RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/01/an-empty-suit-prepares-to-deliver-an-empty-speech.php

President Obama will deliver his sixth State of the Union speech tomorrow night. The media will cover it as though it matters, even though hardly anyone is listening and most Americans have little or no confidence in the president. Obama’s fundamental problem, as he discourses on the state of the union, is that the union’s state is palpably worse, after five years, than it was when he took office. So it is hard to take him seriously when he tries to tell us how to make things better.

American Action Network made this video, titled “#EmptySuit.” It is short but packs a punch:

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/14451#.Uujc2bROmUl Why the uproar over Scarlett Johansson? Is it that a prominent Jewish American woman openly supports Israel? This is shocking? Actually it is. Or is that an A-List Hollywood personality – named the “sexiest woman alive” — has found her inner chutzpah and gone rogue against Hollywood’s 99 percent liberal establishment? Note that in […]

  http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4142/jerusalem-churches There is no individual or group that is empowered to act as “the voice of Palestinian Christians.” It is not “the Palestinian Christians” but just one or two individuals who pen those public statements, even if these appear under a title that can vary from the respectable (“Heads of Churches”) to the preposterous […]

There is a lot in the media and the blogosphere about radicals in the Obama administration. Fair enough. What about John Kerry? Why is Mayor De Blasio’s radical past known by just about everyone, but so little is made of Kerry’s unforgivable past? And, the latter enjoys an appointment which is far more powerful than a one term stint in Gracie Mansion.

On April 22, 1971, John Kerry testified to a Senate committee chaired by Senator j.w. Fulbright, with Senators Symington, Pell, Aiken, Case and Javits present, that “…war crimes committed in Southeast Asia [were] not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command,” he said that the average American soldier who fought in Vietnam was a war criminal. He went on to quote the “testimony” of others” “They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs,blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to3 the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”

That was a blood libel against America and its Armed Forces. Nonetheless, the cad was elected to the Senate and at the Democratic Convention in 2004, this slanderer of America, became the candidate for the White House and unless one knew of his libels and dubious and challenged claims about his medals ( the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts) one would have thought that a latter day Audie Murphy was the candidate.

When he succeeded Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, the media which goes ballistic if a conservative legislator calls a woman a “girl” gave him a pass. Now he is absolutely free to consort with international tyrants and gratify them by bullying Israel.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/america-in-lockdown?f=puball “Dedicated public servants” lock up lands and resources, lock down job and economic recovery  President Obama insists he is determined to create jobs in America. He recently announced the creation of “promise zones” for five communities around the nation and a “manufacturing institute” aimed at fostering more high-paying jobs in energy efficiency. He’s says […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/egypt-and-the-new-constitution The journalistic gunslingers have been out in full force targeting General el-Sisi and the new Egyptian constitution. This criticism, by the way, is bipartisan; it comes from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. What it comes down to is persistent doubt that the government’s pledge to steer Egypt toward a new […]

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4660/iranian_supreme_leader_s_holocaust_denial_not_a_mistranslation

You can barely get into conversation with a Western peacenik or an Iranian diplomat on the subject of Iran without them trying to wriggle out of the extreme threats the regime has made to wipe out Israel or its vicious anti-Semitism by saying that this is all a mistranslation or it’s been taken out of context.

This matters enormously because the premise of the latest moves in Western policy towards the Islamic repubic is that we can take Iran at its word. If a) all they’re doing is lying to us and/or b) all the most damning charges against Iranian threats and rhetoric turn out to be true, we’re heading into the abyss.

As many countries and international institutions mark Holocaust Memorial Day on Monday, it is perhaps fitting that one of those “mistranslation” dragons can now be slain.

It has now been definitively established that Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is a Holocaust denier and that Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who charmed everyone at Davos a couple of days ago, has been lying through his teeth in saying that he is not.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/369574/dangerous-deal-john-r-bolton For nearly three decades, Iran’s ayatollahs have outfoxed and outmaneuvered Western counter-proliferation efforts. Tehran has repeatedly bested our diplomats, our spies, and, most especially, our gullible political leaders. In the Joint Plan of Action, reached in Geneva this November, the mullahs did it again, worsening the already-grim prospects for stopping or even slowing Iran’s […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/369600/print

Mike Huckabee just became a field general in the War on Women.

He inadvertently won his promotion with one sentence at the Republican National Committee winter meeting. To wit: “If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it.”

Literally within minutes, the former Arkansas governor’s comment had become fodder for the vast political and media apparatus devoted to concocting a Republican war on women. His words had their own chyron on MSNBC, like a tornado or a bombing overseas. They instantly became a symbol of all that is allegedly wrong and can’t be fixed about the Republican party.

Needless to say, Huckabee’s statement wouldn’t pass muster as a summation of the Democrats’ position on the contraception mandate in the American Political Science Review. It was the sort of crude caricature of the other party that you tend to hear at . . . meetings of the political parties. Yet the manufacturers of the War on Women managed to take a sentence that should have been offensive to Democrats and make it offensive to half the human race.

The women’s magazines began mocking Huckabee on Twitter with the hashtag #CantControlMyLibido. What sort of blue-nose rube thinks that women can’t control themselves? Never mind that Huckabee attacked the view that women can’t control their libidos, and never mind that Cosmo has not heretofore been known as a publication devoted to the wonders of sexual restraint. The most prominent cover line on its current issue is “Fantasy Sex! 26 Ridiculously Hot Moves.”

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304691904579346523830566300

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

—From ” Harrison Bergeron ” (1961), a short story by Kurt Vonnegut

The year was 2019 and Americans were finally on their way toward real equality. Not just equality in God’s eyes, or before the law, or in opportunity.

They were going to be equal every which way.

All this equality was due to bold new government action. There was the Decent Wage Act of 2017, which pegged the minimum wage to the (inflation-adjusted) average hourly wage of 2016. There was the NEW-AMT, which set a 55% minimum federal tax rate on individual income over $150,000 (or 80% for incomes above $500,000). There was the Unemployment Insurance Is Forever Act of 2018. There was the 2018 De Blasio-Waxman CEO Pay Act, which mandated a 9-to-1 ratio between the highest and lowest paid person in any enterprise.