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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (45105)	8/23/2010 9:29:27 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

SPIN METER: Republicans hot, cold on Constitution By BEN EVANS (AP) – 42 minutes ago google.com WASHINGTON — Republican Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia won his seat in Congress campaigning as a strict defender of the Constitution. He carries a copy in his pocket and is particularly fond of invoking the Second Amendment right to bear arms. But it turns out there are parts of the document he doesn't care for — lots of them. He wants to get rid of the language about birthright citizenship, federal income taxes and direct election of senators, among others. He would add plenty of stuff, including explicitly authorizing castration as punishment for child rapists. This hot-and-cold take on the Constitution is surprisingly common within the GOP, particularly among those like Broun who portray themselves as strict Constitutionalists and who frequently accuse Democrats of twisting the document to serve political aims. Republicans have proposed at least 42 Constitutional amendments in the current Congress, including one that has gained favor recently to eliminate the automatic grant of citizenship to anyone born in the United States. Democrats — who typically take a more liberal view of the Constitution as an evolving document — have proposed 27 amendments, and fully one-third of those are part of a package from a single member, Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., D-Ill. Jackson's package encapsulates a liberal agenda in which everyone has new rights to quality housing and education, but most of the Democratic proposals deal with less ideological issues such as congressional succession in a national disaster or voting rights in U.S. territories. The Republican proposals, by contrast, tend to be social and political statements, such as the growing movement to repeal the 14th Amendment's birthright citizenship. Republicans like Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the lead Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, argue that immigrants are abusing the right to gain citizenship for their children, something he says the amendment's authors didn't intend. Sessions, who routinely accuses Democrats of trying to subvert the Constitution and calls for respecting the document's "plain language," is taking a different approach with the 14th Amendment. "I'm not sure exactly what the drafters of the amendment had in mind," he said, "but I doubt it was that somebody could fly in from Brazil and have a child and fly back home with that child, and that child is forever an American citizen." Other widely supported Republican amendments would prohibit government ownership of private companies, bar same-sex marriage, require a two-thirds vote in Congress to raise taxes, and — an old favorite — prohibit desecration of the American flag. During the health care debate, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., introduced an amendment that would allow voters to directly repeal laws passed by Congress — a move that would radically alter the Founding Fathers' system of checks and balances. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., who founded a tea party caucus in Congress honoring the growing conservative movement that focuses on Constitutional governance, wants to restrict the president's ability to sign international treaties because she fears the Obama administration might replace the dollar with some sort of global currency. Broun, who is among the most conservative members of Congress, said he sees no contradiction in his devotion to the Constitution and his desire to rewrite parts of it. He said the Founding Fathers never imagined the size and scope of today's federal government and that he's simply resurrecting their vision by trying to amend it. "It's not picking and choosing," he said. "We need to do a lot of tweaking to make the Constitution as it was originally intended, instead of some perverse idea of what the Constitution says and does." The problem with such a view, says constitutional law scholar Mark Kende, is that divining what the framers intended involves subjective judgments shaded with politics. Holding up the 2nd Amendment as sacrosanct, for example, while dismissing other parts of the Constitution is "cherry picking," said Kende, director of Drake University's Constitutional Law Center. Virginia Sloan, an attorney who directs the nonpartisan Constitution Project, agreed. "There are a lot of people who obviously don't like income taxes. That's a political position," she said of criticism of the 16th Amendment, which authorized the modern federal income tax more than a century ago. "But it's in the Constitution ... and I don't think you can go around saying something is unconstitutional just because you don't like it." Sloan said that while some proposals to alter the Constitution have merit, most are little more than posturing by politicians trying to connect with voters. "People are responding to the politics of the day, and that's not what the framers intended," she said. "They intended exactly the opposite — that the Constitution not be used as a political tool." The good news, Sloan and Kende said, is that such proposals rarely go anywhere. Since the nation's founding, just 27 have survived the arduous amendment process, and 10 of those came in the initial Bill of Rights. Only two have come in the past 40 years, and both avoided ideology. One, ratified in 1971, lowered the voting age to 18; the other, ratified in 1992, limited Congress' ability to raise lawmakers' salaries. ___ Online: U.S. Constitution: tinyurl.com (This version CORRECTS Hoekstra party to Republican in 9th paragraph) Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (45105)	11/13/2010 1:16:58 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

Barack Obama: The Most Anti-Israel President Ken Blackwell November 12, 2010 With his remarks in Jakarta, Indonesia, President Obama made history once again. Sadly, it’s a most unenviable title. I believe he is the most anti-Israel President in U.S. history. In going to Jakarta, Indonesia, to launch his latest attack, he literally went to the ends of the earth to give voice to his displeasure. He emphasized his opposition to the policies of the elected government of Israel. He used his Jakarta platform to complain about Israel building apartments for her growing population. Where? In Jerusalem, the capital of Israel. To make matters even worse, Jakarta is a city no Israeli is allowed to enter! The symbolism of saying what he said in the country and city where he said it is simply atrocious. He was in Indonesia less than 24 hours. If he had to make such a one-sided and unfair pronouncement, couldn’t he at least have waited until he got to South Korea? Touting Indonesia’s great tolerance is offensive. We love everyone here in Indonesia, except the Israelis, of course, and except Catholic school girls who get beheaded on their way to school. What could he have been thinking in traveling to his boyhood home--in what is widely described as the largest Muslim country in the world--and sharply criticizing Israel? It’s as if he is determined to take an unfriendly stance and to reinforce it with his own biography: This place was a second home to me, and I am telling you, Israel, to knock it off! Those were not his actual words, but how else can we interpret his bizarre sense of time and place? President Obama’s foreign policy puts much greater emphasis on the UN as a world body. He has changed previous policy by bowing to the UN’s horrendous Human Rights Council. This is a body that contains Russia, China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia—those paragons of human rights. It is to this body that the Obama administration finds it necessary to “report.” The reports we have submitted essentially apologize to these brutal despots at the UN for not fully implementing more of the Obama legislative agenda at home. The President has admitted he and his party took a “shellacking” in the midterm elections. So implementation of that agenda looks increasingly problematic. Shellacking it may be, but you cannot put a high-gloss veneer on what happened November 2nd. Voters streamed into the polling places to render a vote of “no confidence” in this administration. Interestingly, if the United States had a constitutional system similar to the parliamentary social democracies that Mr. Obama and so many of his liberal allies clearly favor, they would all be out of office. None of the leaders he will encounter in his G-20 meeting in South Korea this week would be appearing in the group photo if their parties had been given such a shellacking by the voters in their countries. President Obama can thank his stars for the fact that under the United States Constitution, he still has a full two years to try to implement what’s left of his program. He’ll have a hard time doing it with 60+ new members of the House of Representatives who won their seats touting their staunch opposition to Obama policies. Here’s an idea he might suggest that could help build consensus and restore his frayed mandate: President Obama should announce that the U.S. Embassy in Israel will be moved—to Jerusalem. By doing that, he could demonstrate that he is not reflexively anti-Israel. Every other U.S. Embassy in the world is in the host nation’s capital city. When Germany united twenty years ago, the new government there designated Berlin as their capital. The U.S. Embassy in Bonn obediently packed up and moved to Berlin in 1999. By moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, he could reassure Israelis—only 4% of whom think he is a friend of Israel. And he could show “the Muslim world” that he keeps trying to appease that the United States will not abandon its historic alliance with Israel. It’s a sad commentary that such a reassurance is increasingly necessary. Ken Blackwell Ken Blackwell, a contributing editor at Townhall.com, is a senior fellow at the Family Research Council and the American Civil Rights Union. He is the co-author of the new bestseller The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency, on sale in bookstores everywhere.. townhall.com

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (45105)	4/7/2013 7:16:15 PM
From: greatplains_guy	1 Recommendation Respond to of 71588

Rectifying the Palestinian Narrative By Michael Curtis April 7, 2013 The mainstream media in the United States and in Western Europe have often been uncritically receptive of the Palestinian narrative. Media rarely question it, but instead disseminate its distortions of history and its deliberate misrepresentation of Israeli policies and often of the Jewish community. However, alert journalism demonstrated the true nature of that narrative when it uncovered one of the more historically flagrant and outrageous fabrications about Jews in an article published by Miftah, the Palestinian think tank, at the end of March 2013. Miftah, the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy, was founded in Jerusalem in December 1998 with an ambitiously stated objective: "To disseminate the Palestinian narrative and discourse globally to both official and popular bodies and decision-makers." It purports to adopt the "mechanisms of an active and in-depth dialogue, the free flow of information and ideas, as well as local and international networking." Using language that appeals to freedom-loving societies, Miftah says it seeks "to promote the principles of democracy and good governance within various components of Palestinian society." The well-known Palestinian publicist and media personality, Hanan Ashrawi, a Christian member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, member of the executive committee of the PLO, and scholar of literature, was appointed as secretary-general of the organization and also serves as the chair of the Board of Directors. One of the members of the Board of Trustees is Rashid Khalidi, formerly a professor in Chicago and now the incumbent of the Edward Said Chair of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. The organization is very well funded, including contributions from many respectable sources such as the Anna Lindh Foundation (European Union), the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (Germany), UNESCO, the United Nations Population Fund, Oxfam, the NGO Development Center, a number of European countries, the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy, and International Republic Institute. In late March, Miftah published an article on its Arabic language website accusing Jews of using Christian blood in the rituals of Passover. During his visit to Israel President Obama had referred to Passover as "a sacred holiday." While talking to Israeli students, Obama referred to the Passover story and to the history of the Jewish people as one of centuries of slavery, of perseverance amidst persecution, and finding freedom "in your own land." The president's remarks provided the opportunity for one of Miftah's authors, a man named Nawaf al-Zaru, described as an "expert" on Israel and on Hebrew, to promote Miftah's "principles of democracy." This author, presumably a Muslim, used Christian allegations made since the 12th century to correct the president, whom he said did not know the relationship between Passover and Christian blood. He instructed Obama that the historical Jewish blood rituals are real and not fake; "the Jews used the blood of Christians in the Jewish Passover." When a journalist quickly criticized the article, Miftah issued a statement anonymously but presumably from its leader Ashrawi. Forgetting the organization's supposed objective of "active and in-depth dialogue", a concept welcomed by people and organizations in democratic societies, Miftah at first denounced the criticism as a "smear campaign" that slandered the organization. Ashrawi, who has always portrayed herself in American television as a political moderate, refused to disavow the blood libel accusation made by her own organization. Instead, she, or someone in Miftah, blamed the victim. Within a day or so Miftah recognized its blunder, and the offensive article was taken down from its website. The organization offered an apology, reminiscent of typical bureaucratic excuses and defenses of mistakes. It explained that the article was "accidently and incorrectly published by a junior staff member." That unnamed staffer had been reprimanded for the "disgusting and repulsive phenomena of blood libel or accusation, including its use against Jews." (One might ask what other group of people has had to face the repulsive accusation of blood libel!!). The apology by Miftah declared that "Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, as founder has nothing to do with the day to day management at Miftah and was in no way involved in this incident." Ashrawi has been much admired by the Western TV and press media, had been a close friend of Peter Jennings of ABC News, and one may take at face to value her own statement that she has never been associated with any anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic campaign. The problem is that the nature and ideological thrust of various articles published by Miftah, as well as some of the statements made by Ashrawi, suggest caution in evaluating her true political position and that of the organization. In spite of her self-portrait as a "moderate," Ashrawi has been an exponent of some of the main tenets of the familiar Palestinian narrative. She was the highly articulate official spokesperson of the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Process, 1991-1993. At the United Nations Durban I Conference on August 28, 2001 she said, "I represent a narrative of exclusion, denial, racism, and national victimization." She spoke of her heavy heart "leaving behind a nation in captivity held hostage to an ongoing Nakba, as the most intricate and pervasive expression of persistent colonialism, apartheid, racism, and victimization." Israeli settlements, she declared, leads to "ethnic cleansing" in the West Bank. One of the principal writers for Miftah, Joharah Baker, also editor of the Palestine Report, has written a number of articles arguing that Israel is a racist society, as well as praising the female suicide bombers who targeted Israeli civilians. In a July 2006 article she applauded "the string of Palestinian women dedicated to sacrificing their lives for the cause." The criticism of the article in Miftah and consequent reluctant "apology" by the website is significant. It illustrates that a rapid response by independent and courageous media to inaccurate statements and prejudiced accusations can and sometimes does result in rectifying them and shaming the accusers. It is a valuable lesson to the mainstream media when in future they refer to Middle East affairs or are confronted by the Palestinian Narrative to return to Shakespeare and "stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood," and forgo their grudges against the State of Israel. americanthinker.com Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter \| AmericanThinker on Facebook