RUTHFULLY YOURS

The new Republican Congress should move full speed ahead to repeal and replace Obamacare. It would be unwise to wait for the Supreme Court to perform this service for the American people.

With GOP command of Capitol Hill starting tomorrow, Republicans should use their hard-won mandate to obliterate Obama’s medical Godzilla. A record 58 percent of registered voters want to junk Obamacare, according to a December 10 Fox News survey. As well they should. Among other recently revealed shortcomings — according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Employer Health Benefits, 2014 Annual Survey (“Employee Cost Sharing” chapter) — the average deductible for individual plans has climbed from $826 in 2009 to $1,217 in 2014. This is an average annual increase of approximately 8.1 percent on Obama’s watch. Also, a Commonwealth Fund survey discovered that 40 percent of working-age adults have skipped medical treatments because they cost too much.

This is a very comprehensive article….Nonetheless, among my favorite compositions are all the Wagner Overtures…and especially Rienzi which still gives me goosebumps….Ars Vincit Omnia?…rsk
Two centuries after the great composer’s birth, his anti-Semitism remains a bitterly contested issue. Perhaps that’s because neither his defenders nor his detractors have come to grips with its, or his, true nature.

In 2013, as the classical-music world lurched from crisis to crisis, with orchestras on strike and opera companies vanishing into thin air, the bicentennial of the birth of the towering German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) offered a brilliant exception to the prevailing gloom. Productions of his operas filled houses from Seattle to Buenos Aires, and the great companies of Europe and the United States vied to present ever grander stagings of the colossal 15-hour cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. At a time when so many preeminent musical institutions are collapsing into bankruptcy or labor disputes, Wagner is one institution that seems to endure.

Yet Wagner’s powerfully continuing appeal in terms of dollars spent and seats filled is only a part, and the less important part, of his enduring significance. Wagner has always been remarkable not only for the breadth but for the depth of his impact, a depth that can be measured both by the intensity of the devotion that his works inspire and by the fact that his devotees have included many of the intellectual and political elite of Western society. When his fame was at its zenith in the latter part of the 19th century, his most fervent admirers were as varied as the young Friedrich Nietzsche, the poet Charles Baudelaire, and King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who helped to bankroll Wagner’s great festival in the northern Bavarian town of Bayreuth.

The Iranian clerical regime has repeatedly vowed to erase Israel from the map, but American publisher HarperCollins actually did it.
The company released an atlas of the Middle East for English-speaking students in the Persian Gulf region, and Israel isn’t on it. The West Bank and Gaza are on it, which is entirely appropriate since they exist and are not part of Israel, but Israel itself is just…absent.

The Tablet newspaper in Britain originally reported the story, and HarperCollins has since recalled the atlases and promises they will be pulped. Executives at the company headquarters are embarrassed and say they sincerely apologize.

Lower level employees, however, thought they did the right thing.

Collins Bartholomew told The Tablet that putting Israel on the map would have been “unacceptable” in the Middle East and that “local preferences” had to be respected.

You have to ask what’s more nauseating? Al Sharpton’s threats to cry “racism” at corporations who don’t ante up or the corporations themselves who meekly acquiesce to the Reverend’s bullying tactics?

Sharpton has a lot of pull with New York state and local government officials and he has traded that influence for large sums of cash from companies who seek to avoid being labeled “racist.”

The mafia couldn’t run a shakedown operation this efficiently.

New York Post:

Want to influence a casino bid? Polish your corporate image? Not be labeled a racist?

Then you need to pay Al Sharpton.

For more than a decade, corporations have shelled out thousands of dollars in donations and consulting fees to Sharpton’s National Action Network. What they get in return is the reverend’s supposed sway in the black community or, more often, his silence.

Sony Pictures co-chair Amy Pascal met with the activist preacher after leaked e-mails showed her making racially charged comments about President Obama. Pascal was under siege after a suspected North Korean cyber attack pressured the studio to cancel its release of “The Interview,” which depicts the assassination of dictator Kim Jong-un.

Pascal and her team were said to be “shaking in their boots” and “afraid of the Rev,” The Post reported.

No payments to NAN have been announced, but Sharpton and Pascal agreed to form a “working group” to focus on racial bias in Hollywood.

On Tuesday the Palestinians tried to get the UN Security Council to adopt a draft resolution to shrink Israel down to indefensible borders.

They failed to get the nine votes from the 15-member council that they needed. Even if they had, the U.S. had promised to veto the resolution. But the Palestinians would have succeeded in painting Israel as a country almost friendless, hanging by the thread of U.S. support.

The draft resolution demanded that Israel and the Palestinians wrap up all their disputes and reach an agreement within one year; that a Palestinian state be set up along Israel’s 1967 borders; and that Israel withdraw all forces from the West Bank by the end of 2017.

In other words, this would be a slightly prettified version of what Israel tried in Gaza in 2005: a full unilateral withdrawal. Since then over eleven thousand rockets have been fired [2] at Israel from Gaza, and Israel and Gaza terrorist organizations have fought three wars.

Before World War II appeasement was a good word, reflecting a supposedly wise policy of understanding an enemy’s predicaments. Sober Western democracies would grant tolerable concessions to aggressive dictators in Germany, Italy, and Japan to satiate their appetites for more. With such magnanimity everyone would avoid a nightmare like another Somme or Verdun.

Appeasement is always a seductive diplomacy because in the short term a bloody crisis is at least avoided. Hopes then rise that either tensions will cool as aggressors are pacified — or at least the latter won’t start trouble until the appeasers are long out of office. Appeasement is based on the theory that if you give one or two scraps of leftovers under the table to the dog at your feet, he will wag his tail and leave, grateful for such generosity, rather than to prove be even peskier for more.

Everyone associates appeasement with the Western democracies’ concessions to Adolf Hitler over the occupation of the Rhineland, the Anschluss with Austria, and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Such appeasement — widely praised at the time — was supposed to pacify Nazi Germany to end its chronic bullying, as even Hitler would concede it was foolish repeating the mess of 1918 for possession of slices from a far-away country. It worked for a year, until in late 1939 Hitler invaded Poland to begin World War II.

There are lots more recent examples of alluring appeasement. Secretary of State Dean Acheson once assured a tired postwar America that the Truman administration’s defense obligations did not extend [1] to the Cold War powder keg on the Korean Peninsula. Relieved pundits praised such a realistic concession. Only a nut would want to bring back the B-29s and their former pilots or rev up obsolete Sherman tanks. Then a few months later North Korea invaded the South.

“In the meantime, the real message the president has delivered to the perpetrators of global terror is clear: America no longer has the will or the staying power to pursue victory. Like so much of the leftist agenda, all that matters is the narrative, and in this case Obama has simply declared combat operations in Afghanistan to be over, irrespective of events on the ground. He assures Americans that Afghanistan will never be a haven for terror again, even as Taliban terrorists who killed and wounded American troops will now be given a free pass. And if it all goes horribly wrong, Obama and his fellow travelers will feign surprise and completely avoid responsibility for the bloodbath that ensues.”

On Christmas Day at Marine Corps Base Hawaii, followed by a White House press release on Dec. 28, President Obama announced the end of the war in Afghanistan. “We’ve been in continuous war now for almost thirteen years—over 13 years,” he said, “and next week we will be ending our combat mission in Afghanistan. Obviously, because of the extraordinary service of the men and women in the American armed forces, Afghanistan has a chance to rebuild its own country. We are safer. It’s not going to be a source of terrorist attacks again,” he added.

If that message sounds familiar, it’s because virtually the same message was delivered on Dec. 14, 2011 at Fort Bragg, NC. That’s when Obama announced that “America’s war in Iraq will be over” and that “we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant” nation. That would be the same Iraq where, swiftly after Obama’s precipitous military withdrawal, Islamic militants embarked on a barbaric campaign of terror, seizing large swaths of Iraqi territory and wiping out much of the security gains achieved through the loss of thousands of American lives in that country.

Three days before Christmas, one unsuspecting holiday shopper was killed and nine others injured when a van ploughed through a crowded market in Nantes, located in western France. The attack came a day after a man, shouting “Allahu Akbar,” rammed his car into crowds in the eastern city of Dijon, injuring thirteen people; this, some twenty-four hours after an assailant stabbed and wounded three police officers in Joue-les-Tours, central France, likewise while yelling “God is the greatest” in Arabic.

A day after the Dijon attack, which the perpetrator dedicated to the children of “Palestine,” France’s Interior Minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, called on the public “to not draw hasty conclusions since…[the driver’s] motives have not been established.” Nevertheless, and despite the fact that “the investigation had barely begun,” Dijon’s public prosecutor, Marie-Christine Tarrare, made clear that the incident was “not a terrorist act at all.”

In Cuba, freedom of expression is still trampled. Tania Bruguera “was [placed] under arrest at the Acosta Police Station in the Diez de Octubre municipality in Havana” because she wished to use social media and demand “freedom of expression for Cuba’s citizens.” But “claiming that her performance [was] not an artistic work but a political provocation, Cuban authorities denied her request to hold a rally at Havana’s revolutionary square on Dec. 30, 2014.”

Bruguera has been labeled a “CIA agent” and “a mercenary” by Cuban pro-government bloggers. The planned gathering was a hopeful endeavor as a result of the announcement from the Obama administration that Cuba and the United States “would reinstate diplomatic ties that were severed half a century ago.”

Dubbed “Yo Tambien Exijo” (I Also Demand), it is a campaign that uses social media to invite Cubans to have a say in the future of their island. Each participant would have one minute to express his or her views on the future of the island of more than 11 million people.

In the spirit of sermons and soda water, Mark Durie provides a clarifying essay that opens the historical horizons on last month’s deadly Martin Place jihad siege in Australia by comparing it to a strikingly similar jihad attack against picnickers in Australia on New Year’s Day, 1915 (via Ruthfully). In discussing these and other cases of “individual jihad” (including reference to the Dutch colonial experience in Aceh) where Muslim killers answer the Islamic call to jihad, Durie demonstrates that the go-to, feel-good explanations about “lone wolves” and “crazies” have no more relevance than fairy tales to explaining the chronic threat of Islam in the West.

Some excerpts below.

“From Broken Hill to Martin Place: Individual Jihad Comes to Australia, 1915 to 2015”

by Mark Durie

One hundred years ago today, a lethal jihad attack was staged against New Year’s Day picnickers in Broken Hill, Australia. This attack and the recent Martin Place siege, events separated by almost exactly a century, show striking similarities. …