RUTHFULLY YOURS

If it were not so painful, it could be funny. Everyone is shocked, simply shocked that Abbas went ahead with his plan for recognition of a “Palestinian” state. I expect that any moment Alan Dershowitz and Ed Koch and assorted fools and grandees of the Jewish organizations will rear their self righteous indignation at the chutzpah of Abbas.

They supported the concept of a “two state (dis)solution”…..blind and deaf to the realities of geographical impossibility, the stated and repeated jihadist and genocidal goals of the so-called peace processors, the masquerade of Palarab “moderation”, and the deadly lessons of the Gaza withdrawal.

Anne Bayefsky got it just right when she said in a National Review Column: ”
“The Palestinian narrative is a fiction. It is deliberately crafted to mirror that of the Jewish people, beginning with the biggest lie of all — that the catastrophe of the creation of the state of Israel is equivalent to the Holocaust.”
And all those who bought into that fiction and endorsed it and promoted it had a large part in enabling the debacle for Israel in the United Nations.
And now what?

Clinton: ‘Obama and I’ restored ties to Europe
“From day one, President Obama and I…
Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz2DnrRHzWM
Rice: ‘People know not to mess with me’
The Daily Caller
Friday, November 30, 2012
News
“And if they haven’t learned, and they try, then they will learn,” U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice says in a book written by a lifelong friend. Read more…
White House has no plans to halt Palestinian aid
The Blaze
Friday, November 30, 2012
News
There are no plans to withdraw aid to the Palestinian Authority following the United Nations vote to recognize Palestine as an independent state, a White House spokesman said Friday. Read more…
Progressives: Taxes on wealthy ‘just the beginning’
The Hill
Friday, November 30, 2012
News
A group of House Democrats has formed its own Gang of Six to push for progressive tax reform — in which the expiration of the Bush-era tax rates for the wealthiest Americans is “just the beginning.” Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz2DnqlgNys

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2012/11/30/with-rice-benghazi-is-only-the-start-of-the-problem/?print=1

As we awaken to the spectacle of yesterday’s Palestinian coup in the General Assembly — symptomatic of a colossal failure of American leadership — it is worth underscoring the important op-ed authored by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Touro Institute’s Anne Bayefsky in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal.

The piece recounts Susan Rice’s unsavory record as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Ms. Rice, of course, has recently gained notoriety — infamy, really — for her appalling performance as megaphone for the Obama administration’s effort to mislead the country into believing that a protest over an obscure video about Islam’s prophet Mohammed somehow led to the September 11 Benghazi massacre of four Americans, including Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya.

In reality — as the administration well knew when Rice was dispatched to misinform Americans five days after the slaughter — there was no protest. The atrocity was a coordinated terrorist attack, a siege of seven-plus hours during which the commander-in-chief failed to deploy readily available military assets to protect Americans.

It was politically expedient to lie because Obama’s Libya policy created the conditions for a jihadist assault on our personnel. It was also expedient to lie because the attack, by al-Qaeda-connected terrorists, contradicted the Obama campaign theme that the president’s order to kill Osama bin Laden had decimated al-Qaeda.

The ambitious Amb. Rice agreed to do the campaign’s dirty work.

The incident in and of itself should be disqualifying for Rice’s quest to become secretary of State — imagine telling your boss right after the worst malfeasance of a checkered career that you deserved a big promotion. Judge Mukasey and Ms. Bayefsky, however, do the yeoman’s work of marshaling for us, and for the senators who could be asked to confirm Ms. Rice, the facts of that checkered career.

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2012/11/23/4-places-to-visit-in-israel-once-its-safe-to-go-back-part-one/?singlepage=true

THANK YOU KATHY…AND NEXT TIME PLEASE VISIT HEBRON THE CRADLE OF THE JEWISH FAITH AND ISRAEL’S FIST CAPITAL, AND GO TO EFRAT AND ARIEL AND GUSH ETZION AND TEKOAH AND SHILOH….THOSE LOVELY TOWNS THAT ARE STILL CALLED
“SETTLEMENTS” IN ISRAEL’S HEARTLAND…..RSK

Folks who say visiting Israel is like traveling back in time don’t know the half of it. Say: Do you find yourself missing the 1970s — even though, like me, you vowed you never would? That is: Do you miss litter, graffiti, off-leash dogs, free-range cats, smoking on the beach, 13 TV channels, no wheelchair ramps — plus polyester everything?

Because if so, Israel is the 70s with cellphones! You’ll love it! Heck, the same war’s still going on! Seriously: This shiksa just got back from her second trip to Israel — not a moment too soon, from the looks of things — and I’m here with the first of a series of articles that will go from macro to micro.

PJMedia’s own Barry Rubin literally wrote the book on Israel. I read it before I left and recommend it highly. But he’s a Jew who has lived there for years. I’m writing as a gentile two-time visitor.

To that end, I’ll start off with an overviews of major cities and regions in Israel, then drill down in the coming weeks, to cover specific attractions; define words that don’t mean what you (or more accurately, your dorky grad student nephew) think they mean (i.e., “check point,” “settlement,” “refugee camp”); then offer tips on food, language, manners and more.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/11/welcome_to_egypt_sharia_or_bust.html Now they’ve gone and done it. Egyptian Islamists have rammed through a constitution that gives few rights to women, restricts free speech, gives Muslim clerics a large role in passing legislation, and doesn’t ban slavery outright. Other than that, what’s not to like – if you’re a sharia loving Islamist?   Associated Press:   […]

http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/percent-379256-government-spending.html

You cannot simultaneously enjoy American-sized taxes and European-sized government. One or the other has got to go.Previously on “The Perils of Pauline”:

Last year, our plucky heroine, the wholesome apple-cheeked American republic, was trapped in an express elevator hurtling out of control toward the debt ceiling. Would she crash into it? Or would she make some miraculous escape? Yes! At the very last minute of her white-knuckle thrill ride to her rendezvous with destiny, she was rescued by Congress’ decision to set up… a Super Committee! Those who can, do. Those who can’t, form a committee. Those who really can’t, form a Super Committee – and then put John Kerry on it for good measure. The bipartisan Super Committee of Super Friends was supposed to find $1.2 trillion of deficit reduction by last Thanksgiving, or plucky little America would wind up trussed like a turkey and carved up by “automatic sequestration.”

Sequestration sounds like castration, only more so: it would chop off everything in sight. It would be so savage in its dismemberment of poor helpless America that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that, over the course of a decade, the sequestration cuts would reduce the federal debt by $153 billion. Sorry, I meant to put on my Dr. Evil voice for that: ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THREE BILLION DOLLARS!!! Which is about what the United States government currently borrows every month. No sane person could willingly countenance brutally saving a month’s worth of debt over the course of a decade.

So now we have the latest cliffhanger: the Fiscal Cliff, below which lies a bottomless abyss of sequestration, tax-cut extension expiries, Alternative Minimum Tax adjustments, new Obamacare taxes, the expiry of the deferment of the Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate, as well as the expiry of the deferment of the implementation of the adjustment of the correction of the extension of the reduction to the proposed increase of the Alternative Minimum Growth Sustainability Reduction Rate. They don’t call it a yawning chasm for nothing.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323751104578149292503121124.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
The Crisis of American Self-Government
‘We have now an American political party and a European one. Not all Americans who vote for the European party want to become Europeans. But it doesn’t matter because that’s what they’re voting for. They’re voting for dependency, for lack of ambition, and for insolvency.”

Few have thought as hard, or as much, about how democracies can preserve individual liberty and national virtue as the eminent political scientist Harvey Mansfield. When it comes to assessing the state of the American experiment in self-government today, his diagnosis is grim, and he has never been one to mince words.

Mr. Mansfield sat for an interview on Thursday at the Harvard Faculty Club. This year marks his 50th as a teacher at the university. It isn’t easy being the most visible conservative intellectual at an institution that has drifted ever further to the left for a half-century. “I live in a one-party state and very much more so a one-party university,” says the 80-year-old professor with a sigh. “It’s disgusting. I get along very well because everybody thinks the fact that I’m here means the things I say about Harvard can’t be true. I am a kind of pet—a pet dissenter.”

Partly his isolation on campus has to do with the nature of Mr. Mansfield’s scholarship. At a time when his colleagues are obsessed with trendy quantitative methods and even trendier “identity studies,” Mr. Mansfield holds steadfast to an older tradition that looks to the Western canon as the best guide to human affairs. For him, Greek philosophy and the works of thinkers such as Machiavelli and Tocqueville aren’t historical curiosities; Mr. Mansfield sees writers grappling heroically with political and moral problems that are timeless and universally relevant.

“All modern social science deals with perceptions,” he says, “but that is a misnomer because it neglects to distinguish between perceptions and misperceptions.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323751104578151464145246312.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLESecond

The field of Democratic candidates to replace Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D., Ill.), who resigned last week amid a criminal probe of his financial activities, was already more than a dozen strong. And it got bigger yesterday when former Rep. Mel Reynolds, who held the seat from 1993 to 1995, announced he would try to win it back.

Mr. Reynolds’s bid is a long shot. He too resigned from Congress in disgrace and went to jail for bank fraud and sex with a minor. But what worries the black Democratic establishment is that Mr. Reynolds is another black candidate who could further split the black vote and enable the seat to go to a white candidate, namely former Rep. Debbie Halvorson, who served in Congress from 2009 to 2011.

Politico reports that “some black officials have met Halvorson’s entry into the race with outright hostility.” Delmarie Cobb, a Democratic consultant who worked for Mr. Jackson, said: “The battle we have is that we can’t afford to lose a black voice in Congress.” Really?

Blacks comprise a slight majority of Mr. Jackson’s district, which is safely Democratic. The winner of the primary election will almost certainly win the seat and become one of Nancy Pelosi’s reliable soldiers. The color of the winner’s skin will have no impact on any of this.

The reality is that America is a majority-white country with a twice-elected black president. Racism surely still exists, but apparently not enough of it to keep one black man from occupying the White House and another one from running the Justice Department. Yet liberals want us to pretend that 2012 is 1954 and black people need a racially separate political base?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324705104578149462995228692.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
A futile U.N. gesture that violates the 1993 Oslo Accords.????

NOW REALLY, THE 1993 OSLO ACCORDS WERE THE PREQUEL TO PALARAB STATEHOOD….AS WAS THE CAMP DAVID TREATY….AND SO CALLED “INDEPENDENT STATE” IS THE NATURAL OUTCOME OF ALL THOSE MERETRICIOUS POLICIES WHICH DEMANDED ISRAELI SURRENDER OF TERRITORY AND PATRIMONY…..RSK

It was no accident that Mahmoud Abbas chose November 29 to seek a United Nations General Assembly vote recognizing Palestine as a state, albeit as a non-member “observer” state at the U.N. November 29 is the 65th anniversary of the General Assembly’s Resolution 181, which partitioned British-Mandated Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states.

Assistant features editor David Feith on the U.N. General Assembly’s vote to grant Palestine non-member observer status. Photo: Associated Press

The Jews accepted the Resolution; Arabs unanimously rejected it. It passed by a vote of 33-13 with 10 abstentions. Had the Arab world voted for the plan, a Palestinian state would be as old as Israel is today, and within larger borders than the 1949 Armistice lines that the Palestinian President now claims for his new, notional, “state.”

Yet if Mr. Abbas intended to acknowledge the Arab error in rejecting the creation of a Jewish homeland, it wasn’t apparent Thursday. While he referred to Resolution 181 as “the birth certificate for Israel,” he also spoke of the “unprecedented historical injustice inflicted on the Palestinian people since Al-Nakba [the catastrophe] of 1948.” That would not have happened had the Arabs not sought to murder Israel in its crib by invading it.

Nor did Mr. Abbas help his cause by accusing Israel of “ethnic cleansing,” “an apartheid system of colonial occupation,” “the plague of racism,” and more. That kind of talk may work with the usual suspects at Turtle Bay who gave Mr. Abbas a standing ovation. But Israelis who spent recent days in bomb shelters while Iranian-built missiles were fired at them from Gaza probably weren’t cheering. Theirs is the say that matters if a Palestinian state is ever to come into being.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ IT’S OBAMA’S WORLD, WE JUST LIVE IN IT II Obama Considering Directly Arming Syrian Al Qaeda School District with %58 Graduation Rate, 50 Million Budget Deficit Spent 2.7 Million on Plastic Surgery for Teachers At one point the school board offered to cancel 100 teacher layoffs if the union would drop the cosmetic surgery […]