RUTHFULLY YOURS

JERUSALEM – Recent events in the Middle East are a reminder of how the old models of peace between Israel and the Palestinians are no longer relevant.

The time has come to rethink the two-state solution.

This past summer, Hamas and its allies fired over 4,500 rockets and mortars at Israel, demonstrating once again what happens when we evacuate territory to the so-called 1967 lines and hand it over to our adversaries. Peace is not obtained. Rather, we are met by war and bloodshed.

The rise of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, and other extreme elements in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, make the risks just as clear. Israel cannot afford to gamble with its security. There are no second chances in the volatile Middle East.

That is why, for its security, Israel cannot withdraw from more territory and cannot allow for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank. If we were to pull out of the West Bank, the entire country would become a target for terrorists who would be able to set up rocket launchers adjacent to the Old City of Jerusalem and on the hills above the runways of Ben-Gurion International Airport and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.

Take the Jordan Valley. The Palestinians demand that Israel withdraw from this narrow piece of land, which borders Jordan. But if we do so in today’s climate, we potentially open the door for the Islamic State and other extremists to flood into the new Palestinian state. We cannot take that risk.

How do I know? Because it happened. Not once, not twice, but three times.

Barack Obama may pay lip service to working with Republicans, but we know he’ll ultimately ram-rod to implement policies he hopes will transform America, actually damage her. Mr. Obama came to America with a chip on his shoulder, and that splinter remains despite Americans twice electing him. A man with a gracious and forgiving nature would have been moved by this outpouring; yet, despite all this, he seems unable to shed himself of his anti-Americanism, revealing a lack of charitable character.

So, how will Americans protect themselves from his arbitrary Executive Orders that undoubtedly fall beyond his Constitutional limits? How will we be saved from Orders of a fascist nature rarely seen before in American history, such as wholesale amnesty, treaties designed to help Iran manufacture the nuclear bombs that will one day be used against us, or his tying the hands of law enforcement trying to stop domestic jihadism? Congress can impeach, but they probably won’t. They can turn off the monetary spigot, but that’s no guarantee of stopping Obama… after all, money is fungible.

One of the surprise outcomes of Tuesday’s election were the governorships won by Republicans, often in Democratic states. Be it Obamacare, protecting state borders, minimizing illegals, guaranteeing free speech, religious and business rights, outlawing shariah law, or standing by law enforcement, governors and state legislatures have the ability to tell Obama and the Feds: “Not in my backyard.”

The one thing separating the rights and safety of citizens within a state from the indignities and transformation edicts of Mr. Obama and his Attorney General are the state governors. Governors are the firewall between citizens and a lording Obama. Indeed, the Founding Fathers wished it that way, giving states and local officials greater say in the lives of citizens within their state jurisdiction. It is a Constitutional imperative. That is what state’s rights – our rights – are all about. These rights safeguard us from the tyrannical man the Founding Fathers feared in Mr. Obama.

This election- whatever you want to call it- tsunami, wave, ripple….was a real referendum on Obama policies and on liberals gone wild in America. My thumb hurt from continual switching channels for five hours. The coverage was absolutely dim witted and dismal.

On CNN there was the spectacle of Van Jones- the attorney and activist for life who is so radical he had to resign from the Obaminations in 2009, gurgling Gergen and Clinton artifact gmome Paul Begala and terminally insipid Candy Crowley.

But it was Fox News that was so disappointing in its coverage. Bret Baier and Chris Matthews were alright but the beautiful Megyn Kelly who quipped and cackled at her own jokes was annoying and without a clue about the issues that newly elected legislators ran on in both houses. And Kelly took pains to say, several times, that they were not from the “far right.”

No mention of the Keystone pipeline; no mention of the crippling regulations of the EPA that stifle the economy; no mention of opposition to any amnesty in immigration reform; no mention of the opposition to Obamacare; no mention of the need for robust foreign policy and a strong military; no mention of the abandonment of Veterans and the chicanery at so many government institutions; no mention of any commitment to Israel; no mention of gun rights; no mention of the real contribution of the Tea Party to the debate. I could go on and on.

Dave Perdue, Thom Tillis, Cory Gardner, Tom Cotton, Joni Ernst, Ben Sasse, Shelly Moore Capito, and Dr.Bill Cassidy of Louisiana who is chasing Senator Mary Landrieu to a run-off are all real conservatives….not John Boehner clones. Many have been in congress and have a record and campaign sites but none of the team at Fox even checked on the issues they represent.

Here is just an example from the campaign of Dave Perdue who won in Georgia:

Repeal ObamaCare

ObamaCare is an overreaching federal program that will actually reduce the quality of health care and increase costs. I am one of the millions of Americans that had my personal policy cancelled after being told I could keep it. To make matters worse, Obamacare is discouraging full-time job creation. The consequences of politicians passing a massive bill without reading it continue to emerge. We need to repeal ObamaCare and replace it with more affordable free market solutions.

The United States – Israel Relationship

In dangerous times like these, when Israelis are being attacked by a terrorist government that controls the Gaza Strip, my commitment to Israel is not equivocal, “to be determined”, or for sale. I full-heartedly support Israel’s right to defend itself, and as United States Senator, I will strongly support legislation to assist Israel in this time of need. Read more about how I support Israel

These things are on the record but the chickens in the FOX house never bothered to look and offered inanities instead of real election news and opinion.

STONEWALLED: MY FIGHT FOR TRUTH AGAINST THE FORCES OF OBSTRUCTION, INTIMIDATION, AND HARASSMENT IN OBAMA’S WASHINGTON
By Sharyl Attkisson
Harper, $27.99, 432 pages

Full disclosure first: I was one of those military analysts regularly seen on network television until a 2008 New York Times expose accused us of succumbing to improper influences by the Rumsfeld Pentagon. Because congressional Democrats howled for our heads, it took three years, four federal investigations and more than $2 million in tax dollars before The Times report was discredited and we were exonerated.

Ironically, we were accused of precisely the same pattern of government-media corruption at the heart of Sharyl Attkisson’s new blockbuster, “Stonewalled.” Her path-breaking CBS News investigative reports uncovered “phony scandals” from Fast and Furious to Benghazi and Obamacare. All were inconvenient truths that the Obama White House constantly stonewalled – hence the title and three of her eight chapters. Those revelations alone compare favorably with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men,” the canonical account of Watergate and the crimes of President Nixon.

With the heart of a lion and a beaver colony’s work ethic, Mrs. Attkisson also possesses the lockjawed determination of a pit bull. She needed that courage in 2012, when a “well-informed acquaintance” with intelligence connections warned that her Benghazi stories were raising eyebrows. “Keep at it. But you’d better watch out.” Her Deep Throat added, “The average American would be shocked at the extent to which this administration is conducting surveillance on private citizens.”

Shortly thereafter, Mrs. Attkisson’s phones and computers began acting strangely. As she prepared to confront Ambassador Thomas Pickering about his Benghazi report, “Suddenly the data in my computer file begins wiping at hyperspeed before my very eyes. Deleted line by line a split second: it’s gone, gone, gone.” While they might have been remaking the movie “Enemy of the State,” an exhaustive forensics analysis of Mrs. Attkisson’s iMac found evidence of classified documents planted deep in her hard drive; systematic intrusions allowing remote control of her personal files; most damning of all, “a backdoor link to an ISP address for a government computer.” It was slam-dunk confirmation of a deliberately planned government penetration, all predictably denied by Eric Holder Jr.’s Justice Department.

MECHRIC, the largest coalition of Middle East Christian NGOs in the United States and internationally asked the Archbishop to remove Nihad Awad, the director of Islamist group CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) from a coalition said to be aimed at helping Christian minorities in the Middle East. MECHRIC said “Middle East Christian minorities are offended by having Nihad Awad and his Islamist group CAIR claim they are part of a coalition in defense of Christian minorities.” MECHRIC argued that Awad and his group are linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, a terror organization in Egypt and other Arab countries, linked to Hamas, and part of a bigoted campaign against Middle East Christians in the US and worldwide.

Following is the text of the letter, with copies send to many members of Congress:

Nov 4th 2014

Archbishop Atallah Hanna
Archbishop of Sebastia,
Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem
P.O. Box 14518, Jerusalem 91145
Re: interfaith Coalition to Protect Christians

Dear Bishop Hanna:

We have learned that you have sponsored the formation of an “interfaith coalition to protect Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East.” We are troubled by the fact that among the NGOs and activists invited to join the coalition are a number of Islamist and pro-Jihadi groups whose agenda has been and continues to be hostile to the freedom and survival of Christian and other minorities in the Middle East.

Among the activists you have included is Nihad Awad, the President of the Council on Islamic American Relations (CAIR), which is an un-indicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation Terrorism case and is not the civil rights organization it claims to be. For more than a decade, CAIR members and former members have been indicted, and some are serving jail sentences, for terrorism cases successfully brought against them. The Islamist organization is considered by experts as a front to the Muslim Brotherhood, which has inspired leading members of al Qaeda and ISIS (Daesh) and has been put on terror lists by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain. Several members of Congress, including the Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. Pete King, and the Chairwoman of the subcommittee on Intelligence, Rep. Sue Myrick, have considered CAIR an extremist Islamist organization. There are bills introduced in the US House of Representatives calling for identifying the Muslim Brotherhood as a Terror organization.

Fifty years from now, no one will remember the names of the one-term Democratic senators or candidates who were washed out in the 2014 midterm elections—Hagan, Udall, Braley and the others. What they will remember is that the Democrats in 2014 became the party of a modern Herbert Hoover. In Barack Obama , they were led by a detached president whose name history will attach to a prolonged, six-year economic catastrophe. They became the party of economic despair. The party of economic despair will always lose.

That is the one certain thing we learned in the 2014 midterms: Low economic growth in the modern U.S. economy is a total, across-the-board, top-to-bottom political loser.

In Wisconsin, where Gov. Scott Walker represented everything progressive Democrats abhor, exit polls said eight in 10 voters were worried about the economy in the coming year. Pre-election polls in Gov. Pat Quinn ’s Illinois said the same thing. He lost. In truly blue Maryland, its new Republican Governor Larry Hogan built his come-from-behind campaign around the state’s stumbling economy.
Normally “economic growth” is an economist’s term of measurement. But during these six lost years, that bad data was physically felt. Barack Obama kept calling it the Great Recession. He got that right. Even the government’s statisticians felt it. Read between the lines of this paragraph in the federal government’s October employment report, on the eve of the election:

“In September, 2.2 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, essentially unchanged from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months.”

This was a year when the War on Women messaging — previously employed so successfully by the Democrats — failed to yield the desired results. Most of the discussions about that failure have focused on Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado. Udall’s obsessive focus on the “War on Women” playbook became so annoying that journalists and even his own supporters dubbed him “Mark Uterus.”

But it is absolutely unfair that Udall be tarred with all the failures of the War on Women messaging. No one better encapsulates the Democratic playbook than Wendy Davis, who ran for governor of Texas.

Her campaign was launched in vintage War on Women style. By filibustering a popular late-term abortion ban in Texas, she immediately gained the support of many in the mainstream media. They feted her with free in-kind advertising in the form of puffy profile pieces, cover stories, and other effusive coverage.

Sarah Kliff, who famously dismissed the Kermit Gosnell story as nothing more than “local crime” and therefore unworthy of coverage, covered Davis extensively while at the Washington Post and later when she moved to Vox. For instance, she tweeted this on the night of Davis’ filibuster:
Even on election day, the Washington Post continued its coverage of Davis as Philip Bump, previously receiving attention for not having the slightest clue how babies are made, gushed “*This* is how you go vote for yourself on Election Day.” He wrote an entire story about — and I’m not joking here — what t-shirt Wendy Davis wore to vote.

In between these stories were who knows how many articles and video packages claiming that Texas might turn purple, that Wendy Davis would be a formidable candidate, that the War on Women was a weakness … for Republicans.

Planned Parenthood treated Mark Udall and Wendy Davis as their most important races, knocking on a million doors and making two million phone calls, they claimed, to drive votes to them.

The most important election in the country yesterday was the gubernatorial race in Wisconsin. In its historic implications, Scott Walker’s victory was on a par with the GOP’s winning control of the Senate, arguably as important as all the other gubernatorial and congressional elections put together. And the reasons have nothing to do with his presidential prospects. Walker has now proven that his reforms in Wisconsin are both a model for conservative reform and a winning electoral strategy. But those reforms still have a long way to go. The crucial question was whether Wisconsin’s voters were going to give him the chance to keep pushing.

Walker came to office inspired by the advice of Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana, who told him to think bold and strike fast. The spearhead of Walker’s reform agenda was Act 10, which broke the stranglehold of public-sector unions on Wisconsin’s deplorable finances. Act 10 essentially turned Wisconsin, one of the leading lights of the labor-union movement, into a right-to-work state. (Wisconsin is still technically a union state with respect to the National Labor Relations Act, but private-sector unions in Wisconsin have waned to the point of irrelevance, so the major union presence was in the public sector.)

The challenge Walker faced was that reforms take time to work, and – initially, at least — generate much more opposition than support. His approval ratings in Wisconsin plunged to 37 percent as the venomous reaction of entrenched special interests (in this case, public-sector unions) took its toll. Those special interests enjoyed enormous political support both in Wisconsin and across the country, and Walker had only four years to demonstrate that the benefits of conservative reform could outweigh that support among moderates and independents.

Progressives correctly identified the threat that Walker represents to them nationally. If the most sacred privileges of their special interests could be undone in the birthplace of progressivism, those perks wouldn’t be safe anywhere in the country. But if Walker had lost, it would have meant that sweeping conservative reforms of government would face uncertain prospects in virtually every state and at the national level.

There is no substitute for abundance. A country that produces more food and steel and aircraft and microprocessors is going to be, ceteris paribus, better off than one that produces less. A country with a larger share of its population working is going to produce more than a country with a smaller share of its population working, as has been the unhappy trend in the United States during the presidency of Barack Obama. All the blue-ribbon panels and price-control trickery that the progressive hive-mind can dream up will do little or nothing for the quality and affordability of health care compared with increasing the supply of doctors, hospitals and clinics, pharmaceutical manufacturers, makers of medical devices, and the like. “Less is more” might work in the context of the aesthetic of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe or the poetry of Robert Browning, but in the economy of real things, more is more. And the new Republican majority in Congress is well positioned to implement a more-is-more philosophy in a critical economic sector: energy.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of energy in the U.S. economy: The energy market affects almost every company and every industry, from AAL to AAPL, and we have an abundant supply of it, from oil and gas to coal and other sources. Getting government out of the way and allowing those industries to flourish even more fully than they have is a project that is, unlike some of the more ambitious items on the conservative wish list, well within reach, even with President Obama’s veto pen potentially standing between bill and law.

A little history for context. The immediate postwar U.S. economy was in many ways an atypical and unsustainable situation, given that the country’s commanding position in manufacturing — some 60 percent of the world’s industrial output — was predicated in part on the fact that the rest of the world was trying to rebuild its factories after the ruinous war. That wasn’t going to last forever, but manufacturing wasn’t the whole story, either.