RUTHFULLY YOURS

Along with an estimated 637,000 people from the U.S. recently, Paris Hilton and Conan O’Brien somehow squeaked through the cracks of the diabolical U.S. “blockade” of Cuba for a visit to Havana. (Btw, in the 1950’s when Cuba was a “U.S. tourist playground” an average 200,000 Americans visited Cuba annually.)

From the Associated Press this week:

Having seen a long-ago tape of (Jack Paar’s) historic visit just months into the regime of Fidel Castro, (Conan) O’Brien said, “We’ve got to go – right away!”

“It wasn’t as complicated as I thought it would be,” said Conan executive producer Jeff Ross, who reached a production liaison in Havana. “He said, ‘Just come. We’ll get you an invitation from the Cuban government. You’ll have the run of the place.’”

The 10-member troupe went in mid-February and spent several days in the Cuban capital.

“I was shocked,” said O’Brien, “by how much we were left completely alone.”

Let’s get one thing out of the way, the administration bringing charges has openly sold ambassadorships to donors and bundlers.

It has arranged for huge grants to companies owned by its donors. Holder, who moved these charges forward, got involved in the pardon of Marc Rich, a wanted fugitive, in the hopes that he would get the Attorney General spot.

So whatever the merits of the case are, this is political. Top Democrats like Rangel and Reid have committed blatantly illegal acts. As Senate Majority Leader, Reid worked to aid Chinese business interests linked to his son. Hillary Clinton’s brother got a special mining concession from Haiti. Menendez isn’t being charged because of the merits of the case.

He’s being charged because he stood up to Obama on Iran. The timing here isn’t coincidental.

The current presidential administration and State Department have been long touting that global warming/climate change are just as dangerous as Russian bears and Islamic terrorists. In February 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry addressed Asian leaders in Jakarta by informing them, “Climate change can now be considered another weapon of mass destruction, perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.” With such attitudes, is it any wonder the east-west divide all the way from the Middle East to Ukraine in the north is literally on fire with no promising solution or relief to be found anywhere on the horizon? While common sense cries out that the world is entering into very serious times not seen since perhaps World War II, America has a presidential administration and a State Department seemingly far more concerned about global warming/climate change than the cauldron that has erupted in the Middle East, and the seething geopolitical dangers that could easily blow up all of Europe itself.

Worse, leftist pressure has made the U.S. military go green over the last decade. The U.S. armed forces are now buying more and more energy from expensive renewable technology contractors. Presumably by 2025, the U.S. Army will become a virtual green model of sustainability for the entire country. In other words, the Left is using the Defense Department to keep renewable energy boondoggles afloat by wasting taxpayer dollars on green pipe dreams. It would be far better to hook up the U.S. military to the Keystone Pipeline and base it squarely upon Frack Nation principles and practices so that the army will not be dependent upon foreign oil.

Such common sense, of course, would be an intellectual affront to Leftist elites who have imbibed deeply from modern environmentalism since the 1960’s. All too many of them believe primeval nature represents some kind of lost natural purity that requires the destruction of capitalism. Even worse, they also believe Nature itself knows best when it comes to public policy. Both presumptions are myths of the modern leftist imagination that have perverted science and politics to the point where politicians can now trumpet climate change as a very serious national security threat without blushing. Only the mindlessness of Nature can explain such credulity.

Hillary Clinton systematically evaded federal recordkeeping and disclosure requirements. This is very straightforward – indeed, the purpose of evasion is the only logical reason for setting up a complex, alternative, extra-governmental communications system. Predictably, Clinton sympathizers are trying to complicate and obfuscate something that is really very simple. In a nutshell, Mrs. Clinton’s scheme was the antithesis of the system set up by federal law. Under the latter system, government officials must conduct even trivial government business on government facilities. A governmental system serves the imperatives of security and accountability: (a) it is built with extraordinary protective layers to ward off spies and hackers; (b) the communications transmitted and stored are readily available for disclosure to Congress, the courts, and the public. Most significantly, it puts the law in charge of decisions about what communications should be maintained or disclosed in the event a government official contends his or her communications should be withheld on grounds of privacy or privilege.

Islamic State has turned from beheading hostages to waging war on the world’s cultural heritage. Last week the jihadist would-be caliphate posted a five-minute video of its members destroying statues in the Mosul museum with sledgehammers and power tools. This week its fanatics bulldozed the remains of the 3,000-year-old city of Nimrud.

In response the Iraqi government called for an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council, and Irina Bokova, Unesco’s secretary-general, said the “deliberate destruction of cultural heritage constitutes a war crime.”

The Senate on Wednesday failed to override President Obama ’s veto of Congress’s bipartisan bill authorizing the Keystone XL pipeline, falling five votes short of the necessary two-thirds majority. The vote was nonetheless a bipartisan rebuke of the President that shows how captive his Administration is to green billionaires.

In an interview last weekend with a North Dakota TV station, Mr. Obama said: “I’m happy to look at how we can increase pipeline production for U.S. oil, but Keystone is for Canadian oil to send that down to the Gulf. It bypasses the United States and is estimated to create a little over 250, maybe 300 permanent jobs.” Except for the prepositions, everything in that statement is false.

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2015/03/01/4-amazing-discoveries-of-ancient-hebrew-in-the-holy-land/?print=1   Editor’s Note: See the previous installments in P. David Hornik’s fascinating series on the Hebrew language: “4 Ways That the Hebrew Language Redeemed the Jewish People in Our Time,” “4 Ways the World Changed for Me When I Learned Hebrew,” “4 Biblical Sayings That Spice Up Today’s Hebrew,” “5 Ways Hebrew Is (Very) […]

The Western intelligentsia is very, very anxious to make sure that you have a positive view of Islam. Thus we see a steady stream of articles in the mainstream media assuring you that the Qur’an is benign, the U.S. Constitution is Sharia-compliant, and the Islamic State is not Islamic. These articles come in a steady stream, and they have to, because they are asking non-Muslims to disregard what they see every day — Muslims committing violence against non-Muslims and justifying it by referring to Islamic texts — and instead embrace a fictional construct: Islam the religion of peace and tolerance.

This takes a relentless barrage of propaganda, because with every new jihad atrocity, reality threatens to break through. It wasn’t accidental that Hitler’s Reich had an entire Ministry of Propaganda: lying to the public is a full-time job, as the cleverest of propaganda constructs is always threatened by the simple facts. This propaganda comes not just from the Left (the Huffington Post, Salon, etc.), but also from the Right, or at least the Right-leaning media (Forbes); it seems as if whatever divides Americans politically, they’re all united on one point: Islam is just great, and only bigoted, racist “Islamophobes” think otherwise.

It was laughable from the start, but the fact that it was taken seriously is troubling. The ethics apparatus of the United States judiciary moves slowly. It seems also to move truly. It did both on February 19, when it cleared Judge Edith Jones of all the misconduct accusations lodged against her after she delivered a lecture titled “Federal Death Penalty Review” at the University of Pennsylvania. That lecture took place on February 20, 2013.
In it Jones defended the death penalty, mainly by dismantling some leading arguments against it. Three months later, 13 individuals and public-interest groups formally complained that, in her talk, Judge Jones violated several norms of judicial conduct, chiefly by manifesting “bias” against some minority groups. The plaintiffs’ roster indicates some of these groups. Among them were the NAACP and a couple of Latino organizations. Judge Jones unequivocally denied the allegations. The Committee on Judicial Conduct agreed: It concluded that none of the charges was supported by even a “preponderance” of the proof, which is the lowest of evidentiary standards. This is tantamount to a total vindication of Judge Jones.

Can we finally—finally!—be done with the Clintons? As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton schemed to subvert record-keeping and transparency rules for reasons that are probably more or less communicated by her surname: The Clintons are creeps and liars and scoundrels and misfits, always have been, always will be. They are the penicillin-resistant syphilis of American politics. The Democrats’ response to Herself’s trouble has taken three main forms:
1) What she did wasn’t technically illegal, says David Brock and other slavish Clinton retainers, even hauling out that old Al Gore classic, “no controlling legal authority”;
2) What about Scott Walker, huh? say the Democratic-party operators, pointing out that as a county executive Walker also used a private email system — and, to be honest, Walker’s response to the terrorist assault on Milwaukee County’s consulate in Benghazi has never been explained to my satisfaction; and
3) the president repeats his favorite mantra: Wuddint me!