RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2012/01/fast-and-furious-truth-closing-in-on.html?utm_source=The+Lid+List&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=6a56415224-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN

Ye Olde Friday Document Dump! Its amazing what one can find out on a Friday evening. This week’s dump included some internal Department of Justice memos indicating that higher-ups and possibly even Attorney General Eric Holder knew about this disastrous program much earlier than what he told congress.

When Attorney General Holder first testified before Congress on May 3, 2011, he said that he had only been informed about the program for a few weeks. However we now know that there was a flurry of emails sent the day Border Patrol agent Brian Terry was murdered, December 15, 2010. The emails were sent to high ranking members of the DOJ and perhaps even the Attorney General.

An email from one official, whose name has been redacted from the document, to now-former Arizona U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke reads: “On December 14, 2010, a BORTAC agent working in the Nogales, AZ AOR was shot. The agent was conducting Border Patrol operations 18 miles north of the international boundary when he encountered [redacted word] unidentified subjects. Shots were exchanged resulting in the agent being shot. At this time, the agent is being transported to an area where he can be air lifted to an emergency medical center.”That email was sent at 2:31 a.m. on the day Terry was shot. One hour later, a follow-up email read: “Our agent has passed away.”

Conservatives Need to Make the Case for Freedom Posted By Bruce Thornton

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/30/conservatives-need-to-make-the-case-for-freedom/print/

Since ancient Athens, politics in democracies has been brutal. That’s because the conflicts that a democracy empowers a great variety of ordinary people to debate are not about technical matters requiring specialized knowledge. Rather, they arise from questions about the fundamental principles, beliefs, and values that give people their identities and provide meaning for their lives. Such questions are not “scientific,” and the conflicts they raise will not be resolved by experts and technicians. And since these principles and beliefs are so fundamental to our self-identity and meaning, they raise intense passions, and so the public conversation about them is often emotional, at times even angry. Throw in personal ambition, the lust for power, and the vanity of politicians and office-seekers, and the fights can get bloody indeed. But that’s the price we pay for free political speech. As the Athenian playwright Sophocles once said, “Free men have free tongues.”

Consider the biggest domestic problem facing the nation: metastasizing debt that promises to explode because of exponentially increasing entitlement spending. If the problem were simply a technical one, accountants could solve it. Look at the math: our debt has surpassed $15 trillion, over 100% of GDP, and absent entitlement reform will reach 344% of GDP by 2050. Spending on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and Obamacare will devour 18% of GDP by 2050, consuming all federal tax revenues. Total federal spending is slated to consume one-half of GDP by 2056. These numbers point to a Greece-like collapse unless entitlement spending is reined in.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/30/the-muslims-next-door/ Now celebrating its tenth anniversary, Silicon Valley Reads is a program that encourages everyone in northern California’s Santa Clara County “to read the same book, at the same time, and talk about it.” If you think this sounds like a program ripe for abuse by progressives in our educational system promoting groupthink about a […]

Exposing the Alinsky Party Posted By Daniel Greenfield

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/01/30/exposing-the-alinsky-party/print/

Editor’s note: To read David Horowitz’s pamphlet, Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model, click here. To purchase it, click here.

“Of no other occupant of the White House can it be said that he owed his understanding of the political process to a man and a philosophy so outside the American mainstream, or so explicitly dedicated to opposing it.”

– “Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model” by David Horowitz

When Newt won the battle of South Carolina, he also laid out the stakes for the larger conflict beyond the primaries and even beyond the election. It is the battle for the soul of America. In the 2004 election, John Edwards borrowed James P. Cannon’s Two Americas metaphor to showcase his vision of a divided nation.

“Today under George W. Bush, there are two Americas, not one. One America does the work, while another America reaps the reward,” Edwards said. And south of the North Carolina senator’s old seat, Gingrich expressed another and truer vision of the two Americas:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/01/media_blackout_in_obama_georgia_ballot_eligibility_case.html

REGARDLESS OF HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT THE “BIRTHER” ISSUE…THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF FLOUTING THE LAW BY THE PRESIDENT AND THE SERVILE MEDIA’S YAWN ABOUT IT….RSK

Last week, I noted that Obama turned his back not just on Arizona’s Governor Jan Brewer, but also on the laws of the State of Georgia. I closed my column, “Georgia Ballot Challenge: Obama Walks on By,” with the observation: “And most of the media has followed along right behind him.”

At the time, I had just witnessed an historic hearing that actually discussed the eligibility of the sitting president of the United States to run for a second term. The president had been subpoenaed to appear, and instead of his attorney respectfully following protocol to have that subpoena recalled, both Obama and his attorney, Michael Jablonski, simply failed to show up at all or offer any defense whatsoever.

Isn’t there a headline in there somewhere?

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/01/lessons_from_hadithas_quiet_denouement.html

THE HADITHA INJUSTICE VIRTUALLY DISAPPEARED FROM NEWS AND CONCERN: MY PAL VIETNAM VETERAN BRUCE KESLER OF http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/ HAS STAYED ON THIS STORY DOGGEDLY FOR 7 YEARS…THANKS BRUCE!!!!!RSK

Six years ago, in Haditha, Iraq, in the wake of a deadly insurgent attack on their convoy, a Marine quick reaction force raided several houses from which they were taking fire. At the conclusion of the action it became clear that a number of Iraqi civilians had been killed, which was duly reported up the Marine Corps chain of command. The command determined that while the deaths were unfortunate, the engaged Marines had not violated the laws of war.

Then, early in 2006, a reporter from Time Magazine got wind of the incident, and all hell broke loose. An Army report condemned the Marines, Democrat Congressman John Murtha announced that Marines had killed Iraqi civilians in “cold blood,” and the press in general had a field day. Under this new assault, the Marine Corps changed its tune and preferred court-martial charges against eight Marines, from enlisted men to battalion commander. These unfortunate men were accused of everything from obstruction of justice to murder.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11319/pub_detail.asp
This week, the New York Times breathlessly reported in its New York Region section that the New York Police Department had committed a politically incorrect felony by using a film, The Third Jihad, to train its officers on the hidden agenda of many Muslims residing in the U.S. That hidden agenda is the destruction of the United States.

Apparently, the Times doesn’t realize that some Muslims in and out of this country want to harm New Yorkers and other Americans. The article says about the film: “Ominous music plays as images appear on the screen: Muslim terrorists shoot Christians in the head, car bombs explode, executed children lie covered by sheets and a doctored photograph shows an Islamic flag flying over the White House.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11324/pub_detail.asp
Savvy political propagandists normally adhere to the “believability rule” when spinning agitprop, but some newcomers to the art of “spincraft” abandon even the appearance of credibility. Such is the case with Brooke Anderson of Beirut’s The Daily Star. Her hatchet piece, “The right-wing Lebanese Christian advising Romney on the Middle East,” attempts to sully one of Lebanon’s most celebrated and accomplished sons, Lebanese-American professor, Dr. Walid Phares.

The venom of Anderson’s diatribe is unrivaled in Lebanese media and beneath The Daily Star. She besmirches the entire Republican Presidential field, but her primary target is Walid Phares, Mitt Romney’s senior policy advisor on the Middle East. As I endured Anderson’s piece, I found myself asking, “Why would a prominent newspaper like the Star publish a canard entered by an inexperienced political hack who gerrymandered fossilized Lebanese news into current US political goings-on to try and assassinate the reputation of a man whose credibility dwarfs her own?” Granted, Anderson lives in Beirut and writes stories for the Star’s local entertainment section, but she brings no personal experience or knowledge of Lebanese history to the country’s enduring civil debate.

Anderson’s motive for the piece is transparent. She and her jihadist collaborators in cyberspace hope that demonizing Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney will shame the former Governor into reversing Phares’ appointment. Their vilification of Dr. Phares’ role in Lebanon’s policy debate during the Pearl of the Mediterranean’s fifteen-year civil war is contrived and unconvincing. She and her fellow conspirators may hoodwink one or two unwitting American readers by regurgitating old myths crafted by Iranian and jihadist lobby groups in the US, but they will not sway the loyal citizens of Lebanon.

http://neveragainisnow.net/17-tybee/251-u-of-p-on-the-decline

Be reminded: Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790), Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

Dr. Amy Gutman, president of The University of Pennsylvania, while disclaiming sponsorship, endorses PennBDS conference of hatred with her silence. The purpose of PennBDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) is the delegitimization of Israel, the destruction of the only homeland for the Jewish people. Wittingly or unwittingly, but surely acknowledging Saudi funding totaling millions, the University is an enabler of a militant ideology whose ultimate goal could also destroy America, because Islam and democracy are completely incompatible.

Contrived issues of housing and “occupation” are merely tools of destruction. Islam’s ideology uses jihad to wage brutal wars to conquer vast expanses of land and subdue millions of indigenous people across the continents: Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. Muslims do not assimilate or live in peace with others, and the surviving vanquished join forces with the murderers – a unique, permanent Islamic institution.

The Koran instructs its Mohammedan followers to kill Jews and Christians in order to expropriate land for Islam. When their numbers are insufficient to win by violence, Muslims use psychological warfare, beginning with inculcating intense hatred into each new generation. Since 1993, the Abu Mazen/Arafat regime of the Palestinian Authority has indoctrinated an entire generation with terrorist-driven, hate education and incitement via their schools, mosques and media. Unconcerned with the destruction of the childhood of their innocents, they use their children to wage a revisionist historical offensive against the Jewish people. They are aided and abetted by scholars, religious and political leaders, journalists from the Saudi-funded media) and psychologically-damaged, self-despising Jews.

John Paul McCarthy: Shatter spoke for Irish Protestants as well as the Jewish congregation

The justice minister’s Holocaust speech showed how ‘context’ comes from the heart, writes John Paul McCarthy

IN his essay, The Idea of a University, Cardinal Newman observed that “what is spoken cannot outrun the range of the speaker’s voice”. By this he meant that speaker and sentiment must somehow coalesce to generate affecting rhetoric.

The Minister for Justice, Alan Shatter, gave a master class in this regard last week with his landmark speech on the Holocaust. Cutting a chastening swathe through the various arguments about “context”, Shatter denounced Irish neutrality as morally bankrupt. Previous Fine Gael politicians have handled the Emergency era fairly roughly as well. Remember that Garret FitzGerald dismissed neutrality as morally inadequate in Ireland in the World (2005), arguing: “I could never regard our decision to opt out of western European defence and to rely for our defence exclusively on a combination of other states in the formulation of whose policy we have no say as being in accordance with our dignity as a state, or with our moral responsibilities.”

In order to drive home his point about Irish moral delinquency here, he noted some mortifying similarities between contemporary Irish security policy and those of war-torn Tajikistan. (For a spell, both countries were unique in being members of the Conference on Security and Co-Operation, but not members of the Nato-led Partnership for Peace.)