RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444165804578012904284534228.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_BelowLEFTSecond
The White House Goes Mum on Free Speech
While France stands up for a basic right, the Obama administration sits on its hands.

When Rudy Giuliani was mayor of New York, he tried to cut off taxpayer funding for a museum showing a work entitled “The Holy Virgin Mary,” featuring an image of the Madonna smeared with elephant dung, surrounded by cutout porn photos of female genitalia. Mr. Giuliani said the museum didn’t have a “right to government subsidy for desecrating somebody else’s religion.” Hillary Clinton, then a Senate candidate, defended the right to show the artwork: “Our feelings of being offended should not lead to the penalizing and shutting down of an entire museum.”

Mr. Giuliani, who always acknowledged the artist’s First Amendment right while questioning the public funding, was a censorship softie compared with Mrs. Clinton today. Her State Department’s response to a movie trailer tied to Islamic mob violence and organized terrorism has been censorship and a global apology campaign.

The movie “Innocence of Muslims,” apparently made by a Coptic Christian in the U.S., mocks Muhammad, the Islamic prophet, but it exists publicly only as a 14-minute trailer on YouTube. Digital technology can spread mischief, but it was only when an Islamist television show in Egypt aired excerpts that the video got widespread attention. The movie, if there is one, would never have gotten distribution in theaters, with its amateurish filming and clumsily dubbed voices.

The U.S. government attributed enormous power to these 14 minutes of video. The White House press spokesman insisted that the attacks in Egypt, Libya and some 20 other countries were a “response not to United States policy, and not to, obviously, the administration, not to the American people,” but “to a video, a film we have judged to be reprehensible and disgusting.” The White House later backtracked, blaming organized terrorists for killing the U.S. ambassador in Libya and three other Americans.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444813104578014243421799324.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

The headlines this weekend were all about the boos Paul Ryan elicited on Friday when he addressed the AARP, the self-styled seniors’ lobby. The herd of independent media minds missed the real story, which is that the Republican Vice Presidential nominee went into the heart of the entitlement culture, told some hard truths, and even won applause for doing so.

Mr. Ryan deserves credit merely for showing up at an organization that portrays itself as nonpartisan but whose leadership is dominated by long-time liberals who consistently pursue the Democratic Party’s entitlement agenda. On Friday, our Kimberley Strassel reported on the long email trail showing how AARP officials served as an arm of the White House in promoting ObamaCare.

AARP CEO Barry Rand used his opening remarks to defend President Obama’s health-care bill, including its accounting trick of taking $716 billion from Medicare to make a new entitlement appear to save money. He then turned the event over to President Obama, who via satellite attacked Mitt Romney and Mr. Ryan for wanting to deny medical care to seniors.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/09/23/the-answer-isnt-blowin-in-the-wind/#more-806330

It has long been a contention of mine that the most important reason that governments shouldn’t make economic decisions, such as favoring one form of technology over another or bailing out a failing company, is that politicians—who are first, last, and always in the re-election business–can’t make decisions for economic reasons. They can only make decisions for political reasons.

Consider a thought experiment. Say there is a national widget crisis and there are two possible technological solutions to the problem. Most people in the widget industry think that technology A is the better bet. Technology B, however, has been researched by a company that has its headquarters and 40,000 employees in the state represented by Senator Snoot, who chairs the Senate Widget Committee. Which technology do you think Senator Snoot is going to favor? To be sure, he might put the national interest ahead of his political interests and thus become a candidate for a sequel to Profiles in Courage. But there’s a reason that that famous book is a very short one.

One of the major components of the left these days, and by no means just in the United States, is the so-called environmental movement (so-called because it is, at heart, a misanthropic and anti-business movement, not an environmental one). And one of their current hobby horses is “renewable energy,” such as wind and solar power. Liberal politicians have relentlessly pushed for this, offering lavish subsidies and tax advantages, ($14 billion for wind energy in the United States alone in the last four years) even though wind and solar energy still cannot produce electricity at a cost that can compete with coal or natural gas on a per-kilowatt basis.

But over and above that, there is a huge problem with renewable energy sources that environmentalists and their political allies ignore. I’m not talking about the vast amount of land wind farms and solar arrays require, nor the environmental damage they cause by, in the case of wind farms, killing huge numbers of birds, nor the fact that wind and sun tend to be most abundantly found in areas where electricity demand is low, such as the high plains east of the Rockies, necessitating long, visually polluting transmission lines to where power is needed.

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2012/09/echoes-of-shofar-video.html
Echoes Of A Shofar (video)
Not new, but worth another look, an echo of the Mandate period when the British authorities forbade Jews to blow the shofar at the Kotel on Yom Kippur for fear of offending Arabs. It’s the story of several individuals who defied the ban, and were imprisoned for their efforts. Of course, shortly after that the Kotel fell into Jordanian hands, and was inaccessible to Jews until liberated by Israeli troops in 1967.
All of which suggests that Jews should never agree to entrust their holy places to the control of others.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/obama-does-romney-want-start-another-war-middle-014855301–election.html

Obama: Does Romney want ‘to start another war’ in Middle East?

JIMMY CARTER KEPT EVOKING A NUCLEAR WAR IF REAGAN WERE TO BE ELECTED….AND THAT IS WHAT CAUSED REAGAN IN THE DEBATE TO SAY “THERE HE GOES AGAIN.”…RSK

“Still, the incumbent faces a dismaying number of foreign policy problems.Bombings regularly rock Iraq, where the war isn’t over — America is just not as involved. And it seems like each week brings a new report of Afghan security forces killing their NATO and American counterparts. Iran defies international pressure to halt its suspect nuclear program, while civil war rages in Syria. Russia has moved to expel American aid workers. Violent protests have struck U.S. diplomatic posts in the Muslim world, and extremists who have yet to be formally identified stormed the consulate in Benghazi and killed the American ambassador — marking the anniversary of 9-11 with a terrorist attack. China’s territorial disputes with some of its neighbors have escalated.”

President Barack Obama hit back hard in a “60 Minutes” interview broadcast Sunday at Mitt Romney’s criticisms of his handling of Syria and Iran, saying that if the Republican standard-bearer “is suggesting that we should start another war, he should say so.”

Obama also brushed aside talk that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been pressuring him to take a harder line on Iran’s suspicious nuclear program — source of some of Romney’s sharpest campaign-trail criticisms.

“When it comes to our national security decisions– any pressure that I feel is simply to do what’s right for the American people. And I am going to block out any noise that’s out there,” the president said.

“Now I feel an obligation — not pressure but obligation — to make sure that we’re in close consultation with the Israelis– on these issues, because it affects them deeply,” Obama said. “They’re one of our closest allies in the region. And we’ve got an Iranian regime that has said horrible things that directly threaten Israel’s existence.”

Romney has accused Obama of not doing enough to curb Iran’s nuclear program, which Tehran says is a civilian energy program but America and its allies say is an effort to develop the ability to build a nuclear weapon. He has also charged that the president has done too little to help rebels against Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad topple his regime as the civil war there has left perhaps as many as 20,000 dead.

Asked about those criticisms, Obama bristled.

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/328326 ‘I expect to be judged by results. . . . If stuff hasn’t worked and people don’t feel like I’ve led the country in the right direction, then you’ll have a new president.” Barack Obama may regret having said that at a stimulus pep rally in 2009. “The party’s over, the smoke has cleared,” […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/328309/doctor-mccarthy-interview

Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy is the new e-book from Andrew C. McCarthy, the prosecutor of the Blind Sheik and a National Review Online contributor. It’s meant to be “your antidote for the obsession that has become conventional American wisdom: the obdurate portrayal of the ‘Arab Spring’ as a triumph of freedom,” he writes. Andy talks with NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez about the Fever.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Is there anything positive to say about the “Arab Spring”?

ANDREW C. McCARTHY: It is a very clarifying chapter in the history of the Muslim Middle East. Given that the worst of the many bad problems we’ve had is making policy based on the region as we wish it were rather than as it is, anything that shakes the scales from people’s eyes is a positive.

LOPEZ: Is there anything positive to say about the Obama administration’s policies toward Muslim countries?

McCARTHY: Nothing positive springs to mind. But if we focus on violent jihadists operating within Muslim countries, then there are some positive things to say. As I maintained during the 2008 campaign, President Obama had a far superior position to John McCain on the question of attacking terrorist redoubts in countries that claim to be our allies but allow their territories to be used as platforms to launch attacks against us. My hesitation about Obama on that score lay in not believing he was serious — I figured he was just posing as a tough guy on Pakistan because he had been so weak on Iraq and so in favor of turning the clock back to the pre-9/11 criminal-justice paradigm of counterterrorism. But he proved me wrong: He can’t bring himself to say “jihadist,” but he certainly has attacked jihadist redoubts.

Still, his policy is ultimately a failure. Our forces now kill when they could capture and increase our intelligence base. Obama doesn’t want to capture terrorists overseas because he’d have to figure out what to do with them. All his demagoguery over Gitmo — the ideal, obvious place to detain and interrogate captured jihadists — has made a mess of combatant detention. Moreover, while the occasional drone strikes are a positive, they’re not enough to discourage and defeat the enemy, and, more significantly, they are overwhelmed by the negatives of his appeasement policies.

Obama’s “outreach” policy is based on a thoroughgoing fiction that imagines a sharp divide between “violent extremists” and “Islamists” — the former supposedly kill irrationally and wantonly; the latter are “moderates” committed to pursuing their agenda through regular politics. In reality, they are all Islamic supremacists. Terrorists — violent jihadists — kill very rationally. Their goal is exactly the same as that of other Islamists: They want sharia implemented because it is the necessary precondition to Islamizing a society. The “non-violent,” “moderate” Islamists are a figment of our bipartisan foreign-policy clerisy’s imagination: Their sharia agenda is extreme and they support terrorism strategically (e.g., Hamas is the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian faction; Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s leading jurist, calls for terrorism against American troops operating in Muslim countries). Consequently, by empowering Islamists and effectively legitimizing their ideology, Obama empowers their terrorist factions. It’s ironic to think of all his carping about how Gitmo “causes” terrorist recruitment, because Obama’s embrace of Islamists has done more for terrorist recruitment than almost anything else our government could have done — I mean, we’re now funding the Brotherhood in Egypt and the Palestinian territories. We’re working with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, to which 57 Muslim states belong, to impose sharia speech-suppression standards and, in effect, to legitimize the theory that jihadist attacks against Israel are not terrorism but “resistance against an occupying power.”

If you couple the facilitation of Islamists with Obama’s policy of negotiating with terrorist organizations — with the Taliban, with the Iranian-backed terror networks that operate in Iraq, with the Blind Sheikh’s Islamic Group (whose operative was recently invited to the White House for consultations on the future of Egypt) — it more than undoes the good done by occasional drone strikes against jihadist targets.

LOPEZ: What does freedom mean anymore? Does this White House understand it differently than we have in the past? Are there different tiers of freedom depending on where you are or who you are?

McCARTHY: I’m glad you asked that because it is a big theme of Spring Fever. There are two divides here: Islam versus the West, and progressives versus the Constitution.

On the first, the Islamic concept of “freedom” is virtually the opposite of ours. For us, freedom is liberty, self-determination, the right of each individual to chart his own course and maximize his own potential without any more interference from the state than what is minimally necessary to ensure the order we need to flourish. In Islamist-supremacist ideology, which is the dominant Islam of the Middle East, “freedom” means complete submission to Allah’s law — what Islamic scholars over the centuries have called “perfect slavery.”

Now, that will be called “Islamophobic” because I’m the one mentioning “submission” and “slavery.” But such things are commonly said by Muslim jurists — and it is more accurate for us to call them jurists than clerics. The supremacist interpretation of Islam aspires to be more than a set of spiritual principles; it’s a complete framework for how human life is to be lived, down to the minute details. Obviously, the jurists don’t mean their assertions as an insult, and neither do I. My disagreements with Islamists are intense, but they are substantive. I have enough respect for them to try to understand their point of view rather than pretend they are something they are not. Their point is that Allah has been beneficent enough to give mankind the gift of sharia, his “path” or prescription for how life is to be lived. To thumb one’s nose at this gift once one is aware of it is a profound affront. That is how they see it.

That is why Western democracy — real democracy, the culture of liberty, not mere procedures like voting — cannot mesh with their construction of sharia. Our fundamental premise is that the governed have a right to make law for themselves, irrespective of any belief system. Islamic supremacists deny the right to make law that contradicts sharia in any way. That divide cannot be bridged; it’s too basic.

On progressives versus the Constitution, Spring Fever explicates the concept of “totalitarian democracy,” which was developed by the much underappreciated political scientist Jacob Leib Talmon. Very much like Islamists, progressives believe they possess an exclusive truth and that the task of the state is to socialize citizens to accept that truth. Freedom, nonsensically, lies in accepting that truth — i.e., you can, as Rousseau put it, be “forced to be free” by the state. Meaning, capitulate and all will be well. Again, this is antithetical to the Constitution’s conception of freedom as the necessary requirement of individual liberty that the Constitution safeguards by limiting, not empowering, government. The Framers understood that government was necessary in some ways but had a propensity to devour liberty; the Left is seduced by this propensity, which rationalizes its seizure of your liberty as being for your own good.

LOPEZ: Did anything that happened over the last couple of weeks — the attacks on our diplomatic missions and the violent protests across the Muslim world — surprise you?

McCARTHY: No. As the book explains, this was inevitable. The point of being an Islamic supremacist is to achieve supremacy.

LOPEZ: Is the anti-Islamic YouTube video that supposedly provoked the violence just an excuse?

McCARTHY: Yes. So are the cartoons, the burning Korans, the teddy bears, Gitmo, our incarceration of the Blind Sheikh, Israeli “occupation,” and whatever they’ll be marauding about tomorrow. These are all just pretexts. The proximate cause is Islamic supremacist ideology. If you really want to find another material cause, it is American appeasement and fecklessness. When your main adversary, the obstacle to your ambitions, is desperate for you to love him rather than determined to show that there are red lines that can’t be crossed, you cause mayhem. We now have mayhem.

LOPEZ: Why is Turkey’s Erdogan such a bad actor by your account?

McCARTHY: Because I am a pro-democracy — real democracy — Westerner and he is a highly effective Islamist enemy of the West. Using the Muslim Brotherhood’s ingenious, duplicitous tactics, he has — under the guise of democracy — taken a country that was a reasonably democratic ally of the West and flipped it back into the Islamist column, which is already having dire consequences for us.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/declining-fortunes/

A feeling of cultural homelessness, of accelerating decline and imminent ruin, appears to have overtaken many people today. Some do their utmost to cover over a deep intuition of anxiety. Others are prone to a spirit of gloomy resignation. Perhaps a majority are content to live in the short term, relying on the quarterly return, as it were, putting long-term viability out of mind. Some work to hasten the debacle. A committed minority are engaged in the Sisyphean labor of political and intellectual restitution. But “the sense of an ending” is unmistakable, when time, to quote Julian Barnes in his novel of that title, “really does go missing, never to return.”

As I wrote in The Big Lie, we seem to be facing the irrevocable and destructive assault of historical forces which thinkers and historians like Polybius, Ibn Khaldun, Giambattista Vico, Edward Gibbon, Oswald Spengler, Pitirim Sorokin, and Arnold Toynbee spelled out for us. Each in his own way elaborated the idea that all civilizations go through predictable and identifiable phases of development, flourishing, decline and collapse. In particular, Spengler’s notion in The Decline of the West of historical “contemporaneity” as involving “corresponding phases” and “chronological parallels” may be appropriate here. In this sense we would be contemporary with late fourth century-early fifth century Rome, a civilization, as Spengler wrote, “los[ing] its desire to be, and… wish[ing] itself out of the overlong daylight and back into the darkness.…”

Even modern cosmology seems to concur. In Alpha and Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe, Charles Seife points out that since life and consciousness run on energy, and the supply of energy in any finite system is constantly decreasing, “civilization slows down more and more, thinking less and less, until it ceases entirely.…Some would say the process has already started.” Seife does not indicate whether cosmologists mean civilization in general or a given civilization in the course of its particular trajectory, or both — but if each civilization is considered as a finite system containing a discrete amount of “thought energy,” we might argue that what we call “Western civilization” is fast approaching a state of entropic dispersion. It certainly appears to be “thinking less and less.”

Does 1979 newspaper column shed light on 2008 campaign story? – Daily Inter Lake: Frank

http://www.dailyinterlake.com/opinion/columns/frank/article_7924e4f0-0468-11e2-8da2-0019bb2963f4.html?

Does 1979 newspaper column shed light on 2008 campaign story?
Frank Miele, DailyInterlake.com

Searching old newspapers is one of my favorite pastimes, and I have tried to use them many times to shed light on current events — or to inform readers about how the past is prologue to our very interesting present-day quandaries.

Recently, I came across a syndicated column from November 1979 that seemed to point 30 years into the future toward an obscure campaign issue that arose briefly in the 2008 presidential campaign.

Though by no means definitive, it provides an interesting insight, at least, into how Chicago politics intersected with the black power movement and Middle Eastern money at a certain point in time. Whether it has any greater relevance to the 2012 presidential campaign, I will allow the reader to decide. In order to accomplish that, I will also take the unusual step of providing footnotes and the end of this column so that each of you can do the investigative work for yourself.

The column itself had appeared in the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Evening Independent of Nov. 6, but it was the work of a veteran newspaperman who at the time was working for the prestigious Chicago Tribune and whose work was syndicated nationally. (1)

So far as I know, this 1979 column has not previously been brought to light, but it certainly should be because it broke some very interesting news about the “rumored billions of dollars the oil-rich Arab nations are supposed to unload on American black leaders and minority institutions.” The columnist quoted a black San Francisco lawyer who said, “It’s not just a rumor. Aid will come from some of the Arab states.”

Well, if anyone would know, it would have been this lawyer — Donald Warden, who had helped defend OPEC in an antitrust suit that year and had developed significant ties with the Saudi royal family since becoming a Muslim and taking the name Khalid Abdullah Tariq al-Mansour.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obama-calls-recent-middle-east-violence-bumps-road_652971.html

This evening on CBS’s 60 Minutes, President Barack Obama called the recent violence in the Middle East “bumps in the road.”

CBS’s Steve Kroft asked, “Have the events that took place in the Middle East, the recent events in the Middle East given you any pause about your support for the governments that have come to power following the Arab Spring?”

President Obama answered, “Well, I’d said even at the time that this is going to be a rocky path. The question presumes that somehow we could have stopped this wave of change. I think it was absolutely the right thing for us to do to align ourselves with democracy, universal rights– a notion that– people have- to be able to– participate– in– their own governance. But I was pretty certain and continue to be pretty certain that there are going to be bumps in the road because– you know, in a lot of these places– the one organizing principle– has been Islam. The one part of society that hasn’t been controlled completely by the government. There are strains of extremism, and anti-Americanism, and anti-Western sentiment. And you know can be tapped into by demagogues. There will probably be some times where we bump up against some of these countries and have strong disagreements, but I do think that over the long term, we are more likely to get a Middle East and North Africa that is more peaceful, more prosperous and more aligned with our interests.”

Of course, the recent violence in the Middle East resulted in the death of an American ambassador and three other Americans working with the State Department. Additionally, widespread mobs have gathered outside American targets across the Muslim world, including from Egypt to Pakistan.