RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hezbollah Waits and Prepares
With new tensions over Iran’s nuclear program, the militant group stands ready to retaliate against Israel

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203699404577044150277949624.html?KEYWORDS=NICHOLAS+BLANFORD

On a recent Saturday afternoon, a radar operated by French United Nations peacekeepers picked up a pilotless Israeli reconnaissance drone crossing into south Lebanon. It was given no more attention than any of the dozens of other surveillance missions flown by the Israelis in Lebanese airspace each month.

But when the drone passed above Wadi Hojeir, a yawning valley with steep, brush-covered slopes, it abruptly vanished from the radar screen. The startled peacekeepers contacted the Lebanese army, and a search of the rugged valley was conducted in the early-evening gloom. Nothing was found.

No one can recall the last time that an Israeli drone malfunctioned over Lebanon and crashed, and there were no reports of antiaircraft fire. The Israelis have said nothing. Neither has Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group and arch foe of Israel. The peacekeeping force is now abuzz with speculation that Hezbollah may have found a way of electronically disabling drones.

It is food for thought as tensions escalate once more between the West and Iran, Hezbollah’s ideological patron, over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions. A report by the International Atomic Energy Agency released last week claimed that Iran has been engaged in “activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device.” It was the IAEA’s toughest report yet on Iran, and it was preceded by a flurry of articles in the Israeli press saying that the Israeli government was seriously considering a strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/11/17/john-bolton-argues-the-u-s-has-the-wrong-president-for-a-syrian-intervention.html
John Bolton Argues the U.S. Has the Wrong President for a Syrian Intervention

The Arab League’s decision to suspend Syria is a serious blow to President Bashar al-Assad’s highly unpopular regime, and has led many to believe that its end is nigh. We can all certainly hope for Assad’s fall, but the real import of the Arab League’s tough stance is the escalation it represents in the Sunni Arab world’s growing confrontation against Shia Iran.
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What should America do? Why, after decades of Syria supporting international terrorists, pursuing weapons of mass destruction, and brutalizing its citizens (using chemical weapons under Assad’s father), do we not pursue regime change?

While we should have long since been pursuing regime change against the Assad family tyranny, the unhappy reality today is that ousting Assad—or even aiding the dissidents with U.S. military force—is not something we should entrust to Barack Obama. The stakes are too high, the opposition too formidable, and the risks too great to allow him to exercise the commander-in-chief responsibilities in a possible confrontation with Iran. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, we go to war with the president we have, and the incumbent is not fit for duty in the Syrian theater.

No Man’s Land Penn State’s moral adolescents http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/283557 There is a famous if apocryphal tale of a Fleet Street theater critic covering the first night of a new play in the West End of London. At the end of the evening, he went to a public telephone and dictated his review. The following morning, a […]

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/11/18/panetta-to-warn-israel-on-consequences-iran-military-strike/#ixzz1e7CWVJ8x Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said ahead of a meeting Friday with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak that he would warn his Israeli counterpart about the global economic consequences of a military strike on Iran’s nuclear program, adding that he still favors sanctions and diplomacy over a strike. “To go beyond (sanctions and diplomacy) raises […]

Protesting Hate by Promoting Anti-Semitism http://www.investigativeproject.org/3296/protesting-hate-by-promoting-anti-semitism “Iranophobia,” an irrational fear of all things Iranian, has become the Islamic regime’s catch-all excuse for international criticism. Groups like the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the representative body of the world’s Muslim nations, are pushing for a United Nations resolution to ban denigration of Islam and other […]

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

THE EGO HAS LANDED

The long-awaited Gingrich resurgence has come and yet it’s all too likely that the resurgence will give way to the inevitability of Romney. So far every surge has been followed by a prolonged teardown. With Bachmann it was the messianic arrival of Perry and nitpicking over her attacks on his vaccine policy. With Perry it was immigration and a troublingly mixed debate performance. With Cain it was a combination of bad answers and sexual misconduct allegations. Gingrich’s turn is coming now.

Gingrich isn’t quite the last man standing. The Anti-Romney camp can always default to Perry, if he didn’t keep giving them reasons why he shouldn’t. And they probably will. Unlike Romney and Perry, Bachmann and Santorum have the right policies, but she isn’t likely to get a second look and he hasn’t even gotten a first. Perry still has enough money and presidential factors to get a second look and a third. The Gingrich teardown is already beginning, will it succeed? Once the media jumps in, probably. Newt has survived one teardown already at the start of the campaign, but whether he can make another comeback is debatable.

So far the “Id” candidates who said what they thought, Cain and Perry, are in trouble. The “Id” is associated with honesty and boldness. With going forward and damning the consequences. Cain, who was the most “Id” candidate in the race is suffering from “Id” charges, accusations that he speaks without thinking and does immoral things.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=246010
The list of the Left’s blunders is depressingly lengthy. It has been hopelessly wrong about… well, everything.

“Israel has put its trust in leaders who have led it into great peril — and into those who so far have failed to lead it out of it. It has been placed in great danger by the injudicious action of the Left and the impotent inaction of the Right. The Left has imposed a fatally flawed paradigm on the nation; the Right has failed to formulate a persuasive alternative.”

This is the first war in history that on the morrow the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender.
– Abba Eban on the Six Day War

The preceding citation, from arguably Israel’s most consummate diplomat, encapsulates the glaring irrationality and the inverted logic that has become the accepted hallmark of the politics of the Arab-Israeli conflict, both at the level of theoretical analysis and of practical policy-making.

The abandonment of any coherent, reasonable criteria has not been confined to the attitude of the Arabs towards Israel, but sadly has become a characteristic of Israeli policy towards the Arabs – and of a host of domestic issues that impinge directly and indirectly on that policy.

The absurd becomes routine

Consider the situation, which defies rational explanation, that is emerging today before our eyes, without evoking any significant expression of public incredulity — much less outrage — that such an astonishing development should warrant.

The ruling party of the day, the Likud, is, in effect, imploring the Palestinians to enter into negotiations over a resolution of the conflict on the basis of a principle — the Oslo two-state concept — that it itself rejected vehemently only a few years ago.

Mind you, this bizarre situation has not come about because this previously rejected principle has proved to be a stunning success. Quite the contrary, it has been shown to be an abject failure. After all, the endeavor to implement it has precipitated all the dangers its opponents warned of, and none of the benefits its proponents promised. Indeed, it has wrought death and destruction on Jew and Arab alike on a horrific scale.

Failures don’t come more abject or clear than that.

Yet almost inconceivably, just when it became undeniable that the opponents of territorial concessions and political appeasement were completely vindicated, they began to embrace the very policy they had previously repudiated.

These circumstances mirror almost exactly the inexplicable absurdity expressed in the Abba Eban citation above. Instead of the anti- Oslo victors in the ideological-political clash with their pro-Oslo advocates routing their vanquished adversaries, they set about surrendering to them.

Unwarranted intellectual surrender

This faint-hearted and feeble-minded conduct on the part of what is inappropriately dubbed — usually pejoratively — Israel’s political “Right,” constitutes unacceptable, unwarranted and irresponsible intellectual capitulation.

Egypt: More Evidence on How Islam Liberates Women Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2011/11/egypt_more_evidence_on_how_islam_liberates_women.html My colleague Al-Mutarjim has translated comments made this week to the London-based al-Sharq al-Awsat (via the Gazan publication Donia al-Watan) by a female candidate for the Egyptian Parliament, Muna Salah. The Islamically-enlightened Ms. Salah maintains, …that women are deficient in intelligence and religion, […]

http://michaelcutler.net/
Hi Gang:
Here is my most recent commentary that has been posted on the CAPS (Californians for Population Stabilization) website.
In this commentary, I have tackled the ample motivations that our own government provides to foreign nationals (aliens) to violate our nation’s borders. This is done by not only failing to secure our borders and failing to seek the removal of unknown millions of illegal aliens (likely tens of millions of illegal aliens who are present throughout our country today, but then providing them with all sorts of rewards that undermine American citizens and lawful immigrants and cost our nation hundreds of billions of dollars and also endanger the safety and security of our nation, our citizens and, indeed, all who work and visit the United States from foreign countries.

It is hard to blame illegal aliens for violating our borders and our laws when the President of the United States and high ranking members of his administration and politicians in Washington and, in fact, throughout our country, openly declare their disdain for our borders and immigration laws and repeatedly call for placing illegal aliens on a “pathway to United States citizenship!”

Laws are only relevant if they are enforced and if the leaders of our nation send a clear and unequivocal message about the importance of those laws.

What should be expected of illegal aliens when the leaders of their countries lionize their citizens who run America’s borders and then work in violation of law to send money back to their home countries and the leaders of our country echo the very same sentiment?

When a motorist is caught speeding, running a red light or driving recklessly, that driver faces a number of adverse actions that begin with being fined. That errant motorist may also lose his (her) license and have his vehicle seized by law enforcement. In some instances such individuals may also face time in jail.

Could you imagine a municipality telling its police officers who stop speeders to give the speeders money?

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2011/11/18/republicans-democrats-and-wall-street-fraud-or-whos-the-mf-now/

Jon Corzine’s MF Global is missing $600 million of customer money, and the bankruptcy trustee has no idea when it might be found or when investors might be paid back, if ever. The New York Times today says that the investigation points to the conclusion that the firm simply misappropriated (that is, stole) customer money to back up failing bets on the distressed bonds of failing European governments.

The former head of Goldman Sachs and Democratic governor of New Jersey presided over a firm that may turn out to have been a criminal enterprise. Maybe the Occupy Wall Street movement should shift venue to the headquarters of the Democratic Party, which has a long pattern of involvement in outright corruption.

If this is the case — and I will patiently await the results of investigation by the proper authorities before coming to any conclusion — the only proper thing to do would be to throw the book at Corzine and his colleagues and put some people in jail for a very, very long time. In response to corporate malfeasance and Wall Street’s misbehavior in the advent of the 2008 crisis, we have had a raft of new legislation and regulation — Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank, the Volcker rules, and more minutiae than the battery of corporate lawyers hired by the banks can follow. My few friends still employed in the investment banking industry are making a fraction of what they once did, but their lawyers are getting fat. The last hiring bubble in Wall Street, I’m told, is in risk management and legal services. Remember what Mother used to say: “You can’t have any new laws until you use the old ones!”