RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/26/Its-worse-than-a-conspiracy-it%20-s-consensus

Vladimir Bukovsky is one of the founders of the Soviet dissident movement. He spent twelve years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and psychiatric hospitals during his fight for freedom. In 2007, he was nominated for president of Russia by the democratic oppostion in moral protest of Putin’s powers. His many works include To Build a Castle and Judgement in Moscow.

Pavel Stroilov is a Russian exile in London and the editor and translator of Alexander Litvinenko’s book, Allegations. He is co-author with Bukovsky of EUSSR: The Soviet Roots of European Integration, and the author of Behind the Desert Storm: A Secret Archive Stolen From the Kremlin that Sheds New Light on the Arab Revolutions in the Middle East.
Groundbreaking books about the history of communism, such as Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago or Viktor Suvorov’s Ice-Breaker, are never written by “professional” historians. Indeed, historians typically meet those books with remarkable hostility.

Yet, non-academic history books certainly have their advantages. For one thing, they are readable. More often than not, they are better researched too. Above all, they are intellectually honest, free from the unspoken taboos of the academic world and from allegiances to theories and to colleagues that tie the hands of many an academic.

Where a professional historian pursues an academic career, the amateur seeks after the truth. Ignorant of taboos, the amateur can follow the trail of evidence to wherever it leads and discovers things which, according to the academic conventional wisdom, are best left untouched and unsaid.

That is what Diana West does in American Betrayal:The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character. By her own admission, she started that book with no intention of writing much about the Cold War. She started not as a historian, but a simple mortal puzzled and disturbed by the obvious question: how on earth could this great civilization of ours have degraded into such a hypocritical nonsense as political correctness? Having written her previous book about the death of the civilization of grown-ups, now Mrs. West, in her own words, attempts a post mortem–only to discover unmistakable signs of a murder.

She digs deeper, “tracing references and footnotes backward along a well-mapped historical route that has simply fallen into disuse”, as she puts it–and discovers the true history of the 20th century, the history of communist crimes against humanity, to which so many in the Western Establishment were accomplices and collaborators; and then a massive cover-up of those crimes, which infested our entire public life with a culture of hypocrisy and double standards.

It is this search for the causes of our moral crisis that brings her as far back in history as 1930s, when the Great Famine was artificially organized by the Soviets to force the peasants into collective farms, and the Western media consciously helped Stalin to cover up that mass murder. She cites a fascinating account by a repentant journalist who had been present at the meeting of Moscow press corps with the Soviet chief censor, Umansky, to work out a “formula of denial,” after one reckless correspondent reported the news of the famine in 1933.

After “much bargaining in the spirit of gentlemanly give-and-take”, the “formula” was agreed, wherefrom the Western journalists and the Soviet censor proceeded to party with vodka and luxurious snacks until early hours in the morning. The next day, it was infamous Walter Duranty who took the lead in attacking the famine report as an incompetent and biased “big scare story”, and then explaining: “There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation, but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition”.

“To understand this episode,” Mrs. West comments, “is to understand the extent to which Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’ had its birth in the pages of the free press as much as in the totalitarian censor’s office. […] Looking back over more than three-quarters of a century of Big Lies to follow, this initial instance, this first time, demands a level of scrutiny and reflection it doesn’t ordinarily receive, not having been recognized as the Original Sin that would ultimately corrupt us all. It was as if society suddenly became incapable of making the most elementary if vital connections between facts and conclusions, logic and judgment, ideas and implications, and truth and morality.”

“Why German — and to an extent, British — government-spending austerity programs are slowly succeeding, whereas the US is heading into a financial abyss with the profligate current “entitlement” (read socialist) policies fanned by our incompetent (in so many ways) Administration — Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security… Socialism bankrupts governments and wrecks economies, especially in the face of a demographic tsunami, the subject of the article below…DR. JOHN A….”

Stop all the dithering, D.C. The baby-boom budget bomb could destroy the economy within 25 years. The time to act is now.
As President Barack Obama and Congress continue to bicker over passing the federal budget and raising the government’s debt ceiling, a report published by one of the nation’s most credible agencies warns that the U.S. could face economic disaster within 25 years due to excessive government spending.

Obamacare is part of the problem, but so are Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. The cost of these programs will mushroom as tens of millions of baby boomers reach retirement age.

Scott Pollack for Barron’s
The report was published on Sept. 17 by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Its most optimistic forecast shows the federal debt growing to 100% of annual economic output by 2038, from an “already quite high 73%” today. That would make the U.S. like France, which in terms of fiscal strength is none too good.

But the CBO implicitly concedes that the outcome is likely to be a lot worse than that, and so it included its “alternative fiscal scenario,” which is far more realistic. It projects the federal debt will grow to 190% of the nation’s annual economic output by 2038. That would make us worse than Greece today, which has a 27% unemployment rate and periodic bloody riots over its dreadful economic conditions.

A Barron’s cover story on the federal debt compared the potential fiscal crisis in the U.S. to that of Greece (“Debt Crisis: Next Stop, Greece,” Feb. 18). Some critics of that shocking analogy failed to notice that it did not originate with Barron’s, but with the CBO itself. In its September 2013 report, the CBO stood by that analogy.

It is a truism of American democracy that politicians’ time horizons rarely extend beyond the next election. That’s why you have to go back nearly 15 years to find a president squarely addressing the baby-boom budget bomb. In his State of the Union address in January 1999, Bill Clinton urged Congress to seize “an unsurpassed opportunity to address a remarkable new challenge, the aging of America.” With the winds of a budget surplus at his back, Clinton declared that “now is the moment for this generation to meet our historic responsibility to the 21st century.”

http://pjmedia.com/blog/replacing-obamacare-the-strategies-and-options/ This is the fourth and final article in a series on the rollout of Obamacare, and how the law will change our health care system. Each of the past two weeks, we have published two articles: one on the changes in medicine and medical care and one on changes in the insurance industry. We […]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/27/john-mccain-elizabeth-obagy_n_4005380.html

John McCain Hires Elizabeth O’Bagy, Syria Analyst Recently Fired Over False Ph.D Claim

Less than a month after being fired for falsely claiming to hold a Ph.D, Syria researcher Elizabeth O’Bagy has a new job.

Foreign Policy’s The Cable reported Friday that O’Bagy has been hired by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to work as a legislative assistant. It was McCain who propelled her into the national conversation, reading part of an “important op-ed” she wrote for the Wall Street Journal at a Senate hearing on Syria earlier in September.

“Elizabeth is a talented researcher, and I have been very impressed by her knowledge and analysis in multiple briefings over the last year,” McCain told The Cable in a statement. “I look forward to her joining my office.”

O’Bagy was previously employed by the Institute for the Study Of War, who fired her on Sept. 11 after learning that her Dr. title was untrue. She had appeared on various TV networks under that guise, including CNN and Fox News.

“The Institute for the Study of War has learned and confirmed that, contrary to her representations, Ms. Elizabeth O’Bagy does not in fact have a Ph.D. degree from Georgetown University,” the institute said in a statement obtained by Politico. “ISW has accordingly terminated Ms. O’Bagy’s employment, effective immediately.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/359767/how-constitutionally-fund-government-andrew-c-mccarthy

It’s the House’s prerogative to supply funds, or not, for Obamacare.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy.

Republican leaders are right: There was a flaw in Ted Cruz’s plan to defund Obamacare: He took Republican leaders seriously.

Senator Cruz, along with Senator Mike Lee and House conservatives, devised a strategy to forestall the unpopular socialized-medicine scheme that Democrats unilaterally rammed through Congress in 2010. They would starve it of funds, not unlike the way Democrats and Republicans have slashed funds for fence construction along the Mexican border, even though the fence has been the law of the land for seven years. The Obamacare defunding strategy, though, depended on Republican fidelity to a ballyhooed campaign promise to reform Washington’s wayward legislative process by reimposing constitutional order — an order that gives the House of Representatives primacy over the spending of taxpayer dollars.

In the stretch run of what became the historic 2010 midterm elections, the Republican establishment issued its “Pledge to America.” If you flip past the many pin-up glossies of John Boehner, Eric Cantor, and Kevin McCarthy, you occasionally find some text in the Pledge. Text such as this: “We pledge to honor the Constitution as constructed by its framers and honor the original intent of those precepts that have been consistently ignored.”

Constitutional devotion was fashionable in 2010 — more fashion than substance, some of us suspected at the time. The GOP had been cast into the cold by angry voters in 2006 and 2008. The party had controlled the White House and both congressional chambers through most of the first six Bush years. As self-styled “compassionate conservatives,” Republicans bloated government, nearly doubling the debt the nation had previously taken over two centuries to accumulate. Fed up, conservatives stayed home in droves. The result was the Pelosi/Reid Congress and, later, the Obama administration.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/359778/worse-new-normal-mark-steyn A few years ago, after the publication of my book America Alone, an exasperated reader wrote to advise me to lighten up, on the grounds that “we’re rich enough to be stupid.” That’s to say, Western democracies and their citizens are the wealthiest societies ever known, and no matter how much of our energies […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/09/another_stealth_jihadi.html When a black 23-year old North Carolina man, Lakim Anthony Faust, shot four white people near a Wal-Mart last June, the story barely lasted 12 hours in the news cycle. Naturally, USA Today and various other sources covering the shooting left out key details like the races of the victims and the perpetrator. Greenville […]

Dangerous Times: Nobody can Deny Violent Islam http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/09/nobody_can_deny_violent_islam.html No one can deny the nature of jihad after last week’s horrors in Kenya were broadcast around the world. Everybody who saw the brutal Nairobi mall killings gets it. But our profoundly corrupt and Muslim-penetrated media and political class will keep denying those horrors. British PM David […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/359652/opposing-obamacare-isnt-anarchy-jonah-goldberg

It’s the law of the land.”

This is rapidly becoming the preferred shorthand argument for why criticism of Obamacare is just so, so wrong. It also serves as the lead sentence of a larger claim that all attempts to overturn the Affordable Care Act are really symptoms of a kind of extremist right-wing lunacy.
For instance, here’s Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who walked out of the painting American Gothic to deliver this homespun wisdom: “We’re not going to bow to tea-party anarchists who deny the mere fact that Obamacare is the law. We will not bow to tea-party anarchists who refuse to accept that the Supreme Court ruled that Obamacare is constitutional.”

Where to begin? For starters, I know a great many self-described members of the Tea Party, and I’ve yet to meet one who would not acknowledge — admittedly with dismay — that Obamacare is the law. Nor have I met one unwilling to concede that the Supreme Court ruled that Obamacare is constitutional. Though from my informal polling, I can report that most think the Court’s reasoning left much to be desired (logic, persuasiveness, consistency, etc.).

Lurking beneath such lazy rhetoric is a nasty psychological insinuation that there’s something deranged not just about opposing Obamacare, but about being a conservative. This is an ancient smear, used to discredit conservatives in order to avoid debating them.

Reid is a dim and sallow man whose tin ear long ago started to rust. But it’s worth pointing out that “anarchy” is not defined in any textbook or dictionary I can find as “the absence of Obamacare.” While, yes, it’s true that Mad Max, most zombie movies, and other post-apocalyptic films are set in worlds without Obamacare, that’s really not the most salient factor.

More to the point, petitioning Congress to repeal a bad law through formal procedures is not the kind of behavior educated people normally associate with anarchism. Indeed, the hypocrisy of liberals who find it somehow “extreme” for citizens to organize peacefully to overturn a law they consider bad and unjust is a marvel to behold. The Fugitive Slave Act was once the law of the land. So was the Defense of Marriage Act. Were those determined to overturn them anarchists?

On an almost daily basis, I get a fundraising e-mail from a Democrat or from liberal outfits begging for help to overturn Citizens United, which in case you hadn’t heard is the law of the land. Why won’t these anarchists and extremists accept that the Supreme Court has ruled? I cannot wait for the Supreme Court to overrule Roe v. Wade, just to hear liberals announce, “Well, the fight is over. The Court has spoken.”

Nearly the whole story of American liberalism is a story of dedicated ideologues seeking to overturn what they consider to be bad laws and replace them with good ones. Sometimes those efforts were laudable, as when they fought to overturn the doctrine of “separate but equal” (despite fierce opposition from Democrats). And sometimes they are lamentable, as when they routinely labor to overturn or deny school-choice laws, consigning underprivileged children to horrible schools just to placate teachers’ unions. But when conservatives try to do the exact same thing, they can’t simply be wrong, according to liberals. They must be demented extremists, anarchists, and — another favorite epithet these days — nihilists.

With new films, Hollywood finally telling story of fledgling Israeli Air Force

http://www.jta.org/2013/04/03/arts-entertainment/with-new-films-hollywood-finally-telling-story-of-fledgling-israeli-air-force#ixzz2gBGSjrBK

Some 65 years after a band of foreign volunteers took to the skies to ensure Israel’s birth and survival, filmmakers are racing to bring their exploits to the screen before the last of the breed passes away.

Among the competing producers and their financial backers are such famous names as Spielberg and Lansky. And though their budgets fall well short of Hollywood blockbuster standards, their competitive spirits are just as intense.

Nancy Spielberg, the youngest of Steven Spielberg’s three sisters, is the producer of “Above and Beyond: The Creation of the Israeli Air Force.” Her main challenger is Mike Flint with his “Angels in the Sky: The Birth of Israel.” His father, Mitchell, battled the Japanese in the skies of World War II before joining Israel’s famous 101st Squadron in 1948.

Spielberg, who lives in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, N.Y., and Flint, of Los Angeles, are facing competition from Boaz Dvir of the University of Florida in Gainesville, who has been working on “A Wing and a Prayer” since 2007.

The three films focus on the overseas pilots who made up 90 percent of the fledgling Israeli Air Force in the first desperate months after Israel declared its independence in May 1948. The pilots came mainly from English-speaking countries; nearly all of them were veterans of World War II. In Israel, they were officially members of Machal, the Hebrew acronym for “volunteers from outside the land.”