RUTHFULLY YOURS

The EPA wants to redefine ‘the waters of the United States’ to mean virtually any wet spot in the country.

Earlier this year the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers proposed a rule redefining the “waters of the United States” that are subject to regulation under the Clean Water Act. The two agencies recently finished collecting public comments on their draft rule and are deciding how to proceed. Their best course is to abandon the rule or anything like it. Here’s why:

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy wrote in Huffington Post in March that the draft rule would clarify the meaning of the relevant terms in the law without expanding federal jurisdiction and promised it would “save us time, keep money in our pockets, cut red tape, [and] give certainty to business.” None of this is true.

The Clean Water Act of 1972 prohibits discharges into “navigable waters” without a federal permit, defining “navigable waters” as “waters of the United States.” Initially the Army Corps and EPA interpreted waters of the U.S. to mean those that could be used as channels of navigation for interstate commerce. This reading is logical and necessary because the Clean Water Act is authorized by Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce—which as Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), includes the transport of passengers and goods across state lines but not the commercial or noncommercial activity within a single state.

Within a few years, however, the two agencies claimed regulatory authority over wetlands and other nonnavigable waters that had no significant connection to interstate commerce. The Supreme Court has twice rejected these claims.

In SWANCC v. Army Corps of Engineers (2001), the court forbade the Army Corps from regulating “isolated water bodies” that were not connected to traditional navigable waters. Nevertheless, the Army Corps and EPA have largely ignored or circumvented the ruling with new interpretations. They claimed that they could regulate anything with a “hydrological connection” to traditional navigable waters—including normally dry-land features such as arroyos in the desert as well as ditches and culverts hundreds of miles from traditional navigable waters.

The payment system is forcing doctors to sell out to hospitals. The trend, and the law, will be unstoppable without reform.

Dr. Gottlieb, a physician and resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is a member of the Health IT Policy Committee that advises the Department of Health and Human Services. He also invests in and advises health-care companies.

Here’s a dirty little secret about recent attempts to fix ObamaCare. The “reforms,” approved by Senate and House leaders this summer and set to advance in the next Congress, adopt many of the Medicare payment reforms already in the Affordable Care Act. Both favor the consolidation of previously independent doctors into salaried roles inside larger institutions, usually tied to a central hospital, in effect ending independent medical practices.

Republicans must embrace a different vision to this forced reorganization of how medicine is practiced in America if they want to offer an alternative to ObamaCare. The law’s defenders view this consolidation as a necessary step to enable payment provisions that shift the financial risk of delivering medical care onto providers and away from government programs like Medicare. The law’s architects believe that doctors, to better bear financial risk, need to be part of larger, and presumably better-capitalized institutions. Indeed, the law has already gone a long way in achieving that outcome.

A recent Physicians Foundation survey of some 20,000 U.S. doctors found that 35% described themselves as independent, down from 49% in 2012 and 62% in 2008. Once independent doctors become the exception rather than the rule, the continued advance of the ObamaCare agenda will become virtually unstoppable.

Local competition between providers, who vie to contract with health plans, is largely eliminated by these consolidated health systems. Since all health care is local, the lack of competition will soon make it much harder to implement a market-based alternative to ObamaCare. The resulting medical monopolies will make more regulation the most obvious solution to the inevitable cost and quality problems.

A true legislative alternative to ObamaCare would support physician ownership of independent medical practices, and preserve local competition between doctors and choice for patients.

First, Congress should remove the pervasive biases in ObamaCare that favor hospital ownership of medical practices. Payment reforms that create incentives for the coordinated delivery of medical care (like Accountable Care Organizations and payment “bundles”) all turn on arrangements where a single institution owns the doctors. They’re biased against less centralized engagements where independent doctors enter into contractual relationships among themselves.

“One of the main reasons why anything run by the government is hopelessly cost-ineffective is because the state invariably employs many more people than are necessary for the job.”

[T]he suppression of the minority of exploiters, by the majority of the wage slaves of yesterday, is a matter comparatively so easy, simple, and natural that it will cost far less bloodshed… and will cost mankind far less.

Lenin wrote this in The State and Revolution (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) .

In the end, 66 million people were killed in the USSR between 1917 and 1959: tortured, shot, starved, frozen or worked to death. This figure was calculated by Professor of Statistics I. A. Kurganov and quoted by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) .

Others say that the figure is 45 million, still others 20 million. The lower figures may be due to the fact that they only refer to deaths caused by Stalin, and don’t include the pre-Stalin and post-Stalin periods of the Soviet Union.

None of them includes the tens of millions of deaths of the Second World War.

If 60 million were indeed killed from 1917 to 1959, an average of 2 million were killed during each year of Stalin’s horrendous rule – or 40,000 every week (even during “peacetime”).

If the real number is 20 million, that still means 1,830 deaths every single day.

And they were not just “the minority of exploiters”, as Lenin put it. They were peasants, workers, middle class people.

That eventually was the blood and human cost that Lenin considered “natural” and negligible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzHzxwQBJLU#t=258

Dear friends,

Many of my Israeli lefti friends love to hate Naftali Bennett. I think I know why. I also know that all, if not most of them, never bothered to listen to what he has to say. Had they listened with open minds, many of their views might have changed.

Israel’s Economy Minister Naftali Bennett is participating in the Saban Forum with many leaders of the Israeli left. Saban, a close friend of the Clintons, is a supporter of the Israeli left which advocates “TSS” (Two States Solution) i.e. handing over to the Arabs tangible lands in the heart of Israel in lieu of “peace” promises.

The Forum is organized in DC by the Brookings Institute and hosted by Martin S. Indyk, a controversial former US Ambassador to Israel and adviser to President Obama, who supports TSS and favors Arab positions over Israeli ones. Mr. Indyk was the US envoy to the failed negotiations between the “Palestinians” and Israel, and in part responsible for their failure. He carries a big grudge against the Israeli “right” to which Naftali Bennett belongs.

The following link will take you to an interview with Naftali Bennett, hosted by Martin S. Indyk. This is a riveting discussion between two diametrically opposing views that will shape the future of Israel and may seal its fate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzHzxwQBJLU#t=258

Your Truth Provider,

Yuval.

No, I have not seen it yet and this is not a review, but coming to a theater near me in a few days is Director Ridley Scott’s new (and improved?) story of the Biblical Exodus, titled, well, “Exodus,” with this subtitle: “Gods and Kings.” Nice touch. Am I worried? Of course. Hollywood never gets it right.

First question: In this telling, will Moses be Jewish?

Next question: What took so long? With all this newfangled hi-tech gadgetry, the temptation must have been overwhelming to out-do Cecil. B. DeMille and even to surpass The Almighty Himself for “special effects.” This new rendering, from the preview that I saw, is bigger and louder than anything that came before; digital enhancement at its most ferocious.

But is it better? DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments” made many mistakes, but the 1956 spectacular was clear about Moses and Pharaoh. Moses was Jewish and so were the rest of us who followed him (along with the mixed multitudes). Pharaoh was Egyptian, and we could easily tell the good guys from the bad guys. DeMille, to his credit, did not fool around with this.

But times have changed and nothing goes without “the other side of the story” – moral equivalency.

Living in a world where evil and good are merely a toss of the dice, where does that leave those of us who choose sides – the side of Moses?
A few years ago, 2006, ABC-TV produced its own “Ten Commandments,” a two-part extravaganza sanitized to hurt nobody’s feelings. So Moses and Pharaoh were matched as ethically equal, and traces of religion were politically scrubbed. So Moses could have been anybody, and the Hebrew slaves? Throughout, they were called “the people.”

Reality vs. Virtual Reality.

In the mid-1960s, I quit taking photographs for publication for my employer, US News & World Report, in addition to my writing. With my trusty little 35mm Leica body and Nikor lenses, I had blossomed from a rank amateur to become quite proficient. There were even battlefield pictures although I was not, as we said then, a “bang-bang reporter”. I was doing more overall reporting and analysis of a complicated political as well as military war in Vietnam and still nominally “covering” the rest of South and Southeast Asia.

I quit for several reasons. I found that I was beginning to look at everything around me through an imaginary camera rangefinder, even before I put it to my eye. Just as I early in my reporting career had decided that voluminous notes were an impediment to writing a good story – important elements of “the story” would go in one ear and into my writing fingers and forgotten not to be adequately reconstructed from what was supposed to be a record. But if I listened carefully [and took down figures], I was more apt to get the essential significance and even the most important of the details of the story I was trying to follow and to write. That now seemed to be what was happening with my camera: I was losing the overall perspective on the scene I was observing with my attention drawn to how to record it with the camera..

There was another reason, as well. I found that nothing lied as much as a photograph, even perhaps more than words. Photographs are, after all, a minisecond of history of the scene presented. [It’s why I have always wondered if photography really is an art form; isn’t most of the best of photography accidental? When the new machine driven lenses with rapid shutter speeds came into mode, we joked that now Margaret Bourke White would bankrupt Time, Inc., with her film costs. She had already been noted as pointing her camera in a direction and taking photographs as fast as possible, eventually selecting one she thought better represented the scene.]

An iconic Madonna-like photo I took of a tribal mother in Laos with her child and the mist floating in behind her head was magnificent. [It was later included in a photographic insert in my book, A Sense of Asia, Chas. Scribner & Sons, 1969]. In fact, what the photograph camouflaged was the deplorable situation in that village including my Madonna figure’s surroundings – its lack of sanitation and food, the high prevalence of tuberculosis and other diseases, and frequent murderous attacks by the Vietnamese Communists.

Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, the Chief Political/Intelligence Officer of the British Mandate in Palestine, inspired the late Senator Daniel Inouye, who laid the foundation for the landmark US-Israel Strategic Partnership Act of 2014, which was overwhelmingly supported by Congress. The Act reflects Israel’s increasing and unique strategic contribution to vital US defense and commercial interests, and the mutually beneficial, two-way-street nature of the US-Israel relationship.

Col. Meinertzhagen’s Middle East Diary 1917-1956 is as relevant today, for the USA, as it was 80-100 years ago, for Britain, maintaining that a Jewish State would be the most reliable and effective beachhead of Western democracies in an area, which is vital to their critical economic and national security interests.

In 1923, Col. Meinertzhagen stated: “Britain will not be able to sustain its control of the Suez Canal [1882-1956] endlessly…. [Therefore], I’ve always considered the Land of Israel to be the key to the defense of the Middle East…. When a Jewish state will be established, Britain shall benefit from air force, naval and land bases… as well as Jewish fighting capabilities…. which will secure its long-term regional interests…. Unlike the Arabs, Jews are reliable and do comply with agreements…. Zionism is the hope for the reconstructed Jewish homeland; it is also a clear strategic benefit to the British Empire…. The British policy in the Middle East bets on the wrong horse, when appeasing the Arabs….”

In 1920, he wrote: “I firmly believe that a sovereign Jewish State shall be established in 20-30 years, militarily assaulted by all its Arab neighbors.” In 1919, he assessed that a long-term, and possibly insoluble, clash between Jewish and Arab nationalism was inevitable. He expected the Jews to prevail due to their impressive military track record in ancient times. Jewish quality would overcome the Arab quantity.

Islamic Literary Sources: What They Are — on The Glazov Gang
Scholar of Comparative Religion Anthony Rogers explains the theological materials that Muslims base their beliefs on.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/islamic-literary-sources-what-they-are-on-the-glazov-gang/

And don’t miss Mad World New’s Feature on The Glazov Gang, Louis Lionheart and Counter Jihad Coalition!!
http://madworldnews.com/man-warn-america-islam/

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/louisiana-2014-candidates-for-congress-where-they-stand?f=must_reads Was Congressman from District 6 Bill Cassidy M.D (R) http://billcassidy.com/ http://www.ontheissues.org/house/Bill_Cassidy.htm ** http://cassidy.house.gov/issues Rated -2 by AAI, indicating  anti-Arab anti-Palestine voting record. (May 2012) HOT BUTTON ISSUES ENERGY AND EPA REGULATIONS http://cassidy.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/cassidy-questions-epa-administrator-mccarthy-on-unfair-epa-regulations Dr. Cassidy released the following statement: March 2014 – “EPA routinely issues rules and regulations that are difficult to understand, hard to […]

Transcript of Joint Address to Congress Leading to a Declaration of War Against Japan (1941) by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Mr. Vice President, and Mr. Speaker, and Members of the Senate and House of Representatives:

Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.

The United States was at peace with that Nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its Government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific. Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons had commenced bombing in the American Island of Oahu, the Japanese Ambassador to the United States and his colleague delivered to our Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. And while this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or of armed attack.

It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time the Japanese Government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.

The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. In addition American ships have been reported torpedoed on the high seas between San Francisco and Honolulu.

Yesterday the Japanese Government also launched an attack against Malaya.
Last night Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong.
Last night Japanese forces attacked Guam.
Last night Japanese forces attacked the Philippine Islands.
Last night the Japanese attacked Wake Island. And this morning the Japanese attacked Midway Island.

Japan has, therefore, undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. The facts of yesterday and today speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our Nation.

As Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy I have directed that all measures be taken for our defense.

But always will our whole Nation remember the character of the onslaught against us.

No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. I believe that I interpret the will of the Congress and of the people when I assert that we will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost but will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.

Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.

With confidence in our armed forces—with the unbounding determination of our people—we will gain the inevitable triumph- so help us God.

I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.

Transcription courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.