RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/faith-freedom-and-fanaticism-in-the-middle-east?f=puball

A Washington, DC conference exposes the desires by Muslims and non-Muslims alike for a Middle East with freedom of speech and religion that many would only describe as a fantasy

(Washington, DC) Millions of Muslims “are looking for a way out of their misery,” Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia (CDHR) President Executive Director Ali Alyami stated at a July 17 Washington, DC, panel. Yet the Saudi dissent Alyami’s discussion with his fellow panelists of the modern Middle East only emphasized how difficult an escape from this misery for Muslims and non-Muslims alike would be.

“I am not an expert in any religion,” Alyami confessed during an event held ideologically incongruously at the leftwing Institute for Policy Studies. (IPS Fellow Phyllis Bennis, a supporter of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions or BDS against Israel, appeared in the adjacent kitchen during the panel.) But “Islam is not a faith; it is a way of life,” Alyami distinguished from other faiths, however comprehensive Christianity, for example, might have been in the past. “It is all God’s” in Islam in contrast to Jesus’ oft-cited separation between God and government (Caesar), Alyami elaborated.

“I like to think for myself,” Alyami stated in explaining how he personally drifted away from Islam’s encompassing embrace. Obedient to Islam’s daily schedule of five prayers beginning with a pre-dawn devotion, Alyami’s parents awakened him regularly at four a.m. Yet Alyami’s parents offered no good answer when asked why he could not pray to God according to a personal plan, an incident that led to lifelong questioning. Saudi Arabian religious authorities, he has condemned in a previous interview, “set themselves up as superior humans who must not only be worshiped, but fed by poverty-stricken people in the form of religious extortion: The Zakat system.”

Modern Muslims are emulating Alyami in unprecedented numbers, he argued, either calling for Islam’s enlightened reform or abandoning the faith altogether. Young Saudis, for example, spend more time viewing internet pornography than attending mosques. Accordingly, Alyami seeks dialogue with, not damnation of, violence-prone Muslims, even as he sometimes receives telephoned death threats. “You are being used as a tool,” he says to them, often prompting intellectual engagement. Although Muslim societies face a “bloody, long” revolution for freedom, Alyami remains optimistic of ultimate success. “The future will be bright for the Arabs” and others.

While discussing a decades-old “Saudi menace” supporting Islamic supremacism worldwide, though, Religious Freedom Coalition Chairman William J. Murray indicated significant barriers blocking a benign understanding of Islam. “No matter what good is done in the name of Islam, we always have the words of Muhammad to go back to,” words of Islam’s prophet whose import is often far from innocent. Evil done in Christianity’s name, by contrast, contradicts Jesus loving message. A moderate Muslim once claimed to Murray in Turkey that Islam has never had a reformer like Christianity’s Martin Luther. “Yes, you have had many,” Murray countered; “you have killed them all.” Muslims “almost need a Jesus Christ” who could fundamentally change Islam’s canons, rather than a reforming Luther, Murray argued.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/more-fundamental-change-from-our-president?f=puball
Illegal aliens are coming across our southern border because they can. Neither Democrats nor establishment Republicans want to stop them, but ordinary Americans do. Why?

Four years ago I flew to Tucson, Arizona, rented a Jeep, and drove down to the Mexican border at Nogales. I wanted to see for myself what was going on down there. I turned right just before the Mexican crossing and drove west along International Street on the US side of our primitive border fence. There, I encountered several modified, four-door, white and green, Dodge pickup trucks scurrying around in a futile effort to stop the flood of illegals constantly sneaking over, under, and through the flimsy international “barrier.”

The first agent I was able to speak with was, lucky for me, from Maine. He talked freely at first, telling me they arrested over 57,000 illegals just in Nogales during the previous year, down from over 100,000 two years previously, but he indicated that many more than that got through. Somewhere between twelve and twenty million are in the US illegally. Many are on welfare, including thousands in Maine. When I told the agent I was a columnist (wish I’d never done that), he clammed up and referred me to “public information officers” back at headquarters in Nogales who gave me the runaround, erased pictures from my camera, and escorted me off the base. The Border Patrol hierarchy under the Obama Administration wanted to keep a lid on information back then, and it’s only gotten worse since.

Illegal aliens are coming across our southern border because they can. Life on our side is better than it is where they come from, whether they want to work under the table or just go on the dole. Neither Democrats nor establishment Republicans want to stop them, but ordinary Americans do. Why? Because while life improves for the illegals, their presence here makes life more difficult for working-class Americans. According to a study last month from the Center for Immigration Studies and reported at National Review Online: “Net employment growth in the United States since 2000 has gone entirely to immigrants, legal and illegal.” Taxes have risen dramatically in many US states and cities to pay for education, healthcare, housing, food, and jails for illegals and their children. Hospitals and schools are overwhelmed in border states, and wages are driven down for blue-collar workers here, especially blacks.

Now President Obama is expected to grant amnesty to five million of them by Executive Order. Tea Party Republicans in the House are threatening impeachment if he does. The Christian Science Monitor quotes senior White House Advisor Dan Pfeiffer saying: “The president acting on immigration reform will certainly up the likelihood that [Republicans] would contemplate impeachment at some point.” Ironically, Obama seems to relish that prospect, perhaps because it will encourage more Democrat voters to go to the polls in November, trying to keep control of the Senate.

‘Sorry to email you late on a Friday, but I need your urgent support,” Nancy Pelosi wrote me.

The House minority leader went on to explain that “for the first time in history, Congress voted to sue a sitting president.” And, “Today: the White House alerted us that they believe ‘Speaker Boehner . . . has opened the door to impeachment.’

“What Republicans are doing to President Obama is historic — and offensive,” she wrote. And then, in a bright bold red text that can’t be done justice in black and white, she chided me, “With everything happening right now, I’m a little disappointed to see that you haven’t had a chance to chip in to defend President Obama.

“Jonah — we could use your support today.”

Nancy (apparently we’re on a first-name basis) went on to promise that ALL GIFTS ARE TRIPLE MATCHED!

This was only one of a bushel of such e-mails from the Democratic party. I particularly like the ones from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee referring to the “red alert impeachment deadline,” complete with a scoreboard slowly ticking upward toward $2 million. “We now have a shot at hitting our $2,000,000 goal to defend the President — and defeat Boehner’s Republican House.”

No doubt as karmic payback for grave sins I committed in a past life, I am on all of the Democratic fundraising lists. In terms of whipped-up urgency aimed at low-information voters, there’s nothing special about these importuning missives. I can’t count how many times I’ve been told that if I don’t chip in $5 — right now! — the Koch brothers will throw another puppy into the furnace of their land-raping dynamo.

But what is interesting about these e-mails is the transparent glee. Far more than Republicans, Democrats love talking about impeachment. Not just Pelosi and the DCCC, but White House spokesman Josh Earnest, Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer, and first lady Michelle Obama all chummed the waters with the I-word, igniting a frenzy among reporters who pretend that this is a real thing.

At this writing, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is engaged in a dispute with the White House over a subpoena that committee chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) issued to David Simas, director of the White House Office of Political Strategy & Outreach (OPSO), demanding that Mr. Simas appear at a hearing to consider whether OPSO is complying with the Hatch Act. The White House has resisted the subpoena, refusing to produce Mr. Simas for the hearing on the grounds of executive privilege. On July 25, the committee passed a resolution that rejects the White House’s claim that Mr. Simas, as an assistant to the president, is immune from being required to appear before the committee.

It is unclear where this dispute goes from here. The White House undeniably has legitimate separation-of-powers concerns about subjecting an assistant to the president (one of the president’s closest advisers) to process from a co-equal branch of government, even if the White House could be overstepping its bounds under the federal district court’s decision in Committee on the Judiciary v. Miers by declaring that Mr. Simas is absolutely immune from even appearing before the committee.

In the sometimes-heated back and forth about the subpoena, some have questioned the legitimacy of the committee’s inquiry into the activities of OPSO, because there have been no allegations publicly voiced that OPSO has been operating in violation of the law. Nevertheless, there is ample justification for the investigation.

First, this administration has an abysmal record of complying with the Hatch Act, which restricts the partisan political activity of executive-branch employees. In 2010, the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, offered Representative Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania a government position if he would drop his primary challenge to Senator Arlen Specter. A former White House counsel preposterously claimed that this was legally justified as advancing the “legitimate interest” of the Democratic-party leadership by avoiding a divisive primary and retaining Sestak’s congressional seat. The president declined to punish then–HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius after the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), which enforces the Hatch Act, found in 2012 that she had violated it by urging the crowd at an official event to reelect President Obama and elect other Democrats. Then–secretary of labor Hilda Solis is on tape soliciting a subordinate to attend a political fundraiser and to encourage others to attend as well — a clear violation of the Hatch Act. Finally, the evidence that the IRS targeted for extra scrutiny groups with conservative-sounding names that applied for tax-exempt status, or delayed their approvals to keep them out of the political arena, indicates Hatch Act violations there as well. Such an atmosphere of noncompliance with the Hatch Act alone raises legitimate questions about whether the White House is adhering to the law in the activities of OPSO.

Second, the circumstances of the rebirth of the White House political office in January, after President Obama closed the Office of Political Affairs three years earlier, provide further justification for the committee’s investigation.

So the God of Books exists after all.A journalist who could treat businessmen fairly is seeing a big boost to his popularity.

That was the thought of many of us when we saw Business Adventures leap to the top of the bestseller lists. For decades now, this volume by the late John Brooks has enjoyed an intense following among business writers. So has the rest of Brooks’s work, especially Once in Golconda, a collection of articles — fables, almost — about the 1920s. Someone, way back when, even called Brooks the “La Fontaine of finance writers.”

Nonetheless, for whatever reason, the rest of the reading public — whether in the 1990s, the Aughts, or the current decade — did not appear to share the journalists’ enthusiasm. In the case of Once in Golconda, some conjectured that it was the title choice that was fatal. Where, or what, in heck is “Golconda”? A mythical kingdom in India, it turned out. Brooks’s 1920s volume, some of us speculated, might have endured had he titled the book “The Roaring Twenties.”

As it turns out, it was not a better title that Brooks needed but a billionaire. For when earlier this summer news got out that Bill Gates rated Business Adventures his top read, and that Warren Buffett had given Gates the book, it became a bestseller all over again, four decades after it first appeared.

Some of the reasons that billionaires like Brooks have already been noted in the past weeks’ rush of Gates-approved Brooksmania. The first is that Brooks approaches start-up entrepreneurs in relatively friendly fashion. As Slate noticed, Brooks, like Michael Lewis after him, admires young businessmen with icon-busting ideas. Lewis profiles the innovations of Billy Beane and his statistical sidekick, Paul DePodesta, in scouting baseball players. Brooks likes young risk-takers too: His account of a young energy engineer and his firms’ efforts to escape the ambiguities of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s insider-trading rules will make any young entrepreneur breathless. Brooks captures failure of youthful projects as well. The most beautiful article ever written about a product fiasco is Brooks’s account of the folly of the Edsel automobile at the Ford Motor Company. The final line is one not of despair but of triumph: Brooks’s conclusion in “The Fate of the Edsel” is that “failure can have a certain grandeur success never knows.”

A second reason Brooks enraptures is that he captures challenges ubiquitous in business but a bit obscure for popular television or even Morning Joe: intellectual property and noncompete agreements, for example. One of his best is “One Free Bite,” the story of a young scientist named Donald Wohlgemuth who walked over from B. F. Goodrich to a competitor, International Latex, and then discovered, to his shock, that Goodrich objected. Brooks traces the story of how Goodrich dragged the young man into court to stop him sharing secrets of the space suit they were designing for Mercury astronauts.

Against Premature Impeachment

The point is to revive it as a credible threat — and restrain presidential lawlessness.

It has been nearly two months since the publication of my book, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment, helped intensify the national focus on presidential lawlessness — or, if you prefer, infected the nation with “impeachment fever.” The latter is the breathless diagnosis offered by Media Matters in what otherwise is a surprisingly accurate description of what I’ve written. No surprise, then, that I took note of the very interesting question posed by National Review editor Rich Lowry in the title of a recent Corner post: “Does Obama WANT to Get Impeached?”

The context was the president’s plan to proceed with an outrageously lawless, unilaterally decreed amnesty for millions of illegal aliens. Obviously, this kind of massive malfeasance will provoke calls for impeachment — meaning, more calls than we already have. Rich incisively wonders whether that’s exactly what this flailing, cynical White House wants. Obama is brazenly intensifying what progressive law professor Jonathan Turley has acknowledged is “the worst constitutional crisis of [his] lifetime.” With midterm elections on the horizon, is the president calculating that inducing more Republican talk of impeachment will rally the Democratic base and, as Rich puts it, “drive the middle away from the GOP”?

As he decoded the administration’s thinking, Rich inserted a caveat. To me, it is the money line in his analysis: Obama and his advisers are “assuming the politics of impeachment are bad for Republicans.” It is a foolish assumption.

Building the Political Case
When Faithless Execution was released, it was only natural that some commentators homed in on the subtitle’s invocation of “impeachment.” The salient part, however, has always been “building the political case.” The book’s major theme is that impeachment is a political remedy requiring broad public consensus, not a legal one triggered once impeachable offenses are provable.

Contrary to some less than informed opinion, “high crimes and misdemeanors” — the legal standard for impeachment — refers not to indictable criminal offenses but to profound breaches of the public trust by high-ranking officials. Once the standard is understood, it becomes easy to see that the president and his underlings have committed numerous, readily provable impeachable offenses. Yet, even if a president commits a hundred high crimes and misdemeanors, impeachment is a non-starter unless the public is convinced that the president should be removed from power. The real question is political: Are his lawlessness and unfitness so thoroughgoing that we can no longer trust him with the awesome power of the chief executive?

The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler not only invents points the Cheneys did not make, he then casually dismisses “uncomfortable points” they did make. How many Pinocchios is that worth?

Kessler evidently assumes that when intelligence assessments differ, the correct version is only that which differs from the points made by the Cheneys but not by their critics.

Most senior Democratic members of the Senate at the time voted — twice — for giving the President the authority to take down Saddam Hussein. How else can Democrats say they made a mistake voting for the war if they cannot now make the case that they were “fooled”?

The U.S. took down Saddam Hussein’s regime because on balance the threat-intelligence could not be ignored.

A recent article in the Weekly Standard by former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Liz Cheney, noted that there was sufficient evidence prior to the 2003 liberation of Iraq that Saddam Hussein might coordinate terrorist attacks against the U.S. and its interests.

“It is undisputed,” they wrote, “and has been confirmed repeatedly in Iraqi government documents captured after the invasion, that Saddam had deep, longstanding, far-reaching relationships with terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda and its affiliates. It is undisputed that Saddam’s Iraq was a state based on terror, overseeing a coordinated program to support global jihadist terrorist organizations. Ansar al Islam, an al Qaeda-linked organization, operated training camps in northern Iraq before the invasion. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the future leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, funneled weapons and fighters into these camps, before the invasion… We also know, again confirmed in documents captured after the war, that Saddam provided funding, training, and other support to many terrorist organizations and individuals over decades, including to Ayman al Zawahiri, the man who leads al Qaeda today.”

The Washington Times reported on Tuesday that:

Talk of impeachment was cooked up by a White House desperate for something to rally Democrats ahead of November’s elections, House Speaker John A. Boehner said Tuesday, flatly ruling out any action on the controversial suggestion.

“We have no plans to impeach the president. We have no future plans,” Mr. Beohner said. “Listen, it’s all a scam started by Democrats at the White House.”

But PJM’s own Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, has a very different take, both in terms of Mr. Obama, and of the general concept of impeachment itself.

During our interview, Andrew will discuss his latest book, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment. Andrew tells me, “As Madison put it, impeachment was indispensable in the minds of the framers, as a mechanism for Congress to be able to prevent one of the things that they were extremely worried about during the drafting of the Constitution. Which was the possibility that this incredibly powerful new office that they were creating, the President of the United States, where all of the executive power would be reposed in one official. [The founders worried] that that official could become like a monarch; could become basically what the Revolution had fought against in the first place.”

And there’s little doubt that President Obama thinks of himself of having king-like powers, far removed from the controls of Congress.

During our interview, Andrew will discuss:

● How the Founding Fathers thought of impeachment.
● Is he worried about Democrats fundraising off his new book?
● What does McCarthy think of John Boehner’s plan to sue Obama?
● His thoughts on Congress’s investigations of Benghazi and the IRS scandal.
● If McCarthy was drafting the articles of impeachment for Barack Obama, what would they include?

Word came Tuesday that now a third UNRWA school in Gaza was housing rockets for Hamas. (How the missiles were never noticed before was unclear — maybe they were stacked beneath the erasers and paper clips or hidden under student spitballs.) From the Jerusalem Post [1]:

Christopher Gunness, spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, did not name who was responsible for putting weapons in the school, but quickly criticized whoever was at fault.
“We condemn the group or groups who endangered civilians by placing these munitions in our school. This is yet another flagrant violation of the neutrality of our premises,” Gunness said in a statement. “We call on all the warring parties to respect the inviolability of UN property.”

Gunness added that a UN munitions expert was called in to dispose of the weapons, but could not get to the site due to fighting on the ground.

Further, Breitbart.com [2] is reporting:

This week, UNRWA supplies and building materials had been found [3] in Hamas’s tunnel infrastructure, which has been used to smuggle weapons and carry out attacks on the State of Israel.

How’d that get there? More of that pesky teenage pilfering when teacher turned his back? Or was it something a bit more intentional? No wonder The Algemeiner is asking: Are UN Agencies Fighting for Human Rights or Supporting Terrorism? [4] It notes:

None of this is new and seemed only to be surprising to UNRWA itself. The group has a long-documented history of terrorist ties, something UNRWA’s former Commissioner General Peter Hansen openly admitted in 2004 to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation stating, “I am sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll … and I don’t see that as a crime.”

Americans need to be alarmed by what Obama’s actions on behalf of Hamas reveal about the general direction of American Middle East policy under his leadership.

When US President Barack Obama phoned Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Sunday night, in the middle of a security cabinet meeting, he ended any remaining doubt regarding his policy toward Israel and Hamas.

Obama called Netanyahu while the premier was conferring with his senior ministers about how to proceed in Gaza. Some ministers counseled that Israel should continue to limit our forces to specific pinpoint operations aimed at destroying the tunnels of death that Hamas has dug throughout Gaza and into Israeli territory.

Others argued that the only way to truly destroy the tunnels, and keep them destroyed, is for Israel to retake control over the Gaza Strip.

No ministers were recommending that Israel end its operations in Gaza completely. The longer our soldiers fight, the more we learn about the vast dimensions of the Hamas’s terror arsenal, and about the Muslim Brotherhood group’s plans and strategy for using it to destabilize, demoralize and ultimately destroy Israeli society.

The IDF’s discovery of Hamas’s Rosh Hashana plot was the last straw for any Israeli leftists still harboring fantasies about picking up our marbles and going home. Hamas’s plan to use its tunnels to send hundreds of terrorists into multiple Israeli border communities simultaneously and carry out a massacre of unprecedented scope, replete with the abduction of hostages to Gaza, was the rude awakening the Left had avoided since it pushed for Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza.

In other words, in their discussion Sunday night, Netanyahu and his ministers were without illusions about the gravity of the situation and the imperative of winning – however defined.