RUTHFULLY YOURS

“But Mr. Hannan shouldn’t be faulted for his optimism—particularly given the gravity of his book’s central argument: that the survival of democratic self-governance, individual rights and economic freedom depends largely on the choices made today by the world’s English-speaking cousins.’

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303789604579200063693919116?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLESecondBucket

I am reading this wonderful book…Daniel Hannan could write about 50 ways of cooking kale and it would be delightful….rsk

Years ago, when I was an American student in Edinburgh, I had a long conversation about British foreign affairs with another student—an Italian—and remember finding it slightly amusing that he kept referring to the British as “your cousins.” I had never thought much about the political and cultural ties binding the U.S. and Great Britain and was at the time more keenly aware of the differences between the two peoples than of their essential sameness. But as Daniel Hannan observes in “Inventing Freedom,” his history of the principles and institutions that have defined English-speaking nations, non-English speakers much oftener think of the U.S. and Britain as a single entity than as two countries. When French political commentators and European Union officials complain about “Anglo-Saxon” values—liberalized labor markets, low taxes—they are coming closer to the truth than Americans and Britons typically realize.

Mr. Hannan’s book is more than intellectual history; it’s also an argument and a plea. The principles of representative democracy, individual liberty and property rights aren’t the products of some general European phenomenon called “capitalism,” he says, and any belief that they are owes more to Karl Marx than to the historical record. These principles originated in pre-Norman England, were realized fully in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and spread as English speakers left the British Isles to colonize the New World, India, East Asia and Australia.

Maybe Eric Schmidt can get Merrill Newman out of Pyongyang. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304854804579236150756070232?mod=Opinion_newsreel_4 Thinking of taking a holiday in forbidden North Korea so that you can one-up your friends who spent two weeks in exotic Bhutan? The best advice: Don’t. That’s a lesson being learned the hard way by Merrill Newman, a retired executive from California who […]

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303670804579234550517363202?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond

If Ronald Reagan was not a conservative, there is no modern American conservatism. But if Yuval Levin’s provocative new book, “The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Left and Right,” is correct, Reagan was anything but a conservative on what Mr. Levin regards as the most fundamental division between left and right—Burke’s and Paine’s rival conceptions of political change.

In his 1776 pamphlet “Common Sense,” Paine famously proclaimed that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Burke, whom Mr. Levin regards as the progenitor of conservatism, saw the future as inextricably linked to the past and present. Abrupt or revolutionary change begins with social destruction and ends in self-destruction. Change that improves the world is rooted in respect for the tacit wisdom of the present. A true patriot and wise politician, Burke wrote, “always considers how he shall make the most of the existing materials of his country,” a thought that Mr. Levin summarizes as “we do not have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

This brings us to Ronald Reagan, whose attitude toward change was more like Paine’s than Burke’s. Reagan often quoted Paine’s “we have it in our power” affirmation and did so in one of the most systematic statements of his creed—his acceptance speech at the 1980 Republican convention.

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/novelists-view-world/2013/dec/3/obamacare-lotteryand-you-lose-sucker/ It is becoming increasingly obvious that some Americans will benefit from Obamacare, but most of us will lose our doctors, our hospitals, in fact our entire heath care plans because, in horseplayer parlance, there’s a sucker born every minute, and suckers are us! We gambled on the wrong man. The wrong man came up […]

http://www.timesofisrael.com/sound-and-fury-masking-true-debate-over-bedouin-resettlement/ The fiery rhetoric surrounding the Prawer-Begin resettlement plan is hiding the real needs and complicated reality of Bedouin modernization. There is nothing new in the intense interest foreigners take in the Israeli-Arab conflict. But the concentrated flurry of discussion and activism abroad over the government’s so-called Prawer-Begin plan to resettle some of the Bedouin […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

When Obama decided to turn his campaign into a permanent Super PAC; he was stabbing the Democratic Party in the back. But he was doing it to them, before they did it to him.

Organizing for America gave him an independent source of power and influence at the expense of the Democratic Party. Obama was carelessly draining money and energy out of his own party because whatever common interests he had with a political party, that for all its leftward swing was still too conservative for his taste, were about to be fractured during his second term.

The Democratic Party might have been satisfied if he had retained his 2008 halo in 2015. But that was never going to happen. No matter how much the media slobbers over a politician, the voting public, at least those parts of it that don’t have Hope posters and Obama holograms hanging on their walls, eventually needs a break and someone to blame.

Even vice presidents tend to turn on their own presidents once they begin running for office. George H.W. Bush did it to Reagan and Gore did it to Clinton. It may be hard to remember now in this wave of nostalgia for the 90s when there was actually an economy instead of a shrunken shell of one, but the Democratic Party and the American people had grown sick of Clinton and his scandals.

Gore was running as the antithesis of Bill Clinton. Boring and serious-minded where Bill was the life of the party. An ethical man, aside from all those scandals due to the lack of a controlling authority, who really understood the new internet technology, and wasn’t going to be caught with an intern; unless she was working at a massage parlor.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/iran-quran-has-marked-israelis-as-rabid-dogs-and-pigs?f=puball

In the wake of news that Israel will send a delegation to Washington, D.C. to influence the Obama administration’s international negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program, the Islamic Republic is stepping up its attacks on the Jewish state.

“This vicious temperament of dogs and pigs is you (Israel),” said Ayatollah Mohammad Imami Kashani, a member of the Assembly of Experts, the body that appoints the supreme leader, at Tehran’s interim Friday prayer. “The Quran has marked on your foreheads that you will be humiliated. The Zionist officials are like animals, and truly as rogue thugs they do whatever they want, killing people, creating bloodshed and destroying whatever they want.”

Kashani said at this week’s Friday prayers sermon in Tehran that whenever Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears on television, “all of the world hates you. You are hated, humiliated and despicable and,” the ayatollah added in a putrid insult to make to a Jew, “have been immersed in the flesh of rabid dogs and pigs.”

Kashani also had harsh words for the Obama administration: “Nations of the world are the enemies of the Zionists and (America’s support of Israel) will have you share the misery of the Zionists.”

Kashani stated that uranium enrichment is Iran’s right and that America, Britain and Israel lie when they say Iran wants the nuclear bomb.

Last Sunday, Iran and the 5+1 world powers – the five permanent U.N. Security Council members plus Germany – reached agreement in Geneva over Iran’s illicit nuclear program.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/chinese-air-defense-zone The negotiations over Iran’s potential nuclear weapons arsenal has pushed all other foreign policy issues out of the headlines. But as Washington muses about Iran, one of the boldest attempts to challenge the U.S. as a Pacific power has occurred with very little commentary. Recently China unilaterally created an “air defense identification zone” in […]

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/the-suspension-of-disbelief/?print=1

Adding straws of scandal — Fast and Furious, the Associated Press monitoring, the IRS fiasco, and the NSA spying — on any presidential back except Barack Obama’s would have long ago broken it. Watergate ruined Richard Nixon. Iran-Contra earned a special prosecutor and nearly destroyed the Reagan second term. Katrina’s incompetent local and state reactions, coupled with a tardy federal effort — and the insurgency in postwar Iraq — ended the viability of George W. Bush [1] in his second term.

Second, well apart from scandal, the perception of presidential lying usually ends presidential agendas. Richard Nixon resigned after never telling the truth about the Watergate cover-up. “Read my lips: no new taxes” cost George H.W. Bush his reelection [2]. “I did not have sex with that woman” made Bill Clinton’s impeachment likely.

Yet Barack Obama on more than 20 occasions assured the American people that they could keep their existing health care coverage and their present doctor — and still save $2,500 a year per family. He knew those fables were absolutely untrue when he repeated them serially in the reelection cycle of 2012. Yet Obama has not faced any of the fallout of the sort that greeted his predecessors, even as the wreckage of the Affordable Care Act will affect the health of Americans in ways that transcend taxes or Oval Office sex.

Instead, the healthcare falsity — in the manner that the NSA disclosures were just more of the same old IRS and AP scandals — joins a litany of other untruths: the constant insistence that the Benghazi deaths were due to a video, dissimulation about ending the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols, the closing of Guantanamo, the “summer of recovery” after the stimulus, halving the national debt by the and of the first term, and the promised plunge in unemployment. Again — so what that the president does not tell the truth?

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/humberto-fontova/the-cuban-hostage-crisis-day-1460/

On December 3rd, 2009, Castro’s KGB-trained police arrested Alan Gross, a U.S. citizen working in Cuba on contract for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Mr. Gross has languished in a KGB-designed prison cell ever since. His crime was bringing cell phone and Internet equipment into Castro’s fiefdom to help Cuba’s tiny Jewish community communicate more freely with the outside world.

A reminder: Pre-Castro Cubans enjoyed some of the most advanced communications systems in the world. In 1958 Cuba boasted more phones and TVs per capita than most European countries. Today, Castro’s fiefdom has fewer Internet users per capita than Uganda, and fewer cell phones than Papua New Guinea. The Stalinist regime is very vigilant in these matters.

By the way, introducing cutting-edge communications equipment into Cuba didn’t always land Americans in torture chambers. In 1957 ATT presented Cuban “Dictator” (according to every media mention) Fulgencio Batista with a Golden Telephone for his regime’s enthusiastic welcome of all of their latest technology. This Cuban “dictator” reveled in the fact that Cubans had better, more abundant and cheaper means of communications than most Europeans. You might recall the scene from Goldfather II where Hyman Roth and Michael Corleone pass the Golden telephone around Batista’s conference table. This one scene contains an element of historically accuracy.

In March 2011, after he had lost almost 100 pounds from his prison ordeal, a Castroite court finally got around to actually trying their American hostage Alan Gross. They condemned him to a prison sentence of 15 years for working for an agency of the U.S. government “that aimed to destroy the Revolution through the use of communication systems out of the control of authorities.”

And there’s the hitch: “control of the authorities.” Not even Gadaffi’s late regime, or Assad’s in Syria or Hu Jintau’s in China seek to control cell-phone and Internet access.