RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/may/10/documents-withheld-in-gsa-scandal/print/

The watchdog agency for the General Services Administration is declining to release hundreds of thousands of documents about travel fraud investigations, saying the disclosure could interfere with ongoing law enforcement proceedings.

The Washington Times had filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking copies of final reports for all travel fraud probes since 2007, as well as information about a highly publicized audit of lavish spending for a GSA conference in Las Vegas.

In a letter explaining the decision to withhold many of the records, an attorney for the Office of the Inspector General for the GSA noted that “over [800,000] documents are being withheld.” The letter said releasing the records could “interfere with ongoing enforcement proceedings.”

Since the conference audit was already released, the decision to keep the records from public view provides further evidence that criminal charges could come next in the 2010 GSA conference scandal.

Inspector General Brian Miller already has recommended a criminal probe as accusations of bribery and kickbacks emerged following his report on the conference. And the GSA official who planned the conference, Jeffrey Neely, invoked his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination at a congressional hearing last month.

Issued last month, the inspector general’s report on the more than $800,000 Western Region Conference sparked bipartisan outrage on Capitol Hill and the ouster of GSA’s top official, Martha Johnson.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1871 The rise of rape Sexual abuse of women, in one form or another, appears to be on the rise in Israel. As is always the case with crimes of this nature, it is difficult to tell whether the phenomenon is actually increasing, or whether it is being taken more seriously than before and therefore […]

http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/index.html#Attacks List of Islamic Terror Attacks For the Past 30 Days Date Country City Killed Injured Description 2012.05.10 Afghanistan Paktika 4 5 Four others are left dead when six Shahid suicide bombers attack a government building. 2012.05.10 Syria Damascus 55 372 Two Religion of Peace suicide bombers detonate during the morning rush hour, sending at […]

http://times247.com/

Evidence of al Qaeda in Syria mounts
Ynet
Friday, May 11, 2012
News
Evidence of al Qaeda in Syria mounts
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told reporters that U.S. intelligence indicates “an al-Qaeda presence in Syria,” but said the extent of its activity was unclear. “Frankly we need to continue to do everything we can to determine what kind of influence they’re trying to exert there,” Panetta said. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1uYbeuasu
Astronauts ask NASA to cool it on warming
National Review Online
Friday, May 11, 2012
News
Astronauts ask NASA to cool it on warming
Veterans of America’s space program are among the 49 retired NASA employees who recently asked the agency to halt what they consider its unscientific advocacy of climate alarmism. Read more…
Pirates seize oil tanker off Oman coast
BBC
Friday, May 11, 2012
News
Pirates seize oil tanker off Oman coast
A Greek-owned oil tanker has been hijacked by pirates in the Arabian Sea. About 200 people are currently thought to be held as hostages on vessels seized by the pirates. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz1uYbnvtRG

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/11/egyptian-actress-under-fire-for-playing-mother-teresa/
WHO IS HANAN TORK?
http://213.158.162.45/~egyptian/index.php?action=news&id=17696&title=%E2%80%98Let’s%20build%20Egypt%E2%80%99%20launched%20in%20US
‘Let’s build Egypt’ launched in US
The Egyptian Gazette Online
Saturday, April 30, 2011 04:16:13 PM
WASHINGTON – Egypt’s Ambassador in the US Sameh Shokri took part in the ‘Let’s build Egypt’ campaign on Friday night in Virginia, with the participation of Goodwill Ambassador Egyptian actress Hanan Tork, her compatriot, preacher Moustafa Hosni, and some American and Egyptian VIPs, the official Middle East News Agency (MENA) reports.

Hanan Tork, a popular actress in the Middle East of Egyptian origins, who recently took to the hijab and retired from acting, has returned to the silver screen—to much criticism and threats from the same Muslims who formerly praised her for donning the veil. According to Al Sawt, the actress is under “vicious attack” for accepting to play the role of Mother Teresa, the Catholic nun who, for 45 years, dedicated her life to the poor, sick, orphaned, and dying.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/11/blaming-obamas-problems-on-bush-on-the-glazov-gang-1/

Tommi Trudeau, Rob Nelson and Nonie Darwish joined The Glazov Gang this week and fought it out over the silence about Islam in our society. Below are all three parts of a three-part-series. Part I deals with The Fate of a Chinese Dissident, Part II involves the debate over whether Obama can legitimately blame his problems on Bush, and Part III focuses on how criticizing Islam is increasingly becoming forbidden.

hat Lt. Col. Shalom Eisner Really Showed Us About Israel

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/11/what-lt-col-shalom-eisner-really-showed-us-about-israel/

The media firestorm over Israeli Lt. Col. Shalom Eisner never seems to end. It all started when video was posted of Eisner violently striking a protester with his rifle, sparking outrage throughout the world. Immediately, the video was shown as proof of Israeli brutality. But is this really a fair depiction?

Eisner was immediately condemned by Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff. The Israeli media relentlessly covered the incident. He was suspended, has been banned from holding command posts for two years, was reassigned to a training school and is still under investigation. It is very possible that he will face further punishment.

That is the real story here. Israel’s furious reaction to the video debunks what its enemies claim it proves. If the Israelis were so inhumane, this wouldn’t be such a big story. There is no other country in the Middle East that would react the same way if roles were reversed. Ironically, the controversy is showing what is so good about Israel, even if no one notices.

Some context is also needed here. A group of about 250 anti-Israel activists were stopped as they tried to get on Highway 90, as the IDF requires advance notice of such crossings as a security precaution. Keep in mind, the group was part of the International Solidarity Movement, a group that says it is non-violent but supports “the Palestinian right to resist Israeli violence and occupation via legitimate armed struggles.” In other words, ISM supports violence.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/time-to-terminate-big-wind-subsidies

Unprecedented! As bills to extend seemingly perpetual wind energy subsidies were again introduced by industry lobbyists late last year, taxpayers finally decided they’d had enough.

Informed and inspired by a loose but growing national coalition of groups opposed to more giveaways with no scientifically proven net benefits, thousands of citizens called their senators and representatives – and rounded up enough Nay votes to run four different bills aground. For once, democracy worked.

A shocked American Wind Energy Association and its allies began even more aggressive recruiting of well-connected Democrat and Republican political operatives and cosponsors – and introducing more proposals like HR 3307 to extend the Production Tax Credit (PTC). Parallel efforts were launched in state legislatures, to maintain mandates, subsidies, feed-in tariffs, renewable energy credits, and other “temporary” ratepayer and taxpayer obligations.

This “emerging industry” is “vitally important” to our energy future, supporters insisted. It provides “clean energy” and “over 37,000” jobs that “states can’t afford to lose.” It helps prevent global warming.

None of these sales pitches holds up under objective scrutiny, and their growing awareness of this basic reality has finally made many in Congress inclined to eliminate this wasteful spending on wind power.

Entitlement advocates are petrified at that possibility. Crony corporatist lobbyists and politicians have built a small army to take on beleaguered taxpayers, rate payers and business owners who say America can no longer afford to spend more borrowed money, to prop up energy policies that drive up electricity costs, damage the environment, and primarily benefit foreign conglomerates and a privileged few.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-lefts-seven-tragic-terror-lies

If they did not put our troops, our citizens and our country at risk, the Left’s fantastic lies about terror and terrorists would be hilarious. The Left’s self-righteous nonsense in this sphere has no grounding in empirical or historical reality, but, then, reality has long been a greater threat to the Left than Islamist fanatics (the last thing any Leftie wants to do is to face the vast human wastage generated by the addictive, enervating and morally debilitating hook-the-poor social programs of the last five decades).

So, when it comes to addressing the real and deadly terrorist threat, the American left responds in the best Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Chavista and community-organizer traditions: When the facts aren’t palatable, make up new “facts.” And political correctness has worked its poisonous tentacles so deeply into the American body politic that not even our generals challenge the ludicrous claims the Left hurls at us in its neo-Bolshevik bullying mode of shouting down every last unwelcome truth.

Of course, the left’s lies are countless, but the hard left has mastered the art of reducing the most complex human challenges to bumper-sticker slogans as nonsensical as they are reassuring to the herd (the wildly counter-factual prize probably goes to a leftie favorite, “War never changes anything.” On the contrary, war has always changed a great deal, which is why we have wars). These happy-face mantras never rise above intellectual flatulence, but the massed sheep on the Left enjoy the aroma (“Yes, we can!”).

The problem, of course, is that many of our national leaders have been brainwashed with the same slogans. The Left has mastered another technique dictators forged long ago: Repeat a lie often enough and it will be taken as truth. And, of course, our media play along.

So let’s give the slogan-hucksters a brief time-out and dissect just seven of their favorite lines:

http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2012/05/09/craven-and-pusillanimous-at-the-chronicle/?print=1

The Chronicle of so-called higher education, that is.

On April 30, Naomi Schaefer Riley wrote a column for “Brainstorm,” the Chronicle’s blog, called “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations [1].” When I say that there was nothing new in Ms. Riley’s column, I do not mean to disparage it. No: it is a splendid piece, a public service, really. It performs exactly the same service as the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Everyone knows, though few have the temerity to say, that “Black Studies” is an awful confidence game: an exercise in racial grievance mongering utterly without scholarly merit. In this, I hasten to add, it resembles many other pseudo-disciplines invented since the late 1960s to provide a home for intellectually challenged but politically fermenting denizens of our universities: Women’s Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, Transgender Studies, etc. etc. Kingsley Amis once observed that much that was wrong with twentieth century academia could be summed up in the word “workshop.” “Studies” is the new “workshop.” Take a look at the “dissertations” Ms. Riley describes. They are cringe-making in their awfulness. Consider:

* “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth,” by Ruth Hayes. “It began,” Riley writes, “because she ‘noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery.’ How could we overlook the nonwhite experience in ‘natural birth literature,’ whatever the heck that is? It’s scandalous and clearly a sign that racism is alive and well in America, not to mention academia.”
* Then there is “Race for Profit: Black Housing and the Urban Crisis of the 1970s,” by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. “Ms. Taylor believes there was apparently some kind of conspiracy in the federal government’s promotion of single family homes in black neighborhoods after the unrest of the 1960s. Single family homes! The audacity! But Ms. Taylor sees that her issue is still relevant today. . . . She explains that ‘The subprime lending crisis, if it did nothing else, highlighted the profitability of racism in the housing market.’ The subprime lending crisis was about the profitability of racism? Those millions of white people who went into foreclosure were just collateral damage, I guess.”
* Riley’s pièce de la résistance is a work by La TaSha B. Levy. “Ms. Levy,” the Chronicle writes, “is interested in examining the long tradition of black Republicanism, especially the rightward ideological shift it took in the 1980s after the election of Ronald Reagan. Ms. Levy’s dissertation argues that conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, John McWhorter, and others have ‘played one of the most-significant roles in the assault on the civil-rights legacy that benefited them.’” Riley asks: “The assault on civil rights? Because they don’t favor affirmative action they are assaulting civil rights? Because they believe there are some fundamental problems in black culture that cannot be blamed on white people they are assaulting civil rights?”