RUTHFULLY YOURS

Governor Scott Walker, Wisconsin voters, and champions of clean elections won a crucial decision at the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday when the justices declined to hear a challenge to an appeals court’s decision upholding Wisconsin’s photo voter ID law.

While miffed by the Court’s action, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) crowed today (Tuesday) that state officials said the law still will not be in effect for the April 7 election.

The ACLU filed an emergency request on Monday asking for an extension of a stay of the law that had been granted before last November’s election. Within hours, state officials announced that the law would remain suspended because absentee ballots had already been sent out.

“For now, the voters of Wisconsin will be able to cast their ballots free from the burdens placed on them by this law,” said ACLU Voting Rights Project Director Dale Ho, in a press release. “But this should be the case for voters permanently, not just for one election. We are evaluating our next steps in the fight for the right of all Americans to vote free from unnecessary barriers.”

Remember when his father, a bearded gnome addressed his son in Arabic? It was subsequently revealed that in 2011, while his son was held by Taliban Bob Bergdahl made a personal video for the Pakistani government that he hoped would be delivered to his boy, Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.In the three-minute video, he mentioned several high-ranking Pakistani generals by name, thanking them for their sacrifices. rsk (http://www.idahostatesman.com/2014/06/08/3225056/bergdahls-father-now-under-scrutiny.html#storylink=cpy)

Obama wanted to ‘whittle away’ the killers at Guantanamo.

The United States Army intends to charge Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl with desertion and misbehavior before the enemy. That was Wednesday’s news, but the bigger story is the extravagant price the U.S. has paid because President Obama wanted to score political points.

Readers will recall that then-Private First Class Bergdahl went missing from his post in Paktika province in eastern Afghanistan in June 2009. Fellow soldiers suspected desertion, though the Army conducted a risky manhunt to recover him. The sergeant was quickly captured by the Taliban and held for five years.

The Associated Press has reported that an internal Pentagon investigation in 2010 found “incontrovertible” evidence that he had walked away from his post. Journalists also uncovered an exchange of letters in which the soldier wrote to his father “the title of U.S. soldier is just the lie of fools,” that he was “ashamed to even be american,” and that “the future is too good to waste on lies.” Replied father Robert: “OBEY YOUR CONSCIENCE!”

His new doctrine: Downgrade ties to Israel and the Saudis while letting Iran fill the vacuum left by U.S. retreat.

Let’s connect the dots.

Data point No. 1: President Obama withdrew U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011 and is preparing to leave Afghanistan by the end of 2016, even while keeping a few more troops there this year and next than originally planned.

Point No. 2: The Obama administration keeps largely silent about Iran’s power grab in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, even going so far now as to assist Iranian forces in Tikrit, while attempting to negotiate a nuclear deal with Tehran that would allow it to maintain thousands of centrifuges.

Point No. 3: Mr. Obama berates Benjamin Netanyahu for allegedly “racist” campaign rhetoric, refuses to accept his apologies, and says the U.S. may now “re-assess options,” code words for allowing the United Nations to recognize a Palestinian state over Israeli objections.

The coalition that placed Obama in the White House is cemented by what author Joel Kotkin amusingly calls “the clerisy”: the secular priesthood of America’s “progressive” elite, which feathers its nest at the expense of the alliance’s other constituency, the poor.

In case you suffer from the delusion that America’s Democratic Party is the party of equality, Joel Kotkin, in The New Class Conflict, is here to tell you otherwise. Kotkin is a master of revealing statistics, and his book is a short, sharp, inspired diagnosis of what ails America today. It is a damning portrait of a society in awe of smug sanctimonious self-serving Left-liberal elites. These elites use reformist rhetoric and guilt tactics to engineer upward mobility for themselves and downward mobility for the American middle class. Kotkin observes that 95 per cent of the income gains during President Obama’s first term went to 1 per cent of the population. In the 2012 elections, Obama triumphed in eight of the country’s ten wealthiest counties, sometimes by margins of two-to-one. In the first term of his presidency, average annual US household income dropped by $2600 and the number in poverty grew by six million.

Nothing better illustrates the triumph of propaganda over fact than the confected narrative, beloved of Islamists and leftists, which asserts the battles of 900 years ago were imperialist assaults on peaceful and blameless Muslims. They were nothing of the kind.

Soaked in petrol and trapped in a cage, the captured Jordanian pilot watched as the ISIS Islamo-fascist thugs prepared to burn him alive. What were his thoughts in those final moments as they conducted their despicable ceremony and he confronted the horrific fate that was about to engulf him?

Don’t ask President Barack Obama. He didn’t appear particularly concerned at the images of the pilot’s appalling death agony – complete with close-ups – that climax the long, professionally produced video posted on YouTube by ISIS to promote their cause. Indeed, when Obama chose to speak publicly about this abhorrent act, he brushed it aside. Speaking at a National Prayer Breakfast, he indulged in a characteristic exercise of moral relativism, insisting that “lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades … people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ”.

My only cavil with this wonderful column is that I think that “Tom Cotton Hero and Tragic America” would be more apposite. Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) is the most brilliant, articulate, heroic star of both Houses of Congress. His resume is breathtaking….rsk
Despite the value of his open letter, he will become Obama’s scapegoat when the Iran negotiations inevitably fail.
The snarky quip attributed to 19th-century French foreign minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand — “It was worse than a crime; it was a blunder” — has recently been making the rounds to deride a letter written by Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) and signed by 46 other senators. They wrote to the Iranian theocracy that any agreement on nuclear proliferation negotiated with President Obama will not constitutionally bind the next administration — unless it is properly ratified by Congress.

Democrats were outraged. They charged that Cotton’s letter is a crime, a violation of the 216-year-old Logan Act. That law bars unauthorized individuals from conducting negotiations with foreign governments. Even some Republicans sighed that the letter was a political blunder. It supposedly plays into President Obama’s caricature of right-wing and obstructionist conservatives.

Even some Republicans sighed that the letter was a political blunder. It supposedly plays into President Obama’s caricature of right-wing and obstructionist conservatives. In fact, the letter was not a crime or a blunder.

Yesterday, President Obama declared that because of his serious differences with Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu, “this can’t be reduced to a matter of somehow let’s all hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya.’”
Today, we learn the U.S. military will expand its air-strike campaign into the city of Tikrit in order to assist Iranian military forces in the country fighting ISIS. Under President Obama’s unilateral decisions in foreign policy, the United States is closer than we have ever been to Iran, and more estranged than ever from Israel.

As noted in today’s Jolt, we treat our enemies better than we treat our friends:
Russia’s Making Nuclear Threats, and Obama’s Too Busy for NATO

We are losing to both the violent jihad and to the cultural jihad.
Congress needs a strategy to defeat both violent and cultural jihad. On Tuesday, the House Committee on Homeland Security, under the leadership of Chairman Michael McCaul, held the first of a series of very important hearings on the threat of radical Islamism. As I told the committee in my testimony, it is vital that the United States Congress undertake a thorough, no-holds-barred review of the long, global war in which we are now engaged with radical Islamists. This review will require a number of committees to coordinate, since it will have to include Intelligence, Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, Judiciary, and Homeland Security at a minimum.

There are three key, sobering observations about where we are today which should force this thorough, no-holds-barred review of our situation. These three points — which are backed up by the facts — suggest the United States is drifting into a crisis that could challenge our very survival. First, it is the case that after 35 years of conflict dating back to the Iranian seizure of the American embassy in Tehran and the ensuing hostage crisis, the United States and its allies are losing the long, global war with radical Islamists.

We are losing to both the violent jihad and to the cultural jihad. The violent jihad has shown itself recently in Paris, Australia, Tunisia, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Gaza, Nigeria, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Yemen, to name just some of the most prominent areas of violence.

Turkey’s Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, is probably the world’s first ever politician demanding votes to end his own rule.

In a speech in parliament on Jan. 28, Turkey’s main opposition leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, addressed Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu: “You are not the prime minister. You are [a “photo-op”] kid seated on the prime minister’s chair.”

The weird situation Davutoglu has found himself in is the product of his boss and predecessor, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Last summer, as election season approached, then Prime Minister Erdogan and President Davutoglu tightened their grip on the internet. The duo deliberately limited their citizens’ access to social media and to popular and informative websites. They also increased the government’s power over the courts and the power of the MIT (Turkish intelligence Agency) to spy on people. None of this stopped the AKP from winning at the polls.

The mystery deepened today about the circumstances of the crash of a Germanwings flight in the French Alps. Aviation officials were struggling to explain on March 25 how the passenger jet bearing 150 souls on board could have crashed in clear skies. The onboard flight record or black box was recovered today. Evidence from the cockpit voice recorder shows that one pilot left the cockpit before the plane began its disastrous descent. The pilot was unable to re-enter the cockpit. Officials heard a recording of the pilot trying to bash down the cockpit door before the crash occurred.