RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/freddy-gray/2014/03/ten-handy-phrases-for-bluffing-your-way-through-the-ukraine-crisis/

May I add an eleventh phrase? “Of course we have to watch the Ukraine but a crisis of far more serious consequences i heating up in the Middle East as Israel announces the construction of a porch on an existing home in a settlement.This is a provocative act on the cusp of real movement on the peace process……” rsk

We’re all journalists now, apparently, so when a major foreign policy crisis comes along it is important to be prepared. Everyone must learn the art of winging it as the big news breaks. That’s not easy these days. What with Wikipedia on every mobile phone, our understanding of international relations can be called into question at any moment.

So here, as a beginner’s guide, are ten handy phrases for bluffing your way through a conversation about the situation in Ukraine:

‘It’s simplistic to think in terms of east versus west in today’s global, multi-polar world.’ A classic this: the phrase can be adapted and used in just about any serious conversation about anything. Say it early in the discussion, before anyone else can.
‘Sevastopol is of great strategic importance for Putin, especially given the ongoing situation in Syria.’ A useful ploy, this remark establishes you as a bigger-picture guy, who grasps the geopolitics of both eastern Europe and the Middle East — and that global, multi-polar world you were just talking about.
‘What we are seeing here is the return of geography.’Similar to the last, this one neatly lifts you away from the intricacies of Eastern European diplomacy and has the advantage of being almost completely meaningless.
‘The similarities with Hitler and the Sudetenland/Anschluss/Peter the Great/ Stalin and the Tartars/Genghis Khan are striking.’ Historical analogies are invaluable to the experienced bluffer, but the amateur must tread carefully. It is terribly easy to become unstuck in the past. When in doubt, hedge: ‘I am not saying that Putin is Hitler, but …’ or ‘it’s easy to get carried away with these comparisons, but …’ Try to look pained, as if contemplating both the complexity and the imminent possibility of human suffering.
‘Ukraine literally means “borderland”, of course’ — easy one to remember, but a sentence that hints at real wisdom. It has the added benefit of not requiring any follow-up knowledge. Use in the context of ‘statelets’, ‘the great game’ and ‘annexation’.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/tee-time-the-optics-of-presidential-vacations/?print=1
Tee Time: The Optics of Presidential Vacations :Bill Straub

WASHINGTON – Franklin Delano Roosevelt used to hop on the presidential railcar, the Ferdinand Magellan, and roll down to Warm Springs, Ga., seeking relief for his shriveled legs.

Harry Truman would gather his cronies, including Chief Justice Fred Vinson, and head for what became known as The Little White House in Key West, Fla., for marathon poker games and afternoons of fishing. Those trips were vital, Give-Em-Hell Harry once explained, because 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. was the “crown jewel of the American prison system.”

Not to be outdone, Ronald Reagan embraced Rancho del Cielo, better known as the Western White House, near Santa Barbara, Calif., where he could ride horses and occasionally delight pool photographers by wielding an ax to chop wood.

The history of presidential vacations is a long one. John Adams, the second president, left Washington, D.C., in 1798 to tend to his ailing wife, Abigail, back in Massachusetts.

He didn’t return for seven months.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/putins-contempt-for-obama-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center who runs the blog The Point at Frontpagemag.com.

Daniel joined the Gang to discuss Putin Power vs. Obama Weakness. The dialogue focused on the Radical-in-Chief getting humiliated all over again — this time at the hands of a Russian thugocrat over Ukraine.

Daniel also shed light on Why Lois Lerner Pleaded the Fifth, Obama and Israel’s Homicidal Peace Partner, and much, much more:

Fox Haters Carrying Water for CAIR

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ryan-mauro/fox-haters-carrying-water-for-cair/print/

For some progressive writers, it’s more important to bash Fox News than to expose American Islamist groups’ rejection of liberal values. In recent weeks, the Council on American-Islamic Relations has aggressively promoted articles by Fox haters who are more concerned with smearing CAIR opponents as anti-Muslim bigots than addressing facts and evidence.

The U.S. Justice Department says CAIR is a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity and labeled it an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas-financing trial. Federal prosecutors said in a 2007 court filing that CAIR uses deception to “conceal from the American public their connections to terrorists.” CAIR’s documented record should alienate every progressive.

Part of those efforts is taking advantage of writers with influence in the media. Don’t take my word for it. Look at what CAIR Vice Chair Sarwat Husain said at another terror-tied conference:

“Media in the United States is very gullible, ok? And they will see that if you have something, especially as a Muslim, if you have something to say, they will come running to you—and take advantage of that.”

In a presentation by CAIR Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper, he told supporters how to manipulate reporters. One of the slides was titled “Characteristics of a Journalist” and said, “They will expect you to do their work. Let them.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-environmentalist-eugenics-of-the-left/print/

Pick up a copy of Obama’s $3.9 trillion budget and there among the TSA fee hikes, Medicare payment cuts and the $400 million for the Department of Homeland Security to fight global warming is a curious little item.

On Page 930 of the budget that never ends is $575 million for “family planning/reproductive health” worldwide especially in “areas where population growth threatens biodiversity or endangered species.”

The idea that the way to protect insects, fish and animals is by preventing human beings from having children is part of an approach known as Population, Health and Environment (PHE) which integrates population control into environmentalist initiatives.

PHE dates back to the 1980s and is practiced by mainstream organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund. The Smithsonian’s Woodrow Wilson Center, which is funded partly by the US government, aggressively champions PHE eugenics and USAID funds PHE programs and distributes PHE training manuals derived in part from Wilson Center materials.

PHE had been baked into congressional bills such as the Global Sexual and Reproductive Health Act of 2013 co-sponsored by Debbie Wasserman-Shultz and Sheila Jackson-Lee which urged meeting United Nations Millennium Development Goals by using birth control as, among other things, a means of “ensuring environmental sustainability.”

Obama’s budget is more open about its PHE eugenics agenda. While PHE backers usually claim that they want to reduce population to prevent famine and promote gender equality, the budget explicitly states that its goal is to reduce human population growth for the sake of the animals, without any of the usual misleading language about feminism and clean water.

The budget is a blunt assertion of post-human values by an administration that has become notorious for its fanatical environmentalism, sacrificing people on the altar of Green ideology.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/373231/print
Congress: This Time It’s Personal
Senator Feinstein has finally been goaded into noticing executive-branch arrogations of power. By Kevin D. Williamson

Now we know what it takes to nudge Congress’s sense of self-respect into a state of at least semi-consciousness.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, God bless her, is throwing a very public fit over findings that the CIA spied on Congress — on her Select Senate Intelligence Committee, specifically — as part of a campaign to undermine the committee’s investigation into an interrogation program that the agency does not much want to see investigated.

It’s a strange contradiction: Senators do not want for self-respect. If anything, the individual members of that august collection of a hundred self-identified future presidents and vice presidents suffer from excessive self-regard at levels that are frequently embarrassing and occasionally delusional. Look into the eyes of John Kerry or Joe Biden and consider for a moment the political incubator that hatched such specimens of Miltonic-Luciferian self-importance. But the Senate, and Congress as a whole, have been experiencing something of a crisis of confidence in recent decades. Our constitutional order makes Congress the effective seat of domestic governance: Only Congress can appropriate funds; only Congress can tax. Spending bills must originate in the House, presidential appointments are subject to Senate approval. Only Congress can coin money. And while the Constitution entrusts the president with some important powers regarding such outward-directed issues as military engagements, only Congress can declare war or ratify a treaty.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/373215/print

‘​We were not, I repeat, not, told that waterboarding or any of these other enhanced interrogation methods were used.” — Nancy Pelosi, May 2009

Responding to the above: “Hmmm. . . . Well, I personally . . . went to the Congress in September 2002 and briefed her on . . . the techniques that we had used, which included waterboarding.” — Jose Rodriguez, former director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, April 2012

The Pelosi School of Intelligence has a motto: “The fiction shall set you free.”

Dianne Feinstein just became its latest professor.

On Tuesday, Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), complained that the CIA had spied on her committee in order to “intimidate” its staff.

CIA Director John Brennan insists that “nothing could be further from the truth.”

Still, Feinstein is furious. It’s an assault on the Constitution, she says.

But let’s be clear. Whatever Feinstein claims, this a crisis of her own making. To understand why, we need to look back to where this all began — to 2009, and the start of the SSCI investigation into the CIA’s Bush-era Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs).

At the beginning of its investigation, the SSCI’s stated intention was to bring clarity. Its stated intention.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/373230/becoming-party-work-senator-jeff-sessions

Senator Sessions, an incumbent is unopposed for re-election in Alabama. He has a rather anemic record on foreign policy issues…..rsk

According to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll, seven in ten voters believe that the Republican party is “out of touch with the concerns of most people in the United States today.”

What follows is a plan for how the GOP can win back their trust — and a build a conservative majority in the process.

But first, a little history.

When Americans went to the polls in 2012, the following was true: Work-force participation had sunk to its lowest level in 35 years, wages had fallen below 1999 levels, and 47 million Americans were on food stamps. Yet Mitt Romney, the challenger to the incumbent president, lost lower- and middle-income voters by an astonishing margin. Among voters earning $30,000 to $50,000, he trailed by 15 points, and among voters earning under $30,000 he trailed by 28 points.

And what did the GOP’s brilliant consultant class conclude from this resounding defeat? They declared that the GOP must embrace amnesty. The Republican National Committee dutifully issued a report calling for a “comprehensive immigration reform” that would inevitably increase the flow of low-skilled immigration, reducing the wages and living standards of the very voters whose trust the GOP had lost.

http://americanthinker.com/assets/3rd_party/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/03/more_dim_dems.html

Rep. Lee (D- Texas- district 18) has a challenger in Sean Seibert a Republican (http://seanseibert.com/)

Sean Seibert started his military career at the age of 19 by enlisting as a private in the Army. He spent several years enlisted before receiving a commission as a Second Lieutenant in 1987 while attending the University of Texas at Arlington.Over his career he has led our nation’s greatest resources, its sons and daughters, in numerous deployments (to include Guatemala, Bosnia, Persian Gulf, and Afghanistan). In 2009 Sean was selected to join the 82d Airborne Division General Staff on their deployment to Afghanistan. Starting off as the lead planner for the Afghan National Police, whose stalwart performance was rated as immeasurable. The Commanding General selected Sean as his number one choice to lead the efforts at the key strategic board crossing in the Khyber Pass (where 80% of all NATO resources entered Afghanistan from Pakistan).

Remember last summer, when the Congressional Black Caucus was pushing Sheila Jackson Lee to be the new head of Homeland Security? Aside from her previously disclosed problems with managing staff, one of the main criticisms was that the woman simply was not smart enough for the job.

Considering our serving president, one could have reason to wonder if that’s even a requirement for a department head in a Democrat administration. Whether or not Sheila could have done any more damage to the country than her party’s leader, yesterday she provided additional proof that there are some gaps in her grasp of American history and governance. Standing before the House, Lee offered this:

Maybe I should offer a good thanks to the distinguished members of the majority, the Republicans, my chairman and others, for giving us an opportunity to have a deliberative constitutional discussion that reinforces the sanctity of this nation and how well it is that we have lasted some 400 years, operating under a constitution that clearly defines what is constitutional and what is not[.]

As the folks at Washington Free Beacon point out, she missed the Constitution’s launch by only 173 years.

This is a woman with a degree in political science from Yale and a law degree from Virginia – both degree fields supposedly requiring significant study of American politics and American law, both of which are grounded in that Constitution. Was Sheila snoozing in class?

Oh, well. The un-constitutional law professor now leading us believes we have 57 states, so Sheila’s blooper is no big deal. He thinks we’re bigger; she thinks we’re older.

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2014/03/10/obama-needs-a-revitalized-nuclear-strategy

Facing a new Cold War with Putin’s Russia, President Obama needs to embrace a new nuclear weapons strategy.

Whether we like it or not, the United States faces the expanding prospect of a new Cold War. To be sure, the Soviet Union no longer exists, but the successor superpower regime in Moscow is not making things any easier for us. Even during the current crisis in the Ukraine, for example, Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted upon going ahead with test-firing a Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missile (referred to by NATO as the SS-25 Sickle).

How shall we best respond to this ominously re-emergent threat? In order to fully maintain American security in such increasingly volatile circumstances, President Barack Obama will, among other things, need to garner the benefits of a newly-refined and potentially more robust national nuclear strategy. These benefits would not be insignificant. They would be indispensable.

On its face, this would seem to be a perfectly obvious and hence unremarkable observation. Nonetheless, from the moment that he first entered the White House, this president has made it clear that he opposes all nuclear weapons, at least in principle. Ignoring post-World War II history, when such weapons likely prevented a third world war between the two resultant superpowers, he steadfastly maintains that they are inherently corrosive and destabilizing. Indeed, for Obama, there still seemingly can be no more high-minded objective than creating “a world free of nuclear weapons.”