RUTHFULLY YOURS

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INACTION

The ridiculous parade of awards and shows is a rerun of how Obama, an uninteresting Illinois politician, was transformed into the most interesting figure in American politics through obsessive attention and hysterical praise. But Hillary Clinton, who will be pushing seventy by the time her big moment in the sun arrives, has fewer excuses for needing to slap this much greasepaint on an undistinguished resume.

The positions that will be used as props in her quest for higher office came to her only by way of being married to the former President of the United States. And it’s impossible to find anything revolutionary that she did with those positions, except use them as launching pads for an office she was even less qualified for.

The miniseries, the series, the movies, the books and the adoring pundits will zoom in on her gender, but even that isn’t a breakthrough.

Hillary Clinton was one in a long line of female senators. She was the third female Secretary of State. Albright and Rice, for all their flaws, were hard workers with interesting biographies. Hillary Clinton, like John Kerry, was a mediocrity who got their job as a consolation prize for not winning a presidential election.

The Guns of August (1962), is a history by Barbara Tuchman- a spellbinding narrative of World War I… which started in early August 99 years ago. Most people, myself included, know as much about this great war as they do about the Peloponnesian Wars. Many of the British television presentations-Downtown Abbey, Mr. Selfridge, Upstairs, Downstairs- include scenes and drama from that war. Barbara Tuchman is a master historian and narrator. There is nothing to equal reading it on a rocking chair in Nantucket, but this book is so good one could read it in a phone booth. The opening description of the funeral of King Edward VII of England in May 1910 is perfection in prose and description.
Product Details
The Guns of August: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Classic About the Outbreak of World War I by Barbara W. Tuchman and Robert K. Massie (Aug 3, 2004)

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/356666/its-not-crazy-talk-about-impeachment-andrew-c-mccarthy The Framers did not see impeachment as outlandish. To the legacy media, that shriveling adjunct of the White House press office, the story is not why Americans would think it worth asking whether the president should be impeached. It is, as one would expect, why some prominent Republicans are dignifying the question with serious […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/356634/obamacares-hierarchy-privilege-mark-steyn On his radio show the other day, Hugh Hewitt caught me by surprise and asked me about running for the United States Senate from New Hampshire. My various consultants, pollsters, PACs, and exploratory committees haven’t fine-tuned every detail of my platform just yet, but I can say this without a doubt: I will not […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324469304578145242244528334.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

JOSE ORTEGA Y GASSET WAS A SPANISH PHILOSOPHER, ESSAYIST DURING THE YEARS WHEN SPAIN VEERED FROM MONARCHY TO SOCIALISM TO CIVIL WAR TO DICTATORSHIP….. HE DIED IN 1955.

Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, “The Revolt of the Masses” (1929):

My thesis, therefore, is this: the very perfection with which the 19th century gave an organization to certain orders of existence has caused the masses benefited thereby to consider it, not as an organized, but as a natural system. Thus is explained and defined the absurd state of mind revealed by these masses; they are only concerned with their own well-being, and at the same time they remain alien to the cause of that well-being. As they do not see, behind the benefits of civilization, marvels of invention and construction which can only be maintained by great effort and foresight, they imagine that their role is limited to demanding these benefits peremptorily, as if they were natural rights.

In the disturbances caused by scarcity of food, the mob goes in search of bread, and the means it employs is generally to wreck the bakeries. This may serve as a symbol of the attitude adopted, on a greater and more complicated scale, by the masses of today towards the civilization by which they are supported.

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/08/23/allen-west-the-gangster-culture-is-the-real-race-conversation-that-we-need-to-be-having/

Our own Allen West appeared on Hannity last night and took on the gangsta culture that appears to have heavily influenced the murder of Chris Lane in Oklahoma one week ago today. West, who hosts at our sister site Next Generation TV along with John Phillips and Michelle Fields, told substitute host David Webb. “It is a gangster culture out there. It is a culture that is being permeated throughout the media, and throughout the entertainment industry, that we need to start speaking out about. And furthermore, when you think about the fact that 72% of black babies are being born out of wedlock, this is the…second and third order effects that we have seen in the inner city, in the black community, and in other communities where it’s spilling over. So that is the real conversation that we need to start having,” West said. He noted that “when I was 15, when I was 16, my parents ensured that I was not bored.” The teens accused of shooting Chris Lane in the back claim that they killed him out of boredom.

Juan Williams responded, “Let me be blunt, where are the civil rights leaders? Why aren’t we hearing from the civil rights leaders out there leading marches and protests against violence, against the drug dealers, against the bad schools, saying to young women, ‘Hey, this is madness’” before citing out-of-wedlock birth statistics among white, Hispanic and black babies. Williams slammed Jesse Jackson for criticizing President Obama when he tried to speak on the issue of the fractured black family. Williams charged that “I just think that is another sign that these people are all in bed, literally sometimes, with the pornographers, you know, a blind eye to the drug dealers, a blind eye to the people who tell you ‘It’s thug life, or no life.’”

A father in Duncan, OK, where the three teens allegedly killed Chris Lane, has said that the boys had tried to recruit his son into the Crips, and threatened him when he resisted.

Williams continued: “I just think this is a tragedy, and they’re always playing the victimization card.” He also noted that black men are killing other black men in massive numbers, “and that gets almost no attention.”

Webb asked LTC West (USA-ret) what we do about the gangster culture and the fractured black family.

West responded, “I think we have to go into the ‘hood. Look, I was brought up in the inner city of Atlanta, Georgia, the same neighborhood that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was born and raised in. Now we’re going to have the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech next week. I wonder how many leaders are going to stand up and challenge and speak, just as Juan just did, and bring up some of the points that I did, to say that we’re not fulfilling that dream? As a matter of fact, we’re going backwards.” West offered to go into inner city neighborhoods and historically black colleges with Williams to talk about issues facing the black community, and Williams praised West, while warning him that even Bill Cosby came under fierce criticism from civil rights leaders when he spoke out on these issues.

West, who served 22 years in the United States Army and served in combat in Iraq before being elected to Congress, isn’t likely to back down in the face of critics. He told Williams: “I’ve really been shot at, and so the words and the barbs, they don’t bother me.”

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/08/the_week_that_soviet_tanks_crushed_the_prague_spring.html

The people of Czechoslovakia were fighting for their freedom from Soviet oppression and brutality…..Ron Radosh had this to say in an obituary he wrote for Norman Thomas in 1967: “Thomas’ chief sin, in my view, was to have written that he did not, “regard Vietcong terrorism as virtuous.” He was guilty of attacking the heroic Vietnamese people, instead of the United States, which was the enemy of the world’s people. My final judgment was that Thomas had “accepted the Cold War, its ideology and ethics and had decided to enlist in fighting its battles” on the wrong — the anti-communist — side.”

As a kid, we heard the stories of Cuban political prisoners. Our family dinner table was a classroom with my parents telling us about communism or reading the latest letter from Cuba.

I grew up admiring the men and women who risked their lives to fight for freedom. Some of these men were Cardinal Mindszenty of Hungary, those who tried to cross the Berlin Wall, the guerrillas who fought Castro in The Escambray Mountains and those who tried reforms inside the Soviet bloc.

On August 21, 1968, the Rascals were riding high with a song called “People got to be free”.

It was a pop hit in the US. It was reality in the streets of Prague:

“On August 21, 1968, more than 200,000 troops of the Warsaw Pact crossed into Czechoslovakia in response to democratic and free market reforms being instituted by Czech Communist Party General Secretary Alexander Dubcek. Negotiations between Dubcek and Soviet bloc leaders failed to convince the Czech leader to back away from his reformist platform. The military intervention on August 21 indicated that the Soviets believed that Dubcek was going too far and needed to be restrained. On August 22, thousands of Czechs gathered in central Prague to protest the Soviet action and demand the withdrawal of foreign troops. Although it was designed to be a peaceful protest, violence often flared and several protesters were killed on August 22 and in the days to come.”

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/08/what_animates_barack_hussein_obama.html In a 2013 fund-raising letter, Allen West wrote that “Obama’s completely incoherent foreign policy is putting our strongest allies in grave danger.  His extreme ambivalence is simply unacceptable.”   But is it really incoherent?  Obama’s mentors have long taught him to despise America.  In fact, these “mentors and allies were marked by hatred of […]

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/i-ve-got-secret_748485.html?nopager=1 Does the press have an absolute right to declassify?

Fare thee well Bradley Manning. Welcome Chelsea Manning. Hello Fort Leavenworth. The story of national-security secrecy in America grows stranger by the day.
Where did all these troubles come from? The leak of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 is obviously central. James Goodale was general counsel of the New York Times during that epic legal struggle and he has now written an engaging—if also somewhat wrongheaded—memoir, which I’ve reviewed for the Weekly Standard……GS

A stream of national security leaks has lately turned into a tsunami, plunging the country into the most intense controversy over the publication of government secrets since the 1971 Pentagon Papers case. As we wade through the issues raised by the illicitly disclosed information now flowing out of Washington, it is a useful moment to look back at that seminal legal battle. More than a few books tell the story of Daniel Ellsberg’s famous leak of a trove of secret Defense Department documents to the New York Times and other newspapers and Richard Nixon’s subsequent efforts to stop the presses. A new volume by an inside player in the great legal drama has now, four decades later, joined the crowd.

James C. Goodale offers a view of events as seen from his perch as general counsel at the Times during the case. Goodale was not a First Amendment lawyer back when the case broke; the general counsels of great newspapers in that era were typically more concerned with business dealings than with constitutional niceties. He had to get up to speed, and he immersed himself in the intricacies of the espionage statutes.

His reading of both the law and the purloined documents themselves led him to favor publication. His own experience as an intelligence officer in the Army—where he and his colleagues regularly clipped articles from the New York Times, stamped them “secret,” and locked them in a vault—had already convinced him that the workings of the secrecy system were “nonsensical.” The documents taken by Ellsberg were historical in nature: Not one of them was from the Nixon era, which was already well into its third year, and nothing in them, Goodale believed, would cause harm to national security—least of all the kind of grave harm that might trump the newspaper’s right to publish under the First Amendment

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-college-affordability-20130823,0,6515784.story

BUFFALO, N.Y. — The Obama administration will wade into the controversial business of rating colleges and universities based on their “value,” President Obama announced Thursday as he unveiled a set of proposals aimed at tackling the rising cost of higher education.

The “college scorecard” would help students decide whether a school is worth the hefty tuition bills and help the government decide where to spend federal aid money, while giving image-conscious schools an incentive to keep costs down.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/08/22/Increased-Graduation-Rates-Fail-to-Predict-Positive-Outcomes-for-Minorities

As schools and colleges across the nation prepare to begin instruction in the coming weeks, many are assessing the educational progress of American students. Educational data released this past summer depicts a mixed picture of the challenges and achievements of America’s student population. One of the most positive stories from the summer has been the rising graduation rates among minority high school students.

Education Week’s Editorial Projects in Education Research Center reports that high school graduation rates hit a 40 year high in 2010, (the latest year in which data is available). In 2010, the rate reached nearly 75 percent, which is the highest percentage of students graduating from high school since 1973.

The research center reports that gains made by minority students have helped boost overall U.S. graduation rates. In fact, Hispanics enjoyed the greatest boost in graduation rates, as their graduation rate jumped 16 points during the course of the decade and now stands at 68 percent. African-Americans made similar gains, as their graduation rate rose 13 points to rest at 62 percent in 2010. Asians experienced a 5 percent increase to 81 percent, while Native Americans experienced a 3 percent rise to 51 percent.

Whites also made significant gains during the same period, as they experienced a six percent boost and now enjoy an 80 percent graduation rate. While this news is promising, heavily urban and minority-concentrated areas still suffer from disproportionately high dropout rates. The Center named Detroit, Denver, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and New York City as school systems having the highest dropout rates.

The latest figures have generated a healthy amount of skepticism among public school critics and opponents of President Obama’s educational policies. Some allege that students may not actually be learning more, but rather that watered-down curriculum and generally low standards may have amplified these figures.