RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/fjordman/my-life-as-a-public-enemy/print/

I am currently completing a book about the Anders Behring Breivik case and how I got dragged into it against my will. The working title is Witness to Madness, with the subtitle How I Became Public Enemy Number Two. I was considering dropping the reference to being a “public enemy,” as it might be seen as hyperbole. Yet after the reactions I’ve received since the beginning of June 2013, this title actually seems warranted.

On Friday June 14, I announced on my Twitter account, in Norwegian, that I’d just been awarded a grant of 75,000 kroner to support the completion of my upcoming book about the Breivik case. This grant came from Fritt Ord, which is Norway’s largest and most well-funded free speech organization by far.

I was quite happy to receive it, as it had not at all been certain that I would get it. The decision was bound to cause some controversy, given how controversial I am in Norway, but the mass media reactions once again exceeded anything I had truly expected. A full week after my tweet, the debate had still not died down. A Member of Parliament representing the ruling government coalition blasted the decision and me personally on the state broadcaster NRK. The crux of the debate is: Does freedom of speech apply even to truly loathsome creeps like Fjordman?

The controversy was mentioned in the other Scandinavian countries, too, for instance on Denmark’s public broadcaster DR, as well as in national newspapers in Sweden such as Aftonbladet and Expressen.

The good news is that quite a few individuals have taken a principled stand in favor of free speech. The support that meant the most to me personally was that of the long-time publisher William Nygaard. He was the Norwegian publisher of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses and was nearly killed outside his own home in Oslo in 1993. In other words, this is a man who has personally paid a price for doing what he does, and who probably also genuinely disagrees with many of the things that I write, but who nevertheless supports free speech as a matter of principle. He is also not alone in doing this, which is encouraging.

  http://frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/defending-an-islamofascist-with-u-s-troops/print/ In yet another remarkable display of Obama’s determination to secure the Middle East for Islamofascists, 400 U.S. troops will reportedly be deployed to Egypt to augment the police force of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi. They will be part of a 13-country force stationed in Egypt in anticipation of protests, scheduled for June 30th, calling for the […]

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2013/06/25/supreme-court-buries-section-5-of-voting-rights-act/?print=1

The Supreme Court has decided Shelby v. Holder. It is one of the most important decisions in decades.

Now, federal preclearance of state election procedures seems to be forever dead and buried. While some congressional Republicans had vowed to enact new legislation to “fix” any coverage formula deemed unconstitutional, the opinion today offers almost no room to do so. They would have to decide what’s more important: the Republican Party, or the Constitution?

Section 5 required states to obtain preclearance approval for any change involving elections — any change, even moving a polling place 20 feet. Only 15 states were covered by Section 5, including hotbeds of Jim Crow like Michigan, New York, and Alaska.

Over the years, the Justice Department unit enforcing Section 5 has had hundreds of thousands of dollars in court sanctions imposed against it for abusing the Section 5 process. They even demanded that Alabama submit felon DNA testing to the Justice Department for approval, a law which had nothing to do with elections.

Now, voter ID laws in Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi are in effect after a delay of years. Section 5 is dead and gone, and congressional Republicans, no matter how much racialist false witness is lobbed at them, simply have no ability to resurrect the law. Will the GOP defend itself against the already-commenced false racial attacks following the decision, or will they cave?

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/06/26/sheikh-who-okd-killing-americans-in-iraq-gets-white-house-reception/?print=1

Editor’s Note: PJ Media contributor Patrick Poole is the author of the Middle East Review for International Affairs (MERIA) article “Blind to Terror: The U.S. Government’s Disastrous Muslim Outreach and the Impact on U.S. Middle East Policy,” which was published earlier this month.

Steve Emerson and John Rossomando of the Investigative Project reported last night that Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah, vice president of the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), was received by senior Obama administration officials in the White House on June 13:

Bin Bayyah’s website claims that he met June 13 with senior Obama administration officials at the White House.

Nonetheless, it was the Obama administration which sought the meeting with Bin Bayyah, his website’s account said.

“We asked for this meeting to learn from you and we need to be looking for new mechanisms to communicate with you and the Association of Muslim Scholars (another name used for the IUMS),” Gayle Smith, senior director of the National Security Council, reportedly said.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/why-snowden-picked-ecuador/?print=1

ECUADOR’S PRESIDENT RAFAEL CORREA WAS , ALONG WITH BOLIVIA’S MORONIC PRESIDENT EVO MORALES A MEMBER OF HUGO CHAVEZ’ THREE “BOLIVARIAN” STOOGES….ANTI AMERICAN POP SOCIALIST THUGS WHO AMONG THEM CONTROL CRITICAL ENERGY SUPPLIES….ECUADOR AND VENEZUELA HAVE ABUNDANT OIL AND BOLIVIA HAS THE WORLD’S LARGEST SUPPLY OF LITHIUM……RSK

Edward Snowden says [1] that he leaked classified information about National Security Agency surveillance programs because he believes those programs represent a major threat to civil liberties. Ironically, Snowden has now requested asylum in a country — Ecuador — where civil liberties are routinely trampled by an elected autocracy.

As of this writing, he is apparently still in Moscow [1], awaiting a formal response from the Ecuadorean government. If Quito approves his asylum request and Snowden successfully makes it to Ecuadorean territory, he will be the second high-profile leaker to take refuge there over the past year. The first, of course, was WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who entered Ecuador’s London embassy last June and officially received asylum [2] in August.

Why did Snowden pick Ecuador? Like Assange, he recognizes that President Rafael Correa is an anti-American leftist who has repeatedly clashed with Washington and has eagerly embraced U.S. adversaries. Indeed, Correa is a Hugo Chávez acolyte who reportedly received money from Colombian FARC terrorists [3] during his 2006 presidential campaign; who in 2009 expelled [4] a U.S. embassy official named Armando Astorga and forced the U.S. military to leave Manta air base [5] (which had been used for anti-drug operations); who in 2011 expelled [6] U.S. ambassador Heather Hodges; who in 2012 withdrew [7] Ecuadorean troops from the U.S.-based Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation and also threatened to expel [8] USAID from Ecuador; and who boycotted [9] the 2012 Summit of the Americas to protest the exclusion of Cuba. His government has also strengthened ties with Iran [10], and there is compelling evidence that the Iranians have used their close relationship with Ecuador to evade international sanctions and access the global financial system [11]. Ecuadorean foreign minister Ricardo Patiño has called Iran a “strategic partner [12],” and Correa has defended [13] the Iranian nuclear program.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/352009/gops-immigration-debacle-jonah-goldberg I don’t know how Democrats do it. The immigration-reform proposal wending its way through the Senate is tearing the Republican party to pieces. Poor Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), once the golden boy of the Tea Party and the conservative movement, is being treated like a guy who wants to leave a gang but […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/352025/obamas-radical-climate-agenda-editors

t is remarkable that when the scientific consensus on global warming is at its weakest state in years, President Barack Obama has decided to make the issue a new focus of his troubled presidency — and, indeed, that he intends to use the issue as the launching pad for a radical extension of federal power even more significant than his health-care takeover.

President Obama campaigned as a man of science, though he himself has no scientific training. He lambasted his critics as being anti-science Luddites and even enjoyed an endorsement from Bill Nye the Science Guy, who allowed his name to be associated with dishonest and unfair attacks on Republicans. Barack Obama, of course, is not a science guy. For example, he has flattered far-left conspiracy theories about common vaccinations, saying, “The science right now is inconclusive,” which is a position about as scientifically defensible as claiming that the dinosaurs went extinct because Fred Flintstone ordered too many bronto-burgers.

Global warming, contrary to the predictions of the best climate models, is not accelerating. It is slowing, and some estimates show it having been reversed. The warmest year on record was 1998, and there has been significantly less warming in the last 15 years than there was in the 20 years before that. The Economist, which supports measures to control greenhouse-gas emissions and has been a reliable hotbed of warming alarmism, conceded: “There’s no way around the fact that this reprieve for the planet is bad news for proponents of policies, such as carbon taxes and emissions treaties, meant to slow warming by moderating the release of greenhouse gases. . . . They will become harder, if not impossible, to sell to the public, which will feel, not unreasonably, that the scientific and media establishment has cried wolf.”
If only President Obama simply had cried wolf. Instead, the president announced that, on behalf of “all of humankind,” he is in effect directing the EPA to take over the American economy. New power plants will be subject to emissions controls, and existing plants will have to be retrofitted to comply with new standards. New restrictions on heavy trucks will affect the movement of freight and goods across the country. New subsidies will be handed down for politically connected energy firms, and federal lands will be set aside for their use. New federal impositions will affect the construction of factories, commercial buildings, and private homes. The president says that this is all enabled by the “overwhelming judgment of science.”

It certainly has not been enabled by something so mundane as the law. We rather suspect that the overwhelming judgment of Congress would be against the president’s program of regimenting the entire American economy under the management of a newly empowered EPA. But the president has made it clear that he intends to act largely through administrative fiat, subverting the democratic process and the people’s elected representatives. Unhappily, the Supreme Court has abetted this ambition by misconstruing the Clean Air Act as a warrant of action on global warming.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/06/memo_to_snowden_they_shoot_people_like_you_in_cuba.html A few days ago, I was willing to cut Mr Snowden a little slack and see him as a principled individual who opposed the NSA’s program.  I’m not defending his “leak” but was willing to believe that he did it out of some concern for our privacy rights.   Today, I see him as […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324637504578565352740739148.html
Taliban Guns Send a Message About Obama’s Peace Process
Last week, the U.S. cheered the opening of a Taliban office in Qatar. On Monday, their fighters attacked in Kabul.

While much of the world is focused on the indignities being heaped on the United States by Russia, China and Ecuador in the fugitive Edward Snowden affair, the Taliban on Monday demonstrated their own contempt for the Obama administration.

Last week, U.S. officials celebrated what they regarded as a diplomatic breakthrough. They had persuaded the Taliban to open a political office in Doha, Qatar—and now America hopes it has the peace-negotiating partners the Obama administration covets as the U.S. plans its escape from Afghanistan. On Monday, the Taliban attacked the presidential compound in Kabul. The daylight gunbattle left at least eight Taliban and three guards dead.

The Afghan government—and the majority of Afghans—were not happy about the Doha news. The Taliban had immediately begun flying its flag and posting signs declaring the office as an outpost of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. President Karzai announced that he would not join peace negotiations with killers who had been so legitimized by the U.S., and he suspended talks with the U.S. about a long-term security arrangement.

The Taliban didn’t take long to prove his point. Or to expose Washington as a receding and tired presence in Afghanistan, desperate to leave.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323683504578567533647032380.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

President Obama’s climate speech on Tuesday was grandiose even for him, but its surreal nature was its particular hallmark. Some 12 million Americans still can’t find work, real wages have fallen for five years, three-fourths of Americans now live paycheck to check, and the economy continues to plod along four years into a quasi-recovery. But there was the President in tony Georgetown, threatening more energy taxes and mandates that will ensure fewer jobs, still lower incomes and slower growth.

Mr. Obama’s “climate action plan” adds up to one of the most extensive reorganizations of the U.S. economy since the 1930s, imposed through administrative fiat and raw executive power. He wants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 17% by 2020, but over his 6,500-word address he articulated no such goal for the unemployment rate or GDP.
***

The plan covers everything from new efficiency standards for home appliances to new fuel mileage rules for heavy-duty trucks to new subsidies for wind farms, but the most consequential changes would slam the U.S. electric industry. These plants, coal-fired power in particular, account for about a third of domestic greenhouse gases.

Last year the Environmental Protection Agency released “new source performance standard” regulations that are effectively a moratorium on new coal plants. The EPA denied that similar rules would ever apply to the existing fleet, or even that they were working up such rules. Now Mr. Obama will unleash his carbon central planners on current plants.