RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/373231/print
Congress: This Time It’s Personal
Senator Feinstein has finally been goaded into noticing executive-branch arrogations of power. By Kevin D. Williamson

Now we know what it takes to nudge Congress’s sense of self-respect into a state of at least semi-consciousness.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, God bless her, is throwing a very public fit over findings that the CIA spied on Congress — on her Select Senate Intelligence Committee, specifically — as part of a campaign to undermine the committee’s investigation into an interrogation program that the agency does not much want to see investigated.

It’s a strange contradiction: Senators do not want for self-respect. If anything, the individual members of that august collection of a hundred self-identified future presidents and vice presidents suffer from excessive self-regard at levels that are frequently embarrassing and occasionally delusional. Look into the eyes of John Kerry or Joe Biden and consider for a moment the political incubator that hatched such specimens of Miltonic-Luciferian self-importance. But the Senate, and Congress as a whole, have been experiencing something of a crisis of confidence in recent decades. Our constitutional order makes Congress the effective seat of domestic governance: Only Congress can appropriate funds; only Congress can tax. Spending bills must originate in the House, presidential appointments are subject to Senate approval. Only Congress can coin money. And while the Constitution entrusts the president with some important powers regarding such outward-directed issues as military engagements, only Congress can declare war or ratify a treaty.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/373215/print

‘​We were not, I repeat, not, told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used.” — Nancy Pelosi, May 2009

Responding to the above: “Hmmm. . . . Well, I personally . . . went to the Congress in September 2002 and briefed her on . . . the techniques that we had used, which included waterboarding.” — Jose Rodriguez, former director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, April 2012

The Pelosi School of Intelligence has a motto: “The fiction shall set you free.”

Dianne Feinstein just became its latest professor.

On Tuesday, Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), complained that the CIA had spied on her committee in order to “intimidate” its staff.

CIA Director John Brennan insists that “nothing could be further from the truth.”

Still, Feinstein is furious. It’s an assault on the Constitution, she says.

But let’s be clear. Whatever Feinstein claims, this a crisis of her own making. To understand why, we need to look back to where this all began — to 2009, and the start of the SSCI investigation into the CIA’s Bush-era Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs).

At the beginning of its investigation, the SSCI’s stated intention was to bring clarity. Its stated intention.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/373230/becoming-party-work-senator-jeff-sessions

Senator Sessions, an incumbent is unopposed for re-election in Alabama. He has a rather anemic record on foreign policy issues…..rsk

According to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll, seven in ten voters believe that the Republican party is “out of touch with the concerns of most people in the United States today.”

What follows is a plan for how the GOP can win back their trust — and a build a conservative majority in the process.

But first, a little history.

When Americans went to the polls in 2012, the following was true: Work-force participation had sunk to its lowest level in 35 years, wages had fallen below 1999 levels, and 47 million Americans were on food stamps. Yet Mitt Romney, the challenger to the incumbent president, lost lower- and middle-income voters by an astonishing margin. Among voters earning $30,000 to $50,000, he trailed by 15 points, and among voters earning under $30,000 he trailed by 28 points.

And what did the GOP’s brilliant consultant class conclude from this resounding defeat? They declared that the GOP must embrace amnesty. The Republican National Committee dutifully issued a report calling for a “comprehensive immigration reform” that would inevitably increase the flow of low-skilled immigration, reducing the wages and living standards of the very voters whose trust the GOP had lost.

http://americanthinker.com/assets/3rd_party/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/03/more_dim_dems.html

Rep. Lee (D- Texas- district 18) has a challenger in Sean Seibert a Republican (http://seanseibert.com/)

Sean Seibert started his military career at the age of 19 by enlisting as a private in the Army. He spent several years enlisted before receiving a commission as a Second Lieutenant in 1987 while attending the University of Texas at Arlington.Over his career he has led our nation’s greatest resources, its sons and daughters, in numerous deployments (to include Guatemala, Bosnia, Persian Gulf, and Afghanistan). In 2009 Sean was selected to join the 82d Airborne Division General Staff on their deployment to Afghanistan. Starting off as the lead planner for the Afghan National Police, whose stalwart performance was rated as immeasurable. The Commanding General selected Sean as his number one choice to lead the efforts at the key strategic board crossing in the Khyber Pass (where 80% of all NATO resources entered Afghanistan from Pakistan).

Remember last summer, when the Congressional Black Caucus was pushing Sheila Jackson Lee to be the new head of Homeland Security? Aside from her previously disclosed problems with managing staff, one of the main criticisms was that the woman simply was not smart enough for the job.

Considering our serving president, one could have reason to wonder if that’s even a requirement for a department head in a Democrat administration. Whether or not Sheila could have done any more damage to the country than her party’s leader, yesterday she provided additional proof that there are some gaps in her grasp of American history and governance. Standing before the House, Lee offered this:

Maybe I should offer a good thanks to the distinguished members of the majority, the Republicans, my chairman and others, for giving us an opportunity to have a deliberative constitutional discussion that reinforces the sanctity of this nation and how well it is that we have lasted some 400 years, operating under a constitution that clearly defines what is constitutional and what is not[.]

As the folks at Washington Free Beacon point out, she missed the Constitution’s launch by only 173 years.

This is a woman with a degree in political science from Yale and a law degree from Virginia – both degree fields supposedly requiring significant study of American politics and American law, both of which are grounded in that Constitution. Was Sheila snoozing in class?

Oh, well. The un-constitutional law professor now leading us believes we have 57 states, so Sheila’s blooper is no big deal. He thinks we’re bigger; she thinks we’re older.

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2014/03/10/obama-needs-a-revitalized-nuclear-strategy

Facing a new Cold War with Putin’s Russia, President Obama needs to embrace a new nuclear weapons strategy.

Whether we like it or not, the United States faces the expanding prospect of a new Cold War. To be sure, the Soviet Union no longer exists, but the successor superpower regime in Moscow is not making things any easier for us. Even during the current crisis in the Ukraine, for example, Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted upon going ahead with test-firing a Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missile (referred to by NATO as the SS-25 Sickle).

How shall we best respond to this ominously re-emergent threat? In order to fully maintain American security in such increasingly volatile circumstances, President Barack Obama will, among other things, need to garner the benefits of a newly-refined and potentially more robust national nuclear strategy. These benefits would not be insignificant. They would be indispensable.

On its face, this would seem to be a perfectly obvious and hence unremarkable observation. Nonetheless, from the moment that he first entered the White House, this president has made it clear that he opposes all nuclear weapons, at least in principle. Ignoring post-World War II history, when such weapons likely prevented a third world war between the two resultant superpowers, he steadfastly maintains that they are inherently corrosive and destabilizing. Indeed, for Obama, there still seemingly can be no more high-minded objective than creating “a world free of nuclear weapons.”

http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2014/03/our-sociopathic-political-class_12.html
In his March 10th FrontPage column, “Obama’s Appeasement Leads to War,” about how appeasing tyrants has and will continue to lead to war and more international strife, Daniel Greenfield wrote:
On the shield of the Strategic Air Command a steel mailed fist grips a lightning bolt and an olive branch. The motto of the organization that was the nightmarish obsession of every Cold War leftist was “Peace is our Profession.”
To the moviegoers who sat through Dr. Strangelove, to the earnest leftists who saw the world going up in a puff of atomic smoke because the military industrial complex was obsessed with killing people, to the pseudo-idealists who passed on atomic secrets to Moscow to avoid an American monopoly on the bomb, the SAC’s motto was a demented joke. They knew that the only way to stop war was to disarm.
Coincidentally, I watched “Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” the previous evening on Netflix. The last time I saw it in its entirety was the year of its release in1964, on Larson Air Force Base, 462nd Bomb Wing, in Washington State. And I saw it under the most unusual circumstances.
I was in the Air Police, charged with guarding the base and its B52 bombers, KC135 tankers, and U2 spy planes. Larson was also an ICBM base, but the silos had separate security. One evening, after a regular 8-hour shift on the flight line, I was one of about eight other air cops selected to serve on a backup or reserve team. This meant that we could sack out in the reserve team’s quarters, play cards, read a book, or indulge, as a group, armed with our carbines and sidearms, in some other diversion.
On my first night on the team it was decided to go to the base movie theater, to which we were admitted free. “Dr. Strangelove” was playing. As we sat in a back row behind the audience, the movie thoroughly confused me. My colleagues thought it was hilarious, especially when the motto, “Peace is Our Profession” was prominently juxtaposed with the noisy battle scenes between Army troops and Air Force base policemen.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/03/13/business/economy/stanley-fischer-fed-nominee-has-long-history-of-policy-leadership.html?emc=edit_ae_20140312&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=9437676&_r=0&referrer=
Stanley Fischer is a former No. 2 at the International Monetary Fund and was the governor of the Bank of Israel until June.
WASHINGTON — Stanley Fischer has worked for much of his professional life to improve economic policy in the developing world. Now he is on the verge of a new role in a country with plenty of economic problems of its own: the United States.

Mr. Fischer, nominated by President Obama to serve as vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, is likely to move quickly through a confirmation process that begins with a hearing before the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday morning.

Assuming Mr. Fischer successfully negotiates that gantlet, he would join Janet L. Yellen, the Fed’s new chairwoman, in the difficult work of figuring out how much more the Fed can do to help the economy recover from the Great Recession. Ms. Yellen proposed his selection to the White House.

Mr. Fischer has supported the efforts by the Fed and other central banks to revive economic growth, but he has also described the benefits as limited. “You could do a lot with monetary policy, but you couldn’t get the economy growing fast again,” he said on Bloomberg Television in September. “You needed fiscal policy.”

Genial, courtly, self-effacing, Mr. Fischer is skilled at making sharp points without making enemies.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4213/iran-kurds-tortured-hanged

198 people have been hanged so far in 2014 — a period of only two and a half months.

“The court told me, ‘You are an enemy of God. You must be hanged very soon.’ That was the sum of my entire court process. I don’t have any lawyer to defend me.” — Ms. Zainab Jalalian.

Iran’s grotesque human rights violations, the rise in executions, or the fate of three Americans — Amir Hekmati, Pastor Saeed Abedini and Robert Levinson — held as political prisoners inside Iran, were not even discussed during the historic negotiations between the United States and Iran in late 2013.

The Kurdish people, one of the largest minorities in Iran, have been heavily targeted by the Islamic Republic since its 1979 inception when Ayatollah Khomeini famously declared a “fatwa” [religious decree] against the province of Kurdistan and crushed opposing unrest by sending 110,000 troops complete with heavy artillery, fighter jets and armed helicopters. The fighting was so intense that residents were forced to flee into the harsh mountains. Kurdish men have been executed, dozens at a time.

http://sarahhonig.com/2014/03/12/jordans-bizarre-jurists/

Unfortunately, not many Israelis recall that today is the 17th anniversary of the Naharayim massacre in which a Jordanian soldier cold-bloodedly massacred seven Israeli schoolgirls.

Yet that unspeakable crime is bizarrely, almost obsessively, remembered in Jordan and there it has oddly just made the headlines again – but not in the way Israelis would readily imagine.

On Tuesday, Jordanian jurists had taken to the street and raucously protested the killing a day earlier of one of their colleagues, Raed Zeiter, at the Allenby Bridge crossing. Israel had officially expressed regret, shared its initial probe findings with the Jordanians and acceded to Jordanian demands to jointly investigate the matter. So far it all sounds cooperative and well-intentioned enough.

The reaction inside Jordan, however, took none of this into account and, if anything, exploited the incident to fan the flames against Israel and once more agitate for the release of the Naharayim slayer, which has incomprehensibly become a cause célèbre for all too many in Jordan, and, most disconcertingly of all, for its legal community.

Members of Jordan’s Bar Association didn’t rally after Zeiter’s shooting as outraged but hitherto impartial observers. Before having even had the chance to examine and ascertain any of the facts, they demanded the extradition of “the Israeli murderers.” The Jordanian jurists, having a priori formulated their verdict, vowed to mete out their brand of justice. Its nature isn’t difficult to surmise.

They congregated at Amman’s Palace of Justice and burned an Israeli flag there to the sound of hoarse shouts calling for the expulsion of Israeli diplomats and the immediate release of Ahmed Daqamseh, who on March 13, 1997, callously shot to death seven young Israeli girls out on a school excursion.

http://newmediajournal.us/indx.php/item/11583

Sweden is the seventh richest country in the world in terms of GDP per capita and its high standard of living. It is famous for supporting the Norwegian resistance during World War II; for helping to rescue Danish Jews from deportation to concentration camps; and for its native son, Raoul Wallenberg, who rescued up to 100,000 Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust.

We recognize Sweden as the country that gave us the incomparable Ingrid Bergman and Greta Garbo, writers Ingmar Bergman and August Strindberg, IKEA furniture, high-quality steel production, the Volvo, the pop group ABBA, and Pippi Longstocking.

But Sweden’s latest source of prominence, its third largest city, Malmo, founded c. 1275, is now known as the City to Leave. Its Jewish population is fleeing, as Malmo has become home to Muslim immigrants, anti-Semitism and violence, which has earned for Sweden the dubious distinction ofRape Capital of the World. How is it possible for the Muslims to comprise a mere 6% of Sweden’s population, yet be responsible for 77% of the rapes committed? According to the Counter Jihad report, one in four Swedish women will be raped, some killed, as sexual assaults increase by 500%.

Now, since President Obama invited 80,000 Muslims into the United States, with a promise of 100,000 per year over the next five years, and studies show that Islamic immigration brings a rise in rates of rape and molestation, there can be no doubt that we will see a corresponding increase in rape crime in America accordingly.