RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-law-eric-holder-ignored

The Justice Dept. rules for press subpoenas ….

Attorney-General Eric Holder talks about adopting new rules for how the feds subpoena reporter records. This is a typical Beltway ploy, one that “fixes” violations of old rules on the books by passing new ones. Doing so implies that there is a loophole in existing law that needs closing.

But, inconveniently for Holder, there has been since 1980 a DOJ press subpoena regulation (28 C.F.R. sec. 50.10) on the books. And Eric Holder clearly violated it. Rules in the Code of Federal Regulations carry the force of law, and thus bind those subject to them.

The full set of rules merits a read, but here is the money part:

(a) In determining whether to request issuance of a subpoena to a member of the news media, or for telephone toll records of any member of the news media, the approach in every case must be to strike the proper balance between the public’s interest in the free dissemination of ideas and information and the public’s interest in effective law enforcement and the fair administration of justice.
(b) All reasonable attempts should be made to obtain information from alternative sources before considering issuing a subpoena to a member of the news media, and similarly all reasonable alternative investigative steps should be taken before considering issuing a subpoena for telephone toll records of any member of the news media.
(c) Negotiations with the media shall be pursued in all cases in which a subpoena to a member of the news media is contemplated. These negotiations should attempt to accommodate the interests of the trial or grand jury with the interests of the media. Where the nature of the investigation permits, the government should make clear what its needs are in a particular case as well as its willingness to respond to particular problems of the media.
(d) Negotiations with the affected member of the news media shall be pursued in all cases in which a subpoena for the telephone toll records of any member of the news media is contemplated where the responsible Assistant Attorney General determines that such negotiations would not pose a substantial threat to the integrity of the investigation in connection with which the records are sought. Such determination shall be reviewed by the Attorney General when considering a subpoena authorized under paragraph (e) of this section.
(e) No subpoena may be issued to any member of the news media or for the telephone toll records of any member of the news media without the express authorization of the Attorney General….

In cases of exigent national security, the A-G, or a senior national security official, can contact the press & request that the story be held. When six American diplomats were sheltered in Tehran by Canadian diplomats, reporters sat on the story for some three months, until the Americans were safely exfiltrated back to the States.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/joseph-puder/the-six-day-war-46-years-later/ It is hard to believe that 46 years have passed since the Six-Day War of June, 1967. The world has changed a great deal since then. Technology has revolutionized communications and warfare. Instead of war between nations and world wars, most of today’s conflicts occur within states as witnessed in recent years in the […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/fjordman/muslim-riots-and-left-wing-nonsense/ The May 2013 riots in certain immigrant-dominated suburbs of Stockholm raised eyebrows abroad. While I found them disturbing I cannot say that I was totally surprised by them. I’ve consistently warned against such a likely outcome under this pen name for what is now nearly a decade. The political elites not just in Sweden […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/middle-east-peace-process/

Editor’s note: Below is the first installment of a new FrontPage series that will expose the “Middle East Peace Process” and the true genocidal intent of the Arab Palestinians, Israel’s so-called “peace partners.” The translated video below was produced by Palestinian Media Watch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_GcZLMSGk4&feature=player_embedded

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

Ever since FDR made it his campaign song in 1932 while running for office during the Great Depression, the unofficial anthem of the Democratic Party has been that Tin Pan Alley classic, “Happy Days are Here Again.” But no matter how often the old Victor spun, it would not be until well after Roosevelt’s death that happy days would be here again.

Like Hope and Change, Happy Days are Here Again was a blandly optimistic and non-specific promise that good times were coming. Someday the happy days would arrive, an appropriate enough sentiment for a song whose pivotal moment came in the movie “Chasing Rainbows” where it was sung to reassure a cuckolded husband who is threatening to kill himself. And in an even more appropriate bit of symbolism, the actual movie footage of that moment is as lost as the happy times.

No matter how often the Democratic Party cheats on the American people, it can always break out a new rendition of “Happy Days are Here Again” to win them back. And even if the happy days never seem to actually arrive, the promise of “So long sad times” and “Howdy gay times” where “your troubles and cares are gone” is always a winner.

While the American Democratic Party may not have an official anthem, the British Labour Party does and its anthem, “The Red Flag” would be entirely appropriate for the new Democratic Party that no longer has anything in common with Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson.

It might be awkward to imagine Harry Reid or Joe Manchin trying to make it through verses like, “The people’s flag is deepest red” and the sonorous chorus, “Then raise the scarlet standard high /Within its shade we live and die/Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer/We’ll keep the red flag flying here.”

They would probably look almost as awkward singing it as Labour Party leader Ed Milliband does, but you could easily imagine Barack Obama and Valerie Jarrett belting it out. And that would be only right because while The Red Flag never gets around to mentioning Manchester, despite its popularity there, it does namecheck two cities. “In Moscow’s vaults its hymns were sung/Chicago swells the surging throng.”

These days red flag songs, once mandatory, are confined to all sorts of vaults in Moscow. The new Russian anthem is Putin’s redress of the old Soviet one, with lyrics by the same composer. And the Soviet National Anthem, that secular hymn, has a familiar pedigree going back to the Anthem of the Bolshevik Party in 1938, which took its melody from “Life is better, Life is fun.”

Democrats try to paint the gubernatorial candidate as a wacko with a crazy sidekick.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/350596/cuccinelli-bogeyman-virginia-john-fund

After President Obama won Virginia for the second time in a row last November, Democrats were crowing that the state’s governorship would be theirs for the taking this fall.

Their reasoning was simple: Obama had won twice, incumbent GOP governor Bob McDonnell is term-limited, Republicans have lost every U.S. Senate race in Virginia since 2000, and Democrats have said for years that Ken Cuccinelli, the hard-shelled conservative attorney general who is the GOP nominee this year, is unelectable.
But their confidence has gotten a little shaky of late. The Real Clear Politics average of all recent polls shows Cuccinelli with a slim lead, 43 to 42 percent, over Democrat Terry McAuliffe, best known for being Bill Clinton’s fundraising consigliere and the chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 2001 to 2005. In sizing up the race, the liberal American Prospect magazine admitted that McAuliffe was “a weak candidate” who “would have struggled to win the nomination this time if anyone had contested it.” When he had real opponents in the 2009 race, McAuliffe placed a poor third in the Democratic primary. His advantage this year is that as a master fundraiser, he has oodles of money for the kind of get-out-the-vote efforts that pulled Barack Obama across the finish line to victory in Virginia.

But Democrats also think they have a silver bullet. They are frustrated that Cuccinelli has drifted to the center (he has refused to sign Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge and endorsed Governor McDonnell’s relaxing of restrictions on felons’ regaining the right to vote). But they think they can still paint Cuccinelli as a wild-eyed extremist by linking him to E. W. Jackson, the African-American minister who, in a surprise win, nabbed the GOP nomination for lieutenant governor. (In Virginia, the governor and lieutenant governor do not run on the same ticket.) Jackson is strong medicine for many voters, having said such things as that “Obama clearly has Muslim sensibilities” and that liberals have “done more to kill black folks whom they claim so much to love than the Ku Klux Klan, lynching and slavery, and Jim Crow ever did.”

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/06/02/why-the-beasts-fail-to-understand-israeli-happiness/
Why the Beasts Fail to Understand Israeli Happiness
It’s not that they feel themselves to be under the shadow of death, it’s that they’re carried along by life.

A recent, much-read article by Tiffanie Wen in the Daily Beast tried to figure out “Why are the Israelis so Damn Happy?” It based itself on an OECD study of 36 democratic countries, which found that while Israel doesn’t score very high on some major parameters like housing, income, job security, and education, it does score high — eighth on the list — for happiness. (Israel also got a high happiness score on other studies, such as this one.)

Considering that Israel has also experienced far more war and terrorism than any other democratic country since its founding in 1948, that result may seem puzzling. Wen, in fact, claims that “war has quite a lot to do with it” and goes on to say:

Think about it. How would you act if you woke up every morning thinking that this day could be your last? Or at least took a moment to imagine how you would be eulogized at your funeral?…

The point is this: you’d enjoy the day you had. And if you continued to survive until the next morning, this daily exercise might develop into a mantra for how you lived your life. And you might bother to take that beach day, or spend more time with your family. You might grow a pair and launch that startup you’ve been thinking about (Boom: Silicon Wadi) or stop a beautiful woman on the street and insist that she have lunch with you….

First of all, there’s a measure of truth to this. It’s true that a sense of living with threats in the background concentrates the mind on the small pleasures, the good stuff. And Wen also notes a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association indicating that Israelis — who are more toughened by bad stuff — “recover from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) more quickly than people of other Western nations.”

http://pjmedia.com/blog/real-damage-from-racial-preferences/ Racial preferences — i.e., discrimination — are usually touted as a way to help minorities. Often overlooked, however, is the harm they cause these same individuals. Any day now, we will be getting a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court in Fisher v. University of Texas on the constitutionality of the racial preferences practiced […]

http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2013/06/09/government-surveillance-the-view-from-misgav-am/?print=1

It didn’t take the IRS scandal, the Benghazi debacle, and the surveillance of the press to make me think Barack Obama was one of the worst, if not the worst, president in American history. I already did.

But I’m not sure the latest scandal — the mass sweep of everyone’s metadata by the NSA — is everything it’s cracked up to be. Certainly, it’s not surprising. I rather yawned at the revelation that the comings and goings of all our emails, phone calls, texts, etc., were being recorded. I always assumed they were. And I always thought we were all leaving an indelible digital trail.

In fact, I had long since ceased putting my most serious private communications online or even making them over the phone, except in moments of haste or laziness, when I held my nose and went ahead with it. I imagine many of us have done that.

And this has little or nothing to do with Bush, Obama, or any politician. It’s the nature of technology. Privacy, as we once knew it, is over. We can put in strong checks and balances to prevent the improper exploitation of this information to bolster the provisions already in place, but we’re fighting the proverbial uphill battle — and not just because of Obama’s quasi-totalitarian behavior (although who would like the crew behind the IRS scandal peering into our email?).

Sad, but true…. but there is another side to it. I spent part of Sunday at Kibbutz Misgav Am [1] in a part of the extreme north of Israel known as “The Finger.” This is because, like a finger, the kibbutz juts up into Lebanon so that parts of it are bordered by the Arab state on three sides. (Earlier in the day, I had driven an ATV right along that border.)

I stood in the lookout booth at the kibbutz high point with a spokesperson looking down at a Shiite village perhaps two hundred meters away. You could see yellow Hezbollah flags flying in front of the houses, one of them just yards from a small UN installation. To our right were some sculptures made from primitive Hezbollah mortars in previous wars. (By the way, later I saw several UN jeeps heading south on the main road. I couldn’t tell if they were Austrian soldiers who were reported leaving the Golan Heights to avoid involvement in the Syrian civil war, but they looked European.)

The Shiite village houses, it was explained to me, had no glass in their windows, the better to get their weapons out fast to fire at the Israelis. Who wants the inconvenience of glass between you and the despised enemy? No matter that it snowed in winter in this part of Galilee. Hate is hate.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3747/only_in_israel_gay_rights_in_the_middle_east Sexual minorities are as unwelcome in the Middle East as are religious minorities. Except in Israel spectators and participants, including some of Israel’s most powerful politicians. Here is The Times of Israel report on the event: “Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai kicked off the festivities with a speech that reflected on the journey since the first […]