RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hillary Clinton can enjoy the livelihood provided by her foundation, she can count on men like Steyer and Saban to donate handsomely to any campaign, she can reap the benefits of favorable news coverage from outlets Saban owns, she can drape herself in the cloak of moral righteousness from crusading on behalf of the children. What a brilliant arrangement. What a fantastic racket.

Nor does Clinton have to worry about unfavorable coverage from Univision’s competitor, Telemundo. Comcast owns that growing network, just as it owns NBC and MSNBC. The CEO of Comcast is a golf pal of President Obama’s, and his political giving overwhelmingly favors Democrats. Comcast’s chief lobbyist is a Democratic bundler, who has raised millions for the president and has hosted the president for a lavish fundraising dinner. The president calls him “friend.”

NBC News’s chief foreign-affairs correspondent is a friend and ally of Clinton’s, and her husband was chairman of the Federal Reserve under Clinton’s husband. MSNBC, for its part, is less a cable-news channel than a work of high-concept performance art, its hosts pronouncing in heated tones the Democratic talking points on the hour every hour, its guests running the full range of informed opinion from Rik Hertzberg to Katrina vanden Heuvel, its personalities so cocooned in the pieties of academic liberalism, so out of touch with the world as it is actually experienced, that they have a habit of being fired for making offensive statements. In recent weeks I have seen exactly one MSNBC host dissent from the opinion that a Hillary Clinton presidency is both inevitable and wonderful to behold. That host prefers Elizabeth Warren.

Last year, when CNN and NBC each announced plans for Hillary Clinton biopics and said the movies would be aired in time for the coming presidential campaign, Republicans and conservatives foamed at the mouth. They denounced the projects as fluff, as promotional material, as in-kind contributions from the liberal-leaning networks to the Ready for Hillary Super PAC. The Republican National Committee threatened to boycott the networks if the movies went ahead as planned. And it worked: The movies were cancelled. But Clinton’s deal with Univision has not been met with a similar fury. Stands to reason: Hardly anybody knows about it, and no one wants to criticize a Hispanic institution, out of fear that such criticism might provoke a backlash to the backlash.

This has really been a bad few months for Muslim bomb makers. Maybe they’ve been making too many bombs in the kitchens of their moms. Maybe the spring heat or the Hashish is getting to them, but the accident rate is through the roof. (via Religion of Peace)

Literally.

A local Taliban commander was among five militants killed following an explosion inside a mosque in eastern Ghazni province of Afghanistan.

Local government officials said the militants were killed while they were making an improvised explosive device (IED) to carry out a roadside bomb explosion.

Deputy provincial governor Mohammad Ali Ahmadi said the incident took place on Saturday morning in western party of Ghazni city.

Ahmadi further added that the Taliban commander was recognized as Mullah Sadiq who was killed along with four other militants following the explosion.

At least seven militants were killed while making improvised explosive devices (IEDs) inside a mosque in Deh Yak district late in March.

Blowing up your own mosque. Barry would approve.

For the past nine years, a radio show has been broadcast out of Tampa Bay, Florida every Friday representing the viewpoints of radical Islamists. The subjects on the show, ironically called ‘True Talk,’ almost always revolve around two subjects: extreme hatred of Israel and/or support for those associated with terrorism.

During the month of March, different anti-Israel and terror-related content made its way over the airwaves with the blessing of one of the show’s co-hosts, Ahmed Bedier.

On March 14th, over half of Bedier’s radio show consisted of a recorded speech given by Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi discussing strides being made by the boycott movement against Israel. Khalidi has previously been identified in different news reports as “a PLO spokesman” and “a director of the Palestinian press agency, Wafa” (Wikalat al-Anba al-Filastinija), which Khalidi himself has described as “the PLO’s news agency.”

According to the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Act of 1987, signed into law by then-President Ronald Reagan, “The PLO and its constituent groups have taken credit for, and been implicated in, the murders of dozens of American citizens abroad… [T]he Congress determines that the PLO and its affiliates are a terrorist organization and a threat to the interests of the United States, its allies, and to international law…”

Bedier took calls in response to Khalidi’s speech, while lauding him as a “Middle East scholar.”

The previous week, on March 7th, Bedier had as a guest on the show the mother of convicted terrorist Ziyad Yaghi. According to the indictment against him, “the multiple defendants in the case,” Yaghi included, “prepared themselves to engage in violent acts and were willing to die as martyrs. They also offered training in weapons and financing and helped arrange overseas travel and contacts so others could wage violent acts overseas.” Yaghi was convicted on all counts and was sentenced to 31+ years in prison. He and his fellow co-conspirators lost their appeal.

According to his mom, Laila, Ziyad did nothing wrong. She called him a “goofy young man… a young man having fun.” She said that his only crime in the eyes of the prosecutors was that he was a Muslim.

In almost every single state this is a big issue- up these with Obamacare for Republican incumbents and challengers. The Dems (with the exception of about 20 legislators who voted for it,without the limiting amendments) will be tarred with this failure…..to pass a job creating and energy freedom providing initiative….rsk

“On Good Friday, President Obama made a bad call. The State Department announced that it would delay its decision on the Keystone XL pipeline until after the Nebraska supreme court rules in a case involving the route. The administration insists the decision to punt has nothing to do with politics. Pretty much everyone else thinks otherwise.

Obama, who is rarely reluctant to act unilaterally when it benefits him politically, and who regularly brags about his red-tape cutting, is paralyzed by perhaps the only big shovel-ready jobs project he’s been presented with.

He welcomes the Keystone red tape because he’s trapped between an overwhelmingly popular initiative and an overwhelmingly powerful constituency within the Democratic party opposed to it: obdurate rich environmentalists and the door-knocking minions they employ.

Obama’s predicament is just the latest example of how climate-change monomania has become a problem for environmentalists — and the country.

The mark of a truly successful political constituency or lobby is clout in both parties. Since climate change started crowding out other concerns, the environmental movement at the national level has become little more than an adjunct of the left wing of the Democratic party.

Conservation used to be a fairly bipartisan affair. Dubbed the “father of conservation” by the National Park Service, Republican Teddy Roosevelt did more than any other president to preserve large swaths of wilderness. Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, expanded the Clean Air Act, signed the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and proposed the Safe Drinking Water Act.

The Cliven Bundy case in Nevada provides many insights into the state of our nation with respect to the relationship between the people and the government.

The Bundys appear to be honorable American citizens without adequate legal counsel to help resolve a federal land issue about which they disagree with the Bureau of Land Management. Without question, they violated some of the innumerable laws and regulations that continue to entangle every aspect of American life.

Their violations certainly could have been handled through a multitude of less brutal means than those employed by our federal government, which through the mouthpiece of Senator Harry Reid emphasizes how important it is for the government to enforce its laws.

It is quite interesting to see, though, that those same bureaucrats refuse to enforce some of our federal border-protection laws and other domestic policies with which they disagree. Perhaps Reid’s time could be better spent explaining why it is acceptable for the federal government to pick and choose which laws it wishes to enforce.

The senator readily referred to the Bundys and their supporters as “domestic terrorists,” but the current administration is reticent about applying the same term to Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who admitted to slaughtering more than a dozen people in 2009 at Fort Hood in Texas. What does this tell us about our government and its perceptions and alignments?

The massive show of federal force in the Bundy case is frightening because it gives us a brief glimpse of the totalitarian regime that awaits a sleeping populace that does not take seriously its voting responsibilities and places in public office (and returns to public office) people who do not represent traditional American values.

The fact that the ranchers were well armed and willing to literally fight for their rights probably tempered the enthusiasm of the federal forces to engage in further aggression. It was clear from the body language and from some of the reported verbal responses of the government forces that they were not prepared to engage in lethal combat with fellow Americans.

There’s a reason they call it “progressivism” — for years, the main legal question contested in affirmative-action cases, from Bakke to Grutter, was whether the state should be allowed to engage in racial discrimination. In the Michigan affirmative-action case decided today, Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, the question was whether the state should be required to engage in racial discrimination. The progress, then, has followed the Left’s familiar ratchet-effect model, inching its way from “not forbidden” to “compulsory.” Indeed, as the Wall Street Journal put it, the question here was not whether the use of racial discrimination for putatively benevolent purposes is constitutional but whether states “may end racial preferences without violating the U.S. Constitution.”

The Court came to the correct conclusion, but both Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion and Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent suggest very strongly that there is trouble afoot on our highest bench.

In a perfectly Orwellian dissenting opinion, which she read dramatically from the bench, Justice Sotomayor argued that the decision of the people of Michigan to end racial discrimination is itself an instance of racial discrimination and that the only way to mitigate such racial discrimination is through the mandatory maintenance of racial discrimination. In this opinion she was joined by Justice Ginsburg, with Justice Kagan recusing herself from the case. Justice Sotomayor argued that Michigan’s Proposal 2, which mandates race-neutral state policies, is the sort of legislation used to “oppress minority groups.” By outlawing racial discrimination, she argued, “a majority of the Michigan electorate changed the basic rules of the political process in that State in a manner that uniquely disadvantaged racial minorities.”

Justice Sotomayor is here arguing in effect that if a constitutional referendum doesn’t go the NAACP’s way, then its effects are invalid. This is not an exaggeration: Justice Soyomayor argues explicitly that Michigan’s voters would have been within their rights to, for example, lobby university authorities to adopt race-neutral admissions standards but that by adopting a constitutional amendment insisting on race neutrality, thereby transferring the decision from the education bureaucrats to the people themselves and their constitution, they “changed the rules in the middle of the game.” Her opinion is legally illiterate and logically indefensible, and the still-young career of this self-described “wise Latina” on the Supreme Court already offers a case study in the moral and legal corrosion that inevitably results from elevating ethnic-identity politics over the law. Justice Sotomayor has revealed herself as a naked and bare-knuckled political activist with barely even a pretense of attending to the law, and the years she has left to subvert the law will be a generation-long reminder of the violence the Obama administration has done to our constitutional order.

Sonia Sotomayor picks a new euphemism for the endless fixation on race. By John Fund

You can often tell when advocates of one side in an argument fear they will ultimately lose. They change their branding. A few years ago, warnings about “global warming” were replaced with scare stories about “climate change.” One reason? The Earth had stopped appreciably warming in the late 1990s, making the change a PR necessity.

Supporters of affirmative action are now signaling similar weakness. What was called “racial quotas” in the 1970s and has been referred to as “affirmative action” since the 1990s is giving way to a new term: “race-sensitive admission policies.” The language shift is telling — race-based preferences are losing intellectual, judicial, and political support.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court voted six to two to uphold the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI), which was passed with support from 58 percent of that state’s voters in 2006. It simply enshrines in Michigan’s constitution that the state should not engage in race discrimination. Opponents of the initiative sued, claiming the measure discriminated against racial minorities who might wish to lobby for preferential treatment.

The MCRI was put on the ballot in response to a 2003 Supreme Court opinion upholding an affirmative-action program at the University of Michigan. The Supreme Court properly held yesterday that Michigan voters were free to change the program, noting that if the state legislature and university regents had the right to do so — as even the plaintiffs agreed they did — so too should voters.

As narrowly written as the opinion was, it elicited a blistering dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor. At 58 pages, her dissent was longer than the opinions of all the other justices combined — and she took the relatively unusual step of reading it passionately from the bench.

“The stark reality is that race still matters,” Sotomayor said. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination.” She went on to chastise the majority’s opinion: “My colleagues misunderstand the nature of the injustice worked by” the Michigan amendment.

Chief Justice John Roberts directly confronted Sotomayor in his own concurring opinion: “It is not ‘out of touch with reality’ to conclude that racial preferences may themselves have the debilitating effect . . . that the preferences do more harm than good. To disagree with the dissent’s views on the costs and benefits of racial preferences is not to ‘wish away, rather than confront’ racial inequality. People can disagree in good faith on this issue, but it similarly does more harm than good to question the openness and candor of those on either side of the debate.”

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/torquemada-invades-america?f=puball

Torquemada has landed in America. This nation of free and open inquiry has been seized by totalitarians who refuse to entertain other points of view. The debate about global warming is over say adherents of this position. When, if ever, has the debate about any scientific issue been over?

That is the least of it. So complete is the feminist assault on the culture that one can no longer say men and woman aren’t interchangeable. Should a military officer challenge the faith, he can be sure promotion is not in his future. Common sense is in retreat before the gods of cultural reformation.

It is now part of the orthodoxy to contend that all nations and cultures are equally good, with the possible exception of Israel. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the author of Infidel, had the temerity to challenge this “truism” and was denied an honorary degree Brandeis authorities had promised her. Skeptics are not welcome at American universities. In fact, should one leave the herd of independent thinkers, he will feel the full wrath of faculty and student chastisement. The orthodoxy will not accept a challenge.

Here is American fundamentalism with a vengeance. A business executive gave money to an organization that supports traditional marriage and he is hounded by homosexual activists. A photographer refuses to take pictures at a homosexual wedding and he is treated as a sinner who must be punished. A business executive argues against homosexual marriage and his entire food chain is imperiled until he repents.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/islam-for-dummies-a-journalist-guide-whitewashes-islam

“[U]ninformed, inaccurate or consciously provocative journalism” concerning Islam worries Lawrence Pintak, founding dean of Washington State University’s Edward R. Murrow College of Communication.

Unfortunately, Pintak’s remedy to this problem, the online guide “Islam for Journalists” edited by Pintak, betrays an absurdly benign understanding of an Islam whose apparent only fault is being slandered by others.

“Across the Muslim world today,” Pintak’s introduction notes, “extremists are wielding their swords with grisly effect, but the pen…can be just as lethal.”

The 2012 “lewd cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad” in the French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo, for example, receive Pintak’s censure while, like many journalists today, he uncritically applies the honorific “Prophet” to Islam’s founder. Charlie Hebdo’s editor had condemned the weapons used in violent reactions to the anti-Muhammad “Innocence of Muslims” internet movie trailer preceding his cartoons. Yet the “weapon he controlled can do far more damage,” Pintak warned in equating speech with the violent reactions of others, then “evident in the conflagration…erupting across the Muslim world.”

Screenshot of the “Innocence of Muslims” portrayal of Muhammad. (Image: YouTube screenshot)

Screenshot of the “Innocence of Muslims” portrayal of Muhammad. (Image: YouTube screenshot)

“A commitment to press freedom is in my blood,” Pintak qualified against suspicions of censorship. Yet speaking of the 2005 Danish Muhammad cartoons and their violent response, Pintak showed sympathy for those who refused their publication.

“[M]any Muslim journalists,” Pintak related in denying these “Motoons” any news value, “simply couldn’t understand why Western news organizations would republish the offensive images just because” of a legal right. Yet “journalism is not supposed to be a weapon” but rather “to inform, not inflame; to understand, not distort,” in contrast to “propaganda.”

The Danish cartoons exhibited “in our increasingly interconnected world,” writer Jonathan Lyons similarly relativized, “a number of central issues.” These included the “proper extent of press freedoms; minority rights; the shifting landscape of blasphemy laws and prohibitions; and the history of Muslim grievance toward the West.”

Rather than criticize Muslim rioters, Lyons complained that “almost no one reported on…the Danish media and its supporters as cynical provocateurs motivated by domestic political concerns.”

Beyond free speech controversies, “Islam for Journalists” favored Islam with numerous biased and false statements.

After discussing how Islam “roughly translates as ‘surrender’ or ‘submission’…to the will of Allah,” Pintak noted that Muhammad in Islam, “although he is not divine, he is considered ‘the Perfect Man.'”

“By imitating him,” Pintak stated without any critical questioning of Muhammad’s example, “Muslims hope to acquire his interior attitude-perfect surrender to God.” Pintak also takes an uncritical approach towards Muhammad’s migration or hijara to Yathrib (Medina) in order to escape his pagan opponents in Mecca.

JONI ERNST IS RUNNING FOR THE SENATE IN IOWA SHE IS A SOLDIER, MOTHER, GRANDMOTHER AND CONSERVATIVE…THESE ARE HER ISSUES
Joni Ernst (R) Challenger

http://www.joniforiowa.com/

HEALTHCARE Repeal and Replace Obamacare Joni is staunchly opposed to the Obamacare law. Joni supports immediate action to defund Obamacare, repeal it, and replace it with free-market alternatives that put patients first, and healthcare decisions back in the hands of doctors rather than bureaucrats.

SCRAP THE TAX CODE The IRS is a disaster. The greatest nation on earth should not have one of the most predatory, bureaucratic, out of control tax agencies on the planet. Our system is backwards. Joni believes real, fundamental tax reform will require more than tweaks to the tax code. It’s time to scrap it and start over, to make our tax system fairer, flatter, simpler and more certain.

UNITED STATES/ISRAEL PARTNERSHIP http://www.joniforiowa.com/u-s-israeli-partnership/ Since recognizing Israel’s official founding on May 14, 1948, the bond between the United States and the Jewish State has steadily grown stronger through many historic and turbulent moments, to include the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Six-Day War, and Gulf War to presently underway efforts to downgrade, and ultimately eliminate, the offensive capabilities of terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and Hezbollah and to eliminate the regional threat posed by a potentially nuclear Iran. As history has proven time and time again, America has no better friend or more loyal ally than she does with Israel.

Today this strategic alliance has grown well beyond these essential military and intelligence ties to other vital areas such as rapid expansion of trade, cultural exchanges and shared interest in the sciences. What has nourished this growth is the fact that these two powerful nations share the values of democracy, appreciation of free market principles, strict adherence to the rule of law, and culture of innovation.

While over the last few years there has been an unfortunate slight uptick in misguided rhetoric coming from Washington concerning matters related to Israel and her self-interest and security, Joni Ernst believes the United States must remain committed to growing and nurturing this relationship in a host of ways, including the continuation of aid programs, sharing of intelligence, close coordination on foreign policy relating to strategic international and regional importance, and extension of a mutually-beneficial and growing trade relationship.

As a soldier who has commanded an Army unit in the Middle East in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom and current Lt. Colonel in the Iowa National Guard, Joni Ernst looks at the U.S.-Israeli relationship not only through the standard foreign policy and national security prism, but also from an on-the-ground, military readiness and capabilities standpoint. And as the next United States Senator from Iowa, she will enthusiastically fight to expand the bond that exists between these two partners while prioritizing efforts aimed at strengthening the only democracy in the Middle East with a recognition that doing so will preserve the safety and security of both America and Israel for generations to come.