RUTHFULLY YOURS

“This was the moment,” Barack Obama had told the cheering audience in St. Paul, Minnesota. “When we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war.”

St. Paul has an Ocean Street. It has an Ocean Spa and Salon. It even has an Oceanaire Seafood Room. It does not however have an ocean. But with ObamaCare an unpopular subsidized failure, the few new jobs around being confined to a local McDonald’s and Al Qaeda taking over Iraq; Obama has nothing left to do but to go back to his old promise of defeating the rise of the ocean.

With Al Qaeda pressing in on Baghdad, Obama ruled out air strikes. He did however order the Department of Defense to assign a senior official to the vital task of fighting mislabeled seafood. While the Iraqi government was begging for air support, Obama instead issued an order in the name of the authority vested in him “by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America” to “ensure that seafood sold in the United States is legally and sustainably caught.”

The United States Constitution does not have much to say about sustainable seafood. The Founders liked their flounder and they disliked kings and emperors telling them where to fish.

King George III responded to Patrick Henry’s cry of “Give me liberty or give me death” with the Fisheries Bill which banned the fishermen of New England from the North Atlantic. A letter sent to a sea captain denounced it as, “A Bill so replete with inhumanity and cruelty… an everlasting stain on the annals of our pious Sovereign.”

But not even King George III would have contemplated creating a “national monument” consisting of 782,000 square miles of water. And despite being a monarch, he did not unilaterally issue a ban, rather parliament did. Even during the American Revolution, King George III was a more lawful and democratic monarch than Obama’s unilateral reign of royal executive orders.

Three percent of American tuna from the western and central Pacific comes from the waters of the latest national monument to Obama’s ideology. That means rising tuna prices which will hit working Americans, who already have trouble affording basic staples, even harder in the wallet.

After Eric Cantor’s defeat by newcomer Dave Brat, the New York Times ran a dozen articles and blog posts about the election. This flood of words tried to conceal the primary concern of voters in Cantor’s district: amnesty for illegal immigrants. One story did address amnesty and the election, but Times reporters mused at far greater length about anything and everything else.

Such papering-over is to be expected of the Times, which does not wish to draw attention to the fact that most American citizens disagree with open-borders politics. Amnesty’s other cheerleaders also prioritize suppressing the public’s real views on legal and illegal immigration: this motley crew includes the Chamber of Commerce, La Raza, Grover Norquist, Barack Obama, the RNC, the DNC, and even powerful elements within the American Conservative Union.

The Tea Party stands virtually alone in loudly opposing amnesty, and for doing so they are targeted with slurs like “nativist” and “racist.” While their views represent those of many, if not most Americans, the toxic label “racist” intimidates their potential allies from speaking out. This is why election results like the defeat of Cantor come as a surprise to the political establishment. It is also why silencing the Tea Party on immigration is a key ambition of pro-amnesty forces.

Unfortunately, it is not the Chamber of Commerce or even RINOs that threaten to undermine the Tea Party’s courageous stance on immigration. That danger lies closer to home, in national libertarian groups. In particular, Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks have been misleading the grassroots on amnesty. With a vote on immigration a strong possibility in coming weeks, as Erick Erickson warns in RedState, it is time to confront this deception, however unpleasant the confrontation may prove to be.

The official line offered by AFP and Freedomworks is that they are “sitting out” the immigration debate. But there is no such thing as sitting out such a crucial issue. Worse, they aren’t really sitting it out. Behind the scenes and through other organizations, the primary donors to AFP and the primary thinkers at Freedomworks actually advocate for increased immigration and amnesty. When they say they are “sitting immigration out,” they are being dishonest.

The US Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works held a hearing today on “climate change”. A lot of it was business as usual, starting with the opening statement from Senator Barbara Boxer:

We should all know we must take action to reduce harmful carbon pollution, which 97% of scientists agree is leading to dangerous climate change that threatens our families.

Ah, the old 97 per cent consensus. To illustrate the point, the Democrats had invited as their witnesses four former heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, who all happen to be Republicans and yet who all support the “consensus”. They were the Honorable Christine Todd Whitman, the Honorable William K Reilly, the Honorable William D Ruckelshaus, and the Honorable Lee M Thomas – a couple of years in the hyper-regulatory bureaucracy apparently sufficing to earn one a prenominal honorific for life.

Still, in the end they turned out to be pretty Honorable. Click the video below, and note the moment 1 minute and 20 seconds in, when Senator Jeff Sessions says:
The President on November 14th 2012 said, ‘The temperature around the globe is increasing faster than was predicted, even ten years ago.’ And then on May 29th last year he also said – quote – ‘We also know that the climate is warming faster than anybody anticipated five or ten years ago.’ Close quote.

So I would ask each of our former Administrators if any of you agree that that’s an accurate statement on the climate. So if you do, raise your hand.

Do stick with the video to see how many of the EPA honchos agreed with the President.

Who was President Obama rescuing: Bowe Bergdahl or the Taliban terrorists themselves?

The question arises out of the mind-boggling defense of the Bergdahl deal proferred on Tuesday’s “Morning Joe’ by Bloomberg columnist Jeffrey Goldberg, who argued that by dint of the deal, “the President managed to get five guys out of Guantanamo, which is a goal.” Well, at least President Obama didn’t have to send Navy Seals in helicopters over the Gitmo fence to rescue the Taliban. He achieved his goal with a mere stroke of his mighty pen.

Mika Brzezinski had been expressing real skepticism about the deal, but supportively responded to Goldberg’s inanity, saying: “maybe this is — and the hopeful part of me thinks this is at least the beginning of trying to figure out what to do with these [Guatanamo] people.”

Transcript:

EUGENE ROBINSON: To one of your questions: why now? There’s an obvious difference in Afghanistan now. We’re in the end game in Afghanistan now. We were not three years ago. We were in the surge and now we know when we’re leaving and how we’re leaving.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: There was a strong impulse in the White House, we’re trying to close off and cauterize some wounds here. The President managed to get five guys out of Guantanamo, which of course is a goal. And getting this guy out before American troops are gone from Afghanistan is an important goal obviously.

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: We’re never going to know exactly what the circumstances around these five are. I would like to believe that —

Mr. GOLDBERG: We could take a guess.

Ms. BRZEZINSKI: Yeah. Actually, we probably could. I’d like to believe that there are few options in terms of closing Gitmo, and this is a president who wanted to, okay, who is not for the Guantanamo Bay concept and thinks that it tears away at the fabric of what we stand for. Maybe this is — and the hopeful part of me thinks this is at least the beginning of trying to figure out what to do with these people.

So which IRS divisions are still functional, apart from those responsible for collecting tax dollars and targeting conservative groups? The IT department is supposedly to blame for more than two years of missing emails, and the congressional relations team seems to entertain delusions of competence, even as it misleads a sympathetic Senate committee. The list of, er, coincidences lengthens.

On Monday IRS Commissioner John Koskinen met with Finance Chairman Ron Wyden and ranking Republican Orrin Hatch to explain the apparent hard-drive meltdowns that erased the communications to the rest of the executive branch from Lois Lerner and six IRS colleagues. The bipartisan duo learned that the IRS discovered the gap late in February, though by then the investigation had been underway for nearly a year.

In early April the IRS relayed the information to the Treasury, and the Treasury informed the White House the same month. But for some reason Congress and the public were left out of this information daisy chain until last Friday. The IRS has no explanation for the two-month blackout period.

At the Monday meeting with Senate Finance, Mr. Koskinen also neglected to mention the detail of the six other IRS employees whose computers also crashed at the same time as Ms. Lerner’s, though he must have known. IRS staff didn’t tell Senate staff in a meeting the same day either. Mr. Hatch revealed in a letter Thursday that he found out about this in a press release from the HouseWays and Means Committee.

This turn of events is all the more remarkable because Messrs. Wyden and Hatch were about to close a Senate investigation that involved 700,000 pages of documents and 30 interviews. They had agreed on consensus findings of fact that were being drafted, but Mr. Hatch asked for Mr. Koskinen to formally attest that all relevant communications had been produced to Congress. Forcing the IRS chief to go on legal record may help explain why the email gap was finally disclosed after two months, instead of even later or never.

Mr. Koskinen’s lack of candor is either evidence of ineptitude or deliberate abuse, and the Senate committee has reopened its probe. To recover the emails, Congress will need to expand its inquiry beyond the IRS proper to the Treasury, Justice Department and even the White House.

Although Tablighi Jamaat promotes itself as tolerant, American security officials say it is a “recruiting ground” for al-Qaeda, and French intelligence officials describe the group as the “antechamber of fundamentalism.” The French Tablighi expert Marc Gaborieau says the group’s ultimate objective is nothing short of a “planned conquest of the world” in the spirit of jihad.

Local citizens—including many Muslims—are concerned that the project is actually a smokescreen for an ambitious plan to establish a hardline Islamic enclave in East London.

“What marks out Tablighi Jamaat is its unwillingness to enter into dialogue with representatives of different religions and non-religious beliefs. Jamaat does not promote social integration of women. Tablighi women are required to observe purdah, or seclusion. In public places, Tablighi women are required to cover their entire body with a burkha and face veil and must always be accompanied by a male relative. Therefore the female members of this movement—as well as future generations—do not integrate into mainstream British society.” — Tehmina Kazi, Director of British Muslims for Secular Democracy, in her 2011 Summary Proof of Evidence. This month, she abruptly withdrew from giving evidence on the first day of the Inquiry after being “persuaded” by Muslim hardliners.

By successfully silencing Kazi, Tablighi Jamaat has effectively removed a highly effective obstacle. Now all eyes will be on Eric Pickles, the cabinet minister who will decide later this year whether the mosque project goes ahead.

A radical Islamic group is one step closer to building one of the world’s largest mosques in London after a star Muslim opponent of the controversial mega-mosque was intimidated into silence.

Tablighi Jamaat—a fundamentalist Islamic sect opposed to Western values such as democracy and human rights, but committed to “perpetual Jihad” to spread Islam around the world—is fighting a no-holds-barred battle to build a massive mosque complex in West Ham, a neighborhood in the East London Borough of Newham.

The proposed mosque would be built on a 16-acre site near the Olympic Stadium, and would have a capacity for more than 9,000 worshippers. It would be outfitted with towering minarets, an Islamic library, a dining hall, tennis courts, sports facilities, hundreds of parking spaces and apartments for visiting Muslim clerics, all of which would make the East London mosque the largest religious building in Britain and the largest mosque in Europe.

Tablighi Jamaat—an Arabic term that means “Society for Spreading the Faith” or “Proselytizing Group”—is the largest conservative Islamic proselytizing movement in the world.

The nanotech-based detection system is ready for the market, based on the results of a study by researchers By David Shamah June 19, 2014 Quick Watch0:57 A patient uses the NaNose breathalyzer (Photo credit: Courtesy Tel Aviv University) A cancer-detection technology that “sniffs out” malignant tumors is set to be commercialized, after a study showed that a device based on the Technion-developed “NaNose” system successfully detected lung cancer in patients with up to 90 percent accuracy.

At the heart of the device — which looks like a “breathalyzer,” usually used to detect alcohol levels — is a chip based on the NaNose technology developed by By detecting the special “odor” emitted by cancer cells the NaNose system can detect the presence of both benign and malignant tumors much more quickly, efficiently and cheaply, said Dr. Hossam Haick of the Technion, who helped develop the technology. “Current cancer diagnosis techniques are ineffective and impractical.” NaNose technology, he said, “could facilitate faster therapeutic intervention, replacing expensive and time-consuming clinical follow-up that would eventually lead to the same intervention.” Haick, along with fellow researchers Prof. Nir Peled, of Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine, and Prof. Fred Hirsch, of the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Denver, presented the study on the NaNose-based breathalyzer device’s successful cancer detection at a conference in Chicago. According to US government statistics, lung cancer kills more Americans annually than the next three most common cancers — colon, breast, and pancreatic — combined. The reason, doctors say, is because lung cancer is so difficult to detect. The only way to detect early-stage lung cancer is through an extensive process involving blood tests, biopsies, CT scans, ultrasound tests and other procedures. Even then, detection is difficult, said Peled. “Lung cancer is responsible for almost 2,000 deaths in Israel annually, a third of all cancer-related deaths. Lung cancer diagnoses require invasive procedures such as bronchoscopies, computer-guided biopsies or surgery.” “Mostly, the patient arrives for diagnosis when the symptoms of the sickness have already begun to appear,” said Haick, describing the drawbacks in current detection protocols. “Months pass before a real analysis is completed. And the process requires complicated and expensive equipment such as CT and mammography imaging devices. Each machine costs millions of dollars, and end up delivering rough, inaccurate results.” The NaNose-based breathalyzer, on the other hand, doesn’t require anything more than a patient’s breathing into the device in order to come up with an initial diagnosis. Lung cancer tumors produce chemicals called volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which easily evaporate into the air and produce a discernible scent profile. The NaNose chip detects the unique “signature” of VOCs in exhaled breath. In four out of five cases, the device differentiated between benign and malignant lung lesions and even different cancer subtypes. A study conducted by the researchers on the system’s efficacy was presented at a recent American Society of Clinical Oncology conference in Chicago.

ust the day before the three boys were kidnapped, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, welcomed Hamas into the Palestinian Authority government while lambasting Israel for detaining terrorists and and taking action to prevent Hamas terrorist attacks from Gaza and the West Bank. Ashton, though never slow to condemn Israel, took five days to denounce this kidnapping. Both her words and her actions have legitimized and encouraged Hamas.

Both the U.S. and the EU have paid the salaries of Palestinian terrorists by means of grants to the PA; they also fund this propaganda and incitement.

Like every government, Israel has an absolute duty to protect its citizens, and undermining this terrorist threat is an essential part of that responsibility.

The world has undergone gut-churning revulsion this week at the videos of rows of kneeling young Iraqi men callously gunned down by Al Qaida terrorists in Mosul. But time and again, in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Hamas has shown itself to be just as capable of such brutal cold-blooded killing. That knowledge has galvanized Israel’s desperate hunt for those who abducted teenagers Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach as they hitchhiked home from their school in Gush Etzion a week ago.

As a member of Cobra, the UK national crisis management committee, I was involved in British efforts to rescue our citizens kidnapped by Islamist terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan. No modern-day military action is so fraught: the odds are stacked against the captives, the whip hand is with the captors, it is a race against time, and it becomes extremely personal.

The victims look out at us from their photographs and we look into their eyes. We learn about their hopes, their families, their friends, and their daily lives. Nothing – nothing – stands in the way of our efforts to bring them back. Although we hope for the best, we prepare for the worst.