RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Honorable Ed Timperlake is a Fellow at IASC was the first Assistant Secretary for Congressional and Public Affairs and then Public and Intergovernmental Affairs when VA was elevated to Cabinet status.

Veterans are sick and dying and some at the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) simply do not care. It is time for a reckoning.

Over the last few years it has become known that the DVA’s Undersecretary for Benefits has demonstrated total incompetence, and now America is seeing that some leaders in the Veterans Health Administration, as currently reported, may have actually been criminally negligent. The Secretary, based on his Congressional testimony, over time appears rather oblivious.

It is a difficult story to report on because investigating and reporting on the medical health of specific veteran cases, patient privacy safe guards of the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) apply. It is the responsibility for all in the media and law enforcement to publicly respect the privacy of veterans and their specific illness, wounds or disease. This is a critical issue, not to further hurt those who have given so much.

However, respecting HIPPA can still allow a discussion of what America’s veterans may be facing when VA care is denied or delayed. The emerging Department of Veterans Affairs scandal of secret waiting lists is abhorrent and unacceptable. For one generation it is doubly hateful and now for our current warriors equally potentially sinister and deadly.

My fellow Vietnam combat veterans were and now should again be concerned about a grateful nation not delivering on earned benefits and letting them die alone waiting in the dark during their end of life years. Unfortunately, veterans and their families have been there before, but one visionary DVA Secretary said not on his watch.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/review-faithless-execution-building-the-political-case-for-obamas-impeachment-by-andrew-mccarthy?f=must_reads
BY RUTH KING

Andrew McCarthy’s new book has ignited an epidemic of hives among Democrats who have not read it but fear the title. An e-mail from http://my.democrats.org/Stand-with-President-Obama warns in tall and bold letters: “Conservatives are getting excited about a brand new book “Faithless Execution-Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.” They then implore: “It Comes Out Next Month…The Bogus Impeachment Talk Will Never Stop unless we put an end to it! Help Democrats Fight Back!” No doubt it will become a great fundraising vehicle.

Stand down silly Democrats. Thanks for the great pre-publication publicity, but if you read the book you would know that Andrew McCarthy, author of bestselling books on national security issues and one of America’s most respected prosecutors, argues that there is no appetite for it in either political party or among the majority of the population. While it is important to make the case that we have a lawless administration and a president guilty of serial impeachable offenses, it would, he contends, be foolhardy to file articles of impeachment in the absence of strong public support for the president’s removal. In fact, the author takes great pains to aver that the nation would be better served if the President changed course, followed his oath to execute the laws faithfully, and concluded his term. On the matter of legislators and pundits holding the President’s feet to the fire by demanding that he uphold the laws of the nation, McCarthy scolds both parties.

For American adults and voters the word “impeachment” conjures the costly, embarrassing and titillating case of President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, which was about lying, perjury and scurrilous sexual behavior by the President.

But as the author of this essential book states: ” All presidential lawlessness is not the same….and real impeachment will never happen unless the people are convinced, by the nature of the president’s lawlessness, that it must be stopped and that it will not be stopped unless the President is removed from office.” Does Obama’s blatant disregard of the law fit the criteria for impeachment?

Andrew McCarthy lays out the political case for impeachment with methodical and scrupulous detail as both a preparation for litigation and a primer for American citizens and their elected legislators. The author is a skilled prosecutor who has determined, with undeniable evidence that President Obama has shown willful disregard for the chief executive’s fundamental obligation to “take care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

The following questions are occasioned by seven articles of impeachment offered by Andrew McCarthy, with the caveat that the standard adopted by the Framers – “high crimes and misdemeanors” – refers to political wrongs by officials in which high public trust is reposed, not ordinary penal statutes:

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/montana-2014-candidates-for-congress-where-they-stand?f=must_reads

Filing Deadline (Major Parties): March 10, 2014- Filing is complete

Primary: June 3, 2014

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 (**).

U.S. Senate
Jon Tester (D) Next Election in 2018.
John Walsh (D) Incumbent

With Sen. Max Baucus confirmed as the new ambassador to China in February 2014, Montana’s governor appointed Democrat Attorney General John Walsh to fill the remainder of Baucus’ term.

http://johnwalsh2014.com/ http://www.walsh.senate.gov/

He enlisted in the National Guard as a private, working hard and rising through the ranks to become adjutant general, leading the Montana National Guard. As a battalion commander, John led more than 700 brave men and women overseas to Iraq in the largest deployment of Montana National Guard soldiers and airmen since WWII. As Adjutant General, he continued his life of service, preparing Montana’s service members for deployments and making sure they received the benefits they earned and deserve. During his time as adjutant general, John championed the Yellow Ribbon program, an initiative that provides valuable resources to National Guard members and their families at all stages of their deployment and ensures Guard members get their well-earned services and benefits when they return home. Montana’s successful Yellow Ribbon program became a blueprint for similar efforts nationwide.

ON ENERGY APRIL 29, 2014 Keystone supporters push for swift Senate vote

11 Senate Democrats urged Obama in a letter to approve the pipeline by the end of May. Six of the 11 are on the ballot this fall, including Landrieu, Begich and Walsh, and Sens. Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Mark Warner of Virginia.
Dirk Adams (D) Challenger

http://www.adamsformontana.com/

HOT BUTTON ISSUES

ENERGY The Keystone XL Pipeline – The proposed Keystone XL pipeline (which is only a shortcut on an existing pipeline) is a bad deal for Montana. Yet Dirk Adams is the only candidate, Democrat or Republican, who is standing up against it. The pipeline promises jobs it won’t deliver. It will cause problems for landowners. The last pipeline TransCanada built in Montana had 12 spills in its first year of operation, spewing over 20,000 gallons of crude. The Keystone XL pipeline is bad for the environment and the businesses that depend on it. It is bad for Montanans’ health and pocketbooks.

Climate Change – Dirk Adams recognizes the critical nature of climate change. It is a global issue. In Montana where agriculture is our biggest industry, it’s a game-changer. Winters that are too wet or too dry or too cold or too warm wreak havoc with the water supply we depend on in the summer, which in turn affects our crops, livestock, and people’s paychecks. Climate change cannot be ignored. Adams is committed to making sure real and meaningful action is taken in recognition of climate change.

HEALTHCARE The Medicaid Expansion for Montanans is a no-brainer. All we need to do is say “yes” to federal funds and 60,000 more Montanans have health care coverage. Those federal funds include Montana taxpayer dollars. There’s no reason to send that money to other states when the need for health care here at home in Montana is great.

The Affordable Health Care Act (“Obamacare”) has the right goal. But many compromises were made along the way and implementation was clumsy. The Affordable Health Care represents a step in the right direction in terms of intent but there is still much work to do to reform our health care and insurance industries to achieve a system that is efficient, fair, and meets the health care needs of citizens.

REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS Dirk Adams supports full access to reproductive health care for women, including birth control and abortion. Recognizing that rights that cannot be exercised are not rights, he also supports clinic access laws to keep physicians and patients and their families safe and free from bullying and intimidation. The lives and health of women will always come first for Adams when it comes to policy concerning reproductive rights and he will work to keep women’s reproductive health services available, accessible, affordable, and safe.

Adams’ mother ran the first family planning clinic in East Texas in 1962 (before abortion was legal). The importance of the full array of reproductive health care services being available for women was instilled in him from an early age and is one of the issues that defines him politically. Abortion rights are about more than health care, they are also about privacy, one of the most significant and serious issues of our times. They are about the integrity of the individual and the right to self-govern at the most intimate levels of one’s personal life. Dirk Adams is committed to being an advocate and champion for reproductive rights and services.
John Bohlinger (D) Challenger

http://www.bohlingerforsenate.com/
Susan Cundiff (R) Challenger

http://susanforussenate.com/
Steve Daines (R) Currently Congressman At Large

http://www.stevedaines.com/ http://www.ontheissues.org/house/Steve_Daines.htm**

HOT BUTTON ISSUES

HEALTHCARE I support full repeal of ObamaCare. This law imposes a heavy tax and regulatory burden on American families and small businesses, and it will cause millions of Americans to lose the health coverage they currently have. It will also lead to higher health costs and higher premiums, and it will drastically increase federal spending by subsidizing health coverage for millions of Americans and greatly expanding Medicaid. Further, the law weakened competition and choice in Medicare and authorized a board of unelected officials to make further Medicare cuts. I believe ObamaCare’s government-centered approach represents the wrong solution for the health care challenges in our country.

While ObamaCare is not the solution, I certainly recognize that our health care system has major problems. First and foremost, I believe doctors and patients, not insurance companies or the government, should be in charge of health care decisions. Further, I support reforms that would slow the rapid growth in health costs without jeopardizing access to high-quality care. I believe Congress should provide people with greater freedom in shopping for health insurance, make the costs of medical care more transparent, and reward innovation in the delivery of health services. I will also back commonsense medical liability reform, because doctors currently must practice high-cost “defensive medicine” to protect themselves against unwarranted lawsuits.

IMMIGRATION AND HOMELAND SECURITY As a member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, I am committed to ensuring that the federal government effectively protects Americans from terrorism, drug trafficking, cyber attacks, and other threats, while safeguarding our liberties and privacy. Our country faces a number of threats, and I will work to conduct vigorous oversight of the government’s response to those threats. We must be vigilant against all who would do harm to this country, but must ensure that we don’t sacrifice our freedom and liberty in the process.

Protecting our nation’s borders is one of the most pressing issues facing our nation. The increase in illegal immigration, drug trafficking, and human smuggling is unacceptable. I will continue to work to secure our border.

ENERGY As a fifth generation Montanan, I know our state’s natural resources are central to our way of life and an engine to our economy and job creation. Our pristine glacial peaks and rivers, vibrant forests, wide open spaces, and rich mineral and energy deposits earn beautiful Montana its name-the treasure state. As a member of the House Committee on Natural Resources, I will work to preserve Montana’s way of life by encouraging responsible stewardship as we continue to develop our natural resources.

In addition, I support an all-of-the-above approach to securing American energy independence that includes alternative sources of energy-hydropower, wind, and solar-along with coal, oil, and natural gas. Montana will continue to lead the way, through the pending construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, promoting exploration and sustained development of the Bakken oil shale, continuing to lead in domestic coal production, and expanding our renewable energy production. Montana is setting an example of how domestic energy development can be done in a responsible manner to reduce our dependence on foreign energy while sustaining our resources for generations to come.
Champ Edmunds (R) Challenger

http://www.champ2014.com/

HOT BUTTON ISSUES

ENERGY America’s enemies hold the key to our energy-a fundamental part of our free society. Over the past decade, natural resources-coal, oil and natural gas-have been discovered across North America that could make us energy independent and lower our cost of energy. We need to get the government out of the way and develop responsible American energy that produces jobs, revenue and security. I’m ready to approve the Keystone pipeline and responsible energy production across the country. This will bring thousands of jobs to Montana alone.

ECONOMY AND JOBS If we wanted to pay off the national debt today, every man, woman and child in the United States would have to write a check for over $53,000. The government cannot tax its way out of this crisis. We must grow the economy and the best way to do this is unleash the power of the free market through lower taxes and less regulation.

Montana families are working hard to make ends meet, yet the Federal Government continues to borrow and spend. As a single father of two, and a member of Montana’s House Appropriations Committee, I have experience balancing budgets and I want to take that experience to Washington with me.

HEALTHCARE Montana overwhelmingly agrees that government run healthcare is not a step in the right direction. Montana’s own senator, Max Baucus, authored the Affordable Care Act (commonly known as Obamacare), voted for it and now calls it a “train wreck.” Meanwhile, insurance rates for Montanans are skyrocketing and small businesses are suffering.
​
Every Montanan wants healthcare to be affordable, but no Montanan wants the false promises, political favors and exorbitant costs of Obamacare. I support a market solution to healthcare that provides quality care at lower prices.

US HOUSE OF REP LOGO

At Large
Steve Daines (R) Is leaving his seat to run as Candidate for US Senate in 2014
Elsie Arntzen (R) Challenger

http://www.elsieformontana.com/

HOT BUTTON ISSUES

HEALTHCARE The President sold Obamacare as a plan that would help cover the uninsured, lower insurance costs, and make it easier for businesses to cover their employees. As I predicted, the results have been the opposite. Insurance rates are skyrocketing, more people have had their plans canceled than have signed up, and businesses are eliminating jobs as a result of this disaster.

Obamacare must be repealed and replaced with common sense reforms that actually lower the cost of health insurance, not increase it and allow businesses to grow and succeed. I believe health care reform should include things like medical malpractice reform. This will stop the frivolous lawsuits that force doctors to practice defensive medicine and drive up costs. I think we should allow small businesses to pool together to buy insurance. This would enable Montana’s small businesses to have the same buying power as big businesses. Finally, I would allow people to purchase insurance across state lines to create more competition and lower costs.

ECONOMY The President and the radical left who support his agenda have declared a war on the West. Day after day, President Obama and his EPA issue rules and develop policies that hurt Montana’s Economy. His administration cuts off access to our public lands and places barriers in the way of responsible resource development here in our Treasure State.

They don’t understand our way of life in Montana. Washington doesn’t understand what it means to live off the land. They don’t understand that Montana resources reduce energy prices, and improve our economy, but can also reduce our reliance on energy from people who would like to see America destroyed.

I will stand up to Obama like the schoolyard bully he is to Montana’s economy.

SPENDING, DEBT AND BALANCING THE BUDGET As a school teacher, I have seen a lot of red ink on papers, but nothing compares to the red ink in our nation’s budget. Year after year trillion dollar deficits and a President with no plan to stop the out of control spending. As it stands now the greatest challenge facing our country is the towering 17 trillion dollar national debt.

Balancing our nation’s budget will not be easy. We cannot wave a magic wand and make the deficit disappear. However, there are some elementary, common-sense solutions we can find to stop the out of control spending. To start with, I would repeal Obamacare. That saves us 1.7 trillion dollars on day one. Next I would sponsor a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution to force Congress to make the tough spending choices that Montana families make every day, just like we do each session in the Montana legislature. Third, no more bailouts. And finally, I would permanently eliminate wasteful earmark spending.
Matt Rosendale (R) Challenger

http://mattformontana.com/
Corey Stapleton (R) Challenger

http://www.coreystapleton.com/home/

HOT BUTTON ISSUES

MILITARY As a former Navy officer I will always be a close ally with all active duty military and veterans. I am an 11 year veteran myself. I received the Montana National Guard’s “Guardian of the Guard” Award in 2012 for my career of legislation on behalf of veterans. I firmly feel that we need to remain ever vigilant to threats against America, and continuously improve our readiness and abilities against those who would harm our country. – See more at: http://www.coreystapleton.com/issues/#sthash.ik9NFpGw.dpuf

JOBS AND ECONOMY Meaningful creation of jobs comes from the private sector. The fundamental conflict occurring in America between the major political parties is ‘scope’ of governmental intervention. Adding massive spending is not going to create sustainable jobs in Montana. Everyday I help Montanans figure out how they can afford to keep their homes, send their kids to school, and plan for retirement. But to do any of that first requires good jobs are available. I understand the worries too many families are facing, and my focus is keeping and creating good-paying jobs here in Montana.

NATIONAL DEBT National Debt America is trillions of dollars in debt, and Washington D.C.’s politicians use their position to convince Americans that somehow we need more debt. This is epic failure and endangers our national security and our ability to compete in a world economy. We need to reduce our national debt now. America’s rise to greatness last century was tied to the United States loaning money to other countries-not vice versa. Washington is mortgaging the futures of America’s children and grandchildren and it cannot be allowed to continue.
Drew Turiano (R) Challenger Tea Party

http://drewforcongress.com/

HOT BUTTON ISSUES

HEALTHCARE The Affordable Care Act known as Obama-Care has without question become one of the greatest debacles in American history.

There is no longer a question of “is Obama-Care bad for America”, but “how much damage will Obama-Care do to America”?

With the Obama-Care tentacles now reaching into every aspect of America’s lives and businesses, we must stop any further encroachment. According to the Congressional Budget Office, this horrific law is costing America millions upon millions of full-time jobs. This is only the beginning of the Obama-Care devastation to our nation.

As your United States Congressman, I promise that I will do everything in my power to reverse this atrocity on America. I will never vote to fund any part of this law, nor will I ever vote to support this law in any fashion if given the opportunity.

I further promise that I will sponsor or co-sponsor legislation that disassembles as many portions of this law as I possibly can.

IMMIGRATION There are many different opinions on the issue of just how many illegal aliens are on American soil. Current estimates range anywhere from 11,000,000 (that the current administration is claiming) to as high as 25-30,000,000 that opposing experts claim.

The operative word in this entire discussion regarding this issue is “Illegal”.

Most in the media and the current administration are now content to use the words “undocumented worker”. These people are not only undocumented; they are illegal and are in legal terms-guilty of committing felonies by illegally entering the United States.

The current bill passed by the United States Senate last year known as S-744 seeks to totally undermine our current laws regarding immigration in America.

Below are only a few of the many reasons why I will oppose this horrific piece of legislation if elected as your next Representative:

S.744 does not require any additional border fencing or completion of current border fence requirements. Instead, it requires DHS to submit to Congress a fencing “strategy,” in which DHS recommends what additional fencing is needed along the U.S.-Mexico border, if any. (Sec. 5, p. 24)
S.744 voids state and local E-Verify laws. (Sec. 3101, p. 511)
S.744 does not require the deportation of a single illegal alien. DHS is never required to deport an alien whose RPI (Registered Provisional Immigrant) application is denied-for any reason.
S.744 states in (Section 2101 pages 64-67) that DHS is authorized to forgive and expunge the record of an illegal alien that has committed the following crimes. Keep in mind that many of these crimes are actually felonies.

As your Representative from the Great State of Montana, I will only support legislation that does the following:

Secures these United States of America from anyone entering without proper identification and documentation.
Enforces the current laws on the books. These laws were very effective for decades until this administration decided to begin ignoring them.
Prevents the American taxpayer from supporting anyone that is in the United States illegally.
Regulates the immigration to the United States of America by only those individuals that will assimilate into our society and provide an addition to America rather become a drain on our nation.

Ryan Zinke (R) Challenger

Retired Navy Commander

http://ryanzinke.com/
John Lewis (D) Challenger

http://montanansforlewis.com/

HOT BUTTON ISSUES

CREATING JOBS Let’s bring ‘Made in USA’ home again During his role in public service, John Lewis was instrumental in helping Senator Max Baucus organize Montana’s famous economic development summits. The summits resulted in new, good-paying jobs across Montana. John supports responsible policies that boost Montana’s “all of the above” energy industry and also our state’s $6 billion-per-year outdoor industry. In Congress he will champion efforts to bring back manufacturing to America by closing tax loopholes that make it easier to for corporations to ship jobs overseas.

ENERGY SECURITY Finding a responsible balance Montana is uniquely positioned to be a world leader in energy development with all of our energy resources: wind, solar, natural gas, oil, geothermal energy, coal mining and biofuels. John supports responsible policy that balances all of our energy resources, with an eye toward the future. In Congress he will support a strategy that will protect Montana jobs in both traditional and renewable energy development.

HEALTHCARE All Montanans deserve access to affordable, quality health care
All of Montana is considered rural and many of its small towns are considered “frontier” communities that lack access to health care. John Lewis believes that all Montanans deserve access to affordable, quality health care no matter where they live. That means creating incentives to bring good health care providers to small communities. It means improving access to health care for veterans, seniors and children. And it means holding the nation’s insurance companies accountable-to make sure that they don’t charge women more than men, or that they don’t deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/edward-cline-a-review-of-rael-isaacs-roosters-of-the-apocalypse?f=must_reads

Imagine:
A caveman sits at night in front of his hole in the hill, at the edge of a cliff, absently stroking his lice-ridden beard, shivering even in his polecat and skunk coat, hoping his little fire won’t attract the attention of the growling, carnivorous beasts that roamed the forest below. He is hungry. Today’s hunt netted him nothing but some berries he picked from a bush, and a few grubs. Small animals had fled his approach as he lumbered noisily through the brush. He silently prayed to the weather gods to send more raccoons and squirrels his way. But the only answer was the cacophonous, deafening racket of birds, insects, and other creatures as they sang to the night.

The gods were fickle; sometimes it rained endlessly, other times weeks went by without a drop of rainfall. They were also unpredictable with the seasons; the sun god was sometimes hotter, sometimes did not warm his skin; oft times it hid for days behind a rainless canopy of clouds. There was a season when it snowed; this was when the caveman was able to drink cupped hands of ice water without worry of getting sick. When it rained, he stood outside his cave, head thrown back, mouth open, to catch the drops. There was a stream somewhere below. He had drunk from it, but the water was foul and made him ill, as it had made his family ill.

The caveman was born in his cave. He had never ventured far from it. He was alone. His family were all gone, perished from illnesses he did not understand, or stricken down by one or another angry god. His son was the last to go. He had lost him when the giant finger of the god of wind had fallen on him during one of their rare excursions to the outside world. The caveman had looked at the crushed figure beneath a long, round rock-like thing, cried in dismay, and scurried in terror back into the wilderness. What had he done to incur the wind god’s wrath? He could not fathom the mystery. The universe he knew was hostile and unknowable.

The forest below was strewn with strangely shaped, overgrown objects, big and small, made of materials alien to the caveman, some encased in flaking red crusts, others of a baffling, impenetrable nature, bizarre in shape and to the touch. They were not rocks. His father had told him they were the bones and offal of the sky gods’ food. A wise man in his father’s youth had told him that.
He heard twigs snapping below. He leaned cautiously over the edge of the cliff and espied the slinking, shadowy form of a beast of prey moving beneath the disturbed foliage. The caveman gasped and froze.
It was a Jin, one of the earth god’s angels of vengeance and punishment and a merciless guardian of the earth. Jins were human in form, his father had told him, and stalked only careless cavemen who revealed their outlawed existence by building fires which offended the god of darkness and who otherwise despoiled the earth with their presence and appetites. The Jins killed men for the sake of killing. The caveman’s father’s own father years ago had warned his family of these Jins, called “purifiers,” select stewards of Gaia and caretakers of the planet, he said, and then he had disappeared into the forest on a hunt and he was never seen again.
Neither the father nor his son, now the lonely caveman, had understood half of what the old man had said. But they knew enough to be afraid of the half they did.
The caveman reached over and grasped his club, which he had fashioned from a limb from a dead tree, against the will of the wood god, using sharp rocks from the stream below….

No, this story is not set 100,000 years ago in prehistory. It is set late in the next century, or in the one after it, after environmentalists and “climate change” acolytes and their useful idiot allies in politics and academia have destroyed Western civilization. There is no more history, because those born in that kind of world would have no memory of the world that perished long before their own world had risen up among the caveman’s surviving ancestors to smother them. The caveman is sitting among some ruins of a forgotten, even unknown world.

His son was killed by a toppling wind turbine whose foundation had finally crumbled.

Of course, the caveman perishes under the club of the “purifying” Jin, a caretaker environmentalist. What a great subject for another apocalyptic movie. If one examines the root motive of environmentalists – discarding all the guff about “saving the planet,” “saving the polar bear and the snail darter and the smelt and the wolf,” saving the “scenery,” “conserving natural resources for our children,” eradicating pollution, “reducing CO2 emissions,” and so on – one will discover the dark, venomous bile of pure nihilism or a profound hatred of man. The cavemen’s world is a Utopia – to the glassy-eyed environmentalists.

The caveman’s Jin could also be called a “rooster,” as Rael Jean Isaac calls them in her marvelous little book, Roosters of the Apocalypse: How the Junk Science of Global Warming is Bankrupting the Western World.

As 10,000 Israeli basketball fans traveled to Italy on Sunday to root for Maccabi Tel Aviv in the Euroleague championship game against Real Madrid, an estimated 1,000 American troops arrived in Israel for a very different sort of gathering.

Due to the jubilation surrounding Maccabi’s stunning overtime victory, with crowds cheering the players and fireworks and celebrations bursting out all over the country, even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took time out to take pride in his country’s national team.

For this reason, little attention has been given to the presence of the U.S. soldiers, who have come to participate in “Juniper Cobra,” a five-day exercise with the IDF.

The joint training exercise is aimed at testing Israel’s missile interceptors — the Iron Dome, David’s Sling and the Arrow — all of which were developed with the financial assistance of the United States. So far, these interceptors have been put to the test, mostly successfully, against rockets fired from Gaza.

But it is clearly the more existential threat — directly from Iran, not via its Arab proxies — that necessitates such an extensive exercise on the part of the “Great Satan” and the “Small Satan,” both explicit targets of global jihad.

And though both the American and the Israeli defense establishments have asserted that this week’s battle-dress rehearsal does not indicate a heightened alert in relation to the Islamic Republic — pointing to the fact that these drills have been undertaken every two years since 2001 — the truth is that talks with Tehran have been going nowhere.

Other than Vienna, that is, where American, Russian, Chinese, British, French and German negotiators continue to engage in a charade with their Iranian counterparts that is enabling the ayatollah-led regime to forge ahead fast with its nuclear program.

On a short visit to Israel last week, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel met with Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon to prepare for what the former called the largest drill for U.S. troops under the European Command. During his two-day stay, Hagel reiterated “America’s commitment to a strong and secure Israel … [that] has not and never will be anything but complete and unwavering.”

The latest politically correct fashion on college campuses is just insipid enough to catch on.

It is the so-called trigger warning applied to any content that students might find traumatizing, even works of literature. The trigger warning first arose on feminist websites as a way to alert victims of sexual violence to possibly upsetting discussions of rape (that would “trigger” memories of their trauma) but has gained wider currency.

The student government of the University of California, Santa Barbara, passed a resolution calling for professors to include trigger warnings in their syllabi. The New York Times reports that students at schools from the University of Michigan to George Washington University have requested the warnings. A student at Rutgers University proposed a trigger warning for The Great Gatsby about “a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive, and misogynistic violence” (not to mention binge drinking, reckless driving, profligate spending, and gross social climbing).

Oberlin College, long the nation’s leader in the earnestly ridiculous, seeks to be the FDA of political correctness, with warnings about classroom material nearly as comprehensive as the litany of side effects included in advertisements for a new drug. The school’s Office of Equity Concerns published a document for faculty (since pulled for more work after professors complained) urging them to “understand triggers, avoid unnecessary triggers, and provide trigger warnings.” It exhorts professors to “be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism [i.e., prejudice against the transgendered], ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression.”

Yes, the Chinua Achebe anti-colonial novel Things Fall Apart is a “triumph of literature that everyone in the world should read,” according to the guide. But there’s a downside — it could “trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide, and more.”

By this standard, most of literature is “triggering.” Beloved is triggering for anyone who has lived in a haunted house. Mansfield Park is triggering for anyone who has been sent to live with wealthy relations and subsequently encountered messy romantic entanglements. Les Misérables is triggering for anyone who has ever shoplifted bread. The Aeneid is triggering for anyone who has ever been caught in the whirlpool of Charybdis, or on the island of the Cyclops.

The news website Tout Haiti reported last month that two prominent lawyers have petitioned Haiti’s Superior Court of Auditors and Administrative Disputes, demanding an audit of Bill Clinton’s management of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC). There are powerful interests that won’t want to see the petition succeed and it may go nowhere. But the sentiment it expresses is spreading fast. In the immortal words of Charlie Brown, Mr. Clinton has gone from hero to goat.

Four years after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake toppled the capital city of Port-au-Prince and heavily damaged other parts of the country, hundreds of millions of dollars from the State Department’s U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), allocated to the IHRC, are gone. Hundreds of millions more to the IHRC from international donors have also been spent. Left behind is a mishmash of low quality, poorly thought-out development experiments and half-finished projects.

Haitians are angry, frustrated and increasingly suspicious of the motives of the IHRC and of its top official, Mr. Clinton. Americans might feel the same way if they knew more about this colossal failure. One former Haitian official puts it this way: “I really cannot understand how you could raise so much money, put a former U.S. president in charge, and get this outcome.”

Allow me to hazard a guess: While Mr. Clinton was running things for the IHRC, and the U.S. was leading the reconstruction effort, Hillary Clinton was the U.S. Secretary of State, which means that Mr. Clinton was reporting to his wife. Cheryl Mills, Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff and counselor to the State Department (an adviser and consultant to the secretary), traveled to the country an estimated 30 times in four years. A State Department spokesman told me that “reflected the high priority the United State places on Haiti’s recovery and development.” Requests for comment from Mr. Clinton, through the Clinton Foundation, about the petition and his IHRC record went unanswered.

The Metropolitan Council’s plans include making sure there is a proper mix of races and incomes in each suburb.

Minneapolis

Here in the Twin Cities, a handful of unelected bureaucrats are gearing up to impose their vision of the ideal society on the nearly three million residents of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro region. According to the urban planners on the city’s Metropolitan Council, far too many people live in single family homes, have neighbors with similar incomes and skin color, and contribute to climate change by driving to work. They intend to change all that with a 30-year master plan called “Thrive MSP 2040.”

The Met Council, as it’s known here, was founded in the 1960s to coordinate regional infrastructure—in essence, to make sure that sewers and roads meet up. Over the years, its power to allocate funds and control planning has expanded. Now, under Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton—who appointed all 17 current members—the council intends to play Sim City with residents’ lives.

Thrive MSP 2040 is part of a nationwide movement called “regionalism.” Regional planning of infrastructure is important, of course. But regionalism, as an ideology, is about shifting power away from local elected officials and re-engineering society on behalf of “equity” and “sustainability.” According to regionalist guru David Rusk, author of the book “Cities Without Suburbs,” federal programs that promote regionalism should strive to produce “racially and economically integrated and environmentally sustainable regions.”

While minority residents have been streaming into the Twin Cities’ suburbs for the past 15 years, the Met Council wants to make sure there is a proper race-and-income mix in each. Thus it recently mapped every census tract in the 2,800 square-mile, seven-county region by race, ethnicity and income. The purpose was to identify “racially concentrated areas of poverty” and “high opportunity clusters.” The next step is for the council to lay out what the region’s 186 municipalities must do to disperse poverty throughout the metro area.

Reading can be dangerous, some young people seem to believe.

“Colleges across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as ‘trigger warnings,’ explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans,” the New York Times reports.

The Times notes that the warnings “have their ideological roots in feminist thought.” At first glance this looks like just the latest politically correct excess, but it’s distinct in some ways. For one, the faculty is resisting: “The debate has left many academics fuming, saying that professors should be trusted to use common sense and that being provocative is part of their mandate.” Lisa Hajjar, a sociology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, tells the paper: “Any kind of blanket trigger policy is inimical to academic freedom. . . . The presumption . . . that students should not be forced to deal with something that makes them uncomfortable is absurd or even dangerous.”

Students have demanded trigger warnings at Oberlin College, Rutgers University, the University of Michigan and George Washington University as well as UCSB. The Times reproduces an excerpt from an Oberlin “draft guide,” which reads: “Triggers are not only relevant to sexual misconduct, but also to anything that might cause trauma. Be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other Issues of privilege and oppression. Realize that all forms of violence are traumatic, and that your students have lives before and outside your classroom, experiences you may not expect or understand.” (“Cissexism” refers to prejudice in favor of men and women who identify themselves, respectively, as men and women.)

In a recent piece for The New Republic, Jenny Jarvie writes that “some consider [trigger warnings] an irksome tic of the blogosphere’s most hypersensitive fringes.” They started “in self-help and feminist forums to help readers who might have post traumatic stress disorder to avoid graphic content that might cause painful memories, flashbacks, or panic attacks.” They’ve “been applied to topics as diverse as sex, pregnancy, addiction, bullying, suicide, sizeism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, slut shaming, victim-blaming, alcohol, blood, insects, small holes, and animals in wigs. . . . Even The New Republic”–actually a TNR writer named Molly Redden–“has suggested the satirical news site, The Onion, carry trigger warnings.”

But trigger warnings have come in for criticism and mockery even on the left. Jarvie concludes her piece with this sensible observation: “Bending the world to accommodate our personal frailties does not help us overcome them.” She reports that the feminist website Jezebel, “which does not issue trigger warnings, raised hackles in August by using the term as a headline joke: ‘It’s Time To Talk About Bug Infestations [TRIGGER WARNING].’ ” And Susannah Breslin provoked outrage in 2010 when she “wrote in True/Slant that feminists were applying the term ‘like a Southern cook applies Pam cooking spray to an overused nonstick frying pan.’ ”

The Times reports that targets of campus trigger-warning demands include F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” (for “a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence”), Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” (anti-Semitism) and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs Dalloway” (suicide).

Into the Fray: If a Palestinian state were established, the full weight of the horrors of the Arab world would come pressing down on Israel, from indefensible borders, infinitesimal distances from major population centers.

As I mentioned in my previous column, following my participation in The Jerusalem Post Conference in New York last month, I received an invitation from Russell Robinson, the CEO of the Jewish National Fund, to make a telephonic address to major donors across the United States, assessing the status of the “peace process.”

My column last week was devoted to the first part of that address, delivered on the eve of Israel’s Independence Day. In this week’s column, I share with Jerusalem Post’s readers the remaining topics I raised – with some minor modifications and editorial “tweaks” – which as before, have been made to accommodate the transition from oral to written form.

To recap briefly

As readers will recall, in Part I of my address, aided by a citation from Shakespeare’s Richard II, I argued that the entire peace process, from its inception, was founded on the self-delusion of its architects, and their denial of the harsh realities of the region.

I pointed out that there is a growing awareness of the futility of endeavors to reach a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians. This has resulted in an alarming erosion, over recent decades, of Israeli positions, which I illustrated by excerpts from public proclamations of Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin. The spreading sense of futility has led to increasingly desperate proposals for dealing with the situation – some of which I shall elaborate on this week.

I argued that for Israel to survive over time as the nation-state of the Jewish people, it needs to address a twin imperative: geographic and demographic, and that the two-state paradigm does not contend adequately with the geographic imperative while the one-state paradigm does not contend adequately with the demographic imperative.

I concluded by elaborating on why the withdrawals necessary for the implementation of the two-state paradigm would leave Israel’s principle population centers and strategic installations hopelessly exposed to attack. All these would be in range of weapons being used today from territory relinquished by Israel, creating a situation in which it would be impossible to preserve the nation’s socioeconomic routine that could be disrupted at will by regular forces or irregular renegades, deployed in the areas transferred to Palestinian control. Today, this nightmare scenario can no longer be dismissed as “right-wing scaremongering,” as it is no more than a plausible extrapolation of the precedents.

Now I turn to the remaining issues I raised in my address.

Arab Spring as threat multiplier

The dangers entailed in the creation of a Palestinian state are greatly magnified by the ongoing events in Israel’s immediate geo-political environment. Once the “lid” of dictatorship was removed, all the horrific realities that permeate – some would say, characterize – the societies in the Arab world, were graphically exposed.

Clearly then, if a Palestinian state were created, the full weight of the horrors of the Arab world would almost certainly come pressing down on Israel, from indefensible borders, infinitesimal distances from major population centers – raising the already unacceptable risks involved in such a measure to even more intolerable levels.

As Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu noted in last week’s Remembrance Day speech, referring to Syria: “A few kilometers north of Jerusalem a massacre is occurring that has killed tens of thousands who do not have the power to defend themselves. Who would doubt that that would be our fate…”