RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2014/03/06/what-game-of-chess/?print=1

Last week, as the Obama administration scurried to remove the large quantities of egg that Vladimir Putin had deposited on its collective countenance, Michigan Congressman Mike Rogers commented [1] that Putin was playing chess while Obama was “playing marbles.”

I think that was unfair. Marbles are inherently attractive, and their deployment is an innocent pastime that has beguiled the innocent hours of many a boyhood. What’s more, playing marbles takes skill. What is happening in Ukraine is anything but innocent, and the astonishing incompetence on display in Barack Obama’s hesitant but sullen maunderings has been the opposite of skillful.

Vladimir Putin is playing a dangerous game of chess, all right, but the only thing Obama can be said to be playing is the fool.

This morning, it was revealed that Crimea has just voted to “join” Russia. “Crimea’s parliament voted to join Russia,” Reuters reported [2], “and its Moscow-backed government set a referendum within 10 days on the the decision.” What do you suppose that means?

http://pjmedia.com/blog/rep-price-obamacare-causing-economic-destruction/

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. – Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) warned Thursday about the effects of Obamacare on jobs, saying it creates perverse incentives for businesses by compelling them to seek ways to avoid the health care law’s burdens.

“You know who the 29ers and the 49ers are?” Price asked the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). “29ers are folks who have seen their hours reduced from 40 hours a week to 29 hours a week so that their employer can get out from under the incredible burden of Obamacare. The 49ers are those employers who have decreased the number of employees to under 50 so that they’re not exposed to the burdens of Obamacare.”

He said a car dealership in his district with 168 full-time employees has gone down to two full-time employees, while the remaining 166 workers have moved to part-time employment.

“That’s economic destruction. This law is not just harming people’s healthcare lives, it’s harming their economic lives,” Price said.

Price said it was “astounding” to hear Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s claim last week that all the “horror stories” being told about the effects of Obamacare are untrue.

“It’s actually astounding that the leader of the U.S. Senate could make such a statement and mislead and deceive the American people in that way,” he said.

President Obama’s “If not now, when?!”
Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative”
“Israel Hayom”, March 7, 2014, http://bit.ly/1f5YvJm

President Obama assumes that regional and global circumstances are now conducive for a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. According to Obama, such a peace accord would require Israel (once again) to undertake tangible, critical, territorial concessions, in return for (once again) intangible Palestinian commitments. “If not now, when!?” he asked Prime Minister Netanyahu, in a March 2, 2014 interview

However, the editorial headline of the March 3, 2014 Washington Post, a solid supporter of President Obama, stated: “President Obama’s foreign policy is based on fantasy.” According to the Washington Post, “For five years, President Obama has led a foreign policy based more on how he thinks the world should operate than on reality. It was [supposedly] a world in which ‘the tide of war is receding….’ Secretary John Kerry displayed this mindset, [saying that] Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a 19th century act in the 21st century…. Unfortunately, Russian President, Putin, has not received the memo on the 21st century behavior. Neither has China’s president Xi Jinping, who is engaged in gunboat diplomacy against Japan and weaker nations of Southeast Asia…. Assad is waging a very 20th century war against his own people….”

Thus, President Obama considers the non-Palestinian-related Arab Tsunami a transition towards peace and democracy, in spite of the proliferating conflicts throughout the globe. Therefore, he pressures Israel to retreat and concede, in defiance of the receding tide of peace and democracy in the boiling globe and the tectonic Middle East. Contrary to the early assessments of the “Arab Springers,” the real Middle East is increasingly stormy, ruthless, oppressive, Islamist, anti-American, intolerant, fragmented, unstable, unreliably treacherous and violently unpredictable. Moreover, Obama bullies Israel to conclude a peace agreement in a region which has never experienced comprehensive intra-Muslim/Arab peace; a region that has always displayed intra-Muslim agreements signed on ice, rather than carved in stone; a region which features prominently in the clash of civilizations between Western democracies and rogue Islamic regimes.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/why-i-write/?print=1

Some years back I was interviewed by Montreal’s French language daily La Presse concerning the nature and purpose of my writing and teaching. The interviewer, unlike the majority of his colleagues, had acquired a pretty decent familiarity with his subject, a rarity in today’s journalistic profession. I was surprised to learn that he had read some of my translated work, in particular a long essay in which I compared the state of Western civilization to the sinking of the Titanic. Why, he wanted to know, did I continue teaching and persist in writing articles, essays and books if I felt that the future was hopeless and there was little point in the whole enterprise.

Well, I replied, there was the little matter of earning a living. But apart from that desideratum, pedagogy and writing were by no means anomalous or contradictory, since even though I knew the vessel was foundering and could not be saved or hauled back to port for retrofitting, I was intent on helping to keep it afloat for as long as possible. Teaching and writing, I said, were essentially pumping, or bailing. I felt it worthwhile to work to delay the inevitable; better to go down later than sooner.

Things have changed. I quit teaching some time ago, convinced of the uselessness of the profession in the brain-cramped intellectual environment of a nearly defunct civilization. Such plenary impoverishment is daunting and probably irreversible. The canard of “green energy,” the massive “climate change” scam that has co-opted vast segments of the Western public, the relentless advance of blasphemy laws putting a chill on freedom of speech and debate, courts declaring that truth is no defense in cases where offense is given, the campaign against the unborn (abortion on demand) and, in some countries, the elderly (selective euthanasia), the politicized university as a locus of indoctrination rather than learning, the sentimental empowerment of the transgendered and the two-spirited who must be accorded every social benefit as if they represented the quintessence of human progress, the successful feminist war against common manhood, the setting in place of redistributive economics as a form of legalized theft, open-door immigration policies for illegal aliens or members of primitive, antithetical cultures—all these developments are signs of rampant and likely terminal intellectual and social decay.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/is-muslim-brotherhood-in-america?f=puball The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) was founded in Egypt in 1928 and is considered a terrorist organization by many countries, including Islamic countries. Its stated goal  is to instill the Qur’an as the sole religion and political body in the life of every individual and country worldwide.   According to Richard Clarke, former Chief counterterrorism advisor […]

http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/735/a-stone-for-his-slingshot/

Thanks Joan Swirsky!!!

“But these are only words I speak—words to wake up Jews if there are any asleep. He will not lose. No cause that had behind it the sweet and powerful dream of freedom—has ever lost. This dream does not stand on the battlefields alone. It stands in us. There are twenty-eight million Arabs. There are British wealth and British officers—and British military equipment. There are eight hundred thousand Jews—besieged and encircled by this Goliath tonight.A David stands against Goliath. I ask you Jews—buy him a stone for his slingshot.” Ben Hecht….1948

Tucked amid the Ben Hecht Papers at the Newberry Library in Chicago is an undated typescript of 21 pages, with a penciled heading: “Speech at dinner at Slapsy Maxie’s, L.A., financed by Mickey Cohen.” Hecht was, of course, a fabled writer for stage and screen, Mickey Cohen was the notorious Los Angeles gangland boss (recently portrayed by Sean Penn in the movie Gangster Squad), and the speech, which has never before been published, is one of the most riveting and remarkable Jewish fundraising speeches ever delivered. What gives?

The outrageously prolific Hecht—writer of reportage, novels and short stories, Broadway theater and Hollywood movies, and eventually Jewish propaganda—was always attracted to outlaws. The first of his six or seven dozen produced (though not always credited) screenplays was Underworld, a 1927 silent film directed by the Austrian-Jewish immigrant Josef von Sternberg. In his freewheeling autobiography, A Child of the Century, Hecht wrote:

I made up a movie about a Chicago gunman and his moll called Feathers McCoy. As a newspaperman I had learned that nice people—the audience—love criminals . . . It was the first gangster movie to bedazzle the movie fans and there were no lies in it—except for a half-dozen sentimental touches introduced by its director.

Hecht won an Academy Award for Underworld, at the very first awards in 1929. (He was nominated five more times but never won another.) In 1932, he wrote Scarface for Howard Hawks, proudly claiming that “two Capone henchmen” showed up after midnight demanding assurance (which he disingenuously provided) that Scarface was not about “the great gangster.”

http://washingtonexaminer.com/the-false-urgency-of-the-israeli-palestinian-peace-process/article/2545149# Jed Babbin served as a deputy undersecretary of defense in the George H.W. Bush administration and is a senior fellow of the London Center for Policy Research. Almost lost in the avalanche of news about Russia‘s aggression in the Ukraine is that from President Obama‘s meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday. […]

Countless circumstances could trigger abrogation of a treaty with Israel http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/6/beres-why-there-can-be-no-lasting-palestinian-demi/print/ With increasing desperation, Secretary of State John F. Kerry hopes to secure success for a long-elusive Middle East peace process. During all of his recent negotiations, the secretary has reiterated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unconditional demand that any Palestinian state be “demilitarized.” While […]

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Barach Obama came to the Presidency with a radical domestic agenda and with little interest, or understanding, of global political matters. While he did assume office at a time of financial crisis, it is important to understand that much of the corrective work had been done by the time he took the oath of office. The TED spread, indicating banks’ ability to lend had narrowed dramatically from where it had been in the fall. The yield on high yield bonds began coming down in November. While we were still in recession, the bottom was only four months away. The patient was still sick, but the crisis was over.

He was elected, he claimed, to institute a liberal program. He had no interest in negotiating with those he had defeated. “I won,” was the way he put it. In the meantime, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel noted that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” An $840 billion stimulus bill was rammed through Congress during the honeymoon period. The Affordable Care Act was passed unilaterally a year later, while Democrats still controlled both chambers. Not one Republican voted for the bill, something that had never before happened with such a consequential piece of legislation. The President didn’t care; he was on a roll.

In terms of his liberal domestic agenda, Mr. Obama never considered what their consequences might mean in the global world. For example, in the energy sector where a combination of horizontal drilling and fracking technologies were changing the role of America in the production of fossil fuels, he chose to go with “green” energy, solar and wind companies. His EPA, catering to deep-pocketed environmentalists, inflicted burdensome regulations, delaying construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline for four years and preventing any drilling on federal lands. We have become the world’s largest producer of natural gas, but that is in spite of Mr. Obama’s policies, not because of them. Had Mr. Obama worked with the industry, instead of against it, we would today have surpassed Russia as the world’s largest exporter of natural gas, and events in Ukraine and Europe might well have unfolded in a way far more pleasant for the West, democracy and the people of Ukraine.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-lost-spring-a-new-book-on-us-mideast-policy?f=puball

This month, my book The Lost Spring: U.S. Policy in the Middle East and Catastrophes to Avoid will be in libraries across America and online. This new book, published by Palgrave-McMillan in New York, is an analysis of the evolution of the Arab Spring and its future. It also addresses other democratic revolutions, upheavals and civil wars in the Middle East, including events in Iran, Turkey, Sudan, and beyond.

In Future Jihad (2005), a book that was selected for the U.S. House of Representatives Summer Readings 2006, I projected the rise of the global Jihadist movement, including its surge in the West. My previously most recent book published in English, The Coming Revolution: Struggle for Freedom in the Middle East (2010), predicted the Arab Spring, its successive waves, and the civil wars it would cause. I projected three cycles before they even happened: the rise of civil societies, the takeover by Islamists, and the comeback of the seculars to push back against the Islamists. And this is the very pattern we witnessed in both Egypt and Tunisia. My book in French, Du Printemps Arabe a l’Automne Islamiste (From the Arab Spring to the Islamist Fall), which was published in November 2013 in Paris and launched at the European Parliament in Brussels, described the global race between Islamists and seculars in the region.

My new book of 2014 is taking analysis and projections even further. It explains why the West and the United States failed to predict the Arab Spring and why they failed to handle it effectively. The book also addresses the direction these upheavals are headed and how to correct U.S. policy before irreparable catastrophe strikes the region. From bloody and expanding civil wars in Syria, Iraq and Libya to the fight against terror in Egypt, Lebanon and Tunisia; from genocide in Sudan, Darfur and beyond to the persecution of Christian and ethnic minorities and the rise of al Qaeda and Hezbollah; so much in the region appears hopeless, but one must also recognize the emergence of reformers, women, minorities and civil societies.