RUTHFULLY YOURS

“It has been said truthfully that it is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press,” Senator Zell Miller said at the Republican National Convention in 2004. “It is the soldier, not the poet who has given us the freedom of speech.”

“But don’t waste your breath telling that to the leaders of my party today,” the Democrat added.

Miller, a former Marine, was reviled by the same media trolls who had called Michael Moore’s Oscar rant a year earlier “courageous”. But there was nothing courageous in a lefty activist bashing Bush to an audience of fellow lefties.

President Obama is running a massive illegal operation that has issued 5.5 million work permits never authorized by Congress, according to a disturbing new report from the nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies.

The report comes as Congress prepares to vote today on legislation that would reverse some of Obama’s executive overreaches that reward illegal aliens with lawful status for breaking the nation’s immigration laws.

The report also comes as Republicans grapple with profoundly disturbing comments made by the president’s nominee to replace Attorney General Eric Holder. Loretta Lynch, currently U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said at her confirmation hearing last week that she believes illegal aliens possess the same legal right to work in the U.S. as American citizens possess. This is tantamount to a promise to refuse to enforce the immigration laws of the United States and an in-your-face demonstration that Lynch isn’t qualified to carry out parking ticket prosecutions in Flatbush, let alone head up the U.S. justice system.

There is no reason to believe Lynch would be perturbed by the existence of Obama’s shadowy visa-issuing operation. She doesn’t, after all, care about the rule of law, at least as it pertains to immigration and border security.

“There’s things that I see when I’m driving around Birmingham that shouldn’t be happening. I only drive into these areas, never actually walk into these areas, I just wouldn’t. Just in case I did do something that…because of their culture or their religion it was a threat or it was an insult or something.” — Resident of Birmingham.

“There are some communities born under other skies who will not involve the police at all… there are communities from other cultures who would prefer to police themselves.” — Sir Tom Winsor, chief inspector of the police forces in England and Wales.

“We are sleepwalking our way to segregation. We are becoming strangers to each other and leaving communities to be marooned outside the mainstream.” — Trevor Phillips, former chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality.

“One of the results of [multiculturalism] has been to further alienate the young from the nation in which they were growing up and also to turn already separate communities into ‘no-go’ areas where adherence to this ideology [of Islamic extremism] has become a mark of acceptability.” — Michael Nazir-Ali, former Bishop of Rochester.

By driving the administration to intervention in Libya, arms from the U.S. and our allies in the region ended up in the hands of al-Qaeda-backed militias, according to a report in the Washington Times.

The paper has detailed Clinton’s previously unknown actions in the lead up to the war in three part series. Today is the final installment.

The question that many in Congress might want to ask is if Clinton’s determination to intervene in Libya eventually led to the attack on our compound in Beghazi.

Libyan officials were deeply concerned in 2011, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was trying to remove Moammar Gadhafi from power, that weapons were being funneled to NATO-backed rebels with ties to al Qaeda, fearing that well-armed insurgents could create a safe haven for terrorists, according to secret intelligence reports obtained by The Washington Times.

Introduction

The observed absence of a global-warming trend (often described as “pause” or “hiatus”), beginning around Yr 2000 (or perhaps even earlier) contradicts the results of every IPCC climate model – all of them driven by a steady increase in anthropogenic carbon dioxide; see figure. This lack of model validation has obvious implications for model-based estimates of future climate. Until the cause of the pause is better understood and incorporated into existing models, all policies aiming to stabilize climate are useless and are nothing more than highly uncertain and hugely expensive exercises.

The label of “pause” (used by UN-IPCC alarmists) suggests that absence of a warming trend is only temporary — and that warming may soon resume. This seems to be the opinion of well-known climate alarmists; climate skeptics, by and large, have not published their views about the end of the pause.

Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is a handbook for pursuing and achieving political power over an institution, city or country or a manipulatable group of people. Takuan Seiyo’s own “Rules for Radicals” is all about maintaining that power, once it has been seized by groups who are no longer “radicals,” but represent the establishment.

Seiyo’s essays can be found on the always-informative Gates of Vienna site, here for Part I, and here for Part II. They are engrossing in the literal sense: Once read, they are etched into one’s mind, as when one signed or “engrossed” a petition to the Crown to repeal the Stamp Act was signed by American colonials in 1765.

Together, the essays are called “Oppression Instead of Admission.” I suspect that “Takuan Seiyo” is the pseudonym or pen name of a native Californian, now living in Tokyo, who doesn’t want to be identified and found. I doubt he ever will be found in a city of 27 million. He would be as impossible to find as a needle in a haystack the height of Mt. Fuji.

China’s “New Silk Road” might become history’s most ambitious investment in infrastructure. Some Chinese strategists predict an Israeli role in the project on par with, or possibly even more important than, that of Turkey. China calls the project “One Belt and One Road,” referring to a belt of railroads, highways, pipelines and broadband communications stretching through China to the West, and a “maritime Silk Road” combining sea routes with port infrastructure from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean.

Israel’s location makes it possible for the Jewish state to “play the role of bridgehead for ‘One Belt and One Road’ with the completion of the ‘Red-Med’ rail project,” said Dr. Liu Zongyi at a November seminar at Remnin University. Dr. Liu, based at the Shanghai Institute of International Studies, spoke of a $2 billion, 300 km rail line linking Ashkelon with the Red Sea. The “Red-Med” project is usually presented in more modest terms, as a way of absorbing excess traffic from the Suez Canal, or as an alternative route in the event of political disruption.

Biased Schabas Resigns, Scrap Tainted ‘Investigation’ and Report
If the allegations against Schabas’s bias against Israel were so strong and enduring that he was forced to resign, then the entire investigation and report is tainted.

It was announced late on Monday, Feb. 2, that the man named last year by the United Nations Human Rights Council to head an investigation and craft the official UN report on Israel’s conduct during last summer’s war has resigned due to repeated allegations of bias against Israel.

The investigation, however, is over and the report is due to be published next month; that means all of the substantive work is complete.

If the allegations against Schabas’s bias against Israel were so strong and enduring that he was forced to resign, then the entire investigation and report is tainted.

The investigation must begin anew, with an unbiased official overseeing the entire enterprise. That is the essence of the statement issued by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, following the resignation of William Schabas.

President Obama has a problem, and his name is Bowe Bergdahl. Bergdahl apparently deserted his army unit in 2009 and was held by the Haqqani terrorist network for five years. He was released in 2014 in exchange for five high-ranking Taliban commanders held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Much to Obama’s consternation the Army is considering whether Bergdahl will be charged with desertion, some lesser offense, or nothing at all. Desertion is a capital crime.

The last US soldier executed for desertion was Pvt. Eddie Slovik, put to death almost exactly seventy years ago on January 31, 1945. Before him, no soldier had been executed for desertion since the Civil War.

But it’s not the fact that Bergdahl could face execution that poses political trouble Obama: it’s the fact that Obama chose to release an entire Taliban command structure in exchange for him. In its effort to make that appear worthwhile, Obama and his political operatives are placing enormous pressure on the Army to not charge Bergdahl with desertion, and maybe let him off without any significant discipline.

To do that, Team Obama has chosen to create a bizarre narrative that attempts to prove: (1) the Taliban aren’t terrorists, so negotiating with them isn’t contrary to US policy against negotiating with terrorists that goes back at least to Teddy Roosevelt’s “Pedicaris alive or Raisuli dead”; and (2) we never leave any soldier behind; so that (3) it was worth any trade to get Bergdahl, even one that swapped some of the most dangerous inmates in Gitmo to get him.

Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner won election in November with a mandate to reinvent Illinois, and this week he teed up some of his plans.

Mr. Rauner took a warm-up swing at the unions with a speech in Decatur, which happens to be the home turf of AFL-CIO President Michael Corrigan. For starters, he wants to do away with project labor agreements (PLAs) “that are basically what the unions have worked out with the politicians” who “they influence with campaign cash and then impose those contracts on the businesses that contract with the state.” Mr. Rauner complained that PLAs, which usually require contractors to pay union wages and benefits on public construction projects, increase costs by about 18%.
Also on his agenda are “right to work zones” that allow local voters and governments to decide whether workers should be required to join a union and pay membership dues as a condition of employment. While the Republican doesn’t intend to make Illinois a right-to-work state—he wouldn’t have the votes in the heavily Democratic legislature—he fundamentally supports “employee empowerment,” which is his preferred term for right-to-work. So cities like Decatur could pass their own right-to-work ordinances without the state enacting legislation.