RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/08/the_week_that_soviet_tanks_crushed_the_prague_spring.html

The people of Czechoslovakia were fighting for their freedom from Soviet oppression and brutality…..Ron Radosh had this to say in an obituary he wrote for Norman Thomas in 1967: “Thomas’ chief sin, in my view, was to have written that he did not, “regard Vietcong terrorism as virtuous.” He was guilty of attacking the heroic Vietnamese people, instead of the United States, which was the enemy of the world’s people. My final judgment was that Thomas had “accepted the Cold War, its ideology and ethics and had decided to enlist in fighting its battles” on the wrong — the anti-communist — side.”

As a kid, we heard the stories of Cuban political prisoners. Our family dinner table was a classroom with my parents telling us about communism or reading the latest letter from Cuba.

I grew up admiring the men and women who risked their lives to fight for freedom. Some of these men were Cardinal Mindszenty of Hungary, those who tried to cross the Berlin Wall, the guerrillas who fought Castro in The Escambray Mountains and those who tried reforms inside the Soviet bloc.

On August 21, 1968, the Rascals were riding high with a song called “People got to be free”.

It was a pop hit in the US. It was reality in the streets of Prague:

“On August 21, 1968, more than 200,000 troops of the Warsaw Pact crossed into Czechoslovakia in response to democratic and free market reforms being instituted by Czech Communist Party General Secretary Alexander Dubcek. Negotiations between Dubcek and Soviet bloc leaders failed to convince the Czech leader to back away from his reformist platform. The military intervention on August 21 indicated that the Soviets believed that Dubcek was going too far and needed to be restrained. On August 22, thousands of Czechs gathered in central Prague to protest the Soviet action and demand the withdrawal of foreign troops. Although it was designed to be a peaceful protest, violence often flared and several protesters were killed on August 22 and in the days to come.”

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/08/what_animates_barack_hussein_obama.html In a 2013 fund-raising letter, Allen West wrote that “Obama’s completely incoherent foreign policy is putting our strongest allies in grave danger.  His extreme ambivalence is simply unacceptable.”   But is it really incoherent?  Obama’s mentors have long taught him to despise America.  In fact, these “mentors and allies were marked by hatred of […]

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/i-ve-got-secret_748485.html?nopager=1 Does the press have an absolute right to declassify?

Fare thee well Bradley Manning. Welcome Chelsea Manning. Hello Fort Leavenworth. The story of national-security secrecy in America grows stranger by the day.
Where did all these troubles come from? The leak of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 is obviously central. James Goodale was general counsel of the New York Times during that epic legal struggle and he has now written an engaging—if also somewhat wrongheaded—memoir, which I’ve reviewed for the Weekly Standard……GS

A stream of national security leaks has lately turned into a tsunami, plunging the country into the most intense controversy over the publication of government secrets since the 1971 Pentagon Papers case. As we wade through the issues raised by the illicitly disclosed information now flowing out of Washington, it is a useful moment to look back at that seminal legal battle. More than a few books tell the story of Daniel Ellsberg’s famous leak of a trove of secret Defense Department documents to the New York Times and other newspapers and Richard Nixon’s subsequent efforts to stop the presses. A new volume by an inside player in the great legal drama has now, four decades later, joined the crowd.

James C. Goodale offers a view of events as seen from his perch as general counsel at the Times during the case. Goodale was not a First Amendment lawyer back when the case broke; the general counsels of great newspapers in that era were typically more concerned with business dealings than with constitutional niceties. He had to get up to speed, and he immersed himself in the intricacies of the espionage statutes.

His reading of both the law and the purloined documents themselves led him to favor publication. His own experience as an intelligence officer in the Army—where he and his colleagues regularly clipped articles from the New York Times, stamped them “secret,” and locked them in a vault—had already convinced him that the workings of the secrecy system were “nonsensical.” The documents taken by Ellsberg were historical in nature: Not one of them was from the Nixon era, which was already well into its third year, and nothing in them, Goodale believed, would cause harm to national security—least of all the kind of grave harm that might trump the newspaper’s right to publish under the First Amendment

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-college-affordability-20130823,0,6515784.story

BUFFALO, N.Y. — The Obama administration will wade into the controversial business of rating colleges and universities based on their “value,” President Obama announced Thursday as he unveiled a set of proposals aimed at tackling the rising cost of higher education.

The “college scorecard” would help students decide whether a school is worth the hefty tuition bills and help the government decide where to spend federal aid money, while giving image-conscious schools an incentive to keep costs down.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/08/22/Increased-Graduation-Rates-Fail-to-Predict-Positive-Outcomes-for-Minorities

As schools and colleges across the nation prepare to begin instruction in the coming weeks, many are assessing the educational progress of American students. Educational data released this past summer depicts a mixed picture of the challenges and achievements of America’s student population. One of the most positive stories from the summer has been the rising graduation rates among minority high school students.

Education Week’s Editorial Projects in Education Research Center reports that high school graduation rates hit a 40 year high in 2010, (the latest year in which data is available). In 2010, the rate reached nearly 75 percent, which is the highest percentage of students graduating from high school since 1973.

The research center reports that gains made by minority students have helped boost overall U.S. graduation rates. In fact, Hispanics enjoyed the greatest boost in graduation rates, as their graduation rate jumped 16 points during the course of the decade and now stands at 68 percent. African-Americans made similar gains, as their graduation rate rose 13 points to rest at 62 percent in 2010. Asians experienced a 5 percent increase to 81 percent, while Native Americans experienced a 3 percent rise to 51 percent.

Whites also made significant gains during the same period, as they experienced a six percent boost and now enjoy an 80 percent graduation rate. While this news is promising, heavily urban and minority-concentrated areas still suffer from disproportionately high dropout rates. The Center named Detroit, Denver, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and New York City as school systems having the highest dropout rates.

The latest figures have generated a healthy amount of skepticism among public school critics and opponents of President Obama’s educational policies. Some allege that students may not actually be learning more, but rather that watered-down curriculum and generally low standards may have amplified these figures.

http://send.hadavars.com/index.php?action=message&l=2096&c=20803&m=19293&s=a317a26441993bdd8f740ee9a6c71bce President Obama’s maneuverability, domestically and internationally, will depend on the outcome of the very critical November, 2014 six-year- itch election campaign, which is already underway.  The outcome of Obama’s second midterm election – which clipped the wings of many second term presidents – will determine his capability to become a transformational president. It will […]

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Into-the-Fray-Muted-myopic-and-moronic-324010#disqus_thread It would be so nice if something would make sense for a change.– Alice in Wonderland Almost five months ago in this column (April 7), I warned: “With US foreign policy everywhere beleaguered by failure and paralysis, the only hope of any foreign success for the administration is by pressuring a pliant Israel on […]

http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2013/08/resetting-us-foreign-policy Aside from the carnage in Benghazi, the most enduring image from Hillary Clinton’s tenure as US secretary of state was the fake remote control she brought with her to Moscow in 2009 with the word “Reset” in misspelled Russian embossed on it. Clinton’s gimmick was meant to show that under President Barack Obama, American […]

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=5461 The danger from within As if Israel doesn’t have enough trouble protecting its civilians from external threats, such as Thursday’s rocket barrage from Lebanon into the northern Galilee. Now it has an internal demon on its hands: polio. Though no cases of the disease have been reported so far, a strain of the virus […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obama-is-denying-energy-independence-to-america?f=puball Watching the events unfold in the Middle East, it occurred to me that, if we had a president who had even the slightest grasp of energy facts, we could be living in a nation that is not dependent in part on Middle East oil. Instead, we have a president who will not allow the […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/government-shutdown-blame-obama-reid There are two statements one can make with certainty about the current situation inside the beltway. First, truth is a rare commodity. What was promised to be the most transparent administration in American history has proven to, by comparison, make Richard Nixon’s Administration look like Wikileaks. And second, the Republican Party, at its highest […]