RUTHFULLY YOURS

The October, 2013 issue of Discover Magazine has an interview titled “Harper Reed: Game Changer”. Discover will not put it online for several months. The quotes in the article are from the article.

The article is an overview of what they did to get people to be active, to get out the vote and to elect Barak Obama. There are statements that bring into question the role of Internet sites like Facebook, Twitter, email providers and Google. There are many unasked and unanswered questions.

Q (Discover Magazine): Was it the technology itself that was transformational?

A (Harper Reed): l think the real innovation was the team, not the technology and the decision to bring people in-house from outside of politics. Previous campaigns had mostly outsourced technology to political vendors like Blue State Digital, a tech company that cut its teeth on Howard Dean’s [failed presidential] Campaign in 2004. In contrast, we brought people in from Google, from Facebook, from Twitter and from companies all around Chicago. We didn’t want inventors or visionaries or anyone who was going to make things complicated, We just wanted people to come in, work their hardest, not require us to train them, and to aggressively execute.

Were these people paid while they volunteered to work for the Obama campaign? If so, who paid the salaries? If they were paid by their employers, were their salaries listed as campaign contributions?

Would their employers extended the same privileges if they volunteered for the Republican campaign?

Q (DM): In 2008, the Obama campaign use of social media and online tracking tools expanded the Democratic Party’s data information base by at least tenfold.

A (HR): We spent a lot of time figuring out how to integrate databases that were all over the place.

Did the Democratic Party pay to access this data as would any commercial user such as Amazon? If they didn’t, would the same free terms be offered to the Republican Party?

Q (DM): But when people donated to BarakObama.com, the campaign asked to harvest some of their Facebook data, which meant you had the names at least of the Facebook friends. Or you knew if they responded to Facebook postings or targeted email solicitations about specific issues. Every time someone “liked” Planned Parenthood on Facebook, it registered with the Obama campaign. How was this information used?

A (HR): We also did i: on Twitter on Tumblr and even on Pinterest. We didn’t know everything you were doing on Facebook. But if you shared something or uploaded a picture and tagged it as public, we could look to see what it says. We knew if someone was interested in health care or reproductive rights based on an Internet interaction on Facebook or a response to an email. Essentially we used the technology to make sure you’re the right person to receive a particular message. Then we’d ask people if they wanted to share this message. We’d look through his or her friends and ask, “Who are the most important people for us to share this with?” And from there, we would share with these people, which continuously built our base. So if you were sharing something from the campaign, it would register on Facebook.

And with the content creation, and the postings, we tried to measure things, when you post this, what kind of clicks do you get? On Tumblr how many re-blogs, or on Twitter how many retweets? So if you go lo our Facebook page www.faeebook.com/Bararkobama, you can see the response to postings. One that got posted about an hour ago already has 54,000 likes, and 3,000 people shared it. This way, we know which messages are the most effective.

Could the Republican Party have done the same thing? If not, why not.

A question for the Republicans:

How could you run such an inept campaign? You had 4 years to do what the Democrats were doing. If you couldn’t because the companies wouldn’t let you, you could have raised a fuss about it.

But this wasn’t the only thing. Look at the debate where Candy Crowley had Obama’s answer in advance. Romney looked absolutely startled. Why did he not bring up the bias? Why didn’t he storm off pointing out this bias?

It goes on and on like this. Obama won because of his organization, because he was able to get out the vote.

If the Republicans don’t counter this now, they will not gain the Senate in 2014 and they won’t keep the House, either. And then, 2016 will be a forgone conclusion unless a real catastrophe happens and the people blame the Democrats for it.

Jan Mel Poller

janpoller@braemarnet.com

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/nine-women-remaking-the-right?f=puball
They’re talented, they’re diverse, and they have almost nothing to do with the mess in Washington. Patricia Murphy on nine women breathing new life into the GOP.http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/09/03/9-women-remaking-the-right.html

While the Republican National Committee brass writes autopsies for the party’s 2012 losses and GOP lawmakers in Congress fight with each other over who’s a true conservative and who’s a wacko bird, a new generation of Republican women is breathing new life into the Grand Old Party. Here, nine GOP women with the potential to revitalize the right. If you haven’t heard of them yet, you will.

1. Susana Martinez
Susana Martinez

New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez answers a question during a panel discussion at the Walmart U.S. Manufacturing Summit in Orlando, Florida, on August 22, 2013. (Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP)

If asked to name a tough, charismatic Republican governor in a blue state, most people might say Gov. Chris Christie. But make that a female Hispanic chief executive with approval ratings consistently above 60 percent and you’ll get Susana Martinez, the make-it-work governor of New Mexico whom national Republican strategists see as a star in the making. The former district attorney’s record crosses the political spectrum: she approved a state health-care exchange for New Mexico, has worked to take driver’s licenses away from illegal immigrants, required DNA sampling for all felony arrests, and pushed school reforms over the objections of union leaders. Time magazine named her one of the 100 most powerful people in the world, but she says she still shops at Ross Dress for Less and grabs Taco Bell when she can. For a party with problems wooing women, Latinos, and average Joes, it’s hard to imagine a woman better suited to win over all three groups for the GOP.

2. Rebecca Kleefisch
Rebecca Kleefisch

Lt Gov.–elect Rebecca Kleefisch speaks to supporters at Wisconsin Gov.–elect Scott Walker’s victory party in Pewaukee, Wisconsin, on November 2, 2010. (Jeffrey Phelps/AP)

There’s nothing like a national media frenzy to kick off your first days on the job, but that’s what Rebecca Kleefisch faced when she won election as Scott Walker’s lieutenant governor in Wisconsin in 2010. Walker immediately took up a battle with union leaders over collective bargaining, but at the same time, Kleefisch was undergoing chemotherapy for colon cancer. Kleefisch survived her battle with cancer and made it through the recall effort that followed Walker’s union wars. That toughness got the 38-year-old noticed by national conservative leaders, who invariably call the pro-life Kleefisch “courageous” and say the former TV anchor and stay-at-home mom has a major future ahead of her. As former representative Marilyn Musgrave of the Susan B. Anthony List told The Daily Beast, “She’s definitely one to watch.”

3. Pam Bondi
Pam Bondi

Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi visits the House to follow the progress of a mortgage settlement bill during a session of the legislature on April 30, 2013, in Tallahassee. (Steve Cannon/AP)

After Pam Bondi was sworn in as Florida attorney general in 2011, she wasted no time leading the charge against the Affordable Care Act in a 26-state lawsuit against it. That move made the career prosecutor a hero on the right and buttressed the hard-charging reputation she earned after successfully suing BP and Halliburton for $5.4 billion for damages following the Deepwater Horizon spill. Back then, she vowed that the corporations “will be held accountable.” The pro-life Bondi ran in a crowded primary field for AG, including against the lieutenant governor, but a last-minute endorsement from Sarah Palin—and a number of other women on this list—helped her break away from the pack. She’s now the first woman to hold the AG job in Florida and recently announced she’s running for reelection—but that hasn’t stopped fellow Republicans from predicting Bondi will rise higher soon enough.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/357517/print No. That’s the answer Congress should give to President Obama, who in a surprise decision late last week reversed course and asked Congress to endorse his proposed launch of a limited air attack on Syria. The president wishes to punish the Assad regime for its use of chemical weapons to murder more than a […]

The five most populous states in order are: CA, TX, NY, FL, IL. It stands to reason that they would have the highest numbers of mosques.
Islam is supremacist and triumphalist. ‘The call to prayer should be heard throughout the land.’
A mosque is NOT like a church or a synagogue. In Muslim countries, there is NO separation between mosque and state. A mosque is a symbol of ultimate authority and serves the function of organizing EVERY aspect of life in a Muslim community. It exists as a seat of government, a school, a court, a community center, a jihad training center, a military command center and often a weapons depot. In essence, the mosque is a strategic base of operations – a beachhead – in an interconnected network of bases to teach jihad, advance Islam and impose shariah in due time.
Janet Levy,
Los Angeles

http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/061213-659753-all-intrusive-obama-terror-dragnet-excludes-mosques.htm

Before you read this article, take a good look at this distribution map, look at your state, and know that mosques are and have been off-limits to FBI agents because NSA surveillance completely excludes Mosques!

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2013/09/03/the-syrian-rebels-and-chemical-weapons-remembering-your-al-qaeda-history/ Myopic focus on alleged chemical weapons use by the Assad regime in Syria is wrongheaded, as it has been all along. The salient issue is whether the United States should intervene militarily on behalf of enemies of the United States — the “rebel” factions, in which ties to al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood run […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

In 2007, the new Democratic Majority Leader defied President Bush by sitting down to meet with a member of the Axis of Evil.

“We came in friendship, hope, and determined that the road to Damascus is a road to peace,” Pelosi told reporters after her talks with Assad.

Now the road to Damascus is the road to war. And Pelosi and Obama are racing down it along with everyone else.

Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour are nowhere to be found striding insouciantly through the desert or hoofing it alongside a camel. This road movie has an entirely different cast of characters.

It’s a race against time. And a race for blood.

Forget the Grand Prix or the Daytona 500, the real race right now is the race to Damascus. The racers include Syrian rebels in pickup trucks with mounted machine guns and homemade tanks, toting weapons and equipment supplied and paid for by Qatar and Turkey, and more covertly by the British and French intelligence services. Racing along with them are carloads of international diplomats urging their governments to give the militias more money and more weapons.

Everyone is on the road to Damascus in this amazing race. Christian refugees from Aleppo and Alawites packing in behind the tanks of the Syrian army, Iraqi militias that used to plant IEDs in front of American Humvees who have found new work blowing up churches and taking over Syrian bases.

There are international activists from around the world, reporters or citizen-journalists embedded with the rebels, Russian advisers embedded with Syrian units, Qatari trainers turning children into child soldiers with the rebels and Turkish officers trying to get the entire rabble moving in the right direction toward Damascus.

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/09/a_vital_us_interest.html The Executive Branch has become increasingly powerful over the past century, simply because Congress has not successfully checked the president whenever a power overreach occurred.  So now, more from fear of being mocked than dismay over 1,429 dead, including 400 children, Obama has placed himself in a politically precarious position, and the U.S. in […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/09/unrwa_and_palestinian_hatred.html

We in the West think about child abuse in terms of physical and sexual brutality. In all totalitarian societies, however, child abuse also takes the form of intense psychological manipulation.

And no better example can be found than this recent You Tube showing how Palestinian children are being taught to hate Israel in United Nations funded camps.

On August 16, 2013, the U.S. and the Palestinian Authority signed a new $148 million economic aid agreement. The money is used for the PA schools “many of which function in United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) facilities.”

UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East was created in 1949 to help individuals (along with their spouses and dependents) whose homes were in Palestine from June 1, 1946 to May 15, 1948 and who lost both their homes and their livelihoods as a result of the attack on the newly formed country of Israel. It is, in reality, one large welfare and terrorist training program in perpetuity. UNRWA has been a hotbed for radical ideas, terrorist training, and anti-American and anti-Semitic ideology for 64 years. No other refugee group in the world has had a single U.N. agency devoted just for them. Yet world leaders continue to prop up this agency which infantilizes Palestinians and holds the world hostage to terrorist activities. According to Adam Kredo of the Washington Free Beacon, as of 2013 “the UNRWA is responsible for the education of some 485,000 Palestinian children throughout the Middle East.”

Over the years, many authors have tried to shed light on the nefarious deeds of the UNRWA. In August 2006 Justus Reid Wiener and Noam Weissman stated that the

UNRWA educational institutions are controlled by individuals committed to Hamas ideology and they are educating terrorists. Numerous terrorist operatives and Hamas political leaders have been educated in UNRWA schools

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2013/09/marty-glickmans-triumph
Triumph in Adversity – The black runner Jesse Owens humiliated the Nazis at the 1936 Olympics, but U.S. coaches wouldn’t let his Jewish teammates do the same. Luckily, that wasn’t the end of the Marty Glickman story.

For a moment, it all seemed like a dream. Young Marty Glickman, an eighteen year old from Brooklyn, was at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, ready to run the 4 by 100 relay, in hopes of winning gold. It was early in Hitler’s dictatorship, but Jews had already been persecuted for several years. As a Jewish American athlete, proud of his heritage, and proud to represent his country, this was Marty’s opportunity to help expose Hitler’s mad theories about Aryan supremacy—just as Jesse Owens, his African-American teammate, had humiliated the Nazis by excelling in his events.
The morning of the Olympic trials, as Marty prepared to help secure a spot for his relay team in the finals, he and his teammates were called together by Lawson Robertson and Dean Cromwell, the coach and assistant coach of the US team, respectively. In a grim tone, Robertson announced that he had been informed that the Germans were hiding their “best sprinters” for the relay event, to upset the heavily favored Americans. Therefore, Marty and Sam Stoller (Glickman’s Jewish teammate) would be replaced by Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe, to give the US their best chance. Foy Draper and Frank Wykoff, whom Cromwell had coached at USC, would remain on the revised squad.

The decision never made any sense. Glickman and Stoller were at least as fast, if not faster, than Draper and Wykoff; and Glickman and Stoller had been specially trained in the 400 relay and its baton pass, which the otherwise exceptional Owens and Metcalfe had not. Shocked and angered, Marty spoke up: “Coach, there’s no reason to believe the Germans are any kind of threat to the relay.” The best German sprinter, Erich Borchmeyer, had finished a poor fifth in the 100 meter final. He was the best Germany had, and any of the American sprinters could defeat him.
Jesse Owens also spoke. “Coach, let Marty and Sam run, they deserve it. I’ve already won three gold medals. . . . They haven’t had the chance to run. Let them run. They deserve it.” But Dean Cromwell pointed his finger at the great Olympian and shouted him down: “You’ll do as you’re told!”

The race went on, without Glickman and Stoller participating, and the Americans, as expected, won. The Germans finished a distant third. Marty was forced to watch the relay from the stands, his heart breaking, as the second leg was run, thinking, “That oughta be me out there, that oughta be me!” Stoller, described by Glickman as “shattered” by the decision, wrote in his diary, “This is the one day in my life that I’ll remember to my dying day.”

In 2007 Obama asserted that American troops should be withdrawn from Iraq even if that would result in genocide:

“Well, look, if that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now–where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife–which we haven’t done,” Mr. Obama told the AP. “We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven’t done. Those of us who care about Darfur don’t think it would be a good idea.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324886704579051432219385214.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion

President Obama made a compelling moral case Saturday for military action against Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria:

What message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price? What’s the purpose of the international system that we’ve built if a prohibition on the use of chemical weapons that has been agreed to by the governments of 98 percent of the world’s people and approved overwhelmingly by the Congress of the United States is not enforced?

Make no mistake–this has implications beyond chemical warfare. If we won’t enforce accountability in the face of this heinous act, what does it say about our resolve to stand up to others who flout fundamental international rules? To governments who would choose to build nuclear arms? To terrorists who would spread biological weapons? To armies who carry out genocide?

Then, he asserted that although “I believe I have the authority to carry out this military action without specific congressional authorization,” he will seek authorization anyway.

Our initial reaction was that if we were a member of Congress, we would be inclined to vote “no.” We ultimately, and with some difficulty, changed our mind, as we shall detail below. Our resistance–and our continuing misgivings about the prospect of an attack on Syria–are informed by reflection on our errors during the 2002-03 debate that preceded the Iraq war, of which we were a strong supporter.

This is not going to be one of those columns in which we repudiate wholesale our position back then, as no small number of former Iraq war supporters have done. That posture has always struck us as pusillanimous (abandoning one popular position for another), pointless (for one cannot annul an already-fought war), and intellectually lazy.

Administration officials downplayed any risk at the military level, saying they believed Obama’s strong words alone would prevent Assad or his allies from striking before the U.S. make [sic] a decision. One official simply called any future attack by Assad a “big mistake.”

This is an example of magical thinking that is not wishful. It would indeed be a big tactical mistake for Assad either to attack U.S. forces or again to use chemical weapons while congressional action is pending. But that is because of Obama’s political weakness, not his rhetorical strength. Congressional assent to Obama’s request for military authorization is far from assured; if Assad wants to keep it that way, he will lie low as the debate plays out.

Now, let us turn to analyzing the Syria situation in light of our three faulty assumptions about Iraq.

Obama is not making any claim that military action against Syria will have a transformative effect. His argument, instead, rests on the potential dire consequences of inaction. We find it persuasive. Maintaining the international taboo against the use of chemical weapons (and nuclear and biological ones) is a moral imperative. These armaments have the capacity to kill on a far greater scale than conventional explosives and bullets.

But if action is necessary as a moral matter, it must also be sufficient as a practical matter. And that is where Obama’s plan falls terrifyingly short. Here is what he said on Saturday:

This would not be an open-ended intervention. We would not put boots on the ground. Instead, our action would be designed to be limited in duration and scope.

On Friday, before Obama made the decision to seek congressional authorization first, Secretary of State Kerry said that “whatever decision [the president] makes in Syria it will bear no resemblance to Afghanistan, Iraq or even Libya.” That’s a bizarre and illogical assertion: It will be a “resemblance” to Afghanistan and Iraq, for instance, if Obama acts with congressional authorization, and to Libya had he chosen to act without it. But Kerry elaborated in words similar to those the president used the next day:

It will not involve any boots on the ground. It will not be open ended. And it will not assume responsibility for a civil war that is already well underway. The president has been clear: Any action that he might decide to take will be [a] limited and tailored response to ensure that a despot’s brutal and flagrant use of chemical weapons is held accountable.

In short, the administration is promising a cakewalk: an easy strike with little American blood or treasure at stake. As we argued Friday, it is fatuous to assume that would prove sufficient to hold Assad “accountable” or to deter him and other dictators from further bad acts.

To be sure, the authorization the administration is seeking is more open-ended than its rhetoric would suggest. As Politico reports:

[Capitol] Hill aides noted the White House-originated draft did not prevent the deployment of American ground forces in Syria in order to fulfill the mission of interdicting the Assad regime use of chemical weapons. That restriction is seen by some in Congress as a key to winning support for the military effort in both the House and Senate.

According to Politico, the resolution as written is drawing objections from members of the president’s own party, which holds the majority in the Senate. “I know it’s going to be amended in the Senate,” said President Pro Tem Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat. Majority Leader Harry Reid and Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey “are overseeing the revisions, which seek to narrow the scope for any U.S. military mission in Syria, Democratic sources said,” Politico reports.

In addition to reflecting Obama’s own aversion to decisive military intervention, his promise of a “limited” response can be seen as a bow to political reality–and not only within his own party but among Republicans, who control the House. Whereas only one Republican senator and six representatives voted against the Iraq war in 2002, today isolationism is resurgent across party lines. To differing degrees, each party learned the same “lesson” from Iraq.

Which makes the president’s request for congressional authorization difficult to understand as anything but a political ploy, at best an exercise in buck-passing, at worst–and this has been suggested approvingly by some of his admirers–a strategic effort to inflict political damage on congressional Republicans. In support of the latter hypothesis one may note that Obama maintained the element of surprise with his Capitol Hill adversaries while going to ridiculous lengths to spare Bashar Assad of it.

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Even we feel his pain.

For now, we’ll go with buck-passing as the likely explanation. After all, no one seemed more shell-shocked by Obama’s announcement than Kerry, whose performance on “Fox News Sunday” (he was on all the Sunday shows, but we could endure only one) was painful to watch. For this columnist, empathy for John Kerry was a completely novel emotion.