RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/wisconsin-2014-candidates-for-congress-where-they-stand?f=puball

Primary: August 12

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 (**).

SENATE
Ron Johnson (R) Next Election in 2016.
Tammy Baldwin (D)Next Election in 2018.

U.S. CONGRESS

District 1

Paul Ryan (R) Incumbent

http://paulryan.house.gov/ http://www.ryanforcongress.com/

http://www.ontheissues.org/House/Paul_Ryan.htm/** Rated -3 by AAI, indicating anti-Arab anti-Palestine voting record. (May 2012)

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/what-makes-some-british-muslims-become-jihadis?f=puball

“The experience of many ages proves that men may be ready to fight to the death, and to persecute without pity, for a religion whose creed they do not understand, and whose precepts they habitually disobey.”

So wrote Thomas Babbington Macaulay, the Whig MP, historian and poet, in 1848; and, as usual, he was spot on. A leaked MI5 report on the profile of British jihadis made the same observation in more pedestrian prose. “Far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practise their faith regularly.”

Mehdi Hassan has a fascinating piece in the Huffington Post, in which he reveals the books that two Brummie Muslims had ordered from Amazon before heading out to join the insurgents in Syria. Yusuf Sarwar and Mohammed Ahmed, who pleaded guilty to terrorism offences last month, had not bought works on politics or advanced theology, but Islam for Dummies and The Koran for Dummies. Dummies indeed.

An alarming number of our young men – boys born and brought up in the United Kingdom – are involved with extremist paramilitaries in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. There are credible estimates that more British Muslims are fighting with Islamic State (formerly ISIS) than serving in the Armed Forces. As Douglas Murray writes in the current Spectator, this isn’t even the first time that a British Muslim has arranged for the beheading of an American journalist.

What is pushing these youths into violence? Is it something in their religion, something in their socio-economic circumstances, something in their character, or something else entirely?

There are evidently several factors at work, and we should be wary of oversimplifying, but one observation made by almost all the experts who have studied Western-born Islamic militants is that they fit the classic profile of the terrorist down the ages: male, typically in their twenties or early thirties, with some education, narcissistic, lacking in empathy, lonely, unsuccessful with women, often with a history of petty crime.

What makes a terrorist different from other bellicose young men is that he has found a cause that validates his anti-social tendencies – a doctrine that teaches him that he is angry, not because there’s something wrong with him, but because there’s something wrong with everyone else. Islamic State thugs, like Baader-Meinhof gangsters, IRA gunmen, Red Brigaders or nineteenth century anarchists, are convinced that they can see things more keenly than others, and that this clarity of vision elevates and ennobles their aggression.

Most Americans oppose tax-funded support for insurance companies that lose money under Obamacare.

When Congress reconvenes on Monday, September 8, Republicans should fire a torpedo directly into the USS Obamacare. It would blast the creaking vessel’s hull well below the waterline and possibly flood the engine room. And for this, a recent survey reveals, Americans of all stripes would cheer wildly.

Republicans must sink the Obamacare bailout. Believe it or not, Obamacare forces taxpayers to help health-insurance companies absorb significant losses that they incur through Obama’s medical scheme. According to the House Government Oversight Committee, this could cost $1 billion this year alone. This outrage — lodged on page 233 of the original 2,409-page Obamacare bill — would be awful enough if these insurers were prosperous, albeit unwitting, victims of Obama’s $2.6 trillion entitlement. Instead, insurance companies helped pile-drive Obamacare down the throats of Americans, a majority of whom opposed this legislation and loathe it more today than yesterday. Hard data now demonstrate that Americans hate the Obamacare bailout — all across the political spectrum.

McLaughlin & Associates surveyed 1,000 likely voters last June. It asked a simple, straightforward question:

“If private insurance companies lose money selling health insurance under Obamacare, should taxpayers help cover their losses?”

The reaction was volcanic.

McLaughlin found that 81.2 percent of respondents said “No” to this concept, while only 9.9 percent approved. Another 8.9 percent were not sure what to think.

For the president, belief in historical predetermination substitutes for action.
President Obama doesn’t know much about history.

In his therapeutic 2009 Cairo speech, Obama outlined all sorts of Islamic intellectual and technological pedigrees, several of which were undeserved. He exaggerated Muslim contributions to printing and medicine, for example, and was flat-out wrong about the catalysts for the European Renaissance and Enlightenment.

He also believes history follows some predetermined course, as if things always get better on their own. Obama often praises those he pronounces to be on the “right side of history.” He also chastises others for being on the “wrong side of history” — as if evil is vanished and the good thrives on autopilot.

When in 2009 millions of Iranians took to the streets to protest the thuggish theocracy, they wanted immediate U.S. support. Instead, Obama belatedly offered them banalities suggesting that in the end, they would end up “on the right side of history.” Iranian reformers may indeed end up there, but it will not be because of some righteous inanimate force of history, or the prognostications of Barack Obama.

Obama often parrots Martin Luther King Jr.’s phrase about the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice. But King used that metaphor as an incentive to act, not as reassurance that matters will follow an inevitably positive course.

Another of Obama’s historical refrains is his frequent sermon about behavior that doesn’t belong in the 21st century. At various times he has lectured that the barbarous aggression of Vladimir Putin or the Islamic State has no place in our century and will “ultimately fail” — as if we are all now sophisticates of an age that has at last transcended retrograde brutality and savagery.

Can’t get two-third of the Senate to approve a bit of Green Legislation you favor? No problem, if you’re willing to entirely jettison the Constitution.

Do you remember this bit from the Constitution of the United States?

[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; . . .

That’s the so-called “Treaty Clause” from Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the Constitution. It is one of several checks on executive power thoughtfully provided by the Founders but flouted by the Golfer-in-Chief currently occupying the White House.

Can’t get two-thirds of the Senate to approve a bit of Green Legislation you favor? No problem! Just pretend that the United States of America is subject not to its Constitution but to the transnational organization of gangsters, kleptocracies, and Third-World dictatorships known as the Untied Nations.

Sound extreme? We can talk about the composition of the Untied Nations another time. But when it comes to Barack Obama’s cavalier treatment of the Constitution, you need look no further than this morning’s New York Times. Under the headline “Obama Pursuing Climate Accord in Lieu of Treaty,” [1] the paper explains how the president, frustrated by Congress’s unwillingness to barter away U.S. sovereignty by signing on to the so-called “Kyoto Protocol [2],” the economy blighting climate standards devised by Greenies and other folks eager to hamstring the world’s most productive economies, especially the Untied States, is planning to “sidestep” Congress.

It’s written in soporific journalese, but it is an explosive story:

When a drone operator follows a strike order that kills 13 Afghans, he comes undone. Sounds like a plot from ‘Homeland’ or ’24.’

Since antiquity, storytellers have cautioned us about the hazards of men using technology to trespass into realms where only the gods are allowed. For giving man fire, Zeus condemned Prometheus to an eternity chained to a rock with an eagle pecking at his liver. Daedalus’s clever wings melted when his son Icarus flew too close to the sun.

Dan Fesperman’s excellent and timely ninth thriller, “Unmanned,” isn’t quite so archetypal, but it does explore the ethical conundrums of the most potent new weapon in the American arsenal: the unmanned aerial drone. Watching our enemy from the sky is one thing, but what if those same eyes are looking down at us? And who is watching the watchers? “Unmanned” is a smart and thoughtful exploration of the unintended consequences of waging war by remote control.

While the technical details of this exhaustively researched book certainly contribute to its authenticity—the author is a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun—it is his sharply drawn characters that make the novel tick. Capt. Darwin Cole’s transition from F-16 fighter jock to Predator drone operator is going smoothly: He conducts missions against terrorists thousands of miles away from behind a screen in the Nevada desert. “Each twitch of his hand,” Mr. Fesperman writes of Cole’s work, “flings a signal of war across the nation’s night owls as they make love, make a sandwich, make a mess of things, or click the remote.”

Everything changes when Cole receives a command via Internet chat from his mysterious J-TAC, or joint terminal attack controller, whom he has never met, to fire at a target in Afghanistan. The result is 13 civilian deaths, among them several children that he has become familiar with while monitoring the village of Sandar Khosh. Cole is especially haunted by the pixilated image of a young girl whose arm is severed at the shoulder yet who manages to survive the strike. She is, in the grim vernacular of drone warfare, a “squirter,” a person who has escaped the strike and is “so called because on infrared they display as squibs of light, streaming from the action like raindrops across a windshield.”

Islamic State militants have overrun parts of Iraq and Syrian provinces such as Raqqa, above, capturing munitions. The group, formerly known as ISIS or ISIL, raises money through extortion, oil pirating and kidnapping. Reuters

The Islamic State runs a self-sustaining economy across territory it controls in Syria and Iraq, pirating oil while exacting tribute from a population of at least eight million, Arab and Western officials said, making it one of the world’s richest terror groups and an unprecedented threat.

That illicit economy presents a new picture of Islamic State’s financial underpinnings. The group was once thought to depend on funding from Arab Gulf donors and donations from the broader Muslim world. Now, Islamic State—the former branch of al Qaeda that has swallowed parts of Iraq and Syria—is a largely self-financed organization.

Money from outside donors “pales in comparison to their self-funding through criminal and terrorist activities,” a U.S. State Department official said, adding that those activities generate millions of dollars a month.

For Western and Arab nations that are striving to stop Islamic State, the group’s local funding sources pose a conundrum: A clampdown on economic activity that helps fund the group, counterterrorism officials and experts said, could cause a humanitarian crisis in the already stressed areas it controls.

“Can you prevent ISIS from taking assets? Not really, because they’re sitting on a lot of assets already,” said a Western counterterrorism official. “So you must disrupt the network of trade. But if you disrupt trade in commodities like food, for example, then you risk starving thousands of civilians.”

The government of the United States is suing the town of St. Anthony, Minnesota, a Twin Cities suburb with a population a little over 8,000, to force the town to allow development of an Islamic center in an area reserved for industrial development. It is a minor news story, but one that sheds light on broader legal and cultural trends. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports:

The federal government on Wednesday sued the small north-metro city of St. Anthony, contending that its City Council violated federal law in 2012 by rejecting a proposed Islamic center. …

“An injustice has been done,” U.S. Attorney Andy Luger said at a news conference in Minneapolis. “I will not stand by while any religious group is subject to unconstitutional treatment that violates federal civil rights laws.”

Actually, DOJ happily stood by when the city previously denied a Christian group the use of the same space. Mr. Luger didn’t mention that in his pretentious announcement.

The lawsuit alleges that the council’s decision to deny the Abu Huraira Islamic Center the right to establish a worship center in the basement of the St. Anthony Business Center violates the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act passed by Congress in 2000.

Like me, you probably have never heard of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. I haven’t studied it, but, according to the DOJ’s web site, it prohibits zoning laws that “treat churches or other religious assemblies or institutions on less than equal terms with nonreligious institutions.” So it may actually apply here. Although, of course, no one worried about that when a Christian group was being turned down.

Apparently the Religious Land Use statute is being used by the federal government around the country to force acceptance of Islamic centers, contrary to local zoning regulations:

It marks the first time federal prosecutors have sued a Minnesota city citing the law, although the Justice Department has filed similar suits elsewhere in the country on behalf of Islamic centers, according to a U.S. attorney’s office spokesman.

It is important to note that these cease-fire demands are not part of Hamas’s or Islamic Jihad’s overall strategy, namely to have Israel wiped off the face of the earth.

Many foreign journalists who came to cover the war in the Gaza trip were under the false impression that it was all about improving living conditions for the Palestinians by opening border crossings and building an airport and seaport. These journalists really believed that once the demands of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad are accepted, this would pave the way for peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

To understand the true intention of Hamas and its allies, it is sufficient to follow the statements made by their leaders after the cease-fire announcement this week. To his credit, Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s leader, has never concealed Hamas’s desire to destroy Israel.

Hamas and its allies see the war in the Gaza Strip as part of there strategy to destroy Israel. What Hamas and its allies are actually saying is, “Give us open borders and an airport and seaport so we can use them to prepare for the next was against Israel.”

Statements made by Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders and spokesmen following the announcement of the long-term cease-fire agreement with Israel this week serve as a reminder of their true intentions and strategy.

Over the past two months, the two groups, together with several armed factions in the Gaza Strip, repeatedly announced that their main goal was to end the “siege” on the Gaza Strip and build their own airport and seaport.

During the cease-fire talks in Cairo, the Palestinian groups repeatedly and stubbornly insisted that complying with these demands, along with opening all the border crossings with the Gaza Strip, was the only way to end the violence and achieve a long-term cease-fire with Israel.

However, it is important to note that these cease-fire demands are not part of Hamas’s or Islamic Jihad’s overall strategy, namely to have Israel wiped off the face of the earth.

Hamas and its allies in the Gaza Strip are not only fighting for an airport and seaport. Nor are they fighting only for the reopening of all border crossings with Israel and Egypt.

Mark Twain has often been appropriately recognized as a friend, admirer and defender of the Jewish people. However, commonly overlooked has been his understanding of values and perspectives that are deeply ingrained in Jewish thought. This is a subject I will deal with here and which I believe will reveal some remarkable insights by Twain in his well acclaimed historical essay in Harpers, “Concerning the Jew.”

In the essay Twain delineates a number of characteristics of Jews reflective of their cultural heritage that he extols most highly. These include citizenship, family cohesion, honesty in business and an overall intelligence in business and life. One trait, however, that he doesn’t mention and which ironically is exhibited through his own life is a capacity for human or spiritual growth. In Judaism this is powered by “oral Torah” or the ongoing effort to interpret the Torah in expanded ways in light of continuing experiences. In his own life Twain experienced enormous growth through his life experiences which although infinitesimal compared to the cultural experiences of the Jews throughout time are nonetheless in the same direction. This is well reflected in his “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” where the character spiritually matures through his experiences.Upon considering the first of these characteristics “citizenship” Twain in his essay remarks on the low crime and high sense of order within the Jewish community. Here we may observe that the Torah itself warns that one should not place a stumbling block in the path of the blind, which becomes a metaphorical model against exploiting the vulnerable of helpless.