RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

Ever since FDR made it his campaign song in 1932 while running for office during the Great Depression, the unofficial anthem of the Democratic Party has been that Tin Pan Alley classic, “Happy Days are Here Again.” But no matter how often the old Victor spun, it would not be until well after Roosevelt’s death that happy days would be here again.

Like Hope and Change, Happy Days are Here Again was a blandly optimistic and non-specific promise that good times were coming. Someday the happy days would arrive, an appropriate enough sentiment for a song whose pivotal moment came in the movie “Chasing Rainbows” where it was sung to reassure a cuckolded husband who is threatening to kill himself. And in an even more appropriate bit of symbolism, the actual movie footage of that moment is as lost as the happy times.

No matter how often the Democratic Party cheats on the American people, it can always break out a new rendition of “Happy Days are Here Again” to win them back. And even if the happy days never seem to actually arrive, the promise of “So long sad times” and “Howdy gay times” where “your troubles and cares are gone” is always a winner.

While the American Democratic Party may not have an official anthem, the British Labour Party does and its anthem, “The Red Flag” would be entirely appropriate for the new Democratic Party that no longer has anything in common with Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson.

It might be awkward to imagine Harry Reid or Joe Manchin trying to make it through verses like, “The people’s flag is deepest red” and the sonorous chorus, “Then raise the scarlet standard high /Within its shade we live and die/Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer/We’ll keep the red flag flying here.”

They would probably look almost as awkward singing it as Labour Party leader Ed Milliband does, but you could easily imagine Barack Obama and Valerie Jarrett belting it out. And that would be only right because while The Red Flag never gets around to mentioning Manchester, despite its popularity there, it does namecheck two cities. “In Moscow’s vaults its hymns were sung/Chicago swells the surging throng.”

These days red flag songs, once mandatory, are confined to all sorts of vaults in Moscow. The new Russian anthem is Putin’s redress of the old Soviet one, with lyrics by the same composer. And the Soviet National Anthem, that secular hymn, has a familiar pedigree going back to the Anthem of the Bolshevik Party in 1938, which took its melody from “Life is better, Life is fun.”

Democrats try to paint the gubernatorial candidate as a wacko with a crazy sidekick.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/350596/cuccinelli-bogeyman-virginia-john-fund

After President Obama won Virginia for the second time in a row last November, Democrats were crowing that the state’s governorship would be theirs for the taking this fall.

Their reasoning was simple: Obama had won twice, incumbent GOP governor Bob McDonnell is term-limited, Republicans have lost every U.S. Senate race in Virginia since 2000, and Democrats have said for years that Ken Cuccinelli, the hard-shelled conservative attorney general who is the GOP nominee this year, is unelectable.
But their confidence has gotten a little shaky of late. The Real Clear Politics average of all recent polls shows Cuccinelli with a slim lead, 43 to 42 percent, over Democrat Terry McAuliffe, best known for being Bill Clinton’s fundraising consigliere and the chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 2001 to 2005. In sizing up the race, the liberal American Prospect magazine admitted that McAuliffe was “a weak candidate” who “would have struggled to win the nomination this time if anyone had contested it.” When he had real opponents in the 2009 race, McAuliffe placed a poor third in the Democratic primary. His advantage this year is that as a master fundraiser, he has oodles of money for the kind of get-out-the-vote efforts that pulled Barack Obama across the finish line to victory in Virginia.

But Democrats also think they have a silver bullet. They are frustrated that Cuccinelli has drifted to the center (he has refused to sign Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge and endorsed Governor McDonnell’s relaxing of restrictions on felons’ regaining the right to vote). But they think they can still paint Cuccinelli as a wild-eyed extremist by linking him to E. W. Jackson, the African-American minister who, in a surprise win, nabbed the GOP nomination for lieutenant governor. (In Virginia, the governor and lieutenant governor do not run on the same ticket.) Jackson is strong medicine for many voters, having said such things as that “Obama clearly has Muslim sensibilities” and that liberals have “done more to kill black folks whom they claim so much to love than the Ku Klux Klan, lynching and slavery, and Jim Crow ever did.”

http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2013/06/02/why-the-beasts-fail-to-understand-israeli-happiness/
Why the Beasts Fail to Understand Israeli Happiness
It’s not that they feel themselves to be under the shadow of death, it’s that they’re carried along by life.

A recent, much-read article by Tiffanie Wen in the Daily Beast tried to figure out “Why are the Israelis so Damn Happy?” It based itself on an OECD study of 36 democratic countries, which found that while Israel doesn’t score very high on some major parameters like housing, income, job security, and education, it does score high — eighth on the list — for happiness. (Israel also got a high happiness score on other studies, such as this one.)

Considering that Israel has also experienced far more war and terrorism than any other democratic country since its founding in 1948, that result may seem puzzling. Wen, in fact, claims that “war has quite a lot to do with it” and goes on to say:

Think about it. How would you act if you woke up every morning thinking that this day could be your last? Or at least took a moment to imagine how you would be eulogized at your funeral?…

The point is this: you’d enjoy the day you had. And if you continued to survive until the next morning, this daily exercise might develop into a mantra for how you lived your life. And you might bother to take that beach day, or spend more time with your family. You might grow a pair and launch that startup you’ve been thinking about (Boom: Silicon Wadi) or stop a beautiful woman on the street and insist that she have lunch with you….

First of all, there’s a measure of truth to this. It’s true that a sense of living with threats in the background concentrates the mind on the small pleasures, the good stuff. And Wen also notes a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association indicating that Israelis — who are more toughened by bad stuff — “recover from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) more quickly than people of other Western nations.”

http://pjmedia.com/blog/real-damage-from-racial-preferences/ Racial preferences — i.e., discrimination — are usually touted as a way to help minorities. Often overlooked, however, is the harm they cause these same individuals. Any day now, we will be getting a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court in Fisher v. University of Texas on the constitutionality of the racial preferences practiced […]

http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2013/06/09/government-surveillance-the-view-from-misgav-am/?print=1

It didn’t take the IRS scandal, the Benghazi debacle, and the surveillance of the press to make me think Barack Obama was one of the worst, if not the worst, president in American history. I already did.

But I’m not sure the latest scandal — the mass sweep of everyone’s metadata by the NSA — is everything it’s cracked up to be. Certainly, it’s not surprising. I rather yawned at the revelation that the comings and goings of all our emails, phone calls, texts, etc., were being recorded. I always assumed they were. And I always thought we were all leaving an indelible digital trail.

In fact, I had long since ceased putting my most serious private communications online or even making them over the phone, except in moments of haste or laziness, when I held my nose and went ahead with it. I imagine many of us have done that.

And this has little or nothing to do with Bush, Obama, or any politician. It’s the nature of technology. Privacy, as we once knew it, is over. We can put in strong checks and balances to prevent the improper exploitation of this information to bolster the provisions already in place, but we’re fighting the proverbial uphill battle — and not just because of Obama’s quasi-totalitarian behavior (although who would like the crew behind the IRS scandal peering into our email?).

Sad, but true…. but there is another side to it. I spent part of Sunday at Kibbutz Misgav Am [1] in a part of the extreme north of Israel known as “The Finger.” This is because, like a finger, the kibbutz juts up into Lebanon so that parts of it are bordered by the Arab state on three sides. (Earlier in the day, I had driven an ATV right along that border.)

I stood in the lookout booth at the kibbutz high point with a spokesperson looking down at a Shiite village perhaps two hundred meters away. You could see yellow Hezbollah flags flying in front of the houses, one of them just yards from a small UN installation. To our right were some sculptures made from primitive Hezbollah mortars in previous wars. (By the way, later I saw several UN jeeps heading south on the main road. I couldn’t tell if they were Austrian soldiers who were reported leaving the Golan Heights to avoid involvement in the Syrian civil war, but they looked European.)

The Shiite village houses, it was explained to me, had no glass in their windows, the better to get their weapons out fast to fire at the Israelis. Who wants the inconvenience of glass between you and the despised enemy? No matter that it snowed in winter in this part of Galilee. Hate is hate.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/3747/only_in_israel_gay_rights_in_the_middle_east Sexual minorities are as unwelcome in the Middle East as are religious minorities. Except in Israel spectators and participants, including some of Israel’s most powerful politicians. Here is The Times of Israel report on the event: “Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai kicked off the festivities with a speech that reflected on the journey since the first […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323469804578523861138754292.html?mod=opinion_newsreel

Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, has lately garnered more attention for her unhinged political views than for her writing. She has compared Fidel Castro to the Dalai Lama. She refused to allow her book “The Color Purple” to be translated into Hebrew. But perhaps nothing was more off-base—at least morally speaking—than the open letter Ms. Walker wrote in late May to singer-songwriter Alicia Keys. Ms. Walker, writing at the website of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, urged Ms. Keys to cancel a July 4 performance in Israel.

Ms. Walker wrote: “you are putting yourself in danger (soul danger) by performing in an apartheid country.” The writer then compared the plight of the Palestinians to that of blacks in the American South prior to the civil-rights movement. “You were not born when we, your elders who love you, boycotted institutions in the U.S. South to end an American apartheid less lethal than Israel’s against the Palestinian people.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323495604578535552983978828.html?mod=opinion_newsreel

Over the last 72 hours Americans have learned more about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs, whose quasi-exposure appears to be a bombshell without a bomb. The political reaction is no saner as a result, but perhaps reality and substance will eventually prevail.

President Obama emerged to defend the NSA on Friday, noting that his assessment of the programs that originated under his predecessor was “that on, you know, net, it was worth us doing” because “they help us prevent terrorist attacks.” He also invited a debate about how we are “striking this balance between the need to keep the American people safe and our concerns about privacy, because there are some trade-offs involved.”

Mr. Obama is conceding too much to the folks who imagine the government is compiling dossiers on citizens and listening to calls a la “The Lives of Others.”

The NSA is collecting “metadata”—logs of calls received and sent, and other types of data about data for credit card transactions and online communications. Americans now generate a staggering amount of such information—about 161 exabytes per year, equal to the information stored in 37,000 Libraries of Congress. Organizing and making sense of this raw material is now possible given advances in information technology, high-performance computing and storage capacity. The field known as “big data” is revolutionizing everything from retail to traffic patterns to epidemiology.

Mr. Obama waved off fears of “Big Brother” but he might have mentioned that the paradox of data-mining is that the more such information the government collects the less of an intrusion it is. These data sets are so large that only algorithms can understand them. The search is for trends, patterns, associations, networks. They are not in that sense invasions of individual privacy at all.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324634304578535492421480524.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
The NSA’s surveillance program doesn’t do damage. Revealing it does.

Once again, the tanks-have-rolled left and the black-helicopters right have joined together in howls of protest. They were set off by last week’s revelations that the U.S. government has been collecting data that disclose the fact, but not the content, of electronic communications within the country, as well as some content data outside the U.S. that does not focus on American citizens. Once again, the outrage of the left-right coalition is misdirected.

Libertarian Republicans and liberal—progressive, if you prefer—Democrats see the specter of George Orwell’s “1984” in what they claim is pervasive and unlawful government spying. These same groups summoned “1984” in 2001 after passage of the Patriot Act, in 2008 after renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, and many times in between and since.

Regrettably, those best positioned to defend such surveillance programs are least likely to do so out of obvious security concerns. Without getting into detail here, intelligence agencies, with court authorization, have been collecting data in an effort that is neither pervasive nor unlawful. As to the data culled within the U.S., the purpose is to permit analysts to map relationships between and among Islamist fanatics.

For example, it would be helpful to know who communicated with the Tsarnaev brothers, who those people were in touch with, and whether there are overlapping circles that would reveal others bent on killing and maiming Americans—sort of a terrorist Venn diagram. Once these relationships are disclosed, information can be developed that would allow a court to give permission to monitor the content of communications.

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http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/06/are_republicans_more_ethical_than_democrats.html It is easy to be cynical about the corrosive effects of power.  No party has a monopoly on corruption and misuse of public office.  Yet cynicism is not the same as wisdom.  Such every day cynicism helps Democrats escape from the uncomfortable moral challenges posed to big government advocates by the slew of scandals […]