Displaying the most recent of 90433 posts written by

Ruth King

Nuclear Posture And Israel’s Survival By: Louis Rene Beres

Nuclear Posture And Israel’s Survival Nuclear weapons and nuclear war. This is not a new subject for my column in The Jewish Press. What is new is the urgent need to confront, head on, an expanding international movement to eviscerate Israel’s nuclear posture – and at precisely the precarious moment when this critical posture should […]

LORI LOWENTHAL MARCUS: AU REVOIR NEW YORK TIMES? SEE NOTE PLEASE

http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/debt-ridden-ny-times-squeezing-writers-golden-parachuting-ceos/2012/11/01/

IMAGINE NEWS WITHOUT PAUL KRUGMAN, TOM FRIEDMAN, MAUREEN DOWD AND THE OTHER ASSORTED “CALUMNISTS”…..RSK
Debt Ridden NY Times Squeezing Writers, Golden Parachuting CEOs
Remember how the NYT lionized the Occupy Wall Street vigilantes? What a shock to learn about the barrels-full of money it has thrown at its own bigwigs.
Is it time to say kaddish for the New York Times?

Investors in the paper may already be doing so. The last time they received a dividend was in late 2008.

The NYT, considered by many to be the global paper of record, has incurred more than $300 million in net losses since 2005, and its advertising revenues have been declining for five consecutive years.

In fact, the paper’s own financial report made headlines when its third quarter revenues were so much worse than expected that the value of its shares plummeted 22 percent, its biggest one-day drop in at least thirty years. Investors were warned to expect dismal news for the next quarter, as well.

But while the newspaper industry as a whole has been in a funk for years – with Internet news, blogs, and other ’round the clock news sources available—many for free—there are elements of the NYT‘s precarious financial position that make it unique.

The most significant is the stench of hypocrisy hovering over the differences in the way the NYT handles its executives versus its writers.

WES PRUDEN: “THE ONE” WHO HAS COME MAY SOON BE GONE

http://www.prudenpolitics.com/newsletter?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=5026 October has come and gone with no surprise, with just a slow, plodding accumulation of signs and portents suggesting that “the One” who has come will soon be gone. The polls are tight and the numbers are steady, but it begins to feel like 1980 again, when a tight race between President Jimmy Carter […]

West Bank: What the West is Funding by Khaled Abu Toameh

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3429/palestinian-authority-free-speech Harb said that the decision to summon him for questioning was in the context of the Palestinian Authority leadership’s campaign to intimidate Palestinian writers and journalists and stop them from discussing internal issues. International human rights groups and countries that fund and support Abbas’s authority have yet to sound their voices. Failing to hold […]

Islam Overtaking Catholicism as Dominant Religion in France by Soeren Kern

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3426/islam-overtaking-catholicism-france Meanwhile, the Socialist government in France recently inaugurated a new mega-mosque in Paris as a first step toward “progressively building a French Islam.” A majority of people in France, according to a new poll, believe that Islam is too influential in French society, and almost half view Muslims as a threat to their national […]

FRANK GAFFNEY: Obama’s Perfect Storm Libya Cover-up Threatens Re-election

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/oct/29/obamas-perfect-storm/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS

Barack Obama faces not one but two perfect storms. He actually may be grateful for the meteorological one if it predictably helps obscure the political one at least for the next week. Hurricane Sandy is, of course, a disaster no one would welcome. Untold numbers of Americans are having their lives endangered, or at least severely disrupted, and the potential economic harm is unimaginable at this point.

The president could nonetheless see a silver lining in this horrific “weather event.” For one thing, he gets to posture as the leader of the nation in a terrible time of testing, the one to dole out federal emergency assistance and the great consoler around whom we instinctively rally in such circumstances.

Perhaps more importantly for Team Obama, many voters are going to have many other things on their minds for the next few, critical days instead of thinking about the evidence that their commander in chief was seriously derelict regarding the murderous attack in Benghazi, Libya. The president’s re-election bid cannot afford in the closing days of a putatively very close election to have his fraudulent claim to successful stewardship of the national security portfolio become as exposed as his dismal economic record.

It remains to be seen, however, if Frankenstorm Sandy will do more than simply defer the day of reckoning for Mr. Obama. Whether it occurs on Nov. 6 or afterward, the rising popular revulsion at what happened in Libya on Sept. 11, 2012, and the Obama administration’s dissembling, deflections and outright lies in the weeks that followed should blow this presidency away. Consider a sample of the damning information that has come to light so far:

As the attack was under way, the president knew what was going on. Thanks to two unmanned drones, real-time intelligence was being fed to as many as eight different critical civilian and military nodes — including the White House. Published reports indicate that Mr. Obama himself and his senior subordinates were exposed to those video feeds.

OBAMA WILL MAKE GOVERNMENT SMALLER BY MAKING IT BIGGER…HUH?

DANIEL GREENFIELD

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/obama-vows-to-shrink-government-by-making-government-bigger/

A former Biden aide said that Obama was “financially illiterate”, but he may just be plain old illiterate.

Obama’s current economic plan for the next four years is to “break” Republicans and force them to do everything he wants by threatening to use sequestration to wreck the country and the military. This makes Clinton’s government shutdown look good by comparison.

Once Obama has pulled that off, he’s going to raise taxes and cut Medicare. And then he will, in his own words, “Be able to shrink government and create jobs through infrastructure projects, like building roads.”

Not only is this the same exact proposal from four years ago, which he made a mess of, even with a Democratic majority in Congress, but he doesn’t appear to understand the definition of the word, “shrink” and his job growth plan is more of the same “shovel ready” jobs and stimulus plans that ran us into trillion dollar deficits.

Other words that Obama doesn’t understand include, “Debt” when he says, “‘If we’re spending 17% of our GDP on health care, and every other country is spending 11%, and their outcomes are better, that difference is 6%, that’s our deficit and our debt.”

It’s actually neither of those things. Nor is every country spending that much. The numbers vary widely by country. The problem is not the demand on services, that Obama would like to meet with rationing, but the growth of a vast bureaucracy surrounding health care. ObamaCare is a template of the kind of policies that lead to runaway spending and the government bureaucracy that eats up most of the money then begins rationing care and killing the elderly to protect its own structure.

If you liked the last four years, then you’ll love a second term of the same thing.

PAUL SCHNEE: PAT CADELL SPEAKS AT THE WEDNESDAY MORNING CLUB

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/paul-schnee/pat-caddell-speaks-at-the-wednesday-morning-club/

During has talk about “November 6th: What to Expect” given at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Wednesday Morning Club on October 25th, Pat Caddell demonstrated his gift for political punditry as well as his disgust at what he believes is superficial and biased reporting on the part of the mainstream media. Caddell was a life-long Democrat who worked for 5 Democratic presidential candidates. His electioneering expertise was believed to have been essential in securing Jimmy Carter’s victory in 1976. A grateful Carter awarded Caddell with a good deal of influence in his White House, but not enough of it to protect him from a humiliating defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980. Unfortunately for Barack Obama, Caddell is of the opinion that, like Jimmy Carter, our 44th president will be denied a second term.

Since retiring from political advocacy, Caddell has served as a consultant to various films and television shows, written for various publications, including The Wall Street Journal, and he appears regularly on television as a Fox News contributor.

Noting that it is impossible for Obama to run on his record, Caddell observed that the position of the Democrats seems to be that people should vote for Obama because of what Clinton did when he was president. He also said that there are three teams in this race: the Obama team, the Romney team and the media team. The media, said Caddell, will try to block Romney every chance they get and he said that inexplicably the Republicans won’t challenge the media. In late September, he contended, the Romney campaign was slipping badly but the first debate changed the course and had a dramatic effect by showing people that Romney was not the ogre he had been portrayed as by Team Obama. Still, Caddell said, the Republicans have failed to frame the national debate. States being run by Republican governors are doing well and that is the message the Republicans should be telling. The huge electoral gains in November of 2010 were due to the fierce opposition to Obamacare and, so far, the Republicans have failed to build on that. He lamented that Romney didn’t start to tell his own story early enough.

Caddell said that it’s a mistake for either party to think that there is only an election in seven states. Moving numbers in swing states is a hard slog. Hardly a penny has been spent in Minnesota, Michigan or Pennsylvania but Obama has spent $60 million in Ohio on negative advertisements. He knows Ohio hates Obamacare. President Bush lost Ohio by a narrow margin in 2004 and Romney has almost closed the gap there this time. Obama, he said, is running scared in Pennsylvania.

DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE INNOCENCE OF OBAMA ****

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-innocence-of-obama-2/print/

Why an anti-Islam filmmaker is in jail and Benghazi terrorists are free.

Ten years ago most left-thinking liberals were constantly worried about the erosion of civil liberties under the War on Terror, though they could rarely name an instance where an American citizen had actually experienced such an erosion.

This was, after all, before the days when naked scanners and drone strikes had entered the vocabulary, and the best they could do was to haul out Jose Padilla, aka Abdullah al-Muhajir, ACLU’s choirboy of the month, a Brooklyn-born convert to Islam who was being held in jail for no reason at all except aiding terrorists and plotting to build a dirty bomb.

Ten years later the lefty civil liberties types were proven right. The War on Terror did erode our civil liberties, and America’s first political prisoner in generations has spent a month in jail for making an inconvenient movie at an inconvenient time.

When Charles Woods, the father of Tyrone Woods, one of the Navy SEALS who died fighting in Benghazi, met with Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State assured him that “We’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video.” And they got him, officially on charges of violating parole, unofficially on charges of violently offending violent Muslims.

The woman whose policy had overthrown the Libyan government and then placed a barely defended consulate in the middle of a city of jihadists did not promise the grieving father that his son’s killers would pay. She promised him that the man who offended his son’s killers would pay. Not only would his son be the first casualty of that appeasement policy, but the Constitution that his son had sworn to support and defend would be the second casualty.

Mark Basseley Youssef is not the first filmmaker to have been sent to prison by a Democrat in the White House for making the wrong kind of movie and interfering with his foreign policy. That would be Robert Goldstein who made the The Spirit of ’76, a movie about the American Revolution, at a time when Woodrow Wilson was trying to get Americans deeper into World War I.

P. DAVID HORNIK: OBAMA’S COURTING OF THE MULLAHS ****

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/davidhornik/obamas-courting-of-the-mullahs/

It turns out that soon after taking office, President Obama tried to make friends—totally—with the mullahs’ regime in Iran.

The aim was to start with the opening of interest sections in Washington and Tehran, then progress to “full diplomatic ties, including U.S. and Iranian embassies and ambassadors in each other’s capitals, security cooperation…, [and] direct flights between the U.S. and Iran….” All this amity, it was presumed, would get Iran to give up its nuclear program.

So, at least, reports the Israeli daily Maariv (Hebrew original here; English report in The Times of Israel here), basing itself on “two Western diplomats very close to the administration.”

Maariv says that, beginning in summer 2009, there were at least two U.S.-Iranian diplomatic meetings in this context. The second was between Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and chief Iranian nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili in Geneva in October 2009, on the sidelines of nuclear talks between Tehran and the P5+1 countries.

But Tehran, as they say, wasn’t into it. An Israeli source told Maariv that the regime “opposed any sign of normalization with the U.S., and refused to grant a ‘prize’ to the Americans.”

On Obama’s part, all this would have been in the spirit of his holiday video greeting to Iran in March 2009—and, more generally, his wooing of the Islamic world and apologizing for America’s supposed sins, most notably in his June 2009 Cairo speech.