RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-environmentalist-world-war/print/

The Saudi Monarchy and Putin aren’t afraid of Barack Obama or even of an F-35; they’re afraid of fracking.

Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal said that “North American shale gas production is an inevitable threat.” And Putin suddenly turned into an environmentalist when it came to fracking warning that it makes “black stuff comes out of the tap.”

The Russians and the Saudis are both threatened by American energy production for economic reasons and political reasons. America’s import of oil turned Saudi Arabia from a backward country of goat herders not that much more advanced than Afghanistan into a world power whose armies are the legions of Muslim settlers and terrorists spreading across the world.

Without Saudi oil, the Clash of Civilizations with Islam might not even be happening. Energy also allowed Putin to shore up a flailing government and put it back on the path to becoming an expanding empire. But it wasn’t really the KGB oligarchy or the Saudi monarchy that made those things happen.

It was our own environmentalists.

Islam is spreading terror worldwide fueled by oil and dreams of a global Caliphate. Asian countries face a war with China over oil in the South China Sea. Russia is rebuilding the Soviet Union at gunpoint and gaspoint. As Russia, China and Islamic groups gain more confidence; the scale of their conquests will only increase. And all three have become serious threats because of environmentalism.

Environmentalism drove Western nations to export dirty jobs and industries abroad. China gobbled up American manufacturing while Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE took up American energy production. Putin arrived late to the party, but still managed to do to Europe what the Saudis had done to the US. Europe won’t do anything about Russia’s expansionism because it has come to depend on it.

US imports of crude oil quadrupled between 1970 and 1980 while domestic crude oil production continued to fall. Not that long ago the United States was importing 60 percent of its petroleum. Among other economic and social factors, the rise in crude oil imports aligned neatly with the rise of the environmental movement. By the seventies, environmental fanaticism was written into Federal law.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jamie-glazov/valerie-jarretts-influence-on-obama/print/

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Dr. Paul Kengor, a professor of political science at Grove City College. His books include The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor and Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century. His latest book is 11 Principles of a Reagan Conservative.

FP: Paul Kengor, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

I would like to talk to you today about Valerie Jarrett, her background, her relationship with Barack Obama, and her influence in the Obama White House.

Let’s begin first with who Valerie Jarrett is — and her relationship with Barack Obama.

Kengor: Thanks Jamie.

Valerie Jarrett is President Obama’s single most important and influential adviser. No one else in the White or the entire administration is as close to Obama. She has been described as everything from his “right-hand woman” to like a sister and even a mother to Obama. To cite some mainstream/leftist sources: The New York Times says she’s Obama’s “closest friend in the White House,” his “envoy,” his “emissary,” and his “all-purpose ambassador.” The Times calls her the “ultimate Obama insider.” Dana Milbank says her connection to Obama is “deep and personal” and that she’s “the real center of Obama’s inner circle.”

Obama himself calls her one of his “oldest friends” and says “I trust her completely.”

As for Jarrett, she says that she and Obama have a “shared view of where the United States fits in the world.” She says they “have kind of a mind meld.” She’s says that “chances are, what he wants to do is what I’d want to do.”

FP: Ok, so that begs the next question: What is it exactly that they want to do?

Kengor: That’s a very good question. I think the best I can say, which is admittedly at times vague from a policy standpoint, is that both favor some form of leftist “fundamental transformation.”

In domestic policy, we can expect them to desire and pursue the kinds of policies that Obama was able to implement in 2009-10 when he had a leftist Pelosi-Reid Congress. The current Republican majority in Congress gets a lot of heat from conservatives, but at least it has slowed the radical push to the left that occurred under Obama, Pelosi, and Reid during those first two years of the Obama presidency. Those first two years were an Obama-Jarrett policy fest. That what an Obama-Jarrett agenda looks like.

In terms of foreign policy, here again it’s difficult to track down precise ideological statements and actions from Jarrett, though she has said unequivocally that her worldview fully reflects Barack Obama’s. It may even be worse than Obama’s, if the reports of her intervention on Osama Bin Laden are correct.

My sense is that both Obama and Valerie Jarrett prefer a weaker America on the world stage. The pandering to Putin in the first term was probably a reflection of Obama-Jarrett thinking, and thus so is the humiliation at the hands of Putin in the second term.

I’m also suspicious of Valerie Jarrett’s possibly having provided negative input into Obama’s statements on Iran, including his terrible Carter-like reaction to the initial uprising in the Iranian “street” in June 2009. Did Obama’s behavior in that period, which was initially so weak that even Democrats were aghast, reflect Valerie Jarrett’s input? I can’t say, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

FP: How much influence does she actually have on policy?

Kengor: Her influence is highly significant. She has her hands in every major decision, if not every small one. She’s constantly monitoring things, inserting her input and protecting her Barack. I could give a bunch of examples, but here are two.

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2014/03/sunday-christians-dying/

Irene Petros is the pseudonym of Christian university student. She chooses not to use her real name for fear of harassment on campus

As Muslim slaughter Christians, the supine West soothes its conscience with relativism and myths about “the religion of peace”. Today heads roll and blood flows in Syria and Libya. How long before Islam’s emboldened legionaries take their campaign directly to the West?

The most heartbreaking, yet overlooked repercussion of the Arab Spring has been the intensified suffering of Christians at the hands of Islamic fundamentalists. Horrific accounts of persecution are commonly documented by both Christian and Middle Eastern media, but are rarely reported outside the region. Thus, little is known in the West about such occurrences, despite the persecution of Christians having doubled in 2013 on the numbers for the previous year, according nondenominational group Open Doors, which supports persecuted Christians.

Open Doors’ annual World Watch List, which ranks the countries where Christians face the most persecution, lists North Korea as the most dangerous country. However, 36 out of the top 50 nations are Islamic, indicating that Islamic fundamentalism is the biggest overall threat Christianity currently faces.

One recent example out of Somalia (ranked second on the World Watch List), sheds light on the deplorable circumstances Middle Eastern Christians face. Militants from the terrorist entity Al-Shabab reportedly beheaded a mother of two girls, ages 8 and 15, and her cousin upon discovering that they were Christians. The girls were forced to watch their own mother be martyred at the hands of savages. This has been only one of the many vile acts experienced on a daily basis by the Christians in the Middle East.

In Nigeria, terrorist group Boko Haram (meaning “Western teaching is forbidden”) has continuously targeted Christians for over four years. It’s attacks have cost the lives of thousands and destroyed and churches and schools, leaving Nigerians in a perpetual state of fear and insecurity. These attacks have been in keeping with Boko Haram’s professed goal of wiping out the Christian population and establishing an Islamic state in Nigeria. if the rest of the world continues to turn a blind eye and with the Nigerian military struggling to counter the menace, Boko Haram appears well on its way to acvhieving its goals.

Nor is Boko Haram the only group targeting Christians in Nigeria. Iin March, Muslim Fulani herdsman took the lives of over 100 Christians and destroyed homes and churches in Kaduna.

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2014/03/fine-paper-retracted/
Michael Kile is author of the Devil’s Dictionary of Climate Change. He is a graduate of the University of Western Australia and two other universities.

The University of Western Australia’s Stephan Lewandowsky, scourge of climate sceptics, likened “deniers” to moon-landing conspiracy buffs. Now that his, er, research has been withdrawn, the catastropharian chorus reckons he’s the real victim

Carmen Lawrence’s speech last Friday to University of Western Australia Convocation alumni in defence of the Academy was impressive – except for one word and a revealing sentence. Winthrop Professor Lawrence, director of the Centre for the Study of Social Change in UWA’s School of Psychology, spoke on “An avalanche of change: Will universities as we know them survive the onslaught?”

Universities, argued Lawrence, have developed a blind spot over the past three decades or so. By embracing managerialism and its tick-box performance reviews, the academy was becoming a soulless bureaucracy. It was churning out fewer graduates capable of asking the “big questions” — and too many anxious conformists.

“Universities should be crucial players in the issues of the day”, not merely “technical fixers”. The obsession with technology, speed and efficiency was eroding the university’s traditional roles: valuing knowledge for its own sake and providing civilising institutions that encouraged imagination, tolerance, self-governance, and so on. Broader scholarship was being undermined by a focus on specialist research, she continued,often sidelining teaching quality. There were some “very unfortunate practices in the new Church of Measurement” too. Lawrence was especially concerned about the mis-measurement of science, which was producing “serious distortions in research”.

Paradoxically, given the context, Carmen Lawrence then made an aside that probably puzzled many – and worried more than a few:

“Stephan Lewandowsky just emailed to advise he is [still] being pursued by climate deniers in an extravagant way.”

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

There is a delicious irony in that the same people who would ban the sale of a legal smoking product in drug stores, for health reasons, would promote the sale of an illegal smoking product, for health reasons. It has become non-pc to accept money from lobbyists for tobacco companies, but it is okay to take dollars from those promoting the legalization of marijuana. In fact, once Democratic politicos realized how much money they could get from trial lawyers for encouraging plaintiffs to sue tobacco companies, there was no need to help tobacco companies that had kept Southern Democrats in pocket change and in office for generations. Let it never be said that politicians do not know on which side of the bread butter has been spread. Politicians, who can bob and weave with the best, move in a straight line when it comes to money.

In February, CVS Caremark announced they would stop selling cigarettes and other tobacco products, a decision our smoker-in-chief Barack Obama characterized as a “powerful example.” The decision will cost CVS about $2 billion in annual sales, not really significant in a company that generates $126.7 billion in annual revenues, but still enough, possibly, to cost a few jobs. Of course, CVS may simply have anticipated what appears will become a “fait accompli.” San Francisco and Boston banned the sale of cigarettes in drug stores five years ago. And now Attorney Generals from 28 states are urging pharmacies in their states to follow CVS’s example.

Forgotten in the rush to cleanse the American consumer from the hazards of smoking is that it is not incidental to our economy. World-wide, tobacco sales are about $600 billion. If tobacco were a country, it would be a little larger than Sweden. Somewhere between 1.8 and 3.1 million jobs are in fields related to tobacco. The lower number is provided by the American Economics Group and the higher – not surprisingly – by the Tobacco Merchants Association. In the U.S., tobacco is grown on 10,000 farms in 16 states and, in 2011, contributed $17.8 billion to the coffers of states and the federal government. In 2011, they spent $8.4 billion in advertising and generated about $35 billion in profits. On the other side of the ledger – or perhaps not, depending on whose ledger one is reviewing – it is alleged that the annual economic cost of tobacco runs about $70 billion, in direct medical care and lost productivity. The former, of course, adds to the income of doctors and hospitals, while the latter is at best a guess. And tobacco has kept trial lawyers flush for decades.

http://nypost.com/2014/03/25/shake-it-up-baby-2/

In the course of admitting he didn’t have a good reason for taking a good school away from kids in Harlem, Mayor Bill de Blasio said that to fix a “broken” city school system, we have to “shake the foundations.”

Today, some 1,500 students and teachers from Success Academy charter schools will be doing that at the Armory on the Hudson. They are holding a giant pep rally as they head into next week’s tests. It’s called “Slam the Exam!” And it’s a terrific example of how to “shake the foundations” of a public school system mired in low expectations and even lower performance.

This Empire is centrally organized, overly bureaucratic and failing 85 percent of our black and Latino students.

Yet it has its defenders. Look at Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña. She’s already made clear that charter children are not her concern. So what does she tell principals of the children who are her concern? Not to go overboard on “test preparation.” Hmm. Wonder if that’s the approach in Singapore or South Korea, whose students score well above ours in reading, math and science.

Fariña worries about “stressing” students. She should go to the armory today. These kids believe they can compete with the best of them, and that tests give them an opportunity to prove it. So their approach to testing is simple: “Bring it on.”

Then there’s Mayor de Blasio’s idea of shaking it up, which is to take away good schools for kids if they are charters and keep failing schools open if they are traditional schools. That’s the instinct of the old guard who put the teachers union above student performance.

THIS SHOULD BE TITLED MALICE IN ARABIA….SAUDI ARABIA HAS BEEN SPARED EXPOSURE FOR DECADES….IN 1981 FORMER AMBASSADOR JOHN C. WEST FORCED CANCELLATION OF A BRITISH DOCUMENTARY “DEATH OF A PRINCESS”- THE STORY OF A 19 YEAR OLD GIRL WHO WAS BEHEADED FOR ADULTERY ON THE ORDERS OF HER GRANDFATHER, A MEMBER OF THE SAUDI ROYAL FAMILY….AND EVERY SINGLE U.S. ADMINISTRATION AVOIDED MENTION OF THE HARSH SHARIA LAWS IMPOSED BY THE TYRANTS OF THE GULF OIL STATES….RSK

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/374228/alice-arabia-and-foul-idiocy-censorship-tom-rogan

Under pressure, ABC cancels a show that might have told the truth about women’s rights in Saudi Arabia.

Cry insult and let loose the enemies of freedom.

Late last week, following days of media clamor, ABC Family canceled a pilot for Alice in Arabia. The show was to have centered upon a young American woman as she attempted to escape from family kidnappers in Saudi Arabia.

To be sure, ABC’s critics were vociferous, both in volume and in number. But they should never have been able to succeed.

At a basic level, consider the hyperventilating banality that defined the censorship crew’s arguments. BuzzFeed’s Ayesha Siddiqi scoffed at the comparison of Saudi Arabia to Wonderland. In the Guardian, Raya Jalabi declared that “the very premise of the pilot is deeply problematic — not least because it carries the very real potential for perpetuating negative stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims.” The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) echoed this sentiment, claiming that Alice in Arabia might lead to “things like bullying.” Coincidentally, CAIR receives quite a lot of money from Riyadh.

In an ironic twist of prejudice, Rega Jha insinuated that, as a former Arabic linguist in the U.S. military, the writer of Alice in Arabia was inherently racist. The corollary implication: that U.S. military personnel kill innocent Muslims (try the opposite). Time’s Rabia Chaudry ranted that Alice in Arabia bears similarity to lynching narratives.

Facing this sea of anger, one could easily, like Alice, have become lost.

Luckily, however, Lily Rothman was on hand to elucidate censorship’s beneficence — why ABC is lucky to have those who know, to tell them what to speak. But Rothman’s summation also tells us something else.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/374217/print

If you have not seen the biopic of Dr. Carson- “Gifted Hands”…do so….He is an amazing man with an amazing biography….rsk

While the media have been focused on the missing Malaysian aircraft, massive alterations of the world’s geopolitical terrain are underway simultaneously.

The annexation of Crimea by Russia should not have been a surprise for anyone who suspects that Russian president Vladimir Putin is trying to reestablish a powerful Soviet-style empire. When he aggressively attacked Georgia in 2008 — after both Georgia and Ukraine failed to obtain NATO admission at the Bucharest Summit – we should have realized that his goals were not limited to one territory. I suspect he is now calculating an excuse to occupy the easiest regions of Ukraine first and then the whole country over time.

The United States encouraged Ukraine to give up its nuclear arsenal and to deemphasize its military complex, but in its moment of dire need for tangible support, will we have the courage and fortitude to help stop Russian aggression, which ultimately could lead to another Cold War or worse?

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/03/25/obama-on-ukraine-scuffles-history-has-a-funny-way-of-moving-in-twists-and-turns/

President Obama used the word “scuffles” to describe the invasion of Ukraine while maintaining that his No. 1 security concern is a rogue nuclear weapon detonating inside the U.S. instead of Russia.

Obama was eager to stay on the nuke topic at a press conference with Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte after the conclusion of the Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague. Foreign and American media alike, though, wanted to talk Russia after the G-7 met on the sidelines of the conference to take their caucus down by one member.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov showed up for the class photo at the end of the summit, but stood rows away from Obama.

Obama said he was “less interested” in President Vladimir Putin’s motivations for taking control in Eastern Europe than “the facts and the principles that not only the United States, but the entire international community are looking to uphold.”

“I don’t think that any of us have been under any illusion that Russia has been very interested in controlling what happens to Ukraine. That’s not new. That’s been the case for years now. That’s been the case dating back to the Orange Revolution,” he added.

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/03/25/investigating-justice-department-corruption-while-giving-thousands-to-obama-campaign/
Rooting out unethical behavior inside DOJ is not as important as advancing the latest leftist narrative.

A key ethics investigator at Eric Holder’s Justice Department has contributed $6,100 to Barack Obama’s election campaign even though she has participated in high-profile investigations of political misconduct at the Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility.

Mary Aubry is an attorney in the Office of Professional Responsibility. The office has investigated a wide range of politically sensitive matters including the dismissal of the New Black Panther voter intimidation case, terrorist interrogation techniques, and the “investigation” into the firing of United States attorneys who served at the pleasure of President Bush.

After Hans von Spakovsky drew attention to Aubry’s political contributions in this 2011 article, she was removed from investigation into the New Black Panther dismissal. Years after Aubry’s OPR office issued a bungled report on the New Black Panther dismissal, DOJ’s independent inspector general revealed in a subsequent report the deep involvement of political appointees in the matter.

Von Spakovsky:

The investigation of the New Black Panther Party case has dragged on for more than a year and a half. OPR had to remove the lawyer initially assigned to investigate the case (Mary Aubry) after it became public that she had made thousands of dollars of political contributions to Barack Obama, other Democratic candidates, and the Democratic National Committee, with the latest contribution to the DNC coming as recently as July 13, 2010.

More recent FEC data show that Aubry didn’t stop her political participation after von Spakovsky’s 2011 story revealed her thousands in contributions. According to the FEC, Aubry made four more contributions to Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign after von Spakovsky’s article was published, all of them listing her employer as the “U.S. Dept. of Justice.”