RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://sarahhonig.com/2013/06/21/another-tack-love-at-a-price/

There’s something unsavory in taking on very elder statesmen, especially nonagenarians or near-nonagenarians. It seems so uncouth, so unkind, so unfair – just as it would be to slap around helpless little tots or kick cute big-eyed puppies.

Therefore, for many months I struggled hard to suppress my inclination to carp – while preparations for yet another sumptuous birthday bash for our phenomenally spry president, Shimon Peres, got underway with fitting fanfare. But even the most stringent self-control has its limits. In the end, I am succumbing to temptation.

Why? Maybe because too much sometimes really is too much.

There’s a simple acid test for whether all the pomp and circumstance is over the top or not. How would our never-too-objective media react if the birthday boy were not the progenitor of Oslo – the man adored around the globe for having weakened the Jewish state like none of its enemies could?

Worse yet, what if the very same garish ostentation were lavished on the man most of our talking heads irrepressibly love to hate – Binyamin Netanyahu?

Outraged screams would doubtless reverberate around the planet. Our scandal-mongering press would pull out all stops and passionately pour its scathing scorn on the prime minister whom the public again dared reelect against the admonitions of omniscient opinion-molders. The ad hominem onslaughts would be so merciless that the pilloried premier would rue the day he was born, never mind the party thrown in his honor.

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2558/Big-Brother-Uncle-Sam-Is-Trying-to-Rewrite-Our-History-Again.aspx

Why is FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce (left) preventing former Sen. Bob Graham from following up on the FBI’s “secret” Sarasota Saudi-AQ investigation?

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This week’s syndicated column

The narrow boxes through which we find ourselves entering public debate over the rise of a totalitarian government surveillance infrastructure are driving me a little crazy.

“Edward Snowden: Hero or traitor?”

Pick one, now, the question demands, before we learn anything else, think anything more. In this way, our attention is focused onto Snowden, the man, not Uncle Sam, the secret megastate. We wade into a vortex of emotions whirling around loyalty to the republic: a republic with sovereign borders, or so we hope; that runs by rule of law, or so we think; where citizenship is precious, or so we imagine.

What Snowden’s revelations confirm, however, is that such a republic no longer exists – except as a mirage that powerful Surveillance State officials spin as reality.

Tap, tap – answer the question! “Hero or traitor?”

“Traitor!” some cry, never noticing that Snowden’s leak makes him a “traitor” to the Surveillance State, not the republic of memory. But such a gaffe is fine with our Big Brothers, from President Obama and FBI Director Robert Mueller to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Listen the next time they insist that it is only the current state of mass surveillance that can preserve our folkloric republic, its residual form currently being liquidated by “immigration-reforming” U.S. senators, whose “hero” or “traitor” status we might also weigh. Listen the next time they argue that only PRISM, only stockpiling hundreds of millions of cellphone conversations, emails, texts and other personal records, can prevent a fiery cloud of new 9/11s.

Now they are even telling us that the first 9/11 could have been prevented altogether had the mass surveillance infrastructure been in place at the time.

This is a whopper too far, and with the gravest implications. Big Brother is rewriting our history again, after having withheld too many facts from We, the People, about 9/11 all along.

This new Big Lie about 9/11 is that the Snowden-leaked programs of data mining and cellphone collection might well have led authorities to identify two key Saudi hijackers in San Diego and roll up the whole al-Qaida plot. As former Florida Sen. Bob Graham, who served as co-chairman of the Congressional Joint 9/11 Inquiry, has made abundantly clear, this particular pair, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, was already well-known to U.S. intelligence authorities for ties to the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania and other hostile activities. Indeed, the CIA had even listened in on conversations at an al-Qaida safe house in Yemen that referenced the pair as far back as December 1999 – no PRISM necessary.

http://unitedpatriotsworldwide.com/vinienco/2013/06/21/peace-pork-idaho-company-creates-ammo-pork-coating/ Peace Through Pork: Idaho Company Creates Ammo with Pork Coating: A company based in Dalton Gardens, Idaho have created “Jihawg” ammunition. The concept is to defend against Islamic extremists and create “Peace Through Pork”. According to Islamic law pork is unclean. Anyone who is considered unclean must go through a cleansing ritual. No unclean […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/muslims-killing-muslims?f=puball Don’t feel bad if you can’t tell a Sunni Muslim from a Shiite Muslim. It has been a source of confusion for many people outside the world of Islam. If Bret Stephens, a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for The Wall Street Journal is right, we are witnessing “The Muslim Civil War.” Here’s a quick […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-deception-marathon-of-benghazigatebostongate-a-conspiracy We need to demand that Congress investigate deeper into the cause behind the Islamist terrorist bombing in Boston. Investigate the reasons why Benghazi was attacked by Islamist terrorists. What was really going on in Benghazi that Clinton and Obama are so desperate to bury?  There are links tying them together.  Some dot connecting is […]

Israel Spent $126 Billion on Security Due to Palestinian Peace Process
$126 BILLION AND NO SENSE….RSK

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/israel-spent-126-billion-on-security-due-to-palestinian-peace-process/print/

This figure is by necessity bound to be incomplete, but it’s a snapshot of what an economic disaster the endless un-peace process has been for Israel. Aside from the loss of life, the spending involved is staggering for such a small country.

As part of Monday night’s budget debate (the budget barely passed a first reading) conservative Likud Member of Knesset Moshe Feiglin spoke and announced that he has found NIS 453 billion that have disappeared from Israel’s treasury in the nearly 20 years since the Oslo Accords were signed. As you read this, please keep in mind that what Feiglin is doing is comparing Israel’s budgets for the last 20 years to the 26 years before the Oslo Accords were signed (1967-93), during which these items in the budget were not necessary or spent.

Feiglin was forced to stop in the middle, but here’s what I got from it.

86 billion shekels in Israeli government transfers to Gaza in 20 years
28.5 billion additional shekels for General Security Service protection since Oslo was signed
13.7 billion shekels for deploying border police in Judea and Samaria since Oslo was signed (they weren’t needed there before)
87 billion additional shekels for increased IDF deployment in Judea and Samaria since Oslo was signed
68 billion shekels in additional security expenses for restaurants, malls etc. since Oslo was signed (there were no suicide bombings in Israel before Oslo was signed)
20 billion shekels for roads that detour around Arab villages since Oslo was signed (there was no need for them before)
4.7 billion for building the separation walls since Oslo was signed (there was no need for them before)
3.5 billion shekels in compensation to families of murdered terror victims
129 billion shekels for Operation Defensive Shield

This can be written off as the cost of peace, but there is no peace. This is the cost of an ongoing war caused by the illusion of peace.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/351633/uncovering-camp-bastion-cover-michelle-malkin

All it takes is one crack for a stone wall to start crumbling. Nine months after the deadly September 14 raid on Camp Bastion in Afghanistan, the families of two fallen Marines may finally get some answers. Real accountability, of course, is another story.

A formal internal investigation into lax security at the base — a British-run NATO compound that adjoins our Marines’ Camp Leatherneck — is now under way. A few members of Congress are putting pressure on the administration for the truth. And a couple of mainstream reporters are digging deeper.

More, please. And faster. Camp Bastion belongs in the bloody-scandal lexicon with Benghazi and Fast and Furious. This trio of national-security disasters under the Obama administration didn’t just involve run-of-the-mill corruption and cover-ups. It cost American lives.
As I’ve been reporting in a series of columns and blog posts over the past year, the Taliban waged an intricately coordinated, brutal attack on Camp Bastion in Afghanistan last fall — three days after the deadly siege on our consulate in Libya and after months of prior security incidents and warnings. Fifteen jihadists disguised in stolen American combat fatigues penetrated the complex. They used rocket-propelled grenades, assault rifles, and other weapons to wipe out nearly an entire squadron of Marine Harrier jets worth an estimated $200 million.

Along with the most devastating loss of U.S. airpower since Vietnam, two heroic U.S. Marines — Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Raible and Sergeant Bradley Atwell — were killed in the battle, and nearly a dozen others were injured. Military officials refused to release details of the fateful budget and strategy decisions that led to the attack. But Deborah Hatheway, aunt of Sergeant Atwell and the family’s spokesperson, and other Camp Bastion families learned on their own that their loved ones were left vulnerable to attack by military leaders who outsourced watchtower security on the base to soldiers from Tonga.

The neglect of security at Bastion was widely known. Nick Francona, a former Marine Corps ground-intelligence officer with 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, who served as a scout sniper platoon commander in Helmand Province in 2011, recounted on Foreign Policy magazine’s “The Best Defense” blog in April: “It was obvious to even a casual observer that many of the posts were unmanned and were comically left with a ‘green Ivan’ silhouette target as a halfhearted attempt at deterrence.”

http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2013/06/20/gaslight/?print=1

The Los Angeles Times [1] reports that journalist Michael Hastings was working on a story related to Jill Kelly the night he died in a fiery car crash, in which his car burst into flames and the engine block of his car was hurled a distance from the wreck. Readers may remember Kelly as one of the apexes of the Broadwell-Petraeus-Kelley triangle.

Kelley alleges that military officials and the FBI leaked her name to the media to discredit her after she reported receiving a stream of emails that were traced to Paula Broadwell, a biographer of former CIA director David H. Petraeus, according to a lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., on June 3. …

Since Hasting’s death early Tuesday, wild conspiracy theories have bloomed on the Internet implying that he was murdered by powerful forces wanting to silence him.

On Wednesday night, the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks inserted itself into the story, publishing a message on Twitter that Hasting had contacted a lawyer for the organization hours before his car smashed into a tree on North Highland Avenue in Los Angeles.

The spectacular nature of his demise has led to speculation that Hastings was “Breitbarted”. But was he? To set against the other side of the ledger is a story from the Hollywood Reporter [2] saying that accidents similar to that which killed the journalist are common. There are 300,000 vehicle fires every year and it simply a fact of life that fuel in high speed crashes can lead to conflagration.

Frank Markus, technical director of Motor Trend, points out that “any impact at speeds high enough to rip the drive train out of a car is highly likely to force some object to rupture the fuel tank. There is a lot of potential chemical energy in a gas tank that’s even a quarter full. Getting up to such speeds — providing he didn’t start a cold engine and floor the car into that tree — results in a lot of red hot parts, particularly the catalytic converter and other exhaust system parts.”…

Moreover the FBI insisted that Michael Hastings was not under investigation [3]. So was he running from shadows? There is little doubt that Hastings himself [4] was convinced someone was looking over his shoulder.

“He was incredibly tense and very worried and was concerned that the government was looking in on his material,” said Hastings’s friend and Current TV host Cenk Uygur. “I don’t know what his state of mind was at 4:30 in the morning, but I do know what his state of mind was in general, and it was a nervous wreck.

Maybe Hastings was going nuts. But Sharyl Attkisson [5] thought so too. Her computers began behaving strangely around the time she was investigating Benghazi.

“I was sleeping, so they would come on in the middle of the night, sometimes one right after the other,” Attkisson told O’Reilly Monday night. “By the time last fall came around, they would sometimes both be starting up kind of a cacophony of computer music at night in the middle of the night.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/351622/prism-costs-lives-robert-zubrin

OH PULEEZ!!! THE FUNDAMENTAL WRONG IS NOT THE COST BUT THE FACT THAT THE PROGRAM EXCLUDES THOSE WHO ARE THE MOST LIKELY TO PROMOTE, ENABLE, FUND AND TRAIN DOMESTIC TERRORISM…..NAMELY MOSLEM INSTITUTIONS….RSK

The revelation that the National Security Agency has been secretly amassing data on countless law-abiding American citizens has aroused great concern about the potential threat such an effort poses to liberty. While the program’s defenders assure us that the power the data provide has not been used improperly by those who possess it, one would have to be completely innocent of any knowledge of history or human nature not to predict with absolute certainty that it eventually will be.

That this is so goes far toward explaining why those in charge of the NSA metadata-collection program chose to deceive the American people about its very existence, and why they are so upset that they now must defend their activities in the open court of public opinion. We are doing this for your own good, they are saying, and you have neither the need nor the right to know about it. If you wish to be safe, you just have to accept that some of your freedoms, such as those enshrined in the Fourth Amendment, will have to go.
This argument about the purported need to sacrifice liberty for safety has been rebutted by many capable writers from the time Dr. Franklin delivered his famous riposte — “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” — down to the present scandal. For the record, I am strongly with those asserting the priority of freedom.

In this article, however, I wish to advance a different argument against PRISM and related NSA domestic-spying programs: that, far from increasing our safety at the cost of some liberty, they are actually harming our safety, so much so that thousands of Americans may have already died as a result.

The issue comes down to this: The NSA metadata-collection program costs lots of money, and had funds not been expended on it, they could have been used to support other programs that might have been far more effective in saving American lives. If we are to assess the rationality of government expenditures to protect the lives of Americans through massive domestic surveillance, we need to compare this program to others aimed at saving American lives.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/351638/challenge-young-obama-supporters-jonah-goldberg

Okay, young’ns, here’s your chance.

In two consecutive elections, you’ve carried Barack Obama to victory. When he said, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” he basically meant you. You voted for Obama by a margin of 66 percent to 32 percent in 2008, and, despite a horrendous economy for people your age, by nearly that much again in 2012.

The president announced his candidacy in 2007 by insisting, “This campaign can’t only be about me. It must be about us — it must be about what we can do together. This campaign must be the occasion, the vehicle, of your hopes, and your dreams. . . . This campaign has to be about reclaiming the meaning of citizenship, restoring our sense of common purpose, and realizing that few obstacles can withstand the power of millions of voices calling for change.”

And on the night of his reelection in 2012, he proclaimed, “The role of citizens in our democracy does not end with your vote. America’s never been about what can be done for us. It’s about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. That’s the principle we were founded on.”

Between those two elections, the president pandered to you like no president in American history. As I wrote last fall, he visited college campuses more often than a Red Bull delivery truck. He’s carried water for you on college loans like an aqueduct. He made sure you can stay on your parents’ health-care plans until you’re 26, which is a really nice consolation prize when you can’t find a job.