Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was the only featured guest at a New York Republican Party dinner Wednesday night, which a spokesman said raised nearly $750,000.

During his 35-minute speech that roused a crowd of high-profile New York Republicans, it couldn’t have been clearer where the GOP’s rising star from Texas wanted to move — away from the divisive rhetoric of a failed 2012 for Republicans and onto a path that could set them up for success in 2014 and 2016.

His speech served as a direct rebuke to the campaign of 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney. It will only further chatter about his future ambitions, including a potential 2016 run for president.

“I am going to suggest that the last election can be explained in two words: 47 percent,” Cruz said, referencing Romney’s infamous speech to donors at a fundraiser last year. At this fundraiser, Cruz took a profound shot at Romney’s narrative.

“I think Mitt Romney’s a good and decent man, and he ran a very hard campaign. But what I mean is the narrative of the last election. The narrative of the last election was, ‘The 47 percent of Americans who are not paying income taxes, who in some way are dependent upon government. We don’t have to worry about them.’ That’s what was communicated in the last election.

“I have to tell you, as a conservative, I cannot think of an idea more opposite to what we believe. I think Republicans are and should be the party of the 47 percent.”

In its latest effort to protect followers of Islam in the U.S. the Obama Justice Department warns against using social media to spread information considered inflammatory against Muslims, threatening that it could constitute a violation of civil rights.

The move comes a few years after the administration became the first in history to dispatch a U.S. Attorney General to personally reassure Muslims that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is dedicated to protecting them. In the unprecedented event, Attorney General Eric Holder assured a San Francisco-based organization (Muslim Advocates) that urges members not to cooperate in federal terrorism investigations that the “us versus them” environment created by the U.S. government, law enforcement agents and fellow citizens is unacceptable and inconsistent with what America is all about.

“Muslims and Arab Americans have helped build and strengthen our nation,” Holder said after expressing that he is “grateful” to have Muslims as a partner in promoting tolerance, ensuring public safety and protecting civil rights. He also vowed to strengthen “crucial dialogue” between Muslim and Arab-American communities and law enforcement.

Evidently that was a precursor of sorts for an upcoming Tennessee event (“Public Disclosure in a Diverse Society”) that will feature the region’s top DOJ official, who serves as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee, and an FBI representative. The goal is to increase awareness and understanding that American Muslims are not the terrorists some have made them out to be in social media and other circles, according to a local newspaper report. The June 4 powwow is sponsored by the American Muslim Advisory Council of Tennessee.

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You don’t really need more than that headline, do you?

As a metaphor for U.S. interventionism in Syria, it’s hard to do better than this:

Senator John McCain’s office is pushing back against reports that while visiting Syria this week he posed in a photo with rebels who kidnapped 11 Lebanese Shi’ite pilgrims…

“A number of the Syrians who greeted Senator McCain upon his arrival in Syria asked to take pictures with him, and as always, the Senator complied,” Rogers said. “If the individual photographed with Senator McCain is in fact Mohamed Nour, that is regrettable. But it would be ludicrous to suggest that the Senator in any way condones the kidnapping of Lebanese Shia pilgrims or has any communication with those responsible. Senator McCain condemns such heinous actions in the strongest possible terms,” Rogers said.

Of course he doesn’t condone it. The State Department doesn’t condone jihadism as an ideology either, yet in both cases we’d be asked to make common cause with it in the name of replacing a Shiite fundamentalist regime’s puppet with a Sunni fundamentalist “democracy.” Watch McCain’s interview about his Syria trip below and count how many bad arguments there are for intervention. One, at around 2:40, has him arguing that we can “handle” this because, after all, we have the world’s greatest military. That implication, that we should take this challenge on in part to show that we’re equal to it, is both very McCain-esque very unconvincing. If Russian-made Syrian missiles end up shooting down a few American planes, what’s the next step in the challenge that we’re required to accept? If we succeed in decimating Assad from the air, how do we meet the challenge of restraining Sunni fanatics from ethnically cleansing the Alawites? He says the status quo is terrible, which is true, without ever explaining how deviating from it would necessarily be an improvement.

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Ever since 9/11, every time some place or another on the planet has been struck by a major jihadist act, the mainstream media have reliably come out with stories about “backlash” against Muslims. Not accounts of actual backlash, mind you, but pieces in which various academics, public officials, Muslim leaders, and other sensitive souls have been described as wringing their hands over the dreaded possibility that some of us boorish infidels might respond to this latest action by going on the warpath against innocent Muslims. If these “backlash” articles have been such a staple of post-9/11 journalism, it’s obviously because they’ve offered the media an opportunity to focus not on the innumerable Muslim-on-infidel atrocities that have actually taken place but, rather, on hypothetical, and violent, infidel-on-Muslim responses – and thus to persist in casting Muslims in the role of victim, even while the bodies of those they have slaughtered in Islam’s name have yet to go cold.

Yet the fabled “backlash” has never really materialized – not, at least, on anything remotely resembling the scale that the media have repeatedly predicted. On the contrary, with a very small number of minor, isolated exceptions, people in the non-Muslim world have routinely responded to Muslim violence with civilized restraint. Indeed, it’s hard to think of anything that more dramatically reflects the difference between the Islamic and Western cultures than the contrast between the brutality and scale of the jihadist attacks on the West in recent years and the extraordinarily low level and modest scale of actions taken against Muslim targets in revenge. This refusal of non-Muslims to take an eye-for-an-eye approach in response to jihadist acts is a remarkable testament to the native tolerance of Christians, Jews, and other non-Muslims – and, indeed, to the black-and-white distinction between pretty much every other religion in the world and Islam, which, alone among major faiths, instructs its adherents to see offense everywhere and to respond even to the merest cartoon with murderous violence on a global scale.

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A Wall Street Journal editorial notes the Obama administration gave special scrutiny to the tax-exempt status of certain pro-Israel organizations and cites a front-page, 5,000 word article in the New York Times published July 6, 2010 as a possible signal to the IRS:

“Why the special scrutiny for pro-Israel groups? A New York Times article in July 2010 provided a clue: Tax-exempt groups were donating to West Bank settlers, and State Department officials wanted the settlers out. ‘As the American government seeks to end the four-decade Jewish settlement enterprise and foster a Palestinian state in the West Bank,’ the Times wrote, ‘the American Treasury helps sustain the settlements through tax breaks on donations to support them.’

“Did the T-men take their political cues from such stories, or did Administration officials give them orders? Either explanation would be a violation of public trust.”

Let me provide another possible clue, found in the June 16, 2009 minutes of the Palestinian negotiating unit headed by Saeb Erekat–part of the Palestine Papers published by Al Jazeera in 2011.

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Last week, the executive board of Boy Scouts of America voted to allow openly gay kids into their programs, thus compromising their long standing set of Christian morals and values. When I heard about their vote, it saddened me to see them succumb to the pressures of a debauched society.

In my report last week about their compromise, I predicted that a number of church sponsored Boy Scout programs would be ended the same way it happened in Canada when they allowed the gays to go camping with them. Well, it seems the exodus has begun.

Attorney General Eric Holder is in the midst of perhaps the most serious challenge of his career over his department’s investigation of government leaks to journalists.

The battle-scarred head of the Justice Department (DOJ) weathered a House vote placing him in contempt of Congress in President Obama’s first term, but is now facing mounting criticism from figures in both parties as well as scornful scrutiny from the media.

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee are investigating whether he lied to the panel under oath, while David Axelrod —Obama’s former chief political strategist — this week called Justice’s investigation of a Fox reporter “disturbing.” Liberal pundit Bill Press said Holder should resign.

White House press secretary Jay Carney was peppered with several questions Wednesday about Holder, and responded that Obama has “confidence” in the attorney general. Obama believes Holder is “doing a good job,” Carney said.

Holder has taken several actions to move through the storm.

Several hundred thousand opponents of same-sex marriage marched in central Paris on Sunday against a reform the unpopular French government passed last month at the price of deepening political polarization.

Large park grounds around Les Invalides monument were full of protesters waving pink and blue flags, while far-right activists hung a banner on the ruling Socialist Party headquarters urging President Francois Hollande to quit.

The protests, which began as a grass roots campaign strongly backed by the Roman Catholic Church, have morphed into a wider movement with opposition politicians and far-right militants airing their discontent with Hollande.

Although they have failed to block gay marriage, the protesters hope their renewed show of force will help stop or slow down further laws some Socialists want allowing assisted procreation and surrogate motherhood for gay couples.

Jean-Francois Cope, leader of the opposition UMP party, marched in the demonstration and urged young protesters to join his party to keep up pressure on the left-wing government.

“The next rendez-vous should be at the ballot boxes for the municipal elections,” he said, referring to local polls due next year where conservatives hope to profit from the protest movement’s unexpectedly strong mobilization.

While the rally was peaceful throughout much of the day, police said they arrested 96 hardline opponents to the gay marriage law later on for refusing to disperse or occupying private property.

Once the bulk of protesters had gone home, clashes erupted between hardliners wielding sticks and riot police, filling the Invalides Esplanade with tear gas. The violence was less severe than at the end of previous demonstrations, however.

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Filthy scum...watch your backs.