RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/374779/print

In recent weeks, we examined the Obama administration’s willingness to reverse positions that it had once proudly proclaimed — on whether an individual mandate is necessary, whether the individual mandate is a tax, whether it is important that you can keep your plan or doctor, whether lobbyists should work in a president’s administration, whether a donor should be appointed U.S. ambassador, and so on. Then we noted environmentalists who said they would not criticize or attack lawmakers who supported the Keystone Pipeline, as long as they were Democrats.

Last week, we expanded the discussion to progressives’ wide-ranging willingness to contradict their own professed principles: gun-control proponents who travel with armed bodyguards, voucher opponents who send their kids to private schools, and minimum-wage-hike advocates who pay their staff less than the minimum wage, among others.

So what do progressives really want? If, as I suspect, the currency of progressivism isn’t policies or results, but emotions, what does that approach build? What kind of a country do you get when political leaders are driven by a desire to feel that they are more enlightened, noble, tolerant, wise, sensitive, conscious, and smart than most other people?

The evidence before us suggests progressives’ ideal society would be one where they enjoy great power to regulate the lives of others and impose restrictions and limitations they themselves would never accept in their own lives. Very few people object to an aristocracy with special rights and privileges as long as they’re in it.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/374772/print

Name recognition is not always an asset.

Some Republican fat cats are trying to coax former Florida governor Jeb Bush — brother and son to two former presidents — into making a bid for the White House. Democrats have been less subtle. They’ve created a super PAC called Ready for Hillary, which is only slightly less obvious a gesture than constructing a giant neon sign reading “Run, Hillary, Run.”

For obvious reasons, these developments have generated a lot of discussion about political dynasties in America. That’s understandable. After all, in a democratic republic, the prospect of dynasties should make everyone at least a little uncomfortable.

Populists of the Left and the Right like to focus on the more sinister problems of dynasties — the suspicion that the elites have rigged the system in favor of a few powerful families. It sometimes sounds like we’re discussing lines of European nobility swapping out turns on the throne. But in America, where leaders have to run for office, a more useful way to think about dynasties might be to think of them as brand names.

In chaotic and confusing marketplaces, brand names are a useful shortcut. People buy stuff from Apple because they think they know what they’ll get from Apple. The same goes for Kennedys, Bushes, Clintons, and, these days, Pauls. (If Rand weren’t the son of Ron, his political persona would be very different.)

http://weaselzippers.us/181295-spring-blizzard-pummels-the-upper-midwest/
Spring Blizzard Pummels The Upper Midwest

The threat of global warming continues
Via Sheboygan Press

A spring snowstorm in the Upper Midwest is shutting down schools and government offices, making travel hazardous for motorists and life miserable for cattle ranchers in the midst of calving season.
The National Weather Service has issued blizzard warnings for much of the Dakotas and part of Minnesota, with snow amounts of up to 20 inches possible.
In South Dakota, no travel is advised in the northwestern corner of the state, and motorists in other areas are advised to use caution due to the storm. Some schools in the region are starting late or canceling classes, and Gov. Dennis Daugaard has closed state offices in nine western counties.
Forecasters say snowfall amounts could reach a foot in parts of the state, and winds gusting to 50 mph will blow the snow around. Rain and sleet before the snow could create icy conditions in the northeast. South Dakota state transportation secretary Darin Bergquist says travel will be difficult if not impossible.
Meteorologist Michael Mathews in Bismarck says it’s not uncommon for a blizzard to hit the region this time of year – though he says the snow is lighter and fluffier than snow associated with many spring storms.
That’s good news for ranchers with newborn calves. South Dakota Stockgrowers Association Executive Director Silvia Christen says she doesn’t expect a repeat of an early October blizzard that killed tens of thousands of animals.

http://www.americanthinker.com/assets/3rd_party/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/04/april_fools_day_obamacare_enrollment_numbers.html

This is the perfect day to receive Obama administration claims of success in ObamaCare enrollment. “No one expected us to come back from the brink…but we have,” claims Jay Carney, following a script that could have been written by one of the Hollywood screenwriters being massaged by Valerie Jarrett to propagandize their audiences on ObamaCare.

Politico offers the party line:

The first open enrollment season of Obamacare ended at midnight Monday, a day that saw millions of Americans click onto Obamacare sign-up portals, dial into call centers and stand in long lines at assistance sites nationwide. The huge surge made it increasingly likely that enrollment would hit 7 million, the finish line that seemed out of reach during much of the often rocky six-month period.

Shortly after 10 p.m., the Associated Press cited two sources that said sign-ups were “on track” to hit 7 million. Administration officials wouldn’t confirm the number but said that signs were pointing in that direction.

All of the numbers being delivered to us are soft as a grape. But for low information voters, they will do the trick. Hurray! Plucky little ObamaCare fought against the big bad Republicans who tried to sabotage it, and in the end, with a last minute surge powered by Americans desperate for the care that only a messiah like Obama could offer, compassion triumphed.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/04/californias_brownshirt_antisemitism_comes_to_vassar.html
California is the lifestyle incubator of the nation. And now the trendy anti-Semitic thuggery that debuted at California’s public universities has metastasized across America, all the way to the elite halls of Vassar.

Before we discuss the fashionable pogrom that just took place on the Vassar campus where Jackie Kennedy once strolled in pearls, let’s look back at May 7, 2002. On that day, Professor Laurie Zoloth, Director of the Jewish Studies program at San Francisco State University, attended a “Peace in the Middle East” campus rally, organized by Hillel students, where they sang songs and prayed for peace in Israel. Wrote Professor Zoloth:

“As soon as the community supporters left, the 50 students who remained praying in a minyan for the traditional afternoon prayers, or chatting, or cleaning up after the rally, talking — were surrounded by a large, angry crowd of Palestinians and their supporters. But they were not calling for peace. They screamed at us to ‘go back to Russia’ and they screamed that they would kill us all, and other terrible things. They surrounded the praying students, and the elderly women who are our elder college participants, who survived the Shoah, who helped shape the Bay Area peace movement, only to watch as a threatening crowd shoved the Hillel students against the wall of the plaza.
“As the counter demonstrators poured into the plaza, screaming at the Jews to ‘Get out or we will kill you’ and ‘Hitler did not finish the job,’ I turned to the police and to every administrator I could find and asked them to remove the counter demonstrators from the Plaza, to maintain the separation of 100 feet that we had been promised. The police told me that they had been told not to arrest anyone, and that if they did, “it would start a riot.” I told them that it already was a riot.”

ttp://bizcatalyst360.com/5-easy-steps-maximizing-social-media/

Charles (Chuck) Brooks serves as Vice President/Client Executive for DHS at Xerox. Chuck has served as the first Director of Legislative Affairs for the Science & Technology Directorate within the Department of Homeland Security, where he was responsible for advocacy for the Directorate with Capitol Hill. He has been an Adjunct Faculty Member at Johns Hopkins University, and has previously spent 6 years on Capital Hill as a Senior Advisor to the late Senator Arlen Specter where he covered national security, defense, foreign affairs, and technology issues. Chuck also served as President of Brooks Consulting International, leveraging extensive experience in executive management, government relations, and R&D in the public and private sectors

SOCIAL MEDIA is booming in the business community. The medium has become integral to marketing, sales, public relations, policy and strategy. The impact it has had on how we conduct business has become so transformational that the protocols are still evolving. Whether you are a veteran of digital communication, or a newbie to the world of instant and perpetual content sharing, there are some fundamental steps to follow on social media to make your presence more effective for you personally and/or for your company.

1) Join: as the analogy with playing the lottery states, “you cannot win if you don’t play.” There are a multitude of excellent social media forums to consider joining and playing in. The key ones from my personal perspective are: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Pinerest, and FedScoop because they all offer professional outlets to learn, participate, and contribute to discussions relating to my business and social interests. I particularly enjoy LinkedIn because of its business and public policy orientation.

2) Establish a Social Media Profile: It is important to create profiles on the various sites that are accurate, interesting, and representative of your core interests and capabilities. As the Founder of the Internet, Google’s Vint Cerf noted recently, on the Internet there is no such thing as privacy. Expect your profile to be seen and make sure it portrays the public face you desire. A good idea is to search prominent leader’s profiles in the areas of your business or professional interest to see how they word, format, and describe their passions.

The State Department spokesperson suggested, although this was deleted from the official transcript, that Israel is the party which raised the Pollard release.

I think that Pollard’s sentence is unfairly long and harsh since so many real traitors are now free. However, it is unconscionable to link his release to suicidal concessions by Israel….rskn Tuesday’s daily press briefing conducted by the State Department spokesperson Marie Harf, several members of the media insinuated that it was Israel that raised the issue of Jonathan Pollard’s release from prison, as a condition for continuing the U.S. mediated “peace process” negotiations currently underway.

In fact, in a briefing that lasted less than 35 minutes, more than a third of the time was spent on the issue of Jonathan Pollard, and every one of the questions asked by the State Department press corps appeared to be an effort to convince the State Department that what they all characterized as an Israeli effort to get Pollard released was an outrage.

It was the first set of questions that was raised, it was the penultimate set of questions, and the questions were raised by no fewer than five different journalists, representing media outlets from across the globe.

Throughout the questioning, Harf maintained a solid line of no comment. She refused to comment on whether Pollard’s release was a matter under discussion during the “peace talks.”

The one definitive statement made repeatedly by Harf was “the President has not made a decision to release Jonathan Pollard.”

But several extraordinary things happened during the press conference, that is, extraordinary in addition to what seemed to be a united front by the journalists who were cross-examining the State Department spokesperson as to why would the U.S. buckle under a demand from Israel to release a convicted spy.

First, a significant comment made by Harf was deleted from the official transcript. That deletion specifically appeared to confirm for the journalists that Israel was the party which had raised the release of Pollard, rather than, as was the general sense in the Israeli media, that it was the U.S. who raised the issue in a desperate attempt to keep the “peace talks” alive.

Reproduced below, is the first relevant section of the transcript of Tuesday’s briefing. Even before this question, it should be noted, the journalist asking this first series of questions claimed that it was Abbas who cancelled the meeting with Secretary of State Kerry, not the other way around, as it has been generally reported.

QUESTION: (at 2:55) Do you want to give us some kind of readout on how it was that the Pollard release was put back up on the table? I know there’s been a lot of conflicting information over the last week, when these reports first surfaced in the Israeli press. We’d like a little clarification on exactly when and why and how, and whether or not Pollard’s release is still on the table, given that Abbas looks like he – that is what’s making him negative on the process right now. (at 3:23)

MS. HARF: (at 3:24) Well, a few points on that. First, the President has not made a decision to release Jonathan Pollard. I want to be very clear about that. Jonathan Pollard was convicted of espionage and is serving his sentence. I don’t have any further update on his status to provide today. In terms of this being a topic, (at 3:38)

THIS IS WHERE THE AUDIOTAPE OF THE PRESS CONFERENCE AND THE TRANSCRIPT DIFFER DRAMATICALLY. WHAT HARF SAID AS REVEALED IN THE AUDIOTAPE, THOUGH IT DOES NOT APPEAR IN THE TRANSCRIPT AT ALL, IS:

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/illinois-2014-candidates-for-congress-where-they-stand?f=must_reads

The primary was held on March 18, 2014. This is the final slate of incumbents and challengers from the major parties for the election in November.

FAMILY SECURITY MATTERS IS STRICTLY NON PARTISAN…..THESE ARE MY CHOICES UNDERLINED IN RED. FURTHERMORE, I INCLUDE THEIR RANKING BY THE AMERICAN ARAB INSTITUTE, http://www.aaiusa.org/

AND THE YALLAH VOTE http://www.aaiusa.org/pages/yalla-vote-2013/: Their goal is to promote Arab American Candidates and to rate how incumbents voted on key issues like civil liberties, Israel-Palestine, and US-Arab relations.

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 (**).

ILLINOIS 2014

The primary was held on March 18, 2014. This is the final slate of incumbents and challengers from the major parties for the election in November. Filing Deadline for Third Party Candidates is June 23, 2014.

U.S.SENATE

Mark Kirk (R ) Next election 2016

Richard (Dick) Durbin (D) Incumbent

http://www.dickdurbin.com/

http://www.ontheissues.org/senate/richard_durbin.htm **

http://www.durbin.senate.gov/public/

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

Keynote speaker at CAIR gala, on March 15, 2014…..

HOT BUTTON ISSUES

IMMIGRATION

STRONG SUPPORT FOR THE DREAM ACT

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/18/Dick-Durbin-s-Dreamer-F-Israel-Ex-Congressional-Staffer-LIKE

Alaa Mukahhal, the “Dreamer” who has been praised on the floor of the Senate by Dick Durbin (D-IL) as an activist “in the finest American tradition,” wrote a short and obscene assessment of Israel and its supporters on her Facebook page

HEALTHCARE

The Illinois health insurance marketplace is open and ready to help get you and your family covered. This marketplace was created by the Affordable Care Act and will expand coverage to more than 1.4 million in Illinois who currently are uninsured while adding important consumer protections to those already have insurance.Because of this law, insurance companies can no longer discriminate against you and your family for a pre-existing condition. They can’t drop you from coverage when you or someone in your family gets sick. And they can no longer place caps what they’ll cover for your care. Practices like these have caused millions of families to fall deep into debt and helped push the cost of health care higher and higher.So we said enough and worked to rein in costs while expanding coverage and protections for all Americans.

ENERGY

VOTED NO ON KEYSTONE XL PIPELINE

Jim Oberweiss(R ) Challenger

http://www.jimoberweis.com/

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-white-house-is-defeating-the-us-military

I began March with a look at the way President Obama is undermining the U.S. military and did not think I would have to return to this topic for a while. I was wrong.

A March 25 article in The Washington Times was titled “Obama to Kill Navy’s Tomahawk, Hellfire Missile Programs in Budget Decimation” and on March 21, The Wall Street Journal published a commentary, “America’s Incredible Shrinking Navy.” When you add those to The New York Times February 23 article, “Pentagon Plans to Shrink Army to Pre-World War II Level”, you’ve got sufficient reason to begin to realize something very ominous is occurring.

This concerned is heightened by the way dozens of high ranking officers are, in the view of some observers, being purged. A number of retired generals are speaking out about it. One of them, retired Army Major General Paul Vallely has charged that Obama is “intentionally weakening and gutting our military and reducing us as a superpower, and anyone in the ranks who disagrees or speaks out is being purged.” Retired Army Major General Patrick Brady agrees saying, “There is no doubt he is intent on emasculating the military and will fire anyone who disagrees with him.”

The world, over the course of human civilization, has always been a dangerous place. Much of the history of mankind is a history of wars, large and small. In the last century the U.S. military was involved in two world wars, a Korean conflict, a war in Vietnam, and the Gulf War to drive out Hussein’s Iraqi forces after he invaded Kuwait.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/is-president-obama-in-touch-with-reality

Critics have suggested that President Obama’s foreign policy is “feckless.” Some have argued the president is insouciant, a relative innocent, incapable of responding to the challenges that confront him. I see it somewhat differently.

In April 2009 in Prague, President Obama promised to lead a crusade to rid the world of nuclear weapons with treaties and the power of America’s moral example. This is a position he has long held. As a Columbia student, he wrote a piece in the Spectator in which he called for unilateral disarmament, noting that the American example would precipitate a dramatic shift to denuclearization. It was a sophomoric article in my judgment lacking any historical context, but then again it was written by a twenty year old with limited experience.

However, the Obama position hasn’t been altered. His belief that documents, assurances, negotiations, speeches can maintain stability is without historic precedent. “Soft power” of the kind he espouses works when military power stands behind it. When assurances are called into question by hostile forces and a military reaction – either threat or deployment – is unavailable, the world is put at risk.

In fact, the president’s denuclearized dream is likely to result in the very proliferation he opposes. Why? If the nuclear umbrella of the United States is unreliable, nations will seek their own nuclear deterrent. It is not surprising that Saudi Arabia has been in discussion with Pakistan for the purchase of nuclear weapons as a direct reaction to the U.S. rapprochement with Iran over its enrichment of uranium and pursuit of its own bomb.