RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/davidhornik/pollard-and-the-last-ditch-effort-to-save-the-peace-talks/print/

Secretary of State John Kerry hopped over to Israel from Brussels on Monday and left Tuesday morning. The mission: rescue what is known as the peace process, which has been tottering at the brink of collapse.

His game was to offer both sides inducements that, he hoped, they couldn’t refuse. To the Palestinians: 426 freed prisoners including 26 convicted murderers, along with a partial Israeli building freeze in Judea and Samaria (but not in East Jerusalem). In return for those favors, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas was supposed to agree to keep talking with Israel until the end of this year, and not to go to UN bodies to wage diplomatic warfare against it.

To Israel: Jonathan Pollard. In return for that favor, the Israeli government was supposed to—once again—swallow the lopsided terms and agree to keep up the pretense of the talks.

For Israel the terms were still worse than that may sound. Four hundred of the freed Palestinian prisoners were supposed to be minor offenders whom Israel would choose, and who would be released gradually over the course of the year. But of the 26 convicted terrorists (they would be the fourth such group to be released by Israel since last summer), 14 were supposed to be Israeli Arabs.

For Israel that carries a special sting. As president of the Palestinian Authority, Abbas has no authority over Arab citizens of Israel, and his demand for the release of the 14 is a particularly brazen slap to Israel’s judicial autonomy—one that, once again, he appeared to be getting away with.

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/04/01/the-media-wont-cover-leland-yees-alleged-gun-running-because-theyre-democrat-operatives-with-by-lines/?print=1

The only thing I can do with this Glenn Reynolds column is endorse every single word of it. It is absolutely right.

Yee told an FBI agent that, in exchange for $2 million in cash, he’d fill a shopping list of weapons, which he took personal responsibility for delivering, according to the indictment. He also allegedly “masterminded” a complex scheme bring illegal weapons into the country, agreeing to “facilitate” a meeting with an illegal arms dealer to arrange for the weapons to be imported via Newark, N.J. In arranging all of this, the indictment said, Yee relied on connections with Filipino terrorist groups who could supply “heavy” weapons, including the Muslim terrorists of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. Yee allegedly noted that the Muslim terrorists had no reservations about kidnapping, extortion and murder.

This all sounds like news. You’ve got charges of huge bribes, rampant hypocrisy, illegal weapons and even a connection with foreign terrorists — and from a leading politician in an important state.

But — and here’s the part Hollywood would miss — outside of local media like San Francisco magazine, the coverage was surprisingly muted.The New York Timesburied the story as a one-paragraph Associated Press report on page A21, with the bland dog-bites-man headline, “California: State Senator Accused of Corruption.” This even though Yee was suspended, along with two others, from the California state senate in light of the indictment.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/republicans-catch-on-that-negative-advertising-works/?print=1

People who knew Mitt Romney, or worked with him in business or government, in many cases considered him one of the most decent people [1] they ever knew. But starting in the early spring of 2012, months before Romney had officially secured his Party’s nomination for President, many millions of dollars of attack ads were running in key states such as Ohio, Virginia, Florida and Colorado suggesting that Romney was a despicable, greedy Wall Street banker. He was accused of buying up companies, firing the workers, then closing or selling the companies off, getting very rich in the process. He was also accused [2] of causing people to die of cancer after workers lost their health insurance and were presumably denied treatment.

One might think that Romney’s Bain Capital had discovered a formula where he could get rich more quickly through the failure of the businesses in which he invested, than from their successes. People who have spent their lives outside the private sector and have nested within the Democratic Party, seem to assume that private equity companies mostly invest in businesses that are already winners and if they invest in struggling companies, they should be able to turn them into winners 100% of the time. If some investments go bad, then it must be because the private equity companies make more money by destroying healthy companies than rebuilding them. To be fair, Newt Gingrich, had launched a similar demagogic campaign against Romney when his fortunes began to sink after the early primaries in 2012, though he did not go so far as to accuse Romney of causing cancer patients to die without insurance, and his attack ads did not run in many states.

Even before the first Republican Party primary in Iowa, in the fall of 2011, left wing groups had created a campaign known as “Occupy Wall Street” designed to highlight the 1% (especially the Wall Street variety) versus the 99%. One does not need to be a cynic to believe that the Obama campaign team fully expected Romney would be their opponent in the fall of 2012. The Occupy Wall Street campaign was an easy AstroTurf exercise [3] to change the subject — from the glaring failures of their first term to the inequality in America, symbolized by a rich white guy like Mitt Romney.

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2014/04/01/are-there-moderate-muslims-how-about-moderate-jews-and-christians/?print=1

As my friend Daniel Pipes wrote some days ago at National Review, the Middle East Forum is debating whether one can speak meaningfully of “moderate Muslims,” with Dr. Pipes defending the affirmative and Raymond Ibrahim the negative thesis. I respect both Pipes and Ibrahim, but I am not satisfied with the content of the debate. The first issue to be settled is what moderation might mean in the case of adherence to a religion, which is after all not a list of positions but an existential stance towards life. One can speak of a moderate Communist (e.g. Gorbachev) or moderate conservatives, but not quite as simply about moderate faith. Below is an essay I published on the subject in Asia Times in 2006 that attempts to set a theological context for the question.

The West in an Afghan mirror
By Spengler

Death everywhere and always is the penalty for apostasy, in Islam and every other faith. It cannot be otherwise, for faith is life and its abandonment is death. Americans should remove the beam from their own eye as they contemplate the gallows in the eye of the Muslims. Philistine hypocrisy pervades Western denunciations of the Afghan courts, which were threatening to hang Christian convert Abdul Rahman until the case was dropped on Monday.

Afghanistan, to be sure, is a tribal society whose encounter with the modern world inevitably will be a train wreck. The trouble is

that the West has apostatized, and is killing itself. There turned out to be hope for Rahman, but there is none for Latvia or Ukraine, and little enough for Germany or Spain. That said, I wish to make clear that I found the persecution of Rahman deplorable.

The practice of killing heretics has nothing to do with what differentiates Islam from Christianity or Judaism. St Thomas Aquinas defended not just the execution of individual heretics but also the mass extermination of heretical populations in the 12th-century Albigensian Crusades. For this he was defended by the Catholic philosopher Michael Novak, author of learned books about the faith of the United States of America’s founding fathers (see Muslim anguish and Western hypocrisy, November 23, 2004).

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/374779/print

In recent weeks, we examined the Obama administration’s willingness to reverse positions that it had once proudly proclaimed — on whether an individual mandate is necessary, whether the individual mandate is a tax, whether it is important that you can keep your plan or doctor, whether lobbyists should work in a president’s administration, whether a donor should be appointed U.S. ambassador, and so on. Then we noted environmentalists who said they would not criticize or attack lawmakers who supported the Keystone Pipeline, as long as they were Democrats.

Last week, we expanded the discussion to progressives’ wide-ranging willingness to contradict their own professed principles: gun-control proponents who travel with armed bodyguards, voucher opponents who send their kids to private schools, and minimum-wage-hike advocates who pay their staff less than the minimum wage, among others.

So what do progressives really want? If, as I suspect, the currency of progressivism isn’t policies or results, but emotions, what does that approach build? What kind of a country do you get when political leaders are driven by a desire to feel that they are more enlightened, noble, tolerant, wise, sensitive, conscious, and smart than most other people?

The evidence before us suggests progressives’ ideal society would be one where they enjoy great power to regulate the lives of others and impose restrictions and limitations they themselves would never accept in their own lives. Very few people object to an aristocracy with special rights and privileges as long as they’re in it.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/374772/print

Name recognition is not always an asset.

Some Republican fat cats are trying to coax former Florida governor Jeb Bush — brother and son to two former presidents — into making a bid for the White House. Democrats have been less subtle. They’ve created a super PAC called Ready for Hillary, which is only slightly less obvious a gesture than constructing a giant neon sign reading “Run, Hillary, Run.”

For obvious reasons, these developments have generated a lot of discussion about political dynasties in America. That’s understandable. After all, in a democratic republic, the prospect of dynasties should make everyone at least a little uncomfortable.

Populists of the Left and the Right like to focus on the more sinister problems of dynasties — the suspicion that the elites have rigged the system in favor of a few powerful families. It sometimes sounds like we’re discussing lines of European nobility swapping out turns on the throne. But in America, where leaders have to run for office, a more useful way to think about dynasties might be to think of them as brand names.

In chaotic and confusing marketplaces, brand names are a useful shortcut. People buy stuff from Apple because they think they know what they’ll get from Apple. The same goes for Kennedys, Bushes, Clintons, and, these days, Pauls. (If Rand weren’t the son of Ron, his political persona would be very different.)

http://weaselzippers.us/181295-spring-blizzard-pummels-the-upper-midwest/
Spring Blizzard Pummels The Upper Midwest

The threat of global warming continues
Via Sheboygan Press

A spring snowstorm in the Upper Midwest is shutting down schools and government offices, making travel hazardous for motorists and life miserable for cattle ranchers in the midst of calving season.
The National Weather Service has issued blizzard warnings for much of the Dakotas and part of Minnesota, with snow amounts of up to 20 inches possible.
In South Dakota, no travel is advised in the northwestern corner of the state, and motorists in other areas are advised to use caution due to the storm. Some schools in the region are starting late or canceling classes, and Gov. Dennis Daugaard has closed state offices in nine western counties.
Forecasters say snowfall amounts could reach a foot in parts of the state, and winds gusting to 50 mph will blow the snow around. Rain and sleet before the snow could create icy conditions in the northeast. South Dakota state transportation secretary Darin Bergquist says travel will be difficult if not impossible.
Meteorologist Michael Mathews in Bismarck says it’s not uncommon for a blizzard to hit the region this time of year – though he says the snow is lighter and fluffier than snow associated with many spring storms.
That’s good news for ranchers with newborn calves. South Dakota Stockgrowers Association Executive Director Silvia Christen says she doesn’t expect a repeat of an early October blizzard that killed tens of thousands of animals.

http://www.americanthinker.com/assets/3rd_party/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/04/april_fools_day_obamacare_enrollment_numbers.html

This is the perfect day to receive Obama administration claims of success in ObamaCare enrollment. “No one expected us to come back from the brink…but we have,” claims Jay Carney, following a script that could have been written by one of the Hollywood screenwriters being massaged by Valerie Jarrett to propagandize their audiences on ObamaCare.

Politico offers the party line:

The first open enrollment season of Obamacare ended at midnight Monday, a day that saw millions of Americans click onto Obamacare sign-up portals, dial into call centers and stand in long lines at assistance sites nationwide. The huge surge made it increasingly likely that enrollment would hit 7 million, the finish line that seemed out of reach during much of the often rocky six-month period.

Shortly after 10 p.m., the Associated Press cited two sources that said sign-ups were “on track” to hit 7 million. Administration officials wouldn’t confirm the number but said that signs were pointing in that direction.

All of the numbers being delivered to us are soft as a grape. But for low information voters, they will do the trick. Hurray! Plucky little ObamaCare fought against the big bad Republicans who tried to sabotage it, and in the end, with a last minute surge powered by Americans desperate for the care that only a messiah like Obama could offer, compassion triumphed.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/04/californias_brownshirt_antisemitism_comes_to_vassar.html
California is the lifestyle incubator of the nation. And now the trendy anti-Semitic thuggery that debuted at California’s public universities has metastasized across America, all the way to the elite halls of Vassar.

Before we discuss the fashionable pogrom that just took place on the Vassar campus where Jackie Kennedy once strolled in pearls, let’s look back at May 7, 2002. On that day, Professor Laurie Zoloth, Director of the Jewish Studies program at San Francisco State University, attended a “Peace in the Middle East” campus rally, organized by Hillel students, where they sang songs and prayed for peace in Israel. Wrote Professor Zoloth:

“As soon as the community supporters left, the 50 students who remained praying in a minyan for the traditional afternoon prayers, or chatting, or cleaning up after the rally, talking — were surrounded by a large, angry crowd of Palestinians and their supporters. But they were not calling for peace. They screamed at us to ‘go back to Russia’ and they screamed that they would kill us all, and other terrible things. They surrounded the praying students, and the elderly women who are our elder college participants, who survived the Shoah, who helped shape the Bay Area peace movement, only to watch as a threatening crowd shoved the Hillel students against the wall of the plaza.
“As the counter demonstrators poured into the plaza, screaming at the Jews to ‘Get out or we will kill you’ and ‘Hitler did not finish the job,’ I turned to the police and to every administrator I could find and asked them to remove the counter demonstrators from the Plaza, to maintain the separation of 100 feet that we had been promised. The police told me that they had been told not to arrest anyone, and that if they did, “it would start a riot.” I told them that it already was a riot.”

ttp://bizcatalyst360.com/5-easy-steps-maximizing-social-media/

Charles (Chuck) Brooks serves as Vice President/Client Executive for DHS at Xerox. Chuck has served as the first Director of Legislative Affairs for the Science & Technology Directorate within the Department of Homeland Security, where he was responsible for advocacy for the Directorate with Capitol Hill. He has been an Adjunct Faculty Member at Johns Hopkins University, and has previously spent 6 years on Capital Hill as a Senior Advisor to the late Senator Arlen Specter where he covered national security, defense, foreign affairs, and technology issues. Chuck also served as President of Brooks Consulting International, leveraging extensive experience in executive management, government relations, and R&D in the public and private sectors

SOCIAL MEDIA is booming in the business community. The medium has become integral to marketing, sales, public relations, policy and strategy. The impact it has had on how we conduct business has become so transformational that the protocols are still evolving. Whether you are a veteran of digital communication, or a newbie to the world of instant and perpetual content sharing, there are some fundamental steps to follow on social media to make your presence more effective for you personally and/or for your company.

1) Join: as the analogy with playing the lottery states, “you cannot win if you don’t play.” There are a multitude of excellent social media forums to consider joining and playing in. The key ones from my personal perspective are: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Pinerest, and FedScoop because they all offer professional outlets to learn, participate, and contribute to discussions relating to my business and social interests. I particularly enjoy LinkedIn because of its business and public policy orientation.

2) Establish a Social Media Profile: It is important to create profiles on the various sites that are accurate, interesting, and representative of your core interests and capabilities. As the Founder of the Internet, Google’s Vint Cerf noted recently, on the Internet there is no such thing as privacy. Expect your profile to be seen and make sure it portrays the public face you desire. A good idea is to search prominent leader’s profiles in the areas of your business or professional interest to see how they word, format, and describe their passions.