RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.wnd.com/2013/01/pimping-the-culture/

Here is a pithy note from Dr. John, an e-pal…..I could not agree more…rsk

“The screaming, warbling, belting, style of singing — so normal in ‘American Idol’ episodes and its ilk, horrendous, over-embellished, even up to disrespectful renditions of the national anthem, dances at the White House ( see below) etc — are a result of the current worship of the commercialized exaggerations of gospel-singing style of the African-American churches. There are many other features of adorations of barrio pop culture that have filtered into the major fashions and styles of art, music, literature, dress, language…Meanwhile, good jazz, classical and creative pop music, correct speech etc are given over to ever-dwindling cadres of devotees… Where are our teachers in guiding good taste and higher culture in practically all our schools? Why do they kowtow to the predilections of the lowest common denominator in such politically-correct abandon?…. They do their charges little long-term good with such well-intended tolerance or capitulation to the current, commercial hebonic saturations… We need — for so many reasons — a return to more classical standards of education, moral upbringing, and civic consciousness — for everyone’s benefit, but most of all for the poorer sections of the populace…”

The marketplace doesn’t adjudicate the quality of art or pop culture – it does no more than offer an aggregate snapshot of the trillions of subjective preferences acted upon by consumers. That snapshot, in 2013, tells us that when it comes to “Bread and Circuses,” Rome and its provinces wallow in the same lowbrow popular culture.

Incidentally, to judge the quality of a cultural product is not to begrudge the preferences of the people who purchase it. It is simply to apply timeless, objective standards in assessing these products.
In its salient features, the Commander In Chief’s Ball resembles the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. There, some of the most pretentious, worthless people in the country – in politics, journalism and entertainment – convene to revel in their ability to petition and curry favor with one another, usually to the detriment of the people, whether the latter know it or not.

By and large, when it comes to entertainment, the people and the elites are on the same empty page – most of the musicians whose products they patronize, or with whom they fraternize, can’t read music, much less play it.

“Grammy and Academy Award winner” Jennifer Hudson, to whose primal screams the president and first lady attempted to dance, doesn’t sing; she screams. Voice coaches once considered the Hudson brand of “vocal wobble” a deficiency in technique and talent. But then, “Why be a musician, when you can be a success?” Such cacophony currently plays to full houses. It is to their credit that the First Couple smoothed the noise over with some smooth moves.

“We all know Beyoncé can sing,” came the response from inaugural organizers to the rumors that the singing sensation lip-synched to “The Star Spangled Banner.” Beyoncé is another performer who distinguishes herself with an obscene bump-and-grind routine and a din of discordant, jarring yelps.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/clintons-prepare-for-whitewatergate-day-of-humiliation-rupert-cornwell-in-washington-considers-the-evidence-for-a-possible-presidential-coverup-1427537.html

Clintons prepare for ‘Whitewatergate’ day of humiliation: Rupert Cornwell in Washington considers the evidence for a possible presidential cover-up
By STEPHEN LABATON
Published: January 06, 1996

After nearly two years of searches and subpoenas, the White House said this evening that it had unexpectedly discovered copies of missing documents from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s law firm that describe her work for a failing savings and loan association in the 1980’s.Federal and Congressional investigators have issued subpoenas for the documents since 1994, and the White House has said it did not have them. The originals disappeared from the Rose Law Firm, in which Mrs. Clinton was a partner, shortly before Mr. Clinton took office.

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/06/us/elusive-papers-of-law-firm-are-found-at-white-house.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

The only First Lady to have been subpoenaed, she testified before a federal grand jury in 1996 due to the Whitewater controversy, but was never charged with wrongdoing in this or several other investigations during her husband’s administration.
Hillary Clinton Is Subpoenaed To Testify Before a Grand Jury
By ALISON MITCHELL
Published: January 23, 1996

Hillary Rodham Clinton has been subpoenaed to appear before a Federal grand jury that is investigating whether anyone at the White House obstructed justice in the handling of records from the First Lady’s former law firm.

http://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/23/us/hillary-clinton-is-subpoenaed-to-testify-before-a-grand-jury.html

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ben-shapiro/hollywood-libs-push-boycott-of-zero-dark-thirty/print/ According to Hollywood, investigations of Hollywood communists is one of the worst blights on America’s record. Over and over again, like a child picking a scab, Hollywood revisits the horrid days of McCarthyism. In The Majestic, Jim Carrey plays a writer dragged up before McCarthy on charges of communism; in The Way We Were, […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/stop-the-witch-hunt-against-rep-bachmann-on-the-jamie-glazov-show/print/ To sign the Freedom Center’s petition to stop the witch-hunt against Rep. Michele Bachmann, click here. And please spread the word about this petition far and wide! Join The Jamie Glazov Show that aired on Tuesday, January 22, 2013 at 8-9 pm Pacific (11-12 pm EST) on Blog Talk Radio. We discussed the Freedom […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/best-thing-ever-to-emerge-from-a-celebrity-trip-to-north-korea?f=puball When former New Mexican Governor Bill Richardson made yet another of his many trips to North Korea, bringing with him Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, I was skeptical than anything good would come of it. North Korea has a long record of turning to its own advantage any overtures from the Free World, official […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/us-policy-makes-mess-of-mali?f=puball With pro-al-Qaeda Islamist militants running amok in northwest Africa in places like Mali and Algeria, seizing territory and taking hostages, it’s far from clear that Team Obama has the foggiest idea of what to do. That’s not going to cut it. It’s not like this is a new problem. Unleashed by the conflict in […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/organization-of-islamic-cooperation-on-the-defensive-over-shariah-in-america

For all who’ve been working hard to educate Americans on the facts about Islamic Law (shariah), there are some encouraging signals. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and its affiliated network, including the Muslim Brotherhood in America, would seem to be in full-on defensive mode about shariah if a recent Brotherhood conference and a couple of new reports are indicative.

At the Muslim American Society (MAS)-Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) conference in Chicago, Illinois 21-25 December 2012, a few thousand mostly Arabic speaking Muslims circled the wagons for a five-day program aimed at rousing them to defense of Islam. The Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), acknowledged in the Brotherhood’s 1991 “Explanatory Memorandum” as one of its organizations, and the Muslim American Society (MAS) co-sponsored the 11th Annual MAS-ICNA Convention. The Convention speakers roster featured Tariq Ramadan, scion of the Brotherhood’s al-Banna founding family; Nihad Awad, the Executive Director of HAMAS’ U.S. branch, CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations); Siraj Wahhaj, Imam of the al-Taqwa Mosque in Brooklyn, NY and included on a list of unindicted co-conspirators from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial; and Mohamed Magid, president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the largest Muslim Brotherhood front group in the U.S.

The Convention theme of “Renaissance” was all about getting American Muslims to experience a “double revolution in intellect and psychology,” as Ramadan put it, so they’d be energized enough to stand up to an alleged atmosphere of “Islamophobia” in the U.S. that has shariah in its sights. This theme, of course, is straight out of the OIC’s “Islamophobia Observatory” which hyperventilates about such things at Foreign Ministers meetings and in regular reports posted to its website.

A 19 January 2013 report from the Brookings Institute’s Doha Center entitled, “A Rights Agenda For The Muslim World,” presents a full-throated apologia for the OIC’s allegedly frustrated efforts to get its recalcitrant member states to integrate shariah with modern international standards on human rights. The problem seems to be that the OIC allows some of those countries with a “conservative brand of Islam” too much leeway to cling to their “emphasis on national sovereignty,” which just wrecks the OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu’s sincere efforts to implement more effective “supra-national human rights mechanisms.” Apparently, according to the report’s author, Turan Kayaoglu, Ihsanoglu wants to make human rights the centerpiece of the OIC agenda, which Turan says “shows a gradual move away from emphasizing the centrality of shariah.” Supposedly, Ihsanoglu increasingly is willing to “discuss these issues in the context of international human rights rather than exclusively within that of Islamic law and tradition.” A quick check of the OIC website shows the “Islamophobia Observatory” is still up and the Human Rights page features the UN Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18 (the one about restricting free speech criticism of Islam) and other items about “combating intolerance, negative stereotyping, and stigmatization of, and discrimination, incitement to violence and violence against persons, based on religion or belief”-i.e., Islam.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/338595/discussing-islam-religious-taboo-clifford-d-may Can we at least agree that reports of al-Qaeda’s death have been greatly exaggerated? You’ll recall that Peter Bergen, a director at the New America Foundation and the national-security analyst for CNN, began pronouncing AQ dead last summer. At the Aspen Institute, he even gave a speech titled “Time to Declare Victory: Al Qaeda […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/338611/what-goes-around-comes-around-lisa-schiffren  Hillary Rodham famously began her career after Yale Law School, working on Capitol Hill, as a young staff attorney on Watergate Committee. She was known to feel deep, person antipathy for President Richard Nixon, and to take great pleasure in getting members of his administration who were hauled before the committee to squirm. There […]

http://pjmedia.com/blog/algerian-jihadists-wanted-to-teach-the-americans-what-islam-is/ At the height of the hostage crisis in Algeria, one of the kidnappers explained: “We’ve come in the name of Islam, to teach the Americans what Islam is.” As of Sunday evening, this exercise in religious education had claimed eighty-one lives and left BP’s natural gas plant in Algeria in a state of ruin, […]