RUTHFULLY YOURS

A time to fly, a time to say goodbye

http://www.jpost.com/

In exclusive interview with the ‘Post,’ outgoing IAF chief Ido Nehushtan shares his views on Israel’s current, future threats.

In the summer of 1967, during the Six Day War, Ido Nehushtan climbed to the roof of his family’s home in Jerusalem and watched as Israel Air Force fighter jets flew overhead on their way to bomb Jordanian targets near Bethlehem .For the 10-year-old Nehushtan, the sight of the planes and their amazing power planted in him the seed that would lead him to enlist eight years later in the IAF. He became a career soldier, climbing the ranks until eventually he became commander of the IAF, possibly one of the most prestigious positions in Israel.

Nearly 45 years after watching those fighter jets in Israel’s most remarkable war, Nehushtan stepped down this week from command over the IAF, ending a 37-year career in the military. In an exclusive interview with The Jerusalem Post, Nehushtan, a mixture of diplomat and fighter pilot, radiates confidence, but at the same time concern, as he thinks back to that day in 1967.

No one, he says, questions the existence of other countries, such as India, for example.

http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2012/05/17/cover-story-why-bibi-netanyahu-is-king-of-israel/

Why Bibi Netanyahu Is King of Israel
THOSE OF US MORE CYNICAL SEE THIS COALITION AS ONE PREPARED TO MAKE SERIAL AND DANGEROUS CONCESSIONS UNDER THE FIG LEAF OF BEING “RIGHT WING AND UNCOMPROMISING.”…..RSK

The deal deflects calls for fresh elections and gives him a virtual lock on Israel’s top job going forward.

As Stengel puts it:

Netanyahu is poised to become the longest-serving Israeli Prime Minister since David Ben-Gurion, the founding father of Israel. He has no national rival. His approval rating, roughly 50%, is at an all-time high. At a moment when incumbents around the world are being shunted aside, he is triumphant.

Netanyahu, as Stengel writes, stands on history’s cusp: “The question is whether he is a prisoner of that history or he can write a new narrative.” He bears with him the memory of his military service—and the even more painful memory of the death of his elder brother Yoni, a celebrated Israeli commando. He also carries with him the legacy and learning of his father, the late Benzion Netanyahu, a noted, uncompromising Zionist academic.

Like his father, he sees Jewish history as a succession of holocausts. Like his father, he has an almost mystical belief in the abiding power of anti-Semitism, as though it were more biological than cultural.

http://sarahhonig.com/2012/05/18/another-tack-every-man-for-himself/

It’s official. A brand new Three Stooges remake is well under way. The sequel stooges have just banded together in a mutually advantageous alliance to fortify the governing coalition of the Jewish state – the ultimate setting to best suit their zany misadventures. For one thing, it’s quite compatible with the ethnicity of the original trio – brothers Moe and Curly (born Horwitz) and Larry who was a Feinberg.

But more important is the fact that there’s nowhere like Israel’s madcap political arena to accentuate the knucklehead anarchic antics of the jerks-of-all-trades (as yesteryear’s screwballs dubbed themselves). With them around there’s never a dull moment. They keep unsettling all and sundry, themselves foremost.

Stepping into Moe’s shoes is Binyamin Netanyahu even though he doesn’t sport a soup ball haircut and even if he hasn’t exactly been poking at politicos’ eyes, whacking sidekicks with skillets and crunching the noses of cronies with neurotic, hyperactive zest.

But though deficient in Moe’s bully brass, Bibi is nonetheless the uncontested leader of the new threesome and their belated bond has only confirmed and boosted his primacy like never before. For better or worse, Bibi is recognized both near and far as the (for now) indisputable boss. He looks in charge, at the top of his game and unbeatable. But could he be in for nasty surprises?

60 Minutes Veils Education Jihad By Janet Levy

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/05/60_minutes_veils_education_jihad.html

While the mainstream media continues to promote Turkey as a successful example of the coexistence of Islam, democracy, and economic stability — referring to the country as “a bridge between East and West” and a potential asset to the European Union — this view couldn’t be farther from reality.

In fact, Turkey has descended farther into the abyss of Islamization as it continues to refuse to acknowledge its genocide of Armenians, Assyrians, Greek Christians, and other minorities; denies its decades-long repression of its Kurdish population; and persists in its illegal occupation of the Republic of Cyprus. Islamic instruction, under the guise of religious culture and ethics classes, has become mandatory in state schools, further signaling the demise of secularism in Turkey. Meanwhile, veiling, an emblem of Islamization, has increased significantly within the last decade.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s public statements have also defied this optimistic view of Turkey as a “moderate” Islamic state. In 2007, he was quoted inMilliyet commenting on the term “moderate Islam” to describe his party, the AKP: “These descriptions are ugly, it is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.” On democracy, Erdoğan has said, “Democracy is like a street car; you ride it as far as you need, and then you get off.” About the function of mosques, he said, “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.”

http://www.newmediajournal.us/

In the aftermath of Vice President Joe Biden’s “Howard Dean” moment in Ohio this week, I was struck by the sheer magnitude of the Progressive-Democrat Left’s hypocrisy when it comes to their political attacks on the so-called “rich.” As the unwashed masses of the Occupy Movement – the overwhelming majority of which are anarchists, pseudo-Socialists, Progressive activists and union operatives – take to the streets of Chicago to protest the NATO summit, I really do have to wonder if they – the useful idiots of the new millennium – know that those who they follow are the one-percenters?

Among the leaders of the Progressive Movement and the Democrat Party, it is nearly impossible to identify anyone among them who isn’t in the one-percent, and that includes President Obama and, yes, Vice President Biden. Maybe that’s why his statement, “They just don’t get us,” made my head cock like a dog hearing a high-pitched noise. “Who’s us,” I thought to myself.

Truth be told, Mr. Biden is the least wealthy among the Left’s one-percenter elitists. Yes, his roots may have been blue collar, but he benefited from the Capitalist system to become quite wealthy, or at least a heck of a lot wealthier than many. His annual salary is $248,754 and he enjoys perks that include free housing, transportation, health insurance, etc. He has listed assets including between nearly $230,000 to $860,000, many of which are in investment accounts and insurance policies. He has disclosed that he receives between $15,000 to $50,000 annually in rental income on a guest house in Wilmington, Delaware. And, of course, his future will see a healthy pension, book deals and, no doubt, invitations from the mainstream media to contribute as a political pundit (now that will be entertaining).

OpenSecrets.org estimates Mr. Biden’s net worth at $718,994.

But the Progressive and Democrat elite’s one-percenters are many…

President and Mrs. Obama hold family assets estimated in 2010 as up to $8.3 million, including assets of between $500,000 and $1million in a JPMorgan Chase checking account.

According to the Washington Post,

“The president and first lady’s asset mix includes Treasury notes valued at between $1 million and $5 million, Treasury bills worth $500,000 and $1 million, along with retirement and checking accounts.

“Royalties from Obama’s books, ‘Dreams From My Father,’ ‘The Audacity of Hope’ and ‘Of Thee I Sing,’ totaled between $250,000 and $2.1 million.

“The Obamas have a 30-year mortgage on their Chicago home worth between $500,000 and $1 million…”

OpenSecrets.org estimates the Obama’s net worth at $11,830,000.

Then we have the Demo-Progressive leadership in Congress.

In 2010, The Hill reported that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi had an estimated net worth of $35.2 million,

“House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (P-CA) saw her net worth rise 62 percent last year, cementing her status as one of the wealthiest members of Congress.

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2012/05/17/tea-party-should-oppose-latest-terrorist-bill-of-rights/

The Tea Party Should Oppose Latest Terrorist Bill of Rights

The reckless crew is at it again.

Libertarian extremists, who purport to be the face of the tea party movement, and their pals on the Lawyer Left, whose obsession is more rights for mass-murderers, are again making common cause. Their target, once more, is the detention procedure codified in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This time the ringleaders are Representatives Justin Amash (R., MI) and Adam Smith (D., WA). With a new NDAA up for consideration, these congressmen are reprising the starring role played a few months back by Sen. Rand Paul (R., KY). I argued in opposition to Sen. Paul’s gambit here and here.

Under the Smith-Amash amendment, if al Qaeda were to dispatch the second coming of Mohamed Atta & Co. to execute another 9/11-style atrocity in the United States, but this time the FBI managed to apprehend them, they would be given the full rights of American civilian defendants. They could not be detained under the laws of war, they could not be held at Guantanamo Bay for trial by military commission. Instead, they would be treated like garden variety crooks: given Miranda warnings, quickly assigned counsel, held in a civilian prison, eligible for prompt bail hearings, entitled to the full breadth of discovery mandated by civilian due process, and given a full-blown, Grade-A civilian trial in a civilian federal court – just like the trial the Obama administration tried to give Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other surviving 9/11 plotters until public outrage and congressional opposition induced the administration to back down.

Naturally, you won’t be hearing that from the congressmen and their allies – like Rep. Ron Paul, who has come out in support. They know if the wages of their bill were properly understood, they would swiftly be dismissed, including by most Tea Partiers, who are not anti-government but pro-limited government and thus appreciate that national defense is a paramount federal role.

So instead, the congressmen repeat Sen. Paul’s pitch, claiming to be defending the rights of American citizens. They maintain, as Senator Paul did, that the 2012 NDAA expanded the powers of the president to designate American citizens as enemy combatants, to have the military round them up, and to lock them up and throw away the key. Their hysteria is amplified by the likes of the John Birch Society’s outlet, The New American, which asserts that, under the NDAA, Americans could “be subject to military tribunals such as the one currently considering the case of the so-called ‘Gitmo Five’” – i.e., the ongoing military prosecution of KSM and his cohorts. Not to be outdone, Rep. Paul chimes in, “I don’t believe a republic can exist if you permit the military to arrest American citizens and put them in secret prisons and be denied a trial.”

http://www.hinckleyforsenate.com/

ON THE ISSUES PLEASE GO TO http://www.hinckleyforsenate.com/issues

Get government out of the way of job creators.

• Balance the Federal Budget

Repeal Obama Care and replace it with interstate insurance options and competition, small business healthcare pooling and real tort reform

Repeal and replace our 67,000-page tax code.

I believe energy independence is a national priority. I will work to develop a domestic energy plan that weans America off foreign oil within 10 years. I believe in exploring America’s own abundant natural resources through offshore drilling, ANWR, and beyond.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/05/americans_understanding_islamic_world_better_than_george_w_bush.html Wednesday, former President George W. Bush delivered a speech in Washington, D.C. at an event entitled “Celebration of Human Freedom,” sponsored by his presidential foundation, the George W. Bush Institute. The former president observed astutely that “freedom is a powerful force but it does not advance on wheels of historical inevitability.” But then Mr. […]

http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2012/05/16/obama-by-the-numbers/?singlepage=true A friend sent me the following graphs. I’d seen, indeed posted here, some of them already; some were new to me. Taken together they tell a sorry story of failure. Advertisement      

The Death of the Hockey Stick?

http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-death-of-the-hockey-stick/?print=1

People who have been following the climate debate closely know that one of the most controversial and key elements of the controversy is the so-called “hockey stick” — a graph of supposed global temperature over the past centuries that ostensibly shows a dramatic increase in average temperature in the last century or so (the upward swoop of the graph at that point is the business end of the stick, with regard to the puck). It vaulted its inventor, Michael Mann of Penn State University, to climate stardom, with associated acclaim and government grants, when he first presented it in the late ’90s. It was the visual basis of much of the hysteria in recent years, from Al Gore’s Oscar-winning crockumentary [1] to bogus reports [2] from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Unfortunately for those promoting the theory (and the potentially economically catastrophic policy recommendations supposedly supported by it), recent events indicate that the last basis of scientific support for the hockey stick may be crumbling. But to understand this, a little background is necessary.

Ultimately, in addition to Mann’s claim for the dramatic recent uptick (which we are supposed to presume was a result of the late industrial revolution and equally dramatic increase in carbon monoxide into the atmosphere as a result of the liberation of carbon from burning long-buried fossil fuels), Keith Briffa of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England controversially declared, based on Eurasian data, that the well-documented Medieval Warm Period (MWP), from around 950 to 1250 CE — the European Middle Ages — didn’t actually exist.