RUTHFULLY YOURS

In Obama’s most recent — and embarrassing — public whine, he lashed out at the once-obsequious press. In his now customary first-person I/me/my/mine lament (e.g., “They don’t do anything, except block me and call me names. . . . If they were more interested in growing the economy for you and the issues that you are talking about instead of trying to mess with me, we would be doing a lot better. . . . The critics, the cynics in Washington, they’ve written me off more times than I can count.”), he lambasted the partisan culture of Washington. He lashed out at the Tea Party, the House Republicans, his opponents in general, and all those who would unreasonably oppose his blanket amnesties, his climate-change taxes and regulations, the shutdown of the Keystone-pipeline project, Obamacare, and $9 trillion in new debt.

Apparently someone other than Obama is in charge when the IRS goes rogue, the VA implodes, the Justice Department goes after Associated Press reporters, the consulate in Benghazi is overrun, the NSA taps the phones of allied leaders, Iraq is torn apart, the Middle East melts down, or we trade five terrorist kingpins for an American deserter. Obama’s impromptu adolescent moaning was bizarre and reminds us again why he would be wiser to stay close to his teleprompter.

Obama also seems oddly to forget that when he promised to use his pen and phone to run things by his lonesome, nearly everyone took him at his word. And so he tried just that. What Obama is now angry about is not partisanship per se, but that his own partisanship and subversion of settled law have been repudiated consistently by both the Supreme Court and the American public. Were Obama’s poll ratings at 60 percent, and were the Supreme Court upholding his pen-and-phone governance, and were the Democrats on the verge of winning back their long-lost supermajority in the Senate and taking back the House, then Obama would hardly be decrying partisanship, the media, the Tea Party, or Republicans in general. “Messing” with Obama means not being convinced that his record has helped America.

So there is an increasingly desperate strain to the Obama Left, the more so in that the scandals pile up and any idea of a legacy vanishes into Carteresque caricature. One unfortunate result of the end of the “hope and change” and “fundamental transformation” agenda is a sour-grapes nihilism — a sort of “the scandals are your problem, not mine” attitude. In each case, those worried about the mounting chaos are flippantly dismissed with the assumption that they themselves are at fault for worrying about it.

A rogue IRS? Obama smiles that there is not a “smidgen” of corruption as the new IRS commissioner says the agency owes the American people no apologies.

The VA scandal? Too many wars have meant too many veterans needing treatment.

The Presbyterian Church Marginalizes Itself By Jeff Carter

I was born and raised a Presbyterian. Presbyterians and the US have a very close history. The history books glorify Sam Adams and his efforts in Boston. But, the kindling and initial fire for the American Revolution was made in the pulpits of the Presbyterian churches of New Jersey. The pastors in those pulpits gave both a spiritual, and academic base to rally upon.

The American Constitution is patterned after the documents that formed the Presbyterian church, and a lot of the signees of the Declaration of Independence were Presbyterians. I don’t think any one church has a monopoly on worship, a relationship with God, or can guarantee a path to heaven.

Traditional organized religious organizations are losing members in droves. The Presbyterian Church has lost 30% of its membership in the last 13 years. This weekends action to divest itself from Israel will hasten the decline.

Why have traditional churches lost members? It’s because they have lurched to the far left when it comes to official church policy. They are only preaching to one side of the choir. The thing is, if you look at demographics, left wingers attend church in less numbers than right wingers. Traditional churches have made a business decision to go after a market decreasing in size.

One of my local pastors, John Vest, has been blogging about it. John is a progressive member of the church, but was against divestment. He signed this letter, The Things That Make For Peace. Among the points made this one stands out,

It is telling that one of the earliest and loudest affirmations of Zionism Unsettled was by David Duke, perhaps the most notorious white supremacist and anti-Semite in the United States today, who said:
In a major breakthrough in the worldwide struggle against Zionist extremism, the largest Presbyterian church in the United States, the PC(USA), has issued a formal statement calling Zionism “Jewish Supremacism” — a term first coined and made popular by Dr. David Duke.
The reality that David Duke would endorse a Presbyterian study guide available for purchase on the PC(USA) website is sickening to us, and should give all Presbyterians great pause in considering the arguments and language of this document and Zionism Unsettled’s ideological relationship to the overtures coming before the General Assembly.

I have long said, if you want to understand exactly who and what the Progressive Movement is, simply listen to what they espouse to hate. That is who and what they are. Frighteningly, it really is that easy. The movement that proclaims “tolerance,” “inclusion,” “acceptance,” and “equality for all,” is actually a movement that embraces intolerance, exclusion, opposition and oligarchic elitism. And no matter how much they espouse the former, their actions confirm the latter.

The Progressive Movement, which now controls not only the federal government and the government apparatuses in most of the failing, debt-ridden, deficit spending urban centers in the United States (and in many “enlightened” locales across the globe), but the education system and the mainstream media, is tolerant to only those who agree with their world view, include only those who will advance their cause, accept only those who tow the Progressive line ideologically and call for equality to apply for only those with which beg their favor. If you have an opposing viewpoint on culture, government or society, you are smeared, demonized, castigated and otherwise openly and veraciously hated.

So much for all that “hate crime” talk oozing out of the Progressive’s collective “pie hole.”

The Examiner reports:

“While speaking at the Texas Democratic Party convention in Dallas on Friday, state Rep.Trey Martinez Fischer told fellow Democrats that GOP doesn’t stand for ‘Grand Old Party,’ it stands for ‘gringos y otros pendejos.’ In addition to the racist slur, Martinez Fischer’s office handed out a set of six Lotería cards to delegates, one of which depicts a red-faced Abbott as ‘El Diablito.’

“A Google search found that other than the Houston Chronicle and a few other sites, the racist profanity…”

http://www.truthrevolt.org/israel-revolt/arabs-throw-stones-ambulance-carrying-bodies-murdered-boys

Arabs Throw Stones at Ambulance Carrying Bodies of Murdered Boys

According to multiple reports, Arabs stoned the IDF ambulance that was carrying the bodies of the murdered Israeli teenagers. The ambulance was forced to stop, its windshield shattered. According to The Algemeiner:

Palestinian Arabs attacked an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) ambulance humvee on Monday that was transporting the recently discovered bodies of three murdered Israeli boys who were kidnapped on June 12, an Israel source told The Algemeiner.

The Muqata blog posted an image of the damaged vehicle on Facebook writing, “8:44pm IDF Ambulance humvee transporting the bodies of the boys attacked by arabs….windows smashed.”

In the picture, the ambulance’s windshield is smashed and splattered with paint.

When the mothers of the Israeli boys kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists in the area of Gush Etzion, in “Israeli occupied” Judea, spoke before international bodies, many of the diplomats referred to them in their comments and questions as “settlers.” One is given to understand that, in their eyes, inclusion in that category means that they have no human rights and the world’s indifference to their fate is justified. In fact, the boys are not “settlers” but attend schools in Jewish towns in Judea, two of them in kibbutz Kfar Etzion and one in Kiriyat Arba. But let’s leave that aside and cut straight to the core of the issue of the legality of Jewish settlements outside the 1949 Armistice Lines.
There is only one International law concerning Israeli settlement that is binding and has never been superseded. The League of Nations, on July 24th, 1922, established the Mandate for Palestine, by unanimous vote, which included two Islamic states, Persia and Albania. The resolution stated, in part, “Whereas recognition has been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country….”
Note “reconstituting” their national home. The Jewish people was explicitly recognized as the long-exiled indigenous people of that land.
Moreover, Article 6 of the Mandate directs the Administration of Palestine to facilitate … “close settlement by Jews on the land….”
And Jews settled. And it was not contested that those settlements were legal under international law.

Large-scale fighting raged in Iraq on Monday, following Sunday’s proclamation of an Islamic caliphate over large areas of Syria and Iraq by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The jihadist group declared its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as leader of the new entity and its caliph, theoretically combining religious and state authority in the tradition of Muhammad’s early successors, across Iraq and Syria and beyond.
This development should not be dismissed as mere propaganda. For the first time since the abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate in the aftermath of the Great War, there is a substantial state-like entity presuming to revive the mantle of Sunni Islamic universalism.
First of all, it is worth examining what exactly makes a state a “state.” Traditional international law postulates the possession of population, of territory, and the existence of a government which exercises effective control over that population and territory. To put it more technically, a state exists if it enjoys the monopoly of coercive mechanisms within its domain.
Some authors also postulate the prevalent loyalty of the population to the government, but recent legal practice does not support the assertion. In April 1992 the U.S. recognized “Bosnia and Herzegovina” in its Yugoslav federal boundaries, although its nominal government – led by the dedicated jihadist Alija Izetbegovic – commanded the loyalty of only two-fifths of its citizens who happened to be Muslims, and controlled at most a third of the territory. On the other hand, unrecognized state entities such as Transnistria, Abkazia, Northern Cyprus, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh (like them or hate them) command their denizens’ overwhelming loyalty and exercise effectively undisputed control over their entire territory.
Finally, there are international jurists who cite the ability of the self-proclaimed state’s authority to engage in international discourse, but that is a moot point. The capacity to control a putative state’s territory and population almost invariably leads to such ability, regardless of the circumstances of that state’s inception: South Sudan is a recent case in point, and the creation of Israel in 1947 also comes to mind.

Three million girls between infancy and age fifteen are subject to FGM every year, and it is believed that 140 million women worldwide are suffering from the lifelong consequences of the practice.

The Muslim Council of Britain [MCB], the most prominent Muslim council in Britain, has declared that female genital mutilation is contrary to Islam: “FGM is not an Islamic requirement. There is no reference to it in the holy Qur’an that states girls must be circumcised. Nor is there any authentic reference to this in the Sunnah, the sayings or traditions of our prophet.”

“This is a terrible situation for young girls. So our strategy is to target the cutters. They are hurting a lot of people and making a profit from it.” — Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, Commissioner, Metropolitan Police Service.

Thousands of schoolgirls in the United Kingdom are at high risk of undergoing female genital mutilation [FGM] during this year’s summer break, according to the British government, which is actively promoting several nationwide campaigns aimed at raising awareness of the spiraling problem.

The summer holiday—often referred to as the “cutting season”—is an especially dangerous time for at-risk girls, anti-FGM activists warn. Many families consider the summer to be a convenient time to carry out the procedure because there is time for the girls to heal before they return to school in the fall.

Mr. Tucker is the author of “Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Power Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America’s Energy Odyssey” (Bartleby Press, 2010).
It’s not too late to fix Jimmy Carter’s energy blunder of the 1970s.

The Environmental Protection Agency has issued a 645-page ruling whose basic aim is to cut coal plants out of the mix in producing the nation’s electricity. States will supposedly be given a choice, but the only real way to meet the agency’s demands for carbon-dioxide reductions will be to cut back on coal. All this will be a devastating blow to the Midwestern economy, driving up energy prices for everyone, while having only the slightest impact on global warming.

There is a great irony to this. In the early 1970s, coal was being phased out as the nation’s principal source of electricity. The initial concerns about air pollution had focused on coal, and environmental groups such as the Sierra Club were campaigning to lift the 20-year-old ban on imported oil so we could replace coal with low-sulfur oil from Libya and Indonesia.

All this came to a halt with the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74. It became clear that burning oil for electricity in the U.S. was a luxury we could no longer afford. But there was a salvation on the horizon. The nation was just embarking on a monumental effort to implement nuclear power, with almost 200 reactors on the drawing boards or in the pipeline. This would supplant both coal and oil and solve the problem of air pollution once and for all. (Concerns about carbon emissions had not yet arisen.)

Work on more than 50 reactors had already begun when the effort hit a snag. With the new administration of President Jimmy Carter, environmentalists gained a foothold in the government for the first time. They were opposed to air pollution but they were more opposed to nuclear power. At the same time, Mr. Carter was under tremendous pressure to find a replacement for foreign oil, so environmentalists came up with a solution. Theorists such as soft-energy guru Amory Lovins argued that coal could be cleaned up through new technologies—the fluidized bed, for instance, which pulverizes coal for nearly complete combustion. This would allow coal to serve as a bridge to the coming legions of wind, solar and other renewable energies that would be ready to take over completely somewhere around 2025.

Obama’s Dependent States of America — on The Glazov Gang
A disturbing report card on how a Radical-in-Chief’s domestic and foreign policy is crippling America.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/obamas-dependent-states-of-america-on-the-glazov-gang/ –

A culture that celebrates kidnapping is not fit for statehood.

In March 2004 a Palestinian teenager named Hussam Abdo was spotted by Israeli soldiers behaving suspiciously as he approached the Hawara checkpoint in the West Bank. Ordered at gunpoint to raise his sweater, the startled boy exposed a suicide vest loaded with nearly 20 pounds of explosives and metal scraps, constructed to maximize carnage. A video taken by a journalist at the checkpoint captured the scene as Abdo was given scissors to cut himself free of the vest, which had been strapped tight to his body in the expectation that it wouldn’t have to come off. He’s been in an Israeli prison ever since.

Abdo provided a portrait of a suicide bomber as a young man. He had an intellectual disability. He was bullied by classmates who called him “the ugly dwarf.” He came from a comparatively well-off family. He had been lured into the bombing only the night before, with the promise of sex in the afterlife. His family was outraged that he had been recruited for martyrdom.

“I blame those who gave him the explosive belt,” his mother, Tamam, told the Jerusalem Post, of which I was then the editor. “He’s a small child who can’t even look after himself.”

Yet asked how she would have felt if her son had been a bit older, she added this: “If he was over 18, that would have been possible, and I might have even encouraged him to do it.” In the West, most mothers would be relieved if their children merely refrained from getting a bad tattoo before turning 18.