RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/nov/5/carson-a-duty-to-become-well-informed/
“I would be delighted if we deleted party affiliation from all ballots, encouraging people to vote for ideas and records of accomplishment, not parties. We must once again begin to value truth, decency, hard work and the can-do attitude that produced the greatest nation in the history of the world.”

As a child in elementary school, I was the epitome of an underachiever. You could always count on me to get the lowest score on a test, because I lacked even the basic knowledge of an unsophisticated street kid.

I secretly admired the smart children in school and wondered how they always seemed to know the answers to any question the teachers would ask. I would have been doomed to failure but my mother, who was a domestic, keenly observed that her employers did a great deal of reading. She determined that my brother and I would become avid readers in the hope that we would emulate them. We resisted the change from our entertainment-focused lives, but because of her tenacity, my mother always prevailed in the end.

One day, I noticed that I, too, knew most of the answers to the questions the teacher was asking, because I had recently been reading about the subject matter at hand. I was inspired to read everything I could get my hands on, and my academic ascension quickly landed me at the head of the class.

Reading made me knowledgeable and completely changed my perception of myself and the world around me. I began to question things and to study subjects on my own, and I took great joy in astounding adults with my knowledge. The point here is, my perceptions of the world and my role in it were drastically altered by the accumulation of knowledge.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/nov/5/editorial-the-harsh-mistress/

Mark Twain is supposed to have said that “everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” That was actually his friend Charles Dudley Warner (an editorial writer) who said it. President Obama, who has no taste for idle talk, now proposes to actually do something about the rowdy wind and the errant rain. He has appointed a task force. If that doesn’t work, another executive order may follow, to tell the sun to shape up.

For now, the president has ordered all agencies of the federal government to escalate their preparedness in towns and states threatened by global warming. Among the terrors Mr. Obama identifies as requiring federal intervention are “prolonged periods of excessively high temperatures, more heavy downpours, an increase in wildfires, more severe droughts, permafrost thawing, ocean acidification, and sea-level rise.” Frost on the pumpkin and outbreaks of crabgrass in the backyard can be dealt with later.

The president’s new Council on Climate Preparedness and Resilience will tell communities how to mitigate the effects of climate change by recycling and changing to mercury-filled light bulbs, lest the polar bears drown. On his panel are seven Democratic governors and the Republican governor of Guam, “where America’s morning begins” and where the day sometimes includes a big wind roaring down Typhoon Alley.

The president is so determined to impose a little order in the universe that he wants to spend nearly twice as much money on universe-discipline as he’s willing to spend to secure America’s borders against unrestricted and unregulated immigration. In a recent report to House Republicans, the White House took note that the United States will spend $22.2 billion across 18 federal agencies this year to lower the planet’s temperature. Next year, it expects to spend nearly that much to pay authors of scare stories and the producers of windmills, solar panels and $16-a-gallon jet fuel extracted from algae.

On the other hand, Mr. Obama wants to spend only $12 billion for border security and customs enforcement, the agents assigned to hold back illegal immigration. Given the administration’s handling of the southern border — an estimated 12 million illegals, and counting — some people are skeptical that even spending all that climate money will accomplish very much beyond expanding those 18 federal agencies.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-coronation-of-ineptitude-how-to-do-the-obama-two-step

America has always lauded efficiency. Even before the existence of the United States of America, the colonists cultivated a reputation for being efficient marksmen. German gunsmiths immigrated to the colonies and their “rifled” gun barrels proved much more accurate than the smooth-bore muskets and blunderbusses, popular in that day. In fact, the pinpoint accuracy of the colonial “rifle-men” would prove to be a major advantage for the rebels against the professional soldiers of Britain, as it allowed them to conserve ammunition and cripple the morale of Lord Howe’s men.

Effectiveness and efficiency have always commanded a premium in the United States, but today these traits seem to be more elusive than an affordable insurance policy. Looking through the annals of history, no other nation has achieved a comparable amount of innovation in such a wide variety of disciplines as speedily as America has done. The scientific inventions of Franklin and Edison, the political genius of Madison and Jefferson, the militaristic dominance of Eisenhower and Patton, the novel entertainment of Walt Disney and Elvis, and the entrepreneurial spirit of Gates, Ford, and Jobs only scratch the surface on two and a half centuries of American ingenuity.

But the world-changing products of these American minds did not draw their first breath on a bed of incompetence. Yes, Edison’s inventions sometimes took hundreds of iterations to emerge and many of Disney’s sketches ended up on the ink-stained linoleum of his studio floor, but those were not their final incarnations. In each case, our free market system rewarded the most effective product with success while simultaneously encouraging future minds to find even more efficient ways of performing the same task. This is how the free market functions and why it works so brilliantly to provide value and prosperity for creator and consumer alike.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/call-for-national-debate-on-islam?f=puball

Current U.S. political gridlock brings to mind an old joke, modified for the times.

A Democrat and Republican politician walking through the woods come across tracks. Unable to agree on anything, they debate the source. One says they are deer tracks; the other, moose tracks. As the debate rages, the two are killed by an oncoming train. The tracks, of course, were train tracks.

It is sad our leaders — so focused on playing party politics — neglect a real danger barreling down upon us.

The problem is complicated because the danger is a stealthy, political ideology.

Imagine the outcry by Democrats or Republicans if one’s political ideology were given special treatment over the other’s in influencing the U.S. population.

Both demand an equal playing field. Whenever it is overstepped — like a religious group promoting one political party’s goals over the other’s — legal action is taken to stop the group by threatening revocation of its religious status.

The concept of separation of church and state is so fundamental to our nation the requirement for secularism is unquestioned — i.e., the American people will be legally bound by government-imposed laws and never religion-imposed ones.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/victimized-by-muslims-you-deserve-it/print/

Late one night two years ago, only days before Christmas, two burglars wearing ski masks climbed through an open window into the Oslo home of Arild Opheim and Elin Ruhlin Gjuvsland. The noise they made woke Elin first. She saw a shadow through the bedroom door. Next thing she knew, the two intruders were on top of her and Arild, holding them down on the mattress and saying, in English, “Don’t look. Sleep. If look, we kill.”

The thugs tied up the couple – both of whom have worked for years as journalists and program hosts for NRK, the state TV and radio broadcasting system – and gathered up various items, including computers and telephones. Arild and Elin also handed over their bank cards and pin codes. The men were “very aggressive” – one of them struck Elin in the head with a blunt metal object. But they also attempted, as the couple explained last Friday on the TV talk showSkavlan and in a Dagbladet op-ed, to “win sympathy by telling their story.”

In a mixture of Spanish, Arabic, and broken English, they maintained that they “weren’t evil people” but were “in a desperate situation. They wanted to be able to reside and work and lead a normal life in Norway. But their asylum application had been rejected. Now they had no other choice than to rob us and to get money to return home.” In order to get back home “see their families,” they “needed 20,000 kroner” – about $4000. “They’d had a tough life, while Norwegians had it good.” Arild and Elin, said one of the crooks, deserved what they were getting.

(In fact, no rejected asylum seeker in Norway needs to rob anybody to get home. The Norwegian government pays all the expenses for such repatriation. And then some.)

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-rise-and-fall-of-new-york/print/

Twenty years ago, New York’s long nightmare ended with a Giuliani victory over Mayor Dinkins. Now the nightmare returns as former Dinkins staffer and terrorist supporter Bill de Blasio will begin wrecking the city where Dinkins and his Democratic predecessors left off.

Bill de Blasio vowed to undo Giuliani’s reforms and turn back the clock on fighting crime and terrorism. Giuliani’s victory was a wake-up call to Democrats that one of the more dangerous cities in the country had rejected their liberal soft-on-crime policies that had made it unlivable. Bill de Blasio’s victory tells them that soft-on-crime is popular again.

Welcome back Michael Dukakis.

Part of the reason is that New York City has changed. The city’s politics have traditionally been middle class. Even Democratic politicians identified with the storeowner in Brooklyn, the fireman in Staten Island and the auto body mechanic in Queens.

Bill de Blasio breaks with that tradition. The former Warren Wilhelm Jr. did pick a name that opens more political doors for him among working class voters, but other than that his causes, building more housing projects, banning carriage horses in Central Park and ending police surveillance of Muslim terrorists are a grab bag of bad ideas from his two bases; liberal yuppies and welfare voters.

The middle class voters in Queens pleading with Joe Lhota to protect them from Bill de Blasio’s red plague are part of the older New York; that city of gruff accents but kind hearts, loquacious taxi drivers and busybody tenement grandmothers that appears so often on television and in movies that even most New Yorkers still confuse it with reality… even though it hardly exists now.

Bill de Blasio, with his Park Slope digs, represents the city’s new Yuckie overlords, yuppie hippies with Subarus, six- figure salaries, leftist politics and Whole Foods reusable bags full of tofu for the kids. It was only a matter of time until the college kids who moved to the city to slum and protest before finding profitable work formed alliances with minority community groups that would allow them to take over.

The Left’s betrayal of the millions of persecuted Muslim women suffering under Islamic gender apartheid continues.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/john-kerry-and-saudi-women-driving/

For the Left, all cultures are equal, but some cultures are more equal than others.

For instance, in the world of the Left, the West never has a right to say what is right or wrong — when dealing with an adversary culture and regime, that is.

If it’s Israel, you can start shooting right away.

For example, when it comes to Israelis getting out of line and engaging in monstrous behavior like building houses and apartments on their own territory, they must be denounced immediately for that — and pressured relentlessly to desist from such unconscionable behavior.

When Israelis have the audacity to imprison Palestinian terrorists who have massacred Israeli innocent civilians, something has to be done fast. And that’s why, on April 24, 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry and the Obama administration demanded that Israel release a number of Palestinian terrorists from its prisons — to make the Palestinian Authority happy of course. (P.S.: The P.A. was not pressured to stop its mosques, schools and media outlets from teaching that Israel has no right to exist or that Jews are descended from apes and pigs.)

If Kerry were asked what he thinks of apartheid-era South Africa, which Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has compared Israel to, one just dares to presume that he would say it was a bad thing that blacks were considered second-class citizens — which of course it was. He would, in other words, apply a universal standard of human rights on South Africa and declare that a society that marginalizes and disempowers a certain group of people based on skin color is an inferior society and must civilize itself. And that would be a legitimate position.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=6203

On Monday night, Channel 10 Arab affairs commentator Zvi Yehezkeli reported that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas made a rare reference to the U.S.-brokered peace talks under way between the PA and Israel.

Until now, Abbas has been tight-lipped about the hush-hush two-state solution discussions in which his negotiating team is ostensibly invested. And though he has made an effort to come off as more moderate than his terrorist predecessor, Yasser Arafat, he occasionally lets his true ill intentions slip. On Monday, as always, he did this in Arabic. After all, he could not risk being too upfront with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry scheduled to arrive in Israel on Tuesday.

What Abu Mazen told his cronies in the Fatah Revolutionary Committee was that the negotiations are significantly deadlocked. No surprise there. But the words to follow are noteworthy. “The situation,” he said, “is liable to be explosive.”

According to Yehezkeli, the phrase Abbas used in Arabic can also be interpreted as “the situation is explosive.”

Translations aside, Abbas was not merely being careless, linguistically or otherwise. He was effectually giving a green light for an eruption of violence against Israelis. This is something he has been doing indirectly, through the PA-controlled media. But saying it outright is unusual for him, since he always tries to remain above the fanatical fray by hiding behind his tailored suit and silk tie.

It is a wardrobe choice that has worked well where fooling the West is concerned. But it is not the only reason that Washington is putting Jerusalem on a par with Ramallah. More importantly, U.S. President Barack Obama wants his State Department to do something — anything — to smooth over its miserable foreign policy failures across the globe. Though the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is and will remain unresolved until the entire region reforms and accepts the Jewish state in its midst, it is nevertheless an easy target for American pressure. This is because Israel is always anxious to cooperate with Uncle Sam; and the P

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/jews-and-christians-play-the-interfaith-kumbaya?f=must_reads The first chapter of the Koran, Al Fatiha, is recited at the start of Muslim prayer rituals at five different times of the day for a total of 17 recitations daily.  The Al Fatiha entreats Muslims to follow the straight path – obedience to Allah and his messenger Mohammed – and not the path […]

The news that Hillary Clinton has earned what the Washington Post characterized as“close to $500,000” for two recent speeches to Goldman Sachs is generating a certain amount of excitement.

An editorial in the Washington Examiner reports that “some critics now raise questions about the propriety of a Wall Street firm that depends in so many ways upon political influence to maintain its financial health paying such egregiously large speaking fees to the potential next Oval Office occupant, especially someone who has little or no experience with financial products or entrepreneurship.”

Neither Goldman Sachs nor Mrs. Clinton has disclosed in detail the contents of the speeches. But the image of Mrs. Clinton — or, for that matter, her husband Bill — as somehow naïve or innocent in matters of finance or business is enough to bring a smile to the lips of anyone who remembers the Clinton back story.

This is the same Hillary Clinton, after all, who made nearly $100,000 in ten months of 1978 and 1979 trading cattle and hog futures, gains she explained improbably by saying she had diligently read the Wall Street Journal.

It is the same Hillary Clinton who served between 1986 and 1992 as a member of the corporate board of directors of Walmart. That was during that Arkansas-based retailer’s phenomenal growth, at a time when it had a non-union, low-cost workforce similar to the one that troubles left-wing activists today.

Bill Clinton, meanwhile, collected a post-presidential $12 million from a partnership he had with Ron Burkle and what the Wall Street Journal described as “Dubai Investment Group (YGP) Ltd., an entity that was part of the business empire of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai.” That’s on top of the $106 million that Mr. Clinton has earned in speaking fees since leaving the White House, which itself comes on top of his reported $15 million book advance.

Meanwhile, the New Republic, in a long feature on how former Bill Clinton aide Douglas Band parlayed his Clinton ties into a personal fortune and a 200-employee corporate advisory firm, can quote an anonymous “Clinton friend” claiming that Mr. Clinton“doesn’t care about money.”

That’s the Clinton trick — making lots of money while appearing not to care about making money or even to know much about business. It’s a feat, an illusion.

And if Goldman Sachs can manage to learn from the Clintons how to convey the appearance of global do-gooders while at the same time generating this sort of cash-flow, then whatever speaking fee the firm paid Mrs. Clinton will be worth every penny.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Goldman tried to capture some of that Clinton image magic. The firm paid Gene Sperling, who had served as an economic policy aide in the Clinton administration, a reported $887,727 in 2008 for “advice on charitable giving.” At that rate, a half-million for Hillary is a bargain for Goldman Sachs.

To be sure, Goldman’s mission of serving clients and shareholders is different from the Clinton mission, if she runs for president, of serving the public. But just as Goldman clients may sometimes wonder if their interests or the firm’s come first, Americans may sometimes wonder if their interests or the Clintons’ own come first. Sometimes the interests are aligned, but when they aren’t, watch out.