Castro Equating America's Human Rights With Cuba's!
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Yes, the biggest threat to world peace is the Israelis' refusal to negotiate with those who want to annihilate them. That is why radical Islamists blow up trains in Europe. (See 1 and 1a below.)
Of course this is the garbage Obama and his Muslim friends in The U.N. perpetuate because they have sick minds and even sicker intent.
And, of course, this is why we need to bring more undocumented radical Muslims to America in order to show greater compassion, attone for our nation's past sins and allow Obama to fulfill his father's dream.
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This from one of my oldest friends, brightest/logical minds and fellow memo reader:
"Dick: A couple of things. I note ... you posted a Seth Lipsky piece ..., but you really should reprint in its entirety his piece on the Senate's power to refuse to confirm a Supreme Court nominee...
It is always amazing to me that people don't go back to the Constitution or the Federalist Papers before opining. The same clause in the Constitution, that gives the Senate the power to advise and consent on judges, also relates to treaties. And there is no clamor for an up-or-down vote on TPP or a few dozen other treaties that will never be ratified..." (See 2 below.)
===Sowell and black and white. (See 3 below.)
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Bronx Cheer for Hillary's AIPAC speech. (See 4 below.)
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Skidaway Island Republican Club
Presents:
True Perspectives
Chatham County Police Protection
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
Plantation Club
Cocktails/Cash bar : 4:30 PM
Presentation : 5:00 PM
Sustaining members – Free
Regular members - $5
Non-Members - $10
All Welcome
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Dick===
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1) Brussels Rocked by Terrorist Attacks, Killing at Least 27 People
Explosions hit Brussels’ international airport and a subway station near European Union institutions
A blast hit the city’s main airport outside a security check early Tuesday morning. A second explosion occurred after 9 a.m. local time at Maelbeek metro station.
BRUSSELS—Explosions rocked Brussels’ international airport and a subway station near European Union institutions on Tuesday in what authorities described as terrorist attacks. More than two dozen people were killed and many more injured amid horrific scenes of chaos.
A suicide bomber committed the airport attack and authorities were looking into whether some attackers could be on the run, the Belgian federal prosecutor said at a press conference.
The explosions come days after the arrest of Salah Abdeslam, one of the alleged Paris attackers who was captured in Brussels after a four-month manhunt.
The first two explosions Tuesday morning hit the city’s main airport near the check-in counters at about 8 a.m., filling the area with smoke and sending ceiling tiles crashing down. Witnesses described blood from the many injured spread across the floor and panic as people rushed to flee.
After 9 a.m. local time, another explosion hit at Maelbeek metro station, very near the heart of the European quarter in Brussels, home to EU buildings.
Officials said more than a dozen people were killed at the airport and that at least 15 were killed and 55 wounded at the station. Belgian Federal Prosecutor Frédéric Van Leeuw said it was too early to give a precise number of victims, but some were gravely injured.
Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel said it was “a black day” for Belgium
“What we feared has happened to our country and citizens in the form of violent, indiscriminate attacks,” he told reporters. “Our first thoughts are for the victims and their families and for the citizens still waiting for news about their close ones.”
Belgian officials immediately raised the terror alert across the country to its maximum level and shut the entire public transport system in Brussels and asked people to stay where they were. The Belgian government’s national security council was to convene later Tuesday.
1a) Brussels Attacks Tear at the Fabric of the European Union
1a) Brussels Attacks Tear at the Fabric of the European Union
Analysis
The March 22 terrorist attacks in Brussels come as the European Union is still reeling from the November Paris attacks and scrambling to solve the migrant crisis. More important, they come as nationalist forces are challenging key principles of the Continental bloc, including the free movement of labor and the Schengen Agreement, which eliminated border controls among several member states. The atmosphere of fear and suspicion that is sure to follow will only worsen these social, political and economic crises.
The first outcome of the Brussels attacks will be a fresh round of debate over EU border controls, in particular those in the Schengen zone. The Schengen Agreement came under fire at the start of the migrant crisis in early 2015. The Paris attacks escalated the controversy, particularly because the perpetrators moved between France and Belgium without detection. Consequently, France and other countries enhanced their border controls. The European Commission has since said that it wants all border controls in the Schengen area lifted by the end of 2016. However, the latest attacks — and the potential that more will follow — will make this difficult.
Several governments in Western Europe will likely soon announce new national security legislation, improved controls on fighters returning from conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as enhanced intelligence sharing with their neighbors. EU members will also resume discussions on how best to combat terrorism abroad in troubled nations such as Libya and Syria. Europeans will become more willing to contribute to the coalition against the Islamic State, possibly with more weapons and training for the Iraqi military and Kurdish militants, increased deployment of combat aircraft and participation in NATO surveillance missions in Turkey.
Another casualty could be the recent, tenuous agreement between Turkey and the European Unionto limit the arrival of asylum seekers in Europe. Renewed awareness of the threat of terrorism among EU member states will bring focus on the bloc's external borders, possibly justifying deeper cooperation with Turkey. But the attacks could also reignite anti-Muslim sentiments in Europe and increase popular demands on EU governments not to grant visa-free travel to Turkish citizens — a key stipulation from Ankara for cooperation on migrant issues.
Anti-Muslim sentiment could also lead to more support for nationalist parties across the Continent.France's National Front already receives substantial support in electoral polls. In Germany, the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party recently achieved record performances in regional elections and is currently the country's third most popular party. Both France and Germany will hold general elections in 2017, in votes that will happen against the backdrop of the immigration crisis and the multiple terrorist attacks. In both cases, the mainstream parties will be under electoral pressure from their nationalist rivals. As a result, they will likely adopt some elements of nationalist party platforms. The same can be expected in other Northern European countries such as the Netherlands or Sweden, which also have relatively strong nationalist movements. Political parties and groups thatwant the United Kingdom to leave the European Union could also use the recent terrorist attacks to justify greater isolation from the Continent.
Lastly, the Brussels attacks will hurt European economies, though likely only for a short time. In the coming days, some people in Belgium and other Western European countries may decide to avoid travel or densely crowded areas, such as cafes and shopping malls, out of fear of another attack. It will temporarily stifle domestic consumption and the tourism sector. For most Europeans, the threat of terrorism is by now a part of their daily lives. Beyond national politics and economics, the long-term impacts of the attacks will affect the very fabric of the European Union
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To Block a Court Nominee
As an Antidote to Kings
Somewhere Alexander Hamilton is smiling. For the battle that’s beginning over President Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court vindicates the famous Founder’s assurances on judicial appointments.
Hamilton knew that Americans would find their protection from would-be kings in the wisdom of the Senate. He marked this point in 69 Federalist, one of the columns he wrote back in 1788 under the pen-name Publius.
The topic of Federalist 69 is the “real character of the executive.” It makes it clear that in filling the seat once held by Justice Antonin Scalia, President Obama is at the complete mercy of the Senate — and should be.
It was Hamilton’s aim in the Federalist columns, which he wrote with James Madison and John Jay, to convince New Yorkers to ratify the Constitution. One of the things New Yorkers feared was that a president might take on kingly powers.
Like, say, the sort held by the tyrant George III (and coveted by Barack Obama). Hamilton wrote of judges that what the president had was the power to “to nominate, and, WITH THE ADVICE AND CONSENT OF THE SENATE, to appoint.”
Not just judges, but ambassadors and other ministers. It was Hamilton who put the words in all-caps. He went on to contrast the powers of the presidency created in the Constitution with those of “the King of Great Britain.”
The King, Hamilton wrote, “is emphatically and truly styled the fountain of honor,” by which he meant something like the original source of power. “He not only appoints to all offices, but can create offices. He can confer titles of nobility at pleasure.”
What Hamilton stressed was what he called “a great inferiority in the power of the President, in this particular, to that of the British king.” Nor, he went on, was the presidential power even “equal to that of the governor of New York.”
At the time in New York, the appointment power was held by a council that included the governor and four state senators. Not only could New York’s governor nominate a state judge, but he was “ENTITLED to a casting vote in the appointment.”
Again, the all-caps are Hamilton’s. And then the famous words: “In the national government, if the Senate should be divided, no appointment could be made.” This is precisely what Hamilton was marking as a constitutional VIRTUE (all-caps mine).
Hamilton went on to sharpen the contrast with New York. In the state’s government, he warned, “if the council should be divided, the governor can turn the scale, and confirm his own nomination.”
For today, Hamilton puts paid to the notion being slyly advanced by President Obama and the Democrats that the Senate has a responsibility to give an up-or-down vote on the nomination of Judge Garland. That is constitutional poppycock.
We are in precisely the circumstances in which Hamilton foresaw that no appointment could be made. The Founders understood that the ability of the states, via the Senate, to check a nomination was one of the Constitution’s attractions.
And why not? They were revolutionary men. They were taking down a monarchy. They did not want to vest a president with kingly powers of appointment. They didn’t require the Senate to hold even so much as an up-or-down-vote.
Hamilton contrasted the mode of appointment by the president and “an entire branch of the national legislature” with the “privacy in the mode of appointment by the governor of New York.”
The governor, he sneered, was “closeted in a secret apartment with at most four, and frequently with only two persons.” So “the power of the chief magistrate of this State, in the disposition of offices, must, in practice, be greatly superior to that of the Chief Magistrate of the Union.”
With such assurance that the president could be blocked by the Senate, New York ratified the Constitution. And that’s what Obama and Garland are up against.
No one knows it better than the justices Judge Garland aspires to join. They understand full well that the Founders intended there to be circumstances where, absent an intervening election, no appointment to the Supreme Court could be made.
They know that the states wouldn’t have ratified the Constitution if this had not been the case. They know that the Founders were prepared to let the king, the president, and the Devil himself take the hindmost.
This column first appeared in the newspaper Hamilton founded, the New York Post.
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3) Black and White, Left and Right
By Thomas Sowell
Much is made of the fact that liberals and conservatives see racial issues differently, which they do. But these differences have too often been seen as simply those on the right being racist and those on the left not.
You can cherry-pick the evidence to reach that conclusion. But you can also cherry-pick the evidence to reach the opposite conclusion.
During the heyday of the Progressive movement in the early 20th century, people on the left were in the forefront of those promoting doctrines of innate, genetic inferiority of not only blacks but also of people from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe, as compared to people from Western Europe.
Liberals today tend to either glide over the undeniable racism of Progressive President Woodrow Wilson or else treat it as an anomaly of some sort. But racism on the left at that time was not an anomaly, either for President Wilson or for numerous other stalwarts of the Progressive movement.
An influential 1916 best-seller, "The Passing of the Great Race" -- celebrating Nordic Europeans -- was written by Madison Grant, a staunch activist for Progressive causes such as endangered species, municipal reform, conservation and the creation of national parks.
He was a member of an exclusive social club founded by Republican Progressive Theodore Roosevelt, and Grant and Franklin D. Roosevelt became friends in the 1920s, addressing one another in letters as "My dear Frank" and "My dear Madison." Grant's book was translated into German, and Adolf Hitler called it his Bible.
Progressives spearheaded the eugenics movement, dedicated to reducing the reproduction of supposedly "inferior" individuals and races. The eugenics movement spawned Planned Parenthood, among other groups. In academia, there were 376 courses devoted to eugenics in 1920.
Progressive intellectuals who crusaded against the admission of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe, branding them as genetically inferior, included many prominent academic scholars -- such as heads of such scholarly organizations as the American Economic Association and the American Sociological Association.
Southern segregationists who railed against blacks were often also Progressives who railed against Wall Street. Back in those days, blacks voted for Republicans as automatically as they vote for Democrats today.
Where the Democrats' President Woodrow Wilson introduced racial segregation into those government agencies in Washington where it did not exist at the time, Republican President Calvin Coolidge's wife invited the wives of black Congressmen to the White House. As late as 1957, civil rights legislation was sponsored in Congress by Republicans and opposed by Democrats.
Later, when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was sponsored by Democrats, a higher percentage of Congressional Republicans voted for it than did Congressional Democrats. Revisionist histories tell a different story. But, as Casey Stengel used to say, "You could look it up" -- in the Congressional Record, in this case.
Conservatives who took part in the civil rights marches, or who were otherwise for equal rights for blacks, have not made nearly as much noise about it as liberals do. The first time I saw a white professor, at a white university, with a black secretary, it was Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago in 1960 -- four years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
She was still his secretary when he died in 2006. But, in all those years, I never once heard Professor Friedman mention, in public or in private, that he had a black secretary. By all accounts, she was an outstanding secretary, and that was what mattered.
The biggest difference between the left and right today, when it comes to racial issues, is that liberals tend to take the side of those blacks who are doing the wrong things -- hoodlums the left depicts as martyrs, while the right defends those blacks more likely to be the victims of those hoodlums.
Rudolph Giuliani, when he was the Republican mayor of New York, probably saved more black lives than any other human being, by promoting aggressive policing against hoodlums, which brought the murder rate down to a fraction of what it was before.
A lot depends on whether you judge by ringing words or judge by actual consequences.
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4) A Bronx Cheer for Hillary’s AIPAC Speech
At least one American Jewish organization gave presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee the thumbs down. Although the audience applauded, Clinton's ideas were retreads of tried and failed policies.
Clnton spoke during the day, on Monday, March 21 to AIPAC's policy conference in Washington, D.C. Clinton is the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for President.
The Republican frontrunner, Donald Trump, is scheduled to speak during the late afternoon, early evening session, along with the other two candidates for the Republican nomination. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is speaking at 6:50 p.m. ET and Ohio Gov. John Kasich will also speak. Neither Trump nor Kasich had the AIPAC speech listed on their website campaign schedules.
The other Democrat running for the party nomination, Bernie Sanders, chose to skip the AIPAC event. That decision was sure to endear him to the many dozens of thugs, including Max Blumenthal - the son of Hillary Clinton's long-time buddy and Israel policy adviser Sidney Blumenthal - protesting against Israel outside the convention center where the AIPAC policy conference is taking place.
Although Clinton was warmly received, the points she focused on as positives are hardly new, innovative or suggest a smooth road ahead for Israel should Clinton win the general election.
Clinton does not seem to realize that the Israeli people and a majority of the Israeli political spectrum has tired of the unending efforts to twist Israel's arm to sit at the negotiating table with a Palestinian Arab leadership that rejects any movement forward, that only increases its demands, and that does so while glorifying the barbaric murder and maiming of Israelis.
Instead, Clinton proudly recounted her efforts to bring Israeli and Palestinian Arab leaders to the negotiation table.
She also appeared to be tone deaf to the widespread anger and dismay by nearly all Israelis and even nearly all mainstream Jewish and other pro-Israel organizations - including AIPAC - to the Nuclear Iran Deal.
She strongly defended the Iran deal, declaring that it has made “the United States, Israel and the world safer.”
One strong note she sang was a promise to rebuff efforts by outsiders - she said the United Nations, it is doubtful she also means the United States - to impose a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict.
The only victim of terrorism whom Clinton mentioned by name was Taylor Force, an American Christian who was stabbed to death earlier this month by a Palestinian Arab terrorist at the Jaffa port.
While there has been an enormous outpouring of grief by Israel and Israelis over Force's murder, it would have been a reasonable gesture for Clinton to have also mentioned Ezra Schwartz, an American Jewish teenager who was murdered by a Palestinian Arab terrorist just months ago.
When Clinton mentioned Force, she used it to make a strong point, one for which she received huge applause and a standing ovation.
What she said was that the "attacks must end immediately and — Palestinian leaders need to stop inciting violence, stop celebrating terrorists as martyrs and stop paying rewards to their families!" But Clinton made no effort during her tenure as Secretary of State to cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority which pays those rewards.
Although Clinton's speech received generous applause, at least one Jewish group had little positive to say about it. In particular, the RJC noted that during Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State, the relationship between Israel and the U.S. reached its lowest point.
This is the statement put out by the RJC's executive director Matt Brooks:
Hillary Clinton’s rhetoric rings hollow. Actions speak louder than words and Hillary’s words can do little to paper over her disastrous tenure as Secretary of State. Under Secretary Clinton, the US-Israel relationship reached its lowest point and she supported the United States-brokered, ill-conceived and disastrous nuclear deal with Iran. At every turn when her actions could achieve real results and speak louder than words, Secretary of State Clinton chose instead to sit and do nothing. Pro-Israel voters have learned from painful experience that there is a difference between political speeches and governing priorities. Hillary Clinton has proven time and again that talk is cheap, and today was no different.
The National Jewish Democratic Council did not issue a statement either about Clinton's AIPAC speech or about the AIPAC policy conference. The only statement of support by the NJDC for any of this year's presidential contenders was one issued in February, praising Martin O'Malley, as a "true friend to the American Jewish community." O'Malley suspended his campaign in February.
About the Author: Lori Lowenthal Marcus is the U.S. correspondent for The Jewish Press. A graduate of Harvard Law School, she previously practiced First Amendment law and taught in Philadelphia-area graduate and law schools.
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