RUTHFULLY YOURS

Extra! Extra! Romney’s Backbone Discovered!

ROMNEY’S COMMENT:Mitt Romney declined to speak out against Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and four other House Republicans on Friday for seeking to investigate whether Huma Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton, has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.Following a campaign event in Reno, Nev., a reporter asked the presumptive Republican presidential nominee for his reaction to both Bachmann’s allegations against Abedin and a controversy surrounding Chick-Fil-A and gay marriage.“I’m not going to tell other people what things to talk about,” Romney responded. “Those are not things that are part of my campaign.”

http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/
Now this is news: an intact spinal column believed to be the property of Willard Mitt Romney has been discovered by anthropologists! As I write, the former governor of Massachusetts and U.S. presidential hopeful is being examined by surgeons and the American electorate to determine whether the missing anatomical structure can be successfully reinserted.

A critical test comes later today when the Muslim Public Affairs Council holds an inquisition, er, “press briefing” to demand that Romney denounce Rep. Michele Bachmann for telling the truth about members of the Muslim Brotherhood exerting influence at the highest ranks of the U.S. government.

Exhibit A in Rep. Bachmann’s brief is Huma Abedin, chief of staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a woman with deep and extensive ties to the Muslim Brotherhood — ties, by the way, that include not only her immediate family (father, brother, mother) but Ms. Abedin herself, who from 1996 to 2008 worked as a editor at the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs. The journal was founded in the 1970s by Abdullah Omar Naseef, head of the Muslim World League, which (as Andy McCarthy explained) is a “Saudi-financed global propagation enterprise by which the Muslim Brotherhood’s virulently anti-Western brand of Islamist ideology is seeded throughout the world, very much including in the United States.”

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/4713/features/what-are-israels-rights-in-judea-and-samaria-two-views/

AVI BELL WINS THIS DEBATE….CAUTION IS JUST LOSING TIME….

The Levy Report: A Welcome Advance By Avi Bell and The Levy Report: A Note of Caution By JHH Weiler and Yaffa Zilbershats

BELL: In mid-July, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was presented with the report of the Commission to Examine the Status of Building in Judea and Samaria, headed by former Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy. The report has drawn a flurry of overwrought criticism due to its inclusion of a section concerning the lawfulness of Israeli settlement activity.

In contrast with the misinformed and sometimes outright disingenuous criticism, the report’s discussion of the lawfulness of settlements is surprisingly modest in substance. The report does little more than endorse the traditional official Israeli position that the Fourth Geneva Convention does not apply de jure to the West Bank, and in any event does not bar Israeli settlements. While the report’s analysis is far from comprehensive, it is more detailed and more persuasive than that usually offered by anti-settlement activists.

The Levy report adduces one of two fairly compelling reasons for concluding that the laws of belligerent occupation do not apply de jure to Israel’s presence in the West Bank. One of the sine quibus non of belligerent occupation, as reaffirmed recently in an expert conference organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross, is that the occupation take place on foreign territory. While recent years have seen some debate on the meaning of foreign territory, considerable state practice supports the traditional view that captured territory is “foreign” only when another state has sovereignty. The Levy commission is on solid ground in observing that neither Jordan nor any other foreign state had territorial sovereignty over the West Bank in 1967 and that the territory cannot therefore be “foreign” for purposes of the law of belligerent occupation. Indeed, had the Levy commission chosen to so argue, it could have argued cogently that Israel itself was already the lawful sovereign over the West Bank in 1967.

Unmentioned by the report, Israel’s peace agreement with Jordan constitutes a second reason for questioning the de jure application of the laws of belligerent occupation to the West Bank. As Yoram Dinstein wrote some time ago, the rules of belligerent occupation cannot be applied to Israel’s presence in the West Bank “in light of the combined effect of . . . the Jordanian-Israeli Treaty of Peace of 1994 and the series of agreements with the Palestinians. There is simply no room for belligerent occupation in the absence of belligerence, namely, war.” While Dinstein qualified his observation by holding several idiosyncratic views regarding the definition of occupation and the status of the Palestinians, as well as by joining a small group of legal scholars who believe in a “post-belligerent occupation” that shares many of the rules of belligerent occupation, the majority position is still clearly that the rules of belligerent occupation do not apply to an agreed-upon peacetime presence.

On settlements, the Levy report likewise adduces several strong arguments to the effect that even if the laws of belligerent occupation applied to Israel’s presence in the West Bank, the Fourth Geneva Convention poses no bar to the kinds of actions that are subsumed under the term “settlement activities.”

The Fourth Geneva Convention forbids “transfers” and “deportations” by the occupying state of parts of its population into occupied territory, but not “settlements.” Officials of the state of Israel have provided services to settlers and sometimes encouraged them, but the state of Israel has not transferred any Israeli to the West Bank against his or her will. In fact, as even anti-settlement activists like Talia Sasson acknowledge, “there was never a considered, ordered decision by the state of Israel, by any Israeli government” on settlements. While some governments of Israel have favored the physical expansion of settlements or the increase of their population, settlement growth has been driven by the preferences of private citizens not by official Israeli population transfers. There is no precedent for any other state being adjudged to have violated the Fourth Geneva Convention simply on the basis of permitting or facilitating private preferences in the way Israel has done. Indeed, this is the reason that the Arab states sought to redefine the bar on “transfers” in international law by including a crime of “indirect” transfers in the Rome Statute creating the International Criminal Court. However, Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute and it is therefore not bound by the alternative, more restrictive standard.

The Levy commission notes that even if facilitating private Jewish residential preferences in th

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443537404577577360528694408.html?mod=opinion_newsreel

America’s grass-roots voter rebellion continued on Tuesday, most notably in Kansas, where at least nine incumbent Republicans in the state Senate lost their primary re-election bids to conservative challengers.

One big winner is Governor Sam Brownback, who campaigned in 2010 promising a tax cut to make the slow-growth Kansas economy more competitive. But his plan to reduce tax rates and close loopholes ran into trouble in the Senate, which has been controlled by GOP moderates led by President Steve Morris. The Governor managed to pass his tax cut, but Mr. Morris and his coalition refused to cut loopholes, which was part of a strategy of deliberately increasing a budget deficit in order to undermine public support for the rate cuts.

Mr. Brownback now has a conservative majority and a voter mandate to finish the job of simplifying the Kansas tax code and maybe phasing out the income tax. Conservatives for the first time in decades next year will have a governing majority with at least 26 of the 40 Senate seats. “This is all about making Kansas a more competitive place to do business,” he says. Voters agreed.

The spin in the national media is that this Kansas earthquake was bought by Charles Koch, the CEO of Koch Industries in Wichita. Mr. Koch and groups like the Kansas Chamber of Commerce and Koch-supported Americans for Prosperity certainly spent large sums to defeat the incumbents.

But the liberal Republicans spent roughly as much by forging alliances with labor unions, government contractors such as road construction companies, and such interest groups as the Realtors that wanted to preserve their tax breaks. Unions even formed a Super PAC to help the Republican incumbents.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443687504577565451822103204.html?mod=opinion_newsreel

Equatorial Guinea brutalizes its people like North Korea and Syria. So why is a prominent U.S. foundation cozying up to its dictator?

In the campaign for human rights and justice in apartheid South Africa, black American civil rights leaders were instrumental. One was Leon H. Sullivan, who enunciated the “Sullivan Principles” guiding multinational firms toward treating blacks fairly while doing business in South Africa. Why, then, is the Leon H. Sullivan Foundation today celebrating the exploits of a brutal African tyrant?

On Aug. 20, a plane-load of lobbyists, civil rights leaders, entertainers and former government officials will land in the West African nation of Equatorial Guinea for the Sullivan Summit IX. The summit’s stated objective is to “create an atmosphere of open dialogue about the state of human rights and the interconnected issues of modern Africa.” Seldom has so much dishonesty fit into one sentence.

Equatorial Guinea is home to Africa’s longest-ruling dictator, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, who seized power in a military coup by executing his uncle 33 years ago. Freedom House ranks the country among the “worst of the worst” human-rights abusers, along with North Korea, Syria and Somalia. Yet the Sullivan Foundation is celebrating its Obiang-hosted summit as a milestone for human rights, part of its “unwavering commitment to democratic ideals.”

According to the agenda posted online, summit attendees will lounge at a five-star resort for a week discussing human rights and economic development, all between black-tie dinners and champagne. They may toast to the petroleum-rich country’s staggering per capita income of $36,515 (according to the World Bank), but outside the resort the people of Equatorial Guinea will continue to toil in poverty. Sixty percent live on less than $1 a day, the majority don’t have access to clean water or electricity, and nearly one in eight children die before their fifth birthday.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443404004577577190186374230.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

The whispering over Mitt Romney’s choice of a running mate is getting louder, and along with it we are being treated to the sotto voce angst of the GOP establishment: Whatever else Mitt does, he wouldn’t dare pick Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, would he?

Too risky, goes the Beltway chorus. His selection would make Medicare and the House budget the issue, not the economy. The 42-year-old is too young, too wonky, too, you know, serious. Beneath it all you can hear the murmurs of the ultimate Washington insult—that Mr. Ryan is too dangerous because he thinks politics is about things that matter. That dude really believes in something, and we certainly can’t have that.

All of which highly recommend him for the job.

We have nothing against the other men Mr. Romney is said to be still closely considering. Tim Pawlenty twice won the governorship of Minnesota, the second time in the horrible GOP year of 2006. His working-class roots and middle American values would counter the stereotype of Mr. Romney as too rich and disconnected to average concerns. The media would say he’s another middle-aged white male, just like Mitt, but he’d certainly be a safe, mature choice.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1505/the_deadly_impact_of_president_obama_s_economic_policies_59_757_needless_deaths_and_counting
Using the same crazy logic as a pro-Obama super PAC, Obama is responsible for some 59,757 deaths

In what will almost surely be the nastiest campaign ad of the political season, a pro-Obama super political action committee (PAC) basically accuses Mitt Romney and Bain Capital of causing a woman’s death.Viewers are supposed to hold Romney responsible because the woman’s husband lost his job, and the resulting lack of insurance prevented her from getting health care in time to stop her cancer.

The ad has been debunked for several reasons, including the fact that the woman apparently had her own job with her own insurance for two years after her husband lost his job and her cancer wasn’t even discovered until seven years after Romney left Bain, but let’s set those issues aside, assume all the facts are true, and contemplate what it means if we apply the same standard of accountability to the Obama Administration.

Here’s a simple chain of reasoning.

1. There’s a well-established relationship between a nation’s prosperity and the lifespan of its people (see Figures 1 and 2 in my 1992 article in the Journal of Regulation and Social Cost).

2. Obama’s policies have dampened growth in the United States (according to data from the Congressional Budget Office and the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, actual GDP [in today’s dollars] is $836.6 billion below potential GDP).

3. Based on these two simple facts, we can conclude that the foregone growth is causing needless premature deaths.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

Toward the end of Animal Farm when the formerly revolutionary seven commandments have been rewritten to “All Animals are Equal… But Some Animals are More Equal than Others”, what began with the promise of equality has reverted to an authoritarian caste system. America’s civil rights revolution similarly began with, “All Americans are Equal” and ended up with, “All Americans are Equal… But Some Americans are More Equal than Others.”
Liberals have seized the commanding heights of the moral high ground by presenting themselves as the protectors of minorities and vowing to replace one racist system with an equally racist, anti-racist system. But caste systems aren’t just black and white and the rainbow coalition has internal conflicts. What do liberals do when different groups within the rainbow coalition conflict and how do they make that determination?

It’s not a new question. Black men got the vote before white women did, and that very issue led to a heated debate over universal suffrage in the Fourteenth Amendment, which was written to include black men, but exclude women. Suffragists were told in Fredrick Douglass’ words, “This is the Negro’s hour.” To explain why that was the hour on the clock, Douglass brought out what would become the Victim Value Index.

“When women because they are women are dragged from their houses and hung upon lamp-posts… then they will have the urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own,” Douglass sneered. Women had been dragged out of their homes and subjected to horrors because they were women for far longer than the brief few centuries of African slavery in America, but Douglass’ real point was, “My suffering beats your suffering, so my rights beat your rights.” In contemporary progressivism this is expressed in the sneering “White Women’s Tears” meme.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-great-jobs-debate

The United States is having a major debate about how to get the economy going and create millions of new jobs. On one side advocates call for greater government spending on such things as roads and bridges, (“infrastructure”) and higher “taxes on the rich” to pay for the spending and also bring down the debt. On the other side are those who believe that keeping tax rates low and restraining government spending and regulation will spur the necessary investment to create jobs.

The problem with the debate is that if no deal is struck before the end of the year, a fiscal train wreck of massive tax increases and spending cuts happens automatically.

But you might say, Democrats want tax increases and Republicans want spending restraint, so is not this the best of both worlds?

Excellent question, grasshopper. To answer it, we have to first explain how this happened, and then second, go back to first principals as what makes an economy grow. Then we can answer your question.

HOW DID WE GET INTO THIS MESS?

First, how did this happen?

In 2010, with the 2001-2003 tax rate cuts and reforms scheduled to expire, the administration and the lame-duck Congress agreed to extend the tax rates through the end of 2012.

In 2011, with the House now under the control of the Republican majority, the looming European debt crisis and the growing US debt put into stark relief the central concern that had propelled much of the change in the 2010 elections. We were spending too much.

The US Treasury told the new Congress that the US could not borrow any more money unless its debt ceiling limit was extended some time in spring or early summer. The debt limit had been raised repeatedly and was considered “no big deal”. But the Republicans, especially their Tea Party supporters, and some Democrats said, “Not So Fast”. If we were going to increase our borrowing, at least offset the borrowing with an equal amount of long-term spending restraint or debt relief, they said. (1)

Well, the two sides could not agree whether there should be spending restraint or tax increases, or both, so they come up with a interim deal that threatened financial Armageddon unless they came up with a new deal by the end of 2012.

So in August 2011, the administration and Congress agreed that failing to come up with a deal, automatic spending cuts would occur beginning in 2013, reaching $1.5 trillion over ten years. Part of this were automatic across the board cuts of $100 billion a year starting in 2013, equally divided between defense and non-defense discretionary spending.

The debt deal also cut spending by $1 trillion immediately. Defense was cut $487 billion (a number the OMB simply pulled out of thin air!), which meant 14% of the Federal budget (DOD spending) had to come up with nearly half of all the immediate budget cuts.(2) At the same time, unrelated to the debt ceiling deal of August 2011, taxes in 2013 would go up on everyone–at $500 billion a year–as the tax reform of 2001 and 2003 would expire. So Washington faces both massive spending cuts and major tax increases in January 2013 if nothing is done to alter this coming fiscal train wreck.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/outside-view-north-koreas-i-shrunk-the-kids-domestic-policy Undoubtedly, North Korea’s new 20-something leader, Kim Jong Un, was thrilled by the Olympic weightlifting competition in which the country was represented by Om Yum Chol, 20. Om won a gold medal, setting a record by lifting three times his body weight. Most of Om’s life was spent growing up under Kim’s late father, […]

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100175368/the-fortunes-of-permanence-culture-and-anarchy-in-an-age-of-amnesia

PLEASE ALSO SEE: A REVIEW BY BRUCE THORNTON http://www.city-journal.org/2012/bc0803bt.html
RUTH KING: A REVIEW AND INTERVIEW: ROGER KIMBALL: “THE FORTUNES OF PERMANENCE-CULTURE AND ANARCHY IN AN AGE OF AMNESIA”http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-fortunes-of-permanence-culture-and-anarchy-in-an-age-of-amnesia

Daniel Hannan is a writer and journalist, and has been Conservative MEP for South East England since 1999. He speaks French and Spanish and loves Europe, but believes that the European Union is making its constituent nations poorer, less democratic and less free.

In one of his Cicero novels, Robert Harris has the slave narrator, Tiro, wonder why anyone wants to build empires or raze cities when they might instead be sitting in the sunshine with a good book.

I can’t remember when I last sat in the sunshine with such a pleasant feeling of anticipation as when carrying Roger Kimball’s wonderful book,The Fortunes of Permanence.

Kimball is one of the cleverest men alive, and has interesting things to say about almost everything: art, architecture, rhetoric, statecraft, theology, music, poetry, history. His prose style is a joy: erudite but never recondite, witty but never precious. He carries large chunks of the Western canon in his head, and can find an apt quotation for every situation without coming across as contrived. He is a master of the art (so clumsy in the wrong hands) of parenthesis.

The only reason that Kimball, editor of the cultural review The New Criterion, and publisher of Encounter Books, is not acknowledged as one of the great intellectuals of our age is that he is on the Right, and so occupies a place beyond the mental horizons of the commissioning editors who set the tone of our public discourse. Since there are as yet few signs of the cultural shift he would like to see, I’m afraid his recognition will be largely posthumous. Something similar might be said of his British equivalent, Roger Scruton, but that’s another story.

The Fortunes of Permanence is a collation of linked essays. Some centre on literary and philosophical figures: William Godwin, Rudyard Kipling, G.K. Chesterton, Malcolm Muggeridge. (Kimball, educated in Maine and at Yale, is the most penetrating Anglophile I know: he sees us as we are, with all our faults, and likes us anyway.) Others look at the major political currents of the past hundred years.