RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/hillary-spins-benghazi/print/

At a keynote appearance before the National Automobile Dealers Association on Monday, Hillary Clinton began laying the groundwork for how she will respond to the Benghazi scandal during her likely 2016 presidential run. “My biggest, you know, regret is what happened in Benghazi,” she answered in response to a question asking her to identify “do-overs” during her stint as Secretary of State. She then proceeded to double down. “I mean, you know, you make these choices based on imperfect information,” she contended. “And you make them to, as we say, the best of your ability. But that doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be unforeseen consequences, unpredictable twists and turns.”

One is left to wonder what “imperfect information” Clinton was vaguely referring to in her response. The alleged “imperfect information” that led Clinton and company to lie for weeks about the nature of the attack? The “fog of war,” as Clinton previously described it? Of course, “imperfect information” had nothing to do with the Obama administration’s deceitful portrayal of the terrorist attack to the public. Declassified documents made public two weeks ago reveal that AFRICOM commander Gen. Carter Ham told members of the House Armed Services subcommittee that he learned about the “terrorist attack” on the consulate compound only 15 minutes after it commenced. ”My first call was to [Joint Chiefs of Staff General chairman] General Dempsey, General Dempsey’s office, to say, ‘Hey, I am headed down the hall. I need to see him right away,’” Ham testified on June 26, 2013. “I told him what I knew. We immediately walked upstairs to meet with Secretary [of Defense] Panetta.” Ham further testified that Dempsey and Panetta “had the basic information as they headed across for the meeting at the White House.”

The meeting to which Ham referred was a pre-scheduled session with President Obama at 5 p.m. EST. A Defense Department timeline reveals that this meeting occurred one hour and 18 minutes after the attack began. The meeting lasted half an hour. That means that Obama knew it was a terrorist attack on September 11, 2012, before the battle that lasted approximately eight hours was less than two hours old.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/walter-williams/the-politics-of-hate-and-envy/print/

Part of the progressive agenda is to create hate and envy. One component of that agenda is to attack the large differences between a corporation’s chief executive officer’s earnings and those of its average worker. CNNMoney published salary comparisons in “Fortune 50 CEO pay vs. our salaries” (http://tinyurl.com/c2b24rv). Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf’s annual salary is $2.8 million. CNN shows that it takes 66 Wells Fargo employees, whose average salary is $42,400, to match Stumpf’s salary. It takes 57 Wal-Mart employees, who earn $22,100 on average, to match CEO Michael Duke’s $1.3 million. At General Electric, 44 employees earning $75,300 a year match CEO Jeff Immelt’s $3.3 million salary. For people with little understanding, such differences seem patently unfair. Before touching on the fairness issue, let’s look at some high salaries that progressives ignore.

Forbes lists the “Highest-Paid Football Players 2013″ (http://tinyurl.com/kw4dv3d). Drew Brees, quarterback for the Saints, earned $40 million. If the average Saints organization employee earned $45,000, it would take almost 900 of them to match Brees’ salary. Patriots quarterback Tom Brady earned $31.3 million, and Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant earns $23.5 million for playing basketball. It would take the earnings of more than 1,200 workers making $45,000 a year to match the earnings of Brady and Bryant.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/amnesty-ends-the-american-dream/print/ Immigration is becoming unpopular everywhere else. In the UK, immigration has become so toxic that it may lead to a split from the European Union. In Australia, it helped elect a conservative government willing to tackle its migrant boat problem. Meanwhile in the United States, Republicans keep flirting with a Super-Amnesty that would be […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2014/01/are_we_still_a_good_country.html

It is important to remember some guiding principles as we fight back against Barack Obama’s crude and coarse behavior against our country. Though the fight will be long and arduous, what Henry Gregor Felsen wrote in his 1961 book entitled Letters to a Teen-Age Son still applies.

The human need for and the essentials of goodness, decency and righteousness are as modern as they are ancient, and no future time will ever turn them into museum pieces.

Though Obama continues to malign, denigrate, and intimidate those who disagree with him, America is beginning to understand that Obama’s moral compass is predicated on mean-spiritedness. The attack on Dinesh D’Souza is the latest in Obama’s “ongoing persecution of Republicans and conservatives” and “mirrors the attacks by the fascists of Europe on their opponents in the 1930s.” As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, “[w]hat does your right of freedom of speech mean if saying something that irritates the Obama administration” results in a double standard of treatment?

As Obama continues to pander to the lowest common denominator and lie about his opposition’s alleged war on women, America needs to remind him that “to miss knowing the difference between sex and the awareness of mating is to miss one of life’s most perfect, most meaningful moments.” The casual sex as depicted in ObamaCare advertisements and his flippancy about young people will never compete with the profound knowledge that there comes “a time when freedom, pleasure, opportunity, lack of responsibility, self-centeredness, and self-indulgence are not, somehow, enough” to fill a life.

http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2014/01/censorship-by-example.html

Dinesh D’Souza, the prominent conservative writer, has been arrested and indicted on trumped-up Federal Election Law charges.Why?

Just as Leona Helmsley was charged and tried for tax evasion, and Wall Street maverick Michael Milken was charged and indicted for “racketeering,” political enemies can be quashed by fiat law. They were back-stabbed by the envious and the disgruntled. D’Souza has been targeted for punishment for having criticized the Obama administration in the least flattering terms. Just as opponents of Hitler’s régime were crushed, not principally by Nazi-legislated laws, but by laws passed during the Weimar Republic, President Barack Obama is resorting to laws passed long before anyone had ever heard of him. The one this time is the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, which amended the 1971Federal Campaign Act.

It’s all perfectly “legal,” you see. Obama has simply put on the brass-weighted gloves that Congress had already prepared for him.

D’Souza was often in the limelight, having written controversial books critical of Obama’s policies, and having made one relatively successful political film (“2016: Obama’s America”) and will debut another next July

To qualify for having a brass glove knock one’s jaw to the back of one’s cranium, to invite the wrath of such Nazi or Stalinist persecution, one must be a “name,” a celebrity, in the public eye, a non-submissive personality who eschews political correctness and has never exhibited signs of unreserved esteem for an establishment more and more governed by the fiat laws that emanate daily from Washington D.C. In this instance, D’Souza allegedly flouted federal campaign finance laws. He contributed to the war chest of a local candidate whom he happened to have known during her campaign.

Hate-Filled Protest in France Attracts Thousands; Crowd Chants ‘Jew, France Is Not for You!’ (VIDEO) A hate-filled protest took place on the streets of Paris on Sunday, with thousands of marchers chanting, “Jew, France is not for you,” the French JSS News reported. JSS News said police counted 17,000 protesters (the protest groups claimed they […]

THANKS TO JANET LEVY FOR THIS GLOOMY NEWS…..RSK

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has issued its report cardhttp://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/ on the nation’s infrastructure. The overall rate, covering items such as dams, drinking water, waste systems, levees, transportation, bridges, waterways, ports, rail, roads, mass transit, parks, schools, and energy was a lowly D+.

The U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee noted that “America’s infrastructure has fallen in rank from 6th in the world to 25th in just the past 5 years…aging transportation infrastructure is expected to increase the cost of business in America by an estimated $430 billion in the next decade.”

32% of American roads are in poor or mediocre condition, and 25% of bridges are rated as structurally deficient. The American Automobile Association (AAA) notes that many of the 30,000 deaths that occur on U.S. highways are “attributable to the direct result of inadequate lighting, poor signage or outdated road design that might have been prevented by fixing unsafe roads.

One aspect of America’s declining infrastructure, inadequate roads, was examined by National Review. “As congestion has grown worse, so has its estimated cost each year…in 2011, the total estimated cost of congestion in the U.S. topped $120 billion. Think of that as an annual tax on Americans that could be eliminated with better road management…Congestion slows business activity as well, which raises costs and reduces sales and output. A 2009 study by Kent Hymel showed that these costs add up: using data on congestion, existing road infrastructure, and employment, he estimated that a 50 percent decrease in congestion in the United States’ ten most congested cities could boost long-run employment growth in those cities by 10 to 30 percent, and economic growth along with it.”

International Holocaust Memorial Day’s Fatal Flaw On the surface, it is very moving to see half of the members of Knesset at Auschwitz marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day. But in a larger sense, it is not at all clear why this is necessary. The Jewish people have Yom HaShoah V’Hagevura, our own national day of […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4145/egypt-elections-democracy

From reading the American press, you would believe that if Middle Eastern Muslims were allowed to govern themselves by having free elections, this would be the route to democracy. This is a fallacy that we have been following now as a matter of American foreign policy for many administrations and many years. You cannot tell me that, after the same Egyptians voted two-to-one to have an intense Sharia constitution, eight months later they suddenly did not want Sharia any more. What they decided was that they did not want Morsi any more.

If here is ever to be anything approximating democratic transformation in Egypt the only way it is going it happen is if Egypt has a respected institution, such as the military, that governs the country, with the help of whatever technocratic officials it needs to run the country day-to-day, and where the forces of secular democracy at least have a chance to compete — which means growing these institutions to cultivate a respect for minority rights and individual liberty.

The good news is that the Egyptians will not be able to keep their Sharia constitution, at least not the way the Muslim Brotherhood designed it. But the way it was covered in the United States, this was not reflected as good news.

What is going on in Egypt now, while I wouldn’t go up in a balloon over it, is much more of a ray of hope than anything that we have had previously in what has been called the Arab Spring — a misnomer, if ever there was one. We actually knew quite a bit about how Egyptians wanted to be governed before Mubarak fell thanks to polling that was done there – in fact, done not only in Egypt but across the Middle East, from Egypt all the way to Indonesia.

Pakistan and the Arab-Muslim Culture of Denial by Salim Mansur http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4147/pakistan-culture-of-denial Since 9/11, Islamist culture is seen to be synonymous with violence, misogyny and a pathological hatred for others; and, ironically, it has made Muslims themselves its most numerous victims. “Impure,” or non-authentic Muslims, meant those whose Islam had been weakened by un-Islamic or non-Islamic […]