RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Oklahoma Common Core Four

How a group of motivated mothers navigated a political swamp and repealed Common Core.

How’s this for an in-kind contribution: “One time when we were in Canton, Okla., speaking to the PTO moms, they gave us a basket of homemade bread and jams and all kinds of stuff!” Jenni White, the leading activist calling for the repeal of Common Core in Oklahoma, told National Review Online. “We were in heaven!”

White has spent the past four years telling Parent Teacher Organizations and anyone else who would listen that Oklahoma should not implement Common Core, the education standards that most of the country adopted in 2010.

White hasn’t been working alone. “Our organization is made up of a board that just consists of four of us moms basically,” referring to her cohorts Julia Seay, Lynn Habluetzel, and Joy Collins. “We have bankrolled the whole thing out of our poor husbands’ bank accounts.”

Ask anyone in Oklahoma politics who they think led the successful fight to repeal Common Core — Governor Mary Fallin signed the repeal into law on June 5 — and they’ll tell you that the story starts with that foursome. White served as the writer and spokeswoman for the group, which flies under the auspices of their nonprofit organization, Restore Oklahoma’s Public Education (ROPE). Together, the women have spent the past four years talking to Republican-party leaders, attending conservative conferences, and lobbying state legislators. Most of all, though, they cultivated a grassroots political movement against Common Core that overcame a bipartisan coalition ranging from the Department of Education to the Chamber of Commerce. By May 2014, a poll conducted on behalf of a Republican candidate showed that 57 percent of likely primary voters held an unfavorable view of the standards while only 9 percent had a favorable view.

In short, the four moms fought the proverbial city hall and won. “Look at Eric Cantor, seriously,” White suggested. “Some guy who had $300,000 beat him. You don’t think that kind of thing is possible when people have had enough?”

Like the immigration issue that contributed to the House majority leader’s loss last week, Common Core finds favor among political elites on both sides of the aisle and doesn’t carry much weight with the conservative GOP base. White’s analogy to Cantor’s surprising defeat is also apt because the backlash against Common Core grew while the political class was paying attention to other matters.

The Democrats talk about getting money out of politics like heroin addicts talk about quitting. Harry Reid rants about the Koch Brothers every time you pull a little string on the back of his neck, but he’s worst of the bunch.

Reid, indeed, raised a larger percentage of his campaign cash from lobbyist-bundlers than any other member of Congress, 14 percent, or $357,000 of the total $2.6 million he raised.

And so is his party.

No other political candidate or group received more money from lobbyist-bundlers than the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which raised nearly $2.6 million from them despite regularly criticizing lobbyists and Republicans who associate with them.

And guess where the money is coming from…

Lobbyist Tony Podesta of the Podesta Group ranked as the Democratic Party’s top fundraising ally on K Street, records show, bundling about $550,000 combined for Reid and the DSCC.

Podesta, whose brother John Podesta serves as an adviser to Obama, represents a range of corporate clients, including drugmaker Amgen, BP, Google, Wal-Mart, and Wells Fargo.

Calling John Podesta an adviser significantly understates his power and impact in shaping Team Obama.

So yes, let’s talk about getting money out of politics and then stuff our pockets. It’s the Democratic Party way.

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Dr. Mark Durie, a theologian, human rights activist, pastor of an Anglican church, and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Mark discussed,“Female Genital Mutilation and Islam-Denial,” analyzing how the world blinds itself to the Islamic theological foundation of a vicious Islamic crime [starts at the 11:00 minute mark].

The dialogue occurred in the context of “Our ‘Tend and Befriend’ Response to Jihad,” — the phenomenon of how Islamic terror has traumatized the West into psychological slavery.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/female-genital-mutilation-and-islam-denial-on-the-glazov-gang/

Three Jewish boys were abducted by Palestinian terrorists while trying to catch a ride home from school Thursday night. And as far as the foreign press is concerned, it’s their own damned fault.

As Honest Reporting documented, everyone from The Guardian to CNN, to Sky News to the Christian Science Monitor blamed Eyal Yifrach, Gil-Ad Shaer and Naftali Frankel for their victimization.

The boys deserve whatever they get, according to the media, because they are Jews and Jews have no right to be located anywhere that the Palestinians demand be cleansed of Jewish presence. And the Palestinians demand that Gush Etzion be emptied of Jews. So the boys, who dared to be located in Gush Etzion, had it coming.

And the blame doesn’t end with the victims. In trying to rescue them, the Israeli government is also committing an unpardonable crime – against Palestinian unity, no less.

According to The New York Times’ Israel bureau chief Jodi Rudoren, by searching for the boys, Israel has “further destabilized Israeli-Palestinian relations, and challenged the new Palestinian government’s ability to hold together disparate political factions and reunite the West Bank and Gaza after a seven-year split.”

As Seth Mandel wrote in Commentary, “If the unity government can survive only by being permitted to carry out terrorism against Israel without response or consequences, it is not so much a government as a sadistic terrorist gang.”

Mandel understated the problem. There is no conditionality. The Palestinian government is “a sadistic terrorist gang.” “The disparate political factions,” Rudoren was referring to are Fatah and Hamas.

Hamas, as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said, kidnapped the teenagers. Hamas is a jihadist movement recognized by the US State Department and the EU as a foreign terrorist organization.

Its declared goal is the genocide of world Jewry. And to advance its aim, it has murdered Jews, and incited, trained and indoctrinated Palestinians to murder Jews every single day since it was founded in 1988.

Hillary Clinton Turns Liberals into ‘Rape-Loving Scum’

When the Roman Polanski rape case resurfaced, Whoopi Goldberg coined the term “rape-rape” to describe the difference between the kind of rape she opposed and the kind she was okay with because it had been perpetrated by someone she liked.

In the political world the cases of Clarence Thomas and Bill Clinton showed how liberals delineated between the sexual harassment of men they approved of and disapproved of. Now the “rape-rape” distinction is back with Bill’s wife.

Last week liberal activists were denouncing George Will for questioning the lack of due process for accused rapists on campus. Then the Washington Free Beacon posted a tape in which Hillary Clinton had a good laugh discussing how she freed a child rapist she knew was guilty from prison.

Hillary had become the Democratic Party’s official “Role Model for Women” through her willingness to stand by her powerful husband during his affairs, cover up his sexual harassment of other women and even target those women for daring to speak out against her husband.

Now the face of the Democratic Party’s bid to make feminist history in 2016 was caught on tape cheerfully recollecting how she accused a 12-year-old girl, in formal legal language, of being a mentally ill slut. Or as the Washington Post’s Melinda Henneberger put it, “The ‘little bit nutty, little bit slutty’ defense has a long, ugly history. It’s jarring to see it trotted out against a kid by a future feminist icon.”

Suddenly the social justice warriors who were denouncing due process, such as access to legal counsel for campus rapists being tried by student committees, became big fans of due process for rapists.

As with Whoopi Goldberg, it was all about who was doing the raping and who the rapist’s lawyer was.

Amanda Marcotte, of Slate and The Daily Beast, as well a blogger for John Edwards, another noted defender of women, had called critics of the Duke Lacrosse case “rape-loving scum” and suggested that George Will was a “rape apologist” for questioning some questionable rape cases.

http://ulstermanbooks.com/barack-obamas-real-foreign-policy-world-belongs-terrorists/

The map below outlines the rapid expansion of perhaps the most aggressive and dangerous terrorist organization in the world today – ISIS. It is a radical Islamic group deemed too extreme by al-Qaeda. ISIS was once a small, fragmented assortment of Sharia Law hardliners, but found itself a foothold that grew stronger by the day following Barack Obama’s ascension to the White House. Now it threatens to overtake much of the Middle East, and make no mistake, ISIS is determined to make its presence known in America soon as well.“ISIS” stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. The weapons this group used to consolidate its power came from various sources, most of which originated via Obama foreign policy channels such as Libya, and later, Syria. Now ISIS operatives are enjoying an even greater stash of weapons and cash left by fleeing Iraqi soldiers who were armed and trained by the U.S. government.

The result of ISIS’s greatly expanded influence has been mass beheadings, ever increasing violence, and a full on repudiation of freedom and democracy in the Middle East – all taking place on Barack Obama’s seemingly indifferent watch. Last week reports circulated that ISIS had just obtained nearly a half billion dollars in new funding stolen from Iraq’s Central Bank – a bank that had long been propped up by the U.S. government – YOUR tax dollars. These funds now make ISIS the single wealthiest terrorist organization in the world.

Had she written a novel about life in Washington, Jane Austen might have begun: it is a truth universally acknowledged, when information requested by Congressional subpoena could cause political damage to the party charged, that that information would disappear. On June 20, 1972, three days after operatives connected to the White House broke into the headquarters of the Democrat National Committee at the Watergate complex, President Nixon held a 79-minute conversation with his chief-of-staff, Bob Haldeman. Eighteen and a half minutes of that taped conversation went missing. In early January 1996, copies of documents that described Hillary Clinton’s work for a failing savings and loan association, and which had been requested two years earlier by a Congressional investigating committee, were discovered on the third floor of the White House. The discovery occurred “a few days after the statute of limitations expired for a variety of civil lawsuits that may be brought against professionals who fraudulently advised corrupt savings associations,” according to Stephen Labaton, writing about the incident for The New York Times.

Now we are being told that Lois Lerner’s computer crashed in the summer of 2011, permanently erasing e-mails to and from people and organizations, including the White House, Treasury, Department of Justice and the Federal Election Committee. Any involvement of the White House targeting conservative organizations, we are told, would now be impossible to prove. Ms. Lerner, we are led to believe, had to have been a lone wolf. But why did it take so long for the IRS to divulge the information that the computer had crashed three years ago? The investigation has been on-going for over a year. Even more egregious, according to David Camp (R-MI) who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the letter containing news that the e-mails had been lost also had the chutzpah to suggest Congress end its investigation. Why not? If the dog ate my homework, which I intended to hand in, why should I be punished? In fact, why not forget the whole thing? Next subject.

Nothing to see here. Literally. Because the IRS keeps losing stuff.

It’s not just Lois Lerner’s e-mails. The Internal Revenue Service says it can’t produce e-mails from six more employees involved in the targeting of conservative groups, according to two Republicans investigating the scandal.

The IRS told Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp and subcommittee chairman Charles Boustany that computer crashes resulted in additional lost e-mails, including from Nikole Flax, the chief of staff to former IRS commissioner Steven Miller, who was fired in the wake of the targeting scandal.

The revelation about Lerner’s e-mails rekindled the scandal and today’s news has further inflamed Republicans. Camp and Boustany are now demanding a special prosecutor to investigate “every angle” of the targeting. They expressed particular outrage that the agency has known since February that it would not be able to produce the e-mails requested by the committee yet did not apprise the committee of that fact, and they charged in a statement that the IRS is attempting to “cover up the fact that it convenient lost key documents in the investigation.”

The federal government swooped into Gibson Guitar’s Tennessee headquarters in August 2011, with armed agents, and shut the company down temporarily. The suspected crime was using illegally imported wood. Not a particularly important crime, yet the government treated it as if it was a clear and present danger to the republic. No charges have even been filed in that case.

In the case of the IRS, the suspected crime is weaponizing government against citizens who exercised their rights as such. That is a clear and present threat to the republic. There is an active cover-up happening right now in the very heart of the IRS. It’s time for a raid, a round-up, and trials.

WASHINGTON — The arrest of a key suspect in the Sept. 11, 2012, consulate bombing simply opened new controversy in the Benghazi attack, with Republicans questioning how the administration plans to handle the Ansar al-Sharia commander.

Ahmed Abu Khatallah, the subject of criminal charges filed last July, had been essentially living in the open, making himself available for multiple media interviews since the attack that killed four Americans including Ambassador Chris Stevens.

“With this operation, the United States has once again demonstrated that we will do whatever it takes to see that justice is done when people harm Americans,” President Obama said in a statement stressing that he’d green-lighted the Sunday special forces operation. “We will continue our efforts to bring to justice those who were responsible for the Benghazi attacks. We will remain vigilant against all acts of terrorism, and we will continue to prioritize the protection of our service-members and civilians overseas.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said the next step should be sending Khatallah to proper facilities for processing.

“The Obama administration should immediately transfer him to the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay for detention and interrogation. In order to locate all individuals associated with the attacks that led to the deaths of four Americans, we need intelligence. That intelligence is often obtained through an interrogation process,” Rubio said.

“At times, this administration has been more interested in the politics of the war on terrorism than the execution of it, and we have not had an articulable detention policy in six years,” Rubio added. “America remains at war and a return to the failed law enforcement approach of the 1990s is not an adequate response to the very real threats we face.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said he was pleased with the capture, but “I am very disappointed to hear that he will be held on the ship and not sent to Guantanamo Bay.”

So whose fault is the implosion of Iraq? Bush? Obama?

Back in the real world, Republicans don’t lose wars and Democrats don’t lose wars; America loses wars – which is how US allies and enemies alike judge what’s happening in Iraq right now, and how it will be recorded in the history books. Tthere is certainly something to Robert Tracinski’s analysis – that this was a wish-fulfilling prophesy for Obama, and that, in some deep primal sense, for the Democrats it was necessary ultimately for the Iraq war to be lost. Undeniably lost. And to be seen to be undeniably lost – even if it took five-and-a-half years after Bush’s departure from office, or about the length of the entire Second World War.

Let it be said that there is more than enough blame to go round. I see Senator Lindsey Graham has been all over the airwaves saying we need to work with Iran to help save Iraq from ISIS. This is the same Lindsey Graham who’s been calling for the US to assist Syrian rebels in trying to overthrow Assad, Iran’s client. The Syrian resistance is dominated by the same guys currently overrunning Iraq – the Sunni jihadists of the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria”. Consider the now largely erased Syrian/Iraqi border: On the eastern side of this vanished line, a disaffected Sunni who takes up arms against an Iranian client in Baghdad is an enemy of the United States whom we must join with Iran in destroying; but, on the western side of this vanished line, a disaffected Sunni who takes up arms against an Iranian client in Damascus is a plucky Arab Spring freedom fighter entitled to the full support of the United States. Granted that this isn’t the easiest part of the world in which to distinguish friend from foe, the way around this abiding problem is not to locate both of them within, literally, the same person.

So Senator Graham is making even less sense than usual.

Let it also be said that President Obama’s antipathy to meaningful military action undoubtedly commands the support of the American people, who after 13 years of slow-motion unwon wars have had enough. By the way, even we supporters of the Afghan and Iraqi interventions are not in favor only of war. There’s a whole section of America Alone (personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available, etc, etc), beginning on page 158, on the other elements of national power through which an effective sovereign state prosecutes its interests – diplomatic, economic, legal, informational, cultural… They’re what medium-rank nations call “soft power” and Hillary Clinton calls “smart power”. The problem is simple: As inept as they might think the Republicans’ deployment of hard power is, the Democrats’ use of soft power is even lousier. Effective soft power requires great clarity and cunning, neither of which President Obama, Secretary Kerry or anybody else seems to possess.

Hence the chain of dominoes: