RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324461604578194040827752694.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

With Susan Rice withdrawing her name for U.S. secretary of state, President Obama last week nominated Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry for the job. Don’t expect applause from beleaguered democrats south of the border.Mr. Kerry’s record of promoting American values abroad is dismal. It isn’t that he opposes U.S. intervention—far from it. The trouble is that he has a habit of intervening on behalf of bad guys. A left-wing world view and an earnest conviction that it is his destiny to impose it on others may make him a perfect fit in the Obama cabinet. But it won’t be good for poor countries or for U.S. interests.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/ryan-mauro/sharia-now-egypts-law-of-the-land/ Sharia is now Egypt’s law of the land. The Islamist-written draft constitution was approved by about 64% of voters. The Muslim Brotherhood believes its time has come. At long last, it has overtaken the land where the group was founded in 1928. For them, this is a blessing from Allah for their years of […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/theodore-shoebat/the-lost-verses-of-the-quran/print/ Is the Quran of today, the same as it was when it was first written? Muslims says that it is. But there is evidence to suggest that the reality is otherwise. In old books on Islam that I have acquired, I have found references to verses in the Quran which cannot be found in […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/john-kerry-still-wrong-after-all-these-years/ A year and a half before Osama bin Laden was found living in a compound at the heart of Pakistan’s military establishment, Senator John Kerry was celebrating the passage of the “Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act,” also known as the Kerry-Lugar Pakistan Bill. Under either name, Kerry was offering a rather sizable giveaway to […]

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the House

Not a conservative was stirring, not even a mouse;
The pols had left with a harrumph and a grouse
Reid, and Boehner and the cowards in the House
The lame ducks were home tucked in their bed
Hillary tossed with the polls in her head

I woke up with a START from a terrible DREAM
When heard a clatter and saw a silver stream.
Away to the window I flew like a flash,

Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.
I peered through the window and put on my glasses
It was a miniature sleigh with eight tiny jackasses
With a spry old driver, so lively and chipper
I knew in a flash twas the ghost of the Gipper
He scolded and shouted and gave them their work
“Sweep the tax hikes, the earmarks, and toss out the pork.!!!”
A bundle of bags he had flung on his back,

And he laughed out loud while opening his pack.
With a smile and knowing and friendly look
He gave every pol a Cliff Notes book
Another election may we all live to fight
Merry Christmas to All and to all a good night!!

Happy Holidays to all of you!!!

Ruth King

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/corrected-gun-control-means-a-disarmed-public As I noted in my earlier column, “Come Out With Your Hands Up!”on the occasion of the Sandy Hook school massacre and the howling of the Left for gun controls: The calls for stricter controls on automatic and semi-automatic weapons sound more like the baying of a wolf pack as it closes in on […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/marooned-in-mexico
Ion Perdicaris, a Greek-American, was kidnaped in 1904 in Tangier by Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli and held for $70,000 ransom. Outraged, President Theodore Roosevelt sent warships and Marines to Morocco, along with a message: “This government wants Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead.” Perdicaris was freed.

Today, not one, but hundreds of Americans rot in Mexican jails. The State Department stopped reporting numbers years ago, but in 1998 CNN reported 400 U.S. citizens were imprisoned in Mexico, more than in any other nation. The Obama administration response is to create “Beyond Merida,” an aid program with appropriations that totaled $1.3 billion by 2010. In exchange for this ransom, how many Americans held without trial have been freed? None.

Consider the dangers if you are foolish enough to visit Mexico.

You can be shot by a drug cartel mobster. Mexico admits to 27,199 murders in 2011. That’s 24 killings per 100,000 residents, a rate 600% higher than in the U.S.

You can be kidnapped. The State Department estimated there were 50,000 kidnappings in Mexico in 2008, second only to Venezuela.

You can be robbed. Anywhere. In February, twenty-two Carnival Cruise Lines passengers went ashore in beautiful, safe, Puerto Vallarta. Their valuables and passports were taken at gunpoint.

But the greatest danger to an American tourist or visiting businessman is the corrupt Mexican criminal justice system. It is one thing to commit a crime, and a very different thing to be falsely arrested and sent to a Mexican prison, to be abandoned there by Washington. That happened to U.S. Marine combat veteran and two Florida businessmen. They are all still in jail.

On 23 August, Marine veteran Jon Hammar was driving to a holiday in Costa Rica. He showed his great-grandfather’s shotgun to the U.S. Customs Agent at the Mexican border and was told all he had to do was complete a form for Mexican Customs. Hammar showed the shotgun and document to the Mexican border officer and was promptly arrested. Photographs of Hammar, chained to a bed, have surfaced on the web. Marooned for four months in a rat-infested Mexican prison is a Christmas nightmare. How about 14 months?

http://times247.com/
Obama’s Inouye eulogy: 63 references to himself
The Weekly Standard
Saturday, December 22, 2012
News
Obama’s Inouye eulogy: 63 references to himself
President Obama used the funeral for Hawaii senator Daniel Inouye to talk about himself. In the short 1,600 word speech, Obama used the word “my” 21 times, “me” 12 times, and “I” 30 times. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz2FyIKTLua
Report: Obama wavering on Hagel nomination
National Journal
Sunday, December 23, 2012
News
Besieged by criticism from right and left, and considerable skepticism from his former Senate colleagues, Chuck Hagel appears to be following the path of Susan Rice as a trial-balloon nominee who finds himself quickly losing altitude in Washington. Read more…
Conservative activists urge GOP to go over cliff
The Hill
Sunday, December 23, 2012
Blogs
Conservative activists who helped doom Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) “Plan B” say Republicans must be prepared to go over the fiscal cliff to force President Obama to reach a deal that includes no tax hikes. Read more…
Calif. pot farms causing environmental harm
Los Angeles Times
Sunday, December 23, 2012
News
The marijuana boom that came with the sudden rise of medical cannabis in California has wreaked havoc on the fragile habitats. Farmers have illegally mowed down timber, graded mountaintops flat, dispersed pesticides, drained streams and polluted watersheds. Read more…
Islamists destroy mausoleums in ancient Timbuktu
The Telegraph
Monday, December 24, 2012
News
Armed groups occupying Timbuktu in northern Mali used pickaxes to smash mausoleums in the ancient city. “Not a single mausoleum will remain in Timbuktu, Allah doesn’t like it,” Abou Dardar, leader of the Islamist Ansar Dine group, told AFP. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz2FyJ6AkWf
North Korea can ill afford Kim’s prestige projects
Chosun Ilbo
Monday, December 24, 2012
News
North Korea can ill afford Kim’s prestige projects
One year into his rule, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has squandered money on the personality cult surrounding his family and ill-conceived prestige projects. The cost for these “Pyongyang renaissance” projects is more than $1 billion, one-sixth of the North’s annual budget. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz2FyIa8gYL
Report: Obama wavering on Hagel nomination
National Journal
Sunday, December 23, 2012
News
Besieged by criticism from right and left, and considerable skepticism from his former Senate colleagues, Chuck Hagel appears to be following the path of Susan Rice as a trial-balloon nominee who finds himself quickly losing altitude in Washington. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz2FyInUIs2
Obama releases pre-Christmas regulation dump
Dave Boyer

After taking criticism for missing an October deadline, the Obama administration Friday released its list of proposed government-wide regulations that it plans to consider in the next year. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz2FyIyJNR9

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
There was a temporary interval in American life when a shooting spree by a madman would have been viewed as the crime of one man. The dead would have been mourned. The killer, if he had been taken alive, would have been punished, and while the memorial might have been accompanied by some leading sermons, the country would have been spared the media exploitation and blame-a-thon that invariably follows such events.

The trouble is that there are no more individuals. Or rather the individual is no longer recognized as having any standing. “All private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger,” Roosevelt declared in 1940 to the Democratic National Convention And the repeal never seems to have been repealed. Instead all private plans and private lives are being constantly repealed by a turmoil of overriding public dangers, most of them sociological in nature.

A shooting takes place and the media urges that millions of firearms be confiscated. Every crisis requires that more freedoms be sacrificed for that overriding public danger that the talking heads are screaming about this week over news feeds from every corner of the globe. There are no more private lives. Only public ones. Everyone will sooner or later pass before the camera and be judged by millions of strangers in a narrative that will transform him or her into a hero or villain in the great social struggle against the public danger of the day.

Calling Adam Lanza a madman has little meaning now. The madman retreats to a private world of his own making. But the collective culture does not recognize madness as a detachment from the crowd. Instead it views it as yet another social malady to be solved. Re-open the asylums. Provide more mental health funding. Open hotlines for anyone with suicidal thoughts. Social solutions for a social society coping with the anti-social.

http://www.jstandard.com/content/item/national_jew/25583

What criteria should be used to judge one of the country’s pre-eminent jurists, a black-robed superstar whose rulings still reverberate through society nearly a century later? And on what basis should a verdict be rendered for the entirety of his rich and resonant service to the judiciary, Zionism, his family, and the American community as a whole?

Happily, the task of evaluating and explicating the life of Louis Dembitz Brandeis was taken up by law and history professor Melvin Urofsky of Virginia Commonwealth University. His magisterial “Louis D. Brandeis: A Life” was published in 2010 to acclaim and awards. Now issued in paperback, the compelling story of the man who arguably was the nation’s first “National Jew” and the first of his faith to serve on the Supreme Court becomes available to a fresh and wider audience.

Covering the terrain with assurance and a bracing prose style, Urofsky illuminates the Zelig-like odyssey of a man who was born five years before the Civil War and whose life extended to the eve of World War II, a period of profound ferment and change for America. The phrase “indispensable man” seems perfectly coined for Brandeis, whose advice was solicited by presidents facing grave global challenges as well as Garment District unions whose members literally sacrificed their lives for improved working conditions.