RUTHFULLY YOURS

Yesterday I asked ” Huh? What Happened?” about the shutdown. I got the following very concise and perspicacious note from an e-pal who just happens to be the author of an excellent book on the Supreme Court and the Constitution.

“What is the real cost of the shutdown: it made a fool of the Republicans who deserted those who stood up against continued slide to U.S. bankruptcy, strengthened Obama’s resolve that he can get anything he wants, and leaves America without much hope for the next three years. Jerry”
I could not have said it better.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/bill-de-blasio-attends-columbus-day-parade-attacks-columbus/print/

WILL HE CHANGE THE NAME OF COLUMBUS AVENUE IN MANHATTAN TO SANDINISTA AVENUE?…. AND COLUMBUS CIRCLE TO RED SQUARE ? RSK

“If Bill de Blasio doesn’t like my work, maybe he should try moving to North Korea.”

And by attack, I mean Bill de Blasio deflects the question in the usual dishonest way he has while making it clear that he’s in the Anti-Columbus camp. And that’s about what you expect from a guy whose favorite color is red.

“The historical figure of Columbus is complicated to say the least,” Mr. de Blasio, the front-running candidate for mayor, said today at a press conference right before he marched in Manhattan’s Columbus Day parade.

Mr. de Blasio was responding a question asking whether he thought Mr. Columbus, famous for discovering the Americas while sailing for Spain and later attacking the native populations, was worthy of national recognition.

Complicated, like controversial, is how liberals call something bad when they don’t have the guts to come right out and say it.

Mr. de Blasio argued the holiday in its current form was simply a celebration of Italian pride, not the explorer.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303680404579143343379804228.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

“Eventually Mrs. Sebelius will have to make a real accounting of this government failure to someone other than the TV comic Jon Stewart, and perhaps she can also explain why the people who can’t build a working website also deserve the power to reorganize one-sixth of the U.S. economy. For now, the Administration that styles itself as the most transparent in history won’t reveal the truth—perhaps because it is afraid of what the public will find.”

The Affordable Care Act’s botched rollout has stunned its media cheering section, and it even seems to have surprised the law’s architects. The problems run much deeper than even critics expected, and whatever federal officials, White House aides and outside contractors are doing to fix them isn’t working. But who knows? Omerta is the word of the day as the Obama Administration withholds information from the public.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is even refusing to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a hearing this coming Thursday. HHS claims she has scheduling conflicts, but we hope she isn’t in the White House catacomb under interrogation by Valerie Jarrett about her department’s incompetence.

The department is also refusing to make available lower-level officials who might detail the source or sources of this debacle. Ducking an investigation with spin is one thing. Responding with a wall of silence to the invitation of a duly elected congressional body probing the use of more than half a billion taxpayer dollars is another. This Obama crowd is something else.

What bunker is Henry Chao hiding in, for instance? He’s the HHS official in charge of technology for the Affordable Care Act, and in March he said at an insurance lobby conference that his team had given up trying to create “a world-class user experience.” With the clock running, Mr. Chao added that his main goal was merely to “just make sure it’s not a third-world experience.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/361678/print

According to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, it’s his colleagues, more than anyone, who should be blamed for the failure of the defund-Obamacare campaign — and he expects conservatives to remember come primary season.

“Unfortunately, rather than supporting House Republicans, a significant number of Senate Republicans actively, aggressively, and vocally led the effort to defeat House Republicans, to defeat the effort to defund Obamacare,” Cruz says, in an interview with National Review. “Once Senate Republicans did that, it crippled the chances of this effort, and it caused the lousy deal.”

When pressed to cite specific Republican senators who may face primary trouble, Cruz refuses — “I’m not interested in a battle of personalities.” But he strongly urges conservatives to hold those lawmakers “accountable.”

“As with every decision elected officials make, the consequences of those decisions are up to the American people,” Cruz says. “But I will say this: From Day One in office, I’ve urged the American people to hold every elected official accountable, and far too many elected officials are not listening to the American people. . . . when you’ve got 10 to 20 Senate Republicans going on television, day after day after day, saying, ‘we cannot win, this is a fool’s errand, we will lose, nothing will happen, we will surrender,’ and blaming Republicans every step of the way, it eliminates the ability to get a positive outcome.

“Now, I have publicly said it is likely that I will stay out of all incumbent primaries,” he continues. “But every elected official has to make the case to the grassroots in his or her state on why he or she is effectively fighting for them.” When asked whether using the word “likely” means he’s leaving room to back a challenger, Cruz repeats the line, saying it’s “likely” he’ll stay out.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4269/a_bad_fit_islam_and_democracy_at_home_and_abroad

“Democracy presupposes a pre-political order, a set of preconditions, without which democratic elections will not work to produce what we understand as a democratic society.Islam is different. Islam does not recognise a distinction between the religious and the secular. Islamic law, sharia, is a code that regulates all areas of social and personal life and is founded in divine command, not on secular authority.”

Can Egypt, or indeed can any Muslim state ever embrace democracy as we understand and practise it in the West? For many years now, a defining feature of Western foreign policy has been the promotion of democracy as a solution to political conflict throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

This is understandable as Western democratic states have shown remarkable peace and stability over the past 60 years. If Egypt and other Muslim societies were to become Western style democracies, the reasoning goes, they too would become stable societies. So the West supports the “Arab Spring” and democratic elections throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

The problem with this reasoning is that elections are not the basis of democracy. It is a common belief that elections define democracy. But in fact democratic elections are only the by-product, so to speak, of complex historical social values and institutions that are a prior necessity for elections to work. In other words, democracy presupposes a pre-political order, a set of preconditions, without which democratic elections will not work.

Islamic societies do not appear to have these preconditions. The most important difference in terms of political governance between Islam and the West is the historic recognition in Western culture of a distinction between the religious and the secular. As the New Testament has it, Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.

This important distinction has resulted in the gradual development in the West of our secular law and institutions. The Christian West has always (sometimes with more than a little difficulty) acknowledged the legitimacy of a separate non-religious authority. Western secular governments can, and do, legislate to permit behaviour of which the Christian churches disapprove.

This secularisation of society has happened throughout Western history, particularly with the Reformation, and has today resulted in the universal authority of the democratic secular state. This means that all legislation in the West today is a matter of state, with the church (usually) a legal subject of the state and religion essentially a private matter.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/10/were_talking_while_theyre_acting.html Churchill’s dictum, “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war,” is a concept without application in much of the world.  Western-style negotiations seek common ground and compromise, while others seek only to “jaw” while the work of war goes on.  The West vests the process itself with value, providing our adversaries with instant leverage when they value only their […]

HOME Antarctic Ice Sets New All Time Record For Growth In October: ‘What makes the new record so astonishing is that it was set in October, on the 1st. Climatologically, the maximum extent is reached on 22nd September, so it is most unusual for the ice still to be growing 10 days later’ Antarctica Set […]

http://www.cfact.org/about/

The Earth may not have warmed since the nineties, but CFACT’s Climate Depot is on fire!

When Marc Morano reported that the U.S. is experiencing a very low year for extreme weather and so far has the least number of 100 degree days in a century, social media went wild. Matt Drudge picked up both stories and ran them on the Drudge Report.

One of the oddest thing about the global warming folks has always been the way they issue wild pronouncements about things that layman can easily check for themselves.

Thirteen years have gone by since David Viner of Britain’s Climate Research Unit declared that “snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.” Well, is it?

Similarly when Al Gore led a chorus of warmists in declaring that increased extreme weather is the new normal, we again ask, well is it? Scientific observation of the record shows that there is nothing extreme about recent weather and that 2013 has so far been particularly mild.

http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2013/10/john-locke-and-liberty.html “Thus in the beginning all the world was America….” I was inspired by the numerous references to John Locke in Denise Spellberg’s Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an: The Founders and Islam and by my review of that disreputable attempt to affiliate Jefferson with Islam to republish here my original essay on John Locke as a form […]

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com  http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS   A device to give diabetics freedom.  Israel’s Insuline has developed InsuPad – a device that warms the body after diabetics inject themselves – even after meals. The pad helps less insulin absorb much quicker and reduces hypoglycemic incidents. J&J Lifescan has just signed an agreement to market InsuPad in […]