RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/presidential-debate-makes-election-alternatives-clear/print/

Forget all the pre-debate handicapping and advice about what Mitt Romney needed to do or what Barack Obama had to avoid. Last night’s debate clarified the stark choice facing American voters on November 6. On the one hand, we heard a candidate who endorses the limited government, individual rights and freedom, free market economic policies, and personal self-reliance and autonomy that the Constitution was created to protect. On the other hand, we heard a candidate who endorses big government, group rights, redistributionist economic policies, and the progressive ideal that limits freedom and empowers elites to run people’s lives. In this first debate, Romney and the Constitution clearly won, as the weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth emanating from the mainstream media prove.

First, many Americans were seeing the real Romney for the first time. Contrary to the fatcat caricature the Obama campaign and its media enablers have been peddling for months, Romney was warm and jocular, and sensitive to the plight of real people who have suffered under Obama’s policies. He easily had the best laugh lines: “Mr. President, you’re entitled to your own airplane and your own house, but not your own facts.” When Obama lied about lowering taxes for the rich, Romney answered, “I have five boys, and I’m used to people saying things over and over, thinking if they repeat it enough it will be true.” He slyly reminded everybody of Joe Biden’s gaffe that the “middle class has been buried the last four years” when he said, “Middle income Americans have been buried.” Romney responded to Obama’s complaint about $3 billion tax breaks for oil companies by contrasting it to the $90 billion for green energy, landing another punch with, “You don’t pick winners and losers, you just pick the losers.” When Romney was asked about spending cuts, he said he’d eliminate programs that are not “important enough to borrow money from China” to pay for them, like PBS, with an apology to moderator Jim Lehrer. And his early jab, “trickle down government,” should enter the political lexicon.

Thank goodness Romney did not heed all the loopy advice from the right….from Peggy Noonan’s vapors to the scolding from some conservative pundits and the drivel from Henry Olsen with “open your heart Mitt” mush.And thank goodness Obama did heed the advice from his handlers and his worshipful subjects from the mainstream media. They all thought he would cruise instead of crash.

Now both sides are criticizing Lehrer who was just right and recognized what a debate should be.

Here were two men on stage with conflicting vision and agenda for the United States and the future in the most important election of our time and Lehrer let them go at each other…punch and counter punch.

How refreshing compared to the insipid moderating of previous debates.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/10/rethinking_palestine_2012.html In 2011, Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority (PA), failed to win U.N. acceptance of Palestine as an independent state1. This year, he lowered the bar to upgraded status within the U.N. In the intervening year, Palestinian finances have collapsed, Palestinians have taken to the street to denounce PA corruption rather than Israel, […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/10/obamas_freudian_slip_he_wants_to_export_jobs.html President Obama told a September 26 rally at Kent State University in Ohio, “I want to see us export more jobs.” Then he caught himself and continued, “Export more products — excuse me. I was channeling my opponent for a second.” According to Freud, such slips of the tongue reveal true intentions that a […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/911-families-say-obama-set-to-bring-gitmo-to-us-soi New York, NY, October, 2, 2012-9/11 families strongly object to the Obama administration’s plan to purchase Thomson Correctional Facility in Thomson, Illinois without Congressional approval. As stated in our July 27 letter, signed by more than 100 family members, to House Speaker John Boehner, 9/11 families believe this purchase is a back door effort […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/a-world-without-mohammad-and-islam?f=must_reads Daniel Greenfield’s “Imagine if Mohammed Had Never Existed” (FrontPage, 29 September) is an invitation to explore some alternative “what might have been” history. It is tempting, for example, to imagine recent history and the state of America had President Barack Obama never existed – if, say, Stanley Ann Dunham had decided to try out […]

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2012/10/03/obama-would-have-sent-bin-laden-to-civilian-court/

We have a clueless ideologue, or, more likely, a hopelessly dishonest ideologue, as commander-in-chief. There can’t be any other explanation.

The Hill reports that President Obama has said he would have had Osama bin Laden sent to a civilian U.S. court for a criminal trial if the Navy SEALs had captured him, as opposed to killing him. The report is based on a Vanity Fair article derived from Mark Bowden’s new book, The Finish. Using the constitutional term “Article III” as lawyers often do in referring to the civilian federal courts, the report quotes Obama as explaining,

We worked through the legal and political issues that would have been involved, and Congress and the desire to send him to Guantánamo, and to not try him, and Article III…. I mean, we had worked through a whole bunch of those scenarios. But, frankly, my belief was if we had captured him, that I would be in a pretty strong position, politically, here, to argue that displaying due process and rule of law would be our best weapon against al-Qaeda, in preventing him from appearing as a martyr.

It is hard to know where to begin with anything this foolish. Let’s start with dishonesty. Thanks to the train wreck Obama’s demagoguery against Bush counterterrorism has made out of terrorist detention, our forces have killed in several situations — including the bin Laden raid — when it might well have been possible to capture terrorists. A president who actually believed the fantasy that Muslim populations are swayed by how much “due process and rule of law” we give to jihadist terrorists would never have adopted a kill-over-capture preference. For all his agitation against Bush’s war-paradigm for confronting our terrorist enemies, Obama has made liberal use of it in killing terrorists without any judicial warrants or trials. As he well knows, the law of war is the rule of law in wartime, and he has obviously not wasted much time fretting over due process.

http://times247.com/
THE BLAME GAME: IT’S ALL LEHRER’S FAULT!!!!!
Obama campaign hits Lehrer’s moderating
Obama spokesperson Stephanie Cutter …
Read more…
Debate rages on Obama’s downward glances
President Obama is getting lots of c…
Read more…
Maher: Obama does need a teleprompter
HBO host and comedian Bill Maher, wh…
Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz28KCi2iwE
Barone: Coddling by media left Obama untested
Washington Examiner
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Commentary
Barone: Coddling by media left Obama untested
In this first debate President Obama paid the price for the hands-off treatment he has received from mainstream media. His talking points, advanced by his spokesmen in the confidence that they will not be seriously challenged, were refuted by a well-informed Mitt Romney. Read more…
Focus group: Undecideds shift strongly to Romney
Twitchy
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
News
Focus group: Undecideds shift strongly to Romney
Pollster Frank Luntz assembled a focus group consisting of undecided Colorado voters. By the end of tonight’s debate, the group had moved dramatically toward GOP nominee Mitt Romney. Read more…
Michael Moore goes on Twitter rant over debate
The Hill
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
News
Michael Moore goes on Twitter rant over debate
Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore went on a Twitter rant over President Obama’s performance at the first presidential debate. “Fire all debate consultants now,” he tweeted, adding “This is what happens when [you] pick John Kerry as your debate coach.” Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz28KDDlma4
CNN poll: 67% say Romney won debate
CNN
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Blogs
Two-thirds of people who watched the first presidential debate think that Mitt Romney won the showdown, according to a nationwide poll. No presidential candidate had topped 60% in that question since it was first asked in 1984. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz28KDedS4y
Sullivan: Disaster for ‘effete, wonkish’ Obama
The Daily Beast
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Blogs
The debate was a disaster for the president for the key people he needs to reach, and his effete, wonkish lectures may have jolted a lot of independents into giving Romney a second look. Obama looked tired, even bored; he kept looking down; he had no crisp statements of passion or argument. Read more…
Obama debate performance: Worst since Carter
The Washington Times
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Commentary
Bewildered and lost without his teleprompter, President Obama flailed all around the debate stage last night. He was stuttering, nervous and petulant. Not since Jimmy Carter faced Ronald Reagan has the U.S. presidency been so embarrassingly represented in public. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz28KDugrfy

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What I Miss About America is attractively priced for the Obama economy at just $1.99. Buy one for yourself, and a dozen for your friends and family to spread the word about what we’re missing – and what we absolutely must get back.

http://www.newcriterion.com/posts.cfm/Piss-Christ—Art–and-Violence-6908

“Sneering at religion is juvenile, symptomatic of a stunted imagination,” writes Camille Paglia, an atheist, in her new book Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars. She is referring directly to Piss Christ. I interviewed Paglia last Thursday about her new book at the museum of art in Philadelphia, and she made the point that religion lies at the heart of all great art. One of the reasons why the art world is spiritually and intellectually hollow today, she said, is because it continues to “sneer” at religion and think, mistakenly, that doing so is still avant-garde. It’s not. It’s old news.

Serrano’s work is not so much anti-Christian as it is anti-intelligent. So why not let the Piss Christ, and the juvenile imagination that gave birth to it, die in the light of sunlight?”

“Piss Christ” has been resurrected.

Or, at least, the controversy surrounding it has been raised from the dead, now that it is back in New York at the Edward Tyler Nahem gallery (through October 26) in an exhibit called “Body and Spirit” which celebrates the life and work of its creator, the artist Andres Serrano, whom we’ve written about before.

Over twenty years ago, in 1989, the hazy image of a crucified Christ, submerged in a jar of Serrano’s urine, created a public firestorm when conservative Sen. Alfonse D’Amato (NY) deplored it on the Senate floor as a “despicable display of vulgarity”—one that had, no less, been funded by taxpayers. Serrano was radical, but he wasn’t that radical: The so-called avant-garde artist received government support to the tune of $15,000 for the work.

Today, what’s astonishing about Piss Christ is not its vulgarity or shock-value; it is a completely mundane work of “art” which has aged as well as a cheap wine spritzer. The only merit it has is as a historical artifact of the culture wars. It is, to use the phrase of TNC art critic James Panero, a boring blasphemy.

No, what’s astonishing is that despite its third-rate stature, it continues, after all these years, to provoke its intended target to disturbing outbursts of anger and violence.

On Palm Sunday in 2011, for instance, a group of radical young Christians stormed a gallery in Avignon, France, which was displaying Piss Christ as part of an exhibit. They made their way past security, threatened a guard with a hammer, broke through the Plexiglas protecting the image, and slashed it with a sharp object. In 1997 at the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia, the work was also vandalized, and gallery officials received death threats for showing it. In 2007, a group of neo-Nazis attacked a Serrano show in Sweden (though Piss Christ was not on display there).