RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Nor, finally, is the tea party an independent outside force putting pressure on Republicans, according to the survey. Fully 76% of its supporters either identify with or lean toward the Republican Party. Rather, they are a dissident reform movement within the party, determined to move it back toward true conservatism after what they see as the apostasies of the Bush years and the outrages of the Obama administration.”

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303376904579135231053555194

More than a decade ago, before the post-9/11 national fervor set in, Walter Russell Mead published an insightful essay on the persistent “Jacksonian tradition” in American society. Jacksonians, he argued, embrace a distinctive code, whose key tenets include self-reliance, individualism, loyalty and courage.

Jacksonians care as passionately about the Second Amendment as Jeffersonians do about the First. They are suspicious of federal power, skeptical about do-gooding at home and abroad; they oppose federal taxes but favor benefits such as Social Security and Medicare that they regard as earned. Jacksonians are anti-elitist; they believe that the political and moral instincts of ordinary people are usually wiser than those of the experts and that, as Mr. Mead wrote, “while problems are complicated, solutions are simple.”

That is why the Jacksonian hero defies the experts and entrenched elites and “dares to say what the people feel” without caring in the least what the liberal media will say about him. (Think Ted Cruz. )

The tea party is Jacksonian America, aroused, angry and above all fearful, in full revolt against a new elite—backed by the new American demography—that threatens its interests and scorns its values.

http://www.inquisitr.com/1001554/europes-battle-over-immigration-grows-french-surrender-at-mitrovica/#WYLHRFVELi1gjucH.99 Europe’s Battle Over Immigration Rages: French Surrender At Mitrovica [Introduction by Wolff Brachner] The battle for Europe’s soul, much like that of America, is being waged over immigration. European nations are being flooded with immigrants by the millions, many of whom are poor, illiterate, unskilled and often unwilling to assimilate. They cluster in enclaves […]

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304402104579151193673917488?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond
The panic of the liberals is not unfounded. The young and healthy will not persevere through a balky ObamaCare website to buy overpriced insurance policies. Older and sicker shoppers have the biggest incentive to try 63 times (as one journalist did) to register. President Obama is right. For these customers, ObamaCare is a very good deal: hundreds or thousands of dollars a month in health care for as little as $0 a month in premiums after direct subsidies.

Voilà, the insurance death spiral.

Three lessons jump to mind. ObamaCare’s disastrous launch is not just a programmer’s bad hair day but deeply implicated in the central con of ObamaCare.

Secondly, ObamaCare did not need to be founded on misdirection and hidden taxes on the young. It actually would have been a better program and cheaper for the country if it hadn’t been.

Finally liberals hate to be told their hardball policy aim is to make more Americans dependent on government. But in a year or two thousands or millions of older, sicker ObamaCare customers may find their premiums soaring when the young and healthy didn’t show up to subsidize their care. Then what?

Bad hair day: One reason for the snafu-laden rollout is that the administration apparently delayed in setting key rules and specs so no discussion drafts would be floating around before the 2012 election. Why? Because the media would then inevitably dig into the question of who wins and loses under ObamaCare’s thicket of explicit and implicit subsidies.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/10/spains_green_dreams_blow_up.html Green dreamers in Spain once touted solar power as a cheap answer to their energy needs.  Then economic reality intervened: Spain’s economy went from boom to bust — and “green incentives” became too costly for the government (er, taxpayers).  As a consequence, Spain’s cash-strapped government has drastically scaled back its generous “green” subsidies since the 2008 […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/10/murdered_christian_children_the_price_of_obamas_pro-brotherhood_jihad.html

Who is more deserving of punishment by the United States? Millions of Egyptians, for ousting the Muslim Brotherhood? Or the Muslim Brotherhood, for habitually terrorizing and murdering Christians, among many other crimes?

According to the unmistakably clear actions of the Obama administration, it is the millions of anti-Brotherhood Egyptians who deserve punishment.

Last Sunday, the Church of the Virgin [Mary] in Waraq near Cairo was attacked during a wedding ceremony, leaving four dead and many wounded. According to Dr. Hisham Abdul Hamid of forensics, two of those who were murdered were Christian children. Both girls were named Mary: 12-year-old Mary Nabil Fahmy, who took five shots in the chest, and 8-year-old Mary Ashraf Masih (Christ), who took a bullet in the back.

It should be noted that this scene — attacked Coptic churches and murdered Christians, especially on holy days and celebrations — has become a normalized aspect of Egypt’s landscape (see Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians, especially pgs. 42-43 and 56-62).

So too are the murders of Christian children increasingly common in Egypt. Indeed, along with Sunday’s two murdered Marys, back in July, another Christian girl, 10-year-old Jessi Boulos, was shot dead while walking home from Bible class.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/361912/print It is simply amazing to me that Republicans gloat about their ability to “reach across the aisle” to Democrats but shun reaching within their ranks to the Tea Party. …..rsk Conservatives with long memories had to laugh at the recent New York Times front-page headline: “Fiscal Crisis Sounds the Charge in GOP’s ‘Civil War.’” […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/361969/print The developing narrative, whether on talk radio or in these pages and other publications, about the shutdown fight — who was on what side, what the options were, and what was gained or not — often starts from incorrect premises, based on incomplete or erroneous assumptions. Since we need to understand how we got […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/361915/diana-west-responds-conrad-black-letters

Why is NRO trashing American Betrayal, dismissing Vladimir Bukovsky, whitewashing Alger Hiss, and glorifying FDR?

Conrad Black has now published three attacks at National Review Online against my book American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, but I would bet the $4.1 million Black has to pay the U.S. government in fines related to his fraud conviction that he hasn’t read the book.

In his most recent attack — this time against a positive review of American Betrayal by famed Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky and Pavel Stroilov at Breitbart News — Black mocks Bukovsky for, in Black’s telling, imagining that FDR believed that the capitalist and Communist systems were on a path of “convergence.”

“Convergence theory” shows up in more than half a dozen listings in American Betrayal’s index. Nonetheless, Black writes:

Where it [the review] all starts to go horribly wrong is in the sudden metamorphosis of Duranty into Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who, Bukovsky has learned, presumably from whatever unimaginable emanations possessed him in his decades of brave resistance to Communism and in his apparently incomplete convalescence since, sought a “convergence” of Stalinist socialism with American constitutional government.” (Italics added.)

Before I establish the well-founded points of FDR’s oft-stated belief in “convergence,” I will note for readers that this same exercise — demonstrating the baselessness of an attack on my book (or, in this case, on a positive review of my book) — is, to date, the main mechanism of “debate” about American Betrayal. (See The Rebuttal: Defending American Betrayal from the Book-Burners for the gruesome details.) Distortion, fabrication, sloppiness — these are the hallmarks of “discussion.” While I realize American Betrayal’s findings are shocking (they were to me as I uncovered them), I still rather expected the book to be debated civilly, and not continually mauled.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/361929/liberal-denial-climate-change-and-energy-jeremy-carl The late science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick once observed, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” It’s a statement that many liberals need to take to heart on energy and climate issues. According to the Hoover Institution’s recently completed Golden State Poll, conducted in partnership with the nationally respected […]

http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=329351 If you happen to be in Washington, DC, between now and January, you can see a piece of Jewish history that was never supposed to see the light of day. The National Archives is now exhibiting restored holy books and communal documents that belonged to the Jewish community of Iraq. In 1940, the Iraqi […]