RUTHFULLY YOURS

To those who complain about the NY Times but continue to subscribe I say…”get over it and stop reading it….” I did and other than a peek at the obituaries I don’t miss it…..rsk

There were exceptions in high editorial positions even during the “worst of times.”

Abraham Michael Rosenthal, who became know as “A.M.” or “Abe” to his friends was was the executive editor (1977–88) and columnist (1987–1999). His columns “On My Mind” were critical of the left and supportive of Israel. He was edged out in 1999 and wrote columns for the New York Daily News until 2004. He died in 2006.

William Safire, who died in 2009 joined the New York times in 1973 as a political columnist after a stint as President Nixon’s speechwriter. He never failed to defend Israel, especially during the Lebanon War when the media went viral with criticism. Among his many bon mots he called Hillary Clinton “a congenital liar.”

Here are his words in 2002 in a column entitled “The Israeli Choice” (http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/25/opinion/the-israeli-choice.html)

”

I’m a shtarker. This Yiddish word, rooted in the German stark, ”strong,” is defined by the lexicographer Sol Steinmetz as ”a strong-minded person willing to wield power.”

This week, 300,000 members of Israel’s hard-line Likud Party will choose as their candidate one of two shtarkers: Prime Minister Ariel (Arik) Sharon and Foreign Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu.

The dovish Labor Party last week swung far left: its candidate, Amram Mitzna, promises to divide Jerusalem, uproot all settlers and re-offer all other concessions Yasir Arafat spurned two years ago. Likudniks scorn him as ”Yossi Beilin with a beard,” a reference to the ever-hopeful architect of the Oslo disaster.

That means that the party of the shtarkers will win the parliamentary election in January. But which shtarker will be in charge, and does it matter?

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
8,000 people die in the UK every year due to what is being called “Fuel Poverty”. Fuel Poverty is a trendy term for those who can’t afford to heat their home because all the solar panels and windmills, the coal bans and the wars on fracking have made it too expensive for people not to freeze to death..

The left, which never misses a chance to blame profiteering for the failure of its policies, is staging “Die-Ins” outside energy companies to protect the real “Die-Ins” that they caused. But the real “Die-Ins” don’t involve bored university students lying down on the concrete and posting the results to Tumblr. They end with the generation that saved Europe from Hitler dying in their own homes.

Rising fuel prices can in no small part be attributed to environmental mania. Energy companies are not run by saints, but neither do they have an interest in pricing their product out of the reach of ordinary people. It’s hard to sell home heat to the dead or the destitute. On the other hand environmentalists do indeed want to make it hard for ordinary to be able to afford to heat their homes. That’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s their policy.

Talk of using carbon credits for “super-energy efficiency” is an admission that a movement using dead seniors as a prop is actually pushing to make energy use as expensive as possible and to reduce its use as much as possible. The “Die In” crowd isn’t for lowering energy prices, it’s for adding more taxes that will benefit their own parasitic clean energy experts.

Say what you will about energy companies, but their business plan involves selling a product. The anti-energy environmentalists want to make it as expensive as possible. The costs of their policies are not just a talking point, but a grim reality.

The family that has to choose between feeding their children or being able to drive to work and heat their home is not a talking point; they are the new Kulaks, the victims of an ideological activist policy that is killing innocent people for the Green greater good of the environment.

Stalin killed millions to industrialize the Soviet Union, the Green Left is preparing to kill millions to deindustrialize North America, Europe and Australia. It’s already doing it. While its activists are trying to peg the blame for fuel poverty fatalities on a government which is badly out of cash, it need look no further than its own activists and celebrities who preach the green life from their mansions.

Clear energy has become the new Communism, an ideological program that can never be achieved, but for which we must all strive no matter how many die all along the way. In Scotland, the perennially deranged Scottish National Party called for generating 100 percent of the country’s electricity from wind, wave and tidal power by 2020.

This plan would add 900 pounds to the average fuel bill. And that is how fuel poverty gets started.

Wales, which has the highest fuel poverty rate in the UK, is working on one of Europe’s largest wind farms and has a plan for total clean energy by 2025, if anyone is still alive and hasn’t frozen to death. Wind farms don’t tend to do too well in the cold and human beings don’t do too well without heat.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/new-report-highlights-hillary-clintons-role-in-the-preventable-benghazi-attack-that-left-four-americans-dead?f=puball New Report Highlights Hillary Clinton’s Role in the “Preventable” Benghazi Attack That Left Four Americans Dead by OPSEC TEAM February 19, 2014 A new OPSEC report combines for the first time in a single document the findings of multiple official investigations and media reports about Hillary Clinton’s role before, during and after the attack […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/what-jewish-museums-wont-show?f=puball

Holocaust museums around the globe present in remarkably graphic form pre-war Nazi conditions that promoted anti-semitism and the belief that Jews were sub-human. Children read schoolbooks in which Jews were depicted as exploitive, dangerous, lacking in essential human qualities. Jews were demonized to an extent that led inexorably to concentration camps and extermination. The horror of this period is told and retold in museums as a reminder that this must never happen again. Propaganda of a vicious variety has consequences, a condition the world now knows all too well.

Or does it? For decades Palestinian school texts repeat the same dangerous lies about Jews. A crossword puzzle for children asks “what is a four letter word for an exploitive people? Answer: Jews.” Summer camp bunks in the Arab section of the West Bank are named after “martyrs” who have killed Israeli women and children.

Last year Syria had a four part television series on “the blood libel” the claim that Jews kill Christian youth so their blood can be used for the making of matzos. Saudi textbooks have actually reprinted perverse Nazi cartoons from the 1930’s. And the Protocols of The Elders of Zion, a classic anti-semitic book based on nothing more than the ill-advised ideas of a fantasist, has been reprinted in many Arab venues and has been circulated by imams as evidence of Jewish turpitude.

None of this material is surprising. It has been revealed in many newspapers and journals. There have been courageous journalists who have campaigned against these contemporary atrocities. Yet progressive Jewish leaders and Holocaust museum curators ignore these conditions.

If one attends a Holocaust museum, the last exhibit is invariably on genocides in our time from the boat people in Vietnam, to the long march in Cambodia, to Darfur. Poignant photographs are displayed that tug at the heart strings and display Jewish sensitivity to human depravity. This is as it should be. If any group is aware of the horror people can inflict on one another it is the Jews.

However, what is missing is the existential evidence of anti-semitism. Where are the tracts pointing to the rise of anti-semitism in many European communities, the hatred directed against Jews in Muslim populations, and the vile images about Jews promoted in Arab and Persian nations? I suspect the reason for this obvious omission is political correctness. It is certainly not a lack of awareness.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/liberal-media-in-free-fall?f=puball#ixzz2tlgyFyGz
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

An enduring memory of my late Father is of him sitting in his chair by the fireplace reading The New York Times. As far as he was concerned, he was receiving the most accurate news of the nation and the world. Despite the many Pulitzer Prizes it has received over the years, he wasn’t.

One of them went to Walter Duranty in 1932, a reporter who was an apologist for the Soviet Union’s Stalinist regime. History revealed that he failed to accurately report on the 1932-1933 famine that killed countless thousands in the Ukraine where collective farming had been imposed. In November 2003 the Pulitzer Board, decided not to revoke the prize. In its review of the 13 articles, the Board “concluded that there was not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deceptions, the relevant standard in this case.” The Board extended its sympathy to Ukrainians.

Ukraine is the site of major protests as a new generation seeks to align the nation with Europe and not the Russian Republic that replaced the failed Soviet Union. The nation is sharply divided.

A Breitbart news story about The New York Times reported that on Thursday of last week it had announced that “profits had fallen nearly 50% in the fourth quarter of 2013 compared to the same period a year before.” Total revenues were down 5.2% and advertising revenues were down 6.3%. A rise in the number of digital readers has not resulted in digital advertising revenues. “Ultimately, the question is whether readers still want the content the Times is providing.”

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/02/18/white-house-employers-can-prevent-job-losses-after-minimum-wage-hike-by-accepting-lower-profit-margins/?print=1

The White House lauded a Congressional Budget Office report on the proposed minimum wage hike to $10.10 per hour while brushing off one key finding: that such a bill could cost half a million jobs, and maybe more.

“The new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report finds that 16.5 million workers would get a raise from increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour and this would help millions of hard-working families, reduce poverty, and increase the overall wages going to lower-income households,” Jason Furman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Betsey Stevenson, Council of Economic Advisers member, wrote in a White House blog post this afternoon.

“On employment, CBO’s central estimate is that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour would lead to a 0.3 percent decrease in employment and CBO acknowledges that the employment impact could be essentially zero,” they continued. “But even these estimates do not reflect the overall consensus view of economists which is that raising the minimum wage has little or no negative effect on employment. For example, seven Nobel Prize winners and more than 600 other economists recently stated that: ‘In recent years there have been important developments in the academic literature on the effect of increases in the minimum wage on employment, with the weight of evidence now showing that increases in the minimum wage have had little or no negative effect on the employment of minimum-wage workers, even during times of weakness in the labor market.’”

The CBO report says that “once fully implemented in the second half of 2016, the $10.10 option would reduce total employment by about 500,000 workers, or 0.3 percent, CBO projects.”

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/02/18/ayatollah-dismisses-nuke-deal-white-house-official-says-they-have-sober-frame-of-mind/

A senior administration official admitted that the Ayatollah Khamenei’s comments about a nuclear deal being doomed and duplicitous should slightly lower expectations going into the next round of talks in Vienna.

The P5+1 is meeting to take the six-month interim agreement and forge it into a long-term agreement, but the Supreme Leader’s statements sought to dampen any real or feigned optimism from the White House.

Some assume nuclear talks wud solve problems,but as I said b4 I’m not positive abt negotation,it won’t get anywhere but I’m not against it.

— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) February 17, 2014

The nuclear issue is an excuse, if the nuclear [issue] is solved, they’ll look for a new issue.

— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) February 17, 2014

What the Foreign Ministry has started will be continued, Iran will not violate its commitments but I am saying now it will not get anywhere.

— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) February 17, 2014

Iranian nation wanted to reassure the hardworking officials that the Iranian nation is standing up, do not feel weak when facing the enemy.

— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) February 17, 2014

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/371412/shrinking-imperialist-president-jonah-goldberg

Of all the time-honored failings for which we criticize sitting presidents — by “we” I mean pundits, academics, and other members of the chattering phylum — two charges stand out: imperialism and shrinkage. Usually it’s one or the other.

When the president is unpopular or when he’s lost control of his agenda or when he just seems inadequate to the demands of the job, the headline “The Incredible Shrinking Presidency” proliferates like kudzu. When the Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006, The Economist proclaimed “The Incredible Shrinking Presidency” of George W. Bush on its cover. Barack Obama has been diagnosed with presidential shrinkage many times, including in Politico, the New York Times, and my own National Review.

The flip side of the shrinking presidency is the imperial presidency, something we’ve been fretting about, by name, since at least Franklin Roosevelt and in principle since the Founding.

Politically, what is remarkable is that Obama seems to be doing both at the same time. His “Year of Action” — intended to dispel that lame-duck scent — is simultaneously Caesar-like and pathetic. (Maybe the presidential seal should depict that dude from the Little Caesars pizza commercials?) Last week, he announced that he would unilaterally raise the minimum wage for federal contractors seeking new work. Only 1 percent of the workforce makes the minimum wage, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and vanishingly few of them work for the federal government. This probably explains why the White House wouldn’t give an actual number when asked how many people his bold action would benefit.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/ukraine-in-flames/print/Putin’s stooges ruthlessly crack down on Ukrainians’ cry for freedom and independence.

Parts of the Ukrainian capital were on fire last night as protesters battled security forces of that nation’s repressive government — months after it announced Ukraine would align itself with Russia instead of the European Union.

After a late-night pow-wow with opposition figures Vitaly Klitschko and Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych blamed the violent episodes on opposition leaders, but added that it was still “not too late to stop the conflict.”

Activists took over City Hall in Kiev yesterday and anti-riot police moved into Independence Square. BBC reports that at least 18 people were killed Tuesday, including seven police officers, in the worst outbreak of violence in weeks.

Many Ukrainians came to the main protest camp, the Maidan, to support activists who have reportedly been trained to defend barricades from riot police. Supporters had to walk because authorities completely shut down Kiev’s metro, claiming that there is a danger of “terror acts.” It was the first time the metro was shuttered since Ukraine declared independence in 1991.

The explosion of anger comes a month after four anti-government protesters were killed in central Kiev.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/9-out-of-10-saudi-men-say-eyeshadow-on-women-causes-sexual-assaults/

Why are Saudi men attacking women? According to 9 out out of 10 Saudi men, it’s all about the eyeshadow. It has to be the eyeshadow since there’s not much else you can see of a traditional Saudi woman’s face.

In entirely unrelated news…

“The flash memory of mobile phones taken from teenagers showed 69.7% of 1,470 files saved in them were pornographic and 8.6% were related to violence,” said report author Professor Abdullah al-Rasheed.

Whew. I would have thought it would be the other way around.

Saudi Arabia was the only country to generate more searches than Pornistan for an animal, coming in at position 1 for ‘fox sex’. They also finished second or third for a good number of the abovementioned animal terms.

Probably the foxes were wearing too much makeup.

Far be it from me to criticize Islamic culture, but maybe this situation can be resolved by building a giant fence around Saudi Arabia and not letting any Saudi men leave. The Saudi women and the foxes will however be provided with sanctuary in a saner place. Like maybe Somalia.

A survey conducted by the King Abdul Aziz Centre for National Dialogue in Saudi Arabia shows that Saudi men blame women for the rising rate of molestation in the Gulf. The poll surveyed 992 men and women.

Ironically, in a country where women are required to wear full-face and body coverings in public, over 86% of men said that excessive makeup was the main cause of the increase in public molestation of women.