RUTHFULLY YOURS

Senators can and should ask whether she’ll disavow Eric Holder’s most controversial policies.

When attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a two-day confirmation hearing this Wednesday and Thursday, there are many questions she must answer in detail — not just about her conduct as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, but also about her views of the law and specific, deeply troublesome actions (and inactions) that the Justice Department has taken under Attorney General Eric Holder.

Some of the actions and statements of Eric Holder during his years in office have made a mockery of principled law enforcement, yet there has been little to stop him. Congressional oversight, embarrassing unpopularity, and repeated 9–0 Supreme Court decisions against the DOJ’s extreme legal positions have done little to alter the leftward course of this most powerful of federal agencies. Holder has held nobody at the Justice Department accountable for scandal after scandal, from the unjustified dismissal of the New Black Panther Party voter-intimidation case to the reckless Operation Fast and Furious program and the criminal targeting of reporters for alleged leaks. Even finding Holder in criminal contempt of Congress for his refusal to provide documentation to which Congress is entitled has failed to constrain him.

The White House has now become a stickler for protocol, especially when it comes to relations between the two political branches.

The new persnicketiness arises from House speaker John Boehner’s invitation to Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu to speak before a joint session of Congress in March. The invite is being denounced as a major breach and new low in Washington because he didn’t, as had been the traditional practice with such invitations, coordinate with the White House.

As far as violations of the separation of powers in the Obama era, it’s hard to see how this even comes close to registering. Maybe Emily Post wouldn’t approve, and with a different administration it would be worth honoring every courtesy, but we are far beyond that now.

I am not a reflexive Palin basher, but I agree with this….Rick Santorum, Palin, Jeb Bush, Huckabee et.al.should make room for new faces….Governor Scott Walker comes to mind…..not a repeat of the primary follies of 2012…..rsk
Her recent performance in Iowa should disqualify her from any role in the GOP going forward.

In Des Moines this past weekend, Sarah Palin gave a speech, and at long last the vultures began to circle. “A tragedy,” declared Joe Scarborough, on Morning Joe; “bizarro,” ajudged the London Times’ Toby Harnden; “an interminable ramble,” said Iowa professor Sam Clovis. These, alas were among the kinder adjectives.

In the Washington Examiner, Byron York treated those who missed the address to a brutal dissection. First, he recorded, Palin subjected the crowd to an “extended stream-of-consciousness complaint about media coverage of her decision to run in a half-marathon race in Storm Lake, Iowa.” Next, she offered up some self-righteous “grumbling about coverage of a recent photo of her with a supporter” and a litany of “objections about the social media ruckus over a picture of her six-year-old son Trig.” And, finally, she embarked upon a “free-association ramble on Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, the energy industry, her daughter Bristol, Margaret Thatcher, middle-class economics . . . women in politics, and much more.” All in all, York proposed, this did her no favors at all. Rather, the “long, rambling, and at times barely coherent speech, left some wondering what role she should play in Republican politics as the 2016 race begins.”

This, I think, is a good question, and one to which I have a modest answer: How about . . . none?

Not since the 1930s and early 1940s have we seen so many malevolent empires on the rise.

Empires can rise and fall quickly. After World War I, the Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman, and Russian Empires abruptly collapsed amid military defeat, rising nationalism, and revolution.

Yet on the eve of World War II four new empires suddenly grew out the wreckage of old Europe and Asia. A weak Italy under Fascist Benito Mussolini in just a few years grabbed much of East and North Africa, as well as the Dalmatian coast. Hitler’s so-called “Third Empire” carved off Austria and strips of Eastern Europe — and planned to go to war for more. The Soviet Union absorbed the Baltic states and southern Finland. Japan declared first Manchuria, and then Southeast Asia, part of its new “Co-Prosperity Sphere.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Hamas-derived “civil rights” group, “repeated its defense of freedom of speech” in a baffling January 7 press release that “condemned” the Paris jihadist Charlie Hebdo massacre. A trip down a bad memory lane, though, is necessary in order to evaluate critically CAIR’s commitment to free speech rights with proverbial grains of salt equivalent to the Dead Sea’s renowned salinity.

CAIR, an unindicted terrorism coconspirator, and “defense of freedom of speech” simply do not match. CAIR, for example, has unsuccessfully tried to stop critical commentary on Islam in an American public library and school. CAIR has also harassed a Michigan individual who opposed a mosque construction with frivolous subpoenas, ultimately quashed. One 2012 article on the CAIR-Chicago affiliate website discussed how the First Amendment has “been manipulated to make America the catalyst for unjust hate.”

A retired Army lieutenant colonel, Anthony Shaffer, whom FOX News uses frequently to determine goings-on in the Pentagon, revealed last night that the Army is not the culprit in the cover-up of the Bowe Bergdahl investigation. According to the colonel’s internal Pentagon sources, the Army has already charged Bergdahl with desertion but has been stymied in pursuing the normal court-martial processes due to oppressive command influence from the White House. According to Shaffer’s sources, the immediate culprit is Ben Rhodes, current deputy national security adviser for strategic communication for Barack Obama.

White House fear is totally understandable. If you had traded five key terrorist leaders for one American G.I. and your hero turned out to be a deserter who willingly left his post and his unit and went over to the enemy in time of war, wouldn’t you be embarrassed? Worse, had you quite publicly invited said deserter’s parents to stroll congenially and intimately through the White House Rose Garden with you, and then had that event broadcast round the world, wouldn’t you be embarrassed?

The murder of dozens of Jews in Buenos Aires 20 years ago by Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists is being whitewashed in Barack Obama and the West’s desperate policy of making nice with Tehran.

In downtown Buenos Aires there is a cream painted building locked down like Fort Knox. Alongside the building is a billboard, but it’s no suave ad for Kelvin Klein. The billboard is black, and eighty five names, handwritten in white, cover it from top to bottom.

They are mainly the names of Jews. Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorists murdered the eighty five when they blew up the Jewish community building, badly injuring many more. This happened in 1994.

Lately, Argentinian President Cristina de Kirchner, another Eva Peron in her beauty and blinding ambition, has been bartering with Iran: a cover-up of the crime in exchange for Iranian oil and Argentine grain.

Claims that Islamist violence has nothing to do with Islam normally come from the liberal/Left, the usual suspects in Britain being the Guardian and the Independent.

Lately however there have been somewhat similar claims made or suggested by the conservative Right, for example by Daniel Hannan, Conservative Member of the European Parliament, who is very well known for his general concerns about the European Union and the future of Europe.

Writing at CapX, a free-market online news service, Mr Hannan claimed that the Charlie Hebdo murderers were social “losers”, young men who were alienated from wider French society and were in no way representative of Islam or of Muslim beliefs.

So, like many on the Left, the Conservative Mr Hannan seeks, in a sense, to contextualise the Charlie Hebdo murders by blaming wider French society. The killers were social rejects, he says; educational failures, welfare addicts etc, and in frustration at French social injustice, they hit out in the only way they knew.

The sky over New York City was a falling sheet of white. Trails of footprints, work boots, paw prints, sneakers and bird claws, told their own story of how the residents of city were getting through the blizzard to their daily errands. Shoppers lugged home milk as if cows were going extinct. Miniature snowmen decorated mailboxes and garbage trucks towing orange plows clattered down empty streets.

Nowhere in the city was the blizzard more pronounced than in Central Park, designed a century ago to create a miniature forest in the heart of Manhattan. Even the tallest trees, taller than any others in the city, were layered with coats of snow and visibility had vanished into a cloud of whiteness.

And walking along a path in the Ramble, I heard a woman lecturing her children on the dangers of what else, but Global Warming.

Flying James Taylor to Paris to sing You’ve Got A Friend as a gesture of sympathy to France over the Charlie Hebdo attacks, as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry did, was barely less ridiculous than if Canada had dispatched Céline Dion to sing My Heart Will Go On, according to Mark Steyn.

“I would fully have supported Paris nuking Ottawa over that,” said Mr. Steyn, the famously witty cultural doomsayer who is in Toronto this week to be interviewed by Indigo Books & Music Inc. chief executive Heather Reisman about his new book The [Un]documented Mark Steyn on Wednesday night at Indigo Manulife Centre.

“I’m glad that Canada did not descend to the level of the government of the United States,” he said. “I’m also glad that Stephen Harper was not in that lineup of prime ministers holding hands in the street, because I think what was going on there was really an appropriation of the sacrifice of these men.”