RUTHFULLY YOURS

A very sharp analysis of the Syrian situation from the New York Observer’s John Schindler, who lays out a case that Russian influence in the Middle East is on the rise while America’s is being frittered away by the incompetents at the White House.

How incompetent?

The forces Mr. Putin has just deployed to Syria are impressive, veteran special operators backed by a wing of fighters and ground attack jets that are expected to commence air strikes on Assad’s foes soon. They are backed by air defense units, which is puzzling since the Islamic State has no air force, indicating that the Kremlin’s true intent in Syria has little to do with the stated aim of fighting terrorism and is really about propping up Russia’s longtime client in Damascus.

The White House is left planning “deconfliction” with Moscow—which is diplomatic language for entreating Russians, who now dominate Syrian airspace, not to shoot down American drones, which provide the lion’s share of our intelligence on the Islamic State. The recent meeting on Syrian developments between Mr. Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who clearly finds dealing with the Russian strongman preferable to parleying with President Obama, indicates where power is flowing in today’s Middle East.

The progressive creed as it relates to foreign policy, and as represented most notably by our Progressive-in-Chief, President Obama, holds that the impact of United States behavior in the world has largely been negative. It casts American foreign policy as a variation on European colonialism: exploitative, indifferent to the peoples subjected to American attention and intervention, and inexorably engendering anti-American sentiment among those peoples.

The translation of this comprehension of the world into a progressivism-informed foreign policy has had the effect of making the world safer for mass murder.

President Obama has offered apologies for past American policy to Europeans, to Arabs and the Muslim world more broadly, to the peoples of Central and South America. Various media outlets have noted that, according to a 2011 Wikileaks publication, only a negative response by the Japanese government prevented Mr. Obama from going to Hiroshima in September, 2009, and offering apologies for America’s atomic bomb attack on the city.

But whatever the President’s erstwhile intentions vis-a-vis Hiroshima, the broader focus of his apologetics has been on those nations and peoples that are hostile to America. His key foreign policy syllogism, and that of America’s progressive camp, is that anti-American sentiment is essentially a product of American abuses and that American self-reform and accommodation, a kinder, gentler United States, will bring an end to current hostility and engender a new comity between this nation and its long-time victims.

These are people behaving in a way that does not deserve being rewarded with anything, let alone a state. They far more resemble all tyrannical thugs throughout history who spend their lives telling other people how to live, and using violence, or threats of violence, to coerce anyone who does not agree. Sadly, we already have too much of that kind of muscling in our Arab and Muslim world, as Egypt’s forward-looking President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, as well as many others, regularly point out.

We have now reached the same stage as Germany’s Nazis — the same thing, ironically, we falsely accuse the Jews of being — where the appearance of a Jew on a Palestinian television show is considered as an act of “treason” and a “crime.” In reality, it is we who are the New Nazis.

A Palestinian TV talk show host is facing strong condemnations and threats for hosting an Israeli Jewish singer who is extremely popular among Palestinian youths.

The condemnations expose the ugly face of the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS), whose followers are vehemently opposed to any form of “normalization” between Palestinians and Israelis.

The BDS activists are demanding that those who brought the singer, Zvi Yehezkel, to the TV show in Ramallah be punished. The activists do not even seem to care that the singer supports peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Pat Sajak was tweeting Hillary Clinton jokes again. Days before I was scheduled to interview him after a taping of “Wheel of Fortune,” the show he has hosted for 34 years, Mr. Sajak pecked out a message: “Just received an email from the Clinton campaign. Must be important; it’s marked ‘Top Secret.’ ”

The previous week Mr. Sajak had sent this to his 80,000 Twitter followers: “Exciting breakthrough near: Climate scientists close to perfecting giant thermostat to regulate earth’s temperature!” Two days before that, he’d taken to the social-media website to say: “It’s not that the government does everything poorly; it’s just that when it does something poorly, it keeps doing it.”

Fans of “Wheel of Fortune” are familiar with Mr. Sajak’s wit—his repartee with contestants and banter with alphabetic wonderwoman Vanna White. But on Twitter the one-liners come spiked with something else: conservatism. “My overall philosophy about politics and show business,” Mr. Sajak tells me in his dressing room at Sony Pictures Studios, “is even a game-show host has as much right as anyone to babble about anything he wants to.”

In other words, Hillary Clinton jokes are fair game, so long as he makes them off the air. “My only objection is the bait and switch,” Mr. Sajak says. “It just kills me when someone’s on a talk show to promote a movie, and I’ve got to sit through saving the whales first. I like whales as much as the next guy—especially filleted. They’re really tasty.”

The GOP sweep in the Senate and Congress was hamstrung by the policies of the “moderates” who did not use the mandate the election gave them…and Obama rolled right over them…..This is the cause of the anger at Washington that drives the Trumpettes. It was high time for the old guard to step down…..rsk

John Boehner’s resignation as House Speaker, and from his seat in Congress, is an act of personal sacrifice and an education in the limits of political power when government is divided. The question now is whether Republicans will reboot with new leadership, or indulge in more disunity and dysfunction.

Mr. Boehner has spent nearly five years trapped between an implacable President Obama and an uncompromising faction within his own party. Conservatives blamed him for not delivering victories no Speaker could. The Ohio Republican said at a press conference Friday—he looked like he’d just been released from prison—that he’d concluded that “prolonged leadership turmoil” would damage the House of Representatives and the Republican Party.

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/09/25/jamie-glazov-moment-ben-carson-heroic-truth-teller-about-islam/

In this new Jamie Glazov Moment, Jamie discusses Ben Carson: Heroic Truth-Teller About Islam, commending a courageous American for having the guts to lift the veil off of Sharia.

Don’t miss this special Jamie Glazov Moment:

www.OpenTheBooks.com
Open The Books data/analysis drives
EPA ‘Golden Hammer Award’ at Washington Times
Golden Hammer Award: EPA’s Fondness for High-End Furniture
Costs Taxpayers $92.4 Million
By Kellen Howell | Washington Times | September 25, 2015
Read Golden Hammer Award article here
“The EPA can’t relate to the financial hardships regular Americans face.
It’s Herman Miller furniture for the bureaucrats,
but IKEA for the taxpayers.”
Quoted in Washington Times | September 25, 2015
Read today’s Washington Times, Golden Hammer Award – EPA, here
Next week, we are publishing our next oversight report: Federal Transfer Report – U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Stay tuned for further details.
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The federal agency that has the job of protecting the environment doesn’t seem to have too much concern for trees, at least the ones cut down to make furniture.

The Environmental Protection Agency over the past decade has spent a whopping $92.4 million to purchase, rent, install and store office furniture ranging from fancy hickory chairs and a hexagonal wooden table, worth thousands of dollars each, to a simple drawer to store pencils that cost $813.57.

The furniture shopping sprees equaled about $6,000 for every one of the agency’s 15,492 employees, according to federal spending data made public by the government watchdog OpenTheBooks.com.

And the EPA doesn’t buy just any old office furniture. Most of the agency’s contracts are with Michigan-based retailer Herman Miller Inc. According to the contracts, the EPA spent $48.4 million on furnishings from the retailer known for its high-end, modern furniture designs.

Just one of Herman Miller’s “Aeron” office chairs retails for nearly $730 on the store’s website. The EPA has spent tens of thousands of dollars to purchase and install those types of chairs in its offices.

While hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern and Afghani refugees pour into the European Union’s member nations, the EU seems to be treating the crisis as an academic exercise. It can be better understood as a war game that the EU is losing.

It’s neither a faculty lounge problem nor a war game, of course. An estimated four million refugees from Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen — as well as Afghanistan — are fleeing the conflicts in their nations for the possibility of a more peaceful home in Europe. As is often said, it is the largest refugee crisis Europe has endured since World War II.

However, if you analyze the crisis in war game terms, it becomes clearer why and how Europe is losing and will be defeated.

Pope Francis didn’t make the list of “Eminent Persons” [1] assembled by the U.N. Secretary General to plan the “global development framework” for the world beyond 2015 and culminating in 2030. But the pope didn’t need to be on the list. After all, the Vatican has endorsed [2] the anti-capitalist “sustainable development” agenda that is being voted on by the nations of the world at the U.N.

However, the American people, through their elected representatives, have had absolutely no input in developing this new global agenda which President Obama will implement without the input or approval of Congress.

John Podesta, the chairman of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign who previously served as counselor to Obama, was picked by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to be a member of the “high-level panel” of “eminent persons” planning the future of the globe.

The world body’s sustainable development goals [3] promise the end of poverty, education, clean water, justice, good health and well-being, jobs for all, decent shelter, and a life of personal dignity. “These are lofty goals,” says [4] Patrick Wood, a commentator on global issues, “but are they for real? Or do they sound like a bait-and-switch scheme that contains a potentially dangerous payload?”