RUTHFULLY YOURS

First: I have met and spoken with Ted Cruz on a number of occasions, and I like him very much. Second: I am not enthusiastic about the possible presidency of a first term Senator who has never really governed. Third: I am glad he chose to run and inject some real conservative national and foreign policy issues into the GOP debate. There would not have been a Ronald Reagan without the earlier campaign of Barry Goldwater- so I see Cruz as galvanizing a return to conservative policies….rsk
Much of the political world went into full freakout mode yesterday as crusading conservative Ted Cruz became the first candidate from either of the major parties to formally announce he is running for president in 2016.

The ritual denunciations of Cruz, the junior Republican senator representing Texas, from all across the fruited plain quickly piled up. Since he assumed office in January 2013, Cruz has come under intense fire from the Left and from a few corners in the GOP. Some of the criticism is well thought out but much of it doesn’t rise above the level of schoolyard taunts. Some consider it a negative that Cruz, like Barack Obama, began running for president soon after becoming a U.S. senator.

His willingness to buck members of his own party –and to openly criticize other Republicans– when his conservative principles require it has won him legions of admirers across America, but few friends in official Washington. GOP leaders don’t like him because he questions what they stand for, tries to force them to honor their promises, calls them “squishes,” and works to derail their legislative priorities. He has even tried to engineer mini-rebellions in the House by whipping House members to vote against GOP leadership. Finding sympathetic lawmakers is like shooting fish in a barrel because Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) disappoints conservatives nearly every day.

After the 1938 Munich conference, First Lord of the Admiralty Duff Cooper resigned in protest from Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s cabinet. In his speech before the Commons, Cooper put his finger on the cause of Chamberlain’s failure: “The Prime Minister has believed in addressing Herr Hitler through the language of sweet reasonableness. I have believed that he was more open to the language of the mailed fist.” A few weeks earlier, Churchill had used a metaphor similarly apt for Obama’s approach to Iran, ISIS, Russia, and numerous other adversaries: the British and the French, Churchill said, “presented a front of two overripe melons crushed together; whereas what was needed was a gleam of steel.”

Bibi Netanyahu’s victory in last week’s election has reprised that contrast, now between the feckless Obama and his foreign policy delusions, and the Israeli leader who sees clearly the nature of an enemy that for nearly 7 decades has tried to destroy his country. And Netanyahu has made clear, most dramatically in his speech before Congress, that what is needed today to slow down the mullah’s march to a nuclear bomb is the “mailed fist” and the “gleam of steel.” But this administration is no more heeding such warnings than the British and French governments did Cooper’s and Churchill’s. A misplaced belief in “sweet reason,” and a moral fiber as stiff as “two overripe melons crushed together” today enable the same sort of delusions and wishful thinking that paved the way for Chamberlain’s appeasement.

President Obama just got a letter from 367 members of the House stressing that Iran must have no pathway to a nuclear weapon.

On Thursday, House Foreign Affairs Committee ranking member Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) said there were 360 signatures on the letter. The next day, as it was sent to the White House, there were a few more.

Engel and House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.) began circulating the letter around Congress earlier this month.

The letter to Obama notes that “of the 12 sets of questions that the International Atomic Energy Agency has been seeking, Tehran has answered just part of one. Just last week, the IAEA reported that it is still concerned about signs of Iran’s military related activities, including designing a nuclear payload for a missile.”

“The potential military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program should be treated as a fundamental test of Tehran’s intention to uphold the final agreement. Unless we have a full understanding of Iran’s past program it will be impossible for the international community to judge Iran’s future breakout time with certainty.”

The letter notes Iran’s “decades of deception” and said “any inspection and verification regime must allow for short notice access to suspect locations, and verifiable constraints on Iran’s nuclear program must last for decades.”

Never should racial relations be better. Intermarriage between various ethnic, religious, and racial groups has become commonplace. Every family that I know can no longer be termed white or Latino or black, despite the efforts of government and academic clerks to insist on such.

Cousins, nephews, grandkids, spouses, and in-laws now all look quite different from each other. Walk downtown Palo Alto, and couples of the same racial appearance are not the norm. The president, the attorney general, the national security advisor, the chief presidential advisor, the director of Homeland Security, the director of NASA, and the former EPA head are black. To watch television commercials is to see all races hawking shared products — quite unlike in the rest of the world, where they would be more likely killing each other.

Is Pay-to-Play Still Legal in Chicago?
Adam Andrzejewski, Founder OpenTheBooks.com

Last night on FOX News, Founder of OpenTheBooks.com Adam Andrzejewski describes The Chicago Way – a city that pioneered corrupt practices. In 2010, Rahm Emanuel pledged to clean up city hall and end pay-to-play culture.

How did Rahm do? Not too well. Greed is still compromising ethics. Emanuel’s 2011 executive order to stop pay-to-play was a sound bite. Chicago is like an old fisherman, it continues to stink.

At the request of Stossel producers, our teams worked hard to mash up Emanuel’s campaign cash since 2010 with the city checkbook since 2002. Our results are stunning…

HERE’S WHAT WE FOUND:

600 city vendors gave Emanuel $7 million in campaign cash during the past four years, but received $2 billion in city payments since 2002. From a universe of 1,500 companies or their affiliated employees funding Rahm Emmanuel’s campaign since 2010, we matched those company names with payments from the City of Chicago vendor checkbook.

It shows two things: 1. Emanuel is firmly in control of the corrupt Daley political machine; 2. and pay-to-play is still legal in the city.

AMONGST OUR FINDINGS:

United and American airline executives bundled large amounts of campaign donations – even though both companies have current city contracts. Ten American execs gave the same amount ($5,300) on the same day (March 28, 2014) from Texas, Arizona, and Washington DC. 42 United execs gave $73,000 on the same day (September 30, 2014).
Law firms ‘gaming the system.’ Without a “city contract” the law firms and employees are donating tens of thousands of dollars to Rahm’s campaign fund. How? Learn about the voucher- direct payment scheme in city hall.
Investment firms ‘gaming the system.’ Using a middle man to contract with the city pension plans, some of the mayor’s largest donors then manage city pension money by contracting with the middle man. It’s called “fund-of-funds” to skirt the rules.
How much does the Illinois culture of corruption cost taxpayers?
We name names.
How does the legalized money laundering system in Chicago work? Andrzejewski cites specific examples.
Watch John Stossel’s Special Chicago Corruption click here.

Mr. Henderson is the director of the Gulf and Energy Policy program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The U.S. suffers a major setback in the war on terror as a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia looms.

The evacuation of U.S. Special Forces from their base in southern Yemen on Friday because al Qaeda had taken over the nearby city of al-Houta is hard to spin as anything but a major setback for the war on terror. All the more so since last month the few remaining U.S. diplomats in Yemen had flown out of San’a, the capital, because of the threat from Houthi rebels. The American ambassador to Yemen now operates from the Saudi port city of Jeddah.

The fact that (Sunni) al Qaeda and (quasi-Shiite) Houthis hate each other is little consolation to Western observers of Yemen’s meltdown. Al Qaeda’s antipathy toward the U.S. is well-established. No one would treat lightly the Houthi slogan of “God is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Damn the Jews, Power to Islam.”

Previously lawless at night, especially outside the main cities, the most populous country in Arabia, as well as the poorest, is now increasingly anarchic around the clock. The violent chaos in Yemen isn’t orderly enough to merit being called a civil war.

Instead of congratulating the Israeli people for being one of the few countries in the Middle East to hold real free and democratic elections, Obama has decided to inflict collective punishment not on Netanyahu, but on all Israelis, even its Muslim and Christian citizens, for having an election that came out not the way he wanted it to.

The terrorists have also been following with great enthusiasm reports that the Obama Administration is considering reassessing its policy — that the U.S. no longer considers Israel a strategic ally in the Middle East.

In short, Obama’s anti-Israel stance is the best gift the Americans could have given to Muslim terrorists and radical Arabs.

Obama also seems not to want to face the fact that because of his withdrawals and neglect, the situation in the Middle East today, with the rise of Islamic State and other terror groups, is not the same as it was even five years ago.

European countries, such as Germany, expect huge economic benefits if Western sanctions on Iran are lifted.

Those economic benefits to Iran will pay for its nuclear weapons to attack the West – an updated version of Lenin’s, “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them.”

The European Union says it is “not helpful” to “spread fears” about the impending nuclear deal with Iran. The so-called P5+1, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany, hope to clinch a framework agreement with Iran by the end of this month and a final agreement by June 30. Three of the six P5+1 members — Britain, France and Germany — are EU member states.

Last week, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others who warn that supplying Iran with the means to make nuclear weapons is dangerous. Mogherini, successor to the infamous Catherine Ashton, said that the Iranian nuclear deal is “a good deal” and that she is committed to bringing the talks with Iran to a positive end.

In the proposed agreement, the international economic sanctions against Iran will be lifted in exchange for Tehran allowing international inspectors into the country to control whether Iran is enriching uranium exclusively for peaceful purposes. The deal is a major concession to Iran, since a 2010 UN resolution prohibited Iran from enriching uranium. Furthermore, the deal stipulates that all restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program will be completely eliminated after ten years.

The case for her in 2016 boils down to demographic symbolism.

It is amazing how a simple question can cause a complex lie to collapse like a house of cards. The simple question was asked by Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel, and it was addressed to two Democrats. He asked what has Hillary Clinton ever accomplished. The two Democrats immediately sidestepped the question and started reciting their talking points in favor of Hillary. But O’Reilly kept coming back to the fact that nothing they were talking about was an accomplishment. For someone who has spent her entire adult life in politics, including being a senator and then a secretary of state, Hillary Clinton has nothing to show for all those years — no significant legislation of hers that she got passed in the Senate, and only an unbroken series of international setbacks for the United States during her time as secretary of state.

Before Barack Obama entered the White House and appointed Mrs. Clinton secretary of state, al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq had notified their higher-ups, stationed in Pakistan, that their cause was lost in Iraq and that there was no point sending more men there. Hosni Mubarak was in charge in Egypt. He posed no threat to American or Western interests in the Middle East or to Christians within Egypt or to Israel. But the Obama administration threw its weight behind the Muslim Brotherhood, which took over and began terrorizing Christians in Egypt and promoting hostility to Israel.

There is no good in you if they are secure and happy while you have a pulsing vein. Erupt volcanoes of jihad everywhere. Light the earth with fire upon all the [apostate rulers], their soldiers and supporters. — ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, November 2014 Those words weren’t idle. The Islamic State (ISIS) is still advancing, across continents and cultures. It’s attacking Shia Muslims in Yemen, gunning down Western tourists in Tunisia, beheading Christians in Libya, and murdering or enslaving all who do not yield in Iraq and Syria. Its black banner seen as undaunted by the international coalition against it, new recruits still flock to its service. The Islamic State’s rise is, in other words, not over, and it is likely to end up involving an attack on America. Three reasons why such an attempt is inevitable:

ISIS’s Strategy Practically Demands It
Imbued with existential hatred against the United States, the group doesn’t just oppose American power, it opposes America’s identity. Where the United States is a secular democracy that binds law to individual freedom, the Islamic State is a totalitarian empire determined to sweep freedom from the earth. As an ideological and physical necessity, ISIS must ultimately conquer America. Incidentally, this kind of total-war strategy explains why counterterrorism experts are rightly concerned about nuclear proliferation. The Islamic State’s strategy is also energized by its desire to replace al-Qaeda as Salafi jihadism’s global figurehead. While al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and ISIS had a short flirtation last year, ISIS has now signaled its intent to usurp al-Qaeda’s power in its home territory. Attacks by ISIS last week against Shia mosques in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a were, at least in part, designed to suck recruits, financial donors, and prestige away from AQAP. But to truly displace al-Qaeda, ISIS knows it must furnish a new 9/11.