RUTHFULLY YOURS

Congress should deter Iran’s nuclear ambitions by authorizing, now, the president to use military action.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/371512/authorize-force-now-robert-p-george-michael-stokes-paulsen

The six-month “interim” agreement between Iran and the U.S. and other nations on Iran’s further development of its nuclear capacity has now gone into effect. Many Americans of both political parties believe it is a bad deal — one that will not lead to a suspension of Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. The Israelis and the Saudis agree with them. We too have grave doubts.

What if the skeptics are right? We had better think that possibility through very carefully — and do it now. President Obama and key leaders in Congress have stated that the acquisition of nuclear arms by Iran is unacceptable. The president has assured the public, and our allies, that he will not let it happen. If the president is speaking truthfully on this matter, then the possibility of the failure of the “interim” deal means that the United States must be prepared to deploy military force to destroy Iran’s nuclear-development sites.

No American wants that to become necessary. Yet is there any reason to suppose that, if it does, the constitutional debates over presidential authority to take military action will be any more helpful than the embarrassment attending President Obama’s “red-line-already-crossed,” on-again, off-again handwringing over the use of military force against the Assad regime in Syria this past September? Can anyone fail to imagine Iran’s leaders chortling at the sight of America’s Congress debating a resolution authorizing the use of military force, all the while that Iran takes advantage of the time to prepare to defend its weapons against a U.S.-led attack?

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/371961/print

When entrenched interests face competition, wealth and opportunity can skyrocket.

Down with stakeholders.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has come out against affordable health care for kids. Retail medical clinics — at drugstores, Walmarts, etc. — are cropping up across the nation, thanks in part to the expected longer waiting times and out-of-pocket expenses stemming from Obamacare. And the pediatricians don’t like it. “While retail clinics may be more convenient and less costly, the AAP said they are detrimental to the concept of a ‘medical home,’ where patients have a personal physician who knows them well and coordinates all their care,” reported the Wall Street Journal. You say “medical home,” I say locked-in customers. Tomayto-tomahto.

The pediatricians have a point, albeit a weak one. You can’t say the same about teachers’ unions, whose top priorities are to take care of their members, even when such care comes at the expense of students. In New York City, the passion from teachers’ unions is all aimed at pay raises, killing charter schools, and keeping rules that make it harder to get rid of incompetents, criminals, and even, occasionally, sexual predators.

In Michigan, until reforms from Republican leaders kicked in, the Service Employees International Union, with the help of state Democrats, claimed parents of disabled kids were “union members” just so the union could skim “dues” from Medicaid payments to parents who served as their kids’ healthcare providers.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/372007/why-republicans-need-tea-party-david-horowitz

Can the marriage between the Tea Party and the GOP survive?

My answer is: It better. The White House is occupied by a lifelong anti-American radical who has done more to bankrupt this nation’s economy, take us down as a military power, and destroy individual liberty than anyone would have thought possible in January 2009 when he took office. And it’s worse than that. Obama is the head of a Democratic party that has moved so far to the left over the last 46 years that it has become anti–free market, anti-individualist, anti-constitutionalist, and unready to defend America’s sovereign interests at home and abroad. We cannot afford to let such a party run our government for another four or eight years. The world cannot afford it.

So how do we hold together the conservative coalition opposing this national suicide? How do we make this marriage survive? First of all, by recognizing that the basic difference between the Tea Party and the Republican party is a matter of tactics and temperament, not policy and ideology. To understand what I mean by this, one has to go back to the flashpoint that has made the possibility of a Republican schism a topic of the day: the famous alleged government shutdown by tea-party hero Ted Cruz. I probably should acknowledge here that I am a huge fan of what the Tea Party represents, though not always what it does. I believe the emergence of the Tea Party is the most important political development in conservatism in the last 25 years, and is possibly the last best hope for our country.

The government shutdown was the alleged result of Senator Cruz’s filibuster of a continuing resolution to fund the government. In fact, the House had passed a resolution to fund the government but not Obamacare. In the Senate, however, Majority Leader Harry Reid stripped the Obamacare-funding ban from the bill. Cruz conducted a one-man filibuster to express his opposition, both to Reid and to the Republicans who voted to fund Obamacare rather than join him. And so Republicans attacked each other instead of the real culprits.

Ignorance or Enlightenment: The Islam-Israel Conflict

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/61370

The Arab and Muslim total war against Israel appears to be a war without end. This is why it is not accurate to describe it as the Arab-Israel conflict, nor is it correct to label it the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It is, in reality, the Islam-Israel conflict and, like the seventeenth century Thirty Years War, it waxes and wanes but is nevertheless devastating and has ground on for far longer.

The irrevocable Islamic and Koranic injunction upon all Muslims is to wage relentless war against any non-Muslim nation state that exists within what Islam decrees as the Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam). Wherever the Muslim foot has trod triumphal in the name of Allah, that territory is considered eternally Islamic land. If it is lost, then it enters the Dar al-Harb (the House of War) and must be retaken and the population either forcibly converted to Islam or exterminated.

It is not only Israel, the Jewish state, that is warred and aggressed against by the followers of the “religion of peace” but all lands that have been lost to erstwhile Muslim invasion and occupation: They include, Spain, Portugal, Sicily, parts of France, Hungary, Austria, the Balkans, Greece, southern Russia – all lands considered to be in the Dar al Harb.

It is not by chance that much of Europe is slipping and sliding under the orbit of Islamic Sharia law for vast numbers of Muslim immigrants, allowed through slavish adherence to the twin gods of diversity and multiculturalism into Europe, are the present day Islamic advance guard for the re-conquest of much of the European continent.

http://www.d-intl.com/2014/02/23/hollande-government-chokes-on-gender-theory/?lang=en
Hollande government chokes on gender theory
The French government’s attempts to have old-fashioned pink and blue sexual stereotypes replaced with a basket of new kinky stereotypes celebrating same-sex parents, homosexuals, transvestites and the like – have run into trouble.

PARIS. France’s Socialist Hollande government, mired in unprecedented depths of unpopularity, was caught red-handed with its latest social engineering experiment: a pilot project in some 600 kindergartens based on gender theory. The issue had been stewing ever since the passage last spring of the same-sex marriage law that granted homosexuals the right to marry and raise children in wholesome families. Adoption rights are extended, children born in previous heterosexual relationships can be cuddled in recomposed matrimonially united 2-mother or 2-father families.

The implied promise of normalization of children brought into the world with the help of artificial insemination and womb rental and the eventual legalization of these methods in France rounded out the package. But widespread opposition to the indoctrination of male-female equality, starting with day care centers and kindergartens, has blocked the “social progress” momentum.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/
The S&P 500 Index closed at 805.22 the day Barack Obama was inaugurated as President. On Friday the Index closed at 1836.25, for a gain of 128% over the past five years, reflecting an annual compounded gain of 18%. Why, then, do so many, including me, feel his policies are bad for the economic well-being of the country?

Over the same time frame – the five years of the Obama Administration – the prices of other asset classes rose as well. Gold (a harbinger of concern) is up 55%, crude oil (which we have in abundance) has risen 164% and copper has doubled. The CBOE Index has more than doubled. Corporate bonds have done exceptionally well, with the yield on High Yield bonds being roughly one third what they were on January 20, 2009. Somewhat contradictorily, the yields on Treasury Bills are half of what they were when Mr. Obama took the oath of office in January 2008. The principal culprit for the rise in asset prices has been interest rates that have been kept exceptionally low by an accommodative Federal Reserve. The consequence is a schizophrenic market, with a mixture of worry and speculation manifested in the rise in the prices of stocks, high yield bonds, gold and oil, while risk aversion is also very much alive, reflected in the exceptionally low yields on short term Treasury Bills.

We all know, of course, that the economic recovery has been feeble and that federal debt is considerably higher than it was five years ago – $5 trillion (or 30%) more today than it was at the end of fiscal 2009. The biggest problem for the economy has been a lack of jobs. While the stated unemployment rate has declined, the more meaningful number, as it actually reflects people working, is the labor participation rate, which has declined from 65.7% in January 2009 to 63% in January 2014, according to the BLS. Each one percent reflects about 1.5 million workers. Average incomes are lower than they were before the recession began. Total employment, as mentioned above, has declined, and income and wealth gaps have widened.

http://americanthinker.com/blog/2014/02/rep_john_conyers_honors_farrakhan_after_denouncing_his_anti-semitism.html
Rep. John Conyers honors Farrakhan after denouncing his anti-Semitism
Thomas Lifson
Rep. John Conyers, one of the founders of the Congressional Black Caucus and widely considered the dean of the African-Americans in Congress, bestowed a great honor on Louis Farrakhan over the weekend, by attending a three hour sermon before a crowd of 18,000 people in Detroit, sitting behind him and thereby implicitly endorsing his hateful message.

Conyers was already well-acquainted with Farrakhan’s hateful messages, having last year publicly condemned him. Caroline May writes in the Daily Caller:

Last May, Conyers attended another Farrakhan speech at the Fellowship Chapel in Detroit where the black nationalist leader said President Obama “surrounded himself with Satan,” talked about “Satanic Jew,” the “Synagogue of Satan,” and the like. Conyers ended up having to condemn his remarks.

“Last Friday, I attended a speech by Minister Louis Farrakhan at Fellowship Chapel in Detroit, Michigan. During this speech, Minister Farrakhan made unacceptable racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic statements, which I condemn in the strongest possible terms,” Conyers said at the time, adding that he believed the Nation of Islam Leader would be focused on Detroit revitalization efforts.

“The fact that Minister Farrakhan has engaged in important charitable work aimed at expanding economic opportunities for underserved communities does not excuse these statements,” he added. “I sincerely offer my apologies to my constituents and others who also may have been offended by the minister’s words.”

But hey, what’s a little Jew-hatred between friends? All is forgiven, to the extent that Conyers was willing to be pictured seated behind Farrakhan as he unleashed his message, less than a year later.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303880604579405450058012742#printMode

John Dingell announced on Monday that he plans to retire from the House of Representatives at the end of this Congress, and his initial parting shot came with unusual ill-grace. “I find serving in the House to be obnoxious,” the 87-year-old told the Detroit News. “It’s become very hard because of the acrimony and bitterness, both in Congress and in the streets.”

The Democrat from southeastern Michigan was first elected in 1955 and never served in the minority until after the GOP sweep of 1994. He was among those who, Congress after Congress, steadily built the modern administrative state with its vast powers to redistribute income and regulate to punish or reward companies.

In his political heyday as Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee in the 1980s, Mr. Dingell liked to boast that his writ extended to every corner of the American economy. He wasn’t far off. Yet when all economic and cultural questions become political, is it any wonder that politics becomes more acrimonious?

Mr. Dingell may have intended his “obnoxious” barb at the tea party and Americans angry with Washington, but most of those people don’t know how to maneuver through the corridors of power. They can’t afford to hire someone from “the Dingell bar,” the name adopted with an almost civic pride by the Washington lawyers who were well paid for representing businesses caught in the Dingell investigative cross-hairs. Many were his former staffers.

The “Dingell method,” another phrase from the era, was to conduct an investigation, selectively leak what his staff found to a newspaper and TV network (double the media points), then haul the poor business targets for a public grilling before the cameras. The journalists would win prizes for the appearance of enterprise. The CEOs would be advised by the Dingell bar to be obsequious and remorseful whether guilty or not. The acrimony was one-sided.

News from the Middle East is full of the threat of Arab revolts “springing” up in Jordan and challenging the rule of King Abdullah II, son of the late King Hussein. The throne in Amman is depicted as the “ancient” Hashemite Dynasty of Jordan. It’s a royal historical scam. There has never, repeat never, been an ancient Hashemite legacy in Palestine, unless 1922 is “ancient” history.

Abdullah I (left), King of Jordan and (right) his brother Feisal 1 of Iraq.

That year the British deeded 82% of Mandated Palestine to the Arabs. King Feisal got Iraq and his kid brother Abdullah Senior (great-grandpa to the present Abdullah) had to be mollified so they gave him Trans Jordan. He was assassinated and his grandson King Hussein, known as “Al-Malik Al-Insan (“The Humane King”), succeeded his father who was Talal the insane, who ruled only for a few months.

Again, check out the family tree which derails the spin of the ancient Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Please note that the family tree is detailed in small print in Arabic, but the English translation has been removed. The Hashemite clan ruled over parts of the Hijaz region of Arabia from 967 to 1925 in unbroken succession. Moreover, the late King Hussein’s branch of the Hashemite family ruled the holy city of Mecca from 1201 until 1925. When Abdullah (the First) took over Jordan, the local nomadic Arab population was totally indifferent. Calvin Coolidge could have been made king and it would not have created much of a stir.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-four-great-waves-of-defense-neglect#ixzz2uQVGZRPI

If an additional $50 billion a year seems like a lot, how much would be the cost to the United States if adversarial nations continue to chip away at the free world until America finds itself either isolated or impotent to effect a reversal as it faces rogue terrorist states armed with the most deadly of weapons?

America’s fourth wave of neglect of its military since the end of World War II may have disastrous geostrategic consequences.

While Congress has passed a temporary slowdown in the decline in American defense spending with a two-year budget framework, the Ryan-Murray budget agreement, which restores $32 billion to the Department of Defense, the projected defense resources available for the next eight years will not allow the United States to protect its own security, let alone that of its allies.

Taken together, as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned[1], previous and projected cuts to military budgets from 2009-2023 threaten dangerously to undermine the stability required for both economic prosperity and relative peace among the world’s major military powers, as well as America’s global standing.

One of the nation’s top defense analysts sums it up: “The reality is, for all its promise, the Ryan-Murray budget agreement still only addresses less than 7 percent of the defense sequester. Much more work needs to be done to lift the specter of sequestration once and for all …”[2].
THE FIRST WAVE OF NEGLECT, 1945-1950

After World War II, U.S. security suffered. The decline in defense spending after 1945 was large, $90 billion down to $14 billion at the beginning of the first year after the war’s end (FY1947 or July 1, 1946). With the end of World War II, support for a strong US military was not a sure thing.

While the Marshall Plan, or European Economic Recovery Plan, did stop a significant portion of the planned expansion of the Soviets into Europe[3], these efforts consisted primarily of significant American economic assistance and the transfer of surplus military equipment to designated countries, with some American personnel transferred for training purposes as well – but without the deployment of American soldiers[4].

Despite the success of the Marshall Plan, however, serious security threats remained in the post-WWII period. The communists threatened to come to power in Turkey and Greece and succeeded in taking power in Czechoslovakia in February 1948 — a move, it was feared, that would imperil the freedom of other states of Europe.