RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Obama talking point being repeated by the administration’s note-takers in the media is that it makes sense for the president to try a different approach on Cuba because the policy of isolating the dictatorship has not “worked.” Naturally, what is meant by “worked” is not stated.

I’m trying to figure out what exactly the supposed flaw has been in the policy of isolating a brutal regime diplomatically and imposing a trade embargo on it – one that is a lot more like a screen than a wall – in order to pressure it to reform.

American presidents have vast foreign policy powers and plenary control over which regimes the United States recognizes and conducts diplomatic relations with. The Cuban embargo, by contrast, was established by statute and can only be repealed by Congress. Thus, it has many times been repeated over the last 24 hours that, in reestablishing diplomatic relations, President Obama has gone as far as he can on his own – the rest being up to lawmakers.

Wrong.

Several laws control the embargo. Among the most recent is the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act (codified in Chapter 69 of Title 22, U.S. Code). Section 6005 of the law outlines sanctions imposed against Cuba – the qualified blockade, prohibition on some financial transactions, and limitation on remittances.

But then there is Section 6007, the waiver provision. This tells us that, while it is true that it would require an act of Congress to repeal the restrictions on Cuba, no legislation is necessary to ignore the restrictions. The act empowers the president to do that on his own. All he needs to do is represent to Congress that the Cuban government

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/arizona-2014-candidates-for-congress-where-they-stand

Martha E. McSally is a retired United States Air Force colonel. She was the first American woman to fly in combat since the 1991 lifting of the prohibition of women in combat, flying the A-10 over Iraq. She was defeated in her first run for Congress in 2012 by Democrat Ron Barber.

These were the main issues that drove her campaign:

I wore the uniform to serve and make a difference and I am running for Congress to continue that service in DC. This election is going to be about the economy, government overreach, national security, and leadership.

Enacting Patient-Centered Health Care Reform

Our health care system has been broken for a long time, but the president’s health care law is not the solution to fix it. In some cases, it is making matters worse. Because of Obamacare, families I’ve talked with are paying higher premiums, facing reduced choices, and losing insurance they liked and the doctors they’ve known and trusted for years. Small business owners are being buried under piles of new paperwork and letting workers go, while many hourly workers are seeing their hours cut. Doctors are spending more time doing paperwork and compliance than treating patients, and students are no longer incentivized to become doctors, exacerbating the current shortage for the future. This law isn’t working for Southern Arizonans, and we should replace it with a bipartisan solution that puts families first and tackles the greatest flaws in our health care system.

Economy: Families in our community are barely getting by, small businesses are struggling to survive, and Davis-Monthan is at risk of closing. My opponent was asleep at the wheel on the risk to DM until I alerted him in an August 27th, 2013 op-ed. Supporting small businesses and growing good paying jobs is critical to our area and is a top priority of mine. We need a representative in Congress who is going to champion solutions and policies that bring economic growth to Southern Arizona.

Government Overreach: So many people in Southern Arizona have been hurt by Obamacare, Ron Barber supports it. We need common sense solutions to bring down the cost of healthcare so it is more affordable and available, not social engineering founded on mandates, taxes, and penalties. Every dollar that is taken from a small business is a dollar that doesn’t go to new equipment, more employees or raises. Every regulation requires more and more paperwork and it is drowning our job creators. I am running to roll back these and other stifling government intrusions.

National Security: America is facing an increasing array of threats to our security and way of life and we must ensure we have a military that is trained and equipped to protect us. This district contains two critical military bases, a large stretch of the border that is not secure, and 85,000 veterans, as well as citizens who care deeply about the lack of leadership in DC on national security, defense, and support to veterans. I served 26 years in the military, retiring as a full Colonel, and I have the experience and proven leadership to provide oversight to the Administration to defend America.

Leadership: Washington is broken. People are rightfully fed up with politicians and incumbents. We need servant leadership more than ever, focused on what is best for the country and community, instead of worrying about their next election. I am ready to bring to Congress the core values I learned in the Air Force; service, excellence, and integrity. It’s time for a fresh face with a proven record of leadership to solve the challenges we face and put Southern Arizona First.

PHOENIX (AP) — Republicans will have their largest U.S. House majority in 83 years when the new Congress convenes next month after a recount in Arizona gave the final unresolved midterm race to a Republican challenger.

Retired Air Force Col. Martha McSally won a House seat over Democratic incumbent Ron Barber by 167 votes out of nearly 220,000 cast, according to results released Wednesday.

Barber was district director for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords when he and the congresswoman were wounded in a mass shooting at apolitical event in Tucson in January 2011. Barber then won a special election to fill out the remainder of Giffords’ term after she stepped down in early 2012. He went on to defeat McSally in that year’s general election to win a full term in Congress, in a race separated by fewer than 2,500 votes.

Barber said he wouldn’t contest the results and that he called McSally to congratulate her. “I want her to be successful because the people of southern Arizona deserve that,” he said.

McSally said it was time to unite after a long campaign battle and that she plans to focus on economic development and border security. “These things are not politically charged, and really it’s where the majority of people that I talk to, where they want my focus to be,” she said. “So my intent is to represent them on the things that unite us and not the things that divide us.”

Vulnerable cyber communications are fast becoming the preferred Weapon of Mass Effect (WME), the safest venue to attack the U.S. economy, national security, and even the right to free expression.

Sony’s recent hacking and publication of its files, allegedly by North Korean hackers, has meant heavy short- and long-term damage to the company. Moreover, it has intimidated Sony’s executives into first, toning down “The Interview,” a film describing the fictional assassination of Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, and today, to canceling the release of the film on Christmas day.

The latest threat of physical damage like the 9/11 attacks by the unidentified hackers, have intimidated Sony’s management enough to to announce “We are deeply saddened at this brazen effort to suppress the distribution of a movie, and in the process do damage to our company, our employees, and the American public.” And while declaring: “We stand by our filmmakers and their right to free expression,” they attempt to distance themselves from their submission to the hackers demand to stop the screening, saying, “we are extremely disappointed by this outcome.”

This hacking, as JP Morgan Chase, the Las Vegas Sands, and other major business, government, and infrastructure cyber attacks could have been prevented, or mitigated, by implementing superior cybersecurity systems. Indeed, the escalation in cyberattacks highlights the sorry state of cybersecurity of American based companies.

We have been are under attack by hackers — state sponsored terrorists, organized criminal groups and individuals for years. Yet the government and the private sector alike have failed to secure our communications, exposing our personal and national secrets, costing untold economic damage to individuals, companies and to our national security,

Americans alarmed by Obama-administration lawlessness were further demoralized by last week’s “cromnibus” debacle. First, the Republican-controlled House voted to fund the government for the next year, surrendering its power of the purse as a check on the president’s excesses. Then, in what appears to have been part sympathy for Obama’s non-enforcement of the immigration laws and part fit of pique at having to work over the weekend, an astounding 20 Republican senators joined all the Democrats in rejecting a challenge to the president’s blatantly lawless decree of effective amnesty for millions of illegal aliens — a constitutional challenge spearheaded by Senators Ted Cruz (R., Tex.) and Mike Lee (R., Utah) that, shamefully, drew only 22 Republican supporters.

Conservatives are feeling angry and betrayed after working hard to give Republicans a runaway victory in last month’s midterm elections. It is only natural, then, that we were heartened by Tuesday’s news: A federal court in Pittsburgh ruled that Obama’s amnesty decree is unconstitutional.

We should disenthrall ourselves. This ruling, rendered in a 38-page opinion by district judge Arthur J. Schwab, is as rogue an exercise as the executive usurpation that prompted it.

THE AMNESTY DECREE IS IRRELEVANT TO THE CRIMINAL CASE
At bottom, the case before the court, United States v. Elionardo Juarez-Escobar, has nothing to do with President Obama’s amnesty decree. It is a criminal case involving an illegal alien who pled guilty to reentering our country sometime after being deported in late 2005. (Reentry after deportation is a felony.) The only issue before Judge Schwab at this point is the determination of a sentence of incarceration. The case does not involve deportation, which is a civil proceeding. It is to deportation that Obama’s amnesty decree pertains — specifically, to categories of illegal aliens for whom deportation is to be deferred.

http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/5889/full

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2014/12/the-paranoid-style-in-russian-politics/

Walter Laqueur was born in 1921- Please visit http://www.laqueur.net/index2.php?r=4 for a list of his outstanding books.

For some considerable time the element of fantasy in Russian political discourse has been strong (and growing stronger), not only at the popular level but in official statements. It has grown in intensity and quantity since the spring of 2014 with the events in Crimea and Ukraine. How to explain this? Where did it originate and how important is it in the general context of the new “Russian doctrine”? Extreme, even fanatical statements directed against the “enemy” can be found at almost all times in many countries — there is nothing specifically Russian about it. But there are limits even to absurdity and if these limits are disregarded, how to explain it?

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda and an accomplished practitioner in this genre, is a prime example of the deliberate fabrication of falsehoods. The police chief in Berlin in the years just before the Nazi takeover was a Jew named Bernhard Weiss, a former army officer and a career official with moderate views. Goebbels launched an all-out campaign against him, turning him into a demonic figure, highly dangerous, incredibly cunning and devious, aiming to destroy everything in his way. When friends pointed out to Goebbels that Weiss (whom he had nicknamed Isidor) was a perfectly harmless bureaucrat, he laughed and said: “Do you think I am not aware of this?”

This is a typical example of the cynical approach. But not all statements, ideas and theories which are manifestly absurd are deliberately fabricated and cynically exploited as part of a wider propaganda campaign. Some, as in contemporary Russia, are genuinely believed for reasons that have been insufficiently investigated. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were a product of deliberate fabrication and the same is true of the “doctors’ plot” in Stalin’s final year. But both the Protocols and the story of the Jewish “killer doctors” were believed by many, and the question of why they were so widely believed is not easy to answer.

There is a widespread tendency (again not specifically Russian and not invented there) to believe in occult, hidden forces which are the real shakers and movers in world politics, whereas those about whom we read and hear in the media are merely their puppets. Some Russian ideologues believe (or pretend to believe) that the real struggle in world politics is between two parties — the Rothschild party and the followers of the Rockefellers. Believers in contemporary conspiracy theories generally have only a dim idea of where the real big money is found. According to the more learned followers of Lyndon LaRouche, for instance, it is a bitter fight between factions on a higher philosophical level — the Aristotelians and the Neo-Platonists. But it is not made clear where they keep their money — certainly not in present-day Greece. There has been in recent years a close cooperation between the Russian extreme Right and the LaRouchans; a recent example is Sergei Glazyev’s “On Eurofascism” in Executive Intelligence Review, a LaRouche organ.

Seventy years ago this week, Hitler launched his last great offensive of World War II. The only thing standing in his way was a group of men like Private First Class Earnest Williams, a paratrooper from the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion.

In a largely forgotten chapter of American history, the 509th and two other independent, “bastard” units — the 551st Parachute Infantry Battalion and the 517th Parachute Regimental Combat Team — were hastily attached to the legendary 82nd Airborne Division and trucked in to plug the holes in the northern shoulder of the Bulge.

It was six months after the Allies’ triumphant D-Day landing. The war in Europe seemed to be slowly grinding to an end.

But Hitler wasn’t ready to surrender.

On December 16, 1944, he made his last big gamble, sending tens of thousands of his best troops toward the Meuse River to retake the Belgian port city of Antwerp and drive a wedge between the British and American armies. It was the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge, a month-long brutal conflict that involved more than a million men from each side. Before it was all over, the United States had lost more than 80,000 killed, wounded, taken prisoner, or missing.

The attack largely caught the Allies unaware. With few reserves available to stem the massive onslaught, they rushed U.S. paratroopers into the gaps in the line in a desperate attempt to hold back the German tide.

THE 509TH HOLDS THE LINE
In a small Belgian crossroads town called Sadzot, German troops had found and were exploiting a hole in the Allied lines. In a daring nighttime raid, the 509th attacked and drove elite Waffen-SS troops from the town, killing 30 and taking another 33 prisoner.

His Department of Health banned fracking today, blocking economic growth over specious worries.

Thanks to an announcement from the state Department of Health today, New Yorkers will miss out on a multi-billion-dollar industry that has made other states rich.

The decision, a ban on fracking, has little to do with sound science and much more to do with the political cowardice of New York’s leaders, the politicization of state agencies, and the political activism of radical environmentalists.

The story begins about six years ago, when Governor David Paterson decided to refer a politically controversial decision about fracking to state agencies, ordering a study while instituting a de facto fracking ban. His successor, Governor Andrew Cuomo, also washed his hands of the hard call; at today’s news conference, Cuomo said his commissioners had made the decision, adding, “I don’t think I even have a role here.”

The Department of Health justified its decision to ban fracking with a long-anticipated report on the practice’s public-health effects, but there’s reason to question the objectivity of this study.

In fact, the first draft of the environmental-conservation report inconveniently concluded that New York should allow fracking to proceed — so Governor Paterson demanded a do-over. Under intense environmental lobbying, and after years of delay, the new report offers a more palatable conclusion for a Democratic governor: that the risk to public health is just too great to allow fracking in New York.

Barack Obama: ‘I’ve been mistaken for a valet and a waiter’
Michelle Obama: ‘I’ve been asked to grab items from a shelf at Target’

The United States’ first African-American president, Barack Obama, and the First Lady, Michelle Obama, have revealed that they too have been a victim of racial biases.

Speaking to People magazine on Wednesday (17 December), the US President said: “There’s no black male my age, who’s a professional, who hasn’t come out of a restaurant and is waiting for their car and somebody didn’t hand them their car keys.”
“There’s no black male my age, who’s a professional, who hasn’t come out of a restaurant and is waiting for their car and somebody didn’t hand them their car keys.”
– Barack Obama

First Lady, Michelle Obama, joined in the conversation by recalling her own experience at a Target store recently, when she was asked by a shopper to take something down from a shelf.

“I think people forget that we’ve lived in the White House for six years. Before that, Barack Obama was a black man that lived on the South Side of Chicago, who had his share of troubles catching cabs,” said Michelle Obama.

“I tell this story – I mean, even as the first lady – during that wonderfully publicized trip I took to Target, not highly disguised, the only person who came up to me in the store was a woman who asked me to help her take something off a shelf. Because she didn’t see me as the first lady, she saw me as someone who could help her. Those kinds of things happen in life. So it isn’t anything new.”

The American Left has loathed the embargo and overlooked all of Castro’s repressive actions since the 1960s. They have blamed the U.S.–Cuba deadlock entirely on the United States and have sought the end of the embargo whenever a Democrat was in the White House. Under Johnson, Carter, and Clinton they did not get their way; that had to await Obama.

When the Soviet Union fell, the Castro regime was in dire straits. It survived through sheer repression — until it was sustained by Venezuelan oil money sent by Hugo Chávez. Today Chávez is dead, oil is under $60 a barrel, and Venezuela is reeling. Who will bail Castro out this time? Now we have the answer: Barack Obama.

Put aside the prisoner exchange, which one can be for or against and still decry the rest of Obama’s moves today. It’s clear that Obama told the Cubans they had to let Alan Gross out before he could make the rest of his changes — and told them he would undertake those changes immediately. So the Castros not only get diplomatic recognition and a big financial lift — more trade, more tourism, more remittances to Cubans from family members in the U.S., and from which the regime can take a big cut — but they get it all for nothing. That is, the prisoner trade (whether smart or dumb) was a bargained-for exchange. They got three, we got two. All the rest in the Obama policy changes is simply a gift to the regime. The Castros made no promises at all to reduce oppression, allow freedom of speech or assembly, or make any political reforms or foreign-policy adjustments.

The Obama White House conducted these negotiations itself, with no meddling from the State Department. The centralization of all activity in the White House continues, and in this case the American negotiator was Ben Rhodes. Rhodes is a speechwriter with a graduate degree (M.F.A.) in creative writing, so one might wonder if he struck the hardest bargain possible. But of course those would not have been his instructions anyway: The president didn’t want a hard bargain. He wanted to destroy 50 years of American policy toward the Castro regime.