RUTHFULLY YOURS

The tragic 1969 car accident that left a young woman dead at the hands of late Sen. Ted Kennedy will make it to the big screen for a film that the project’s producer says will show audiences what Kennedy “had to go through.”

According to The Hollywood Reporter, 50 Shades of Grey director Sam Taylor-Johnson has signed on to direct Chappaquiddick, which was recently named to the 2015 Blacklist.

Project producer Mark Ciardi told THR Monday, “I’ve done a lot of true life stories, many sports stories, but this one had a deep impact on this country. Everyone has an idea of what happened on Chappaquiddick and this strings together the events in a compelling and emotional way.

Ciardi adds: “You’ll see what he had to go through.”

Finally- the words “jihad” and “Islam (Radical natch)” have made their way into the foreign policy and terrorism debate.

One winner was Wolf Blitzer who moderated fairly and efficiently. One loser was Hugh Hewitt who got appropriately booed by asking a dumb question of Dr. Ben Carson.A few days will tell will be the declared winners and losers by the poll weevils.

As for the candidates? I have only one real litmus test now. Who can beat Hillary?

My bet is on Marco Rubio….so far.

And speaking of Rubio,he will leave the Senate and an open seat in Florida.

Ron de Santis a great Congressman who currently represents District 6 has already announced a run. During his active duty Navy service, he served as a military prosecutor, supported operations at the terrorist detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and deployed to Iraq during the 2007 troop surge as an advisor to a U.S. Navy SEAL commander in support of counterinsurgency operations in Iraq. He has also performed duties as a federal prosecutor, taught courses on military law, and written on constitutional issues.

He has introduced the Terrorist Refugee Infiltration Prevention Act in order to strengthen national security and ensure that terrorists cannot exploit the United States’ refugee resettlement program.

Stay tuned!!

As Christmas approaches, many Americans are making their holiday reading lists—and their plans to cozy up over a long vacation with the year’s hot books or their piles of unopened magazines. But it’s important, too, to think about the value of rereading favorite works: Robert Frost’s poems, perhaps, or George Eliot’s “Middlemarch.”

We do a lot of rereading at my college. Students are instructed to reread assignments once or twice before going to class, and professors in faculty study groups must reread books from the college’s core list.

Yet some regard rereading as a guilty pleasure. After all, new books come out all the time. “With the shelves thus groaning,” Hephzibah Anderson wrote last year for the BBC, “pulling down a well-thumbed favourite feels like an unconscionable indulgence.”

Surely we shouldn’t give in to this feeling. There may have been a time when so few books had been published that one could read everything. But that was several centuries ago. It doesn’t make much sense to feel guilty for failing to attain an impossible goal.

As the only person to have won the Nobel Peace Prize on the basis of sheer hope rather than actual achievement, Barack Hussein Obama could be expected to do everything within his power to vindicate this unprecedented show of trust. Instead he has presided over a clueless foreign policy that has not only exacerbated ongoing regional conflicts but made the world a far more dangerous place. Nowhere has this phenomenon been more starkly demonstrated than in the Middle East where the Nobel laureate has abetted Tehran’s drive for regional hegemony and brought the regime within a stone’s throw of nuclear weapons; driven Iraq and Libya to the verge of disintegration; expedited the surge of Islamist terrorism; exacerbated the Syrian civil war and its attendant refugee problem; made the intractable Palestinian-Israeli conflict almost irresolvable; and plunged Washington’s regional influence and prestige to unprecedented depths,[1] paving the road in grand style to Russia’s resurgence.
Duped by the Mullahs

Consider Tehran’s quest for nuclear weapons, perhaps the foremost threat to Middle Eastern stability, if not to world peace, in the foreseeable future. In a sharp break from the Bush administration’s attempts to coerce the mullahs to desist from this relentless drive, which culminated in five U.N. Security Council resolutions imposing a string of escalating economic sanctions,[2] Obama opted for the road of “engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect”[3] with the presumptuous aim of mending the 30-year-long U.S.-Iranian breach and reintegrating the Islamist regime in Tehran into the international system.

Key homeland security priorities to watch in 2016

Charles (Chuck) Brooks serves as the vice president for government relations & marketing for Sutherland Government Solutions. He served at the Department of Homeland Security as the first director of legislative affairs for the Science & Technology Directorate.

2015 was a year that brought homeland security back into the limelight, with increased terror threats both domestic and globally, and alarmingly sophisticated cyberattacks against government, its workforce and citizens. Readiness levels are again paralleling the post 9/11 environment.

So where shall the Department of Homeland Security focus its efforts in 2016?

Counterterrorism

A top priority of DHS, along with law enforcement, the Department of Defense, and the intelligence community, will be to preempt and monitor potential terrorists. The change in risk environments necessitates greater DHS collaboration with these agencies, and will include more outreach to the private sector stakeholders who owns most of the nation’s vital infrastructure.

Secretary Jeh Johnson already announced that DHS will unveil a new situational awareness terror alert system that will reflect the current security environment when “not having a specific credible piece of intelligence specifying a plot isn’t the end of the story.” All areas of transportation, including maritime, rails, and aviation will received increased monitoring.

The self-appointed P5+1, elected by no one but themselves, should be embarrassed to find that they have made a deal with no one but themselves.

The media’s emphasis on the JCPOA has sadly neglected any in-depth coverage of Iran’s own comprehensive plan of action, which seems to consist of developing nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles and related systems to deliver them.

The IAEA cannot even confirm with certainty that Iran does not already possess a nuclear bomb, and yet is not expected to challenge Tehran’s assertion that it ceased nuclear weapons development more than a decade ago.

Although the U.S. also cannot be certain of Iran’s intentions, it would be advisable to assume that Iran means what it says: “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”

Iran is cheating already — or is it? Iran has not signed anything, so presumably it cannot be cheating on something it never agreed to – as predicted on these pages half a year ago. The self-appointed P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany), elected by no one but themselves, should be embarrassed to find that they have made a deal with no one but themselves.

‘Playing into the hands of ISIS” is the new Beltway mantra. The finger-shaking by the administration and its supporters warns Americans not to give in to their supposedly natural biases against Muslims.

Never mind that FBI statistics show that Jews in this country are the objects of hate crimes at nearly four times the rate of Muslims. It is mysteriously never reported who are the main perpetrators of hate crimes against Jews. In any case, when the administration alleges Islamophobia, it assumes that if it did not, ISIS might announce to Muslims worldwide, “We told you so,” to confirm its suspicions of American prejudices toward Islam.

But according to Obama’s own logic, his constant suggestions that Americans are prejudiced against Islam would themselves strengthen ISIS by providing them a rationale or justification for their anti-American terrorism. Would they not think, “If President Obama himself is constantly worried that his own people are anti-Muslim, then surely they must be — even though statistics do not support that charge”?

Or are we to think that ISIS reasons along the following lines: “Even after 9/11, Americans let in hundreds of thousands of Muslims, and yet hate crimes against them are far rarer than against Jews. Therefore Americans are our friends, and we will refrain from attacking them”?

Not long after signing the nuclear deal, the ruling clerics of the Islamist state of Iran have clearly breached the agreement and several of the United Nations Security Council Resolutions. What is the Obama administration’s response? He is turning a blind eye to this vital issue. The administration is ignoring these blatant violations and continuing with its efforts to lift sanctions on the Ayatollah’s regime.

The Joint Plan of Action Agreement (JCPOA), which was reached between the six world powers and Iran, clearly mentions “addressing UN Security Council (UNSC) resolutions” regarding the Islamic Republic. Specifically, the JCPOA (UNSCR 2231 Annex II, paragraph three) states that Iran should not undertake any ballistic missiles activity “until the date eight years after the JCPOA Adoption Day or until the date on which the IAEA submits a report confirming the Broader Conclusion, whichever is earlier.”

Despite agreeing to the nuclear deal, Iran has repeatedly test-fired long-range ballistic missiles and laser-guided surface-to-surface missiles. In fact, last week, the Islamic Republic tested a new ballistic missile capable of carrying multiple warheads. This is in direct breach of two UN Security Council resolutions and the JCPOA.

In the spring of 1790, as the members of the First Congress, meeting in New York City, discarded one proposed location after another, it seemed almost certain that the nation’s permanent capital would end up somewhere in Pennsylvania. Few expected it to wind up sandwiched between the slave states of Maryland and Virginia—except President George Washington and his leading acolyte in Congress, James Madison. How the capital got there is just one of the many stories that Tom Lewis recounts in “Washington: A History of Our National City,” an engagingly written, panoramic chronicle of the nation’s capital, from its unlikely founding to the era of the city’s notorious crack-smoking mayor Marion Barry.
Washington: A History of Our National City

By Tom Lewis
Basic, 521 pages, $40

Madison, brilliantly playing a weak political hand, derailed the overconfident Pennsylvanians and their allies and concluded the first great back-room deal in American political history. Over dinner at Thomas Jefferson’s rented house on Maiden Lane, he agreed to provide enough (grudging) Southern votes to ensure the passage of Alexander Hamilton’s ambitious financial plans, in return for the Treasury secretary’s agreement not to block the establishment of the federal city on the Potomac River.

One of the most stirring moments in Western cinema is the lighting of the beaconsin Peter Jackson’s film version of “The Return of the King,” summoning the riders of Rohan to the aid of the beleaguered city of Minas Tirith. The fire is kindled from mountaintop to mountaintop as the long vigil of lonely watchmen ends with a signal across distance and darkness, giving the free peoples of the West the courage to rise together against the evil gathering in Mordor. The blood surges and the heart pounds as the tiny points of light become visible across far-off mountain ranges.

Tonight Jews around the world complete the eight days of the Feast of Hanukkah, lighting eight candles in the windows of their homes. To the Jewish people, dispersed across the world for two millennia before the founding of the State of, the flames of the Hanukkah menorah beckon to us like Tolkien’s signal fires, but across time rather than space.

Hanukkah(“Dedication”) remembers the cleansing of the Temple at Jerusalem after a Jewish army expelled the invaders of the Greek Seleucid dynasty in 165 B.C.E. But it is more than remembrance: the candles we light in Jewish homes during the eight days of the festival rekindle the Eternal Flame of the Temple itself, the symbol of the Shekhinah, God’s indwelling on earth. We are grateful for the military victory against the Seleucid invaders and mention it in our holiday prayers, but it was short-lived. The Hasmonean dynasty that ruled Israel for the next century degenerated and Israel became a de facto Roman protectorate in 65 B.C.E. Our revolt against Roman oppression ended with the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. and our long exile. The Temple was destroyed, and the rabbis of antiquity declared that the Sekhinah went into exile with the Jewish people. The eternal flame of the Temple was extinguished by the Romans but rekindled in every Jewish home. In the poverty, persecution and humiliation of exile, Jewish families became a Temple in exile, and the rededication of the Temple’s light of 165 B.C.E. became an act of rededication in every home.