RUTHFULLY YOURS

Not long after signing the nuclear deal, the ruling clerics of the Islamist state of Iran have clearly breached the agreement and several of the United Nations Security Council Resolutions. What is the Obama administration’s response? He is turning a blind eye to this vital issue. The administration is ignoring these blatant violations and continuing with its efforts to lift sanctions on the Ayatollah’s regime.

The Joint Plan of Action Agreement (JCPOA), which was reached between the six world powers and Iran, clearly mentions “addressing UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions” regarding the Islamic Republic. Specifically, the JCPOA (UNSCR 2231 Annex II, paragraph three) states that Iran should not undertake any ballistic missiles activity “until the date eight years after the JCPOA Adoption Day or until the date on which the IAEA submits a report confirming the Broader Conclusion, whichever is earlier.”

Despite agreeing to the nuclear deal, Iran has repeatedly test-fired long-range ballistic missiles and laser-guided surface-to-surface missiles. In fact, last week, the Islamic Republic tested a new ballistic missile capable of carrying multiple warheads. This is in direct breach of two UN Security Council resolutions and the JCPOA.

In the spring of 1790, as the members of the First Congress, meeting in New York City, discarded one proposed location after another, it seemed almost certain that the nation’s permanent capital would end up somewhere in Pennsylvania. Few expected it to wind up sandwiched between the slave states of Maryland and Virginia—except President George Washington and his leading acolyte in Congress, James Madison. How the capital got there is just one of the many stories that Tom Lewis recounts in “Washington: A History of Our National City,” an engagingly written, panoramic chronicle of the nation’s capital, from its unlikely founding to the era of the city’s notorious crack-smoking mayor Marion Barry.
Washington: A History of Our National City

By Tom Lewis
Basic, 521 pages, $40

Madison, brilliantly playing a weak political hand, derailed the overconfident Pennsylvanians and their allies and concluded the first great back-room deal in American political history. Over dinner at Thomas Jefferson’s rented house on Maiden Lane, he agreed to provide enough (grudging) Southern votes to ensure the passage of Alexander Hamilton’s ambitious financial plans, in return for the Treasury secretary’s agreement not to block the establishment of the federal city on the Potomac River.

One of the most stirring moments in Western cinema is the lighting of the beaconsin Peter Jackson’s film version of “The Return of the King,” summoning the riders of Rohan to the aid of the beleaguered city of Minas Tirith. The fire is kindled from mountaintop to mountaintop as the long vigil of lonely watchmen ends with a signal across distance and darkness, giving the free peoples of the West the courage to rise together against the evil gathering in Mordor. The blood surges and the heart pounds as the tiny points of light become visible across far-off mountain ranges.

Tonight Jews around the world complete the eight days of the Feast of Hanukkah, lighting eight candles in the windows of their homes. To the Jewish people, dispersed across the world for two millennia before the founding of the State of, the flames of the Hanukkah menorah beckon to us like Tolkien’s signal fires, but across time rather than space.

Hanukkah(“Dedication”) remembers the cleansing of the Temple at Jerusalem after a Jewish army expelled the invaders of the Greek Seleucid dynasty in 165 B.C.E. But it is more than remembrance: the candles we light in Jewish homes during the eight days of the festival rekindle the Eternal Flame of the Temple itself, the symbol of the Shekhinah, God’s indwelling on earth. We are grateful for the military victory against the Seleucid invaders and mention it in our holiday prayers, but it was short-lived. The Hasmonean dynasty that ruled Israel for the next century degenerated and Israel became a de facto Roman protectorate in 65 B.C.E. Our revolt against Roman oppression ended with the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. and our long exile. The Temple was destroyed, and the rabbis of antiquity declared that the Sekhinah went into exile with the Jewish people. The eternal flame of the Temple was extinguished by the Romans but rekindled in every Jewish home. In the poverty, persecution and humiliation of exile, Jewish families became a Temple in exile, and the rededication of the Temple’s light of 165 B.C.E. became an act of rededication in every home.

There will be no postings until Monday December 14th,2015

For good and for ill, fighting from the air has been perhaps the defining aspect of America’s warmaking. We invented “precision” daylight bombing against Germany in WWII. We pioneered firebombing and nuclear bombing against Japan in that same conflict. We developed laser-guided munitions for use against high-priority targets while fighting North Vietnam, and even more precise GPS-guided munitions for our 21st century wars.

We build the best bombers, the best fighters, and the smartest bombs. We invented stealth so that “America, f*** yeah!” you won’t even see us coming.

Our pilots are perhaps the best trained in the world, and even if our Air Force has become too small for today’s needs, it’s still the biggest and by far the most powerful in the world.

And don’t even get me started on drones. Big drones give Air Force colonels capabilities once reserved to jillion-dollar spy satellites, and tiny drones turn a muddy-boot Army grunt into an aerial reconnaissance asset. Even cooler, a president sorting through “assassination cards” in the Oval Office can have his order relayed to a drone pilot in Nevada who gives a command via satellite to an armed drone over Syria — and then a few seconds later a Hellfire missile sends a jihadi commander to Paradise.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/nebraska-2014-candidates-for-congress-where-they-stand?f=must_read
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2014/05/30/nebraska-congressional-elections-2014/
Ben Sasse (R) Challenger

FP: Nick Adams, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Adams: Thank you, Jamie, great to be with you.

FP: Congratulations on your new book. Let’s begin with this question: Why does an Australian care what happens in America?

Adams: Jamie, what’s good for America is good for the world. A weak America is a weak world. A strong America is a strong world. That’s not a theory. That’s reality. We can see it happening right now. Cast your eye over the world: Islamists are openly working to establish a Caliphate. There is a catastrophic humanitarian disaster. Russia is attempting to re-establish the Soviet empire. China is aggressively expanding in the South China Sea. There are vast refugee flows. This is no coincidence. Frankly, this is what the world looks like when American influence is in decline. We are all paying a heavy price for the Obama administration’s politically correct decisions. Western intellectuals have long believed that America is not a force for good in the world, and should take a backseat in world affairs. They now have egg on their face.

FP: Tell us about your new book and why people should read it.

Adams: Let me put it this way: if you love America, and you hate political correctness, then you need to read this book. It’s as simple as that. Nothing is more anti-American, anti-freedom, anti-truth, and anti-reality than political correctness. It is a noose around America’s neck, growing tighter each day. From identity politics and secularism to the all-powerful welfare state and the war against national identity, every problem in America today is either rooted in, or compounded by political correctness. It is destroying America, and if it destroys America, it destroys Western civilization. So, we have to crush it, and only America can.

There have been many books written about Benghazi, but not every book led to a personal attack from the White House. And yet that’s what happened with “Architects of Disaster”, the book by former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra indicting Obama and Hillary for the Libyan disaster.

In “Architects of Disaster”, Hoekstra lays out the case against the intervention in Libya, a war that still remains nameless and hardly discussed despite the post-war murders of five Americans in that country. Beginning with the attack on the American compound in Benghazi, he traces back the roots of that disaster to Obama and Hillary’s intervention in Libya which ended up empowering Islamic terrorists.

As Hoekstra states, the cause of that atrocity was rooted in the administration’s belief that “Jihadists can be both trusted and managed.” And as Hoekstra, currently a Shillman Senior Fellow with the Investigative Project on Terrorism, points out that, “in spite of all that has happened… the Obama administration has continued this policy to the present day.” And appears ready to continue it forever.

Despite that beginning, “Architects of Disaster” is less of a look at Benghazi and instead represents a wider examination of what really happened in Libya. Benghazi was one of the symptoms that Obama and Hillary’s war had gone badly wrong. But it was neither the beginning nor the end of what was taking place in Libya. It was a bloody moment that made Americans rethink a war that they had opposed, but had otherwise never really paid much attention to.

Baseball has been overtaken by other professional sports in terms of fan interest. The recent World Series — a competitive one, including a New York team from America’s largest media market — had trouble competing for TV viewers against an NFL Sunday night football game. It is therefore not surprising that few people could identify the Major League Baseball player who set the record for most times stealing home in a single season (7), and most times carried off the field in a stretcher in his career (11), not including similar events while playing ball in the Army during World War II.

That player, who enjoyed a season and a half of extraordinary performance until the first of many head-on collisions with an outfield wall short-circuited his career, was Pete Reiser, sometimes known as the original “Pistol Pete.”

In his first full season as a starting outfielder with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1941, Reiser won the National League batting title (.343) while leading the league in doubles, triples, runs scored, number of times hit by a pitcher, and slugging percentage. He was named a starter in the All-Star game, finished second in MVP balloting, and helped the Dodgers make it to the World Series for the first time in 21 years (where of course they lost to the Yankees in the first of five head-to-head defeats at the hands of the “Bronx bombers” during the next 13 seasons). The next season, Reiser was having an even better year, hitting .350, getting voted onto the All-Star team again, and pushing the Dodgers into a 6-game lead over St. Louis in the National League pennant race.