RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s a fact of human nature that it’s easier to talk about who’s to blame for a problem than it is to figure out what to do about the problem.

Case in point: There’s a near-riot in liberal circles over the very idea that supporters of the Iraq War should even be allowed to criticize the president’s handling of the current Middle East crisis, never mind offer advice on how to proceed.

The Atlantic’s James Fallows says Dick Cheney and company “have earned the right not to be listened to.” Slate magazine’s Jamelle Bouie says that prominent public intellectuals and journalists who supported the Iraq war should “be barred from public comment.” Charles Pierce at Esquire is less subtle: “Shut up, all of you. Go away.”

Some go even further. Katrina vanden Heuvel asks in the Washington Post: “Can someone explain to me why the media still solicit advice about the crisis in Iraq from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)? Or Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)?” (One possible answer: They are newsmakers, holding prominent positions on pertinent Senate committees.)

I’m always curious what agency in a free society is in charge of enforcing prohibitions on such things.

Given the tendency for nearly everyone to get things wrong over time, this is a dangerous game. Vanden Heuvel has been wrong about so many things, it’s difficult to know where to begin. She opposed pretty much the warp and woof of America’s Cold War policies. She opposed Bill Clinton’s war in the Balkans. She opposed the Persian Gulf War.

Fallows made a name for himself in the 1980s and ’90s championing the notion that Japan Inc. would overtake the United States. Shall we stop listening to him on economic issues?

Congress doesn’t have prosecutorial power, but it can act to remove those responsible.

For all my friends who continue to call for a “special counsel” — meaning an independent prosecutor — for the IRS scandal, I have one simple question:

If you believe, as I do, that President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are corruptly covering up the conspiracy by the executive branch and congressional Democrats to violate the constitutional rights of conservative groups, what makes you think they would appoint a scrupulous lawyer to investigate and expose the conspiracy?

The question answers itself, so much so that some members of Congress, in their understandable outrage and frustration, are proposing unconstitutional solutions to the Obama administration’s unconstitutional lawlessness. Exhibit A: Senator Pat Roberts (R., Okla.), a member of the Finance Committee investigating the IRS scandal — a metastasizing exhibition of high crimes and misdemeanors that now piles destruction of evidence, misleading testimony, and obstruction of justice atop abuse of the revenue agency’s awesome powers to intimidate conservative groups.

Senator Roberts says:

At this point, only a Congressionally appointed and separately funded special counsel, with full subpoena power, can get to the bottom of this matter. Congress has longstanding and broad authority to both investigate allegations of wrongdoing within the federal government and to delegate its investigatory powers to other entities. It’s time to put this authority into action.

The italics are mine, in order to highlight the problem. Yes, Congress has investigative authority in connection with its important oversight function — i.e., overseeing the activities of executive-branch agencies such as the IRS that Congress establishes and underwrites with taxpayer funds. What Congress does not have, however, is prosecutorial authority.

Congress can issue subpoenas for information in connection with its oversight function; it lacks any power to issue subpoenas in connection with what Senator Roberts says he is calling for: “the arrest and prosecution of those responsible for suppressing the First Amendment.” Congress is bereft of authority to enforce the penal laws, to conduct grand-jury proceedings, to issue indictments, to make arrests, and to subject offenders to criminal trials.

Fouad Ajami: A courageous scholar who was friendly to Israel
If Fouad Ajami had been brought into U.S. public diplomacy, perhaps the Obama administration wouldn’t now be stumbling in its support for the right of the Arab world for liberty.

The death of Fouad Ajami, a Lebanese-born American scholar of the Middle East, would be for all who knew him a sad day whenever it occurred. But his death — he succumbed Sunday to cancer at the age of 68 — is particularly tragic, because we have lost him just as America is engulfed in the kind of crisis where we are going to be in need of the wisdom he dispensed.

I didn’t know Ajami well, but we both wrote for the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages across the same generation. Like scores of other editors and colleagues, I came to admire him enormously. This was not only for his great scholarship, his friendliness to Israel, and his adherence through all the travail of the Middle East to the ideals of freedom and democracy. I also admired his courage and his preparedness to take an unpopular stand.

In respect of Israel this was remarkable enough, as Ajami made clear when, in 2011, the Palestinian Arabs unilaterally went to the UN General Assembly for a vote on statehood. Ajami was among those who argued that the Palestinian Arabs had, as he put it in the Wall Street Journal, “misread” the vote in 1947. “True, the cause of Jewish statehood had been served by the vote on partition, but the Zionist project had already prevailed on the ground.”

“Jewish statehood was,” Ajami wrote, “a fait accompli perhaps a decade before that vote. All the ingredients had been secured by Labor Zionism.” Here was an Arab American intellectual prepared to acknowledge not only that there was “a military formation powerful enough to defeat the Arab armies,” but that there were “political institutions in place, and there were gifted leaders, David Ben-Gurion pre-eminent among them, who knew what can be had in the world of nations.”

Yet the clearest glimpse I had of Ajami’s preparedness to stand apart was his friendship with Ahmed Chalabi. He is the Iraqi exile, a Shia who, during the Baathist tyranny, played an outsized role in forming the Iraqi National Congress. Chalabi also played an important role in winning passage in the United States Congress of the Iraq Liberation Act. The law, enacted in 1995 on an overwhelming and bipartisan vote, made it national policy to seek regime change in Iraq.

Chalabi, who once sat with First Lady Laura Bush at a State of the Union Address by President Bush, fell out of favor with the administration. He was a casualty of, among other things, the intramural wars in Washington. The State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency didn’t like Chalabi. He was the man the Left, in particular, loved to hate, although he had some distinguished enemies on the right. All the more admirable that Ajami stuck with him.

Incompetence breeds incompetence, and eventually the slowest-witted among us recognizes the man who not only doesn’t know what he’s doing but won’t listen to those who do. His earnest ignorance blights everything he touches. Even yellow-dog Democrats are growling.

By all accounts Barack Obama is a nice man, decent, attractive, a faithful husband, devoted father and highly intelligent. He no doubt means well, by his lights, blinkered by ideology. He’s just not very smart.

Like a lot of liberals, he has learned a lot of things that ain’t so, and is eager to apply them. He learned, as the hyper-educated often do, to mistrust experience and common sense. Only such a sage, armed with prodigious book-learning, will sit down on a red-hot stove twice (if that’s where the textbook tells him to sit).

Mr. Obama doesn’t know much about the 57 states of America (as he once numbered them), or how Americans think, or appreciate the fundamental verities Americans cherish. How could he? His Kenyan father abandoned the family when Barack was a small boy, and when the Kenyan father didn’t work out his mother found another Third World father for him, one with no appreciation of America, either, and took him to Indonesia to spend his formative years far from the influences of America and the West. The poor Jakarta street kid, as he described himself, never knew the down-home delight of a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich. He famously said the evening call to Muslim prayer he heard in Jakarta was the prettiest sound on earth, and in his tender ears it no doubt was. That’s because he never heard America singing.

His later childhood years in Hawaii, with his expensive private-school education, couldn’t teach him much about America. Hawaii is a gorgeous tropical paradise, where life is a day at the beach. No one growing up in Hawaii has ever heard the sighing of an icy wind through the wheat fields, the wail of an outbound freight at 3 o’clock in the morning on its way across the sleeping continent. His lack of intuitive knowledge of his native land is not Barack Obama’s fault, but he never tried to challenge his ignorance. He doesn’t understand why the rest of us think Abraham Lincoln was right that America is, indeed, “the exceptional nation.” We hear a hymn to the land — “… for heroes proved in liberating strife, who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life …” and think that hymn, not the call to Muslim prayer, is the prettiest sound on earth.

THIS IS ABOUT Z STREET LAWSUIT….RSK

The IRS is spinning a tale of bureaucratic incompetence to explain the vanishing emails from former Tax Exempt Organizations doyenne Lois Lerner and six other IRS employees. We have less faith by the minute that there is an innocent explanation for this failure to cooperate with Congress, but even if true it doesn’t matter. The IRS was under a legal obligation to retain the information because of a litigation hold.

In 2009 a pro-Israel group called Z Street applied to the IRS for tax-exempt status. When the process was delayed, an IRS agent told the group that its application was undergoing special review because “these cases are being sent to a special unit in the D.C. office to determine whether the organization’s activities contradict the Administration’s public policies.” In August 2010 Z Street sued the IRS on grounds that this selective processing of its application amounted to viewpoint discrimination.
Under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and legal precedent, once the suit was filed the IRS was required to preserve all evidence relevant to the viewpoint-discrimination charge. That means that no matter what dog ate Lois Lerner’s hard drive or what the IRS habit was of recycling the tapes used to back up its email records of taxpayer information, it had a legal duty not to destroy the evidence in ongoing litigation.

In private white-collar cases, companies facing a lawsuit routinely operate under what is known as a “litigation hold,” instructing employees to affirmatively retain all documents related to the potential litigation. A failure to do that and any resulting document loss amounts to what is called “willful spoliation,” or deliberate destruction of evidence if any of the destroyed documents were potentially relevant to the litigation.

At the IRS, that requirement applied to all correspondence regarding Z Street, as well as to information related to the vetting of conservative groups whose applications for tax-exempt status were delayed during an election season. Instead, and incredibly, the IRS cancelled its contract with email-archiving firm Sonasoft shortly after Ms. Lerner’s computer “crash” in June 2011.

In the federal District of Columbia circuit where Z Street’s case is now pending, the operating legal obligation is that “negligent or reckless spoliation of evidence is an independent and actionable tort.” In a 2011 case a D.C. district court also noted that “Once a party reasonably anticipates litigation, it must suspend its routine document retention/destruction policy and put in place a ‘litigation hold’ to ensure the preservation of relevant documents.”

You cannot be running TV, social media and newspapers encouraging terror and murdering Jews and then claim you are innocent when acts of terror happen.

The PA is now officially united with Hamas, a terror organization that pledges to destroy a sovereign nation and establish a Muslim caliphate. Financing the PA is therefore financing terrorism. PA terror has become a major industry. Is this what the West is so breathless to support?

Would the U.S. or Europe agree to give its cities and parts of its soil for a terrorist organization to establish a country the way U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has been pushing Israel to give up most of the West Bank and return to pre-1967 borders?

Can we Palestinians blame Israel when the wall never existed before Hamas and the PLO started launching terror attacks on Israel on a daily basis?

Instead of financing the PA leaders’ lavish lifestyles, the world should start questioning the PA’s institutionalized incitement of terror and hatred to my people which they do every day through media, education and religious institutions. For the sake of both Israel and the Palestinians, it is not Israel but the PA that should be boycotted.

“Most people are mad at those who kidnapped the kids. When they commit such acts, we rejoice, celebrate for Israel’s suffering, then sit down and worry if we will be allowed into Israel for work and medical treatment. This has to stop, for our own sake.” Palestinian businessman

While Israel prays for the safe return of three Israel teenagers kidnapped by terrorists last week, although Palestinian Authority [PA] President Mahmoud Abbas tepidly defended the search for the teens — comments for which many Palestinians attacked him — the official PA daily wrote that “Israel itself is behind the ‘kidnapping’,” alleging that the three boys were soldiers when in fact they were students, two in high school, and the kidnappings were celebrated by people, glorifying the kidnappers and passing out sweets. The Fatah Facebook page then published a cartoon showing the three kidnapped teenagers as rats bearing the star of David with the caption “The Master Stroke”.

Keep in mind that the PA exerts extreme monitoring and control over social media used by Palestinians in the West Bank. A Palestinian man was jailed for six months for “liking” an anti-PA post on Facebook. The PA, therefore, is fully responsible for encouraging the celebrations of the kidnappings over Palestinian social media.

Anne Bayefsky ,Human Rights Voices, follow her on twitter @AnneBayefsky )

http://www.humanrightsvoices.org/site/articles/?a=8110

Before 9/11 – 2001, that is, how many years have passed, and there is still no “closure”! – Islamists were of no concern to Americans. Well, a liberal politician or columnist might retort, maybe except for the botched World Trade Center bombing of 1993, when only six people were killed. Less than a handful. Nothing to worry about. The WTC recovered. People got on with their lives, up until, well, 9/11. As far as blaming Muslims and jihadists is concerned, anything that happened before 9/11 is just a blank page.

But wait! There’s more! Brush the cobwebs from your memories. Those of us with non-porous memories will remember: Muslims have been waging a murderous war in the name of Islam, and even in the name of racism, since at least 1972! Oh, come on!

Oh, yes.

Bill Warner of the Political Islam site recently published “Jihad in America,” a five-page list of sixty-four terrorism incidents dating from 1973 to April 2013. That’s forty years of Islamic terrorism, and counting.

Post-9/11 data are derived from The Religion of Peace site, which, in addition to reporting the latest Islamic murders, conquests, and outrages, features a list longer than Bill Warner’s of Islamic atrocities committed around the world between the end of May 2014 and June. That’s just about thirty days, or nearly 500 incidents of Islamic violence which resulted in deaths, injuries, and kidnappings. In one month.

Astonished by the number of Islamic violence-related incidents that have not been reported in the mainstream media, or even hinted at, I printed out that list – it came to ten pages – and took the time to tally the bodies: 2,190. This body count includes Muslims attacking non-Muslims, Sunnis fighting Shi’ites in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, the depredations of Boko Haram in Nigeria and of ISIS in Mosul.

The death count does not include individuals executed in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Yemen (did I leave any country out?) as part of the government’s enforcement of Sharia, or the vengeance killings, rapes, extorted conversions, and kidnappings by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. From Thailand to Sadr City to Damascus to Benghazi to Kenya, the Bubonic plague of Islamism has claimed thousands of lives just in recent memory – never mind in centuries past – and will continue to claim them until Islam is repudiated, or until the Western powers (or are they “powers” anymore?) decide to teach Islam a lesson.

Noteworthy in the list of Islam-related crimes committed in the U.S. is the number committed by members of the Nation of Islam (NOI), an organization which could be said to have pioneered waging its own brand of jihad on the country, and especially against whites and Jews. And another astonishing discovery was that the Southern Poverty Law Center, not known for its adherence to reality and objectivity in identifying domestic terrorist organizations, has actually designated NOI as a “hate group” guilty of spewing “hate speech.” The SPLC staff must have been on meth then, or were recovering from hangovers from a drunken Christmas party.

Today is primary day in New York State: Voters can decide which incumbents get to stay and which challengers get to challenge. Pretty much what goes on in every state…or, is it? New York law permits “fusion” candidates (i.e., individuals who
concurrently seek an office as a candidate of more than one party. So….you need a legend.

POLITICAL PARTY LEGEND:
(D) = Democrat • (R) = Republican • (C) = Conservative • (CNST) = Constitution
(G) = Green • (IP) = Independence Party • (I) = Independent/No Party
(L) = Liberal • (Libt) = Libertarian • (NL) = Natural Law • (RTL) = Right to Life
(SWP) = Socialist Workers • (WF) = Working Families

There are 27 districts and not one candidate is, mercifully, running as an SWP- Socialist Workers Party. However, many democrats are running on the WF line which stands for Working Families. So, I wanted to know what they stand for and went to their site: http://workingfamilies.org/states/new-york/ and this is their agenda.
Working Families is New York’s progressive political party. The Working Families Party is focused on tackling the political, economic, and educational inequality that deprive working and middle class families of opportunity. Our vision is to build a New York that is fair for all of us, not just the wealthy and well-connected.We recruit, train, and electing the next generation of progressive leaders to local and state office — candidates who fight for the needs of working class, middle class and poor families. We’re known for our legislative fights on issues that cut to the core of New Yorkers’ concerns today–raising the minimum wage and guaranteeing paid sick days, fighting the influence of big money over politics, and defending quality public schools. Nearly a quarter million New Yorkers voted on the Working Families Party ballot line in 2012.

Voters across the state vote on the Working Families Party ballot line because they want to see elected leaders who care more about the needs of every day voters than the demands Wall Steet billionaires and corporate lobbyists. That’s why hundreds of thousands of Working Families voters are helping to build a stronger progressive movement.

There are seventeen Democrat incumbents for congress running on that ticket, and so is incumbent Governor Andrew Cuomo, and so did Mayor De Blasio.Just thought you’d want to know….rsk

For the first time in history, a terrorist attack on the electric power grid has blacked-out an entire nation. Media attention has been so focused on the terror group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), on their brutal conquest of northern Iraq and advance toward Baghdad, that the perhaps even more significant terrorist threat in Yemen has been ignored.

On June 9, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), used rocket propelled grenade launchers and mortars to destroy transmission towers, plunging the whole of Yemen into blackout. The AQAP blackout of Yemen’s electric grid has gone largely unreported.

Yemen, a nation of 24 million, is an important U.S. ally in the war on terrorism and has been the scene of some of the most significant episodes of that war. AQAP, based in Yemen, is notorious for its aggressive and ingenious terror operations against the United States.

For example, on October 12, 2000, AQAP used plastic explosives to convert a motorized dinghy into a torpedo that blasted the USS Cole, killing and injuring 56 sailors, and nearly sinking the sophisticated guided missile destroyer, worth almost one billion dollars. The 9/11 Commission attributed U.S. failure to retaliate for Cole as the proximate cause for Al Qaeda’s launch of the September 11, 2001 holocaust that killed 3,000 Americans.

AQAP has disguised bombs to look like soft drinks, underclothing, and printing cartridges in its persistent efforts to smuggle explosives aboard airliners bound for the United States.

Last year, the Obama Administration evacuated U.S. embassies across the Middle East in response to a plot led by AQAP, involving coordinated activity by terror groups throughout the region.

On August 2, 2013, Administration and intelligence community officials disclosed that just days earlier, the U.S. intercepted communications among senior leaders of Al Qaeda indicating a major and imminent threat to U.S. interests somewhere in the region of the Middle East and North Africa.