RUTHFULLY YOURS

A little past midway through the second season of House of Cards, Episode 1, Chapter 14, Frank Underwood, ambitious politician and murderer, throws Zoe Barnes, the sluttish, amoral reporter who helped him move closer to the Vice Presidency and finally the Presidency with her stories calculated to smear or destroy his rivals, not so much under the bus, as under an incoming DC Metro train. He does this just after persuading her to erase all evidence of contact with him from her iPhone. Barnes was also Underwood’s sometime mistress.

Earlier in the series, he tells a co-conspirator, Remy Danton, a former employee and now a weight-throwing lobbyist for an “evil” natural gas giant, that he disposes of people he is finished using if they threaten his climb up the political “food chain.” A while later, Freddy, the ribs specialist, tells him that his new ribs supplier uses what I recognized from his disapproving description of it as a version of the Muslim halal way of killing animals – letting them bleed to death first – instead of killing them quickly and cleanly. Freddy’s new supplier instead shoves a pipe down a pig’s throat.

The 60-day clock for congressional consideration of the Iran deal, otherwise ‎known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action has barely begun to run, and the White House and its allies are ‎already in full sell-and-destroy mode. As details of the agreement are revealed, ‎including side agreements, the total collapse of our side’s negotiating position in ‎the last few weeks of the talks has become more apparent. This should be an easy ‎deal to reject on the merits. The promise of “anytime, anywhere” inspections ‎turned into 24-day advanced notice inspections. It was just rhetoric, claimed White ‎House adviser Ben Rhodes. We never meant it. Inspections at the Parchin facility, ‎where it is generally assumed military research and testing took place connected ‎with Iran’s nuclear program, will now consist of the International Atomic Energy Agency examining samples ‎provided by the Iranians.

The testimonials of more than 100 students from almost 50 colleges and universities in twenty states tell of “being intimidated, harassed or bullied as a Jewish and/or a pro-Israel student,” according to Student Voices(SV). A project of the AMCHA Initiative, which combats campus anti-Semitism, the data at SV spans the past year-and-a-half, and typically originates with student op-eds and articles from sympathetic media.

Although the majority of cited incidents involve Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the Muslim Student Association (MSA), student government groups, and the BDS movement, several of the examples involve professors of Middle East studies, many of whom are themselves BDS activists and supporters.

http://edgar1981.blogspot.com.au/2015/07/the-iran-deal-comparison-with-1938-is.html,

The always astute and reliable Edgar Davidson points out the following:

For signing the deal Iran got 50billion with no strings attached. In 1938 the Germans got no money and a warning of war against them if they flout the deal. The Germans accepted limits on military movements and minor limits on weapons. The Iranians have no such limits on movements or conventional weapons.

In 1938 Germany promised not to harm the Jews, although Hitler made it very clear he wanted all Jews out of Germany. In 2015 Iran burns American flags, chants “Death to America” and repeatedly pledges death to Israel.

Chamberlain was a misguided pacifist. Obama sees global warming and climate change as the major threat to the world.

THANKS TO DAPHNE ANSON….
Palestine Solidarity Campaign at NUT Conference 2015 –

This year again Palestine was centre stage at the National Union of Teacher’s annual delegates conference in Harrogate during the Easter weekend.

Dozens of NUT delegates flocked to the PSC stall to sign the petition asking for sanctions on Israel, as well as finding out about our current campaigns and to purchase some essential PSC merchandise.

A disturbing pattern emerging regarding the candidate’s cavalier attitude toward the truth

The ultra-left Guardian is stirring up trouble for Donald Trump. The newspaper contacted several U.S. veterans listed as members of “Veterans for Trump” on the candidate’s website and discovered at least three had no clue they were supposed to be supporting him.

A number of people were named as members of “Veterans for Trump” on Trump’s election website. “These veterans have pledged their support to Mr Trump in the primary, and they will be advocating for him,” a press release said.

But when the Guardian contacted several claimed Veterans for Trump members on Friday, three said they had never heard of the organisation and had not signed up as members.

Who will Hillary Clinton blame now?That was my first reaction to this New York Times story:

Two inspectors general have asked the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into whether sensitive government information was mishandled in connection with the personal email account Hillary Rodham Clinton used as secretary of state, senior government officials said Thursday.

The answer came quickly (that’s why they call it “rapid response”) from campaign spokesman Nick Merrill.

“Contrary to the initial story, which has already been significantly revised, she followed appropriate practices in dealing with classified materials. As has been reported on multiple occasions, any released emails deemed classified by the administration have been done so after the fact, and not at the time they were transmitted.”

Bad news from the continent. In an interview with the German weekly Stern, Laurent ‘Riss’ Sourisseau, the editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo, announced that he would no longer draw cartoons of any historical figure called Mohammed. This follows his former colleague Renald ‘Luz’ Luzier saying a couple of months back that he would no longer draw Mohammed either. ‘Luz’ announced that he was leaving the magazine shortly afterwards.

I don’t judge either of them for this decision. ‘Luz’ happened to be running late for work on the morning that the Kouachi brothers forced their way into the Charlie Hebdo offices and started shooting his colleagues. ‘Riss’ was in the office and took a bullet to the shoulder, bringing him to the floor where he lay – playing dead – while the sharia-blasphemy force finished off his colleagues. This would be enough to have made most people retreat into silence for the rest of their lives. But both men stuck with the publication through the immediate aftermath of the atrocity and asserted their right to keep publishing depictions of Mohammed.

Such is the self-absorbed arrogance of the Clintons that Hillary actually thought she could get away with the criminal activity of conducting her government business on a personal server and keeping and transmitting classified data in violation of federal law.

It was a server as vulnerable to foreign hacking as any in the private sector that has been hacked, or the servers at the foreign-hacked Office of Personnel Management. She put her country at risk, and now her personal political ambitions as well. Only the disinterested Justice Department of the administration she served and a sycophantic press will save her from the incarceration she so richly deserves.

Inspectors general of the State Department Hillary once ran said Friday that, contrary to the statements of Hillary and Team Clinton, information that was classified then and now was kept on her server – the server she refuses to turn over. So far, four emails in particular are at issue, found in a random examination of 40 sample emails. The four were discovered to have dealt with government secrets. How many in the 30,000 Hillary and her staff deleted also illegally contained government secrets?

“Taking the issue of Israel first, it was the height of insensitivity for Kerry to make two particular remarks. One was to mock Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech and the cartoon of a bomb he had drawn at the United Nations, and to state that Netanyahu had not offered a real alternative to the deal he had been long criticizing. The other was to warn Congress that a vote against the Iranian deal could mean that Israel will find itself more isolated in the international arena and “more blamed.”

Though the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) endorsed by unanimity the nuclear arms agreement of July 14, 2015 between Iran and the P5+1 powers, the United States Congress is expected to vote on it by September 17. The UNSC agreed to lift the economic sanctions on Iran it imposed by Resolution 1696 on July 31, 2006, after Iran refused to suspend its uranium enrichment program, if it believes that Iran has curbed its nuclear activities. The U.S. Congress has 60 days to decide whether to lift the separate U.S. sanctions.

Countless appropriate questions can be asked about the deal. Does it sufficiently limit Iran’s nuclear weapons capability? Can accurate verification of Iran’s actions truly be done? Was it appropriate to make the deal by U.S. executive agreement and not by treaty, thus deliberately making it more difficult for Congress to reject it? Was there really no alternative to the deal except war, as both President Barack Obama and Secretary John Kerry have maintained? Would rejecting the deal, as Kerry asserted, pit the U.S. against the rest of the world?

In view of Iran’s well-known record on the issue, not everyone can agree that, as Kerry remarked, everything in the agreement was verifiable and that it meant a process by which we would know what Iran is doing. Iran has been given 24-day notice for international inspection of suspect sites, and the likelihood of its cheating is high. Indeed, already Iran has stated that the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will be denied access to the country’s military sites.