I remember once when -- we were sitting shiva for my paternal grandmother, I think-- I mentioned to my grandfather how smart I thought my youngest cousin, David, was. He replied, “All my grandchildren are smart, but the longer they go to school the dumber they get.” I thought of this when Drudge reported “42% of Millennials say they’re socialists, 16% know what a socialist is.” I guess the other 26% think it means they twitter.

On the other hand, though the news of the world seems grim, there are small rays of intelligence starting to beam through the dopiness.

While America’s inconsistent and incomprehensible Middle East policies could lead someone intelligent to think we were deliberately stirring the various Moslem sects to murder each other and leave the rest of us alone, there are signs, as Daniel Pipes observes that the world is waking up to the Palestinian game and Israel is getting fairer treatment than usual. Probably this relates as much to Hamas’ idiotic timing, but perhaps there’s more to it:

The current Hamas assault on Israel has lured the predictable coven of Palestinian nationalists, Islamists, Leftists, and antisemites from the woodwork to bash the Jewish state. But, more surprisingly, Israel is getting support, or at least restraint and fairness, from unexpected sources:

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon: "Today we face the risk of an all out escalation in Israel and Gaza with the threat of a ground offensive still palpable and preventable only if Hamas stops rocket firing."

The Lebanese Internal Security Forces detained two persons for having fired rockets into Israel.

Egyptian security forces seized 20 rockets on their to being smuggled into Gaza.

Mahmoud Abbas, chairman of the Palestinian Authority, attended a Ha'aretz "peace conference" in Israel the day the current fighting began and has infuriated Hamas by his willingness to continue to work with the Government of Israel.

Jordan's Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh demanded that Israel "stop its escalation immediately," but balanced this with calls for "the restoration of complete calm and avoidance of targeting civilians" and "the return to direct negotiations."

The media, too, is displaying an unwonted fairness to Israel.

The BBC published an article, "Are #GazaUnderAttack images accurate?" about pictures claiming to show the effects of Israeli airstrikes on Gaza and found that "Some of the images are of the current situation in Gaza, but a #BBC trending analysis has found that some date as far back as 2009 and others are from conflicts in Syria and Iraq."

CNN's Jake Tapper asked former PLO legal advisor Diana Buttu about a tape of Hamas spokesmen encouraging civilians in Gaza to protect homes of Hamas' leaders with their bodies. When Buttu retorted by calling this a racist accusation, Tapper replied, "It's not racist, we have video… That's not racist, it's a fact."

He adds, per Rasmussen, among likely U.S. voters, by margins of almost 3 -1 Palestinians are blamed more for the hostilities than the Israelis.

The U.S. Middle East muck-up includes of course the feckless John Kerry’s preposterous peace initiative, which preceded this latest war. As to the nonsensical notion that further Israeli concessions could ever lead to peace, Sultan Knish once again is on target:

The rational response is that peace simply isn't going to happen. The two terrorist groups in their two states were set up for the sole purpose of destroying Israel. They are funded and supported by those countries that were attacking Israeli farmsteads with tanks around the time that Orwell was putting his final touches on "War is Peace, Slavery is Freedom and Ignorance is Strength."

They are not going to stop trying to destroy Israel because it's all they know and it's their only reason for existence. And if that weren't enough, they have spent generations teaching their children to hate and there is no sign whatsoever of them putting the brakes on the hate machine which expresses more clearly than anything else that they do not intend to stop fighting now or even twenty years from now.

Not when their educational system is busy training the suicide bomber of tomorrow.

But ignorance is a particular strength of peacemakers. They don't want reasons why it can't happen. Nor do they want to hear that the best kind of peace with people whose religion tells them that they will go to heaven if they die while cutting your throat is the heavily armed peace of cold iron and steel.

War is their peace and ignorance is their strength.

At the moment latest Gallup polls show that Obama’s approval among Jews has dropped to 55 percent, down 22 percent since the beginning of his presidency.

At 55%, given the high educational attainment of American Jews, I have to say my grandfather was much wiser than I gave him credit for decades ago.

Domestically, the administration’s faring no better. The moronic decision to allow tens of thousands of unaccompanied children to pour across our borders is not the big winner Obama might have thought it was when he played his bully card to force amnesty without first securing the border. His failure to push for legislation allowing their immediate deportation only magnifies the mess he created when he announced during his campaign for re-election that he’d delay such deportations. (Despite false reporting by Reuters and Yahoo, he still hasn’t even gone to the border. He chose instead to drink and play pool in Austin and Denver. How noxious he has become out West is obvious from the fact that beleaguered Senator Mark Udall, on whose behalf he went to Denver to campaign, claimed to be otherwise engaged when the president showed up.)

Blacks have been the president’s most loyal supporters, but as A.J. Delgado notes in National Review they are the true casualties of the amnesty battle.  

The black unemployment rate is almost 11 percent, far higher than that of any other group profiled by labor statistics. African Americans are disproportionately employed in lower-skilled jobs -- the very same jobs immigrants take. As Steven Camarota asked in a recent column, why double immigration when so many people already aren’t working?

Who will be harmed most by amnesty? African-Americans.

The issue resurfaced this week when a YouTube video emerged of two young African-Americans confronting pro-illegal-immigration demonstrators in Murrieta, California. Murrieta is one of the towns in which undocumented minors are being relocated -- and supporters are squaring off with protestors.

The young man argues:

If somebody brought six children to your house and you ain’t got no job, are you gonna take them in?… What are you gonna do? Are you gonna try to go out there and take care of these children AND the children you got already that you can’t take care of?… What are we going to do for the people who are here who are starving already?… We got our OWN people that are starving and hungry…. Why would we add to the problem?!

He also laments the problems in black neighborhoods where prices “are upped on everything” after large groups of immigrants move in.

The young woman argues:

It’s just too much…. We already have our own poor people. Starvation, kids walking with no shoes…. We don’t need other people’s kids to bring more problems…. You’re gonna watch America go spiraling down… We’re already in debt as it is. [Now] we’re gonna need more money to support these kids.

Why are Democratic politicians disregarding the concerns and needs of black Americans in a push to address the concerns and needs… of foreigners? Amnesty proponents speak of the need to grant others a better life -- but what of the need to look out for our fellow Americans? What of those black Americans whose ancestors quite literally built this nation through the sweat of their brows?

Instead, Democrats are chucking aside black voters in their rush to lock in the Latino vote (or so they’re hoping). Taken for granted as a given come election-time, blacks are now actively harmed as the Democrats vow to grow their voting base through importing more and more of what they see as future blue-voters. It’s the husband who leaves his wife of 30 years: ‘We had a good run, honey, but I’ve found someone new.’

Black attorney and member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Peter Kirsanow serves as one of the lone voices of reason, repeatedly outlining the harm amnesty will cause black Americans. In a 2013 letter to the Congressional Black Caucus, he wrote: “The obvious question is whether there are sufficient jobs in the low-skilled labor market for both African-Americans and illegal immigrants. The answer is no.” Kirsanow’s statistics demonstrate the way in which immigration impacts the wages and employment opportunities of black males and hurts the black community.

But no one seems to listen to Kirsanow.

[snip]

Senator Jeff Sessions’s recent National Review column  “On Immigration, It’s Time to Defend Americans,” hits the nail on the head. Sessions notes:

Harvard professor George Borjas estimated that high immigration rates from 1980 to 2000 resulted in a 7.4 percent wage reduction for lower-skilled American workers…. The Center for Immigration Studies issued a study based on Census data showing that “since 2000 all of the net gain in the number of working-age (16 to 65) people holding a job has gone to immigrants.”… If mass immigration is so good for the economy, why then -- during this long sustained period of record immigration into the U.S. -- are incomes falling and a record number of Americans not working?

Birthright citizenship is already bad enough; largely refusing to deport illegal immigrants is already bad enough. But now, we’ve upped the ante even further. Overburdened taxpayers, including black taxpayers, are covering the cost to feed, clothe and educate illegals, and black Americans face the additional burden of having their historic suffering belittled and their precarious circumstances made even worse.

Democrats have built a brand as the party willing to stand up for black Americans, but the amnesty push shows what a false promise that was. The message to black voters is: “Yes, your ancestors endured unimaginable hardships and helped build this country, and we said we’d help you out. But now we have a new trophy wife.”[/quote]

Some blacks are already catching on and Jesse Jackson has already expressed concern that money that could go to ameliorate the black community’s ills (and doubtless line his pockets) will go to others.

Well, Hispanics, the Democrats’ new “trophy wife” as Delgado calls them, are not uniformly for swamping the country with  impoverished, ill-educated Latin Americans either.

Americans are angry watching the administration’s massive lawlessness and the court’s slow response. It seems as though the Constitutional guarantees are meaningless without judicial or Congressional intervention, both of which take more time than we think they should. Still this week, the courts and even the ACLU seem to be coming to life.

We are waiting the decision on the challenge to the administration’s effort to make eligible for federal healthcare subsidies those who enroll through the federal insurance exchange rather than state exchanges as the law provides. Even Obama’s law professor, Lawrence Tribe, says he’d not “bet the farm on this coming out in a way that preserves Obamacare.” If the challenge survives, it is unlikely Obamacare will.

And the mendacious officers of the IRS and the government lawyers covering up for Lois Lerner and her bosses are about to learn that Courts can act more quickly than Congress to punish those who misrepresent the facts to them. Two federal judges in the District of Columbia are holding the government to account. In one case Judge Emmet G. Sullivan has given the IRS one month to submit in writing how it lost Lerner’s emails. Normally, the word of government attorneys, considered officers of the court and held to a high ethical standard, is sufficient, but the judge has said this declaration must be under oath and signed by the appropriate official. Shows you how much weight he’s willing to put on the government’s word.

In a separate case in the same jurisdiction Judge Reggie Walton entered another order on this issue:

U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton told Obama administration lawyers on Friday he wants to see an affidavit explaining what happened with Lerner's hard drive. The IRS claims her computer suffered a crash in 2011 that wiped her email records at the time clean. 

But at a hearing examining a lawsuit against the IRS by conservative group True the Vote, Walton said he wants to know what happened to Lerner's hard drive, which allegedly was recycled. He asked for an affidavit from those involved in handling the crashed drive. 

Among other things, he said he wanted to know the serial number, if any, assigned to the hard drive and if that number is known, "why the computer hard drive cannot be identified and preserved."

That makes two judges in an important federal circuit with the most experience in handling cases involving the federal government indicating they will not take government lawyers’ word unless it is signed and under oath, That is a remarkable development.

The administration’s lies, concealments, and delaying tactics respecting its coordinated plan to shut up the opposition in the last presidential election are not going to go unexposed and unpunished for much longer.

As for the effort to stir up women voters and herd them to the polls this year, Senator Chuck Schumer and other Senate Democrats on the Judiciary Committee are pounding on the Hobby Lobby case and  have put forth a constitutional amendment, which would limit free speech and association rights. Even the lefty ACLU has come to life on this one. Its website announces that but for the failed policies of Prohibition, the Constitution has never been amended to limit rights and freedom.

I’d like to think this proposal has no chance at all, but who knows, with so many Millennials, women, (still) 55% of Jewish voters, unknown numbers of blacks and Hispanics who don’t yet understand what’s happening, the Obama and Schumer party just might succeed in turning this into the kind of country Obama always had in mind: a one-party socialist dictatorship.