RUTHFULLY YOURS

Willfully ignoring the effects of 15 years of combat, President Obama, Congress and Pentagon leaders are causing the readiness of our combat aircraft to sink to so low a level that it clearly endangers national security. It’s a matter of shrunken budgets and awful planning.

Readiness — the ability of a force to accomplish its assigned combat mission — is measured somewhat differently among the services. But when it comes to aircraft the criteria are immutable. They’re objective measures that are based on metallurgical science and the laws of physics.

Our military went into combat a month after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks when we attacked al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. In the nearly 15 years since, our air forces have flown almost constantly, attacking the terrorist forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. The burden on them has worn out too many aircraft to the degree that they can no longer be flown in combat.

As reported by Fox News, only a small minority of Marine Corps aircraft — about 30 percent of the Marines’ F/A-18s — are ready to fly and only 42 of their 147 heavy-lift CH-53E helicopters are airworthy. They — like the F/A-18s — are just plain worn out.

Retired U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Mike Groothousen flew A-7 attack aircraft and F-18 strike fighters. He was captain (in combat) of the nuclear carrier USS Harry S. Truman and had four other aviation and surface commands in his career.

The last time I was in Los Angeles, there were guards at every synagogue. In New York, there are police officers in front of every synagogue. But the media won’t talk about Muslim anti-Semitism. Instead it’ll pretend that we face a grave Islamophobia threat. Two days from now this story will be buried beneath a deluge of “Muslims fear backlash” stories. And Jews will have to pray in synagogues under assault.

And so we turn to James Gonzalo Medina aka James Muhammad, who converted to Islam, threatened a church and then plotted to bomb a synagogue for Islam.

Medina has a number of prior arrests, including one in August 2012 when he was accused of sending violent threats via text message to a Coral Springs family.

One text read: “By next week, Ima bomb ya [curse word] … Bring him! I will buy a gun [off] the street and rampage [family member’s] church. Murder she wrote,” according to the 2012 affidavit.

And at some point, Muhammad/Medina prioritized killing Jews.

One of Medina’s associates informed the FBI source that Medina was planning to martyr himself in a firearms attack on the Aventura synagogue, using AK-47 assault rifles — then, the affidavit said, the conversation turned to claiming responsibility for it. Medina said he liked the source’s idea of using the name of a notorious terrorist group — ISIS or al-Qaida-linked Shabaab — to assume responsibility.

Medina, who told the source he had converted to Islam four years ago, said the planned synagogue attack would inspire other Muslims. Medina would later express his “current hatred for the Jewish people,” the affidavit said.

The 9/11 Commission came to regard immigration fraud and visa fraud as the key means by which international terrorists enter the United States and embed themselves. Yet, these issues are seldom, if ever, discussed or reported on by the media or politicians- especially those politicians who are determined to foist a massive legalization program involving unknown millions of illegal aliens on the United States.

Immigration fraud and visa fraud have long been of great concern where issues of national security are concerned. In point of fact, on May 20, 1997 I participated in a hearing conducted by the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims on the topic, “Visa Fraud And Immigration Benefits Application Fraud.”

That hearing was predicated on two terror attacks carried out in 1993 by terrorists from the Middle East including those who had engaged in visa fraud and also filed fraud-laden applications for immigration benefits.

In January 1993 a Pakistani national, Mir Aimal Kansi, stood outside CIA Headquarters with an AK-47 and opened fire on the vehicles of CIA officials reporting for work on that cold January morning in Virginia. He killed two CIA officers and wounded three others.

Just one month later, on February 26, 1993 a bomb-laden truck was parked in the garage under the World Trade Center complex and detonated. The blast nearly brought one of the 110 story towers down sideways. Six innocent people were killed, over one thousand people were injured and an estimated one-half billion dollars in damages were inflicted on that iconic complex of buildings located just blocks from Wall Street.

The Clinton administration abjected refused the learn the lessons that should have been learned from those attacks thereby literally and figuratively leaving the door wide open for the terrror attacks of 9/11.

Since the attacks of 9/11 we have witnessed a long list of terror attacks and attempted terror attacks that involved foreign nationals who gamed the visa process and/or the immigration benefits program.

Mark down Monday’s decision on hydraulic fracturing by the Colorado Supreme Court as a win for rationality in public policy, which at times can seem an increasingly rare event.

Colorado’s highest court ruled that the measures to ban fracking, which were passed by the cities of Longmont and Fort Collins, are invalid because state law pre-empts them.

Set aside for a moment the pitched battles over fracking’s safety. The issue here is analogous to the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, whose purpose is to settle conflicts between laws passed by Congress and laws legislated by the states. Similarly, the Colorado high court is arguing that state law supercedes local law when the state legislature acts.

In the particular matter of fracking, the common sense of this proposition should be self-evident. The geology of fracking typically covers large areas. In Colorado that is the mountain range known as the Front Range, which includes the state’s most populous cities, including Denver and Boulder. CONTINUE AT SITE

On the matter of Barack Obama and the performance of the U.S. economy, the aptest metaphor is anatine: We aren’t swimming in gold like Scrooge McDuck, and we haven’t blasted the beak off our face with a shotgun like Daffy Duck, but instead limp along like what the president is: a lame duck.

Spare me the technicalities about how President Obama isn’t officially a lame duck until after the election; we aren’t officially in recession, either, but 0.5 percent annualized growth — the most recent figure — is close enough.

How should we judge President Obama’s economic record? There are two ways to go about that: First, from the point of view of people who understand at least a little about economics; second, from the point of view of Barack Obama.

We Americans maintain a superstitious, priest-king attitude toward presidents and economies. Just as moral and religious defects in the holy chieftains of old were thought to be the source of droughts and crop failures, we take weakness in the economy to be the result of presidential flaws: He didn’t “care about people like us” enough, he followed the wrong policies, listened to the wrong people, etc. That’s mainly not true.

The most important factors shaping the economic performance of the United States, or that of any advanced country, isn’t policy, but events, from developments abroad to entrepreneurship and innovation at home. The 1990s didn’t boom because Bill Clinton pursued a radically different economic agenda from that of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush: He ran on “time for a change” but more or less stayed the course, thanks in no small part to Newt Gingrich and the 1994 election. The 1990s boomed because the development of the personal computer and other forms of information technology, supercharged by the growth of the web, launched an extraordinary period of investment, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Bill Gates, Marc Andreessen (whose Netscape browsers brought the web to the masses), the development teams at Ericsson and Nokia, and a few million Americans who invested enthusiastically in everything marked “dot-com” had a lot more to do with the economy of the 1990s than Bill Clinton did. Likewise, the rough spots of that era (such as the Asian currency crisis) weren’t the president’s doing, either.

There is no mystical connection between presidents, GDP growth, employment, and wages.

PJ Media has obtained video taken inside Justice Department offices which show empty, unused office space within leased commercial space. The offices are intended for at least twenty federal employees according to DOJ sources — but only TWO are using them.

The Justice Department Community Relations Service offices in Dallas are on the 20th floor of the Harwood Center, a luxury downtown high rise. Justice Department sources provided PJ Media with a video taken inside the Dallas DOJ offices which documents the brazen waste of taxpayer dollars.

The video shows empty offices, boxes stacked on unused desks, jumbo window offices with couches, large conference rooms with television sets running, enormous offices which appear to be unused, stacks of printer boxes, bookshelves filled with VHS tapes, and a kitchen area with seating for four.

The video shows 58 chairs for use by just two employees working in the office.

Ghazala Salam has embedded her life in groups associated with terror. This year, she left her job with CAIR, an organization that has been linked to terrorist financing and terrorist leaders, for a position with Emerge USA, a radical Muslim outfit attempting to push its way into the political arena. Yet, even with this sinister background, Salam has managed to achieve numerous honors from South Florida government and government-related institutions. Has she pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes or are they intentionally ignoring facts.

On April 12th, Ghazala Salam stood next to Broward County Commissioner Stacy Ritter and accepted a proclamation declaring that day ‘Equal Pay Day,’ “urging all employers in our community to recognize the full value of the skills and contributions of women in the labor force and recommit to making equal pay a reality.” Signing the proclamation was Broward County Mayor Marty Kiar.

On March 25th, Salam received the honor of speaking at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Citizenship Ceremony, where new US citizens are sworn in. Emblazoned on the podium where she spoke from was a prominent Department of Homeland Security logo.

Photos and information regarding both of these events are found on the Facebook site of Emerge USA, an organization where Salam serves as its Florida State Director.

Emerge USA, despite its patriotic sounding name, has an extremely radical agenda based on terrorism and bigotry shrouded in the guise of political advocacy.

The main individual behind Emerge USA is Khurrum Wahid, a South Florida attorney who has built his name on representing high profile terrorists. They include members of al-Qaeda and financiers of the Taliban. According to the Miami New Times, Wahid himself was placed on a federal terrorist watch list in 2011.

A “pervasive army” of more than 25,000 federal lawyers have raked in $26.2 billion from U.S. taxpayers since 2007, according to a new report by the non-profit government watchdog Open The Books.

“Today’s federal government is protected by a pervasive army of attorneys,” Open The Books founder and the report’s author Adam Andrzejewski told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “At a force size of 25,000, that’s bigger than a conventional combat division.”

Nearly half of the lawyers are based in Washington, according to the report, called “Lawyered Up: Federal Spending On Lawyers, 2007-2014.” Open The Books maintains a database containing 2.6 billion lines of government spending, representing the largest such digital resource in the world.

The federal portion of the database was made possible by the Federal Financial Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, which was co-sponsored by then-senators Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Barack Obama of Illinois, and signed into law by President George W. Bush.

“Since 2007, federal spending on attorneys exceeded $26 billion in salaries and bonuses,” the report said. More than 50 salaries exceeded $250,000 and 19 bonuses were for more than $50,000 since 2007. (RELATED: It Pays To Be A Lawyer In DC … A Lot)

“In 2014, the Environmental Protection Agency employed 1,020 attorneys while the Internal Revenue Service employed 1,423 attorneys,” the report said. (RELATED: Justice Department Plans Attorney Hiring Spree To Keep Pace With Obama’s Pardon Push)

Open The Books also found:

In 2014, the top federal lawyer salary was $266,469.