is some relief on the horizon. First, we’ll tackle the issues. Then we’ll outline some developments that should ease the pain. …
Interesting background to the WWII story about the Man Who Never Was.
It was a plan devised by two, approved by twenty: to mislead the Axis powers that instead of attacking Sicily, the Allies intended to invade Greece, then Sardinia, and then southern France. Live agents were risky — they could be tortured or turned, so the ideal plan was to create an agent who was not only fictitious but also dead.
Inside Section 17M, a unit of the British intelligence service so secret that only a handful of people knew of its existence, two officers with impeccably British names of Montagu and Cholmondeley created this imaginary agent, his likes and dislikes, his habits and hobbies, his talents and weaknesses. They gave him a middle name, a religion, a nicotine habit and a place of birth. They gave him a hometown, rank, regiment, bank manager, solicitor and cufflinks. Most importantly, they gave him a supportive family, money, friends, and a fiancée named Pam. …