RUTHFULLY YOURS

There are no women’s rights in Islam; there are no women’s rights in most Muslim countries. And there is no freedom of expression in these countries; people have become virtually voiceless.

To make a positive change in Muslim countries, we need to be able to speak openly, without putting one’s life at risk, and tell the (too-often criminalized) truth about what Islamic teachings and traditions actually contain.

If one is called “racist” or “Islamophobe,” the answer is that these are the accusations bullies always use to silence those who disagree with them. The real Islamophobes are those who degrade, abuse and kill their fellow Muslims.

If oppression of women is rooted in the culture, shouldn’t one be asking, ‘what makes a culture that misogynous?’

There is a situation even more frightening. It now seems to be difficult to speak openly about fundamentalist Islam even in Western countries. The worst thing any Western progressive or feminist can do is to stay silent.

The loudest voices in the West now seem to come from many progressives who say that criticizing of Islam is racist, intolerant, bigoted and Islamophobic. Injustices, they claim, take place all around the world, not just among Muslims or in Muslim countries. The criticism, they go on, comes from wrong interpretations of Islamic teachings. They say that Islam respects women, and that there are good and bad Muslims, just as there are good and bad people in all religions.

In just seven years, however, between 2002 and 2009, the rate of murdered women in Turkey has increased by 1400 percent.[1]

There are also more than 181,000 child brides in Turkey.[2]

When those figures are provided by state authorities, they are based on factual statistics. But when they are expressed in a critical manner by Canan Arin, a lawyer and women rights activist, they are, apparently, a “crime.”

Canan Arin, 72, is a feminist lawyer who has dedicated her life to women’s rights struggles in Turkey.[3]

The Antalya Bar Association, in December 2011, invited her to its newly founded Women’s Rights Enforcement Centre to give training to the lawyers on violence against women. There, she delivered a speech about early and forced marriages, and gave two examples — one from the 7th century, the other from the 20th century — to clarify her point.

The News Media also got trounced.

Along with trashing the Democrats, voters on Tuesday also dumped on the news media for failure to communicate.

For failure to deliver the truth, Elite Media were snubbed by a citizenry that said keep your opinions to yourselves. This time we’re going it alone.

Never mind your sly front pages and your cunning editorials. We are on to your tricks.

…not once did The New York Times run a headline or an opinion piece critical of the president.
Throughout the land, The Majority pushed buttons or pulled levers to register their disgust with corrupt journalism and to declare their disdain for reportage that for years, by hook or by crook, kept Americans in the dark. Americans voted No to the bellyful of deceit that came through airwaves and by newsprint.

From ballot to ballot, Americans said, “We don’t trust you either.”

Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/colorado-2014-candidates-for-congress-where-they-stand#ixzz3ITgJpJ4J

BEFORE HE RAN FOR THE SENATE HE REPRESENTED COLORADO DISTRICT 4….
Cory Gardner (R-District 4 ) Tea Party Challenger
Cory Gardner leaving his seat to run for Senate against Senator Mark Udall
http://gardner.house.gov/

http://www.ontheissues.org/house/Cory_Gardner.htm **Rated -3 by AAI, indicating anti-Arab anti-Palestine voting record. (May 2012)

IMMIGRATION http://gardner.house.gov/issue/immigration The solution to the problem isn’t for the Justice Department to file a taxpayer-funded lawsuit against the Governor of Arizona for responding to a law enforcement crisis. It isn’t giving amnesty to the 12-20 million illegal immigrants in this country, or giving those people benefits that will only encourage more illegal immigration.

The time has come to enforce the rule of law and end illegal immigration. To that end, I will support legislation that ensures employers only hire people who are here legally and that guest workers are here temporarily. The technology exists to accomplish this in a sensible way, and it is time that we implement that technology.

ENERGY http://gardner.house.gov/issue/energy As a member of Congress, I have passed two pieces of legislation out of the House that will tap American energy resources and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. The Jobs and Energy Permitting Act would streamline the permitting process for drilling in the Alaskan Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). Production in the OCS could provide a million barrels of oil a day – comparable to what we currently get from Saudi Arabia.

The other piece of legislation I have passed out of the House is the Strategic Energy Production Act, which would link a drawdown of America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to increasing access to domestic land for oil production. In the event that the SPR is tapped, my bill would trigger the Secretaries of Energy, Agriculture, and the Interior to develop a plan to increase the percentage of federal lands leased for energy production by an amount equal to what is depleted from the nation’s stockpile of oil. Currently, only three percent of federal land is leased for oil and gas production.

HEALTHCARE http://gardner.house.gov/issue/health As a member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, I will be at the forefront of the effort to outline replacement legislation. At the top of this list has to be tort reform. I believe that capping medical malpractice damages is one important way to lower the cost for doctors and patients.

A quarter-century after the Berlin Wall fell, Putin is building his own Russian Bloc.

In November 1989 I watched on television as the Berlin Wall was being torn down, and my eyes welled up with tears. Once again, I was incredibly proud to be a citizen of the United States. The whole world was expressing its gratitude to this great country for its four decades–plus of successful Cold War against the Soviet empire. “Communism is dead,” people shouted. Indeed, Soviet Communism is dead as form of government. But the Kremlin’s science of dezinformatsyia is on the rise again, and few people are paying attention.

I was with Nikita Khrushchev when the idea of erecting the Berlin Wall germinated in his head. He had landed in Bucharest on October 26, 1959, to solicit Romania’s political support for seizing West Berlin, which had become the escape-hatch through which millions of East Germans were fleeing westward, draining East Germany’s already shabby economy. At the time I was running Romania’s intelligence station in West Germany, and as the country’s “German expert,” I attended most of the discussions.

“No power on earth can stop us,” Khrushchev spat out. President Eisenhower did stop him, however. On August 13, 1961, Khrushchev made the humiliating decision to close off East Berlin with a barbed-wire fence that later became the Berlin Wall, and he proclaimed that a major victory.

On December 26, 1989, Leonard Bernstein conducted a magnificent concert before the toppled Berlin Wall, which for so many years had “protected” tyranny from freedom. His centerpiece was Beethoven’s Ninth, containing Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” but with the word joy (Freude) changed into freedom (Freiheit). The orchestra and choir were from both East and West Germany, as well as from the United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States. That concert celebrated the fall of the Soviet empire.

After a couple of years, the Russians had stopped seeing their government as a boon bestowed from on high, and Socialist Russia had collapsed. On the evening of December 25, 1991, the flag of the Soviet Union was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time. The next day, the U.S.S.R. was dissolved, and Russia’s old tricolor banner was raised again over the Kremlin. The world watched in amazement as the Russian people, armed only with a fierce desire for freedom, brought down one of the most repressive forms of government known in history.

Post-Soviet Russia has been transformed in unprecedented and positive ways. The barriers the Kremlin spent 70 years erecting between Russia and the rest of the world, as well as between individual Russians, are coming down. The freedoms of religion and assembly have been restored. Commerce and communication with the rest of the world have become a daily reality. Russian culture is reviving, and private ownership of property is now gradually being institutionalized.

ELECTIONS ARE COMING AND SPEAKING OF IOWA MEET LT. COL. JONI ERNST****
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2014/04/23/elections-are-coming-and-speaking-of-iowa-meet-lt-col-joni-ernst/
APRIL 2014
JONI ERNST IS RUNNING FOR THE SENATE IN IOWA SHE IS A SOLDIER, MOTHER, GRANDMOTHER AND CONSERVATIVE…THESE ARE HER ISSUES

“Faced with a younger, positive, appealing Republican candidate who avoids gaffes and runs not on amnesty and entitlement reform, but on a platform aimed at middle-class families and working-class whites, there is no telling how Hillary Clinton would look, how she would perform, what choices she would make. And if she slips and falls, who’s going to rescue her? David Brock?”

The 2014 election was a disaster for Hillary Clinton. Why? Let us count the ways.

She will have to run against an energetic and motivated Republican party. If the GOP had failed to capture the Senate, the loss would have been more than demoralizing. It would have led to serious discussion of a third party. Donors would have reconsidered whether their spending was worth the reputational cost. Candidate recruitment efforts would have stalled. Republican voters would have asked why they bother to show up. The Republican circular firing squad, always a problem, wouldn’t use conventional weapons. They’d use ICBMs.

Clinton would have loved to capitalize on this scenario. It would have enabled her to prolong strategic decisions such as how and when and to what degree she breaks from Obama. She would have claimed partial credit for saving the Senate. She would have promised to build on Democratic success. You would have been able to see her aura of inevitability for miles.

But she has been denied. Instead she must calculate how to salvage the wreckage of 2014. She must convince Democrats that their savior is a grandmother who lives in a mansion on Massachusetts Avenue. It is her party that is shell shocked, not the GOP. Trust me: You don’t want to be in that position.

The results also showed that the electorate looks forward rather than backward. Clinton’s 2016 argument will be based in part on recollection. Her message: If you liked the 1990s, the last period of broad-based growth and full employment, put my husband and me back in the White House.

But voters are not retrospective. They judge based on the conditions of the moment. In 2010, Democrats tarred Rob Portman as a former Bush official. In 2014, they tried something similar with congressional candidate Elise Stefanik. Both Portman and Stefanik won.

Iowa’s new senator-elect has other duties before she heads to Washington.

Des Moines — A day after winning one of the most contested Senate seats in the country, Joni Ernst reported for duty at her National Guard base. Ernst, a lieutenant colonel, started two days of training with the 185th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion on Thursday.“Not many folks know she is in uniform on Thursday and Friday,” Ernst’s husband Gail tells National Review Online, “She does it without fanfare.”

A spokesman for the Iowa National Guard, Greg Hapgood, says soldiers don’t “punch the clock.” “We serve regardless of our situations and Colonel Ernst doesn’t want to be treated any differently.”

Ernst, a ferocious campaigner, had just finished a 24-hour straight campaign sweep of Iowa two days before reporting for duty. Her victory in the race also sealed the Senate for the GOP majority.Hapgood admits that Ernst’s is a unique situation and the Guard will have to work with the senator-elect to find a balance. “She is going to be a soldier when on duty and a senator when off duty,” Hapgood predicts.

An Ernst campaign source says the National Guard has already been accommodating Ernst’s unique circumstances. “She was supposed to drill last weekend but was able to reschedule until after the election,” according to the source.

The senator-elect cannot do interviews while on duty, but those in close contact with Ernst say she is doing great and is happy to be back with her unit. According to Hapgood, Ernst’s duties this weekend as a senior officer will include working with her team on how to best serve the logistical needs of Iowa’s National Guard. “She’s working to make sure our units are totally combat ready,” he says.

Taking time off for National Guard duty is nothing new for Ernst. The then-candidate took time off the trail this summer to serve a week. While she was serving, a number of high-level GOP names visited the state to fill in at campaign events and the Twitter hashtag #ondutyforJoni was started.

There is high anxiety over President Obama’s impending unilateral amnesty order for millions of illegal aliens. How many millions? The estimates vary. On the low end, 3 to 8 million, assuming some correlation to the potential beneficiaries of the president’s already existing amnesty decrees (including DACA or Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals). On the high end, as many as 9 to 34 million, factoring in likely categorical expansions of amnesty and their ramifications over the next several years.

The anxiety stems from a remorseless truth that no one — most especially Mr. Obama’s most ardent detractors — wants to confront. It is the truth I have addressed, to much groaning and teeth-gnashing, in Faithless Execution, my recent book on presidential lawlessness.

It is this: The nation overwhelmingly objects to Obama’s immigration lawlessness, but it has no stomach for the only effective counter to it — the plausible threat of impeachment.

To hear the demagogue-in-chief tell it, the controversy over how to deal with the approximately 12 million illegal aliens currently in the U.S. is a Manichean debate between enlightened humanitarians and vulgar xenophobes. (To be fair to the president, he is far from alone in peddling this smear.) But objections to Obama’s reckless immigration policies — indeed, to his policies in general, as this week’s historic election reaffirmed — cut across party and philosophical lines.

To be sure, the most intense protest is heard in “restrictionist” circles and among those for whom rule-of-law and national-security concerns trump sympathy for the plight of legions of decent but unlawfully present non-citizens (some of whom were brought here as children and are blameless for their illegal status). There are also, however, many enthusiasts of immigration amnesty — the euphemism is legislative “reform” — who recognize that the president’s sweeping, dictatorial approach is angering the public. That damages not just the cause but the career prospects of those who’ve made the cause their own.

So, on immigration, the president has managed to unite much of the country . . . against him — who says he’s divisive? Nevertheless, Obama made clear again this week that he intends to push ahead with massive amnesty by executive order. Further infuriating the public with his cynicism, he has strategically but quite openly delayed his directive until after the election, as if to say, “The rubes are too stupid to grasp what I’m doing even when I make no secret of it!”

Dear Reader (particularly those of you who will buy me a drink on the Lido Deck next week),

In Men in Dark Times Hannah Arendt says, “Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it . . . it brings about consent and reconciliation with things as they really are.”

This, naturally, brings to mind that great episode of the Brady Bunch “Adios, Johnny Bravo.” This YouTube video summarizes the tale expertly, but since you might be at work and are reluctant to get caught watching Brady Bunch videos (again) at the office, I will summarize. Greg Brady, scion of House Brady, is offered a contract from a record label. At first he is reluctant to sign on because he’s a loyal member of his family band. But the record producers convince him that he owes it to himself to be all he can be. They want him to become the new smash-hit sensation “Johnny Bravo.”

The role of Johnny Bravo comes complete with a sensational matador-themed costume and a rented gaggle of winsome young ladies ready to tear it off on command (very much like the job of senior editor here at National Review). The producers promise that he won’t simply be in the Top 20, he’ll be the Top 20. “Just sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride,” they tell him. It would be a tempting offer for any young man.

After much soul-searching, Greg agrees to become Johnny Bravo. That is, until he finds out that the producers don’t much care about his musical talent. Through the wizardry of music production — long before the advent of AutoTune — they twist his vocal stylings to what the market wants, not what Greg’s muse has on offer. “That’s not the way I sound!” Greg protests.

The producer retorts, “You? Now c’mon baby, don’t get caught up on an ego trip. I mean who cares how you sound? We’re after the sound.”

If you don’t care about my sound, what do you need me for? Greg asks.

“Because you fit the suit,” another producer responds.

Putting the O in BravO
Forgive me for committing the error of defining my meaning. But Barack Obama fits the suit.

I recently found a 1984 edition of Comprehensive English by Harold Levine. An Amsco publication, it was meant to “help students pass the New York State Comprehensive Examination with distinction.” At the time, the examination contained a listening test, a reading comprehension test, the literature test, and the composition test.

I have serious doubts as to whether my current crop of college students could pass this examination In the course of teaching, one develops some theories about classroom discipline and the ability to reach students. My “theory of threes” used to mean that if there were three troublesome students in a class – i.e., class clown, disruptive individual, pupil outwardly resistant to reasonable demands – it was going to be a rough class to teach. Thus, creative strategies were devised to reach those three without adversely affecting the other students, who were eager to learn and who expected the teacher to control a class and teach.

Things have changed radically. If I have three students in a class who are eager to apply critical thinking skills, I consider it a lucky break. What more instructors are faced with is a classroom of bored students who would rather stare into space than actually tackle the lesson at hand. And remember that for financial aid purposes, “D” and “D-” are passing grades.

I have had to pepper the blackboard with “Ban Mental Lethargy” just to get their attention. But then again, they do not know what lethargy means, even though their ever ready cell phones have a dictionary function.

The last time that I asked if students were attending school because of a love for learning, I was greeted with undisguised guffaws.

In an effort to maintain class size, one school is pushing students to “earn bucks just by enrolling in weekend classes.” Thus, a student can “earn $50 per credit for Friday classes that start after 3:30 p.m. and for Saturday classes that start before noon.” For “Saturday classes that start after noon, one can earn $100 per credit.” These bucks can then be used at the university bookstore and the campus food outlets, including Starbucks.

Each semester becomes more dispiriting than the previous one. At one school, the readings center on the topic of marriage. Mostly concerned with the breakdown of traditional marriage and the upswing in gay marriage, there is little that promotes marriage and its concomitant joys. Thus, in an (unedited) recent piece, one student wrote:

In my culture legal marriage does not happen that much. Once the woman becomes pregnant then she is supposed to go live with her boyfriend and live together as if they were married. There are a few couples who do get legally married. I believe a couple should be legally married if they are already living together and in love. Why not? Isn’t this the goal when starting a relationship?