RUTHFULLY YOURS

A recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that defending the country against terrorism should be the No. 1 priority for the federal government. It was ranked as a priority higher than the economy, jobs, education and Social Security. For the first time in the past five years, homeland security received more support than the economy as the top issue of concern in the Pew Survey.

There are a variety of factors that have contributed to the focus on homeland security by the American public. These include: the rise of extremist Islamist terrorism in the Middle East and the recent incidents in Europe and Africa; the public debate on a growing concern for protecting our borders; recognition of the increased sophistication in transportation-related threats; and the new realities of cybersecurity attacks and breaches in today’s increasingly connected society.
Because of its prominent role among federal agencies, it is easy to overlook that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was only created a little more than a decade ago. After the horrific events of 9/11, the DHS was molded from 22 different agencies with separate cultures and processes. Some of these high-profile agencies included the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Secret Service, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, U.S. Citizens and Immigration Service, U.S. Transportation Security Administration and U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. The Science and Technology Directorate and the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO) were created during the early formation and operations of the DHS.

Let me not mince words. There is no difference between those who carried out the Charlie Hebdo and kosher supermarket attacks in Paris and those who run the Palestinian Authority. Many Western governments, with the notable exceptions of Canada, Australia and the United States Congress, have developed a cognitive dissonance when it comes to the Palestinians and refuse to acknowledge the obvious but make no mistake, those who carried out the Paris massacre and those who sit in the Ramallah Mukataa are cut from the same fascist cloth. Don’t let their finely tailored Italian suits and silk ties fool you. They share the same genocidal goals but differ only in tactics.

What France faces today, Israel has had to confront for 67 years. The difference between the French and the Israelis however, is that the Israelis understand their enemy and have developed a proficiency in dealing with them. The French on the other hand are still learning and that is why their reactions to the terror attacks were so sluggish and haphazard and why Paris was in chaos for a number of days.

The two-state paradigm, one that envisions a dysfunctional, Jew-free Palestinian welfare state in Judea & Samaria sticking like a bone into Israel’s throat is untenable and poses an existential threat to the State of Israel. It also poses a threat to Jordan. Within 10 years or less, such a state would unravel and devolve into another Hamastan and that’s the best case scenario. Iran and ISIS would like nothing better than to gain a foothold in Judea & Samaria and these fascist and totalitarian entities thrive in an environment of chaos. The only thing preventing such a takeover now is the presence of the Israel Defense Forces in Judea & Samaria.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is not only a nuclear power aspirant, but a nation seeking regional Middle Eastern hegemony. The Ayatollahs and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards (IRG) are the sponsors of worldwide Islamic terrorism. Recently, the world was gripped by the savage attack of Sunni Muslim jihadists who murdered 17 French people, including four Jews in a kosher supermarket in Paris. Yet, the world has forgotten the Shiite-Muslim Iranian regime sponsored 1994 van bombing of the Argentine Jewish Charities Federation or AMIA in Buenos Aires, that left 85 people dead and 300 others wounded. It has been the worst Islamic terrorist attack to date of its kind in South America.

Alberto Nisman, 51, the Argentine prosecutor charged with investigating the Buenos Aires bombing by Iran, which the Argentine governments of President Carlos Menem (1989-1999) and Cristina Fernandez Kirchner (2007-present) deliberately obstructed, was found dead hours before he was to testify on the collusion between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Cristina Kirchner government. He was due to address an Argentine Congressional hearing on Monday (1/19/2015) to provide evidence of his assertions.

U.S. air, aid, and advisers in Iraq are currently furthering Iran’s interests, not America’s.

Today in Iraq, American advisers stay in safe shelters, while Iranian soldiers and generals fight alongside Shia militias and Iraqi soldiers on the front lines. Our bombing supports Iranian-directed movements on the ground. This bizarre situation bring into question American policy goals. Are the administration’s actions ad hoc and poorly thought out, or is there a hidden, more foreboding agenda?

In the State of the Union address, President Obama said that “in Iraq and Syria, American leadership — including our military power — is stopping ISIL’s advance.” Actually, America is following Iranian leadership inside Iraq. In 2007, when President Bush surged more than 20,000 American troops into Iraq, Iran responded with explosive devices and assassination teams to kill our soldiers. Eight years ago, it would have been risible to predict that American troops would deploy a second time to support Iran’s Republican Guard. Yet that is what we have done.

Senators can and should ask whether she’ll disavow Eric Holder’s most controversial policies.

When attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a two-day confirmation hearing this Wednesday and Thursday, there are many questions she must answer in detail — not just about her conduct as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, but also about her views of the law and specific, deeply troublesome actions (and inactions) that the Justice Department has taken under Attorney General Eric Holder.

Some of the actions and statements of Eric Holder during his years in office have made a mockery of principled law enforcement, yet there has been little to stop him. Congressional oversight, embarrassing unpopularity, and repeated 9–0 Supreme Court decisions against the DOJ’s extreme legal positions have done little to alter the leftward course of this most powerful of federal agencies. Holder has held nobody at the Justice Department accountable for scandal after scandal, from the unjustified dismissal of the New Black Panther Party voter-intimidation case to the reckless Operation Fast and Furious program and the criminal targeting of reporters for alleged leaks. Even finding Holder in criminal contempt of Congress for his refusal to provide documentation to which Congress is entitled has failed to constrain him.

The White House has now become a stickler for protocol, especially when it comes to relations between the two political branches.

The new persnicketiness arises from House speaker John Boehner’s invitation to Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu to speak before a joint session of Congress in March. The invite is being denounced as a major breach and new low in Washington because he didn’t, as had been the traditional practice with such invitations, coordinate with the White House.

As far as violations of the separation of powers in the Obama era, it’s hard to see how this even comes close to registering. Maybe Emily Post wouldn’t approve, and with a different administration it would be worth honoring every courtesy, but we are far beyond that now.

I am not a reflexive Palin basher, but I agree with this….Rick Santorum, Palin, Jeb Bush, Huckabee et.al.should make room for new faces….Governor Scott Walker comes to mind…..not a repeat of the primary follies of 2012…..rsk
Her recent performance in Iowa should disqualify her from any role in the GOP going forward.

In Des Moines this past weekend, Sarah Palin gave a speech, and at long last the vultures began to circle. “A tragedy,” declared Joe Scarborough, on Morning Joe; “bizarro,” ajudged the London Times’ Toby Harnden; “an interminable ramble,” said Iowa professor Sam Clovis. These, alas were among the kinder adjectives.

In the Washington Examiner, Byron York treated those who missed the address to a brutal dissection. First, he recorded, Palin subjected the crowd to an “extended stream-of-consciousness complaint about media coverage of her decision to run in a half-marathon race in Storm Lake, Iowa.” Next, she offered up some self-righteous “grumbling about coverage of a recent photo of her with a supporter” and a litany of “objections about the social media ruckus over a picture of her six-year-old son Trig.” And, finally, she embarked upon a “free-association ramble on Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, the energy industry, her daughter Bristol, Margaret Thatcher, middle-class economics . . . women in politics, and much more.” All in all, York proposed, this did her no favors at all. Rather, the “long, rambling, and at times barely coherent speech, left some wondering what role she should play in Republican politics as the 2016 race begins.”

This, I think, is a good question, and one to which I have a modest answer: How about . . . none?

Not since the 1930s and early 1940s have we seen so many malevolent empires on the rise.

Empires can rise and fall quickly. After World War I, the Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman, and Russian Empires abruptly collapsed amid military defeat, rising nationalism, and revolution.

Yet on the eve of World War II four new empires suddenly grew out the wreckage of old Europe and Asia. A weak Italy under Fascist Benito Mussolini in just a few years grabbed much of East and North Africa, as well as the Dalmatian coast. Hitler’s so-called “Third Empire” carved off Austria and strips of Eastern Europe — and planned to go to war for more. The Soviet Union absorbed the Baltic states and southern Finland. Japan declared first Manchuria, and then Southeast Asia, part of its new “Co-Prosperity Sphere.”

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Hamas-derived “civil rights” group, “repeated its defense of freedom of speech” in a baffling January 7 press release that “condemned” the Paris jihadist Charlie Hebdo massacre. A trip down a bad memory lane, though, is necessary in order to evaluate critically CAIR’s commitment to free speech rights with proverbial grains of salt equivalent to the Dead Sea’s renowned salinity.

CAIR, an unindicted terrorism coconspirator, and “defense of freedom of speech” simply do not match. CAIR, for example, has unsuccessfully tried to stop critical commentary on Islam in an American public library and school. CAIR has also harassed a Michigan individual who opposed a mosque construction with frivolous subpoenas, ultimately quashed. One 2012 article on the CAIR-Chicago affiliate website discussed how the First Amendment has “been manipulated to make America the catalyst for unjust hate.”

A retired Army lieutenant colonel, Anthony Shaffer, whom FOX News uses frequently to determine goings-on in the Pentagon, revealed last night that the Army is not the culprit in the cover-up of the Bowe Bergdahl investigation. According to the colonel’s internal Pentagon sources, the Army has already charged Bergdahl with desertion but has been stymied in pursuing the normal court-martial processes due to oppressive command influence from the White House. According to Shaffer’s sources, the immediate culprit is Ben Rhodes, current deputy national security adviser for strategic communication for Barack Obama.

White House fear is totally understandable. If you had traded five key terrorist leaders for one American G.I. and your hero turned out to be a deserter who willingly left his post and his unit and went over to the enemy in time of war, wouldn’t you be embarrassed? Worse, had you quite publicly invited said deserter’s parents to stroll congenially and intimately through the White House Rose Garden with you, and then had that event broadcast round the world, wouldn’t you be embarrassed?