RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/1963/Good-Riddance-to-Ungrateful-Volcanoes.aspx
Good Riddance to “Ungrateful Volcanoes”

Written by:Diana West 11/27/2011 8:55:00 AM

The last hot meal to be served at Camp Victory, the largest of 505 military bases once operated by the United States in Iraq, was a Thanksgiving dinner on Nov. 20. Cooks served more than 2,000 pounds of turkey and more than 3,000 pounds of mashed potatoes to 6,000-plus military personnel.

Doing the dishes this time also meant shutting down the kitchen. That’s because Camp Victory, one of only 10 U.S. bases still in operation, will be closed soon. According to the agreement signed in 2008 by President George W. Bush and implemented by President Barack Obama, the U.S. military in Iraq is coming home.

Praises be. So what if the U.S. withdrawal comes only after Obama was unable to convince Iraq to extend its welcome under tenable conditions? I’ll take it, and give thanks. I am very sorry Camp Victory troops are on cold rations until they finally return stateside next month, but I am thankful to be able to see the day when they will have left Iraq – taking all of their Christian religious posters and symbols from base chapels with them, according to the New York Times.

Air Force Academy adapts to pagans, druids, witches and Wiccans – latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-air-force-pagans-20111127,0,6813530.story
Air Force Academy adapts to pagans, druids, witches and Wiccans
Officials say an $80,000 Stonehenge-like worship center underscores a commitment to embrace all religions.

In the still of a cold November evening, a small gathering of pagans, led by two witches, begins preparations for the coming winter solstice. But these are not just any pagans, and this is not just any setting. They are future officers of the United States Air Force practicing their faith in the basement of the Air Force Academy’s cadet chapel.

Their ranks are slim. According to the academy’s enrollment records, only three of 4,300 cadets identified themselves as pagans, followers of an ancient religion that generally does not worship a single god and considers all things in nature interconnected.

Still, the academy this year dedicated an $80,000 outdoor worship center — a small Stonehenge-like circle of boulders with propane fire pit — high on a hill for the handful of current or future cadets whose religions fall under the broad category of “Earth-based.” Those include pagans, Wiccans, druids, witches and followers of Native American faiths.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204452104577060213419360578.html?

An intense, two-year investigation ends with the arrest of Jose Pimentel, a declared enemy of America.

Inspire magazine—the now-defunct al Qaeda glossy published for English-speaking militant Muslims—didn’t send out rejection letters. So we’ll probably never know why it ignored a 20-page ode to Osama bin Laden submitted by an aspiring young writer in New York. But the writer’s intentions were clear.

“I will, God willing, destroy America in writing, until I can do so in the field,” he wrote last April in an email accompanying his article.

Law enforcement officials say the writer was Jose Pimentel, aka Muhamad Yusuf, whom the New York Police Department had been monitoring since May 2009. This week Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. charged Mr. Pimentel with building pipe bombs to blow up police cars, post offices, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, and other targets.

The email, described by law enforcement officials in interviews, is part of a vast investigative file containing over 400 hours of surveillance audio and video tapes, interviews and other material amassed by the NYPD. Prosecutors will use it to try to convict the 27-year-old Mr. Pimentel—a Dominican Republic-born American citizen and convert to Islam—on terr

http://news.yahoo.com/early-results-show-islamist-party-lead-morocco-095841594.html

RABAT, Morocco (AP) — Election results for the first 78 seats in Morocco’s parliament announced by the state news agency early Saturday suggest a moderate Islamist party is taking about 36 percent of the seats.

With just a fraction of the results for the 395-seat Parliament reported, the opposition Justice and Development Party looks to have dramatically increased its share.

Party Secretary General Abdelilah Benkirane said late Friday that by its own estimates, his party had come in first.

A coalition of eight liberal, pro-government parties led by Finance Minister Salaheddine Mezouar have amassed slightly more seats so far than the Islamists in the preliminary results, but according to the new constitution the party with the most seats gets first crack at forming a new government.

If the trend continues, the Islamists must find coalition partners willing to work with them.

In recent years Morocco’s Islamists have cultivated an image as honest outsiders battling corruption and seeking to improve services, rather than focusing on moral issues such as the women’s headscarf.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.10893/pub_detail.asp
According to Saudi Arabian Law it is illegal for any non-Muslim to step foot in the cities of Mecca and Medina. In Medina however, non-Muslims are allowed to enter the Sheraton hotel on the outskirts of town. The Islamists allow a man made exception in their divinely inspired Shariah for the Sheraton Hotel Corporation, yet they make no exception for anyone else.

The equivalent of the Mecca/Medina Apartheid would be the Vatican issuing a decree excluding all non-Catholics/Christians from entering Vatican City, at threat of arrest and imprisonment. The Vatican however, welcomes all people without regard to race, religion, or national origin. Israel also welcomes all faiths, including Muslims, to their most holiest of places, the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. Conversely, during the period of Jordanian occupation from 1948 to 1967, all Jews were barred entry into the entire Old City and the Wailing Wall was desecrated by the Islamists.

So what it is about non-Muslims that Muslims find so revolting that it is illegal for them to step foot inside the city limits of Islam’s two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina?

http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2011/11/oops-new-study-shows-co2-not-likely-to.html?utm_source=The+Lid+List&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=eaaa956418-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN I had an interesting climate change discussion over turkey dinner yesterday my cousin claimed that the climate change skeptics have to prove that man-made global warming was false. I on the other hand argued the proponents of the great hoax have to prove that global warming was really happening, that it was caused by […]

http://www.translatingjihad.com/2011/11/international-union-of-muslim-scholars.html
The International Union of Muslim Scholars Wishes You a Happy “Save al-Aqsa Friday” (while Pushing for War with Israel)
Posted by Translating Jihad
The International Union of Muslim Scholars is headed by the highly-popular cleric, Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who is also the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. Point being, when these guys issue a statement, you can pretty well consider it the view of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Here they warn the Israelis that any stone disturbed on al-Aqsa will be met with “heavy bloodshed”; they call for the Palestinian factions to unite against Israel; they call for the withdrawal from any peace initiatives with Israel; and they call for Muslims to revive the duty of jihad and prepare for victory against Israel.

http://reason.com/archives/2011/11/22/the-simpletons
David Brooks, Thomas L. Friedman, and the banal authoritarianism of do-something punditry

That Used To Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back, by Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, Current Affairs, 380 pages, $28

Consider for a moment the paradoxical pain of being a best-selling political pundit so successful that American presidents don’t just seek but heed your advice. You have lobbied in your columns for the commander in chief to deploy your signature catch phrases, and he has. You have, in times of both crisis and sloth, advocated robust federal action in the name of national “greatness,” and the people in power have mostly followed suit. You have been flattered by invitations to the White House and pecked at by lesser partisans, yet you’ve maintained your critical distance in the patriotic spirit of post-ideological problem solving. All this influence and success, and somehow the country still sucks.

Republicans Subsidize Mansions

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/284101
The GOP is missing its chance to stand for limited government.
Almost two weeks ago, when they figured no one was watching, the Republican-dominated House of Representatives, by an overwhelming 292–121 margin, voted to increase funding for the Federal Housing Administration. Just as government debt hit $15 trillion, edging closer to 100 percent of GDP, these self-proclaimed scourges of spending decided Uncle Sam should continue subsidizing mini-mansion mortgage loans — up to nearly three-quarters of a million dollars.
Given the straits that the mortgage crisis has left us in, to say nothing of the government’s central role in getting us there, one might think Republicans would be asking whether the government should be in the housing business at all. “Stop out-of-control spending and reduce the size of government” — that is what Boehner, Cantor, & Co. promised in big bold letters during the 2010 campaign. That was in the snippets of text that occasionally interrupted the gauzy photo spread they called their “Pledge to America.”
Instead, here we are a year later, careering toward the cliff. We ought to be doing everything in our power to tee up the 2012 election as a high-noon showdown between Obama’s insatiable Leviathan and a GOP vision of fiscally sane, constitutional conservatism. So how do Republicans respond to their moment? How do they propose to “stop out-of-control spending and reduce the size of government”? Why, by putting taxpayers on the hook for shaky loans on luxury homes — sure to add prodigiously to the already $142 billion (and counting) housing bailout attributable to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Not housing for the poor, mind you, nor even for the middle-class — luxury homes. The real-estate market is so depressed at the moment that the median sale price of a single-family home is less than $170,000. Even in high-cost areas like Los Angeles, the Wall Street Journal reports, it has plunged to less than $325,000. Yet the Republican House — installed by the Tea Party in a sea-change election to be the antidote to Obamanomics — decided the taxpayers should guarantee FHA loans up to $729,750. Had they not acted, the public obligation would have been reduced to “only” $625,500 per FHA loan — couldn’t have that, right?

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/284111
I see Andrea True died earlier this month. The late disco diva enjoyed a brief moment of global celebrity in 1976 with her ubiquitous glitterball favorite:

More More More
How do you like it?
How do you like it?
More More More
How do you like it?
How do you like it?

In honor of Andrea’s passing, I have asked my congressman to propose the adoption of this song as the U.S. national anthem. True, Miss True wrote the number as an autobiographical reflection on her days as a porn-movie actress but, consciously or not, it accurately distills the essence of American governmental philosophy in the early 21st century: excess even unto oblivion.
When it comes to spending and the size of government, only the Democrats are officially panting orgasmically, “More More More, How do you like it?” while the Republicans are formally committed to “Less less less.” This makes for many dramatic showdowns on the evening news. In the summer, it was the “looming” “deadline” to raise the debt ceiling. In the fall, it was the “looming” “deadline” for the alleged supercommittee to agree $1.2 trillion of cuts. The supercommittee was set up as a last-minute deal for raising the debt ceiling. Now that the supercommittee’s flopped out, “automatic” mandatory cuts to defense and discretionary spending are supposed to kick in — by 2013. But no doubt, as that looming deadline looms, the can of worms will be effortlessly kicked down the room another looming deadline or two.