RUTHFULLY YOURS

Can the U.S. Navy Cope with Iranian Mines? Posted By Stephen Bryen and Shoshana Bryen

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/can-the-u-s-navy-cope-with-iranian-mines/

The USS Ponce, a lightly armed and slow-moving amphibious transport dock built in 1970, is about to be upgraded by the U.S. Navy. According to The Washington Post, it will become a forward staging base aimed at Iran.

Navy specifications published in Federal Business Opportunities indicate that the refurbished ship will carry 370 personnel, plus four video teleconferencing centers each capable of holding 25 staff and an operations center of 20. It will be loaded with 10,000 gallons of extra fuel for helicopters, and store weapons and ammunition. The ship itself has only a couple of small guns — a CIWS Phalanx gun (with an old and ineffective sensor) and a machine gun — neither of which can challenge an incoming missile.

Why anyone would want to float nearly 400 people and a gazillion gallons of flammable liquid on an indefensible bucket in the world’s most hostile waterway is unclear, but three possibilities exist: staging SEAL attacks; meeting “local” surface threats; and minesweeping. The Obama administration denies the first, and the Ponce is optimal for none. Under the Navy’s specs, the Ponce is optimal only for becoming a very large fireball.

Lessons from North Korea for Israel and Iran Posted By Rick Richman

http://pjmedia.com/blog/lessons-from-north-korea-for-israel-and-iran/

THERE ARE ALSO LESSONS FOR ISRAEL FROM THE U.S. ABANDONMENT OF TAIWAN… JIMMY CARTER AFTER THE KISSINGER/NIXON CAPITULATION TO CHINA’S COMMUNIST THUGS, MOVED THE US EMBASSSY FROM TAIPEI TO PEKING…..DUCKING ALL PRINCIPLES AND COMMITMENTS TO DEMOCRATIC TAIWAN….RSK

On January 20, President Obama told [1] a New York reception that “we’re not going to tolerate a nuclear weapon in the hands of this Iranian regime.” Four days later, in his State of the Union address [2], he issued this declaration:

Let there be no doubt: America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal.

The words were as direct as presidential language gets: we will not “tolerate” an Iranian nuclear weapon and will take “no options off the table” — complete with Obama’s trademark preface, “Let there be no doubt.” In his Super Bowl interview on Sunday, Obama reiterated [3] that “no option is off the table.”

But this is not the first time an American president declared he would not “tolerate” a nuclear weapon, insisted on dismantlement of a nuclear weapons program, applied crippling sanctions — and then declined to act after the regime violated an explicit presidential warning.

George W. Bush said it in 2003 with respect to North Korea; issued the warning in 2006; failed to act in 2007; and left office with an expanded North Korea nuclear weapons program in place, which expanded dramatically under Barack Obama.

The North Korea story is important not only in itself, but because of its obvious implications for the current face-off with Iran. As Iran evaluates President Obama’s seemingly clear words, it knows what happened — or didn’t happen — with respect to similar rhetoric in the case of North Korea. From the memoirs recently published by George Bush [4], Dick Cheney [5], and Condoleezza Rice [6], we can now piece together what occurred. The story places Obama’s recent words in a context that leads to an important conclusion.

The Real Issue Surrounding the Daily Caller Dinner with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn: Your Tax Dollars Helped the Illinois Council on the Humanities Sponsor It! Posted By Ron Radosh

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2012/02/07/the-real-issue-surrounding-the-daily-caller-dinner-with-bill-ayers-and-bernardine-dohrn-your-tax-dollars-helped-the-illinois-council-on-the-humanities-sponsor-it/

The real issue surrounding the recent Sunday event in Chicago, in which former Weather Underground leaders Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn hosted a dinner for Daily Caller editor-in-chief Tucker Carlson, Caller editor Jamie Weinstein, media mogul Andrew Breitbart, Weekly Standard writer Matt Labash, and a Caller reader, is the legitimization of Ayers and Dohrn. That was not the fault of those who attended the dinner, but of the Illinois Humanities Council [1], the state’s facilitator and affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which is subsidized by your taxpayer dollars.

The reason that Carlson and company were attending the dinner is because they won it at an auction held by the Council. Carlson cast the highest winning bid, which was $2,500. One might wonder why the Council would even think of auctioning off a dinner with two unrepentant advocates of “armed struggle,” who are dedicated in principle to the creation of a revolutionary communist future for the United States. A quick run through the Council’s search engine provides the answer: Bill Ayers in particular is a regular participant in the Council’s programs!

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.1685/pub_detail.asp

1.
Bernanke: ‘A Long Way to Go’ Before Full Jobs Recovery [CNS]
2.
Strike or Sanctions? Leaders Debate How to Handle Iran [CBN]
3.
Payroll tax holiday talks stuck — again [FOX]
4.
Navy SEAL Commander Advised to ‘Get the Hell Out of the Media’ [ABC]
5.
Syria: Nearly 50 die overnight in Homs [TELEGRAPH]
6.
Greece: ‘There’s no more left to cut’ [INDEPENDENT]
7.
Former Democratic Congresswoman: I Wouldn’t Have Voted for Obamacare If I’d Known About HHS Rule [WEEKLY STANDARD]
8.
Student debt often leads to bankruptcy, lawyers find [WT]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11385/pub_detail.asp
As someone who vividly recalls the Iranian “students” who took our diplomats hostage in 1979 and the 444 days it took to get them back, the repeat of this by the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, putting 19 pro-democracy, non-government organization (NGO) Americans on trial on trumped up charges has an ugly repetitive feel to it.

The contempt the Iranian revolutionaries, led by Ayatollah Khomeini, had for America and, I might add, international law and practice that goes back centuries, is everything you need to know about dealing with militant Islamists, whether they are in Iran, Egypt, or anywhere else on the face of the Earth.

Just as then-President Jimmy Carter dawdled while looking for a diplomatic response, this same scenario is now being played out by Barack Obama and it won’t work now just as it did not work then. Carter authorized a failed military operation that, by most accounts, was poorly organized and executed.

What is needed now is a Navy SEAL unit or larger force to go in, rescue our American hostages, and extract them from Cairo. We need direct military action, just as we need direct military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities, missile operations, and the barracks of the Revolutionary Guards.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

“Halftime in America” is a punchier version of Wag the Dog’s reelection slogan, “Don’t Change Horses in Midstream”. They might have tried, “The Best is Yet to Come”, but Bloomberg already took that one.
It’s one of those wonderful side benefits of socialism that the gap between corporate advertising and a campaign commercial blurs. What’s good for GM is good for America and what’s good for Chrysler is good for Obama. We may not have the pipeline, but we’re still pipelining taxpayer money to a few precious union jobs with car companies that look a lot like the UK’s car companies did in the seventies.

http://townhall.com/columnists/humbertofontova/2012/02/07/will_the_pope_absolve_fidel_castro

Pope Benedict XVI will visit Cuba in March. Two of Italy’s top newspapers are reporting that Fidel Castro will avail himself of the visit to confess his sins and be accepted back into The Catholic Church, which excommunicated him in 1962.

“During this last period, Fidel has come closer to religion,” says Castro’s estranged daughter Alina who lives in Miami. “He has rediscovered Jesus at the end of his life. It doesn’t surprise me because dad was raised by Jesuits.”

A baptized and confirmed Catholic, but lifelong layman, I don’t claim expertise in ecclesiastical matters. But before granting absolution the Catholic Church, I’m fairly sure, still requires contrition—sincere contrition.

On his 1998 visit to Cuba, Pope John Paul II remarked that he was “reserving judgment on Che Guevara who had served the poor.” Upon greeting the Cuban ambassador to the Holy See in 2005, this same Pontiff hailed Cuba’s “gains in health care and education.” The above makes patently obvious that, on matters Cuban, the Vatican references the same media and academic sources gleefully bestowed Havana bureaus and visas by the Castro regime. Heaven knows the Vatican is not alone on this.

http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2827/university-bubble

It has become glaringly apparent that the college tuition bubble is about to burst. At a time of financial exigency, the cost of $250,000 for a four-year education at a private college is beyond the means of most middle class parents. That story is now very much front page news. What may not be front page news, but is itself a related bubble, is the excessive commentary surrounding the liberal arts.

If one speaks to an academic immersed in the academic culture, he is likely to glorify the virtues of the liberal arts curriculum. The liberal arts, however, have been injected with foreign steroids that have ballooned the number of offerings and weakened the meaning of the curriculum. If one were to rely on the Matthew Arnold standard of “the best that is known and thought as a guide,” the current curriculum is anything that will fit, or whatever you can get away with.

The absurdity of the offerings, from the Occupy Movement to Film Noir, represent little more than outcroppings of the contemporary imagination. So absurd are many of the college level courses that it is even impossible to caricature them. The university has let itself become a feast for those bursting with “expression.” Rather than distinguish between the worthy and the ridiculous, scholars refuse to distinguish at all.

http://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2012/02/08/ben_shapiro/print

EVEN THE “SUPREME” RUTH BADER GINSBERG HAS “DISSED” THE CONSTITUTION SUGGESTING THAT EGYPT NOT USE IT AS A MODEL…..SEE:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/02/06/ginsburg-to-egyptians-wouldnt-use-us-constitution-as-model/

BEN SHAPIRO

“Is the U.S. Constitution dying? It isn’t dying because it was never alive — it’s a document. What is apparently dying is the constitutional mindset in America, the mindset that says, “Leave me to my own devices, and I’ll succeed. I just need the right to be free.” The rest of the world has relied on America’s constitutional mindset to support it through trials and tribulations for well over a century. Who will support us when we abandon the philosophy that has stood for American freedom for centuries?”

According to The New York Times, the American Constitution is losing popularity with people around the world. “The Constitution,” writes Adam Liptak, “has seen better days … its influence is waning.” Liptak points out that in 1987, over 160 of the 170 countries on Earth had cribbed from the Constitution — but today, few countries do. Why? Liptak suggests, quoting Professor David Law of Washington University in St. Louis, that our Constitution is “Windows 3.1.” It’s difficult to amend, and it doesn’t guarantee so-called “positive rights,” such as healthcare, housing and education. Justice Michael Kirby of the High Court of Australia said that he relies more on the legal framework of India, South Africa and New Zealand than on that of the United States.

http://q4j-middle-east.com

Syria: I Really Do Want To Care More… by Gerald A. Honigman
But my fears and some nasty facts of life get in the way. May G_d forgive me.

A good friend, Sherkoh Abbas, President of the Kurdistan National Assembly of Syria, is also Secretary General of the Syria Democracy Council. He wrote the Foreword to my own book which gets into the very issues we’re seeing unfolding right now in the Middle East…events involving the quest for justice for all peoples in the region. His organizations have been meeting in Washington and elsewhere regarding the recent upheavals.

You see, while dubbed the “Arab Spring,” the quest for human and political rights goes far beyond those involving just Arabs in the region. Sadly, however (and not by accident), if left to such folks as the American State Department, most of academia, and the mainstream media, one would be hard pressed to discover that scores of millions of native, pre-Arab/non-Arab folks have perhaps an even greater stake in the outcome of the current turmoil than the Arabs do themselves.

As a student who has been engaged in extensive research involving the Middle East for almost five decades now, the anquish that I feel for the thousands of Arabs mowed down in the streets by fellow Arabs in Syria is unfortunately offset somewhat by the knowledge of whom is fighting whom over there.

Sure, I want to see “democracy” prevail.