RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2012/08/31/the-reckoning-cia-interrogation-investigation-closed-without-further-charges/

With the nation’s eyes fixed on Tampa, the Obama Justice Department quietly announced the closure of its much heralded investigation into purported torture, murder, and other war crimes that the Bush-deranged Left alleged were committed in carrying out the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program.

Attorney General Eric Holder issued a statement Thursday afternoon, reporting that the investigation was being terminated without charges.

Most of the allegations had been investigated during the Bush years — not by political appointees but by career prosecutors, who after diligent scrubbing determined that there were no prosecutable cases. The 2008 Obama campaign nevertheless accused Bush officials of war crimes. No one was louder on the subject than then-campaign spokesman Holder, who stoked Obama’s base in a speech at the leftist American Constitution Society:

Our government authorized the use of torture, approved of secret electronic surveillance against American citizens, secretly detained American citizens without due process of law, denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants and authorized the use of procedures that violate both international law and the United States Constitution.

Holder promised a “reckoning” for Bush’s “needlessly abusive and unlawful practices” that not only offended “the Constitution and the rule of law” but “made us less rather than more safe.” Having thus passed the audition with flying colors, Holder was named Obama’s attorney general and assured the Senate panel considering his nomination that the CIA had surely committed “torture” in the interrogation program by waterboarding three — count ‘em, three — high-value al-Qaeda detainees (with the knowledge of bipartisan congressional leadership, including Rep. Nancy Pelosi).

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/ad-lib/2012/aug/29/no-muslim-prayers-democratic-convention-cardinal-d/
IS THIS LAST MINUTE HOUSEKEEPING BY THE DNC? THE JUMAH PRAYER WAS LISTED ON THE DNC SITE AND THEN SCRUBBED….RSK
No Muslim prayers at Democratic Convention, but Cardinal Dolan will give closing prayer

WASHINGTON, August 29, 2012 — Enough of the nonsense. Enough of the outright lies and distortions.

Here are the facts:

* Cardinal Timothy Dolan will give the closing prayer at the Democratic Convention, just as he is doing at the Republican Convention.

* There will be no Muslim prayer led by any radical Islamists at the Democratic Convention.

Here is the truth despite Right Wing blogs and misreporting by various media:

Just as he did at the Republican Convention, Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York, accepted the Democrats’ invitation to close their convention with a blessing. Even though he has often been at odds with Democrats on social issues, the Cardinal will be there as he was at the GOP event as a pastor. In a statement released by the Cardinal’s spokesman, Joseph Zwilling, to the Catholic journal Commonweal Magazine, the Catholic prelate made clear his role:

“Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York, has accepted an invitation to deliver the closing prayer at next week’s Democratic National Convention. As was previously announced, he will also be offering the closing prayer at the Republican Convention on Thursday of this week.

“It was made clear to the Democratic Convention organizers, as it was to the Republicans, that the Cardinal was coming solely as a pastor, only to pray, not to endorse any party, platform, or candidate. The Cardinal consulted Bishop Peter Jugis of the Diocese of Charlotte, who gave the Cardinal his consent to take part in the convention that will be taking place in his diocese.”

That should end the ridiculous rumors about Democrats snubbing the Cardinal, disinviting him, or in any way disrespecting him.

As for the Muslim distortions that have gone viral, there will be no Jumah prayers at the Democratic Convention by the Bureau of Indigenous Muslim Affairs. There will be a gathering of Muslims on Friday, August 31 at Marshall Park in Charlotte for an open-air prayer, and other events are planned for around the city as well. It is, however, only one of the 1,000 non-official events that are occurring in Charlotte over the next week.

As the Charlotte Observer noted, these events are timed to coincide with the Convention but are not part of the convention unless they have the Democratic Convention logo. The Jumah Congregational Prayer does not have a DNCC logo.

Some of the other events planned for the week of convention, and not endorsed by the DNCC, include a NASCAR event, an Alabama Gospel brunch, A CarolinaFest (celebrating the Carolinas and the South), Texas Exes Happy Hour, Financial Football, Zumba/Cardiofunk Dance Fitness, and Bend the Arc Jewish Action breakfast to name only some of the events swirling around the main event of the Convention itself.

To fact check this further, go to Snopes, a website that investigates and debunks rumors that have no basis in fact.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=283307

Into the Fray: The Right must revert to the traditional Zionist perception of “reality” as malleable rather than immutable.

In this two-part sequel to my columns analyzing “What’s wrong with the Right,” I set out the components of a comprehensive approach to what is usually termed the “Palestinian problem.”

This will include not only the measures that should be undertaken to dissipate – rather than resolve – the problem per se, but those that must be undertaken to render them feasible.

To recap briefly

Over the past two weeks, I took the Right to task for its poorly thought through proposals for alternative policy paradigms to the two-state-solution (TSS) proposal, which even if implemented would, in all likelihood, eliminate few of the threats to Israel’s security, and exacerbate many.

I criticized what I saw as the intellectual surrender by the Right in failing to acknowledge, or, at least, failing to clearly articulate acknowledgement of the inevitable conclusion that, to sustain itself as the nation-state of the Jewish people, Israel must address two imperatives:

a. The geographic imperative, which implies it cannot make any significant territorial concessions in Judea and Samaria; and

b. The demographic imperative, which implies it cannot incorporate large segments of the Palestinian Arabs, resident in this area, as enfranchised citizens within its sovereign territory.

This leads to the inescapable deduction that if Israel is to be secured as the permanent Jewish nation-state, the only non-coercive option is the relocation of the Palestinian Arabs, induced primarily by generous economic incentives.

Recognizing realities

Effective policy invariably requires one to acknowledge existing realities. But acknowledging reality does not mean accepting it. Indeed, to successfully change reality, one has first to recognize it.

In this regard, it must be admitted that – mainly due to decades of dereliction of diplomatic duty – Israel has allowed the international discourse on the Mideast conflict in general, and the Palestinian component of it in particular, to gel very disadvantageously for it. It has permitted the TSS-concept to become deeply engrained in the international psyche as the only option available to Israel that will allow it to exist as a Jewish democracy and prevent it from becoming either an undemocratic Jewish ethnocracy – imposing minority Judeo-centric rule on an Arab majority – or a non-Jewish state-of-allits- citizens.

In other words, the currently entrenched (mis)perceptions are that Israel must choose between the risk of becoming geographically unviable, or the certainty of becoming demographically unviable. Intellectual allegiance to this misplaced dichotomy between a TSScompliant Jewish democracy on the one hand, and non-democratic/non-Jewish alternatives on the other, has come to dominate not only the content of the international debate, but the cultural codex of its conduct.

To challenge its validity – no matter what the substantive basis for such dissent – is to risk being marginalized professionally and ostracized socially, at least as far as mainstream institutions are concerned.

It will not be easy to shatter this political reality, which due to a noxious mix of neglect, naïveté and nefariousness has, over more than two decades, hardened into the “received wisdom” on the Judeo-Arabic conflict in the Middle East.

However, within the constraints of the faux framework of artificially imposed dictates that comprises current conventional wisdom, there is no viable policy-paradigm that can sustain Israel, in the long run, as the nation-state of the Jews.

Accordingly, despite the daunting difficulties, prising loose the debilitating stranglehold it has in defining the conceptual space of the discourse is an essential precondition for the promotion – and eventual implementation – of any Zionist-compliant TSS-alternative.

Unless this is grasped – and perceived as both possible and imperative – pursuit of such alternatives is futile.

Radical revision required

To accomplish this objective requires a radical revision of how the nation relates to diplomacy – particularly public diplomacy (a.k.a. hasbara) – as a crucial element in the design of the strategic arsenal required to sustain Jewish sovereignty in the modern era.

MY FRIEND AND E-PAL SAW THINGS DIFFERENTLY….AND I ALWAYS APPRECIATE HIS TAKE ON THINGS…..RSK

A number of people sent me messages to the effect that this speech or that speech didn’t cover a particular topic, particularly the infiltration of the Muslim Brotherhood into our government.The speeches weren’t made for us – we are already against Obama and we know the hidden problems like the Muslim Brotherhood.

The speeches are aimed at the people who undecided or who are wavering in their support of Obama. As such, they have to hit the problems that people are having in their day-to-day lives. To emphasize the Jihadi problem would make it difficult to persuade many voters to come to the Romney side.

Foreign policy certainly was not the emphasis of the convention but it was not neglected. Quite a few speakers did mention Obama’s abandonment of Israel. They mentioned the loss of respect for the U.S., the diminishment of our power. Most of us are aware of Condi Rice’s positions on the Mideast and we don’t like them. But Condi’s speech wasn’t about foreign policy. Her speech was about the ability of a Black woman, raised in Jim Crow Alabama to rise up through the ranks of the Republican Party to become Secretary of State. She accomplished that. She gave that whole speech from a few notes and no teleprompter.

In this instance, we have to put aside her personal views. We have to consider how much she contributed to the fight against Obama.

The same themes, that minorities can succeed in America, that they can succeed in the Republican Party and that they can make difference permeated all the speeches by minority men and women. Another consistent theme was that Republican governors have taken terrible state financial conditions and turned them around.

What the campaign had and has to do is convince a few percent of voter here, a few percent there to support Romney instead of Obama. That Israel was mentioned by name by so many speakers is an attempt to increase Jewish support for the ticket. Already Jewish support for Obama has dropped from 78% to the low 60’s. Maybe it can drop down to the 50’s.

We will only know how successful these efforts were after the election.

Jan

PS: The irony of this campaign is the number of anti-Racist, non-Racist people who voted for Obama because of his race.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=2495

After fighting for his life for three days, Sgt. Yehonatan Ben-Yishai died on Thursday in Haifa’s Rambam Hospital. The 20-year-old soldier in the Golani Brigade sustained critical injuries when he was run over by a Merkava tank during a military exercise. An investigation of the incident was immediately launched by the Israel Defense Forces, but it will take a while before all the facts are in. Still, initial reports indicate that the tragic accident occurred while Ben-Yishai and two other soldiers in his unit were lying on the ground – where, it seems, they had fallen asleep. The driver of the tank, who was backing up the vehicle, was unable to see his comrades-in-arms, and inadvertently drove over Ben-Yishai’s torso. Miraculously, the other two boys emerged unscathed.

It goes without saying that everyone in this country feels for Ben-Yishai’s grieving parents. Less talked about, but equally obvious, is the sense that the driver of the tank must be in the kind of pain that few of us can imagine.

Unwittingly crushing another human being is certain to have life-long emotional repercussions – no matter what the investigation reveals, and regardless of who or what is determined to be at fault.

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2221/Whats-Whiter-Than-the-GOP-The-Media.aspx= Ah, to be a member of Big Media when the white Republicans gather to nominate their white ticket for the White House. It’s like shooting white elephants in a white convention center, what with their unbearable whiteness of being – so “non-diverse,” as Big Media strenuously signal their audiences. Gallup tells us Republicans are […]

Finally the show is over. Never mind some disappointing speeches and the conventional silliness. Frankly, Clint Eastwood is not exactly a political genius. Chris Christie should stick to New Jersey. But, most important of all there is a real team at the top and they have changed the conversation.

MITT ROMNEY FOR PRESIDENT

PAUL RYAN FOR VICE PRESIDENT

I hope their coattails usher in some real conservative stars into the Senate and Congress. A majority is within reach now.

Mazeltov!!!

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/is-the-media-worse-now-about-their-left-wing-bias-than-ever

I suspect that’s a matter of interpretation and “feel,” as it would be hard to quantify statistically.But it feels like the left-wingers in the legacy/elite media have gone off the rails this week at the Republican National Convention.

First there was Juan Williams, who’s an exemplar of the legacy media (Washington Post and NPR, which make up his pedigree, suffice nicely even though he works at Fox News now), and his mind-boggling assault on Ann Romney as a pampered corporate wife mere minutes after a speech she gave about conquering adversity. Williams offered an “explanation” of his attack on the GOP nominee’s wife which contained an attempt to confine his fire to her speech and not her person – and fell as flat as his initial attack.

And Williams’ denigration of Ann Romney was virtually identical to what was going on at MSNBC. That network, already stinging from the unhinged and embarrassing rant Chris Matthews laid on RNC chair Reince Priebus earlier in the week and Newt Gingrich’s subsequent verbal beatdown of the connected-but-lacking-in-merit former failed Congressional candidate, has nevertheless plowed ahead with coverage of the convention falling off even its own rails.

For example, on Tuesday – after that network had again and again decried the implicit racism of the GOP – with Matthews serving as only one of its inquisitors – the convention’s speaking roster included two very articulate and talented black speakers in Mia Love and Artur Davis as well as three other Hispanic speakers in Luce Fortuno, Brian Sandoval and Ted Cruz. And MSNBC would not televise a single one of those speeches. Not a single one. NBC News wouldn’t even list Davis’ speech – in which he came out publicly as a Democrat switching to the GOP – as one of the notable speeches at the convention on its website. They would do the same thing to Susana Martinez’ speech on Wednesday.

This while Chuck Todd of that network roamed the convention floor and cooked up the narrative that the black people at the convention were strategically placed in the seating arrangements so as to maximize their visibility in front of the cameras.

On Wednesday, Condoleezza Rice gave a stirring speech which articulated black conservatism perhaps better than anyone before her – containing the outstanding line that “a little girl grows up in Jim Crow Birmingham – the most segregated big city in America – her parents can’t take her to a movie theater or a restaurant – but they make her believe that even though she can’t have a hamburger at the Woolworth’s lunch counter – she can be President of the United States and she becomes the Secretary of State. Yes, America has a way of making the impossible seem inevitable in retrospect.”

ABC News showed just two minutes of the speech and ate up the rest of the time Rice was talking with babbling from Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos, making them the leader in the clubhouse. At least, until this…

Birtherism? Where does that come from? From this line, apparently:

“In America it doesn’t matter where you came from. It matters where you’re going.”

Also in last night’s coverage, this lowlight – in which a thoroughly unremarkable Mitch McConnell speech was filtered and interpreted by Martin Bashir and Lawrence O’Donnell as a sneaky attempt at subtle racism using golf as a racial dog whistle…

MARTIN BASHIR: We have seen an early draft of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s forthcoming oration. Can I quote something from you? “For four years, Barack Obama has been running from the nation’s problems, he hasn’t been working to earn re-election. He has been working to earn a spot on the PGA Tour.” How about that?

LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: Well, we know exactly what he’s trying to do there. He is trying to align to Tiger Woods and surely, the – lifestyle of Tiger Woods with Barack Obama. Obviously, nothing could be further from the truth. They find every way they possibly can to –

BASHIR: Lawrence – don’t you think – don’t you think that what he’s really trying to do is to suggest that the president is not paying attention to the central issues that come with the responsibility he has? Is he really – Mitch McConnell really making a connection with Tiger Woods who, of course, has become infamous for chasing various cocktail waitresses around Las Vegas and so on?

O’DONNELL: Martin, there are many, many, many rhetorical choices you can make at any point in any speech to make whatever point up want to make. If he wanted to make the point that you just suggested and I think he does want to make that point, they had a menu of a minimum of ten different kinds of images that they could have raised. And I promise you, the speech writers went through, rejecting three or four before they land order that one. That’s the one they want for a very deliberate reason. That – there’s – these people reach for every single possible racial double entendre they can find in every one of these speeches.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post’s Sally Quinn published a column asking whether Isaac landing in Louisiana wasn’t God’s way of punishing Republicans. Not a blog post at Democrat Underground or Fire Dog Lake, but a column at the Washington Post.

And at CBS News, Charlie Rose – oblivious to the volume of black and Hispanic speakers at the RNC, apparently – said “…Many people worry that people who are Hispanic, African-American and other minorities don’t have a place in this party.”

And there was the David Chalian incident. Chalian, Yahoo! News’ Washington bureau chief and a former producer at ABC News who won an Emmy for Charlie Gibson’s peer-down-the-spectacles-at-Sarah Palin hit-piece interview four years ago, was caught on a hot mic yesterday “jokingly” accusing the Romneys of being happy to have a party while black people are drowning. Chalian was immediately fired by Yahoo!, which apparently still has some journalistic standards, but his peers hardly ran from him in the aftermath of the statement.

PBS’ Gwen Ifill…

One mistake does not change this. @davidchalian is God’s gift to political journalism. #IStandwithDavid

– gwen ifill (@pbsgwen) August 29, 2012

And the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza…

ryan lizza_tweet

But things really came to a boil as Paul Ryan took to the stage to speak last night. Ryan told the story of a GM plant in his hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin which was going down the tubes and has closed despite Obama’s promises to the contrary…

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-dangerous-lie-of-the-hijab

As the number of converts to Islam grows around the world, little is more surprising than the fact that the vast majority of those converts are women – by some counts, as many as four times the number of women in the United States as men. And over and over, as if reciting dogma, these women offer the same bizarre explanation: Islam, they say, with its “modest” dress code, frees them from the “oppression” of Western society and a culture that judges women on their looks alone. It is, in fact, as if they have bought into the religion not for its precepts, but for its costumes.

Perhaps you could even believe their reasoning if most of these women actually dressed in full chador or burqa. But they don’t. Rather, they simply cover their heads – and occasionally their bare necks – in hijabs, or headscarves, arguing – with flawed logic and misrepresentations of the principles supporting Western notions of equality and feminism – that even this is a sign of “liberation” as much as it is of their allegiance to a religion.

And evidently, more and more non-Muslims are buying it, especially as legal battles erupt in Europe — and in some American cities — over the right to wear a hijab in the public realm.

Latest among them, it seems, are the editors of the International Herald Tribune, who earlier this summer ran an op-ed by Ayesah Nusrat, a self-described “Indian Muslim,” defending her decision to don a hijab at the age of 23. (What the editors evidently failed to notice was that the pious young author of the piece lifted all of her ideas and a reasonable portion of her words directly from a previously-published essay by a Canadian Muslim, Naheed Mustafa, which is widely available online,)

Poorly written, speckled with faulty grammar and plagiarized clauses, Nusrat’s piece presents a downright bizarre depiction of Western media and public opinion (among other things, she describes Western feminism as being defined by “a skewed perception of women’s equality as the right to bare our breasts in public”). Nonetheless, her commentary places in full view of a wide public one of the biggest obstacles we face in combating the growth of Islam in the West, and, even more, of political, aggressively Islamist Islam as it masquerades as a faith – and a doctrine – based on justice and equal rights, slinking its deceitful, theocratic destructiveness into the secular humanism of the West.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/08/condi_rice_apeaks_again_and_again.html

Condoleezza Rice spoke to the RNC Wednesday night to near universal acclaim. I agree that it was a smoothly delivered speech, no doubt because it’s the same speech she always gives and practice makes perfect.

Compare her speech to the GOP convention in 2000 to the one she gave in 2012; all very similar. In 2000, George Bush knows we must be strong and engage the world. In 2012 Mitt Romney does too. Free trade is good and important for international relations. In the latest iteration she also remarks on school choice. She ends both talks with a recollection of segregation days in Alabama.

No thought of any specific policy ideas are ever advanced. We are warned about China in both speeches, but not told what, if anything, we are supposed to do. From the 2012 speech you would never know George Bush had ever been President or Rice his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State.

Perhaps in a more extended format Rice might be more substantive? Don’t count on it; her 2011 autobiography runs an amazing 784 pages yet you learn next to nothing of her personal life beyond adolescence, or her foreign policy philosophy. There’s no analysis or reflection on the many historic events of the Bush years or her role in them. She barely even tells her readers where she was all that time, but merely regurgitates the international headlines of the day.

I don’t know if Rice seriously competed to be Romney’s VP. If she did and was outshone by Paul Ryan’s obvious depth and brilliance, it reflects well on Romney’s good judgment. Post-Reagan Era Republicans in any event, have had enough of Beltway careerists, who will say anything to win the next big job, or in Condi’s case, the same thing, over and over.

Frank Friday is an attorney in Louisville, Ky.