RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/review-of-the-death-of-liberalism?f=puball

The redoubtable R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. has done it again; he has written yet another penetrating analysis of the liberal establishment in his latest book, The Death of Liberalism, Thomas Nelson, 2012.

Although this is a polemic with the biting attributes of Tyrrell’s acid-like analysis, the points are critical, or as he puts it, fatal. For example, as he notes, the increase in the national debt is crushing and no amount of expropriation in the form of new and higher taxes can retire it. At bottom Tyrrell, relying on a transparent admission by Herbert Croly in the Promise of American Life, maintains that liberalism is an expression of the belief “that the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.” Hence, the need for government social engineers who arrogantly do the necessary bidding for reform.

The new progressives invariably invoke the goals of justice and fairness, but their policy applications are anti-democratic and illiberal. They claim, as an example, that universal health care will engender low cost and high quality care, but overlook the fact that it entails stripping many Americans of cherished liberties.

Clearly statism of the kind promoted by the new progressives argues for aggressive legislation to right the wrongs of the past, from the unequal distribution of wealth to urban woe. In the process, liberty is compromised and the promised goals of this intellectual exercise prove elusive. As Tyrrell contends, liberalism is exhausted, a victim of failed policies going back to the New Deal.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/iran-boasts-us-has-abandoned-israel?f=puball

http://www.wnd.com/2012/05/iran-boasts-u-s-has-abandoned-israel/print/

Iranian outlets have been claiming recently the United States has been forced to bow before Iran on its nuclear program, demonstrating the West’s abandonment of Israel and paving the way for the Islamic regime to annihilate the Jewish state.

While restating that Iran will demand ever more in the upcoming second round of talks with the 5+1 nations to be held this month in Baghdad, the Iranian media are now boasting that Israel has been abandoned by its allies and is in a dire bind.

One such editorial, published last week by Iran’s Keyhan newspaper, which is directly under the supervision of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, stated, “It can be said that within the last 60 years, this is the first time that the Zionist regime, since its illegal inception, has had to endure rejection by the West over its vision and interest in the region.”

The editorial, written by Sadollah Zarei, a columnist for the hard-line paper, said that within the last three months, Israeli officials, after reports that America is on the verge of accepting the Iranian nuclear program, have made several trips to Washington, where on one trip they met for 10 days with U.S. officials to try to change President Obama’s decision to accept Iran’s nuclear program. They were unsuccessful.

“The ramifications of [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s defeat in the face of Obama’s policies have been a breakdown in Israel’s usurper regime, where now many within its own government have spoken against its own prime minister, claiming Iran is a rational regime and not after the bomb,” Zarei wrote.

While Israel’s government is in disarray internally, the editorial said, the West is forced to watch Iran’s victory in nuclear negotiations.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/bombshell-al-qaeda-infiltrator-was-working-for-brits-not-cia-cover-blown-for-election-year-politics?f=must_reads http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/05/14/bombshell-al-qaeda-infiltrator-was-working-for-brits-not-cia-cover-blown-for-election-year-politics/ Just a week ago the establishment media was aflutter with news that a CIA double-agent had thwarted a new type of underwear bomb attack targeting U.S. flights in a plot devised by al-Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula. But as the week progressed, a developing bombshell story got buried under President Obama’s gay marriage […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-coming-islamic-state-of-yemen Don’t be overjoyed by the penetration of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the group’s branch in Yemen, by Saudi, British and American intelligence. Osama Bin Laden picked Yemen as the best “launching point” for creating an Islamic state with good reason. In Yemen, Al-Qaeda is advancing, the Islamists dominate the political scene, southern […]

http://melaniephillips.com/a-french-greek-wake-up-call

The recent elections here and in Europe have left Jews and all who care about freedom and democracy with many reasons for unease.

In Greece, around two thirds of those who voted did so for extremist parties of left and right. Chillingly, the neo-Nazi “Golden Dawn” party won no fewer than 21 seats. As I write, Greece is in chaos, with fresh elections a distinct possibility if no party can form a government.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the EU, whose founding credo was to prevent fascism from ever again taking root in Europe, is now looking at a member state with a significant fascist element in its ruling body.

Not only that, the EU itself precipitated this calamity. For the Greek debacle was a public spasm of fury against austerity measures imposed by Brussels and Berlin.

The convulsions in Europe are throwing up some curious and disturbing parallels and alliances. In France, the left-wing Francois Hollande won on the very same anti-austerity platform as the neo-Nazis in Greece.

Hollande says he is an “enemy of finance” – in effect making common cause with the far right, which identifies the Jews as controlling that financial world, which they agree with the left is a conspiracy against the interests of working people.

Behind his victory, moreover, lies an alliance between Islamic radicals and the left. Writing before the election, French Jewish commentator Michel Gurfinkiel wrote that the French left had recast the proletariat as the “multitude”, the West as “Empire” – and Jews as Zionists, the spearhead of counter-revolution.

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2119/Sgt-Bowe-Bergdahl-Prisoner-of-COIN.aspx

From today’s New York Times, a story about Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the lone American POW in Afghanistan. We still don’t know the circumstances under which he was captured in 2009, but we do know something about his outlook on the counterinsurgency (COIN) disaster as conceived and executed by Gens. Petraues and McChrystal under Presidents Bush and Obama.

From the story:

Sergeant Bergdahl was assigned to the First Battalion, 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, Fourth Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division, based at Fort Richardson, Alaska. He deployed as a machine gunner in early May 2009 to a small combat outpost in Paktika Province, at a time when American forces were extremely sparse in the area.

At first his e-mails home were effusive. “He was happy as a clam,” Mr. Bergdahl said. He wrote of “how beautiful it was, how wonderful the people were.”

But the tone of his son’s e-mails soon darkened, Mr. Bergdahl said, although he declined to say specifically what set off the change.

Mr. Bergdahl would say only that he himself had become disillusioned by the military’s doctrine of counterinsurgency, aimed at winning over the Afghan population by building roads, schools and good governance while protecting them from insurgents. As part of the strategy, American troops often travel on roads planted with homemade bombs, or improvised explosive devices, to meet with villagers during the day to collect information about their needs — and to ask the whereabouts of insurgents so they can target them in night raids.

Cyber criminals can exploit a posting on Facebook or Twitter. A gorgeous PowerPoint attachment may harbor a malicious program. Women are more vulnerable to online security breaches, so here’s a few words from the web-wise
.http://womensenews.org/

WeNews correspondent

(WOMENSENEWS)– “Celebrating my birthday tonight at Alfredo’s!”

Supposing it was you who put up this innocent-looking Facebook post. That post would be guaranteed to worry Mark Herschberg, an MIT-trained cryptographer. As a New York-based cyber-security expert and CTO, he would find a number of causes for concern since he knows that women are particularly vulnerable to misuse of information used in social media.

“Your Facebook/Twitter status and photos say a lot about you,” he says, adding, “A determined person may already have found out that you’re a women, learned where you live and whether you live alone. With that post, the bad guy now knows that you’re not home. That post could set you up for a robbery or even a physical attack.”

He goes on to say, “On top of that, the bad guy also knows it’s your birthday, and if he’s a determined cyber-criminal, this could help him hack your identity.”

Identity theft is a serious issue for women. According to the Affinion Security Center, 17% percent of female identity theft victims have lost $1,000 or more due to the crime, versus only 10% of males.

If you were talking with Mark about this, you might answer him, “But I keep my Twitter and Facebook accounts private. Why should I worry?”

His answer: “Even if you have your privacy settings set to friends of friends, some of those friends might be easy-going and accept all friend requests, and now you have a hole in your security. Cybercriminals are out there, looking to exploit those kinds of holes.”

“Mainstream” Islamist Group Attacks Law Enforcement and Whitewashes Jihadists
http://www.investigativeproject.org/3576/mainstream-islamist-group-attacks-law-enforcement
Few organizations in the United States have been as consistent in attacking law enforcement as the Muslim Public Affairs Council and its president, Salam al-Marayati.
Marayati, who attended last year’s White House Iftar Dinner during Ramadan, has suggested that Muslim Americans are at war with both al-Qaeda and the FBI. “We in the Muslim American community have been battling the corrupt and bankrupt ideas of cults such as Al Qaeda,” he wrote in October in the Los Angeles Times.” Now it seems we also have to battle pseudo-experts in the FBI and the Department of Justice.”
Marayati was incensed over reports that the FBI and one U.S. Attorney’s office had used training materials “revealing a deep anti-Muslim sentiment within the U.S. government.” One example was a 2010 presentation by an analyst working for a U.S. Attorney in Pennsylvania which warned of a civilizational jihad that is “waged today in the U.S. by ‘civilians, juries, lawyers, media, and charities'” who “threaten our values.”

http://www.fightfiercely.com/

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The 2012 election will determine the fate of America
After George Bush doubled the national debt in just eight years, Barack Obama said he would reign his Republican predecessor’s reckless spending. Instead, he has engaged in a breathtaking spending binge of his own that is pushing America to the brink of financial Armageddon.
When America’s first black president promised to “fundamentally transform the United States of America”, few people who voted for him thought to ask, “Transform it into what?” Increasingly, the answer appears to be into the world’s latest unsustainable socialist nation. What happens in the next election will likely determine whether the economic and governing systems that made America great will survive, or be turnedinto something few Americans will recognize. You can help influence undecided voters by sharing Fight Fiercely compositions with your email and social networking contacts, and by helping promote FightFiercely.com as a source for uniquely-presented information about key issues that will decide the next election.

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http://politicalmavens.com/

In a review of Show Me A Story: Why Picture Books Matter (WSJ 5/12/12), Meghan Cox Gurdon quotes from some of the interviewees who are subjects in Leonard Marcus’ anthology of famous illustrators. Maurice Sendak, probably the most admired children’s book author since Dr. Seuss had this to say about the grotesque (Gurdon’s word) aunts and uncles who visited his family when he was a child, “God knows most of the people who came there were pigs.” He then goes on to explain that the day of his own Bar-Mitzvah was also the day his father collapsed with the news that other members of his family had been killed in the holocaust: “I remember my father falling down, and me in my little suit all ready to go, and the rage that was stirred in me by these dead Jews who constantly infiltrated our lives and made us miserable.” We’re reading the words of an adult recapturing the emotion not of a 5 year old Little Lord Fauntleroy, but of a 13 year old adolescent son of hard-working, devastated Jews . It’s hard not to remember that he was the same age as another teenager who penned her own emotional reaction to far more serious deprivation in the posthumously published Diary of Anne Frank.

In Sendak’s recent obituary in the NYTimes, Margalit Fox described him as the man “who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche.” I’m not sure what Ms. Fox considered the works of the Brothers Grimm to be but for all of us whose favorite children’s stories were fairy tales, it’s puzzling to wonder whether anything Sendak wrote was as terrifying as Hansel and Gretel or Snow White, folktales anthologized by the brothers in the early 19th century, or Little Red Riding Hood, first written in 1697 by Charles Perrault. Yes, Pierre does get eaten by the lion but the rhyme takes away the sting of the deed and even very young children smile at that part, understanding the subtle humor of the lion uttering Pierre’s refrain: They pulled the lion by the hair They hit him with the folding chair His mother asked – Where is Pierre? The lion answered – I dont care His father said – Pierre’s in there!