RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/03/27/obama-meets-pope-francis-gives-him-a-box-of-seeds/

President Obama met Pope Francis this morning at the Vatican in a meeting that lasted a little under an hour and featured Obama giving the pontiff a box of seeds.

Obama brought along Secretary of State John Kerry, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer, press secretary Jay Carney and deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes.

The pope greeted Obama outside the Papal Library with a friendly handshake. Obama “nodded his head slightly,” according to the White House pool report. “Wonderful meeting you,” the president said. “Thank you sir, thank you.”

“It is a great honor. I’m a great admirer. Thank you so much for receiving me,” Obama continued. “I bring greetings from my family. The last time I came here to meet your predecessor I was able to bring my wife and children.”

Michelle Obama departed China yesterday after a weeklong trip with her daughters and mother.

The pool reporters could not hear the pope’s responses to Obama as they sat across a desk from each other, each with an interpreter. Pope Francis’s native language is Spanish but he also speaks Italian, Portuguese, French, German, Ukrainian, Piedmontese and Latin, according to the Vatican.

Article printed from The Rosett Report: http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett

On Thursday the United Nations General Assembly weighed in on Russia’s seizure of Crimea, inspiring headlines to the effect that Russia is becoming a pariah at the UN. For instance, the New York Times reported: “Vote by U.N. General Assembly Isolates Russia.” [1]

If only it were that straightforward. But if you look at the actual resolution, and the vote, it’s more like the UN General Assembly has sort-of-maybe-somewhat semi-isolated Russia. The point being that, unfortunately, the UN is no place to go for any solution to Russia’s territorial grabs.

The UN body that should really be objecting to Russia’s seizure of Ukraine is the UN Security Council. But with Russia holding one of the Permanent Five veto-wielding seats, the Security Council is even more impotent than usual. So Ukraine had to take its case to the General Assembly, where the resolutions can carry a certain heft as a reflection of general opinion, but have no binding force.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/14751#.UzVPdYWCUtV

Those of us in America who stay awake nights worrying about Israel sometimes imagine that the rest of the country is similarly obsessed. This is a serious mistake. America has other business. Even worse is when Israel makes foolish and tragic concessions in order to “make America happy.” But America is happy enough watching “Dancing with the Stars.”

Back when I was editor for KYW all-news radio (a million listeners during my Morning Drive shift) I ran Israel as the top story day after day. I gave people what I thought they wanted. Turned out, from a scientific survey, that people wanted weather and traffic. News about the rest of the country was a distant third and news about the rest of the world was down at the bottom at about zero.

The other day I asked some people I know what they thought of Bibi. “Bibi who?” was the consensus.

“Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” I said.

“Oh,” said one wise man. “He’s the prime minister of Iran, right?”

Make no mistake. Americans are not stupid. They just don’t care. If it’s not happening here, it’s not happening anywhere.

America’s heartbeat is in its ballparks.

The most recent Gevalt moment was when Bibi was dragged to Washington kicking and screaming. We worried. What is he going to give up today? How much territory will Israel lose and how many more murderers will be released? Israeli prime ministers, according to ritual, are invited to the White House once a year to get themselves slapped around.

http://sarahhonig.com/2014/03/28/another-tack-some-are-more-equal/

Speaking the truth can be a dangerous undertaking. It can expose the speaker to all sort of chastisement. This isn’t only so in any given country’s domestic affairs but very much so in relations between states.

Ours, after all, is a globalized reality. This fact can induce and intensify inordinate hubris in some leaders with pretensions to hold sway over more than their own specified domain. White House occupant and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Barak Obama, for instance, often conducts himself as if the American electorate and the Nobel committee had put him in charge of the whole earth.

Had Obama been an unqualified success, his conceit may be suffered but his isn’t and he doesn’t like to hear that he isn’t.

Despite his resplendent liberal credentials, Obama’s concept of liberty is a tad constricted. Everyone – everywhere on the face of this planet and beyond – is perfectly free to go into raptures over him but it’s a whole different opera when not-so-flattering opinions are sounded.

Obama, his appointed sidekicks and salaried mouthpieces resent criticism. Plain and simple.

Quite clearly, the US president and secretary of state don’t subscribe to George Orwell’s ever-relevant observation that “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

*Therefore, woe to the Quixotic sorts – both on America’s home turf and abroad – who insist on telling Obama and crew precisely what they’re loath to hear. Woe all the more to the recidivists who persist in upsetting the Obama administration’s omniscient ones.

Very obviously Israel’s defense minister Moshe Ya’alon is among the least stomached recidivists, even if he speaks his mind at closed meetings or in private conversations.

Ya’alon must come to grips with the fact that freedom of speech isn’t universally countenanced in our Obamaesque existence. Someone can be counted upon to leak or record uncomplimentary evaluations of the dear leader and then woe to him who dared tell it like he sees it.

The only way to avoid Obama’s self-righteous censure is to obsequiously shut up. Not to do so is imprudent in the extreme.

Nonetheless, Ya’alon keeps breaching the gag order that has been imposed on Israeli statesmen by Obama’s eminently ultra-liberal administration. Its honchos detest unfavorable analyses, which amounts to not wanting them voiced – not even behind closed doors.

Actually it’s not merely what is said but who says it. Restrictions on free speech especially apply to notable absentees from Obama’s list of favorites. Ya’alon most certainly is not featured on that list but a host of Iranian ayatollahs who harbor no inhibitions to stridently denounce America as the “Big Satan” are among the favorites who must never be called to order, no matter what.

Ramallah figurehead Mahmoud Abbas (now in his tenth year of office as “president,” despite having supposedly been elected in 2005 to only a four-year term) can also rant as he pleases. No amount of mind-blowing mendacity, outright incitement, rampant terror-glorification, extraordinary distortion or in-your-face extortion will ever land this perpetual favorite in hot water.

Yet whatever bespectacled soft-spoken Ya’alon says is guaranteed to get him into scalding disfavor, even if he dares talk in camera. He presumably should curb his tongue even in the privacy of his bedroom, as is advisable for anyone of whom the White House so indignantly disapproves.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/27/mandel-a-fatal-flaw-in-the-palestinian-peace-proce/?page=all#pagebreak

Palestinian recognition of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state has assumed center stage in recent days. The Palestinians have repeatedly refused, insisting that their official recognition of Israel without reference to the Jewish character of the state is sufficient.

Although the Obama administration is aggressively pursuing Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has thrown it not even a bone: In Washington on March 20, he told President Obama to his face that the Palestinians will not accept Israel as a Jewish state. The Arab League echoed that rejection this week.

Mr. Abbas also told Mr. Obama that there could be no compromise on what Palestinians call the “right of return” — the repatriation to Israel, rather than to a Palestinian state, of the Palestinian refugees of the 1948-49 war and their millions of descendants. He also repudiated the idea that a signed peace settlement with Israel would mark an end to further claims and conflict.

This result was only to be expected. American pressure on the Palestinian Authority has never been tried, even though the Obama administration was thought to be in accord with Israel on the necessity of such recognition and seeking Palestinian agreement behind the scenes. It turned out recently that this, too, is absent.

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2794/The-War-on-Wilders-Part-1.aspx

Behold the statue of The Dockworker in Amsterdam (found here via here). It stands between the Portugese Synagogue and the Jewish Historical Museum on Jonas Daniel Meijerplein Square.

Of course, all eyes are drawn to the black flag of Al Qaeda, that elongated and Arabian-curled swaztika, waving beside it.

Back to the statue for a history lesson that makes the appalling symbolism apparent. Below is a screenshot from A Travel Guide to Jewish Europe. It tells us that nearly three-quarters of a century ago, during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, Dutch dockworkers went on strike to protest the Nazi seizure of 400 young Dutch Jews for deportation and all but certain death. The dockworkers’ strike, the guidebook tells us, was “brutally put down by the Germans.” The statue commemorates this Dutch protest of yore to save Jewish citizens from the genocially anti-Semitic and supremacist Nazis.

Pause a moment to consider the Islamic ex-Mufti’s alliance during World War Ii with Nazi Germany. Such anti-Semitism and supremacism is mirrored in centuries of canonical Islam, which is exemplified in its most violent form in that black flag of jihad.

Think about the popularity of Mein Kampf in Islamic countries today, and Hitler, too. Consider also the Islamic anti-Semitism that undergirds the Iranian drive for nuclear weapons, the Iranian drive to destroy Israel. The black flag of jihad, an abomination anywhere, could hardly be more offensive than here in this Dutch square.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/obama-shouldnt-expect-a-warm-reception-in-riyadh/article/2546340#

President Obama has spent this week bingeing on diplomacy but he cannot be drunk on success. There’s very little to show for his days in Europe other than a few joint statements that were forgotten as soon as the press releases were handed out.

Friday will be different and not because it will deliver a diplomatic triumph. President Obama will meet with Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz at a moment when the relationship between the two nations is worse than it has been since the 1973 Arab oil embargo. Going into the meeting, Obama is at a considerable disadvantage that results directly from his own policies. The Saudis look around the Middle East and what they see scares them.
Since about February 2013, the Saudis have been giving billions of dollars and tons of arms to the rebels seeking to depose Syrian President Bashar Assad. They believe the heavy Iranian and Russian support for Assad’s survival (in equal or greater amounts of money and arms as well as jihadist fighters and Iranian troops) to be the creation of a Shiite Iranian puppet less than a hundred miles from their northern border. Late last August, Obama said that he had decided to take military action against Syria because of Assad’s use of chemical weapons against civilians. When Obama abruptly decided that he would ask Congress for permission to make the strike, and then failed to pursue congressional action, the Saudis felt betrayed.

In October, after having campaigned for it, the Saudis rejected a seat on the United Nations Security Council because it hadn’t brought the Syrian civil war to an end. Only days after the rejection, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi intelligence chief, said “This was a message for the U.S., not the U.N.” Bandar said that he planned to scale back diplomatic cooperation with the U.S. and for his country to have a foreign policy independent of America’s. That is exactly what the Saudis have done

http://www.clarionproject.org/print/news/saudi-king-holds-daughters-prisoners-13-years

Princesses’ mother, who fled to London after the couple’s divorce, breaks silence

Princesses’ mother, who fled to London after the couple’s divorce, breaks silence
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/03/saudi-king-holds-daughters-prisoners-for-13-years/#Pu6BgoUTxz40U4CW.99

(ClarionProject) King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has kept four of his daughters locked in a royal compound in Jeddah for the last 13 years. Their mother, his second wife who fled to London after the couple’s divorce, broke the silence and told Britain’s Channel Four about their plight. She has not seen her children for 10 years.

Princess Alanoud Al Fayez married then Prince Abdullah in an arranged marriage when she as just 15. She bore him four daughters: Sahar, Maha, Hala and Jawaher.

The four have been kept in a compound in the eastern port city of Jeddah, which they cannot leave without armed guards. Their passports have been taken away, and they are barred from leaving the country. Their villa is dilapidated and falling apart, far from the living quarters of the princesses’ privileged childhood.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/authors/detail/ruth-king-2014-candidates-for-congress

It is hard to believe that the Nutmeg State has not a single Republican legislator….This posting reflects my views and choices, not those of Family Security Matters which is non partisan.

To see the actual voting records of all incumbents on other issues such as Foreign Policy, Second Amendment Issues, Homeland Security, and other issues as well as their rankings by special interest groups please use the links followed by two stars (**). U.S. Senate

Richard Blumenthal (D) Next Election in 2016
Chris Murphy (D) Next Election in 2018

District 1

John Larson (D) Incumbent

http://www.larson.house.gov/

http://www.ontheissues.org/house/John_Larson.htm **

RATED 1+ BY AAI INDICATING A PRO ARAB VOTING RECORD

HOT BUTTON ISSUES

HEALTHCARE http://www.larson.house.gov/index.php/on-the-issues/health-care

The historic health care legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama offers the American people the choice of affordable quality health care coverage for the first time. The Affordable Care Act is giving Americans more security by holding insurance companies accountable, and helping more families get the peace of mind of affordable health insurance.

IMMIGRATION http://www.larson.house.gov/index.php/on-the-issues/immigration

President Obama’s recent commonsense immigration reform proposal has four parts. First, continue to strengthen our borders. Second, crack down on companies that hire undocumented workers. Third, hold undocumented immigrants accountable in order to earn their citizenship; this means requiring undocumented workers to pay their taxes and a penalty, move to the back of the line, learn English, and pass background checks. Fourth, update the legal immigration system for families, workers, and employers.

ENVIRONMENT http://www.larson.house.gov/index.php/on-the-issues/energy-a-environment Today our nation continues to confront three of the most critical issues of our time, our environment, our foreign policy and our economy. It is clear that we must end our reliance on foreign sources of fossil fuels. These fuels are damaging our environment and causing hazardous climate change around the globe. They are also making us indebted to foreign countries, putting our national security in jeopardy. Americans are seeing record fluctuations in the cost of energy; filling up the gas tank or heating a home has become difficult to afford. That’s why Congressman Larson has focused on ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, lower the price of energy, and invest in renewable energy sources.

Opposed construction of Keystone XL Pipeline without limiting amendments.

FOREIGN POLICY http://www.larson.house.gov/index.php/on-the-issues/foreign-policy Congressman Larson has stood firmly in support of Israel, considered our greatest ally and a great democracy in the Middle East. Previously, Larson has voted in favor of resolutions reaffirming Congressional support for Israel and the right of the Israeli people to protect themselves. At the same time, Larson has joined his colleagues in recognizing the dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza, supporting diplomatic initiatives in the region.

Matthew Corey (R) Challenger

Contractor, Navy Veteran http://www.coreyforcongress2014.com/

HOT BUTTON ISSUES

http://www.coreyforcongress2014.com/issues

HEALTHCARE http://www.coreyforcongress2014.com/issues/health_care Health care cost is on the rise. I support purchasing insurance across state lines because competitive bidding will lower the cost of health care. I also believe in you should be able to keep the same benefits when switching policies. There should not be discrimination on purchasing healthcare with preexisting conditions. I believe in setting up private health care savings accounts to drive the cost of health care down. With the implementation of Obama Care we will see health care costs on the rise, people losing their primary care doctors, loss of full time positions to part time, and stagnation in hiring because business cannot afford the extra burden of regulations. Seniors are facing the most challenges with limited services and waiting lists. States should help subsidize health care to those who can’t afford it. Repeal the National Health Care and end its unconstitutional mandate that all Americans must carry only government-approved health insurance or answer to the IRS.

ENERGY http://www.coreyforcongress2014.com/issues/energy National security starts with becoming energy independent. We need to put an end to burdensome regulations that have a minimum impact on the environment. I believe we need to put Americans back to work by giving permits to drill on federal lands in a responsible way. Americans can collect royalties from mining companies to fund our green energy projects. We can grow our economy by keeping money state side instead of funding terrorist nations. This approach will protect our national interests, security, and stimulate economic growth.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obamacares-tough-day-in-court?f=puball

Since its passage, a number of lawsuits have attempted to undermine Obamacare as a law, with varying degrees of success. The individual mandate challenge failed before the Supreme Court in 2012, despite what seemed like positive reception to the challenge during oral argument. Hobby Lobby went before the Supreme Court on March 25 to challenge the religious liberty implications of the contraception mandate portion of the law.

While the media have largely focused on the Hobby Lobby challenge, a few blocks away, the D.C. Court of Appeals was hearing another argument about Obamacare-one that, if passed, could well have the effect of ending this law as we know it. And it has liberals running scared.

In the piece “Forget Hobby Lobby. The Bigger Legal Threat to Obamacare Still Has Life,” Alec Macgillis writes for the New Republic, “If the contraception challenge succeeds, it just means that that one sliver of Obamacare is struck down. If this other challenge succeeds, both sides agree that it would blow up the entire law.”

The argument for the plaintiffs is as follows: In order to provide the 60th vote, which was necessary to get the bill through the Senate, Ben Nelson, the then-Democratic senator from Nebraska, insisted on a clause that said that federal subsidies could only go to people who signed up on exchanges set up by the states. The purpose was to incentivize states to actually set up exchanges.

Then, the plaintiffs argue, the IRS wrote a rule in 2012 which reinterpreted the law to say that federal exchanges could give out subsidies as well. “The alternative policy under the IRS’ rewriting of the rule creates a bizarre circumstance where it’s almost impossible to fulfill the Act’s purpose of having state-run exchanges, because it eliminates any tangible incentive for these people to go ahead and adopt the exchanges,” argued Michael A. Carvin, the plaintiffs’ attorney, before the Court of Appeals on March 25. “So they’ve created a situation which has predictably resulted in only 14 states doing what Congress clearly wanted 50 states to do, which is to set up their exchanges.”