RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4245/come-get-us

The entire purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter possible threats to the United States, especially the use of nuclear weapons against us by a major nuclear-armed state. They are primarily weapons of “war prevention” rather than “war fighting.”

Destroying a mere 10 targets would be a far less daunting task than taking on the 567 American nuclear assets an adversary has to fear today. Why would anyone make it easier for our enemies to target U.S. nuclear forces? The Global Zero study even admitted this critical flaw. What assessment has been done by Global Zero to determine that the world is going to be a lot less dangerous then?

In the latest proposed defense budget, a preview of which had been discussed a day earlier by DOD leaders at the Pentagon, on February 26, 2014, Doyle McManus of the LA Times took Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel to task for not slashing the funding for the US nuclear deterrent.

McManus concluded that U.S. nuclear deterrent forces can be dramatically curtailed through a series of sleight-of-hand moves mixed in with a mash of disarmament happy talk, including cooking the books on the relevant nuclear numbers based almost entirely on a 2012 report by an organization known as “Global Zero.”

McManus began with the claim that, “Almost every expert on nuclear weapons agrees that the United States has a far larger nuclear force than it needs to deter attacks,” including more warheads and platforms upon which the warheads are carried. He then reassures his readers that the U.S. has even more nuclear weapons than our main adversary Russia, so there apparently is nothing to worry about.
What are the facts?

It is true that Russia does not publish exact date on its nuclear forces. Two arms control experts, Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists and Robert Norris of the Natural Resources Defense Council, explain “Russia does not disclose how many nuclear weapons it has….[we] use public statements made by Russian officials, newspaper articles, observations from commercial satellite images, private conversations with government officials, and analysis of Russian nuclear forces over many years to provide the best available unclassified estimate of Russian nuclear forces.”[1]

With those caveats in mind, they place Russian nuclear warheads — deployed on platforms, in reserve and awaiting dismantlement, at 7800 while U.S. warheads are estimated to be 7400.

While the U.S. and Russia both will deploy roughly an equal number of warheads on their long-range strategic systems as required by the New Start Treaty of 2010, Russia has a major advantage in smaller-yield nuclear weapons. These are generally thought to be mated to shorter-range delivery systems, often referred to as “tactical nuclear weapons” for which there are no arms control limits.

Even the current estimates of greater numbers of Russian tactical nuclear weapons assume we are not underestimating Moscow’s nuclear stockpile which we did throughout the Cold War.[2]

This Russian advantage was highlighted in an essay by the former Commander of the US Strategic Command and the top military authority over America’s nuclear deterrent, retired Admiral Richard Mies. In the Spring 2012 issue of Undersea Warfare Magazine, dedicated to the nuclear strategic deterrent mission[3], the retired admiral explained Russia’s warhead advantage — that could actually be as great as four to one — by highlighting the US elimination of most of its tactical nuclear warheads and our countries lack of warhead production capacity, which contrasts sharply with Russia’s many thousands of theater nuclear weapons it has kept in its stockpile and its robust warhead production capability.

Given current Russian aggression against Ukraine, and its massing of 20,000 troops on Ukraine’s eastern border,[4] the US-Russian nuclear balance may be a critical aspect of whether hostilities break out between Ukraine and Russia.

McManus however appears to make light of Russian nuclear modernization. He references comments from Brookings Institute arms control expert Steven Pifer, a former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, who explains away Russian nuclear weapons modernization as indicative only that “Putin needs the political support of the small towns in Russia that produce military equipment.”

McManus also similarly leads us to believe that it is only members of the U.S. Congress “from missile states” who support the nuclear missiles making up our nuclear Triad for land, sea and air because they provide jobs in their states.

He does bow briefly in the direction of “fairness,” with an aside that representatives in Congress “might” be motivated by “honest differences in strategy,” but in his essay, that remark is the only indication that there might indeed be reasonable differences in strategy among Americans concerning their nuclear deterrent future.

As explained by leading nuclear expert Dr. Mark Schneider[5], Russia has adopted a nuclear weapons use doctrine that allows for the first use of nuclear weapons in local and regional wars not only in response to WMD attack but also in a conventional war. Schneider underscores that it was Putin who was directly responsible for this doctrine when he was National Security Council Secretary in the 1990s. He signed the policy into law as acting President of Russia in 2000.

This doctrine even goes so far as to view the first use of nuclear weapons in a crisis as a “de-escalation of a conflict.” Additionally, Russia employs various types of nuclear attack threats as a means of intimidating its neighbors. Since 2007, there have been about 15 overt Russian nuclear targeting threats from senior officials, including four from Putin.

Then McManus, having assumed Russia has fewer nuclear warheads than America (highly certain a false assumption) and that Russian arms modernization is largely due to retail politics and not a hostile intent against the US or its allies (again a highly dubious assumption), endorses the Global Zero 2012 report.[6]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4246/uk-sharia-law

The question of what constitutes “voluntary” remains. Could the state ever have confidence that a woman whose marital problems were put before a Sharia court actually “volunteered” for this process, or avoided it, or would have any say whatsoever in accepting the court’s judgement? In reality, the woman never stood a chance.

If we are indeed seeing the beginning of this process, we are far from seeing what lies at the end of it.

What is Sharia and what should be our attitude towards it? These questions, which have intermittently swirled around Britain in recent years, have just re-erupted thanks to a recent story in the Sunday Telegraph.

The story revealed that The Law Society — the body which represents and advises solicitors in England and Wales — has drawn up guidance for its members on how to draw up wills in accordance with Islamic law. The document can be seen here. As the Telegraph pointed out, High Street solicitors in England and Wales will now be assisted in drawing up documents that refuse women an equal share of inheritance and that discounts the potential inheritance of non-believers entirely. Nicholas Fluck, president of The Law Society, told the Sunday Telegraph that the document, which would be recognised by the national courts, would promote “good practice” in applying Islamic principles. The paper claims that this document effectively enshrines Sharia law in the British legal system for the first time.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/the-war-on-poverty-21-trillion-later/print/

Fifty years and trillions of dollars after the “War on Poverty” was launched, Americans aren’t much better off, according to a study published by Republican reformers in Congress.

The War on Poverty has barely made a dent in poverty, said the 205-page report unveiled by the House Budget Committee, which is chaired by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.). The report was created in the hope of starting a discussion in Congress about reforming poor-relief programs.

In 1965, the poverty rate was 17.3 percent. In 2012, it was 15 percent. This means taxpayers blew a staggering $20.7 trillion over the last half century in order to achieve a paltry 2.3 percentage point decrease in poverty.

Those on the Left consider this to be social progress by way of coercive redistribution. Mere results have always been less important to the Left than intentions.

Although a sane person would consider the minuscule reduction in poverty a humiliating defeat, left-wingers have successfully been changing the subject, moving the discussion away from their policy failures for 50 years now.

It began back in the Sixties, when instead of being satisfied with New Deal-era programs like Social Security, left-wingers resolved to move America even farther away from its founding ideals, fundamentally changing the country by erecting a supremely sclerotic behemoth welfare state answerable to no one.

The War on Poverty itself was a part of the massive left-wing social engineering and vote-buying scheme known as the Great Society. This war really should have been called the war on American values. As a result of misguided government policies that grew out of the War on Poverty, out-of-wedlock birthrates have mushroomed, David Horowitz and John Perazzo reported in “Government vs. the People.”

Despite an orgy of federal spending, blacks and other minorities have suffered the most from big government poverty alleviation efforts. The anti-marriage, anti-family tilt of welfare policies has devastated black communities.

In his first State of the Union address on Jan. 8, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson ushered in a half-century of government-incentivized sloth, indolence, dependency, and social decay. He exhorted Congress to launch a new belligerency against a perpetually ineradicable foe.

“Let this session of Congress be known,” Johnson exclaimed, “as the session which declared all-out war on human poverty and unemployment in these United States.”

The Economic Opportunity Act (EOA) of 1964 became the centerpiece of the new war. It expanded the nation’s social safety hammock, turning government resources into war materiel to be used against the American system of constitutionally limited government.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/islamic-human-slaughterhouses-for-christians-on-the-glazov-gang/
This week’s Glazov Gang episode was joined by Walid Shoebat, a former Muslim Brotherhood terrorist who turned to love and Christianity. He is the author of his most recent book The Case for Islamophobia and heads the organization RescueChristians.org.

He joined the program to discuss Islamic Human Slaughterhouses for Christians:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-mideast-nightmare/print/

A man sits holding a cup of coffee in a restaurant. He drops the cup and it cracks. Everyone around him berates him for his thoughtless stupidity.

Then a second man enters and after delivering a fine speech on the virtues of making this into the best restaurant that it can be, begins smashing all the cups and then the plates. He overturns the tables, tears down the curtains, breaks the lights, tumbles all the food to the floor and sets the whole place on fire.

The first man was named George. The second man was named Barack.

During George W. Bush’s last month in office, thirty-one Americans had died in Iraq and Afghanistan. By June, the month of Obama’s infamous Cairo speech, that number had climbed to forty. And by that same time next year, it was at sixty-eight.

When Bush left office at the end of his second term, the region was mostly stable aside from Iran’s nuclear program. By the time Obama had finished his first term, it was in a state of endless war.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303978304579475860515021286?mod=Opinion_newsreel_1

Mr. Koch is chairman and CEO of Koch Industries.

I have devoted most of my life to understanding the principles that enable people to improve their lives. It is those principles—the principles of a free society—that have shaped my life, my family, our company and America itself.

Unfortunately, the fundamental concepts of dignity, respect, equality before the law and personal freedom are under attack by the nation’s own government. That’s why, if we want to restore a free society and create greater well-being and opportunity for all Americans, we have no choice but to fight for those principles. I have been doing so for more than 50 years, primarily through educational efforts. It was only in the past decade that I realized the need to also engage in the political process.
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A truly free society is based on a vision of respect for people and what they value. In a truly free society, any business that disrespects its customers will fail, and deserves to do so. The same should be true of any government that disrespects its citizens. The central belief and fatal conceit of the current administration is that you are incapable of running your own life, but those in power are capable of running it for you. This is the essence of big government and collectivism.

More than 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson warned that this could happen. “The natural progress of things,” Jefferson wrote, “is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” He knew that no government could possibly run citizens’ lives for the better. The more government tries to control, the greater the disaster, as shown by the current health-care debacle. Collectivists (those who stand for government control of the means of production and how people live their lives) promise heaven but deliver hell. For them, the promised end justifies the means.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303978304579473513472208506?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop&mg=reno64-wsj

IS THIS TURN TO THE RIGHT REAL OR IS IT A REHEARSAL FOR HIGHER OFFICE BY A VERY CANNY POLITICIAN?….RSK

Maybe Bill de Blasio should have played it a little cooler. New York City’s new mayor roared into office promising a war on charter schools, and his main achievement seems to have been a political backlash. The budget deal that Governor Andrew Cuomo concluded over the weekend with state legislators overrules nearly all of Mr. de Blasio’s assault on charters. It requires New York City’s school district to find space for charter schools or provide a $3,000 per-pupil subsidy for private space. The subsidy would grow over time.

New York Post editorial writer Robert George on why the Governor’s budget adds funding and new protections for the state’s charter schools. Photo credit: Getty Images.

The mayor is also prohibited from charging charters rent and nixing co-locations without the schools’ consent. Charter operator Eva Moskowitz, a particular target of Mr. de Blasio’s union allies, will be able to open three schools as planned this fall. This is especially good news since her Success Academies are holding their annual lottery for admission on Friday and they include some of the top performing schools. Fifth-graders at Harlem Central Middle School, which Mr. de Blasio sought to close, have the highest pass rate of 2,254 schools in New York on state math exams.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/04/httpwwwamericanthinkercomimagesbucket201404192018_5_png.html

Andrew G. Bostom is the author of such seminal works as The Legacy Of Jihad: Islamic Holy War And The Fate Of Non-Muslims and Sharia Versus Freedom: The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism. In March 2014 he published his latest book, Iran’s Final Solution for Israel: The Legacy of Jihad and Shi’ite Islamic Jew-Hatred in Iran.

Bostom worries about what he terms the Trusting Khomeini Syndrome. Just days after the Islamic leader Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in Iran in 1979, Richard Falk, an International Law Professor at Princeton University, reassured the world in a New York Times op-ed entitled “Trusting Khomeini” that “the depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false.”

Richard Falk was very wrong back then. Khomeini and his hard-line mullahs succeeded in deceiving quite a few Iranians and even more naïve Western observers about their true intentions. Have Western leaders and policy makers learned anything in the decades that have passed since then? Bostom fears that this is not the case.

Khomeini faced a weak US President back in the late 1970s in Jimmy Carter. His successors face an equally weak US President in Barack Hussein Obama today, plus many appeasing European powers, too. The difference is that this time, the Islamic regime in Iran has a substantial nuclear program as well. Bostom doesn’t criticize merely the Obama Administration, but also the Bush Administration, for failing to deal properly with the Iranian threat. The mullahs of Iran arguably constitute a greater threat than the cruel but largely secular dictator Saddam Hussein in Iraq ever did.

Andrew Bostom laments the fact that even allegedly conservative observers in the West hailed Grand Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri as a supposed “moderate” when he died in December 2009. This despite the fact that Montazeri in his writings maintained a perfectly traditional view of offensive Jihad as an open-ended obligation on Muslims to establish global Islamic supremacy. Montazeri further held traditional sharia-based views on the inferiority and subjugation of non-Muslims (dhimmis), as well as on the obligation to kill blasphemers.

http://pjmedia.com/davidsteinberg/house-gop-leaderships-anti-tea-party-event-removed-from-sponsor-pacs-website/

Last week, Erick Erickson reported that John Boehner, Eric Cantor, and Kevin McCarthy — the three most powerful Republican members of the House — would be attending a private weekend retreat at Amelia Island to discuss how to “bolster our incumbents who are under attack from the far right.” The retreat is sponsored by Republican Main Street Partnership, a PAC headed by liberal Republican Steve LaTourette and funded by several Democratic Party-supporting organizations.

Since Erickson’s report, Boehner has announced he will not be attending due to a “scheduling conflict.”

As of today, the event has disappeared from Main Street’s Events page.

Will Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy still attend? Is the event still on?

I have placed calls to both congressional offices. I have also contacted Main Street to ask why the event listing has been removed, and why Main Street’s website contains no other mention of what would be their largest event of the year.

The left is already apoplectic about the decision.

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2014/04/02/supreme-court-strikes-down-limits-on-individual-free-speech-contributions/?print=1

Until this morning, the federal government could limit the amount of money you contribute for political speech. Today in McCutcheon vs. FEC, the Supreme Court invalidated overall contribution limits. The federal government limited individual campaign contributions to $48,000 overall and $123,200 to everything (PACs, candidates, national parties) each cycle.

The Supreme Court struck down the limits, holding that the government’s justification for limiting free speech rights – to keep money out of politics and the avoid the appearance of impropriety – failed.

This decision cuts at the heart of the leftist narrative on free speech attacks. The heart of the narrative on the left (and among a smattering of GOP Senators) is that money in politics is bad and that large financial contributions create the appearance of corruption.

The Court rejected these justifications squarely:

Significant First Amendment interests are implicated here. Contributing money to a candidate is an exercise of an individual’s right to participate in the electoral process through both political expression and political association. A restriction on how many candidates and committees an individual may support is hardly a “modest restraint” on those rights. The Government may no more restrict how many candidates or causes a donor may support than it may tell a newspaper how many candidates it may endorse.

After the page break, we’ll explore the driving force behind the decision.