RUTHFULLY YOURS

Secretary of State John Kerry admitted to Al-Arabiya that it’s “very disturbing” how Ayatollah Ali Khamenei continues talking about destroying the U.S. and Israel after signing the P5+1 nuclear agreement.

Kerry said he would be pitching Gulf partners on “all of the ways in which this agreement, in fact, makes the Gulf states and the region safer.”

“I will also discuss with them at great length the things that the United States of America is going to do, working with them, in order to push back against the terror and counterterrorism efforts and other activities in the region that are very alarming to them,” he said, adding “it’s a chance for them to ask me any misgivings they have.”

US President Barack Obama hailed the recently concluded nuclear agreement in Vienna between the P5+1 world powers and Iran as a step towards a “more hopeful world.”

On July 14 CNN cited President Obama’s claim that, “This deal is not built on trust. It’s built on verification.” This nuclear agreement, however, seems to be predicated more on this administration’s proclivity towards building on hope. The Obama administration is hoping that an inspection regime by the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will accomplish under this agreement what the UN has failed to do for decades under the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) treaty. Their ultimate hope is that this agreement will foster political change within Iran during the coming decade – postulating that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may pass away and that a more vibrant Iranian economy will enable the “moderates” in Iran to gain power and change the nature of the regime. According to the administration’s thinking, this nuclear agreement will provide a back wind for Iran’s “moderate” President Rouhani to overcome the “hardliners” of the regime, and that an economic boom would force the Supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the bedrock of the Ayatollah’s support, to yield to the Iranian people’s demand for a relationship with the West, and thus end its hostility towards the US, particularly when US and Iranian interests, according to the Obama administration, converge on “defeating ISIL.”

Charming Chuck is running for re-election in 2016…..rsk

How the senator from New York could change the game in Congress if he has the guts.

In April 2010, following a series of deliberate slights and insults by the Obama administration directed at Israel and its prime minister, including a threat by the State Department that the depth of the US-Israel alliance would depend on the progress of peace talks, Senator Chuck Schumer, the Senate’s ranking Democrat and Obama ally placed a call to the White House. The senator had had just about enough. He informed White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel in no uncertain terms that the administration’s conduct was “counterproductive” and its attacks on Israel needed to stop immediately. But he didn’t stop there. He told the White House that if the State Department didn’t retract its deleterious statement concerning the US-Israel alliance, he would publicly “blast” the administration. The pressure worked and the White House backtracked.

Obama did everything he could to undermine Nigeria’s Christian president Jonathan Goodluck in his fight against the Islamic terrorists of Boko Haram. The administration kicked and screamed against even naming Boko Haram a terrorist organization. Every offer of aid was undermined with more claims that Nigeria was violating Muslim civil rights.

Finally Obama got what he wanted. Nigeria’s former Muslim dictator was “elected” and began promptly Islamizing key portions of the military. Then he came to Washington D.C. for a victory lap.

Obama on Monday offered strong support for Nigeria’s new president, Muhammadu Buhari, saying he had a “clear agenda” for defeating the militant Islamist group Boko Haram and was working to root out corruption.

We call the war of 1861 the Civil War. But is that right? A civil war is a struggle between two or more entities trying to take over the central government. Confederate President Jefferson Davis no more sought to take over Washington, D.C., than George Washington sought to take over London in 1776. Both wars, those of 1776 and 1861, were wars of independence. Such a recognition does not require one to sanction the horrors of slavery. We might ask, How much of the war was about slavery?

Was President Abraham Lincoln really for outlawing slavery? Let’s look at his words. In an 1858 letter, Lincoln said, “I have declared a thousand times, and now repeat that, in my opinion neither the General Government, nor any other power outside of the slave states, can constitutionally or rightfully interfere with slaves or slavery where it already exists.” In a Springfield, Illinois, speech, he explained: “My declarations upon this subject of Negro slavery may be misrepresented but cannot be misunderstood. I have said that I do not understand the Declaration (of Independence) to mean that all men were created equal in all respects.” Debating Sen. Stephen Douglas, Lincoln said, “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes nor of qualifying them to hold office nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”

Before and after 9/11, the FBI took a hard look at Youssef Abdulazeez because he had apparently donated money to Hamas through a front group. He went on a watch list. He went off the watch list. The FBI forgot about him until his son, Mohammod Youssef Abdulazeez, went on a Jihadist killing spree in Chattanooga.

Just like the Tsarnaev terrorists, the media is digging into the background of this dysfunctional Muslim family. We have learned that Youssef Abdulazeez liked to beat and rape his wife. He even wanted to get a second wife to rape and beat, as permitted “under Islamic law… in the parties’ native State of Palestine.” He also included some of his kids in his Koran-approved domestic abuse.

The family is issuing statements claiming that their son, like every Muslim terrorist ever, was suffering from “depression” and that Islam is a peaceful religion. But the father’s donations to Hamas and the rants about America, Israel and Europe on his family’s social media tell a very different story.

Officially, the rhetoric of the euro’s champions remains unchanged: the common currency is forging a new Continent by fostering its “ever-closer union”. As Greece’s endless travails and the reaction to them demonstrate, that quest for amity exists more as notion than fact
Perhaps time has come to question the dogma of an “ever-closer” European Union. Everything and its contrary has already been said about Greece and all the peculiarities that have surrounded the last minute agreement reached in Brussels. But the most striking — indeed, irritating — feature of this pseudo-debate is the growing radicalisation of the verbal confrontation between those who present themselves as “defenders of Greece” and their critics. I regret having to displease the two rival tribes: in my view, this confrontation is basically irrational.

The illegal immigration activists who set up a video ambush of Scott Walker in Plainfield, Iowa thought they could really embarrass him, but Walker deftly turned the tables on them. The Washington Post’s account (video below):

As presidential hopeful Scott Walker toured a farm in this tiny town where he lived as a child, he was confronted by an undocumented worker from Mexico who is living in Wisconsin and demanded to know why Walker does not support President Obama’s plan to give temporary status to some undocumented workers, including parents of children who were born in the United States.

“We’re a nation of laws,” Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin, repeatedly told Jose Flores, 38, who was joined by two of his four children, Luis, 7, and Leslie, 13, who had tears rolling down her cheeks throughout the exchange.

The Ladies in White (‘Las damas en blanco”) are an amazing story. They would be big Hollywood favorites if only their target were some pro-U.S. right-wing dictator like Pinochet in Chile. These ladies march every Sunday calling for the release of their husbands, their sons, and other men from the political prisons.

This is how Berta Soler, one of their leaders, welcomed the story of the U.S. flag going up in Havana, as reported by Belen Marty:

“With or without the embassy, the Cuban government will continue to do whatever they want.” These words from Berta Soler, leader of the Ladies in White democratic opposition, have been echoed by dissidents across the island and abroad. As she and others have documented, the Cuban flag may now fly over the embassy in Washington, DC, but the regime has continued with heavy-handed arrests against peaceful human-rights activists.

The most compelling argument the Obama administration is offering to boost what it acknowledges is a compromise nuclear deal with Iran is this: it’s better than the alternatives. That sort of pragmatic point is appealing to members of Congress, particularly skeptical Democrats who are searching for ways to support their president and who are accustomed to voting for the lesser of evils in a realpolitik world where the options are often bad, worse, even worse, and worst of all.

But the question remains: How did we get ourselves into the situation where there are no good options?