RUTHFULLY YOURS

Obama’s Game of Immigration Poker
Does the president want to change the system, or just blame Republicans for failure in next year’s midterm elections?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324493704578430843929482444.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond

The Senate’s Gang of Eight this week unveiled its hard-negotiated immigration bill. A bipartisan group in the House praised the product and declared its own bill not far behind. And the White House? Let the guessing continue.

The overriding question throughout this year’s push to reform immigration has been what game the White House is playing. The media keep writing that President Obama sees immigration as his second-term legacy. That’s what the White House keeps telling them, anyway, and who are they to doubt it?

But congressional negotiators remain highly suspicious that the White House is more interested in using a failed immigration bill as a weapon against the GOP in 2014. They look past the administration’s occasional tepid statements of support to its actions. So far what they’ve seen is a string of events that have been decidedly unhelpful in the cause of reform.thema to the GOP.

There was a lot of blowback against the speech, and two weeks later in his State of the Union address Mr. Obama restrained himself to broad talking points. Yet within a week, the White House leaked a draft of its own immigration bill, a partisan document that seemed designed to force Senate negotiations to the left or derail the talks altogether.

There’s also been the White House’s rear-guard action against a “trigger”—which makes a path to citizenship contingent on progress in border enforcement. There is wide bipartisan understanding that an evaluation of current border security is central to any bill, and this requires the Department of Homeland Security to produce data. Yet in March, a senior DHS official told a House committee that it had not created a broad measure of security (despite promising to do so in 2010), and wasn’t likely to anytime soon.

Obama officials told the New York Times last month that they had “resisted” a measurement “because the president did not want any hurdles placed on the pathway to eventual citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally.” Yet even congressional Democrats understand that the DHS’s failure could be a deal-killer—Texas Rep. (and Obama fan) Sheila Jackson Lee warned the agency it had better “get in the game.” The administration’s response was to roll out Homeland Secretary Janet Napolitano, who on March 26 insisted there is “no one number” that can capture border security, and that in any event a trigger “is not the way to go.”

Meanwhile, the White House has refused to say if it will accept policies that are central for Republican support. Senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer recently dodged a question about whether his boss would sign a bill with a trigger. White House officials have been equally evasive on whether the president supports a guest-worker program.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/04/a_growing_sense_that_were_not_getting_the_truth_about_boston_bombing.html

While the media are bearing the brunt of public skepticism over the handling of the Boston bombing, the behavior of government is also eroding public trust. Yesterday’s promised but cancelled news briefing is just one symptom. Andrew McCarthy of PJM notes that “Misinformation rather than enlightenment has been the order of the day in the investigation of Monday’s terrorist bombing of the Boston Marathon,” and that part of it is the natural outgrowth of the desire of investigators to keep the details of their investigations secret, so as not to alert suspects. In these circumstances, the media, hungry for something to say in their wall-to-wall coverage, press law enforcement sources, to whom they offer anonymity, for information. In the circumstances, misinformation is almost certain to get reported.

But there is something else at work: a taboo, widespread in the MSM and government, on suspecting jihadists. McCarthy writes:

We don’t know what the investigators know, but on our state of information, it would be irresponsible to discount the possibility that this is an instance of jihadist terror. Of course, other ideological motivations cannot be ruled out, either. My point is that it is ludicrous to enforce a politically correct filter in which the most plausible explanation must not be spoken on pain of being cast out as a racist “Islamophobe,” yet every other theory, no matter how half-baked, is given a respectful airing. (snip)

…no radical ideology that urges violence should be ruled out at this point when, apparently, no perpetrators have been identified. How strange, though, that what experience suggests are the least likely scenarios – conservatives or anti-government extremists striking savagely at their defenseless fellow citizens – are being embraced seriously (even wistfully) by some media pundits, while one must walk on eggshells to describe scenarios whose proving out would surprise no one.

The avoidance of jihad as an explanation is particularly ridiculous given the initial suspicions focused on Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi, the 20 year old Saudi student, who is now rather mysteriously being deported, we are told. Jim Host of Gateway Pundit reports:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/climate_change_conversation_aborted.html An editorial essay by American Chemical Society (ACS) officers Bassam Shakhashiri and Jerry Bell (Science 5 April 2013) extends a gracious invitation for a “respectful conversation” about Climate Change.  Yet when I tried to respond, the editors of Science refused to print it.  So much for “conversation.”   Aside from its admirable tone, the […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323309604578431754054345908.html?mod=us_most_pop_newsreel MIT Campus Police Officer Fatally Injured in Shooting CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—A campus police officer was shot and killed Thursday night at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after responding to a disturbance on campus, according to Cambridge police and the Middlesex County District Attorney’s office. Gunshots were reported on the MIT campus at 10:48 p.m. near […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346033/partisan-speculation

THERE REMAINS THE NIGGLING DOUBT HERE BECAUSE A SAUDI SUSPECT LINKED TO TERROR IS BEING SLIPPED OUT OF THE COUNTRY….RSK

Until officials identify a culprit and motive in the Boston bombing, the Left should calm down.

At this writing, no one knows who planted two bombs in Boston that killed three people, wounded 176 others, and forced doctors to amputate the limbs of at least 13 maimed victims. Authorities have yet to arrest the murderer(s), whose motivations remain mysterious. (While the FBI released photos of two possible suspects late Thursday, their names and backgrounds are not evident.)

Nonetheless, while investigators labor valiantly amid such uncertainty, omniscient liberals already have concluded who unleashed this carnage: the far Right.

“We really don’t know who did this,” Obama strategist David Axelrod told MSNBC. “It was tax day.” Presumably, the bombs were meant to hammer high tax rates rather than pressure the much-maligned 1 percent to pay “their fair share.”

CNN’s Peter Bergen explained that if the bombs contained conventional explosives — instead of al-Qaeda’s favorite, hydrogen peroxide — the attackers “might be some other kind of right-wing extremists.” According to CNN’s Tim Lister and Paul Cruickshank, “a senior U.S. counterterrorism investigator told CNN that pressure cooker bombs have also been a signature of extreme right-wing individuals in the United States who he said tend to revel in building homemade bombs.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346043/cooking-books-deportation-stats t is one of the Obama administration’s favorite talking points on immigration: It has been deporting illegal immigrants in record numbers. That bolsters its credentials on enforcement and supports the argument that, now that we’ve gotten tough on the border, it is time to enact comprehensive immigration reform. But figures recently unearthed by a […]

http://acdemocracy.org/?utm_source=The+Muslim+Brotherhood+Deception+%26+Education+&utm_campaign=ACD%2FEWI+BLOG&utm_medium=email

Introduction:
The Muslim Brotherhood’s response to the Boston Marathon bombings is a good way to illustrate the “flexibility” principle that dictates the organization’s modus operandi.

Egypt serves as the MB headquarters. Its Freedom and Justice Party released a statement in English condemning the bombing and “offering heartfelt sympathies and solemn condolences to the American people and the families of the victims.”

On Facebook in Arabic, senior Brotherhood leader and vice chairman of the party Essam el-Erian suggested a Western conspiracy linking the Boston bombings to the French war in Mali, the “destruction” of Syria and Iraq, and the faltering rapprochement between the Turkish government and Kurdish rebels.

El-Erian asked ”Who disturbed democratic transformations, despite the difficult transition from despotism, corruption, poverty, hatred, and intolerance to freedom, justice, tolerance, development, human dignity, and social justice?”

El -Erian continued to answer his own accusatory question with another one: “Who planted Islamophobia through research, the press, and the media? Who funded the violence?” Who?

El-Erian’s Arabic-speaking audience of course knows the answer because they’ve been fed it with their mothers’ milk. Who? The corrupt infidels, the U.S. and … the Jews…

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/04/18/exclusive-congressional-source-contradicts-ice-account-says-lawmakers-in-possession-of-file-on-saudi-national-that-called-for-visa-revocation/

Exclusive: Congressional Source Contradicts ICE Account, Says Lawmakers in Possession of File on Saudi National That Called for Visa Revocation

Apr. 18, 2013 9:34pm Jason Howerton

Documents have been presented to Congress confirming that plans were made to revoke the visa of Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi, a Saudi national once considered a “person of interest” in the Boston bombings, a congressional source told TheBlaze on Thursday.

Other sources, including one at the FBI, previously informed TheBlaze that there have been discussions about deporting Alharbi on “security and related grounds.” He has been living in the Boston area and in the U.S. on a student visa. An FBI source said the agency is against deporting Alharbi because of his status as a material witness.

The congressional source told TheBlaze it was unclear as to why representatives from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would be unaware of this information. Earlier on Thursday, an official with ICE said it was “categorically false” that Alharbi had ever been considered for deportation.

The congressional source, however, said the information sent to Congress showed that a file was created on “Abdul Rahman Ali Al Harby” at 4 p.m. on Tuesday by an official with the National Targeting Center, a counterterrorism sub-agency of U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security. The file stated that the individual is “linked to the Boston bombing” and was to be processed for revocation of his visa based on national security grounds, the congressional source revealed.

The source confirmed seeing the information sent to members of Congress but could not provide copies of any documents to TheBlaze.

http://www.jidaily.com/8da9a

In May 1998, the eminent British historian Paul Johnson published an essay in Commentary to mark Israel’s 50th birthday; marking its 63rd, we re-publish the essay here.—The Editors

The state of Israel is the product of more than 4,000 years of Jewish history. “If you want to understand our country, read this!” said David Ben-Gurion on the first occasion I met him, in 1957. And he slapped the Bible. But the creation and survival of Israel are also very much a 20th-century phenomenon, one that could not have happened without the violence and cruelty, the agonies, confusions, and cross-currents of our tragic age. It could even be argued that Israel is the most characteristic single product, and its creation the quintessential event, of this century.

Certainly, you cannot study Israel without traveling the historical highroads and many of the byroads of the times, beginning with the outbreak of World War I in 1914. That great watershed between an age of peace and moderation and one of violence and extremism set the pattern for all that followed, and marked a turning point as well in the fortunes of Zionism.

Theodor Herzl’s Zion, a product of the 1890’s, was not exactly a modest proposal, but it could fairly be described as a moderate one. His book was entitled Der Judenstaat, and that phrase—a “state of the Jews”—fairly describes what he had in mind. But he was not necessarily wedded to the historical dream of a state in Palestine. He toyed, for example, with the notion of a giant settlement in Argentina, and not until the Seventh Zionist Congress in 1905 was Uganda, too, finally rejected as a possible site. By that time Herzl was dead, at the age of forty-four. One of his last pronouncements had been: “Palestine is the only land where our people can come to rest.”

Uncertainties and ambivalences of other kinds abounded. Although Herzl had always used the word “sovereignty” in connection with his imagined Jewish state, his friend Max Nordau, the philosopher, believed that in order to avoid offending the Turks, of whose empire Palestine then formed a part, the term Judenstaat should be replaced by Heimstätte, or homestead, rendered into English as “national home.” This fortuitously became an important factor in winning acceptance for the Zionist idea among European statesmen. Similarly, Herzl had written of a huge “expedition” that would “take possession of the land,” but the idea that the land would actually have to be conquered, and then fiercely defended, does not seem to have occurred to him.

As for the arrangements of life in his future commonwealth, Herzl was enamored of the model of Venice at the height of its power. He imagined a Venetian-style constitution, a Jewish doge, a coronation ceremony, and city plans featuring huge squares like the Piazza San Marco. He also foresaw theaters, circuses, café-concerts, and an enormous opera house specializing in Wagner, his favorite. The only military touch was to be a guards regiment, the Herzl-Cuirassiers, for ceremonial occasions; the New Zion would not, he thought, need much of an army. In many ways, Herzl’s conception had more in common with the Ruritania of Anthony Hope’s novels than with the state that actually came into being a little over four decades after his death.

http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=6965

The sour wind from the left

Bearded terrorists can be terrifying, but there’s nothing more terrifying than a politician, particularly a clean-shaven member of Congress in full hysteria mode. Once a congressional — or gubernatorial — mouth starts flapping, you never know how much wind it can expel.

Rep. Peter King of New York is a Republican member of the House Homeland Security Committee (a title right out of George Orwell’s literary fancy) and the House Intelligence Committee (“intelligence” in the House? Who knew?). He wants everybody put under suspicion, if not arrest. He prescribes more cameras, more dogs, more surveillance, more neighbor-to-neighbor snooping to deal with the terrorists. Even if you don’t see something, say something. Call the cops.

“For instance,” he told MSNBC in the wake of the Boston massacre, “merchants, if they’re selling any components that can be used for a bomb, everywhere from ball bearings to beauty products, they can all make bombs. They should notify police.”

Eyeliner alert!

Merchants and even other shoppers must be on the scout to help police nab anyone buying mascara, lipstick, cold cream, face powder, rouge, body lotion, eau de cologne and perfume. Helena Rubenstein, Max Factor and Cover Girl must be added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List at once.

Mr. King thinks the Boston massacre should lead to the installation of more and more cameras. “Privacy,” he says, “involves being in a private location. Being out in the street, there’s not an expectation of privacy. Anyone can look at you, can see you, can watch what you’re doing. A camera just makes it more sophisticated.”

Good citizenship requires good citizens to keep their window blinds open, to enable the camera to get a good view. When you get up in the middle of the night to visit the facilities, turn on the lights. The camera must get a good look.

Mr. King wants the cops to have “jammers” to disable cell phones, preventing terrorists from detonating “improvised explosive devices” by remote control: “I feel strongly that local police should have access to jammers. I believe they should have more co-operation with the military –- right now there are legal issues, as far as military being involved in this.” Ah, yes. Those pesky “legal issues” always get in the way of hysteria. But the great thing about hysteria is that it blows away impediments like a Constitution.