RUTHFULLY YOURS

In its apparent, inexplicable eagerness to sign just about any deal with Iran to allow it nuclear weapons capability, the U.S. State Department has removed Iran and its proxy, Hezbollah — two of the world most undisguised promoters of terror — from its Foreign Terrorist Organizations List.

Iran’s President, Hassan Rouhani, has even openly admitted that Iran’s diplomacy with the U.S. is an active “jihad.” How much plainer does a message have to get?

The Islamists have nothing but contempt for Europe’s weakness.

The West needs to paralyze Iran, rather than appease it.

A series of significant defeats to Islamist organizations will counter the effects of their efforts to entice young people to join them, especially ISIS.

In these terrible times, critical for the future of our region, Netanyahu spoke in the U.S. despite the objections of Israelis and Americans, willing to accept personal, political and diplomatic setbacks for himself and his country, in order to look after his people’s security.

We are all also hoping that that the government of Israel will focus even more on bringing the Arabs of Israel into the Israeli fold. Otherwise a “fifth column” could form and harden that will drive them into the open and waiting arms of Hamas and other terrorist groups.

Arab-Israeli politicians might also focus more on helping such an effort, rather than, as many Arab politicians do, strike out and blame others for what is wrong — a lazy, destructive substitute for actually helping improve the lives of their people.

Ever since Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, came back from his recent visit to the United States, it has repeatedly been shown that he was right to stand before Congress and issue his warnings. Tehran’s Ayatollahs have not only clung to their desire for a naval exercise in the Strait of Hormuz, where they targeted a simulated a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, they also displayed a new series of intercontinental ballistic missiles [ICBMs] that could paralyze all the shipping in the Gulf.

Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R) said the State Department funding granted to a group lobbying against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “a big, huge deal and warrants some deep investigation.”

OneVoice, a 501(c)3 organization, partnered with anti-Bibi campaign committee V15, which in turn partnered with 270 Strategies — a political consulting firm with more than a dozen staffers who were in leadership roles in President Obama’s re-election campaign. One of those is Jeremy Bird, who served as national field director for Obama’s 2012 campaign and was reportedly working in Israel to defeat Netanyahu.

Kinzinger told Fox “this is a huge, huge issue.”

“I mean, I don’t know at least of overtly before the U.S. government has ever funded an organization that funded a subsidiary whose sole purpose was to overthrow an elected government of an ally, of a friend. I mean, Benjamin Netanyahu is not a major opponent of the United States. He’s a friend of the United States,” the congressman said. “The Israel people are friends. If, in fact, this is true that the State Department — I mean, money is fungible. So money was given to this group, OneVoice, and they gave money to the subsidiary Victory 15, whose sole purpose stated is to overthrow or dis-elect the current government.”

Marine veteran Amir Hekamti has been unjustly held by Iran for 1,297 days as the Islamic Republic refuses to bend to international pressure to let him go — asserting that since he’s an Iranian citizen, it’s none of America’s business.

But Amir, who was born in Flagstaff, Ariz., and grew up in Michigan, is a dual citizen only because of his father’s heritage. The Iraq War veteran was visiting extended family for the first time in August 2011 when he was seized and sentenced on trumped-up espionage charges.

In a recent letter to the Iranian Interest Section in Washington, D.C., Amir makes clear he is 100 percent American and renounces his Iranian citizenship.

Amir writes that he was “surprised” to be given an Iranian passport when he applied for a visa in 2011, but was eager to see the country of his heritage. “Sadly, after only three weeks of my visit, I was falsely imprisoned and put as a part of a propaganda campaign by the Ministry of Intelligence and for nearly 3½ years I’ve endured inhumane treatment and witnessed the devastation this has caused my family and the deteriorating health of my father who is battling with cancer.”

“We will stand by the Israeli people and their duly elected political leadership.”

With early returns showing the Likud party hanging on and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claiming victory, Republican senators who were chastised by the White House for signing an open letter to Tehran on Iran’s nuclear program began to swiftly weigh in.

The Times of Israel noted that voter turnout in Israel was 71.8 percent — the highest since 1999. Zioinst Union leader Isaac Herzog had not conceded defeat, but with Likud and ZU neck-and-neck Netanyahu’s party is in a strong position to form a unity government. Netanyahu said after voting that, should he win, the third person he calls would be President Obama.

“Against all odds:a great victory for the Likud. A major victory for the people of Israel!” Netanyahu triumphantly tweeted. “This is a great victory for our nation. I’m proud of people of Israel who in the moment of truth knew what was important. Every family, soldier, citizen, Jewish or not are important to me! We will form a strong government to work for them.”

Our Call… Open the Federal Pensions

The Dark Secrets of Federal Pensions
By Adam Andrzejewski | Editorial
Washington Times, March 17, 2015
Click here to read our editorial

Shine the Light on the Nest Egg | Graphic by Washington Times

It’s national Sunshine Week across America. During this week, good government groups advocate for open government and transparency. One area that remains hidden is federal pensions.

Imagine if you could review your congressman’s pension including amount contributed, years to break-even and total payout to life expectancy.
Click here to read our clarion call: Open the Books on Federal Pensions.
Recently, our organization, American Transparency, filed a Freedom of Information Act request to reveal individual federal pensions. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) rejected it as “a clear unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” Still, our request for the active salaries of the 2.5 million federal employees was fulfilled with seven-year histories. We post these salaries on our website, OpenTheBooks.com.
But if active salaries (by name) can be transparent, why would posting federal retiree pension amounts, service credits, and contributions be an invasion of privacy? The same privacy law underlies both records. The Obama Administration’s legal argument against revealing pension data is arbitrary.
Taxpayer groups should not have to file a lawsuit to see this data.

Last year, former IRS executive and now federal retiree Lois Lerner was held in contempt of Congress after pleading the fifth to forgo answering the questions from the House Oversight Committee. Citizens deserve to know Lerner’s annual pension. But estimates by two DC think tanks vary by over $52,000 annually, or nearly $2 million in lifetime payout.
What did we find at the state level to justify the opening of the federal pensions?
How are federal pensions calculated?

You are not going to believe it’s the 21st century.

The founder of OpenTheBooks.com Adam Andrzejewski lays out a great argument to open the federal pensions to transparency…
Click here to read our clarion call: Open the Books on Federal Pensions.

It’s Sunshine Week across America. Join the Transparency Revolution!

Matthew Tyrmand, Deputy Director
Adam Andrzejewski, Chairman

P.S. Your help is needed today. Please help us post “every dime online in real time” across America.
Please make a tax deductible gift of $25, $50, $100, $250 or $500 today.

• Adam Andrzejewski is the chairman of American Transparency and founder of OpenTheBooks.com.
Records housed in caves should be exposed to public scrutiny.

It’s national Sunshine Week across America. During this week, good-government groups advocate for open government and transparency. One area that remains hidden is federal pensions.

Imagine if you could review your congressman’s pension, including amount contributed, years to break even and total payout to life expectancy. Or what if taxpayers could view the pensions of former Internal Revenue Service chief Lois Lerner or former Secret Service boss Julia Pierson? But we don’t know because we can’t see them. The data is not merely opaque, but literally housed and hidden in a Cold War-era underground complex in Pennsylvania.

Recently, our organization, American Transparency, filed a Freedom of Information Act request to reveal individual federal pensions. The Office of Personnel Management rejected it as “a clear unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” Still, our request for the active salaries of the 2.5 million federal employees was fulfilled, with seven-year histories. We post these salaries on our website, OpenTheBooks.com.

So, what goes on in the heads of Islamic terrorists? Barack Obama says their massive, continuing murder sprees have nothing to do with Islam. The Prime Minister of Denmark, which has experienced multiple Islamic terrorist attacks over the last week, agreed with Obama that they had nothing to do with Islam, but did admit they were terrorist attacks. Ms. Thorning-Schmidt sought to calm tensions after the attacks, saying, “This is not a war between Islam and the West….We feel certain now that it was a politically motivated attack, and thereby it was a terrorist attack,” she said. If the violent suppression of freedom of speech is a “politically motivated attack, and if she is certain of that, why deny it has nothing to do with Islam?

Speaking to reporters in Copenhagen on Sunday, according to Danish television station TV2, Ms. Thorning-Schmidt said: “This is not a war between Islam and the West. We will do our best to defend our democracy and Denmark.”

In the name of what politics were the attacks on a meeting about freedom of speech in Copenhagen and on a newspaper in Paris launched? No answer. Blank out.

After a hiatus from my columns, one enforced by the necessity of writing, without distraction, my latest Cyrus Skeen mystery novel, Silver Screens, set in the Hollywood milieu (but not in Hollywood itself), it is appropriate that I return with the review of a book about the early American novel, Philip F. Gura’s Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel, which traces the beginnings of the literary form in this country and discusses its largely religious nature and later anti-American nature. He covers roughly the century just prior to the American Revolution up to the mid- to late 19th century.

Gura discusses such better known novelists as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, and reveals that they, too, experimented with, if not endorsed, the kind of “self-fulfillment” dramatized by their lesser known colleagues in the realm of fiction. Many of the novelists Gura discusses aren’t even on Wikipedia’s list of known 19th century writers.

All novels are “morality tales” of one kind or another, including Silver Screens. The difference, however, between Silver Screens and virtually every novel discussed by Gura is that the morality in Silver Screens is integrated with the action, whereas the morality and action in these early novels are rarely integrated and are paragons of what novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand called the soul-body dichotomy. That is, the morality is not reason-based and so is at odds with man’s nature and with reality itself.

20th Knesset. With almost all the ballots counted for Israel’s general election held today, the ruling Likud party of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has scored a dramatic and decisive victory over the rival Zionist Union party

99% of votes have been counted from a total of 4,223,057 and Likud is in first place with 23.29 percent. Zionist Union is trailing far behind in second place with 18.76 percent, almost 5 percentage points behind Likud. (Media and Polls caught lying through their wishful thinking teeth once again)

The results give Netanyahu 29 seats in Israel’s Knesset, a full 5 more than the Zionist Union with 24. The tally significantly exceeds exit poll results which showed the two parties in a dead heat.

The United Arab List is in third place at 10.95 percent or 14 seats, followed by the centrist Yesh Atid with 8.78 percent or 11 seats and Moshe Kahlon’s Kulanu with 7.42 percent or 10 seats. Bayit Yehudi now holds 6.40 percent or 8 seats, Shas has 5.82 percent or 7 seats, Yisrael Beiteinu has 5.17 percent or 6 seats, and United Torah Judaism has 5.18 percent.

Politicians should stop referring to the President of the United States as “the Commander-in-Chief,” as he is often referred to. Most recently, Hillary Clinton, whom I admire, said the following about Republican senators who wrote an open letter to Iran:

“Either these senators were trying to be helpful to the Iranians or harmful to the Commander-in-Chief in the midst of high-stakes international diplomacy.”

But the president is not the Commander-in-Chief for purposes of diplomatic negotiations. This characterization mistakenly implies that President Obama — or any president — is our Commander, and that his decisions should receive special deference. This is a misreading of our constitution, which creates a presidency that is subject to the checks and balances of co-equal branches of the government. The president is only the commander in chief of “the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States.” This provision was intended to assure civilian control over the military and to serve as a check on military power.