RUTHFULLY YOURS

Boko Haram is a violent Salafist group that emerged in predominantly Muslim northeast Nigeria in the early 2000s. (Salafism is a Sunni Muslim reform movement that seeks return to the mores of the first generations of Muslims — the Salafiyya or the companions of Mohammed.)

There are reports that it got seed money from Osama bin Laden, and it has long been known to have al Qaeda ties, but how closely it actually works with al Qaeda — as opposed to loud displays of ideological support — is the subject of some debate in the U.S. government. This debate is reflective of general confusion and incoherence in American counterterrorism policy.

The ideological glue that holds Islamist groups together is Islamic supremacism, which is directly derived from a strict, literal interpretation of Muslim scripture, coupled with a belief that the “golden age” of Islam was the time of the first generations — Mohammed and his immediate companions and descendants — to which Muslims must return if they are ever to overcome the corrupting influence of the West. (Boko Haram actually means “Western education is ‘haram’ or forbidden.”)

Nevertheless, our government adamantly refuses to acknowledge the Islamic doctrinal underpinnings of Islamic supremacism. Consequently, the disconnect: Boko Haram is quite clear that its goal is to impose sharia law and join al Qaeda’s global jihad. Its targets include churches and Western symbols, and its current leader, Abubakar Shekau, is quoted threatening the United States in 2010: “Do not think jihad is over. Rather jihad has just begun. America, die with your fury.” Yet, the Obama administration long refused to designate it as a terrorist organization — at the insistence of the State Department under Hillary Clinton, over the objections of other government agencies. (The State Department finally listed Boko Haram as a terrorist organization after John Kerry took over for Mrs. Clinton.)

Brig. Gen. (ret.) Uzi Eilam is an octogenarian who served as the director general of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission from 1976 until 1985.

Last Friday Eilam gave a head-scratching interview to Yediot Aharonot’s Ronen Bergman in which he claimed that Iran’s nuclear weapons program is a decade from completion. He said it is far from clear that the Iranians even want a nuclear arsenal. He accused Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of cynically exaggerating the threat from Iran in order to strengthen himself politically.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Eilam’s interview was his absolute certainty in his judgment.

Eilam, who hasn’t had any inside knowledge of nuclear issues since 1985, would have us believe that he knows better than active duty Israeli intelligence chiefs and US intelligence directors about the status of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. He even thinks he knows better than the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Israel assesses that Iran already has sufficient quantities of enriched uranium to produce five atomic bombs. As Netanyahu has said, the interim nuclear deal the US and its allies signed with Iran last November only delays Iran’s bomb making capacity by six weeks.

In January, James Clapper, the director of US national intelligence, agreed with Israel’s assessment. In testimony before the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence Clapper said that Iran is already a nuclear breakout state. In his words, “Tehran has made technical progress in a number of areas – including uranium enrichment, nuclear reactors and ballistic missiles – from which it could draw if it decided to build missile- deliverable nuclear weapons.”

Clapper argued that this doesn’t matter because the US’s monitoring capabilities are so trustworthy and advanced that Iran wouldn’t be able to put nuclear weapons together without the US noticing.

Unfortunately there is no reason to believe Clapper is right. Indeed, Netanyahu said as much to US National Security Advisor Susan Rice when she repeated Clapper’s claim during her visit to Israel last week.

They have to share more.

That’s the general opinion about the rich these days, and it seems to apply in special force when it comes to a certain kind of rich: the rich involved in medical innovation. Sometimes the issue is simply tax revenues from admired companies. When, for example, Pfizer recently announced its plans to move to London to reduce its tax bill, brothers Representative Sander Levin (D., Mich.), and Senator Carl Levin (also D., Mich.) promptly joined forces to back new legislation that would force Pfizer to share its revenues by blocking the companies’ move.

The New York Times branded Pfizer’s move a “tax dodge,” a way of suggesting Pfizer’s behavior is sleazy. But of course the loss of tax revenues isn’t all that the resenters resent. They resent the wealth of the rich scientists, who care for their families with “concierge doctors” in special clinics no one else knows about. The critics also resent the loss of intellectual capital that occurs when the rich decamp — and that, legitimately. As President Obama pointed out when he created the Brain Initiative to keep science and science money stateside: “We can’t afford to miss these opportunities while the rest of the world races ahead.” But what if rich pharma did share? And what if it shared not only patented drugs but also something far more precious, its innovating brain?

That exhilarating possibility is the essence of a new state-by-state drive involving experimental drugs, “The Right to Try.”

Herewith, the basics. For decades now the Food and Drug Administration has maintained an onerous and slow approval process that delays the debut of new drugs for fatal diseases, sometimes for years longer than the life span of the patients desperate to try them. Attorneys and scholars at the Goldwater Institute of Arizona have crafted legislation for the states that would allow terminally ill patients to try experimental drugs for cancer or degenerative neurological diseases earlier. These “Right to Try” bills are so scripted that they overcome the usual objection to delivery of such experimental drugs: safety. Under “Right to Try,” only drugs that have passed the crucial Phase 1 of FDA testing could be prescribed, thereby reducing the possibility of Thalidomide repeat. Second, only patients determined to have terminal cases would be eligible to purchase the drugs, making it harder to maintain that the drug will jeopardize their lives.

Representatives in Colorado, Louisiana, and Missouri approved the “Right to Try” measure unanimously. Citizens of Arizona will vote on the effort to circumvent the FDA process this fall.

Why Jeb Bush’s Turn May Not Come-Unlike his father and brother, he’s made no effort to woo the GOP base. By Jonah Goldberg

What is happening to the Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram is tragic. The sinking of the Titanic, the fall of Saigon, the British defeat at Gallipoli, the Dred Scott decision — tragedies all. You can go on all day and all night listing terrible calamities and even lesser injustices, misfortunes, and other evidence that life isn’t fair. But you will probably collapse from exhaustion before you reach Jeb Bush’s difficulty becoming the third President Bush.

The New Yorker cartoons write themselves. Bush, in all his blue-blazered glory, sitting next to, well, just about anyone at a bar (or standing in front of the Pearly Gates, or lying on a psychiatrist’s couch, or visiting the complaints department) lamenting that he never got his turn. Or maybe he’d wear a shirt saying, “My Dad and My Brother Lived at the White House and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.”

Of course, that’s not actually all Bush got. He was a successful two-term Florida governor (a much tougher job than being governor of Texas, particularly for a Republican). He has a lovely family. He’s made a bundle in the private sector, and he’s a respected voice in lots of policy debates. But he hasn’t checked the last and most important box on his to-do list.

And I doubt he ever will.

It’s well known that Republicans tend to pick the candidate whose “turn” it is. Except for 1964 and 2000, the guy who came in second the last time or who in some way was perceived as next in line got the nomination. Barry Goldwater was a special case because of the rise of the conservative movement and the sense that JFK’s assassination made LBJ unbeatable.

George W. Bush was a special case for completely different reasons. There really wasn’t anyone next in line that year, but “Dubya” came the closest because the GOP felt his dad had been robbed in 1992 by Bill Clinton (and Ross Perot).

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/dear-chairman-gowdy-america-is-counting-on-your-backbone

Your investigation is a huge relief to millions of Americans like me who have wondered and agonized over the past almost-two years about the actual events that happened before, during and after the September 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi, Libya, that resulted in the horrific murders of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, information officer Sean Smith, and embassy security personnel and former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods.

Another State Department employee, diplomatic security agent David Ubben, was gravely injured while under attack with Woods and Doherty, but like other survivors he has been forbidden by the Obama Administration from speaking publicly about his ordeal.

However, as reported by Catherine Herridge of Fox News, when the late Florida Congressman Bill Young met Ubben at Walter Reed Medical Center last summer, he said that Ubben “emphasized the fact” that the attack on the Benghazi compound “was a very very military type of operation…they had knowledge of almost everything in the compound…they knew where the gasoline was, they knew where the generators were, they knew where the safe room was, they knew more than they should have about that compound.”

Will the Select Committee include the testimony of Ubben and the other muzzled victims and will it explore who sabotaged the Americans by revealing to the terrorists “more than they should have known about the compound”?

Of course, neither your Select Committee nor my letter to you would have seen the light of day if the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch had not been successful in their Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, which revealed “the smoking gun” e-mail in which Benjamin J. Rhodes, then-White House Deputy Strategic Communications Adviser laid out several goals for U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to meet on the five Sunday-morning TV shows she was scheduled to appear on, chief of which was: “To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.”

According to Dick Morris, former advisor to President Bill Clinton, a full day and a half before Rhodes sent his email advising Susan Rice to blame the Benghazi attacks on the video, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used the identical language in a statement of her own.

This suggests, Morris says, “at the very least, a close coordination between and White House and Hillary Clinton to deceive the American people about the true nature of the attack in Benghazi. And it may also be evidence that Hillary Clinton engineered that decision immediately following the attacks. Was the cover-up Hillary’s idea?”

In addition, Morris is emphatic in saying that the CIA talking points were in no way related to the White House talking points, which seem to have been made up out of whole cloth.

Will the Select Committee vigorously investigate the allegation that this 19-month cover-up was instigated by Hillary Clinton? Alternatively, will you get to the bottom of who exactly created the fiction of the video?

“Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.” – Ayn Rand, 1963*

At the end of Ayn Rand’s prophetic 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, a judge who is on strike with other producers against a future, nightmarish state of America (echoes of Obama) and has disappeared with them into a Rocky Mountain sanctuary, is at work. Before him is a “copy of an ancient document [the Constitution]. He had marked and crossed out the contradictions in its statements that had once been the cause of its destruction. He was now adding a new clause to its pages: ‘Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of production and trade…'”

I am sure that Rand scoured the Constitution for its virtues and flaws, and very likely read books on its history. But I am not so certain she ever did a study of state constitutions. One of the contradictions she does not allude to in the novel is the authority which that “ancient document” bestowed on the states at ratification to “regulate” their economies, production, and trade, which power the federal government was prohibited, in many instances, from interfering with. Had that issue occurred to Judge Narragansett, he might have added another clause: “Congress shall have the power to nullify states’ laws abridging the freedom of production and trade within their boundaries….” Or words to that effect.

James W. Ely, Jr., wrote a gem of a history of the Constitution that focuses almost exclusively on the treatment of property rights, from colonial times to the present, The Guardian of Every Other Right: A Constitutional History of Property Rights. It is one of the handiest and briefest digests of the history of property rights vis-à-vis federal and state courts and legislative acts I’ve come upon, written in clear, succinct language. For anyone imbued with the ambition to tackle The Federalist, the Constitutional Convention debates, and the papers of Founders such as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, Ely’s book can serve as a nonpareil introduction to the subject of property rights in a political context.

Ely underscores on virtually every page that not only was Congress guilty of violating individuals’ property rights by abridging the freedom of production and trade, but that, for the longest time, it was the states that were the greater and more frequent violators and usurpers.

District 13

John Conyers Jr. (D) Incumbent
http://www.johnconyers.com/
http://www.ontheissues.org/MI/John_Conyers.htm**
http://conyers.house.gov/

Rated +6 by AAI, indicating pro-Arab pro-Palestine voting record. (May 2012)

ISSUES
HEALTHCARE
What does the new health care law mean for me and my family?
On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed into law the first comprehensive health care reform law in our nation’s history. By insuring an additional 32 million Americans and reducing the national deficit by $143 billion over 10 years, this historic legislation is the first step forward in making health care a right for all Americans—not an expensive privilege for some.

The new health care law bars insurance companies from discriminating based on pre-existing conditions, health status and gender. It provides small businesses and working families with tax credits to help purchase insurance. And it strengthens Medicare and closes the prescription drug “doughnut hole.”
REPARATIONS

In January of 1989, I first introduced the bill H.R. 40, Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. I have re-introduced HR 40 every Congress since 1989, and will continue to do so until it’s passed into law.
One of the biggest challenges in discussing the issue of reparations in a political context is deciding how to have a national discussion without allowing the issue to polarize our party or our nation. The approach that I have advocated for over a decade has been for the federal government to undertake an official study of the impact of slavery on the social, political and economic life of our nation.
Over 4 million Africans and their descendants were enslaved in the United States and its colonies from 1619 to 1865, and as a result, the United States was able to begin its grand place as the most prosperous country in the free world.
It is un-controverted that African slaves were not compensated for their labor. More unclear however, is what the effects and remnants of this relationship have had on African-Americans and our nation from the time of emancipation through today.
I chose the number of the bill, 40, as a symbol of the forty acres and a mule that the United States initially promised freed slaves. This unfulfilled promise and the serious devastation that slavery had on African-American lives has never been officially recognized by the United States Government.
ENERGY
Voted against the Keystone XL Pipeline without limiting amendments.
Weatherization
Weatherization is the process of shielding homes from extreme weather and making them more energy efficient. It is done by modernizing heating and air conditioning equipment as well as adding more insulation and sealing leaks. Low-income families spend a significant amount of their gross income on energy bills. Weatherization reduces these costs by up to 30%, or about $350 a year. This process also improves the market value of homes.
Michigan will be given $243,398,975 through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to increase funding to their weatherization program, which provides these services at no cost to low-income homes throughout the state. These upgrades, on average, are worth $6,500.

Wait, John Conyers was ruled ineligible for the ballot after 50 years in office?

Longtime Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) has a problem on his hands. After nearly a half century in Congress, Conyers’s bid for a 26th term has been imperiled by a county clerk’s ruling that he is not eligible to appear on the ballot.

In a final judgement issued Tuesday, Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett ruled that Conyers did not collect enough petition signatures to appear on the primary ballot, a major setback for the man who stands to be the longest serving member of Congress if reelected this year.

How did Conyers arrive at this point and what’s next? Below is everything you need to know.

So why is Conyers in this tough spot in the first place?

Because many of the petition signatures his campaign submitted to secure his place on the ballot were judged to be invalid. Conyers submitted the maximum allowed 2,000 signatures — double the requisite 1,000 — but most didn’t count, Garrett decided last week.

At issue is the people who collected the signatures for Conyers. State law requires that they be registered to vote in the state. Conyers’s primary opponent, the Rev. Horace Sheffield, challenged the signatures collected by two people who did not appear to be registered to vote at the time they gathered them. The Detroit News later reported on two more people who did not appear to be registered voters. Subtracting invalid signatures, including those collected by people who weren’t allowed to do so, Garrett’s office judged that Conyers only submitted 592 valid signatures. So, yeah. You do the math.

There are few political requests so obviously insincere as the call by those on the Left for equality. Certainly, those like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid consider themselves superior. They expect the masses to rely on their and government’s wisdom. It is hypocrisy at its worst. The same could be said for mainstream media. Do you really believe that the editorial staff at the New York Times considers itself inferior to, or even the same as, those at the New York Post?

Democrat leaders generally accept inequality when applied to their intellectual, moral and empathetic traits. But, they also accept inequality when it comes to their individual wealth. Otherwise, why would Al Gore, an outspoken foe of fossil fuels, sell his “dismal-rating-achieving” Current TV (words from the Washington Post) to oil-funded Al Jazeera for $500 million? Why do politicians like Harry Reid become rich after years earning modest salaries in Washington? Why do those like the Clintons and Gores chase dollars with such fervor once leaving office? Hint: it is not a desire for equality.

All Americans, including “hard-hearted” conservatives who are targets of Mr. Obama’s sarcasm and Harry Reid’s venom, believe in equality of opportunity and equality before the law. In the first sentence of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson’s use of “equal” implies that our laws should treat everyone equally, and not favor a few as was true in England at the time. He was not suggesting that everyone should be equal in terms of income or wealth, or in any other material, physical or intellectual way. He knew they weren’t.

Liberté, egalité, fraternité was the motto of the French Revolution, not of the American. The founding fathers wanted self government. George Washington, when offered a monarchy, rejected the concept and the title, as it would create an aristocracy alien to the principles of the American Revolution. Wealth and position should be determined by merit, not birth. The French Revolution, which advocated equality, introduced a ‘Reign of Terror’ for twelve years that included guillotining 16,500 unfortunate souls and murdering another 30,000. The First Republic ended with the ascension of Napoleon in 1804. Napoleon was not exactly a model republican. France, now in its Fifth Republic and for all my fondness for the Country, has not been exactly a model of stability.

Cheney calls Madison and Jefferson ‘the two greatest minds’ of the 18th century—one that also produced Hume, Kant and Burke.

In 1787, when the Constitutional Convention was debating the powers of the respective branches of government, the slight and scholarly delegate from Orange County, Va., achieved a success “that would have profound consequences down the years,” Lynne Cheney writes in ” James Madison : A Life Reconsidered.” In the Constitution’s passage on congressional war powers, Madison moved to substitute “declare” war for “make” it, thereby reserving the day-to-day decisions about the use of the military to the executive branch.

The substitution soon enough had profound consequences for Madison himself. During the War of 1812, he had to act as the commander in chief, and the demands of the job did not bring out his finest qualities. Diffident, bookish and afflicted with an ailment that Ms. Cheney concludes was a form of epilepsy, Madison was a theoretician and legislator par excellence; he was considerably less effective as the ex officio head of an army.

Against weighty opposition, Madison appointed John Armstrong as his secretary of war, a shifty character with a reputation, as Henry Adams later wrote, for “indolence and intrigue.” Certain that the British were heading for Annapolis, Md., rather than Washington, Armstrong left the capital defenseless, and Madison, looking “shattered and woe-begone,” turned to a fellow Virginian, James Monroe, for help. Monroe promptly restored order to the smoldering capital, throwing up defenses against further attacks and redeploying 7,000 militiamen around the town.

The debacle of 1812 could have been an unfortunate stain on a distinguished career of public service. It was Madison’s good fortune to come out of the war with his reputation not just intact but strengthened, and there may be some justice in that, since his career was otherwise exemplary.