RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323744604578475043181969484.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLESecond

President Obama visited Texas Thursday as a part of his “Middle Class Jobs & Opportunity Tour.” And the trip happened to coincide with the release of Chief Executive Magazine’s annual report of the best states to do business in America.

For the ninth year in a row, CEOs picked Texas as the most business-friendly state in the country. The survey takes into account taxation, regulation, quality of the workforce and living environment.

“CEOs are well disposed to Texas, and it’s not hard to understand why,” the magazine explains. “52 Fortune 500 companies now call Texas home. 15 Texas companies went public in 2011, making the state the hottest IPO market in the nation. Austin has become one of the fastest growing tech hub.” It’s no wonder that Texas job creation has outpaced the national average.

Apparently Texas is the place to be. But it’s not because the Lone Star State is asking the wealthy to pay a little more in taxes, or for the people to rely a little more on government expansion. It doesn’t even have a higher minimum wage that will “reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth,” as the president suggested in his remarks.

In fact, CEOs in the survey were happy to point to what Texas and a handful of other states were doing right to attract business. “The regulatory and tax environment in Texas makes it my first pick,” one CEO noted. Another from Wisconsin explained, “Our business environment has improved dramatically with Gov. [Scott] Walker and the Republican legislature. Lower taxes and more incentives for new and relocating business are needed.”

Some CEOs even spoke to the so-called “Texodus”—the flight of businesses and workers from California to Texas. “A number of my friends do business in both California and Texas,” the head of one company noted. “Their experiences are causing them to move as much of their operations to Texas as they can.”

Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s office took the president’s visit as an opportunity to criticize his policies on Twitter saying, “Obama should have focused on jobs and opportunity five years ago.”

Better late than never. But if the president really wants to make up for lost time, he might consider what Texas is doing to grow the economy and be more business friendly. It seems to be working.

http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2013/05/12/benghazi-the-video-vanishes/ The dam really is breaking on Benghazi with even reliable Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein offering criticism of the administration on Meet the Press Sunday. Will she go under the bus too in the next Jay Carney press briefing, as have the State Department and the CIA? Hard to say, but here’s what the California […]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/arrested-development/?print=1 Canvassing the craven and deviant (which is to say, left-oriented, mainstream) response to the Boston Marathon bombing among media and intellectual elites — yes, the Tsarnaev brothers killed and mutilated but they were displaced, troubled, resentful of Western domination, etc. — Bruce Bawer [1] offers an astute diagnosis. The progressive multiculturalism to which these […]

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/the_bloody_hands_of_barack_obama.html

I AGREE WITH EVERYTHING STELLA PAUL WRITES….BUT THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT WERE NOT STARTED BY OBAMA….THE COIN DOCTRINE WAS IN PLACE DURING THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION ENDORSED BY GENERALS McCHRYSTAL AND PETRAEUS …..RSK

The Three Whistleblowers at the Benghazi hearing spoke softly, but with the emotional wallop of The Three Tenors. They told the truth, and it blasted like thunder through Obama’s tissue palace of lies.

Listening to these strong, solemn men, I heard the sound of old America: a place of hardworking people who love their country and believe in something bigger than their own power.

The America of Gregory Hicks, Mark Thompson, and Eric Nordstrom won World War II, walked on the moon, and defeated Communism. But today, their America is forced to serve a different god: a cold, smiling man with a hollow heart and hands that get bloodier by the day.

Obama stands center stage in this tragic opera of America’s downfall, cheapening, endangering, and destroying the lives of the best among us. The pile of corpses grows ever higher, and the lies more noxious.

Let’s pay tribute to some of his many victims, and vow to honor their memory by holding him to account.

http://www.ibtimes.com/israels-medical-startups-can-regrow-bones-can-they-do-so-money-1251649

JERUSALEM — Doctor Shai Meretzki can regrow bones.

Not that that makes him special; the medical technology to do it has been available for years. But Meretzki can take excess body fat, extract mesenchymal stem cells from it, and grow custom-made bone, outside the patient’s body. It even comes complete with the patient’s own blood vessels, and once grafted, it will grow the patient’s own bone marrow.

That is what’s unique, and it all started when Meretzki was studying biotechnology and chemical engineering at Technion Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, about 15 years ago. What if it were possible, he thought, to grow cells in three dimensions rather than the traditional two-dimension method?

“Many people grow cells two-dimensionally in a petri dish, in which you put the cells and they grow across the dish in a mono layer. But in our body, nothing is 2-D. What we’ve found is that the moment you take 2-D cells and grow them in 3-D, they behave completely differently,” the Israeli doctor and scientist said.

Meretzki’s research group was the first in the world to grow cells in a 3-D culture. He went on to found Pluristem Therapeutics (Nasdaq:PSTI), a biotechnology company that develops off-the-shelf cell therapies for a variety of human diseases. That was 11 years ago. It’s now a public company worth about $200 million and employing about 150 people in Haifa.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/05/benghazi-cia-talking-point-edits-white-house.html?mobify=0 It’s a cliché, of course, but it really is true: in Washington, every scandal has a crime and a coverup. The ongoing debate about the attack on the United States facility in Benghazi where four Americans were killed, and the Obama Administration’s response to it, is no exception. For a long time, it seemed […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3710/iphone-videos-third-reich As we observe an anniversary of the end of World War II, it’s intriguing to ask “Could the Third Reich have survived the iPhone?” The all-pervasive social media’s use of iPhone video created an instant universal awareness of the Boston Marathon bombings. It also created a bittersweet reflection on how world history could have […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3709/wmd-middle-east There exists in the Middle East a basic willingness to use WMD against civilians — with no hesitancy involved — and with full Islamic religious justification. The US and the EU are trying to find a diplomatic solution to a problem that does not have one. It is Iran that must be struck. If […]

http://phillyafsi.wordpress.com/2013/05/12/egypt-is-not-at-peace-with-israel-admits-john-kerry/ In a press conference on April 30th U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry admitted that Egypt is not at peace with Israel. In response to reporter’s question Kerry said: “This is literally a statement by the Arab world that they are prepared to make peace providing the Palestinians and Israelis reach a final status […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324482504578453363318730182.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

He was convicted when it was obligatory—as it remains today—to give credence to every accuser charging a priest with molestation.

Last Christmas Eve, his 18th behind bars, Catholic priest Gordon MacRae offered Mass in his cell at the New Hampshire state penitentiary. A quarter-ounce of unfermented wine and the host had been provided for the occasion, celebrated with the priest’s cellmate in attendance. Sentenced to 33½-67 years following his 1994 conviction for sexual assault against a teenage male, Father MacRae has just turned 60.

The path that led inexorably to that conviction would have been familiar to witnesses of the manufactured sex-abuse prosecutions that swept the nation in the 1980s and early 1990s and left an extraordinary number of ruined lives in its wake. Here once more, in the MacRae case, was a set of charges built by a determined sex-abuse investigator and an atmosphere in which accusation was, in effect, all the proof required to bring a guilty verdict. But now there was another factor: huge financial payouts for victims’ claims.

That a great many of the accusations against the priests were amply documented, that they involved the crimes of true predators all too often hidden or ignored, no one can doubt.

Neither should anyone doubt the ripe opportunities there were for fraudulent abuse claims filed in the hope of a large payoff. Busy civil attorneys—working on behalf of clients suddenly alive to the possibilities of a molestation claim, or open to suggestions that they remembered having been molested—could and did reap handsome rewards for themselves and their clients. The Diocese of Manchester, where Father MacRae had served, had by 2004 paid out $22,210,400 in settlements to those who had accused its priests of abuse.

The paydays did not come without effort. Thomas Grover—a man with a long record of violence, theft and drug offenses on whose claims the state built its case against Father MacRae—would receive direction for his testimony at the criminal trial. A conviction at the priest’s criminal trial would be a crucial determinant of success—that is, of the potential for reward—in Mr. Grover’s planned civil suit.

The 27-year-old accuser found that direction from a counselor at an agency recommended by his civil attorney. During Mr. Grover’s testimony, this therapist could be seen (though not by the jury) standing in the back of the courtroom. There, courtroom observers noted, and it is a report the state disputes, she would periodically place her finger at eye level and slowly move it down her right cheek—a pantomime of weeping. Soon thereafter Mr. Grover would begin to cry loudly, and at length.

Thomas Grover’s allegations were scarcely more credible than those of the 5- and 6-year-olds coaxed into accusations during the prosecutions of the day-care workers—children who spoke of being molested in graveyards and secret rooms. The accuser’s complaints against Father MacRae were similarly rich, among them allegations that few prosecutors would put before a jury. In a pretrial deposition, Mr. Grover alleged that Father MacRae had “chased me through a cemetery” and had tried to corner him there. Also, that Father MacRae had a gun and was “telling me over and over again that he would hurt me, kill me if I tried to tell anybody.” The priest had, moreover, chased him down the highway in his car.