RUTHFULLY YOURS

That there is a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions in refugees fleeing Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and numerous African nations for Europe cannot be denied. That the causes of these flights are an insurgent, ISIS-run Islamic Caliphate that now controls territory In Syria and Iraq larger than Great Britain, ruthless dictators like Bashar al Assad in Syria and Omar Hassan al-Bashir in Sudan, and Islamic terrorism throughout the region is also undeniable. And we know that Islamic terrorist organizations will not let this crisis go to waste. They will insert terrorists and martyrs among the fleeing refugees, thereby increasing risks to the West.

The UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) have said there were 14.4 million refugees worldwide at the end of 2014, a 25% increase from 2013. Almost all have come from the Middle East and Africa, chased out by fear, famine and pestilence. Additionally, the number of internally displaced persons is put at 38.2 million. The situation has worsened in 2015.

The photograph of the body of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach near the town of Bodrum this past week tore at the heart strings of those in the West. It brought a personal element to one of the greatest human tragedies in recent times. This boy, with his Velcro sneakers and red shirt, could have been our son or grandson. In fact he was Syrian, trying to reach Europe when the boat he was on capsized, drowning him, his five-year-old brother and his mother. His father, Abdullah, alone of the family survived. But will that knowledge effect they way we treat the causes of this migration from Hell? Will we finally admit that those being tortured, killed and chased from their homes are not a consequence of “violent extremism,” but are victims of Islamic terrorism? Will we reconsider the role we have played in abetting this horror?

It’s time to give preference to immigrants who are unlikely to use welfare programs.
Two new reports from the Center for Immigration Studies show very high rates of welfare use by immigrants. The first, released last week, looked at all immigrant households, legal and illegal, and found that 51 percent accessed one or more welfare programs.

This week we released a second report, looking at the same data but separating out legal and illegal immigrants. While we found that illegal-immigrant households make significant use of welfare, here I want to focus on the far bigger problem of legal immigrants’ welfare use. Three-quarters of all immigrant households using welfare are headed by legal immigrants. Legal immigration is a discretionary policy that is supposed to benefit the country; we can allow in or keep out anyone we want. Yet our current legal-immigration system has produced a flow of immigrants in which a large share cannot support themselves or their children.

To study immigrant welfare use, we used the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation. Like other researchers, we identified legal and illegal immigrants based on various questions in the survey. We estimated that 49 percent of households headed by legal immigrants used one or more welfare programs in 2012, compared with 30 percent of households headed by the native-born. Legal immigrants have significantly higher use rates than native-born households overall and for cash programs, food programs, and Medicaid; use of housing programs is about the same as for natives. Among legal-immigrant households with children, the rate of welfare use is an astonishing 72 percent. There is no evidence that these numbers represent fraud; instead, they represent a profound problem with the selection criteria we use to admit legal immigrants.

In Senator Ted Cruz’s excellent Senate floor speech against President Obama’s catastrophic Iran deal, he urged Republican leadership – Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) and House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) – to reject the claim that Congress must vote on the deal in the next few days. He is absolutely right. By the unambiguous terms of the Corker law, the period for congressional review of the Iran deal has never begun because Obama has failed to provide the entirety of it.

This maneuver has the normally sensible Jen Rubin ballistic. At her Washington Post blog, Jen inveighs that Cruz is guilty of a “singular act of betrayal of anti-Iran forces” that has “incensed” at least one unidentified official of a pro-Israel group, who insists, “If you loathe the deal, the only course of action is to demand an up or down vote on the resolution of disapproval.”

That is ridiculous. If you loathe the deal, as Cruz plainly does (watch his speech if you have any doubt), the objective should be to derail the deal. By contrast, Jen and her sources, including Josh Block of the Israel Project, maintain that the objective is to move as quickly as possible to a vote on the resolution of disapproval – a vote that anti-Iranian forces will lose thanks to the truly loathsome Corker review process that enables Obama’s deal to win with just 34 votes. Obama already has commitments from 42 Democrat

With increasingly implausible excuses, she just keeps digging herself a deeper hole. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s purported state of mind made perfect sense as she became America’s top diplomat on January 21, 2009.

“I was not thinking a lot when I got in,” Clinton reminisced with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell on Friday. Reflecting on her early days as secretary of state, Clinton added, “There was so much work to be done. We had so many problems around the world. I didn’t really stop and think what kind of e-mail system will there be.”

Naturally, Clinton wanted to pursue urgent diplomatic matters, such as launching a “Russian reset” with Vladimir Putin, managing America’s difficult relationship with Syria’s Bashar Assad (whom she referred to as “a reformer”), and tightening security at U.S. diplomatic outposts, not least the consulate at Benghazi, Libya.

If only Clinton’s behavior matched her sentiments.

Given this pressing business, it would have been logical for Clinton to rely on the State Department’s normal e-mail procedures. She would have received a state.gov e-mail address. Her classified messages would have zipped exclusively along secure government connections and landed on encrypted federal servers. All of this would have been tended to by diplo-geeks under her command, during regular office hours.

In nearly all of his speeches on the campaign trail, Ben Carson sketches the following scene: When a four-year-old boy was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1985, doctors across the city of Atlanta told his parents to prepare for the end. But the couple, armed with what Carson calls “an unshakeable faith,” journeyed with their son from Georgia to Johns Hopkins University’s Pediatric Neurosurgery Center in Baltimore.

There, after troubling scans and an unsuccessful operation, even Carson warned the couple there was little hope for their son. In Carson’s telling, the parents responded firmly, “The Lord is going to heal him, and he’s going to use you to do it.” Carson went on to remove the tumor. He calls the event a “revelation.”

The patient, Christopher Pylant, calls it a “miracle.”

Now 34 years old and living in Lakeland, Fla., Pylant has devoted his life to God. A graduate of Southeastern University with a degree in practical theology, he ministers to Christian congregations and youth groups across Florida. Two years ago, he published a book, along with his late father, Neal Pylant, called A Touch from Heaven: A Little Boy’s Story of Surgery, Heaven and Healing. Carson wrote the foreword.

“I feel very honored that Dr. Carson tells my story,” Pylant says. “I feel blessed to be a part of his life, to have even a small portion of the impact on him that he’s had on me.” Since his surgery 30 years ago, Pylant says the two have maintained a “great rapport.” When he graduated high school, Pylant says he sent Carson a photograph that Carson later kept on the desk in his office.

Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) provided air support for a revolt underway in the House today, as he called on Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to stop the Iran deal by refusing to hold a vote on the agreement.

Cruz’s mention of GOP leadership drew boos at Wednesday’s rally against the Iran deal on Capitol Hill, which he helped organize. “Hold on: I come not to bury Caesar but to praise him,” Cruz said, quoting from William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. “I want to give a path forward. There are two men in Washington, D.C., who can defeat this deal. Their names are Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker John Boehner.”

Cruz noted that Obama has not provided Congress with side agreements negotiated between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency, as required by the legislation that established a process for Congress to review the larger deal. “What that means is that all that has to happen is for Mitch McConnell and John Boehner to say, ‘The congressional review period has not started. Under federal law it is illegal for Obama to lift sanctions,’” he said. “Mitch McConnell and John Boehner can stop this deal if they simply enforce . . . federal law.”

Do you remember Lewis “Scooter” Libby?

In 2003, the Department of Justice appointed a special counsel to investigate allegations that Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, unlawfully disclosed the covert status of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

Yet Plame may not have been a covert undercover agent, based on the formal government definition of that role. And even if she were, it was widely known at the time that Secretary of State Colin Powell’s subordinate, Richard Armitage, had most likely disclosed her status earlier.

In other words, Libby was in an Orwellian position of being accused of a crime that may not have existed. But if it had, it was more likely committed by someone else.

Publicity-seeking special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald persuaded a Washington, D.C., jury to find Libby guilty of obstruction of justice, perjury, and making false statements to federal investigators — not the supposed crimes for which he was originally targeted by the media.

Apparently, the very suspicion of improper behavior by high public servants once warranted vigorous legal inquiry — by supposedly independent and autonomous prosecutors.

In the eight-plus years since the Libby trial, the Obama administration has blown up the law as we have known it for centuries.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2015/09/oxfam-part-2/

In case you missed part 1: https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2015/09/facts-go-begging-oxfams-fundraising/

Tony Thomas With Friends Like Oxfam…

The organisation’s fundraising literature and ad campaigns focus on helping the starving and wretched. How odd that its deep-green activism would make that poverty even worse by denying reliable power, development and jobs to the same Third World it professes to care so much about
Are you thinking of an annual donation to Oxfam Australia to help those dirt-poor people in the Third World? Actually, you would be helping to finance Oxfam’s dark-green push to destroy the Australian coal and petroleum industry. Oxfam’s latest climate document gloats that destroying these industries would represent a $100 billion per annum hit to the federal government’s export expectations.

“The shift to a 2degC [warming] pathway would see annual export revenue from coal, gas and iron ore fall to AUD100b less than the Australian government’s current projections ,” enthuses Oxfam’s climate guru, Dr Simon Bradshaw, who wants a zero-emissions Australia well before 2050. So who is Bradshaw? He’s a “climate leader” in Al Gore’s official team of global warming propagandists, also a climate campaigner for the Australian Conservation Foundation and a PhD (in philosophy) from Melbourne University, an institution which seems to specialise in promoting green zealotry and anti-growth ideologies (e.g. it now runs 1300 “sustainability” researchers at a cost of $218m p.a.).

Bradshaw did his thesis on contrasts between Tibetan ecology and “over-consumption in the modern industrial world”. As his thesis puts it:

On the one hand, our continued desire for growth at a time of ever more dire warnings of ecological collapse can look like collective insanity. However, a brief reflection on the complex and entrapping nature of modern economic systems soon serves to illustrate some of the difficulties in breaking free from the shackles of the past and moving beyond the growth economy ….

The result, to use a popular analogy, becomes something akin to thinking we are flying when in fact our aeroplane is plummeting from the skies, the ground rushing up ever more rapidly towards us. Strangely, only the more inquisitive or concerned are aware of what’s coming. The majority remain oblivious or choose to ignore the inevitable impending crash…

Meanwhile, within the world’s most ‘advanced’ and economically prosperous industrial nations, apparent rises in incidence of psychoses (including particularly depression) coupled with trends in obesity, marital break-up, heart disease, cancer, drug use, prisoner numbers and a variety of other societal ills suggest that ‘happiness’ is on the decline and give cause to re- evaluate the social success of capitalism….”

“The fruits of liberty enjoyed by Germans today are not Germany’s to squander in the first place. Every bit of this precious freedom was paid for in blood — from the beaches of Normandy to the pavements of the Warsaw Ghetto — often meter-by-meter with bare knuckles and bloody fists.As if history has come full circle, in the span of less than a century, Germany’s state institutions are folding again at the mere sight of an organized band of fascists.”

German, and possibly European, demographics are being set to change forever.

Conservative Islam, the one dominant in Germany, is incapable of thinking critically about its past.

“No one knows exactly what actually happens in Islamic classes in German primary schools.” — Abdel-Hakim Ourghi, head of the Faculty for Islamic Theology and Religious Studies at the Freiburg University of Education.

According to the report, the textbooks fail to “confront the problematic verses of Koran.” The curriculum also fails in its most important purpose — integrating Muslims into the German society — as it fails to reconcile the “Islamic faith of the students with the reality of the western society” they are living in.

By legitimizing extremist groups such as DITIB within German Muslim society as the sole legitimate representatives of Islam, the German government has marginalized genuine voices of reform and dissent within its Muslim population.

These courageous dissident Muslim men and women are left to face threats and intimidation on their own, while the government is busy appeasing the self-proclaimed leaders of the faith.

The New York Times reported last month that an IG investigation was looking into complaints that military officials skewed intelligence assessments about the United States-led campaign in Iraq against the Islamic State to provide a false, Obama-approved narrative about their progress.

Now, in an exclusive for the Daily Beast, Shane Harris and Nancy A. Youssef report on a “revolt” by more than 50 intelligence analysts who are sick and tired of seeing their honest assessments about the campaign turned into unrealistic “happy talk.”

The spooks working out of the U.S. military’s Central Command “have formally complained that their reports on ISIS and al Qaeda’s branch in Syria were being inappropriately altered by senior officials,” the Daily Beast reports.

Some of those CENTCOM analysts described the sizeable cadre of protesting analysts as a “revolt” by intelligence professionals who are paid to give their honest assessment, based on facts, and not to be influenced by national-level policy. The analysts have accused senior-level leaders, including the director of intelligence and his deputy in CENTCOM, of changing their analyses to be more in line with the Obama administration’s public contention that the fight against ISIS and al Qaeda is making progress. The analysts take a more pessimistic view about how military efforts to destroy the groups are going.