RUTHFULLY YOURS

In 2012, U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Scott Gration abruptly stepped down from his post. According to a Foreign Policy report by Josh Rogin (now a reporter for Bloomberg), Gration was the subject of a whithering evaluation from the State Department:

The impending release of a highly critical report by the State Department’s Inspector General’s office prompted the sudden resignation Friday of U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Scott Gration, according to administration and congressional sources.
The report was described to The Cable by multiple people briefed on its contents as one of the worst reviews of an ambassador’s performance written by the IG’s staff in several years.

While Gration was fired for a myriad of reasons, one passage of the damning report leaps out in light of recent events:

Very soon after the Ambassador’s arrival in May 2011, he broadcast his lack of confidence in the information management staff. Because the information management office could not change the Department’s policy for handling Sensitive But Unclassified material, he assumed charge of the mission’s information management operations. He ordered a commercial Internet connection installed in his embassy office bathroom so he could work there on a laptop not connected to the Department email system. He drafted and distributed a mission policy authorizing himself and other mission personnel to use commercial email for daily communication of official government business.

Last year, the Palestinian Authority made a promise to respect “the civil and political rights of individuals, including the right to life, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, electoral rights and rights to due process and a fair trial” by signing the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The PA has also signed the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Arab Charter on Human Rights.

All of these documents guarantee freedom of religion in some way.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that religious minorities under the PA enjoy freedom. In fact, according to a new report from the Jerusalem Institute of Justice, these minorities face many “unreported, often censored, violations by Palestinian governing authorities against Palestinians.” The JIJ report is an effort to provide a voice for those marginalized Palestinians — mostly Christians — who cannot speak for themselves.

Arkansas argues EPA’s actions will give it “unfettered regulatory jurisdiction” over most of the water in state.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s plan to tighten rules governing the nation’s water and air quality would have a crippling effect on state and local economies and send consumer energy prices soaring, the attorneys general of two rural states told a House panel last week.

The hearing held by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform focused on the EPA’s proposals to amend three of its regulations. The first would mandate reductions in emissions at coal-fired power plants and similar facilities; the second would require reductions in ozone, or smog, levels; and the third would clarify the types of waterways controlled by the EPA under the Clean Water Act.

Montana Attorney General Tim Fox told the committee he resents what he says are the EPA’s growing efforts to meddle in matters best left to the states.

“The people of Montana have taken steps to fully protect [the state’s waterways] for ourselves, our downstream neighbors and all of our progeny,” Fox said.

Those protections, he explained, begin with the state’s constitution, which asserts Montana’s right to make decisions regarding its water use — and requires the state legislature to “provide adequate remedies for the protection” of its waters.

The EPA, he said, has no right to expand its authority under the Clean Water Act.

“I believe it is my duty to stand up and push back when I perceive an agency of the federal government overreaching the authority given to it by Congress and proposing actions that infringe on our sovereignty,” Fox said.

When Hillary Clinton tweeted yesterday in the midst of her latest scandal “I want the public to see my email,” did she mean all ten hidden accounts, or just hdr22@clintonmail.com, the only account to be outed before that tweet? Now, thanks to a hacker, who seems not to have done anything illegal but use a piece of software, things have gone, shall we say, a little haywire [1]:

A prominent hacker tells Fox News’ James Rosen that Hillary Clinton appears to have established multiple email addresses for private use.

Aides to the former secretary of state say she only used one private email while in office — hdr22@clintonemail.com. That domain name has been traced to a private Internet server in Clinton’s hometown of Chappaqua, N.Y. The server was registered in the name of Clinton’s former aide Eric Hothem a week before the Obama administration assumed office.

“Rules are for thee, not for me” could be Hillary Clinton’s motto, and we have proof. Fox News obtained a copy of a cable sent to State Department employees admonishing them to not use private emails for official business.

Sent to diplomatic and consular staff in June 2011, the unclassified cable, bearing Clinton’s electronic signature, made clear to employees they were expected to “avoid conducting official Department business from your personal e-mail accounts.” The message also said employees should not “auto-forward Department email to personal email accounts which is prohibited by Department policy.”

Since Mrs. Clinton did not even have an official email account, obviously she was using personal email in violation of the policy. Her cable cited specifics:

The cited section from the Foreign Affairs Manual states: “It is the Department’s general policy that normal day-to-day operations be conducted on an authorized AIS [the authorized department information system] which has the proper level of security control to provide nonrepudiation, authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the resident information. … Employees should be aware that transmissions from the Department’s OpenNet to and from non-U.S. Government Internet addresses, and other .gov or .mil addresses, unless specifically directed through an approved secure means, traverse the Internet unencrypted.”

Only don’t expect for Obama or John Kerry to ever bring this up.

In spite of what Barack Obama would have us believe, he was as much in tune to Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress this week as was anyone and everyone else in the world. But exclusive focus on American/Israeli and Israeli/Islamic relations threatens to blind us to the fierce, unrelenting oppression with which Christians throughout the world are routinely forced to reckon courtesy of their Islamic neighbors.

Throughout the Islamosphere in Africa and the Middle East, men, women, and children have been subjected en masse to unspeakable acts of cruelty. Jihadists, while pillaging and burning homes and churches, have laid waste to whole communities. Families have been destroyed as husbands and fathers were bludgeoned, beheaded, and burned to death; wives and mothers raped, beaten, and starved; young boys forced to convert to Islam and take up arms on behalf of their captors; and young girls enslaved and sold off to become either wives to grown men or human missiles—i.e. suicide bombers.

In an age where so many of our elites assert that tolerance, pacifism and dialogue are the foundation of the moral life, we are certainly seeing a lot of intolerant banning, shunning and boycotting. This notion of tolerance for the intolerant Islamofascists (who, when they take power, ban all tolerance) is the main concern of my recent book, Tolerism: The Ideology Revealed (Mantua Books).

For the current ideology of tolerism is in fact only tolerant towards evil and is very intolerant of the traditional Judeo-Christian ethic.

In my book, I outline how cultural and moral relativism and moral equivalency act to twist the value of tolerance into a value that replaces traditional values like justice and individual liberty with some kind of multicultural appeasement, where the appeasers see nothing in American values that are more admirable than the Islamist values rooted in 6th century jihad.

We know that the tolerists do not really act in a tolerant way when it comes to the country in the forefront of identifying the evil and taking concrete steps against it. Instead, we see:

– Banning of Israelis speakers or professors from American campuses.

What short memories we have.

Just three weeks ago, gloating ISIS terrorists beheaded 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians on a Libyan beach. The Catholic Church proclaimed them “martyrs.” Former Virginia Republican Congressman Frank Wolf, now at Baylor University, called for the creation of a safe haven for Middle East Christians.

And then, the world moved on. The body of yet another beheaded Coptic Christian was found in Libya on Wednesday. But by then the media had turned their gaze elsewhere so the outrage was gone.

Hillary Clinton and her supporters in the national media are counting on our short memories to allow them to tout her “successes” as Secretary of State as they gild her chariot for a ride to the White House in 2016.

And therein lies reason #1 why Mrs. Clinton will do everything in her power to keep the public from seeing her email — at least, an unsanitized version that would provide the full record of her tenure as Secretary of state.

“We came, we saw, he died.”

The one thing that Democrats and Republicans have in common these days is nostalgia for a pre-Obama era. The leading candidates of both parties serve as shorthand for a time before the era of Obama. The last names Bush and Clinton summon up nostalgic visions of their family’s previous administrations.

The Bush and Clinton political express is moving forward not because these families have become dynasties, but because the majority of Americans want to go back to a time before Obama.

Hillary and Jeb are not popular on their own merits. To Democrats, Hillary seems to offer a return to the Bill Clinton days when the economy was up and the country didn’t hate them. To Republicans, Jeb seems to offer a way back to the clearer issues of the Bush years when domestic politics had been temporarily taken off the table. After two terms of Obama’s unfiltered left-wing radicalism on domestic and foreign policy, the potential matchup will return to the triangulation of the Bush-Clinton years with Jeb adopting liberal ideas on domestic policy to appeal to Democrats and Hillary pretending to take a tougher stance on foreign policy and national defense to appeal to Republicans.

The White House portrait of a crumbling terror group is contradicted by documents seized in the bin Laden raid.

In the early-morning hours of May 2, 2011, a small team of American military and intelligence professionals landed inside the high white walls of a mysterious compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The team’s mission, code-named Operation Neptune Spear, had two primary objectives: capture or kill Osama bin Laden and gather as much intelligence as possible about the al Qaeda leader and his network. A bullet to bin Laden’s head accomplished the first; the quick work of the Sensitive Site Exploitation team accomplished the second.

It was quite a haul: 10 hard drives, nearly 100 thumb drives and a dozen cellphones. There were DVDs, audio and video tapes, data cards, reams of handwritten materials, newspapers and magazines. At a Pentagon briefing days after the raid, a senior military intelligence official described it as “the single largest collection of senior terrorist materials ever.”