RUTHFULLY YOURS

Apparently UK gun control was effective enough so that Irfaq Naz had a 950,000-volt stun gun, hammers, kitchen knives, a machete and a samurai sword.

But maybe he just liked the idea of manually beheading the Prime Minister, who once claimed that the UK needs to integrate with Islam rather than the other way around.

Taxi driver Irfaq Naz, 34, was caught by officers in July driving the wrong way down a north London street having travelled down from his Middlesbrough home.

An unsheathed Samurai sword, a machete, kitchen knives, hammers and masking tape were also found in his Vauxhall Astra, after police resorted to smashing their vehicle into his to prevent him from driving on.

While officers were initially called to reports of a dangerous driver travelling for three-quarters of a mile into oncoming traffic, it was only after they’d detained him that he admitted he was ‘on his way to kill the prime minister’.

From the rear seat officers recovered a claw hammer, a lump hammer and an axe which were in a plastic bag that also contained masking tape.

In the boot they found a machete and a stun gun, shaped as a knuckleduster. That device, a Blast Knuckles 950,000 volt stun gun, was found to be in working order and a prohibited weapon.’

A search of his home at Finsbury Street, Middlesbrough, found the Downing Street postcode and the names of prominent political figures.

“As frustrating as HealthCare.gov may be sometimes,” Obama told ObamaCare navigators and volunteers. “We’re on the right side of history.”

It wasn’t the first time that Obama had invoked the right side of history to rally the troops. During the Arab Spring, as Mubarak resigned on his orders, he said, “History will end up recording that at every juncture in the situation in Egypt, that we were on the right side of history.”

It’s hard to be on the right side of history at every juncture. But Obama believed that he had achieved the feat by backing Mubarak, then backing his overthrow and then backing the Muslim Brotherhood.

Two years later, history recorded that Obama was on the wrong side of history with the fiction of the Arab Spring being swept away by the impersonal forces of history which despite liberal claims to the contrary do not care who was claiming to be on their good side last week.

After lying to Americans and telling them that his intervention in Libya was about protecting Benghazi from a massacre that was never going to happen, he told the Democratic National Committee; “We’re on the right side of history now throughout the Middle East, because we believe in preventing innocents from getting slaughtered, and we believe in human rights for all people.”

The Libyan rebels began targeting Africans and Christians, then they attacked the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, and today the country is run by warring militias; including Al Qaeda groups which recruit fighters and obtain weapons for their campaigns in Mali and Syria.

In the summer of this year, Obama told

Nearly ten years ago, the towns in Indonesia were called Banda Aceh and Pangadaran. Now they’re Philippine towns named Guiuan and Tacloban. Odd-sounding names of far-away places that we never hear about unless something terrible has happened there. They have almost nothing to do with America.

But the 600,000 homeless and the millions affected by Typhoon Haiyan are enormously fortunate because Americans want to have something to do with them. And our armed forces are not only the first on the scene after the Filipinos themselves, but they are doing things no one else can do, with speed and effectiveness.

When a disaster like Typhoon Haiyan hits, the big dogs come running and provide the help that only our military can with the speed that only they can achieve.

When Indonesia was nearly destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami nearly ten years ago, Americans stepped up to provide disaster relief as only we can. The UN relief chief at the time, some punk named Jan Egeland, said that the U.S.’s response was stingy. I recall doing a radio interview the following day with then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who didn’t take kindly to Egeland’s comment.

Rumsfeld — with some exasperation in his voice — pointed out that we, at the time of Egeland’s comment, had 33 Navy ships with thousands of sailors and Marines already there, fanning out to rescue people and deliver thousands of tons of supplies.

(It turned out, as it always does with the UN, that Egeland’s temper tantrum resulted from the idea that we weren’t picking up what he thought was our share of the UN’s relief costs. Never mind that between a third and a half of those costs were to pay the UN’s staff and travel expenses, and most of the rest couldn’t be accounted for at all.)

We do these things not only because we can. Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post got it precisely wrong the other day when she said we were displaying American generosity. Generosity is what we prove by donations to charities. This is different. Call it compassion, call it simple humanity, it’s what we do. It’s what Americans are made of, a reflection of a lot of the things it means to be an American.

The scope of our rescue and recovery operation is massive. First on the ground was the Third Marines Expeditionary Brigade, deployed from Japan on November 12, just four days after the storm. It began the relief operation and began setting the stage for the Navy, following close behind.

The aircraft carrier USS George Washington is, like all our Nimitz-class carriers, so massive that it’s sometimes hard to believe it actually moves. Home to about 6,000 officers and enlisted sailors, Washington and its sister ships have an awesome capacity to make war or peace, whichever is needed. Disaster relief meant Washington, based in Yokosuka, Japan, was given orders to shed its jets to make room for as many V-22s and helicopters it could operate off the flight deck, which is a lot. (The deck of a Nimitz-class carrier, at 4.5 acres in size, holds a lot of aircraft. The hangar decks below can roughly double that number.)

WASHINGTON — On the same day the administration finally designated Boko Haram as a terrorist organization, a survivor of the Islamist group’s inhumanity poured out to Congress his story of being shot point-blank in the face for his Christian faith.

The joint subcommittee hearing of the House Foreign Affairs panels on Africa and Terrorism was sparsely attended by lawmakers, with chairmen Chris Smith (R-N.J.) and Ted Poe (R-Texas), respectively, and ranking members Karen Bass (D-Calif.) and Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) showing up to hear the horrifying tales from this hotbed of extremism — and learn about the threat the al-Qaeda-linked group poses to the U.S.

Habila Adamu comes from Yobe state in northern Nigeria, where gunmen came to his home on Nov. 28, 2012. They ordered him to step outside as his wife begged the gunmen not to harm him.

“They said she should go back, because they were here to do the work of Allah,” Adamu said. “When I heard that, I knew that they were here to kill me.”

After Adamu confirmed to the men armed with AK-47s that he was a businessman and not police or military, they asked if he was a Christian. “I said I am a Christian. They asked me why are we preaching the message of Mohammed to you and you refuse to accept Islam. I told them I am a Christian, we are also preaching the gospel of true God to you and other people that are not yet to know God,” Adamu testified. “They asked me if I mean we Christian know God. And I told them we know God and that is why I preach the good news to other people that do not know God.”

“Then they asked me, ‘Habila, are you ready to die as a Christian?’ I told them, ‘I am ready to die as a Christian.’ For the second time, they asked me, ‘Are you ready to die as a Christian?’ and I told them, ‘I am ready,’ but before I closed my mouth, they have fired me through my nose and the bullet came out through the back.”

American healthcare aside (“If you like your plan…”), there are some promises that President Obama has kept. Notably, his promise last year to Russia’s Vladimir Putin — accidentally overheard by the entire world [1], via an open microphone — that once he’d won the 2012 presidential election, he’d have more “flexibility.” He was true to his word. With this September’s Russia-brokered deal over Syria’s chemical weapons, the Obama administration showed flexibility enough to compete with Cirque du Soleil.

Now, just when it seemed that U.S. policy toward Russia could hardly become more flexible without requiring all Americans to dine daily on borscht (or does the Affordable Care Act already include a provision for that?), here comes a story in the New York Times, headlined “A Russian GPS Using U.S. Soil Stirs Spy Fears.” [2] The gist is that the State Department is gung-ho to allow the Russian Space Agency, Roscosmos [3] (which coordinates with Russian military launches), to install on U.S. turf some half a dozen electronic monitor stations for a Russian Global Positioning System. The Times reports that not everyone in the administration thinks this is a great idea. The Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency see this plan as a threat to U.S. security: “They fear that these structures could help Russia spy on the United States and improve the precision of Russian weaponry.”

But does that worry the State Department? Not according to the Times, which goes on to provide the following account of the State Department’s rationale:

Political correctness might have been born in Sweden, where excessive sensitivity is a leading cause of death. The first Swedish police dog was a cocker spaniel. Now the Swedes are revising movie ratings to protect feminists, some more radical than others, but all victims of artists who produce swashbuckling guy movies.

“G” or “PG” will no longer cut it. Something called the “Bechdel” scale will decree that a movie must have at least two named female characters who talk to each other about something besides men. That sounds like an easy hurdle to clear, but it may be difficult for screenwriters to find such characters in real life. Movies that don’t meet this lofty standard receive an “F.” Can Hollywood be far behind?

“The entire ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, all ‘Star Wars’ movies … and all but one of the ‘Harry Potter’ movies fail this test,” Ellen Tejle, director of an art-house theater in Stockholm, tells The Associated Press. Ms. Tejle’s theater is one of four Swedish movie houses that introduced the Bechdel rating system last month.

Most Hollywood romantic comedies would get a thumbs down from Swedish critics, as would war movies, Westerns and action thrillers, making it difficult for a politically correct couple to find a movie on date night in Goteborg or Uppsala.

Moviegoers rarely see “a female superhero or a female professor or person who makes it through exciting challenges and masters them,” laments Ms. Tejle, who concedes that the rating isn’t a measure of the film’s quality (and might be the opposite). “The goal is to see more female stories and perspectives on cinema screens.”

The Bechdel test takes its name from American underground-press cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who introduced the concept in her comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For.” (The strip died.) The current favorite flick in the art houses, “Blue Is the Warmest Colour,” might not pass muster. The movie’s seven-minute-long nude lesbian love scene thrilled the Cannes Film Festival, but some critics scorned it as insufficiently authentic. “The Hurt Locker,” a 2010 war film about a bomb-disposal team in Iraq, can’t pass the test despite its female director, Kathryn Bigelow, winning an Oscar for it.

To any thinking observer, President Obama’s own explanation offers an involuntary confession that he knowingly lied about his Affordable Health Care law. But rather than paying careful attention to his actual words, our country continues to argue about the motive and integrity of its president.

At stake is a lot of damage that people were promised would never happen. NBC News reports that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million Americans who purchased their insurance policies individually are likely to receive cancellations because their policies do not conform to new regulations from the Affordable Health Care Act.

According to a recent Fox News poll, 50 percent of voters believe President Obama deliberately lied when he promised that people could keep the health care plans and doctors they preferred.

Still, Obama supporters such as House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) insist that no lie was told. Hoyer claims Obama’s words were accurate at the time the statement was made.

“You understand,” Hoyer said, “that if you had a policy on the day that this bill was adopted, you got to keep it … Now, you didn’t get to keep it if the insurance companies didn’t want to offer it to you.”

And so the debate rages on. Did Obama knowingly lie or was he himself uniformed about the subtle nuances of his own health care law?

Timid generals seem afraid to challenge efforts to emasculate our fighting men and objectify our women

Feminism is trying to yank the U.S. military in two directions at once. While claiming that women have no problem meeting the rigorous standards of the SEALs or infantry, advocates of opening these branches to women argue that female members of the military must be protected from the male sexual predators that, we are assured, are widely represented in the military. However, they can’t have it both ways. Are women “hear me roar” Amazons, or are they fragile flowers who must be protected from “sexual harassment,” encouraged to level the charge at the drop of the hat?

In her 2000 book, “Real Politics: At the Center of Everyday Life,” the late American political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain identified the two extremes of modern radical feminism: the “repressive androgynists,” who contend that there are no real differences between men and women, indeed that the idea that there are differences is an illusion fostered by a repressive patriarchy; and the “feminist victimization wing,” which paints the relations between the sexes as a continuous train of abuses by men who victimize women on a daily basis.

For two decades, these wings of feminist ideology have worked in tandem to sustain an attack on the culture of the U.S. military, culminating in the recent decision by the Pentagon to open infantry and special operations to women. In light of the argument that women are capable of performing these elite missions, it is indeed ironic that the wedge issues driving the military toward this end have come from the victimization wing, stretching from the “Tailhook” episode in 1991 to the recent moral panic over alleged rampant sexual assault in the military.

Let me be clear: There is absolutely no excuse for sexual assault. Period. There is no excuse for a superior who pressures a subordinate for sexual favors. Period. The data cited by the Pentagon creating widespread panic within the military are rendered suspect for two reasons. The first problem is methodological: The numbers — some 26,000 active-duty service members out of a population of 1.4 million claim to have been sexually assaulted in 2012 — are based on an anonymous survey. This number far exceeds reported cases of sexual assault.

Navy SEALs are the toast of America, but revelations show that the top brass has not always watched their backs during the Obama administration.

SEALs have brought exhilarating moments for the White House. The storied SEAL Team 6 killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011 and rescued U.S. cargo ship captain Richard Phillips from Somali pirates in 2009. Hollywood transformed both operations into blockbuster movies — with the administration’s help.

But some in the special operations community cite shabby treatment.

A book by Billy Vaughn, father of a SEAL killed in the Aug. 6, 2011, shootdown of a Chinook helicopter in Afghanistan, blames the administration for leaking too much information about his son’s unit.

Another book by two former SEALs tells the “shameful ordeal” they endured based on allegations of prisoner abuse by one unreliable sailor and one determined terrorist. Instead of issuing gratitude for nabbing the “butcher of Fallujah” in Iraq in 2009, U.S. Central Command court-martialed the SEALs on felony charges.

The two authors and a third SEAL were acquitted by military juries when the prosecution’s case fall apart.

Is anyone deliberately forgetting Kennedy’s shameful betrayal of dissident Cubans in the Bay of Pigs? Compared to Carter and Clinton he was a decent president….compared to Obama they are all better….Also, Kennedy was the first US President to earmark arms sales to Israel….rsk

Fifty years after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, a surprising fact has been rediscovered: In his time, he was not considered a liberal.

“Understanding Kennedy as a political conservative may make liberals uncomfortable, by crowning conservatism with the halo of Camelot,” Ira Stoll writes in his new book, ” JFK, Conservative.” Yet “it could make conservatives uncomfortable, too—many of them have long viscerally despised the entire Kennedy family, especially John F. Kennedy’s younger brother Ted.”

Mr. Stoll makes a strong case that in 1960 “the anti-Communist, anti-big government candidate was John F. Kennedy. The one touting government programs and higher salaries for public employees was Richard Nixon, ” he writes.

JFK’s false image as a government-loving peacenik was created “partly because of the work of liberal historians, partly as a result of shifts in American partisanship,” Mr. Stoll writes. (Disclosure: I’m on the board of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which published “JFK, Conservative.”) The best-selling biographies of the president after his death were by two of his more left-wing advisers, Ted Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.