RUTHFULLY YOURS

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson encouraged members of the media to stand “on the side of the people,” saying if the nation goes off the fiscal cliff, reporters are going along with it.

“I am just so tickled with the media. I mean, these guys, they just don’t get it and the interesting thing is the media is the only business in America protected by the United States Constitution. And there was a reason that they were protected; it was because they were supposed to be on the side of the people,” Carson said at the Values Voter Summit in Washington.

“They weren’t supposed to pick and choose which side they were on because that distorts the entire system. And we should hope and pray that one day they come to understand that if the nation goes off the cliff they’re going off with it. Maybe they will wake up and begin to understand what is going on,” he added.

The retired neurosurgeon explained that the media twisted his answer to a question about whether or not he would support a Muslim for president.

Carson said he recently went back and forth with an unnamed commentator who told him, “But you said that someone who was of Islamic faith and a Muslim could not be president of the United States.”

In response, Carson told the commentator to re-read the transcript of the full interview.

“I said anybody of any faith of any belief system who comes to America, becomes an American citizen, embraces our American values and principles, and is willing to subjugate their beliefs to our Constitution is somebody I have no problem with,” Carson said. “Anybody that doesn’t fit in that category, I don’t care who they are, they can be a Christian, if they don’t fit in that category I’m not going to advocate they be president of the United States. It’s as simple as that.”

Double-teaming with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, Valerie Jarrett, President Obama’s Supreme Leader, demonstrated what the White House really wants to happen in the race for the Democratic nomination. Joe Biden most assuredly got the message, as did Hillary. Blake Seitz of the Free Beacon reports:

White House Chief of Staff Valerie Jarrett admitted Wednesday that the White House had issued guidance to cabinet secretaries recommending they use government email for official business—guidance that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ultimately ignored.

“Weren’t there guidelines from the White House to all cabinet secretaries to use government email?” MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell asked Jarrett at an event sponsored by the Aspen Institute.

“Well, yes there were. Yeah, absolutely,” Jarrett said.

I’m starting to think that Jeb Bush can’t win the nomination for president. Past nominees (McCain and Romney) gave at least lip service to securing the border. Not only does Jeb, on the other hand, want to give amnesty to illegals, but, unlike Donald Trump’s current position, he wants to import more Muslims from the Middle East:

Changing his tune on Syrian refugees, after once saying he would grant them asylum because “humanitarian basis, you have to”, Trump now says he would kick them out. “I’m putting the people on notice that are coming here from Syria as part of this mass migration, that if I win, if I win, they’re going back.”

Bush also says that Donald Trump’s statement that he would send back Syrian refugees is “a horrible thing” and was out of line with “American values.”

I don’t think a Republican primary electorate would support a candidate who openly supports amnesty for illegal aliens. I also think, in this current climate, when we are facing terrorist attacks from a subgroup of Muslim immigrants in America, that Republican primary voters are not going to support a candidate like Bush, who says we have to bring more of them in.

A friend of ours quipped amid the Iraq debate of 2003 that the only thing Europeans dislike more than U.S. leadership is a world without it. Well, we are now living in such a world, and the result is the disorder and rising tide of war in the Middle East that even the Obama Administration can no longer dismiss. How do you like it?

The epicenter of the chaos is the Syrian civil war now into its fifth year. President Obama justified his decision to steer clear of the conflict by pointing to a parade of horribles if the U.S. assisted the opposition to Bashar Assad. Every one of those horribles—and more—has come to pass in the wake of his retreat.

Syria has become a “geopolitical Chernobyl,” as former General David Petraeus recently put it. It was the breeding ground for Islamic State and is a new sanctuary for terrorism. It has nurtured a growing regional conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, while unleashing the worst refugee crisis on Europe since World War II. And now it has become an arena for potential major power conflict as Vladimir Putin forms an alliance with Iran to make Russia the new Middle East power broker.

Mr. Putin unveiled his strategy this week with a disdain for a U.S. President unseen in a Russian leader since Nikita Khrushchev “beat the hell out of” John Kennedy, as JFK put it, at the Vienna summit in 1961. Mr. Putin coaxed Mr. Obama to grant him a private meeting, then told the world to rally behind his alternative coalition to fight Islamic State and prop up the Assad regime. It’s as if he set up Mr. Obama for humiliation.

The economic punishment from President Obama’s green agenda continued Tuesday as the Environmental Protection Agency issued a new regulation on ozone, among the most costly in U.S. history.

The final rule is wholly discretionary, and none other than President Obama overruled the EPA on ozone in 2011 in the name of “reducing regulatory burdens and regulatory uncertainty.” But that was headed into an election year, and Mr. Obama is making amends to burnish his eco-legacy.

Ozone in the ambient air can contribute to smog and respiratory ailments, but the U.S. has worked hard to control O3 to the point of virtual nonexistence. “Back in 1979, Los Angeles still was so full of smog that there were days where people who were vulnerable just could not go outside,” Mr. Obama said in August. “And you fast-forward 30, 40 years later, and we solved those problems.”

Sure enough, the EPA’s latest measures show most of the U.S. is meeting the 2008 standards of ozone concentrations of 75 parts per billion (ppb) or less, except for pockets in Texas and the northeast. Only green-happy California is in “extreme non-attainment.”

The EPA is nonetheless lowering the standard to 70 ppb and the green lobby wanted 65 ppb or even 60 ppb. So while avoiding the worst-case scenario, the factories, utilities, refineries, farms, cars and trucks that produce the man-made emissions that cause ozone to form will need to install expensive retrofits. New ones will be more expensive. The EPA estimated the 2011 draft proposal would cost the private economy anywhere from $19 billion to $90 billion.

Hillary Clinton hopes you are busy. Hillary Clinton hopes you are confused. Hillary Clinton hopes the endless stories about her private email server—and her endless, fabulist explanations—will make your head hurt, make your eyes cross, make you give up trying to figure it out.

All you really need to know at this point is this: Pretty much every claim Mrs. Clinton made at her initial March news conference, and since then, is false. In the spirit of keeping it simple, here’s the Complete Busy Person’s Guide to the Clinton Email Scandal. Stick it on the fridge.

Why she kept a private server.
Clinton: It was for “convenience.” “I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two.”

Truth: Mrs. Clinton’s team acknowledged in July that she traveled with both a BlackBerry and an iPad while secretary of state, and that she had her private email set up on both.

Why she finally gave her emails to the State Department.

Those who rushed to declare the death of the Oslo Accords fell into Abbas’s trap.

Abbas’s threats are mainly designed to scare the international community into pressuring Israel to offer Abbas more concessions. He is hoping that inaccurate headlines concerning the purported abrogation of the Oslo Accords will cause panic in Washington and European capitals, prompting world leaders to demand that Israel give Abbas everything he asks for.

Abbas knows that cancelling the agreements with Israel would mean dissolving his Palestinian Authority, and the end of his political career.

The tens of thousands of Arab refugees now seeking asylum in Europe could not care less about the “occupation” and settlements.

Ironically, Abbas declared that, “We are working on spreading the culture of peace and coexistence between our people and in our region.” But his harsh words against Israel, in addition to continued anti-Israel incitement in the Palestinian media, prove that he is moving in the opposite direction. This form of incitement destroys any chance of peace.

After weeks of threatening to drop a bombshell during his speech before the UN General Assembly, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas on September 30 proved once again that he is an expert in the art of bluffing.

In the end, the bombshell he and his aides promised to detonate at the UN turned out to be a collection of old threats to abrogate signed agreements and a smear campaign against Israel.

There was nothing dramatic or new in Abbas’s speech. During the past few years, he and some of his aides have been openly talking about the possibility of cancelling the Oslo Accords if Israel does not fulfill its obligations towards the peace process.

On Wednesday the Obama administration was caught off guard by Russia’s rapid rise in Syria. As the Russians began bombing a US-supported militia along the Damascus-Homs highway, Secretary of State John Kerry was meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, at the UN. Just hours before their meeting Kerry was insisting that Russia’s presence in Syria would likely be a positive development.

Reacting to the administration’s humiliation, Republican Sen. John McCain said, “This administration has confused our friends, encouraged our enemies, mistaken an excess of caution for prudence and replaced the risks of action with the perils of inaction.”

McCain added that Russian President Vladimir Putin had stepped “into the wreckage of this administration’s Middle East policy.”

While directed at the administration, McCain’s general point is universally applicable. Today is no time for an overabundance of caution.

The Palestinian press has been saying for weeks that Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas would “drop a bombshell” when he spoke to the United National General Assembly today. In the event, the bomb did not go off. The speech was mostly a rehash of tired complaints about Israel, some of them linked to reality (occupation is never popular) and others entirely manufactured and irresponsible.

Abbas’s low point came right at the beginning of the speech, when he accused Israel of various crimes defiling the Temple Mount. He said Israel is trying “to impose its plans to undermine the Islamic and Christian sanctuaries in Jerusalem, particularly its actions at Al-Aqsa Mosque.” This is a lie, and given the violence around the Temple Mount in recent weeks it is the kind of lie that can create injuries and loss of life.

Abbas continues to say that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are swallowing it up, which is simply false: the settlements are growing in population but not expanding territorially. As to Gaza, he said Israel “continues its blockade of the Gaza Strip.” But his listeners surely know that it is Egypt that is maintaining a strict blockade, while Israel supplies the vast bulk of food, water, and electricity to Gaza. Abbas’s claim that the PA is “working on spreading the culture of peace and coexistence” is remarkable in view of the repeated glorification of terrorist murderers in school books and the naming of parks and schools after them. A moment of humor, unintentional to be sure, arrived when Abbas said “we seek to hold presidential and legislative elections.” Elected in 2005, he is now in the eleventh year of his own four year term and has shown zero desire to submit himself to the polls again.

Much credit/blame is heaped on Obama for the destruction of American ideals, the demise of our constitutional republic and the loss of our position as the premiere world power. However, the transformation of the U.S. has been a gradual one that preceded Obama by decades. By shortsightedly focusing on Obama’s role, we blind ourselves to the historical context of our downfall as a nation and absolve ourselves of the responsibility for the eternal vigilance required of all free societies. Most importantly for the present, a narrow view that targets Obama leads to magical thinking about the impact of presidential elections.

Obama is clearly the coup de grace in the “fundamental transformation of America,” a process that began in the 1950s with the U.S. visit of Muslim Brotherhood godfather, Sayyed Qutb (one could argue that the downfall began in 1928 with the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood) AND the rise of the radical Left in America in the 60s (SDS, Black Panthers, Weathermen, etc.) Of course, Diana West would argue (correctly so) that the genesis was in the early 1930s with the infiltration by Stalinist agents and fellow travelers and their influence over the White House (Roosevelt) and throughout the government, media and Hollywood. (See Red Star Over Hollywood).