RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/374498/print

Another man might have assumed, correctly, that launching a campaign of insult and insinuation against two billionaires would result in renewed attention to his own finances. Not Harry Reid. The Senate Democratic leader since 2005, and the Senate majority leader since 2007, is not one to reflect before speaking. His mouth runs far ahead of his brain.

In recent years Reid has declared an American war “lost” while our troops still fought overseas; praised President Obama for his “light” skin and “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”; asserted falsely and without evidence that Mitt Romney had not paid any taxes for a decade; and said “Why would we want to do that?” when asked if he would fund cancer research during the government shutdown.

Now, with his majority in danger, his president unpopular, and his floor agenda obstructed by members of his own caucus, Reid thrashes about uncontrollably. He calls Obamacare horror stories “untrue.” He says Obamacare numbers are not as high as projected because Americans “are not educated on how to use the Internet.” His Senate Majority PAC launches a $3 million ad campaign tying Republican candidates to two men most Americans have never heard of, two men who, funnily enough, are more popular than Reid.

From the floor of the Senate, Reid says these two men, Charles and David Koch, are “un-American” and are trying “to buy America.” Without the terrible specter of the Koch brothers, Harry Reid would be disarmed. He has no issue for his Democratic senators to run on; the minimum wage and climate change are not enough. Nor has he another means of inspiring donors to open their checkbooks. He only has fear, fear of the Kochs, fear of extractive industry, fear of the portion of the elite that favors economic freedom. The Koch brothers, Reid says, “rig the system to benefit themselves.” He should know.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/374294/print

On Monday, Indiana governor Mike Pence (R) signed legislation withdrawing the Hoosier state from the Common Core. What began as a bipartisan effort in education reform ended with Indiana as the first state to withdraw from the national standards that 45 other states and the District of Columbia have signed on to.

“I believe our students are best served when decisions about education are made at the state and local level,” Pence wrote in a statement. “By signing this legislation, Indiana has taken an important step forward in developing academic standards that are written by Hoosiers, for Hoosiers, and are uncommonly high.”

Common Core was designed to provide unified national standards by which to measure and teach students. Beyond easing the educational transition of children who move from one state to another, the Common Core was intended to promote the reading of “informational texts” more than fiction and push for the teaching of a “conceptual understanding” of math over mere memorization.

At first, the initiative seemed full of promise; it was little-known and seldom critiqued outside of education-policy circles. In Indiana, the effort to implement the Common Core was spearheaded by Republican governor Mitch Daniels and his fellow Republican Tony Bennett, the superintendent of public instruction, with the support of Democrats and Republicans alike. In August 2010, only two months after the final standards were made public, Daniels touted the Common Core as a simplification of the state standards that had previously been in place, and the state board of education voted unanimously to join. Implementation began the next school year. Only four states — Alaska, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia — refused to adhere to the new standards.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/374528/print

For conservatives, the story of the Obama years has been the depressing spectacle of Republicans fighting a rearguard action covering their retreat from a Democratic agenda backed by superior numbers. Republicans began the Obama administration with effectively no leverage: Barack Obama in the White House, Nancy Pelosi in the speaker’s chair, and Harry Reid running the Senate. The outcome of that was the enactment of the Affordable Care Act, the worst domestic defeat for the cause of limited government in a generation. The 2010 congressional elections gave Republicans some relief in the form of a House majority empowered to contain the worst fiscal and policy inclinations of the Obama administration and its congressional allies, and the blessed Republican obstructionists in the Senate have kept a few very bad apples out of high office, but a House majority alone is a poor foundation for advancing conservative policies or reversing the Left’s advances. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have felt the wrath of the Right for spending too much time playing defense, but voters — including conservative voters — left them with little opportunity to do much of anything else.

Republicans now have the opportunity to effectively bring the Obama administration’s legislative program to an early end this November by eliminating the Democrats’ majority in the Senate, which would also give them a much stronger hand in keeping the worst of his appointees out of office, safely quarantined in whatever dank recesses of academia currently housing them. And while one should never underestimate the Republicans’ ability to blunder their way into missing a political opportunity or the fickleness of our bread-and-circuses electorate, there is a very good chance that that will happen. (Knock wood, salt over the shoulder — pick your own prophylactic.) But conservatives all too often seem to have failed to learn the lesson of the heavy losses we have suffered during the Obama years: The differences among us are minor compared with the differences between us and them, which are fundamental.

Opening World Series Pitch – 12 years ago

Most people are not aware that a secret service guy was dressed as an umpire the night President Bush threw out the first pitch during the 2001 World Series at Yankee Stadium. Great story. I’m surprised that none of the newspaper guys ever picked up on the “stranger” in the umpire’s uniform.
Remember this was just after 9/11/01!!! This is our country at one
of its best moments…..
If you don’t do anything else today, just watch this! It’s great!!!

http://www.youtube.com/embed/bxR1tZ08FcI?rel=0

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/03/28/bipartisan-capitulation-on-iranian-nukes/

One of the major themes of my new book, Iran’s Final Solution for Israel, is the abject failure of imagination regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran, which transcends the political and ideological Republican/Democratic party, and Right/Left, divides.

Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the craven capitulation to Obama administration demands that Congress “butt out” of the “P5 +1” sham agreement process which has provided dangerous U.S. and international validation of Iran’s uranium enrichment program.

As reported by Al-Monitor yesterday (3/27/14), House lawmakers are crafting a “bipartisan” bill targeting Iran’s jihad-terror “proxy” Hezbollah, having acquiesced to the Obama administration’s demand not to address Iran’s relentless pursuit of nuclear capabilities, whose ultimate goal has long been acknowledged to be the production of nuclear weapons. The Hezbollah-limited focus, though allegedly “in the works for several months,” in reality represented bipartisan subservience to Obama administration wishes, gaining momentum,

after Democrats acceded to the Obama administration’s request that Congress butt out of the multiparty nuclear negotiations with Iran. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has blocked a vote on a bipartisan Iran sanctions bill that has garnered 59 cosponsors, and the House has also lifted the pressure since passing its own sanctions bill on a 400-20 vote last summer.

Pressed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, during hearings on February 4, 2014, U.S. chief negotiator with Iran Wendy Sherman conceded that the P5 + 1 agreement, failed to “shut down” Iran’s continuing development of ballistic missiles. These weapons, which have long range capabilities, are the preferred devices for delivering a nuclear payload. Senator Bob Corker (R., Tenn.), the committee’s ranking member, raised the appropriate questions, interspersed with relevant commentary:

From my e-pal Dr. John A.
In anticipation of an upcoming papal visit to the Holy Land, an Open Letter signed by more than 200 bishops, clerics, members of religious orders, and theologians from several faith traditions, was delivered to Pope Francis on March 5, 2014. Archbishop Desmond Tutu has now added his support of this… ———– Pure calumny and propaganda… Where is the ANY credible evidence of any official targeting of any children by Israel?? Where??!! Quite the contrary, the Palestinians are inculcating young children into hate with propaganda and training for violent jihad and in praise of suicide murderers.. The liberalo-leftist world has turned mad…JHA

http://org.salsalabs.com/o/641/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=15218

Pope Francis: Speak out to end Israel’s Targeting of Palestinian Children

http://nsroundtable.org/as-we-see-it/perverse-logic/

“CIA director John Brennan is at it again,” writes Raymond Ibrahim below, “equivocating over the nature of jihad by evoking paradigms familiar to the West.”

Many of us are quite familiar with Mr. Brennan’s world view, as we wrote about here when Brennan was first nominated to be CIA Director. As Brennan himself said, Islam had “helped to shape my own world view,” as his travels around the world for more than three decades, had taught him about “the goodness and beauty of Islam.”

Well, Mr. Brennan was at it again last Tuesday, as he spoke at the Council of Foreign Relations. You can read details of his visit below, however we would like to point out one thing.

Raymond Ibrahim writes that the “tendency to project one’s own cultural norms and priorities onto others is the height of arrogance and ethnocentrism.” He is 100% correct. It is something Americans have a bad habit of doing, including in their prosecution of the War on Terror. …” National Security Roundtable

A CIA Chief’s Willful Blindness On Jihad By Raymond Ibrahim

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/raymond-ibrahim/cia-chief-jihad-fueled-by-repression-economics-and-ignorance/print/

CIA director John Brennan is at it again—equivocating over the nature of jihad by evoking paradigms familiar to the West.

Last Tuesday, “during an event at the Council of Foreign Relations, Brennan was asked about the ‘war of ideas’ surrounding Islam, which the questioner said many Americans tend to equate with violence.”

The CIA chief responded by saying that al-Qaeda’s ideology is “a perverse and very corrupt interpretation of the Qur’an”; that “al-Qaeda has hijacked” Islam; that “they have really distorted the teachings of Muhammad.”

Even so, “that ideology, that agenda of al-Qaeda,” confirmed Brennan, “has gained resonance and following in many parts of the world.”

So what is the CIA chief’s explanation as to why such a “perverse and very corrupt” understanding of Islam—one that has “distorted the teachings of Muhammad”— resonates among Muslims?

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/was-malaysia-airlines-flight-370-lost-because-of-terrorism/ Terrorists want people to know what they did and why they did it. Terrorist groups usually rapidly put out a statement taking credit for an attack that they took part in… or didn’t take part in. Terrorist groups live off publicity and donations. They need to constantly kill people and issue […]

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Into-the-Fray-My-renewed-challenge-to-Michael-Oren-346758
When someone who was one of Israel’s best known diplomats touts such silliness, it is difficult to know what is more disconcerting: Whether he actually believes what he is preaching, or whether he doesn’t.

Ambassador (ret.) Michael Oren: Israel must take its fate in its own hands and adopt measures that are a riposte to any Palestinian effort to declare a state unilaterally at the UN…we must not sit idly but declare what our borders are; borders that leave the maximum number of Israelis on our side and afford maximum security for Israeli citizens.

Interviewer: You are talking about a unilateral measure similar to what Ehud Olmert called “Convergence.”

Michael Oren: We should learn from past mistakes…there are dangers involved in all situations – even a two-state one, which by the way is always the preferred solution, a solution that emerges from mutual negotiations. But if this is impossible, we cannot deliver our destiny into the hands of the Palestinians or any external party, [we must] take the required steps to preserve our identity as a democratic and Jewish state, and if possible, acquire American support for these measures. – Interview with Michael Oren on what Israel should do if the negotiations with the Palestinians fail, Channel 2, March 22.

Three months ago, I called on former-ambassador Michael Oren to meet me in a public debate over his support for unilateral withdrawal from much of Judea-Samaria, if negotiations on a Palestinian state fail (See “A public challenge to Michael Oren,” January 23).

Unanswered challenge

In the column, I challenged Oren to address what I saw as the numerous and dangerous lacunae in his policy proposal, to elaborate on its prospective implementation, and to explain how any benefits would, in fact, accrue from such implementation.

I challenged him to give some idea of his envisioned post-unilateral evacuation map, of the frontiers to which he sees Israel withdrawing, and of how they would be demarcated and secured.

I called on him to designate which portions of the western slopes of the Judean-Samarian highlands that command the heavily- populated coastal plain, Israel’s only international airport, much of the trans-Israel highway, and vital infrastructure installations, he would, unilaterally, include under Israeli jurisdiction, and which portions he would, unilaterally, exclude.

These, and other trenchant questions, regarding the feasibility and advisability of his proposed policy paradigm went unanswered – and with good reason. For any attempt to translate Oren’s (or any other) unilateral prescription from the conceptual to the concrete will quickly reveal it to be, at best, impractical imbecility—or worse, deliberately detrimental.

Oxymoronic formula

It pains me to have to resort to such harsh language with regard to the affable Oren, with whom I have always maintained an amicable relationship, and who, has devoted much of his adult life to meritorious service to his country.

But lives – many lives – are at stake and his current proposal is so patently preposterous and perilous that it must be condemned in the strongest possible terms, exposed as the hallucinatory hazard it truly is, and dispatched swiftly from the public discourse, with the scorn it richly deserves.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/panama-100-years-later

Begin with one of the most famous (to some, infamous) quotations from a generation ago: California Republican Senator S. I. Hayakawa (served 1977-83) said during the election preceding the 1977 signing of the Panama Canal Treaty, “We should keep the Panama Canal. After all, we stole it fair and square.” Yet in 1978 the senator would help shepherd the treaty through the Senate and win ratification.

A trip I recently took to Panama entailed becoming a member of the trip sponsor, the Theodore Roosevelt Association, whose namesake began building the Canal pursuant to the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty of November 18, 1903, 15 days after, with U.S. backing, Panama declared its independence from what had been Gran Colombia. The U.S. set up the Canal Zone as a separate entity, governed under Delaware law, with a U.S. governor. The September 7, 1977 Panama Canal treaty, which came into effect October 1, 1979, provided for transfer of full control to Panama on December 31, 1999. Spurred by pressures arising out of the shooting of demonstrating student-nationalists by U.S. soldiers – at the behest of an addled garrison commander – in 1964, the treaty negotiated between the Carter administration and Panama’s dictator, Omar Torrijos-Herrera, proved a rare foreign policy triumph for Carter.

Early plans to build a canal date back to the 16th century. It was after crossing the Panama isthmus that Spanish explorer Vasco Nuñez de Balboa discovered the Pacific Ocean in 1513. The one major failed attempt was a 15-year late-19th century effort by Suez Canal architect Ferdinand de Lesseps. His Suez success did not face the significant variations in terrain elevation that made Panama unsuitable for a pure sea-level canal.

It was the brilliant American engineer John Frank Stevens who saw that a sea-level canal would not work; he devised the locks system. Stevens resigned in 1907, and passed the torch to David DuBose Gaillard, who saw the project to completion, under the overall supervision of George Washington Goethals. In November 1906 Theodore Roosevelt visited Panama (and Puerto Rico), becoming the first president to travel abroad on official diplomatic business.

The Canal’s 27,609-person death toll combines an estimated 22,000 for the failed French effort plus 5,609 for the decade-long American effort. Most of the difference was disease; when William Crawford Gorgas directed the effort to conquer yellow fever, thousands of lives were saved. Nearly 40,000 workers toiled to build the Canal, mostly West Indians; the workers on the French and American efforts moved 268 million cubic yards of dirt – more than 25 times that for the (English) Channel Tunnel. The project cost the U.S. a total of $375 million ($9.5 billion in 2012 dollars, reflecting a 25-fold depreciation of the greenback); the cost was a record for an infrastructure project up to that time.

The Panama Canal locks transit system consists of six locks, depicted here (place cursor over locks for video simulation), the first starting and the last ending at sea level. On the Pacific side there are three locks, two Miraflores, one Pedro Miguel, rising a total of 26 meters (85 feet) to the artificial Lake Gatun; the three Gatun locks on the north side lower the ships to the Atlantic side. Lake Gatun, at about 20 miles, is the largest share of the 50-miles transit, followed by the roughly 9-mile Culebra Cut (also known from 1915 through 1999 as the Gaillard Cut, after the engineer who directed its creation). When Panama took possession of the Canal it revived the original name, which had been used from 1903 to 1914. Initially 92 meters (302 feet) wide, the Cut has been expanded twice, and now is 192 meters (630 feet) in straightaway sections and 222 meters (728 feet) on curved sections. Alongside the Canal is the Chagres River, which is the only river running across the entire isthmus.

Our passage was blessed by a mostly sunny Saturday. We began on the Pacific Ocean side, which, as the Canal isthmus runs east-west, is on the south end, at a colorful place named Flamenca Island [sic]; the north side, at the Atlantic (actually, the Caribbean) end, reaches the port of Colon. Thus in 16th century parlance the Pacific was the Southern Sea (and the Atlantic the Northern Sea). Both ports rest at sea level; the Pacific tide runs 21 feet daily, whereas the Caribbean-Atlantic Ocean side runs a mini-tide of only 1-1/2 feet. All gates for locks on the Pacific side are higher, to allow for tidal flow. The existing gates have functioned for a full century, operating purely on gravity to move water in and out of the lock chambers. The gates on the Pacific side weigh 700 tons each.

We boarded our vessel, the Pacific Queen, at 7 a.m. By 7:15 we had passed under the Bridge of the Americas, rising 100 meters above sea level; across it runs the Pan-American Highway, which goes from Chile, with one gap, 30,000 miles all the way (not as the crow flies) to Alaska. Traversing the three locks on the Pacific side, we reached the midway point, Centennial Bridge, around 11 a.m.; the bridge spans Gold Hill to Contractor’s Hill. Gold Hill was named to help create a stock market commodity price bubble; a predictable frenzy ensued, as investors piled in only to be outmaneuvered by insiders. We see on the east bank a huge red and white construction crane, and are told that it had been used by billionaire magnate Howard Hughes to lift his monster Spruce Goose seaplane out of the water after its only flight, in 1947.