RUTHFULLY YOURS

Rep. Darrell Issa must be at the top of the White House’s enemies list. His House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has released copies of emails from former IRS official Sarah Hall Ingram indicating exchange of information with White House officials that is by law confidential.

The Daily Caller has broken the story:

Ingram attempted to counsel the White House on a lawsuit from religious organizations opposing Obamacare’s contraception mandate. Email exchanges involving Ingram and White House officials – including White House health policy advisor Ellen Montz and deputy assistant to the president for health policy Jeanne Lambrew – contained confidential taxpayer information, according to Oversight.

The emails released by the committee contain numerous redactions of the names of specific groups, containing the notation “6103” which refers to section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Service code, which:

forbids a federal employee from “disclos[ing] any return or return information obtained by him in any manner in connection with his service as such an officer or an employee.”

That means that Ingram was discussing specifics with the White House that she was forbidden by law to disclose to anyone.

The exact content of the redactions remains unknown at the moment, but Rep. Issa has requested unredacted copies of the emails, “citing a prohibition from misusing Section 6103 ‘for the purpose of concealing information from a congressional inquiry,'” according to the Daily Caller.

During her testimony, Ingram claimed she couldn’t remember the contents of the redacted portions, as opposed to taking the Fifth Amendment, like her former colleague Lois Lerner.

This scandal has explosive potential. Disclosure of confidential taxpayer information is a felony.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304520704579125580451142834.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond

Charter-school parents march in New York to secure a civil right: education.

It’s too bad every New Yorker who plans to vote in the city’s mayoral election Nov. 5 couldn’t be at the Brooklyn Bridge Tuesday morning. They would have seen the single most important issue in the race between Bill de Blasio and Joe Lhota. It’s not stop-and-frisk.

Thousands and thousands of charter-school parents with their young children—most looked to be in the first to fourth grades—marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall to save their schools.

When Bill de Blasio won the Democratic nomination for mayor, the first question many asked was whether Mr. de Blasio’s intention to heavily regulate the police department’s stop-and-frisk program would put the city’s years of low-crime calm at risk.

But this big Brooklyn Bridge march of mothers, fathers and kids alters the calculus of next month’s vote. The crime issue, though important, is ultimately about self-interest.

By contrast, most New York voters—especially better-off white voters who’ve already made it here—have no direct stake whatsoever in New York City’s charter schools. They do, however, have a stake in the integrity of their political beliefs.

For decades, New York’s inner-city schools sent wave after wave of students into the world without the skills to do much more than achieve a minimal level of lifetime earnings, if that. This failure, repeated in so many large cities, remains the greatest moral catastrophe in the political life of the United States.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304626104579123403196916722.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

A staggering $250 billion per month, 80% of spending, runs on autopilot without congressional control.

At its core, the shutdown is part of a much bigger battle to restrain the federal government. It is spending $3.6 trillion per year without a budget, and its expenditures are expected to increase rapidly in the years ahead.

Meanwhile, the government has piled up $17 trillion in debt and $60 trillion more in unfunded spending promises. The Federal Reserve will borrow $1.1 trillion in 2013 alone to buy bonds—and it reserves the right to borrow unlimited amounts for future bond purchases without congressional or presidential permission.

These are crisis-level problems. Whether the government is open or closed, they are surely grounds for immediate talks between the president and Congress on ways to pare ineffective federal programs, restrain spending and reduce borrowing.

Ducking governance decisions year after year will leave the U.S. too weak to face global challenges. Big government has meant slow growth, painfully high youth and minority unemployment and falling median incomes—except in the Washington, D.C., area, which recent census data show is growing ever richer.

Under current law, the federal government and Federal Reserve are in a sharp upward trajectory in their power and the riskiness of their policies. Federal domination of the economy and financial markets is only increasing. The government shutdown reflects a Republican demand for permanent new checks and balances—to restrain a government that spends wildly without a budget, buys $1 trillion per year in overpriced bonds from an already-rich Wall Street, and micromanages federal medical care but exempts unions and Congress from the sting of regulations that affect others.

http://www.newmediajournal.us/ It is unconscionable. It is rude, insensitivity, callus and unacceptable. With the news that family members of fallen soldiers killed in Afghanistan are not only being denied death benefits, but are being denied transportation to Dover AFB for the arrival of the caskets containing the remains of their loved ones, the Obama Administration has […]

FORGET THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZES….THEY ARE JUST TUTU RIDICULOUS….RSK

IN PHYSICS:

Professor Francois Baron Englert (80) shared a Nobel prize in physics with Professor Peter Higgs of Britain, for their discovery of the Higgs mechanism. Englert is a Belgium Jew and Holocaust survivor. He is also associated with the University of Tel Aviv.

IN MEDICINE: Nobel Prize winners are James Rothman of Yale University and Randy Schekman of the University of California.

IN CHEMISTRY: Professor Arieh Warshel of the University of Southern California (USC), a Technion alumnus, Martin Karplus and Michael Levitt. The academy said Levitt, 66, is a British, U.S., and Israeli citizen and a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Warshel, 72, is a U.S. and Israeli citizen affiliated with the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Karplus was a child when his family fled from the Nazi occupation in Austria. Prior to their immigration to the United States, the family was known for being “an intellectual and successful secular Jewish family” in Vienna

The war of words is over regarding Diana West vs. the Radoshites. She won hands down after the magnificent column defending her by Pavel Stroilov and Valdimir Bukovsky. Conrad Black has decided to ignite more debate in this feeble argument which is not worth a response. Most laughable is Black’s last paragraph:

“We all sympathize with and admire Mr. Bukovsky’s endurance of his ordeal. I do so as one who was also unjustly imprisoned, though for only three years and in the vastly gentler regime of the United States. (It was no day at the beach. And it has not destroyed my regard for the U.S., but it has not made me a compulsive American-flag-waver either.) Whatever injustices any of us may have suffered, they do not entitle us to defame the justly honored dead, invent and deform history, or impugn the righteousness of our civilization, flawed and tainted and often riddled with hypocrisy though it is, but the best the world has had.”

Huh? He dares to use the word “us.” Black was tried, convicted and jailed for fraud. Bukovsky was not tried but convicted for dissidence against a criminal government and spent a total of twelve years in Soviet prisons, labor camps, and forced-treatment psychiatric hospitals. Bukovsky is a giant and Black is a gnat…..rsk

Defaming the Cold WarriorsWest, Bukovsky, and Stroilov are wrong. By Conrad Black

It is a painful but implacable duty to return to the dismaying subject of Diana West’s book, American Betrayal, about which she has written, in the last few days, “The war of words is over.” Her authority for this triumphalist expression of relief is that Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky and his co-commentator Pavel Stroilov have described Mrs. West’s book as “huge and brilliant.” Part of their review of her book, and much of the debate, has been a fierce firefight including a considerable, though often somewhat entertaining, volume of recriminations that asperse the rigor, motivations, ideological orientation, integrity, and sanity of the two sides. I do not fit any of the stereotypes erected and riddled with high-explosive projectiles by both sides, and am merely a non-American biographer of Roosevelt and strategic historian (as well as other occupations), of impeccable conservative credentials, who has uttered no personal critique of the protagonists (I have enjoyed the previous work of Mrs. West that I have seen). And I am generally outside the circular firing squad that has been debating these issues, and so have not had to repair to the field hospital or even the dressing station, and am unafflicted in wind and limb by the tremendous exchange of ordnance this debate, if it can be so described, has provoked.

Shirley Sherrod, the self-described one-time racialist who was caught on video admitting that she initially denied federal benefits to a white farmer because of his race, is seeking to add the widow of Andrew Breitbart to her lawsuit against the deceased new-media pioneer.

In a 2010 speech before an NAACP awards dinner, Sherrod admitted that she was initially unwilling to help a white farmer because he was white. Sherrod said she did not give him the help she could have, and instead took him to a white lawyer. She called the white lawyer “one of his own kind.”

Andrew Breitbart’s website posted a two minute clip of Sherrod’s admission. In the video, Sherrod’s story of refusing benefits to a white farmer is met by laughter and statements of “that’s right” from those in the NAACP audience. Later in the video, Sherrod reversed her position and provided a story of redemption.

No applause or laughter came from the NAACP audience at the conclusion of Sherrod’s story when she described how she realized race was not an appropriate factor in her behavior.

After Andrew Breitbart posted a video clip of Sherrod’s statement, she resigned from the United States Department of Agriculture.

In February 2011, Kirkland & Ellis sued Andrew Breitbart and others for defamation, false light and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/cair-stalks-ucf-professor?f=puball On October 1, 2013 The Council On American Islamic Relation’s Samantha Bowden drove 85 miles from her home in the Tampa, FL area to the University of Central Florida.  Ms Bowden’s objective was to stalk Professor Jonathan Matusitz during one of his classes. Upon being interviewed the next day, Samantha Bowden admitted to have […]

I must confess I had a moment of schadenfreude – taking pleasure in another’s misfortune – when I read that, in late September, the Russians had seized the Greenpeace ship, Arctic Sunrise, and towed it to the port of Murmansk after Greenpeace personnel had boarded a Russian oil platform, “Priraslomnaya,” in the Pechora Sea.

Russia called the 30 people arrested “pirates” and, if found guilty, they face sentences from 10 to 15 years in prison. Five of them were Russians while the others came from some 17 nations, including the United States.

Greenpeace is best known for its propaganda tactics, the latest being the trespass of the oil platform, but in 2009, while Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior was docked in Copenhagen, the tables were turned when members of CFACT, a U.S. think tank devoted to debunking environmental claims, boarded it and, while distracting the crew with donuts, hung a banner that obscured the word “Rainbow” with “Propaganda” turning it into the Propaganda Warrior.

A CFACT spokesman said that the piracy charged seemed too severe, but thought lesser charges should apply. Even Russian President Putin said that piracy did not apply, but their actions were reckless. “We can’t help but appreciate the irony. Greenpeace conducts ongoing campaigns for greater government control over individuals. In Russia, they may get a taste of where that leads.”

Greenpeace has incurred the wrath of many with its aggressive, attention-grabbing tactics and, in 1985 French Special Forces sunk the original Rainbow Warrior when it was docked in New Zealand. Ultimately, an international court ruled that France had to pay Greenpeace $8 million. More recently, Greenpeace campaigners who scaled the chimney of the UK’s Kingsnorth coal power plant were acquitted.

While the incidents Greenpeace stages are intended to draw attention to it, most people are unaware of how large the organization is. It has offices in more than 40 nations as it pursues its campaigns devoted to global warming, deforestration, overfishing, commercial whaling, genetic engineering, and anti-nuclear issues.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/yogi-bear-starves-to-death-during-government-shutdown The death of Yogi Bear, lifelong resident of Jellystone Park, was announced by Ranger Smith this week. According to Ranger Smith, Yogi died of starvation related to the current government shutdown. “Unlike other bears at Jellystone, who eat berries, grass, insects and the occasional fish or bit of roadkill, Yogi subsisted on sandwiches, potato […]