RUTHFULLY YOURS

The good news is that America has stopped sliding in economic freedom. The bad news is that we’re stalled as Earth’s twelfth-freest economy.

The Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal have just released their 21st annual Index of Economic Freedom. Once again, it finds the U.S.A. wheezing significantly behind the five most unfettered markets: Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, and Switzerland. Among 178 nations rated on ten different economic metrics, from government spending to free trade, the bottom five are Eritrea, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Cuba, and — dead last — North Korea.

Since 2010, America has missed the list of “free economies.” Instead, this country is “mostly free,” behind No. 11 Denmark and ahead of No. 13, the United Kingdom.

Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East and North Africa. Eight million Israelis are surrounded by some 400 million Muslims in more than 20 states. Almost all of Israel’s neighbors are anti-Israeli dictatorships, monarchies, or theocracies — a number of them reduced to a state of terrorist chaos.

Given the rise of radical Islam, the huge petrodollar wealth of the Middle East, and lopsided demography, how has Israel so far survived?

The Jewish state has always depended on three unspoken assumptions for its tenuous existence.

First, a democratic, nuclear Israel can deter larger enemies. In the Cold War, Soviet-backed Arab enemies understood that Israel’s nuclear arsenal prevented them from destroying Tel Aviv.

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio is “comfortable” with himself. So the city learned during the biggest crisis to hit a New York mayoralty in recent memory. “I’m comfortable with the fact that I’ve always tried to tell the truth and stay true to my values,” de Blasio said in mid January, as police officers across New York City continued a work slowdown that had brought discretionary police activity to a virtual standstill. De Blasio’s breezy self-assurance was revealing but unfortunate, since it was his belief in his own mission as social-justice truth-teller that had pushed the police into revolt in the first place.

William Bratton, New York City police commissioner, has now mobilized the considerable management and disciplinary tools at his disposal to force officers to increase their enforcement activity. But the fault lines that led to the slowdown are still there. Law enforcement in New York may be on the rise for now, but in the long term public safety remains at risk from an activist mayor who sees his base as the anti-police Left.

Gabbard, the first Hindu member of Congress, is a captain in the Hawaii Army National Guard and Iraq combat veteran. She is also a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. She is a firm supporter of Obamacare and voted against the Keystone Pipeline…..rsk

A Democratic congresswoman says the administration needs to be accurate about its descriptions of terrorists in order to properly fight terrorism.

“It’s not just about words, it’s not about semantics, it’s really about having a real true understanding of who our enemy is and how important that is, that we have to understand what their motivation is and what their ideology is, this radical Islamic ideology that’s fueling them,” Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) told Fox.

“Just a couple of days ago, Secretary Kerry said in a speech that ISIS and al-Qaeda are engaging in, quote, ‘criminal conduct rooted in alienation, poverty, thrill seeking and other factors.’ Now if we really look at what he’s saying and if that’s really the cause, then the solution would be to give them a trophy, give them a hug, give them a good paying job, $10,000, and a skateboard so they can go and get their thrills and say, OK, great, they’re going to be happy and they won’t be fighting anymore,” she continued.

Obama administration Muslim adviser Mohamed Elibiary is no stranger to regular PJ Media readers.

In September, Elibiary was unceremoniously removed from his fellowship position with the Department of Homeland Security, which he tried to spin as a “resignation,” but letters sent to members of Congress by DHS officials indicated he would not be reappointed.

Undoubtedly, one of the chief reasons for DHS cutting ties with Elibiary was a long string of extremist statements he had been making on Twitter, including talking about the inevitability of the return of an ISIS-style caliphate — tweets that were subsequently used by ISIS supporters for recruiting purposes.

But Elibiary has apparently not learned his lesson, engaging in a hate-filled anti-Christian rant on Twitter yesterday, even going so far to attack Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal as a “bottom feeder”:

Nor, as you’ll see below, is this the first time he has indulged in his anti-Christian bigotry.

Before revisiting his Twitter meltdown, perhaps it’s useful to revisit some of Elibiary’s greatest hits:

The Pentagon has relabelled its battle plan for fighting China in the Western Pacific. The battle plan formerly known as AirSea Battle is from now on to be known as “Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons.” This is very good news because the use of the term Global Commons in the title goes to the heart of what is at stake for the United States and the rest of the free world.

China is intent upon starting a war with Japan and seizing a large patch of ocean in Southeast Asia. What most people don’t realise about the Chinese nine-dash-claim of territoriality in the South China Sea is that it is not so much about gaining area and resources but excluding others. Commercial operators might not be affected and don’t care about filling in forms and asking permission to cross the sea or sky. The Chinese claim, if enforced, would stop any other country’s warships and military aircraft from crossing the South China Sea. Vietnam, which is 1,200 km long, would be restricted to a strip along their coastline that gets as narrow as 92 km. For Malaysia, their operating strip would be as narrow as 44 km, as shown by these maps from page 5 of State Department Report No. 143:

Jeb Bush thinks he can ride Common Core to the White House. He is using it as a litmus test to prove he is not a scary conservative and will not upset the federal gravy train. This is a grave misjudgment. It will be as toxic for him, as Romneycare was for Romney.

Bush would usher in the complete capitulation of our education system to the progressive agenda. Common Core reproduces everything wrong with Obamacare, and then some. It is unconstitutional, corrupt, and incompetent. And it is a government takeover of our children.

Like Obamacare, Common Core is unconstitutional: our founding fathers reserved education for state and local control. By finessing the word “standards,” and ignoring the dictatorship of textbooks and tests over classroom teachers, Common Core pretends it is not a federal takeover of education. This is a transparent lie.

Can the International Criminal Court [ICC] even be considered an impartial legal body, any more than a Jim Crow court in America’s old South?

The supporters of this repackaged anti-Semitism always seem perfectly comfortable “forgetting” that Hamas offers its people no human rights. Thus is a liberal democracy, Israel, maligned by a theocratic tyranny.

It is clear that these illustrious members of the international community are secretly hoping that if they can rig the system so that the Arabs can finish off Israel, they, in the international community, will still be able to preen and congratulate themselves that the obliteration of the Jewish state had nothing to do with them.

Groups such as al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, Hizbullah or Hamas are considered terrorists because they do not abide by the principles of international or domestic law. That, as well as the acts they commit, is what identifies them as terrorists. The differentiating factor with Islamist terror organizations is that they do not recognize international law at all.

Islamic law frees Hamas and other such groups from any obligation to abide by international standards, which they demonize as “Western” or “Christian” and therefore “Satanic.”

In 1992, Nazila Fathi was working as a fixer for Western journalists when she was approached about keeping an eye on ‘suspicious’ reporters.

Security forces in July seized Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post’s Tehran correspondent, and his wife, Yeganeh Salehi, from their home in the Iranian capital. Ms. Salehi, a journalist for an Emirati newspaper, was released in October, but Mr. Rezaian, a U.S. citizen, still languishes in a Tehran prison. After six months of detaining him without charge, the regime announced earlier this month that Mr. Rezaian had been indicted, though the substance of the charge remains a mystery.

The timing—a year and change since Hasan Rouhani ’s election as president of Iran—was no coincidence. It signaled that, for all of the new president’s rhetoric about moderation, the regime wasn’t about to ease the press of its boot against the throat of Iranian civil society. Since Mr. Rouhani came to power, journalists have routinely been imprisoned. Thirty were behind bars in Iran last year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

President Obama took a foreign-policy bow during his State of the Union speech last week, boasting that “we’re upholding the principle that bigger nations can’t bully the small—by opposing Russian aggression, supporting Ukraine’s democracy, and reassuring our NATO allies.” Whereupon Russian-backed forces promptly expanded an offensive in Ukraine that has already claimed more than 5,000 lives.

On Saturday the Ukrainian port of Mariupol, strategically located on the Sea of Azov, came under indiscriminate rocket fire from positions controlled by the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, the Moscow-sponsored militia in eastern Ukraine. Some 30 people were killed in the attacks; another hundred or so were wounded. Aleksandr Zakharchenko, since November the Donetsk Republic’s “Prime Minister,” had earlier promised an offensive against Mariupol, though both his militia and Moscow were quick to deny responsibility for the massacre.