RUTHFULLY YOURS

Like Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, the EPA’s regulatory assault on energy production, Obama’s anti-suburban moves, American policy in the Middle East and other fundamental transformations, Common Core is so big and sprawling a change that it’s often tough to see it whole. That problem has just been solved by Drilling through the Core, a book that’s bound to become the go to handbook of the Common Core’s opponents.

Drilling through the Core is a collection of essays by the most informed and prominent critics of the Common Core, including Sandra Stotsky, Ze’ev Wurman, William Evers, and R. James Milgram. It includes a wonderful treatment of the Founders’ views on the study of history by James Madison biographer Ralph Ketcham.

But what sets the book apart is the 80 page introduction by Peter Wood. Calmly and with crystal clarity, Wood explains and connects nearly every aspect of the battle. It’s all here, from the most basic explanation of what Common Core is, to the history, the major arguments for and against, and so much more. The controversies over both the English and math standards are explained; the major players in the public battle are identified; the battle over Gates Foundation’s role is anatomized; the roles of the tests and the testing consortia are reviewed; concerns over data-mining and privacy are laid out; the dumbing-down effect on the college curriculum is explained; as is the role of the Obama administration and the teachers unions.

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/09/29/islamic-lobbyist-saba-ahmed-vs-ex-islamic-imam-mark-christian-on-ben-carson-and-islam-on-the-glazov-gang/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by Saba Ahmed, an Islamic Lobbyist with the Republican Muslim Coalition, and Mark Christian, a former Islamic Imam who is now the president of the Global Faith Institute.

The two guests went toe-to-toe about women’s rights under Sharia and Ben Carson’s comments about Islam.

Don’t miss it!

Top Hillary Clinton aide Cheryl Mills sent classified information about a foreign government to a Clinton Foundation employee, according to an e-mail released by the State Department through a public records lawsuit.

In the July 2012 message, obtained by conservative group Citizens United and reported by the Washington Free Beacon, Mills sent classified information about the governments of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Amitabh Desai, Bill Clinton’s foreign-policy director at the Clinton Foundation.

The information was originally sent to Mills by Johnnie Carson, the State Department’s assistant secretary for African affairs. Carson asked Mills if Bill Clinton could push Rwandan president Paul Kagame to meet with his Congolese counterpart Joseph Kabila during a visit to the DRC later that month. He then relayed the classified material in question, which is said to be sensitive diplomatic information. Mills forwarded the entire e-mail to Desai, along with “talking points for Presient [sic] Clinton.”

Since there has been much evasion and obfuscation about Hillary Rodham Clinton’s email use, it seems appropriate to step back and simply review what we know in light of the law. It’s also instructive to compare Clinton’s situation to arguably the most famous case of our time related to the improper handling of classified materials, namely, the case of Gen. David Petraeus.

Instead of turning his journals — so-called “black books” — over to the Defense Department or CIA when he left either of those organizations, Petraeus kept them at his home — an unsecure location — and provided them to his paramour/biographer, Paula Broadwell, at another private residence. (None of the classified information in the black books was used in his biography.)

On April 23, Petraeus pled guilty to a single misdemeanor charge of unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or materials under 18 USC §1924. Many in the intelligence community were outraged at the perceived “slap on the wrist” he received, at a time when the Justice Department was seeking very strong penalties against lesser officials for leaks to the media.

If President Obama could play golf as well as his administration practices hypocrisy, he would easily win every major tournament. Take the way Obama’s pet regulatory agency, the EPA treats its own environmental accidents with those that occur in the private sector. Examine the EPA’s latest debacle – its disastrous spill into a Colorado river. An EPA contractor breached a wall at a long-shuttered mine and roughly three million gallons of fluid laden with arsenic, lead, mercury, and other heavy metals flowed freely into the Animas River.

Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, New Mexico Governor Susanna Martinez, and local leaders have rightly called for accountability and transparency.

The EPA’s response to its own environmental disaster has been anything but honest, transparent or thorough. The EPA released documents – only after weeks of pressure and in an effort to bury the news at the end of the week – revealing how officials knew of the potential for a spill more than a year before the debacle near Durango.

“Conditions may exist that could result in a blow-out of the blockages and cause a release of large volumes of contaminated mine waters and sediment from inside the mine,” reads a June 2014 EPA report. A separate May 2015 report by an EPA contractor again warned of the risk of a spill and recommended building a pond to collect contaminated water in case of failure.

About Those 50 Centcom Whistleblowers — Where Are All the Others?

More than 50 U.S. intelligence analysts working with the U.S. Central Command have filed complaints with the Pentagon inspector general, claiming that their analyses were manipulated by senior officials to downplay the threat from ISIS and the al-Nusra Front (the al-Qaeda branch in Syria), according to a recent Daily Beast story. The journalists reported that authorities have altered intelligence to bolster the Obama administration’s claim that the U.S. is making progress in defeating these Islamist terrorist groups.

Although these are serious complaints that merit an investigation, this story may well be the tip of the iceberg; I believe there is a broad pattern of distorting intelligence analyses to support Obama-administration policy. The real question is why we are not hearing from more whistleblowers.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for instance, was accused of politicizing intelligence analysis in February 2011 when he said, during a congressional hearing: “The term ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ is an umbrella term for a variety of movements — in the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried al-Qaeda as a perversion of Islam.”

President Obama’s U.N. speech today is filled with nice lines that unfortunately bear no relationship to his seven years of foreign policy — and in some cases, no relationship to reality.

The speech had several strong paragraphs about freedom, human rights, and democracy. For example, Obama said: “I believe a government that suppresses peaceful dissent is not showing strength. It is showing weakness, and it is showing fear. History shows that regimes who fear their own people will eventually crumble.” But his administration has in fact steadily reduced American programs supporting human rights and democracy, and reached out to tyrannies such as Iran and Cuba — delaying the day when they will “eventually crumble.”

He spoke of the nuclear non-proliferation regime as one of the “principle achievements” of the United Nations, but of course that regime has been endangered by his awful Iran deal more than by any other development in decades. (And in what sense were nuclear non-proliferation agreements negotiated by the United States an achievement of the U.N., anyway?)

Obama spoke harshly of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, “who drops barrel bombs on innocent children” and uses chemical weapons, and he called for “a managed transition away from Assad.” But it is Barack Obama who has led the way for three years in doing absolutely nothing about Assad’s terror. When in 2012 even Hillary Clinton advised that the United States had to do more, Obama rejected that advice and stood firmly for inaction. On Libya, he said: “Even as we helped the Libyan people bring an end to the reign of a tyrant, our coalition could have and should have done more to fill a vacuum left behind.” But why did the coalition not do more? Because Barack Obama rushed for the exits, not because “our coalition” got it wrong.

President Obama applies the same principles abroad that he does at home.
At home President Obama is well known for his preference for perceived parity over liberty. Most of his domestic agenda — Obamacare, executive-order amnesties, open borders, near-zero interest rates, quantitative easing, the piling up of $9 trillion in new debt, tax hikes, more regulations — is apparently aimed at shifting power and capital away from the upper middle class to the lower classes.

From Obama’s first appearance on the national scene, his rhetoric has been directed against those whom he perceives as the inordinately privileged — much more the supposedly uncouth upper middle class than the tasteful Martha’s Vineyard Wall Streeters or the jeans-and-T-shirt Malibu super-rich.

Americans who did not favor his redistributionist vision were rhetorically reduced to clingers, nativists, the privileged unwilling to spread their wealth, leaches on government who didn’t build their own businesses and who didn’t realize they had already made enough money. Obama once suggested that he was for higher capital-gains taxes even if such tax hikes would discourage profitable activity and thus lead to lower revenues for the Treasury, simply for the sake of “fairness” — reminding us of Tocqueville’s various warnings that many people would prefer parity even if meant less liberty and wealth for themselves.

Obama sees the rest of the world as he does the United States — and thus in need of a redistribution in power that will bring greater fairness to the planet. Accordingly, under current U.S. foreign policy, the desire for supposed equality trumps most considerations of human rights, values, consensual government, and our own national interest.

She’s never been able to turn down a buck.
How low will she go? We already know that the Clinton Foundation has rather…uh…lax standards when it comes to accepting massive donations. But now Hillary Clinton has attended a campaign fundraiser at the home of a convicted drug dealer. Anita Kumar of McClatchy writes:

Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president, attended a fundraiser in New York hosted by John Zaccaro, convicted on felony drug charges after he sold cocaine to an undercover cop.

The 1988 conviction of the son of unsuccessful Democratic vice presidential candidate Gerraldine Ferraro was reported in numerous publications at the time. But the arrest was unearthed Friday by the Republican National Committee.

“Hillary Clinton can’t seem to kick her decades-long habit of taking money from sketchy campaign contributors,” RNC spokesman Michael Short said. “During her last presidential campaign it was straw donors, now it’s convicted cocaine dealers.”

New polls are out which should help clarify the race based on my presidential “brackets” analysis.

First off, the NBC/WSJ poll for September shows big changes from its July one. While Donald Trump still leads, his support has leveled off at about a fifth of the vote while Carly Fiorina battling him in the businessman bracket has seen her support jump from negligible to 11%.

A handful of candidates saw their support double: Ben Carson now statistically ties Trump. Marco Rubio now ties Fiorina and beats Jeb. John Kasich also saw his support double and seems to have benefited from Scott Walker’s withdrawal from the race.

Other candidates saw their support shrink to half from the previous poll: Jeb Bush saw his support halve from June to July and then halve again from July to September. Ted Cruz saw his support drop to his June levels even with Rick Perry out of the race. Rand Paul’s numbers have collapsed steadily and consistently since April, he and now ties Chris Christie. Mike Huckabee has also dropped steadily since the summer.