RUTHFULLY YOURS

In Senator Ted Cruz’s excellent Senate floor speech against President Obama’s catastrophic Iran deal, he urged Republican leadership – Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) and House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) – to reject the claim that Congress must vote on the deal in the next few days. He is absolutely right. By the unambiguous terms of the Corker law, the period for congressional review of the Iran deal has never begun because Obama has failed to provide the entirety of it.

This maneuver has the normally sensible Jen Rubin ballistic. At her Washington Post blog, Jen inveighs that Cruz is guilty of a “singular act of betrayal of anti-Iran forces” that has “incensed” at least one unidentified official of a pro-Israel group, who insists, “If you loathe the deal, the only course of action is to demand an up or down vote on the resolution of disapproval.”

That is ridiculous. If you loathe the deal, as Cruz plainly does (watch his speech if you have any doubt), the objective should be to derail the deal. By contrast, Jen and her sources, including Josh Block of the Israel Project, maintain that the objective is to move as quickly as possible to a vote on the resolution of disapproval – a vote that anti-Iranian forces will lose thanks to the truly loathsome Corker review process that enables Obama’s deal to win with just 34 votes. Obama already has commitments from 42 Democrat

With increasingly implausible excuses, she just keeps digging herself a deeper hole. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s purported state of mind made perfect sense as she became America’s top diplomat on January 21, 2009.

“I was not thinking a lot when I got in,” Clinton reminisced with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell on Friday. Reflecting on her early days as secretary of state, Clinton added, “There was so much work to be done. We had so many problems around the world. I didn’t really stop and think what kind of e-mail system will there be.”

Naturally, Clinton wanted to pursue urgent diplomatic matters, such as launching a “Russian reset” with Vladimir Putin, managing America’s difficult relationship with Syria’s Bashar Assad (whom she referred to as “a reformer”), and tightening security at U.S. diplomatic outposts, not least the consulate at Benghazi, Libya.

If only Clinton’s behavior matched her sentiments.

Given this pressing business, it would have been logical for Clinton to rely on the State Department’s normal e-mail procedures. She would have received a state.gov e-mail address. Her classified messages would have zipped exclusively along secure government connections and landed on encrypted federal servers. All of this would have been tended to by diplo-geeks under her command, during regular office hours.

In nearly all of his speeches on the campaign trail, Ben Carson sketches the following scene: When a four-year-old boy was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1985, doctors across the city of Atlanta told his parents to prepare for the end. But the couple, armed with what Carson calls “an unshakeable faith,” journeyed with their son from Georgia to Johns Hopkins University’s Pediatric Neurosurgery Center in Baltimore.

There, after troubling scans and an unsuccessful operation, even Carson warned the couple there was little hope for their son. In Carson’s telling, the parents responded firmly, “The Lord is going to heal him, and he’s going to use you to do it.” Carson went on to remove the tumor. He calls the event a “revelation.”

The patient, Christopher Pylant, calls it a “miracle.”

Now 34 years old and living in Lakeland, Fla., Pylant has devoted his life to God. A graduate of Southeastern University with a degree in practical theology, he ministers to Christian congregations and youth groups across Florida. Two years ago, he published a book, along with his late father, Neal Pylant, called A Touch from Heaven: A Little Boy’s Story of Surgery, Heaven and Healing. Carson wrote the foreword.

“I feel very honored that Dr. Carson tells my story,” Pylant says. “I feel blessed to be a part of his life, to have even a small portion of the impact on him that he’s had on me.” Since his surgery 30 years ago, Pylant says the two have maintained a “great rapport.” When he graduated high school, Pylant says he sent Carson a photograph that Carson later kept on the desk in his office.

Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) provided air support for a revolt underway in the House today, as he called on Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to stop the Iran deal by refusing to hold a vote on the agreement.

Cruz’s mention of GOP leadership drew boos at Wednesday’s rally against the Iran deal on Capitol Hill, which he helped organize. “Hold on: I come not to bury Caesar but to praise him,” Cruz said, quoting from William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. “I want to give a path forward. There are two men in Washington, D.C., who can defeat this deal. Their names are Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker John Boehner.”

Cruz noted that Obama has not provided Congress with side agreements negotiated between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency, as required by the legislation that established a process for Congress to review the larger deal. “What that means is that all that has to happen is for Mitch McConnell and John Boehner to say, ‘The congressional review period has not started. Under federal law it is illegal for Obama to lift sanctions,’” he said. “Mitch McConnell and John Boehner can stop this deal if they simply enforce . . . federal law.”

Do you remember Lewis “Scooter” Libby?

In 2003, the Department of Justice appointed a special counsel to investigate allegations that Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, unlawfully disclosed the covert status of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Yet Plame may not have been a covert undercover agent, based on the formal government definition of that role. And even if she were, it was widely known at the time that Secretary of State Colin Powell’s subordinate, Richard Armitage, had most likely disclosed her status earlier.

In other words, Libby was in an Orwellian position of being accused of a crime that may not have existed. But if it had, it was more likely committed by someone else.

Publicity-seeking special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald persuaded a Washington, D.C., jury to find Libby guilty of obstruction of justice, perjury, and making false statements to federal investigators — not the supposed crimes for which he was originally targeted by the media.

Apparently, the very suspicion of improper behavior by high public servants once warranted vigorous legal inquiry — by supposedly independent and autonomous prosecutors.

In the eight-plus years since the Libby trial, the Obama administration has blown up the law as we have known it for centuries.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2015/09/oxfam-part-2/

In case you missed part 1: https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2015/09/facts-go-begging-oxfams-fundraising/

Tony Thomas With Friends Like Oxfam…

The organisation’s fundraising literature and ad campaigns focus on helping the starving and wretched. How odd that its deep-green activism would make that poverty even worse by denying reliable power, development and jobs to the same Third World it professes to care so much about
Are you thinking of an annual donation to Oxfam Australia to help those dirt-poor people in the Third World? Actually, you would be helping to finance Oxfam’s dark-green push to destroy the Australian coal and petroleum industry. Oxfam’s latest climate document gloats that destroying these industries would represent a $100 billion per annum hit to the federal government’s export expectations.

“The shift to a 2degC [warming] pathway would see annual export revenue from coal, gas and iron ore fall to AUD100b less than the Australian government’s current projections ,” enthuses Oxfam’s climate guru, Dr Simon Bradshaw, who wants a zero-emissions Australia well before 2050. So who is Bradshaw? He’s a “climate leader” in Al Gore’s official team of global warming propagandists, also a climate campaigner for the Australian Conservation Foundation and a PhD (in philosophy) from Melbourne University, an institution which seems to specialise in promoting green zealotry and anti-growth ideologies (e.g. it now runs 1300 “sustainability” researchers at a cost of $218m p.a.).

Bradshaw did his thesis on contrasts between Tibetan ecology and “over-consumption in the modern industrial world”. As his thesis puts it:

On the one hand, our continued desire for growth at a time of ever more dire warnings of ecological collapse can look like collective insanity. However, a brief reflection on the complex and entrapping nature of modern economic systems soon serves to illustrate some of the difficulties in breaking free from the shackles of the past and moving beyond the growth economy ….

The result, to use a popular analogy, becomes something akin to thinking we are flying when in fact our aeroplane is plummeting from the skies, the ground rushing up ever more rapidly towards us. Strangely, only the more inquisitive or concerned are aware of what’s coming. The majority remain oblivious or choose to ignore the inevitable impending crash…

Meanwhile, within the world’s most ‘advanced’ and economically prosperous industrial nations, apparent rises in incidence of psychoses (including particularly depression) coupled with trends in obesity, marital break-up, heart disease, cancer, drug use, prisoner numbers and a variety of other societal ills suggest that ‘happiness’ is on the decline and give cause to re- evaluate the social success of capitalism….”

“The fruits of liberty enjoyed by Germans today are not Germany’s to squander in the first place. Every bit of this precious freedom was paid for in blood — from the beaches of Normandy to the pavements of the Warsaw Ghetto — often meter-by-meter with bare knuckles and bloody fists.As if history has come full circle, in the span of less than a century, Germany’s state institutions are folding again at the mere sight of an organized band of fascists.”

German, and possibly European, demographics are being set to change forever.

Conservative Islam, the one dominant in Germany, is incapable of thinking critically about its past.

“No one knows exactly what actually happens in Islamic classes in German primary schools.” — Abdel-Hakim Ourghi, head of the Faculty for Islamic Theology and Religious Studies at the Freiburg University of Education.

According to the report, the textbooks fail to “confront the problematic verses of Koran.” The curriculum also fails in its most important purpose — integrating Muslims into the German society — as it fails to reconcile the “Islamic faith of the students with the reality of the western society” they are living in.

By legitimizing extremist groups such as DITIB within German Muslim society as the sole legitimate representatives of Islam, the German government has marginalized genuine voices of reform and dissent within its Muslim population.

These courageous dissident Muslim men and women are left to face threats and intimidation on their own, while the government is busy appeasing the self-proclaimed leaders of the faith.

The New York Times reported last month that an IG investigation was looking into complaints that military officials skewed intelligence assessments about the United States-led campaign in Iraq against the Islamic State to provide a false, Obama-approved narrative about their progress.

Now, in an exclusive for the Daily Beast, Shane Harris and Nancy A. Youssef report on a “revolt” by more than 50 intelligence analysts who are sick and tired of seeing their honest assessments about the campaign turned into unrealistic “happy talk.”

The spooks working out of the U.S. military’s Central Command “have formally complained that their reports on ISIS and al Qaeda’s branch in Syria were being inappropriately altered by senior officials,” the Daily Beast reports.

Some of those CENTCOM analysts described the sizeable cadre of protesting analysts as a “revolt” by intelligence professionals who are paid to give their honest assessment, based on facts, and not to be influenced by national-level policy. The analysts have accused senior-level leaders, including the director of intelligence and his deputy in CENTCOM, of changing their analyses to be more in line with the Obama administration’s public contention that the fight against ISIS and al Qaeda is making progress. The analysts take a more pessimistic view about how military efforts to destroy the groups are going.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed today that Israel won’t exist in 25 years, and in the time leading up to that the Jewish state will have “no moment of serenity.”

In a public address in Tehran today, Khamenei called Israel “fake,” according to the semi-official Fars News Agency.

“Some of the Zionists have said that given the results of the nuclear negotiations, they have been relieved of concerns about Iran for 25 years, but we tell them that basically, you will not see the next 25 years and with God’s grace, nothing under the name of the Zionist regime will exist in the region by then,” the ayatollah said.

He later tweeted his quotes with a photo of people walking on the Star of David, stressing that “heroic and jihadi morale” will torture Israel until its fall.

Maybe he can be so conservative on taxes that voters will forget about his immigration position.

I love the way Jeb Bush thinks. He knows that his views on illegal immigration are unpopular, so he thinks that if he talks conservatively enough about other topics, people will overlook his minor policy differences with mainstream America on illegal aliens and vote for him.

Don’t laugh. After all, if he promised to drop marginal rates to zero and to eliminate the income tax and replace it with a national sales tax (which no other candidate has called for!), wouldn’t that be worth the price of legalizing the existing legal aliens? If the answer is yes, then there is a tax rate at which you would vote for Jeb Bush!

So the question becomes, how big a tax cut do you need to vote for Jeb Bush? When I consider the question, I weigh the many downsides of illegal immigration and assign a point value. Right now the top marginal tax rate is 39%, or with a extra 4% tax on investments, about 43%, depending on the circumstances (and obviously not everyone pays the top rate). Bush wants to reduce the top rate to 28% (while raising it at the same time for people who are evil by virtue of the fact that they invest in hedge funds).