RUTHFULLY YOURS

A Kurdish official has written to Defense Secretary Hagel pleading for the U.S. to honor its promises of military aid.
In President Obama ’s Sept. 11 speech about combating Islamic State jihadists, he said that America “will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq.” But the president said that U.S. military advisers “are needed to support Iraqi and Kurdish forces with training, intelligence and equipment.”

If this is the plan, little in terms of weaponry or training has reached Kurdish Peshmerga forces in Iraq—and they are begging Washington to make good on its promises.

In the meantime, in the front-line town Khazar, between Islamic State-held Mosul and the Kurdish capital, Erbil, Peshmerga forces drive unarmored pickup trucks and carry AK-47s as they face off against Islamic State, aka ISIS, fighters armed with U.S.-made tanks, armored Humvees and heavy artillery. The imbalance is replicated across the entire border of almost 650 miles that Kurds share with ISIS in Iraq.

In three trips to the Kurdistan Region since ISIS invaded Iraq in early June, I have seen the situation improve as a result of U.S.-led airstrikes, but little has changed in terms of the supply of equipment and training for our Kurdish allies.

The coalition that supports the airstrikes should take immediate action to provide the Peshmerga with the offensive and defensive equipment they need to match the firepower of ISIS. Failing to do so increases the likelihood—despite President Obama’s vows not to involve U.S. forces—that America and other coalition countries, which include France, Australia and the U.K., will have to send in troops to defeat ISIS.

In a letter sent on Oct. 2 to U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel that until now has not been made public, the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Minister of Peshmerga Affairs Mustafa Sayid Qadir pleaded for help, saying that his forces still carry “outdated AK-47s, Soviet Dragunov rifles and other light arms.”

The letter, which I was given access to by the Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs, tabulated the surprisingly small amount of equipment received from international allies. In addition to AK-47s, the U.S. has provided fewer than 100 mortars and just a few hundred rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs. The Peshmerga haven’t received a single tank or armored vehicle from coalition countries. The problem is compounded by the fact that Iraqi security forces denied the Peshmerga access to the thousands of tanks and armored vehicles the U.S. left behind for Iraq when the military pulled out in 2011. Meanwhile, ISIS fighters have commandeered U.S.-provided tanks and Humvees abandoned by Iraqi forces fleeing from battle.

For the price of $6,995, the New York Times is offering 13-day tours of Iran guided by Times journalist Elaine Sciolino. Promotional material for the tour on the Times website promises “luxurious hotels” and describes Tehran as a city where “the young and fashionable adopt a new trendy joie de vivre.” Also on the itinerary: “a pleasant evening stroll around the colorful bazaars,” along with insights into the “accomplishments” of the late Ayatollah Khomeini.

The U.S. Treasury Department website advises that notwithstanding the American economic sanctions on Iran, “All transactions ordinarily incident to travel to or from Iran, including the importation of accompanied baggage for personal use, payment of maintenance and living expenses and acquisition of goods or services for personal use are permitted.”

The State Department, however, warns: “Some elements in Iran remain hostile to the United States. As a result, U.S. citizens may be subject to harassment or arrest while traveling or residing in Iran…The U.S. government does not have diplomatic or consular relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran and therefore cannot provide protection or routine consular services to U.S. citizens in Iran.”

Travelers dissatisfied with their experience on the trip may have a tough time if they try to sue. The “terms and conditions” for the trip include a “binding arbitration clause” that gives arbitrators, “not any federal, state, or local court or agency,” “exclusive authority to resolve any dispute” related to the trip. A 2010 New York Times editorial described such binding arbitration clauses as “pretty unfair” and advised readers to “beware” them.

It’s time for someone to write an update of Paul Hollander’s marvelously insightful and humorous [after a fashion] 1981 Political Pilgrims. For those kiddies for whom all this, and the environment in which it was written, is ancient history, may I remind you of Hollander’s hypothesis he fulfilled so well. It was to expose those Western intellectuals who flitted allegiance from one Marxist paradise to another.
That followed, of course, their final acceptance that their initial unassailable infatuation with the Soviet Union was a failed love affair however bitter sweet. Even their political naiveté could no longer take the strain between their hopes for a collectivized paradise on earth and the stark realities of one, if not the worst, of tyrannies the world had ever known. So they transferred their political affections to Communist China, then Castro’s Cuba, then to Sandinista Nicaragua, and so on, sometimes falling off the train even into North Korea, Albania, Romania, or Mozambique, along the way.
True, there was a basis in the excoriation of the ancien regimes: Tsarist Russia was an abomination, Nicaragua’s Somoza was the epitome of petty tyrants [even if FDR did say “he’s a SOB, but he’s our SOB” after weaning him from pro-Nazi sympathies], Batista’s Cuba was infinitely corrupt, etc., etc.
But the Political Pilgrims were willing to excuse almost anything in the hope that the new revolutionary regimes would deliver on the promised “from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs” in their hoped for utopias. Along the way, however, they picked up rationalizations for the absence of the rule of law and new, bitter human rights transgressions. And, so, on to the next candidate with the help, often, of a compliant media. [There was The New York Times’ Herbert Mathews famous infatuation with Fidel Castro, the Christian Science Monitor’s Moscow correspondent as a Soviet agent, etc.!]

Why ISIS Beheads — on The Glazov Gang
Dawn Perlmutter, an expert on Jihadist psychology, takes us into the dark world of Jihad’s key tactic and signature.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/why-isis-beheads-on-the-glazov-gang/

Ebola has now claimed over 4000 lives, mainly in Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

The United Nations Security Council response to eradicating this deadly virus and prevent it spreading world-wide stands in marked contrast to its ineffectual resolutions seeking to address the catastrophic humanitarian crisis that has emerged in Syria and Iraq over the past five months. A flurry of diplomatic activity to halt the Ebola outbreak resulted in Security Council Resolution 2177 being passed on 18 September calling on:

“Member States to provide urgent resources and assistance, including deployable medical capabilities such as field hospitals with qualified and sufficient expertise, staff and supplies, laboratory services, logistical, transport and construction support capabilities, airlift and other aviation support and aeromedical services and dedicated clinical services in Ebola Treatment Units and isolation units, to support the affected countries in intensifying preventive and response activities and strengthening national capacities in response to the Ebola outbreak and to allot adequate capacity to prevent future outbreaks;”

On 29 September the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER) was established in Ghana – whose Minister for Communications expressed the Government of Ghana’s profound support to the United Nations.

“Ebola is a global problem that knows no boundaries. Ghana is happy to host the UNMEER as we work together to contain and prevent further spread of the disease”

On 10 October UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon made the following remarks at a special meeting focusing on the Ebola virus held at the World Bank in Washington, D.C:

“The best antidote to fear is an effective and urgent response. We need a 20-fold resource mobilization,” Mr. Ban told those gathered, as he called for more mobile laboratories, vehicles, helicopters, protective equipment, trained medical personnel and medevac capacities to be provided in order to stay Ebola’s advance.”

Here’s what I wrote when the Cartagena hooker scandal broke back in 2012:

Unlike the government of the United States, I can’t claim any hands-on experience with Colombian hookers. But I was impressed by the rates charged by Miss Dania Suarez, and even more impressed by the U.S. Secret Service’s response to them.

Cartagena’s most famous “escort” costs $800. For purposes of comparison, you can book Eliot Spitzer’s “escort” for $300. Yet, on the cold grey fiscally conservative morning after the wild socially liberal night before, Dania’s Secret Service agent offered her a mere $28.

Twenty-eight bucks! What a remarkably precise sum. Thirty dollars less a federal handling fee? Why isn’t this guy Obama’s treasury secretary or budget director? Or, at the very least, the head honcho of the General Services Administration, whose previous director has sadly had to step down after the agency’s taxpayer-funded public-servants-gone-wild Bacchanal in Vegas.

All over this dying republic, you couldn’t find a single solitary $28 item that doesn’t wind up costing at least 800 bucks by the time it’s been sluiced through the federal budgeting process. Yet, in one plucky little corner of the Secret Service, supervisor David Chaney, dog-handler Greg Stokes, or one of the other nine agents managed to turn the principles of government procurement on their head. If the same fiscal prudence were applied to the 2011 Obama budget, the $3.598 trillion splurge would have cost just shy of $126 billion. The feds’ half a billion to Solyndra would have been a mere $18 million. The 823-grand GSA conference on government efficiency at the M Resort Spa & Casino would have come in at $28,805.

Chaney-Stokes 2012! Grope . . . and Change! Red lights, not red ink.

Alas, young Miss Suarez, just 24 and with a nine-year-old son and a ravenous pimp to feed, didn’t care for the cut of her Secret Service man’s jib. He made the fairly basic mistake — for an expensively trained government operative — of attempting to pay a prostitute in the hotel corridor, and Dania caused an altercation whose fallout has brought the Secret Service to its knees. Which isn’t how these encounters usually go.

A month from the midterm elections, an unusual dividing line has developed in the narrative of each party’s candidates and the national parties.

Republicans are happy to run against President Obama: a new Gallup poll [1]shows a near record number of voters who plan to use their vote to protest against the president. These numbers are in line with those from 2010, when Republicans picked up 63 House seats and 6 Senate seats in the midterms with voter anger focused on Obamacare. The numbers also match up with the results in 2006, when opposition to President Bush over the Iraq War and his handling of the response to Hurricane Katrina led to Democrats taking control of both houses of Congress, winning 6 Senate seats and 29 House seats. In general, voters who are angry are a bit more passionate about voting than those who want to express support, particularly in midterms when turnout is well below what is seen in presidential election years.

Below, Gallup describes the results from its latest poll of registered voters. Note that Nate Silver [2] of fivethirtyeight.com has argued that Republican support is usually a few points stronger among likely voters than is picked up in registered voter surveys:

Registered voters are more likely to view their choice of candidate in this year’s midterm elections as a message of opposition (32%) rather than support (20%) for President Barack Obama. That 12-percentage-point margin is similar to what Gallup measured for Obama in 2010 and George W. Bush in 2006, years in which their parties performed poorly in the midterm elections.

Surprisingly, given these bleak polling numbers of which the White House is clearly aware, President Obama seemed to double down this week, saying the upcoming Congressional elections were in fact a vote on his presidency:

Now, I am not on the ballot this fall. … But make no mistake: these policies are on the ballot — every single one of them.

It was a tough day for FLOTUS yesterday in Iowa. When claiming to be a “good friend” of someone, a necessary element of credibility is knowing what his name is.

Fox News summarizes the events:

While campaigning in Des Moines, Iowa Friday for Democratic Senate candidate Bruce Braley, she referred to him multiple times as “Bailey” before she was corrected by someone shouting from the audience.

(a longer video featuring her repeated mispronunciation is found here)

More embearrassing: “The flub came despite a huge array of signs in the hall where she was speaking, all spelling Braley’s name correctly.”

Mrs. Obama’s excuse offered to the audience was that she has been traveling too much. This means, in other words, that her claim to be a good friend is so much eyewash, just empty words intended to fool Iowans.

She also got something else wrong. Very wrong:

The first lady also referred to Braley as a Marine Corps veteran, which he is not. Braley’s staff said she meant to refer to his late father, Byard Braley, a Marine who fought at Iwo Jima.

Braley’s opponent in the Senate race, Republican Joni Ernst, is a member of the Army reserve and National Guard.

All in all, it is hard to see how her visit to Iowa is going to help Braley.

How do you spell desperation? Wendy Davis of Texas! By Silvio Canto, Jr.

By now, most of us are immune to negative campaigning. We see it, it makes us sick, but life goes on.

However, the latest ad from the Wendy Davis campaign in Texas is about as bad as it gets. It makes the 1964 “Daisy” ad look like a G-rated film. It even makes those “James Byrd ads” against Bush in 2000 look reasonable.

It is nasty, as Aaron Blake reported in The Washington Post:

It goes on to attack wheelchair-bound state Attorney General Greg Abbott (R) for hypocrisy because, after suing and winning a large reward for the accident that caused his partial paralysis, he has opposed similar litigation as the state’s top cop.

“A tree fell on Greg Abbott,” the narrator says. “He sued and got millions. Since then, he’s spent his career working against other victims.”

This ad is the sort of highly risky gambit you only see from a long-shot campaign. And, as often as not, these sorts of “Hail Marys” fail miserably.

If it does backfire and Davis wants to run for office in the future, you can rest assured this one will stick with her.

If it does backfire?

This is a horrible ad, and it tells you a lot about the state of the Davis campaign. She has failed to excite her base because there is nothing to her story, whatever her story is this week. Her position on abortion is not clicking with Hispanic women. Worst of all, she has not presented a forward-looking agenda beyond playing every card in the Democrat playbook.

Hopefully, it reminds Democrats that they need to nominate a candidate who can win in Texas rather than in San Francisco.

If America is alone, is it therefore in the wrong?

The actress and Democratic activist Eva Longoria, who apparently has never heard of France, was ruthlessly mocked this week for her claim that the United States “is the only country that promotes monolingualism.” Both of the assumptions behind that statement are false: The United States does not promote monolingualism, and some other countries, and would-be countries such as Quebec, do. Ms. Longoria is a native of Corpus Christi, Texas, where state standards at the time of her high-school education generally required two years of the same foreign language, and where neither the University of Texas nor Texas A&M, which Ms. Longoria attended, will admit students without two years of the same foreign language. Ms. Longoria currently is a resident of California, a state in which official business is conducted in more than 30 languages. As for other countries, suffice it to say that neither China nor Mexico is offering driver’s-license exams in Farsi. Spain has one language with national official status — guess which.

Ms. Longoria is not what you would call a rigorous thinker. Arguing in favor of immigration reform, she demands to know whether Americans are ready to pay — horrors! — $17 for valet parking or “$8 for a head of broccoli,” but in the very next sentence boasts of paying three times the going rate for avocados, choosing much more expensive organic avocados in order to ensure that “a farm-worker wasn’t sprayed with pesticides.” So, paying more to avoid Round-up residue is an act of civic virtue, but paying more to ensure that farmworkers are not being paid starvation wages in a market in which wages are depressed by the flood of illegal workers from Latin America is xenophobia. That’s one way to read the guacamole.

So, another dopey celebrity heard from — who cares?