RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.americanthinker.com/assets/3rd_party/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/03/the_ayatollahs_lobby_on_k_street.html

Has the National Iranian American Council and its founder, Trita Parsi, inserted itself into the debate over Iran sanctions under false pretenses? Has the left been duped and psychologically disarmed by Parsi and the folks at NIAC, who have seemingly tried to appeal to the left’s dove-like idealistic sentiments? Substantial evidence points to the conclusion that NIAC’s agenda, far removed from the actual interests of the Iranian-American community at large, displays almost zero daylight between itself and the docket of the “supreme leader’s” theocratic regime.

Trita Parsi and the staff at NIAC have penned articles in several left-wing mainstream media outlets, including The New York Times and The Huffington Post, among many others. Parsi recently lectured at CIA headquarters and has personally met and lobbied former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Parsi, along with the staff at his disposal, claim to be “the voice” of the one million Iranian Americans in the United States, with the stated mission of “advancing the interests of the Iranian American community.”

If NIAC’s mission is truly to serve the best interests of the Iranian-American community, it has epically failed to meet that objective. When polled, 99% of Iranian Americans who support a pro-democracy trajectory for Iran expressed that NIAC did not in any way represent their interests. Furthermore, a staggering 99% of respondents also believed that NIAC are simply a lobby for the Ayatollah’s Islamic Republic.

Mohsen Makhmalbalf, an established leader in Iran’s Green Movement, said of Parsi, “I feel his lobbying has secretly been more for the Islamic republic.” When reached for comment, Amir Fakhravar, an Iranian jailed dissident and recipient of the Annie Taylor Journalism Award, said of NIAC, “You cannot find any difference between their statements and the Iranian regime’s statements. Either officially or unofficially, they are following the path of the regime.”

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4780/killing_the_poor_is_a_perverted_obsession_of_the_left

The Left needs the poor so much that it wants as many people as possible in poverty. Just look at the data and find an argument to dispute this. Shame on the Left for its disgraceful, self-serving behaviour

On several occasions, I’ve observed that the poverty rate in America was steadily falling, but that progress came to a halt in the mid-1960s when the government declared a War on Poverty.

And I almost always included a chart showing the annual poverty rate over several decades. Moreover, I posted graphs showing how government programs trap people in dependency because of very high implicit marginal tax rates. And that’s true in other nations as well.

But it didn’t matter how many times I revisited this issue, I was never clever enough to look at the poverty-rate data to estimate what would have happened if the federal government hadn’t become involved.

Fortunately, John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis was insightful enough to fill the breach. He shows that the War on Poverty has made a big difference. But in the wrong way.

Poverty Goodman

Here’s some of what John wrote about the topic in a column for Forbes.

“From the end of World War II until 1964 the poverty rate in this country was cut in half. Further, 94% of the change in the poverty rate over this period can be explained by changes in per capita income alone. Economic growth is clearly the most effective antipoverty weapon ever devised by man.

“The dotted line shows what would have happened had this trend continued. Economic growth would have reduced the number in poverty to a mere 1.4% of the population today—a number so low that

private charity could probably have taken care of any unmet needs. …we didn’t continue the trend. In 1965 we launched a War on Poverty. And as the graph shows, in the years that followed the portion of Americans living in poverty barely budged.”

John augments this analysis by looking at some of the social science research about poverty and government dependency.

The numbers are very depressing.

“…here is something you may not know. Early on ― in the first decade of our 50-year experiment with an expanded welfare state ― carefully controlled experiments funded by the federal government established without question that welfare changes behavior. It leads to the very behavioral changes that keep people in a state of poverty and dependency. …

“The experiments were all conducted by social scientists who believed in the welfare state and had no doubt about its capacity to be successful. …The experiments were all controlled. Randomly selected people were assigned to a “control group” and an “experimental group.” …the results were not pretty. To the dismay of the researchers, they largely confirmed what conventional wisdom had thought all along. …

“The number of hours worked dropped 9% for husbands and 20% for wives, relative to the control group. For young male adults it dropped 43% more. The length of unemployment increased 27% among husbands and 42% for wives, relative to the control group. For single female heads of households it increased 60% more. Divorce increased 36% more among whites and 42% more among blacks. (In a New Jersey experiment, the divorce rate was 84% higher among Hispanics.)”

President Obama and other folks on the left don’t seem overly interested in this data. Instead, they beat the drums about class warfare and income inequality.

They want us to believe the economy is a fixed pie and that all of us somehow get less if some entrepreneur becomes rich. But John’s point from the column is correct. Economic growth is the way to help the poor, not redistribution.

Unfortunately, many politicians are hostile to the types of policies that produce more growth. Maybe it’s because they don’t understand economics. Or maybe they understand economics but don’t care because they think they’ll be more successful at the ballot box if they pursue the politics of envy and division.

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/following-obama/?print=1

Meet President Bucky Brewster. You’ll like his style, even if MSNBC, NPR, PBS, CNN and Time magazine won’t.

Imagine if a hard-right-wing president were to follow Barack Obama and embrace the new precedents that Obama himself has established for the presidency. Would he then be seen as an unusually polarizing figure, who abused the power of his office? Let’s call him Bucky Brewster, the new Republican President from Montana.

Settled law?

President Bucky Brewster announces that he finds most of the Affordable Care Act patently unconstitutional [1]. So he suspends all its timetables of implementation, stops the employer and individual mandates, and gives exemptions to big corporations, Tea Party groups, and the NRA. Brewster goes on to throw out Obama’s recently passed “comprehensive immigration reform” act, deporting at once four million illegal aliens and cancelling the Dream Act, remarking: “It contradicts prior law. The federal immigration law is the law.”

Brewster worries about the EPA a lot [2]. So he decides that the Endangered Species Act is unconstitutional and a threat to property rights. He suspends enforcement of it indefinitely. Brewster also orders a regulatory raid on liberal Solaris, alleging that its solar panels will cause too much glare for private aviation pilots and are made of rare imported silica, and so shuts the company down. Brewster also advises Boeing that, if it were smart, it should leave Washington and go to a right-to-work state like Mississippi [3]. Brewster also reminds that the Defense of Marriage Act has never been repealed and thus he outlaws all gay marriages “in accordance with settled law.”

What will MSNBC say? The abuse of power? Unconstitutional? Impeachment?

Appointments?

President Bucky Brewster wants to fundamentally transform America and so his appointments must reflect his conservative ideology. So he taps as green jobs czar an ad man for the oil companies who, we learn, is a “birther.” [4] His new NASA director gives an interview pledging that the chief aim of the space agency is now to reach out to Christians abroad [5].

One of his communications directors praises the efficiency of Mussolini, who, she says, has always been her role model. His EPA director, who is a big Keystone pipeline booster, opens a fake email account to take the pulse of the pipeline debate — and has the EPA give an award to her alias! He appoints as Treasury secretary Donald Trump, who confesses that he wrote off his kids’ camp fees as tax deductions and pocketed his FICA allotments. His new energy secretary, Billy Bob Fella, who drives a Hummer, announces: “We want gas prices to get down to around 70 cents a gallon [6], right down there to those Saudi or Kuwaiti levels. What a great way to save the planet by returning a little cash to the poor driver’s pocket.”

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2014/03/02/introducing-a-deity-who-makes-sense/ “HEAVENLY Father,” take to thee The supreme iniquity, Fashioned by thy candid hand In a moment contraband. Though to trust us seem to us More respectful—“we are dust.” We apologize to Thee For Thine own Duplicity. That’s by Emily Dickinson, the wonderful 19th-century American poet who churned out almost two thousand […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/alaska-2014-candidates-for-congress-where-they-stand?f=puball 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   Senator Lisa Murkowski (D) – Next Election […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-progressive-destruction-of-the-us?f=puball

Barack Obama is the final piece of the map in the progressive movement’s century of steady destruction of the U.S. dollar, income taxation, and massive, liberal intrusion into the lives of all Americans from birth to death.

An excellent analysis of this is found in “The Great Withdrawal: How the Progressive’s 100-Year Debasement of American and the Dollar Ends” by Craig R. Smith and Lowell Ponte ($19.95, Idea Factory Press, Phoenix, Arizona). Together they have written eight books on economic topics.

There is a great backlash to the Obama administration’s efforts to impose a socialist economy on America in which the federal government essentially controls all elements of it. The most recent and dramatic example is Obamacare, the takeover of one sixth of the economy. The Tea Party movement emerged to protest it in 2009 and has steadily grown as a political movement.

Their protest march on Washington, D.C. that year drew nearly a million or more Americans.

In 2010 the movement was instrumental in returning power to the Republican Party in the House of Representatives. If the political pundits are right, the forthcoming November midterm elections will remove many of the Democrats who voted for it and may also return power to the GOP in the Senate. The elections are critical to thwarting Obama’s further efforts to destroy the nation by adding millions to its many welfare programs as the result of its failure to increase economic growth from a dismal 2% per year, the lowest in decades. Presidents Kennedy and Reagan took office and reversed recessions. Obama has not.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/kerrys-centuries-of-error?f=puball

“You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country,” said Secretary of State John Kerry on CBS’s “Face the Nation” last Sunday. The 19th century reference is one Kerry has used frequently since the Ukraine crisis erupted, but there are a couple of problems with this attempted use of history.

First, invasions are not an event unique to the 19th century. Indeed, there are many more recent examples from the 20th century Kerry could cite, including both world wars, the Korean and Vietnamese wars, and the Gulf War among others. Soviet Russia invaded Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 to keep puppet governments in power against popular calls for reform. In both cases, Soviet troops were told that they were stopping an impeding counter-revolution. If Moscow did not intervene, the “enemies of socialism” were going to open to the West and let NATO forces into the countries being defended by the Red Army. The similarities to the current Ukraine situation are obvious, perhaps too much so for Kerry who wants to avoid anything that would imply a revival of the Cold War.

Yet, President Vladimir Putin’s justifications for invading Ukraine given March 4 sounded like they came out of the Brezhnev Doctrine expounded after the Czech invasion. No change in neighboring governments hostile to Russian interests will be tolerated.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4203/israel-rest-of-world
LONG BEFORE THE NAZIS EVEN USED THE WORD “JEW”- JEWS WERE DESPISED, OPPRESSED, DENIED BASIC RIGHTS, HUMILIATED AND KILLED IN THE MOSLEM/ARAB WORLD- READ DR. ANDREW BOSTOM’S BOOK
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The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History by Andrew G. Bostom and Ibn Warraq (May 30, 2008)

The Nazis invented the Jewish boycott, and went on from there to the Holocaust.

The world excuses Islamic murder, but focuses on flaws, often imaginary, on the part of Israel.

This is the wrong boycott in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Everybody hates Israel. That is not just accepted wisdom, it is a reality that chokes all rational debate on the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. There are exceptions, of course, such as Canada, but most of Western Europe has slipped from support for Israel to support for the Palestinian cause, as if both sides might not have valid claims to the disputed land.

Most Americans are enthusiastic about Israel, but the U.S. government under Barack Obama, has, in recent years, shown increasing antagonism. Unsurprisingly, not a single Muslim nation likes Israel at all.

Many hate the Jewish state precisely because it is a Jewish state — there seems no other reason why they might hate it. Many, in a display of true prejudice, have never even visited it.

In the world in general, and Europe in particular, anti-Semitism is growing at a rate not unlike the 1930s. It does not take much mental grip to see the link between that escalation of the “oldest hatred” and the refined political and religious rejection of Israel as the one and only state in the world that deserves to be abolished. Or, as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad once put it in Farsi, “exterminated” (Umam-e Eslami bayad Isra’il-ra qal’ o qam’ kard: The nations of Islam must exterminate Israel.)

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303630904579419293477469018?mod=Opinion_newsreel_4

There are plenty of candidates for that title, but after Tuesday the prize belongs to attorney Steven Donziger. Federal judge Lewis Kaplan ruled that the environmental activist had engaged in a massive racketeering scheme and declared that a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron in an Ecuadorian court cannot be enforced in the United States.

As our readers know, in 1993 Mr. Donziger sued Texaco (now merged with Chevron) for what he said was the company’s failure to clean up oil pits it drilled in Lago Agrio in the 1970s with state oil company PetroEcuador. Chevron had signed proof that it had cleaned its portion of the pits and had been absolved of any liability, but Mr. Donziger sniffed the potential windfall of a media-ready environmental “disaster” and sued the company for $113 billion. He enlisted all manner of celebrity helpers, including actress Daryl Hannah.

He won in Ecuador, but only thanks to what Judge Kaplan found were “dishonest and corrupt” measures including bribery, coercion and engaging an American consulting firm to ghostwrite an independent expert’s reports. In a 485-page opinion, the judge called the case “extraordinary,” calling the actions of Mr. Donziger and his legal team “offensive to the laws of any nation that aspires to the rule of law, including Ecuador.” The corrupt extortion was intended to “instill fear of a catastrophic outcome in order to increase the amount Chevron would pay to avoid the worst,” Judge Kaplan wrote.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304815004579417541596103908?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop&mg=reno64-wsj

If Russia’s Ukraine incursion goes unpunished, Moscow may turn to ‘rescuing’ ethnic Russians in NATO countries.

If Russia’s Ukraine gambit works, an emboldened Vladimir Putin may be tempted to take on the NATO alliance directly. How? By claiming danger to ethnic Russians in one of the Baltic states and intervening to protect them. President Obama’s challenge is to head off the possibility of such a challenge, one that could lead to war in Europe.

The stakes in Ukraine, President Putin’s motives and the region’s anxieties are rooted in history that Americans tend not to know. For those who lived in the Soviet empire, however, it is history that hasn’t been forgotten. It shadows today’s events and wracks the nerves of those who knew Soviet domination.

In 1917, during World War I, revolutionaries overthrew Czar Nicholas II, and the Bolsheviks soon took control of the revolution. A civil war then raged for several years between the revolutionary Reds and the monarchist Whites. Ukraine took advantage of the upheaval to declare independence. Azerbaijan, Armenia and other parts of the Russian empire, singly and in groups, did likewise.

The Bolsheviks wanted to change Russia’s government and rename the country, but they didn’t want Russia to lose its empire. When they defeated the Whites and consolidated power, the Bolsheviks forced the split-away states to reincorporate into the empire, newly dubbed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Westerners in general may be unaware of the short-lived independence of those Russian imperial lands in that time of civil war, but the people in those lands know the story well.