RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/364117/print

Barack Obama could not have been more unequivocal. The telecommunications companies had to be punished for violating the letter of federal law. He didn’t want to hear about how President Bush told them it was okay.

One laughs now remembering how Obama’s base, the anti-anti-terrorist Left and its lawyer legions, used to call Bush the “imperial president” and thunder for his impeachment. Bush couldn’t hold a candle to our incumbent Caligula. He had no idea, for example, that presidents can just “waive” inconvenient parts of congressional statutes, like FISA.

FISA governs foreign intelligence surveillance. It requires the executive branch to get a judicial warrant before it can eavesdrop on alien terrorists and other foreign agents who threaten national security. Nevertheless, after al-Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11, Bush directed the NSA to wiretap suspected jihadists without obtaining court permission. He pressed the telecoms to help the NSA carry out the program — stressing the imperative of protecting American lives during a crisis, assuring these private companies that they would face no legal jeopardy for complying with his request.

Oh no you don’t, Obama and his base shrieked.

After the top-secret program was revealed, a paralyzing debate threatened to shut down American intelligence collection — at a time when we had troops in harm’s way in two war theaters and jihadists continued plotting mass-murder attacks against our homeland. By late 2007, recognizing the desperate need to reopen foreign-intelligence operations, Congress was poised to pass a FISA overhaul that would clarify the NSA’s surveillance authority. But passage was delayed for months because the hard Left refused to budge.

The Left’s goal was to bleed the telecoms dry with lawsuits over Bush’s warrantless surveillance program. Thus they pressured Democrats to block the passage of any FISA bill that would give telecoms the legal protection — in Obama parlance, the “waiver” — Bush had promised them. And the hard Left had a card to play: the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Then-senator Barack Obama, himself a hard Leftist and an opportunist (yes, that’s redundant), realized that captivating the party’s Marxist wing — the anti-business, blame-America-first activists — was vital to capturing the nomination. So he duly dispatched his top campaign spokesman to proclaim to the progressive media, “To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies.”

Of course, you must keep in mind that this is Barack Obama we’re talking about — a.k.a. Barack “If You Like Your Health Insurance Plan You Can Keep Your Insurance Plan, $2,500 Premium Reductions, Obamacare Is Not a Tax, The Video Caused Benghazi, Raising the Debt Ceiling Is Unpatriotic, I Didn’t Know About Fast and Furious Until I Read About It in the Newspapers” Obama. So naturally, after he snagged the nomination and it came time to appeal to the sane part of the country in the general election, he did his usual 180 and supported the FISA overhaul with retroactive immunity for the telecoms.

The purpose here is not to prove, yet again, that Obama is a fraud, which would be like proving that Detroit may be a tad mismanaged. The purpose is also not to establish, yet again, Obama’s hypocrisy in condemning Bush’s flouting of a single statute when, once he assumed power, Obama so systematically violated laws that you’d think the oath says, “Take care that the laws be faithlessly executed.” The purpose is not even to reprise Thursday’s remarkable press conference, at which Obama — in the very moment of his humiliation over serial lying — brazenly repeated some of his most notorious and resoundingly disproved whoppers: the claim that his oft-repeated promise about Americans being able to keep their health-insurance plans somehow “ended up being inaccurate” when it was willfully false; the claim that this lie affects only the 5 percent of Americans in the individual market when he has known for years (as John Hinderaker shows) that Obamacare would force the cancellation of tens of millions of employer-provided plans; and so on.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/364093/thus-spake-obama-mark-steyn

It is a condition of my admission to this great land that I am not allowed to foment the overthrow of the United States government. Oh, I signed it airily enough, but you’d be surprised, as the years go by, how often the urge to foment starts to rise in one’s gullet. Fortunately, at least as far as constitutional government goes, the president of the United States is doing a grand job of overthrowing it all by himself.

On Thursday, he passed a new law at a press conference. George III never did that. But, having ordered America’s insurance companies to comply with Obamacare, the president announced that he is now ordering them not to comply with Obamacare. The legislative branch (as it’s still quaintly known) passed a law purporting to grandfather your existing health plan. The regulatory bureaucracy then interpreted the law so as to un-grandfather your health plan. So His Most Excellent Majesty has commanded that your health plan be de-un-grandfathered. That seems likely to work. The insurance industry had three years to prepare for the introduction of Obamacare. Now the King has given them six weeks to de-introduce Obamacare.

“I wonder if he has the legal authority to do this,” mused former Vermont governor Howard Dean. But he’s obviously some kind of right-wing wacko. Later that day, anxious to help him out, Congress offered to “pass” a “law” allowing people to keep their health plans. The same president who had unilaterally commanded that people be allowed to keep their health plans indignantly threatened to veto any such law to that effect: It only counts if he does it — geddit? As his court eunuchs at the Associated Press obligingly put it: “Obama Will Allow Old Plans.” It’s Barry’s world; we just live in it.

The reason for the benign Sovereign’s exercise of the Royal Prerogative is that millions of his subjects — or “folks,” as he prefers to call us, no fewer than 27 times during his press conference — have had their lives upended by Obamacare. Your traditional hard-core statist, surveying the mountain of human wreckage he has wrought, usually says, “Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.” But Obama is the first to order that his omelet be unscrambled and the eggs put back in their original shells. Is this even doable? No. That’s the point. When it doesn’t work, he’ll be able to give another press conference blaming the insurance companies, or the state commissioners, or George W. Bush . . .

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/caroline-glick/the-bothersome-annoying-truth/print/ A controversy is raging in the Washington, DC, Jewish community involving the local JCC (DCJCC) and its in-house Theater J. While a local tale, it is a distressing encapsulation of Israel’s predicament. Israel’s rights and justness are grounded in truth. But today truth isn’t worth as much as it used to be. Those who fight […]

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/COLUMN-ONE-The-demise-of-Pax-Americana-331803
The US remains the most powerful actor in the world. But last week, American credibility was shattered.

What happened in Geneva last week was the most significant international event since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The collapse of the Soviet Union signaled the rise of the United States as the sole global superpower. The developments in the six-party nuclear talks with Iran in Geneva last week signaled the end of American world leadership.

Global leadership is based on two things – power and credibility. The United States remains the most powerful actor in the world. But last week, American credibility was shattered.

Secretary of State John Kerry spent the first part of last week lying to Israeli and Gulf Arab leaders and threatening the Israeli people. He lied to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the Saudis about the content of the deal US and European negotiators had achieved with the Iranians.

Kerry told them that in exchange for Iran temporarily freezing its nuclear weapons development program, the US and its allies would free up no more than $5 billion in Iranian funds seized and frozen in foreign banks.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/islamist-syrian-rebels-behead-wrong-man/

Islamist Syrian rebels belonging to a group linked to al-Qaeda sought “understanding and forgiveness” after decapitating a man who later turned out to be a member of another rebel group. The rebels had originally accused the man of belonging to a Shi’ite Iraqi militia fighting for Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The rebels, members of the al-Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), beheaded the man in a public execution on the streets of Aleppo after announcing that the accused belonged to a pro-Assad group.

The execution was filmed and posted on the web, after which the rebels’ mistake quickly became apparent. The beheading victim was soon identified as Mohammed Fares, a member of Ahrar al-Sham, a fellow Sunni rebel group which also has Islamist leanings.

In the video footage of the executions, the ISIS fighters can be seen holding up a man’s head in front of an incensed crowd.

The Daily Telegraph quoted the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights as saying Thursday that Fares was killed due to a misunderstanding.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/when-a-palestinian-teen-shed-the-last-traits-of-humanity/

When a Palestinian teen shed the last traits of humanityWhat brought a 16-year-old West Banker to such vicious depths as to murder the sleeping Israeli man-child in the adjoining seat on a bus on Wednesday? The drip-drip poison of incitement

I cannot get the vision of Eden Atias, stabbed again and again and again, and bleeding to death in his blue fabric seat on a bus at Afula bus station on Wednesday morning, out of my head. And I’m sure I’m not alone in the abiding sense of horror and despair.

A young man, conscripted into the Israeli army just two weeks earlier, fast asleep in his seat on a bus inside Israel, knifed over and over by a Palestinian teenager so consumed, so spilling over with hatred as to have truly lost “the image of God.”

All killing is foul, all terrorist murders indefensible. But this assault is particularly depraved and depressing. For it sickeningly demonstrates an atmosphere and a mindset evidently prevalent, among at least some Palestinians in the West Bank, that leaves no room for optimism in the short-term. And it underlines the nature of the task ahead if there is to be any substantive change for the better in the medium-term.

Human nature is flawed. We all grapple with what seem to be instinctive tendencies to be selfish, materialistic, suspicious of the unfamiliar, resentful of others who we think have it easier or better than we do. Some of us deal with these unpleasant aspects of our personalities better than others. In the best of us, good wins out over evil more often and more completely.

But even in the most stained and weak of characters, there are limits to the horrors and the wrongs that our flaws will push us to commit. At some point, other, better instincts kick in. Many folks drive irresponsibly; some cheat on their taxes; fewer carry out robberies and assaults. Most people recoil at the idea of taking a human life.

Almost nobody, no matter how flawed, how skewed, how filled with hatred, sinks so low as to take a life in cold blood.

A bloodstained bus seat where soldier Eden Atias was stabbed to death by a young Palestinian man on a bus at the central bus station in Afula (photo credit: Avishag Shaar Yashuv/Flash90)

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=6347 When sex trumps war It was a stormy week indeed, both literally and figuratively. Israel’s relations with the Obama administration took a major turn for the worse over the latter’s attempt to make a deal with Iran; Israeli rescue teams headed for the Philippines to assist the population of Tacloban devastated by Typhoon Haiyan; […]

http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=331799   US president warns of cost of military conflict, urges Congress to hold off on new sanctions on Tehran; US Secretary of State Kerry says sanctions ease is necessary in order to build trust with the Iranians.   WASHINGTON – US President Barack Obama said Thursday that no matter how powerful the American military, […]

http://www.liberateliberty.com/2013/11/13/david-horowitz-publishes-new-book-hopes-conservatives-dont-treat-him-way-he-and-conservative-establishment-treated-diana-west/ Noted professional clown and all around jackass David Horowitz has been on a publicity tour for his new book, The Black Book of the American Left. His book discusses, among other things, communist influence and support in America. I spoke to Horowitz and those praising him, asking how they can justify his new book with a straight face […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/sharia-court-in-berlin-demands-defendant-pay-100-camels-1/print/

That is a lot of camels. I doubt there are 100 camels in all of Berlin. But who are we to argue with the enlightened wisdom of Mohammedan justice?

This is your justice system. This is your justice system on Sharia. Even when there aren’t beheadings and behandings, there are camels. Lots and lots of camels.

As Taccidin Yatkin drove in the spring of 2013 to a reconciliation meeting with the Lebanese extended family Omeirat, he hoped that both sides in Arab tradition would join hands and would drink tea. In January 2009, Yatkin’s son Ali had hit the 17-year-old Mohammed Omeirat when he went through a red light with his Alfa Romeo and fatally injured him.

As the former president of the Central Council of Turks in Germany entered the premises of the Lebanese Association in Berlin-Neukölln, he knew that the victim’s family didn’t want to smoke a peace pipe.

There waiting were the Omeirats, 40 to 50 members of the family and other Arab clans. The message of the scenario was clear: Who does not cooperat, messes with the entire extended family Omeirat. Parts of which the police consider to be organized crime and which has distinguished itself primarily through property and violent crimes.

The director at the meeting was the Imam of the Mosque of Omar Neukölln reciting from the Qur’an determined that the case should be “solved according to Sharia”. The son of Othe meirats had been killed and the person responsible for it was not punished. According to the “law of our country he is guilty, whether he acted negligently or intentionally.”