RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.wsj.com/articles/barack-obama-promises-to-nominate-successor-for-justice-antonin-scalia-1455417127?mod=trending_now_1

RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif.—The sudden vacancy on the Supreme Court following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia presents President Barack Obama with both a historic opportunity and one of his steepest challenges during his last year in office.

Mr. Obama quickly sought to lay down his marker in what had already become a pitched political debate over Mr. Scalia’s successor in the hours after his death was announced Saturday.

The president stepped before the cameras during a golf vacation in California to make clear he wouldn’t leave Mr. Scalia’s vacancy for his successor to fill, as some Republicans have suggested. By addressing the matter immediately, Mr. Obama underscored how fiercely he intends to mount a public campaign to pressure the Senate to confirm the third Supreme Court nominee of his presidency.

“I plan to fulfill my constitutional responsibilities to nominate a successor in due time,” Mr. Obama said Saturday. “There will be plenty of time for me to do so, and for the Senate to fulfill its responsibility to give that person a fair hearing and a timely vote.”

Mr. Obama will be the first president since Ronald Reagan, who nominated Mr. Scalia, to be tasked with filling three Supreme Court vacancies. He now faces a decision on what type of nominee to choose: a liberal, as desired by his Democratic Party base, or a moderate who may have a better chance of winning the 14 Republican votes needed to meet the Senate’s 60-vote threshold to secure confirmation. READ THE ENTIRE COLUMN AT THE SITE

UPDATE: CBS News is reporting that the FBI is investigating the incident as a lone wolf terror attack. Suspect is a Somali, Mohamed Barry:

CBS News has identified the suspect as Mohamed Barry, however neither 10TV nor Columbus Police have confirmed the suspect’s name. CBS News also reports Barry has a Somali background and may have traveled to Dubai in 2012.

Law enforcement tells them the incident appears to be the type of “lone wolf terrorist attacks they’re trying to stop.”

The FBI is assisting in the investigation.

Original post:

A suspect who attacked patrons and staff at the Nazareth Restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, with a machete last night was shot and killed by police minutes later, and there are some indications that the attack may have been motivated by the owner’s Israeli heritage.

Four people were transported to the hospital, one critically injured. Victims were able to get video of the suspect’s car and a partial license plate. Police were able to locate the suspect’s vehicle and gave chase. After spinning the car out, the suspect emerged with both a machete and a knife and lunged at police, at which point the suspect was shot and killed.

We have a name of the suspect, but police so far have refused to confirm so we are holding it at this time.

At a press conference late last night, a police spokesman was asked by reporters about claims the suspect was on the terror watchlist:

A television ad for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign now airing in South Carolina shows the candidate declaring that “too many encounters with law enforcement end tragically.” She later adds: “We have to face up to the hard truth of injustice and systemic racism.”

Her Democratic presidential rival, Bernie Sanders, met with the Rev. Al Sharpton on Wednesday. Mr. Sanders then tweeted that “As President, let me be very clear that no one will fight harder to end racism and reform our broken criminal justice system than I will.” And he appeared on the TV talk show “The View” saying, “It is not acceptable to see unarmed people being shot by police officers.”

Apparently the Black Lives Matter movement has convinced Democrats and progressives that there is an epidemic of racist white police officers killing young black men. Such rhetoric is going to heat up as Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders court minority voters before the Feb. 27 South Carolina primary.

But what if the Black Lives Matter movement is based on fiction? Not just the fictional account of the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., but the utter misrepresentation of police shootings generally. CONTINUE READING AT THE SITE

Facebook soon to ban Gatestone? What you can do. Dear Friends, Last week, an important article, “Facebook’s War on Freedom of Speech” by Douglas Murray, detailed a new initiative by Facebook in Germany, to remove supposedly “racist” comments from Facebook. This initiative by Facebook at the moment appears to include anything critical of the EU’s […]

The mosquito species Aedes aegypti transmits viral diseases, including Zika, dengue, chikungunya, West Nile, and yellow fever, between human hosts. For most of these viral diseases, there are no vaccines and no effective medicines. So until recently, public-health officials have had to use old, low-tech approaches to controlling the mosquito vector and reducing the incidence of infections: pesticide sprays, public education about exposure (DEET, mosquito nets, and clothing that covers as much skin as possible), and control of breeding areas (water in flower pots, tires, drains, etc.).

Oxitec, a British subsidiary of the American company Intrexon, has created a new way to control Aedes aegypti. Male mosquitoes are bred in the laboratory with a specific genetic mutation that, in the absence of a certain chemical, causes their offspring to die before reaching maturity. Male mosquitoes do not bite, so their release presents no health risk, and, because their progeny die, the genetically engineered mosquitoes do not persist in the environment. Releasing the males over a period of several months causes a marked reduction in the mosquito population.

In field tests conducted in Brazil, the Cayman Islands, Malaysia, and Panama, Oxitec has shown that the release of these genetically engineered male mosquitoes has consistently reduced wild populations by more than 80 percent, and the most recent field trials show greater than 90 percent reduction. In 2014, on the basis of these field trials, Brazil’s regulatory authority approved the commercial release of these mosquitoes. Brazil approved Oxitec’s approach because the traditional approaches to mosquito control were failing to protect the country’s inhabitants from A. aegypti–borne viral diseases. The apparent association of Zika-virus infection with microcephaly in babies born to infected mothers has only added to the urgency.

In his final book, economist Mancur Olson wrote of the profound and crucial connection between representative government and the property and contract rights important for economic progress. Olson quoted James Madison: “Just as a man may be said to have a right to his property, so he has a property in his rights.” The rule of law is therefore essential for the preservation of constitutional government and for economic growth. In no country have the economic fruits of the rule of law been more plentiful than the United States.

Today there is no greater threat to the rule of law and the right to the peaceful enjoyment of property than the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in the course of prosecuting its ostensible mission to clean the air and the water. Under the guise of the Clean Air Act, the agency’s Clean Power Plan will take control of America’s electrical-power infrastructure.

Yet Congress did not envisage that the 1970 legislation would be used to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. To get around the inconveniently precise wording Congress provided in the statute, EPA resorted to rewriting the provision of the Clean Air Act that didn’t fit with its regulatory plans — a gambit that has had ups and downs in the Supreme Court, which will soon address the legality of the Clean Power Plan. Until Monday, the timetable was well advanced, with states being required to submit compliance plans this summer. Then, on Tuesday, the Supreme Court in a 5–4 decision agreed to freeze its implementation, showing that the plan’s opponents have a reasonable prospect of persuading the courts to throw out the plan.

The U.S. economy grew at an anemic rate of less than 1 percent in the last quarter of 2015.

While the unemployment rate has dipped below 5 percent, the all-important labor-force participation rate is at a historic low of just 62.7 percent. More than 90 million able-bodied adults are either not currently in the labor force or have stopped looking for work altogether.

Average household incomes have been mostly stagnant in recent years relative to the rate of inflation. The Dow Jones industrial average fell by 2.2 percent in 2015 and has continued to plummet this year. Most people’s retirement portfolios have been losing money.

Such economic sluggishness, more than seven years after the 2008 financial crisis, was not supposed to happen, given all the traditional economic stimuli.

When times are tough, politicians sometimes call for a reduction in energy taxes to help lower gas prices and bring down household heating and cooling costs. Such cutting usually puts more disposable income into the pockets of families.

Yet, largely because of Persian Gulf oil politics and private-sector fracking and horizontal drilling, U.S. gas prices have already plunged to a national average of less than $1.80. That is a huge drop from the average 2014 price of about $3.34 a gallon — and it should provide an enormous economic stimulus.

“De Oppresso Liber”
(To Liberate the Oppressed)
~~Motto of the U.S. Army Special Forces.

A poignant Afghan proverb declares, “Cowards cause harm to brave men.”

This ancient Pashtun adage reflects the shocking true life story of U.S. Special Forces Sgt. Charles Martland.

Five years ago, Sgt. Martland saved the life of an Afghan boy who was abducted from his mother, imprisoned as a sex slave, and repeatedly raped by an Afghan police chief, Abdul Rahman. Martland’s heroic actions to rescue a defenseless child cost him dearly. The Army punished not Rahman, but Martland, and relieved him from his duty post in Afghanistan, and is now seeking to involuntarily discharge him from military service.

What was the dreadful and dischargeable infraction by the highly decorated Green Beret Charles Martland?

In 2011, Martland and his Special Forces Captain Dan Quinn (who has since resigned from the military) physically assaulted Abdul Rahman, after learning that Rahman had abducted an Afghan boy, chained him to a bed, repeatedly abused him as a sex slave and beat up the boy’s mother when she sought to find and rescue her son. The Green Berets intervened when they discovered that the boy was being raped and held by Rahman. According to the Martland and Quinn, the Afghan villagers were pleading with them to do something about repeated sexual assaults against children by the Afghan police.

Here is the dirty, not so little secret of Afghanistan: The sexual abuse of children is widespread and embedded into the Afghan Pashtun culture. There is scant prosecution of child sex exploitation in Afghanistan. American military have long been saddled with the knowledge of the Afghan practice of “bacha bazi,” translated as dancing boys. Bacha Bazi is the ancient and widespread practice of Afghan men who abduct and lure poor boys into the grisly world of child sex slavery where they are raped and exploited by Afghan men. Frontline exposed this lurid child sex trafficking trade.

U.S. military stationed in Afghanistan experience the hideous reality that children are expendable in the worthless Afghan criminal justice system. Cultural mores trump human rights among the tribesman of Afghanistan. Incredibly, our military is warned to turn a blind eye to this insidious abuse of children. See no evil.

This wasn’t the first time that Martland and Quinn experienced inaction from the Afghan government for serious child sexual exploitation crimes committed by the Afghan police force. Martland and Quinn knew that two Afghan commanders were not prosecuted nor punished for the rape of a 15-year-old girl and the honor killing of an Afghan commander’s 12 year old daughter who kissed a boy.

Martland, who was disgusted and fed up with the ongoing sexual exploitation of children by Afghan officials said, “I felt that morally we could no longer stand by and allow our Afghan commanders to commit these atrocities.”

Since when is a highly decorated Green Beret who confronts a violent child sex predator and trafficker and woman beater, punished and involuntarily discharge from the military? Is this the new politically correct ethic dominating deployments in foreign lands.