RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/01/31/florida%e2%80%99s-results-are-the-best-that-money-can-buy/
Florida’s Results Are the Best That Money Can Buy

As the Florida primary election results pour in, I have to wonder how much positive, pro-conservative messaging could have been generated with the $18M that Mitt Romney just spent on character assassination. In the midst of national debts and credit downgrades, there is worldwide civil unrest. From the riots in Greece, through the flash mobs in the UK, and all the way to the Oakland City Hall Occupiers, there are people who realize that one trillion dollars doesn’t go very far these days. Purity is the goal, but reality is the harsh equalizer. While the Tea Party is engaging in the political process and working on policy, the Occupiers are sending a parallel message to elites in both political establishments. The ruling class is on its way out.

When I joined the Tea Party in 2009, I was a purist. Demanding fiscal responsibility and accountability was just on the surface. I also wanted elected officials to represent the people with strong positions on national security and limited government. Like many, reality settled in after the 2010 elections. A mass wave of big conservative talkers and campaigns that insisted on Tea Party principles fooled many. Unfortunately, many of these candidates did not have an actual record to validate their claims, and their maiden voyages in politics were not particularly impressive. Many grassroots activists who helped these candidates get elected in the 2010 elections are now recruiting their replacements.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11341/pub_detail.asp

The sixteen names of the scientists who jointly signed the article in The Wall Street Journal, “No Need to Panic About Global Warming” on January 27th are mostly unknown to the general public. Perhaps the best known would be Harrison H. Schmidt, a former Apollo 17 astronaut and U.S. Senator. Others might recognize Burt Rutan, an aerospace engineer and designer of Voyager and SpaceShip One.

Moreover, not only were the signers distinguished scientists, but they came from places like Paris, France and Cambridge, England, Jerusalem, Israel, and Geneva, Switzerland. Mostly climatologists and meteorologists, some were physicists and astrophysicists. Antonio Zichichi, one signer, is president of the World Federation of Scientists. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the combined credentials of these men represent some of the best minds on planet Earth in their respective fields.

What brought them together? On the surface it was just another of the countless articles that have been published over the years as scientists of real merit and courage took on the juggernaut of those for whom global warming had become a vast flow of government and foundation funding.

Normalizing the Kingston Honor Killings Posted By Bruce Bawer

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/01/normalizing-the-kingston-honor-killing/

Last month, after the Costa Concordia fiasco in Livorno, Gregoria De Falco – the port official who ordered the cartoonishly cowardly captain, Francesco Schettino, to get back on his ship and aid in the rescue effort – became an instant hero. But De Falco’s wife dissented, saying it was “ridiculous” to call her husband a hero. “The worrying thing,” she said, “is that people like my husband who simply do their duty every day, immediately become idols, personalities, heroes in this country. That is not normal.”

Wise lady. But it’s not only in Italy, these days, that some people are awed when others simply do their duty. Take last Sunday’s guilty verdicts in the Kingston, Ontario, honor-killing case. On June 30, 2009, as Stephen Brown recounted here the other day, three teenage sisters and their father’s first wife were found dead in a car in the Rideau Canal. Three weeks later, police arrested the girls’ father, Afghani-born real-estate tycoon Mohammad Shafia, their mother, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, and their brother, Hamed. All three have now been handed 25-year prison sentences for first-degree murder.

You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to crack this case. Far from it. The perpetrators’ alibis were monumentally feeble, the motives transparent, the evidence ludicrously incriminating. On the family computer, someone had Googled “where to commit a murder” and “Can a prisoner have control over his real estate.” On wiretaps recorded after the murders, the father was heard boasting of his sense of honor, calling his dead daughters “filthy and rotten children” and saying “may the devil shit on their graves.”

Yet after the verdict, commentaries hailed the judge and jurors as courageous. How depressing that it should be considered courageous to send such people to prison! “Experts in so-called honour killings,” wrote Monique Muise in the Montreal Gazette, “heralded the verdict as a step forward; a clear message that neither Canada’s courts nor its people will tolerate this type of crime.” How depressing that a free country needs to send a message that it’s unacceptable to kill your children!

The Death of Art Posted By Ben Shapiro

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/01/the-death-of-art/

Over the weekend, I was reading Stephen Sondheim’s fantastic semi-autobiography – really, a commentary on his lyrics over the years – Finishing the Hat. Sondheim’s brilliant, of course, and his use of language is exact – the rhymes and rhythmic schemes in Sweeney Todd are simply spectacular. Sondheim asks the question, though, whether such linguistic playfulness is worthwhile. He does so by quoting an anonymous pop composer, X – some have suggested it’s Pete Townshend of The Who – dismissing rhyme as unimportant in lyrics: “I hate all true rhymes [i.e. red and bed, as opposed to false rhymes, like home and alone]. I think they only allow you a certain limited range …. I’m not a great believer in perfect rhymes. I’m just a believer in feelings that come across. If the craft gets in the way of the feelings then I’ll take the feelings any day.”

Sondheim caustically observes, “Claiming that true rhyme is the enemy of substance is the sustaining excuse of lyricists who are unable to rhyme well with any consistency … The point which X overlooks is that the craft is supposed to serve the feeling. A good lyric should not only have something to say but a way of saying it as clearly and forcefully as possible – and that involves rhyming cleanly. A perfect rhyme can make a mediocre line bright and a good one brilliant. A near rhyme only dampens the impact.”

Why Jews Need Israel Posted By David Solway

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/01/why-jews-need-israel/

In a speech given to the Domestic Affairs Committee of the German Bundestag in June 2008 on the subject of a renascent antisemitism, journalist Henryk Broder distinguished between a prejudice and a resentment: “a prejudice concerns a person’s behavior; a resentment concerns that person’s very existence. Anti-semitism is a resentment. The anti-Semite does not begrudge the Jew how he is or what he does, but that he is at all. The anti-Semite takes offense as much at the Jew’s attempts to assimilate as at his self-marginalization. Rich Jews are exploiters; poor Jews are freeloaders….The anti-Semite blames Jews for everything and its opposite.”

Of course, this is a story as old as the Judean hills. If there is anything “new” about it in the current historical moment, it resides in the form this ancient “resentment” happens to take. Its racist, religious and class manifestations persist, but a fourth ingredient has been added to this toxic soup of roiling hatreds, namely, a national element that goes under the rubric of anti-Zionism. The “historical strain of anti-Semitism continues,” writes Phyllis Chesler in The New Anti-Semitism, “but in the last fifty years it has also metamorphosed into the most violent anti-Zionism.”

Taliban: New and Improved? Posted By Robert Spencer

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/01/taliban-new-and-improved/

Apparently the Taliban are softening, even allowing girls to get an education. Clearly this heralds an opening to the West, a heady indication that their most repressive days are past them, and that soon they will take their place among the free people of the earth. Soon they will be following the teachings of Naomi Wolf and Thomas Paine.

Yaroslav Trofimov, in a piece that ran Sunday in the Wall Street Journal, noted that Maulvi Qalamuddin, who headed the Committee to Protect Virtue and Prevent Vice back when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, has completely changed his tune regarding the education of girls. Where once he oversaw the shutting-down, sometimes violently, of girls’ schools, now he says: “Education for women is just as necessary as education for men. In Islam, men and women have the same duty to pray, to fast—and to seek learning.”

Anyone who believes this, or believes that Maulvi Qalamuddin believes it, should contact me, as I have a lovely bridge to sell you. “War is deceit,” said Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, according to a famous hadith, and the Taliban are listening. But the Taliban are to be forgiven for thinking that this sort of thing would play well in Washington, for it very likely will. After all, Joe Biden is still the Vice President – the amiable dunce who recently said: “Look, the Taliban per se is not our enemy. That’s critical. There is not a single statement that the president has ever made in any of our policy assertions that the Taliban is our enemy because it threatens U.S. interests. If, in fact, the Taliban is able to collapse the existing government, which is cooperating with us in keeping the bad guys from being able to do damage to us, then that becomes a problem for us.”

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11339/pub_detail.asp
According to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), there is a grave threat to America that must be suppressed at all costs. The threat is that Lieutenant General William “Jerry” Boykin might be allowed to exercise his constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech.

This proposition is bizarre on multiple levels. For one, General Boykin, who is a friend and greatly admired colleague of mine, is one of the United States’ most accomplished and decorated military heroes. He served in and led our most elite special forces units for decades, including in many of our most dangerous recent combat operations. He also held a number of senior positions in the intelligence community, including as the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.

For another, Jerry Boykin is also an ordained minister. And the sorts of events CAIR has lately insisted he must not address include prayer sessions convened by the mayor of Ocean City, Maryland and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9SK83100&show_article=1 By ANNE GEARAN and KIMBERLY DOZIER
WASHINGTON (AP) – U.S. intelligence officials acknowledged Tuesday that the United States may release several Afghan Taliban prisoners from the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as an incentive to bring the Taliban to peace talks.Meanwhile, Afghan officials told The Associated Press that a plan to give Afghanistana form of legal custody over the men if they are released satisfied their earlier objection to sending the prisoners to a third country.

Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper told Congress Tuesday that no decision had been made on whether to trade the five Taliban prisoners, now held at Guantanamo Bay as part of nascent peace talks with the Taliban. He and CIA Director David Petraeus did not dispute that the Obama administration is considering transferring the five to a third country.

U.S. officials and others had previously spoken only vaguely, and usually anonymously, about the proposal to send the prisoners to Qatar, a Persian Gulf country that has asserted a central role in framing talks that might end the 10-year war in Afghanistan. The lead U.S. negotiator trying to coax the Taliban into talks had also publicly acknowledged the possibility of a release, but said there was no final decision.

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

As anyone who has ever made a formal complaint to the BBC knows, internal investigations into allegations of bias, if they proceed at all, tend to be dismissed and Al Beeb thus vindicates itself, amid its characteristic self-puffery.

Until there is a complaints procedure that is independent of the broadcaster itself, conducted by an external body which is genuinely free of Al Beeb’s influence, this will always remain so.

Internal investigations tend, in all likelihood, to favour an organisation put on the defensive and eager to extricate itself from blame, especially when political bias is so ingrained in the culture of that organisation that it fails to recognise bias as such.

Since SBS has a long track record of bias against Israel, it doesn’t really surprise me to learn via J-Wire that an internal investigation by the Australian multicultural channel SBS into a complaint made by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) regarding the four-part series The Promise, broadcast late last year, maintains that

“the series does not, demonise Jews either individually or as a collective, nor deny their individual and collective right to self determination and therefore does not vilify Jews or Israelis.”

The SBS.s decision has been described by ECAJ Executive Director Peter Wertheim as “disappointing and unsatisfactory”.

J-Wire continues:

‘In dismissing the complaints, the SBS Complaints Committee found that the series did not violate the SBS Codes of Practice and that “the ordinary reasonable viewer fully appreciated that The Promise was a fictional drama and nothing more than that”. It also noted that “accuracy per se is not a Code requirement in respect of a drama such as The Promise.”

Rep. Allen West Is Conservative Slam Dunk For Veep

http://news.investors.com/Article/599548/201201311827/congressman-west-is-best-gop-veep-choice.htm

THIS IS REALLY SOMETHING FOR THE GRANDEES WHO HAVE ANOINTED ROMNEY TO THINK ABOUT…..WEST COULD EVEN OUT- DEBATE GINGRICH….RSK

There is no doubt that as important as the state of Florida is for the GOP candidates running for the right to oppose Barack Obama, it will be even more critical in the general election.

Since he was first elected to the Senate, we have heard Marco Rubio’s name floated time and again as a potential running mate for the Republican nominee. To be sure, Sen. Rubio would be an outstanding candidate and would bring many built-in advantages to the ticket.

That said, I believe he has a fellow Floridian in Congress might be a more promising pick: Congressman Allen West from the state’s 22nd District.

As Gov. Romney and his supporters embarrass themselves and cheapen the process with their deliberately inaccurate and escalating attacks against Newt Gingrich — with Gingrich childishly flinging the same mud back at Romney — it’s clear to all Americans who cherish our rapidly fading traditional values that the GOP would be dramatically better served if statesmen like West or Rubio were at the top of the ticket instead of the current crop of candidates. Sadly, they are not.

That said, we can still insert both men and other true conservatives into the process.

For West, the fastest and best way would be for the GOP nominee to pick him as his running mate. Period.

No matter if that nominee is Romney or Gingrich, selecting West might be the only way they would make themselves remotely competitive with Obama, his surrogates in the mainstream media and the billion dollars Obama is salivating to dump on the Republicans’ standard-bearer.

More than that, imagine the mileage the Republican ticket would get if they continually volunteered to have West debate Obama instead of the Republican nominee.

To compare West’s heroic service to our nation in Iraq and Afghanistan during his 22-year military career to Obama’s community organizer days, to his years nodding his head to the vile and dangerous pronouncements of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and to his days learning at the feet of ultraviolent Weather Underground radicals Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

Imagine the reaction if West brought his college transcripts and challenged Obama to produce his. Imagine if others wished to compare West’s Bronze Star, three Meritorious Service medals and three Army Commendation medals with the drug paraphernalia from Obama’s experimental days.

Pure and simple, West is a proud conservative and a patriot. As he himself has said, “I have traded in my camouflage uniform for a suit, but the commitment to protect the people of the United States is still my mission.”

READ IT ALL AT SITE