RUTHFULLY YOURS

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Equatorial Guinea brutalizes its people like North Korea and Syria. So why is a prominent U.S. foundation cozying up to its dictator?

In the campaign for human rights and justice in apartheid South Africa, black American civil rights leaders were instrumental. One was Leon H. Sullivan, who enunciated the “Sullivan Principles” guiding multinational firms toward treating blacks fairly while doing business in South Africa. Why, then, is the Leon H. Sullivan Foundation today celebrating the exploits of a brutal African tyrant?

On Aug. 20, a plane-load of lobbyists, civil rights leaders, entertainers and former government officials will land in the West African nation of Equatorial Guinea for the Sullivan Summit IX. The summit’s stated objective is to “create an atmosphere of open dialogue about the state of human rights and the interconnected issues of modern Africa.” Seldom has so much dishonesty fit into one sentence.

Equatorial Guinea is home to Africa’s longest-ruling dictator, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, who seized power in a military coup by executing his uncle 33 years ago. Freedom House ranks the country among the “worst of the worst” human-rights abusers, along with North Korea, Syria and Somalia. Yet the Sullivan Foundation is celebrating its Obiang-hosted summit as a milestone for human rights, part of its “unwavering commitment to democratic ideals.”

According to the agenda posted online, summit attendees will lounge at a five-star resort for a week discussing human rights and economic development, all between black-tie dinners and champagne. They may toast to the petroleum-rich country’s staggering per capita income of $36,515 (according to the World Bank), but outside the resort the people of Equatorial Guinea will continue to toil in poverty. Sixty percent live on less than $1 a day, the majority don’t have access to clean water or electricity, and nearly one in eight children die before their fifth birthday.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443404004577577190186374230.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

The whispering over Mitt Romney’s choice of a running mate is getting louder, and along with it we are being treated to the sotto voce angst of the GOP establishment: Whatever else Mitt does, he wouldn’t dare pick Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, would he?

Too risky, goes the Beltway chorus. His selection would make Medicare and the House budget the issue, not the economy. The 42-year-old is too young, too wonky, too, you know, serious. Beneath it all you can hear the murmurs of the ultimate Washington insult—that Mr. Ryan is too dangerous because he thinks politics is about things that matter. That dude really believes in something, and we certainly can’t have that.

All of which highly recommend him for the job.

We have nothing against the other men Mr. Romney is said to be still closely considering. Tim Pawlenty twice won the governorship of Minnesota, the second time in the horrible GOP year of 2006. His working-class roots and middle American values would counter the stereotype of Mr. Romney as too rich and disconnected to average concerns. The media would say he’s another middle-aged white male, just like Mitt, but he’d certainly be a safe, mature choice.

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1505/the_deadly_impact_of_president_obama_s_economic_policies_59_757_needless_deaths_and_counting
Using the same crazy logic as a pro-Obama super PAC, Obama is responsible for some 59,757 deaths

In what will almost surely be the nastiest campaign ad of the political season, a pro-Obama super political action committee (PAC) basically accuses Mitt Romney and Bain Capital of causing a woman’s death.Viewers are supposed to hold Romney responsible because the woman’s husband lost his job, and the resulting lack of insurance prevented her from getting health care in time to stop her cancer.

The ad has been debunked for several reasons, including the fact that the woman apparently had her own job with her own insurance for two years after her husband lost his job and her cancer wasn’t even discovered until seven years after Romney left Bain, but let’s set those issues aside, assume all the facts are true, and contemplate what it means if we apply the same standard of accountability to the Obama Administration.

Here’s a simple chain of reasoning.

1. There’s a well-established relationship between a nation’s prosperity and the lifespan of its people (see Figures 1 and 2 in my 1992 article in the Journal of Regulation and Social Cost).

2. Obama’s policies have dampened growth in the United States (according to data from the Congressional Budget Office and the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, actual GDP [in today’s dollars] is $836.6 billion below potential GDP).

3. Based on these two simple facts, we can conclude that the foregone growth is causing needless premature deaths.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

Toward the end of Animal Farm when the formerly revolutionary seven commandments have been rewritten to “All Animals are Equal… But Some Animals are More Equal than Others”, what began with the promise of equality has reverted to an authoritarian caste system. America’s civil rights revolution similarly began with, “All Americans are Equal” and ended up with, “All Americans are Equal… But Some Americans are More Equal than Others.”
Liberals have seized the commanding heights of the moral high ground by presenting themselves as the protectors of minorities and vowing to replace one racist system with an equally racist, anti-racist system. But caste systems aren’t just black and white and the rainbow coalition has internal conflicts. What do liberals do when different groups within the rainbow coalition conflict and how do they make that determination?

It’s not a new question. Black men got the vote before white women did, and that very issue led to a heated debate over universal suffrage in the Fourteenth Amendment, which was written to include black men, but exclude women. Suffragists were told in Fredrick Douglass’ words, “This is the Negro’s hour.” To explain why that was the hour on the clock, Douglass brought out what would become the Victim Value Index.

“When women because they are women are dragged from their houses and hung upon lamp-posts… then they will have the urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own,” Douglass sneered. Women had been dragged out of their homes and subjected to horrors because they were women for far longer than the brief few centuries of African slavery in America, but Douglass’ real point was, “My suffering beats your suffering, so my rights beat your rights.” In contemporary progressivism this is expressed in the sneering “White Women’s Tears” meme.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-great-jobs-debate

The United States is having a major debate about how to get the economy going and create millions of new jobs. On one side advocates call for greater government spending on such things as roads and bridges, (“infrastructure”) and higher “taxes on the rich” to pay for the spending and also bring down the debt. On the other side are those who believe that keeping tax rates low and restraining government spending and regulation will spur the necessary investment to create jobs.

The problem with the debate is that if no deal is struck before the end of the year, a fiscal train wreck of massive tax increases and spending cuts happens automatically.

But you might say, Democrats want tax increases and Republicans want spending restraint, so is not this the best of both worlds?

Excellent question, grasshopper. To answer it, we have to first explain how this happened, and then second, go back to first principals as what makes an economy grow. Then we can answer your question.

HOW DID WE GET INTO THIS MESS?

First, how did this happen?

In 2010, with the 2001-2003 tax rate cuts and reforms scheduled to expire, the administration and the lame-duck Congress agreed to extend the tax rates through the end of 2012.

In 2011, with the House now under the control of the Republican majority, the looming European debt crisis and the growing US debt put into stark relief the central concern that had propelled much of the change in the 2010 elections. We were spending too much.

The US Treasury told the new Congress that the US could not borrow any more money unless its debt ceiling limit was extended some time in spring or early summer. The debt limit had been raised repeatedly and was considered “no big deal”. But the Republicans, especially their Tea Party supporters, and some Democrats said, “Not So Fast”. If we were going to increase our borrowing, at least offset the borrowing with an equal amount of long-term spending restraint or debt relief, they said. (1)

Well, the two sides could not agree whether there should be spending restraint or tax increases, or both, so they come up with a interim deal that threatened financial Armageddon unless they came up with a new deal by the end of 2012.

So in August 2011, the administration and Congress agreed that failing to come up with a deal, automatic spending cuts would occur beginning in 2013, reaching $1.5 trillion over ten years. Part of this were automatic across the board cuts of $100 billion a year starting in 2013, equally divided between defense and non-defense discretionary spending.

The debt deal also cut spending by $1 trillion immediately. Defense was cut $487 billion (a number the OMB simply pulled out of thin air!), which meant 14% of the Federal budget (DOD spending) had to come up with nearly half of all the immediate budget cuts.(2) At the same time, unrelated to the debt ceiling deal of August 2011, taxes in 2013 would go up on everyone–at $500 billion a year–as the tax reform of 2001 and 2003 would expire. So Washington faces both massive spending cuts and major tax increases in January 2013 if nothing is done to alter this coming fiscal train wreck.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/outside-view-north-koreas-i-shrunk-the-kids-domestic-policy Undoubtedly, North Korea’s new 20-something leader, Kim Jong Un, was thrilled by the Olympic weightlifting competition in which the country was represented by Om Yum Chol, 20. Om won a gold medal, setting a record by lifting three times his body weight. Most of Om’s life was spent growing up under Kim’s late father, […]

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100175368/the-fortunes-of-permanence-culture-and-anarchy-in-an-age-of-amnesia

PLEASE ALSO SEE: A REVIEW BY BRUCE THORNTON http://www.city-journal.org/2012/bc0803bt.html
RUTH KING: A REVIEW AND INTERVIEW: ROGER KIMBALL: “THE FORTUNES OF PERMANENCE-CULTURE AND ANARCHY IN AN AGE OF AMNESIA”http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-fortunes-of-permanence-culture-and-anarchy-in-an-age-of-amnesia

Daniel Hannan is a writer and journalist, and has been Conservative MEP for South East England since 1999. He speaks French and Spanish and loves Europe, but believes that the European Union is making its constituent nations poorer, less democratic and less free.

In one of his Cicero novels, Robert Harris has the slave narrator, Tiro, wonder why anyone wants to build empires or raze cities when they might instead be sitting in the sunshine with a good book.

I can’t remember when I last sat in the sunshine with such a pleasant feeling of anticipation as when carrying Roger Kimball’s wonderful book,The Fortunes of Permanence.

Kimball is one of the cleverest men alive, and has interesting things to say about almost everything: art, architecture, rhetoric, statecraft, theology, music, poetry, history. His prose style is a joy: erudite but never recondite, witty but never precious. He carries large chunks of the Western canon in his head, and can find an apt quotation for every situation without coming across as contrived. He is a master of the art (so clumsy in the wrong hands) of parenthesis.

The only reason that Kimball, editor of the cultural review The New Criterion, and publisher of Encounter Books, is not acknowledged as one of the great intellectuals of our age is that he is on the Right, and so occupies a place beyond the mental horizons of the commissioning editors who set the tone of our public discourse. Since there are as yet few signs of the cultural shift he would like to see, I’m afraid his recognition will be largely posthumous. Something similar might be said of his British equivalent, Roger Scruton, but that’s another story.

The Fortunes of Permanence is a collation of linked essays. Some centre on literary and philosophical figures: William Godwin, Rudyard Kipling, G.K. Chesterton, Malcolm Muggeridge. (Kimball, educated in Maine and at Yale, is the most penetrating Anglophile I know: he sees us as we are, with all our faults, and likes us anyway.) Others look at the major political currents of the past hundred years.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/york-when-1099-felons-vote-in-race-won-by-312-ballots/article/2504163 “Wasserman Shultz and her fellow Democrats are doing everything they can to stop reasonable anti-fraud measures, like removing ineligible voters from the rolls and voter ID. Through it all, they maintain they are simply defending our most fundamental right, the right to vote.” In the eyes of the Obama administration, most Democratic lawmakers, and […]

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Chinese ‘very impressed’ with Israeli economy

Major Beijing university to offer courses on Israel’s high-tech, business culture; another school teaches Hebrew language, culture
Itamar Eichner
One of Beijing’s largest universities is set to establish an Israeli economics and Judaism department, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Wednesday.

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3259/saudis-to-muslim-brotherhood-drop-dead “The uneasy modus vivendi between the Muslim Brotherhood and the military most likely will fail, and probably sooner than later,” I argued July 9, and the aftermath of the terrorist execution of sixteen Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai peninsula supports this conclusion. The funeral service for the dead soldiers erupted in rage against the […]