RUTHFULLY YOURS

Having watched closely the manner in which questions of liberty and power are batted around in the first part of the 21st century — most recently during the disgraceful contretemps that Indiana’s rather tame Religious Freedom Restoration Act provoked across the land — I have come to wonder of late whether the Bill of Rights could be ratified today.

In its classical mode, liberalism requires the citizenry that it serves to respect the crucial distinction that obtains between the principle of a given rule and the consequences that the rule might feasibly yield. Simply put, a country in which the people regard certain individual rights as inviolable axioms of nature — and who accept with alacrity, therefore, that they will often be used for ill — will be a country that boasts protections of those rights within its national charter. A country in which the people are focused primarily on what might be done with those rights, by contrast, will be a country that prefers to elevate and to abide by the whims of transient majorities — or, perhaps, by the discretion of a supposedly enlightened few. In Indiana, we were given an insight into which of these countries the people of the United States would rather live in.

Hill and Bill can’t hide from shady deals exposed in ‘Clinton Cash’

The Clintons have been playing the political press for idiots.

Revealing what they’ve been up to took a little bit of work. It wasn’t obvious. While Bill Clinton was giving a speech about fighting AIDS in Africa, or about educating girls in Asia, reporters simply regurgitated the press release. They didn’t ask: Who’s that shady guy standing next to Bill? What are his interests? How much money has he given to, or raised for, Bill, Hillary and their foundation? And what favorable treatment did the shady guy subsequently receive from Hillary?

When you’re a political reporter, complexity is boring. Curiosity takes work. Asking questions and looking up information can lead to dead ends.

It’s much easier to do gaffe patrol. Go to press conferences. Quote party hacks who call you every day with juicy little observations. Or, when all else fails, simply write down your opinions and call it “analysis” or attribute your thoughts to “critics.”

Thank goodness, then, for Peter Schweizer and his blockbuster expose “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.” (Very rich: The pair have made at least $136.5 million since 2001).

The details of the Clinton operation vary, but the overall M.O. is fairly consistent, he writes.

Across Bangkok, there are dozens of offices, unmarked and unbillboarded, with unlisted telephone numbers and extensions, trying to reach the perfect ratio of attracting no attention whatsoever while committing maximum, preferably violent harm on a small number of human targets.

The sharp-eyed might have noticed some of those offices last week by the extremely late-burning lights.

Three and a half years ago, the men and women in those offices, helped by almost unbelievably good luck, took a series of actions that shut down plans for terrorist attacks in Bangkok and, probably, upcountry. The plans were put to sleep but now there are suspicions the planners have awakened — regrouped, refreshed and restarted.

http://dailycaller.com/2015/05/03/breaking-shooting-in-texas-outside-of-muslim-cartoon-event-attended-by-geert-wilders/ Two men who opened fire Sunday outside of an event in Garland, Texas attended by Geert Wilders, a Dutch lawmaker and outspoken critic of radical Islam, have been killed by police. “As today’s Muhammad Art Exhibit event at the Curtis Culwell Center was coming to an end, two males drove up to the front […]

“To modify Lady Macbeth, not all the diarrhea in Africa can wash away the stench of the Clinton Foundation.”

One of the lessons learned by the Clintons back in the Nineties is that, if you’re gonna have a scandal, have a hundred of ’em. And then it’s all too complicated and just gives everyone a big headache, and they go back to watching “Friends” or “Baywatch” or whatever it was back then. When a scandal gets too easy to follow, that’s where the danger lies.

As things stand, Vladimir Putin has wound up with control of 20 per cent of American uranium production.

That’s almost too funny an update of the line variously attributed to Lenin, Stalin and others: “The capitalists will sell us the rope by which we will hang them.” In this case, we’ve sold Putin the uranium by which he will nuke us. As the Russian news agency TASS reported two years ago:

MOSCOW, May 22 (Itar-Tass) – Russia’s nuclear power corporation Rosatom controls 20 percent of all uranium reserves in the United States, the corporation’s chief, Sergei Kiriyenko told the State Duma on Wednesday…

“I am pleased to inform you that today we control 20 percent of uranium in the United States. If we need that uranium, we shall be able to use it any time,” Kiriyenko said.

Great! By the way, before he became America’s fastest rising uranium executive, Mr Kiriyenko was Prime Minister of Russia.

In return for facilitating the transfer to Putin of one-fifth of US uranium, the Clintons were given tens of millions of dollars by Vancouver businessman Frank Giustra (the founder of “Uranium One” in its pre-Putin days) and various of his associates. In 2006, Mr Giustra told The New Yorker:

The putative climate “debate” that has been raging for the last thirty years or so has now reached the point of duncical irrationality. (I put “debate” in scare quotes since what we are observing is not so much a debate as an ideological crusade that brooks no resistance; in effect, a political jihad against those who oppose the Warmist orthodoxy.) The upcoming Paris COP (climate treaty conference) slated for December of this year, which Obama is expected to ratify, renders the situation increasingly urgent.

The world’s leading politicians, abetted by the dubious claims of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are plainly eager to sign an accord which, if implemented, would lead to record levels of poverty and unemployment in both the developed and Third worlds. In the words [1] of Director of the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) Tom Harris, “in formulating public policy on climate change, our leaders gloss over the uncertainties and close the door to evidence that does not fit the alarmist agenda.” There is little any concerned citizen can do but register his skepticism, doubts and defiance — that is, his resolute and fact-based denial, despite the social and professional stigma associated with being a “denier” and the threat of various forms of punitive action [2], especially in the academy. (See, for example, the “Statement on Climate Change” [3] professing allegiance to the IPCC signed by the faculty of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A & M University. Skeptics, regardless of their credentials, would never be hired in such a restrictive milieu.) By marshalling the reasons justifying such denial and disseminating them to the public, one hopes against hope to mitigate the disaster — not the so-called meteorological “disaster” of global warming but the economic disaster of uncertain science and crippling legislation — before it becomes irreversible.

On April 27, the media quoted Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman — the foreign policy wizard who engineered the fiasco of the North Korean nuclear deal under Pres. Clinton and who is now working her diplomatic legerdemain on Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran — threatened Israel. She said that if Prime Minister Netanyahu’s new coalition government does not pledge allegiance to the Two-State Solution (TSS), the U.S. will “find it difficult” to back Israel in the U.N. Security Council as U.S. administrations have in the past scores of times by casting a veto.

With the U.N’s roster of member-states almost one-third officially Muslim, if not for the United States the Council would long ago have crippled Israel with sanctions like those passed against Apartheid South Africa that helped bring that racist system down. In 1975, the General Assembly judged Zionism in UNGA Resolution 3379 to be “a form of racism” too. That resolution was repealed in 1991 but not the fifty-three other General Assembly resolutions passed over the years that explicitly liken Israel to Apartheid South Africa.

Paul Hollrah is a Senior Fellow at the Lincoln Heritage Institute.

On the night of February 26, 2012, in Sanford, Florida, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a black high school student from Miami, was shot to death during an unprovoked attack on neighborhood watch coordinator George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old mixed-race Hispanic. The incident occurred when Martin became concerned that his movements were being observed by a person or persons unknown. When attacked, Zimmerman was awaiting the arrival of local police after having reported the presence of a suspicious-looking person passing through his neighborhood.

In the afternoon of July 17, 2014, on a sidewalk in Staten Island, New York, 43-year-old Eric Garner, a black man, was approached by police officers when he was observed selling individual cigarettes from packs without tax stamps, a violation of New York state law. Garner complained about being “harassed,” and when an officer attempted to place handcuffs on him he slapped the officer’s hands away. Garner, a very large man who suffered from asthma, struggled with five officers, during which time he was allegedly held in a chokehold for approximately 15 seconds. Officers called for medical assistance but Garner expired an hour later of cardiac arrest.

“If PEN as a free speech organization can’t defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures, then frankly the organization is not worth the name.” — Salman Rushdie, former President of PEN.

Today, a genuine fear of retribution for a “blasphemous” statement has subdued the will to stand up for one’s own beliefs, values and the right to speak out. This fear has made most of the West submissive, just as Islam — in both its name [Islam means “submission”] and declarations — openly wants.

This time, the condemnation had not come in a fatwa from Iran’s Supreme leader, but from a Western academic. If we do not reverse this trend, censorship, blasphemy laws, and all the other encumbrances of totalitarians, will return to our lives. The bullies will win.

If Geert Wilders and others are being accused of hate speech, then why isn’t the Koran — with its calls for smiting necks and killing infidels — also being accused of hate speech?

The mere criticism of a religious belief shared by many people mainly in the Third World has been linked, with no justification, to their genuine prejudice against the inhabitants of the developed world.

Anyone who has had much to do with publishing, or anyone who cares about books and free speech, will be familiar with the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, an enduring champion of the First Amendment and the public’s right to read whatever they please — without the interference and censorship of self-appointed guardians of inoffensiveness and sexual purity.

“Yet religion should not pass itself off as science. Conversely, (post-modern climate) science should resist the temptation to proselytise, to politicise and to encourage “a religious comet to trail off into the darkness, making suspicious everything about itself that it presents as science”, especially where its arguments – and ‘expert scholarship’ – lack precision, clarity and evidence.”

They tinker with their computer models and hand down oracular pronouncements on atmospheric events 100 years hence, never troubled by self-doubt nor annoying queries from congregants in the media choir. Like Islam, if science is to be reformed, look to the heretics.

Further evidence that our national broadcaster is on a climate-change jihad emerged this week as ABC RN Breakfast’s Ellen Fanning chatted with Ayaan Hirsi Ali about her new book, Heretic: Why Islam needs a Reformation now. What folows are some snatches from that broadcast (emphasis added):