RUTHFULLY YOURS

Revelations about North Korea’s systematic oppression, abuse and terror assault decency. Has anyone considered what the American role was in leaving the brutal Kim dynasty in charge of the hapless North? Please read this column from 2008.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/exclusive-the-legacy-of-an-unfinished-war

Ruth King: The Legacy of an Unfinished War

When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote to the survivors of fallen soldiers in Word War II, these were his words:

“He stands in the unbroken line of patriots who have dared to die so that freedom might live, and grow and increase its blessings. Freedom lives and through it he lives in a way that humbles the undertakings of most men.”

This past Memorial Day, in a leafy town in Connecticut, where soldiers, sailors, veterans and their families and many townspeople gathered for a tribute to the town’s fallen heroes, I was struck by the number of octogenarians who were veterans of the largely forgotten and unfinished Korean War which cost so many lives and accomplished so little in bringing freedom and its blessings.

Korea, a unified and independent nation since the seventh century, was occupied and annexed by Imperial Japan in 1910 after a succession of wars with China (1894-95) and Russia (1904-05). In the aftermath of World War ll, Korea was freed from the Japanese who surrendered in Seoul in 1945. However, acceding to Stalin’s demands for “buffer zones” in Asia, the nation was divided by the 38th parallel into the People’s Republic of (North)Korea and the Republic of (South)Korea, to be administered by the Russians and the Americans respectively.

There were continuous simmering conflicts between both Koreas caused by South Korea’s resistance to the enforced Communism of the northern regime run by then 33-year-old Kim Il Sung (the father of North Korea’s present dictator) whose patrons were Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung. In fact, thousands of North Korean troops fought on Mao’s side in the Chinese Civil War. When those battle hardened troops returned to North Korea, Kim Il Sung “volunteered” them along the 38th parallel, and escalated provocations from border skirmishes to combat and ultimate invasion of the Republic of South Korea on June 25, 1950.

Secretary of State Dean Acheson persuaded President Truman to defend South Korea, reversing earlier reluctance to enter into another conflict so soon after World War II. The United States prepared to deploy the Seventh Fleet of the U.S. Navy in the Taiwan Strait and send massive air and naval power to the area. Ground troops were committed on June 30th, despite the reluctance of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were concerned about stretching American defenses. The draft, still in place, increased the numbers of active duty troops to roughly 700,000 Army and 90,000 battle-ready Marines.

Only two days after the invasion, on June 27th, at the urging of the United States, the UN Security Council voted in favor of armed resistance to North Korea. UN support for the defense of South Korea enabled Truman and Acheson to gain public support for U.S. intervention. Although the United States commenced the war under the auspices of the United Nations with contingents of troops from Turkey, England Canada and Australia it was really America’s war.

In July 1950, World War II hero General Douglas MacArthur was given command of U.S. troops in Korea. Despite his initial assessment of an easy victory, the North Korean Army delivered a series of humiliating losses and retreats to the United States Army and drove south to the nation’s capital Seoul.

Soros and Saudi Arabia Finance a Non-Profit War in Israel Posted By Daniel Greenfield

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/soros-and-saudi-arabia-finance-a-non-profit-war-in-israel-2/

[Edwin Black will be speaking about his new book, Financing the Flames, to the Wednesday Morning Club in Beverly Hills on March 11, 2014. For more info, click here.]

Many books have been written about the financing of war, but Edwin Black’s latest book is about the financing of peace. That would seem like a positive theme, except that Black reveals that the financing of peace is really the financing of war.

Edwin Black has a history of writing investigative reports about the financing of conflict and Financing the Flames: How Tax-Exempt and Public Money Fuel a Culture of Confrontation and Terror in Israel is firmly in that tradition. Black picks up where he left off with his investigation of the Ford Foundation’s bigoted Anti-Israel shenanigans at Durban to look at the left’s financing of the conflict in Israel.

Israel is a small country and most Israeli Jews and Arabs already know that the conflict is stirred up by interested parties. They know that rocks don’t just get thrown randomly at soldiers and confrontations between Jewish and Arab villages are often staged by interested parties who don’t even live there.

The conflict was always externally encouraged, whether it was the British and the Nazis playing spy games or Iran and the Soviet Union funneling money and instructions to terrorists, but the perpetuation of the conflict has interwoven a mesh of conflict profiteers into the country, from hordes of stringers and journalists looking for a conflict photo or terror interview to sell, and over to the networks of non-profit organizations stirring up violence on an even larger scale and for even uglier motives.

URL to article: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/j-christian-adams/in-defense-of-the-elastic-clause-of-the-constitution/

Reprinted from PJ Media.

If college students listened to Mark Levin or Rush Limbaugh, they would receive a better American history education than they are getting from their professors. I recently spoke at Emory University, where one student defended all of President Obama’s unconstitutional actions by invoking the Elastic Clause of the Constitution.

Citing the Elastic Clause could indeed justify a wide range of administration actions, except for one problem – it doesn’t exist.

But you couldn’t tell that to the student at Emory University who came to my speech last week on Obama’s abuses of power. He persisted in defending the actions through the Elastic Clause, as if the be-all, end-all provision was common knowledge.

From the sound of it, the Elastic Clause must be common knowledge in faculty lounges.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

60 years ago an uprising in the Ukraine would have been met with machine guns fired from behind the armor of Communist ideology. With the fall of the USSR, Russia didn’t have much of an ideology to deploy against Ukrainian nationalism. It accused the protesters of being fascists, an accusation with some truth to it, but not one that anyone will take seriously coming from another fascist regime.

Putin tried to replace Communism’s international agents of influence by cobbling together a crude
network of leftist anti-imperialists, paleo-libertarians and assorted conspiracy theorists and exploited it with classic tradecraft. Assange and Snowden showed how damaging this could be to the United States, but Assange, Snowden, Greenwald and all the rest of the gang couldn’t keep the Ukraine in Putin’s hands.

The anti-government sentiments projected by RT can bring in useful idiots, Assange and Snowden are evidence of that, but they lack Communism’s power to influence millions through the medium of a comprehensive ideology whose followers were willing to lie and die for it in unending numbers.

If Russia had set out to suppress an uprising 60 years ago, its talking points would have been on the lips and printing presses of innumerable writers and papers that would have immediately constructed rationalizations and denounced the protesters. Americans would have been told that we don’t understand what is going on there, that the protesters aren’t saints and that angering the USSR would destabilize the global situation and lead to war.

A Good Start on Tax Reform
By The Editors
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372097/print

It is a testament to the scale and absurdity of the U.S. tax code that it takes a 979-page bill to reform and simplify it. That’s how much paper Representative Dave Camp’s proposal, from the House Ways and Means Committee, uses to reduce marginal rates for businesses and individuals, limit tax deductions and exclusions, and simplify the system overall. And a great deal of the proposal is good.

It’s hard to object, for instance, to the 89 sections of the bill devoted just to removing “deadwood” (provisions that no longer affect taxes paid) from the tax code. We can’t count the number of distortionary or costly active provisions in the individual and corporate income-tax codes that Camp’s bill eliminates. Of course, each of these changes will attract opposition from somewhere, but such is the price of tax reform.

What are the benefits? It would cut the top corporate tax rate, one of the highest in the world, to 25 percent, while the top individual-income rate would fall to 35 percent. It would reduce the complexity of the code significantly — allowing 95 percent of Americans to take just the standard deduction — while maintaining similar levels of revenue and encouraging business investment. In other words, we can reliably expect to move in the right direction along the Laffer curve. (Simplifying the tax code also reduces the incentives and opportunities for mischief by tax collectors, and Camp’s bill includes further measures to insulate taxpayers from political abuse by the IRS.)

Across income levels, Camp’s proposal is essentially neutral: Incentives are improved without giving Democrats any chance to wail about tax cuts for the rich. Of course, some will pay more and some will pay less. The bill’s redistribution is largely from single Americans to families, and from firms that have won special advantages in the tax code to those that have typically seen high tax bills. Both of these are, besides any considerations of fairness, good economic policy.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372077/print
The history of Obama’s foreign-policy posturing bodes ill for the future of Ukraine.

Don’t step over the line and re-militarize the Rhineland. Absorbing Austria would cross a red line. Breaking up Czechoslovakia is unacceptable. Get out of Poland by the announced deadline. The rest was history.

Don’t dare blow up another American military barracks overseas. Don’t even consider another attack on the World Trade Center. Don’t even try blowing up one more American embassy in East Africa. Don’t ever put a hole in a U.S. warship again. The rest was history.

President Obama issued yet another one of those sorts of warnings to stop the violence to Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych just before protesters drove Yanukovych out of office. “There will be consequences if people step over the line,” Obama threatened.

Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser, amplified that veiled warning. He called the Ukrainian government’s repression “completely outrageous” — as opposed to just outrageous or completely, completely outrageous.

Secretary of State John Kerry joined the chorus of condemnation by hinting at economic sanctions if Yanukovych didn’t stop his violent crackdown on protesters.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372094/print
President Obama rejects risk out of arrogance.

‘The price of greatness,” Winston Churchill once said, “is responsibility.”

There can no longer be any doubt that President Obama is unwilling to pay that tariff.

In a world defined by uncertainty and ever-stronger enemies, the president’s administration announced this week that American armed forces would be cut to historically low levels. But the sad farce doesn’t end there.

Last Thursday, we also learned that the president’s new budget won’t include a minor but useful reform he’d proposed last year to trim entitlement spending. The rejection of these changes — ones that every citizen capable of basic arithmetic should know are necessary to save America’s pension program — is telling.

After ten years of war, that is, the military gets gutted while civilian entitlements remain sacred.

This is a White House in which short-term ideological calculations always rule the roost.

Less than a month ago, the president spoke of “working together” with Congress — now he is calling for an end to the era of austerity. (Did it ever begin?) The president’s budget next year proposes increased spending on favorite (wasteful) programs. This is playing to the favorite liberal myth that austerity doesn’t work, that only continued binging can end the hangover. The president knows that the U.S.’s fiscal position remains tenuous, and knows that ballooning deficits will make recoveries much harder in the future.

http://americanthinker.com/assets/3rd_party/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/02/waking_up_to_defense_cuts.html

If you are surprised by this week’s announcement of major manpower cuts to the U.S. Army, you haven’t been paying attention. For a long time. There are two components to understanding America’s defense spending choices — the political and the budgetary; they are not the same. The Administration has made the political case clear.

Beginning in 2011, President Obama pronounced himself committed to “ending the wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan “responsibly.”
The president committed to a turn inward, beginning with a 2011 statement that “the nation we need to build is our own,” coupled with the promise to cut troops deployed abroad in half.
The refrain “no boots on the ground,” is the mantra of many administration officials, resurrected again last weekend by Susan Rice regarding limits to U.S. support of rebels in Syria — although no one appears to have suggested so much as a huarache.
Secretary Kerry’s visit to Indonesia prompted him to declare global “climate change” as big a threat in Asia as “terrorism, poverty and WMDs.” He skipped China’s increasingly bold assertions of hegemony in Asian waters and increasingly large defense budget (still miniscule compared to ours, but one heads one way, the other the other way).

It really doesn’t matter that none of those things are true, meaningful, or helpful in terms of American national security policy. The president’s political message has been consistent and expedient — except for the large, not-very-truthful explanation of the war in Libya and its aftermath — and resonates with an American public that is “war wary” (if not “war weary”), creepingly (if not yet creepily) isolationist, and happy with a presidential plan to “save money” after years of rise in the national debt.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/of-armies-and-libraries-the-end-of-western-civilization?f=puball

Two items of news have flashed across my eyes in the last few days that appall me. One is that the United States plans to reduce its armed forces, the men and women who protect all of us from enemies all around the globe, to pre-World War II levels. The second is that New York City was planning to transform the big Public Library on Fifth Avenue-the one with the lions in front-into a lending library and somewhat glorified internet café-the seven stories of ancient and modern books, one of the greatest research collections in the world-to be sent into cold storage in far-off New Jersey.

We all should know from history that a principal reason why the United States did not react to the threats increasingly manifest to its security and that of its closest allies during the 1930s-and why it took so long to get into action properly after Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941-was that the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines were woefully undermanned and lacking in adequate arms. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan took advantage of American inability to defend itself. Today, as the Putin threaten another Crimean War, the Middle East (for all its vaunted Arab Spring) is more unsteady and volatile than ever, North Korea and Iran posture and pose real dangers as nuclear powers, Syria commits atrocities beyond imagining and falls into the hands of Al-Qaida–and thus all around the strategic map where there is a need for flexibility rather than total reliance on huge technological systems and miniature unmanned drone-like weapons. We have known that for a long time that the United Nations has become worse than a farcical house of racist palaver: it is a source of potential-and often enough, very real-provocations to anti-American, anti-Western and anti-Israeli actions. The European Union, Nato and other international alliances are stymied by their own petty squabbles and mental blocks. Without a strong, alert and multi-layered United States military, what hope is there in the world?

And so to the New York Public Library, though this is a story that seems t6o have broken in 2012 and was settled in the next year, the very diea remains a possibility-and this is what frightens me. In the days of electronic-readers reductivity of books to mere information and digital technology, surely the breakdown of one major collection would be a sign of the collapse of knowledge, study and understanding as it has been built up for the past several millennia. What comes next, the closing down of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Bronx Zoo, the Botanical Gardens-in brief, the end of New York as one of, if not the, greatest city in the world…that history has ever known? This would be the triumph of Philistinism, managerial and sociological jargons and political know-nothingism, and the phantasmagoria of celebrity and narcissism that is popular culture.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/its-not-scaremongering-its-love-of-country

On Feb. 9, 50.3 percent of Swiss voters passed a referendum to cap immigration from the EU. In the course of a (very hostile) Spiegel Online interview with Christoph Blocher, leader of the Swiss People’s Party, the impetus becomes clear. The EU’s so-called freedom of movement — read: untrammeled immigration into decreasingly sovereign states — has approached a crisis for Swiss nationhood.

“Some 23.8 percent of Switzerland’s population is comprised of foreigners, and almost 15 percent are first-generation naturalized Swiss citizens,” Blocher said. “No similar European state has anything like that.”

Once the shocking fact that nearly one in four people in Switzerland are foreigners sinks in, it seems logicial to conclude, as Galliawatch does, that many if not most non-native voters probably opposed the immigration cap. That means that the outcome among native Swiss was likely a more resounding majority than 50.3 percent indicates.

For now, then, the Swiss have affirmed they are still a nation, a culture — rather an amazing feat given these demographics. Spiegel puts it down to “scaremongering.”

SPIEGEL: In your campaign for the referendum, SWP drafted horror scenarios of an overflowing Switzerland, a country that has become a cement jungle. The truth is that your country is doing better than ever before. Why the scaremongering?

Blocher: It’s not scaremongering. If things continue, we will surpass the 10-million mark in 2033. By 2061, we will have 16 million inhabitants, more than half of whom will be foreigners.

Bravo, Blocher, for at least halting the slide.