RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/mark-tapson/mr-x-and-the-new-cold-war/print/

Sixty-five years ago this July, Foreign Affairs published an explosive article by diplomat George Kennan, under the pseudonym Mr. X, which isolated and defined “The Sources of Soviet Conduct.” It became the centerpiece of our response to Soviet expansionism and the foundation of our Cold War policy, and made “containment” a household word and a foreign policy strategy for decades afterward.

In the article, Kennan explained that the Soviet Union’s leaders were determined to spread the communist ideology around the world. Due to the “innate antagonism” between socialism and capitalism, the USSR perceived itself to be at perpetual war with the West, with no possibility for peaceful coexistence. And they were extremely patient and practical in the pursuit of that goal:

The Kremlin is under no ideological compulsion to accomplish its purposes in a hurry… The main thing is that there should always be pressure, unceasing constant pressure, toward the desired goal.

Direct conflict was never considered a desirable avenue for the propagation of their cause; instead, the Soviets were always on the move to fill “every nook and cranny available to it in the basin of world power.” Their foreign policy, Kennan wrote, “is a fluid stream which moves constantly, wherever it is permitted to move, toward a given goal.”

Kennan argued that the Soviets were weak compared to the united Western world, and vulnerable to internal fault lines. He noted that Soviet power was “unamenable to argument or reason,” but very sensitive to superior force, in the face of which Russians would simply withdraw to wait for a more propitious time. That did not mean that the West should allow itself to be lulled into complacency by such a retreat, however.

Kennan described our conflict with Soviet Communism as “undoubtedly the greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced and probably the greatest it will ever have to face.” His policy conclusion was that the main element of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of

a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies… designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon he interests of a peaceful and stable world.

The United States adopted that policy, and the USSR collapsed twenty years ago (which is not to say that the threat of communism collapsed with it).

Now go back and reread this but replace the Soviet threat of the past with the contemporary one of Islamic fundamentalism. Check off the similarities: Islam a totalitarian ideology at perpetual war with Western capitalism? Check. Muslims patient and prepared to fight the long war? Check. Impervious to the logic of reason, but vulnerable to force? Check. Islam always on the move to fill every nook and cranny available to it? Check. Of course there are differences, but the big picture is strikingly similar. To paraphrase Kennan, our conflict with Islamic fundamentalism is probably the greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced or will ever have to face.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-greenfield/the-election-farce-in-libya/

“The real message of this election is that the alliance between the Libyan establishment and the Muslim Brotherhood is still holding together. The NFA and the Brotherhood are both opposed to autonomy and are both determined to stop any regional independence bids. The elections and the coalition will give the new regime the appearance of legitimacy while its thugs go back to doing what Gaddafi’s thugs were doing in Benghazi.”

The official story for the Libyan election has already been written. Even before the count is fully complete, newspaper headlines from London to Sydney to New York are hailing the triumph of a liberal party over the Islamists. Few of them notice or care that these election results seem to neatly reflect the agreement made between the Muslim Brotherhood and the National Forces Alliance before the election even took place.

While the media does its best to spin the election as a setback for the Muslim Brotherhood, it is nothing of the kind. Libya is the second country that Obama has delivered into the hands of the Brotherhood with Syria set to be the third. The Libyan election was a public show of support for a coalition that predated the election. A coalition in which the Muslim Brotherhood is set to play the 800-pound gorilla.

No media outlets noted that the Libyan military had been put on full alert through the election or that a helicopter belonging to the electoral commission came under anti-aircraft fire in the civil war burning behind the scenes of the phony transition. There are few mentions of the independence protests and the shooting of independence protesters by state security forces, and even fewer mentions of the ballots burned, multiple attacks on polling places and firefights between armed gunmen.

The media has its hand-fed story and will be sticking to it. Unfortunately there are some problems with their story.

For one thing the National Forces Alliance is neither liberal nor secular. Rather, it describes itself as moderate Islamist. And it isn’t a political party, but a bloc of around 60 parties and hundreds of civil and national organizations, ranging from tribal groups to soccer clubs. The goal was to create as broad a coalition as possible, and we won’t find out exactly who is in the alliance until much later. It is a safe bet that a group that broad includes terrorists and people too ugly for even Obama to shake hands with.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/a-republic-if-you-can-keep-it-2

So it’s a tax law, huh? If it were a law forcing people to buy health insurance or pay a penalty, it wouldn’t be constitutional, but if it’s a tax law, it is constitutional. But Obamacare didn’t pass as a tax bill. Democrats in Congress who passed it (not a single Republican voted for it) insisted it wasn’t a tax bill. It was signed by a Democrat president who insisted it wasn’t a tax bill. It never would have passed if it were a tax bill, so they didn’t call it that. Rather, they called it “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” though few call it that anymore. Everyone calls it Obamacare.

So the Roberts Court should have declared it unconstitutional and sent it back to the Congress, right? But they didn’t do that. Instead, Roberts re-wrote Obamacare as a tax law and declared it constitutional! He did this with the four liberal justices who just wanted to move it along no matter how that was achieved. Even Justice Flipflopper – I mean Kennedy – was flabbergasted. Talk about legislating from the bench! Even my middle-school civics students knew it’s the Congress that writes laws, not the Supreme Court.

And now government can tax us for what we don’t do? How is that possible? To tax our income, they had to pass the 16th Amendment back in 1913. Why isn’t the amendment process required this time?

Two more problems: the Constitution requires that tax bills originate in the House of Representatives, and it doesn’t give the Supreme Court power to write law or re-write law. Obamacare originated in the Senate, then was re-written in the Supreme Court.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/a-clash-of-supremacies-over-obamacare

Before Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, wrote the majority opinion upholding the alleged constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (on one hand, denying its constitutionality under the Commerce Clause, but, on the other, sanctioning the individual mandate as a tax Congress has the power to impose), otherwise known as Obamacare (ADA), several states had announced that they would refuse to implement the law or conform to its specific provisions. At last count there were four, from the original twenty-seven, led by Florida.

Such opposition may move Congress to repeal Obamacare in part or in its entirety, instead of fighting the states (provided Republicans retain control the House and win control of the Senate); it may cause it to “replace” Obamacare with something less onerous (but no less unconstitutional); or it may cause another Constitutional crisis in which the states invoke the Tenth Amendment and are answered by the federal government overriding the states’ supposed right to resort to that strategy.

The last major defiance of federal policy by the states on the basis of states’ rights precipitated the Civil War.

The questions are: Can the states successfully resist the federal government on this issue? Can they unite in their opposition? Would the federal government back off, or offer a compromise, such as was reached during the Nullification Crisis of the 1830’s? Can the federal government override their opposition? Will the federal government threaten to punish states that refuse to comply with Obamacare, e.g., by withholding federal highway funds or Medicaid funds, or by devising another strategy to induce compliance? And if the states champion noncompliance with any facet of Obamacare, on what moral grounds?

Three features of the Constitution will come into play in this pending conflict:

The Tenth Amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States, or to the people.

The Supremacy Clause of Article VI, Section 2, which states that the Constitution, and the Laws of the United States…shall be the supreme Law of the Land. This clause applies solely to the enumerated powers granted to Congress in Article I, Section 8, and to no other laws, assumed or imagined. This clause by inference also exempts the federal government from complying with state laws.

The Necessary and Proper Clauseof Article I, Section 8, which reads: To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof. This is the last of eighteen enumerated powers.

The Tenth Amendment, or the “states’ rights or sovereignty” Amendment, has a dubious history. It has been invoked by states in the past to impose or legitimate the denial of individual rights to blacks or to sanction the statist mischief or criminal behavior of a state legislature. The Amendment has never been invoked to protect individual rights.

Furthermore, in the 20th century, the argument from state sovereignty or from “reserved rights” lost credibility when states began to accept federal money for various highway, welfare, and other federal programs. By accepting those funds, the states lost a great portion of their vaunted sovereignty. They could claim arm-twisting by the federal government, but once they submitted, the wind went out of their claims to state sovereignty. They became addicted to and dependent on the subsidies in terms of their own budgets and expenditures. They complemented the growth of federal power with the growth of their own powers. It may be too late to reassert their sovereignty now. States maintain that they can pick and choose which powers they reserve (in the name of “the people”). This they might do, but the federal government has in many instances adopted a policy of “benign neglect” in respect to allowing states to assert their own prerogatives.

The Supremacy Clause has been virtually ignored by Congress, because Congress has passed thousands of laws not enumerated in the Constitution (“implied” powers), but whose enactment has been rationalized by Article I, Section 8, whose first clause reads, The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-fortunes-of-permanence-culture-and-anarchy-in-an-age-of-amnesia

It is summertime and the reading is hard. I am overdosed on the tomes that warn how our schools, our culture, our academies, and our justice system are failing. The “caliphate” is coming, capitalism is dying, pseudo environmentalism is ruining the planet and industry, we are on a downward spiral, the sky is falling and only obesity, the new bi-partisan national obsession, is going up. Don’t get me wrong. Most of those books are informative and worth reading, but I’m suffering from crisis fatigue and a desire for a touch of political amnesia and an Anthony Trollope novel.

Therefore it was with some hesitation that I started Roger Kimball’s new book “The Fortunes of Permanence-Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia.” Roger Kimball gives the lie to those who claim that culture, language, erudition and wit have been hijacked by multiculturalism.

His knowledge is dazzling and in the most elegant and witty prose sparkling with quotes from Aristotle to Stefan Zweig, he debunks the modern self-righteous and destructive attitude that all points of view on all subjects have equal value and merit.

In a recent column about the notorious and atrocious writer Alice Walker, professor and critic Edward Alexander wrote of Irving Howe for whom the substitution of Alice Walker for John Keats in the American curriculum epitomized the debasement of public education. As Kimball illustrates, the debasement continues as cultural reversal and Elton John is now put on the same level as Bach.

The irony is that with a keyboard and mouse information is virtually instant and yet students know less history, less geography, less mathematics and less literature. They are indifferent and blasé in schools more concerned with teaching self esteem and promoting deviancy as dissidence. As Kimball puts it “Data, data everywhere but no one knows a thing.”

Why Muslims Are Allowed to Stone Christians in America — on The Glazov Gang
by Frontpagemag.com
Tom Trento, Dwight Schultz and Josh Brewster shed a terrifying light on Sharia U.S.A.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/frontpagemag-com/muslims-stone-christians-in-dearborn-michigan-on-the-glazov-gang-1/

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jul/6/no-fracking-way-forward/print/#.T_oT5ZY_TKE.email

Greenies turn against natural gas in their war on cheap energy

American oil is enjoying a renaissance few would have predicted even a decade ago. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates nearly half the crude oil we consume will be produced at home within a mere eight years. Continental Resources CEO Harold Hamm, discoverer of the Bakken oil fields of Montana and North Dakota, goes further and says the United States can produce enough oil to replace OPEC.

What this rosy scenario overlooks is that the environmental movement’s sights increasingly will be set on outlawing – or, at minimum, strangling via regulations – the “fracking” techniques that make it possible to access much of this oil.

Ironically, this was not a battle of choice for U.S. Big Green organizations. Fracking also is responsible for the natural-gas revolution, and it was only yesterday that the major environmental outfits were touting natural gas, which produces half the greenhouse gas emissions of coal, as the bridge to a renewable energy future. Chesapeake Energy, this country’s second-largest natural-gas producer, kick-started the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal anti-coal campaign with $26 million in donations. (Such shortsightedness is typical of American corporations – seeking to gain advantage over rivals in the short term, they overlook the probability that their strange bedfellows will soon turn on them.) As recently as 2010, leaders of the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) were joining with heads of the natural-gas industry in a Critical Path Energy Summit in Aspen, Colo., in recognition, so they said, “that the only way to unleash the economic, social and environmental benefits of natural gas [is] to work much more closely together.”

But the pressures have been mounting on the U.S. green complex. The same year as the Critical Path Energy Summit, the Sierra Club’s Executive Director Michael Brune says he walked away from an additional $30 million offered by Chesapeake. Part of the pressure comes from the grass roots, which have been fired up in a way unseen since the heady days of the anti-nuclear-energy movement, when outfits like the Clamshell, Palmetto, Shad and Bailly alliances manned the barricades. (Before popular passions were unleashed, both Audubon and the Sierra Club supported nuclear energy for years.) In August 2011, 68 groups, with names like Climate Action Alliance of the Valley, Free the Planet, Gas Truth of Central Pennsylvania and Kids for Saving Earth sent a letter to President Obama urging him to “employ any legal means to put a halt to hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’).” The following month, hundreds of protesters bore down on a shale gas convention in Philadelphia with signs like “Fracking Poisons Air and Water; Fight Back Now,” claiming people were falling ill, cattle were dying and pets were losing their hair. In June, more than 100 groups, along with the usual assortment of celebrities, attacked Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s plan to permit fracking (now under a moratorium) in parts of New York state.

Within the Sierra Club, its Atlantic chapter has been the most vociferous, calling the club’s fracking policy “completely inadequate.”The policy has been to allow chapters to oppose fracking only on a project-by-project basis. In a sign of shifting sentiment within the club, at the 2011 national meeting, the Atlantic chapter’s resolution that would allow chapters to advocate for a total fracking ban passed by a vote of 34-20. (It was referred to committee.)

http://times247.com/

DEBBIE (WASSERMAN SCHULTZ ) DOES THE NETWORKS
DNC chair ‘pretty happy’ with economic recovery
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla…
Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz207SG7ryk
Putin orders inquiry as flood toll nears 200
Associated Press
Monday, July 9, 2012
News
Putin orders inquiry as flood toll nears 200
Russia’s president moved quickly to address anger over the deaths of at least 171 people in severe flooding in the Black Sea region that turned streets into swirling muddy rivers and inundated thousands of homes as many residents were sleeping. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz207Szk0p8
EDITORIAL: Obama gambles, America loses

EDITORIAL: Obama gambles, America loses
Washington Times | The latest Obama 2012 campaign slogan is “Betting on America.” However, the latest round of dismal economic news shows that when it comes to the economy, President Obama is a poor gambler, and the country is headed for bust. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz207TGBAl5
Texas takes Justice to court over voter ID law
Bloomberg
Sunday, July 8, 2012
News
The Obama administration’s claim that Texas’s voter identification law will keep blacks and Hispanics away from the polls this November will be tested in a week-long federal trial starting today in Washington. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz207TTGSHY

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/1401/Democrats-Deny-Purple-Hearts-to-Pvt-Long-and-His-Brothers.aspx

WRITTEN IN MAY 2010

The House Armed Services Committee today approved an amendment to the 2011 defense authorization bill that declares the 2009 shootings at the Little Rock recruiting station and at Ft. Hood to be acts of war. Or at least a lawyerly equivalent as acts “of an enemy of the United States.” This provision will enable the government to provide, as Marine Times reports, a “one-time payment equal to what those killed and wounded would have received if they were in a combat zone at the time of the shootings.”

But no Purple Hearts.

Killed by Muslims professing jihad, these battle dead will lie in their graves unrecognized by the US government whose uniform they wore.

Another disgrace.

The Marine Times story hints at some distasteful Democrat bargaining over this — bargaining I’d like to know more about.

The addition of the June 1 Little Rock shooting to the amendment was part of a compromise on a provision pushed by Republicans to make a point that the war on terror has hit home. As part of the compromise, the final bill also was narrowed so that casualties of the two shootings are not eligible for a Purple Heart or other combat-related benefits that Republicans had wanted in the bill.

How do they live with themselves?

https://www.losingoursons.com/
“The film stands as a warning to Americans about the consequences of a failing civic leadership.”

Daniel Pipes, Founder and director of the Middle East Forum
“The film Hollywood would not make, the media would not report, and civic leaders ignore at our peril.”

Dr. Charles Jacobs, human rights activist, President of American for Peace and Tolerance.