Letter From America (About A New Gomorrah)

San Francisco Is Suffering

Drowning in The Excesses Of Its Own Liberalism

Erielle Davidson
The Federalist

About two years ago, I moved to San Francisco from Manhattan in order to pursue a position in economic research at the Hoover Institution. I had originally been working in finance, but welcomed with a special eagerness the opportunity to enter the realm of public policy.

My only interaction with California had been limited to a week in the Piedmont-area of Oakland, California during my junior year of college. Over the course of that first visit, I experienced the “quintessential” San Francisco that characterizes most people’s expectations of the city. I bought colorful groceries at a quaint farmer’s market. I ate an In-N-Out burger with the “special sauce” and donned the silly hat as I scarfed it down. I gawked at the sheer amount of tie-dye I witnessed in Haight-Ashbury. I even braved the earthquake simulation at the California Academy of the Sciences. In short, I developed a quick affection for the city that was only to be challenged severely upon my move.

Between receiving a job offer and my first day of work, I had precisely three weeks to relocate to the Bay Area. Despite my scant knowledge of the region beyond my short stint in Oakland, I managed to secure a decent apartment within my budget and within an hour or so of my work.  From my estimations, the neighborhood seemed adequately safe, though perhaps slightly less cared for than my old neighborhood on the Upper East Side. Still, it was a home, and I was appreciative. The afterglow of my moving victory, however, was short-lived.

Letter From America (About "Christian" Capitulation)

How Religious Liberty Dies

David French
National Review Online

So, this is what passes for national news:

First-grade teacher Jocelyn Morffi lost her job at Saints Peter and Paul Catholic School a day after she returned from her Florida Keys wedding.

A female teacher at a Catholic school married a woman and got fired. Why should anyone be surprised that a Catholic school follows Catholic teachings?

The answer’s obvious, of course. National news organizations are populated with people who loathe orthodox Christian teaching on sexual orientation and identity, and stories like this are simply advocacy disguised as reporting. They know news articles ratchet up pressure. They know members of the community respond to negative coverage.

And, sure enough, in the middle of the AP article linked above is this depressing detail:

Several parents say they were surprised and upset at Morffi’s firing, which they learned of in a letter from the school Thursday evening. About 20 parents went to the school Friday morning to demand an explanation.

Over the long term, this is the real threat to religious freedom.

Letter From America (About the Curse of Abortion in India)

India Performs 15.6 Million Abortions per Year

Dr Susan Berry
Breitbart

A new study finds that about 15.6 million abortions were performed in India in 2015, making the abortion rate in that country 47 abortions per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 49.
The study is published at Lancet Global Health and was conducted by the pro-abortion rights Guttmacher Institute – which was founded by former Planned Parenthood President Alan Guttmacher – the Population Council of New Delhi, and the International Institute for Population Sciences.

According to the study, 81 percent of the abortions performed in India are via medication, and 14 percent are surgical abortions.

Former abortionist Dr. Anthony Levatino explains that during a medication abortion – usually occurring within the first trimester – the mother takes Mifepristone (also known as RU-486), a drug that blocks the action of the hormone progesterone, which is naturally produced during pregnancy, to enable her to nourish the baby. Without progesterone, the lining of the mother’s uterus breaks down, and the baby dies inside her womb after being denied blood and nourishment.

Within the next day or two, the mother takes another drug called Misoprostol (also called Cytotec) that causes contractions and bleeding, forcing the baby from her uterus.

The study also finds that of the 48.1 million pregnancies in India in 2015, about half were unintended, leading to an unintended pregnancy rate of about 70 per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 49. The researchers note India’s unintended pregnancy rate is comparable to those of Bangladesh (67) and Nepal (68) but lower than that of Pakistan (93).

Letter From America (On the Fourth Estate Gone Rogue)

Journalism is Decomposing Dead Meat

Saritha Prabhu
The Federalist

I’m a liberal Democrat who didn’t realize for a long time that our mainstream media is biased. For years, I consumed news and commentary from my favorite media sites uncritically: CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times. From time to time, I watched Fox News to see what “the other side” was saying.

I lived in a kind of information bubble, but like most bubble-dwellers I didn’t know I was living in one. Ironically, the 2016 election opened my eyes to this “Truman Show”-like media universe we’ve all been inhabiting.  My awakening came accidentally when I realized in 2016 that I just couldn’t support Hillary Clinton (I ended up protest-voting for Gary Johnson). I thought Clinton was arrogant, entitled, corrupt, and dishonest. I couldn’t believe the Democratic Party would nominate someone who was the subject of an FBI investigation.

But as 2016 rolled on, I became quietly incensed. I couldn’t help noticing repeatedly that the mainstream media was shielding and enabling Clinton in her dissembling and media avoidance. I noticed that the commentators at CNN, MSNBC, and the NYT either ignored or made light of Clinton’s many problem areas: the private email server, compromising of state secrets, and the questionable multimillion-dollar donations to the Clinton Foundation. (Yes, the Times broke the story in 2015 about Clinton’s personal email account, but I’m talking here about its 2016 treatment of her candidacy.)

Ironically, had I been a Clinton supporter, I’d have likely been blind to the media bias.

Letter From America (About Faux Virtue)

Phony Virtue is Ruining Western Society

From Hollywood to our foreign policy, Rousseau's joke is on us

William S. Smith
The Federalist

What counts as virtue among Western elites? As Aristotle teaches, if you can identify what a society considers to be virtuous or good, you can understand the moral outlook of that society’s institutions, from its schools to its foreign policy. One needs only to study any gathering of American elite culture to see that virtue, traditionally centered in personal character, has become redefined as public sympathy for humanitarian causes. When watching any cultural awards program, for example, one is treated to a parade of “beautiful” souls voicing support for myriad progressive causes. This moral preening has become so commonplace that a term has developed to characterize it: “virtue signaling.”

The West’s moral outlook is now animated by the widespread belief that virtue is measured by one’s professed sympathy for causes such as combatting homelessness, extending civil rights for various protected groups, and decrying poverty in far-off places. The more publicly ostentatious one is in attaching oneself to these causes, the more virtue one is assigned by our elite culture.

Yet the continuing sex scandals of our elites are (pardon the phrase) laying bare the inadequacy of this definition of virtue. In Hollywood and other elite institutions, puffed-up paragons of “virtue” reign, but backstage are characters such as Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer, people wholly lacking self-control, decency, moderation, temperance, and civility. In short, many of “the beautiful souls” who have been telling us how to live are reprobates–or protecting them, either tacitly or directly.

Letter From America (About Murderous Greenists)

The Lynch Mob Targets Scott Pruitt


‘If he has had enough serious death threats, then he shouldn’t have proposed the deep cuts to the EPA budget.’

By Julie Kelly
National Review Online

Scott Pruitt, Trump’s EPA administrator, is the top target of the anti-Trump lynch mob. He’s enduring daily attack pieces in the media and threats of violence against him and his family. It’s hard to think of any cabinet member — current or former — who has been subjected to more vitriol and vilification than Pruitt, and he’s been on the job for less than a year. Suddenly, everything from overlooked Superfund sites to the Flint water crisis to “toxic” pesticides are Pruitt’s fault, which of course means he is poisoning children and destroying the planet.

According to the EPA inspector general’s office, Pruitt has received “four to five times the number of threats” that his predecessor, Gina McCarthy, did. The level of concern for Pruitt’s safety is so deep that agents are being added to his round-the-clock security detail. In a recent Bloomberg News interview, Pruitt said, “The quantity and the volume — as well as the type — of threats are different. What’s really disappointing to me as it’s not just me — it’s family.”

Why are Pruitt and his family in the crosshairs?

Letter From America (About Europe, The Sick Man of the West)

Quo Vadis? The Philosophical, Spiritual Floundering of Europe in 2017

Where Christianity and cultural identity are declining in tandem

By Garland Tucker
National Review Online

During my recent vacation to Scotland, the National Centre for Social Research released a major new survey, which documented the continuing decline of Christianity in the U.K. The headline read: “Non-believers outnumber the faithful by widest margin yet.” This fall has been driven primarily by young people. Of those between 18 and 24 years old, 62 percent have no religion. The figures for the Church of England were devastating: The proportion of the population describing themselves as Anglican has dropped from 30 percent in 2000 to 15 percent today — with just 3 percent of 18- to-24-year-olds. In Scotland, church attendance has fallen by over half in the past 30 years.

As the import of this survey was sinking in, the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, weighed in with a sadly telling reaction. Noting the alarming decline in young believers, he blasted the inequities of Britain’s capitalistic system, which he perceives as “failing our children.” If warmed-over socialism is all the church can offer young people, it’s no wonder they are saying “no thanks” in record numbers. How sadly ironic that the ideas of Adam Smith are criticized by someone who should fully understand capitalism’s unmatched contributions to the improvement of mankind. No economic system in the history of man has done more to lift humans, all over the globe, from poverty.

Welby should also know that it was capitalism, born of competitive innovation and consumer choice, that rebuilt Europe after World War II. The freedom to pursue personal opportunity gave life to a European rebirth.

Letter From America (About Merkel's Unholy Zeal)

The Europe Merkel Made

Her legacy includes Brexit, the rise of far-right parties, and border walls.

Michael Brendan Dougherty
National Review Online

Angela Merkel really is the most consequential politician of modern Europe, but lately not in the way she hopes. Her 2015 decision to welcome over 1 million migrants into her country, and then her attempts to impose refugee quotas across the European Union, have altered the politics of Europe for a generation.

The latest of the run on-effects of this decision is now in Austria. The 31-year-old leader of the People’s Party, Sebastian Kurz, will soon be chancellor of Austria, after the smashing success of his insurgent campaign, which renovated the party. Kurz won by promising “something new” in politics. That something new includes a position on immigration that is arguably harder than the one offered by the far-right Freedom Party, a group with some roots in fascist politics and the likely coalition partner of Kurz’s party. Kurz talks openly of working with or joining the Visgrád Group, the four countries of central Europe that have rejected Merkel’s migration quotas.

The migration flow created after the 2015 “welcome” were used by terrorists involved in the Bataclan massacre in Paris and in the Brussels airport bombing.

Letter From America (About Obama's Vacuous Cant And Campus Rape)

Betsy DeVos’s Critics Rely on Junk Science and Sheer Malice

David French
National Review Online

Honestly, even for a person who’s been hardened by decades of campus ideological and legal battles, it’s hard to believe how thoroughly unhinged, how intellectually bankrupt is the argument against protecting due process on campus. Yesterday, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos announced that the Trump administration would shortly begin a regulatory rulemaking process designed to protect college students from sexual assault while also protecting the fundamental constitutional rights of the accused.

More precisely, DeVos signaled her intention to withdraw the Obama administration’s 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter that unilaterally and lawlessly required universities to adjudicate sexual-assault claims under a preponderance-of-the-evidence standard (the accused is responsible if there’s a 50.1 percent probability he committed the crime) but without protecting due process. Obama’s policy resulted in a kangaroo-court system where accused students often don’t have access to counsel, the ability to effectively cross-examine their accuser (indeed, the Obama admin specifically urged that accused students not be permitted to cross-examine accusers), or even access to all the evidence in the case.

Judging from the Twitter reaction to DeVos’s remarks, you would have thought that she’d declared open season on young women on campus. Under the hashtag #StopBetsy, ideologues and celebrities declared that DeVos was taking the “next step on our path to authoritarianism.” Or, in the words of the reasonable non-hysterical folks at the Women’s March, she was “making campuses safer for rapists.” The makers of a deeply flawed campus-rape documentary called “The Hunting Ground” slammed DeVos, saying, “Her proposal should scare the hell out of every parent in this country with a college bound child — schools will become much more dangerous places for their children.”

But what is this terrible proposal? While the details are yet to be revealed, from her remarks it’s clear that she wants to protect students from sexual assault and to protect students from kangaroo courts.

Letter from America (About Leftist Violence Being Only Loving Correction)

‘No Enemies on the Left’ Is Still the Mantra of  Liberals

The U.S. Civil Rights Commission refuses to condemn antifa violence.

By John Fund
National Review Online

One of the great gifts the British writer George Orwell gave us, in addition to his classics 1984 and Animal Farm, was a clear and uncompromising look at dangerous ideologies. In “Orwell and the British Left,” British writer Ian Williams recalls Orwell’s underlining of “the old, true and unpalatable conclusion that a Communist and a Fascist are somewhat nearer to one another than either is to a democrat.” Orwell’s well-observed conclusion nonetheless scandalized many on the left who rallied behind the Marxist phrase “no enemies on the left.”

Sadly, a quarter century after the fall of Communism, too many leftists are still ignoring Orwell and refusing to acknowledge the reality of left-wing brutality. In the wake of Charlottesville, eyewitnesses and reporters agreed that while the violence was instigated by neo-Nazis and white nationalists, it was countered with bloody counterattacks by left-wingers and black-shirted anarchists wearing masks. There was a clear asymmetric outcome to the violence: A white nationalist mowed down protestors with his car, killing a 32-year-old woman.

But that didn’t mean there were no victims of left-wing violence. Antifa — short for “anti-fascist” — protestors came armed with pepper spray, bricks, and clubs. Antifa members believe that racist speech is violence and that they must counter it physically, not just oppose it with rhetoric or better ideas.

As the New York Daily News reported, among antifa’s victims were journalists:

Letter From America (About Enforced Memory Loss)

Our War against Memory

The new abolitio memoriae

By Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

Back to the Future

Romans emperors were often a bad lot — but usually confirmed as such only in retrospect. Monsters such as Nero, of the first-century A.D. Julio-Claudian dynasty, or the later psychopaths Commodus and Caracalla, were flattered by toadies when alive — only to be despised the moment they dropped.

After unhinged emperors were finally killed off, the sycophantic Senate often proclaimed a damnatio memoriae (a “damnation of memory”). Prior commemoration was wiped away, thereby robbing the posthumous ogre of any legacy and hence any existence for eternity.

In more practical matters, there followed a concurrent abolitio memoriae (an “erasing of memory”). Specifically, moralists either destroyed or rounded up and put away all statuary and inscriptions concerning the bad, dead emperor. In the case of particularly striking or expensive artistic pieces, they erased the emperor’s name (abolitio nominis) or his face and some physical characteristics from the artwork.

Impressive marble torsos were sometimes recut to accommodate a more acceptable (or powerful) successor. (Think of something like the heads only of the generals on Stone Mountain blasted off and replaced by new carved profiles of John Brown and Nat Turner).

A Scary History

Without Leon Trotsky’s organizational and tactical genius, Vladimir Lenin might never have consolidated power among squabbling anti-czarist factions. Yet after the triumph of Stalin, “de-Trotskyization” demanded that every word, every photo, and every memory of an ostracized Trotsky was to be obliterated. That nightmarish process fueled allegorical themes in George Orwell’s fictional Animal Farm and 1984.

Letter From America (About The Nation's Largest Chop Shop)

Cutting Down the Hydra

Theresa Bonopartis
The Federalist

On April 29, protesters took to the streets across the country to call for Congress to finally fulfill Republican leaders’ promises to end taxpayers’ sponsorship of Planned Parenthood, our nation’s largest abortion provider.

Sadly, in the debate between pro-lifers and pro-aborts, certain voices are often ignored. This includes the women who have experienced abortion and were deceived by organizations like Planned Parenthood, which have a vested interest in downplaying or denying the effects abortion can have on women’s lives.

While the abortion giant claims to have women’s best interests at heart, countless numbers of us who have suffered the adverse effects of abortion know that’s anything but true. While the organization’s brass promote themselves as health-care providers and advocates of poor women, a little research reveals the people running the show aren’t the champions they claim to be.

In fact, they’re doing quite well for themselves as taxpayers watch their hard-earned dollars support their organization, which delivers more than 300,000 abortions each year. In 2014, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards earned $957,952, according to Internal Revenue Service records, while the organization received $528 million in government funding the same year.

Letter From America (About Leviathan)

Trump Wants to Deconstruct the Regulatory State? 

Good. Here’s How You Start

David French
National Review Online


On Thursday at CPAC, Trump administration chief strategist Steve Bannon outlined what he called the “three verticals” of the Trump administration, providing in essence a broad sketch of Trumpism. The first he called “national security and sovereignty.” The second was “economic nationalism.” The third was “the deconstruction of the administrative state.”  

While conservatives need to wait and see what the administration means when it talks about national security and sovereignty and should oppose Bernie Sanders–like efforts to restrict the free market, we should fully embrace the administration’s expressed goal of dismantling the administrative state. Done correctly, it could be Trump’s most lasting (and valuable) legacy.

At present, the vast and bloated executive branch — existing through its alphabet soup of agencies such as the EPA, IRS, DOE, ATF, and the like — intrudes into virtually every aspect of American life. It regulates your workplace, your home, your car, and your kids’ school. It’s staffed by legions of bureaucrats who enjoy job security that private-sector employees can only dream of, and it’s granted legal authority by the Supreme Court to interpret its own governing statutes and expand the scope of its own authority. In its own spheres of influence, it often acts as legislator, prosecutor, and judge.

Letter From America (About Qualifications for Leadership)

An Insider's View

What I learned about Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson after spending a week on jury duty with him

Emily Roden
Dallas News

Nine years ago, I showed up to the Denton County Courthouse for jury duty and got myself picked for the job. A young girl had accused her mom's boyfriend of sexual assault, and the case was being brought to trial.

If you've ever served on a jury trial before, you understand the almost immediate yet very temporary bond that ties 12 strangers together who are randomly chosen from each of their private lives to fulfill a solemn public purpose.

One of our first tasks was to choose our jury foreman. Perhaps it was his business suit, his impressive stature, or his charisma, but almost everyone in that jury room suggested that this middle-aged man with graying hair was likely the most fit for the task.

Thanks, but I decline. I'm not interested in the spotlight, he told us. I didn't think anything of it.
I had just bought my first BlackBerry and used my breaks to catch up on all the emails I was missing from my week at the courthouse. I recall leaving the jury room on a break with this man and remarking how busy I was and how much work I had to do. He smiled as he sat and read the paper.

From the first day of jury selection, we all noticed another suited man always present in the courtroom. His presence was intriguing due to the ear piece in his ear.

Letter From America (About the Netherlands)

Geert Wilders Has Something to Say

The Editors
National Review Online



A month ago, the Dutch politician Geert Wilders was considered likely to become the country’s next prime minister. On Friday, he was convicted on hate-speech charges — and became slightly more likely to become the president’s next prime minister.

Wilders is a longtime fixture in the European circles described in the American press with fear and loathing as “far right.” He and his party wish to reduce immigration, especially the immigration of Muslims from Morocco and the Middle East; they want the Netherlands to maintain its national character, which is secular and liberal, and lament the “Islamization” of their society; he is allied with Marine Le Pen in European affairs but also has worked to distance his Freedom party from what he calls “right-wing extremist and racist” parties, such as the anti-immigrant parties in Germany and Hungary that share some of his views.

He has adopted the slogan “Make the Netherlands Great Again,” for some indication of his substance and style.

Wilders was convicted of inciting discrimination and giving group offense, two “crimes” that are observed in much of Europe but that are not properly the stuff of criminal offenses in a country with free speech. While it is worth keeping in mind that Wilders isn’t a consistent defender of the free-speech rights he complains are being here violated — he has advocated banning both the Koran and the building of new mosques in the Netherlands — the laws he has been convicted of violating are absurd and have no place in a civilized, liberal society such as the Netherlands.

Letter From America (About Corruption in the Pentagon)

The Pentagon: Part Of A Broken System

Rod Dreher
The American Conservative




Whenever I hear a politician say he’s going to save money by tackling “waste, fraud, and abuse,” I think, “yeah, whatever,” assuming that he’s avoiding hard choices. But here is an example of spectacular waste, one that I hope Trump will lay into hard:

The Pentagon has buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget, according to interviews and confidential memos obtained by The Washington Post.  Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.

The report, issued in January 2015, identified “a clear path” for the Defense Department to save $125 billion over five years. The plan would not have required layoffs of civil servants or reductions in military personnel. Instead, it would have streamlined the bureaucracy through attrition and early retirements, curtailed high-priced contractors and made better use of information technology.

More:

But some Pentagon leaders said they fretted that by spotlighting so much waste, the study would undermine their repeated public assertions that years of budget austerity had left the armed forces starved of funds. Instead of providing more money, they said, they worried Congress and the White House might decide to cut deeper.

So the plan was killed. The Pentagon imposed secrecy restrictions on the data making up the study, which ensured no one could replicate the findings. A 77-page summary report that had been made public was removed from a Pentagon website.

The Pentagon wanted to save money, allegedly. This report found great ways to save a gob of it. So the Pentagon killed it, because they were afraid that people would assume that they were wasting money. Which they are.  Why doesn’t Congress want to know how much money is being wasted by the military-industrial complex? From the story:

Arnold Punaro, a retired Marine general and former staff director for the Senate Armed Services Committee, said lawmakers block even modest attempts to downsize the Pentagon’s workforce because they do not want to lose jobs in their districts.  Without backing from Congress, “you can’t even get rid of the guy serving butter in the chow hall in a local district, much less tens of thousands of jobs,” he said.

Read the whole thing. Notice how senior bureaucrats within the Pentagon worked to shoot it down. Note also that for that $125 billion in mere waste and inefficiency at the Pentagon, you could run HHS, the EPA, and the Justice Department for a year. The entire 2017 budget for Veterans Affairs is $70 billion. But heaven forbid that anybody ask the Pentagon pencil-pushers to tighten their belts.

Reading that report, I thought of Bret Stephens’ great column in the Wall Street Journal today. Stephens says that the huge political changes going on around the world have less to do with globalism and more to do with people being fed up with injustice. He writes:

In other words, the “system,” with its high-toned rationale and its high-handed maneuvers, struck millions of people as unaccountable and unjust. It might have been a good thing that the sky didn’t fall on everybody [in the financial crash of 2008], but shouldn’t it at least have fallen on somebody? Bernie Sanders got remarkably close to winning the Democratic nomination by calling Wall Street a fraud and demanding prosecutions. Hillary Clinton lost the White House by so perfectly typifying the system that supposedly worked so well. Donald Trump is what he is, and readers know what I think of that. But Mrs. Clinton’s unforgivable sin was her outsized—and unearned—sense of entitlement.

Look again at this year’s other big political surprises.

Colombians rejected the peace deal because they would not abide having terrorists lightly let off for their crimes. Filipinos elected Rodrigo Duterte because they wanted to exact moral justice against drug dealers, never mind the finer details of legal justice. Britons disregarded dire warnings about the consequences of leaving the EU because the powers of Brussels violated their sense of democratic sovereignty. Italians told Prime Minister Matteo Renzi to shove off because they weren’t sympathetic to plans they see as having been made in Berlin for the benefit of Germans.

The populist wave now cresting across much of the world is sometimes described as a revolt against globalization: immigrants failing to assimilate the values of their hosts, poorer countries drawing jobs from richer ones, and so on. But the root complaint is not about economics. It’s about justice. Why does the banker get the bailout while the merchant goes bankrupt? Why does the illegal immigrant get to jump the citizenship queue? What right does a foreign judge have to tell us what punishments our criminals deserve? Why do our soldiers risk their lives for the defense of wealthy allies?

Those of us who believe in the liberal international order (now derisively called “globalism”) ought to think about this. There are powerful academic arguments to be made for the superiority of free trade over mercantilism, or of Pax Americana over America First. But liberalism’s champions will continue to lose the argument until we learn to make our case not in the language of what works, but of what’s right.

A system that allows a bloated Pentagon bureaucracy to spend $125 million on things it doesn’t need, and suppress a report that suggests ways to cut that waste — in what sense does such a system work?

Letter From America (About Bibi)

The Real Middle East Story

Walter Russell Mead
The American Interest

Precisely because he has a colder view of international affairs than Obama, Netanyahu’s leadership has made Israel stronger than ever.

Peter Baker notices something important in his dispatch this morning: at this year’s UNGA, the Israel/Palestine issue is no longer the center of attention. From The New York Times:

They took the stage, one after the other, two aging actors in a long-running drama that has begun to lose its audience. As the Israeli and Palestinian leaders recited their lines in the grand hall of the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, many in the orchestra seats recognized the script.

“Heinous crimes,” charged Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president. “Historic catastrophe.”  “Fanaticism,” countered Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. “Inhumanity.”

Mr. Abbas and Mr. Netanyahu have been at this for so long that between them they have addressed the world body 19 times, every year cajoling, lecturing, warning and guilt-tripping the international community into seeing their side of the bloody struggle between their two peoples. Their speeches are filled with grievance and bristling with resentment, as they summon the ghosts of history from hundreds and even thousands of years ago to make their case.

While each year finds some new twist, often nuanced, sometimes incendiary, the argument has been running long enough that the world has begun to move on. Where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once dominated the annual meeting of the United Nations, this year it has become a side show as Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Abbas compete for attention against seemingly more urgent crises like the civil war in Syria and the threat from the Islamic State.

Baker (and presumably many of his readers) don’t go on to the next, obvious question: What does this tell us about the relative success or failure of the leaders involved?

Letter From America (About the Trans Cult"

How To Fight The Trans Cult

Rod Dreher
The American Conservative

Hey, I’m in Nashville today at the Southern Baptist ERLC event, so please forgive the light posting. I want to bring to your attention an extraordinary letter from a reader who writes about how he fought the transgender cult that briefly seized his daughter’s imagination. He’s responding to a letter another reader wrote about how this thing has her child in its grips, and the local school authorities are fighting her, the mom, over it. I want to share it with you in case it is helpful to you in your situation. I have edited it slightly to protect privacy:

I wrote you a week or so ago about my experience with this sort of thing in [xxx] County. I absolutely know where this person is coming from and I feel her pain and frustration . The only thing I can tell her, if she has the stomach for it, is to get almost downright combative with the counselors in the school and any psychologist that her teenage daughter sees especially if she, the parent is paying for it. I would keep the pressure on these counselors and their bosses, principals and superintendent as well as school board members. I would usually do it in private and not in any type of open session. In my case it paid off on a few levels.

Letter From America (About Moral Corruption In High Places)

Anthony Weiner, Part 3: The Clintonization of Politics Begins

We should always expect the politicians in Washington, DC, to act like a bunch of Weiners.

Robert Tracinski

The Federalist

Anthony Weiner is at it again, a three-time loser caught once again exposing himself in Internet exchanges with younger women—who inevitably hand him over to the tabloids for a feeding frenzy.

Given his compulsion toward self-destructive behavior, Anthony Weiner is actually lucky sending revealing photos to girls is his thing. If it were liquor, he’d probably already be lying in the gutter on Skid Row. If it were heroin, he’d probably be dead by now. As it is, his third time will cost him plenty, including his marriage to top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin and—well, given the circumstances of the latest iteration of this scandal, he may be unlikely to get either custody or visitation rights with his son.

But that’s his business, and we can only wish it would remain his business. For the rest of us, having the Weiner scandal on the front pages is an early reminder of what it’s like having the Clinton family and its hangers-on at the center of American politics. What happens is that everything becomes all about them, and their personal soap operas become national news.

Letter From America (About a Victorious Skirmish Over Religious Liberty)

California Relents For the Moment

Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra
Christianity Today

A day after religious leaders released an open letter calling on California to protect religious liberty in higher education, the lawmaker behind a controversial bill dropped the proposal in question, allowing religious schools to keep exemptions to anti-discrimination laws related to sexuality.

Under state Senator Ricardo Lara’s amended bill, schools must “disclose if they have an exemption and report to the state when students are expelled for violating morality codes,” the Los Angeles Times reported.  “HUGE NEWS! Sponsor of #SB1146 is amending bill to keep exemptions in place,” tweeted Andrew Walker, director of policy studies at the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC). “#SB1146 is still bad, because it has the disclosure (public shaming) element, but this, for now, is good.”

“Sighs of relief and prayers of gratitude that California #SB1146 bill (restricting religious liberty of colleges) has been dropped,” tweeted National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) president Leith Anderson.

Earlier versions of Senate Bill 1146 would have prevented colleges that received state funds from enforcing codes of student conduct reflecting a college’s religious beliefs about sexual identity, including teaching that marriage is between a man and woman and limiting bathrooms to biological gender. Traditionally, California’s religious schools have received a religious exemption from non-discrimination laws. This bill would have limited it to students who were preparing for a religious career, such as ministry.