RUTHFULLY YOURS

Kay Hagan (D) Incumbent
http://www.hagan.senate.gov/
http://www.ontheissues.org/senate/kay_hagan.htm **

Thom Tillis (R) Challenger
http://thomtillis.com/
ISSUES

GOVERNMENT
Under the Obama Administration, big government handouts and bailouts have increased while millions of Americans have lost their jobs. Thom knows that big government doesn’t create jobs—the private sector does. Government has simply become too big, too expensive, and too intrusive in our lives and businesses. In the Senate, Thom will work to shrink the size of our federal government to its core Constitutional role so the private sector can thrive.. In the Senate, Thom will be a stalwart conservative reformer, pushing at every opportunity for the tough decisions it will take to balance the budget every year by cutting spending, and reducing our outrageous $17 trillion national debt.
HEALTHCARE
ObamaCare is a cancer on our national economy and it threatens the quality of every American’s health care. It is paralyzing business expansion, displacing families from the health coverage they have now, raising costs, and threatening the federal treasury for all future years. ObamaCare is ridden with policies that are bad for families, bad for seniors, bad for businesses, and bad for the economy. Thom will fight in the Senate for full repeal of ObamaCare, for defunding ObamaCare, and he will work to implement private sector solutions to reduce healthcare costs for North Carolinians.
IMMIGRATION
Our porous border threatens our national security and undermines our rule of law. Thom believes we must provide border patrol agents with the additional resources, personnel, and technology needed to effectually protect us and keep out those who want to do us harm, those who are transporting narcotics, and those who would break our laws. Thom opposes amnesty and he believes Congress should solve our border security crisis now before it even debates any other changes to our immigration laws.
REGULATIONS
North Carolina families and businesses are suffering greatly as a result of costly and excessive federal government regulation. These unnecessary regulations drive up the cost of everyday purchases such as groceries and cripple small businesses with additional costs and uncontrollable red tape. As a businessman who led the reform movement that swept the North Carolina Capitol, Thom has made regulatory reform his signature crusade. As a result, the state legislature recently passed an extensive regulatory overhaul measure that will free North Carolina businesses of numerous government regulations that hinder economic growth and job creation. In Washington, Thom will continue his fight for regulatory reform to get our oppressive government out of our families and small businesses.

Senator Mike Johanns (R) Is retiring in 2014

Ben Sasse (R) Won the Republican Primary in Nebraska and has a great chance to win the election in November.
https://www.sassefornebraska.com/

ISSUES
HEALTHCARE
He opposes ObamaCare not just because:
• it was passed by a dishonest legislative gimmick
• it is based on a premise that Government can successfully plan 18% of our economy
• it puts bureaucrats between patients and doctors
• it infringes on religious liberty and forces people of conscience to pay for abortion
• its information technology systems won’t work, and will likely lead to massive data leaks of Americans’ confidential financial and health data
…though all those things are true.

He’s also against it for a much more basic reason: Ben opposes ObamaCare because he rejects the worldview underlying it. It’s a worldview that says:

“If there’s a problem, only the Federal Government can solve it.”

“Fake budget projections are fine, it’s OK to hide the truth from the American people because “DC knows what America needs and the ends justify the means”

“The Executive branch has the authority to just fill in parts of the law that are unfinished, grant special waivers to politically connected friends, and change parts of the law that are politically inconvenient.”

“The American people need Government to care for them and permanent dependency isn’t just an acceptable outcome, it’s a goal of this Administration.”

This does not work. Republicans must be ready with conservative solutions to the crisis Obamacare has caused. Otherwise we will be forced into a single-payer system.

Real health care reform can only be achieved through patient-centered health policy solutions, not more bureaucracy. The health care sector was a mess before Obamacare—not because we didn’t have enough government, but because we already had too much.
JOBS AND ECONOMY
Ben knows that the government does not create jobs – businesses and local communities create jobs. The way to get a real economic growth agenda is by rolling back the regulatory state and letting job creators go to work.
One area where over-regulation has been most obvious is the energy sector. The Keystone XL pipeline should have been approved years ago. Ben believes that we need an all-of-the-above energy policy. This approach would lower energy prices, create as many as three million jobs, and reduce our dependence on the Middle East.
When government gets out of the way, America can compete – and win – in any industry. We’ve got the people; we’ve got the talent; and most of all we have the work ethic – the will to create something lasting for our families and our neighbors– if we can just get the federal government out of the way, and let our people build.

IMMIGRATION
The Federal Government’s primary responsibility is to protect Americans from enemies foreign and domestic. The American people are not safe unless we know who is entering and leaving our country. Neither Party has been willing to get serious about border security, dating back to the mid-80s when a Republican president agreed to amnesty in exchange for promises of securing the border later. It never happened.

President “You can keep your doctor” Obama refuses to lead on this issue because he is more concerned about turning Texas into a Democrat state than he is about solving the problem. Republicans must not make a deal with President Obama. We must secure the border. End of story.
FOREIGN POLICY
A strong America is a more prosperous and secure America, and American leadership makes for a safer and more peaceful world. But President Obama’s policies have done more to weaken our nation than anyone since Jimmy Carter. Under the Obama Administration, America’s global standing has deteriorated to dangerous levels. Our adversaries don’t fear us and our friends don’t trust us. Russia’s attack on Ukraine shows the folly of President Obama’s naive, liberal worldview that international aggression is out of date. Dictatorships like China and North Korea have become emboldened by Obama’s lead-from-behind weakness. His passivity on Syria has led to a dramatic increase in the number of jihadist terrorists, and on his watch Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon than ever before. Restoring America’s credibility means strengthening our alliances, deterring our enemies, and leading the world from the front.

In 1943 Simon and Schuster printed a book entitled The Ten Commandments: Ten Short Novels of Hitler’s War Against the Moral Code. The ten authors included Thomas Mann, Rebecca West, Franz Werfel, John Erskine, Bruno Frank, Jules Romains, Andre Maurois, Sigrid Undset, Hendrik Willem van Loon, and Louis Bromfield.

In the foreword, editor Armin L. Robinson wrote that he hoped that these stories “dealing with the men who have sought to destroy those Commandments–will help to open the eyes of those who still do not recognize what Nazism really is” (ix).

In the preface of the book, Herman Rauschning recounts “A Conversation with Hitler” wherein he asserts that “what the leader of the National Socialist movement sought was the deliberate destruction of the very earth whence our civilization had sprung.” Hitler’s intent was “a murderous assault on every form of higher human culture” (x). The horrible destruction that Hitler wrought was described as “demoniac forces.”

And Rauschning sadly observed that his words were met with the same result everywhere: “skepticism, disagreement, and even confusion” even though the Nazi forces “concern all of us, Christians, Jews, and freethinking humanists alike.”

Like Nazism, sharia law deals “with the deliberately planned battle against the dignified, immortal foundation of human society; the message from Mount Sinai” (x). It is a battle against the Decalogue. When Hitler screamed that “the Christian religion is nothing but a Jewish sect…” and Streicher responded that the Third Reich “[doesn’t] fight Christian circles, [it will] fight against Christian ideas [since] they constitute the real poison in our blood” he was foreshadowing the heinous words that come from the Muslim imams who spew their vile hatred.

When Hitler insisted that “after the destruction of Judaism, the extinction of Christian slave morals must follow logically,” he was laying the foundation for the kidnapping of Nigerian girls and the wholesale destruction of Coptic Christian communities — all committed in the name of the alleged religion of peace.

Another scientist gets blackballed for his skepticism about global warming.

On Monday, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson took a tilt at climate skeptics. “The assumption that the vast majority in a scientific field is engaged in fraud or corruption is frankly conspiratorial,” Gerson wrote. As a non-scientist, he decided that the answer to the question of whether humans had warmed the planet was to trust scientists.

The article’s timing was unfortunate. Three weeks ago, Lennart Bengtsson, a leading Swedish meteorologist approaching his 80s, announced that he was joining the avowedly skeptical Global Warming Policy Foundation think tank. In an interview with Speigel Online, Bengtsson spoke of the need for climate-model predictions to be validated against observations. “Since the end of the 20th century, the warming of the Earth has been much weaker than what climate models show,” he said.

Hadn’t the IPCC covered this in its recent report? “Yes,” Bengtsson replied,

the scientific report does this but, at least in my view, not critically enough. It does not bring up the large difference between observational results and model simulations. I have full respect for the scientific work behind the IPCC reports but I do not appreciate the need for consensus. It is important, and I will say essential, that society and the political community is also made aware of areas where consensus does not exist.

One of the most telling features of climate science is just how few climate scientists changed their minds as the evidence changed. The pause in global temperature in the last 15 years or so has been unexpected. Now we know why: Yesterday, Bengtsson dropped a bombshell. He was resigning from the think tank. In his resignation letter, Bengtsson wrote:

Ever since she emerged on the US national political scene, the mainstream media and Hollywood have treated Hillary Clinton as if she’s the be all end all of womanhood. That she is the world’s smartest woman. That her ascension to the ultimate seat of power, the presidency of the United States, was nothing less than inevitable.

We’re hearing it again now — that Hillary Clinton is a shoo-in for the presidency in 2016. She’s unbeatable. No Democrat stands a chance against her if she decides to run. The Republicans shouldn’t even bother to field a candidate.

Of course, they were all saying the same things about Clinton in 2007. She became quite evitable when Barack Obama came out of nowhere to steal her birthright with grins, celebrity and empty speeches.

Clinton will probably prove to be just as not-invincible in 2016. For all the hype that the media builds around her, Hillary Clinton is probably the most over-rated politician on the planet.

Not only is Hillary Clinton not an inspiring candidate, with no compelling backstory to fuel her run. Not only is Hillary Clinton a lousy stump speaker whose cadence and style careen between the wooden and the clownish. Not only did she prove to be a terrible campaign manager in 2007-08, elevating incompetent loyalists to positions of power when seasoned professionals were needed. Not only is Hillary Clinton all of that. Not only does Hillary Clinton have horrible taste in fashion (pantsuits…really?) She’s a lousy, blundering oaf when it comes to policy.

Hillary Clinton’s political career is filled with major, damaging mistakes.

The most current example of Hillary’s follies is Boko Haram. That terrorist group is currently holding about 220 girls hostage in Nigeria, and is almost surely doing unspeakable things to its captives. This morning broke with news that the Islamic terrorists are planning to use the girls as bargaining chips to get hundreds of its own jihadists released from prisons in Nigeria and probably elsewhere. Islamist groups across the world have been angling for a way to get the blind sheikh, the Santa-hatted mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center terrorist attack, released from prison in the United States. In fact, getting him released motivated the attacks on September 11, 2012, including the one in Benghazi, Libya, that Hillary Clinton later blamed on a YouTube movie.

Christine Lagarde is the latest ritualistic burning of a college-commencement heretic.

It’s been a long time coming, but America’s colleges and universities have finally descended into lunacy.

Last month, Brandeis University banned Somali-born feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali as its commencement speaker, purporting that “Ms. Hirsi Ali’s record of anti-Islam statements” violates Brandeis’s “core values.”

This week higher education’s ritualistic burning of college-commencement heretics spread to Smith College and Haverford College.

On Monday, Smith announced the withdrawal of Christine Lagarde, the French head of the International Monetary Fund. And what might the problem be with Madame Lagarde, considered one of the world’s most accomplished women? An online petition signed by some 480 offended Smithies said the IMF is associated with “imperialistic and patriarchal systems that oppress and abuse women worldwide.” With unmistakable French irony, Ms. Lagarde withdrew “to preserve the celebratory spirit” of Smith’s commencement.

On Tuesday, Haverford College’s graduating intellectuals forced commencement speaker Robert J. Birgeneau to withdraw. Get this: Mr. Birgeneau is the former chancellor of UC Berkeley, the big bang of political correctness. It gets better.

Berkeley’s Mr. Birgeneau is famous as an ardent defender of minority students, the LGBT community and undocumented illegal immigrants. What could possibly be wrong with this guy speaking at Haverford??? Haverfordians were upset that in 2011 the Berkeley police used “force” against Occupy protesters in Sproul Plaza. They said Mr. Birgeneau could speak at Haverford if he agreed to nine conditions, including his support for reparations for the victims of Berkeley’s violence.

In a letter, Mr. Birgeneau replied, “As a longtime civil rights activist and firm supporter of nonviolence, I do not respond to untruthful, violent verbal attacks.”

Smith president Kathleen McCartney felt obliged to assert that she is “committed to leading a college where differing views can be heard and debated with respect.” And Haverford’s president, Daniel Weiss, wrote to the students that their demands “read more like a jury issuing a verdict than as an invitation to a discussion or a request for shared learning.”

Mr. Birgeneau, Ms. McCartney, Mr. Weiss and indeed many others in American academe must wonder what is happening to their world this chilled spring.

Collector Had Change of Heart on Works Stolen From Jews, Wanted Other Pieces to Leave Germany

Cornelius Gurlitt, 81 years old and his heart faltering, called a notary to his Bavarian hospital bed in early January, determined to write a last will and testament inspired by love and hate.

Mr. Gurlitt—stung by the local government’s seizure of the cache of priceless art that he called his life’s only love and by the world-wide furor over the fact that much of it was snatched from Jews by the Nazis—had two desires: to burnish his family name by giving the trove to a museum and to send it out of Germany.

Only two months earlier, after a German magazine had exposed his secret collection, Mr. Gurlitt had vowed never to return any of the paintings.

But the secret will he signed in the Ludwigsburg, Germany, hospital was his first step toward an agreement with German officials ensuring the looted works could go back to their rightful owners.

Cornelius Gurlitt for decades hid a collection of modern European masterpieces. Zuma Press

The story of the art collector’s change of heart is filled with legal maneuvering, delicate negotiations and personal appeals to Mr. Gurlitt by German government officials urging him to let go of art he so loved. His about-face culminated in frenzied and fragile negotiations between his lawyers and the government that climaxed just before his death last week.

Mr. Gurlitt’s decision, people close to him say, reflected in part his alienation from his country and anger at the Bavarian officials who confiscated his collection. At first, he “felt like a victim of Bavaria,” a person close to the collector says. But, as he began “growing paler by the day, he wanted to keep his father’s name from being tarnished and give back the Jewish art.”

Mr. Gurlitt’s story made global headlines in November, when the German magazine Focus reported that prosecutors in Augsburg had in 2012 secretly discovered about 1,400 valuable works in his apartment, including Nazi loot. In the final days of World War II, his father, art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, had loaded his family and those artworks into a truck to flee Allied bombing, ending up at a baron’s castle in Bavaria.

The roller-coaster quest to get late collector Cornelius Gurlitt to give back the Nazi-looted pieces in his trove nearly hit a wall until the ailing octogenarian had a fateful change of heart. Timeline

After the Focus report, Germany faced intense pressure from the U.S., Israel and others to return the looted works to their rightful owners. But in Mr. Gurlitt, Germany faced a difficult negotiating partner. His health was rapidly deteriorating. He was under no legal obligation to cooperate. And his legal team at times splintered into camps, making it tough to negotiate.

A Wall Street Journal examination of the dealings over Mr. Gurlitt’s collection—based on unreleased documents and on interviews with politicians, officials close to the case and a small group that assisted the collector—provides an inside look at his last months and how close Germany’s deal came to collapsing before he died.

The government deal, involving Bavarian and national agencies, happened partly because of Mr. Gurlitt’s hope he would see the art again before his death—a wish that went unfulfilled.

Mr. Gurlitt had spent his later years living a hermit’s life in a fifth-floor apartment in Munich’s gentrified Schwabing district, tending to artworks he inherited from his father, one of Adolf Hitler’s art dealers.

Mr. Gurlitt had few outside contacts after his mother’s death, his days punctuated by strolls to the grocery store and afternoon coffee at the Palate Game, a cafe with a Queen Elizabeth II bobblehead doll in the window. His only extravagance seemed limited to trying different cakes, says Alexander Vesely, the proprietor.

The incident that ended his tranquil existence occurred Sept. 22, 2010. On the EC197 train from Zurich to Munich, customs officials searched Mr. Gurlitt and found €9,000—below the limit requiring a declaration but enough to raise tax-evasion suspicions. Prosecutors in Augsburg, Bavaria’s third-largest city, ordered a search of Mr. Gurlitt’s home on Feb. 28, 2012.

“The spiritual father of the fanatical incitement against the Jews was Abner of Burgos, a Jewish kabbalist and scholar who converted to Christianity in about 1321, upon experiencing a deep religious and spiritual crisis, and became known as Alfonso of Valladolid. His… despair of the Jewish question found expression in his polemics—some written in Hebrew, others in Spanish—which contain a complete doctrine of denunciation of the Jews and their laws and morals. Oral Law, he maintained, constituted a code of robbery, usury and deception. …Various sayings by the Talmudic sages … were interpreted by this apostate to mean that the Jews must be deprived of the easy livelihoods of usury and medicine, that they must be deprived of their autonomy and that they must be terrorized and subjected to harsh laws. Only then would they merit redemption.”

–H. H. Ben-Sasson, A History of the Jewish People.

Prelude: at Vassar College

Starting in late February the campus of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie has been the scene of some of the ugliest depredations yet organized by the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) campaign designed to expel Israel from the family of nations. The college founded in the nineteenth century by a brewer has become a witches’ brew of bullying and raw violence carried out by Students for Justice in Palestine and its collaborators. They described themselves as “staging an action [italics mine]” (on March 3) against the on-campus part of an International Studies class that was to include a trip to the Middle East to consider “water issues” in the region. Since the Jew and then the Israeli have been perpetually on trial it was considered necessary by Vassar to convene a special forum to consider the “ethics” of a course that would include setting foot in Israel. Although the trip’s itinerary confirmed that its (predictably tendentious) purpose was to convince students that Israel is unfairly depriving Palestinian Arabs of water, that slander was not sufficient to protect it (or its two garden-variety Jewish leftist instructors) from the wrath of BDSers, who consider Israel the devil’s own experiment station or, in the colorful lingo of Philip Weiss, a Jewish hater of Israel in attendance at the forum, “a blot on civilization.” Their violence (which included screaming, interruptions, and perhaps ululating) was the existential realization of a letter published on March 1 by a group of thirty-nine Vassar faculty members who condemned the Vassar administration for daring to criticize the recently passed resolution of the American Studies Association in favor of boycotting Israeli academic institutions.

The professors charged that critics of the ASA boycotters had had “a chilling effect on the free exchange of ideas and opinions.” It is now almost 65 years since Lionel Trilling remarked (in The Liberal Imagination) on the way in which modern liberals not only want the right to go their own way in all things, but to go their own way without any questions ever being asked of them. Those who carried out the “action” also had their special complaint. According to Weiss they were “people of color” (perhaps by analogy with “jeans of blue”), and therefore entitled to accuse their critics of “racism.” (They understand liberal-left quackery only too well: liberals think “the poor” are their equals in every sense … except that of being equal to them.) But the final word on that allegation of “chilled” discourse was left to the gloating Weiss: “The spirit of that young progressive space was that Israel is a blot on civilization, and boycott is right and necessary. If a student had gotten up and said, I love Israel, he or she would have been mocked and scorned into silence.”

Meriam Yahia Ibrahim, 27, is a graduate of the School of Medicine at Khartoum University and lifelong Christian. Meriam, met and married her naturalized American husband in Khartoum in 2012, and they have a 20-month old toddler son. Currently pregnant with their second child, Meriam was sentenced to death for apostasy and 100 lashes for adultery by the Public Order Court in El Haj Yousif, Khartoum, Sudan on May 11, 2014. Meriam Ibrahim’s case illustrates starkly the liberty-crushing barbarity of Sharia, and the disgraceful, abject U.S. capitulation to the horror of this ubiquitous religious totalitarianism.

First there are the morally depraved Sharia “charges,” sham legal proceedings, and heinous “punishments”—all antithetical to Western conceptions of law and justice

A year ago, a purported relative of Ibrahim opened a case against her (and her husband) in Halat Kuku Court of Khartoum North for alleged “adultery” under article 146 of the Sudan Criminal Code because of her marriage to a Christian. Ibrahim’s husband Daniel Wani was accused of proselytizing a Muslim, and eventually authorities added the apostasy charge to Ibrahim herself. She was arrested on February 17, 2014, and is currently detained in Omdurman Federal Women’s Prison along with her 20-month-old son, Martin Wani. Meriam Ibrahim was charged with the so-called Sharia “hadd offenses” under Sudan’s Penal Code of adultery (per article 146), and “apostasy’”(forsaking Islam, per article 126).

Ibrahim’s Sudanese Muslim father abandoned the family when she was 6 years old, leaving her to be raised by her Ethiopian Orthodox Christian mother. During a March 4, 2014 “hearing” Ibrahim testified before the Public Order Court that she is a Christian, showing her marriage certificate—which designates her as Christian—as formal proof of her religion. Moreover, three potential witnesses from Western Sudan who traveled to the hearing to validate Ibrahim’s lifelong adherence to Christianity were denied the opportunity to provide evidence. Indeed the refusal to accept such witness testimony, and denying a priori the validity of Ibrahim’s own claims, would be entirely consistent with a Sharia Court’s rejection (or dismissal) of non-Muslim testimony because infidels are deemed to be of a lower order of truthfulness. Ibrahim’s naturalized American husband, Daniel Wani reports that since their incarceration a guard named Kawther Hassen has not allowed his wife and son to receive visits, including from him, or to access medical assistance. However, Mr Wani also notes that his wife has been allowed visits by Muslim scholars who have been pressuring her to ‘return’ to Islam, the religion of her father.

On the front page of Sunday’s New York Times was a hysterical article charging the New York Police Department with trampling Muslim civil rights by trying to recruit Muslims who had been arrested on other charges to be informants. The headline screamed “New York Police Recruit Muslims as Informants on Terrorism” and proceeded to “expose” the “profiling of Muslims” by the NYPD to serve as potential informants from within their communities. Reporter Joseph Goldstein interviewed people who had been questioned by police and found the exercise “coercive.”

NYPD records show “that religion had become a normal topic of police inquiry in the city’s holding cells and lockup facilities,” the story said. Police reports noted which mosque a suspect attended or whether he “had made a pilgrimage to Mecca.” The story did not say why this is inherently problematic and how this differs from policing on everything from drug peddling to organized crime. But its appearance on Sunday’s front page — on the right column above the fold — tells readers that this is a big deal.

The article implied that Muslims were being singled out by law-enforcement officials because of their religion, and that they were asked invasive and improper questions about their religion.

Freedom of the press is limited to those who own it, H.L. Mencken once said, an axiom that The Times has demonstrated repeatedly by routinely deprecating the threat of “Islamic terrorism” in the United States. For years, The Times has blindly pursued an agenda that coincides with the same agenda of radical Islamic groups masquerading as “civil rights” groups in trying to prove that Islamic terrorists were unfairly convicted and framed.

Ignoring the facts about U.S. law enforcement techniques that apply to all members of divergent ethnic and religious groups to collect intelligence, Goldstein reported on what he presented as the improper questioning of Muslims held in jails. Amazingly, the paper did not question at all the credibility of the allegations perpetrated by those he interviewed, all of whom had been arrested and jailed for violating laws, including an NYPD sergeant convicted of perjury in the fabricated hunt for scoundrels in the NYPD.

As part of the paranoid Times narrative, the reporter portrayed as unethical and racist the tried and proven law-enforcement technique of recruiting informants among different ethnic population pools. The same tactic is applied in the fight against illegal gangs, druggies, and criminal organizations: street gangs, Mexican drug cartels, Japanese yakuza gangs, Italian mafia, etc. Recruiting members of different ethnic and racial groups to infiltrate gangs and criminals has been a successful, legal and proven technique of collecting vital intelligence by law-enforcement officials across the country.

For The New York Times to claim that recruiting jailed Muslims as informants in their own communities is somehow racist is manifestly disingenuous and dishonest. Pat Dunleavy should know. He served as deputy inspector-general of the New York State Department of Corrections.