RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/361340/print

If you lose the spending war on the airwaves, you’re likely to lose on Election Day.

As Virginia’s gubernatorial race enters its final stretch, Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s campaign has been re-running an ad from earlier in the year.

The ad, “Too Important,” is designed to promote McAuliffe as a bipartisan dealmaker, but it also features outgoing governor Bob McDonnell quite a bit, as one of the heroes of the story, bedeviled by Cuccinelli and “tea-party Republicans” until McAuliffe arrives to save the day:

McAuliffe’s willingness to associate himself with McDonnell — over a tax increase! — points to the fallacy of one of the more popular theories of this year’s election in Virginia: that the scandal surrounding McDonnell’s acceptance of more than $145,000 in gifts and loans from a wealthy donor, Jonnie Williams Sr., CEO of Star Scientific, is hurting Cuccinelli. (McDonnell is limited to one term.)

The scandal certainly doesn’t help the Republican candidate, of course, but McDonnell regularly polled better than Cuccinelli this year, even after details of the scandal emerged.

A Quinnipiac survey in late August found 47 percent approving of McDonnell’s performance in office, with 39 percent disapproving; At the same time, that pollster found Cuccinelli with only 42 percent head-to-head against McAuliffe and only 35 percent saying they had a favorable opinion of Cuccinelli.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303382004579130042181662318?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop An ideal agreement would force Iran to stop all uranium enrichment. Most of the other alternatives are bad. Hopes are running high in many quarters that the West and Iran could begin to work out a deal over the Iranian nuclear program this week in Geneva. As the Iranian deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4018/islamist-trojan-horse First, the “closest enemy” must be destroyed, the leaders of Arab countries aligned with the West; after that, the “distant enemy, ” the Christian West. The masses of the Middle East thirst for the quality of life in the West as they see it through the media; the Islamist leaders desire the total alienation […]

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/10/10/mr-obama-presidency-is-no-place-for-amateurs/

Edward Klein is the former editor-in-chief of The New York Times Magazine. His latest book is “The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House” (Regnery 2012) which has just been released in paperback.

“I sit here all day trying to persuade people to do the things they ought to have sense enough to do without my persuading them,” Harry Truman once lamented. “That’s all the powers of the President amount to.”

As usual, the plain-speaking Truman got it right: presidential power is the power to persuade. Too bad the current occupant of the White House has never learned this basic lesson.

Barack Obama’s refusal to negotiate with the Republicans in Congress on the government shutdown is proof once again that he doesn’t understand the first thing about presidential leadership.

The one-time constitutional lawyer fails to grasp the fact that the president of the United States does not obtain results by giving orders.

Strangely enough, this one-time constitutional lawyer fails to grasp the fact that the president of the United States does not obtain results by giving orders.

Thanks to our Constitution’s separation of powers, he can’t get action without bargaining with Congress. The presidency and Congress are inextricably linked; one can’t govern without the other.

http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2013/10/16/prime-minister-netanyahu-hajj-amin-el-husseinis-animating-ideology-was-islam-not-nazism/ During his October 6, 2013 speech at Bar Ilan University, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alluded to the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin el-Husseini. Mr. Netanyahu characterized el-Husseini as, “the undisputed leader of the Palestinian national movement in the first half of the 20th century.” The Prime Minister highlighted the ex-Muft’s role in fomenting […]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/CEN-01-151013.html

A REVIEW OF Implosion: The End of Russia and What It Means for America by Ilan Berman

Since the fall of communism in 1991, Washington consistently underestimated Russia. American policy in consequence has crashed and burned repeatedly: in the Ukraine, where the American-backed “Orange Revolution” of 2004 collapsed in favor of an administration friendly to Moscow; in 2008, when America backed Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s attempt to incorporate Russian-majority provinces on Georgia’s borders; and in 2013, when Russia trumped American in the Middle East and took the diplomatic lead in the Syrian chemical weapons crisis.

American diplomats have had their heads handed to them byMoscow yet again. If they are so poor, how come they ain’t dumb? Americans play Monopoly; Russians play chess. Russia has found the fault lines in American policy and compensated for its light footprint with superior leverage. In particular, Russia has exploited the timidity of the last two US administrations towards Iran, presenting itself as the purveyor of a solution to problems it helped to create. In terms of technique, Moscow’s performance is praiseworthy, even if its intent is malicious.

Russia, to be sure, is in crisis. But Russia has been in crisis since Peter the Great build modern Russia with one foot in Siberia and the other in Eastern Europe. It is not a nation-state but an empire, badly constituted from the beginning. Russia always taxed its European provinces to support uneconomic expansion in its Far East, a policy that collapsed between the 1905 war with Japan and the 1914-1918 war with Germany. Russia regained its eastern influence in 1945 and lost it in 1989.

Its population has declined from a peak of 149 million in 1992 to 143 million in 2012 and threatens to decline even faster. Russia’s demographics are weak, although it is worth asking whether they are much weaker than in 1945, after Russia had lost 15% of its total population in war, not to mention a great deal of its productive capacity and infrastructure. That didn’t stop the Soviet Union from building thermonuclear bombs and ICBMs and beating America into space. The Soviet economy suffered from the equivalent of arteriosclerosis, but it nearly won the Cold War. Putin’s economy has suffered a string of self-inflicted failures, but that doesn’t remove Russia from the field.

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=5993 Kudos to this week’s Sunday Times for revealing the contents of a report on Palestinian spending of European aid. The report, which has yet to be released, was prepared by the European Court of Auditors, a Luxembourg-based watchdog group that is part of the organization Transparency International, based in Berlin. The Court of Auditors […]

http://bit.ly/19KW5YV The following are excerpts an essay by Yakov Faitelson, the lead expert on the Jewish-Arab demographic balance: “Since 2003, the annual population growth rate [birth, mortality and migration rates] of Israeli Jews has grown steadily from 1.48 percent to 1.81 percent while the aggregated annual increase of the Arab Middle Eastern countries has decreased […]

http://www.investigativeproject.org/4185/column-terror-attacks-by-any-other-name In Nairobi, well-armed gunmen stormed a shopping mall intending to kill as many people as possible. They asked victims about their religion, sparing the lives of Muslim shoppers. At least 67 people were killed in the attack. The world rightly sees this as an act of terrorism. Six years earlier, a well-armed gunman stormed […]

http://www.israpundit.com/archives/63590717#more-63590717 Steven Plaut:   The following article is a bit long and appeared in “Jewish Magazine” more than 15 years ago.  http://www.jewishmag.com/9mag/plaut/plaut.htm  It is too long to reproduce in full here but I think you will find it still timely.  In any case, here is but one segment, and if you find it interesting you can read the […]