RUTHFULLY YOURS

Big-Government Republicans By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/289905

Forget the fratricidal warfare between two establishment soldiers so harmonious on substance that their contest, inevitably, has descended into a poisonous, personal food-fight. The problem is not the GOP infighting. The problem is the GOP. Republicans are simply not interested in limiting government or addressing our death spiral of spending.

My weekend column was about the dog-and-pony show that congressional Republicans just put on to snow you into thinking they oppose the $2.4 trillion debt-ceiling increase they actually approved only six months ago. Now, get ready for House Republicans to unveil their $260 billion transportation bill.

The federal government should not be in the transportation business at all. A federal role was rationalized in the mid-Fifties to finance the construction of interstate highways. As National Review’s editors observed in 2005, that project was completed in the early Eighties, at which time the fuel tax that funded it should have been repealed and the upkeep of highways left to the states. “Instead,” they wrote, “Congress morphed the program into a slush fund for some of its most indefensible pork-barrel spending.”

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,812208-2,00.html

Political scientist Francis Fukuyama was once the darling of American neo-conservatives. In a SPIEGEL interview, the author of “The End of History” explains why he now believes that the excesses of capitalism are a threat to democracy and asks why there is no “Tea Party on the left.”

SPIEGEL: Professor Fukuyama, you are best known for your essay “The End of History,” in which you declared that, after the demise of the Soviet Union, liberal democracy had emerged as the triumphant global model. Now, your latest research claims that the flaws of capitalism and globalization could endanger this democratic model. How do you explain this shift?

Fukuyama: Capitalism is the wrong word to use here, because there is not a viable alternative to capitalism.What we are really talking about is just economic growth and the development of modern economic societies. A combination of factors is beginning to challenge their progress in the United States. We have had a lot of technological change that substituted for low-skill labor and made many people in Western democracies lose their jobs.SPIEGEL: Which is why countries such as the United States or Britain wanted to turn themselves into “service-oriented” economies.

Fukuyama: We have unthinkingly embraced a certain version of globalization that assumed we had to move very quickly into this post-industrial, post-manufacturing world. Doing so, we forgot that the whole reason real socialism never took off in the US was the fact that the modern economy seemed to produce middle-class societies in which the bulk of the population could enjoy a middle-class status. They worked in industries that were abolished in our countries and transferred to countries like China.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0212/cia_spy_on_iran2.php3

HOW TO MAKE THE MULLAHS CRY “UNCLE”…..SAM

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | (TCSM) President Obama, in his State of the Union Address, said he will not allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons and that all options to prevent that are on the table.More importantly, Obama said the Islamic regime, which fuels terrorism worldwide and oppresses its own people at home, could still rejoin the international community “if it changes course and meets its obligations.” That is not going to happen — despite glimmers of hope after a trip of UN nuclear inspectors to Iran this week.

As a former CIA spy in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, I wrote a cautionary, open letter to President Obama when he took office three years ago. I said I was worried that he failed to see the realities of the regime’s fanaticism.

In offering to negotiate with Iran over its nuclear program, Mr. Obama must have believed that the aggressive policies of his predecessor, George W. Bush, were to blame for the lack of progress. But I reminded the new president of the long history of attempted rapprochement by every US administration, each attempt ending in failure.

I explained that the very ideology of Iran’s Islamic leaders was the sole reason for no progress in a negotiated settlement. They simply would not close an honest deal with infidels.

http://spectator.org/archives/2012/02/01/romneys-cheap-and-empty-win/print

The GOP is signing its own political death warrant by backing him.

Mitt Romney’s plastic and philosophically vapid campaign secured an easy victory in Florida on Tuesday night. Sunshine state GOP voters swallowed his “electability” argument whole, according to the exit polls. It appears that country club Republicans have succeeded again in duping the GOP electorate into crowning a “centrist” Republican. Never mind that “centrist” Republicans rarely win the center. They usually lose the center while sapping the spirit of the party’s conservative base.

Out of Bob Dole’s and John McCain’s tattered Big Tent steps another “reformed” RINO, Mitt Romney, who will receive, should he win the nomination, a similar thumping from the Democrats.

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/02/01/breaking-doj-prosecutors-took-bribes-from-financial-execs-still-working-at-doj/

Matthew Boyle at the Daily Caller has this late breaking blockbuster story:

A U.S. Justice Department source has told The Daily Caller that at least two DOJ prosecutors accepted cash bribes from allegedly corrupt finance executives who were indicted under court seal within the past 13 months, but never arrested or prosecuted.

The sitting governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands, his attorney general and an unspecified number of Virgin Islands legislators also accepted bribes, the source said, adding that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is aware prosecutors and elected officials were bribed and otherwise compromised, but has not held anyone accountable.

The bribed officials, an attorney with knowledge of the investigation told TheDC, remain on the taxpayers’ payroll at the Justice Department without any accountability. The DOJ source said Holder does not want to admit public officials accepted bribes while under his leadership.

Go read the whole report. You might also want to revisit our reporting here at PJ Media last year about the DOJ’s scuttling of the impending terror finance prosecution of Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) co-founder Omar Ahmad and the money laundering/tax evasion prosecutions of the executives of the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT).

Fisking Eric Holder’s Prepared Remarks for the Fast and Furious Hearing Posted By Patrick Richardson

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/fisking-eric-holders-prepared-remarks-for-the-fast-and-furious-hearing/

On Thursday, Attorney General Eric Holder will find himself in the hot seat as he again faces questions before Chairman Darrell Issa’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The testimony he plans to enter for the record [1] was obtained by PJ Media. Portions of the testimony (followed by my own dissection) follow:

Chairman Issa, Ranking Member Cummings, and members of the Committee, I am here today because I understand and appreciate the importance of congressional oversight, and because I am committed to ensuring the highest standards of integrity and professionalism at the Department of Justice. That’s precisely what I pledged to do – exactly three years ago tomorrow – when I was sworn in as Attorney General. And it is exactly what I have done.

Really? Because I thought Holder actually sent Congress documents which were a lie and had to be retracted [2], had one of his employees admit his testimony before Issa’s committee “lacked completeness,” and so politicized his office that former employees have written books about the corruption [3]within his Justice Department.

No More ‘Peace Talks,’ Please Posted By Shoshana Bryen

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/no-more-peace-talks-please/

The current round of Israeli-Palestinian meetings in Jordan ended with a Palestinian decision to leave. “The Israelis brought nothing new in these meetings,” said one official, without bothering to note the obvious — neither did the Palestinians.

The talks were the result of a Quartet plan to have Israelis and Palestinians make proposals on territory and security in hopes of reaching a deal in 2012. Questions abound, but the most important is, “How many more times will this farce be played out without recognition of the real and incompatible bottom lines of the two parties?”

It is that fundamental incompatibility — not the lack of pressure or lack of bribes — that prevents the present creation of the mythical “two-state solution” embedded in the Oslo Accords, negotiated without U.S. participation, and signed in 1993.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11353/pub_detail.asp

The Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report

U.S. National Intelligence Director Cites Muslim Brotherhood As Bulwark Against Al-Qaeda
In his statement for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper appears to endorse the concept Muslim Brotherhood involvement in the Mideast political process will serve as some kind of bulwark against Al-Qaeda and other such groups. He writes:

If, over the longer term, governments take real steps to address public demands for political participation and democratic institutions—and remain committed to CT efforts—we judge that core al-Qaeda and the global jihadist movement will experience a strategic setback. Al Qaeda probably will find it difficult to compete for local support with groups like the Muslim Brotherhood that participate in the political process, provide social services, and advocate religious values. Nonviolent, pro-democracy demonstrations challenge al Qaeda’s violent jihadist ideology and might yield increased political power for secular or moderate Islamist parties.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11346/pub_detail.asp
Pete Wells, the newly appointed restaurant critic of the Times has a serious problem. The thick- necked, double-chinned man who prefers the “just folks” appellation of Pete must be in a constant state of cognitive dissonance as the audience for whom he writes are people he clearly cannot stand. In Wednesday’s review of an upper east side restaurant named Crown, 99 percenter Pete leads with words of disdain for the 1 % millionaires with “identical teeth, hair with an amethyst tint, an unyielding tightness in the flesh around the eyes ….people whose 40th birthday was celebrated in a previous century….locals who’ve given the cook the night off….families who eat wordlessly, girls ballerina-straight, boys slumped in their blazers, parents plodding their way through a cozy Burgundy.”

http://melaniephillips.com/the-other-britain

Last Thursday night I was on BBC TV’s Question Time in Plymouth, which you can view here.
The last question on the show came from a woman who asked whether, ‘since Israel has many more nuclear weapons than Iran’, we should agree with President Obama’s statement that no option (in other words, war with Iran) should be ruled out.

The woman who asked this question was doubtless a reasonable, moderate person with a benevolent and kindly approach to humanity, who would be astonished to be told there was anything shocking about her basic premise.

But the equation she made was of course obnoxious. There is no reasonable equation to be made between Israel and Iran over their possession of nuclear weapons. Israel’s nuclear weapons – like those in the possession of every true democracy – are intended solely for the country’s defence against attack.

Israel, moreover, is in the unique position of being threatened with extinction by most of its neighbours — of which the most terrifying is Iran, which regularly announces its intention to wipe Israel off the map and is racing to develop nuclear weapons with which to realise that infernal aim. To equate Israel’s nuclear weapons with those of Iran is thus to equate the prospective perpetrators of genocide with the prospective victims of that genocide.

Behind this astonishing failure to grasp the fact that if the Iranian regime is not stopped a second genocide of the Jews is in the making lies the corresponding failure of the British public to understand the scale of the evil and the threat, not only to Israel but to the west and to the peace of the world, represented by the fanatical and apocalyptic Iranian regime.

The historical precedent for the Iranian crisis is not, as the audience seemed to believe, that ‘we were taken to war in Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction which never existed’ (which I don’t believe was the case either, but let that pass for now). The proper analogy is with the 1930s, when Britain supported the appeasement of Nazi Germany on the basis that the threat posed by Hitler was much exaggerated.