RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Jan. 10, a protester holding a sign “I am Charlie” was arrested in Moscow and later sentenced to eight days in jail. A few days later, the federal media watchdog ordered the St. Petersburg edition of the Business News Agency to remove the new cover of Charlie Hebdo from its website. The same agency was warned that reprinting the cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad could be considered a criminal offense, and that it would violate the “ethical and moral norms formed in Russia through the centuries of different peoples and faiths living side by side.”

On Monday, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, whom Vladimir V. Putin appointed president of Chechnya in 2007, held a mass rally in Grozny, the regional capital, against “the enemies of Islam.” It was reportedly attended by tens of thousands of people, many of them sporting slogans that read “We love Muhammad,” in Russian, Arabic and English. The largest banner quoted Mr. Putin: “Islam is a vital part of Russia’s cultural makeup.” In his speech, Mr. Kadyrov pledged to defend Russia and denounced Western journalists and politicians.

The Iowa Freedom Summit this weekend became a major event, with 1,500 voters and 200 journalists crammed into an old theater near downtown Des Moines. It showcased more than a dozen potential Republican presidential candidates, and even though big names such as Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, Senator Rand Paul, and Governor Bobby Jindal didn’t make it, voters and journalists were able to size up most of the GOP field on the same stage for the first time.

The field this cycle is the most open and competitive I’ve ever seen. Traditionally, Republicans have picked as their nominee the candidate who placed second in the most recent competitive nomination contest (the “it’s your turn” mentality). Think Ronald Reagan in 1980, George H. W. Bush in 1988, Bob Dole in 1992, John McCain in 2008, and Mitt Romney in 2012. This year is different. The number-two candidate in 2012 was former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum; even though he might run again, he isn’t accorded first-tier status for 2016.

Clear winners and losers emerged from the marathon ten-hour session of back-to-back speeches that was hosted by Citizens United (the group at the center of the famous Supreme Court case) and Iowa congressman Steve King.

Here’s the rundown.

WINNERS
Scott Walker — The Wisconsin governor proved he can be a dynamic speaker, striding the stage in shirtsleeves and demonstrating Midwest sensibilities that connected him to his Iowa audience. Who knew that he’d lived in Iowa until the third grade or that he was an expert coupon clipper at Kohl’s, a well-known regional department-store chain? Walker made a strong case for electability: “I’ve won the race for governor three times in the last four years — three times, mind you, in a state that hasn’t voted Republican for president since I was in high school 30 years ago.” Everyone knew Walker had triumphed in his hard-fought battles against the state’s public-sector unions. After his speech this weekend, Iowa audiences will clearly now get the rest of the Walker story.

The FCIC (Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission), the Commission of which Representative Phil Angelides (D-CA) was chairman, reached nine main conclusions as to the cause of the near credit collapse in 2008, not one of which cited the role played by Congress, prior Administrations, or Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE). The Commission was comprised of ten people, five Senators and five Representatives. Six were appointed by Democrats and four by Republicans. It was like having the fox investigate the stealing of chickens.

Certainly the causes cited by Mr. Angelides played a role. Regulatory supervision was lax, as were corporate governance and risk management assessments. Homeowners took on more debt than was prudent, and investors bought mortgage securities without paying adequate attention to the risks they entailed. There was little transparency and government was ill prepared for the crisis. There was a breakdown in business ethics (assuming they ever existed), as well as in mortgage-lending standards. Over-the-counter derivatives played a part, and credit rating agencies – with ratings paid for by the seller – were disingenuous. Buoyant markets and sunny days led to an aversion to skepticism.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referenced his upcoming address to a joint session of Congress in remarks at today’s cabinet meeting, stating that he has a duty without borders to keep Iran from going nuclear.

“In the coming weeks, the major powers are liable to reach a framework agreement with Iran, an agreement that is liable to leave Iran as a nuclear threshold state, which would endanger – first and foremost – the existence of the State of Israel,” Netanyahu said at the outset of the meeting. “This is the same Iran that has taken over Lebanon and Syria and is now taking over Yemen and Iraq. This is the same Iran that is preparing an active front against us both on the Golan Heights and in southern Lebanon. This same Iran cannot advance toward nuclear weapons.”

Iran’s Press TV reported Saturday that a Revolutionary Guard commander threatened to open a new front against Israel across the West Bank.

“We will certainly consider a special retaliation for this issue,” IRGC’s second-in-command, Brigadier General Hossein Salami, told al-Alam of the recent strike that killed six Hezbollah members and an Iranian general in the Golan Heights. “This is part of a new reality that will gradually unravel.”

http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001511.html

For those pressed for time, I recommend reading at least the first two. The first is a tough critique of the Saudi regime, and the second a good round-up of the sycophantic tributes paid to this despot.

CONTENTS
1. “King Abdullah embodied the wickedness of Saudi Arabia’s regime” (By Andrew Brown, The Guardian, Jan. 23, 2015)
2. “Why is Westminster Abbey honouring the king of a country where Christianity is banned?” (By Ed West, The Spectator, Jan. 23, 2015)
3. “Our ally Saudi Arabia beheaded 10 people this month” (By David Keyes, The Daily Beast, Jan. 18, 2015)
4. “King Abdullah, a feminist? Don’t make me laugh” (By Anne Perkins, The Guardian, Jan. 23, 2015)

***“SAUDI’S INFLUENCE ON THE OUTSIDE WORLD IS ALMOST WHOLLY MALIGN”
King Abdullah embodied the wickedness of Saudi Arabia’s regime

Change may be looming for Saudi Arabia, but reforming a country where torture, corruption and judicial murder are commonplace won’t be easy

The Jerusalem Post reports:

The Fox news segment, on the show “Shepard Smith Reporting,” began with a response to a quote from Martin Indyk from The New York Times on Thursday wherein the former US ambassador to Israel and the former US envoy to the peace process says: “Netanyahu is using the Republican Congress for a photo-op for his election campaign and the Republicans are using Bibi for their campaign against Obama…Unfortunately the US relationship will take the hit. It would be far wiser for us to stay out of their politics and for them to stay out of ours.”

Wallace said he agreed completely with Indyk and that he was “shocked” by the whole affair.

Smith queried whether Netanyahu would back out of the speech because, “Members of his own Mossad have come out and said this is a horrible idea and so have members of his own political party. Of course his political opponents are screaming up and down, the newspapers over there are going wild over this,” he added.

When Boston Was the Frontier Colonists thought the New World was a place to be discovered. It was also a place where they discovered themselves as Americans.More than a century ago, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner asserted that the colonial frontier turned European emigrants into American democrats. Having crossed the Atlantic, colonists plunged into a wild world of dense forests and savage people. In braving the dangers and seizing new opportunities, the newcomers gradually shed their European heritage, which valued cohesion, tradition and hierarchy. These newly made Americans would come to cherish individualism, innovation, equal legal rights, and the unequal economic results of geographic and social mobility. With his “Frontier Thesis,” Turner codified a long-standing version of American self-explanation that went back at least to the 18th century, when John Hector St. John de Crèvecouer in his “Letters From an American Farmer” famously asked: “What, then, is the American, this new man?”

Migration to a strange land inevitably changes people, but “American exceptionalism” insists upon a stark, indeed a complete, transformation in which Americans became the utter inversion of Europeans. Shades of gray will not do. In his lively “Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans,” Malcolm Gaskill seeks to qualify, but not forsake, the exceptionalist story by applying a shiny coat of ambiguity and contradiction.

First his death was declared a suicide; now Argentina’s president says it was the work of her enemies. What about Tehran?
It’s hard to know who had most to gain—and the least to lose—from the death of Argentine federal prosecutor Alberto Nisman. I’d say it’s Iran.

Nisman was scheduled to testify last week to the Argentine Congress about his investigation into the 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish community center that killed 85. In 2006 he indicted seven Iranians and one Lebanese-born member of Hezbollah for the crime. None have been captured, though the Lebanese suspect was killed in 2008 in Syria.

Earlier this month Nisman filed a criminal complaint in an Argentine court, alleging that President Cristina Kirchner and Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman had crafted a secret agreement with Iran to let the terrorists off the hook in exchange for Iranian oil largess and Iranian purchases of Argentine grain.

Nisman claimed he had a solid case against la presidenta and her alleged co-conspirators, and he released a summary of a 300-page report on his investigation. He promised to reveal more at the hearing.

Argentina is a lovely country if you forget all the dictators, juntas, strongmen, and assorted socialists, fascists, and communists who have run the country ragged, or that Fidel Castro’s favorite killer, Che Guevara, was an Argentine. It’s a far nicer country than is Saudi Arabia. I have been to Argentina, stayed in Buenos Aires and visited the Alpine-like resort town of San Carlos de Barilochi on Nahuel Huapi Lake in the west near the Chilean border.

Argentina is a country settled and populated by people from a variety of European countries: Italy, Germany, England, Ireland, Spain, Russia, Scandinavia, and by Jews from the same nations. It is as nearly a “melting pot” as is the U.S. From the late 19th century until the early 20th Argentina was an industrial nation that rivaled the U.S. and Great Britain in GNP and productivity and wealth. Then, around 1930, it caught the European collectivist/nationalist disease that was half Fascism and half Marxism, spiced with Latin American passion, and it has been in decline ever since.

But then the U.S. caught the same bug just a little earlier than that.

Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is an arid, hot country. Or is it an inflated tribal fiefdom in thrall to a Wahhabist theocracy? Was the Vito Corleone crime family ever recognized as a nation? Go figure. I would never set foot in Saudi Arabia even had I been forgiven all the critical things I’ve written about Islam. Saudi Arabia is a country that thrives on loot extorted from industrialized nations. It has been doing so since the end of WWI.

Saudi Arabia is not a “melting pot” populated by people from other nations. It is overwhelmingly Arab in population. Immigration to the place is severely limited, if not outright prohibited. Non-Muslim foreign nationals residing there, such as diplomats, engineers, and the like, are there on sufferance, and are restricted in where they can go and what they can do, confined to kaffir ghettoes. Freedom of speech does not exist there. The slightest squawk about Islam or the slightest infraction of Sharia law earns one horrific punishments. The 1,000 lashes “earned” by Raif Badawi, a Saudi blogger who offended the theocrats on the Internet, is a measure of the utter irrationality and barbarity of Islamic “justice.” It hangs gays, amputates the hands of thieves, and strives to keep women under wraps, literally, not to be seen, nor even heard.

Saudi Arabia is not a “republic,” nor a “democracy,” nor even a “people’s state.” It is Saudi property, lock, stock and barrel.

Days before the opening of the a long-anticipated public inquiry into the circumstances of the murder of former KGB spy Alexander Litvinenko, in London, the Telegraph UK reported that “American spies” of the NSA had intercepted communications between London and Moscow, fingering those involved in his murder in November 2006, which they provided to British authorities. The inquiry itself, much of which will be held in secret and will hear evidence inadmissible in a trial, is scheduled to last for two months.

Litvinenko’s murder by poisoning with a difficult to detect, rare and highly radioactive isotope, polonium-210, was described by many as a “Russian-backed” state execution. The Russians did not hesitate to use this radioactive weapon on British soil, perhaps because they knew they could get away easily.