RUTHFULLY YOURS

From the Inside Out A Lawyer-Spy Makes the Case for the CIA.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/articles/inside-out_786484.html?nopager=1&utm_source=Gabe%27s+Master+List&utm_campaign=0c71c4db80-Journalism_or_Espionage_8_29_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d6f821d880-0c71c4db80-48019861

It was time for the CIA to lawyer up. In 1974, then-New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh broke a story exposing illegal covert actions conducted by the agency over a quarter of a century. Congressional investigations followed. The CIA emerged from the organizational ordeal wrapped in a dense web of new laws and regulations. A young, freshly minted attorney by the name of John Rizzo, working for the U.S. Customs Service in his first job, recognized that the newly reformed spy agency might need lawyers—lots of them. He signed up.

After the obligatory background check, the polygraph, and some training, a nearly four-decade career began. It brought Rizzo to a wide variety of law-related assignments inside America’s lead intelligence agency, culminating in his service as acting general counsel—the CIA’s highest legal slot (when a presidentially appointed general counsel is not in place).

Serving under a parade of directors, Rizzo saw and heard a lot. The astonishing roster of his bosses begins with William Colby, followed by George H. W. Bush, Stansfield Turner, William Casey, William Webster, Robert Gates, James Woolsey, John Deutch, George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Leon Panetta. Rizzo’s portraits of these individuals in action—some of them legendary figures in the history of American espionage—make this memoir worth the price of admission. But Company Man also holds interest for the light it sheds on a variety of quasi-secret subjects, some of them highly controversial. It also gives us insight into the set of problems that plague all democracies, and has hit America particularly hard: the human and bureaucratic difficulties that arise when an agency whose primary function is to break laws strives to operate under the rule of law.

http://acdemocracy.org/pollard/

John Kerry’s latest desperate attempts to broker, or more accurately, impose peace between Israel and the Palestinians, resulted in a great embarrassment for himself and the U.S.

He tried to use Jonathan Pollard as a bargaining chip with Israel. Accordingly, the U.S. would release Jonathan Pollard from prison, while “demanding” that Israel give major concessions to the Palestinians: halt the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, extend negotiations through 2015, and release hundreds of Palestinian terrorists from Israeli prisons.

His offer was rejected by all sides, including President Obama. Pollard himself refused to play the badly scripted role assigned to him by Kerry, and rejected the offer to appear in a parole hearing that could have freed him in 2015 .

Kerry’s futile efforts to negotiate a peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians are best described by Benny Avni in the NY Post:

“Secretary of State John Kerry worked behind the scenes in the last few days

to pull off a cascading set of maneuvers worthy of ‘House of Cards,’ the Netflix blockbuster. But it turns out Kerry is no Frank Underwood. As brutally selfish as Underwood’s ambitions may be, his plotting, while creative, is always reality-based. When Kerry gets as creative as Underwood, as he did this week, he also tosses realism out the window. Sooner or later, his dream of negotiated Mideast peace will collapse like, well, the house of cards that it is.”

In addition to Kerry’s absurd plan, the involvement of Pollard in it has led to the resurfacing of the old rancorous objection by the US intelligence community, as well as to a justified outrage over the unprecedented and vengeful prison term Pollard is serving.

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2014/04/04/obamas-motley-champions-of-change/?print=1

I did not learn until this week that President Obama’s website, WhiteHouse.gov, regularly profiles young leftwing radicals it calls “Champions of Change.” Now, in a space of just a few days, two of the president’s “champions” have made news.

One is Linda Sarsour, described by the White House as a “community activist” who specializes in “community organizing” and “immigrants’ rights advocacy,” and who “conducts trainings nationally on the importance of civic engagement in the Arab and Muslim American community.” Evidently, civic engagement need not be civil engagement. Ms. Sarsour has joined her voice to that of CAIR in the campaign to suppress Honor Diaries, a film about the brutalization and systematic inequality faced by women in Muslim-majority societies. Ms. Sarsour reacted to the widely viewed and acclaimed film by tweeting:

How many times do we have to tell White women that we do not need to be saved by them? Is there code language I need to use to get thru?

I’d note that the executive producer of Honor Diaries is the heroic Somali human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. It features several courageous Muslim women, including Pakistani-born Qanta Ahmed, a medical doctor who has an important column about the film and the campaign to suppress it at NRO today. But there are indeed some “White women” involved in the writing, production and financing of the film, and that’s apparently too much for a “Champion of Change” to abide.

http://carolineglick.com/a-chance-to-move-on/

On Monday, former prime minister Ehud Olmert’s career ended.

Earlier this month, former IDF chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. (ret.) Gabi Ashkenazi’s career ended.

And on Tuesday, the phony peace process ended.

In the lead-up to last year’s elections, the media and key political figures were yearning for Olmert’s return to politics.

In July 2008, Olmert was forced to cede leadership of the Kadima party, and so opt out of running for reelection, when then-attorney-general Menahem Mazuz announced he was indicting the premier on corruption charges. Olmert left office in March 2009 when his government was replaced by Binyamin Netanyahu’s coalition government.

The public abandoned its support for Olmert in the summer of 2006 as a result of his incompetent leadership of the Second Lebanon War. By the end of the summer, Olmert’s approval rating stood at 3 percent. But with the able assistance of the media, and of Yisrael Beytenu chairman Avigdor Liberman who saved Olmert’s government by joining it, Olmert was able to weather the storm and keep going despite the public’s lack of faith in his leadership and ardent desire to force him from office.

The media’s romance with Olmert began formally in late 2003, when he followed then-premier Ariel Sharon from the center-right to the far Left. Indeed, as Sharon abandoned his pledges to voters and adopted the platform of the defeated Labor Party of unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza, Olmert outflanked him from the Left.

http://www.climatedepot.com/2014/04/04/shock-peer-reviewed-paper-advocates-information-manipulation

New Paper: It’s OK to lie about climate – Published in American Journal of Agricultural Economics

Peer reviewed paper OK to lie about climate

A new peer-reviewed paper published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, titled “Information Manipulation and Climate Agreements”, is openly advocating that global warming proponents engage in mendacious claims in order to further their cause.

The paper appears to openly advocate lying or “information manipulation” to further the cause of man-made global warming and “enhance global welfare.”

The authors, Assistant Professors of Economics Fuhai Hong and Xiaojian Zhao, note how the media and environmental groups “exaggerate” global warming and then the offer their paper to “provide a rationale for this tendency” to exaggerate for the good of the cause.

The paper was published on February 24, 2014.

The author’s boldly note in the abstract of the study that the “news media and some pro-environmental have the tendency to accentuate or even exaggerate the damage caused by climate change. This article provides a rationale for this tendency.”

“We find that the information manipulation has an instrumental value, as it ex post induces more countries to participate in an IEA (International Environmental Agreements) which will eventually enhance global welfare.”

The authors of the paper are Fuhai Hong, an assistant professor in the Division of Economics, Nanyang Technological University and Xiaojian Zhao is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. (fhhong@ntu.edu.sg)

http://bit.ly/1ilhGNQ

According to Secretary John Kerry, “if we do not resolve the issues between Palestinians and Israelis; if we do not find a way to find peace; there will be an increasing isolation of Israel.”

However, a thorough examination of Israel’s international standing reveals an increasingly splendid global integration of the Jewish state – economically, technologically and scientifically – irrespective of the Palestinian issue.

Contrary to the Kerry school of thought – and based on a reality check – the Palestinian issue has never been a core cause shaping the Middle East, a crown-jewel of Arab policymakers or the crux of Israel’s relations with Arab countries and the international community. While diplomatic talk highlights the Palestinian issue, the diplomatic, commercial and industrial walk reveals that policy-makers and the international business community do not embrace Kerry’s “Palestine First” assessment and his “Isolation Warning/Threat.”

Thus, the Turkish Statistics Institute documented an expansion of the Turkey-Israel trade balance, despite the brutal anti-Israel ideology of President Erdogan. The Institute reports a 56% export increase, to Israel, during the first five months of 2013, compared with January-May, 2012, while the imports from Israel were increased by 22% during the same period. The Israel-Turkey trade balance was $3.4BN in 2008 and exceeded $4BN in 2012. Turkey’s requirements in the areas of industry, medicine, health, agriculture, irrigation, education, science, technology and defense – and Israel’s unique innovations in these areas – have prevailed over Erdogan’s anti-Western, anti-Israel and pro-Hamas Islamist orientation.

The London Financial Times reported: “in six hours of [Prime Minister Netanyahu’s] talks with the Chinese leadership, they spent roughly ten seconds on the Palestinian issue, while revealing an unquenchable thirst for Israeli technology.” Highlighting Israel’s intensified and diversified global integration, the China-Israel 2013 trade balance exceeded $10BN, providing a tailwind to the currently negotiated free trade agreement, and enhanced by Chinese investments in some fifty Israeli high tech companies. The Japan Times reported the growing Japanese interest in Israeli business opportunities, tripling the number of reviews of Israeli companies.

From Maosim and the Black Panthers to Conservatism — on The Glazov Gang
Film producer John Duffy shares his personal journey from communism to the belief in American freedom and liberty.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/from-maosim-and-the-black-panthers-to-conservatism-on-the-glazov-gang/

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2798/Who-Really-Won-the-Cold-War.aspx
Whether the Cold War is back, it’s an apt moment to strike up a wider conversation about a couple of central questions from my book American Betrayal. Why did the West fail to claim an ideological or moral victory at the apparent end of the Cold War? Did the West really even win the Cold War?

If we go back in time and listen, we hear no consensus click over signs that an unalloyed U.S.-led triumph over communist ideology had taken place; nor do we find a sense of national thanksgiving for the forces of good – or, at least, for the forces of better – in their triumph over the forces of a non-abstract evil as manifested in Gulag or KGB or famine or purge history. “Mustn’t gloat” was about as joyous as the White House of Bush 41 ever got.

Was the official non-reaction due to that “crisis of confidence” we always hear about – specifically, that “politically correct” failure to believe in the worth of the West? I used to think exactly that and no more. The self-loathing West, failing to see anything of value in itself, was simply unable to take satisfaction, let alone pride, in the demise of its mass-murdering nemesis. “After all,” the PC catechism goes, “Who’s to say the Western system is ‘better’ than any other?”

But there is far more to it. At a certain point, it becomes clear that what we are looking at isn’t a West that fails to appreciate itself anymore, but rather a West that isn’t itself anymore. Decades of subversion by communist infiltrators and American traitors, collaborators and “useful idiots” have helped make sure of that. So, even if the military enemy went away after the dissolution of the USSR on Christmas Day 1991, our ideological enemy never even had to break step. Cold Warriors might have prevailed abroad, but America lost the ideological Cold War at home.

This helps explain why our college campuses are outposts of Marx, our centralizing government is increasingly invasive and dictatorial, and our culture is one of metastasizing decadence – the amoral conditions of “The Communist Manifesto” made manifest.

Indeed, to be “anti-Western” today, as some have noted, is to stand in opposition to the West’s rampant immorality, as Russian President Vladimir Putin pointedly claims to do. This is why, as Masha Gessen recently wrote in the Washington Post, Russians look at events in Ukraine and think “the West is literally taking over, and only Russian troops can stand between the Slavic country’s unsuspecting citizens and the homosexuals marching in from Brussels.”

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/florida-part-i-of-ii-2014-candidates-for-congress-where-they-stand?f=must_reads

FAMILY SECURITY MATTERS HAS A NON PARTISAN LIST…JUST THE FACTS ABOUT ALL INCUMBENTS AND CHALLENGERS AND THEIR HOT BUTTON ISSUES. THIS IS MY OWN LIST WHICH INCLUDES MY PERSONAL CHOICES AND INFORMATION ON HOW THESE CANDIDATES ARE RATED BY THE ARAB AMERICAN INSTITUTE.

FLORIDA 2014- DISTRICTS 1-13

Filing Deadline (Federal Candidates): May 2, 2014

Please note that filing is still open for challengers.

Primary August 26, 2014

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 (**).

U.S. SENATE

Bill Nelson D) -Next Election in 2018.

Marco Rubio (R) – Next Election in 2016.

U.S. CONGRESS:

District 1

Jeff Miller (R ) Incumbent **

http://jeffmiller.house.gov/

http://www.ontheissues.org/FL/Jeff_Miller.htm **

http://jeffmiller.house.gov/issues/

Rated -5 by AAI, indicating a anti-Arab anti-Palestine voting record. (May 2012)

HOT BUTTON ISSUES

ENERGY

The time has come for our nation to develop a comprehensive energy policy that recognizes the importance of nuclear energy. Modern nuclear power plants are an incredibly safe, clean, and efficient way of generating electricity. Bringing more of these plants online would reduce our dependence on other sources of electricity and potentially save consumers millions of dollars. Our nation has several renewable energy sources at its disposal. I support an “all of the above” approach as a comprehensive energy solution.

Supports Keystone Pipeline

IMMIGRATION

Many of my colleagues in the House agree with this “enforcement first” approach, knowing full well that if we do not take steps to secure our border then other methods of addressing immigration will be useless. We were saddened to see the Senate not only consider amnesty provisions, but also provisions allowing citizenship for the nearly 12 million illegal immigrants currently residing within our borders. That misguided approach not only forgives criminals; it rewards them. I find this stance on illegal immigration both wrong and unacceptable, and will continue to fight for the House immigration reform bill and reject any provisions from the Senate or elsewhere that allow amnesty for illegal immigrants. The taxpayers of this nation deserve better, and it is my commitment to see that they receive it.

HEALTHCARE

Voted against Obamacare and for repeal

July 7, 2013

I believe that the Wall Street Journal’s findings are simply another reason to continue with the House-led efforts to repeal and defund Obamacare, and I will continue to work with my colleagues to achieve this goal.

John Krause (R) Challenger

http://krause4congress.com/

Travis Miller (R ) Challenger

Website in formation He was a candidate in 2010

James Bryan(D )Challenger

No current website

Bryan is the holder of two world records for parachuting, records which still hold today, and also is an expert with nuclear weapons. He has received over 30 combat decorations, including 3 purple hearts and saved over 200 lives.

Jim was a weapons test manager for a major weapons program for the Department of Defense and the United States Army Tactical Nuclear Weapons Program. He is a master parachutist, master gunner and heavy weapons expert. He helped train then 2nd Lieutenant David Petraeus, from 1975 through 1977 and later built a trucking business in Arizona.

District 2

Steve Southerland (R ) Incumbent **

http://southerland.house.gov/

http://southerland.house.gov/index.cfm/on-the-issues

http://www.ontheissues.org/FL/Steve_Southerland.htm **

Rated -4 by AAI, indicating a anti-Arab anti-Palestine voting record. (May 2012)

Opposed Arms Treaty that limits gun trade to Israel & Taiwan. (Nov 2012)

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=7959

Negotiating to the death

During a nine-hour meeting Wednesday between Israeli and Palestinian chief negotiators Tzipi Livni and Saeb Erekat, the atmosphere turned so ugly that U.S. Special Envoy Martin Indyk had to intervene. Apparently, even Livni — who is almost as obsessed as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry with the pointless process — lost her cool.

And it’s no wonder. Erekat shouted at her that he doesn’t work for the Israelis. “We’ll see you in court at The Hague,” he threatened.

This was a major slap in Livni’s face, since she has been doing her best to work for the Palestinians. So she also issued an ultimatum. Hers was that if the Palestinians did not start playing fairly, there would be a breakdown in negotiations. As though this would be some kind of penalty to a party that has no interest in peace talks, let alone in the concept of independent statehood alongside Israel. Destroying the Jewish state that it refuses to recognize is still its ultimate goal.

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during that exchange. Watching Indyk rush in to soothe tempers and prevent Erekat from storming off and putting the final nail in the coffin of Kerry’s Nobel Peace Prize would have made for great comedy. But tragedy is never far behind, as is evident in Kerry’s attitude and Palestinian behavior.

While the secretary of state was expressing his frustration with “both sides” for not being able to reach an agreement, and calling on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to exhibit “leadership,” Abbas was busy seeking membership in U.N. bodies.

Abbas seems to be the only player fully aware that neither Kerry’s efforts nor Netanyahu’s concessions have been part of an actual negotiation towards “two states for two peoples.” He knows it has all been for the purpose of persuading him to agree just to come to the proverbial table. Milking this for all it is worth, he keeps upping the ante.

This is why Netanyahu announced that the fourth batch of prisoner releases (a euphemism for the freeing of bloodthirsty terrorists from Israeli jails) would not go through as scheduled. Since the first three releases only served to strengthen Palestinian intransigence and endanger Israeli civilians, it would have been political suicide for Netanyahu to execute another one.