RUTHFULLY YOURS

The administration has decided to send two officials to the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy ‎conference this week.

One is Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, ‎who once called for a U.N. military operation to drive Israel out of the West Bank. ‎The other is Susan Rice, the president’s national security adviser. Rice is best ‎known for lying on five Sunday network news shows in the same morning about ‎who was responsible for the Benghazi attack on Sept. 11, 2012, blaming it on ‎a video no one in the region had seen. This lie was needed to preserve the ‎mythology of the Barack Obama re-election campaign, that al-Qaida was defeated and on ‎the run. Rice, ever the loyal trooper (a good explanation, really the only one, for ‎her continual advancement up the ranks), made her contribution to ‎the current impasse between Israel and the United States this week by blasting the ‎government of Israel, claiming that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress will be a ‎‎”destructive force” in U.S. Israel relations. As Jennifer Rubin has accurately ‎described it, sending Rice to AIPAC is sticking a finger in AIPAC’s eye.‎

Why are tens of thousands of young Muslims leaving the safety of their homes to join Islamic State and wage jihad in Iraq and Syria? We’ve heard any number of excuses, including the view that it’s a result of poverty, a lack of educational opportunity and the absence of participatory government. But it’s hard to beat the explanations now offered for Mohammed Emwazi, better known as “Jihadi John” for his videotaped beheadings of Western captives.
The Kuwaiti-born Emwazi, now in his mid-20s, grew up in London and attended the University of Westminster. As early as 2009 British authorities suspected him of attempting to wage jihad abroad. In a 2009 email exchange with Cage, a U.K. advocacy outfit that campaigns against “state policies developed as part of the War on Terror,” Emwazi complained of rough treatment he allegedly received at the hand of interrogators from MI5, Britain’s domestic-security agency.

Boris Nemtsov threw his big body, big voice and big heart into the uphill battle to keep democracy alive in Russia.

Boris Nemtsov, my longtime friend and colleague in the Russian opposition, was murdered in the middle of Moscow on Friday night. Four bullets in the back ended his life in sight of the Kremlin, where he once worked as Boris Yeltsin ’s deputy prime minister. Photos showed a cleaning crew scrubbing his blood off the pavement within hours of the murder, so it is not difficult to imagine the quality of the investigation to come.

Vladimir Putin actually started, and ended, the inquiry while Boris’s body was still warm by calling the murder a “provocation,” the term of art for suggesting that the Russian president’s enemies are murdering one another to bring shame upon the shameless. He then brazenly sent his condolences to Boris’s mother, who had often warned her fearless son that his actions could get him killed in Putin’s Russia.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/02/26/former-sen-coburn-joins-american-transparency-to-open-govt-books/

Former Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, who highlighted wasteful government spending throughout his career, is joining the activist group American Transparency as its Honorary Chairman.

“Open the Books is doing the work I envisioned when the Coburn-Obama transparency bill became law,” Coburn says in a statement. “Their work is so important because so few groups – or elected officials – do it, and fewer do it well.”

Coburn’s landmark legislation, the “Google Your Government Act,” co-sponsored by then-Sen. Barack Obama, forced public disclosure of almost all federal government spending. American Transparency’s “Open The Books” project extends this idea through a searchable public database of nearly all federal and state government spending.

The database, which can be accessed through a mobile App, documents “all disclosed federal spending- contracts, loans, grants, farm subsidies, direct payments, insurance payments, salaries and bonuses since the year 2000.” It includes spending from 48 of 50 states and more than 500,000 local units of government.

“During my service I saw how small reforms, and discoveries, can generate huge savings and create greater opportunity and freedom for all Americans,” Coburn said. “I’m encouraged that Open the Books is accepting this challenge.”

The Open the Books project has documented potentially fraudulent farm subsidy payments and Small Business Administration loans.

“At OpenTheBooks.com, we are committed to carrying forward Coburn’s robust legacy,” said Adam Andrzejewski, Chair of American Transparency. “We deeply appreciate Dr. Coburn’s courage, principles and national leadership and are extremely privileged to have him as our Honorary Chairman.”