RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

“People like that do exist, though they can be hard to find. Florida found a former lieutenant colonel who in the normal state of affairs would probably never have run for office. Once upon a time California found a former movie star. There are people like that all around us outside the political class. They have talents, they can speak and they have firm beliefs that they can communicate. But many of them have never thought of running for office. If the Tea Party or any conservative grass roots movement is to be effective, it will need to find those people and support them. That’s not an easy task, the last two years remind us that not everyone who speaks well or says the right things or is a political outsider is also going to be a good candidate… but that is also part of the process.”

What the 2010 elections and the 2012 primaries both tell us sharply is that having a vibrant grass-roots is not the same as having political leaders. Often when the base is boiling, that’s when the party is unable to bring anyone to the table except the halfwits and leaders so uninspiring that no amount of hair pulling cognition can make you understand how they made it to the endgame.

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/1969/US-Military-Ban-on-Bibles-at-Walter-Reed-Revealed-and-Rescinded.aspx

C.W. Callahan, chief of staff for Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, who set the September 14, 2011 guidelines prohibiting visitors to “wounded, ill, and injured partners in care” from giving away or using Bibles in the hospital.

Who advised him?

—

From Todd Starnes, Fox News and Commentary:

Walter Reed National Military Medical Center said they are rescinding a policy that prohibits family members of wounded military troops from bringing Bibles or any religious reading materials to their loved ones.

The decision to rescind the ban on Bibles came exactly one day after a Republican lawmaker denounced the policy on the House floor and called on President Obama to publicly renounce the military policy.

“The President of the United States should address this and should excoriate the people who brought about this policy and the individual who brought it about should be dismissed from the United States Military,” Rep. Steve King (R-IA) told Fox News & Commentary.

Frank’s sneering insults won’t be missed

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/10808/frank-sneering-insults-wont-be-missed

BARNEY FRANK may be the only member of Congress who has ever made headlines for not acting like a jerk.

When the longtime Massachusetts representative found himself last year facing — for the first time in decades — a surprisingly strong Republican challenge, journalists noticed something strange: He wasn’t being as nasty as usual. He wasn’t responding to questions with his trademark put-downs. He wasn’t condescending to critics with quite as much sneering contempt.

“Barney Frank reinvents himself as a nice guy,” wrote Jonathan Strong in a story for The Daily Caller. The Boston Herald’s Margery Eagan, “bracing to get hammered” when she asked Frank some questions, was amazed when, instead of insulting or berating her, he answered her questions “almost diplomatically.”

But Frank’s unwonted restraint vanished on election night. In what may have been the most graceless victory speech in US congressional history, he savaged the Herald, accused Republicans of engaging in “vituperation [and] anonymous smears,” and proclaimed his re-election “a victory for a concept of government which eschews anger and vitriol.”

Which was quite a proclamation, coming from someone who is as renowned for his invective and browbeating as for his liberalism and smarts. When Frank eventually goes to his eternal reward – and I wish him many more years of activity and good health – it’s safe to assume that the words “He eschewed anger and vitriol” will not be engraved on his monument.

Frank said last week that he plans to retire when his current term ends at the end of next year. That made him the 24th House incumbent to announce that he won’t seek re-election. But only in Frank’s case did the media coverage include printing roundups of his “oftentimes acerbic comments,” or collecting tweets from “the many journalists who have felt his wrath,” or posting a greatest-hits reel of Frank on the House floor, belittling and excoriating his Republican colleagues.

Politics and passion have always gone together, and all other things being equal, a quick-witted congressman with strong views and the ability to defend them is preferable to a colorless drudge. No one has ever doubted Frank’s intelligence or wit, and it isn’t only liberals who could appreciate his gift for wry retorts. (“My colleagues on the other side have decided to adopt a Marxist idea,” he said during one House debate. “The Marx in question, of course, is Chico.”)

But it’s one thing to be a quotable curmudgeon. It’s something quite different to be a bully.

www.myrightword.blogspot.com
http://blogs.jpost.com/content/green-lined

In response to the recent criticism of Israel by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman, today the chairman of the Emergency Committee for Israel, William Kristol, issued the following statement:
www.committeeforisrael.com/?p=1484

“Nobody believes President Obama when he claims, as he did last week, that he ‘has done more for the security of the state of Israel than any previous administration.’ That’s because he hasn’t — and because President Obama and his administration keeps acting to weaken the security of the state of Israel.

“For example: as reported in the Israeli press, the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman — a top Obama fundraiser in 2008 — told a conference in Brussels this week that Muslim anti-Semitism ‘stems from the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.’ Pardon us for retaining our belief that Muslim anti-Semitism in the Middle East predates 1967, and even 1948 — and in any case is the fault of the anti-Semites, not of the Jews.

“At another conference, this one in Washington, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta surveyed the Middle East and discovered that at every turn, the Jewish state is to blame for problems in the Muslim world. Are there Arab uprisings that are bringing Islamists to power and endangering peace with Israel? Israel must placate the radicals. Are there constant provocations and taunts from Turkey’s Islamist government? Israel must beg for better treatment. Do Palestinians refuse to negotiate? ‘Get to the damn table,’ Panetta thundered twice – as if Israel was refusing to talk, instead of the reverse.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-02/islamists-electoral-rise-due-to-failed-secularism-pankaj-mishra.html

SUCH WISHFUL THINKING AND NOT A WORD ABOUT THE KORAN OR SHARIA OR JIHAD OR THE BARBARIC TREATMENT OF WOMEN…..IT’S JUST SECULARISM GONE SOUR……RSK

“As Ebrahim Yazdi, one of the leaders of Iran’s Green Movement, put it in an open letter to Ghannouchi last week, there is reason to be “seriously concerned about the long range outcome.” He continued: “Our people, Muslims of every nation, struggle for the restoration of their basic rights, liberty, and sovereignty. But we do not have sufficient experience with democracy … We fight and overthrow dictators, but not dictatorship itself.”

Furthermore, the ideological oppositions that arouse many laptop warriors in the West — liberal democracy versus Islamism, secularism versus theocracy — bleach out the mundane but more significant social and economic factors behind the Arab Spring: For instance, the fact that welfare-statism in Tunisia followed by a globalized and apparently successful economy produced a latent middle class whose high expectations, fueled by the entertainment media, turned out to be impossible to fulfill.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ The Man from Massachusetts He was a prominent politician from Massachusetts with great hair and all the visual qualities of a leader. There were some who accused him of flip flopping on important issues, but he always had a glib reply, except for the times when he got nervous and said something stupid. Like, […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/284773 I’ve been alarmed by the latest polls. No, not from Iowa and New Hampshire, although they’re unnerving enough. It’s the polls from Egypt. Foreign policy has not played a part in the U.S. presidential campaign, mainly because we’re so broke that the electorate seems minded to take the view that if government is going […]

Corruption and Islamism in Egypt Posted By David P. Goldman

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2011/12/02/corruption-and-islamism-in-egypt/

Egypt under Mubarak was a tightly-controlled kleptocracy, and Egypt since Mubarak has been an uncontrolled kleptocracy, in which public officials steal whatever isn’t tied down. Shiploads of rice, diesel fuel, and other tradables are leaving Egyptian ports for hard-currency markets, while the country–which imports half its caloric consumption–runs out of money. Mubarak’s elite has helicopters revving on their roofs. It’s no surprise Islamists swept this week’s parliamentary elections. Whom do we expect Egyptians to vote for?

A new book by an economics reporter at Egypt’s al-Wafd party’s newspaper alleges massive corruption at the country’s central bank. Reviewed in al-Wafd newspaper today, the book by Mohamed Adel Ajmi claims that central bank chief Farouk Abd El Baky El Okdah exercises one man rule over the country’s banking system through cronies in all the central bank’s major departments. The central bank’s reserves, Ajmi claims, are unaudited and subject to the personal control of the central bank governor, who abused his position to enrich political allies of deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/690/same_old_story_in_the_new_middle_east Same old story in the new Middle East The Arab world has a tendency to waste resources in a fight against “plots and plans” that don’t exist. In this respect, the new Middle East is shaping up to look just like the old one There is a growing chorus of voices acknowledging that it’s […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/12/obama_and_the_occupoopers.html

“This is the image of the Obama years you’ll want to keep in mind for next November. Blacks and Hispanics cleaning the leavings of rich white kids.”

Well, Obama had the youth vote last time, when one 27- year old white kid told me he voted for Obama “because Hillary looks too white.” This is a middle-class unemployed irresponsible left-indoctrinated spoiled-rotten would-be Occu-pooper.

I like him personally. He’s a nice, completely brainwashed kid, even with his DUIs; but what a national disaster when you multiply him by 50 million.

Well, that was 2008.