RUTHFULLY YOURS

American healthcare aside (“If you like your plan…”), there are some promises that President Obama has kept. Notably, his promise last year to Russia’s Vladimir Putin — accidentally overheard by the entire world [1], via an open microphone — that once he’d won the 2012 presidential election, he’d have more “flexibility.” He was true to his word. With this September’s Russia-brokered deal over Syria’s chemical weapons, the Obama administration showed flexibility enough to compete with Cirque du Soleil.

Now, just when it seemed that U.S. policy toward Russia could hardly become more flexible without requiring all Americans to dine daily on borscht (or does the Affordable Care Act already include a provision for that?), here comes a story in the New York Times, headlined “A Russian GPS Using U.S. Soil Stirs Spy Fears.” [2] The gist is that the State Department is gung-ho to allow the Russian Space Agency, Roscosmos [3] (which coordinates with Russian military launches), to install on U.S. turf some half a dozen electronic monitor stations for a Russian Global Positioning System. The Times reports that not everyone in the administration thinks this is a great idea. The Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency see this plan as a threat to U.S. security: “They fear that these structures could help Russia spy on the United States and improve the precision of Russian weaponry.”

But does that worry the State Department? Not according to the Times, which goes on to provide the following account of the State Department’s rationale:

Political correctness might have been born in Sweden, where excessive sensitivity is a leading cause of death. The first Swedish police dog was a cocker spaniel. Now the Swedes are revising movie ratings to protect feminists, some more radical than others, but all victims of artists who produce swashbuckling guy movies.

“G” or “PG” will no longer cut it. Something called the “Bechdel” scale will decree that a movie must have at least two named female characters who talk to each other about something besides men. That sounds like an easy hurdle to clear, but it may be difficult for screenwriters to find such characters in real life. Movies that don’t meet this lofty standard receive an “F.” Can Hollywood be far behind?

“The entire ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, all ‘Star Wars’ movies … and all but one of the ‘Harry Potter’ movies fail this test,” Ellen Tejle, director of an art-house theater in Stockholm, tells The Associated Press. Ms. Tejle’s theater is one of four Swedish movie houses that introduced the Bechdel rating system last month.

Most Hollywood romantic comedies would get a thumbs down from Swedish critics, as would war movies, Westerns and action thrillers, making it difficult for a politically correct couple to find a movie on date night in Goteborg or Uppsala.

Moviegoers rarely see “a female superhero or a female professor or person who makes it through exciting challenges and masters them,” laments Ms. Tejle, who concedes that the rating isn’t a measure of the film’s quality (and might be the opposite). “The goal is to see more female stories and perspectives on cinema screens.”

The Bechdel test takes its name from American underground-press cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who introduced the concept in her comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For.” (The strip died.) The current favorite flick in the art houses, “Blue Is the Warmest Colour,” might not pass muster. The movie’s seven-minute-long nude lesbian love scene thrilled the Cannes Film Festival, but some critics scorned it as insufficiently authentic. “The Hurt Locker,” a 2010 war film about a bomb-disposal team in Iraq, can’t pass the test despite its female director, Kathryn Bigelow, winning an Oscar for it.

To any thinking observer, President Obama’s own explanation offers an involuntary confession that he knowingly lied about his Affordable Health Care law. But rather than paying careful attention to his actual words, our country continues to argue about the motive and integrity of its president.

At stake is a lot of damage that people were promised would never happen. NBC News reports that 50 to 75 percent of the 14 million Americans who purchased their insurance policies individually are likely to receive cancellations because their policies do not conform to new regulations from the Affordable Health Care Act.

According to a recent Fox News poll, 50 percent of voters believe President Obama deliberately lied when he promised that people could keep the health care plans and doctors they preferred.

Still, Obama supporters such as House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) insist that no lie was told. Hoyer claims Obama’s words were accurate at the time the statement was made.

“You understand,” Hoyer said, “that if you had a policy on the day that this bill was adopted, you got to keep it … Now, you didn’t get to keep it if the insurance companies didn’t want to offer it to you.”

And so the debate rages on. Did Obama knowingly lie or was he himself uniformed about the subtle nuances of his own health care law?

Timid generals seem afraid to challenge efforts to emasculate our fighting men and objectify our women

Feminism is trying to yank the U.S. military in two directions at once. While claiming that women have no problem meeting the rigorous standards of the SEALs or infantry, advocates of opening these branches to women argue that female members of the military must be protected from the male sexual predators that, we are assured, are widely represented in the military. However, they can’t have it both ways. Are women “hear me roar” Amazons, or are they fragile flowers who must be protected from “sexual harassment,” encouraged to level the charge at the drop of the hat?

In her 2000 book, “Real Politics: At the Center of Everyday Life,” the late American political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain identified the two extremes of modern radical feminism: the “repressive androgynists,” who contend that there are no real differences between men and women, indeed that the idea that there are differences is an illusion fostered by a repressive patriarchy; and the “feminist victimization wing,” which paints the relations between the sexes as a continuous train of abuses by men who victimize women on a daily basis.

For two decades, these wings of feminist ideology have worked in tandem to sustain an attack on the culture of the U.S. military, culminating in the recent decision by the Pentagon to open infantry and special operations to women. In light of the argument that women are capable of performing these elite missions, it is indeed ironic that the wedge issues driving the military toward this end have come from the victimization wing, stretching from the “Tailhook” episode in 1991 to the recent moral panic over alleged rampant sexual assault in the military.

Let me be clear: There is absolutely no excuse for sexual assault. Period. There is no excuse for a superior who pressures a subordinate for sexual favors. Period. The data cited by the Pentagon creating widespread panic within the military are rendered suspect for two reasons. The first problem is methodological: The numbers — some 26,000 active-duty service members out of a population of 1.4 million claim to have been sexually assaulted in 2012 — are based on an anonymous survey. This number far exceeds reported cases of sexual assault.

Navy SEALs are the toast of America, but revelations show that the top brass has not always watched their backs during the Obama administration.

SEALs have brought exhilarating moments for the White House. The storied SEAL Team 6 killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011 and rescued U.S. cargo ship captain Richard Phillips from Somali pirates in 2009. Hollywood transformed both operations into blockbuster movies — with the administration’s help.

But some in the special operations community cite shabby treatment.

A book by Billy Vaughn, father of a SEAL killed in the Aug. 6, 2011, shootdown of a Chinook helicopter in Afghanistan, blames the administration for leaking too much information about his son’s unit.

Another book by two former SEALs tells the “shameful ordeal” they endured based on allegations of prisoner abuse by one unreliable sailor and one determined terrorist. Instead of issuing gratitude for nabbing the “butcher of Fallujah” in Iraq in 2009, U.S. Central Command court-martialed the SEALs on felony charges.

The two authors and a third SEAL were acquitted by military juries when the prosecution’s case fall apart.

Is anyone deliberately forgetting Kennedy’s shameful betrayal of dissident Cubans in the Bay of Pigs? Compared to Carter and Clinton he was a decent president….compared to Obama they are all better….Also, Kennedy was the first US President to earmark arms sales to Israel….rsk

Fifty years after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, a surprising fact has been rediscovered: In his time, he was not considered a liberal.

“Understanding Kennedy as a political conservative may make liberals uncomfortable, by crowning conservatism with the halo of Camelot,” Ira Stoll writes in his new book, ” JFK, Conservative.” Yet “it could make conservatives uncomfortable, too—many of them have long viscerally despised the entire Kennedy family, especially John F. Kennedy’s younger brother Ted.”

Mr. Stoll makes a strong case that in 1960 “the anti-Communist, anti-big government candidate was John F. Kennedy. The one touting government programs and higher salaries for public employees was Richard Nixon, ” he writes.

JFK’s false image as a government-loving peacenik was created “partly because of the work of liberal historians, partly as a result of shifts in American partisanship,” Mr. Stoll writes. (Disclosure: I’m on the board of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which published “JFK, Conservative.”) The best-selling biographies of the president after his death were by two of his more left-wing advisers, Ted Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Although Chamberlain threatened that if Czechoslovakia didn’t give the Sudetendland to Hitler, WWII would start, the sad truth is that giving it over is what enabled the war to start. Obama is going down the same path.

On 1 September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland with Stalin soon to follow, and World War II began in force. During the next six years, close to 85 million people died.

As Obama hints that Israel will cause WWIII if Iran is not allowed to slip out of the sanctions that have slowed its pursuit of a nuclear arsenal, one need only remember back 75 years. In 1938, the world also teetered on the precipice of World War II.

In 1938, the quintessential appeaser, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, excoriated the embattled Czech Prime Minister Benes as the cause of a world war if Benes did not accede to Hitler’s demandsand agree to expose his country to occupation by Nazi Germany.

Chamberlain “blackmailed” the self-defensible Benes into becoming an indefensible victim. Chamberlain morphed genocidal war-maker Hitler into a smiling ‘peace-maker.’ Chamberlain intoned the same false ‘logic’ that Obama uses today: Agree to the murderer’s terms, or he will occupy and murder more of you.

William L. Shirer, the greatest of World War II historians, lived the events as a news reporter and later recorded his epic history “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” (“The Rise and Fall”). In Chapter 12, “The Road to Munich,” Shirer recounts the predatory actions taken by Chaimberlain that forced PM Benes to cede the Czech Sudetenland to Hitler.

The Sudetenland was the mountainous western half of Czechoslovakia that had some ethnic German population. That mountainous Czech Sudetenland served as a defensive bulwark against a Nazi German attack eastward into Czechoslovakia. Without its mountain topographic defenses, the eastern remainder of Czechoslovakia was defenseless in the face of further Nazi occupation – which occurred several months later.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/11/17/bad-sh-epic-hot-mic-moment-catches-translator-saying-what-some-including-theblaze-have-noticed/

A United Nations interpreter translating the proceedings of the General Assembly on Thursday was caught – not realizing her microphone was still piping her voice into the chamber – expressing her dismay that the world body is so focused on condemning Israel while ignoring every other country in the world.

Following votes at the General Assembly’s Fourth Committee which includes all 193 UN member states, nine resolutions were adopted condemning Israel. Not one resolution was adopted targeting any other country, not even Syria where more than 100,000 have been killed in just two-and-a-half years.

The unnamed interpreter, unaware she was still being heard both by delegates and online via a live webcast, said, “I mean, I think when you have five statements, not five, like a total of ten resolutions on Israel and Palestine, there’s gotta be something, c’est un peu trop, non? [It’s a bit much, no?] I mean I know… There’s other really bad sh** happening, but no one says anything, about the other stuff.”

One of the greatest costs to Medicare and one which presented the most difficult moral issue facing the American health system on the eve of Obamacare was the growing number of persons with dementia As lives lengthened, one 2010 study estimated that almost 15% of those over 70 suffered from some form of dementia. The annual cost to families and society as a whole was estimated annually at between $31 and $56 thousand dollars for each individual with a total cost of between $157 and $215 billion.

In the post-Obamacare era, these two elements of the total medical picture may assume the greatest importance. The obvious necessity to make “co-pay” a part of the Medicaid commitment, even for the poorest recipient, would appear part of any solution. An increase in the 20% of Medicare which now must be paid by the insured may well be necessary to refinance that system. But neither will be easy for an electorate, promised so many freebies by Obamacare.

Growing obesity and other manifestations of the American lifestyle presented an even greater challenge – and will continue to do so – in any effort at prevention rather than treatment. That is going to demand a mobilization of public opinion long after the squabbles over Obamacare are historical footnotes.

Hopefully in a more realistic environment occasioned by Obamacare’s demise, reason and common sense will prevail. And, as always, scientific breakthroughs may be around the corner, particularly for Alzheimer’s. [British scientists announced such a breakthrough in October 2013 in experiments with rats although they cautioned application to humans would be some time off.]

But there again tightened budgets, in no part the result of the Obama Administration’s campaign against competition and the traditional concept of equal opportunity [rather than Pres. Obama’s redistribution of wealth for guaranteed equality] would be the touchstone.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/11/obamas-suez/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=24ea0d2283-Mosaic_2013_11_18&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-24ea0d2283-41165129

In siding with his enemies against his allies in the Suez crisis, Dwight D. Eisenhower committed (in his own words) his “major foreign-policy mistake.” Obama seems bent on repeating it.

Israel’s primary adversary is acquiring powerful new weapons that will overturn the military balance in the Middle East. But it needs at least a year before its weapons will be fully functional. In the meantime, the Israelis are signaling that they are contemplating a preemptive war. In Washington, however, the president does not share Israel’s sense of alarm. The fears of the Jewish state, he believes, are exaggerated. Its preparations are a tool for goading the United States into a policy that is more attentive to Israeli interests.
ASSOCIATED PRESS

EGYPTIAN TANKS ENTER PORT SAID AFTER BRITISH AND FRENCH TROOPS EVACUATE, DECEMBER 23, 1956.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

While arguing strenuously against the use of force, the president launches a series of diplomatic initiatives designed to reduce regional tensions. The negotiations, however, produce no tangible results, and the Israelis grow increasingly disaffected with Washington. They are, however, by no means alone. The French also regard American policy as starry eyed. Paris and Jerusalem grow closer. Before long, they begin clandestine security cooperation, which quickly turns into joint planning for war—behind the back of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The scenario in question is, of course, the prelude to the Suez war of 1956. Israel’s adversary at the time was not Iran, but Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt. In September 1955, Nasser signed an arms deal with the Soviet Union, which provided him with sophisticated arms in unprecedented quantities. The new weapons, however, were unfamiliar to the Egyptian military, which needed time to absorb them into the ranks. Meanwhile, Nasser organized terror attacks against the Israelis while sponsoring revolutionary movements aimed at driving Britain and France from the Middle East. Eventually, the British also despaired of American policies. They fell into direct alignment with the French.

The situation that President Obama now confronts is uncannily similar. There are enduring patterns to American relations with the Middle East, and President Obama would be well advised to study the war that erupted on Eisenhower’s watch. He should treat it as a cautionary tale—not least because the two European powers and Israel launched parallel invasions of Egypt in October 1956.

Eisenhower was taken totally by surprise, and he felt betrayed. He took the extraordinary step of voting with the Soviet Union in the United Nations against his own allies. Imposing severe sanctions on the Europeans, he brought the British to the brink of economic collapse. He demanded, with near-total success, that all invading forces evacuate Egypt unconditionally.