RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://spectator.org/archives/2012/01/23/sotu-sitrep

President Obama tried out his soul music falsetto last week at New York’s Apollo Theater and he sounded pretty good. It might help if he sang his State of the Union address, but not much. It wouldn’t help because — from what we know of the man and from the trial balloons he’s floated in the gigolo media — Obama wants a season of confrontation, not a year of compromise. He wants issues, not accomplishments.

Obama’s tactic — angry words spoken calmly — has played well from the beginning of his presidential campaign four years ago. In his first meeting with the Republican caucus in the House three years ago, Obama answered Republican objections by saying, “I won.”

Since then, his rhetoric has only increased in temperature. His mantra is “we can’t wait.” His threat is that he will act without congressional approval if he can’t get agreement on his terms.

In the SOTU speech, according to a trial balloon in the New York Times, Obama will demand more “clean energy” investment, more taxation of “the rich” and — in a string of liberal code words — legislation aimed at “income equality,” which means taking wealth from the “rich” and giving it to the government.

http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/archives/19025-Wuterich-Vindicated.html
Wuterich Vindicated

Frank Wuterich agreed this morning to accept a prosecution offer of pleading guilty to one count of dereliction of duty, with relatively minor penalty. “Dereliction of duty” is such a broad count that it can cover most anything, and in possible multiple counts possible in the court martial, could have resulted in Wuterich facing much heavier penalties.

This ends his 7-year ordeal at the hand of zealot prosecutors and rush to judgment media. The prosecution in this case, as in all its others, saw its own witnesses either basically testify for the defense or be demonstrated as liars or otherwise unreliable.

Failed treasury auction portends Egyptian disaster By Spengler

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NA24Ak02.html
Investors bought less an a third of the 3.5 billion Egyptian pounds (US$580 million) worth of Treasury bills offered to the market on January 22, a red flag warning that Egypt’s foreign exchange position is close to the brink.

Yields on Egyptian government debt maturing in nine months jumped to nearly 16%, but the government could not place its local-currency debt to Egyptian investors, even at that exorbitant rate.

This is a new and ominous decline in the financial position of the most populous Arab country. I have been warning since last May that “Egypt is running out of food, and, more gradually, running
out of the money with which to buy it.” How fast this may occur is hard to specify, but the government’s inability to borrow on money markets suggests that the crunch is not far off. (See The hunger to come in Egypt Asia Times Online, May 10, 2011.)

http://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/article/?q=MTFhZjcyZmQ1Mjc0NGRmODY2ZGMyMWNmZjE2N2IyNjQ=

The tumult indelibly dubbed “the Arab Spring” in the West, by the credulous and the calculating alike, is easier to understand once you grasp two basics. First, the most important fact in the Arab world — as well as in Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other neighboring non-Arab territories — is Islam. It is not poverty, illiteracy, or the lack of modern democratic institutions. These, like anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, and an insular propensity to buy into conspiracy theories featuring infidel villains, are effects of Islam’s regional hegemony and supremacist tendency, not causes of it. One need not be led to that which pervades the air one breathes.

The second fact is that Islam constitutes a distinct civilization. It is not merely an exotic splash on the gorgeous global mosaic with a few embarrassing cultural eccentricities; it is an entirely different way of looking at the world. We struggle with this truth, which defies our end-of-history smugness. Enthralled by diversity for its own sake, we have lost the capacity to comprehend a civilization whose idea of diversity is coercing diverse peoples into obedience to its evolution-resistant norms.

http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/columns/louis-rene-beres/empathy-suffering-and-human-survival-a-jewish-perspective/2012/01/11/0/
According to ancient Jewish tradition, one that certain Talmudists trace back to the time of Isaiah, the world rests upon thirty-six just men, the Lamed-Vav tzaddikim.
For those who remain unknown to themselves, the spectacle of the world is insufferable beyond description. Inconsolable at the extent of human pain and woe, for them, so goes the chassidic tale, there is never a moment of tranquility. From time to time, therefore, God himself, in an effort to open their souls to Paradise, sets forward the clock of the Last Judgment by one minute.

There are several meanings to this extraordinary tradition. One offers special hope in our incontestably growing nearness to vast global catastrophe. We shall soon require a whole world of just men and women. We shall, it seems, soon have to create the conditions whereby each and every inhabitant of our imperiled planet can feel the full anguish and portent of the Lamed-Vavniks. Only then will we be able to take the necessary steps back from defilement to sanctification. Faced with a choice between life and death, between “the blessing and the curse,” we shall “therefore choose life.”

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/01/new_docs_reveal_how_doj_kowtows_to_muslim_brotherhood.html
New Docs Reveal How DOJ Kowtows to Muslim Brotherhood By Pamela Geller

In what promises to be an enormous document dump, I have received the first in a series of DOJ bundles in response to my FOIA request filed close to a year ago. Specifically, I asked for “records relating to the meeting of the ‘Monthly Outreach Meeting’ with Muslim and Arab groups at the Civil Rights Division. Specifically, include lists of attendees at each monthly meeting, the agenda of each meeting and any minutes or summary prepared subsequent to each meeting. Please also specifically note the meetings at which the Attorney General of the United States attended.”

The principal impact of reading through the material is the sheer bulk of it. Hundreds and hundreds of pages of emails, documenting nearly daily friendly contact, consultation, cooperation and collaboration between the DOJ and Hamas-linked Muslim Brotherhood groups. One thing is clear, the Muslim Brotherhood has fully infiltrated command and control at the Department of Justice civil rights division.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/288782/inside-obamacare-spin-zone-james-c-capretta Yesterday, the White House issued a new “study” on the supposed progress states have made in implementing the “health exchanges” that are central to constructing the Obamacare system. According to the administration’s spin, some 28 states are “on their way” toward establishing the exchanges, so everything is apparently well under control. In other words, […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11275/pub_detail.asp
It is the crime of the century that America, home to some of the world’s greatest reserves of coal, natural gas and oil, is being deliberately destroyed by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior as they do everything in their power to restrict access and drive energy producers out of business.

It is common sense that a nation that cannot produce sufficient electricity to turn on its lights and power its manufacturing sector will be destroyed if current Obama administration regulations and actions continue. Our vital transportation sector and all others that utilize petroleum-based products will suffer, too.

While President Obama babbles about millionaires and billionaires, everyone will be impoverished by the loss of jobs and revenue our energy sector produces now and can produce in the future.

http://familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11272/pub_detail.asp
We live in times when Holocaust denial or diminution is openly pervasive , not only in the Muslim world, but also in the halls of the UN, and classrooms and auditoriums of some of America’s most prestigious academic institutions. In New York, the president of Columbia University and subsequently, Columbia students have repeatedly invited Ahmadinejad to address their groups. We cringe as the frequent comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany and South Africa receive thoughtful consideration instead of ridicule and rebuke. Campuses across the U.S. and Canada have been flooded with events such as the BDS Conference (Boycott, Divest, Sanction Israel) which is scheduled at the University of Pennsylvania in early February. This, along with Israel Apartheid Week and Palestine Awareness Week is the politically correct default position of academia , supported by students and faculty alike. Too many Jews and even Israelis aid and abet in this travesty of history, railing at the sins of their own people and proscribing what further land Israel needs to cede, and what further concessions it must make to Palestinians while remaining silent about the murderous rampages committed by Muslims across Africa, Asia and the Middle East. While there are no student organized marches urging western intervention to save the Christian and non-Islamic populations of these countries, vocal threats and placards are commonly seen at anti-Israel and Occupy Wall Street events urging another Holocaust to finally eliminate the Jews. At the London School of Economics last week, students played a Nazi drinking game and broke the nose of the Jewish student who refused to participate in saluting Hitler with Sieg Heil!

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11274/pub_detail.asp What would have been the largest-scale war games in the two countries’ military cooperation history with thousands of U.S. and Israeli Army servicemen, dozens of ships and deck-based aircraft, was called off on January 15th. The ‘Austere Challenge 2012’ was more than just war games. Aside from its size and importance it came at […]