RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last Friday I took a really long train trip to the South. I had a seat next to a nurse from Baltimore who was bound for Chicago. We chatted about many things including politics. She told me that she had goose bumps at the election and presidency of Obama and goose bumps at the potential election of a woman- namely, Hillary Clinton. She asked what I thought. I told her that my answer might anger her – I do not admire President Obama, and I will be voting for Donald Trump.

Her response was immediate….verbatim: “Honey….Why would I be angry? This is not Russia and you are entitled to your opinion.” It sounded like music after the political rancor among my friends in the Northeast.
And in magnificent Albemarle county in Virginia, we came upon:

TRUMP VINEYARDS

Planted in 1999 and nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Trump Winery is situated on a 1,300-acre estate just a few miles from Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, the birthplace of American viticulture, and James Monroe’s Ash Lawn-Highland in Charlottesville, VA. Planted with nearly 200 acres of French vinifera varieties, Trump Winery is Virginia’s largest vineyard and the largest vinifera vineyard on the East Coast.

Is there any doubt that ISIS is or can be placing terrorists among the Syrian refugees entering this country, and that the entry into this country of such terrorists “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States”? And further, that our government has no means of vetting all such refugees to eliminate those who are terrorists.

Section 212(e) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (still the law):

“Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or non immigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate. ”
Mr. Walpin is the author of ” The Supreme Court vs. The Constitution- You Don’t Have to be a Lawyer To Understand How Supreme Court Justices Have Substituted Their Own Elitist Views for Constitutional Guarantees That Protect the Average American’s Security and Values”

President Obama is very upset at his critics, who are taking him and his administration to task for refusing to use the term “radical Islam” to describe our enemy in the terror war.

During his speech on Tuesday, in referring to the term “radical Islam,” the president stated angrily:

What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change? Would it make ISIL less committed to try to kill Americans? Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this? The answer is none of the above. Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away. This is a political distraction.

It is interesting to note that our enemy has quite a preoccupation with this very same “political distraction.”

Indeed, back in 2011, Muslim Brotherhood front groups approached the Obama administration and demanded to look at the training materials for the FBI and law enforcement agencies to see what words they were using. It’s curious that instead of telling the Brotherhood to go away with the explanation that labels didn’t “accomplish” or “change” anything, the administration docilely obliged. More curious still, when the Brotherhood returned and demanded that all mention of words connected to Islam, such as “jihad,” “Sharia” and “radical Islam,” be purged from the manuals, the administration again docilely obliged.

So we have an intriguing situation: when people who want to protect America implore Obama to use the term “radical Islam” to describe the force waging war on us, he refuses and angrily responds that “different” names don’t make things go away. But when a totalitarian ideology that seeks to destroy our civilization (and boasts that it will do so by our own hands) tells us not to use the label “radical Islam” when we were doing that, Obama follows the orders.

And so, as author Stephen Coughlin has documented in his work Catastrophic Failure, the Obama administration rooted out all references to jihad and Islam from U.S. intelligence agency manuals. And this action and attitude has affected every realm of government. That’s why in the State Department, for example, an official is not even allowed to ask an immigrant about his views on jihad or Sharia law before approving his visa application. In fact, a “counterterrorism” government guide counsels that keeping Muslims out of the country for supporting Sharia law violates the First Amendment.

Such is the devious mentality behind Obama’s “defense strategy” in the terror war, which demands that American officials and investigators are to consider only violent or criminal conduct when trying to keep America safe. Radical ideology is to be ignored, particularly if it has the veneer of “religious expression.”

NO POSTINGS

If the British vote down the Brexit referendum later next week and choose to remain in the European Union, the results will be unfortunate for the United States in many ways. Britain’s continuing membership in the EU threatens not only America’s economic interests, but also its strategic and military interests. If the architects of the European Union realize their ambitions, it will be impossible for the United States and the United Kingdom to maintain a significant bilateral military and strategic partnership for a simple reason: The United Kingdom will increasingly cease to function as a sovereign state capable of determining its own foreign and defense policy. Instead, it will have to subordinate its own interests to the dictates of a common European foreign and defense policy issuing from Brussels.

The legal (and illegal) precedent for such a shift has been accreting by degrees for some time. After the Single European Act in 1986 and the Maastricht Treaty on European Union in 1992, the nature of the “European project,” originally just an economic partnership, began to change. Subsequent treaties — Amsterdam (1999), Nice (2001), and Lisbon (2009) — moved the project more obviously and explicitly toward full political integration. Integral to this objective has been the establishment of a Common Foreign and Security Policy, operating separately from NATO and beyond the control of Europe’s individual nation-states.

The Amsterdam treaty, signed by all European Union member states, included articles envisioning a continent-wide foreign policy. It also established for the first time an EU foreign minister. The failed European Constitution of 2004 included provisions under which the individual members’ defense and foreign policies — the last remaining areas of national sovereignty allowed by previous EU treaties — would have been completely eliminated. The constitution expanded the role of the European foreign minister, giving the occupant of that office the power to set a continent-wide foreign policy. It would have legitimated and expanded the European Defence Agency, which had already begun to operate under a centralized command structure apart from NATO. Thus it jettisoned the last vestiges of intergovernmental cooperation and “shared sovereignty” in favor of a fully sovereign European super-state.

Though French and Dutch voters rejected the constitution in the summer of 2005, the unelected architects of “ever closer union” have used other means to implement its key provisions. In particular, almost the whole of the defeated European Constitution was enacted in the Lisbon treaty in 2009 after the EU Council of Ministers agreed to the treaty without consulting their voters. Indeed, over 90 percent of the wording in the treaty is the same as that in the failed constitution. The only changes made were cosmetic, notably omitting the references to the EU flag and anthem because these were already part of established EU law. Even before the Lisbon treaty, the European Commission and the Council of Ministers had begun using the “spirit” of those earlier treaties to establish covertly and piecemeal much of what they could not get Dutch and French voters to approve.

In 2001 members of a group of Castroite spies in south Florida known as the Wasp Network were convicted of charges ranging from espionage to conspiracy to commit murder (of U.S. citizens). They were sentenced to terms ranging from 15 years to two life sentences. According to the FBI’s affidavit, the charges against these KGB-trained Communist spies included:

• Compiling the names, home addresses, and medical files of the U.S. Southern Command’s top officers and that of hundreds of officers stationed at Boca Chica Naval Station in Key West.

• Infiltrating the headquarters of the U.S. Southern Command.

This past April, on Obama’s orders, some of the U.S. Southern Command’s top officers gave an in-depth tour of the Southern Command’s most vital facilities to some of Cuba’s top Military and Intelligence officials—probably to some of the very ones who earlier got this vital information from their WASP charges via “encrypted software, high-frequency radio transmissions and coded electronic phone messages,” as the FBI affidavit showed.

If this sounds impossible or like the plot for the next Austin Powers Movie, here’s the story from The Miami Herald.

And never mind the convicted Cuban spies, some of whom helped murder four U.S. citizens. They’re all living like celebrities in Cuba now after Obama gifted them back to Castro in December 2014, upon commencing his smoochfest with the terror-sponsoring drug-runner who came closest to nuking the U.S.

It gets better:

Coincidently (perhaps) the vital U.S. defense facilities that Obama invited the eager Communist drug-runners to carefully inspect serve as the U.S. Defense Department’s “command center on the war on drugs.”

Coincidently, (perhaps) on top of serving as a base for terrorist group Hezbollah and probably laundering funds for Al-Qaeda as late as two years ago, the Castro-Family-Crime-Syndicate also help facilitate much of world’s cocaine smuggling. The dots are not overly difficult to connect. Let’s have a look:

*The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) attributes half the world’s cocaine supply to the Colombian Terror group FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.)

In the spring of 2013 Barack Obama delivered the defining speech of his presidency on the subject of terrorism. Its premise was wrong, as was its thesis, as were its predictions and recommendations. We are now paying the price for this cascade of folly.

“Today, Osama bin Laden is dead, and so are most of his top lieutenants,” the president boasted at the National Defense University, in Washington, D.C. “There have been no large-scale attacks on the United States, and our homeland is more secure.” The “future of terrorism,” he explained, consisted of “less capable” al Qaeda affiliates, “localized threats” against Westerners in faraway places such as Algeria, and homegrown killers like the Boston Marathon bombers.

All of this suggested that it was time to call it quits on what Mr. Obama derided as “a boundless ‘global war on terror.’ ” That meant sharply curtailing drone strikes, completing the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, and closing Guantanamo prison. It meant renewing efforts “to promote peace between Israelis and Palestinians” and seeking “transitions to democracy” in Libya and Egypt. And it meant working with Congress to repeal the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against al Qaeda.

“This war, like all wars, must end,” he said. “That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.”

King Canute of legend stood on an English shoreline and ordered the tide to recede. President Canute stood before a Beltway audience and ordered the war to end. Neither tide nor war obeyed.

In 2010, al Qaeda in Iraq—Islamic State’s predecessor—was “dead on its feet,” as terrorism expert Michael Knights told Congress. World-wide, the U.S. government estimated al Qaeda’s total strength at no more than 4,000 fighters. That was the result of George W. Bush’s surge in Iraq, of Mr. Obama’s own surge in Afghanistan, and of the aggressive campaign of drone killings in Pakistan and Yemen.

But then the Obama Doctrine kicked in. Between 2010 and 2013 the number of jihadists world-wide doubled, to 100,000, while the number of jihadist groups rose by 58%, according to a Rand Corp. study. That was before ISIS declared its caliphate. CONTINUE AT SITE

In an era of resurgent collectivism, Religious Freedom Coalition founder William J. Murray “stands athwart history yelling ‘stop’” with his new book Utopian Road to Hell: Enslaving America and the World with Central Planning. Therein he provides a valuable primer into mankind’s rogue gallery of radicals who have ravaged humanity from antiquity to the present with interrelated utopian delusions both authoritarian and hedonistic in nature.

The born-again Christian conservative Murray brings unique personal perspective to his intellectual subject matter as a self-professed “‘Red diaper’ baby.” His family attempted to defect to the Soviet Union in 1960 and as a teenager he met Communist Party USA chairman Gus Hall, among other leftist luminaries. Murray has thus “served nearly equal periods of my life on opposing sides of reality.”

Murray surveys the collectivist thought of intellectuals from Plato, born in 429 B.C. in Athens, to Edward Bellamy, author of the 1888 socialist paean Looking Backward, and President Woodrow Wilsonadvisor Edward Mandell House. “If Plato had lived in the early nineteenth century, he would likely have become a dedicated Marxist,” Murray interestingly reveals. Plato’s Republic, for example, envisioned a society that denied medical care to the chronically ill who had no value to the state.

Likewise English statesman Sir Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia described a totalitarian government that offered free medical care but urged gravely ill persons to commit suicide. Utopianism’s namesake fictional writing “had great influence on the collectivist leaders of the twentieth century,” Murray notes. Vladimir Lenin “championed More’s Utopia as worthy of honor in his newly created worker’s paradise of the Soviet Union.”

Statistics cited by Murray attributing almost 100 million deaths to Communist regimes bear witness to Marxism’s harsh reality. “This is the legacy of utopian thinking: people die by the millions,” he writes, and quotes William Bradford’s seminal 1623 recounting of the Pilgrims’ experiment with collective agriculture. Struggling for survival in a harsh, infant New England colony removed from intellectual thought experiments, the Plymouth governor noted that the Pilgrims experienced the

emptiness of the theory of Plato and other ancients, applauded by some of later times, that the taking away of private property, and the possession of it in community, by a commonwealth, would make a state happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.

Evelyn Beatrice Hall (28 September 1868 – 13 April 1956) was an English writer who used the pseudonym S. G. Tallentyre. She is best known for her biographies of Voltaire.

In” The Friends of Voltaire”, Hall wrote the phrase: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it “-which is often incorrectly attributed to Voltaire. It is often quoted in praising free speech.

Just try to tell a liberal that you are voting for Trump and you will get insult, opprobrium, accusations of racism and stupidity, lack of morals, and more of “I disapprove of what you say and you have no right to say it.” rsk

Let’s start with the misguided decision to have famed editor Maxwell Perkins wear a hat indoors in every scene of this film. Undoubtedly it was stimulated by the biography on which this movie is based, but for viewers who haven’t read that book, it becomes a joke to see a cultured intellectual sit at a dinner table with his elegant wife and daughters wearing the hat that he wore with his winter coat when he walked through the front door of his elegant home. You just know that any wife played by Laura Linney would have glared at him and not allowed the meal to commence before the hat was removed. Since the movie never rises to that level of emotional truth, it won’t be a spoiler to reveal that its ultimate removal is meant to signify a larger than life sentiment.

But this movie falters in so many directions at once that you’ll be looking at your watch way before you reach that point. There is Jude Law playing Thomas Wolfe as an overgrown adolescent whose talent is hidden beneath a mountain of excess verbiage – a man so in love with his own logorrhea that he actually brings assorted bundles of handwritten paper totaling 5,000 pages to his editor whose equanimity belies any recognizable reaction by a normal professional in the book trade. There is Colin Firth’s performance as Perkins – a character better suited to a book than a motion picture which implies occasional changes of expression to fit that definition. And there is Nicole Kidman playing Aline Bernstein, a married middle-aged set designer besotted with the youthful Harvard graduate and willing to overlook his alcoholic boorishness and over-arching narcissism because she too recognizes his talent. The viewer yearns for Mrs. Robinson, a more direct and breezy version of this caricature.

“Look Homeward Angel” was once a staple of college courses in 20th century American Lit – the movie suggests that it was a runaway best seller that had young women swooning for its author a la Frank Sinatra bobby-soxers. If “Genius” had not been such a turn-off, I might have been tempted to check the veracity of that depiction. But it hardly makes a difference. Nobody reads “Look Homeward Angel” anymore and very few people will see this film. Those who do should think of it as marginally better than a 1 hour and twenty minute dental appointment. I omit the names of the writer and director out of kindness.