RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/new-american-vocabulary/?print=1

Of all the many changes that the Obama administration has enacted over the last five years, the least remarked upon are the strange changes in our vocabulary. To fathom the shifting meaning of words [1], here is a guide to the new Obama lexicon.

Affordable Care Act: Mostly unaffordable, uncaring, and inactive [2].

Assault Weapon: Paint your .22 black and add a plastic handle [3].

Associated Press: Leakers who dared to challenge [4] the White House monopoly.

Baby: Punishment for a mistake [5].

Benghazi: We won’t have any more because one video-maker is now in prison [6].

Berlin Wall: Analogous to the Cold War fence [7] that kept out German illegal aliens from entering a free East Berlin.

Biden: Buffoonery after it becomes boring.

Buffett: He alone built that [8].

Carney: Ron Ziegler lives [9]!

Cashing in: A practice finally ended when Hillary Clinton and Lisa Jackson left office.

Coal: A toxic rock that the crazy Chinese believe makes heat [10].

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/353386/picking-tom-cotton-robert-costa

STAY TUNED TO TIM COTTON ONE OF MY FAVES IN THE GOP LINEUP OF BRIGHT NEW FACES….RSK

On immigration, a freshman speaks for the right flank of the House GOP.

HC-5, a drab, wood-paneled conference room in the Capitol basement, was quiet last Wednesday as Paul Ryan pushed for immigration reform. All eyes were on the Wisconsin Republican as he touted the economic benefits of bringing illegal immigrants into the work force. He assured his colleagues, who were clustered in cliques — moderates here, old bulls there — that stronger border security remains the leadership’s priority.

As Ryan spoke, freshman Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who was behind him in line, listened carefully. He was calm and upright, and unlike a handful of conservative rabble-rousers in the back, he didn’t sigh as Ryan made his points. Instead, he clasped his hands and focused on his coming speech. After Ryan stepped away, Cotton, a 36-year-old former Army officer, moved forward, and soon his clipped drawl filled the room.
The crowd of 200-plus Republicans took notice. From the start, Cotton’s message was a contrast with Ryan’s. He sliced into the Senate’s immigration bill and dismissed the idea of a compromise. He urged Republicans to oppose a conference with the Senate, and warned that any formal negotiations with the upper chamber would lead to disaster. He then turned to Speaker John Boehner, who was standing nearby, and advised him to tread carefully. For a moment, they engaged in a terse back-and-forth.

“We are not worlds apart from the Senate, we are galaxies apart,” Cotton told the speaker. Boehner responded that Cotton shouldn’t worry. “We’re not going to conference until we’re ready,” he said. The speaker coolly explained to Cotton that it’s important to pass legislation that reflects the position of House Republicans.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/353410/injudicious-criminal-justice-florida-john-fund The prosecutorial misconduct in Zimmerman’s trial reveals a judicial system run amok. The trial of George Zimmerman should be taught in law schools and elsewhere as a prime example of one of the most mishandled and politically motivated prosecutions in recent U.S. history. If we want to reserve the criminal-justice system for deciding guilt […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323734304578541121465226816.html?KEYWORDS=DOROTHY+RABINOWITZ

For the school of believers certain that an all-powerful American government regularly plots to invade their lives and subvert their freedom, these are heady days—or so they seemed. News of data mining looked to be irresistible proof of that faith—their darkest vision of an America at the mercy of a government secretly gathering all sorts of personal information and subverting the Constitution. And there was Edward Snowden, the latest addition to the pantheon of anti-government leakers, releasing a tonnage of classified data about the NSA surveillance programs.

For this he was, not unexpectedly, acclaimed as a hero both in the precincts of the Progressive Left and its anti-terror war warriors, and some quarters of the Libertarian Right—two groups, it has long been obvious, with much in common.

Trouble is, this latest face of self-sacrifice for a higher cause (Snowden has let it be known he considers his life as a free man pretty much over now) hasn’t been greeted with anything remotely like admiration among Americans, other than sympathizers in the aforementioned groups. From all indications, he’s an object of general contempt well deserving of prosecution—another in the line of socially deranged seekers who found the self-definition they long for in their obsessed vision of their government as the central source of evil in the world. It didn’t help that Mr. Snowden’s explanation for what he did came brimming odiously with virtue—he had, he said, decided to leak material because he thought Americans should be informed so that they could debate the questions he raised.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323368704578595783263740510.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

What will happen should American sea power wane and China replace the U.S. as the guarantor of maritime security?

Adm. Roughead, a former chief of naval operations, is a fellow at the Hoover Institution.

The American strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914) characterized naval power as “more silent than the clash of arms.” His emphasis on the centrality of this “silent” power in world affairs captured the interest of a young visiting lecturer at the Naval War College in the late 1880s. That lecturer, Theodore Roosevelt, would go on to be president and transform the U.S. Navy into the global force that has underpinned international security and prosperity for a century.

The sort of thinking about naval power that informed Mahan’s and Roosevelt’s work now appears anachronistic. When the U.S. Navy is discussed today, the conversation leaps immediately over strategy to commentary on budgets and the number of ships. Those are aspects of sea power, to be sure, but the ability to command the seas is much more than comparisons with other navies and much more complexly tied to our place in the world. Sea power sets conditions for stable world trade, as some 90% of commerce moves on the oceans. The Navy’s persistent presence far from our shores enables effective diplomacy and provides regional influence without the burdens and sensitivity of deploying ground troops on foreign lands.

In “Mayday: The Decline of American Naval Supremacy,” Seth Cropsey, a former deputy undersecretary of the Navy, argues that the end of unchallenged U.S. supremacy at sea may be closer than American policy makers would like to think. In a well-structured narrative, Mr. Cropsey provides a concise and compelling summary of the evolution of American and other great powers’ application of and dependence on sea power. He chronicles the waxing and waning of that power and the global order that has come with our nation’s ability to command the seas.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/14/justice-department-george-zimmerman_n_3595835.html?utm_hp_ref=politics WASHINGTON — The Justice Department says it is looking into the shooting death of Trayvon Martin to determine whether federal prosecutors should file criminal civil rights charges now that George Zimmerman has been acquitted in the state case. The department opened an investigation into Martin’s death last year but stepped aside to allow the […]

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/13547#.UePA_EbD-Un When you don’t protest it allows things to get worse and worse. What  would Jews or other people with a conscience do if a famous museum in London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid or Rome glorified the Holocaust through the exhibition of Jewish ashes, bones, glasses and hairs? I imagine, or at least I hope, that some brave Jew […]

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Editorials/The-right-stuff-319731

Last week’s announcement that former senior aide to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Ron Dermer, will be the next ambassador to Washington has been met with generally enthusiastic response both in Israel and in the United States. And for good reason.

The 42-year-old native of Florida is a highly intelligent and thoughtful individual with the additional advantage of being among the prime minister’s closest advisers and confidants. He will not only serve as an appealing public face for Israel in the US, but like his predecessor Michael Oren, he will be able to put forward Israel’s case eloquently.

We wholeheartedly agree with the statement released at the end of the week by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations that said, “As an articulate and knowledgeable representative of the State of Israel [Dermer] will be able to present Israel’s case to the administration, Congress, and American people as Ambassador Oren did so effectively… We know that Mr. Dermer will continue in that tradition and will strengthen the bond at all levels between these two great democratic allies.”

Not everybody has responded to Dermer’s appointment with such open arms and an open mind. Published comments claiming that Dermer has long been in the Obama administration’s dog house for allegedly endorsing governor Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election and that Washington was less than enthusiastic about his appointment.

http://standpointmag.co.uk/counterpoints-july-august-a-world-of-flowers-rebecca-alexander-woolwich-pakistan
A World of Flowers
REBECCA ALEXANDER
Rebecca Alexander lives in Seattle, Washington, and works as a horticulture librarian, answering questions from gardeners around the world. The same week that two men murdered Lee Rigby on a Woolwich street, she assisted two college students in Peshawar, Pakistan, with their floricultural research. This poem is a reflection on the choices we make in the face of adversity, and the legacy we leave the world.
Raising Gladioli in Peshawar (for Gulzar Ullah, Fawad Naeem, and all who grow in adverse conditions)
Your mother dreamed you would grow

upright as a date palm

though your feet were estranged

from Yoruba soil

trainer-shod instead

for tarmacadam and tower blocks

They will say you were a sweet child

mild and pliant if unambitious

until a seething wind of rhetoric

blew through your empty corridors

slamming shut your soul’s last open doors

landing you here, a hollow megaphone

for third-hand hatred

In Peshawar students sift the web

for guidance in building a world of flowers

Gulzar propagates a rainbow,

fingertips dusted with pollen

Fawad breeds in resistance

to pestilence and strife

but you, a continent away-

What have you become,

your palms a red we can’t erase

you have laid waste a life

and with it your mother’s hopes

mourners line a Woolwich roadside

with roses from allotment gardens

and bouquets grown far afield

while in her mind’s eye

the dreamed tree’s roots recoil and fail

and you are lost forever.

In Egypt and Syria, misguided food and water policies set the stage for revolt and civil war.

Mr. Goldman, president of Macrostrategy LLC, is a fellow at the Middle East Forum and the London Center for Policy Research.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323740804578597502771627238.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

Sometimes economies can’t be fixed after decades of statist misdirection, and the people simply get up and go. Since the debt crisis of the 1980s, 10 million poor Mexicans—victims of a post-revolutionary policy that kept rural Mexicans trapped on government-owned collective farms—have migrated to the United States. Today, Egyptians and Syrians face economic problems much worse than Mexico’s, but there is nowhere for them to go. Half a century of socialist mismanagement has left the two Arab states unable to meet the basic needs of their people, with economies so damaged that they may be past the point of recovery in our lifetimes.

This is the crucial background to understanding the state failure in Egypt and civil war in Syria. It may not be within America’s power to reverse their free falls; the best scenario for the U.S. is to manage the chaos as best it can.

Of Egypt’s 90 million people, 70% live on the land. Yet the country produces barely half of Egyptians’ total caloric consumption. The poorer half of the population survives on subsidized food imports that stretch a budget deficit close to a sixth of the country’s GDP, about double the ratio in Greece. With the global rise in food prices, Egypt’s trade deficit careened out of control to $25 billion in 2010, up from $10 billion in 2006, well before the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak.

In Syria, the government’s incompetent water management—exacerbated by drought beginning in 2006—ruined millions of farmers before the May 2011 rebellion. The collapse of Syrian agriculture didn’t create the country’s ethnic and religious fault lines, but it did leave millions landless, many of them available and ready to fight.