RUTHFULLY YOURS

1. While on my weekends back home, I wrote two articles for Israel Hayom.
On Iran: http://tinyurl.com/7qyx4ca
On the GOP race: http://tinyurl.com/6wetzbe

2. Andrew Ferguson alone makes the Weekly Standard worth reading. With a Bill Clinton revival in full swing, Ferguson reminds us of the parts of the story left untold in the new “documentar”y on Clinton on PBS and some new hagiographies in various magazines, such as Esquire:
The Big Creep: http://tinyurl.com/6quw4rv

3. Jay Cost on the two faces of the Democratic Party- the social justice side and the payoffs side.
http://tinyurl.com/6tgha77

4. Warren Buffet talks the fairness talk all the way to the bank. As the oracle of Omaha’s returns in recent years have gravitated towards the S & P mean, he has relied to an increasing extent on favorable policy from Washington to boost returns.
http://tinyurl.com/6tgha77

5. Opponents of military action against Iran’s nuclear program, have agued that such an effort would require a many weeks air campaign to have any real effect, and would create grave strategic risks.
That may not be the case:
Spengler: http://tinyurl.com/78wk5b9
Luttwak: http://tinyurl.com/7tejkzh

6.The duplicity of Professor Jon Gruber at MIT is one reason why I do not give any money to this school I attended. Of course given the size of their endowment, they do not need my money. I wonder why any sane alum would give to any of the Ivy League schools, or other well endowed elite institutions, unless it is to win favor among the admissions committees for future legacies. Gruber is one of the architects and author of the two thousand plus pages of Obamacare, as a well paid consultant to HHS. Now he tells some states that private insurance premiums will skyrocket after the bill is fully in force in 2014, by 30% or more. . But Gruber assured us while the bill was being debated, that this was not the case. But now he has some new paying clients and the story has changed. .
http://tinyurl.com/7h94on8

End the imperialist colonialist occupation !! Liberation now!!

Now that the heads of Iran are openly calling for Israel’s
annihilation, and Iran’s “president” suggests that Europe create a
Zionist state some place inside Germany or maybe in Alaska, I think we
should all promote a REAL solution to the problems of the Middle East
and end the illegal occupation. I refer of course to the illegal
Iranian occupation of lands that properly belong to the Mongols.

Meaning all of Iran.

True, Iran was conquered or liberated from the Persians by the Mongols
militarily starting in 1219. Iran then became a legitimate part of the
Mongol homeland. Tamerlane, who was part Mongol, also ran the place.
All in all, the Mongol liberation of Persia lasted for two and a half
centuries, not much different from the length of the period of Arab
rule of “Palestine,” after which Iran was “lost” to Turkic tribes. I
guess that means the Turks also have a legitimate claim to a homeland
there!

http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2012/02/harvard-jew-haters-motherhood.php

This morning I received an e-mail alert from CAMERA that my alma mater, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government is hosting a two-day conference which essentially begins with the proposition that Israel has no right to exist. This isn’t surprising. After all, the Kennedy School is home to my old professor Steve Walt. No one there batted a lash when he co-published his updated version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with University of Chicago’s John Mearshimer.

Not only did Walt suffer no recrimination from his colleagues at Harvard when he first emerged a professional Jew basher. He suffered no recrimination when he used the controversy surrounding his book into a means of transforming himself into a celebrity Israel basher.

As I wrote in my recent column about mainstreaming Jew hatred, Walt and Mearshimer’s book has enabled anti-Semites to emerge from under the rocks where they had been hiding and proudly announce that it is reasonable to discriminate against the Jewish people and side either actively or passively with those like the Iranian regime and the Sunni jihadists from Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood who openly call for the annihilation of the Jewish state and the Jewish people.

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/02/foreign_aid_and_american_priorities.html

It is a struggle to decide who, if anyone, has a claim to US foreign aid dollars. It is, after all, money earned by American taxpayers and sent to people who didn’t earn it, at least not in the traditional sense. Should it be used to encourage countries to accept American requirements — or to reward countries that have done so? Should it be only for people who like Americans? That would be a small group. James Lindsay, senior vice president of he Council on Foreign Relations, reminds us, “Gratitude isn’t the primary objective of U.S. foreign aid… Washington doles out aid primarily based on calculations about how to advance U.S. strategic interests.”

If the minimal condition is that American money should advance American interests, it is worth considering money spent on the Palestinian Authority and on Egypt, as well as in support of what remains of the “Arab Spring.”

Palestinians

The US interest is in a negotiated “two-state solution” resulting in a secure Israel and a democratic Palestine. How are the Palestinians doing? Under the leadership of President (though his term expired in 2009) Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority

Hatred versus Occupation By Yonatan Silverman

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/02/hatred_versus_occupation.html

NICE TRY MR. SILVERMAN….BUT THE ARABS DID NOT BETRAY OSLO…..OSLO WAS A BETRAYAL OF ISRAEL BY ISRAEL AND LED TO THE LONGEST SPREE OF TERRORISM AGAINST INNOCENT CIVILIANS IN TEL-AVIV, NETANYA, HAIFA, JERUSALEM…BECAUSE IT WAS A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL….ARAFAT…..AND SHOWED ISRAEL WITH A WEAK HAND READY TO RELINQUISH ITS SAFETY AND LEGACY….RSK

The most rudimentary analysis of the Palestinian Authority’s position on Israel leads to only one conclusion — the most influential element in the Palestinian Authority attitude toward Israel and to the Jewish people is blind hatred. Hatred mobilizes the Palestinians to close the door to peace and to coexistence with Israel.

It was different under the 1993 Oslo Accords. The Oslo Accords came about in response to mutual understanding of political realities and political aspirations, and they put hatred aside. But the Palestinians have betrayed Oslo.

Not recognizing Israel as the Jewish state is only the place where the problem and its manifestations begin. Palestinian media is flooded with anti-Israel and anti-Jewish incitement.

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/02/who_truly_deserves_a_state_the_kurds_or_the_palestinians.html There are over twenty Arab states throughout the Middle East and North Africa, but the world demands, in a chorus of barely disguised animosity towards Israel, that yet another Arab state be created within the mere forty miles separating the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan. Israel, a territory no larger than the tiny […]

The Iranian Nuclear Menace: Al Beeb Calls In The Camel Corps

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

Alas! It’s so typical of the BBC that as soon as Foreign Secretary William Hague warns that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to a Cold War in the Middle East even worse than the one which existed between the USSR and the Western powers, it calls in the nay-sayers to undermine the argument.

True, an alternate viewpoint provides the balanced reportage that Al Beeb is obligated by its Charter to provide yet conspicuously lacks, especially regarding the Middle East. But to quote not one but two pundits (in addition to politicians) who contradict Hague weights the scales well away from equilibrium and smacks of deliberate propagandising.

Indeed, Al Beeb has turned for comment to a seemingly archetypal FCO Arabist, former Ambassador to Iran Sir Richard Dalton, who retired from the Diplomatic Service in 2006 and became an associate of Chatham House, specialising in the Middle East and North Africa.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

The old totalitarian paradigm was guns or butter. The Soviet Union could provide its people with the basic food groups or it could run a military race to conquer as much of the world as possible. As a totalitarian ideology, it naturally chose the latter.
The modern incarnation of the hammer and sickle, the liberals who took it slow, working from within the system instead of seizing the reins and executing anyone who got in the way, isn’t big on guns. The Clinton and Obama administrations both inflicted massive cuts on the military because it was extraneous to their domestic goals. They didn’t want guns, but they didn’t want butter either. They wanted a third thing.

The Obama Administration is about as interested in creating jobs as the denizens of the Kremlin were in making sure that every Russian family had plenty of milk and butter on the table. Totalitarian ideologies don’t care about individual welfare and they certainly are not interested in individual empowerment. An improved economy would weaken the left, it would undermine its central program of promoting fear and dependence on a social safety net and a rights infrastructure administered by them.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1391

Though Israel always gets caught in the crossfire no matter what the battle, I admit to experiencing bouts of schadenfreude whenever its enemies engage in internecine warfare. I am not, for a change, referring to Fatah-Hamas struggles or Arab Spring strife — though they certainly apply on occasion. Far more enjoyable, I find, is when the hard Left in the West gets entangled in imbroglios born of its own relentless and tiresome idiocies.

A recent case in point is an interview with Norman Finkelstein, conducted by Frank Barat at Imperial College London on Feb. 9. The two rabidly anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian radicals could have been, and indeed were, expected to have a more-than-friendly one-on-one chat, particularly since the topic of “debate” was the boycott/divestment/sanctions (BDS) campaign led by the Palestinian Solidarity Movement.

After all, Barat, like Finkelstein, is a great admirer of Noam Chomsky. Barat, like Finkelstein, considers Israel to be an abomination. And Barat, like Finkelstein, thinks Hamas and Hezbollah have every right to target Israelis with missiles and bombs in “retaliation” for having been targeted first, if not for merely breathing the same air as the rest of the world since 1948.

Police accuse Occupy protesters of targeting elderly. Squatters arrested at homes owned by elderly, infirmed By Jim Redden http://portlandtribune.com/news/story.php?story_id=132918808448956400 Police are accusing Occupy Portland protesters of exploiting the elderly by squatting in their houses. According to police, at 11 a.m. on Feb. 9, officers assigned to the North Precinct Neighborhood Response Team , with the […]