RUTHFULLY YOURS

Free speech is dandy, writes London Review of Books’ Mary-Kay Wilmers, who nevertheless reckons that riling the head-lopping acolytes of a seventh-century warlord goes beyond the pale. By her logic, it is safe to label her a coward and cultural quisling because she won’t reach for a sharp knife.

Dear Ayatollah, Yes, I know your lot commits butchery on a grand scale; engages in the most godawful terrorism; executes people for the merest trifles; ill-treats women; and, given half a chance, would have us with our posteriors uppermost paying homage five-times a day to a vengeful deity conjured up by a seventh-century illiterate warlord. But, still and all, there is no excuse for our use of hurtful words. Yours Ingratiatingly…

I was skimming through the February 5 edition of the London Review of Books when I came across a letter expressing disappointment with the tepid response of the magazine to the Charlie Hebdo attack. The editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers responded to the letter. She began this way: “I believe in the right not to be killed for something I say, but I don’t have a right to insult whomever I please.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/why-the-left-never-looks-back-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Ari David, the host of the Ari David Show Podcast.

Ari discussed Why the Left Never Looks Back, analyzing how the Left’s schemes engender mass human suffering — and why progressives learn and admit nothing. The discussion occurred within a focus on Finding Out I Was a Communist and How I Escaped, in which Ari shared how he found himself imprisoned within the political faith — and how he found his way out.

“Forget 50 years of occupation. Six years of Obama’s occupation of the White House must end.”

Is that the White House Chief of Staff or the Chief of Staff for the PLO? Hard to tell the difference these days.

White House Chief of Staff, Denis McDonough showed up at J Street, an anti-Israel group funded by a lot of the same left-wing billionaires as Obama, e.g. George Soros, to denounce Israel and praise the work of the anti-Israel org.

After delivering some standard talking points about how great the economy is these days (for anyone who works for the government), McDonough bashed Republicans for not being supportive of Israel.

(Yes, the errand boy for the guy who spent the past week threatening Israel is accusing Republicans of not being supportive of Israel. George Orwell, please pick up the white courtesy phone.)

“To achieve this, the United States has long advocated direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. In 2009, Prime Minister Netanyahu publicly endorsed a two-state solution. Over the course of President Obama’s administration, most recently with the tireless efforts of Secretary Kerry, the United States has expended tremendous energy in pursuit of this goal,” McDonough said.

First: I have met and spoken with Ted Cruz on a number of occasions, and I like him very much. Second: I am not enthusiastic about the possible presidency of a first term Senator who has never really governed. Third: I am glad he chose to run and inject some real conservative national and foreign policy issues into the GOP debate. There would not have been a Ronald Reagan without the earlier campaign of Barry Goldwater- so I see Cruz as galvanizing a return to conservative policies….rsk
Much of the political world went into full freakout mode yesterday as crusading conservative Ted Cruz became the first candidate from either of the major parties to formally announce he is running for president in 2016.

The ritual denunciations of Cruz, the junior Republican senator representing Texas, from all across the fruited plain quickly piled up. Since he assumed office in January 2013, Cruz has come under intense fire from the Left and from a few corners in the GOP. Some of the criticism is well thought out but much of it doesn’t rise above the level of schoolyard taunts. Some consider it a negative that Cruz, like Barack Obama, began running for president soon after becoming a U.S. senator.

His willingness to buck members of his own party –and to openly criticize other Republicans– when his conservative principles require it has won him legions of admirers across America, but few friends in official Washington. GOP leaders don’t like him because he questions what they stand for, tries to force them to honor their promises, calls them “squishes,” and works to derail their legislative priorities. He has even tried to engineer mini-rebellions in the House by whipping House members to vote against GOP leadership. Finding sympathetic lawmakers is like shooting fish in a barrel because Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) disappoints conservatives nearly every day.

After the 1938 Munich conference, First Lord of the Admiralty Duff Cooper resigned in protest from Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s cabinet. In his speech before the Commons, Cooper put his finger on the cause of Chamberlain’s failure: “The Prime Minister has believed in addressing Herr Hitler through the language of sweet reasonableness. I have believed that he was more open to the language of the mailed fist.” A few weeks earlier, Churchill had used a metaphor similarly apt for Obama’s approach to Iran, ISIS, Russia, and numerous other adversaries: the British and the French, Churchill said, “presented a front of two overripe melons crushed together; whereas what was needed was a gleam of steel.”

Bibi Netanyahu’s victory in last week’s election has reprised that contrast, now between the feckless Obama and his foreign policy delusions, and the Israeli leader who sees clearly the nature of an enemy that for nearly 7 decades has tried to destroy his country. And Netanyahu has made clear, most dramatically in his speech before Congress, that what is needed today to slow down the mullah’s march to a nuclear bomb is the “mailed fist” and the “gleam of steel.” But this administration is no more heeding such warnings than the British and French governments did Cooper’s and Churchill’s. A misplaced belief in “sweet reason,” and a moral fiber as stiff as “two overripe melons crushed together” today enable the same sort of delusions and wishful thinking that paved the way for Chamberlain’s appeasement.

President Obama just got a letter from 367 members of the House stressing that Iran must have no pathway to a nuclear weapon.

On Thursday, House Foreign Affairs Committee ranking member Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) said there were 360 signatures on the letter. The next day, as it was sent to the White House, there were a few more.

Engel and House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.) began circulating the letter around Congress earlier this month.

The letter to Obama notes that “of the 12 sets of questions that the International Atomic Energy Agency has been seeking, Tehran has answered just part of one. Just last week, the IAEA reported that it is still concerned about signs of Iran’s military related activities, including designing a nuclear payload for a missile.”

“The potential military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program should be treated as a fundamental test of Tehran’s intention to uphold the final agreement. Unless we have a full understanding of Iran’s past program it will be impossible for the international community to judge Iran’s future breakout time with certainty.”

The letter notes Iran’s “decades of deception” and said “any inspection and verification regime must allow for short notice access to suspect locations, and verifiable constraints on Iran’s nuclear program must last for decades.”

Never should racial relations be better. Intermarriage between various ethnic, religious, and racial groups has become commonplace. Every family that I know can no longer be termed white or Latino or black, despite the efforts of government and academic clerks to insist on such.

Cousins, nephews, grandkids, spouses, and in-laws now all look quite different from each other. Walk downtown Palo Alto, and couples of the same racial appearance are not the norm. The president, the attorney general, the national security advisor, the chief presidential advisor, the director of Homeland Security, the director of NASA, and the former EPA head are black. To watch television commercials is to see all races hawking shared products — quite unlike in the rest of the world, where they would be more likely killing each other.

Is Pay-to-Play Still Legal in Chicago?
Adam Andrzejewski, Founder OpenTheBooks.com

Last night on FOX News, Founder of OpenTheBooks.com Adam Andrzejewski describes The Chicago Way – a city that pioneered corrupt practices. In 2010, Rahm Emanuel pledged to clean up city hall and end pay-to-play culture.

How did Rahm do? Not too well. Greed is still compromising ethics. Emanuel’s 2011 executive order to stop pay-to-play was a sound bite. Chicago is like an old fisherman, it continues to stink.

At the request of Stossel producers, our teams worked hard to mash up Emanuel’s campaign cash since 2010 with the city checkbook since 2002. Our results are stunning…

HERE’S WHAT WE FOUND:

600 city vendors gave Emanuel $7 million in campaign cash during the past four years, but received $2 billion in city payments since 2002. From a universe of 1,500 companies or their affiliated employees funding Rahm Emmanuel’s campaign since 2010, we matched those company names with payments from the City of Chicago vendor checkbook.

It shows two things: 1. Emanuel is firmly in control of the corrupt Daley political machine; 2. and pay-to-play is still legal in the city.

AMONGST OUR FINDINGS:

United and American airline executives bundled large amounts of campaign donations – even though both companies have current city contracts. Ten American execs gave the same amount ($5,300) on the same day (March 28, 2014) from Texas, Arizona, and Washington DC. 42 United execs gave $73,000 on the same day (September 30, 2014).
Law firms ‘gaming the system.’ Without a “city contract” the law firms and employees are donating tens of thousands of dollars to Rahm’s campaign fund. How? Learn about the voucher- direct payment scheme in city hall.
Investment firms ‘gaming the system.’ Using a middle man to contract with the city pension plans, some of the mayor’s largest donors then manage city pension money by contracting with the middle man. It’s called “fund-of-funds” to skirt the rules.
How much does the Illinois culture of corruption cost taxpayers?
We name names.
How does the legalized money laundering system in Chicago work? Andrzejewski cites specific examples.
Watch John Stossel’s Special Chicago Corruption click here.

Mr. Henderson is the director of the Gulf and Energy Policy program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The U.S. suffers a major setback in the war on terror as a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia looms.

The evacuation of U.S. Special Forces from their base in southern Yemen on Friday because al Qaeda had taken over the nearby city of al-Houta is hard to spin as anything but a major setback for the war on terror. All the more so since last month the few remaining U.S. diplomats in Yemen had flown out of San’a, the capital, because of the threat from Houthi rebels. The American ambassador to Yemen now operates from the Saudi port city of Jeddah.

The fact that (Sunni) al Qaeda and (quasi-Shiite) Houthis hate each other is little consolation to Western observers of Yemen’s meltdown. Al Qaeda’s antipathy toward the U.S. is well-established. No one would treat lightly the Houthi slogan of “God is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Damn the Jews, Power to Islam.”

Previously lawless at night, especially outside the main cities, the most populous country in Arabia, as well as the poorest, is now increasingly anarchic around the clock. The violent chaos in Yemen isn’t orderly enough to merit being called a civil war.

Instead of congratulating the Israeli people for being one of the few countries in the Middle East to hold real free and democratic elections, Obama has decided to inflict collective punishment not on Netanyahu, but on all Israelis, even its Muslim and Christian citizens, for having an election that came out not the way he wanted it to.

The terrorists have also been following with great enthusiasm reports that the Obama Administration is considering reassessing its policy — that the U.S. no longer considers Israel a strategic ally in the Middle East.

In short, Obama’s anti-Israel stance is the best gift the Americans could have given to Muslim terrorists and radical Arabs.

Obama also seems not to want to face the fact that because of his withdrawals and neglect, the situation in the Middle East today, with the rise of Islamic State and other terror groups, is not the same as it was even five years ago.