RUTHFULLY YOURS

It is not constitutionally proper or practical for a legislator to sue the president over a public-policy dispute.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/367823/ron-johnsons-frivolous-obamacare-lawsuit-andrew-c-mccarthy

Back in October, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin slammed his fellow Republican senator Ted Cruz of Texas for what he portrayed as Cruz’s flawed strategy of attempting to defund Obamacare. But it soon became painfully apparent that Johnson had no strategy of his own to mount any meaningful opposition to the law. He had no answers, and barely a coherent thought, when grilled on the matter by Mark Levin. Now, as reported Monday in Alec Torres’s post and outlined in the senator’s own Wall Street Journal op-ed, Johnson has decided that filing a lawsuit is the way to go. . . . thereby demonstrating that he still has no serious strategy — other than to engage in the very sort of grandstanding the Republican establishment accused Cruz of.

Johnson says he will file a complaint in Wisconsin federal court. The point, apparently, is to try to have a judge affirm that it is illegal for President Obama to exempt members of Congress and their staffs from the full financial burden of purchasing insurance through an Obamacare “exchange.”

The senator is right when he says the risibly entitled Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) does not permit this — just as it does not permit various other exemptions, waivers, and actions our would-be emperor-in-chief deems himself empowered to order.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/367829/fifty-year-war-editors

This year marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s proclamation of a “war on poverty,” and the progress in this theater has not been encouraging. Trillions of dollars have been spent, and the number of Americans living in poverty is higher today than it was in 1964, while the poverty rate has held steady at just under one in five. That contrasts unpleasantly with the trend before President Johnson declared his war: The poverty rate had been dropping since the end of World War II. That progress came to a halt as President Johnson’s expensive and expansive vision began to be implemented in earnest, which coincided with the tapering of the postwar boom. By the 1970s, the poverty rate was headed upward. It declined a bit during the Reagan years, crested and receded again in the 1990s, and resumed its melancholy ascent around the turn of the century.

To understand the failure of the war on poverty requires understanding its structure, which itself is bound up in the idiosyncrasies of Lyndon Johnson’s politics. President Johnson played many parts in his political career: Southern ballast to John Kennedy’s buoyant Yankee idealism; an enemy of civil-rights reform and anti-lynching laws who reversed himself in 1964; a sometimes reluctant but in the end unshakeable Cold Warrior. But at heart President Johnson was a New Deal man, and his Great Society, of which the war on poverty was a critical component, was his attempt to resuscitate the spirit and the political success of Franklin Roosevelt’s program.

It was the New Deal that made Johnson’s Texas a fiercely Democratic state, as the older residents of New Deal, Texas, no doubt remember. Johnson’s House district was energetically anti-Communist, not especially segregationist, but above all wild about the New Deal. Johnson ran for the House as a New Dealer, and it was his association with FDR’s domestic agenda (and, according to biographer Robert Caro, a few thousand fraudulent ballots) that made him a senator and a force.

For all its shortcomings, and they were many, the New Deal was enacted in response to a genuine economic crisis—the Great Depression. The Great Society was launched under very different circumstances: Between the end of World War II and President Johnson’s declaration of war on poverty, the real economic output of the United States had doubled. The postwar boom was not destined to last forever, because the war-ravaged nations of Europe and Asia inevitably would reemerge as global economic competitors, but in the early 1960s the United States enjoyed a position of unprecedented economic advantage. The real challenge of the Johnson years, tragically overlooked, was figuring out how to build upon that position and consolidate those gains. Unfortunately, what got consolidated was political power, as Johnson and his progressive allies did what progressives always do: transfer wealth, power, and responsibility from the private sector to the public sector, where they can be put under the political discipline of men such as Johnson and his allies.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303433304579304791043726948?mod=Opinion_newsreel_3

Son of Ron should give up his presidential ambitions….he has never governed…..and the GOP must avoid another of those debate marathons with incompetent wannabes like Santorum, Bachmann and now Rand Paul…..rsk

Rand Paul has made no secret of his presidential ambitions, but he has some work to do if he wants to be credible as a potential Commander in Chief. Consider his apologia for fugitive National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.

On ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, the Kentucky Senator repeated his calls for leniency for Mr. Snowden, who has been indicted on three charges of theft and espionage and has sought and received asylum in Russia.

“I don’t think Edward Snowden deserves the death penalty or life in prison. I think that’s inappropriate. And I think that’s why he fled, because that’s what he faced,” said Mr. Paul. “Do I think that it’s OK to leak secrets and give up national secrets and things that could endanger lives? I don’t think that’s OK, either. But I think the courts are now saying that what he revealed was something the government was doing was illegal. So I think, personally, he probably would come home for some penalty of a few years in prison.”

Mr. Paul is exaggerating that “death penalty” bit, and he fails to mention that lower courts are divided on the legality of collecting metadata. But the key point is that he is in essence asking the government to offer Mr. Snowden a plea bargain, from his redoubt in Moscow and in advance of any trial.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304325004579296781320668314?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

Why do Leonardo DiCaprio and Richard Branson lecture us about carbon consumption while plotting trips to space?

If all goes according to plan, Hollywood icon Leonardo DiCaprio will blast into space aboard the maiden voyage of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic spaceship sometime this year, opening up a new era of civilian space travel. This development might only be remarkable as the fulfillment of a dream long predicted by futurists and technophiles, were it not for the fact that Messrs. Branson and DiCaprio are prominent environmentalist celebrities who have warned of a coming ecological catastrophe if we fail to address our carbon problem.

Mr. Branson’s commitment to fighting climate change is praiseworthy: Over the years, he has consistently advocated for a broad mix of clean energy sources, including nuclear. He is founder and chief benefactor of the Carbon War Room, an outfit that has long advocated for carbon pricing and energy efficiency measures to help alleviate global warming. Mr. DiCaprio is on the board of trustees of the Natural Resources Defense Council and has decried overconsumption. “We are the number one leading consumers, the biggest producers of waste around the world,” the actor said in 2008.

Private space travel doesn’t seem to mesh with living green, and Mr. Branson surely anticipated that his project would raise environmentalists’ eyebrows. Perhaps that’s why he announced this past May: “We have reduced the [carbon emission] cost of somebody going into space from something like two weeks of New York’s electricity supply to less than the cost of an economy round-trip from Singapore to London.”

Professore Lindzen wrote the foreword to Rael Jean Isaacs book “Roosters of the Apocalipse- How the Junk Science of Global Warming is Bankrupting the Western World”- which is dedicated to someone named Ruth King…..rsk

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/what-catastrophe_773268.html

When you first meet Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, leading climate “skeptic,” and all-around scourge of James Hansen, Bill McKibben, Al Gore, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and sundry other climate “alarmists,” as Lindzen calls them, you may find yourself a bit surprised. If you know Lindzen only from the way his opponents characterize him—variously, a liar, a lunatic, a charlatan, a denier, a shyster, a crazy person, corrupt—you might expect a spittle-flecked, wild-eyed loon. But in person, Lindzen cuts a rather different figure. With his gray beard, thick glasses, gentle laugh, and disarmingly soft voice, he comes across as nothing short of grandfatherly.

Granted, Lindzen is no shrinking violet. A pioneering climate scientist with decades at Harvard and MIT, Lindzen sees his discipline as being deeply compromised by political pressure, data fudging, out-and-out guesswork, and wholly unwarranted alarmism. In a shot across the bow of what many insist is indisputable scientific truth, Lindzen characterizes global warming as “small and .  .  . nothing to be alarmed about.” In the climate debate—on which hinge far-reaching questions of public policy—them’s fightin’ words.

In his mid-seventies, married with two sons, and now emeritus at MIT, Lindzen spends between four and six months a year at his second home in Paris. But that doesn’t mean he’s no longer in the thick of the climate controversy; he writes, gives myriad talks, participates in debates, and occasionally testifies before Congress. In an eventful life, Lindzen has made the strange journey from being a pioneer in his field and eventual IPCC coauthor to an outlier in the discipline—if not an outcast.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/alfred-hitchcocks-unseen-holocaust-documentary-to-be-screened-9044945.html

It’s a little known fact that the great director made a film about the Nazi death camps – but, horrified by the footage he saw, the documentary was never shown. Now it is to be released. Geoffrey Macnab reports

The British Army Film Unit cameramen who shot the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 used to joke about the reaction of Alfred Hithcock to the horrific footage they filmed. When Hitchcock first saw the footage, the legendary British director was reportedly so traumatised that he stayed away from Pinewood Studios for a week. Hitchcock may have been the king of horror movies but he was utterly appalled by “the real thing”.

In 1945, Hithcock had been enlisted by his friend and patron Sidney Bernstein to help with a documentary on German wartime atrocities, based on the footage of the camps shot by British and Soviet film units. In the event, that documentary was never seen.

“It was suppressed because of the changing political situation, particularly for the British,” suggests Dr Toby Haggith, Senior Curator at the Department of Research, Imperial War Museum. “Once they discovered the camps, the Americans and British were keen to release a film very quickly that would show the camps and get the German people to accept their responsibility for the atrocities that were there.”

The film took far longer to make than had originally been envisaged. By late 1945, the need for it began to wane. The Allied military government decided that rubbing the Germans’ noses in their own guilt wouldn’t help with postwar reconstruction.

Five of the film’s six reels were eventually deposited in the Imperial War Museum and the project was quietly forgotten.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4123/st-james-church Within hours of her release, Wafa al-Biss was speaking to Palestinian children, urging them to put on suicide vests and kill as many Jews as possible. And some people wonder why the Israelis need a security barrier. It is a lie to say that Israel is an apartheid state and that the wall is […]

The United States formally recognized the government of Fidel Castro in Cuba. Secretary of State John Foster Douglas pressured President Eisenhower to overcome suspicions of a new Communist dictatorship in our hemisphere, claiming that friendly relations were possible. The new government of Cuba almost immediately nationalized all American owned industries and voiced and declared economic cooperation and alliance with the European Communist nations. The rest is history.

The tyrant Castro has oppressed and jailed thousands during his reign which includes the presidencies of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2 and Obama. And, his brother Raul is even worse.

The media, however glorifies Castro and his murdering henchman Che Guevara: Read: Humberto Fontova :A&E Glorifies Homophobes — and Mass-Murdering Warmongers

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/ae-glorifies-homophobes-and-mass-murdering-warmongers/print/

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/the-ny-times-benghazi-myths-on-the-glazov-gang/print/

An Iranian-American Christian pastor rots in Iran’s gulag for his faith. What exactly is Obama doing about it?

This week’s special edition of The Glazov Gang was hosted by Superstar Ann-Marie Murrell and joined by Titans Morgan Brittany, Dwight Schultz and Michael Chandler.

The Gang gathered to discuss A Day in the Life of Saeed Abedini. The dialogue occurred in Part I (starting at the 11:00 mark) and shed light on the Iranian-American Christian pastor who is rotting in Iran’s gulag for his faith — and on Obama’s indifference to his plight.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/how-the-arab-spring-unleashed-al-qaeda/ Open up a national newspaper and flip to the stories about the Middle East. The daily toll of bombings and shootings, starving refugees and demolished cities have little resemblance to the cheerful stories about the transformation of the Middle East that were running during the boom days of the Arab Spring. There isn’t much […]