RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304691904579346523830566300

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

—From ” Harrison Bergeron ” (1961), a short story by Kurt Vonnegut

The year was 2019 and Americans were finally on their way toward real equality. Not just equality in God’s eyes, or before the law, or in opportunity.

They were going to be equal every which way.

All this equality was due to bold new government action. There was the Decent Wage Act of 2017, which pegged the minimum wage to the (inflation-adjusted) average hourly wage of 2016. There was the NEW-AMT, which set a 55% minimum federal tax rate on individual income over $150,000 (or 80% for incomes above $500,000). There was the Unemployment Insurance Is Forever Act of 2018. There was the 2018 De Blasio-Waxman CEO Pay Act, which mandated a 9-to-1 ratio between the highest and lowest paid person in any enterprise.

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2014/01/26/the-ten-worst-u-s-purveyors-of-antisemitism-3-thomas-friedman/?print=1

The Ten Worst U.S. Purveyors of Antisemitism, #3: Thomas Friedman

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was for a long time a particularly harsh critic of Israel. The criticism had a special edge, a sneer, to it. The Israelis were such idiots he almost couldn’t believe it.

As in a November 2009 column where Friedman asserted:

Right now [America] want[s] [peace] more than the parties…. Today, the Arabs, Israel and the Palestinians are clearly not feeling enough pain to do anything hard for peace with each other…. [T]hen I say, let them enjoy it. I just don’t want to subsidize it or anesthetize it anymore. We need to fix America. If and when they get serious, they’ll find us. And when they do, we should put a detailed U.S. plan for a two-state solution, with borders, on the table….

Full disclosure: Israelis don’t like this sort of thing. We don’t like being derided by a comfortable American Jew like Thomas Friedman for “not feeling enough pain,” not wanting peace. We don’t like being told that we and our rather peace- and democracy-challenged neighbors are on the same peace-refusing page, and a “detailed U.S. plan” is all it would take for flowers of harmony to sprout.

Then there was the March 2010 dust-up when Vice President Biden was here, and the Israeli Interior Ministry committed the terrific faux pas of announcing plans for apartments—for Jews, no less—in a Jerusalem neighborhood. Biden, Friedman wrote,

should have… flown home and left the following scribbled note behind: “Message from America to the Israeli government: Friends don’t let friends drive drunk. And right now, you’re driving drunk. You think you can embarrass your only true ally in the world, to satisfy some domestic political need, with no consequences? You have lost total contact with reality. Call us when you’re serious….”

Again, those damn idiot Israelis. If one were to veer into the psychological, one would note that in these outbursts Friedman himself is suffering embarrassment over what he sees as his boorish country cousins, and contrasting this rather emphatically with his American allegiance.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/kofi-annan-and-desmond-tutu-visit-iran-pay-tribute-to-ayatollah-khomeini/print/

Kofi Annan, along with some of the “elders” visited Iran. The Elders were a group founded by Nelson Mandela and includes such controversial figures as Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter.

Carter does not seem to have accompanied the Elders to Iran because a Carter hostage crisis featuring Jimmy Carter might have been a bit too much even for him, but Desmond Tutu came along.

According to Iranian media, the trip began “with a visit to the mausoleum of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini” where the former UN Secretary General who became notorious for both allegations of corruption and appeasement, “expressed certainty that with his presence at the mausoleum of Imam Khomeini, his mission in Iran would yield good results.”

Fars News described Annan as “paying tribute” to the mass murdering Ayatollah. Photos from Ahlul Bayt depicted Tutu, Annan and other Elders at the Khomeini mausoleum.

According to Iranian media, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani responsible for the murder of Iranian democratic activists in Europe, among other atrocities, questioned Annan, quoted the Koran and denounced the terrorism and oppression of colonial powers. It goes on to say that “Kofi Annan praised the role of the Islamic Republic, especially in the area of ​​peace.”

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/why-obama-wont-call-saeed-abedinis-wife-on-the-glazov-gang/print/

This week’s Glazov Gang was hosted by Ann-Marie Murrell, the National Director of PolitiChicks.tv and joined by Dwight Schultz, a Hollywood Actor, and John Duffy, a Film Producer from the Bronx.

The Gang gathered to discuss Stop Giving Obama Radicals the Benefit of the Doubt. The discussion occurred in Part I and focused on the destructive forces Obama has brought into his administration.

The episode also analyzed Michelle Obama Sees Jane Fonda as a Role Model, How Obama Brought the Muslim Brotherhood into the Government, The Mullahs Say They Didn’t Agree to Anything, Why Obama Won’t Call Saeed Abedini’s Wife, and much, much more. Watch both parts of the two-part episode below:

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/hillary-spins-benghazi/print/

At a keynote appearance before the National Automobile Dealers Association on Monday, Hillary Clinton began laying the groundwork for how she will respond to the Benghazi scandal during her likely 2016 presidential run. “My biggest, you know, regret is what happened in Benghazi,” she answered in response to a question asking her to identify “do-overs” during her stint as Secretary of State. She then proceeded to double down. “I mean, you know, you make these choices based on imperfect information,” she contended. “And you make them to, as we say, the best of your ability. But that doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be unforeseen consequences, unpredictable twists and turns.”

One is left to wonder what “imperfect information” Clinton was vaguely referring to in her response. The alleged “imperfect information” that led Clinton and company to lie for weeks about the nature of the attack? The “fog of war,” as Clinton previously described it? Of course, “imperfect information” had nothing to do with the Obama administration’s deceitful portrayal of the terrorist attack to the public. Declassified documents made public two weeks ago reveal that AFRICOM commander Gen. Carter Ham told members of the House Armed Services subcommittee that he learned about the “terrorist attack” on the consulate compound only 15 minutes after it commenced. ”My first call was to [Joint Chiefs of Staff General chairman] General Dempsey, General Dempsey’s office, to say, ‘Hey, I am headed down the hall. I need to see him right away,’” Ham testified on June 26, 2013. “I told him what I knew. We immediately walked upstairs to meet with Secretary [of Defense] Panetta.” Ham further testified that Dempsey and Panetta “had the basic information as they headed across for the meeting at the White House.”

The meeting to which Ham referred was a pre-scheduled session with President Obama at 5 p.m. EST. A Defense Department timeline reveals that this meeting occurred one hour and 18 minutes after the attack began. The meeting lasted half an hour. That means that Obama knew it was a terrorist attack on September 11, 2012, before the battle that lasted approximately eight hours was less than two hours old.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/walter-williams/the-politics-of-hate-and-envy/print/

Part of the progressive agenda is to create hate and envy. One component of that agenda is to attack the large differences between a corporation’s chief executive officer’s earnings and those of its average worker. CNNMoney published salary comparisons in “Fortune 50 CEO pay vs. our salaries” (http://tinyurl.com/c2b24rv). Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf’s annual salary is $2.8 million. CNN shows that it takes 66 Wells Fargo employees, whose average salary is $42,400, to match Stumpf’s salary. It takes 57 Wal-Mart employees, who earn $22,100 on average, to match CEO Michael Duke’s $1.3 million. At General Electric, 44 employees earning $75,300 a year match CEO Jeff Immelt’s $3.3 million salary. For people with little understanding, such differences seem patently unfair. Before touching on the fairness issue, let’s look at some high salaries that progressives ignore.

Forbes lists the “Highest-Paid Football Players 2013″ (http://tinyurl.com/kw4dv3d). Drew Brees, quarterback for the Saints, earned $40 million. If the average Saints organization employee earned $45,000, it would take almost 900 of them to match Brees’ salary. Patriots quarterback Tom Brady earned $31.3 million, and Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant earns $23.5 million for playing basketball. It would take the earnings of more than 1,200 workers making $45,000 a year to match the earnings of Brady and Bryant.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/amnesty-ends-the-american-dream/print/ Immigration is becoming unpopular everywhere else. In the UK, immigration has become so toxic that it may lead to a split from the European Union. In Australia, it helped elect a conservative government willing to tackle its migrant boat problem. Meanwhile in the United States, Republicans keep flirting with a Super-Amnesty that would be […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2014/01/are_we_still_a_good_country.html

It is important to remember some guiding principles as we fight back against Barack Obama’s crude and coarse behavior against our country. Though the fight will be long and arduous, what Henry Gregor Felsen wrote in his 1961 book entitled Letters to a Teen-Age Son still applies.

The human need for and the essentials of goodness, decency and righteousness are as modern as they are ancient, and no future time will ever turn them into museum pieces.

Though Obama continues to malign, denigrate, and intimidate those who disagree with him, America is beginning to understand that Obama’s moral compass is predicated on mean-spiritedness. The attack on Dinesh D’Souza is the latest in Obama’s “ongoing persecution of Republicans and conservatives” and “mirrors the attacks by the fascists of Europe on their opponents in the 1930s.” As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, “[w]hat does your right of freedom of speech mean if saying something that irritates the Obama administration” results in a double standard of treatment?

As Obama continues to pander to the lowest common denominator and lie about his opposition’s alleged war on women, America needs to remind him that “to miss knowing the difference between sex and the awareness of mating is to miss one of life’s most perfect, most meaningful moments.” The casual sex as depicted in ObamaCare advertisements and his flippancy about young people will never compete with the profound knowledge that there comes “a time when freedom, pleasure, opportunity, lack of responsibility, self-centeredness, and self-indulgence are not, somehow, enough” to fill a life.

http://ruleofreason.blogspot.com/2014/01/censorship-by-example.html

Dinesh D’Souza, the prominent conservative writer, has been arrested and indicted on trumped-up Federal Election Law charges.Why?

Just as Leona Helmsley was charged and tried for tax evasion, and Wall Street maverick Michael Milken was charged and indicted for “racketeering,” political enemies can be quashed by fiat law. They were back-stabbed by the envious and the disgruntled. D’Souza has been targeted for punishment for having criticized the Obama administration in the least flattering terms. Just as opponents of Hitler’s régime were crushed, not principally by Nazi-legislated laws, but by laws passed during the Weimar Republic, President Barack Obama is resorting to laws passed long before anyone had ever heard of him. The one this time is the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, which amended the 1971Federal Campaign Act.

It’s all perfectly “legal,” you see. Obama has simply put on the brass-weighted gloves that Congress had already prepared for him.

D’Souza was often in the limelight, having written controversial books critical of Obama’s policies, and having made one relatively successful political film (“2016: Obama’s America”) and will debut another next July

To qualify for having a brass glove knock one’s jaw to the back of one’s cranium, to invite the wrath of such Nazi or Stalinist persecution, one must be a “name,” a celebrity, in the public eye, a non-submissive personality who eschews political correctness and has never exhibited signs of unreserved esteem for an establishment more and more governed by the fiat laws that emanate daily from Washington D.C. In this instance, D’Souza allegedly flouted federal campaign finance laws. He contributed to the war chest of a local candidate whom he happened to have known during her campaign.

Hate-Filled Protest in France Attracts Thousands; Crowd Chants ‘Jew, France Is Not for You!’ (VIDEO) A hate-filled protest took place on the streets of Paris on Sunday, with thousands of marchers chanting, “Jew, France is not for you,” the French JSS News reported. JSS News said police counted 17,000 protesters (the protest groups claimed they […]