RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://townhall.com/columnists/calthomas/2012/02/02/nearing_a_decision_on_iran/print

One of several casualties of the vitriolic name-calling between Republican presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich is what to do about Iran.

In interviews, Romney has spoken about tougher sanctions, but it’s been difficult to consider the candidates’ positions on Iran — or much else — with the childish talk about who is the bigger liar.

James Clapper, director of National Intelligence, testified Tuesday before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Clapper said that while American sanctions are likely to have a greater impact on Iran’s nuclear program, they are not expected to lead to the demise of Iran’s leadership.

Clapper said, “We assess Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons, in part by developing various nuclear capabilities that better position it to produce such weapons, should it choose to do so.”

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/152332
Canadian Foreign Minister Visits Kfar Chabad By Hana Levi Julian

PLEASE DO NOT CONFUSE LUBAVITCHER AND CHABAD WITH THE ULTRA ORTHODOX WHO HAVE BEEN MAKING A GOOD DEAL OF TROUBLE IN ISRAEL….AND BLESS JOHN BAIRD FOR ALL HIS WONDERFUL SENTIMENTS…..RSK
Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird munched on matzah and pressed the flesh Tuesday in a visit to Israel’s Kfar Chabad village.

Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird munched on matzah and pressed the flesh Tuesday in a visit to Israel’s Kfar Chabad village.

The Chabad-Lubavitch Chassidic enclave warmly welcomed the Canadian lawmaker, who came as a guest of the Chabad Terror Victims Project.

Baird met with the families of terror victims, heard their stories and wiped away tears.

“This meeting was important to me, because until today I knew about the issue of terrorism only through dry reports,” he said. “Now I know about the pain of terrorism borne on the faces of those who lived.”

The minister was accompanied by Canadian Ambassador Paul Hund, Israeli Ambassador to Canada Miriam Ziv and Chabad-Lubavitch emissary to Ottawa, Rabbi Chaim Mendelson.
The entourage visited the reconstruction of the room of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, in the village’s replica of “770” — the headquarters of the worldwide Lubavitch Movement located in Brooklyn, New York

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

If you were to suggest in a public forum that just possibly Israel’s failure to reach a peace agreement with a terrorist organization, run by kleptomaniacs and homicidal maniacs, which still continues to applaud the murder of Israeli children, might possibly be due to the terrorists and not because of Israel, then according to the consensus of the left, you are an Israel Firster.

http://news.yahoo.com/report-shows-taliban-pows-convinced-victory-093256579.html

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The Taliban believe they will return to power after the U.S.-led coalition ends its combat role in Afghanistan in 2014, NATO officials said Wednesday, based on a classified report on the interrogation of thousands of insurgent prisoners.

The captured Taliban fighters also believed they were receiving support from Pakistan and that they were doing well on the battlefield, the officials said.

But the officials cautioned that the report, compiled shortly after the capture of Taliban fighters, was a summary of those interrogations and not based on an intelligence analysis.

“Obviously they are telling us what their idea is about the goings on of their campaign,” said Brig. Gen. Carsten Jacobson, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF. “It is what they either do believe or what they want us to believe.”

http://times247.com/articles/occupiers-throw-condoms-at-kids-at-pro-life-rally
IT GETS MORE APPALLING EVERY DAY….IMAGINE IF SOMEONE THREW A CARTOON AT A MOSLEM SCHOOL MEETING….RSK

By Todd Starnes/FACEBOOK

A group of Occupy Wall Street protesters disrupted a Right to Life rally and threw condoms on Catholic school girls inside the Rhode Island state capitol building.

Barth Bracy, executive director of Rhode Island Right to Life, said their rally had to be cut short after the Occupiers began screaming and refused to allow a Catholic priest to deliver a prayer.

“This is their idea of civil speech but we believe it’s an outrage,” Bracy told Fox News & Commentary “They started heckling, chanting and blowing whistles. They shouted down a priest.”

Last week’s rally was held inside the rotunda of the state capitol in Providence. Bracy said the Occupiers, along with some pro-choice demonstrators, infiltrated the crowd of some 150 pro-lifers. He said the pro-life crowd was made up of senior citizens, mothers with young children, Cub Scouts, and school kids.

Bracy said one of the most egregious incidents occurred when an Occupier climbed to the third floor balcony and dumped a box of condoms on girls from a Catholic school.

“What kind of individual throw condoms at Catholic school girls,” Bracy asked.

Dems Release False Report on Fast and Furious Posted By Bob Owens

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/dems-release-false-report-on-fast-and-furious/

Ranking Member Elijah Cummings and other Democrats in the minority of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee have made an attempt to whitewash [1] apparent felonies committed by the Department of Justice during Operation Fast and Furious:

Democrats looking into Operation Fast and Furious say a yearlong investigation has turned up no evidence that the flawed gun smuggling probe was conceived or directed by high-level political appointees at Justice Department headquarters.

The probe, the Democrats say, was just one of four such operations that were part of a misguided five-year-long effort, during both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, in the Phoenix division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives against firearms trafficking along the Southwest border.

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/01/31/florida%e2%80%99s-results-are-the-best-that-money-can-buy/
Florida’s Results Are the Best That Money Can Buy

As the Florida primary election results pour in, I have to wonder how much positive, pro-conservative messaging could have been generated with the $18M that Mitt Romney just spent on character assassination. In the midst of national debts and credit downgrades, there is worldwide civil unrest. From the riots in Greece, through the flash mobs in the UK, and all the way to the Oakland City Hall Occupiers, there are people who realize that one trillion dollars doesn’t go very far these days. Purity is the goal, but reality is the harsh equalizer. While the Tea Party is engaging in the political process and working on policy, the Occupiers are sending a parallel message to elites in both political establishments. The ruling class is on its way out.

When I joined the Tea Party in 2009, I was a purist. Demanding fiscal responsibility and accountability was just on the surface. I also wanted elected officials to represent the people with strong positions on national security and limited government. Like many, reality settled in after the 2010 elections. A mass wave of big conservative talkers and campaigns that insisted on Tea Party principles fooled many. Unfortunately, many of these candidates did not have an actual record to validate their claims, and their maiden voyages in politics were not particularly impressive. Many grassroots activists who helped these candidates get elected in the 2010 elections are now recruiting their replacements.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11341/pub_detail.asp

The sixteen names of the scientists who jointly signed the article in The Wall Street Journal, “No Need to Panic About Global Warming” on January 27th are mostly unknown to the general public. Perhaps the best known would be Harrison H. Schmidt, a former Apollo 17 astronaut and U.S. Senator. Others might recognize Burt Rutan, an aerospace engineer and designer of Voyager and SpaceShip One.

Moreover, not only were the signers distinguished scientists, but they came from places like Paris, France and Cambridge, England, Jerusalem, Israel, and Geneva, Switzerland. Mostly climatologists and meteorologists, some were physicists and astrophysicists. Antonio Zichichi, one signer, is president of the World Federation of Scientists. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the combined credentials of these men represent some of the best minds on planet Earth in their respective fields.

What brought them together? On the surface it was just another of the countless articles that have been published over the years as scientists of real merit and courage took on the juggernaut of those for whom global warming had become a vast flow of government and foundation funding.

Normalizing the Kingston Honor Killings Posted By Bruce Bawer

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/01/normalizing-the-kingston-honor-killing/

Last month, after the Costa Concordia fiasco in Livorno, Gregoria De Falco – the port official who ordered the cartoonishly cowardly captain, Francesco Schettino, to get back on his ship and aid in the rescue effort – became an instant hero. But De Falco’s wife dissented, saying it was “ridiculous” to call her husband a hero. “The worrying thing,” she said, “is that people like my husband who simply do their duty every day, immediately become idols, personalities, heroes in this country. That is not normal.”

Wise lady. But it’s not only in Italy, these days, that some people are awed when others simply do their duty. Take last Sunday’s guilty verdicts in the Kingston, Ontario, honor-killing case. On June 30, 2009, as Stephen Brown recounted here the other day, three teenage sisters and their father’s first wife were found dead in a car in the Rideau Canal. Three weeks later, police arrested the girls’ father, Afghani-born real-estate tycoon Mohammad Shafia, their mother, Tooba Mohammad Yahya, and their brother, Hamed. All three have now been handed 25-year prison sentences for first-degree murder.

You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to crack this case. Far from it. The perpetrators’ alibis were monumentally feeble, the motives transparent, the evidence ludicrously incriminating. On the family computer, someone had Googled “where to commit a murder” and “Can a prisoner have control over his real estate.” On wiretaps recorded after the murders, the father was heard boasting of his sense of honor, calling his dead daughters “filthy and rotten children” and saying “may the devil shit on their graves.”

Yet after the verdict, commentaries hailed the judge and jurors as courageous. How depressing that it should be considered courageous to send such people to prison! “Experts in so-called honour killings,” wrote Monique Muise in the Montreal Gazette, “heralded the verdict as a step forward; a clear message that neither Canada’s courts nor its people will tolerate this type of crime.” How depressing that a free country needs to send a message that it’s unacceptable to kill your children!

The Death of Art Posted By Ben Shapiro

URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/01/the-death-of-art/

Over the weekend, I was reading Stephen Sondheim’s fantastic semi-autobiography – really, a commentary on his lyrics over the years – Finishing the Hat. Sondheim’s brilliant, of course, and his use of language is exact – the rhymes and rhythmic schemes in Sweeney Todd are simply spectacular. Sondheim asks the question, though, whether such linguistic playfulness is worthwhile. He does so by quoting an anonymous pop composer, X – some have suggested it’s Pete Townshend of The Who – dismissing rhyme as unimportant in lyrics: “I hate all true rhymes [i.e. red and bed, as opposed to false rhymes, like home and alone]. I think they only allow you a certain limited range …. I’m not a great believer in perfect rhymes. I’m just a believer in feelings that come across. If the craft gets in the way of the feelings then I’ll take the feelings any day.”

Sondheim caustically observes, “Claiming that true rhyme is the enemy of substance is the sustaining excuse of lyricists who are unable to rhyme well with any consistency … The point which X overlooks is that the craft is supposed to serve the feeling. A good lyric should not only have something to say but a way of saying it as clearly and forcefully as possible – and that involves rhyming cleanly. A perfect rhyme can make a mediocre line bright and a good one brilliant. A near rhyme only dampens the impact.”