RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://townhall.com/columnists/calthomas/2012/02/14/losing_liberty/print

“Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?” — Thomas Jefferson

“The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government — lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.” — Patrick Henry

Liberty is always tenuous. Those who enjoy it seem to be a minority in the world. That’s why liberty must not only be preserved by those who currently benefit from it; it must also be fought for and constantly renewed for future generations, because there are always those who wish to restrict or eliminate our freedoms.

The Obama administration’s ham-fisted attempt to require that contraceptives and abortifacients be offered to employees of Catholic and other religious institutions is a serious threat to our civil liberties. Yes, federal (through EEOC oversight) and state governments already play this role and have for a time. According to the Guttmacher Institute, “Some 28 states have mandated coverage of birth control and 20 of those have some sort of exemption for religious employers.” New York and California are among the 28. But do we really want government to continue to take the place of individual conscience? Should government continue to dictate to its citizens how to order and conduct their lives?

http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2012/02/14/the_progressive_legacy/print

http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2012/02/14/the_progressive_legacy_part_ii

http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2012/02/14/the_progressive_legacy_part_iii/print

Although Barack Obama is the first black President of the United States, he is by no means unique, except for his complexion. He follows in the footsteps of other presidents with a similar vision, the vision at the heart of the Progressive movement that flourished a hundred years ago.

Many of the trends, problems and disasters of our time are a legacy of that era. We can only imagine how many future generations will be paying the price — and not just in money — for the bright ideas and clever rhetoric of our current administration.

The two giants of the Progressive era — Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson — clashed a century ago, in the three-way election of 1912. With the Republican vote split between William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt’s newly created Progressive Party, Woodrow Wilson was elected president, so that the Democrats’ version of Progressivism became dominant for eight years.

What Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had in common, and what attracts some of today’s Republicans and

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=257672 Israel’s position on Kosovo is a matter of vital national interest on which no government should ever compromise. February 17 marks the fourth anniversary of Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia. The UDI has been recognized since by the United States and its key NATO partners, as well as 80-odd other countries. The […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/14/a-muslim-love-story/ William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet concludes with the words, “For never was a story of more woe, Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.” Fortunately for him, Shakespeare had never paid a visit to Pakistan where all love stories end in woe and young lovers tend to die not in overwrought murder-suicide pacts, but […]

What Obama Needs to Say to China’s Next Supremo Posted By Gordon G. Chang

http://pjmedia.com/blog/what-obama-needs-to-say-to-chinas-next-supremo/?print=1

Vice President Xi Jinping, slated to become China’s next supremo, arrives at the White House tomorrow. We have been told [1] that the Obama administration will not “sacrifice the important issues for the sake of having a comfortable visit,” yet there is a sense of pessimism in Washington about America’s ability to persuade China to move in the right direction. It seems that everyone here believes that Beijing owns the century and controls our destiny.

The truth, however, is that we have the ability to get China to do what we want. Why? Because at the moment the Chinese economy is faltering — most indicators are pointing to low single-digit growth and “hot money” is gushing out of the country — and Washington holds the key to rescuing it.

China at the moment is in trouble because, among other things, export growth, once the engine of its economic “miracle,” has been on a long downward trend. Last month, exports fell 0.5% on a year-to-year basis and 14.2% month-on-month, a performance well below consensus estimates. That’s a problem for Beijing because it is dependent on sales abroad to keep Chinese factories humming and workers employed, and the American market is extraordinarily important to them.

The general narrative is that, when the global downturn hit in 2008, Chinese exporters started selling more to other markets and became less reliant on tapped-out American consumers. The facts tell the opposite story, however. In 2008, 90.1% of China’s overall trade surplus related to sales to the United States. That already staggering figure increased to 115.7% in 2009, and 149.2% in 2010.

And last year? Last year, the figure was a simply unbelievable 190.5%. In 2011, China’s trade surplus against the United States hit $295.5 billion, easily surpassing the 2010 record of $273.1 billion.

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2029/-Prince-Talals-Fox-News-AWOL-on-Prince-Talals-Twitter-Story.aspx

Have you heard about Hazma Kashgari, the Saudi blogger who tweeted an imaginary conversation with Mohammed, drew so many (tens of thousands) angry comments from his co-religionists and co-kingdomists that he deleted his tweets, fled the country and made for New Zealand to seek asylum but was arrested in Malaysia and extradited back to Saudi A where he now faces charges on the capital crime of “blasphemy”?

Not if you watch fair and balanced Fox News, you haven’t. I have searched the site but cannot find any stories about Kashgari. (You try.)

You don’t suppose the fact that Saudi dictatorship-family-member Talal bin Alwaleed owns the largest non-Murdoch stake in Fox News (7 percent) and a new stake in Twitter (almost 4 percent) has anything to do with that, do you?

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
Racism is about many things but it isn’t about race. To understand the uses of race in American liberalism requires understanding its place in the political culture. When American liberals speak of race they aren’t speaking in the genetic sense, what they are doing is clumsily piggybacking class onto race and adding one dubious construct to another.
The placement of racial politics at the center of liberal advocacy coincided with a growing national prosperity that seemed to be on the way to making class warfare of the old kind irrelevant. Previous liberal civil rights activity had been a subset of class, but class now became a subset of race. And both were a means of liberal self-definition as the people concerned with the plight of the downtrodden.

Class warfare was not really about the poor, it was about using a permanent social problem as a means of recreating the social order and gaining permanent political power. Race is just class dressed up in the same old class warfare clothes so that there is nearly no distinction between the two. Reformers gain power by attacking the failures of the system and positioning a social problem as an open sore that must be healed. But it isn’t healing that they have in mind.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/14/terror-from-tehran/print/ Terror from Tehran Posted By P. David Hornik Terror struck—or attempted to strike—Israel in two foreign locations on Monday. In New Delhi, a passing motorcyclist apparently slapped a bomb onto the car of an Israeli diplomat. He wasn’t inside, but his wife was, and she and the driver were injured—neither of them gravely. The […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/14/hating-valentines-1/print/ [Editor’s note: This article is reprinted from our Valentine’s issue of 2010. It has been slightly edited to fit this year’s day of love.] Today, Tuesday, February 14, is Valentine’s Day, the sacred day that intimate companions mark to celebrate their love and affection for one another. If you’re thinking about making a study […]

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

When Professor Alan Dershowitz spoke to hundreds of pro-Israel supporters at the University of Pennsylvania last week, many understood him to be simply providing a broad-strokes counter-message to the anti-Israel Penn BDS (boycotts of, divestment from and sanctions against Israel) conference which began the next day on the same campus.

But while Dershowitz was there in the ostensible role of “lover of Israel because I am a liberal Democrat,” a close listening and gentle unpacking of many of his standard lines reveal more nuanced positions relating to Israel than many typically understand him to espouse. The nuances are very important, especially because they come from so committed a tribunal of the liberal left.