RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-greenfield/swingers-of-the-supreme-court/

After Chief Justice Roberts switched his position on ObamaCare, the media has been hailing him as a new swing vote on the Supreme Court. But that would make him just one of many swing vote justices who were appointed by Republican presidents. In the last forty years the majority of Supreme Court Justices were chosen by Republican presidents. Nixon alone nominated four Supreme Court justices and Reagan nominated three. But that did not turn the Supreme Court to the right, as the left claims. Not only have Supreme Court justices nominated by Democratic presidents moved to the left, but those nominated by Republican presidents have also often moved to the left.

When a Republican president chooses a nominee for the Supreme Court, there is at least a 50 percent chance that the nominee will move to the left once on the bench. Of the three justices nominated by Reagan, only one could be considered a reliable conservative voice. Of the two justices nominated by George H.W. Bush, only one, Clarence Thomas, could be considered a reliable conservative voice. It would not be surprising at all if this track record turns out to have held steady with the justices nominated by his son.

The same, however, cannot be said of the two justices nominated by Clinton or those two nominated by Obama. No one would ever accuse Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor or Elena Kagan of being promiscuous swing votes. Not when Sotomayor has voted with her Clinton administration predecessors 90 percent of the time. The liberal bloc of the Supreme Court has functioned as a steady voice for the left without the ire and accusations that the far more fragile conservative bloc has received for daring to occasionally defend the Constitution.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/iran-preparing-to-down-american-passenger-planes?f=must_reads

A source who served in Iranian intelligence says the Iranian regime is preparing to down Western airliners in case of an attack on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has been preparing for war for some time as the Islamic regime closes in on developing nuclear weapons, says a source who served in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ intelligence and has recently defected to a country in Europe.

The source said the regime has taken several measures should war erupt:

* Thirty-two command and control centers have been formed around the country so that the Guards and the Basij can act independently in battle. In case of a breakdown of communication with the central government, their orders are to suppress any uprising from within and confront any potential enemy.
* All political prisoners and all activists within the country are to be slaughtered, as are those Iranian opponents outside the country, to ensure no viable opposition will remain to guide an uprising to overthrow of the regime.
* Thousands of cells have been established in collaboration with Hezbollah to conduct terrorist acts against Israel, America and the West. One specific preparation, as discussed by the Guard commanders, is to target America’s civilian airliners in order to cause terror in the West.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-supreme-courts-declaratory-act?f=must_reads

Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, wrote the majority opinion upholding the alleged constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), otherwise known as Obamacare. Obamacare will compel, under penalty of a monetary payment, all Americans to purchase health insurance. This monetary penalty was never intended by the authors of the ACA to be a revenue-raising impost. It was never intended to be a tax, either, although the Internal Revenue Service was appointed the enforcer of the law and collector of the penalty. Further, proponents of Obamacare argued that Congress had the power to enforce compliance with the law under the Commerce clause of the Constitution, which bestows on Congress the power to “regulate interstate commerce.”

Opponents of the law have argued that Congress does not have the power to force individuals to engage in such commerce. During initial arguments before the Court, the Court rebutted this argument to some extent, dismissing the Solicitor General’s position that an absence from such commerce is no excuse for not complying with the mandates of Obamacare. The “individual mandate” – or the feature of force – became the bête noir of Obamacare.

Chief Justice Roberts, however, side-stepped the whole issue and, as some commentators have observed, “rewrote” the punitive feature of the individual mandate and called it a “tax,” arguing that such a tax is not outside the bounds of Congressional power. In that single act, Chief Justice Roberts, in an act of evasion and moral cowardice, conferred upon Congress the power and authority to tax every human action and commodity.

Violating the Aristotelian law that a thing cannot be A and non-A at the same time, Roberts wrote that the punitive penalty can be treated as a tax. Worse, the Constitution can limit Congress’s powers, and expand them at the same time, as well. He did not recognize the Commerce clause argument advocating compulsory engagement in the commerce of insurance. He recognized, however, Congress’s power to enslave and destroy.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-supreme-court-upholds-obamacare-a-sad-day-for-america The America I love is disappearing from the public scene. When the Supreme Court ruling upheld the constitutionality of ObamaCare, a disturbing and, in my opinion, dangerous precedent has been created, one not different from the “separate but equal” precedent behind Plessy v. Ferguson. A majority court decision confirms the view that there are […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/304646 Given how many more Americans define themselves as conservative than as liberal, let alone than as left, how does one explain the success of left-wing policies? One answer is the appeal of entitlements and a desire to be taken care of. It takes a strong-willed citizen to vote against receiving free benefits. But an […]

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2012/07/02/happy-spring-sharia-will-rule-egypt/?singlepage=true

ALSO READ: Salafi leader: Brotherhood agrees Sharia, not principles, to be legislative source

http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/salafi-leader-brotherhood-agrees-sharia-not-principles-be-legislative-source

Egypt’s military junta oversaw the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi’s assumption of the presidency over the weekend. Some in the press have reported this as a transfer of power from the military to the new, freely elected president. That is wrong: Egypt does not have a new constitution yet, and it is not clear exactly what the presidency will be.

It could be a very powerful post if the Islamic supremacists (the Muslim Brotherhood and the so-called Salafists) who overwhelmingly won the parliamentary elections get to write the constitution. But the junta, under cover of a court opinion, disbanded parliament before the presidential election and indicated that the generals would form a constitution-writing committee. If a committee selected by the junta ends up writing the constitution, the presidency could be an essentially ceremonial office. It is, however, hard to imagine that the Islamic supremacists will quietly abide an arrangement in which both their seeming acquisition of legislative authority is voided by the military and the presidency they also won is made toothless. Expect lots more trouble, of the violent kind.

From the perspective of true democratic reform (as opposed to the hollow shell of democratic procedures, a popular election by which a largely Sunni supremacist population ushers enemies of real democratic culture into power), the frightful thing is that the Obama administration and the West have chosen the wrong side: they are pressuring the moderately pro-Western military to hand over power to the Brotherhood, which despises the West.

While that struggle ensues, the very alarming development over the weekend is that the Brotherhood and the Salafists, who are determined to exercise the parliamentary power they accurately say they won fair and square, have thrown down the gauntlet on sharia — Islam’s totalitarian legal framework for society. The Egypt Independent reports that the collaborating Islamic supremacist factions have agreed that sharia itself — not just guidelines gleaned from sharia principles — will be the primary law of Egypt. If that happens, Egypt will far more resemble Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the fundamentalist-controlled Aceh province of Indonesia than what we prefer to imagine as “moderate” Islamic countries.

The report explains:

http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2012/07/02/mitt-romneys-big-problem-and-hence-ours/?print=1

WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE AND WHERE IS THE FIRE IN THE BELLY…..??? THE CANDIDATE WALKS SOFTLY AND CARRIES A CARROT…RSK

Mitt Romney’s Big Problem — and Hence Ours

Mitt Romney has a big problem, and it is one that he shares with many conservatives and Republicans who seem to believe that given the horrendous nature of Obama’s policies, he has to do very little to win. Unfortunately, a Romney victory in November is anything but a sure thing.

The polls right now show a very close race. And as most observers have noted, the outcome will be decided by a few voters in the swing states that Romney must conquer if he is to overtake the president. The latest Real Clear Politics compendium [1] of all the polls shows Obama with a 3.5% lead in the general election, 47.6% for Obama compared to 44.1% for Romney.

When you break the polls down to look at the data in the critical swing states and see which candidate has more of the crucial Electoral College votes [2] — the only thing that really count — the RCP data give Obama at present 221 and Romney only 181, with 131 a toss-up. So if the election were held today, there is more chance that Obama would get the necessary 270 electoral college votes. The swing states that are presently in neither man’s column include Michigan, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin. And Pennsylvania, that many thought would possibly now be a sure bet for Romney, is ranked as leaning to Obama.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/new-zimmerman-evidence-removes-any-doubt/?print=1

Several months ago, after a review of the then-available evidence, I concluded that George Zimmerman was innocent. New evidence, recently released by the trial judge, supports the fact that George Zimmerman is the victim of a liberal racist lynch mob. There is no doubt in my mind that Zimmerman is the main victim here and that President Obama, Attorney General Holder, Al Sharpton, special prosecutor Angela Corey, Sanford detective Chris Serino, and a host of others are prominent members of this shameful multiracial lynch mob.

In my previous article, I pointed out that I have investigated many cases of racial violence and police brutality, and have documented, in official federal reports, that many such awful events have indeed taken place in this country. Yet Zimmerman’s case did not have any of the features of those other incidents of racial brutality.

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

Sydney lawyer and international affairs analyst David Singer turns his attention to Israel’s probable next move in the face of Mr Abbas’s continuing intransigence.

“The inability of the international community to do anything to end the slaughter in Syria that has so far reportedly claimed 16000 lives in the last 15 months indicates that any protests at Israel extending its sovereignty into a large part of the West Bank where very few Arabs presently live – would be rhetoric at best and nothing more.”

A confluence of events is increasingly pointing to Israel taking action in the very near future to extend its sovereignty over a substantial part – if not all – of the 61% of the West Bank it has totally controlled since 1967 – unless Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas ends his posturing and submits to considerable loss of face by announcing he is now prepared to resume negotiations with Israel without preconditions of any kind.

Abbas himself only last week declared the negotiating processes begun under the Oslo Accords in 1993 and the Bush Roadmap in 2003 to be “clinically dead” (whatever that means). If he is not prepared to at least try to breathe life into those stalled processes by unconditionally returning to the negotiating table – he will be presiding over the irreversible end of those negotiations. Israel is not going to continue to mark time waiting for Abbas to end his political filibuster.

Abbas’s attempts to procure international pressure to be brought to bear on Israel to freeze building activities in the West Bank as a condition of resuming such negotiations have failed. He has literally been left to hang out to dry.

His meeting with Russian President Putin – during Putin’s visit to Israel, the West Bank and Jordan this week – clearly indicated his desperation and frustration – as revealed in the following press release:

“We assured the president that the way to peace is through negotiations with Israel, and we continue to call for him to hold an international peace conference in Moscow, as we previously agreed. We asked our friends to help us to release our prisoners who were arrested prior to 1994, who it was agreed with Israel would be released, but have not yet been freed, If it (Israel) frees these prisoners, there could be a meeting with Mr Netanyahu for a session of dialogue but that doesn’t mean negotiations,”

Only one person – President Obama – can possibly resuscitate the negotiations by inducing Israel to impose a building freeze for a limited time in the West Bank or release more prisoners than the thousands it has already don

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/07/when_everythings_been_said.html It was at dinner in the garden of a well-known analyst of Iran. He’d spent years writing prolifically and astutely about the regime, its progress on nuclear technology, dissidents, U.S. policy, Israeli policy, and the machinations of the P5+1. “What’s the latest on your blog?” we asked. “Italian food,” he replied. “There’s nothing left […]