RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Obama’s self-congratulatory State of the Union message last week made it sound like our nation’s problems are behind us. But on Tuesday the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office set the record straight with a blistering warning.

The CBO cautioned that America’s unaffordable public programs and crushing debt will condemn us to anemic economic growth.

Total federal debt will reach $22.3 trillion by 2020. Unsustainable, says the CBO — especially when now-low interest rates return to normal.

Don’t count on spendaholics in Congress to take this warning seriously. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), for example, responded to the CBO by boasting about this year’ s $468 billion federal deficit — the smallest since Obama took office — and smirking at “Republican rhetoric about ‘a big government’ boogeyman.”

Sorry, senator. The CBO predicts you won’t be seeing deficits that small again except in the rear-view mirror. By 2020, the deficit will nearly double, as federal spending reaches a staggering $4.8 trillion.

A four-foot stack of $100 bills totals $1 million. To get to $1 billion, you need seven stacks as high as the Washington monument. To get to $4.8 trillion, you need 33,000 Washington monuments.

Or an increasing number of entitlement programs. The CBO report devotes an entire chapter to the nation’s newest entitlement, ObamaCare, presenting three distressing facts on the programs next five years:
• The cost of subsidies on the exchanges will more than triple, from $32 billion to $106 billion in 2020.
• Over the same period, federal Medicaid costs (also goosed by the ObamaCare law) will double.
• Despite all the spending, 30 million people will still be uninsured. That’s more than the number the law helps.

Nick Gray is Director, Christian Middle East Watch, a British organisation dedicated to objective and factual discussion of Middle Eastern issues, especially of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Christian leaders be careful what you link to

The extraordinary case of an English Christian vicar using social media in Holocaust Memorial week to highlight conspiracy theories that Israel perpetrated the 9/11 attacks shows how casual and unyielding hatred of the Jewish state has become in mainstream Britain

The pleasant and rather up-market town of Virginia Water in South-West London must have wondered what was going on this week as it was invaded by live-broadcast satellite TV vans and their accompanying film crews and reporters.

As random worthy citizens of Virginia Water were interviewed it came to light that it was their vicar, Rev Dr Stephen Sizer, who had brought this invasion upon them.

Stephen Sizer is an evangelical clergyman of long standing, who besides pastoring his congregation somehow manages to cause dismay and concern over speeches, writings and Facebook posts concerning Israel. In fact, it would not take too deep a reading of his material to encourage one to label him as firmly anti-Israel in both his politics and theology.

Sizer repeatedly claims that he cares “…passionately about the safety of the Jewish people and the right of Israel to exist within internationally agreed borders”. For someone making such an apparently balanced statement, Sizer’s writings and activities betray an attitude towards the conflict that is anything but balanced.

The administration makes a desperate and indefensible claim.

No doubt because of my background investigating, prosecuting, and studying terrorism, the cynical claim by White House spokesmen that the Taliban is not a terrorist organization has annoyed me even more than the Obama administration’s nonstop lying usually does. No surprise then that I could be found railing about it on The Kelly File Thursday night.

In that spirit, ten thoughts for the weekend:

1. Under federal law, there are only three requirements for a group to qualify as a “foreign terrorist organization”: It has to be (a) foreign, (b) engaged in “terrorist activity” (bombings, assassinations, etc., carried out to intimidate people and change policy), and (c) a national-security threat to the United States. The law that covers this is Sec. 1189(a) of Title 8, U.S. Code, from the federal Immigration and Nationality Act. It’s here, and it’s just the first few lines — even a president who routinely ignores the laws he is sworn to execute faithfully should be able to make some time for it, maybe on the plane ride between the golf course and the Saudi palace.

As a little girl, I was always reminded by my mother that gum chewing was in poor taste. She would recite this little ditty and it has stuck with me ever since. It seems so apropos when watching the spectacle of our President-of-Poor-Manners as he gallivants the globe and chews gum at formal events.

The gum-chewing girl and the cud-chewing cow.

What is the difference

I will allow.

The intelligent look on the face of the cow.

Obama should make every American with a modicum of decency feel ashamed and sickened as he continues his coarse and boorish behavior. We used to be known as the Ugly American, a term used to refer to perceptions of arrogant behavior by Americans abroad, but Barack Hussein Obama truly epitomizes such genuine arrogance.

In 2006 Jayne Clark wrote the following for USA Today/Travel/Destinations

. . . research aimed at discovering the roots of anti-American sentiments around the world points, in part, to the American personality. People overseas don’t just dislike our foreign policy; they dislike us. And that’s unsettling to U.S. businesses with interests abroad, as well as to the U.S. tourism industry vying for a share of incoming foreign travelers.

Historically, people would separate the American government and the American people. But that distinction is being blurred. Typically, [Americans] were admired for our way of life. It was a lifestyle that many aspired to, and that’s not the case any more.

On January 27, Governor Scott Walker (R-WI) announced the formation of a 527 committee called Our American Revival, unveiled a new website, and issued a statement which included the following:

To move this country forward we need new, fresh leadership from outside of Washington. We need leaders who are bold. That’s how we build a better future for our children and grandchildren. We’ve done it in Wisconsin and it can be done across this country with the right leadership.

Walker’s statement refers to his actions in balancing Wisconsin’s state budget, closing an unconstitutional deficit hole of $3.6B while actually cutting state taxes and capping local property taxes. He achieved this mostly by curtailing the hitherto virtually unrestrained power of public employee unions, to the intense dismay of the Wisconsin Left. Walker’s statement also comes on the heels of a major speech delivered over the weekend to Iowa conservatives, in which he urged policies that “go big and bold” in tackling such major public policy problems.

The wish of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the father of Pakistan, was that the country evolved into a modern democratic state where Muslims, as a majority population, could feel at ease.

But the modernizers who succeeded the colonial authorities in taking power aroused expectations that were simply beyond their abilities to deliver.

But religious authorities were agitating, warning the bewildered masses that these defeats were divine punishments for betraying the true message of Islam by not faithfully abiding by its requirements.

Qutb in his writings recast the division in the world from the classic Muslim one between the House of Islam and the House of War, to one between Islam and jahiliyya, a condition of paganism that preceded the coming of Islam to Arabia. Jahiliyya has now become all-pervasive in the modern world, supposedly sparing none, including Muslims, except for that small coterie of Muslims who took flight [hijra] from the corrupted world and prepared for jihad [armed struggle].

Sad news:

Lt. Col. Edward Saylor, one of four surviving Doolittle Raiders who attacked Japan during a daring 1942 mission credited with lifting American morale during World War II, has died. He was 94. Rod Saylor said his father died of natural causes on Wednesday in Sumner, Washington.

He was a young flight engineer-gunner and among the 80 airmen who volunteered to fly the risky mission that sent B-25 bombers from a carrier at sea to attack Tokyo on April 28, 1942. The raid launched earlier than planned and risked running out of fuel before making it to safe airfields. ”It was what you do … over time, we’ve been told what effect our raid had on the war and the morale of the people,” Saylor told The Associated Press in a 2013 interview.

Wounded, nearly fatally, at Pearl Harbor just four months earlier, the United States decided the way to even the score was to put planes in the air and show the Japanese that we could hurt them. The Americans didn’t withdraw to the safety of San Francisco and San Diego, nor bomb some useless atoll in the Pacific, or issue a stern warning to the emperor to turn over Tojo and Yamamoto in order to bring them to “justice.”

Newt Gingrich is quite possibly the best thinker in foreign policy today. He is more specific on every threat America faces. He is, however, a very poor candidate for public office….but his words and analysis should be heeded…especially by pretenders to the White House in 2016….rsk

How is our nation dealing with the continuing menace of Islamic supremacism, the ideology that catalyzes the jihadist and cultural threat to the West?

At the Freedom Forum in Iowa last Saturday, Newt Gingrich drew an apt analogy to the period from the end of World War II through 1948, as the Iron Curtain consigned half of Europe to tyranny: Imagine that the president of the United States had been not Harry Truman but Stalin’s useful idiot, Henry Wallace – the former vice president whom FDR thankfully dumped from the Democratic ticket in 1944.

Had that happened, Gingrich opined, our president would have been assuring us, “There is no KGB. There is no Comintern. The Soviet Union is not a threat. Communism is okay. I don’t think you should be worried about all these things.”

Meaning: What we’d have had is defeat in the Cold War.

Newt’s admonition was clear. In a rousing speech about “America’s survival,” the former House speaker argued that, after being at it for fourteen years, we are losing “the war with radical Islamists.”

His main point, one very similar to the contention advanced by Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal (in a recent London speech that was the subject of my NRO column last weekend), is that we are at w

Seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz, violence and hatred against Jews is on the rise, especially in the Middle East and among Muslims in Europe

Last Tuesday, a group of Holocaust survivors, by now gaunt and frail, made their way back to Auschwitz, the West’s symbol of evil—back to the slave-labor side of the vast complex, with its mocking inscription Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work makes you free”), and back to the death camp, where a million and a quarter human beings, most of them Jews, were gassed, burned and turned to ash. They were there to commemorate the day, 70 years ago, when Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz and saw, for the first time, the true dimensions of the greatest crime since human beings first set foot on Earth.

The moment would have been emotional at the best of times, but this year brought an especially disturbing undercurrent. The Book of Genesis says that, when God told Abraham what would happen to his descendants, a “fear of great darkness” fell over him. Something of that fear haunted the survivors this week, who have witnessed the return of anti-Semitism to Europe after 70 years of political leaders constant avowals of “Never again.” As they finished saying Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for mourners, one man cried out, “I don’t want to come here again.” Everyone knew what he meant. For once, the fear was not only about the past but also about the future.

The murder of Jewish shoppers at a Parisian kosher supermarket three weeks ago, after the killing of 12 people at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, sent shivers down the spines of many Jews, not because it was the first such event but because it has become part of a pattern. In 2014, four were killed at the Jewish Museum in Brussels. In 2012, a rabbi and three young children were murdered at a Jewish school in Toulouse. In 2008 in Mumbai, four terrorists separated themselves from a larger group killing people in the city’s cafes and hotels and made their way to a small Orthodox Jewish center, where they murdered its young rabbi and his pregnant wife after torturing and mutilating them. As the Sunday Times of London reported about the attack, “the terrorists would be told by their handlers in Pakistan that the lives of Jews were worth 50 times those of non-Jews.”

“It has been described as one of the most dangerous post-mortem examinations ever undertaken in the Western world, and I think that’s probably right.”

So testified forensic pathologist Nathaniel Cary on Wednesday, the second day of the inquiry into the 2006 poisoning death of Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko. The proceeding, held at the Royal Courts of Justice, aims to examine the circumstances under which Litvinenko was murdered with radioactive polonium-210, a highly unusual poison and one of many Hollywood-ready elements of the case that has made it a tabloid fixture for nearly a decade.

Some aspects of the inquiry have a definite cloak-and-dagger feel. Also on Wednesday, journalists were barred from the room at one point so that “Scientist A1,” whose day job is to help maintain the U.K. nuclear deterrent, could testify about the deadly substance. The press was ushered into a separate annex, where Scientist A1 could be heard but not seen.

The details of the case largely are more prosaic, when they’re not confusing for a lay audience. The top-secret Scientist A1 was there to tell the inquiry that “one gram of polonium-210 emits one-six-six, zero-zero-zero, zero-zero-zero, zero-zero-zero, zero-zero-zero alpha particles per sec—”

“Pausing right there,” an exasperated barrister interrupted, inadvertently triggering laughter in the courtroom and the press annex. “I may be wrong, but 166 quadrillion per second?”