RUTHFULLY YOURS

Gulf leaders to discuss EU-style union
CNN
Monday, May 14, 2012
News
The leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council will hold a meeting Monday in Saudi Arabia to discuss transforming their six nations into a union, similar to the European Union

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1uqVFFJG1
The Amateur: Obama’s conceitful incompetence
American Thinker
Monday, May 14, 2012
Commentary
Edward Klein’s new book on Barack Obama, The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House, is a withering portrayal of a radical adrift, in over his head, drowning in his own incompetency. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1uqVPZWep
CURL: Team Obama panics, and it’s only May
Joseph Curl
05/13/2012
CURL: Team Obama panics, and it’s only May
It’s mushroom cloud after mushroom cloud for President Obama. We’ll never see the internal polls, but the externals are awful: Down 8 percent to challenger Mitt Romney in the latest poll, with fewer than 180 days; disillusioned college kids, independents and the white working-class fleeing in droves. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1uqVh5x8y

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/14/israel-why-land-matters-part-i/ In the years that followed the 1967 Six Day War a prevailing conventional wisdom developed among Western policy makers – especially in Washington — that simultaneously contends that a “strong and secure Israel” should have, as per UN Resolution 242, “secure and recognized boundaries” or simply “defensible borders,” yet nonetheless calls on Israel to […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/lucky-13

When Egypt’s election commission published the final list of those who will be allowed to run in the first presidential election since the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak last year, the list ended up with 13 names out of 23 that had initially applied.

Two high-profile candidates have been barred, Omar Suleiman, the former vice president and spy chief under Hosni Mubarak and Khairat al-Shater, the main nominee of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Suleiman was deemed ineligible because he had not submitted enough endorsing signatures to qualify. Shater was disqualified because he had been imprisoned and Egyptian law bans criminal convicts from running for president.

After Shater was disqualified the Muslim Brotherhood nominated their backup, Mohamed Morsi, the Chairman of the Freedom and Justice Party and former member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Guidance Bureau.

Two others of the Egyptian presidential front-runners faced off during the country’s first televised presidential debate on Thursday. The hot topics were religion, Islamic law and Israel.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/alias-marx-and-alinsky

Calling socialists liberals is as deceptive as calling goose gizzards foie gras. It fools no one but the epistemologically blinkered. The term liberal allows liberals to pose as concerned, generous and forward-thinking individuals and to act under what was once an honorable term for anyone who advocated or endorsed liberty. And as any well-read American knows, liberals do not advocate liberty. Quite the opposite.

The subject here is the devolution of the term liberal, not its evolution.

Even out-and-out communists are called liberals. President Barack Obama is called a “liberal.” The late Senator Ted Kennedy was called a “liberal.” Barney Frank is a liberal. Obama’s cabinet is largely staffed by liberals (unless outed, as self-confessed communist Van Jones was). Communism and socialism still carry a bad reputation, so everyone, including the Main Stream Media, and even well-intentioned pundits and commentators friendly to liberty, use the term liberal. The MSM, however, does it to dodge the reputation. Others use it from habit or ignorance, or because calling liberals socialists or communists in drag might open a can of worms they couldn’t handle. This is courtesy carried to a fault. Underlying the fault is a fear of the inevitable clash between those who advocate freedom, and those who do not.

Obama’s campaign slogan, “Forward,” is simply a Progressive marching order. “Forward” to what? To socialism. To communism. To a command economy and a slave state, one half governed by bureaucrats, the other half by an alliance of Islam and quivering religionists of various stripes, willing to pay jizya to Islam in order to be granted their “religious freedom.”

The Washington Post trumpeted “Forward” with no reservations or even curiosity about its Communist and Nazi origins. But then the Washington Post has been in the Saul Alinsky camp for over a generation.

One Alinsky benefactor was Wall Street investment banker Eugene Meyer, who served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1930 to 1933. Meyer and his wife Agnes co-owned The Washington Post. They used their newspaper to promote Alinsky.

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/05/the_spy_on_your_cell_phone_is_a_professional.html Every day in the United States, professional cyber-spies are stealing tremendous amounts of information. Mainly from Russia and China, these spies target computer networks and increasingly seek entryways through mobile phones. Modern mobile phones — Smartphones — are powerful, networked computers, but they lack the firewalls and safeguards typically installed on PCs. What protection […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2012/05/life-is-bomb.html?

“When the number of Muslims proliferates, so does the number of bombs; the kind that al-Asiri makes and the kind that Arafat and the House of Saud made. The kind that blow up right away and the kind that tick slowly away from generation to generation, embedding themselves into a society, undermining it, chipping away at its roots, until it is time for them to go off. But whatever kind of bombs they are, when they go off they destroy our lives and our freedoms. And when there are enough Muslims around us, then life is a bomb.”

Good news for those of you who enjoy taking your shoes off in airports. Al-Qaeda’s chief bombmaker, a cheerful fellow named Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, who sent his younger brother off on a suicide bombing mission with a bomb up his rectum, has been working on turning everything into a bomb. Cameras, printer cartridges and even pets.

The good news is that al-Asiri isn’t very good at it. His bomb did a good job of killing his brother, but not much else. The original underwear bomb worn by the Christmas bomber didn’t work out. The bad news is that with enough cannon fodder and enough attempts, sooner or later al-Asri or another college dropout will get it right. But even if he doesn’t, the force multiplier of the threat alone will do the job.

All it took was one shoe bomber to get us to take off our shoes. A failed plan to blow up airliners with liquid explosives led to the liquid ban. In the age of underwear bombs we have naked scanners. What is going to happen when the next plot involves explosives embedded in a laptop or surgically implanted in a pet?

The UN and the Terrorism Trade http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/ Compensation of victims of terrorism sounds like a good idea. But is this something the United Nations should be involved with? Fresh from the Guardian newspaper comes a dispatch headlined “UN moves to compensate the victims of terror: Report will recommend far-reaching changes to rebalance international law in […]

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/

Arianna Huffington, a liberal media prima donna and Internet purveyor of celebrity gossip, offers the silliest advice we have heard so far to the beleaguered people of Greece in today’s New York Times. Her missive sets a new high water mark for liberal stupidity, both for the author, and for the newspaper that chose to print it.

Greece should default on its foreign debt, she avers, like Argentina:

Argentina, which defaulted and restructured beginning in 2001, offers a point of comparison. The austerity crowd warned that Argentina would collapse if it stopped pegging the peso to the dollar and defaulted on its debt. There are many differences between Argentina and Greece. But Argentina’s default was followed by a few short months of economic crisis and then many years of steady economic growth — a dramatically different direction than the one Greece is now taking toward a potentially endless path of contraction that is destroying millions of lives and crippling the indomitable Greek spirit.

The trouble is that Greece is another banana republic without bananas. Argentina is a commodity exporter that won the lottery when commodity prices soared. In 2010 the country exported $68 billion worth of goods, mainly food, oil and metals, and imported $56 billion, with a trade surplus at about 3% of GDP. If you have a trade surplus, you don’t need the international lending market. You can pay cash.

Greece, by contrast, had a trade deficit in 2010 of $22 billion, equal to 7% of GDP. In 2011, both the deficit and GDP shrank, and the deficit remained at 6% of GDP. If Greece defaults, it will be unable to borrow the 6% of GDP it requires to finance this deficit, and it will be reduced to cash-and-carry trade–which means that it will cut imports by the equivalent of 6% of GDP. It appears that arithmetic wasn’t on the syllabus when Mrs. Huffington went up to Cambridge.

Her encomium begins with a sentimental portrait of her self-sacrificing mother, and concludes:

Greece, like my mother, has always been devoted above all else to its children. When the future of those children is diminished, the future — and life — of the country will be diminished, too.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/NE15Dj02.html

Zombies remind us that death is social

By Spengler

Paradoxical as it may sound, but the one thing that each us of must do alone – namely die – is the most social of all acts. That is because we construct our lives so that they will have meaning after our death, and we depend on others to sustain that meaning. What we call culture is communication between our ancestors and descendants; what we call tradition is the link to past generations which we transmit to future ones. When we cease to construct our lives this way – when we reject tradition and transgress the culture – we also know that our lives have no meaning beyond our physical existence, and we begin to feel dead.

That explains the improbable popularity of the zombie sub-genre. A search of the International Movie Data Base for productions with the term “zombie” yields just under 1,000 titles, the same number as the search term, “cowboy.” Thankfully, only one title in the IMDB data base combines the two genres.

Zombies are boring by construction, even more boring than cowboys. All zombie films, moreover, have the same plot: some untoward event turns people into zombies, and people killed by zombies also turn into zombies, until no-one is left but a tiny band of human survivors. Of all the formulaic genres, zombie films are most predictable in terms of plot and the least suggestive of new of special effects. The fact that they are especially cheap to produce does not explain why people watch them.

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/

Today marks the launch of Andrew McCarthy’s new blog “Ordered Liberty,” at PJMedia.com. The inaugural post is below. also please see the interview by Roger Simon at:

http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=174&load=6932

Roger L. Simon talks to former prosecutor, author and PJ Media columnist Andrew C. McCarthy about the illusion of Islamic democracy. McCarthy is an expert on the constitution, law enforcement and homeland security. He is working on a new book about the Arab Spring which he thinks is akin to spring fever. Hear why as McCarthy brings his insights about the Middle East to PJTV viewers.

For Edmund Burke, liberty was the distinguishing feature of the British constitution. He did not, however, mean liberty in some vacuous, hopeychangey sense. “The only liberty I mean,” he wrote, “is a liberty connected with order; and that not only exists with order and virtue, but cannot exist at all without them.”

When we hear the term “ordered liberty” nowadays, it is generally in a legal context. It has become famous — we might better say “infamous” — in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence of “incorporation”: the doctrine holding that Bill of Rights protections that restrict the federal government are also validly asserted against the state governments, through the Fourteenth Amendment. The doctrine’s premise is dubious: state sovereignty is the foundation of our form of constitutional governance; if it had been the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment to undo that basic assumption, one might have expected that incorporation would be clearly prescribed — and that it might have taken less than sixty years for the Supreme Court to start enforcing it.

That said, though, the real infamy lies in the doctrine’s inconsistency. It does not apply all of the Bill of Rights against the states; only those rights that the judges, in their wisdom, determined to be “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,” as Justice Benjamin Cardozo put it in Palko v. Connecticut (1937). That is to say, there is an arbitrariness to “ordered liberty” as judicially manufactured. Caprice, even if it piously flies under the “rule of law” banner, undermines the very idea of order.