RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

The other day I was in a genteel local clothing store with a decidedly genteel clientele – the type of people who dress on weekdays almost as if they’re going to church. The staff, in manner and appearance, reflect the ethos.

In the background, as usual, there was no obtrusive “musack” but there were the pleasant strains of classical music from CDs that the store sells as a sideline.

As I approached the changing rooms, garment in hand, I heard a well-dressed middle-aged man ask the genteel, middle-aged sales lady standing nearby what the music (Smetana’s Vltava) was that was being currently played.

“I think it’s Smetana,” she said. “But I’m not sure.”

“Yes, it is Smetana,” I heard myself saying, to smiles and nods. Evidently the store was about to notch up another CD sale.

And then, for good measure, since these were obvious music-lovers, I added: “It’s very similar to the Israeli national anthem.”

I suppose I expected to hear: “Really! How interesting!” or “That’s a coincidence. I wonder why.”

Not a bit of it. The genteel customer and the genteel sales lady look profoundly shocked. Then the lady threw her head back and roared an off-putting kind of laugh, while the man, not to be outdone, swiftly followed with curious hollow guffaws. He didn’t seem as keen to purchase a copy of the CD now.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1423/banning_circumcision_in_germany

“There are now moves from our government to protect the tradition of male circumcision among the Jewish and Muslim community in Germany. For a legal problem there will be a legal answer.Fine, but what will remain – along with the feelings that have been hurt – is that for two weeks this country has been locked in a ridiculous debate while genocide is continuing in Syria, while Iran moves further towards obtaining nuclear weapons, while no one knows what will happen to women’s rights in Egypt and while not a single person in this country has stood up to call for an end to the barbaric practice of female genital mutilation.”

For a little more than two weeks I have been in a state of shock. Since the Cologne verdict banning male circumcision at the end of June I have sat numerous times in front of my computer and looked at an empty page that remained empty.

I couldn’t find the right words to describe how hurt I felt about the court’s decision. And I experienced the worst nightmare that can happen to a journalist: writer’s block.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

Elections are won by demographics. No soup company blindly dumps cans of its newest “Turkey Coconut Bouillon with Nutmeg and Omega 3” in Aisle 6 of the supermarket without testing to see what demographics such a hideous concoction might appeal to. Will the product appeal to lesbian single mothers, divorced Asian firefighters or eccentric Latvian millionaires? Politics is no different.
A political party has its base, definable groups who groove to its message, who eat up the red meat that its candidates toss their way. It has the demographic groups which will always vote for it and those who might swing its way. It knows them by race, gender, age, class, sexuality, home ownership and a thousand other statistical slices of the pie. It has those numbers broken down by states, cities and neighborhoods so that it has a good estimate of its chances in a given place and time based on the demographics of the people who live there.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/309765/obama-flouts-rule-law-andrew-c-mccarthy

A new prison scheme could enable him to close Gitmo.

Mona Charen had a characteristically great column Tuesday about President Obama’s illegal welfare policy. The president purports to be unbound by federal welfare law, which imposes work requirements on welfare recipients. The Washington Times reports that “such activities as motivational reading, housework, weight loss, and journaling” will now qualify for exemption from work requirements.

There is nothing new about this sort of thing. As Mona points out, “It’s old news that Obama has contempt for the rule of law. He’s declined to ‘take care that the laws be faithfully executed’ on many subjects: immigration, the Defense of Marriage Act, labor laws, and environmental rules, among others.”

To take yet another example, Congressman Steve King of Iowa observes that Obama has serially flouted the federal law that requires the president to submit a plan to address Medicare’s fiscal health if, as long ago happened, the program’s trustee issues an insolvency warning. The president does not even deem himself obliged to follow the health-care law he famously championed, imperiously issuing numerous “waivers” to excuse non-compliance. He asserts executive privilege frivolously to stonewall Congress’s investigation of his Justice Department’s Fast and Furious program. In addition, he flouts the Constitution’s requirement that Congress actually be in recess before a president can make recess appointments.

http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2012/07/17/christianitys-death-rattle-in-gaza/ Christianity’s Death Rattle in Gaza? A report today (7/17/12) in Haaretz [2] highlights the ongoing plight of Gaza’s tiny, fragile Christian minority. Their miniscule numbers have shrunk from a mere 3,500 to about 1,500 since Hamas seized control in 2006, dispersed among 1.7 million Gazan Palestinians, overwhelmingly traditionalist, Hamas-supporting Muslims. Briefly ignoring their dangerous […]

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2182/Time-to-Declare-Victory-over-Madness-and-Come-Home-from-the-COIN-Crusades.aspx

From the Sydney Morning Herald a report titled “”Fears over Afghan army, Taliban collusion.” As you read it, ask yourself at what point in this tragically familiar, numbingly repetitive cycle of Afghan army/Taliban collusion do Western commanders, both civilian and military, bear responsibility for KNOWING FULL WELL that such collusion is commonplace?

In the act of betrayal described below, the target of the raid mounted by Australian troops and their Afghan “partners” was a Taliban leader of 100 men from a handful of villages. Ask yourself also: How is that those 100 measly fighters in the Afghan bush magnetically draw the concentrated might of the Western democracies? Better: tell me how is it that those 100 fighters threaten the Western democracies in the first place? The strategic vision driving this and other such assaults is a joke. The COIN strategy of remaking Afghanistan in our PC image has failed. It is time to declare victory over madness, over delusion, and leave. That’s a “winning strategy” according to an ex-Green Beret friend with multiple stints in Afghanistan, who wrote: “By ‘winning’ I mean leaving Afghanistan as soon as possible, burning in place or blowing up all our materiel we can’t carry with us quickly.”

Ten years on, we can now say with certainty that, try as we might, we did not win the people’s “hearts and minds”; we did not win the people’s “trust” — the fundamental goals of the Bush-Petraeus-Obama-Mullen-McChrystal policy. This failure was preordained by the decision to ignore the truth about Islamic culture, by our arrogant assumption that we could win over its collectivist, supremacist, misogynist, totalitarian heart with bribery and blood, with self-sacrificial ROEs and training procedures that have killed innumerable troops. The fact is, COIN didn’t work in Afghanstan — just as COIN didn’t work in Iraq (or anywhere analogous). But we fight on till our deadline, and send our Sgt. Diddams into danger, day after day.

To what end?

Click here: The State Of The Anti-Jews – Maggie’s Farm http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/archives/20179-The-State-Of-The-Anti-Jews.html A REVIEW OF EDWARD ALEXANDER’S BOOK: THE STATE OF THE JEWS- A CRITICAL APPRAISAL The State Of The Anti-Jews Edward Alexander’s latest book, The State of the Jews: A Critical Appraisal, would better have been titled The State of the Anti-Jews. Edward Alexander is […]

http://www.turkishweekly.net/news/138693/new-cyber-espionage-virus-found-targeting-iran.html Dubbed the “Mahdi campaign” by security experts, the software is the first to be written in Farsi, stole info from around the Mideast. BOSTON – Security experts have uncovered an ongoing cyber espionage campaign targeting Iran and other Middle Eastern countries that they say stands out because it is the first such operation using […]

http://news.yahoo.com/obama-bracing-outspent-romney-065038242.html

Never before has an incumbent president failed to outraise a challenger, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a campaign finance watchdog. In Obama’s record-setting 2008 campaign, he made history in September by raising $150 million.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Barack Obama was the first presidential candidate to raise more than $100 million in a month and in 2008 was the first to forgo public money for his campaign. Now, he faces the very real threat of being the first president to be outspent by a challenger.

Obama, who four years ago broke just about every fundraising record for a presidential hopeful, has now been forced to look his supporters in the eye and confess he might not keep pace with Republican Mitt Romney. It’s a sobering realization for his campaign, which had imagined an unlimited budget for ads, offices and mail.

“I will be the first president in modern history to be outspent in his re-election campaign,” Obama wrote to supporters recently.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Conservatives just two years ago feared Obama would raise and spend a billion dollars in the 2012 campaign. Now, there is a real possibility that Romney and his official partners at the Republican National Committee could overtake Obama in total spending.

How did Obama go from fundraising juggernaut to money chaser in just four years?

In the early days of the 2007 primaries, he used fundraising success to puncture Hillary Rodham Clinton’s aura of inevitability. Obama surpassed Clinton’s primary fundraising in the first two quarters of that year — $25 million to Clinton’s $20 million from January to April, and $31 million to Clinton’s $21 million in the three months that followed.

The numbers shocked observers and inspired supporters to give even more to the fresh-faced, first-term senator from Illinois. But now that magic seems elusive.

“They bought into hope and change and they’re not getting it. There’s some buyers’ remorse,” said Greg Mueller, a Republican strategist who is a veteran of Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaigns.

Then, the potential was so great that Obama became the first modern candidate to bypass the public financing available to presidential candidates, and the spending limits that come with it, since the system was created in 1976 in the wake of the Watergate scandal.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303754904577530720384291742.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

Leave it to a small, little-known agency to prove just how out of control the United Nations can get.We learned last month that the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which oversees multilateral treaties involving patents, trademarks and copyrights, has been delivering computer hardware and “technical assistance” to none other than Iran and North Korea. The U.N. body’s actions are in blatant disregard of Security Council sanctions on Tehran and Pyongyang, prompting House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen to call last week for freezing U.S. contributions to the organization.

WIPO says it is merely fulfilling its responsibilities, in this case by improving the capabilities of Iranian and North Korean intellectual-property agencies. Translated: U.N. bureaucrats believed (or pretended to believe) that Pyongyang and Tehran wanted computer networks to beef up their patent offices, surely real beehives of activity. Whistleblowers who revealed the transgressions by going public with what they knew now face reprisals that could imperil their jobs.