A Time For Choosing by Ronald Reagan

There are perhaps four speeches in American history that so electrified the public that they propelled their orators to the front rank of presidential politics overnight: Abraham Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address of 1860, William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic convention, Barack Obama’s keynote address to the 2004 Democratic convention and Ronald Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” speech 50 years ago.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXBswFfh6AY

The War of Clinton's Ear by Mark Steyn

Hillary's all-day testimony on Benghazi, still in progress as Hugh and I spoke:


http://www.hughhewitt.com/wp-content/uploads/10-22hhs-steyn.mp3

Ted Cruz: A fresh approach to American foreign policy – and US-Israel relations by Caroline Glick

US Senator and presidential contender issues scathing rebuke of Obama administration's handling of the Mideast conflict.

US Senator Ted Cruz, the conservative Republican firebrand from Texas, is running for president. Up until a few weeks ago, his candidacy was met with indifference as the media and political operatives all dismissed the viability of his candidacy. But that is beginning to change. The voices arguing that Cruz, the favorite of Tea Party fiscal conservatives and Evangelical Christians may have what it takes to win the Republican nomination have multiplied.

Since arriving in Washington four years ago, Cruz has arguably been Israel’s most avid defender in the Senate. During Operation Protective Edge in July 2014, Cruz used his authority as a member of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee to force the Obama administration to end the Federal Aviation Commission’s ban on US flights to Ben-Gurion Airport. Cruz announced at the time that he would put a hold on all State Department appointments until the administration justified the flight ban...

I interviewed Cruz by telephone from the campaign trail earlier this week about his views on the purpose of American foreign policy, US-Israel relations, the Iran nuclear deal and the Palestinian conflict with Israel.

The transcript of our conversation follows.

http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Politics-And-Diplomacy/Ted-Cruz-A-fresh-approach-to-American-foreign-policy-and-US-Israel-relations-429752

Palestine: The Psychotic Stage by Bret Stephens

The truth about why Palestinians have been seized by their present blood lust.

If you’ve been following the news from Israel, you might have the impression that “violence” is killing a lot of people. As in this headline: “Palestinian Killed As Violence Continues.” Or this first paragraph: “Violence and bloodshed radiating outward from flash points in Jerusalem and the West Bank appear to be shifting gears and expanding, with Gaza increasingly drawn in.”

Read further, and you might also get a sense of who, according to Western media, is perpetrating “violence.” As in: “Two Palestinian Teenagers Shot by Israeli Police,” according to one headline. Or: “Israeli Retaliatory Strike in Gaza Kills Woman and Child, Palestinians Say,” according to another. 

Such was the media’s way of describing two weeks of Palestinian assaults that began when Hamas killed a Jewish couple as they were driving with their four children in the northern West Bank. Two days later, a Palestinian teenager stabbed two Israelis to death in Jerusalem’s Old City, and also slashed a woman and a 2-year-old boy. Hours later, another knife-wielding Palestinian was shot and killed by Israeli police after he slashed a 15-year-old Israeli boy in the chest and back. 

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Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Peter Berkowitz on the prospect of the Palestinian Authority's third intifada against the Jewish state. Photo credit: Getty Images.

Other Palestinian attacks include the stabbing of two elderly Israeli men and an assault with a vegetable peeler on a 14-year-old. On Sunday, an Arab-Israeli man ran over a 19-year-old female soldier at a bus stop, then got out of his car, stabbed her, and attacked two men and a 14-year-old girl. Several attacks have been carried out by women, including a failed suicide bombing.

Regarding the causes of this Palestinian blood fetish, Western news organizations have resorted to familiar tropes. Palestinians have despaired at the results of the peace process—never mind that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas just declared the Oslo Accords null and void. Israeli politicians want to allow Jews to pray atop the Temple Mount—never mind that Benjamin Netanyahudenies it and has barred Israeli politicians from visiting the site. There’s always the hoary “cycle of violence” formula that holds nobody and everybody accountable at one and the same time.

Left out of most of these stories is some sense of what Palestinian leaders have to say. As in these nuggets from a speech Mr. Abbas gave last month: “Al Aqsa Mosque is ours. They [Jews] have no right to defile it with their filthy feet.” And: “We bless every drop of blood spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah.”

Then there is the goading of the Muslim clergy. “Brothers, this is why we recall today what Allah did to the Jews,” one Gaza imam said Friday in a recorded address, translated by the invaluable Middle East Media Research Institute, or Memri. “Today, we realize why the Jews build walls. They do not do this to stop missiles but to prevent the slitting of their throats.”

Then, brandishing a six-inch knife, he added: “My brother in the West Bank: Stab!”

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Imagine if a white minister in, say, South Carolina preached this way about African-Americans, knife and all: Would the news media be supine in reporting it? Would we get “both sides” journalism of the kind that is pro forma when it comes to Israelis and Palestinians, with lengthy pieces explaining—and implicitly justifying—the minister’s sundry grievances, his sense that his country has been stolen from him?

And would this be supplemented by the usual fake math of moral opprobrium, which is the stock-in-trade of reporters covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? In the Middle East version, a higher Palestinian death toll suggests greater Israeli culpability. (Perhaps Israeli paramedics should stop treating stabbing victims to help even the score.) In a U.S. version, should the higher incidence of black-on-white crime be cited to “balance” stories about white supremacists?

Didn’t think so.

Treatises have been written about the media’s mind-set when it comes to telling the story of Israel. We’ll leave that aside for now. The significant question is why so many Palestinians have been seized by their present blood lust—by a communal psychosis in which plunging knives into the necks of Jewish women, children, soldiers and civilians is seen as a religious and patriotic duty, a moral fulfillment. Despair at the state of the peace process, or the economy? Please. It’s time to stop furnishing Palestinians with the excuses they barely bother making for themselves.

Above all, it’s time to give hatred its due. We understand its explanatory power when it comes to American slavery, or the Holocaust. We understand it especially when it is the hatred of the powerful against the weak. Yet we fail to see it when the hatred disturbs comforting fictions about all people being basically good, or wanting the same things for their children, or being capable of empathy.

Today in Israel, Palestinians are in the midst of a campaign to knife Jews to death, one at a time. This is psychotic. It is evil. To call it anything less is to serve as an apologist, and an accomplice.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/palestine-the-psychotic-stage-1444692875

Nigel Farage Confronts Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande About Failure of EU, Currency and “Refugees”…

Merkel looks disgusted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLeFfiYgcro

Zero correlation between state homicide rate and state gun laws

There’s been much talk recently — including from President Obama — about there being a substantial correlation between state-level gun death rates and state gun laws. Now correlation obviously doesn’t equal causation; there may be lots of other factors that are the true causes of both of the things that are being measured. But if we do look for now at correlation, it seems to me that the key question should focus on state total homicide rates, or perhaps (for reasons I describe below) total intentional homicide plus accidental gun death rates. And it turns out that there is essentially zero correlation between these numbers and state gun laws.

To begin with, here’s why I focus on total homicide, rather than gun homicide or all gun deaths. First, few people care much about whether they are stabbed to death or shot to death. And even if gun restrictions do decrease gun homicides, that effect may well be offset (or more than offset) by an increase in other homicides:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/10/06/zero-correlation-between-state-homicide-rate-and-state-gun-laws/

Oregon and Our Post-Constitutional Republic

Here's the reason why our debate is about struggling to limit the Left’s antigun agenda rather than asserting our own gun rights.

Are you embarrassed by the reasons why we have the right to keep and bear firearms? Democrats think you are and, in this, they could not be more right.

That is why last week’s mass-murder shooting at Oregon’s Umpqua Community College has led to the same tired political act we witness each time a gun tragedy or atrocity occurs: The shooting is politicized by the Left to advance gun restrictions; the timely and false suggestion is made that gun crime is on the rise (it has actually decreased dramatically in the last generation); regulatory proposals are advanced that would have had little or no chance of preventing the just-occurred shootings; gun-rights advocates point out the flaws in both the proposals and the premise that guns cause more violence than they create; and we have a stalemate in the gun policy debate while ignoring mental illness (the wayward policies on which contribute more to mass-shootings than does the availability of firearms).

Why are we debating policy? After all, gun rights are explicit in the Second Amendment. In general, there is not supposed to be much policy debate where our fundamental rights are concerned. We would not, for example, abide a suggestion that we reconsider whether the government may break into your home and poke around for evidence without a warrant. That is not to say there may not be logical reasons to allow a police officer to act unilaterally on a strong hunch; it is to say that a constitutional right is supposed to be a guarantee – something the government has to respect, not something the citizen has to justify.

So why is that not the case with guns?

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2015/10/08/oregon-and-our-post-constitutional-republic/?singlepage=true

BRILLIANT! WATCH TED CRUZ DESTROY SIERRA CLUB PRESIDENT ON CLIMATE CHANGE

This is excellent. Ted Cruz masterfully debates Sierra Club President, Aaron Mair, on Climate Change, asking him about the objective data that shows no significant warming trend in the last 18 years. But Mair only wanted to focus on a study that he agrees with, that says 97 percent of scientists say the earth is cooking or something and claims the science is settled and no longer up for debate. It was pathetic. 

Cruz took him apart, exposing the fact that he doesn’t know what the heck he’s talking about, and then schooled a Democrat who objected.

Watch:

http://therightscoop.com/briliant-watch-ted-cruz-destroy-sierra-club-president-on-climate-change/

Sen. Cruz: The Real Story of What Is Happening in Washington

Ted Cruz gave possibly the best speech I have ever heard on the Senate Floor. John Adams would have been proud of him. While on the Senate floor, Cruz beseeched his fellow Republicans to defend the most innocent among us… the unborn. He spoke fervently in favor of defunding Planned Parenthood and protecting the precious lives of millions of unborn babies. This is an issue that most conservatives are in favor of and support. It is at the very heart of being a conservative. The magnificent speech that Ted Cruz gave followed the GOP leadership’s blocking of his attempt to get them to vote on his amendment to strip the funding from the butchers of Planned Parenthood and the apocalyptic funding of the Iranian nuclear deal.

http://www.cruz.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=2455

The truth about gun deaths: numbers and actual solutions

When the President went on television after the Oregon college mass shooting he issued a challenge to the media. He asked them to show America the number of gun deaths as compared to the number of terrorism related deaths since the 9/11 attacks. The media dutifully complied and soon every network, newspaper and magazine was putting up startling graphics, such as this one tweeted by CNN.

These graphics and figures were almost uniformly followed by comments about the mass shooting and the “pressing need” for background checks and other gun control laws. Unfortunately, all of these numbers flashing around were dishonestly offered up with no context or details. As it turns out, however, the real numbers are available from a variety of sources including the FBI and the CDC, among others, so let’s take a look at them. It takes federal agencies a long time to compile and publish their statistics, so the last full set of data we have is from 2011 and the figures can shed a lot of light on exactly how mendacious gun control advocates are being with these studies.

http://hotair.com/archives/2015/10/04/the-truth-about-gun-deaths-numbers-and-actual-solutions/

UPDATED WITH FULL SPEECH — WATCH Bibi Netanyahu’s dramatic ‘DEAFENING SILENCE’ moment before the UN!

Netanyahu had a very simply but incredibly dramatic moment in the middle of his speech before the United Nations where he paused for 45 seconds, and just stared down the members, shaming them for the world’s complicity with the attempted genocide of the Jews in World War II...

Wow. There were some idiot liberals on Twitter mocking the moment, but it was of course, because they despise Israel. Given the collapse of Obama’s idiotic foreign policy in Syria in the last few days, it’s good to see some strong leadership from ANYONE in the West.
http://therightscoop.com/watch-bibi-netanyahus-dramatic-deafening-silence-moment-before-the-united-nations/