RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/obama-sides-with-palestinian-rejection-of-the-jewish-state/print/

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has flatly refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. Such recognition is a key condition that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has demanded for reaching an acceptable peace agreement on a two-state solution with the Palestinians.

Prime Minister Netanyahu explained the importance of such Palestinian recognition, which would amount to an expression of the Palestinians’ good faith intention to truly end the conflict by accepting Israel’s right of self-determination to once and for all live in peace as the Jewish state its founders envisioned:

“The central question at the end is of course ‘Are you willing to recognize that the state of Israel is the nation state of the Jewish nation?’. If you don’t have the brunt of the agreement, then why turn to the leftovers. Concentrate on the central and difficult questions that they need to provide an answer for, but they don’t provide an answer. If they do give an answer — its negative. They say that they will not recognize a Jewish state in order to leave the right of return on the table. So then what are we even talking about here? That a Palestinian state will be established but it will continue its conflict against the state of Israel with more preferential borders? We are a lot of things, but we are definitely not fools.”

Incredibly, the U.S. State Department backs Abbas’ position. The spokeswoman for the State Department, Jen Psaki, stated in an interview Saturday with the “Al-Quds” newspaper that “[T]here is no need for the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. The American stance is clear in that it recognizes Israel as a Jewish state, but there is no need for the Palestinians to recognize it as such in a final agreement.”

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303824204579421732340754044?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion&mg=reno64-wsj

How many black people own a broadcast television station in the United States? The answer is one: Armstrong Williams. I know this because he’s a friend.

So imagine my surprise when I heard that the Federal Communications Commission is currently considering pulling the financial rug from under him by changing its regulations to—get this—promote diversity.

The reason for the proposed rules shift is that Mr. Williams’s two television stations operate under a so-called sidecar agreement with a larger broadcast company. Sinclair Broadcasting, the larger, white-owned firm, leverages its clout in the market to get better deals from advertisers for the two stations in return for a percentage of Mr. Williams’ revenues.

This arrangement is not a token deal. Similar agreements are common in the television industry. The difference is that typically all the players are white. Nevertheless, the FCC is proposing new restrictions that would make it harder for broadcast companies to control two stations operating in the same market.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/supplemental/2014/03/two-state-minus/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=2ecf3a11ca-2014_3_10&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-2ecf3a11ca-41165129

Oh Puleez!…Hillel Halkin is an articulate writer….In the most erudite and elegant prose he straddles every fence….and remains stranded in blatherdom because he always returns to the “legitimate needs” of the Arabs. rsk

I agree with Yoav Sorek that we should look forward to the day when there are no signs in the Land of Israel forbidding Jews to travel in parts of their historic homeland. But we should also look forward to there being no walls, fences, and roadblocks preventing and encumbering Palestinians from traveling in far more extensive parts of their historic homeland. However justified these may be at the present moment by considerations of security, they are surely more of an inconvenience and humiliation to Palestinians Arabs than the ban on travel in Area A is to Israeli Jews.

I point this out not because I wish to engage in the who’s right/who’s wrong debate that has characterized most discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian issue and that characterizes much of Yoav Sorek’s essay. Although I’m an Israeli and happen to think, if not in terms as black-and-white as Sorek’s, that my side has been more right than wrong, that’s not something I expect to convince the other side of. I point it out because any discussion of the problem that does not take into account the legitimate needs of both sides will just keep going around in circles.

Sorek is one of a growing number of people in Israel and elsewhere to argue that the conventional two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be implemented because it does not satisfy these legitimate needs and it must therefore be abandoned in favor of its one-state alternative. With the first half of that proposition, I once again agree. Dividing the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan into an Israel and Palestine that will, like Israel and Egypt, live with little contact on either side of a sealed border requiring passports and visas to cross is not possible. Israelis and Palestinians are not separable like Israelis and Egyptians. They are irreversibly scrambled together, with over a million Palestinians Arabs now living in Israel and over a half-million Israeli Jews in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Moreover, a majority of each people thinks it has a right—if not necessarily an exclusive one—to the entirety of this territory. No approach to the problem that fails to take these facts and feelings into account can work.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/articles/other-russian-crackdown_784284.html On February 24, while Ukrainian protesters were still reveling in their victory over corrupt pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, eight Russians stood in a Moscow courtroom to hear their sentences in a blatant show trial stemming from the last of Moscow’s massive street protests two years ago. Seven men convicted on trumped-up charges of rioting […]

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/obama-s-fantasy-based-foreign-policy_784266.html?page=1

On February 23, five days before Russia invaded Ukraine, National Security Adviser Susan Rice appeared on Meet the Press and shrugged off suggestions that Russia was preparing any kind of military intervention: “It’s in nobody’s interest to see violence returned and the situation escalate.” A return to a “Cold War construct” isn’t necessary, Rice insisted, because such thinking “is long out of date” and “doesn’t reflect the realities of the 21st century.” Even if Vladimir Putin sees the world this way, Rice argued, it is “not in the United States’ interests” to do so.

It was a remarkably transparent case of pretending the world is what we wish it to be, rather than seeing it as it is.

On February 28, Russian troops poured into Ukraine. As they did, Secretary of State John Kerry spoke to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart. Kerry briefed reporters after their talk, plainly unaware of the developments on the ground. Kerry said that Russia wants to help Ukraine with its economic problems. Lavrov had told him “that they are prepared to be engaged and be involved in helping to deal with the economic transition that needs to take place at this point.”

Hours later, television screens across the world displayed images of Russian soldiers infiltrating Crimea and Russian artillery rolling through Sevastopol. Obama administration officials told CNN’s Barbara Starr that the incursion was not “an invasion” but an “uncontested arrival” and that this distinction was “key” to understanding the new developments.

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/truth-lies-and-iranian-weapons-shipments/

For Iran’s foreign minister and chief nuclear negotiator Mohammad Javad Zarif, it had to be an awkward moment. There he is, the “moderate” face of Iran, fluent in English, educated in the U.S., jetting around the world telling everyone that Iran will never give up its nuclear facilities — but don’t worry because Iran’s nuclear program is “nothing but peaceful.”

And then the Israelis go and fracture Zarif’s “nothing but peaceful” narrative by interdicting yet another of those big illicit Iranian weapons shipments. On March 5, Israeli commandos board a freighter in the Red Sea, which is heading for Port Sudan after taking on cargo at ports including Iran’s Bandar Abbas.

Onboard they find crates of Syrian-made M-302 rockets, hidden by bags of made-in-Iran cement. They release statements and videos [1], showing the rockets and explaining that they had been tracking this shipment for months — as the rockets were flown from Damascus to Tehran, transported to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, and loaded onto the freighter, a Panama-flagged ship called the Klos C. The Israelis say these rockets were meant to be smuggled overland from Sudan across Sinai and into Gaza, where they would have provided Palestinian terrorists with a game-changing range covering almost all of Israel.

That doesn’t sound peaceful at all. Even worse for Zarif, it comes just as AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, is wrapping up its annual meeting in Washington — where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has just given a speech warning about the dangerous, aggressive agenda of Iran (read Bridget Johnson’s report here [2]). It illustrates the point.

http://pjmedia.com/andrewklavan/2014/03/09/mitch-mcconnell-beclowns-himself/?print=1

I have plenty of misgivings about the GOP and the oldies versus the new guys…..but when a Republican joins the baying against the Tea Party and sounds nastier than the Dems…he should have a good look at the average age of those who attended CPAC….the vast majority were young and eager and spirited unlike the old guard in its dotage…..rsk

Politics requires a sense of humor. On the one hand you have your sacred principles. On the other hand, you have the legion of Bozos, criminals, dirtbags and lowlifes whom you expect to enact those principles into law. If that’s not a recipe for comedy, I don’t know what is.

So we conservatives stand for liberty, the inalienable rights of man, the equality of all people in the eyes of their Creator. And to realize these principles we have the Republicans. If you’re not laughing by now, you’re probably rocketing off the padded walls of your cell. Trust me on this: laugh — you’ll live longer.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, under apparently zero real threat from primary challenger businessman Matt Bevin, has boldly announced to the New York Times that Tea Party candidates don’t stand a chance in the upcoming midterms. “I think we are going to crush them everywhere,” McConnell blithered to his Timesian pals. ”I don’t think they are going to have a single nominee anywhere in the country.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372980/print

In a state by state election survey that I am doing for Family Security Matters (see http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/,http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/texas-2014-candidates-for-congress-where-they-stand)it is astonishing what a hot button issue repealing Obamacare has become among incumbents and challengers….RSK

The American people realize that Obamacare is a very bad policy. But more and more conservatives agree that we need to offer a solid alternative before voters reject Obamacare root and branch. Recently, three prominent Republican senators — Richard Burr (N.C.), Tom Coburn (Okla.), and Orrin Hatch (Utah) — unveiled an alternative proposal. In this article, I would like to outline my own.

The proposal I suggest would achieve four remarkable things: It would be more progressive than Obamacare, because it would involve more distribution from higher- to lower-income households. It would provide genuine protection for people who have a preexisting condition, as opposed to the bait-and-switch promises of Obamacare. It would provide genuine access to care for everyone, as opposed to leaving 30 million uninsured, as Obamacare does. And it would work in practice, primarily because it would confine the role of government to setting a few simple rules of the game, leaving individual choice and the marketplace to do the heavy lifting.

I call this reform a “consensus reform” because it draws not just on such right-of-center think tanks as the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute but also on such left-of-center think tanks as the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, and various scholars including President Obama’s former and current economic advisers, Peter Orszag and Jason Furman. It takes the best ideas these folks have offered and combines them with an important principle: No plan designed by those at the top can ever work unless people at the bottom have an economic incentive to make it work.

Further, the ideas presented here are consistent with the health-care plan John McCain endorsed when he ran for president and with health-care-reform legislation introduced by Senator Tom Coburn, Representative Paul Ryan (Wis.), and other Republican members of Congress. So it could easily be adopted as the Republican alternative to Obamacare.

Here are the essential elements.

Choice. People should be able to choose a health-care plan that fits their individual and family needs, rather than a plan designed by bureaucrats in Washington. This means no mandate. Men shouldn’t have to buy maternity coverage; women shouldn’t have to buy coverage for prostate-cancer tests; teetotalers shouldn’t have to buy substance-abuse insurance; etc. And no one should have to buy coverage for preventive procedures that health researchers have known for years are not cost-effective.

It is commonly believed that, without a mandate, people will game the system — waiting until they get sick to enroll. But we have found a way to handle this problem in Medicare Part B, Medicare Part C, and Medigap insurance without any mandate. In all three cases, the insurance is guaranteed-issue (no one can be turned down) and community-rated (no one can be charged a higher premium because of a health condition). But people are not permitted to game the system. If you don’t enroll when you are first eligible, you will be charged a penalty, and, in the Medigap market, you may be charged a premium that does reflect your health status.

Had we accepted the principle of choice in designing a health-care reform, we would not face the prospect of up to 10 million individual policyholders’ losing insurance they were promised they could keep. We would also not face the prospect of millions of additional people’s fearing the loss of their employer plans.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372988/print

PULEEZ! BECK WAS GREAT AT POLITICS…EVEN EDGY…BUT CULTURE? ….RSK

Glenn Beck is tired of politics.

“I think politics is a game, and I think people watch politics as a game, like they watch the NFL,” he tells me, leaning back in his chair. He once thought Washington politicians “actually believed in something.” Now, he says, “I don’t think they do.”

Beck hasn’t lost respect for all politicians, just most of them. On the right, he likes Utah’s Mike Lee, Texas’s Ted Cruz, and Kentucky’s Rand Paul. He respects anybody who goes to Washington and sticks to his principles — even the socialist senator Bernie Sanders. “I’m sure Bernie would disagree, but Bernie and I could be fast friends because he’s doing what he said he’d do,” he says. “ Same with Dennis Kucinich, aliens and all.”

Beck’s disenchantment with news and politics aren’t just for show. Though best known for his flame-throwing political commentary, he is turning his attention to cultural projects like plays and movies. His years in TV, he says, have taught him that news is secondary to culture. “News,” he says, is simply “what the culture allows.”

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=7629

When U.S. President Barack Obama wants the Jewish community to sit up and listen to what he thinks about Israel and the Middle East, he regularly does two things. One is to call in Jeffrey Goldberg, a writer for Bloomberg View and The Atlantic, to interview him on the subject. The second is to let The New York Times know what’s fit to print in their news stories and especially their op-eds and editorials about the subject. Of course, the White House need not issue directives to writers or editors at The Times, though for all I know it might. An interview with Jeffrey Goldberg will convey the message and do the trick. So too will comments the president makes in public. One thing you will never find is any space between Barack Obama’s stated views on Israel and those of the staff of The New York Times opinion pages in the days and weeks that follow.

Last week, just as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was flying to the United States to meet with Obama, and speak at the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee convention, the White House invited Goldberg back in to set the stage before Netanyahu might seize it from him. The text of the conversation was released as the AIPAC conference was starting up.

Even Goldberg, a fan of the president, and a journalist more than happy to see and present the president in the best light as a true friend of Israel (one who knows better than Israel’s elected leaders and the Israeli voters what is really best for them), seemed to think the president stepped over the line this time.