RUTHFULLY YOURS

‘Shared sacrifice” is one of Obama’s favorite mantras. Translation: The White House shares your money while you sacrifice.

Amid the alleged horrors of the sequester, truly shared sacrifice is the last thing on Obama’s mind. The American people are enduring 0.4 percent GDP growth and 7.7 percent unemployment. A record 48 million citizens are on food stamps. Meanwhile, those in America’s royal palace are enduring tropical beaches, country clubs, and ski resorts.

As Joseph Curl recalled in Sunday’s Washington Times, the Obamas rang in 2013 in a 6,000-square-foot, $8 million estate in Oahu’s Paradise Point. That’s when Obama played his 100th presidential golf round, one of five during the first family’s 17-day Hawaiian getaway.

The Obamas rented this five-bedroom estate in Kailua, Oahu, in December 2011. They stayed in a
similar Hawaiian property for 17 days last Christmas/New Year’s season. Photo: David Dunham.

The first lady and her daughters skied Aspen, Colo., in February. But some like it hot, so Obama rode Air Force One to Palm City, Fla., where he swung his clubs with Earth’s No. 1 golfer, Tiger Woods.

Not to be outdone, Clown Prince Biden greeted 2013 in the Virgin Islands. He slid down the slopes of Snowmass, Colo., in February. That month, Biden visited Europe. He and his entourage invested $459,338.65 in tax money for 136 rooms tied to Biden’s one-evening sleepover in London. Biden also stopped overnight in Paris. Rather than rely on, say, the U.S. embassy’s car fleet, Team Biden spent $321,665 for limousine rentals in the French capital. This reportedly was just for Biden’s party; Biden himself appropriately used his secure official vehicle, which was flown with him.

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/04/04/a-hollywood-and-academic-rehab-for-new-left-terrorists-and-black-panther-murderers/?singlepage=true This week, the rehabilitation of the most extreme of the New Left groups — the Weather Underground — entered a new stage. Yesterday, the New York Post revealed that convicted felon Kathy Boudin — who was released from jail a decade ago after serving 22 years for her role as getaway driver in a deadly […]

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/04/04/afghan-government-illegally-detains-beats-american-wants-2-4m-for-him/

Lawmakers urged Secretary of State John Kerry to step in and fight for an American contractor detained and beaten by Afghan authorities reportedly in connection with a contract dispute.

Reps. Scott Rigell (R-Va.), Frank Wolf (R-Va.), and Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) sent a letter to Kerry today requesting his help in expediting the release of David Gordon, a Virginia Beach resident and employee of project management firm Tamerlane Global Services, Inc.
Gordon, a father of two with a third on the way, was arrested Wednesday without charge in Qomandani Amanya, Kabul, Afghanistan.

The Afghan Attorney General’s office said Gordon’s detention was related to an ongoing commercial contract dispute and is asking for $2.4 million to release him.

In addition to what sounds like the Afghan government demanding ransom for an illegal detention, the story gets worse.

“We were deeply concerned to learn that Mr. Gordon was beaten during the night of April 3, sustaining several injuries, and was not sent to the infirmary until April 4, 2013,” the congressmen wrote. “The threats that he is receiving and the demonstrated lack of protection during his confinement give us serious concern about his welfare.”

“We request that the Department of State intervene and expedite the release of this illegally detained American.”

http://pjmedia.com/blog/film-review-the-company-you-keep/?print=1

The Company You Keep [1], Robert Redford’s valentine to aging former members of the Weather Underground, opens this week in New York and Los Angeles. I’ve seen it so you don’t have to. Ed Driscoll [2], Michelle Malkin [3], Scott Johnson [4], and Jonathan Tobin [5] have done an excellent job criticizing the politics of the film; this post is intended to provide a consumer alert about its cinematic merits.

The 76-year-old Redford plays a small-town lawyer with an eleven-year-old daughter and an undisclosed past: he was part of the radical group that robbed a bank in the 1970s and killed a guard. He goes on the run after his identity is disclosed by a reporter.

The notable actors, like the characters they portray, have seen better days. They deliver paeans about the way they were, while Redford runs about trying to clear his name (since he may not have been guilty of this particular crime, and further, these days he loves his daughter). In the Sony Pictures Classics press kit [6], Redford says:

For me [the film] was a bit like Les Misérables, with the character Jean Valjean sentenced to nineteen years for a loaf of bread.

The movie is not a bit like Les Misérables. It might be a bit like Les Misérables if Jean Valjean had been wanted for murder rather than bread-theft. Or had Valjean looked like Robert Redford on a good day, rather than Hugh Jackman after serving on a slave ship and spending two decades in jail; and if Valjean had ultimately been protected by a “conscience-stricken” reporter who decided to toss his further story after Redford lectures him about the importance of keeping secrets:

Secrets are dangerous things, Ben. We all think we want to know them. But if you’ve ever kept one yourself then you understand to do so is not just knowing something about someone else, it’s discovering something about yourself.

Such a message Inspector Javert would probably have found a bit unconvincing had it come from Jean Valjean. Similarly, a journalist would probably find it a bit presumptuous coming from someone who is a fugitive rather than just a source. The rest of us would consider it extraordinarily trite, even if delivered by Redford as if it were literature.

In an unintentionally funny scene, Redford shows up at a Midwestern university to search for a former Weather comrade who is now a respected history professor: the professor may know where Redford can find Julie Christie’s character. Redford sits in the back of the class in his disguise (consisting of a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead, so he won’t stand out as an old man in a college class who looks like Robert Redford).

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=3911 Jon Stewart, the host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” is a very lucky man. This is not merely because the satirist/news anchor is hugely popular, extremely rich and the proud owner of a reputation for fierce honesty cloaked in humor. No, the more relevant reason Stewart should be thanking his lucky stars these […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/gays_for_sharia.html

Over at Salon, Chris Stedman, the Assistant Humanist Chaplain and the Values in Action Coordinator for the Humanist Community at Harvard, has published a vicious piece attacking me for calling attention to the persecution of gays under Islamic law. This comes just days after San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution condemning my ads standing up for gays. Stedman and the transgender head of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, Theresa Sparks, could form a new organization: Gays for Sharia.

Stedman is a chaplain? Now that’s a mouthpiece: a chaplain who smears and defames. What will Harvard think of next? In Stedman’s headline, he calls me a “Crusader,” despite the fact that I am…Jewish. That gives you an indication of the quality of Stedman’s inflammatory smear.

More indications of how Stedman plays fast and loose with the facts came when he describes me as misrepresenting a proposed Islamic Community Center in lower Manhattan as the Ground Zero mosque. Uh, Chris, it is a mosque, and it’s in a building that was destroyed in the 9/11 attacks – that is, at Ground Zero. But don’t let the facts get in the way of a good lie. Stedman trots out that venerable leftist, opportunistic, and very well-compensated fundraising machine, the SPLC, that deems every proud patriot a threat (yes, a threat to progressives). And he says that I have spent millions. Not. Even. Close. If I had that kind of money, my ads would be everywhere.

In justifying Muslim oppression of gays under the Sharia, Stedman pulls out the old “religion-based bigotry” card, but fails to mention that Christians and Jews are not slaughtering gays under canon law or Jewish law.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3168/israel_the_coming_energy_superpower

Israel’s transformation from a land of milk and honey into a land awash with oil and gas money is under way. When the country’s offshore Tamar field finally started pumping domestic natural gas direct to Haifa on the last day of March 2013, it meant that Israel was no longer in the thrall of its Arab neighbours for gas imports. And it also signalled the beginning of Israel’s rise to energy superpower status.

But don’t take my word for it. Take the words of Russia’s Vladimir Putin or, much more significant, his recent actions. Shaken by the success of the US shale gas revolution and the threat to Russia’s stranglehold on European gas supplies that a prospective eastern Mediterranean supply carries, Putin’s Kremlin has, in recent months, feted Israel as never before.

In February this culminated in Russia’s Gazprom signing a landmark deal giving Russia a major stake in the future distribution of massive Israeli gas resources. It is also likely to be just an entree deal now that Moscow has a place at the Israeli energy table.

In early 2012, Noble Energy, the US partner of the major Israeli energy companies, announced a new find of 1.2 to 1.3 trillion cubic feet of gas in the Tamar prospect. Noble is confident that there may be up to a dozen more such gas discoveries to be made in the Tamar field. Yet the Tamar and Dalit offshore Israeli gas fields are just the beginning.

Others are showing signs of significant quantities of gas, including the Aphrodite 2 field, 100 miles from Haifa. But the enormous Leviathan gas field overshadows them all. Leviathan is estimated to have twice the amount of gas of Tamar and should come online between 2016 and 2018. But Leviathan and Tamar also hold out the further tantalizing prospect of significant amounts of oil.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/apr/2/no-nukes-could-beget-nuclear-war/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS Tensions are escalating by the day on the Korean Peninsula. North Korea has declared that it is in a state of war with its neighbor to the south, and its untested young despot, Kim Jong-un, has been photographed meeting with his generals flanked by charts showing the trajectory of missiles aimed at U.S. targets. […]

http://myrightword.blogspot.co.il/2013/04/haaretz-continues-its-intifada.html Haaretz keeps up its intifada against the Yesha enterprise. It now reports: West Bank settlements matched Tel Aviv for home building, despite smaller population rise The five largest cities across the Green Line, containing the majority of the region’s Jewish residents, enjoyed an increase of 17,800 housing units and 18,500 households during that period. […]

FROM JANET LEVY
Iran, Cuba and Venezuela have developed a close and cooperative relationship against the U.S. and in support of terrorism. The three regimes increasingly coordinate their policies and resources in a three way partnership aimed at counteracting and circumventing U.S. policies in the Middle East and Latin America. Within this relationship, Cuba plays a strategic role in terms of geography (proximity to the U.S.), intelligence gathering (both electronic eavesdropping and human espionage) and logistics.
Worrisome to the U.S. are reports that “have uncovered covert operations between Cuba and Iran in the development and testing of electromagnetic weapons that have the capacity to disrupt telecommunication networks, cut power supplies and damage sophisticated computers.” (1) Furthermore, Cuba can easily provide Iran with valuable information from its sophisticated espionage apparatus. Iran is also able to obtain information on biotechnology from Cuba. In the late 1990s, Cuba began “transferring (licensing) both its medical biotechnologies and, along with the technical know-how, implicit capabilities to develop and manufacture industrial quantities of biological weapons,” creating a significant security threat for the United States and Israel. (2)
In addition to its proven technical prowess to interfere and intercept U.S. telecommunications, Cuba has deployed around the world a highly effective human intelligence network. The type of espionage carried out by Ana Belén Montes, the senior U.S. defense intelligence analyst who spied for Cuba during some 16 years until her arrest in 2001, has enabled the Castro regime to amass a wealth of intelligence on U.S. vulnerabilities as well as a keen understanding of the inner-workings of the U.S. security system. Such information and analysis was provided to Saddam Hussein prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and would undoubtedly be provided to a strategic ally like Iran. While one may argue that factors such as Iran’s limited military capabilities and sheer distance diminish any conventional concerns, one should expect that Tehran, in case of a U.S.-Iran conflict would launch an asymmetrical offensive against the U.S. and its European allies through surrogate terrorist states and paramilitary organizations. In such a scenario, Cuban intelligence would be invaluable to Iran and its proxies and Cuban territory could be used by terrorist groups to launch operations against the U.S.
In more specific terms: