RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/colorado-2014-candidates-for-congress-where-they-stand

Democrat Senator Mark Udall is now facing a stiff challenge…..stay tuned!! The views on my blog do not represent the non partisan Family Security Matters….rsk

To see the actual voting records of all incumbents on other issues such as Foreign Policy, Second Amendment Issues, Homeland Security, and other issues as well as their rankings by special interest groups please use the links followed by two stars (**).
Michael Bennet (D) – Next Election in 2016
Mark Udall (D) Incumbent

http://www.markudall.senate.gov/

http://www.ontheissues.org/senate/Mark_Udall.htm **

RATED +1 BY AAI INDICATING AN ALMOST NEUTRAL POSITION ON ISRAEL/ARAB AFFAIRS, ALOTHOUGH UDALL DISPLAYED VIGOROUS SUPPORT FOR ISRAELO DURING THE GAZA BLOCKADE IN 2012

HOT BUTTON ISSUES

ENERGY AND THE ENVIRONMENT http://www.markudall.senate.gov/?p=issue&id=2 Reducing our reliance on foreign oil and curbing the effects of climate change have long been priorities of mine, and I’m working in the Senate to create a plan to tackle these important goals. To do so, we will need an all-of-the-above strategy that includes all of our energy sources, with a special emphasis on those that are clean and domestic. That means focusing on everything from renewable energy and energy efficiency to natural gas and safe nuclear power. This approach will help diversify the sources of energy we depend on, which will stabilize prices, create new jobs and make our country more secure.

HEALTHCARE http://www.markudall.senate.gov/?p=issue&id=3 The Affordable Care Act is meant to put Coloradans in charge of their own health care, provide a sense of stability and security, and ensure individuals can choose their coverage plan and their health care provider. The goal is to finally start reducing the ever-increasing costs for consumers, small businesses and the government by taking critical steps to address the runaway growth in health care costs, which are the biggest driver of our spiraling federal deficit.

HUNTING FISHING AND SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS http://www.markudall.senate.gov/?p=issue&id=61 We need to respect and protect the land while also ensuring that the public can enjoy the resources and recreational opportunities it provides. Interacting with the land is a way of life in the West, whether it’s through hunting, fishing, boating, hiking, skiing or any other kind of outdoor recreation. That’s why it’s important to support these activities as we consider issues involving wildlife management or conservation of our natural environment. Responsible gun-ownership is also an integral part of our Western heritage. The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is an individual right, and I’m committed to protecting the rights of citizens to own firearms for personal protection, hunting, collecting and for other legal purposes.

IMMIGRATION http://www.markudall.senate.gov/?p=issue&id=18 Any solution to fix our immigration system must ensure that employers hire only those who are legally authorized to work in the United States, make our country safer by preventing drug-traffickers and terrorists from entering the United States, and improve the legal channels to enter our country.
Cory Gardner (R-District 4 ) Tea Party Challenger *****

RATED -3 BY THE ARAB AMERICAN INSTITUTE INDICATING A PRO ISRAEL VOTING RECORD
Cory Gardner leaving his seat to run for Senate against Senator Mark Udall
http://gardner.house.gov/

http://www.ontheissues.org/house/Cory_Gardner.htm **

HOT BUTTON ISSUES

IMMIGRATION http://gardner.house.gov/issue/immigration The solution to the problem isn’t for the Justice Department to file a taxpayer-funded lawsuit against the Governor of Arizona for responding to a law enforcement crisis. It isn’t giving amnesty to the 12-20 million illegal immigrants in this country, or giving those people benefits that will only encourage more illegal immigration.

The time has come to enforce the rule of law and end illegal immigration. To that end, I will support legislation that ensures employers only hire people who are here legally and that guest workers are here temporarily. The technology exists to accomplish this in a sensible way, and it is time that we implement that technology.

ENERGY http://gardner.house.gov/issue/energy As a member of Congress, I have passed two pieces of legislation out of the House that will tap American energy resources and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. The Jobs and Energy Permitting Act would streamline the permitting process for drilling in the Alaskan Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). Production in the OCS could provide a million barrels of oil a day – comparable to what we currently get from Saudi Arabia.

The other piece of legislation I have passed out of the House is the Strategic Energy Production Act, which would link a drawdown of America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to increasing access to domestic land for oil production. In the event that the SPR is tapped, my bill would trigger the Secretaries of Energy, Agriculture, and the Interior to develop a plan to increase the percentage of federal lands leased for energy production by an amount equal to what is depleted from the nation’s stockpile of oil. Currently, only three percent of federal land is leased for oil and gas production.

HEALTHCARE http://gardner.house.gov/issue/health As a member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, I will be at the forefront of the effort to outline replacement legislation. At the top of this list has to be tort reform. I believe that capping medical malpractice damages is one important way to lower the cost for doctors and patients.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=7835

On Monday evening, the gag order was lifted on a sexual abuse complaint lodged against Energy and Water Minister Silvan Shalom. For more than 24 hours before that, the story was fodder for the Israeli gossip mill, with a number of websites even revealing Shalom’s identity.

According to the complainant, who worked for Shalom during his term as science minister 15 years ago, he invited her to his hotel room and used the power of his position to get her into bed.

The allegation is now being probed by police, and Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein is in the process of determining whether there is room to file charges.

There are a few problems with the case.

First of all, the 10-year statute of limitations on the sexual assault of an adult has passed. Police are thus waiting to see whether other women will come forward with more recent accusations against Shalom.

Secondly, the woman in question took two different polygraph tests, with uneven results.

Thirdly, the timing of the complaint is suspicious, emerging one month before the election for the next president takes place — and Shalom is a front-runner candidate.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/elisha-krauss-on-the-impact-of-truthrevolt-org-on-the-glazov-gang/print/

This week’s edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by Elisha Krauss, a Staff Writer at TruthRevolt.org and Co-Host of The Morning Answer on AM 870.

She discussed The Conservative Long-Game, analyzing how the Right can more effectively fight political war.

The dialogue occurred within the context of The Impact of TruthRevolt.org, the new conservative media watchdog group started by Ben Shapiro with David Horowitz at the David Horowitz Freedom Center:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/bloomberg-vs-the-koch-brothers/print/

The Democratic Party wants the 2014 elections to be about anything and everything except ObamaCare. The depths of Hope and Change were plumbed in 2008, the War on Women was exhausted in 2012 and that leaves only the Koch Brothers.

Senator Harry Reid, facing the end of his time as Senate Majority Leader, has decided to bet the farm on the Koch Brothers. His Senate Majority PAC (formerly Commonsense Ten, really “Keep Harry Reid Majority Leader”) is trying to protect Senate Democrats who are hated in their own states for voting to drive up the price of health insurance while cutting Medicare by accusing their Republican opponents of being pawns and puppets of the Koch Brothers.

One ad already running in Louisiana tells voters, “Out-of-state billionaires are spending millions to rig the system and elect Bill Cassidy. Their goal? Another politician bought and paid for.”

And who is funding the $3 million Reid ad campaign denouncing out-of-state billionaires for spending millions to influence politics? Is it grass roots Louisiana voters or local kindergarteners pitching in their pennies to stop the rampage of the billionaires?

The single biggest donor to Senate Majority PAC is an out-of-state billionaire. Michael Bloomberg donated $2.5 million this year. Bloomberg’s priorities of banning guns, soda and salt are more at odds with the average Louisiana voter, who overwhelmingly supports the Second Amendment and eats what he likes no matter how much salt and sugar it has, than those of the “libertarian-minded” Koch Brothers.

Mainstream media stories about the Senate Majority PAC ad blitz don’t bother to mention that the clamor over “out-of-state billionaires spending millions” is really a case of the 16th richest man attacking the 6th richest men in order to keep the Senate exactly the way it has been for the last seven years.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/laurie-cardoza-moore/teach-your-children-well/print/

Following the horrific attacks on 9/11, I began to ask, like most Americans, what happened to our country. As I researched and talked to experts, the issues of radical Islam and the attacks on America and Israel became extremely personal to me. In response, I founded Proclaiming Justice to the Nations, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating Christians about their biblical responsibility to stand with and for the people and land of Israel. I established PJTN as a powerful Christian voice for Israel in the media using my years of experience in broadcasting and film. Christians were for the most part silent during the first Holocaust — I believe we cannot be silent again.

Little did I realize I would be fighting anti-Semitism in my very own backyard. For the last twenty-five years, we have resided in Williamson County, TN, a county with a long tradition of being one of the top ten most conservative counties in the U.S; a county in the very center of the Bible belt; a county where Christians should not stand by in silence. I discovered that behind our backs, a liberal school board agenda had taken hold and was indoctrinating our children. Several controversial incidents and troubling educational materials have been cause for great alarm.

Anti-Semitism in a Pearson Published Textbook

In November of 2012, a concerned Williamson County parent contacted PJTN about a controversial human geography textbook (The Cultural Landscape) being used in her son’s high school. The immediate problem involved a section under the title, “Terrorism by Individuals and Organizations,” that asks students to consider the following question on why terrorism has increased:

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-pathway-to-the-future?f=puball

Several decades ago the distinguished sociologist Daniel Bell wrote: “The real problem of [American] modernity is the problem of belief. To use an unfashionable term, it is a spiritual crisis, since the anchorages have proven illusory and old ones have become submerged. It is a situation which brings us back to nihilism, lacking a past or a future, there is only the void.”

Fredrick Nietzsche argued very much the same in The Birth of Tragedy where the search for meaning in a nihilistic environment leads inevitably to the perverse and degrading.

And Oswald Spengler in his lugubrious account of Western societies contended in Decline of The West that a diminished sense of meaning will ultimately yield decline and defeat.

Is this a one way street to oblivion? Can American resilience reassert itself? What are the telltale signs in our midst?

Recently a Duke University student said she has entered the ranks of the pornographic world in order to pay her tuition expense. Not only has she advertised this condition, she says it as a matter of pride, asserting a right to feminist independence. Her acolytes agree. Apparently for these millennials the word “shame” is not in their vocabulary.

Three young men in a small Oklahoma town claimed to solve the issue of boredom by tracking a jogger and killing him in cold blood. One of the assailants indicated “there isn’t much to do in this town.”

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/academic-food-fights?f=puball

To take a much-needed break from the missing (or hijacked) Malaysian flight, Putin’s annexation of the Crimea from the Ukraine, the antics, antisemitism, and anti-Americanism of President Barack Obama, and news of college professors advocating the jailing of global warming deniers, I decided to indulge in some semi-humorous, cathartic (or therapeutic) commentary in this column.

When I saw the headline of Daniel Greenfield’s FrontPage article of March 15th, “Ice Cream Social Justice: ‘Critical Food Studies’ Comes to College,” I initially read it as “Critical Foot Studies,” and wondered what mischief the podiatrists and shoe manufacturers were up to now. Had they taken a survey of collegiate footwear and lobbied Congress to mandate environmentally friendly shoestring and leather on campus? Or asked Congress to enact prohibitively high import tariffs on Indonesian and Chinese products? Then I blinked once and saw it was “Critical Food Studies.” Never mind. “Critical Food Studies” was ludicrous enough. However, I’m sure some tenure-hungry yob is massaging a proposal to introduce foot, ankle and heel studies.

Greenfield, in his characteristically droll style, opened his article with:

Higher education tuition costs and student loan debt have increased proportionally with the sheer worthlessness of a college education. Students were paradoxically far more likely to learn something worthwhile when higher ed was for dilettantes, than now when it’s a mandatory job prerequisite.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obamas-inept-gamesmanship-in-a-dangerous-world

In the months following the October 1, 2013 unveiling of Obamacare, Americans across the political spectrum have been appalled at how the whole operation was thoroughly bungled from beginning to end. Admittedly, few on the political right ever anticipated anything else, since the historical track record of socialism has always been disastrous. In contrast, those on the left waited in rapt anticipation of the utopia that was to ensue, only to be sorely disappointed at the pathetic reality of non-functioning websites, curtailed medical care, and exorbitantly higher premiums. Five months into the program, a wide-ranging consensus has been reached that the American people will never collect on any of the rosy promises on which the Obamacare mirage was built.

Sadly, the Obamacare debacle has proven to be only one facet of a much more extensive problem. Any honest assessment of the past five years reveals an unbroken pattern of abject failure by the Obama Administration on every front, from the economy to the management of government, to assurances of “transparency” by which Barack Obama sanctimoniously declared that his regime would rise far above any before him. Most ominous of all, in recent weeks, it has again been affirmed that the general ineptitude of this administration also includes its arrogant and ham-fisted approach to foreign affairs.

Americans were willing to stand with Obama in the days immediately following the May 2, 2011 elimination of Osama bin Laden. However, it was not long before Obama and his minions were again flaunting their self-absorption in a thoroughly ugly manner. Commentators soon began to parody the number of times per speech that Obama “casually” mentioned that he had gotten rid of the al Qaeda terrorist. Unfortunately, a dangerous undercurrent heralded eventual catastrophe as Obama went into full campaign mode, and in the process essentially declared that with bin Laden gone, the “War on Terror” had been won.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4832/tony_benn_a_class_act

Romantic leftists like Tony Benn are easy dupes for the propaganda of brutal power politics.

By all accounts the late Tony Benn was a charming man. Those who met him say he had the real grace and charm of the educated aristocratic Englishman. Even his political enemies praise him as a man who may have been wrong, but at least he was wrong with conviction.

Certainly, back in the seventies, Benn cut a dash as a sort of respectable Che Guevara character, a patrician tribune of the people. Private Eye dubbed him “the most dangerous man in Britain”, a title he apparently relished.

But was there ever anything more than showmanship and self image-making to Tony Benn? Consider his grasp of political events.

According to Christopher Booker of the Sunday Telegraph, Benn compared Labour’s general election win in 1964 to Castro’s march into Havana in 1959.

Such a comparison was, surely, a measure of Benn’s immature romantic revolutionary mentality. After all, when Castro marched into Havana he had 500 supporters of the old regime murdered. When Harold Wilson won in 1964 he made Tony Benn Postmaster General.

Lack of political realism was — and still is — a common feature of the romantic Left in Britain. On the Northern Ireland problem, for example, Benn always had a simple solution — the British government should talk to the IRA terrorists: simple as that.

Of course, what Benn was suggesting would have conferred a degree of political legitimacy on those who placed car bombs among women and children. Not that Benn would, for one moment condone such behaviour.

But that’s the point: romantic leftists like Tony Benn are easy dupes for the propaganda of brutal power politics.

An interesting observation here, considering Benn’s never-ending demands to respect parliamentary democracy, was that he never said the elected majority Unionist voice should be listened to and respected.

But then, there was no kudos for a dashing revolutionary who had stylishly renounced his aristocratic title in supporting the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone.

Yet for all his leftish posturing, Tony Benn was not one of Lenin’s useful idiots. There was always the impression with Benn that he was conscious of his public image as the patrician tribune, the man with a higher understanding of world events than have ordinary mortals.

Such higher understanding lay behind his meeting with the isolated and embattled Saddam Hussein in 2003. Benn was on the world stage bestowing his wisdom on Saddam, above the narrow self-interests of ordinary politicians like Blair and Bush, very much the title-renouncing aristocrat.

Indeed, one feels it was the sheer class superiority in renouncing such a title that persuaded Saddam to host Benn.

The Arab League has drafted a blasphemy law that would likely be voted down at the U.N.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/374107/print

If you’re planning on visiting an Arab country for business or pleasure, be sure not to engage in any blasphemous dancing, singing, or miming — yes, miming.

On March 24, diplomats and experts from the European Union, the U.S., and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) met in Doha, Qatar, for the fourth meeting of the Istanbul Process. A series of meetings, inaugurated under former secretary of state Hilary Clinton, the Istanbul Process aims to bridge the gap between the West’s approach to fighting religious intolerance and the approach of the OIC. If the participants are serious about countering religious intolerance, their choice of venue is curious.

On November 26, 2013, the justice ministers of the 22 members of the League of Arab States (all of which belong to the OIC and whose annual summit in Kuwait coincides with the Doha meeting) endorsed the Arab Guideline Law for the Prevention of Defamation of Religions, a model blasphemy law drafted by none other than the ministry of justice of Qatar. The text includes a broad prohibition against “defamation of religions.” According to an English translation, practices include, inter alia:

1. Blasphemy against the divine essence or questioning it or infringing on it. 2. Contempt or disrespect [for] or [offense to] any of the religions or by defaming them or insulting them or ridiculing them or infringing on them. 3. Any infringement on the heavenly books, through abuse or alteration or desecration or prejudice. 4. Making fun of one of the prophets or the messengers or sacred symbols of these religions or their wives or their families or their companions or insulting or ridiculing them or infringing on them.

This sweeping definition would likely entail a ban on atheism and even agnosticism, which clearly questions “divine essence.” Moreover, the concepts “contempt,” “prejudice,” “ridicule,” “insult,” and “infringement” are not defined and would seem to encompass anything from mild satire to serious criticism to outright hostility toward protected religions. Proscribed offenses may take the form of “audio or visual [content] or written [content], or [content delivered through] electronic [media] or via the Internet or communications networks, or industrial materials, whether through [spoken] words or [in] writing, or [through] expressionist [illustration] or cartoon or symbolic drawing, or [through] photography or singing or acting or mime or electronic data or other forms [of communication,] and in any language.”