RUTHFULLY YOURS

Iran controls the strategic waterway through which 40 percent of seaborne oil and a quarter of seaborne gas transits to global markets.

The Maersk Tigris is flagged to the Marshall Islands. The South Pacific archipelago gained its independence from the US in 1986 after signing a treaty conceding its right to self-defense in exchange for US protection. According to the treaty, the US has “full authority and responsibility for security and defense of the Marshall Islands.”

Given the US’s formal, binding obligation to the Marshall Islands, the Iranian seizure of the ship was in effect an act of war against America.

In comments to Bloomberg hours after the ship was seized, Junior Aini, chargé d’affairs at the Marshall Islands Embassy in Washington, indicated that his government’s only recourse is to rely on the US to free its ship.

Irrespective of a cynical and gullible “elite” media, independent of diplomatic pressure, political correctness and conventional wisdom, in defiance of the global economic slowdown, in the face of war and terrorism, and despite ill-advised threats of boycott, divestment and sanctions – but, due to principle-driven tenacity, inherent optimism, human capital/brain power, creativity, cutting edge ingenuity and breakthrough, game-changing innovations – Israel’s economy is expanding beyond expectations, reacting constructively to pressures/challenges, and developing unique commercial and security niches in response to local and global needs.

Remember that map of the world lit up from space with North Korea plunged into darkness? This is the left’s twisted environmentalist vision for the world.And they’re starting in one of the biggest and brightest cities in the world.

After the last election, New York City is trapped with a radical leftist mayor, Bill de Blasio (aka Warren Wilhelm Jr.), but it also has the most radical City Council in history with a supporter of Puerto Rican terrorists [2]who rejects the Pledge of Allegiance [3], Melissa Mark-Viverito.Now her corrupt City Council has a brilliant plan. Why not turn Manhattan into North Korea by plunging it into darkness [5]?

Commercial-building owners may soon have another reason besides sky-high Con Ed rates to turn out the lights: $1,000 fines.

City Councilman Donovan Richards (D-Queens) has introduced legislation that would prohibit exterior and interior lighting at night for roughly 40,000 buildings, with exceptions carved out for small stores and landmarks like the Empire State Building.

While President Obama continues with his agenda of nuclear talks with the Islamic Republic and attempts to give a legacy to his name, he has completely ignored the fate of several American citizens who are jailed in the Islamic Republic.

No concrete pressure has been put on the Iranian leaders by the Obama administration in order to push the Iranian leaders to release the American prisoners, who have been detained based on religious affiliations or political reasons.

The sole focus of President Obama has been to view Iran from the prism of nuclear talks and reach a deal so that he will be remembered in history as the first American president who reached a nuclear agreement with the U.S.’s longtime foe: The Islamic Republic. In other words, he wants to create a phenomenon such as the historic Nixon-China agreement and Nixon-Mao handshake. Nevertheless, Nixon was looking to begin a new period of Chinese-American relations, not only seeking to meet narcissistic objectives. In addition, the extremist Islamic Republic of Iran is not anything like China.

Consider the case of the Christian pastor Saeed Abedini, who was detained in 2012 and incarcerated in the notorious Evin Prison. The infamous Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) arrested him on ambiguous charges such as endangering national security. The question is how building orphanage in the Northern city of Rash and helping orphans are endangering the national security of the Islamic Republic.

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/04/israel-arab-youth-facebook-peace-messages-idf.html

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2015/05/from-baghdad-with-love-for-the-idf/
It all began as a personal project by a young Israeli Arab who lives in northern Israel. He wanted to use social networking to convince other Israeli Arabs that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are not some “army of evil” and that its soldiers are not as bloodthirsty as they tend to be portrayed in Arab propaganda films. He soon learned, however, that in the digital age, there is no end to surprises. Instead of messages and responses from the Israeli Arab audience he was targeting, he began receiving messages of peace and love from young Arab men and women from across the Arab world.

M. is an Israeli Arab Muslim who served in the IDF. He spoke to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. Last year, he came across a series of billboards sponsored by the Balad Party as part of its campaign against the recruitment of Israeli Arabs into the IDF. He decided to fight back. “I saw the signs that were hung in Arab villages, and I kept track of the Facebook campaign being run by activists of Balad and the other Arab parties under the name ‘TZaHaL ma bistahal’ [‘The IDF isn’t worth it’]. It infuriated me,” he said.

“Activists would show up in the main square of Shfaram with bits of rubble, as if the rubble were from Gaza. They carried big signs too, as if they were trying to say, ‘Look what the army that is calling on you to enlist is actually doing in the Gaza Strip.’ Some of the activists would even paint their faces red, as if they were injured, while they tried to relay their message of ‘Don’t enlist!’ to young Bedouin, Druze, Christians and Muslims. I decided to respond to them on Facebook, so I made a page called ‘TZaHaL bistahal’ [‘The IDF is worth it’], but instead of getting responses from the young Arabs to whom I was directing my personal campaign, I started to get photos and texts from young people around the Arab world. My jaw dropped.”

Churchill would have recognised in an instant what Russia’s mischief in Ukraine portends, most particularly its brazen disregard for national borders and neighbours’ sovereignty. His appraisal of the nasty and brutish is lost on those who fail to notice that quoting the law leaves outlaws unimpressed.

We imagine we know everything that Winston Churchill thought. He wrote volumes of history, reminiscence and current controversy. Quotations from him fill bookcases of books. Some of them are justly titled “The Wit and Wisdom of …” And both his bon mots and solemn geopolitical warnings are littered throughout the writings of others. So it is a pleasant surprise to come across a Churchill quotation that is fresh, memorable, and seemingly directed to our current concerns.

Such a quotation appears in the Winter issue of the American Interest in an article by Professor Eliot Cohen, himself a distinguished historian, whose works include an important study of political leadership in war. It is taken from an account of a 1935 luncheon-party discussion by the then-famous American foreign correspondent Vincent Sheean. It shows Churchill, relaxed but combative, responding across the table to clever people who thought he was attaching too much weight to Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. He demurred: the problem was neither Italy nor Ethiopia.

“It’s not the thing we object to,” he said, “it’s the kind of thing.”

When asked by his shrewd hostess if the British had not committed the kind of thing many times before, Churchill responded that Britain had done so in “an unregenerate past”. But since the Great War a large fabric of international law had been established to restrain nations from infringing on each other’s rights. That was now at risk:

In trying to upset the empire of Ethiopia, Mussolini is making a most dangerous and foolhardy attack upon the whole established structure, and the results of such an attack are quite incalculable. Who is to say what will become of it in a year, or two, or three? With Germany arming at breakneck speed, England lost in a pacifist dream, France corrupt and torn by dissension, America remote and indifferent—Madame, my dear lady, do you not tremble for your children?

Churchill’s prescience was, as always, remarkable: what followed was the Second World War. Whether or not the children of Churchill’s hostess were among its victims, Mussolini ended up hanging upside down in a Milan piazza.

Like Churchill, however, Professor Cohen is less concerned with the thing than with the kind of thing—in his case not so much Putin’s de facto invasion of Ukraine as its impact upon the post-Cold War structure of international order. Whatever the rights and wrongs, or risks and gains, of NATO expansion, the Soviet-era transfer of Crimea to Ukraine, and the Maidan revolution, the rules of international life clearly prohibit subverting, invading, occupying and ultimately either conquering or dismembering a sovereign state. Such actions are “the kind of thing” that signal a wider breakdown in civilised international conduct and increased insecurity for all states.

Non-citizens are voting in American elections, and the federal government refuses to do anything to stop it.

Worse, the current administration seems to be doing everything they can to prevent the states from trying to stop it. First, they sued states that asked people to present ID before voting. Now, the administration will not let states even ask people to establish they are citizens when they register to vote.

That’s the underlying plot in the latest major case in election law that has just been presented to the Supreme Court. Federal law says that states must accept and use a federal form for registering voters. But the federal form doesn’t require any proof that the person submitting the form is a citizen.

The form just asks the registrant to check a box.

Meanwhile, federal law mandates that voter registration forms be made available and pushed everywhere from licensing branches to welfare offices.

Hillary Clinton gave a speech yesterday, and Vox.com published a puff piece about it. The next part is hard to believe: The Vox puffer, Jonathan Allen, did not give Mrs. Clinton enough credit.

Mrs. Clinton was the keynoter at Columbia University’s 18th annual David N. Dinkins Leadership and Public Policy Forum. Her campaign website headlines the speech “It’s Time to End the Era of Mass Incarceration,” and the headline of Allen’s piece reads “Hillary Clinton Just Gave One of the Most Important Speeches of Her Career.” Here’s how Allen begins:

Fair or unfair, Democrats’ chief criticism of Hillary Clinton has been that she doesn’t truly share their most cherished values, particularly when it comes to addressing inequality. They also worry that she’s not ready for prime time—that she’s too stilted, too programmed, too cold on the stump.

On Wednesday she answered both points.

Her first major policy address of the 2016 campaign was Clinton at her finest, showcasing both strong policy chops and a deep sensitivity to Americans who are heartbroken over the deaths of young black men at the hands of police officers.

Indeed, she read the names—Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin—and said “the patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable,” without specifying what the disparate and in some cases uncertain fact patterns in these cases have in common.

“She freely moved between prose and statistic,” gushes Allen, referring to her invocation of the Fox Butterfield fallacy: “It’s a stark fact that the United States has less than 5% of the world’s population, yet we have almost 25% of the world’s total prison population. The numbers today are much higher than they were 30, 40 years ago, despite the fact that crime is at historic lows.”

Mrs. Clinton didn’t offer much by way of policy proposals, apart from body cameras for police and “community mental health centers.” “I don’t know all the answers,” she said. “That’s why I’m here—to ask all the smart people in Columbia and New York to start thinking this through with me.” But she was clear about the goal of turning many prisoners loose: “It’s time to change our approach. It’s time to end the era of mass incarceration. We need a true national debate about how to reduce our prison population while keeping our communities safe.”

An electromagnetic-pulse attack from North Korea or another U.S. enemy would cause staggering devastation.

Amb. Cooper is the former director of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Mr. Pry is executive director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security and served in the EMP Commission, the House Armed Services Committee, and the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Pentagon is moving the headquarters for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad) back into Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs, Colo., a decade after having largely vacated the site.

Why the return? Because the enormous bunker in the hollowed-out mountain, built to survive a Cold War-era nuclear conflict, can also resist an electromagnetic-pulse attack, or EMP. America’s military planners recognize the growing threat from an EMP attack by bad actors around the world, in particular North Korea and Iran.

An EMP strike, most likely from the detonation of a nuclear weapon in space, would destroy unprotected military and civilian electronics nationwide, blacking out the electric grid and other critical infrastructure for months or years. The staggering human cost of such a catastrophic attack is not difficult to imagine.

“I’m not sure that it is any business of Congress to determine who should be running for public office.”

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417760/fec-goes-far-outside-its-mandate-hold-women-politics-forum-hans-von-spakovsky?target=topic&tid=3264

One of the biggest problems in Washington is the overreach of federal agencies, many of which go far beyond their limited mandates. Instead of simply carrying out the duties assigned to them under federal laws, they invade the province of Congress, which is supposed to hold hearings, formulate public policy, and create the federal laws that these agencies enforce.

Take Federal Election Commission chair Ann Ravel’s May 12 forum on “Women in Politics.” The FEC was created in 1975 to enforce the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), which governs the raising and spending of funds in federal elections for president and Congress. The federal statute that authorizes the FEC (2 U.S.C. § 437c) lays out its duties very succinctly: 1) enforce federal campaign-finance law, 2) issue regulations implementing the law, and 3) provide advisory opinions to affected individuals, candidates, and political organizations that explain the requirements of the law. Congress also very specifically made the FEC a bipartisan agency.