RUTHFULLY YOURS

“I fail to understand why the simple legal facts and the healthy common sense that emerge from the Levy Report should be a source of concern to Mr. Gordis. Why on earth should Israel’s prestige be imperiled for respecting more carefully the rule of law, as the Levy Report recommends? I wonder if Daniel Gordis and his co-signatories actually read the Levy Report. But if saying the truth imperils our prestige, then the lack of prestige is a badge of honor.”

www.navon.com

Last month, a panel of three Israeli legal experts (former Supreme Court Judge Edmond Levy, former District Judge Tchia Shapira, and the former legal advisor of Israel’s Foreign Ministry Alan Baker) submitted to the Prime Minister and to the Minister of Justice a “Report on the Status of Building Activities in Judea and Samaria” (the “Levy Report”). The report was immediately condemned by the US State Department whose spokesman, Patrick Ventrell, declared: “We do not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity and we oppose any effort to legalize settlement outposts.”

Less expected was the condemnation coming from mainstream North American Jewish leaders. In a letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu, those leaders expressed concern “about the recent findings of government commission led by Supreme Court Justice (Ret.) Edmond Levy.” They went as far as to claim that the endorsement of the Levy Report by the Israeli government would place the “prestige of Israel as a democratic member of the international community in peril.” The letter was noticeably signed by Shalem Foundation President Daniel Gordis.

I found it hard to believe that a report whose purpose was to analyze the legal status of Israeli buildings beyond the armistice lines of 1949 would, if officially endorsed, imperil the “prestige of Israel as a democratic member of the international community.” So I read it.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/think-veepits-important

Rumors are swirling about Governor Romney’s pick for a running mate. It’s no small matter. An active Vice-President can influence policy, be an effective spokesman for legislation, and if necessary take over the administration and finish an interrupted term. A vice president is also poised to run for election and complete the agenda of a successful predecessor. The Vice President is first in the line of succession to a President who is removed, resigns, becomes incapacitated or dies. The Vice President as designated by our Constitution, is also the President of the Senate and can break tie votes. That can be crucial in a closely divided Congress.

In the past, electors in the Electoral College, were permitted two votes and the candidate who came in second became the Vice President almost automatically but since 1940 the candidate chooses the potential Vice-President.

The only modern Presidential candidate who did not pick a Veep and had Congress do it for him was Adlai Stevenson, a pompous poseur who lost to Dwight Eisenhower whose Vice President was Richard Nixon.

The qualifications for Vice President are exactly like those for President ….an individual must:

* Be a natural born U.S. citizen
* Be at least 35 years old
* Have resided in the U.S. at least 14 years

Too bad. That leaves Ileana Ros- Lehtinen the doughty Representative from Florida (District 18) out. She is a she, is savvy, great on defense and foreign policy and Hispanic. But, she was born in Cuba.

Although the President is limited to only two terms, a Vice-President has no limit of terms. Thus, Joe Biden can be Vice-President for life as long as a Democrat is President. And Al Gore could do so too. In fact, Al Gore could have become President if Bill Clinton had been removed from office after the impeachment. He would have had almost two full years to cool America.What a chilling thought.

The office of Vice President has evolved greatly. At one time it was seen as ceremonial and virtually a sinecure. However, the influence and prestige of the office grew markedly in the last century. Perhaps because a seemingly unprepared and unprepossessing figure like Harry Truman became a worthy successor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

President Roosevelt who was ill for much of his time in office actually had two Vice Presidents before Harry Truman. John Nance Gardner, a governor of Texas was the Veep in the first two terms (1933-41). Gardner did not think much of the office. He is quoted as saying “the office is not a bucket of warm piss.”

Henry A. Wallace, a Republican progressive served during Roosevelt’s third term (1941-1945). Wallace was an apostle for the “New Deal” and an apologist for Russia. Fortunately President Roosevelt dumped him in 1944 and selected Harry Truman. Imagine America if Wallace had become President. He certainly would have attempted a radical transformation and one can only guess at how the war in the Pacific would have ended.

In 1947 when Wallace tried to run for President a writer described his effort as “”the closest the Soviet Union ever came to actually choosing a president of the United States.”

Harry S Truman of Missouri was elected Vice President for Roosevelt’s fourth term, but served only a few months (Jan-May 1945) before becoming president. The office of the Vice President became vacant when Harry Truman succeeded to the presidency in 1945 and remained so until 1948 when Alben Barkley of Kentucky, was elected.

Barkley was a likeable chap who was seventy years old when he was sworn in as vice president. Age did not crimp his style and he courted and wed a widow half his age while in office. He had a long career in national politics that took him from the House to the Senate to the vice-presidency. However, he took no real part in the tumultuous events of the Truman Presidency and never had an office in or near the White House.

Barkley left no real footprints but the term “Veep” which he coined has lasted and is now being recycled by the media.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/government-let-25-illegal-aliens-attend-flight-school-owned-by-illegal-alien?f=puball

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/tsa-let-25-illegal-aliens-attend-flight-school-owned-illegal-alien

(CNSNews.com) — The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) approved flight training for 25 illegal aliens at a Boston-area flight school that was owned by yet another illegal alien, according to the Government Accountability Office.The illegal-alien flight-school attendees included eight who had entered the country illegally and 17 who had overstayed their allowed period of admission into the United States, according to an audit by the GAO.

Six of the illegal aliens were actually able to get pilot’s licenses.

Discovery of the trouble at the flight school began when local police–not federal authorities–pulled over the owner of the school on a traffic violation and were able to determine that he was an illegal alien.

Rep. Mike Rogers (R.-Ala.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Transportation Security, said he found the GAO’s findings “amazing.”

“We have cancer patients, Iraq War veterans and Nobel Prize winners all forced to undergo rigorous security checks before getting on an airplane,” said Rogers, “and at the same time, ten years after 9/11, there are foreign nationals in the United States trained to fly just like Mohammed Atta and the other 9/11 hijackers did, and not all of them are necessarily getting a security background check.”

Stephen Lord, who is the GAO’s director of Homeland Security and Justice Issues, testified about the matter Wednesday in Rogers’ subcommittee. Rogers asked him: “Isn’t it true that, based on your report, the Transportation Security Administration cannot assure the American people that foreign terrorists are not in this country learning how to fly airplanes, yes or no?”

Lord responded: “At this time, no.”

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-saudi-indoctrination-of-children

The Muslim community of believers is the best in the eyes of God, and we must make it the same in the eyes of men by force… We must fight the unbelievers. When I grow up, I intend to carry out jihad in every possible way.

– Nine-year-old madrasa student, Northwest Pakistan

When the Soviet Red Army captured Berlin in May 1945, the last Germans to surrender were the Hitler Youth. Most of these young boys chose to fight to the death. For their entire cognizant existence, all they had known was Aryan supremacy, hatred of inferiors, and subservient allegiance to the Führer. The Nazis were not the first to use children in combat, nor have they been the last. Excluding North America, to this day the depraved practice of child soldiery has continued on every inhabited continent.

Before a child’s life is destroyed in this manner, an adult must destroy the child’s mind. The apparent ease with which this can be done is chilling. It requires the devious task of using a child’s weakness to eradicate his natural-born strengths. Children’s strengths are evident. They are curious and question everything. They are not born blindly adhering to a political or religious doctrine. They are eager to befriend others regardless of differences. They are not born hateful and vindictive.

But this innocence is their vulnerability. Children trust adults with their safety. They believe as truth whatever adults tell them to be true. As such, they are not aware of the fact that they are being conscripted against their will. A child will endure an adult’s seminar and unknowingly emerge with a contaminated character. The most prevalent contemporary example of such evil is Saudi Arabia and its religious indoctrination of children throughout the world’s mosques and madrasas.

Even if international affairs were placid, the Saudi royal family’s global propaganda would constitute an egregious offense to supporters of human rights. International affairs, however, are not placid. There is a bit more urgency to the matter. Saudi Arabia is on the other side-and at the forefront-of an ideological conflict that has for decades shown its potential to bend the trajectory of the human condition violently downward.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/07/why_im_boycotting_the_olympics_ioc_admits_muslims_prevented_the_honoring_of_murdered_israeli_athlete.html The Olympics are due to start in London. But I will not be watching them, discussing them, or even thinking about them, and I urge anyone with a claim to human decency to do the same. In 1972, at the Olympics in Munich, PLO terrorists murdered 11 Israeli athletes. The games, of course, went […]

http://www.algemeiner.com/2012/07/18/the-state-of-the-jews/

The worrisome state of the Jewish people these days has little to do with anything intrinsic to the State of Israel, the thriving, vibrant, and solitary democracy in the Middle East. Rather, as Edward Alexander writes in the Introduction to The State of the Jews, his selection of trenchant essays and reviews spanning the last decade, it is attributable to “the role played by Jews in the war of ideas against the state of the Jews.”

Alexander, professor emeritus of English at the University of Washington (who also taught for many years at Tel Aviv University), does not suffer liberal fools gladly. It was, he reminds us in his scrutiny of the Victorian background of anti-Semitism, the writer George Eliot who suggested back in 1878 that liberals have a “Jewish problem.” To be sure, not only liberals. The Fagin of Oliver Twist, after all, was the direct literary descendant of Shakespeare’s Shylock.

Alexander’s scathing scrutiny of English literary anti-Semitism befits a professor of literature whose powers of critical analysis expose “the enormous role of English Jews in the current war of ideas (and agitprop) against Zionism and Israel’s existence.” Yet he also illuminates the complementary Victorian phenomenon of “British Philosemitism,” a now bygone sympathy once expressed by Benjamin Disraeli, Arthur Balfour (of Declaration fame), and Winston Churchill.

It is a chilling contrast, as Alexander notes, with the anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist rants by contemporary British academics: philosopher Ted Honderich, who proclaimed that Palestinians have “a moral right to their terrorism”; Jacqueline Rose, who condemned “those wishing to denigrate suicide bombers and their culture”; and Oxford poet Tom Paulin, who urged that Jewish settlers “should be shot dead.”

As Alexander makes clear, the history, politics and literature of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are inextricably interwoven. Along the way, he moves deftly from the history of Commentary magazine to Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas’s invented story (predictably featured in The New York Times) about his family’s “expulsion” from Palestine that never happened. He eviscerates Barack Obama’s “artful theft of the Jews’ sad history” in his 2004 keynote address at the Democratic National Convention and his “engagement” with Islam five years later in Cairo when, as president, he challenged the legitimacy of Jewish settlements and obscenely compared “more than sixty years” of Palestinian suffering to the Holocaust.

http://politicalmavens.com/

In its loftiest Orwellian doublespeak, the Wall Street Journal of July 18th informs us that the number of New York Students who scored proficiency level on state-wide standardized English tests has jumped from 52.8% to 55%. In New York City, the number of students who achieved proficiency in English has leaped from 43.9% to 46.9%. In other words, the news that only slightly more than half the 436,000 students taking the test throughout the state passed it, and that the majority of students taking the test in NYC flunked it – is headlined in the WSJ as “Student Test Scores Jump in New York.” These students would have to be olympic pole vaulters to make this “jump” anything but shocking, shameful and totally discouraging. If the staggering sum of 18.82 billion dollars that gets funneled into the Department of Education’s annual budget can’t bring most students to a passing grade, why do we continue to fund it? Though a better headline might be “New York City Jumps Ship As It Closes Rotting Dept of Education,” Mayor Bloomberg congratulated Chancellor Denis Walcott with the salvo of “a wonderful accomplishment,” a line that would surely have elicited a smile from that great, dead satirist, Jonathan Swift.

In behavior consistent with the parody of educational achievement, the parents and educators are disturbed less by the failure of the students to perform than with the growing length of the exam and the fact that these scores will be used as a significant part of teacher evaluations. Judging by these scores, what needs to be radically lengthened is the number of hours and days that students attend school and the number of hours and days that educators and administrators should spend revising whatever pedagogical approach has led us to this disaster – without being paid overtime. There are no real surprises here. Students are failing upwards as they continue to be promoted regardless of their capacity to work at grade level. English as a Second Language has been nothing more than a holding cell for students, preventing them from being immersed in a language which they might learn within six months, as foreign students have proven in Israel utilizing the ulpan method of learning Hebrew and as our immigrant forbears managed to do when they came to NYC at the beginning of the last century. In those days, progress was measured not by the increasing numbers of translators available for every immigrant child to understand the test material in his/her native language but by the ability of foreign and native students to comprehend, speak and write just one language – English.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

Creativity is an individual act. The act of building something, whether with hammers, blueprints, words, boards or plans is individualistic. Collectives can build, but not creatively. A mass has no vision because it has no personality. It can follow rules but not dreams.
The soul of American exceptionalism lay in a society which empowered the creative talents of the individual, not through grants, regulations, instructional pamphlets, inspectors and guidelines, but through the simple virtue of leaving men alone to do their work.

Freedom is the greatest creative force because it liberates the individual to build and as freedom diminishes within a society so does its creativity. Progress in restricted areas dwindles to a trickle as collectives expend a thousand times the money and effort, and still fail to equal the achievements of individuals operating on shoestring budgets.

The Soviet Union fell because its Communist collectives were not able to equal the West in the military or the economic arena. The only technique that Communist states ever had was to create a heavily regulated top-down infrastructure and when a crisis occurred, a mass of people would be thrown at the problem.

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/309931

STOP TWIDDLING YOUR THUMBS…..LET THE SO -CALLED PROCESS DIE OUT…ENCOURAGE WIDESPREAD SETTLEMENT OF JUDEA AND SAMARIA AND CURB THE ILLEGAL ARAB BUILDING AND IMMIGRATION THERE….WHEN IT IS STABLE AND IRREVERSIBLE….ANNEX IT …THE ARABS WHO FIND IT TOO ONEROUS TO LIVE UNDER ISRAELI RULES WHICH ARE COMPATIBLE WITH SECURITY AS WELL AS RIGHTS OF ASSEMBLY, SPEECH AND PRESS SHOULD BE FREE TO MOVE NEXT DOOR TO EASTERN PALESTINE AKA JORDAN…..RSK

Let us start with a rare activity in that twilight zone that is called the Middle East peace process: talking about things we agree upon.

Regional leaders and experts on all sides of the discussion have declared the peace process to be dormant, if not dead. No meaningful negotiations have taken place in almost three years. The Obama administration is hiding its head in the sand. Rumors have replaced ideas and action.

Alas, that reality remains a taboo topic in Washington. So, for that reason, we and others have arrived on Capitol Hill to lay out the realpolitik of the peace process, to strip away the fig leaf, and to force us to see and act.

The time has come, 20 years after Oslo, to reevaluate our thinking and try a new approach. It is the only hope of moving toward a lasting peace. This Thursday in Washington, we are converging with leaders, experts, and journalists from all sides to go back to the drawing board and rethink our basic assumptions about peace in the Middle East. We must. If no path forward can be found, the region is doomed; the sentiment that “it can’t get any worse” will be disproved and mocked.

The two of us come together as Zionists. We do not yield in our determination that Israel shall thrive and grow and be a beacon of democracy, perhaps even a role model for our neighbors in the Arab world, who are now probing new possibilities and lurching toward possible democracy — or theocracy — in their homelands. That said, we do not always agree with each other about the appropriate way to achieve this all-important goal.

In 1992, one of us, Yossi Beilin, initiated top-secret negotiations with the Palestinians, including now–Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, resulting in the Oslo agreement in 1993, and then, in 1995, a list of guidelines for a permanent solution to the conflict. He further participated in the 2001 joint talks in Taba and the later signing of the Geneva Accords, which were designed to be a model permanent-status agreement.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/sarah-n-stern/appeasing-the-muslim-brotherhood-crocodile/ This weekend, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made her first visit to Egypt since Mohammad Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood was elected president of Egypt. Despite the fact that her motorcade was pelted with tomatoes and stones and protesters chanted “Monica, Monica,” the Secretary seemed to be willfully blinding herself as to what “Islamism” […]