RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/314851

Good news for Senator Harry Reid: If he’s a little bored while waiting for Mitt Romney to release his tax returns, there are plenty of other elected officials — in his own party, to boot! — who merit the same eyebrow-raising he’s directed at the presumptive GOP presidential nominee. The Senate majority leader has expressed consternation about the fact that Romney has some money in offshore accounts, which probably reduces his tax burden. According to the Huffington Post, Reid quipped, “Most Americans don’t have the benefit of Swiss bank accounts or tax shelters in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda.” And Gawker just published more than 950 pages of Bain documents related to Romney’s offshore holdings, saying they detail his use of “exotic tax-avoidance schemes available only to the preposterously wealthy.”

Some of the “preposterously wealthy” Americans who do use such “schemes” include Senators Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.), Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.), Frank Lautenberg (D., N.J.), and John Kerry (D., Mass.). That should be music to Reid’s ears, since his transparency crusade might be a little easier to pull off within his own party.

He could start with Feinstein. OpenSecrets.org lists her as the seventh-wealthiest senator, with a net worth between $44 million and $94 million, according to her latest disclosure forms. And, just like Romney, she keeps a portion of it in offshore accounts. Her most recent reports say she has an unspecified amount (at least $1 million) “held independently by the spouse or independent child” in Coral Growth Investments, Ltd., in St. Peter Port, Guernsey. Guernsey, a tax haven, is a small island in the English Channel that early this year drew the ire of a British Labour-party leader for helping wealthy Brits dodge taxes. The California senator also has between $500,000 and $1 million in a fund called Cevian Capital II L.L.C. in Jersey, another of the Channel Islands. According to her latest forms, that holding generated between $15,000 and $50,000 in capital gains, interest, and dividends. Feinstein has another $1,000 to $15,000 in Mauritius, an island nation in the Indian Ocean off Madagascar that is an up-and-coming tax haven.

Like Feinstein, Richard Blumenthal is on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Also like Feinstein, he has funds sheltered from taxes — $15,000 to $50,000 in a hedge fund in the Cayman Islands, to be exact. That might not sound like a huge number, but his most recent disclosure forms say he made $50,000 to $100,000 from the fund in capital gains, dividends, and interest.

Lautenberg appears to be in the same boat. The New Jerseyan is the fifth-wealthiest senator, with a net worth that, in 2006, was six times the Senate’s average. His most recent forms show that his wife’s family has between $500,000 and $1 million in Port Louis, Mauritius. The money is in a real-estate private-equity fund that does its actual investing in India, and the earnings it generates are subject to taxes, as one of his representatives told National Review Online.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/314858/virtues-premium-support-deroy-murdock

‘Governor Romney now owns the Republican, Ryan budget that puts millionaires ahead of Medicare and the middle class,” House minority leader Nancy Pelosi of California recently snapped.

“By picking Representative Paul Ryan, Governor Romney has doubled down on his commitment to gut Social Security and end Medicare as we know it,” Senate majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada snarled.

Pelosi and Reid know better. The Medicare-reform proposal of presumptive GOP running-mate Paul Ryan is precisely as extreme as the health plan available today to every member of Congress. Ryan envisions average seniors’ being able to enjoy Capitol Hill–style medical options. This itself, however, would be a choice. Seniors who oppose choice in health coverage will be 100 percent welcome to remain within traditional Medicare.

Ryan’s “far-Right” Medicare reform is co-sponsored by Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon liberal Democrat (2010 Americans for Democratic Action rating: 100 percent). Unlike most Democrats, Wyden understands that if Medicare continues to traverse today’s path, by 2024 it will tumble into a canyon.

“Paul Ryan shares my belief that we don’t hold election certificates to sit on the sidelines, and that the only way to tackle some of the big challenges facing our nation is to work together on big solutions,” Wyden said as he and Ryan (2010 ADA rating: 0 percent) unveiled their legislation last December. “Paul has also long shared my view that the best way to hold down health costs is to give all Americans the ability to hire and fire their insurance company.”

Wyden-Ryan would do just that, although no time soon.

“Americans currently over the age of 55 would see no changes to the structure of their benefits,” their bill summary states. “Starting in 2022, Medicare would begin offering seniors a choice among Medicare-approved private plans competing alongside a traditional Medicare plan.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444443504577599120307000312.html?mod=WSJ_article_MoreIn_Opinion

Dr. Coburn, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, served on the “Bowles-Simpson” National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. He is the author of “The Debt Bomb” (Thomas Nelson, 2012).

Coburn: The Truth About Ryan and His Critics
First Obama rejected the ‘grand bargain’ of his own Bowles-Simpson commission. Then he turned around and ridiculed the Wisconsin congressman’s comprehensive alternative.

The more voters learn about Congressman Paul Ryan’s leadership style and his thoughtful and creative approach to solving problems, the more they will decide that the Romney-Ryan ticket looks presidential and electable. That’s why there has been a coordinated effort in recent days to ramp up not just the “Mediscare” rhetoric against Mr. Ryan, but to depict him as a partisan ideologue who was instrumental in derailing a grand bargain on the deficit. This line of attack is cynical and, most of all, false.

First, Paul Ryan didn’t force President Obama to abandon the budget recommendations of his own 2010 deficit commission, known as Bowles-Simpson. Mr. Obama’s decision to punt on deficit reduction—and then to ridicule Mr. Ryan’s plan to address the deficit—offended and disappointed Republicans and Democrats alike.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444812704577605802637698824.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLESecond
By MARY ANASTASIA O’GRADY

Conventional wisdom holds that Connecticut Republican Senate candidate Linda McMahon—a political neophyte in a famously Democratic stronghold—has no chance of victory in November. But a Rasmussen poll released Tuesday suggests otherwise. At the very least Mrs. McMahon seems to be making it a horse race.

The Rasmussen sample, which surveyed 500 likely voters, gave the Republican from Fairfield County 49% of the vote against 46% for the heavily favored Democrat candidate, Congressman Chris Murphy. That three percent spread is the first time Mrs. McMahon has edged out her opponent in a poll, though she has been narrowing the gap for months. The Real Clear Politics average of polls, since the end of May, now favors Mr. Murphy by a measly spread of 2.6%.

The Rasmussen poll is also the first major poll released since Mrs. McMahon became the official Republican candidate, decisively beating former Republican Congressman Chris Shays in the Aug. 14 primary. Mr. Shays went down to defeat partly because his record in the House was considered too moderate for many primary voters. But Mrs. McMahon also spent heavily to crush him. The Los Angeles Times reported that the bill during primary season was “at least $12 million, much of it from her own pocket.” The former World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) executive has deep pockets and she is not afraid to shell it out. In her failed 2010 bid to win a Senate seat, she used almost $50 million of her own money.

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2012/08/cutting-khazar-crap.html

ARTHUR KOESTLER, THE ERUDITE AND BRILLIANT WRITER WAS ONCE A MARXIST AND BECAME A FIERCE CRITIC OF COMMUNISM. HIS “DARKNESS AT NOON” IS A MASTERPIECE IN DISCLOSING THE MAD AND FANATIC VIOLENCE OF THE STALINISTS. HE WAS ALSO AN EARLY MILITANT ZIONIST WHO THEN TURNED ON ISRAEL AND ZIONISM AND IN 1976 PUBLISHED “THE THIRTEENTH TRIBE” PROMOTING THE CANARD THAT ASHKENAZI JEWS HAD NO LINEAL ANCESTRAL TIE TO ISRAEL WHICH SERVES THE PALARAB CAUSE SO WELL…..RSK

On their website Australians For Palestine make a laughing stock of themselves by putting up that map I blogged about yesterday, describing it (with an accompanying story from Facebook about some pesky “Zionists” who took offence at it) as a map of 1700, but that’s not the only lie that Australians For Palestine have swallowed and perpetuated.Elsewhere on the website the organisation (which incidentally does not baulk at reproducing articles from the antisemitic Redress site) quotes extracts from Encyclopaedia of the Palestine Problem by the late Issa Nakhleh, one of which states:

“The Khazars are a people of Turkish origin who lived in the kingdom of Khazaristan in the south of Russia. They were converted to Judaism in the 9th century A.D. Approximately 90% of the Jews of today are of Khazar origin and have no ethnic or historical relationship with Palestine.”

It”s the final sentence in that passage that’s the mendacious one (though the impression that Nakhleh gives, that the Khazars in their entirety embraced Judaism, is misleading nonsense too).

That complex intellectual Arthur Koestler sure left a poisoned legacy with his The Thirteenth Tribe (1976), for, as was obvious the moment it appeared, it was manna to Israel’s enemies everywhere.

Reportedly, Koestler believed that if it could be shown that European Jewry descends not from Biblical Semites but from the Khazars, antisemitism would disappear. I wondered at the time, and I still wonder, whether the thesis that he pursued so avidly was rooted in some psychological anxiety regarding his own identity. Might the man with the magyarised Jewish background be satisfying a personal quest born of some anxiety in boyhood to assure himself that, like the Magyars themselves, he too was of Turkic stock?

PRESBYTERIANS FOR MIDDLE EAST PEACE CITE AMERICA-ISRAEL FRIENDSHIP LEAGUE’S “CRITICAL ROLE” IN DEFEAT OF BDS/APARTHEID RESOLUTIONS

Reverend Dr. William Harter Calls 2012 Meeting of Presbyterian General Assembly “Intense”

New York, August 23, 2012: In a letter addressed to Kenneth Bialkin, Chairman of the America Israel Friendship League, the Reverend Dr. William Harter, co-convener of the Presbyterians For Middle East Peace, summarized the results of several votes cast during the 2012 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA, held in Pittsburgh in July. The Reverend Dr. Harter said the role played by the AIFL was “absolutely central and critical” in the defeat of the Divestment and “Apartheid” overtures proposed at the recent PC USA meeting. “The AIFL’s support and investment – moral, spiritual, and financial – and the personal presence and counsel of the League’s leadership were invaluable.”

Harter noted that nine of the PFMEP members present in Pittsburgh had participated in a delegation of Presbyterian clergy who had traveled to Israel as part of a group sponsored by AIFL. Among those was Reverend David Berge, Associate Pastor for Youth from Ojai, California, whom Dr. Harter characterized as “eloquent, both in committee hearings and at the plenary.” Harter called the work of The Reverend William (Bill) Borror “invaluable, both in his testimony and in strategic planning.” The critical logistical support and “very effective” discussions with commissioners led by the Reverend Dr. John Wimberley, PFMEP’s co-convener, and all the members of the PFMEP were “crucial.”

“Our journey to Israel equipped the representatives with essential knowledge and experience,” said the Pastor Emeritus. “This year’s struggle was the most intense I have experienced in 42 years of attending General Assemblies. The votes were very close, but voices of reason prevailed. The intercessory prayers of many, many individuals and congregations were answered. Finally we must recognize that this result was achieved b’Ezrat HaShem – with the Help of G-d. His name was, and is, glorified as we continue to give thanks for His miraculous power and compassion.”

Bialkin, speaking on behalf of the AIFL, said “the efforts and success of Dr. Harter and each of our colleagues are deeply appreciated. We look forward to evolving, continued positive associations with Presbyterian Church USA leaders and members. “

Kenneth Bialkin Harley Lippman

Chairman President

—http://www.jewishpress.com/news/israel/former-ambassador-indyk-white-house-thinks-israels-iran-threats-are-a-sham/2012/08/23/
Former Ambassador Indyk: White House Thinks Israel’s Iran Threats Are a Sham
By: Jacob Edelist

INDYK WITH THE APPOSITE NAME WHICH MEANS TURKEY IN POLISH IS OF THE DENNIS ROSS SCHOOL OF UNTRUSTWORTHY ISRAEL BASHERS….BUT ALL THOSE LEAKS COMING FROM ISRAEL ABOUT IMMINENT STRIKES ARE DETRIMENTAL….EITHER DO IT OR SHUT UP….THERE WERE NO LEAKS AND THREATS FOR OSYRAK, OR THE SYRIAN LAB, OR ENTEBBE…..RSK

“In the U.S. they were convinced that Israel was going to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities in the spring, and we’ve tried everything in our power to change their stance,” Martin Indyk, former American ambassador to Israel, told Tali Lipkin-Shachak in an interview on IDF Radio on Thursday.

Indyk, who served under two presidents as American ambassador to Israel, explained that the Americans figured out finally that Israel was not really going to attack. “I think that afterwards they felt that Prime Minister Netanyahu and Security Minister Barak created a big fraud,” he explained.

“The president is obligated to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons,” emphasized Indyk, “But this was the boy who cried wolf. First it looked like it really worked, when everyone did whatever they could to placate Israel. But after another round of Israeli threats, people in the Administration were saying, “Looks like they’re doing their threats again, but we can live with it.”

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2012/08/23/islamophobic-hysteria-becomes-conventional-wisdom/?print=1

It’s been quite a week to be the author of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

My book was well received by the public and generously reviewed by some of the conservative press. In what passes for the “mainstream” media, however, it was mostly ignored and otherwise panned as Islamophobic hysteria. This was because the book had two themes that were deeply unpopular:

1. Islamic supremacism is not a fringe ideology, but instead an entirely mainstream interpretation of Islam that is followed by hundreds of millions of Muslims worldwide — the dominant Islam of the Middle East, and — whether a majority or a strong plurality — the dynamic Islam in the rest of the world today, including the West. Its chief proponents are the Saudi Kingdom and the Muslim Brotherhood (Iran and its satellites compete with a Shiite version that is equally revolutionary, but there are vastly more Sunnis than Shiites). The Brotherhood rightly perceives itself as the intellectual vanguard of a global Islamic mass-movement with a ground-up strategy for Islamizing societies that prioritizes the implementation of sharia.

2. Islamists and Leftists are frequent collaborators. Though their disagreements are several and not trivial (e.g., women’s rights, gay rights, abortion), they are in harmony on basic, big picture matters. Both ideologies are totalitarian in the sense of wanting centralized control of people’s lives, down to the small details; both elevate the good of the collective (or the ummah) over the individual; both are vigorously anti-capitalist (something most Americans still do not know about Islamist ideology); and neither can succeed in achieving its grand design without suppressing the liberties and self-determinism of the citizen.

On point 2, some objected to my use of the word sabotage in the subtitle. The word is not something I came up with, though. I was quoting an internal Muslim Brotherhood memorandum which described the Islamist mission in America as “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within” by means of “sabotage” (to be precise, by “sabotaging” the “miserable house” that is “Western civilization”).

This concept of pretending one’s intentions are benign in order to bore into a society’s institutions and fundamentally to transform them from within mirrors the Alinsky-style community organizing favored by the hard Left. Given that Islamists admit (at least among themselves) that they are committing sabotage, and given their propensity to make common cause with Leftists who employ the same transform-from-within strategy, I do not think there is much merit in this objection to the word sabotage. Put a different way, I think the real objection is that I spotlighted something they would rather keep hidden.

http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4319

Craig Karpel is a recovering addict. He says so himself. His addiction is to Barack Obama, and his recovery inspires him to write a book. He offers a 12-step program, patterned after the program that has rescued thousands of town drunks.

He’s a confirmed Obamaholic, but he doesn’t blame the president. He absolves Mr. Obama of blame for the addiction to the messiah from the south side of Chicago that turned so many healthy Americans into junkies. His book has created a bit of a buzz already.

“My name is Craig K.,” he says in the opening line of the “12-Step Guide for the Recovering Obama Voters,” published by HarperCollins Broadside Books.

“I’m an Obamaholic. Welcome to what Alcoholics Anonymous would call a ‘meeting in print.’ We’re here to admit to each other and to ourselves that the Obama presidency isn’t Obama’s fault – it’s ours. We should be impeached for having elected him.”

Though the collective stupor induced by Mr. Obama’s speechifying four years ago is finally dissolving, little by little, there’s still a lot of stupor out there. Gallup only this week said Mitt Romney has edged ahead of the president in a national poll of voters, but what is remarkable to the sober observer is that Mr. Obama is keeping it close, given the unholy mess he has made of the economy.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/mark-durie/insider-killings-in-afghanistan/

In the past two weeks at least nine Americans have been killed by their Afghan allies in what is known to as “insider killings.” Members of the Afghan army, having been trained and armed by NATO forces, are turning their weapons in increasing numbers against their foreign allies, killing at least 40 NATO troops this year so far.

These killings are demoralizing, not only for the troops, but also for the folks back home. They make people war-weary. Mrs. Marina Buckley, the mother of Lance Corporal Gregory Buckley who was killed by one of his Afghan allies just before he was due to return home, spoke for many when she said: “Our forces shouldn’t be there. It should be over. It’s done. No more.”