RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://washingtonexaminer.com/obama-shouldnt-expect-a-warm-reception-in-riyadh/article/2546340#

President Obama has spent this week bingeing on diplomacy but he cannot be drunk on success. There’s very little to show for his days in Europe other than a few joint statements that were forgotten as soon as the press releases were handed out.

Friday will be different and not because it will deliver a diplomatic triumph. President Obama will meet with Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz at a moment when the relationship between the two nations is worse than it has been since the 1973 Arab oil embargo. Going into the meeting, Obama is at a considerable disadvantage that results directly from his own policies. The Saudis look around the Middle East and what they see scares them.
Since about February 2013, the Saudis have been giving billions of dollars and tons of arms to the rebels seeking to depose Syrian President Bashar Assad. They believe the heavy Iranian and Russian support for Assad’s survival (in equal or greater amounts of money and arms as well as jihadist fighters and Iranian troops) to be the creation of a Shiite Iranian puppet less than a hundred miles from their northern border. Late last August, Obama said that he had decided to take military action against Syria because of Assad’s use of chemical weapons against civilians. When Obama abruptly decided that he would ask Congress for permission to make the strike, and then failed to pursue congressional action, the Saudis felt betrayed.

In October, after having campaigned for it, the Saudis rejected a seat on the United Nations Security Council because it hadn’t brought the Syrian civil war to an end. Only days after the rejection, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi intelligence chief, said “This was a message for the U.S., not the U.N.” Bandar said that he planned to scale back diplomatic cooperation with the U.S. and for his country to have a foreign policy independent of America’s. That is exactly what the Saudis have done

http://www.clarionproject.org/print/news/saudi-king-holds-daughters-prisoners-13-years

Princesses’ mother, who fled to London after the couple’s divorce, breaks silence

Princesses’ mother, who fled to London after the couple’s divorce, breaks silence
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/03/saudi-king-holds-daughters-prisoners-for-13-years/#Pu6BgoUTxz40U4CW.99

(ClarionProject) King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has kept four of his daughters locked in a royal compound in Jeddah for the last 13 years. Their mother, his second wife who fled to London after the couple’s divorce, broke the silence and told Britain’s Channel Four about their plight. She has not seen her children for 10 years.

Princess Alanoud Al Fayez married then Prince Abdullah in an arranged marriage when she as just 15. She bore him four daughters: Sahar, Maha, Hala and Jawaher.

The four have been kept in a compound in the eastern port city of Jeddah, which they cannot leave without armed guards. Their passports have been taken away, and they are barred from leaving the country. Their villa is dilapidated and falling apart, far from the living quarters of the princesses’ privileged childhood.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/authors/detail/ruth-king-2014-candidates-for-congress

It is hard to believe that the Nutmeg State has not a single Republican legislator….This posting reflects my views and choices, not those of Family Security Matters which is non partisan.

To see the actual voting records of all incumbents on other issues such as Foreign Policy, Second Amendment Issues, Homeland Security, and other issues as well as their rankings by special interest groups please use the links followed by two stars (**). U.S. Senate

Richard Blumenthal (D) Next Election in 2016
Chris Murphy (D) Next Election in 2018

District 1

John Larson (D) Incumbent

http://www.larson.house.gov/

http://www.ontheissues.org/house/John_Larson.htm **

RATED 1+ BY AAI INDICATING A PRO ARAB VOTING RECORD

HOT BUTTON ISSUES

HEALTHCARE http://www.larson.house.gov/index.php/on-the-issues/health-care

The historic health care legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama offers the American people the choice of affordable quality health care coverage for the first time. The Affordable Care Act is giving Americans more security by holding insurance companies accountable, and helping more families get the peace of mind of affordable health insurance.

IMMIGRATION http://www.larson.house.gov/index.php/on-the-issues/immigration

President Obama’s recent commonsense immigration reform proposal has four parts. First, continue to strengthen our borders. Second, crack down on companies that hire undocumented workers. Third, hold undocumented immigrants accountable in order to earn their citizenship; this means requiring undocumented workers to pay their taxes and a penalty, move to the back of the line, learn English, and pass background checks. Fourth, update the legal immigration system for families, workers, and employers.

ENVIRONMENT http://www.larson.house.gov/index.php/on-the-issues/energy-a-environment Today our nation continues to confront three of the most critical issues of our time, our environment, our foreign policy and our economy. It is clear that we must end our reliance on foreign sources of fossil fuels. These fuels are damaging our environment and causing hazardous climate change around the globe. They are also making us indebted to foreign countries, putting our national security in jeopardy. Americans are seeing record fluctuations in the cost of energy; filling up the gas tank or heating a home has become difficult to afford. That’s why Congressman Larson has focused on ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, lower the price of energy, and invest in renewable energy sources.

Opposed construction of Keystone XL Pipeline without limiting amendments.

FOREIGN POLICY http://www.larson.house.gov/index.php/on-the-issues/foreign-policy Congressman Larson has stood firmly in support of Israel, considered our greatest ally and a great democracy in the Middle East. Previously, Larson has voted in favor of resolutions reaffirming Congressional support for Israel and the right of the Israeli people to protect themselves. At the same time, Larson has joined his colleagues in recognizing the dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza, supporting diplomatic initiatives in the region.

Matthew Corey (R) Challenger

Contractor, Navy Veteran http://www.coreyforcongress2014.com/

HOT BUTTON ISSUES

http://www.coreyforcongress2014.com/issues

HEALTHCARE http://www.coreyforcongress2014.com/issues/health_care Health care cost is on the rise. I support purchasing insurance across state lines because competitive bidding will lower the cost of health care. I also believe in you should be able to keep the same benefits when switching policies. There should not be discrimination on purchasing healthcare with preexisting conditions. I believe in setting up private health care savings accounts to drive the cost of health care down. With the implementation of Obama Care we will see health care costs on the rise, people losing their primary care doctors, loss of full time positions to part time, and stagnation in hiring because business cannot afford the extra burden of regulations. Seniors are facing the most challenges with limited services and waiting lists. States should help subsidize health care to those who can’t afford it. Repeal the National Health Care and end its unconstitutional mandate that all Americans must carry only government-approved health insurance or answer to the IRS.

ENERGY http://www.coreyforcongress2014.com/issues/energy National security starts with becoming energy independent. We need to put an end to burdensome regulations that have a minimum impact on the environment. I believe we need to put Americans back to work by giving permits to drill on federal lands in a responsible way. Americans can collect royalties from mining companies to fund our green energy projects. We can grow our economy by keeping money state side instead of funding terrorist nations. This approach will protect our national interests, security, and stimulate economic growth.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obamacares-tough-day-in-court?f=puball

Since its passage, a number of lawsuits have attempted to undermine Obamacare as a law, with varying degrees of success. The individual mandate challenge failed before the Supreme Court in 2012, despite what seemed like positive reception to the challenge during oral argument. Hobby Lobby went before the Supreme Court on March 25 to challenge the religious liberty implications of the contraception mandate portion of the law.

While the media have largely focused on the Hobby Lobby challenge, a few blocks away, the D.C. Court of Appeals was hearing another argument about Obamacare-one that, if passed, could well have the effect of ending this law as we know it. And it has liberals running scared.

In the piece “Forget Hobby Lobby. The Bigger Legal Threat to Obamacare Still Has Life,” Alec Macgillis writes for the New Republic, “If the contraception challenge succeeds, it just means that that one sliver of Obamacare is struck down. If this other challenge succeeds, both sides agree that it would blow up the entire law.”

The argument for the plaintiffs is as follows: In order to provide the 60th vote, which was necessary to get the bill through the Senate, Ben Nelson, the then-Democratic senator from Nebraska, insisted on a clause that said that federal subsidies could only go to people who signed up on exchanges set up by the states. The purpose was to incentivize states to actually set up exchanges.

Then, the plaintiffs argue, the IRS wrote a rule in 2012 which reinterpreted the law to say that federal exchanges could give out subsidies as well. “The alternative policy under the IRS’ rewriting of the rule creates a bizarre circumstance where it’s almost impossible to fulfill the Act’s purpose of having state-run exchanges, because it eliminates any tangible incentive for these people to go ahead and adopt the exchanges,” argued Michael A. Carvin, the plaintiffs’ attorney, before the Court of Appeals on March 25. “So they’ve created a situation which has predictably resulted in only 14 states doing what Congress clearly wanted 50 states to do, which is to set up their exchanges.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/fjordman/natos-next-secretary-general-jens-stoltenberg/print/

NATO’s Next Secretary General: Jens Stoltenberg

Posted By Fjordman On March 27, 2014 @ 12:40 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | No Comments

The Norwegian press has been buzzing with rumors lately that Jens Stoltenberg — who until the autumn of 2013 was the Prime Minister of Norway — is a serious candidate for becoming the new Secretary General of the Western defense alliance NATO. The former Danish PM Anders Fogh Rasmussen is stepping down from this position later in 2014.

Apparently, German Chancellor Angela Merkel proposed Stoltenberg for the job. Merkel made her proposal directly to US President Barack Obama, who agreed that he was a good choice for the role. Stoltenberg allegedly spent months discussing the role with the US Secretary of State John Kerry and his security advisor Susan E. Rice while he was in New York, ostensibly in his role as UN Special Envoy for Climate Change.

This is not a done deal yet, however. One of Mr. Stoltenberg’s presumed rivals for the job as head of NATO is José Barroso, Portugal’s former Prime Minister and also a former Communist. In 2014 Barroso will be stepping down as President of the European Commission, the unelected and unaccountable government for half a billion people in the EU. Barroso has held this job for ten years. Other possible NATO candidates who have been mentioned are Franco Frattini, Italy’s former Foreign Minister, and Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s current Foreign Minister.

The decision on who will become the next formal head of NATO has thus not been made yet. However, Jens Stoltenberg himself is taking this possibility so seriously that there are already rumors that he might soon be leaving his current position as the leader of the Norwegian Labour Party.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-and-putin-two-totalitarians-one-game/print/

War is what Obama does best. The War on Women. War on Poverty. Class War. Race War.

Walk up to a union member snoozing on a bus, a Latino man crossing the street, a gay cowboy poet earning minimum wage, and community organize him along with a few hundred thousand others into the latest battle in the social justice war that never ends.

“Fight for card check, for birth control, for gay marriage and illegal alien amnesty.”

Every time a battle is won and an election ends, a new source of social conflict is dug up and deployed for war.

As a domestic radical, divisiveness is his natural weapon. Obama plays on fragmented identities, assembling coalitions to wage war against some phantom white heteronormative patriarchy consisting of a middle class barely able to pay its bills.

It’s governing by terrorism. The bombs are ideological. The objective is a constant state of war.

The war that never ends has been good to Obama. Its various clashes have given him two terms and very little media scrutiny. They have given him a post-American army of identity groups with few mutual interests except radical politics and government dependency.

While Obama profits from stirring up conflicts at home, making it easy for him to light some fuses and walk away, he loses from conflicts abroad.

A Reaganesque president could have turned the Syrian Civil War or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine into an approval rating bonanza. Foreign conflicts pay off politically for presidents even when they aren’t involved. But that’s not true of Obama who is congenitally incapable of showing strength and reacts to a foreign crisis by playing for time while struggling to resolve the ideological betrayal of using American power abroad.

Internationally, it’s the KGB agent, not the community organizer, who profits from conflict. Putin plays Obama’s role in the world community, dividing and conquering, doing to America internationally what Obama does to it domestically.

Obama uses a phantom patriarchy, a phantom white privilege, a phantom 1 percent, to mobilize a coalition for his own agenda. Putin uses the United States as a phantom enemy to organize a coalition of “oppressed” tyrants from Belarus to Venezuela to North Korea.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

The post-American world will be many things, but multilateral isn’t one of them. There will be no world government and international organizations will be good for little except sucking up the last drops of wealth and prestige of the United States. It will be a chaotic place with everyone out for themselves.

The Cold War map of the world divided into two camps was simple and clear. The post-American
world will be a much more ambiguous place. Instead of two global ideological alliances based around two world powers, there will be three post-ideological powers, no longer global in scope, and one worldwide ideological alliance.

The United States, Russia and China are post-ideological states. Russia and China have abandoned Communism. The United States is even abandoning nationalism; to say nothing of capitalism, democracy or freedom. Its rulers cling to scraps of global leftist ideology that isolate them from their own people.

Russia and China are run by powerful corrupt elites who emerged from the old Communist order to build economic oligarchies enforced by the ruthless use of force. The United States is increasingly run by an oligarchy of ideological bureaucrats, corrupt technocrats and leftist academics that has a distant resemblance to the USSR and the PRC; but its long march through the institutions hasn’t turned fully totalitarian yet. That may be less than a generation away.

Russia, China and the United States are all demographically unstable. Russia and the United States are both on track to become majority-minority countries. China’s demographic disaster will be the outcome of its one child policies, gender abortion and its war on the countryside. The United States will probably weather its demographic problems better than Russia or China, because the former faces a fatal Muslim demographic takeover and the latter a conflict that will tear its society apart, but like Russia and China, the demographic crisis in the United States will be exacerbated by the lack of common bonds to see it through a period of social stress.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4835/israel_palestine_peace_talks_head_for_inevitable_failure
Nick Gray is Director, Christian Middle East Watch, a British organisation dedicated to objective and factual discussion of Middle Eastern issues, especially of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Nick, who is a regular contributor to The Commentator, blogs at cmewonline.com
Israel-Palestine peace talks head for inevitable failure
A whole generation of Palestinians has grown up under PA-sanctioned incitement to hate Israelis and Jews and has been encouraged to continue “the resistance”. That’s no basis for any kind of peace

Like two naughty school boys, Bibi Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas have, in the last couple of weeks, been called to the Head Master’s study in Washington for a stern talking to. No doubt, both were told “could do better”, but their respective reactions to The “framework” presented to them will surely have left the gap between the protagonists as wide as ever.

We might have expected some immediate follow-up from John Kerry, but one or two other issues have cropped up around the world that need his attention first. The red lines on both sides must have left the State Department frantic to find some miraculous way to rescue these doomed talks before the end of April.

After so many years of conflict and twenty years of “peace process”, did John Kerry really believe he was ever going to wrap things up in nine months with no loose ends?

In international conflict resolution situations the spotlight is naturally on the lead players; in this case Messrs Netanyahu and Abbas. The teams behind them doing the real work seldom get much recognition but their bosses get the credit or the blame in the end-game.

What the media-led frenzie usually forgets is that neither leader acts alone. Both Netanyahu and Abbas have to answer to their political constituencies for decisions they make — decisions which thoseconstituencies can reject, swiftly returning us to square one.

The hard truth is that neither of the two leaders can accept what is on offer from Washington. Aside from the fact that the two negotiating teams have not spoken face to face for weeks, both have come under immense pressure to perform what is essentially face-saving for Obama and Kerry.

http://americanthinker.com/assets/3rd_party/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/03/the_coming_paradigm_shift_on_climate_.html
The just-published NIPCC reports may lead to a paradigm shift about what or who causes current climate changes. All the evidence suggests that Nature rules the climate – not Man.

Watch for it: We may be on the threshold of a tipping point in climate history. No, I’m not talking about a tipping point in the sense that the Earth will be covered with ice or become hellishly hot. I’m talking about a tipping point in our views of what controls the climate — whether it’s mainly humans or whether it’s mainly natural. It makes an enormous difference in climate policy: Do we try to mitigate, at huge cost, or do we merely adapt to natural changes — as our ancestors did for many millennia?

Such tipping points occur quite frequently in science. I have personally witnessed two paradigm shifts where world scientific opinion changed rapidly — almost overnight. One was in Cosmology, where the “Steady State” theory of the Universe was replaced by the “Big Bang.” This shift was confirmed by the discovery of the “microwave background radiation,” which has already garnered Nobel prizes, and will likely get more.

The other major shift occurred in Continental Drift. After being denounced by the Science Establishment, the hypothesis of Alfred Wegener, initially based on approximate relations between South America and Africa, was dramatically confirmed by the discovery of “sea-floor spreading.”

These shifts were possible because there were no commercial or financial interests — and they did not involve the public and politicians. But climate is a different animal: The financial stakes are huge — in the trillions of dollars, and affect energy policy, and indeed the economic wellbeing of every inhabitant of the developed and developing world. For example, the conversion into ethanol fuel of a substantial portion of the US corn crop raised the price of tortillas in Mexico and caused food riots.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/374292/print

On January 23, 1980, Jimmy Carter delivered his final State of the Union address. It was a difficult time: Iran held American diplomats captive, and the Soviet Union had just invaded Afghanistan. “As we meet tonight,” the president told the assembled members of Congress, “it has never been more clear that the state of our Union depends on the state of the world.”

Carter, who had devoted the first part of his presidency to domestic reforms and arms control, was now prepared to act decisively; his eyes had been opened by the Russian move into Afghanistan, which he described as a “radical and aggressive step.” He imposed a number of stiff economic sanctions on the USSR, from denying fishing rights to shutting down access to high-technology equipment, and asked the Europeans not to “replace our embargoed items.” He articulated a “Carter Doctrine,” asserting that the United States would not countenance disproportionate Russian influence in the Middle East. But most of all, he moved to swiftly rebuild U.S. military strength, creating the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force, the precursor to today’s U.S. Central Command, and proposing a 5 percent annual increase in defense spending — the precursor to the Reagan-era buildup.

But where Carter moved to restore the sinews of America’s weakened armed forces, today we adhere to the constraints of a Budget Control Act that is steadily eviscerating a battle-tested professional force. Carter, in the final year of what would prove to be a single term as president, took steps to create new options for future commanders-in-chief. Barack Obama, with three years left, appears resolutely committed to foreclosing American military options.

However, thanks to the constitutional separation of powers and the competition of our political parties, the president’s weaknesses need not be the final word on such matters. It is the duty of Congress “to raise and support Armies,” “to provide and maintain a Navy,” and to provide for the common defense. And it is the duty of the loyal opposition to make the arguments that might correct the course of failing policies.