RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://townhall.com/columnists/calthomas/2012/01/31/war_through_weakness

One of the memorable slogans from the Reagan administration was “peace through strength.” Reagan believed a strong defense was a safeguard against enemy attacks and the best hope of victory should America go to war.

President Obama is taking the opposite approach. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently announced cuts in defense spending of $487 billion over the next 10 years. Supposedly, these cuts will reduce the federal deficit, but Congress always finds new ways to spend money, so I am not optimistic.

The cuts were announced before critical questions were asked: What is America’s role in the world in the 21st century? Where does the military fit into that role? The administration thinks a sleeker, more mobile military — like SEAL Team Six, which has had recent successes taking out Osama bin Laden and rescuing hostages from Somali pirates — is the way to go, but even the highly-trained SEALs can’t confront, say, a nuclear threat from Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or China’s increasing military power. The administration says it will preserve its manpower and weapons systems in the Middle East and shift resources to Asia.

Ships and planes take time to build. If America is not building them to ward off present and future threats, someone else — like the Chinese — will. The world does not remain stagnant and threats are not always obvious.

http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/johnransom/2012/01/31/camp_mittens_duplicity_on_allen_west_worse_than_conspiracy_its_a_habit/print
Camp Mittens Duplicity on Allen West Worse than Conspiracy: It’s a Habit
All the crying going on from Camp Mittens denying that Romney set out to screw Congressman Allen West out of his seat in Palm Beach County is just the usual exaggerated outrage that we should be accustomed to from Mitt and Company when they’ve been caught in the act.

Remember these are the same guys who are saying that Mitt’s the most electable candidate, but if we question Mitt’s electability we’ll only have ourselves to blame if Mitt doesn’t get elected.

Or something like that.

It’s hard to keep up with the rhetoric when a campaign has one set of lies to fool the public, one set of lies to fool reporters and one set of lies to fool themselves, in a paraphrase of war-time British Prime Minister David Lloyd George.

“I must have missed something in today’s column” wrote one rabid Romney fan, deliberately misreading criticism of Romney, “what office in the Florida legislature does Mitt Romney hold?”

None, of course

And no one is saying that Mitt Romney, much less his campaign, set out specifically to hurt Colonel West.

What we are saying, and what has been acknowledged to have some level of veracity, is that people in the Florida GOP who represent Mitt set out to hurt West during the redistricting process. They did it because they are essentially hostile to the Tea Party element. So get used to it because these are the people who Mitt picked to surround himself with.

http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2012/01/31/the_florida_smear_campaign/print

The Republican establishment is pulling out all the stops to try to keep Newt Gingrich from becoming the party’s nominee for President of the United States — and some are not letting the facts get in their way.

Among the claims going out through the mass media in Florida, on the eve of that state’s primary election, is that Newt Gingrich “resigned in disgrace” as Speaker of the House of Representatives, as a result of unethical conduct involving the diversion of tax-exempt money. Mitt Romney is calling on Gingrich to release “all of the records” from the House of Representatives investigation.

But the Wall Street Journal of January 28, 2012 reported that these records — 1,280 pages of them — are already publicly available on-line. Although Speaker Gingrich decided not to take on the task of fighting the charge from his political enemies in 1997, the Internal Revenue Service conducted its own investigation which, two years later, exonerated Gingrich from the charges. His resignation was not due to those charges and occurred much later.

Do the Romney camp and the Republican establishment not know this, a dozen years later? Or are they far less concerned with whether the charges will stand up than they are about smearing Gingrich on the eve of the Florida primaries?

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2019/General-Boykin-and-the-War-for-Muslim-Outreach-Redux.aspx Eight years and three months ago, I wrote a column inspired by the furor over statements by General William Boykin attesting to the religious dimension of the so-called war on terror. The thought that there might be a religious dimension to Islamic terrorism is, absurdly and disastrously,  the Big No-No-No of our age (as […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

When Elizabeth Warren went on MSNBC to deny that she was a member of the 1 percent despite her nearly 15 million dollar net worth, the denial had a cultural element to it. Despite being a millionaire, Warren did not see herself as “wealthy”.
The current debate over the 1 percent and the 99 percent is notable mainly for the shifting boundaries that are not based on economics, but on identity. For all its ‘Power to the People’ antics American liberalism is not a movement of struggling people, there is a reason why the word limousine so often comes before liberal. Its roots lie in an upper class New England strata that relentlessly fought against Southern Baptists and working class Catholic immigrants. Those roots define modern day liberals much more so than the Jacksonian populism that they occasionally try to imitate.

The American liberal is not a populist, he is still a New England preacher, but without a religion to preach. He has a great faith in the virtues of an ordered moral society, even if that ordered moral society would have been completely incomprehensible and unacceptable to his forebears. It is a society based on the virtues of tolerance and the rule of the enlightened.

The inflow of the European left has brought in a strain of power to the people populism, but that has not made the American liberal take seriously the notion that the people whose rights he defends are his intellectual or social equals, no more than the 19th century New York Republicans patting African-Americans on the head while stomping on the Irish viewed either group as equals.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/update-cair-applauds-west-point-prayer-breakfast-withdrawal-of-general-critical-of-islam/
Faith Update: CAIR Applauds West Point Prayer Breakfast Withdrawal of General Critical of Islam

A retired U.S. lieutenant general who made comments some consider disparaging to Islam withdrew Monday from speaking at a West Point prayer breakfast after a progressive veterans’ advocacy group — VoteVets.org — along with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) asked the Army chief of staff to rescind the invitation.

Last week The Blaze reported VoteVets.org told Gen. Raymond Odierno in a letter that allowing retired Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin to speak at West Point next week would be anathema to Army values and disrespectful to Muslim cadets.

According to the Associate Press, late Monday afternoon, West Point issued a statement saying Boykin had decided to withdraw speaking at the Feb. 8 event and that another speaker would take his place.

For its part, CAIR is celebrating the outcome.

“We welcome Mr. Boykin’s withdrawal from this event and hope that the speaker who replaces him will offer cadets a spiritual message that promotes tolerance and mutual understanding,” CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad said in a press release.

Awad added that CAIR has been challenging Boykin’s “un-American bigotry” for a number of years.

From The Blaze’s earlier report:

Retired Lt. Gen. William Boykin was the Pentagon’s senior military intelligence official until 2004, when he was reprimanded for remarks comparing the war against radical Islam to a Christian struggle against Satan and for saying Muslims worship idols and not “a real God,” according to the Washington Post. He has also said he believes no mosques should be built in America and has called Islam “a totalitarian way of life.”

Boykin, an ordained minister who speaks around the country, was scheduled to be the keynote speaker at a West Point prayer breakfast.

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2012/1/31/main-feature/1/bloomsburys-rabbi/e

A translator stands between two languages and between the two worlds that the languages represent. If he does his job well, he may belong in neither place. Such was the fate of Samuel Koteliansky, an emigré Russian Jew in London, who translated Chekhov, befriended D.H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield, and circulated on the fringes of the Bloomsbury group. These activities, portrayed by Galya Diment in her new biography of Koteliansky, A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury, did not add up to much in the way of literary accomplishment. But Koteliansky—Kot, his English friends called him—saw a great deal of the literary lions whose accomplishments and personal lives burnt on through the entire 20th century.

Bloomsbury Recalled Quentin Bell, Columbia University Press. Bell’s memoir of his parents and their friends—Woolf, Forster, Strachey—who made up the dazzling, dated Bloomsbury group. SAVE

D.H. Lawrence and Kangaroo George Simmers, Great War Fiction. In Lawrence’s World War I novel, the “really ugly” character based on Koteliansky was a minor player, much like Kot in Bloomsbury.

The Myth of Starving Americans According to the Census Bureau, 96% of parents classified as poor said their children were never hungry.
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970204573704577185553258224344-lMyQjAxMTAyMDMwMDEzNDAyWj.html?mod=wsj_share_email
We take it as a given that hunger stalks America. We hear it in the news, we see a myriad of government and private organizations set up to feed the hungry. And we are often reminded of the greatest of all ironies—in the richest nation on earth, there are still those without enough to eat. But are these media portrayals of hunger in America accurate?

A hungry child is the ultimate third rail in the entitlement debate. Few candidates—Democrat, Republican or independent—would even question conventional wisdom on this particular issue because that would make them look indifferent to hungry children and that, of course, is political death.

The U.S. government spends close to $1 trillion a year providing cash, food, housing, medical care and services to poor and near-poor people. Of that figure, about $111 billion is spent on food in federal and state programs. Yet despite this spending, stories of rampant hunger persist. With all that money going out, how is that possible?

In a report published last September by the Heritage Foundation, researchers Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield asked that very question. They found that, according to Census Bureau data for 2009 (the most recent year statistics available), of the almost 50 million Americans classified as poor, 96% of the parents said their children were never hungry. Eighty-three percent of poor families reported having enough food to eat, and 82% of poor adults said they were never hungry at any time in 2009 due to a lack of food or money.

One could deduce that the reason the vast percentage of America’s poor say they are never hungry is precisely because of federal and state assistance, but the government offers no way of testing whether this is true or false.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203806504577179303330474134.html
As the Ten Commandments instruct, envy is corrosive to the individual and to those societies that embrace it.
Who would have expected that in a Republican primary campaign the single biggest complaint among candidates would be that the front-runner has taken capitalism too far? As if his success and achievement were evidence of something unethical and immoral? President Obama and other redistributionists must be rejoicing that their assumptions about rugged capitalism and the 1% have been given such legitimacy.

More than any other nation, the United States was founded on broad themes of morality rooted in a specific religious perspective. We call this the Judeo-Christian ethos, and within it resides a ringing endorsement of capitalism as a moral endeavor.

Regarding mankind, no theme is more salient in the Bible than the morality of personal responsibility, for it is through this that man cultivates the inner development leading to his own growth, good citizenship and happiness. The entitlement/welfare state is a paradigm that undermines that noble goal.

http://www.nypost.com/f/print/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/of_films_and_fear_e8UbGROFizSTvSELdLAbBL
Last week’s controversy over the NYPD’s showing of the documentary “The Third Jihad,” which I narrated, has brought horrendous distortion of the film and my body of work against radical Islam. It seems obvious that The New York Times, and in its wake the NYPD and Mayor Bloomberg, is buying into blatant inaccuracies peddled by the Council on American-Islamic Relations — a group named in federal testimony as linked to the terrorist organization Hamas and one to which the FBI has broken off all ties.

Let’s start with the Times’ most outright error: As evidence for the charge that “The Third Jihad” paints most American Muslims as extremists, it reported that the film (that is, me, narrating it) says, “This is the true agenda of Islam in America.” In fact, it says, “This document shows the true agenda of much of Muslim leadership here in America.”

More, the film opens with the text: “This is not a film about Islam. It is about the threat of radical Islam. Only a small percentage of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims are radical.”