RUTHFULLY YOURS

Between the February 2011 fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and the July 2013 military coup that ousted the ill-fated Muslim Brotherhood regime, I published nearly two dozen articles contending that Egypt’s economy was the problem. Egypt is a banana republic without the bananas, dependent on imports for half its caloric consumption. The foreign policy establishment ignored Egypt’s economic free-fall, focusing its tunnel vision on the players on the political stage. The liberal internationalists of the Obama administration agreed with the neoconservatives that the “Arab Spring” would give rise to a new era of Muslim democracy, and both John Kerry and John McCain counseled patience and sympathy for Egypt’s Islamists. That this was delusional is demonstrated by events: the majority of Egypt’s adult population, nearly 40 million people, took to the streets to demand the Brotherhood’s ouster in the summer of 2013.

Now, long after the fact, comes Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations, warning of Egypt’s impending insolvency and urging American aid to prevent it. In what the CFR calls a “Contingency Planning Memorandum,” Dr. Cook writes:

Egypt is experiencing a deep economic crisis. The country’s foreign currency reserves are less than half of what they were before the January 2011 uprising, threatening Egypt’s ability to pay for food and fuel. Egypt’s budget deficit is 14 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) and its overall debt, which is the result of accumulated deficits, is more than the country’s economic output. In this difficult economic climate, roughly 45 percent of Egyptians live on less than two dollars per day. Inflation, which reached as high as 12.97 percent after the July 2013 military coup, is currently at 11.4 percent. Tourism revenue—traditionally a primary source of foreign currency along with Suez Canal tolls and remittances from Egyptians working abroad—is less than half of what it was in the last full year before the uprising. Foreign direct investment has dried up outside the energy sector. Unemployment remains high at 13.4 percent. Among the unemployed, 71 percent are between fifteen and twenty-nine years old. This economic weakness makes it politically difficult to address the problems that contribute to a potential solvency crisis because the necessary reforms will impose hardship on a population that is already experiencing economic pain.

Back in 1962, Robert Gover published a novel called the One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding [2] whose premise Amazon describes this way: “A college sophomore spends a weekend with a pretty 14-year-old black prostitute under the manly misapprehension that she has invited him because she finds him irresistible.”

I remember reading it as an undergraduate and finding it mildly amusing. Of course, inflation being what it is, it’s hard to write a book about a piddling hundred dollar misunderstanding anymore. But somehow the novel came to mind today when reading one of my favorite websites — The College Fix [3].

The misunderstanding it called to mind, however, is not between johns and hookers of whatever ages. It is between parents and the colleges to which we are sending our children. And the cost of this misunderstanding has expanded exponentially – to sixty-five thousand dollars! That’s the current approximate total for room, board and tuition at many of our finest private universities for those considered “fortunate” enough to be able to pay the full amount. For others it can be anything from ten to forty grand, still a princely amount.

And what are we parents getting for this (besides broke)? The College Fix’s editor Nathan Harden gives us a look in a report today — “Adventures in Gender Neutral Bathrooms” [4] — that begins:

When you really have to pee at Columbia University, there is one question that must be answered before you can go: What is my gender today?

If you are biologically male, for instance, but feel like a female, you may feel the need to use the ladies restroom. And why shouldn’t you? If the girl in the stall next to you doesn’t like to take her pants down next to a man she doesn’t know, that’s just evidence of her hetero-normative bigotry. That’s why the Obama administration ruled in 2012 [5] that dudes who feel like ladies have a right to use the women’s bathrooms on campus, no matter how unsafe that makes the women on campus feel.

This week, as Jews celebrate the Passover holiday, they are commemorating the Bible’s Exodus story describing a series of plagues inflicted on ancient Egypt that freed the Israelites, allowing them to make their way to the Holy Land. But over the past century, another exodus, driven by a plague of persecution, has swept across the Middle East and is emptying the region of its Christian population. The persecution is especially virulent today.

The Middle East may be the birthplace of three monotheistic religions, but some Arab nations appear bent on making it the burial ground for one of them. For 2,000 years, Christian communities dotted the region, enriching the Arab world with literature, culture and commerce. At the turn of the 20th century, Christians made up 26% of the Middle East’s population. Today, that figure has dwindled to less than 10%. Intolerant and extremist governments are driving away the Christian communities that have lived in the Middle East since their faith was born.

In the rubble of Syrian cities like Aleppo and Damascus, Christians who refused to convert to Islam have been kidnapped, shot and beheaded by Islamist opposition fighters. In Egypt, mobs of Muslim Brotherhood members burn Coptic Christian churches in the same way they once obliterated Jewish synagogues. And in Iraq, terrorists deliberately target Christian worshippers. This past Christmas, 26 people were killed when a bomb ripped through a crowd of worshipers leaving a church in Baghdad’s southern Dora neighborhood.

Christians are losing their lives, liberties, businesses and their houses of worship across the Middle East. It is little wonder that native Christians have sought refuge in neighboring countries—yet in many cases they find themselves equally unwelcome. Over the past 10 years, nearly two-thirds of Iraq’s 1.5 million Christians have been driven from their homes. Many settled in Syria before once again becoming victims of unrelenting persecution. Syria’s Christian population has dropped from 30% in the 1920s to less than 10% today.

Government “investments” have had a poor showing of late. President Barack Obama, convinced as ever that our economy can run on good intentions rather than hydrocarbons, got sold a bill of goods by such corporate rent-seekers as Solyndra and Tesla. And the federal government cannot even get the hydrocarbon-related businesses right, either: Our alleged “investment” in General Motors cost taxpayers many billions of dollars and made them partners in an incompetent and negligent operation that contributed to the deaths of at least 13 people who perished in accidents related to faulty switches in GM vehicles. As investment gurus go, Barack Obama isn’t exactly E. F. Hutton.

But our current feckless chief executive is not the worst offender on this front, and probably not even in the top ten, a point of more than merely historical interest argued at some length in Burton and Anita Folsom’s Uncle Sam Can’t Count: A History of Failed Government Investments, from Beaver Pelts to Green Energy, a terrific and very readable book published earlier this week. The Folsoms, who both teach at Hillsdale College, start setting ’em up and knocking ’em down with George Washington, a great president but a pretty lousy practitioner of beaver-pelt protectionism. The rogues’ gallery includes everything from federally supported steamship operations and railroads to Herbert Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the corrupt favor factory that gave birth to the Small Business Administration and Fannie Mae, and sundry 21st-century variations on the 18th-century mercantilist theme.

President Washington, inaugurating a line of argument that would be refreshed every generation up to (and, no doubt, beyond) our own time, viewed the beaver-pelt trade as a national-security issue, a critical component of the economy that demanded federal intervention to foreclose the possibility that devious foreigners would horn in on our national economic infrastructure and leave us vulnerable to outside interference. The Washington administration, concerned that British and French inroads in the pelt trade would lead to the strengthening of their ties with the Indians, saw to it that a $50,000 annual subsidy — which of course grew to six times that figure — was dedicated to building infrastructure for trade with the Indians, in order to “fix them strongly in our Interest.” Thus was born the Office of Indian Affairs. But like the Affordable Care Act so many years later, the rollout of the Indian trade infrastructure was so poorly managed that nobody wanted to do business there — especially not the Indians, who had many trading partners to choose from: English, French, and private American firms working outside the government system. Politics of course came to dominate economic concerns, and rather than stock federally established trading posts with goods the Indians actually wanted, the government stocked them with goods that they believed the Indians should want — goods that would have the effect of civilizing them and bringing their cultural values into line with those of the fledging United States. Which is to say, we tried to sell farm implements to tribes organized around hunting, offering plows to a market hungry for muskets.

Solving the illegal-immigration problem should not be hard. No one knows how many foreign nationals are residing illegally in the United States — estimates range from 11 million to 20 million. But everyone understands that it is an untenable situation that must be addressed.

The two extreme positions of the Left and Right probably have little public support — on the one hand, blanket amnesties and open borders, and on the other, deportation of all foreign nationals who reside here without legal authorization.

Polls show that most Americans want something in between.

Close the border. Allow entry only to those who have legal permission. Ensure that employers hire only those foreign nationals who have valid green cards. Permit those who have resided here for a while, who are without criminal records and are employed, to apply inside the U.S. for either a pathway to citizenship or legal residence.

Require that those residing here unlawfully pay a fine for breaking the law and wait in line until immigrants who followed the law are first processed. Reform legal immigration to make it ethnically blind and predicated on skill sets and education rather than on proximity to our borders or on family connections to those residing here unlawfully.

Most would agree with those sensible reforms, but I doubt that we will see any such grand bargain. The trouble is not, as the Democratic and Republican establishments allege, because of xenophobic and nativist bigots. Only a minority now favor sending every undocumented immigrant home without a chance for the hard-working and law-abiding to stay here while they apply for citizenship.

The problem instead is that the establishments of both parties talk in high-minded fashion but in fact act selfishly. Unfortunately, identity-politics elites and Democratic-party activists, along with employers of undocumented workers, do not support such a grand bargain.

I agree with David and Rich that John Hinderaker’s Bundy post is very strong. As a matter of law, Cliven Bundy is in the wrong. He is nevertheless a sympathetic figure, and the concerns raised by the standoff in Nevada transcend the illegality of his conduct.

Rich’s recollection of Lincoln’s exhortation that reverence for the law become “the political religion of the nation” triggered my recollection of a seemingly inconsistent speech Lincoln delivered as president nearly a quarter-century later. As the Civil War raged, the president very controversially suspended the writ of habeas corpus and imposed martial law in states where Confederate operatives and sympathizers were taking seditious action. Addressing Congress on July 4, 1861, Lincoln defended his suspension of the writ:

Of course some consideration was given to the questions of power and propriety before this matter was acted upon. The whole of the laws which were required to be faithfully executed were being resisted and failing of execution in nearly one-third of the States. Must they be allowed to finally fail of execution, even had it been perfectly clear that by the use of the means necessary to their execution some single law, made in such extreme tenderness of the citizen’s liberty that practically it relieves more of the guilty than of the innocent, should to a very limited extent be violated? To state the question more directly, are all the laws but one to go unexecuted and the Government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated?

Now, it was only advisedly that I described this speech as “seemingly” inconsistent with the one Rich excerpted. For one thing, Lincoln did not believe his suspension of the writ violated the law, and he had a very colorable argument. The Constitution provides for the writ’s suspension in cases of rebellion or invasion; it does not say who may suspend it. The Supreme Court’s eventual conclusion (in the 1866 case of Ex Parte Milligan) that Congress must enact a suspension because the relevant clause is in Article I was sensible, but it was not indisputable. Lincoln was not without reason to believe that he had the necessary authority as long as a rebellion or invasion had occurred. Moreover, Lincoln’s passion for the rule of law was evident even in the act of arguably breaking it: He not only vigorously contended that his suspension was lawful; he also urged Congress to affirm the suspension by passing legislation (which Congress did in 1863).

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/hawaii-2014-candidates-for-congress-where-they-stand
Not just for those who live in Hawaii. All Congressmen and Senators will vote on issues critical to all Americans…see the whole elections series at Family Security Matters…so far we have posted Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Texas(Primary over), California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia and Hawaii and llinois….coming up next Idaho, Iowa, ….stay tuned…..rsk

To see the actual voting records of all incumbents on other issues such as Foreign Policy, Second Amendment Issues, Homeland Security, and other issues as well as their rankings by special interest groups please use the links followed by two stars (**).

Note: Late filing date and primary. We will update periodically if more candidates file.

U.S. Senate

Brian Schatz (D) Incumbent

http://brianschatz.com/ http://www.schatz.senate.gov/

http://www.ontheissues.org/senate/Brian_Schatz.htm **

HOT BUTTON ISSUES

ENERGY Schatz Statement on Keystone Pipeline Environmental Report – Friday, January 31, 2014: Washington, DC – U.S. Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawai‘i), Chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water and Power, issued the following statement regarding the State Department’s final supplemental Environmental Impact Statement for the Keystone XL pipeline permit application:

“I am certain that encouraging the production of Canadian tar sands – some of the dirtiest oil in the world – is not in America’s national interest. As other agencies, Secretary Kerry, and ultimately President Obama review the environmental analysis, I would urge that they conclude that the environmental impacts of this pipeline are simply too high and reject the proposal. Climate change is the challenge of our generation and we need to be moving forward with policies to support clean energy, not backwards with dirty energy like the Keystone pipeline supports.”

HEALTHCARE ICYMI: Schatz Speaks on Senate Floor in Support of Affordable Care Act – Wednesday, September 18, 2013: Today, Senator Brian Schatz delivered a floor speech on the merits of the Affordable Care Act, its benefits in Hawai‘i, and the recklessness of some members of Congress who are holding the debt ceiling vote hostage over implementation of health care reform.

“I refuse to engage in the process of political and parliamentary gymnastics designed to score small, short-term wins at the expense of the American people and the economy,” said Senator Brian Schatz. “It has got to be pointed out that anyone who wants to grind the entire government to a halt over the implementation of this several years’ old law will cause harm to the economy, cause harm to their communities, because federal funding provides essential services and programs to constituents in every state, in every county, in every district. If improvements or changes need to be made, they can be done through the regular order- with hearings, serious discussions and bipartisan support.”

Colleen Hanabusa (D) Challenger

Is currently U.S. Representative in District 1 http://hanabusaforhawaii.com/ http://www.ontheissues.org/house/Colleen_Hanabusa.htm **

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=69498
Sometimes a choice of words can be extremely revealing. That was the case with Kerry’s contentious testimony in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Under pressure, Kerry tends to slip and say revealing things. That was how the infamous, “for it and against it” clip was born.

Kerry dismissed breakout as “just having one bomb’s worth, conceivably, of material, but without any necessary capacity to put it in anything, to deliver it, to have any mechanism to do so, and otherwise.”

He then admitted that “our goal” is not eliminating nuclear capability as much as “proving that this is a peaceful program.”

The first part of that is a preview of the next stage of Obama Inc’s Iran argument. One bomb doesn’t matter. Wait until they have thirty.

The second part however is even more revealing.

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=69495
It’s not often that a U.S. government agency gets caught red-handed abiding by its charter and performing its publicly-avowed and legislatively-approved duties. But last week the AP “broke” a long and breathless story from Havana that nailed the USAID (United States Agency for International Development) for just that.

In their own words, “a secret plan aimed at undermining Cuba’s communist government,” was courageously exposed by the AP’s intrepid Havana bureau.

Such is the magnitude of the scandal that a red-faced and snarling Senator Patrick Leahy is now chairing hearings on Capitol Hill where he grills USAID director Rajiv Shah on his agency’s “cockamamie!” plan.

The diabolical cloak and dagger scheme hatched in 2008 during George Bush’s term, (which may account for Democratic Senator Leahy’s dudgeon) amounted to setting up a “Cuban Twitter” named ZunZuneo (Cuban slang for a hummingbird’s tweet) in order for Cuban youths to text each other without snooping by Castro’s KGB-mentored secret police…..

Caught your breath back?….Yes, amazingly such a scheme somehow escaped the imaginations of Ian Fleming, John Le Carre’ and Tom Clancy.

In sum, a brief effort was made (lasting from 2008-12, and involving 68,000 of Castro’s hapless subjects) to allow Cubans (who pre-Castro enjoyed more phones and TVs per-capita than most Europeans) to communicate with each other in the same manner as do teenagers today in such places as Sudan, Papua New Guinea and Laos.

Understandably this scheme to facilitate a tiny window of freedom for a tiny fraction of their subjects greatly alarmed Cuba’s Stalinist rulers. After all, it wasn’t easy converting a free and prosperous nation with a higher per-capita income than half of Europe, a flood of immigrants from same and the first Mercedes dealership in the Americas into a totalitarian pesthole that repels Haitians and features a glorious rebirth of communications by bongo-drum and transport by oxcart.

Well, the news was barely broken by Castro’s U.S. media allies when, as mentioned, Castro’s U.S. legislative allies picked up the signal from Havana and erupted in outrage—not against the KGB-mentored censorship by a terror-sponsor mind you. But against the U.S. attempt to foil it. No. This is not your father’s cold war.

Senator Patrick Leahy, true to his historic role as U.S. legislative messenger for Castro’s every whim and wish, promptly denounced the program as “dumb, dumb, dumb.” “What in heaven’s name are you thinking?”‘ Leahy complained to Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC about the USAID scheme. “This makes no sense at all.”

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/?p=69492
An explosion devastated a busy bus station on the outskirts of the Nigerian capital of Abuja on Monday, April 14, 2014. It was the latest in a series of terrorist attacks on Africa’s most populous nation. No group had claimed credit for the attack as of Monday, but Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan laid the blame at the feet of Boko Haram, the Islamist terrorist group seeking the eradication of Christians and the Islamization of Nigeria.

The blast took place at 6:55 a.m. according to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN). Reuters reported at least 71 dead and 124 injured, but on Tuesday, Punch raised the number dead to 89, including three perpetrators, with 257 injured. And this was not the week’s only attack.

Just days earlier, Boko Haram jihadists killed some 200 in Borno, a northeastern Nigerian state that has seen far more than its share of jihad terrorism. Punch reported that on April 9-10 attacks took place on communities in several towns, as well as on a teachers’ training college and a group of students traveling to their matriculation exams. Boko Haram seemed determined to show that “western education is forbidden.”

Rarer was Monday’s attack on Abuja’s Nyanya Mass Transit Park – demonstrating the terrorists’ brazenness, operating in the country’s capital, as well as the northern and middle state belts to which they have already laid claim. The blast destroyed 16 high-capacity buses and damaged another 24, as well as affecting smaller vehicles, a police spokesman told Reuters. Many of the buses were loaded with commuters, so the attack left a hellish scene of charred bodies, body parts, and twisted metal. In Tuesday’s report, Punch told of an eyewitness who said that the attack was carried out by four insurgents in a Volkswagen Golf.

According to NAN, many of the commuters in this transit point for the satellite communities of the Federal Capital Territory surrounding Abuja were on their way to work and their businesses. But Nigerian attorney and human rights activist Emmanuel Ogebe pointed out that this attack took place on the first day of Holy Week in a country in which Easter is a major holiday.

“Abuja is emptying out as people travel to their home states for the long holiday,” said Ogebe. He believes the bus station was targeted deliberately on the week of Easter. This would be no surprise, as a majority of Islamist attacks in Nigeria target Christians, Christian holidays (holy days), and have occurred at churches and Christian schools and universities.

When President Jonathan visited the scene of the carnage, Reuters said he denounced “the activities of those who are trying to move our country backwards,” mentioning Boko Haram by name. The Nigerian government has not been successful in stopping Boko Haram, nor in assisting those who have been victimized the jihadists. But even their efforts in that direction have been constantly criticized for heavy-handedness and/or unfairness by the US State Department. The State Department favors a more nuanced approach to northern Nigerian Islamists.