RUTHFULLY YOURS

PLEASE READ: ELIANA JOHNSON

Upstate New York’s Conservative Hope Meet House candidate Elise Stefanik, 30.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/389221/upstate-new-yorks-conservative-hope-eliana-johnson

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/new-york-part-ii-of-ii-2014-candidates-for-congress-where-they-stand

REGULATORY AND TAX BURDENS Reduce the out-of-control tax and regulatory burdens facing small businesses by reforming the tax code to be flatter and fairer The U.S. tax code is over 3 million words and over 85,000 pages long. Each year Americans spend billions of hours and hundreds of billions of dollars just trying to comply with it. What if small businesses and hardworking families could use that money, time and energy to buy a house, grow their business, save for the future, or hire an additional employee? Elise will work to pursue fundamental tax reform, make it flatter and fairer for everyone, close special-interest loop holes, and eliminate burdensome regulations that hinder job growth and family savings.

HEALTHCARE Repeal Obamacare and replace it with common sense solutions to lower health care costs and improve quality and access Families and small businesses in the North Country want health care that works for them and fits their specific needs. Instead, Obamacare has caused premiums to rise, coverage plans to be dropped, and small businesses to cut employees and reduce shifts and work hours. This is not the way to reform health care to improve quality and increase access. My family’s business lost our health care plan as a result of Obamacare, and we are now forced to pay more for less coverage. To lower costs and improve care, Elise believes we need to repeal Obamacare and replace with common sense solutions; including to allow Upstate families and businesses to shop for insurance across state lines; pursue real tort reform; fight the waste, fraud and abuse that costs our health care system billions each year; protect those with pre-existing conditions by funding state-level high-risk pools; and allow individuals and families to purchase insurance on the same tax-advantaged basis as businesses.

ENERGY Affordable energy means ‘all of the above’ Energy costs are often times the highest expenses for a family or business in Upstate New York. Gas for the car, heating bills for home or the office – these costs add up quickly. The federal government often places unnecessary mandates and regulations on energy suppliers and development. However, America is home to vast supplies of energy that if fully utilized will supply a growing nation and fuel our economy into the future. Elise supports a national energy policy that increases American-made energy, reduces our dependency on foreign oil, protects the environment, and brings down energy costs for New Yorkers.

Expanding energy exploration and drilling for oil and natural gas where it can be reached; utilizing alternative energy sources like solar and wind; developing more clean-coal and nuclear energy; and keeping government mandates and taxes low on energy suppliers and developers – these are critical components of an American-made ‘All of the Above’ energy policy.

IMMIGRATION Securing our Borders, Addressing a Broken Immigration System

A nation of immigrants, a nation of laws Elise does not support amnesty of any kind for immigrants who have broken the law and entered the country illegally. The first step in fixing our broken immigration system must involve making our borders secure and ensuring law enforcement has the tools and resources they need to keep us safe. America is a nation of immigrants, but is also a nation of laws. But our immigration system is currently broken and doing nothing amounts to de facto amnesty. The more than 11 million illegal immigrants currently living in the United States are doing so outside the law. On the other hand, immigrants trying to do so legally can wait more than 15 years in some cases to obtain legal citizenship. Our system penalizes those who follow the law and rewards those who do not. The North Country has a unique understanding of immigration not only due to our proximity to the Canadian border, but also because of the needs of our local farmers and agriculture businesses, as well as students attending New York universities using student visas. Elise will work in Washington towards an immigration system that upholds the law and keeps Americans safe, while also encouraging economic growth in New York.

It took the gruesome videos of two American journalists being beheaded by a masked Islamic State (ISIS) butcher, followed since then by more victims, to finally wake Americans to the threat that they face from Islam, but the beheading of a Moore, Oklahoma victim by a man who had been trying to get his co-workers to convert to Islam that brought the threat to the homeland.

The memory of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon have long since begun to fade, but Islam has returned to page one with a display of the violence that is the heart and soul of a cult based on the life and teachings of Muhammad.

Don’t call it a religion. And surely do not call it the “religion of peace.” There was nothing peaceful about Islam from its earliest days when the citizens of Mecca came to the conclusion that Muhammad and his followers were a threat to them. That was 1,400 years ago.

If it were in my power, I would require every American to read “It’s All About Muhammad: A Biography of the World’s Most Notorious Prophet” by F.W. Burleigh ($`6.95, Zenga Books).

Instead, I will only highly recommend it as the best way to understand the man who literally invented a so-called religion based on his own pathologies and then, through terror, ensured it spread to the entirety of Arabia in his lifetime.

As the author notes in its introduction, the biography is based almost entirely on the original literature of Islam as well as early biographies, histories, and collections of traditions. Twenty thousand pages of material were given line-by-line scrutiny “because what is written about him in the original literature is disturbing.”

“More than two-thirds of the canonical biographical materials have to do with the violence he used to spread his religion.” It was a short step from Muhammad, the self-proclaimed prophet who later called himself the messenger of Allah, to Alton Nolen, the Muslim convert who is alleged to have beheaded a former co-worker.

What is little known about Muhammad is that he suffered from epileptic fits throughout his life and had had a troubled youth that would have unhinged anyone. A fortunate marriage at age 24 took him out of a life of low status and poverty. His wife was twenty years his senior, a woman of wealth. Though a grave concern in an era when the fits were seen as demon possession, Muhammad began to interpret them as the voices of Allah and his angels, particularly Gabriel.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/arguing-with-sharia-supporting-muslims-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Louis Lionheart, a Christian preacher who engages in open-air debates, dialogues and evangelism on 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, Ca. For information on his ministry visit his web site: TruthDefenders.com.

Louis came on the show to discuss “Arguing With Sharia-Supporting Muslims,” sharing his experience of being told that Islam is peaceful and then being threatened in the same conversation. The dialogue occurred within the context of a focus on “The Battle Over Islam on the Streets of L.A.,” in which Louis discussed his experience of engaging Muslims about their religion on 3rd St. Promenade:

If the weather is too hot or too cold, if there is a natural disaster, if a plane crashes, if crime increases, if crime decreases, if the Ebola virus rampages across of Africa or stays home to read a good book instead, if the price of coffee goes up or if a war breaks out… it will eventually be connected to Global Warming

Even the rise of ISIS has been blamed not on the Koran, but on Global Warming.

Meanwhile a Muslim terrorist can blow himself up at Ground Zero on September 11 while screaming, “I am doing this because I am a Muslim and I hate you all” and those same experts will tell us that it had nothing to do with Islam, but it was caused by the impact of Global Warming on the molecules of his brain.

It’s all a matter of how you connect the dots.

Democrats think that Global Warming is a bigger threat to America than Al Qaeda. That’s the profitable notion that Al Gore has been selling for some time. When ISIS began making headlines, lefty publications scurried to explain how ISIS had been caused by Global Warming. If you can’t get rid of ISIS, you can always promise to make it go away with another few billion for Bay Area Green Tech liberal donors.

That’s why Homeland Security is focusing on Global Warming. Why bother with Islam when the root cause of Islamic terrorism turns out to be neither Islam nor terrorism, but your failure to buy recycled toilet paper and pay much higher prices for energy. Instead of droning ISIS, we will drone on about sustainable sustainability and how eagles would rather be killed by wind turbines than by oil spills.

Ideas are roads to conclusion and conclusions lead to policies. If you want to control the policy, you have to control where the roads go. The media narratives are roads. If you take them, you can never reach the right conclusions because they just don’t go there. The media’s map of America has highways going from climate change to marriage equality to death panels. The policies we end up with are based on that map and the policies determine where all the money and the power end up.

Disturbed Americans rack up attacks that al-Qaeda and the Islamic State would envy.

Americans are right to be concerned about the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and other international terrorist threats.

But in recent days, we’ve seen a sudden flurry of disturbing examples of non-terrorist Americans carrying out terrorist-style attacks against other people.

Let’s stipulate that Alton Nolen, the Oklahoma man who beheaded one of his co-workers, may be a case of “do-it-yourself jihadism” — he had no direct ties to terror groups but behaved as an ally of those groups. Nolen converted to Islam, and a prosecutor said he had “an infatuation with beheadings.”

Then there’s the strange case of Federal Aviation Administration contract worker Brian Howard, who attempted suicide, then allegedly attempted arson of an FAA control center, prompting enormous numbers of delayed flights across the country:

According to an affidavit, first responders found smoke when they arrived in the basement of the control center after a 911 call about 5:40 a.m. Friday.

They also found blood on the floor. They followed the trail and found two knives and a lighter and then Howard, who was in the process of cutting his throat, according to the affidavit.

The paramedics took a knife from him and began to treat Howard, who told them to leave him alone. Howard was taken to a hospital in Aurora.

It’s funny how President Obama is always talking about “I” and “me” whenever it makes him look good, but suddenly it’s “they” and “we” when mistakes are made.

For instance, for years Obama boasted about how he ended the Iraq War and how he withdrew American troops. “You know I say what I mean and I mean what I say,” he boasted on the campaign trail in 2012. “I said I’d end the war in Iraq. I ended it.”

Then, over the summer, as one Iraqi city after another fell to Islamic State militants, and as critics insisted that Obama’s decision to pull all our troops out of Iraq was partly to blame, he suddenly changed his tune, mocking the critics. “What I just find interesting is the degree to which this issue keeps on coming up, as if this was my decision [to withdraw U.S. troops].”

On Sunday night, the always-congenial Steve Kroft of CBS’s 60 Minutes noted comments by James Clapper, the director of national intelligence. Clapper said, “We overestimated the ability and the will of our allies, the Iraqi army, to fight.”

“That’s true. That’s absolutely true,” Obama replied. “Jim Clapper has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria.”

Eli Lake of the Daily Beast contacted a “former senior Pentagon official who worked closely on the threat posed by Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq,” who was, in Lake’s words, “flabbergasted” by the president’s remarks. “Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bulls****ing,” the official said.

It’s almost surely the latter. Lake and others have gone on to detail how the intelligence and defense communities were briefing the White House and Congress about the threat even when Obama was still dismissing the Islamic State as the “jayvee squad” of terrorism.

Fort Bliss: Moms at War Myer’s movie offers a satisfying completion of the Long War Trilogy started by The Hurt Locker and Lone Survivor. It would be a shame if Fort Bliss isn’t given the opportunity to reach a bigger audience.

America has been at war for over a decade. In that time, Hollywood has managed to make only three films worthy of the people who do our fighting—The Hurt Locker, Lone Survivor, and Fort Bliss. In one way or another, all three stood apart from mainstream Tinseltown. They reached the big screen more because of the passion and vision of the filmmakers than the Hollywood suits who usually pick and choose what gets released to the corner cinema.

Take the The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow’s story tracing the harrowing experiences of a three-man bomb disposal squad in Iraq. Big studios were not that interested in it. As Bigelow noted in a 2009 New York Times interview, “I’ve never made a studio film.” But audiences loved this movie. The Hurt Locker won the Best Picture Oscar in 2008.

Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor (2013) performed equally well at the box office, but was snubbed by Oscar. Although Berg has made his share of standard Hollywood fare, this film was anything but mainstream cinema. The director struggled to find support and financing to bring the story of an ill-fated Special Operations mission in Afghanistan to the screen. “Nobody puts a gun to your head and makes you do something,” Berg said in one interview, “It’s just better when you care.” Audiences cared. It was one of the highest-grossing films of the year.

Less well-known is Claudia Myers’ Fort Bliss. It recently opened with only a very limited theatrical release. The movie follows an Army medic—a single mom who returns home and struggles to reconnect with her young son only to be confronted with the possibility of being deployed once again.

In addition to the fierce commitment of their creators, the films have something else in common. They are all small movies about long, difficult wars. Yet each is virtually devoid of the politics of war. They aren’t films for the right wing or the left wing. They are smart enough to recognize that, for the people who fight our wars, politics are left at the war’s edge. It is not possible to make an authentic American war film and wrap it in a political agenda.

Further, each of these movies could have been transported to any American war, and the stories would have worked just as well. They each focus on the quintessential and timeless experience of Americans at war. They are studies rooted in why we fight and the impact that service has as it ripples through the lives of men and women in uniform and their families.

This summer saw an eruption of anti-Semitism across Europe that included firebombs thrown at synagogues and cries of “Jews to the gas!” Now the European Parliament has named an Egyptian activist notorious for violent rhetoric against Israel to the list of nominees for its annual Sakharov Prize, named after the great Soviet dissident.

Alaa Abdel Fattah, a Web developer and blogger, was among the secularist leaders of the 2011 uprising that overthrew Hosni Mubarak . He was sentenced to 15 years in prison earlier this year for violating the restrictive new protest law enacted by the regime of Abdel Fattah Al Sisi. He is out on bail, pending a retrial.

Mr. Abdel Fattah may have been brave in confronting authoritarianism in his own country. But his rhetoric on Israel and moderate Arabs is another story. “One should only debate human beings,” he tweeted in 2009. “Zionists and other imperialists are not human beings.” In late 2010 he tweeted: “Dear zionists please don’t ever talk to me, I’m a violent person who advocated the killing of all zionists including civilians.”

“My heroes have always killed colonialists,” Mr. Abdel Fattah tweeted in 2010, linking to a news article marking the death of Abu Daoud, the Palestinian terrorist who masterminded the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of 11 Israeli athletes. In 2012 he wrote: “Assassinating [Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat isn’t something that should shame a man, but instead honor him.”

Mr. Abdel Fattah’s nomination is part of a pattern of subverting the Sakharov Prize to embarrass certain unpopular supporters of global freedom, such as the U.S. and Israel. The Confederal Group of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left, or GUE/NGL, the parliamentary bloc that put forth Mr. Abdel Fattah’s name, nominated Edward Snowden for last year’s prize.

Such stunts sully the legacy of Andrei Sakharov who, according to his wife, the dissident Yelena Bonner, once said that “all wars that Israel has waged have been just, forced upon it by the irresponsibility of Arab leaders.” The European Parliament should uphold this distinction and remove Mr. Abdel Fattah’s name from the list.

Double Trouble Carbon Regulation
The D.C. Circuit will hear an important challenge to EPA abuse.

President Obama prophesied at the United Nations last week that climate change is the “one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other,” and perhaps this vision of Apocalypse explains why he thinks he can disregard the law to regulate carbon. Whatever they think about warming, the courts may pay more respect to statutes.

This month a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to hear a challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency’s new climate rules under the Clean Air Act. The order was unusual because the courts generally review rules only after they are finalized, which could take another year or more. The Ohio-based coal company Murray Energy and a dozen states are suing under the All Writs Act of 1789.

Murray drew a D.C. Circuit panel including a liberal (Judge Sri Srinivasan ), a moderate (Judge Thomas Griffith ) and a conservative (senior Judge Douglas Ginsburg ). Murray also happens to be correct on the legal merits.

The EPA wants to reorganize U.S. electric power generation and drive coal and eventually natural gas out of the energy mix under a rarely used backwater of the Clean Air Act called section 111(d), whose mandates apply state by state. The problem is that the law also includes a clause meant to prevent double regulation: Air pollutants that are controlled at the national level under the act’s section 112 are therefore specifically excluded from section 111 control. Carbon emissions, under a separate 2012 rule, are already subject to 112, but the EPA wants to have it both ways.

In a legal memorandum, the EPA claims that “a literal reading of that language would mean that the EPA could not regulate any air pollutant from a source category regulated under section 112,” and thus such a reading is “not reasonable.” In other words, obeying the law would not let the agency do what it wants to do, so the law must go.

In 40 years of covering national elections, I’ve never seen anything like this effort to keep Senate control.

In Kansas, Democrats persuaded their Senate candidate, Chad Taylor, to drop out of the race against incumbent Republican Pat Roberts. Mr. Taylor was running third in polls behind Mr. Roberts and independent Greg Orman. Soon after Mr. Taylor’s early-September withdrawal, Democratic lawyers went to court to keep his name off the ballot.

In Montana, after Democratic Sen. Max Baucus announced that he would not seek re-election in 2014, Democrats feared that an open seat would be an easy win for Republican Steve Daines. So Mr. Baucus resigned and went to China as U.S. ambassador. Lt. Gov. John Walsh was appointed senator. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, meanwhile, pressured another Democrat to drop out and allow Mr. Walsh to win the primary without a challenger. Mr. Walsh later quit the race in a plagiarism scandal.

All that maneuvering only begins to suggest the lengths to which Democrats are going to retain control of the Senate in the midterm election on Nov. 4. Candidate switches have happened before. Democrats replaced New Jersey Sen. Robert Torricelli, who had won the primary, with Frank Lautenberg as their candidate in 2002. But that pales next to Democratic machinations in 2014.

Republicans aren’t above ruthless tactics, but in 40 years of covering national elections I’ve never seen anything like the extraordinary efforts of Democrats to prevent Republicans from picking up the six seats to gain Senate control.

Mr. Reid is the leading architect of the Democratic campaign and its unprecedented tactics. He has sought to protect incumbent Democrats from votes that might imperil their re-election. And he is determined to keep Republicans from demonstrating that they’re not opposed to every Democratic initiative. To manage this, he has slowed Senate business to a near halt.