RUTHFULLY YOURS

The debate over the Export-Import Bank is one about political fluidity, cronyism, and the conflicting needs between big and small businesses. It is also a debate over very small potatoes. Last year, the Ex-Im Bank authorized $27.3 billion in direct loans, loan guarantees and credit insurance. In contrast, total American exports were $2.3 trillion, suggesting the hullabaloo regarding the bank is about just over one percent of all exports. Whether it stays or goes will have little effect on employment or the economy, despite dire predictions to the contrary from both fans and foes. From a practical perspective – is this how Congress should spend its time?

Certainly there are arguments against reauthorization. Whenever and wherever business and federally-funded financing opportunities present themselves, cronyism will be found lurking in plain sight. In 2012, 76% of all loans went to ten large companies, like GE, Caterpillar, Bechtel and Boeing, with the latter taking the lion’s share. All of these companies have hundreds of lobbyists wining and dining their favorite members of Congress. Boeing sells planes to foreign airlines, many of which are state owned. Thus, one could argue that the American taxpayer is supporting foreign governments, along with big business. In terms of governments, think China and the United Arab Emirates. The Ex-Im Bank helps foreign airlines that purchase Boeing planes, which is the reason Delta Airlines has been one of the strongest advocates for deep-sixing the Bank. On the other hand, when Delta purchases an Airbus 320 they are being helped by the ECB, at the expense of Air France and BOAC. There is also a question regarding the accuracy of the bank’s statements. Supporters cite the $1.1 billion that the bank returned to the Treasury last year. Detractors argue that the bank’s statements do not accurately reflect capital adequacy and usual accounting standards, possibly placing taxpayers at risk.

Questions come to mind: Why do seventy-six percent of all loans go to only ten large companies? Why should companies like GE that have reduced domestic employment be provided low interest loans? Why should the bank support foreign competitors? Why should American taxpayers provide cheap financing to foreign governments?

“The Justice Department has taken over the case for prosecution of the peeper, but he’s probably not too worried since Attorney General Eric (“I see nothing”) Holder Jr. is a graduate of the See No Evil School of Prosecution. The poop perp can probably skip to the loo, confident he’ll be able to continue contributing to government waste, one way or the other.”
Government waste redefined at Environmental Protection Agency

The Environmental Protection Agency gives a whole new meaning to government waste. It’s accustomed to flushing tax dollars down the toilet, and now the agency has dealt with so many incidents of employees clogging the toilets with paper towels and even “placing feces in the hallway,” that an official at the EPA’s office in Denver dispatched a mass email pleading with the slackers and bums responsible to cease and desist.

“Management is taking this situation seriously,” wrote the EPA’s deputy regional administrator, Howard Cantor, “and will take whatever actions are necessary to identify and prosecute these individuals.” In his email, obtained by Government Executive magazine, Mr. Cantor asked for any employees with knowledge of the poop perpetrator to notify a supervisor.

Management at the EPA — flush with cash — then consulted John Nicoletti, said to be a “national expert” on workplace violence, for advice on what to do next. Mr. Nicoletti averred that using the hallway to do one’s business is definitely a threat to the health of employees. Such behavior, he added, is “very dangerous” and that the perpetrator’s actions would “probably escalate.”

“Our brief consultation with Dr. Nicoletti on this matter,” said EPA spokesman Richard Mylott, ” … reflects our commitment to securing a safe workplace.”

Even if the scatological scofflaw is ultimately identified, little is likely be done about it. Even among federal agencies where “public servants” are invulnerable, the EPA has a remarkably low firing rate. In fiscal 2010, the agency terminated only 19 of its 18,742 employees, or 1/1,000 of 1 percent. Even fewer guvvies are being kicked to the curb today. For fiscal 2013, Federal Times reported last week, “Federal firings continue to drop.” Just 0.46 percent of the federal workforce of 2.05 million was fired, down from 0.49 percent the year before.

Unilateral concessions bolster a Palestinian entitlement mentality

The recent kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers near Hebron should give pause. Israel has named as suspects Marwan Kawasmeh and Amar Abu-Eisha, who are members of Hamas, the U.S.- and European Union-listed terrorist group that calls in its charter for the worldwide killing of Jews. Hamas, recently incorporated into the Fatah-Palestinian Authority (PA) regime, is still receiving U.S taxpayer funding.

Given these circumstances, Israel needs to put an end to its concessionary policy of “confidence-building measures” — removing security checkpoints and roadblocks, and freeing convicted and jailed Palestinian terrorists as demanded by the PA — especially if it emerges that the absence of checkpoints enabled the terrorists to carry out the killings.

That some terrorist acts have been facilitated in this way is beyond argument. The January 2010 killing of Israeli Meir Chai by Fatah’s own Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, occurred during a Palestinian terrorist attack made possible by the removal of a road closure and checkpoint, part of “confidence-building measures” previously urged upon Israel by the Obama administration.

In April 2010, then-U.S. envoy George J. Mitchell again urged Israel to “make a number of gestures to Palestinians, including release of prisoners, removal of checkpoints, transfer of authority over West Bank territories.” Israel acceded to President Obama’s wishes — and that August, Palestinians terrorists killed four Israelis, including a pregnant woman, also near Hebron. The attackers escaped the scene via a route opened by the removal of a checkpoint — part of the “number of gestures” Mr. Mitchell had urged upon the Israelis.

Western governments, including the Obama administration, are continually tantalized at the prospect of renewed negotiations, and the PA has adroitly succeeded in recent years in making Israeli concessions a condition of their resumption. International leaders have willingly obliged.

Here, for example, is a news item from February 2012 about U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon: “The U.N. chief urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make ‘goodwill gestures’ to bring the Palestinians back to direct negotiations, frozen since September 2010.”

Note that, in such cases, Israelis are not being asked to make these “gestures” in return for anything, merely so that PA will deign to speak to them from across a table. In other words, the intended “gestures” are unilateral Israeli concessions. Unfortunately, peace has never been facilitated by Israeli unilateral concessions. Quite the contrary.

Since the end of the IDF’s Operation Pillar of Defense, through June 30, 2014, 300 aerial attacks have been launched from Hamas-ruled Gaza toward southern Israel.

The fact that many terrorist organizations based in Gaza proudly take responsibility for firing rockets and missiles toward the Israeli civilian population, and not necessarily the ruling terrorist group, Hamas – as the media and Israeli officials continue to emphasize – makes no difference to the families and children of one million Israelis.

Once the siren goes off and they run for shelter and for their lives, they have between 15 and 45 seconds to ask which terrorist organization is firing at them. Instead, they wonder where the rocket will explode: inside or outside their town.

“Rocket reality” is still a basic way of life on the Gaza border.

Compared to recent years, this year has been quieter than others (due to Operation Pillar of Defense), but the Gaza threat grows each day. Realistically, the question is not if Israel will have to take action in Gaza, but rather when.

However, the Russian-roulette reality finally exploded on Saturday night, just after 8 p.m., when an entire factory in Sderot went up in flames that were visible from miles away.

Why are there still those who claim Hamas is interested in maintaining calm? Have they forgotten the Hamas charter, which openly calls for genocide of the Jews in Israel? And what about the statement issued by Izzadin Kassam, the Hamas “military wing” in Gaza, one week before the first cease-fire in November 2006: “We are not going to stop firing the Zionist settlement Sderot, until the last citizen of Sderot leaves.”

Over 20,000 aerial attacks have been launched from Gaza toward Israel after Israel pulled all of its troops and civilians out of Gaza in August 2005.

The world today sees a sudden aggressive presence of Islam in a way not seen since the defense of Vienna in 1532. Large numbers of Muslims are now aggressively present in the West and on all Islam’s world borders. They insist on retaining their religion and customs wherever they reside. They present internal problems in Western nations that they have not had to face before. The leading forces in Islam seem to have decided that the best way to expand through and defeat the west is not by imitating modern science and technology, but by establishing and enforcing Muslim law everywhere, either gradually or quickly.

Yet, a hard-headed Muslim intellectual today, if there be such, would have a sense of the history of theology and of the military means by which Muslim expansion originally took place. He might well judge that, everything seems to be falling into place.

Yet, two dangerous “technical” developments could undermine the present Muslim rigid hold on its own people and on its recently renewed determination to expand. A long dormant Islam, but one that lost few followers in the five centuries since it lost world political power, has overcome its inferiority complex against Western modernity. It has, in various ways, symbolized by the bombing of the World Trade Center by primitive means, developed a new way to defeat advanced technical power that is no longer morally confident of its own principles.

The first caution to this advancement thesis is the realization that vast undeveloped quantities of oil and gas are known to exist outside of Islamic borders. These rapidly developing resources, plus several significant nuclear energy advances, might well, if used with political shrewdness, make Arab oil considerably less important and profitable to the world economy. Arab power and religious expansion have been fueled by oil money. But little in the Arab world itself was the cause of these oil-based riches. Islam sat on oil, protected by Western theories of sovereignty, but it did not develop the economy or the tools that made oil valuable. Much of Arab oil wealth, moreover, has gone into the private hands of rulers and their families. Arab countries themselves are quite poor and comparatively backward

Sahib Bleher and his Islamic Party of Britain [IPB], like many, seem happy to contradict themselves publicly — possibly in the hope that where there is contradiction, there is uncertainty; and where there is uncertainty, there is room for fundamentalists to claim victimization at the hands of their supposedly “Islamophobic” critics, while at the same time reassuring their Islamist supporters that their dogma has not been cut back.

Most extremists probably do not, understandably, like to be accused of extremism. They might even find that in the eyes of the public simply denying the allegation is enough to offset all evidence to the contrary.

Denials, even if not necessarily sincere, can be successful, perhaps because so many people have been persuaded to regard religious extremists as victims of prejudice — a view they rightly do not ascribe to political activists, such as members of neo-Nazi organizations.

Sahib Bleher, a spokesperson for the Islamic Party of Britain [IPB], for instance, claims that, “never and nowhere did the Islamic Party of Britain advocate the killing of homosexuals.” The IPB’s website, however, explicitly states that “Islam condemns and outlaws homosexuality. As far as Islamic law is concerned, the rules are that the state does not interfere in the privacy of people’s homes, but it would need to safeguard public decency by preventing any public advocacy for homosexuality. Such activity would come under the heading of public incitement. The death penalty … only applies to a public display of lewdness witnessed by several people.”

This policy is also archived on Bleher’s own website.

Further references to homosexuality found within the IPB’s publications include mention of the “organized homosexual movement,” in which homosexuals are compared to “thieves, murderers and adulterers” and described as “spiritually sick.”

After the infamous Oslo Agreement brokered, or should I say bullied, by President Clinton, three participants- Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White House Lawn. The deal that eventually won the three stooges Nobel Prizes “for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East” gave the PLO every single line item demand in exchange for their recognition of Israel’s right to exist and their revocation of their covenant which called for the destruction of Israel. Smiles all around.

As the ink dried on the articles of surrender by Israel, the PLO embarked on the longest, the most brutal, heinous and indescribable spree of atrocities claiming babies in strollers, elders in wheelchairs, soldiers, teenagers, shoppers- all civilians making their diurnal rounds and enjoying themselves in Haifa, in Netanya, in Tel-Aviv. in Jerusalem, in markets, cafes, bus stops.

Which were the four worst years for terror fatalities since 1967? In order: 1996, 1994, 1993 and 1995. Each of the years after the accords was worse than any of the years before them.

Flush with international good will Israel’s Prime Minister called these victims ” casualties of peace” in the most perverse use of language. Furthermore, if the attacks occurred in the West Bank, his response was spineless and callow. When the teenage son of one of the settlement leaders was trapped, tortured and killed while on a hike, Rabin said”he was in the wrong place at the wrong time” and when settlers complained of his policies he said ” let them spin in the wind.”

Terror from the PLO has never let up..it has intensified in the West Bank- soldiers lynched,a whole family killed in their beds- including a swaddled infant, stonings, threats, vandalism….culminating with the recent murder of three teenagers.

This is the legacy of appeasement, of releasing terrorists from jails, of showing any inclination to continue the political charade of negotiations, of inciting the enemy whose own children celebrate horror and terror. And, most egregious, of endangering a people’s life and sovereignty for recognition of “the right to exist” of a civilized and humane democracy by barbarians and their enablers.

It chills the heart. rsk

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obama-continues-his-attack-on-us-energy?f=puball

IN FSM’S COMPREHENSIVE ELECTION COVERAGE FOR 2014 WE LIST, WHENEVER AVAILABLE THE CANDIDATES’- BOTH REPUBLICAN AND DEMOCRAT -VOTES ON THE KEYSTONE XL PIPELINE ….RSK

The delay of the Keystone XL pipeline is a perfect example of the way President Obama and his administration has engaged in, not just a war on coal, but on all forms of energy the nation has and needs. Even his State Department admits there is no reason to refuse its construction and, as turmoil affects the Middle East, there is an increased need to tap our own oil and welcome Canada’s.

The latest news, however, is that Canada has just approved the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project, a major pipeline to ship Canadian oil-to Asia.

The pure evil of the delay is compounded by the loss of the many jobs the pipeline-that will not require taxpayer funding-represents to help reduce the nation’s obscene rate of unemployment and to generate new revenue for the nation. That’s what oil, coal, and natural gas does.

Less visible has been the out-of-control Environmental Protection Agency that has, since Obama took office on January 20, 2009, issued 2,827 new final regulations totally 24,915,000 words to fill 24,915 pages of the Federal Register. As a CNSnews article reported, “The Obama EPA regulations have 22 times as many words as the entire Harry Potter series which includes seven books with 1,084,170 words.” Every one of the EPA regulations affects some aspect of life in America, crushing economic development in every conceivable way.

The worst part of the EPA regulation orgy is the fact that virtually all of it is based on a hoax. As reported by James Delingpole, a British journalist, “19 million jobs lost plus $4,335 trillion spent equals a global mean temperature of 0.018 degrees Celsius. Yes, horrible but true. These are the costs to the U.S. economy, by 2100, of the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulatory war on carbon dioxide, whereby all states must reduce emissions from coal-fired electricity generating plants by 30% before 2005 levels.”

Citing a study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Delingpole reported that the new regulations will cost the economy another $51 billion annually, result in the 224,000 more lost jobs every year, and cost every American household $3,400 per year in higher prices for energy, food, and other necessities.”

In his celebrated new book, Ari Shavit claims that “Zionism” committed a massacre in July 1948. Can the claim withstand scrutiny? By Martin Kramer

“In 30 minutes, at high noon, more than 200 civilians are killed. Zionism carries out a massacre in the city of Lydda.”— Ari Shavit, My Promised Land

Perhaps no book by an Israeli has ever been promoted as massively in America as My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, by the Ha’aretz columnist and editorial-board member Ari Shavit. The pre-publication blitz began in May 2013, when the author received the first-ever Natan Fund book award, which included an earmark of $35,000 to promote and publicize the book. The prize committee was co-chaired by the columnist Jeffrey Goldberg and Franklin Foer, editor of the New Republic; among its members was the New York Times columnist David Brooks. Not only was the choice of Shavit “unanimous and enthusiastic,” but Goldberg and Foer also supplied florid blurbs for the book jacket. Goldberg: “a beautiful, mesmerizing, morally serious, and vexing book,” for which “I’ve been waiting most of my adult life.” Foer: “epic history . . . beautifully written, dramatically rendered, full of moral complexity . . . mind-blowing, trustworthy insights.”

Upon publication last November, the book proceeded to receive no fewer than three glowing encomia in the Times from the columnist Thomas Friedman (“must-read”), the paper’s literary critic Dwight Garner (“reads like a love story and thriller at once”), and the New Republic‘s literary editor Leon Wieseltier (“important and powerful . . . the least tendentious book about Israel I have ever read”). From there it jumped to the Times’s “100 Notable Books of 2013” and to the non-fiction bestseller list, where it spent a total of six weeks.

The Times was hardly alone. The editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick, who is credited by Shavit with inspiring the book and curating its journey into print, hosted a launch party at his home and appeared with Shavit in promotional events at New York’s 92nd Street Y, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, and the Charlie Rose Show. Jeffrey Goldberg likewise surfaced alongside Shavit both on Charlie Rose and at campus whistle stops.

“What happened during the first week of my book’s publication went beyond anyone’s expectation, beyond my dreams,” marveled Shavit in an interview. In January, he collected a National Jewish Book Award. In short order, he became a must-have speaker for national Jewish organizations from AIPAC to Hadassah, and a feted guest at the Beverly Hills homes of media mogul Haim Saban and the producer-director Tony Krantz. “If you want to see what prophecy looks like among Jews in the early part of the 21st century,” wrote an attendee at one of these soirées, “follow Ari Shavit around Los Angeles.”

Beyond Shavit’s powerful writing style and engaging personal manner, what inspired this outpouring? “My book,” he says, “is a painful love story,” the love in question being his professed “total commitment to Israel, and my admiration for the Zionist project,” tempered by his conspicuously agonized conscience over the misdeeds of that state and that project. It was, undoubtedly, this dual theme that gave the book its poignant appeal to many American Jewish readers eager to revive a passion for Israel at a time when Israel is defined by much of liberal opinion as an “occupier.” To achieve his artfully mixed effect, Shavit adopted a particular strategy: confessing Israel’s sins in order to demonstrate the tragic profundity of his love.

And the sins in question? The obvious one in the book is the sin of post-1967 “occupation.” But many readers were especially taken aback to learn of an earlier and even more hauntingly painful sin. This one, detailed in a 30-page chapter titled “Lydda, 1948,” concerns an alleged massacre of Palestinian Arabs that preceded an act of forcible expulsion. Shavit’s revelation: Lydda is “our black box.” In its story lies the dark secret not only of the birth of Israel but indeed of the entire Jewish national movement—of Zionism.

The Lydda chapter gained resonance early on because Shavit’s friends at the New Yorker decided to abridge and publish it in the magazine. There, it ran under an expanded title: “Lydda, 1948: A City, a Massacre, and the Middle East Today.” The meaningful addition is obviously the word “massacre.” An informed reader might have heard of another 1948 “massacre,” the one in April at the Arab village of Deir Yassin. But at Lydda? Who did it? Under what circumstances? How many died? Was it covered up?

Last month, President Barack Obama chose to support and fund a Palestinian Authority (PA) government that includes Hamas, a U.S. and EU-designated terrorist group that calls in its charter for the destruction of Israel (Article 15) and the murder of Jews (Article 7). Also last month, Obama freed five senior Taliban terrorist commanders in exchange for an American serviceman who may have been a deserter.

Obama could have cut funding to the PA, which would have made sense strategically, and could have supported a close, long-standing American ally, Israel. He could have refused any exchange of senior Taliban leaders. Why didn’t he?

Because he supports engagement with radical Islam – not merely moderate Muslims, Arab liberals, or secular reformers. Al-Qaeda notwithstanding, Obama believes radical Muslims are potential allies and friends. This is confirmed by his decisions at every important point in his presidency.

Thus, when Obama addressed the Muslim world in Cairo in June 2009, he insisted on inviting members of the parliamentary bloc of the (then-banned) radical Muslim Brotherhood over the objections of U.S. ally, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak – though the Obama administration later denied that it did so. (A furious Mubarak refused to attend.)

It was no secret that numerous surveys had shown before 2011 that large majorities of Egyptians favor discriminatory sharia, the death penalty for apostates and so on – meaning that it was almost certain that radical Muslims would triumph in elections. Yet, when a groundswell of opposition to Mubarak’s rule arose in February 2011, Obama called for Mubarak to step down “now” while his spokesman called for early elections involving “non-secular actors.”

When the Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi was, unsurprisingly, elected president, Obama did not discontinue arming the regime, even though its future policies were as yet entirely unknown. Yet, when in July 2013, Morsi was ousted by the Egyptian military under Field Marshal Abdul el-Sisi, Obama suspended military aid.

The Iranian regime is one whose leaders have called for the destruction of both America and Israel. Tehran has been developing a nuclear weapons capacity that would give it the means to act on these designs. Yet, Obama has not sought to undermine or replace the regime. In 2009, when Iranians were brutalized on Tehran’s streets for protesting the rigged re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Obama did not call for Ahmadinejad to step down – he pointedly refused to get involved, saying “it’s not productive, given the history of U.S.-Iranian relations, to be seen as meddling.”