RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/367985/print

Obamacare’s Cornhusker Nemesis by John Miller
It’s not easy to pile up more than 20,000 sheets of paper — the number of pages of regulations associated with Obamacare, according to some estimates. Yet it’s an effective prop for Ben Sasse, a Republican running for Senate in Nebraska. “This is a picture of what government can’t do well, wasn’t built to do, and inevitably fails at,” he says, gesturing toward the tower of paper. At full height, the pages stand more than nine feet tall. On the evening of December 17, in the First National Bank of Holdrege with its eight-foot ceiling, the top segment has to rest on a nearby table. “Government this big squashes freedom,” says Sasse. A man in the audience senses a more imminent threat: “I’m hoping that stack doesn’t fall on you!” It stays up during an hour-long town-hall meeting in part because a pipe runs through the middle of the pages like a spine, holding them together. Aides wheel the contraption around on a dolly and store it in the bowels of the campaign’s RV.

Sasse is betting that deep discontent with Obamacare will drive him into the Senate later this year. Nebraska is all but certain to elect a Republican to succeed retiring GOP senator Mike Johanns, so the state’s main election will take place on May 13, when Sasse squares off against banker Sid Dinsdale, former state treasurer Shane Osborn, and two other Republicans in this year’s first truly contested Senate primary. Between now and then, each candidate will position himself as a conservative and rail against Obamacare. With Sasse, however, Nebraska Republicans have an opportunity to do more: They can elect not merely a man who promises to vote for the repeal of President Obama’s signature policy achievement, but a senator who almost immediately would become one of the GOP’s most visible and articulate experts on the health-care law’s defects and the ways to replace it.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

NO SECOND GUESSING HERE

Lynne Stewart suggested that maintaining the blind sheikh’s “exchange value” was part of her job. “It could be very important that that person is still perceived as worth exchanging, perhaps, for someone else,” she suggested.

A year after Rahman was sentenced to life in prison, terrorists from his Muslim Brotherhood splinter organization, the Islamic Group, carried out the Luxor Massacre in Egypt. European tourists had their ears and noses cut off before being killed. The attack had been carried out to take hostages to exchange for Lynne Stewart’s client. A note calling for the release of Rahman was found in a disemboweled body.

When asked about the Luxor Massacre, Stewart accused Americans of being “two-faced about violence” adding that, “The basic desire of people to be free hasn’t changed. And I’m not sure that I want to second-guess what methods other people use.”

In the massacre that Lynne Stewart refused to second-guess; the methods included the murder of Shaunnah Turner, a 5-year-old girl.

rhttp://bit.ly/1cJUsj9

Secretary of State, John Kerry, is preoccupied with the attempt to establish a Palestinian state, as a means to advance peace and US interests. However, Congress – which is charged by the Constitution with supervising the Administration – has yet to conduct hearings on the impact of the proposed Palestinian state upon vital US interests. Congress cannot relinquish its constitutional responsibility to probe, independently, the critical implications of a Palestinian state upon the US economy, core values, homeland and national security, as well as upon the stability of pro-US Arab regimes, in particular, and the Middle East in general.

Independent Congressional scrutiny of this Palestinian state-driven policy is doubly-essential against the backdrop of the systematic US Middle East policy failures since 1947.

The US Administration Track Record

In 1948, the US State Department opposed the establishment of a Jewish state. Assuming that Israel would be an ally of the Communist Bloc, and expecting Israel to be devastated by the invading Arab armies, the Administration imposed a regional military embargo, while the British supplied arms to Jordan, Iraq and Egypt.

During the 1950s, the US Administration courted the Egyptian dictator, Nasser, in an attempt to remove him from Soviet influence, offering financial aid and pressuring Israel to “end the occupation of the Negev,” internationalize Western Jerusalem and evacuate the whole of Sinai. Instead, Nasser intensified his pro-USSR policy, subversion of pro-US Arab regimes and support of Palestinian terrorism.

During the 1970s and 1980s, until the invasion of Kuwait, the US Administration supported Saddam Hussein through an intelligence-sharing agreement, the transfer of sensitive dual-use US technologies and approval of five billion dollar loan guarantees.

In 1977, the Administration, initially, opposed the Begin-Sadat peace initiative, lobbied for an international conference, and finally jumped on the peace bandwagon.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Into-the-fray-Sovereignty-Yes-but-look-before-you-leap-337716

Extending Jewish sovereignty over Judea-Samaria is imperative, but some proposals for this imperil Israel no less than the two-state folly.

No one has a job over there… They are shooting at each other. There are drugs. They burn cars. Enough is enough.

– a Swedish citizen, cited in The New York Times, February 26, 2011, on the impact of Muslim immigration.

Lebanonization refers to the [situation] within a single country so riven with religious and other disputes that the country becomes impossible to govern.

– A.M. Rosenthal, cited by William Safire in the New York Times, April 21, 1991.

Two apparently unrelated events occurred over the past week or so.
The one was the publication of the second issue of the political journal Sovereignty by Women in Green and the Forum for Sovereignty, which carried various proposals for alternatives to the two-state paradigm that has dominated – or rather tyrannized – the public debate on the Palestinian question for almost a quarter century.

The other was a visit to Israel by two Scandinavian journalists (one Danish, the other Swedish), who gave a hair-raising account of the influence the massive Muslim migration into their countries is having on their societies at virtually every level.

Despite these two events being seemingly entirely unconnected, they are in closely linked, and Israelis – particularly opponents of the two-state principle – will ignore this at their peril.

  http://www.nationalreview.com/article/368176/new-scandal-same-old-christie-andrew-c-mccarthy New Scandal, Same Old Christie It’s not the first time a top official has been fired for lying to the governor. After swiftly dismissing a top official in his administration, Chris Christie was characteristically caustic when pressed by the press for the lesson to be drawn from the scandal: “Don’t lie to the […]