RUTHFULLY YOURS

This was an interesting Center for Security Policy briefing on American policy and Iraq, Libya, and Syria.

“Fourteen years after 9/11 we are worse strategically than where we were on 9/11,” stated former Congressman Pete Hoekstra at a November 13 Center for Security Policy (CSP) Washington, DC, briefing. A pleasant view from offices overlooking Washington, DC’s National Mall on a sunny day was perhaps the only bright spot during panelist presentations on a volatile Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region before some 20 CSP affiliates.

Hoekstra began this MENA tour d’horizon with Libya, where Americans “as a country snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory” by overthrowing Muammar Ghaddafi’s dictatorship in 2011. By 2003, American confrontation for over 30 years with had convinced a once dangerous adversary to cooperate with the United States and avoid the fate experienced by Ghaddafi’s peer in Iraq, Saddam Hussein. “When we decided to take him out he was doing everything we had asked him to do and had been doing it for eight or nine years,” stated Hoekstra, who met with Ghaddafi three times between 2003 and 2009.

Hoekstra cited several improvements in Ghaddafi’s behavior, such as reparations payments to victims of his regime’s terrorism like those of the 1989 Pan Am 103 bombing. “His nuke program was crated up, shipped to the United States,” and is “now sitting in a warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant fromIndiana Jones,” Hoekstra commented comically. Ghaddafi also engaged in critical intelligence cooperation with the United States on the basis of having “been fighting radical jihadists for decades.”

HUNGER GAMES – Mockingjay – Part II

Katniss Everdeen is back, her bow and arrows ever at the ready. Okay, so the books are beloved icons of young adult readers. And the first two/three were [just] tolerable as movie experiences, helped along by the luminescent Jennifer Lawrence, the circus-y emcee Elizabeth Banks, plasticized Stanley Tucci, the guru in nasty-mode Woody Harrelson and the unctuous, evil Donald Sutherland as President Snow. Josh Hutcherson is a mystery: why was he cast, of all the testosterone running wild in LA? He seems always slightly dyspeptic in all the lensers of the franchise.

Panem is still in rebellion mode, one district against the other, with Katniss the reluctant rebel leader. Her task: bring together the factions to fight not each other, but Pres. Snow, hostile-benign dictator.

In this go, the last of the 4-part franchise, the beautiful behind-the-scenes Coin is played by Julianne Moore, and one is momentarily upset by the sight of the now-deceased Philip Seymour Hoffman in his continuing role.

War between the districts is still ongoing, with .Julianne Moore and Philip Seymour plotting to use Everdeen to their ends, feigning support of the rebels, should they succeed.

http://www.wateraid.org/us/get-involved/world-toilet-day?utm_source=GAW&utm_medium=cpc&utm_content=WorldToiletDay&utm_campaign=GAW&gclid=Cj0KEQiAg7ayBRD8qqSGt-fj6uYBEiQAucjOwbnirc5qrWYlD0LFP2QMqrunRwZcaABtmJ_NM3sqDbcaAixj8P8HAQ
How fitting…coming from the cesspool of international politics….rsk

There’s a problem no one’s talking about

There’s a problem that affects 2.3 billion people, or 1 in 3 people worldwide. It’s one of the world’s greatest obstacles to public health and environmental sustainability, and it costs the world’s poorest countries 260 billion dollars every year. It’s the lack of a basic human right.

It’s the lack of access to water and toilets.

At WaterAid we love talking about toilets. So we were thrilled when, last year, the UN officially created a day to recognize the importance of sanitation: World Toilet Day. Get ready to help us spread the message that toilets save lives.

Earlier this month, premier Fox newsman Bill O’Reilly became unhinged on live television. A red-faced O’Reilly loudly and repeatedly called his invited guest, Washington Post columnist and fellow conservative Fox News journalist George Will, a “hack” and accused him of lying.

It was a surreal moment, with stunned viewers no doubt muttering to themselves, “Is the jig finally up?”

Will had written a negative review of the fifth of O’Reilly’s co-authored “Killing” books, Killing Reagan. So O’Reilly dared Will to appear on his “No Spin Zone” hot seat.

Will did — and quietly punched some holes in O’Reilly’s strange thesis that President Ronald Reagan had been metaphorically “killed” after a March 30, 1981, assassination attempt. According to Killing Reagan, even years later the president may not have recovered enough to meet the demands of the office.

As I argued in Faithless Execution, the principal constitutional duty of the chief executive is to execute the laws faithfully. President Obama, by contrast, sees his principal task as imposing his post-American “progressive” preferences, regardless of what the laws mandate.

In his latest harangue against Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and other Americans opposed to his insistence on continuing to import thousands of Muslim refugees from Syria and other parts of the jihad-ravaged Middle East, Obama declaimed:

When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted … that’s shameful…. That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.

Really? Under federal law, the executive branch is expressly required to take religion into account in determining who is granted asylum. Under the provision governing asylum (section 1158 of Title 8, U.S. Code), an alien applying for admission must establish that … religion [among other things] … was or will be at least one central reason for persecuting the applicant.

Moreover, to qualify for asylum in the United States, the applicant must be a “refugee” as defined by federal law. That definition (set forth in Section 1101(a)(42)(A) of Title , U.S. Code) also requires the executive branch to take account of the alien’s religion:

When the hacker group Anonymous announced it was launching a campaign against the Islamic State (“These are not the 72 virgins they were expecting,” as one now immortal online quipster put it), something happened that was, in its way, remarkable: Most everybody took them seriously.

Anonymous has taken credit for eliminating some 3,800 pro-ISIS social-media accounts, and it has suggested that, as in its campaign against the rather less significant Ku Klux Klan, it will gather a great deal of real-world information on Islamic State sympathizers and confederates and make it public. In the case of the Klan, that would mean mainly exposure to social opprobrium; in the case of Islamic State groupies and co-conspirators, that could mean a great deal more.

Anonymous is a famously fractious coalition of individuals and factions with internal rivalries and disagreements — a collective front rather than a united front, as Jamie Condliffe put it in Gizmodo — but it is generally regarded as being reasonably good at what it does. Terrorist groups are critically dependent upon electronic communication for everything from recruitment and motivation to actual operations, and there is some reason to suspect that groups such as Anonymous will prove more adept at disrupting that communication than our conventional intelligence and law-enforcement forces have. The Islamic State isn’t really a state, yet; like al-Qaeda, it is a non-state actor, and it is likely that other non-state actors will be enormously important in countering it.

Secretary of State John Kerry believes that the terrorist attacks in Paris last week are a more demonstrable assault on Western society than the massacre of Charlie Hebdo writers that took place in January.

Kerry made the distinction while addressing U.S. embassy staff in Paris Tuesday. “There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that,” he said. “There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of — not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, ‘Okay, they’re really angry because of this and that.’ This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people.”

Kerry’s comments reflect the discomfort with Charlie Hebdo​’s satirizing of Islam that led left-leaning writers to criticize the magazine after two men affiliated with al-Qaeda murdered most of its editorial team. But they are at odds with his remarks in the immediate aftermath of that attack.

Ladies and gentleman, your Secretary of State, Mr. John Kerry:

In the last days, obviously, that has been particularly put to the test. There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of – not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they’re really angry because of this and that. This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people. It was to attack everything that we do stand for. That’s not an exaggeration. It was to assault all sense of nationhood and nation-state and rule of law and decency, dignity, and just put fear into the community and say, “Here we are.” And for what? What’s the platform? What’s the grievance? That we’re not who they are? They kill people because of who they are and they kill people because of what they believe. And it’s indiscriminate.

The late Soviet dictator Josef Stalin made a name for himself by murdering millions, as Nikita Khrushchev and other Soviet bosses acknowledged. In The Untold History of the United States, co-author and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone lists only two atrocities for Stalin. So it should come as no surprise that an American Stalinist screenwriter should be the subject of a movie such as Trumbo, currently making the rounds.

Dalton Trumbo made a name for himself, and a lot of money, by churning out screenplays based on producers’ ideas. For decades he has been cast as a noble artist, a victim of McCarthyism, and a champion of free speech and constitutional rights. None of that is true but there’s more to the man than anyone will find in Hollywood legend. In a famous speech, Trumbo claimed that Hollywood’s political wars yielded “only victims.” In Trumbo’s heyday victims did indeed abound, but they don’t show up in the movies.

In August 1939 Stalin and Hitler signed a pact that divided up Europe and effectively started World War II. Many German Jewish Communists had fled to the Soviet Union but during the Pact Stalin handed those Jews over to the Gestapo. The Stalin-Hitler Pact prompted many to abandon the Communist Party, never to return, but Dalton Trumbo was not one of those. Trumbo joined the Communist Party during the Pact and worked like Stakhanov for the cause.

Last year at a NATO summit, Obama explicitly disavowed the idea of containing ISIS. “You can’t contain an organization that is running roughshod through that much territory, causing that much havoc, displacing that many people, killing that many innocents, enslaving that many women,” he said.

Instead he argued, “The goal has to be to dismantle them.”

Just before the Paris massacre, Obama shifted back to containment. “From the start, our goal has been first to contain them, and we have contained them,” he said.

Pay no attention to what he said last year. There’s a new message now. Last year Obama was vowing to destroy ISIS. Now he had settled for containing them. And he couldn’t even manage that.

ISIS has expanded into Libya and Yemen. It struck deep into the heart of Europe as one of its refugee suicide bombers appeared to have targeted the President of France and the Foreign Minister of Germany. That’s the opposite of a terrorist organization that had been successfully contained.