RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=6496

“Mr. Obama, pressing for the elusive diplomatic solution to the Iranian threat to build the Islamic bomb, quotes the ancient Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu: “Build a golden bridge for your opponent to retreat upon.” Nice work, if you could get the opponent to use such a bridge. The evil-doers in the Middle East would blow it up and pocket the gold.”

Barack Obama, who stiffed the Israelis throughout his first term, is finally packing his bags for a visit to what we once called the Holy Land, before the world became an unholy mess. The Israelis have even put up an “app” on the Internet to enable everyone with a laptop to keep track of the trip in Hebrew, English and Arabic.

The app, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promises, will feature “real-time updates, video, photographs and behind-the-scene glimpses of the visit,” with Web links to the prime minster’s office, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Now if only Mssrs Obama and Netanyahu actually do something worth talking about.

“Another day,” observes the Jerusalem Post, “another gimmick.” There’s lots to talk about, and both the president and the prime minister are practicing to give the other man an earful. Mr. Obama offered a hint or two last week when he called two dozen leaders of Jewish organizations in the United States to the White House for a briefing of sorts about what to expect.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3618/comic-relief-charity-extremists Every year, the charity Comic Relief organizes the leading fundraising event in Britain. Some of the vast sums it raises, however, end up in the bank accounts of politicized groups with extremist agendas. Every year since 1985, the British charity Comic Relief has held a high-profile fundraising telethon called Red Nose Day. Since its […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3619/euro-islam Yet the book also contains troubling passages revealing cracks in Idriz’s façade. “Idriz plays two different pianos.” — Gunther Beckstein, President, Bavarian Interior Ministry Benjamin Idriz, an imam who leads the Islamic Community Penzberg (Islamische Gemeinde Penzberg or IGP) in a town south of Munich, has achieved prominence in Germany as an exponent of […]

Kerry, Obama, and the Turkish Prime Minister John Kerry’s recent rebuke of Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan for “inflammatory verbal attacks on Israel” stands in sharp contrast to Barack Obama’s long-established indifference to them. In the three months prior to Obama’s speeches in Turkey in early April (6-7) of 2009, Jewish life had been […]

Can you just imagine that the Normandy Invasion had been hinted at, and bruited about in the news by pundits, legislators and military men who all hinted that a strike was coming but, then backed off because “sanctions” needed time to work?

Or, if the nation most immediately threatened kept moving the “red line” and the goal post assisted by a seditious media and the Don Quixotes of Israeli politics?

To every hawkish thrust there is a pacifist parry…..yup thrust with a sword and deflect with a carrot—-namely, more threats that there will be even more and greater threats.

What a spectacle.

And, by the way, that Son of a Ron is now a hero? Puleez! Read Daniel Greenfield’s notes today.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/342522/while-you-werent-looking-obama-kills-military-commissions-andrew-c-mccarthy In the blink of an eye, the second Obama term has turned the clock back to the pre-9/11 days, when al-Qaeda was a law-enforcement problem, not a national-security challenge. Remember the great ruckus over the administration’s attempt to give Khalid Sheik Mohammed & Co. a civilian trial in lower Manhattan? In what would, in […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/342568 It was Wednesday, shortly before Senator Rand Paul’s bravura 13-hour filibuster, the Jimmy Stewart star turn in Paul’s crusade to have the Constitution ban a bogeyman of his own making: the killing of American citizens on American soil by America’s armed forces — a scandal that clearly cries out for action, having occurred exactly […]

WHERE THE GOVERNMENT SEES, IT CAN SEND A DRONE…

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/342564

I shall leave it to others to argue the legal and constitutional questions surrounding drones, but they are not without practical application. For the last couple of years, Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, has had Predator drones patrolling the U.S. border. No, silly, not the southern border. The northern one. You gotta be able to prioritize, right? At Derby Line, Vt., the international frontier runs through the middle of the town library and its second-floor opera house. If memory serves, the stage and the best seats are in Canada, but the concession stand and the cheap seats are in America. Despite the zealots of Homeland Security’s best efforts at afflicting residents of this cross-border community with ever more obstacles to daily life, I don’t recall seeing any Predator drones hovering over Non-Fiction E–L. But, if there are, I’m sure they’re entirely capable of identifying which delinquent borrower is a Quebecer and which a Vermonter before dispatching a Hellfire missile to vaporize him in front of the Large Print Romance shelves.

I’m a long, long way from Rand Paul’s view of the world (I’m basically a 19th-century imperialist a hundred years past sell-by date), but I’m far from sanguine about America’s drone fever. For all its advantages to this administration — no awkward prisoners to be housed at Gitmo, no military casualties for the evening news — the unheard, unseen, unmanned drone raining down death from the skies confirms for those on the receiving end al-Qaeda’s critique of its enemies: As they see it, we have the best technology and the worst will; we choose aerial assassination and its attendant collateral damage because we are risk-averse, and so remote, antiseptic, long-distance, computer-programmed warfare is all that we can bear. Our technological strength betrays our psychological weakness.

And in a certain sense they’re right: Afghanistan is winding down, at best, to join the long list of America’s unwon wars, in which, 48 hours after departure, there will be no trace that we were ever there. The guys with drones are losing to the guys with fertilizer — because they mean it, and we don’t. The drone thus has come to symbolize the central defect of America’s “war on terror,” which is that it’s all means and no end: We’re fighting the symptoms rather than the cause.

http://news.yahoo.com/egypt-angry-fans-torch-soccer-federation-111211284.html

CAIRO (AP) — Fans of Cairo’s Al-Ahly club have stormed Egypt’s soccer federation headquarters, setting it ablaze in anger after a court acquitted seven of nine police officials on trial for their alleged role in a deadly stadium melee last year.

Fire also swept through a nearby police club, but it was not immediately clear whether Al-Ahly fans were responsible for that blaze as well. Heavy black smoke billowed out of the rose-colored, three-story neocolonial building in central Cairo.

The fires followed a court verdict earlier Saturday that confirmed death sentences against 21 people for their role in the 2012 riot that killed 74 people after a game in the city of Port Said. The court also sentenced two senior police officers to 15 years in prison, but acquitted seven other security officials.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2013/03/friday-afternoon-roundup-senator-from.html
THE ROUNDUP

Rusty at The Jawa Report has a comprehensive and well thought out piece on the strategy for Obama and Rand Paul. I don’t agree with all of it, but it’s well worth a read.

Since the majority of the American people have not actually read the Holder memo on drone strikes, they simply do not know that the Administration never asserted a right to assassinate Americans on US soil.

Rand Paul knows this.

What he’s asking the Administration to do is prove that they don’t believe something which they never claimed they believe.

I can’t believe that even he believes the slippery slope argument that he’s making. I’m also not sure the political game he’s playing or what he thinks he’ll get out of this. He’s certainly getting a lot of attention and a lot of support from the Right.

…

Which is why Holder’s answer is so puzzling. If the administration wanted to clear the air why didn’t they just tell Sen. Ryan, “No, we can’t do that”?

Isn’t the answer simple? They don’t want to clear the air. They want to keep this political maelstrom going. They want to distract the American people from, well, everything!

$16.5 trillion in debt.

The worst recovery in US history — ever!

Millions of people unemployed or underemployed.

And no end in site of the economic misery. Obama’s failures are simply the new normal.

But, look kids, the Republicans are so nutty!

Rand Paul may be scoring some personal political points by trying to drag this thing out for as long as possible. It may help him with several elements in the base.

Sure. Politicians play to their base. It’s a careerist game. The real story isn’t in what they say, it’s in what they do. Don’t read their lips. Read their votes.