RUTHFULLY YOURS

The polls and the pundits tell us that the people of the United States of America are deeply divided politically and they’re right.

A bit of history helps to understand this.

The former colonies that later became the states when they accepted a federal form of government were always divided, along with their citizens, a goodly portion of whom did not want to declare independence and go to war with Great Britain. After it became clear that the Articles of Confederation were useless, a group of wealthy elites got together in Philadelphia and, in the greatest secrecy, scrapped the Articles and wrote our revered Constitution.

Fortunately, this group-now called the “framers” or “founders”-were highly educated for their time, most were successful businessmen and/or farmers. However, to call George Washington, who presided at the meeting, a farmer was an understatement. Washington owned thousands of acres and had many enterprises related to the crops he grew with the assistance of several hundred slaves. Washington was one of the wealthiest men in the nation. He and others may not have liked slavery, but there were no tractors, harvesters, or other farm equipment of later eras. Plows were still pulled by oxen or horses. If you wanted to get anywhere, you either went on foot, by horse, in a carriage, or by boat.

Washington, having led the armies of the aspiring American nation to victory over eight years, was a universally revered commander who had ultimately demanded and got complete control over the military from a generally useless continental congress that notoriously failed to pay the army.

When the Constitution has been ratified by enough states to become the new government of the new nation, there was never any question in anyone’s mind as to who should be its first President. As Harlow Giles Unger, the author of a new, excellent book, “Mr. President”: George Washington and the Making of the Nation’s Highest Office”, makes clear “…in one of the defining events in the creation of the U.S. presidency, Washington startled his countrymen by ignoring the constitution limits on presidential powers and ordering troops to crush tax protests by American citizens-much as the British government had tried, and failed, to do in the years leading up to the American Revolution.” History and life is filled with ironies.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/shoshana-bryen/hamas-and-the-peace-process/print/ The Palestinians have thrown a monkey wrench in the works again –  as they have a pattern of doing every time the “peace process” is supposed to be close to “solving” the problem. Despite the secrecy surrounding the current U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry-sponsored talks, a Palestinian leak Sunday put positions on the […]

Uncertainty and struggle are what we most often associate with poverty. Not knowing if you can still afford to pay next month’s bills and worrying over how much more you can cut back when you’re already barely getting by. This way of life has become more associated with the middle class than with those at the very bottom.

The statistic that shows that average black household worth is at $4,955 while average white household worth is at $110,729 is often quoted, but these numbers are not comparing similar things.

The $110,729 and $4,955 don’t reflect different standards of living; but different ways of living.

The $110,729 and $4,955 families both have large flat screen televisions, smartphones and the usual consumer toys. They could both eat equally well, except that the $4,955 family doesn’t bother watching its food budget. It just takes whatever it wants off the shelf and worries about prices later.

In terms of personal satisfaction, the $4,955 family is happier than the $110,729 family.

To understand this, think of the “Cloud.” You can buy a laptop powerful enough to store all your programs and data. Or you can get by with a mobile device whose apps connect online to a “Cloud” of someone else’s servers which store your data. The laptop is heavier to carry than the mobile device, but makes you more independent. Or you can just live in the “Cloud” confident that no matter how you mess up your device; your data will be backed up.

America is being divided between the workers and the dwellers in the government cloud.

The $110,729 families are independent while the $4,955 families are living in the cloud. Their cloud is “Social Capital.” Instead of using real capital, they use the collective Social Capital of family resources and government aid.

Big Brother is not only watching you. He is eavesdropping on you, stealing your metadata, snooping in your email and telling you what to eat and which illnesses you can treat if you’re lucky enough to see a doctor once Obamacare is implemented.

In Obama’s 1984, Mark Tapson shows that if he were here today George Orwell would see a disturbing resemblance between the U.S. and the dystopian future he wrote about so prophetically a generation ago. Obama’s 1984 takes the reader into the dark heart of this administration, a place of omnipresent NSA surveillance, police state tactics by the IRS and TSA, and nonstop intimidation of political opponents. Tapson shows how this President, like Big Brother, shamelessly digs memory holes where fact disappears (the murders of Americans in Benghazi were the result of an Internet video) and uses the “newspeak” of perverted language to whitewash the Islamic threat (the Islamist murders at Ft. Hood were the result of “workplace violence.”)

This pamphlet shows that we are less free than before as we head back to Orwell’s future, and because of Barack Obama the road we travel is the road to serfdom.

On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran. – Nineteen Eighty-Four

“Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices.”

– President Barack Obama, commencement address to the graduating class of Ohio State University on May 5, 2013[1]

In June of 2013, Amazon.com sales of George Orwell’s classic Nineteen Eighty-Four spiked nearly 10,000%.[2] Why? Because in the wake of recent revelations about secret, overreaching surveillance on the part of the National Security Agency, the ominous label “Orwellian” was being used so often by the media to describe the contemporary American political scene.

Orwell’s famous dystopian novel is the story of Winston Smith’s doomed rebellion against a Kafkaesque, all-knowing, all-seeing totalitarian state. The Great Britain of the future in Nineteen Eighty-Four – as imagined by Orwell in 1948, the year of the book’s composition – is a world of omnipresent government surveillance and public mind control, a totalitarian government as successfully repressive as North Korea today, which stamps out all individualism and independent thought. The brainwashed people’s reverence for the mysterious Party leader, Big Brother, whose glowering image is ubiquitous, is the very epitome of a cult of personality.

Admiral Elmo “Bud” Zumwalt Jr. for whom this destroyers and a class of ships is named died in 2000. I was honored to have met him to voice my appreciation for his stalwart and unbending defense of Israel….rsk

WASHINGTON: To boldly go in a revolutionary ship where no one has commanded before. Why the clumsy Star Trek reference? Because the Navy’s newest, stealthy, most radical ship, the USS Zumwalt, will be commanded by the fabulously named Capt. James A. Kirk. The Navy couldn’t make something like this up, could they?

The Zumwalt, launched on Monday, contains a plethora of new weapons, a radical power plant and a controversial new hull design designed to reduce its radar signature. And it really is commanded by Capt. James A. Kirk. As aficionados of the original Star Trek series know, the full name of the USS Enterprise’s commander was James Tiberius Kirk, so there should be no mistaking the two men.

How important is the first of the three Zumwalt-class ships to the US Navy? One of America’s preeminent naval experts, Norm Polmar, put it simply:

“The Zumwalt introduces new hull form and machinery concepts that could be the harbinger of the next generation of surface warships. In some respects the advancements are comparable to the Monitor of Civil War fame that revolutionized naval ship design.”

One of the country’s top defense lawmakers, Rep. Randy Forbes, tells us the Zumwalt and her sister ships “are poised to define surface ship design for years to come. It is game-changing technologies like those found on the Zumwalt-class that will enable the Navy’s future dominance in the decades ahead.”

What makes the ship so powerful a tool? Polmar says “the ship is the perfect p

Despite some signs of an eventual superpower agreement on Syria, portents of regional disintegration still seem increasingly plausible in the Middle East. What shall we make of these all too familiar portents? In particular, what must Israel prepare to do about them?

For Israel, growing anarchy may signal a very special kind of warning and fragility. Israel, always the individual Jew in macrocosm, could once again become the conspicuous scapegoat for many intractable area problems and the world’s principal national victim of any further regional disintegration.

Nonetheless, chaos, although hardly benign, can be a powerful teacher. There are, in fact, genuinely vital lessons to be learned from chaos. Ironically, perhaps, even the most sorely palpable disintegrations can sometimes reveal both sense and form.

What is there to examine?

In the Middle East, probably by increments, the fragmentation of world authority processes could express a recognizable shape. How, exactly, should this more or less discernible shape, this utterly eccentric geometry of chaos, be deciphered by Israel?

The world is best understood here as a system. What happens in any one part of this system must affect what happens in all or several of the other parts. When a particular deterioration is marked, and begins to spread from one country to another, the corollary effects can undermine regional and global stability. When a deterioration is sudden and catastrophic, as it would be following the onset of any unconventional war and/or unconventional terrorism, the perilously unraveling effects could be both prompt and irresistible.

Israel, like every state a juridical conglomerate of interdependent and interpenetrating parts, exists precariously in our chaotic world system. Aware that any incremental collapse of world authority structures would, in one way or another, impact its (few) friends, as well as its (many) enemies, leaders of the Jewish state will eventually need to learn something daunting. More precisely, this redemptive lesson would instruct how to conceptualize and advance certain informed expectations of national collapse.

Security expert breaks down the security threat posed to Israel by any future “Palestinian State” in Judea and Samaria (“West Bank”).

As negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority continue amid international calls for a 23rd Arab state in the Judea and Samaria (West Bank) region – which would leave Israel with the territory it held prior to the 1967 Six-Day War – familiar calls from within Israel are being heard warning of the “indefensible borders” the Jewish State would be left with in such an eventuality.

It is not a new claim. Israel’s former Foreign Minister Abba Eban famously referred to the so-called “’67 borders” as “Auschwitz borders,” provocatively expressing the fears of many Israelis that a return to the 1949 Armistice lines would leave them perilously vulnerable to attack in a neighborhood which has proven all too often to be hostile to their very presence.

But is that really the case? Or, as some critics of Israel claim, are those fears simply unfounded?

One prominent Israel advocate who has taken it upon himself to clearly illustrate the case is New York based attorney Mark Langfan. On Tuesday Langfan appeared on the CBN News show “The Watchman with Erick Stakelbeck,” and, with the aid of three topographical maps set out to prove why in his view a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria would create an indefensible security situation for Israel.

The show starts with a regional map showing how Israel provides “the first and last line of defense” between Islamic terror and NATO nations, first among them Greece.

Langfan then showcased a topographical map illustrating how the inaccurately termed “West Bank” actually consists of the mountains of Judea and Samaria. His analysis predicts a Palestinian state there could turn into a strategic terror base in the heart of Israel.

http://us7.campaign-archive2.com/?u=8845fe2dede2c2c13382821ba&id=db00c30831&e=953b85394c
New York, Friday, November 1, 2013 – Here is a case study of a strip of small businesses in Bayside at 220 Street and Horace Harding Expressway that are being plagued by new parking regulations of the NYC Dept of Transportation. These businesses thrive on rush hour traffic and the new regulations prevent customers from parking during rush hour. Customers are getting $150 tickets and they don’t come back. This is hurting the business owner’s bottom line, their ability to pay the rent and meet business expenses. NYC DOT recently changed to these arbitrary new parking rules which are inconsistent with the rules up the block which allow all day parking. See the linked photos and video of John Konyoudjian, owner of Mt. Ararat Bakery.

These frustrated businessmen reached out to everyone for help, but no one would help them. Where is Councilman Weprin who should be handling this issue and helping to remove the obstacles to thriving businesses? Instead Joe Concannon is on the job as City Councilman fighting against the capricious rules of a city agency that is killing small businesses.

“SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POLICE”

Obama and his supporters emit a fog of equivocation and euphemism.

“If you like your plan, you can keep it.” That assertion, repeated with small variations, was Barack Obama’s central pledge when he was campaigning for president and then for the enactment of health-care “reform.” The pro-Obama New York magazine has assembled a 95-second video montage of the future and current president making the assertion two dozen times between 2008 and 2010.
Enlarge Image

Obama in 2008: “You can keep your plan if you are satisfied with it.” Associated Press

Surely this is the clearest example of a broken presidential promise since George H.W. Bush’s “Read my lips: no new taxes.” In Bush’s defense it may be said that political exigencies–a Democratic Congress, a foreign-policy crisis–forced him to accede to a tax hike. Similarly, Obama in 2008 opposed the idea of an individual mandate to purchase health insurance, but agreed to it because his preferred options, the “public option” (in which the government would compete with private insurers) and “single payer” (in which the government would be the only insurer) were political nonstarters even with an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress.

But the you-can-keep-your-plan promise was not a sacrifice to political necessity. The ObamaCare law included a grandfather clause permitting the continuation of existing plans even if they aren’t compliant with ObamaCare’s mandates. But as we noted Tuesday, the administration applied that provision narrowly, so as to maximize the number of cancelled policies.

What do you call a political promise delivered repeatedly and emphatically only to be broken deliberately? David Firestone, an editorialist at the New York Times, calls it an “unfortunate blanket statement.” We suppose another example of an unfortunate blanket statement was “I am not a crook.”

Euphemism is only one way of attempting to fog up the debate so as to escape accountability. Another is equivocation–the informal logical fallacy of using ambiguous language in an effort to mislead. The classic political example is Bill Clinton’s claim “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” Clinton was using “relations” in the narrow sense of “intercourse,” even though most people understood him to be making a blanket (heh) denial of hanky-panky.

According to Obama and his defenders, what he meant by “plan” or “insurance” is something different from what you might have thought he meant. Former Clinton operative James Carville, asked by Fox News Channel host Bill O’Reilly if Obama “lied in the runup to ObamaCare,” answered as follows:

Well, I think he could have said, I think the more accurate statement would have been that you will keep your coverage unless you are an individual market and have a so-called insurance policy that doesn’t meet the basic requirements. You know, just calling something health insurance doesn’t make it health insurance.

You see the game Carville is playing here. If you liked your plan and it was cancelled on account of ObamaCare, it’s not that Obama failed to keep his promise, it’s that the promise didn’t apply to you because your plan wasn’t a plan at all.

What he doesn’t spell out is that the legal definition of “health insurance” is part of the ObamaCare legislation. So the Obama pledge qualified by the Carville equivocation is a tautology: If your plan is one that ObamaCare permits you to keep, you can keep your plan.

hat sure was a blockbuster ruling Thursday from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, staying a federal judge’s decision against New York City’s “stop and frisk” police practice and tossing the judge off the case. The ruling throws a curve into the last week of New York mayor’s race and complicates the liberal campaign to block police practices that have greatly reduced crime.

The shocker came as the Second Circuit hears New York City’s appeal of Judge Scheindlin’s ruling, in which she declared that stop and frisk violated the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment. New York police have for years stopped, questioned and searched for weapons if they have reasonable cause to believe someone may be connected to a crime. Cheered on by a liberal media campaign, Judge Scheindlin declared it illegal. She also appointed a panel of liberal worthies to micromanage New York’s finest, an affront both to the police force and self-government.

The Second Circuit panel is a long way from judging the merits of the appeal. But the three judges noted in their ruling Thursday that “upon review of the record in these cases, we conclude that the District Judge ran afoul of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges, Canon 2 (‘A judge should avoid impropriety and the appearance of impropriety in all activities.’)”

Specifically, the court said Judge Scheindlin had “compromised” the appearance of partiality by improperly inviting a stop-and-frisk suit. In a December 21, 2007 hearing on an earlier case, Judge Scheindlin stated: “[I]f you got proof of inappropriate racial profiling in a good constitutional case, why don’t you bring a lawsuit? You can certainly mark it as related.”