RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

THE EGO HAS LANDED

The long-awaited Gingrich resurgence has come and yet it’s all too likely that the resurgence will give way to the inevitability of Romney. So far every surge has been followed by a prolonged teardown. With Bachmann it was the messianic arrival of Perry and nitpicking over her attacks on his vaccine policy. With Perry it was immigration and a troublingly mixed debate performance. With Cain it was a combination of bad answers and sexual misconduct allegations. Gingrich’s turn is coming now.

Gingrich isn’t quite the last man standing. The Anti-Romney camp can always default to Perry, if he didn’t keep giving them reasons why he shouldn’t. And they probably will. Unlike Romney and Perry, Bachmann and Santorum have the right policies, but she isn’t likely to get a second look and he hasn’t even gotten a first. Perry still has enough money and presidential factors to get a second look and a third. The Gingrich teardown is already beginning, will it succeed? Once the media jumps in, probably. Newt has survived one teardown already at the start of the campaign, but whether he can make another comeback is debatable.

So far the “Id” candidates who said what they thought, Cain and Perry, are in trouble. The “Id” is associated with honesty and boldness. With going forward and damning the consequences. Cain, who was the most “Id” candidate in the race is suffering from “Id” charges, accusations that he speaks without thinking and does immoral things.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=246010
The list of the Left’s blunders is depressingly lengthy. It has been hopelessly wrong about… well, everything.

“Israel has put its trust in leaders who have led it into great peril — and into those who so far have failed to lead it out of it. It has been placed in great danger by the injudicious action of the Left and the impotent inaction of the Right. The Left has imposed a fatally flawed paradigm on the nation; the Right has failed to formulate a persuasive alternative.”

This is the first war in history that on the morrow the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender.
– Abba Eban on the Six Day War

The preceding citation, from arguably Israel’s most consummate diplomat, encapsulates the glaring irrationality and the inverted logic that has become the accepted hallmark of the politics of the Arab-Israeli conflict, both at the level of theoretical analysis and of practical policy-making.

The abandonment of any coherent, reasonable criteria has not been confined to the attitude of the Arabs towards Israel, but sadly has become a characteristic of Israeli policy towards the Arabs – and of a host of domestic issues that impinge directly and indirectly on that policy.

The absurd becomes routine

Consider the situation, which defies rational explanation, that is emerging today before our eyes, without evoking any significant expression of public incredulity — much less outrage — that such an astonishing development should warrant.

The ruling party of the day, the Likud, is, in effect, imploring the Palestinians to enter into negotiations over a resolution of the conflict on the basis of a principle — the Oslo two-state concept — that it itself rejected vehemently only a few years ago.

Mind you, this bizarre situation has not come about because this previously rejected principle has proved to be a stunning success. Quite the contrary, it has been shown to be an abject failure. After all, the endeavor to implement it has precipitated all the dangers its opponents warned of, and none of the benefits its proponents promised. Indeed, it has wrought death and destruction on Jew and Arab alike on a horrific scale.

Failures don’t come more abject or clear than that.

Yet almost inconceivably, just when it became undeniable that the opponents of territorial concessions and political appeasement were completely vindicated, they began to embrace the very policy they had previously repudiated.

These circumstances mirror almost exactly the inexplicable absurdity expressed in the Abba Eban citation above. Instead of the anti- Oslo victors in the ideological-political clash with their pro-Oslo advocates routing their vanquished adversaries, they set about surrendering to them.

Unwarranted intellectual surrender

This faint-hearted and feeble-minded conduct on the part of what is inappropriately dubbed — usually pejoratively — Israel’s political “Right,” constitutes unacceptable, unwarranted and irresponsible intellectual capitulation.

Egypt: More Evidence on How Islam Liberates Women Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/11/egypt_more_evidence_on_how_islam_liberates_women.html My colleague Al-Mutarjim has translated comments made this week to the London-based al-Sharq al-Awsat (via the Gazan publication Donia al-Watan) by a female candidate for the Egyptian Parliament, Muna Salah. The Islamically-enlightened Ms. Salah maintains, …that women are deficient in intelligence and religion, […]

http://michaelcutler.net/
Hi Gang:
Here is my most recent commentary that has been posted on the CAPS (Californians for Population Stabilization) website.
In this commentary, I have tackled the ample motivations that our own government provides to foreign nationals (aliens) to violate our nation’s borders. This is done by not only failing to secure our borders and failing to seek the removal of unknown millions of illegal aliens (likely tens of millions of illegal aliens who are present throughout our country today, but then providing them with all sorts of rewards that undermine American citizens and lawful immigrants and cost our nation hundreds of billions of dollars and also endanger the safety and security of our nation, our citizens and, indeed, all who work and visit the United States from foreign countries.

It is hard to blame illegal aliens for violating our borders and our laws when the President of the United States and high ranking members of his administration and politicians in Washington and, in fact, throughout our country, openly declare their disdain for our borders and immigration laws and repeatedly call for placing illegal aliens on a “pathway to United States citizenship!”

Laws are only relevant if they are enforced and if the leaders of our nation send a clear and unequivocal message about the importance of those laws.

What should be expected of illegal aliens when the leaders of their countries lionize their citizens who run America’s borders and then work in violation of law to send money back to their home countries and the leaders of our country echo the very same sentiment?

When a motorist is caught speeding, running a red light or driving recklessly, that driver faces a number of adverse actions that begin with being fined. That errant motorist may also lose his (her) license and have his vehicle seized by law enforcement. In some instances such individuals may also face time in jail.

Could you imagine a municipality telling its police officers who stop speeders to give the speeders money?

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2011/11/18/republicans-democrats-and-wall-street-fraud-or-whos-the-mf-now/

Jon Corzine’s MF Global is missing $600 million of customer money, and the bankruptcy trustee has no idea when it might be found or when investors might be paid back, if ever. The New York Times today says that the investigation points to the conclusion that the firm simply misappropriated (that is, stole) customer money to back up failing bets on the distressed bonds of failing European governments.

The former head of Goldman Sachs and Democratic governor of New Jersey presided over a firm that may turn out to have been a criminal enterprise. Maybe the Occupy Wall Street movement should shift venue to the headquarters of the Democratic Party, which has a long pattern of involvement in outright corruption.

If this is the case — and I will patiently await the results of investigation by the proper authorities before coming to any conclusion — the only proper thing to do would be to throw the book at Corzine and his colleagues and put some people in jail for a very, very long time. In response to corporate malfeasance and Wall Street’s misbehavior in the advent of the 2008 crisis, we have had a raft of new legislation and regulation — Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank, the Volcker rules, and more minutiae than the battery of corporate lawyers hired by the banks can follow. My few friends still employed in the investment banking industry are making a fraction of what they once did, but their lawyers are getting fat. The last hiring bubble in Wall Street, I’m told, is in risk management and legal services. Remember what Mother used to say: “You can’t have any new laws until you use the old ones!”

http://pjmedia.com/blog/a-brief-summary-of-james-e-hansens-nasa-ethics-file/?print=1

NASA records released to resolve litigation filed by the American Tradition Institute reveal that astronomer and global warming activist Dr. James E. Hansen, an astronomer, received approximately $1.6 million in outside, direct cash income in the past five years for work related to — and, according to his benefactors, often expressly for — his public service as a global warming activist within NASA. This does not include six-figure income over that period in travel expenses to fly around the world to receive money from outside interests.

Also troubling, and specifically detailed below, is that he failed to report tens of thousands of dollars in global travel provided to him by outside parties – including to London, Paris, Rome, Oslo, Tokyo, the Austrian Alps, Bilbao, California, Australia and elsewhere, often business or first-class and also often paying for his wife as well — to receive honoraria to speak about the topic of his taxpayer-funded employment, or get cash awards for his activism and even his testimony and other work for NASA.

Ethics laws require that such payments or gifts be reported on an SF278 public financial disclosure form. As detailed, below, Hansen often refused to report this income, nonetheless.

Also, he seems to have inappropriately taken between $10,000 and $26,000 for speeches unlawfully promoting him as a NASA employee, even despite NASA ordering him to return the money. This raises troubling issues about Hansen’s, and NASA’s, compliance with ethics rules, the general prohibition on not privately benefitting from public service, and even the criminal code prohibition on not privately benefitting from public employment. All of this lucrative activity followed Hansen ratcheting up his global warming alarmism and activism to be more political which, now to his possible detriment, he has insisted is part of his job. As he cannot receive outside income for his job, he has placed himself in peril, assuming the Department of Justice can find a way to be interested in these revelations.

The following summarizes records produced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request regarding the required financial disclosures Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/ceo-salaries-and-pharmaceutical-costs/

I had a conversation recently with someone who was quite upset about how much money pharmaceutical companies spend on CEO compensation — at a time when many people are not able to afford necessary medicines.

While I do not support restricting or limiting compensation, I also often scratch my head and ask, “Does it really make sense for a corporation to give someone tens of millions a year to run a company?” Beyond a certain point, there’s no useful way to spend the extra money. Someone who gets $30,000,000 in a year is grossing more than $82,000 per day, or $575,342 per week. How many steaks can you eat, how many vacations can you take, how many homes can you occupy, how many Ferraris can you drive?

Still, I thought it would be interesting to see how much pharmaceutical makers are spending on CEO compensation, and if this might be a factor in the costs of lifesaving pharmaceuticals. Forbes keeps track [1] of the top 400 CEO compensation packages for American corporations. Pharmaceutical company CEOs are NOT unusually highly paid. There are a few pharmaceutical CEOs in the top 100, but only a few. By comparison, other sectors, such as health care, communications, entertainment, consumer products, and stuff of questionable actual value [2], are more common in the top 100 list. UnitedHealth Group’s CEO is the top: $101,960,000 [3].

When I started digging into the details of these compensation packages, however, I noticed something very interesting, of which David E. I. Pyott of Allergan (a drug company) [4] is pretty typical: The vast majority of the compensation is stock gains, not salary or bonuses. Of Pyott’s $33.76 million compensation, $30.64 million was stock gains — not salary, bonuses, or other forms of direct compensation. In practice, this means that what the company actually wrote him checks for was about $3 million; the rest is the result of stock option grants.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/283458/obamacare-court-andrew-c-mccarthy Monday’s announcement that the Supreme Court will consider constitutional challenges to Obamacare has been met with hurrahs on the right. Count me a skeptic. And that’s not only, or even primarily, due to uncertainty about how the justices will rule. Big Government’s attempt to usurp control of the health-care sector, and all the control […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2011/11/18/facing-the-truth-about-islam/ A few years back I was invited to give the keynote address at a one-day conference in Washington – or, actually, in Arlington – about the future of Europe.  I am still baffled as to why I was invited.  Pretty much all the other people there – the audience members as well as the […]

Using the ‘Arab Uprisings’ to Bash America and Israel Posted By Judith Greblya URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2011/11/18/using-the-%e2%80%98arab-uprisings%e2%80%99-to-bash-america-and-israel/ On Thursday November 10, 2011, approximately sixty people gathered for a lecture hosted by the University of California, Los Angeles’s Center for Near Eastern Studies. The event was titled, “Take Stock: The Arab Uprising on the Eve of […]