RUTHFULLY YOURS

D.C.’s delegate to Congress today asked “what can we do about the irrationally negative views of Islam and Muslims that have grown since 9/11” after a prayer service at Northern Virginia mosque Dar Al-Hijrah.

The Falls Church mosque was home to imam Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born al-Qaeda recruiter whose videos continue to inspire jihadists today. Sept. 11 hijackers Hani Hanjour and Nawaf al-Hazmi attended prayer services at the mosque, as noted in the 9/11 Commission report.

Besides D.C.’s Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), Reps. Don Beyer (D-Va.) and Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) attended Friday’s prayer service to show solidarity with the local Muslim community.

At a press conference after prayers, Norton said “one might ask what a small band of members of Congress can do to counter indiscriminate bigotry against Muslim Americans.”

“What can we do when the loudest voices preaching Islamophobia are amplified daily? The three of us would have to concede not much, although we know of many more members who would have joined us today had Congress not adjourned yesterday, and many are attending services at mosques in their home districts,” she said.

The Senate voted 52-47 to gut Obamacare, strengthening a House passed bill that many conservatives – including Ted Cruz and Mike Lee – didn’t think went far enough.

The House vote on the amended version will come in the next few days and is almost certain to pass. This means that for the first time, President Obama will be forced to veto an Obamacare repeal bill – a prospect that many political experts think will benefit Republicans.

Obamacare is slowly melting down as exchanges are shuttered, insurance companies are pulling out, and fewer healthy people are signing up for coverage. The writing is on the wall and Republicans are salivating about running against the unpopular program.

The Hill:

The vote caps weeks of intense and at times acrimonious debate within the Senate GOP conference over how far the repeal should go.

Conservative Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who are running for president, and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) threatened to oppose a House-passed repeal bill for not going far enough.

Three moderates, Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), balked at it for including language defunding Planned Parenthood.

GOP leaders briefly floated the possibility of dropping the Planned Parenthood language but dropped the idea knowing it could spark a conservative backlash.

Instead, McConnell leaned on Cruz, Rubio and Lee to vote yes and sweetened the prospect by crafting an amendment that dramatically beefed up the Senate package. All three voted yes.

Little appreciated in the current debate on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) is the dramatic way the TPP will abrogate legislative authority permanently from the U.S. Congress to the president. TPP creates a commission with full power to amend the agreement, and an arbitration mechanism with the strength to enforce such amendments. The House and Senate gave up their rights to amend TPP, but they can still vote it down when it comes up for up-or-down votes in both chambers next year.

Although many people still labor under the delusion that TPP is a free trade agreement, the 5,544 page TPP regulates trade, the environment, immigration, patents, copyrights, and labor laws among the 12 countries that are participants and the additional countries that are expected to join. Consequently, in a post-TPP world, U.S. presidents could force almost any alteration in U.S. law simply by achieving support in the TPP commission for a U.S. specific modification to the TPP. Case in point today, Obama’s climate ambitions.

President Obama entered the White House believing that the “war on terror” was a misguided overreaction driven by political fear, and his government even stopped using the term. Seven years later Mr. Obama is presiding over a global jihadist revival that now threatens the American homeland more than at any time since the attacks of September 11, 2001.

That’s the distressing lesson of the recent spate of terror bombings that this week arrived at a center for the disabled in San Bernardino, California. FBI Director James Comey said Friday that his agency is now investigating Wednesday’s massacre of 14 people as an act of terrorism and that the two Muslim killers showed “indications of radicalization.”

Mr. Comey added that while there is no evidence so far that the killers were part of a larger terror cell or plot, there are some indications of potential foreign terror “inspiration.” The latter would have to mean Islamic State or al Qaeda, perhaps through the Internet.

The FBI director said more than once that the investigation is in the early stages, but he deserves support for speaking frankly about the evidence and dangers. Every instinct of this Administration, starting with the President, has been to minimize the terror risk on U.S. soil—perhaps because it contradicts Mr. Obama’s political belief that all we have to fear is fear of terrorism itself.

A few weeks before Syed Farook went on his ritual killing spree in San Bernardino, he got into an argument about Islam with one of the co-workers he later murdered.

The co-worker said that Islam wasn’t peaceful. Farook said it was.

Like most Islamic theological arguments, this was one was settled with bombs and bullets.

The motive is officially still unknown. Obama said it might be terrorism or a workplace thing. His laughably corrupt Attorney General, Loretta Lynch said, “We don’t know if this was workplace rage or something larger or a combination of both.”

The kind of workplace rage that leads a couple to assemble a small army’s worth of firepower, some bombs and tactical gear, destroy their cell phones and carry out a massacre all within 20 minutes.

This story is brought to you by the same people who insisted that the assault on the Benghazi compound conducted with heavy firepower was really a spontaneous movie review.

Even with many details about the San Bernardino, Calif., massacre still unknown, law-enforcement officials see a chilling terror danger from extremist sympathizers who, unnoticed by authorities, are able to amass deadly arsenals to attack vulnerable gatherings anywhere in the U.S.

Much about the case has crystallized trends that officials have feared for years: The attackers, a young married couple with a baby, had never surfaced as subjects of any terror investigation and lived apparently ordinary suburban lives while secretly stockpiling guns, ammunition and homemade bombs.

The attacks Wednesday believed carried out by Syed Rizwan Farook, a religious Muslim and U.S. citizen, and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, a native of Pakistan, targeted a gathering of county workers far from any high-profile metropolis. The couple entered the room armed to kill a lot of people, quickly.

“Terrorists have adapted and evolved in order to carry out heinous plots since 9/11, and this tragedy reinforces the need for law enforcement to evolve its intelligence-gathering and investigative techniques,’’ said U.S. Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R., Va.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

As the shooting rampage was about to begin, authorities said, Ms. Malik posted a message on Facebook pledging her allegiance to the leader of Islamic State. Pipe bombs later found at the couple’s Redlands, Calif., home echoed designs posted online by the al Qaeda publication, Inspire. The Federal Bureau of Investigation said they had evidence the couple showed signs of radicalization.