A video posted last week at MoveOn.org’s website charges that calling illegal immigrants “illegal” fits the definition of a hate crime and calls for the word “illegal” to be abolished when describing individuals entering the United States illegally.  They would prefer using adjectives such as “undocumented” immigrants or “unauthorized” immigrants.  That is sort of like calling a bank robber an unauthorized withdrawer. How about working to eliminate incentives for the illegal behavior itself rather than focus on banning its correct characterization?

“No human being is illegal,” intones MoveOn.org. True, but human beings can and do perform illegal acts.

Words “sometimes kill,” MoveOn.org preaches.  Not really.  Human beings kill, including illegal immigrants.  Thousands of Americans have been killed by illegal immigrants since 9/11.

“While crime is crime and the victims suffer equally whether the perpetrator is a citizen or illegal alien, what makes illegal alien crime so different is that the crime would have never happened if our government was doing its constitutionally mandated duty and enforcing immigration laws,” the group 9/11 Families for a Secure America correctly said in a press release.

However, facts mean nothing to left-wing ideologues.  Indeed, MoveOn.org labels anyone who uses the phrase “illegal immigrant” to describe immigrants who are in this country illegally as a “racist.” Apparently that would include Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor, the first Hispanic justice to sit on the Supreme Court, who used the phrases “illegal alien” and “illegal immigrant” several times during last week’s oral argument concerning Arizona’s immigration law.

Another far Left website, ColorLines, has joined MoveOn.org in the race baiting that substitutes for rational discussion:

Linking immigrants to language like “illegals” (the i-word) is dehumanizing, racist, confuses the immigration debate and it’s just not legally accurate. This anti-immigrant strategy has been moved into the media by a web of people and organizations committed to halting and derailing reasoned, informed debate and policy on immigration.

To the contrary, labeling someone who enters the country illegally as an illegal immigrant is both legally accurate and fundamentally fair to those immigrants who have followed the law and are in this country legally. Simple logic dictates that if a non-citizen entering the country is an immigrant, a non-citizen entering the country illegally is by definition an illegal immigrant. There are no shades of gray here. And it is also fundamentally unfair to Hispanic and other immigrants who have come to this country legally, and have followed the law since arriving here, to airbrush and reward illegal behavior.

The fate of Obamacare, particularly whether its individual mandate provision exceeds the constitutional limits of Congress’ power, is now in the hands of the Supreme Court. Although a decision is not expected until late June, the Left is already trotting out its narrative that any outcome other than a complete upholding of Obamacare would represent an act of unrestrained judicial activism that will endanger the very legitimacy of the Court.

In its lead editorial on Sunday April 1st, for example, the New York Times declared that there has been “no court less restrained in signaling its willingness to replace law made by Congress with law made by justices.” The Times attributed this “disastrous” trend to – horror of horrors – “a political ideology that limits government and promotes market freedoms, with less regard to the general welfare.”

Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) parroted the Times editorial when he appeared on NBC’s “Meet The Press” the same day. Overturning Obamacare, he said, would cast the justices voting in the majority as judicial activists.

What the Times‘ editors, Senator Schumer and the rest of the chattering class on the Left conveniently ignore is that the “political ideology” of limited government they so revile is precisely what animated the Founding Fathers to create the constitutional framework protecting the people and the states from the exercise of unlimited federal centralized power. Consider the following quote from James Madison:

If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress…. Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America. [James Madison, Letter to Edmund Pendleton, January 21, 1792.]

Was it really so surprising that a Supreme Court justice who takes the Constitution and its founding principles of limited government and protection of individual liberties seriously would ask, as Justice Kennedy did during the oral argument on the individual mandate, “whether or not there are any limits on the Commerce Clause?” Was Justice Scalia so out of line when he said that “the Federal Government is not supposed to be a government that has all powers; that it’s supposed to be a government of limited powers.” The Left thinks so.

Let’s suppose the Supreme Court does end up rejecting the constitutional challenge to the individual mandate and decides that it is a legitimate exercise of Congress’ power under the Commerce Clause. Obamacare will still not be home free from a further constitutional challenge. It could come as soon as the centralized government rationing mechanism, which Obamacare uses to rein in the nation’s overall health costs, ends up denying a patient the financial means to pay for critical health care that the individual and his or her doctor deem medically necessary.

Ironically, the next challenge could will be based on the same line of reasoning that the Supreme Court had used to justify one of the Left’s most beloved precedents – Roe v. Wade.

What does Roe v. Wade have to do with Obamacare? It’s all about the meaning of “liberty” under the Constitution’s Due Process Clause.

The 5th Amendment to the Constitution says that “no person” shall “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The 14th Amendment extends that basic protection of individual life, liberty and property against any arbitrary action by the various states. Roe v. Wade applied the Due Process Clause, particularly its protection of personal liberty to make decisions about one’s own body, in upholding a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion to terminate a pregnancy without any undue burden imposed by the government.

Justice Kennedy expounded on the meaning of liberty, in an opinion he co-authored that re-affirmed the Roe v. Wade decision. He explained that protection of individual liberty involved:

the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy… At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State. [Planned Parenthood Of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992).]

Obamacare’s fundamental restructuring and regulation of the nation’s health care services necessarily affects the relationship between the government and the individual when it comes to decisions as personal as the care of one’s own body. This includes governmental decisions on what type and level of critical care should be funded at all.

The central issue boils down to the scope of federal government power over individual purchase decisions. Will the constitutional scheme of limited enumerated powers granted to the federal government have any meaning if the Obamacare individual mandate is held to be constitutional?

The answer to this question revolves mostly around two key provisions of the Constitution. They are: the Interstate Commerce Clause, which specifically authorizes Congress “to regulate commerce… among the several states” (Art. I, § 8, cl. 3), and the “Necessary and Proper Clause,” which authorizes Congress to “make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution” its other enumerated powers (Art. I, § 8, cl. 18).

The Obama administration also made the additional argument that the penalty imposed in Obamacare on individuals who do not comply with the mandate to purchase health insurance is a tax, which Congress has the separate enumerated authority to impose (Art. I, § 8, cl. 1).

However, before the Supreme Court could proceed to address the merits of the constitutional challenge to Obamacare, it had to deal with the threshold question of whether it has jurisdiction to decide the constitutional issues at this time. Thus, the first day of oral arguments involved the technical question of whether it was too soon for the Court to consider the constitutional issues because of a congressional statute, the federal Anti-Injunction Act, which prohibits courts from even hearing a lawsuit challenging a tax before the tax is paid.

Both the Obama administration and the parties challenging Obamacare dismissed the relevance of the Anti-Injunction Act to this case. Indeed, in a demonstration of the legal advocate’s version of “having one’s cake and eating it too,” Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. argued on behalf of the Obama administration that the Obamacare penalty should not be considered a “tax” for the purposes of determining whether the Anti-Injunction Act is applicable, but is nevertheless nothing but a “tax” when considering Congress’s constitutional power to impose a penalty on non-complying individuals via the IRS. The Solicitor General’s attempt to put a square peg in a round hole came back to haunt him the next day when the Supreme Court heard his arguments that the penalty, which both Congress and President Obama said was not a tax when Obamacare was being crafted, was indeed a tax after all. His argument on the tax issue was met with skepticism even by the most liberal members of the Court.

In any event, the Supreme Court wanted the Anti-Injunction Act issue argued for the record before proceeding to the merits of the case and enlisted for that purpose an independent advocate to make the argument for invoking the Anti-Injunction Act in this case. After listening to the arguments and raising questions about the jurisdiction of the Court to hear the case at this time and whether the Anti-Injunction Act could be waived, most justices seemed inclined to find a way around this hurdle so that they could rule definitively on the constitutionality of Obamacare.

The second day of oral arguments was devoted to the main event – the issue of whether Congress had the constitutional authority under the Constitution’s Commerce Clause and Necessary and Proper Clause to require individuals to purchase private health insurance as part of Congress’s authority to address and regulate the national interstate health service market. The tax authority issue, for the reasons mentioned above, did not get much traction with the Court.

Supreme Court decisions going back more than a half century have concluded that Congress may regulate not only those intrastate activities that substantially affect interstate commerce, but also, where necessary to make a regulation of interstate commerce effective, Congress may regulate even those intrastate activities that do not themselves substantially affect interstate commerce. The most classic case establishing this principle involved Congress’s authority to even limit how much wheat may be grown on a family farm. Does the Obamacare individual mandate fall within established Supreme Court precedents or does it push the boundaries of congressional constitutional authority beyond recognition?

The Obama administration’s argument begins with the premise that everyone has to consume health services sooner or later as an inherent part of the human condition. The question is how individuals can most efficiently finance their health service needs without unduly shifting the costs of such services to others. It is fundamentally unfair, the argument goes, to let some people forego purchasing any health insurance for themselves in advance of needing health services because they will end up shifting the cost burden to the rest of society for the health services they will inevitably consume some day but may not be able to afford at that time. Congress, the Obama administration contends, has ample authority to regulate the means and timing of individual financing decisions through the health insurance mandate. This is because individuals’ health service financing decisions in the aggregate affect the viability and scope of the national health services market over which Congress has undisputed regulatory power.

Here is an excerpt from the Obama administration brief, which refers to the individual mandate as the “minimum coverage provision.” It provides a roadmap to the administration’s oral argument to the Supreme Court on the individual mandate issue:

The Affordable Care Act expands access to health care services and controls health care costs by reforming the terms on which health insurance is offered and rationalizing the timing and means of payment for health care services…The minimum coverage provision is within Congress’s power to enact not only because it is a necessary component of a broader scheme of interstate economic regulation, but also because, within that scheme, the provision itself regulates economic conduct with a substantial effect on interstate commerce, namely the way in which individuals finance their participation in the health care market. Individuals without insurance actively participate in the health care market, but they pay only a fraction of the cost of the services they consume…In sum, the uninsured as a class presently externalize the risks and costs of much of their health care; the minimum coverage provision will require that they internalize them (or pay a tax penalty). This is classic economic regulation of economic conduct.

In trying to appeal to Justice Kennedy, often the swing vote on close decisions, and possibly even to Justice Scalia who has taken an expansive approach to the Necessary and Proper Clause, the Obama administration’s brief referred frequently to a relevant Supreme Court decision both justices supported. The decision upheld the authority of Congress to prohibit individuals from engaging in a very localized activity. What Congress prohibited involved the growing, possession and use by individuals of their own marijuana for medicinal purposes even in a state where it was legal to do so (Gonzales v. Raich545 U.S. 1 (2005)). Justices Kennedy and Scalia agreed with the majority decision.

In his concurring opinion, Justice Scalia relied heavily on the Necessary and Proper Clause of the Constitution, which he said “empowers Congress to enact laws in effectuation of its enumerated powers that are not within its authority to enact in isolation.” He said that the relevant question was whether the means chosen were “reasonably adapted” to the attainment of a legitimate end under Congress’s interstate commerce power. The Obama administration’s argument applied Justice Scalia’s language in the Raich case to Congress’s decision to require virtually all individuals to purchase health insurance, no matter their present state of health.

The parties challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare – including twenty-six states – argued that the individual mandate goes further than any previous invocation of the Commerce Clause. For the first time Congress was attempting to regulate inactivity by requiring individuals to purchase a product in the private sector market just because they are alive and reside in the United States. Congress did not just prescribe the rules for commerce that already exists but claimed the power to compel people to enter into commerce in the first place.

As Paul D. Clement, the attorney representing the twenty-six states challenging Obamacare put it:

The mandate represents an unprecedented effort by Congress to compel individuals to enter commerce in order to better regulate commerce.

Congress is creating an affirmative duty for individuals to go into commerce, according to this argument, and buy a product at such time as Congress determines and with, at minimum, the specific features that the government dictates, whether or not the individual will ever need all these features. The parties challenging Obamacare questioned where the limits on congressional power would be if such an individual mandate were held to be constitutional. Clement highlighted this point when he said that the government’s justification of the mandate as a regulation of the economic decision to forego the purchase of health insurance is “a theory without any limiting principle.”

A number of justices zeroed in on this “limiting principle” issue during the oral argument.

Al Jazeera has descended to such low depths that a critic from the Arab media had this to say about it:

Al-Jazeera’s problem is not its political stance. It is entitled to that. Its problem is that it has dealt a blow to every genuine attempt to build strong and reasonably independent Arab media. The channel will allow no discussion of what has become of it, and has taken us back to the days of the ‘no voice rises above the sound of the battle’ media. It casts aspersions on the motives of anyone one who criticizes it, defends fatal mistakes with feigned naivete, and at the same time refuses to concede that its ‘logical justification’ for what is happening today is: “we are implementing the policy of our funder, period.”

Media Matters was founded with the help of another Soros-sponsored enterprise, the Center for American Progress, the radical brain of the Democratic Party. Media Matters itself couldn’t care less about upholding professional standards in journalism. Its affinity with Al Jazeera has nothing to do with a shared commitment to journalistic integrity. Rather, it shares a common enemy with Al Jazeera: Fox News.

Some of Al Jazeera’s most severe critics in the U.S. media just happen to be Fox News commentators such as Bill O’Reilly, who reports periodically on its blatantly biased anti-American, anti-Israel coverage. Media Matters’ founder and head honcho, David Brock, hates Fox News so much for its rejection of left-wing orthodoxy that he decided to use Media Matters’ resources to launch what he called an all-out campaign of “guerrilla warfare and sabotage” aimed at the Fox News Channel. Thus, it is no wonder that the two organizations, Media Matters and Al Jazeera, have formed a mutual admiration society. After all, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Media Matters Action Network senior foreign policy fellow MJ Rosenberg has a profile on Al Jazeera’s website, where his articles attacking Israel and the United States regularly appear. As reported by the Daily Caller, Rosenberg represented Media Matters at the first Al Jazeera “Unplugged” forum on social media in Doha, Qatar in May 2010. At the forum, he praised Al Jazeera as a “mainstream network” and “factual” while attacking Fox News as a “very, very dangerous force in the United States.” For good measure, Rosenberg also charged that Al Jazeera “was bombed by orders of the United States government.”

The new executive order gives the president and his executive branch agency heads far more power than was contemplated by Congress in the Defense Production Act (“Act”).

At least, the definition of “national defense” in both the Act and executive order are the same:

programs for military and energy production or construction, military or critical infrastructure assistance to any foreign nation, homeland security, stockpiling, space, and any directly related activity.  Such term includes emergency preparedness activities conducted pursuant to title VI of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, 42 U.S.C. 5195 et seq., and critical infrastructure protection and restoration.

The difference lies in how much discretion the president has to intervene in and control major portions of the economy if he or his delegated agency heads believe it is appropriate to do so to promote the national defense.

The Act authorizes the president to prioritize contract performance and to “allocate materials, services, and facilities in such manner, upon such conditions, and to such extent as he shall deem necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense.” The executive order follows this statutory grant as far as it goes, but then goes much further, particularly with respect to the energy industry.

Part II of Obama’s executive order (“Priorities and Allocations”) delegates to a broad array of executive agency heads the president’s authority over contract prioritization and allocation of materials, services and facilities across all major segments of the private sector economy, including agriculture, “all forms of energy,” “health resources,” “all forms of civil transportation,” “water resources,” and a catch-all for “all other materials, services, and facilities, including construction materials.”

The executive order delegates to the agency heads, with policy and oversight responsibilities affecting all these different industries, the authority to “issue regulations to prioritize and allocate resources and establish standards and procedures by which the authority shall be used to promote the national defense, under both emergency and non-emergency conditions.” Their authority is be exercised to support programs deemed by the secretary of defense, secretary of energy or secretary of homeland security to be necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense.

The Defense Production Act does not purport to affect so many industries. For example, nowhere are “health resources” even mentioned, much less defined, in the Act, as it is in the executive order.

The executive order is particularly over-reaching concerning the energy industry sector. When setting forth the president’s powers with respect to “the allocation of, or the priority performance under contracts or orders…relating to, materials, equipment, and services in order to maximize domestic energy supplies,” the Defense Production Act places strict conditions on the exercise of such powers.

Specifically, the Act states that the statutory authority to exercise such presidential powers:

may not be used to require priority performance of contracts or orders, or to control the distribution of any supplies of materials, services, and facilities in the marketplace, unless the President finds that—

(A) such materials, services, and facilities are scarce, critical, and essential—

(i) to maintain or expand exploration, production, refining, transportation;

(ii) to conserve energy supplies; or

(iii) to construct or maintain energy facilities; and

(B) maintenance or expansion of exploration, production, refining, transportation, or conservation of energy supplies or the construction and maintenance of energy facilities cannot reasonably be accomplished without exercising the authority specified in paragraph (1) of this subsection.

The Obama administration’s executive order skips right over the special statutory limitations on its executive authority to intervene in the energy industry sector. Instead, the Obama administration gives itself the direct authority to centrally manage the entire energy industry, encompassing fossil fuels and all forms of alternative energy, whenever and however it deems “necessary” or “appropriate” to promote the national defense.

Clinton called on Russia and China to support a Security Council resolution that placed the blame for the violence squarely on the shoulders of the Assad regime. She insisted that, as between the government and the opposition, Syrian President Assad’s forces must stop the firing first. Elaborating on a central theme of her Security Council speech, she told reporters afterwards:

The monopoly on deadly violence belongs to the Syrian regime, and there needs to be an end to the violence and the bloodshed in order to move into a political process. Now, of course, once the Syrian Government has acted, then we would expect others as well to cease the violence. But there cannot be an expectation for defenseless citizens in the face of artillery assaults to end their capacity to defend themselves before there’s a commitment by the Assad regime to do so… There must be a cessation of violence by the Syrian regime first and foremost. Then we can move toward asking others, who will no longer need to defend themselves because we will be in a political process, to end their own counter-violence.

French Minister of Foreign and European Affairs, Alain Juppé, agreed, telling reporters that one of his “red lines” in negotiating a new resolution was to make sure that the initiative for a cease fire must first come from the Assad regime. His other “red line” was that the resolution must include a clear reference to a political process that takes account of “the aspirations of the Syrian people to freedom and to democracy.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov agreed that there must be “an immediate end of violence” in Syria. However, he added that armed elements of the opposition in Syria – including elements said to be affiliated with al Qaeda – were also responsible for the violence and should cease their armed attacks in conjunction with the Assad regime. He supported a resolution by the Security Council, but one that did not impose “any prejudged solutions.”

Both Russia and China referred back to the Security Council resolution authorizing international military action in Libya to protect civilians, which they felt was exceeded by NATO in terms of the scope of the NATO bombings and the arming of some rebels in Libya. They had both abstained on the Libyan resolution, and vowed not to permit a repeat situation in Syria.

French Minister Juppé minced no words in criticizing Russia and China for their comparisons with the Libyan situation:

It is rather indecent to try to condemn this intervention and at the same time to block, to veto a resolution in Syria just at the moment when the regime is killing hundreds and hundreds of victims.

The back-and-forth at the UN took place against the backdrop of more killings in the city of Homs as well as in other parts of Syria. The United Nations estimates that 7,500 people have died so far in Syria, since the crackdown on protests began about a year ago. Valerie Amos, United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator for Syria, expressed horror at the devastation she witnessed first-hand. “As fighting, shelling, and other violence intensifies in Idlib, Homs and other places in Syria, the risk of a grave humanitarian crisis grows,” she said. “I call on all Member States to continue to ensure that the humanitarian response and negotiations for humanitarian access are clearly separated from political discussions.”

An attempt by the UN-Arab League Special Envoy, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, to persuade Assad to initiate an immediate ceasefire failed. Nevertheless, Annan – who once called Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein “a man he could do business with” – remains optimistic.

Negotiations are underway behind the scenes for some sort of watered down Security Council resolution, which could end up finessing the timing of cessation of violence by each side, provide general support for the Arab League’s plan for transition towards a more inclusive government chosen by the Syrian people without specifically asking for Assad to step aside, and call for unrestricted access for international humanitarian workers to reach those in need of assistance. For any such resolution to pass, there will have to be a disavowal of any outside military intervention and no reference to the imposition of economic sanctions under UN auspices.

The Obama administration is indifferent to the spreading use of abortion to deliberately control the growth of the female population. This should not be surprising, considering that, as a state senator in Illinois, Barack Obama consistently refused to support legislation that would define an infant who survives a late-term induced-labor abortion as a human being with the right to live.

And, as I will discuss below, left-wing feminists are perfectly willing to ignore the war against future generations of baby girls if it means preserving abortion on demand at all costs.

Without the deliberate tilting of the scales against the birth of baby girls through gender-discriminatory abortions, the normal sex ratio at birth (SRB) for large human populations has tended to be in the range of 105 newborn boys for every 100 newborn girls. There are millions upon millions of new “missing baby girls” each year, whom Eberstadt defines as the number of baby girls who would have been expected to be born based on the normal biological sex ratio at birth, but were not given a chance to live because of sex-selective feticide.

Eberstadt documents the tragic statistics in his article, starting with China, where girls are not valued as highly as boys. Anti-female eugenics by abortion has resulted in a sex ratio at birth approaching 120 in China – more than 14% over the expected natural biological norm. Eberstadt provides detailed SRB figures by Chinese province, with the ratio reaching more than 130 newborn boys for every 100 newborn girls in at least two provinces.

China has a coercive population control program known as the “One Child Only” policy. Although Beijing officially outlawed prenatal sex determination in 1989, and criminalized sex-selective abortion in 2004, it does little to enforce those laws while concentrating its resources on enforcing its overall One Child Only program. That’s not to say that such enforcement is airtight. Some families do have more than one child. According to Eberstadt, the total number of births per woman per lifetime is estimated by the UN Population Division as averaging 1.64 for the 2005-2010 period, and by the U.S. Census Bureau International Data Base at 1.54 for the year 2010. However, the data show that Chinese families are more inclined to strictly adhere to the One Child Only edict by means of abortion if they learn that the second child would have been a girl.

“Chinese parents appear to have been generally willing to rely upon biological chance for the sex outcome of their first baby,” Eberstadt observed, “but with increasing frequency they have been relying upon health care technology and services to ensure that any second- or higher-order baby would be a boy.”

At work is the interplay of coercive governmental action and cultural norms. The Chinese government seeks to strictly control the overall population through the means of its enforced, but imperfect, One Child Only policy. Cultural norms in China that devalue the worth of girls, as compared to boys, have led many Chinese women to submit to abortions of prenatally identified female fetuses, particularly if they already have a child. The sex ratio at birth for children born after the first child has been “stratospheric,” according to Eberstadt. As of 2005, this ratio was an astonishing 143 for second births and rose to 156 for third births – 36% and 48% above the natural biological sex ratio respectively.

Eberstadt concluded that, to the extent there are births in a Chinese family beyond one child, they are heavily skewed on purpose towards male births:

“…there is absolutely no doubt that shockingly distorted sex ratios for newborns and children prevail in China today — and that these gender imbalances have increased dramatically during the decades of the One Child Policy…In effect, most of contemporary China’s abortions are thus intentional female feticides.”

The net result is that, through deliberate killing of fetuses identified as female by inexpensive prenatal gender determination ultrasonography, the population in China is being socially engineered to radically favor boys over girls.

Let’s not forget that Vice President Joe Biden said during his official visit to China: “I’m not second-guessing — of one child per family.” The “pro-women” Obama administration is also not second-guessing China’s use of abortions to deliberately extinguish the lives of little girls in the womb. Tragically, the Obama administration is making American taxpayers accessories to this calamity. It insists on contributing to the United Nations Population Fund, which helps China carry out its brutal population control policies.

China, while the most coercive in its eugenics policies, is far from the only country experiencing alarming unnatural disparities in the sex ratio at birth between boys and girls due to widespread abortions of female fetuses that have been gender identified by inexpensive obstetric ultrasonography. Eberstadt lists other countries in Asia with similarly high ratio disparities such as Singapore, Vietnam, and India where sex-selective abortion is technically illegal.

The sex-selective abortions cut across religious, educational, socio-economic lines.

However, Eberstadt identifies three forces contributing to this anti-female outcome in the Asian countries that he focused on. They are (1) “local mores that uphold a truly merciless preference for sons;” (2) “low or sub-replacement fertility trends which freight the gender outcome of each birth with extra significance for parents with extreme gender bias,” and (3) “easy and affordable abortion and prenatal sex diagnostics” that enable the eugenic manipulation of the population to favor males over females.

With globalization and increased mobility, intentional female feticides are becoming a world-wide phenomenon. Eberstadt estimates that over fifty countries and territories accounting for over 3.2 billion people, or nearly half of the world’s total population, have unnaturally high sex ratios at birth. The unnatural “girl deficit” for females 0-19 years of age as of 2010 are estimated to have totaled in the range of 32-33 million.

The European Union’s foreign-policy chief, Catherine Ashton, issued a statement on behalf of China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and the U.S. accepting Iran’s invitation to resume talks on what Iran vaguely referred to as “various nuclear issues.”

Of course, there is only one nuclear issue that matters – Iran’s abandonment of its nuclear enrichment program aimed at achieving a nuclear arms capability. Iran’s history of lies, deception, interference with the work of United Nations inspectors and stalling tactics would indicate to anyone with his eyes open that negotiations with Iran at this juncture are not only useless, they will play right into Iran’s hands by helping them to run out the clock until they reach their goal.

Recall candidate Obama’s presidential campaign promise. He vowed to engage in “unconditional” negotiations with Iran. Nearly four years later, President Obama is still wearing rose-colored glasses.

During his March 7th press conference, Obama emphasized the negotiation route:

At this stage, it is my belief that we have a window of opportunity where this can still be resolved diplomatically…And, as a consequence, we are going to continue to apply the pressure even as we provide a door for the Iranian regime to walk through where they could rejoin the community of nations by giving assurances to the international community that they’re meeting their obligations and they are not pursuing a nuclear weapon.

There is not a single shred of evidence to support Obama’s willingness to give the Iranian regime the benefit of the doubt on anything. Indeed, the results of Obama’s failed “engagement” policy towards Iran have proven precisely the opposite. Obama bent over backwards from the very beginning of his administration to enter into the “unconditional” talks with the Iranian leaders that he had promised during his campaign. Most notably, he turned his back on Iranian dissidents in June 2009 so as not to offend the thugs running the Iranian regime.

What was the answer of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei? In 2010, Khamenei said:

The late Imam Khomeini never gave any concession and we, on behalf of the Iranian nation, will never give any concession.

Where is Iran today in its nuclear program compared with 2008?  By December 2008, Iran had accumulated enough of the uranium isotope U-235, which fissions in first-generation nuclear weapons, to fuel one bomb according to a study cited by Iran Watch. Each year thereafter during Obama’s presidency, Iran added to its stockpile enough U-235 to build at least one additional bomb a year if it decided to “raise the level of U-235 in its low-enriched uranium stockpile (3.5 percent U-235) to weapon-grade (90 percent or more U-235).” By the end of November 2011, Iran is estimated to have had enough U-235 to fuel a fifth bomb if it wishes to proceed in that direction.

Obama seems to be counting on the hope that Iran will not make the leap from its increased nuclear enrichment capability to actually building bombs. He thinks that a combination of his charm offensive at the negotiating table and escalating sanctions will give Iran’s leaders pause. But the record indicates otherwise.

Prior to their meeting, Obama re-affirmed what he had said the day before to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference. “My policy is prevention of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons,” he promised. Obama also reiterated that “the United States will always have Israel’s back.”

Netanyahu pointed to the common bond between Israel and the United States, and the threat the two allies shared in common from Iran:

“Americans know that Israel and the United States share common values, that we defend common interests and that we face common enemies. Iran’s leaders know that too. For them you’re the Great Satan, we’re the Little Satan. For them, we are you and you are us. And you know something, Mr. President? At least on this last point I think they’re right. We are you and you are us. We’re together. … Israel and America stand together.”

The three-hour meeting in the Oval Office was described as “friendly, straightforward, and serious” by an unnamed White House official quoted by the New York Times. The mood during the meeting was said to be somber and business-like, but less icy between the two leaders than during previous meetings. Netanyahu thanked Obama afterwards for the “warm hospitality.”

Netanyahu reportedly told Obama that Israel had not yet made a decision on striking Iran. Nevertheless, while appreciating President Obama’s pledge to prevent the Iranians from building a nuclear bomb rather than rely on a policy of after-the-fact containment, Netanyahu left no doubt that Israel was prepared to act alone if necessary to neutralize the Iranian threat to Israel’s very existence.

Key differences were apparently not resolved during the meeting. Obama still believes there is a window for sanctions and the blacklisting of Iran’s central bank to work in pressuring Tehran back to the bargaining table. He tried to persuade Netanyahu to give these measures and diplomacy more time before deciding whether to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Netanyahu does not like the odds that such pressure tactics would work. He expressed deep skepticism that diplomacy and sanctions alone would persuade Iran’s leaders to forsake the development of nuclear weapons. He also made Israel’s case that negotiations proposed by Iran should not resume unless Iran agreed first to a verifiable suspension of its uranium enrichment activities. Obama has not appeared willing to make such suspension a pre-condition to re-opening talks with Iran.

A key difference between Obama and Netanyahu on Iran is over timing of a possible military attack. When will it be time to move beyond diplomacy and sanctions, and take military action? The Obama administration is willing to wait until there is clear evidence that Iran is actually in the process of building one or more nuclear bombs. Israel’s leaders believe waiting that long – even if it were possible to detect such bomb-building activity occurring deeply underground – is a gamble that Israel cannot afford to take.

According to the White House official quoted by the New York Times, Netanyahu did not press Obama on this specific timing point during their discussions. Evidently, Netanyahu saw no benefit in precipitating a dispute with the United States at this time over whether or where to set a firm “red line” beyond which military action would be taken. In effect, for the purposes of their March 5th White House meeting at least, Obama and Netanyahu agreed to disagree.

However, whatever pressure the president and Obama administration officials are putting on Israel privately to stand down until the United States gives its go-ahead, Prime Minister Netanyahu will not agree to put the fate of Israel in the hands of the United States to decide.

Instead, he chose to focus on President Obama’s public statement of support for Israel’s “sovereign right to make its own decisions” when it comes to defending its own people, which Obama expressed during his AIPAC speech on Sunday. In his own speech to AIPAC on Monday evening, Netanyahu said that Israel “must always have the ability to defend itself, by itself against any threats. As Prime Minister of Israel, I will never let my people live in the shadow of annihilation.”

The President began his speech by lavishing warm praise on Israeli President Shimon Peres, who had just previously said in his own speech that Israel has “a friend in the White House.” He announced that he will be inviting Peres to the White House later this spring to present him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “I am grateful for his life’s work and his moral example,” the President affirmed.

Obama offered no such praise for the resolute leadership of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom he is meeting this week, and who carries the real burdens of Israel’s security on his shoulders.

The Preisdent’s speech to AIPAC contained four major themes, which were previewed in his extensive interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic.

First, President Obama emphasized the strong, “unshakable” bond between the United States and the “Jewish state of Israel.” He referred not only to the two countries’ shared economic and security interests, but also to their common ideals of freedom and belief in human dignity:

The United States and Israel share interests, but we also share those human values that Shimon spoke about: A commitment to human dignity. A belief that freedom is a right that is given to all of God’s children. An experience that shows us that democracy is the one and only form of government that can truly respond to the aspirations of citizens.

President Obama also said that “we will always reject the notion that Zionism is racism” and will fight any efforts to de-legitimize the Jewish state.

Yet Obama failed to acknowledge that the Arab Spring, which his administration has strongly supported, is backfiring by producing conditions that are largely antithetical to the universal human values that the United States and Israel share in common. He failed to acknowledge that the rising power of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which his own administration has described in positive terms, threatens the durability of the three decade-old peace treaty between Egypt and Israel and is perpetuating  the Arabs’ vicious slander against Zionism.

For example, Ali Abd Al-Fattah, a Muslim Brotherhood leader in Egypt, said the following during an interview which aired on Palestine Today TV on February 19, 2012:

The time has come for the entire Egyptian and Arab people to unite against the Zionist-American enterprise. We can do without all the foreign aid and dictates, and we can liberate Palestine from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea, by means of our determination and our capabilities… The time will come when all the Arab peoples will strive to realize their aspirations, and Arab Jerusalem – both East and West Jerusalem – will become the capital of the State of Palestine, the accursed Jews will return to wherever they came from, and all the Palestinian rights will be restored, like the Right of Return of the refugees, and the Arab land will be completely cleansed from Zionist filth.

President Obama missed a valuable opportunity to specifically contrast such hateful rhetoric, which is all too typical in the Muslim world, with Israel’s desire to live in freedom and peace with its neighbors.

President Obama’s second theme in his speech to AIPAC was that his words of support for Israel have been matched by his actions. “If you want to know where my heart lies, look at what I have done,” he said.

Obama claimed that “over the last three years, as President of the United States, I have kept my commitments to the state of Israel. At every crucial juncture — at every fork in the road — we have been there for Israel. Every single time.”

Obama listed several examples of his accomplishments, such as providing Israel with more advanced technology and increased military aid, including providing Israel with funding to deploy the Iron Dome system for the protection of Israeli civilians against rocket attacks.

“And make no mistake,” Obama said, “we will do what it takes to preserve Israel’s qualitative military edge — because Israel must always have the ability to defend itself, by itself, against any threat.”

The Obama administration does deserve credit for a number of actions it has taken in support of Israel’s military security, including its supplying Israel with bunker-busting  bombs. However, while discussing what he has done for Israel, Obama might also have noted that the Israeli-American relationship is not a one-way street in which the United States always gives and Israel always takes, as some Americans seem to believe. Israel also contributes significantly to America’s security. In addition to shared intelligence, for example, an Israeli company has developed advanced armor technologies used in the majority of the U.S. vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan, helping to save thousands of lives of U.S. service men and women.

Obama also took credit in his speech for challenging the one-sided Goldstone Report that had unfairly singled out Israel’s actions during Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, for staying away from the Durban “anti-racism” conferences, for opposing efforts to boycott and divest from Israel and for standing up for Israel in the United Nations.

However, if we use Obama’s own standard of judging him by his deeds, his record in unequivocally standing by our closest ally in the Middle East is mixed at best.

For example, President Obama decided that the United States should join the virulently anti-Israel United Nations Human Rights Council. He said that when “one-sided resolutions are brought up at the Human Rights Council, we oppose them.” But despite knowing the dismal track record of this Council, Obama nevertheless helped legitimize its actions by joining it in the first place. He intends for the United States to remain a paying member.

As Anne Bayefsky, director of the Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust at Touro College, explained:

What was the president’s response to the ritualized Jew-bating (sic) that carries on unabated in a global forum in the name of human rights? He is now actively seeking a second term on the Council for the United States.

Not once did President Obama make the equal treatment of the Jewish state a condition for remaining on this “human rights”  body — notwithstanding that the whole foundation of the UN Charter is the “equal rights of nations large and small.”

With regard to Palestinian-Israeli negotiations towards a secure and lasting peace – the third theme of President Obama’s AIPAC speech – his actual deeds have strongly undercut his words of support for “a secure Israel that lives side by side with an independent Palestinian state.”

President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be meeting in Washington, D.C. on Monday March 5th. This meeting is likely to be their most critical one to date. The Iranian nuclear problem, and the need for a definitive response, are expected to dominate their discussions. Israel believes that time is quickly running out for non-military means such as economic sanctions to stop Iran from being able to build a nuclear bomb at will. The Obama administration is saying “not so fast” and to give sanctions more of a chance to work.

Prime Minister Netanyahu is expected to publicly express a hard line against Iran during the meeting, according to a senior Israeli official quoted by Haaretz. Netanyahu will reportedly press for American support for firm action beyond the vague declaration that all options remain on the table. He wants Obama to state unequivocally that the United States is preparing for a military operation in the event that Iran crosses certain “red lines,” according to this Israeli official. Obama is unlikely to go anywhere close to making such a public declaration or to openly back Israel if it decides to launch a pre-emptive attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The United States and Israel do agree on two basic points. They agree that Iran is intent on achieving a nuclear arms capability and is moving full-steam ahead with its nuclear program. They also agree that there will come a point when it will probably be too late to stop Iran from achieving its objective.

Inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have confirmed that there is a sound basis for these concerns in their latest report. They concluded that Iran is pushing ahead with its nuclear program while stonewalling the agency’s efforts to investigate allegations that Iran’s scientists had conducted extensive research on how to build a nuclear warhead. When IAEA inspectors visited Iran recently, Iranian officials refused to allow them to visit a key research facility where some of the alleged experiments were said to have occurred.

However, while sharing concerns about Iran’s advancement towards becoming a nuclear power, the United States and Israel disagree on the urgency of the problem and the timing of any military action to counter it. They differ on the precise point when it will become too late to stop Iran from producing a nuclear bomb and whether Iran can be successfully contained even if it is not stopped in time. “We believe that there is time and space to allow for a diplomatic resolution,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said last month.

No meeting will paper over these differences as long as Obama, who has yet to visit Israel as president while managing to find time to visit Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, fails to fully appreciate the threat that Israel is confronting. He fails to understand Israel’s acute sense of vulnerability against hostile forces determined to destroy the Jewish state by any means possible and Israel’s fierce determination to protect itself at any cost. Nor does he seem to understand that the direct threat a nuclear armed Iran would pose to Israel today will become a direct threat to the United States in the not too distant future if the jihadist megalomaniacs now ruling Iran or their like-minded successors remain in charge.

In short, Israel considers a nuclear-armed Iran to be an existential threat. No wonder, considering the Iranian leaders’ repeated calls for the annihilation of the Jewish state, Iran’s proximity to Israel, and the ease with which Iran’s surrogates in the Hezbollah and Hamas terrorist organizations can be used to help carry out its plans for Israel’s destruction.

On the other hand, while the Obama administration views a nuclear-armed Iran as a very serious threat to regional peace and security, it does not view a nuclear-armed Iran as an existential threat to the United States itself or to the free world generally. It believes that even a successful military strike would only delay Iran’s nuclear program for a few years and would almost certainly set off a firestorm of violence in the Middle East and elsewhere with dangerously unpredictable consequences for America’s strategic interests. That is why President Obama and his top officials have been urging Israel not to take precipitous unilateral military action.

[W]e note that today’s proposal continues to involve needless government intrusion in the internal governance of religious institutions, and to threaten government coercion of religious people and groups to violate their most deeply held convictions. In a nation dedicated to religious liberty as its first and founding principle, we should not be limited to negotiating within these parameters. The only complete solution to this religious liberty problem is for HHS [U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] to rescind the mandate of these objectionable services.

Aside from the Obama administration’s First Amendment problem which the so-called compromise does nothing to solve, Obama’s disparate treatment of unions and Catholic organizations when it comes to granting Obamacare waivers is yet another example of Obama’s two sets of rules. There is the lenient set of rules for his union cronies, who get the Obamacare waivers they requested. And then there is the much stricter set of rules for religious organizations, who will still be shelling out the money to the insurance companies that now become the direct instruments of the Obamacare free birth control mandate. The Obama administration also has a more lenient set of rules when it comes to accommodating Muslims’ exercise of their religious beliefs. The Obama Justice Department, for example, ordered an Illinois school district to pay a Muslim teacher $75,000 because the school district had denied her request for a special unpaid three week leave of absence in the middle of the school year for a pilgrimage trip to Mecca. Never mind the burden imposed on the school to line up substitute teachers to cover her class while she is away, as well as the possible disruption in her students’ learning environment without their regular teacher. And never mind the fact that the pilgrimage takes five or six days, not the three weeks the Muslim teacher demanded. The Obama administration rushed to court to vindicate the Muslim teacher’s “right’ to interrupt her responsibilities during the school year to take part in a pilgrimage. The school district settled the case because it could not afford the cost of lengthy litigation against the federal government. As part of the settlement, the district will also be required to provide mandatory training on religious accommodation to all board of education members and school supervisors. But the Obama administration offers nothing meaningful to accommodate the religious beliefs of devout Catholics who object to being forced, directly or indirectly, to help pay for the Obama administration’s policy of mandating free birth control in employers’ health insurance policies for all employees who request it. Obama’s peculiar sense of fairness extends to other areas of policy as well. Let’s take energy, for example.

The Obama spin machine is in overdrive trying to fool the American people about President Obama’s dismal record in office. His campaign has a website called AttackWatch devoted to fighting back against what the Obama spin machine claims are “false attacks on the President.”

First, the Obama spin machine is trying to convince the American people that the economy has substantially improved under Obama’s watch, evidenced by the lower January unemployment rate of 8.3%. We’re all happy that the unemployment rate appears to be going down (although it is still higher than when Obama took office). However, there are questions as to how the 8.3% rate was calculated. Nearly three million people are not being counted as part of the labor force in the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculation of the unemployment rate. They are arbitrarily excluded from the base labor pool as if they did not exist.

Here is the kind of caveat that you find when you read the fine print of the Bureau of Labor Statistics report for January 2012:

In January, 2.8 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, essentially unchanged from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey (emphasis added).

The more meaningful underemployed rate for January 2012 (which includes people not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them and total employed part time for economic reasons) is 15.1%.

Also, the 243,000 jobs that were reportedly created in the month of January may reflect some computer model expectation-adjusted numbers because fewer seasonal jobs were lost than had been expected. The difference between the loss of seasonal jobs that were expected and the lower number of seasonal jobs that were actually lost appears to have been recorded by the Bureau of Labor statistics as a net gain of jobs. As the New York Post’s business columnist John Crudele concluded after examining the detailed calculations behind the 243,000 job growth number:

A loss of jobs that isn’t as bad as expected turns into a job gain. Does that mean there really are 243,000 new jobs out there? Absolutely not.

When we get past the ambiguous employment figures, every other significant measure of economic performance is unambiguously worse since Obama became president. Here are just three examples:

• 1. The national debt was $10.627 trillion in January 2009 as compared with $15.371 trillion today.

• 2. The average retail price per gallon of gasoline in the U.S. was $1.83 in January 2009 compared with $3.50 today.

• 3. The number of people in poverty in the U.S. was 39,800,000 in January 2009 compared with more than 46,000,000 today.

The facts on the dismal state of the U.S. economy under President Obama speak for themselves.

The second area that the Obama spin machine is trying to re-write involves Obama’s drastic cuts in Medicare to fund Obamacare. The Obama administration’s funding of Obamacare depends on making $500 billion in cuts to Medicare spending for seniors over a period of ten years. Yet when Republican candidates running for their party’s nomination simply point out this heavy blow inflicted on seniors, all that the Obama spin masters can say is that the Republican candidates misunderstand the issue. To the contrary, it is the Obama administration which is misleading the public, particularly seniors, as to its true intentions. Obamacare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) and the regulations being churned out by the Department of Health and Human Services are all about top-down, government mandated health care rationing.

Every Supreme Court justice is required, under Article VI of the United States Constitution, to be bound by his or her oath or affirmation “to support this Constitution.” Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has just broken this commitment by insulting, in front of a foreign audience, the very document she is sworn to support.

In an interview during her visit to Cairo, which aired January 30, 2012 on Al-Hayat TV, Justice Ginsburg advised the Egyptian people to ignore the U.S. Constitution in preparing their own new constitution. It’s just too “old,” she said. Instead, Justice Ginsburg  lavished praise on several post-World War II foreign documents such as the South African constitution, Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the European Convention on Human Rights.

“I might look at the constitution of South Africa,” Justice Ginsburg said. It is “a great piece of work that was done.”

“You would almost certainly look at the European Convention on Human Rights,” she continued.

As for her own country’s constitution, Justice Ginsburg said she “would not look to the U.S. Constitution if I were drafting a new constitution in 2012.”

Quite the contrary. Justice Ginsburg believes that contemporary foreign laws and decisions should be used by her and other Supreme Court justices in determining the meaning of provisions of our own constitution.

At least there was a time when she believed that the United States can both teach other nations from its own experience as well as learn from the experience of others:

If U.S. experience and decisions may be instructive to systems that have more recently instituted or invigorated judicial review for constitutionality, so too can we learn from others now engaged in measuring ordinary laws and executive actions against fundamental instruments of government and charters securing basic rights.

In her latest remarks to the Egyptian audience, however, Justice Ginsburg no longer saw any teaching value in our constitution.  It’s just too “old.”

Justice Ginsburg’s remarks further confirm what we have suspected all along. This far-left justice, a former general counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union, has little use for our constitution as it was written.  Typical of progressives, she views the constitution as malleable clay, which she is perfectly happy to refashion according to her idea of what an up-to-date document for 2012 should look like.

Consider the South African constitution, which Justice Ginsburg praised as “a great piece of work” for Egyptians to learn from instead of the U.S. Constitution.

The South African constitution contains a clause protecting free expression. But unlike the right of free speech under our First Amendment, the South African constitution says that the right of free expression does not include “propaganda for war” or “advocacy of hatred that is based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion, and that constitutes incitement to cause harm.” These vague exceptions go beyond the very limited “incitement of imminent violence” exception to the First Amendment that our courts have recognized. Instead, they intrude into the very areas of potentially controversial speech that our constitution protects. Is that what Justice Ginsburg is seriously recommending?

Nearly 6000 Syrians have died during the 10-month revolt against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, including hundreds of children. In one of the worst single day outbursts of violence, which occurred on February 3rd, the death toll from shelling by Syrian security forces in the city of Homs alone exceeded 200.

In the midst of the escalating violence, the United Nations Security Council met in a special Saturday session on February 4th to address the crisis in Syria. It failed to take any action after Russia and China vetoed a resolution expressing moral support for the beleaguered Syrian people and endorsing a plan put forward by the Arab League to help them move peacefully beyond Assad towards democracy. The Security Council let the Syrian people down as Assad’s killing machine continues to massacre innocent civilians.

Last week started out with much fanfare. The Arab League’s secretary general and the prime minister of Qatar addressed the Security Council in person on January 31st to present the Arab League’s plan and ask for the Security Council’s endorsement.

“The government killing machine continues effectively unabated,” said Qatar’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani. “The hope of the Syrian people is in your hands,” he added.

“Do not let the Syrian people down in its plight,” said the Arab League Secretary General Nabil el-Araby.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and several of her counterparts, including the foreign ministers of France and the United Kingdom, followed the presentation of the Arab League plan to the Security Council with their own supportive speeches.

In her stern address to the Council, Clinton harshly condemned the Syrian regime’s brutality against its citizens and urged full backing for the Arab League’s plan. “It is time for the international community to put aside our own differences and send a clear message of support to the people of Syria,” Clinton told the Council. “The alternative – spurning the Arab League, abandoning the Syrian people, emboldening the dictator – would compound this tragedy, and would mark a failure of our shared responsibility, and shake the credibility of the United Nations Security Council.”

Russia and China had vetoed a prior resolution last October concerning the violence in Syria.  Russia in particular has been running interference for its ally Assad, whose regime is a major customer for Russian weapons and has provided Russia with access to one of its ports.

Mindful of the fate of the prior resolution, which had been spearheaded by the West, Clinton reminded the Council that this time it was the Arab League taking the lead and asking the Council for its support:

So why is the Arab League here before this Security Council?  Because they are seeking the support of the international community for a negotiated, peaceful political solution to this crisis and a responsible, democratic transition in Syria.  And we all have a choice:  Stand with the people of Syria and the region or become complicit in the continuing violence there.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé accused the Syrian regime of “crimes against humanity.” He added that the Arab League was offering the only viable plan to counter the violence and help facilitate a peaceful transition to democracy. “We have to take it,” Ambassador Juppé said.

However, Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly I. Churkin made it clear in his own remarks on January 31st that Russia would oppose any Security Council resolution that attempted “to prescribe outcomes” for the Syrian regime.

In the days that followed these speeches, Morocco’s original draft resolution went through successive mark-ups that were circulated in an effort to reach a consensus among all the members of the Security Council. While China is reported to have proposed little during the informal discussions, Russia insisted upon and obtained a number of key concessions. Bringing Russia on board was the key to passage of the resolution. China, in this case, was viewed as joined at the hip with Russia and likely to follow whatever Russia ultimately decided to do.

The Arab League plan proposed specific steps to successfully transition to democracy. Under the plan, Syrian President Assad would first cede power to his vice president, followed by the formation of a national unity government with the opposition and ultimately a new constitution and new elections. The original text of the Security Council resolution laid out these same steps. However, by the end of the week, these steps were removed from the final draft of the resolution as a concession to Russia.

The original proposed resolution expressed the Security Council’s “grave concern at the continued transfer of weapons into Syria which fuels the violence” and called on the member states “to take necessary steps to prevent such flow of arms.”

The final draft removed any reference to weapons as a further concession to Russia.

The final draft also made clear that nothing in the resolution authorizes the use of any military force to accomplish its purpose.

Russia even managed to promote itself in the resolution as a partner with the Arab League in the search for a peaceful solution. The final resolution draft  noted specifically “the offer of the Russian Federation to host a meeting in Moscow, in consultation with the League of Arab States.”

Everything appeared to be on track by the end of last week to finally bring Russia on board, until Russia decided at the last moment to introduce some amendments with a few revisions to the resolution’s wording. That is where the United States, France, the United Kingdom and others on the Council drew a line in the sand. They decided that Russia had gone too far in trying to weaken the resolution’s text. Precious time was being wasted while civilians were dying in Syria.

The Left is in a horrible huff. Once again James O’Keefe, the conservative  film-maker who exposed ACORN, has demonstrated the duplicity of the Left. This time he proved why strict voter ID laws, opposed strongly by the Left, are necessary.

In more than 10 minutes of video footage, which has gone viral on the Internet, O’Keefe demonstrated how easy it was in New Hampshire for an individual to pose as a deceased voter and still receive a ballot to vote in an election.

New Hampshire House Speaker William O’Brien, (R-Mont Vernon) called the video “a shocking exclamation point on the need for immediate reform to New Hampshire’s election laws to ensure that voter fraud does not taint the rights of our citizens to have their votes counted in an honest, responsible way and impact our state.”

New Hampshire Governor John Lynch vetoed legislation passed in 2011 requiring photo ID at the polls. Governor Lynch had stated in his veto message that there was “no voter fraud problem in New Hampshire.”

O’Brien begged to differ. He said the House will pass legislation again this year. “Hopefully, this video will shame the Governor into signing it,” O’Brien remarked.

Leftists are trying to divert attention away from the underlying voter fraud issue, which O’Keefe graphically exposed, by going after the messenger. They want to prosecute O’Keefe and his colleagues for allegedly violating federal and state election laws, even though there is no evidence that the conservative activists actually tried to cast the ballots that they received posing as deceased voters.

The far-left Daily Kos and People for the American Way, for example, are circulating a petition asking for the New Hampshire Attorney General and the U.S. Attorney to “thoroughly investigate the actions of James O’Keefe and his operatives.”

The petition accuses O’Keefe of sending “his own agents out to commit fraud.” It claims that O’Keefe’s reason was that “he wants fewer Americans to vote.”

The truth is that all concerned citizens, including O’Keefe, simply want fewer dead or fictional “voters” to be counted in determining the outcome of elections.

New Hampshire’s House Majority Leader DJ Bettencourt (R-Salem) twittered a response to the calls for O’Keefe’s head. “Fascinating some want to prosecute individuals who had guts to prove our election system had huge hole in it. Didn’t actually illegally vote,” he wrote.

Articles on FrontPagemag.com and other sites have picked apart President Obama’s latest State of the Union address, both in terms of substance and tone. The speech dragged on and on, with language recycled from his previous State of the Union addresses. The rhetoric was highly partisan. The economic proposals consisted of a laundry list of progressive, anti-private enterprise, big government ideas and so on. However, beyond the specific deficiencies in Obama’s speech, his address was more of an exercise of a state of denial than an honest accounting of the State of the Union.

The most glaring example of Obama’s state of denial was his self-righteous chastisement of others for what he has done himself:

[A]nyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

Remember, Obama’s barbs at others is coming from the same man who felt that America had to be fundamentally transformed from the kind of political and economic system that has come down to us from the Founding Fathers.

Moreover, Obama himself has put down America on several occasions while representing the United States abroad. Perhaps it is time for him to admit that he didn’t know what he was talking about when he leveled all his criticisms of the United States in front of foreign audiences. For example, on his very first trip overseas, in Strasbourg, France, Obama said the United States had “failed to appreciate Europe’s leading role in the world” and that “there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive.”

In addition to his apologies and put-downs of America, Obama has downplayed the idea of American exceptionalism. When asked in France what he thought of America’s claim to an exceptional position among nations, he quipped that “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.”

By extension of Obama’s logic, since every country would most likely think of itself as exceptional, the idea that America truly is a unique example of freedom, economic dynamism, and goodness to the rest of the world has no meaning. This is moral relativism at its worst, compounded by Obama’s embarrassing habit of bowing to world leaders.

Moreover, as a result of some of his own policies, Obama is helping to bring about a decline of American power and influence, if they are not soon reversed. He is planning to hollow out our military with drastic budget cuts. He is ceding economic power to China. His so-called reset policies with Russia have played into Russia’s hands. Iran is ever closer to developing a nuclear bomb while Obama’s engagement policy has cost us crucial time. The list goes on and on.

A second example of Obama’s state of denial in his State of the Union address involved energy. He still believes the sun and wind gods, with a big dose of government funding, are the answer to our nation’s energy problem.

Because of federal investments, renewable energy use has nearly doubled. And thousands of Americans have jobs because of it.

Somehow, the Solyndra fiasco didn’t make it into Obama’s speech. American taxpayers were the losers to the tune of $500 million. So were the Solyndra employees when the company went belly-up. The only winners in the case of Solyndra were Obama’s campaign contribution bundlers who were lobbying for the Solyndra government loan guarantees.

Obama’s inexplicable decision to block the Keystone pipeline for crass political reasons didn’t make it into his speech either. Obama is inexcusably playing political games to hold on to his environmental base through the election, with good jobs for Americans and increased energy independence cast aside as the sacrificial lambs. Even Obama’s own jobs council has recommended building more pipelines. But then again, Obama rarely listens to the critical recommendations of his own councils and commissions such as his bipartisan deficit reduction commission.

To convince the world that sharia-based laws protect personal freedoms and human rights for all, Islamists engage in the time-honored Muslim tradition of lying about their own beliefs to conceal their true nature. This form of deception is known as “taqiyya.” Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is engaging in taqiyya as it prepares to lead Egypt’s newly elected parliament and to assure Egyptian citizens and the world at large that they are peace-loving advocates of universal human rights. The Obama administration is buying this taqiyya hook, line and sinker — and spreading it.

Just last week, for example, U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson met with the Muslim Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide Mohammed Badie, congratulating the group for the victory of their political wing, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), in the elections for a new parliament. She listened attentively as Badie assured her that sharia law “ensures personal freedoms for all.” When Badie told her the United States had to prove to Muslims that it has seen the error of its ways in past dealings with the Muslim world, Patterson followed the lead of President Obama. She apologized for what she said were past American mistakes and promised that the U.S. will “learn from them to avoid their recurrence in the future.”

Back in Washington, D.C., State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said in a January 5th press briefing that the United States trusts the Muslim Brotherhood party’s good intentions. Choosing to downplay an interview by a senior Muslim Brotherhood leader with Al Hayat, in which he said that the treaty with Israel is not binding, Nuland responded:

We’ve seen this press report. I would say that it is one member of the Muslim Brotherhood. We have‬ had other assurances from the party with regard to their commitment not only to universal human rights, but to the international obligations that the Government of Egypt has undertaken.

The Muslim Brotherhood and its Obama administration partners in taqiyya ask us to accept at face value the Brotherhood’s current face of moderation. We are supposed to believe that it has eschewed violence, wants to maintain peaceful relations with Israel and is dedicated to fostering an open pluralistic democracy in Egypt in which all of its citizens are treated equally.

The facts unfortunately do not support this rosy picture. For example, the “one member of the Muslim Brotherhood” whose hostile remarks earlier this month against Israel were dismissed as irrelevant by the State Department spokeswoman was the Brotherhood’s deputy leader, Dr. Rashad Bayoumi. He said in his interview that his organization will not recognize Israel “under any circumstance.” Bayoumi added that “we do not recognize Israel at all. [Israel is] an occupying criminal enemy.”

Dr. Bayoumi’s interview took place just a few weeks after Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide Mohammed Badie welcomed Hamas’s Gaza leader, Ismail Haniyeh, at the Brotherhood’s Cairo headquarters. Haniyeh said during his visit that “Our presence with the Brotherhood threatens the Israeli entity.” For his part, Badie had nothing but praise for Hamas, which has not renounced violence and was after all the offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Dr. Mahmoud Saad al-Katatni, the Director of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Freedom and Justice Party until he resigned on January 21, 2012 to serve as the speaker of the new Egyptian parliament, said last month that the parliament is expected to reevaluate the Camp David peace treaty that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed with Israel in 1979:

A long time has passed since the Camp David accord was signed and like the other agreements it needs reevaluation and this is in the hands of the Parliament[.]

Al-Katatni denied a report in an Israeli newspaper that had claimed the Muslim Brotherhood has reached understandings with the United States and Israel regarding the importance of safeguarding the peace treaty with Israel:

The report in the newspaper is completely unfounded. There have been no contacts or understandings with the American or Israeli side about the peace treaty that President Anwar Sadat signed in 1979.

Is the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated leader’s equivocation on a 32-year-old treaty, which has maintained peace between Egypt and Israel, what the State Department’s spokeswoman had in mind when she expressed confidence in the Muslim Brotherhood’s “commitment… to the international obligations that the Government of Egypt has undertaken”?

And what do we make of the report from the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which closely monitors the Arab media, about the recent virulent anti-Semitic writings appearing on the Muslim Brotherhood’s website, Ikhwanonline.com? The report stated:

The website of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in Egypt, Ikhwanonline.com, contains articles with antisemitic motifs, including Holocaust denial and descriptions of the ‘Jewish character’ as covetous, exploitative, and a source of evil in human society. While articles of this tenor have been posted on the site in the past, their posting has recently taken on greater importance in light of the group’s increasing strength following the ouster of the Mubarak regime, as reflected by the results of the recent parliamentary elections.

In addition to antisemitic content, articles on the site also include praise for jihad and martyrdom, and condemnation of negotiation as a means of regaining Islamic lands. Among these are articles calling to kill Zionists and praising the September 9, 2011 attack on the Israeli Embassy in Cairo – which one article called a landmark of the Egyptian revolution.

Saying one thing to guarantee Obama administration support for the Muslim Brotherhood and saying another on the Muslim Brotherhood’s own website is vintage Islamist taqiyya.

How about universal human rights such as freedom of religion and expression? Again, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Obama administration want us to forget about the Muslim Brotherhood’s past positions on denying certain rights to women and religious minorities. They expect everyone to fall in line and embrace the “moderate” leadership of today, exemplified by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide, Mohammed Badie, and the former director of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Freedom and Justice Party, who was just chosen as the speaker of the parliament, Mahmoud Saad al-Katatni.

Both Badie and al-Katatni espouse sharia law as the basis for governing Egypt, but maintain that sharia law, inclusive democracy and universal human rights are all compatible with each other. To this end, as noted above, Badie claims that sharia law “ensures personal freedoms for all.” Al-Katatni said in an interview with al-Jazeera that the Freedom and Justice Party “is not a religious party but it’s a civil party… that seeks a modern and democratic state but with a ‘Islamic reference’.” The Muslim Brotherhood’s website describes al-Katatni as “renowned for his moderate stances.”

Congressman Ron Paul showed in the January 17th Fox News debate why he would be so dangerous as president and commander-in-chief. He believes, in a twist on the Judeo-Christian Golden Rule, that our Islamist enemies are only assaulting us because we assaulted them first. Sorry, appeaser-in-chief Paul, but the Koran commands devout jihadists to use whatever means are necessary to destroy all infidels, no matter what we have done or plan to do to them.

As part of an exchange involving the appropriate response to al Qaeda and their Taliban supporters, Paul exclaimed:

My point is, if another country does to us what we do others, we’re not going to like it very much. So I would say that maybe we ought to consider a golden rule in — in foreign policy. Don’t do to other nation… what we don’t want to have them do to us.

Paul even offered the absurd analogy comparing our killing of the mass murderer Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil, where he was provided a sanctuary, to the Communist Chinese government deciding to go after a Chinese dissident seeking freedom in the United States. Newt Gingrich properly labeled this comparison “utterly irrational.”

Ron Paul may have some good ideas on reining in the power of the Federal Reserve and on the need to control federal spending. But he is clueless in dealing with our Islamist enemies. He either does not understand or refuses to believe the ideology that drives them. They want to kill us because our nation is governed on the basis of principles derived from Judeo-Christian beliefs including the true Golden Rule. They hate us because of who we are, not for any alleged harm that we’ve ever caused them.

Only three years after the United States won its independence, when there was no Jewish state for Muslims to resent, and no American troops on Muslim soil, Thomas Jefferson, then U.S. ambassador to France, and John Adams, then U.S. Ambassador to Britain, learned from a Muslim ambassador to Britain why the Muslims were so hostile towards Americans. Jefferson and Adams were attempting to negotiate a peace treaty with the Muslim “Barbary pirates,” an exercise that ultimately proved to be futile.

As Jefferson and Adams later reported to Congress, the Muslim ambassador explained to them that Islam

Was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman [Muslim] who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.

All that Ron Paul needs to do is take a look at the Koran itself, cited by that Muslim ambassador more than 200 years ago, to understand the source of the  jihadist ideology that we are still fighting today.

Here is a sample:

• “Kill the disbelievers wherever we find them.” (Koran, 2:191)

• “O ye who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends: They are but friends to each other.” (Koran 5:51)

• “Shall I tell you who, in the sight of God, deserves a yet worse retribution than these? Those [the Jews] whom God has rejected and whom He has condemned, and whom He has turned into monkeys and pigs because they worshiped the powers of evil.” (Koran 5:60)

• “I will inspire terror into the hearts of unbelievers: you smite them above their necks and smite all their fingertips off of them.” (Koran, 8:12)

• “So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captives and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, leave their way free to them; surely Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.”

•  “[F]ight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book [Christians and Jews], until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” (Koran, 9:29)

• “When we decide to destroy a population, we send a definite order to them who have the good things in life and yet sin. So that Allah’s word is proven true against them, then we destroy them utterly.” (Koran, 17:16-17)

Islamist apologists argue that the Koran also contains verses calling for tolerance and understanding.  If the verses written while Muhammad was living in Mecca, where he and his followers were then surrounded by much stronger non-Muslim populations, constituted the entirety of the Koran, they may have had a point. However, the milder verses were superseded by the far more war-like and intolerant verses written during Muhammad’s time in Medina where he successfully launched his jihad of conquests against non-believers, especially against Jews who refused to convert to Islam. Moreover, when one examines the real meaning of jihad according to Muhammad from other primary sources such as Bukhari (the Hadith, which are oral traditions relating to the words and deeds of Muhammad), the fact is that 97% of the jihad references are about war and 3% are about so-called inner struggle.

On January 4, 2012 President Obama announced four unilateral appointments, citing the Recess Clause of the Constitution. These involved the appointment of the first director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray, and appointees to fill three vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board. Predictably, the Obama Justice Department ratified his abuse of his constitutional recess appointment power. In a legal memo dated January 6, 2012, Virginia A. Seitz, the assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, concluded that the Senate’s “pro forma” sessions counted as recesses even though the Senate did not regard them as recesses. Why? Because the president says so.

Seitz claims that if during any period the Senate cannot actually conduct business on the spot and is “unavailable to perform its advise-and-consent function,” the president is free to deem the Senate in recess and make his own “recess” appointments. The absurdity of such logic means that any time between Friday and Monday when the Senate often does not conduct official business, the president can make all of the appointments he wants to.

Seitz admits that the practice of holding “pro forma” Senate sessions that were not deemed recesses by the Senate began when the Democrats controlled the Senate and a Republican occupied the White House:

Beginning in late 2007, and continuing into the 112th Congress, the Senate has frequently conducted pro forma sessions during recesses occurring within sessions of Congress… The Senate Majority Leader has stated that such pro forma sessions break a long recess into shorter adjournments, each of which might ordinarily be deemed too short to be considered a “recess” within the meaning of the Recess Appointments Clause, thus preventing the President from exercising his constitutional power to make recess appointments.

Seitz even quotes a 2007 statement by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.): “[T]he Senate will be coming in for pro forma sessions . . . to prevent recess appointments.”

Reid is still the Senate Majority Leader under whom the very same pro forma procedure is being followed this time around. The only real difference – there is now a Democrat occupying the White House.

Seitz tries to draw another distinction between then and now. In 2007-2008, she says, the Senate really wanted to block recess appointments by using the pro forma sessions. This time, Seitz argues, the House of Representatives made the Senate do it by refusing to pass any resolution to allow the Senate to recess or adjourn for more than three days:

While this practice was initiated by Senate action, more recently the Senate’s use of such sessions appears to have been forced by actions of the House of Representatives.

Under the Constitution, as Seitz acknowledges, “[n]either House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days.” (U.S. Const. Art. I, § 5, cl. 4 ). But Seitz tries to turn this provision around to her favor by arguing that, since the House prevented the Senate from adjourning for more than three days even if it wanted to, the president can help the Senate out and decide for himself that the Senate was really on an extended recess.

Seitz then proceeds to the heart of her legal argument in support of Obama’s “recess” appointments.  She states that under a test first articulated by Attorney General Daugherty in 1921, and subsequently reaffirmed and applied by several opinions of the Justice Department, the “constitutional test for whether a recess appointment is permissible is whether the adjournment of the Senate is of such duration that the Senate could ‘not receive communications from the President or participate as a body in making appointments.’”

Seitz proceeds to take quotes out of context from the Daugherty opinion, which she uses to support her argument, such as the following:

[T]he president has broad discretion to determine when there is a real and genuine recess making it impossible for him to receive the advice and consent of the Senate.

Seitz neglects to mention that Attorney General Daugherty was dealing with the issue of whether the president can make appointments during a recess, no matter how long, if the recess occurred within a single session. Daugherty concluded that a 28-day intra-session break clearly did constitute a recess for purposes of the Recess Appointments Clause. However, he wrote that a break “for only 2 instead of 28 days” did not constitute such a recess. “Nor do I think an adjournment of 5 or even 10 days can be said to constitute the recess intended by the Constitution.”