RUTHFULLY YOURS

Dealing with the mullahs, Kerry and Obama appear to be on their knees, without a safeword.

How do we really explain the peculiar Iran nuclear negotiations that seem to have been going on for the better part of the last decade? What is holding these people together? It couldn’t be more obvious the whole thing is a charade orchestrated by the Iranians with the cooperation of Obama. It could have been short-circuited by the inevitable — simply shipping a few nukes to Tehran on a spare aircraft carrier and kissing Israel and maybe half of Lebanon goodbye. But both sides insist on playing this game, talking the talk until our heads spin.

A brothel that benefited from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) support of the state’s legalized prostitution industry has offered to throw his retirement party.

The open letter from Sheri’s Ranch in Pahrump congratulates Reid on a “long and successful political career” and says they are “sorry to hear that the Silver State’s most tenacious public servant will not seek reelection in 2016, and your plan to retire from politics.”

“Your work over the years has positively affected the lives of the legal prostitutes of Sheri’s Ranch. You were a strong force in pushing Obamacare and passing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. This law now provides Nevada’s legal prostitutes (each of them an independent contractor who must acquire their own health insurance) the right to health care. Despite the fact that legal sex workers in Nevada practice only safe sex and must be tested regularly for STD’s and HIV, health insurance was something that licensed working girls were often denied due to the reputation of unlawful prostitution. Thank you for making it illegal for insurance companies to deny Nevada’s legal hookers the right to health care,” the letter continues.

Liberals believe that social engineering can bring about universal success; conservatives want to foster individual responsibility and initiative. For liberals, the failure of an individual is a failure of society; for conservatives, individuals should be allowed to succeed or fail on their own merits. There are degrees, of course; most conservatives eschew Social Darwinism or Ayn Rand’s egotism, and most liberals do not believe in the strict application of the Communist maxim, “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” But that is the bright line that divides us conservatives from the liberals.

The Max Planck Institute in Germany is among the world’s most prestigious scientific research institutions, and a new study coming from its Institute for Meteorology cannot be dismissed by warmist profiteers like Al Gore. Michael Bastasch reports at the Daily Caller:

A new study out of Germany casts further doubt on the so-called global warming “consensus” by suggesting the atmosphere may be less sensitive to increases in carbon dioxide emissions than most scientists think.

A study by scientists at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Meteorology found that man-made aerosols had a much smaller cooling effect on the atmosphere during the 20th Century than was previously thought. Why is this big news? It means increases in carbon dioxide emissions likely cause less warming than most climate models suggest.

What do aerosols have to do with anything? Well, aerosols are created from human activities like burning coal, driving cars or from fires. There are also natural aerosols like clouds and fog. Aerosols tend to reflect solar energy back into space, giving them a cooling effect that somewhat offsets warming from increased CO2 emissions.

Rep. Gabbard is impressive on foreign policy but voted against the Keystone Pipeline without limiting amendments and supports Obamacare…..rsk
Meet the Beautiful, Tough Young Democrat Who’s Turning Heads by Challenging Obama’s Foreign Policy
Hawaii’s Tulsi Gabbard is pushing back on White House weakness She’s young, she’s hip, and she’s beautiful. She’s also a combat veteran and a Democrat who has made headlines for slamming the Obama administration’s rudderless foreign policy. Tulsi Gabbard may be a Democrat, but the 33-year-old congresswoman from Hawaii has endeared herself to right-wing hawks by showing a willingness to buck the president, and her party, on foreign affairs. “I like her thinking a lot,” American Enterprise Institute president Arthur Brooks tells National Review in an e-mail. Brooks describes Gabbard as “smart and reasonable,” as well as “pragmatically strong on defense.” “She could be a very powerful new voice on the D side,” he says. It’s not often, especially in the Age of Obama, that you hear prominent Republicans lavish praise on up-and-coming Democrats

But Gabbard’s public condemnation of the president’s national-security strategy is turning heads and winning her rave reviews from across the aisle. With the U.S. on the precipice of a deal with Iran, Gabbard’s embrace of American exceptionalism, combined with her exotic background — she was born in American Samoa, and she is Hindu — seems to offer the Democratic party a different way forward. It harkens back to the Truman era, and it’s attractive to many Republicans, particularly those who care about foreign affairs and are seeking to renew a bipartisan consensus on national security. “I think she’s a responsible American congresswoman who served in the military and looks at the situation as she sees it,” says Danielle Pletka, AEI’s vice president for foreign policy and defense. “She doesn’t see everything through a political prism and is thoughtful and serious,” Pletka says. “I admire her.”

In looking for liberal turncoats, Patriotic Betrayal ignores George Kennan and Cold War realism. The cover of Karen M. Paget’s Patriotic Betrayal consists entirely of an extraordinary advertorial instructing readers how they should think about the book’s revelations. The text declares that in February 1967, “CIA director Richard Helms had, as he would later recall, ‘one of my darkest days,’ when President Lyndon Johnson told him that the muckraking magazine Ramparts was about to expose one of the Agency’s best-kept secrets: a covert project to enroll American students in the crusade against communism.”

Asserting that the Ramparts article revealed only “a small part of the story of the CIA’s two-decades-long effort to ensnare the National Student Association,” the cover then boasts that Paget “tells the rest of the tale, which reads like a John le Carré novel, filled with self-serving rationalizations, layers of duplicity, and bureaucratic double talk.” It also claims that Paget “throws a sharp light on the persistent argument, heard even today, about whether America’s national-security interests can be secured by skullduggery and deception.”

In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that I winced when I read those words. That’s because I was one of the editors of Ramparts and the principal author of the article exposing the CIA’s covert funding of the NSA, only one part of an elaborate web of anti-Communist citizen groups supported by the spy agency during the first decades of the Cold War.

Once again our leaders are needlessly appeasing a hostile state that shows them nothing but contempt. The Western capitulation to Adolf Hitler in the 1938 Munich Agreement is cited as classic appeasement that destroyed Czechoslovakia, backfired on France and Britain, and led to World War II. All of that is true.

But there was much more that caused the Munich debacle than simple Western naiveté. The full tragedy of that ill-fated agreement should warn us on the eve of the Obama’s administration’s gullible agreement with Iran on nuclear proliferation. Fable one is the idea that most people saw right through the Munich folly. True, Europeans knew that Hitler had never once told the truth and was already murdering German citizens who were Jews, Communists, or homosexuals. But Europeans did not care all that much. Instead, the Western world was ecstatic over the agreement. After the carnage of World War I, Europeans would do anything to avoid even a small confrontation — even if such appeasement all but ensured a far greater bloodbath than the one that began in 1914.

The new Advanced Placement U.S. history exam focuses on oppression, group identity and Reagan the warmonger.

If you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

—President Ronald Reagan, speech at the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, 1987

President Reagan’s challenge to Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev remains one of the most dramatic calls for freedom in our time. Thus I was heartened to find a passage from Reagan’s speech on the sample of the new Advanced Placement U.S. history exam that students will take for the first time in May. It seemed for a moment that students would be encouraged to learn about positive aspects of our past rather than be directed to focus on the negative, as happens all too often.

Presenting himself as Tobi the German, the author hears praise of Nazis in the West Bank and talk of Jews’ ‘racist’ DNA in Tel Aviv.

Here is the classic recipe for writing about Israelis and Palestinians: start by mentioning the “cycle of violence” and the distrust it has bred between two peoples in a contested holy land. Next speak of the sane moderates on both sides who are willing to compromise and believe in what “everyone” knows to be the reasonable way forward, a two-state solution. Bemoan how “extremists” on the side you dislike are sabotaging prospects for peace. Repeat until the U.S. president calls for a new peace conference, then insist it represents a last chance.

In “Catch the Jew!,” Tuvia Tenenbom eschews this crusty framework. Crisscrossing Israel and the Palestinian Territories over seven months in 2013-14, Mr. Tenenbom meets with high-ranking politicians, celebrated writers, religious leaders, “human rights” professionals, left-wing political activists and West Bank settlers, cajoling Jews and Arabs to speak for themselves. Mr. Tenenbom’s conversations range from the sacred to the profane, from high-level politics to ribald discussions of the dating rituals of various religious groups and ethnicities. “Catch the Jew!” is an illuminating—and alarming—account of a part of the promised land that few foreigners see.

Nuclear talks with North Korea prove Iran’s program will go forward—deal or no deal.

By the nuclear compliance standards of Barack Obama and John Kerry, North Korea was a model state—in 1992. In 1985, North Korea joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. In 1992 it and South Korea jointly declared the “denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula. North Korea next signed a safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Within months, the IAEA reported “inconsistencies” in North Korea’s nuclear program.