RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2012/03/11/the-real-entitlement-mentality/

As regular readers know, I admire the headlines Matt Drudge chooses for the articles he links to on the Drudge Report. He is especially cunning, I think, in the way he juxtaposes headlines [1]:

* Michelle Obama Cites “Remarkable Progress” On Economy…

* AMERICAN AIRLINES to cut 13,000 jobs…

* NYC goes on hiring spree — for people to work its welfare offices…

Nice, eh?

I was disappointed, though, with today’s featured headline:

SHOCK POLL: ROMNEY 48% OBAMA 43% [2]

The link is to a Rasmussen poll, and the implication, I believe, is that readers will be shocked at the news that Mitt Romney is ahead. (In fact, Rasmussen reports that Rick Santorum also leads Obama, though he trails Romney.)

What is really shocking, though, is that the difference is so small. By any rational metric, Obama has presided over a national disaster

http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2012/03/11/judge-learned-hand-on-communism-and-islam-in-the-dennis-case/
Judge Learned Hand on Communism and Islam in the Dennis Case
Judge Billings Learned Hand (1872-1961) was a US judge and judicial philosopher. Hand served on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and subsequently the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Judge Hand has the distinction of having been quoted more often than any other lower-court judge by legal scholars and the Supreme Court of the United States.
Even my good friend and colleague Andrew C. McCarthy [2], a perspicacious, erudite legal scholar, who is utterly fearless in combating the threat of jihadism, was apparently unaware of Judge Hand’s clear-eyed, direct analogy between ancient Islamic and modern Communist totalitarianism, stated plainly in the 1950 decision, United States v. Dennis, I83 F.2d 20I, 2I3 (2d Cir. 1950) [3].
McCarthy, in his sound debunking of the legal casuistry employed to defend jihad terrorists, ostensibly under their first amendment rights (“Free Speech for Terrorists?,” February 28, 2005 Commentary Magazine [4]), noted,
Learned Hand, soberly considering the Communist threat, found it cold comfort that violent insurrection might await a moment when “success seems possible.”
But McCarthy then added this observation [4]:
And Hand did not figure on militant Islam.

http://www.cjnews.com/canada/st-denis-merchants-hurt-anti-israel-picketing St. Denis merchants hurt by anti-Israel picketing Chaussures Naot, which sells Israeli-made shoes, is the prime target of an Israel boycott campaign on Montreal’s St. Denis Street. MONTREAL — After almost 18 months of regular anti-Israeli demonstrations on their block, some shopkeepers on Montreal’s St. Denis Street say their business is suffering and they […]

http://www.melaniephillips.com/iran-and-britains-dislocation-from-reality

Anyone who remains blissfully unaware of what passes in Britain for debate about Iran might like to listen here to Wednesday evening’s edition of BBC Radio Four’s The Moral Maze, on which I am a regular panellist.

The show – whose somewhat misunderstood purpose is not so much to discuss an issue in the round as test individual arguments to destruction – featured two particularly illuminating contributions by Professor Michael Clarke, Director-General of the prestigious Royal United Services Institute, and Dr David Rodin, Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict, University of Oxford.

Prof Clarke, who by virtue of his position is one of Britain’s top military analysts, blithely asserted that Iran would not pass the nuclear threshold for another three to four years. On what evidential basis does he put this point so much further down the line than US or Israeli estimates? And anyway, the real point about the dilemma of whether or when to attack Iran is surely not when it might go nuclear, but at what point it becomes impossible to stop it from going nuclear.

Obama Caught On Video — on The Glazov Gang
by Jamie Glazov
Hollywood star Jim Tooey squares off with playwright Sonja Schmidt and conservative comedian Evan Sayet.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/03/12/obama-caught-on-video-on-the-glazov-gang/

http://www.israpundit.com/archives/44235 The Death of Oslo and the Rebirth of Jordan-is-Palestine  The “Jordan-is-Palestine” option for resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict is an idea that, despite history and logic, was beaten into silence by Israel’s enemies and detractors. Critics denounced the concept as preposterous, reactionary and counterproductive. And yet, the idea has been resurrected from within Jordan itself. […]

http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/archives/19329-New-Pro-Palestinian-Chutzpah-Tactic-To-Silence-Pro-Israel-Professors.html
New Pro-Palestinian Chutzpah Tactic To Silence Pro-Israel Professors

In blatant chutzpah, if the pro-Palestinians at UCSD will allow a Yiddish term, they have launched a specious campaign to claim they were harassed and insulted by their opponents. This false claim is in order to step up their own fear, slander and harassment that silences students and faculty at UCSD and other campuses from defending Israel.
These false charges are a test experiment to use elsewhere to counter the documented charges of harassment and violence by pro-Palestinian students at other campuses that have been deemed serious enough to be taken up by the federal government under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, and for which ten students were convicted for their acts at U of C Irvine.

http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2932/pro-palestinian-bias-europe-foreign-policy

“We gave the Palestinians money to help the poor, but they spend it on hate education.” — Andrew Percy, M.P.

It does not often happen that a cabinet minister loses his temper and starts scolding a parliamentarian of his own party. Last week, however, William Hague, the normally even-tempered British Foreign Secretary and one of the most influential politicians of the governing Conservative Party, lost his cool in a heated discussion with thirty MPs belonging to the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI). The MPs accused Haig of being part of a “bigoted” Foreign Office plot against Israel.

“The Foreign Office is not pro-Palestinian. I’ve never heard such claptrap,” an angry Haig snapped at Douglas Carswell MP when the latter told Haig that he is “under the thumb” of “pro-Arabist” diplomats in the Foreign Office. “The Foreign Office displays a kind of bigotry towards Israel,” Carswell said. “The whole idea of self-determination in the Middle East is anathema to some Foreign Office people. It is anti-Israel just as it is pro-EU.”

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/980/hitler_or_not_the_nazi_comparison_is_real

Hitler or not, the Nazi comparison is real

When the Hitler analogy is lodged against Jew-hating dictatorships, publicly hanging gays and stoning women to death, commentators denounce not the regime, but the comparison.Among the overused tropes of contemporary political discourse, few are as resilient as the Hitler analogy. Both liberals and conservatives indulge in this rhetorical practice – including politicians, commentators, celebrities, and academics.

To cite just a few from the superabundance of examples:

– Colorado Prof. Ward Churchill calling victims – not perpetrators – of the 9/11 attacks on New York’s Twin Towers “little Eichmanns,” accusing them of moral complicity in alleged U.S. military atrocities.

– Left-wing entertainer Linda Ronstadt calling the Bush administration a “new bunch of Hitlers” during the 2004 Presidential campaign.

– Republican Senator Rick Santorum comparing Democratic opponents of President Bush’s judicial nominees to “Adolf Hitler in 1942 saying, ‘I’m in Paris . . . How dare you bomb my city? It’s mine.’”

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/972/the_high_priests_of_global_warming_have_lost_their_prestige_and_the_realists_are_winning_the_debate

The high priests of global warming have lost their prestige. They’re still chanting the same old mantras. But no one’s listening, no one cares.

Something extraordinary is happening in the great Climate Wars. I had a taste of it just the other day on an LBC talk show. The producer had only booked me in for a ten-minute slot, in case the listeners weren’t interested in my boring new book about that tediously hackneyed subject Man Made Global Warming. But the switchboards were jammed and the station ended up keeping me in for a full hour to reply to all the calls.

There was one big problem though: “We can hardly find ANYONE who disagrees with you,” whispered the show’s host, Julia Hartley-Brewer. This was true. By the end, things had got so desperate that I found myself accidentally picking fights with callers who were on my side. An easy mistake to make for someone on my (sceptical) side of the debate: we card-carrying Satanic “deniers” are so used to being vilified at every turn it really feels kind of weird suddenly to be in tune with the popular mood.