RUTHFULLY YOURS

Earth day 2016 TURN LIGHTS OFF
Earth Hour 2016 will be held on Saturday 19 March between 8.30PM and … The first thing anyone can do to get involved is to turn off their lights on Saturday. … the lights are turned off at the end of the business day the Friday before Earth Hour …
My Earth Day Message:
Keep the home lights burning…..RSK

After President Obama moved on his own to normalize relations with Cuba, White House officials told reporters they were confident that the thaw between the countries would result in positive change in Cuba. How’s that working out?

Not well. Political dissidents were rounded up before and after Obama’s visit last month. The Columbia Journalism Review noted that last week’s Communist Party Congress was “a particularly opaque affair, even by Cuban standards. Raúl Castro emphatically rejected new reforms during the opening speech.” “Julie Martinez,” a Havana secretary who asked that her real name not be used, told the Financial Times: “The same [80-year old] leaders and the same [lack of] reforms. . . . Am I supposed to wait till I’m their age to see some real change?”

Castro supporters are crowing that the Cuban regime has gained new credibility and legitimacy without having to make more than surface concessions to openness. Indeed, the evidence is that the U.S. policy on Cuban dissidents has, if anything, gotten worse since Obama’s opening. “Obama said his policies would help change Cuba, but instead the evidence is that Cuba is changing America more,” concludes Thor Halvorssen, founder of the Human Rights Foundation, an internationally respected organization fighting authoritarian and totalitarian rule of both the Right and the Left.

Consider the following three examples of U.S. interests’ kowtowing to the Cuban regime, and discriminating against Cuban Americans, in just the last month.

Paquito D’Rivera, a Cuban-American jazz musician who has won 14 Grammys, had already played at White House events. He was invited to perform there again, on April 29, by the renowned Thelonious Monk Institute — but was then told by the White House that he wouldn’t be attending, because he was “not passing the vetting process.”

D’Rivera quickly smelled a Castro rat, and expressed his belief that Cuban officials had intervened and tried to have him banned. In February, he had told the Miami New Times that Obama’s openness to Cuba would result only in “cosmetic” changes, mostly improvements in the Cuban elite’s access to the West: “Maybe now, some people, some elites, have the chance to go play with American musicians, like Wynton Marsalis going and playing there . . . but that doesn’t change much.”

President Obama came into office in 2009 promising “transformation” and he has delivered on that promise. Over the past 7 1/2 years we’ve witnessed billion dollar deficits and the establishment of a highly politicized and inexorably failing health care system (“Obamacare”); the “weaponization” of government agencies (think, IRS, EPA, DOJ) to intimidate and attack his political opponents; the calculated and feckless decline of American power and influence throughout the world; relentless redistributionist policies; and the president’s support (often with a wink and a nod) of thuggish (and sometimes violent) radical groups like “Occupy Wall Street” and “Black Lives Matter.” As a result, America is “on edge” — socially, racially, economically — as it hasn’t been for decades. Indeed, many have reached the sobering insight that America’s best days may now be behind her.

Overlooked by most in Obama’s relentless efforts to “remake” America has been his ongoing and dangerous transformation of our military. Here I am not going address the dozens of weapon systems cut, or the tens of thousands of troops given their “pink slips.” What I want to speak to is his administration’s systematic destruction of the 200+ year-old culture of the U.S. military. This “multicultural makeover,” happening right before our eyes, threatens to undermine the very fabric of our armed forces. The forced acceptance of open homosexuality and the burgeoning hostility toward Christianity; the gratuitous degradation of our troops (e.g., forcing ROTC cadets to march in red high heels to experience what it’s like to be a woman; making male soldiers wear simulated lactation devices, or lecturing them on “white privilege,” dare I go on?); the “full-court press” to make our forces more diverse, most alarmingly by opening up combat positions (even special forces) to female soldiers; and the relentless purging from the ranks of dozens of fine general officers whose only “offense” was their failure to “get with the program” — all of this, like some nightmarish “progressive” Blitzkrieg, is now wreaking havoc with our reluctant service members, the objective being that of a complete and irreversible cultural transformation. What’s next, I wonder — weaponized hair and nail salons on wheels?

The 28 pages of a Congressional report detailing where the 9/11 hijackers got their financing have been classified for years, but what they contain is an open secret. Former Senator Bob Graham explained: “The 28 pages primarily relate to who financed 9/11, and they point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as being the principal financier.” So why keep this information secret? Because the Saudis wield undue influence in Washington, among both parties – an influence that has deformed our response to the global jihad threat, and continues to do so.

Responding to a bill that would allow 9/11 victims’ families to sue governments linked to terror attacks inside the U.S., the Saudis have acted like neither an ally nor an innocent party: they’ve threatened to sell $750 billion in U.S. asserts, vividly demonstrating why their influence in Washington is so detrimental.

Nonetheless, they still have a friend in Barack Obama, a man who has never hesitated to reach out in friendship to those who threaten the United States. Obama is trying to get Congress to reject the bill, and his solicitude for the Saudis is drawing criticism even from members of his own party. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) called on him to release the 28 pages: “If the president is going to meet with the Saudi Arabian leadership and the royal family, they think it would be appropriate that this document be released before the president makes that trip, so that they can talk about whatever issues are in that document.”

The New York Daily News, normally a reliable Democratic Party organ, fumed: “If the President allows himself to get pushed around this way in front of the world, then he earns every bit of the anger being directed at him by the extended family of September 11.”

Of course, all too many Republicans are just as much in the tank for the Saudis as the Democrats. CBS News reported on September 30, 2001, on George W. Bush’s watch, that “two dozen members of Osama bin Laden’s family were urgently evacuated from the United States in the first days following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, according to the Saudi ambassador to Washington.” If Hitler had had twenty-four relatives on U.S. soil on December 8, 1941, would FDR have urgently evacuated them to Berlin?