RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://townhall.com/columnists/dianawest/2011/11/18/shine_a_light_on_americas_afghan-iraqi_rathole/print

When the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan closed shop on Sept. 30, it reported its “sobering but conservative” estimate that U.S. taxpayers had lost between $31 billion and $60 billion in waste and fraud of the $206 billion Uncle Sam has spent on contracts and grants in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, that’s not all. According to the commission’s final report, “a similar amount could be lost due to unsustainable projects and programs.”

These staggering, if “conservative,” figures are the result of three years of the commission’s work, including 25 hearings and eight reports to Congress. What the commission neglected to mention in its final press release, however, was that it was trucking all of its records to the National Archives where, as The Wall Street Journal reported, also on Sept. 30, they would be sealed for 20 years.

News traveled slowly up Capitol Hill. “We learned of this development after the fact,” the two original Senate co-sponsors of the commission, Claire McCaskill and Jim Webb, wrote in a Nov. 7 letter to the archivist of the United States, David S. Ferriero. Noting that the commission hadn’t thought to ask or even inform Congress about deep-freezing the documents for the next two decades, the senators asked “that the National Archives make a full disclosure of the commission’s files and records as quickly as possible, consistent with protections for privacy, proprietary information and other applicable laws.”

http://www.prudenpolitics.com/index.php/pruden/full_column/when_a_tantrum_gets_a_little_old When you’re bored, broke and mad at everybody, including Mom, throwing a tantrum is fun. Three-year-olds entertain their mommies with such noisy fits all the time. When regiments of tantrum-throwers get loose on Wall Street, they make the front page. The Occupy Wall Street movement spilled a little blood yesterday in New York City—nearly […]

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2011/11/17/main-feature/1/israeli-intransigence-try-palestinian-rejectionism/e

OH PULEEZ!!!WHO IN BLAZES NEEDS RECOGNITION FROM BARBARIANS WHOSE KORANIC FAITH DRIVEN LUST WANTS TO DESTROY ISRAEL AND ALL INFIDELS? THIS HAS BECOME STANDARD “IS-REAL POLITIK”….AND IT IS FRANKLY NAUSEATING AND STUPID…..RSK

The conventional wisdom in diplomatic and media circles concerning the Israeli-Arab conflict is that Israeli intransigence—especially on the building of West Bank settlements—is the dead weight that prevents the achievement of a two-state solution in the Middle East. The Netanyahu government has been trying to convince anyone willing to listen that the real cause of the conflict’s persistence isn’t Israeli intransigence but Palestinian unwillingness to accept a Palestinian state so long as that means accepting a Jewish state alongside it. Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, these efforts haven’t met with much success.

The Real Obstacle Yossi Kuperwasser, Shalom Lipner, Foreign Affairs. Nearly two decades of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians have failed miserably because the Palestinians have refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. SAVE

No Higher Honor Condoleezza Rice, Random House. The former Secretary of State gives her version of conflicts in the world and in the White House. SAVE

A Century of Palestinian Rejectionism Fred Siegel, RealClearPolitics. Current Palestinian rejectionism has roots in an obsession with Jews and a refusal of political compromise, inspired by Islamic teachings—and European fascism. SAVE

But Israelis are nothing if not persistent; and two high-ranking officials in the Netanyahu government, Shalom Lipner and Yossi Kuperwasser, have just given it another try. Their article in the current issue of the influential journal Foreign Affairsfaithfully reflects the reasoning behind the government’s position and does so with careful documentation and lucid argument.

Lipner is a long-time civil servant in the Prime Minister’s Office; Kuperwasser is Director General of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs. The head of the Ministry, former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Moshe “Bogie” Ya’alon, is a soft-spoken, independent-minded kibbutznik who has been taking on conventional pieties ever since he was forced out of the IDF by Ariel Sharon for opposing, on strategic grounds, the “disengagement” from Gaza. True to form, Ya’alon recently argued that a construction freeze in the West Bank would amount to an “ethnic cleansing” of the region’s Jews.

http://www.jewishledger.com/2011/11/jewish-book-month-is-every-month/ Jewish Book Month begins Nov. 21 and runs through Dec. 21.  Not long ago, book fairs all took place during this month. In fact, Hartford had one of the ten most important Book Festivals in the country and other Jewish Community Centers around the state held many of their book events during this month, […]

http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/11/13/3090237/argentine-jewish-boxer-to-defend-title-in-buenos-aires BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (JTA) — In many ways, Carolina Raquel Duer is a typical middle-class Jewish kid from Buenos Aires. She attended a Jewish day school, spent time working and traveling in Israel and celebrated her bat mitzvah at a Conservative synagogue. But when she stepped into the ring Nov. 12 at Club Atletico […]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/nov/16/part-time-congress/
Proposal would end career politics and crony capitalism

ANOTHER GOOD AND ORIGINAL IDEA THAT PERRY PROPOSED….RSK

Anti-Washington fervor has reached a new high. According to Gallup, 82 percent of A Americans now disapprove of what they see on Capitol Hill. No wonder, considering crony capitalism has enabled the two parties to rack up $15 trillion in debt. The political establishment needs to change.

On Tuesday, Rick Perry proposed creating a part-time Congress by cutting in half the legislative calendar, member pay and office budgets. If the House and Senate fail to balance the budget by 2020, lawmaker salaries would be cut in half once more. “The status quo is good to the Washington insiders,” the Texas governor said. “It’s good to the overpaid bureaucrats. It’s good for the power-players, who can trade favors to build fiefdoms of influence. Those who got us into this mess will not get us out.”

Mr. Perry also wants to criminalize insider trading by lawmakers, referring to revelations in the explosive new book “Throw Them All Out” by Peter Schweizer about politicians who have hit the jackpot with stock trades or real-estate investments that coincide with their special knowledge of earmarks and other legislation. The book gives details of Republican and Democratic leaders from the permanent political class profiting from their inside information. Meanwhile, a study this week by the Center for Responsive Politics showed a whopping 47 percent of congressmen are millionaires. The median net worth of a senator in 2010 was $2.63 million and is 11 percent higher than 2009 – despite the bad economy shrinking the take-home pay of ordinary Americans.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1111/may111711.php3

The report issued by the International Atomic Energy Agency last week confirms that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will soon have their fingers on nuclear triggers — unless serious actions are taken. “The biggest threat to the United States,” a senior U.S. military official toldreporters, “has come into focus and it’s Iran.”

You think? Thirty-two years ago this month, Iranian revolutionaries committed their first act of war against America: storming our embassy in Tehran and taking 52 diplomats hostage. Four years later, the regime deployed Hezbollah, its terrorist foreign legion, to slaughter 258 American Marines and diplomats in Beirut. In 1996, the FBI believes, the ayatollahs ordered the bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. airmen. Tehran has supported militias in Iraq that have killed hundreds of American soldiers. It has provided assistance to both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Iran’s rulers have vowed that “a world without American . . . is attainable,” and “Death to America!” has for years been scrawled on Iranian missiles. Last month, law enforcement authorities revealed details of an Iranian plot to blow up a restaurant in Washington, D.C.

All this and more the theocrats managed while Iran has been militarily weak. Imagine what they will do once they are packing nuclear heat.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.1769/pub_detail.asp 1. VIDEO: Maxine Waters on Deaths and Crimes at Occupy Protests: ‘That’s Life and It Happens’ 2. VIDEO: DISGRACE! ‘Forced Unionization’: SEIU Collects Union Dues From Disabled Kids’ Medicaid Checks 3. SHOCK VIDEO: NBC ‘Today’ Panel Agrees: ‘Shame on People’ Who Object to Porn Star Reading to Young Children -Their Logic: “Anytime someone is […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.10842/pub_detail.asp For all but the most blindly dogmatic, any former “bloom” has long since left the rosy facade of the “Occupy Wall Street” phenomenon. Though the liberal media have been working overtime from the beginning to maintain the fantasy that the protesters embody the concerns and aspirations of Real America, and despite their best efforts […]

http://phillipsblog.dailymail.co.uk/2011/11/bigotry-revisionism-and-baroness-warsi.html

The co-chairman of Britain’s Conservative Party, Sayeeda Warsi, has delivered a speech about antisemitism to the European Institute for the Study of Antisemitism. I am sure that Baroness Warsi means well. I am sure that she is personally genuinely opposed to bigotry and prejudice in any form. I would therefore like to be able to say it was a fine speech. I cannot do so. Despite much in it that was worthy and unexceptionable, in one vital respect it was a travesty – made no more palatable by the fact that many Jews subscribe to precisely the same lethally misguided misapprehension.

This revolves around the comforting but mistaken notion that Jews and Muslims stand shoulder to shoulder against the same threat by racists and bigots. It’s the argument that says ‘antisemitism = Islamophobia’. And it’s the claim that there is nothing intrinsically threatening to Jews within Islam.