RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.newmediajournal.us/

In the aftermath of Vice President Joe Biden’s “Howard Dean” moment in Ohio this week, I was struck by the sheer magnitude of the Progressive-Democrat Left’s hypocrisy when it comes to their political attacks on the so-called “rich.” As the unwashed masses of the Occupy Movement – the overwhelming majority of which are anarchists, pseudo-Socialists, Progressive activists and union operatives – take to the streets of Chicago to protest the NATO summit, I really do have to wonder if they – the useful idiots of the new millennium – know that those who they follow are the one-percenters?

Among the leaders of the Progressive Movement and the Democrat Party, it is nearly impossible to identify anyone among them who isn’t in the one-percent, and that includes President Obama and, yes, Vice President Biden. Maybe that’s why his statement, “They just don’t get us,” made my head cock like a dog hearing a high-pitched noise. “Who’s us,” I thought to myself.

Truth be told, Mr. Biden is the least wealthy among the Left’s one-percenter elitists. Yes, his roots may have been blue collar, but he benefited from the Capitalist system to become quite wealthy, or at least a heck of a lot wealthier than many. His annual salary is $248,754 and he enjoys perks that include free housing, transportation, health insurance, etc. He has listed assets including between nearly $230,000 to $860,000, many of which are in investment accounts and insurance policies. He has disclosed that he receives between $15,000 to $50,000 annually in rental income on a guest house in Wilmington, Delaware. And, of course, his future will see a healthy pension, book deals and, no doubt, invitations from the mainstream media to contribute as a political pundit (now that will be entertaining).

OpenSecrets.org estimates Mr. Biden’s net worth at $718,994.

But the Progressive and Democrat elite’s one-percenters are many…

President and Mrs. Obama hold family assets estimated in 2010 as up to $8.3 million, including assets of between $500,000 and $1million in a JPMorgan Chase checking account.

According to the Washington Post,

“The president and first lady’s asset mix includes Treasury notes valued at between $1 million and $5 million, Treasury bills worth $500,000 and $1 million, along with retirement and checking accounts.

“Royalties from Obama’s books, ‘Dreams From My Father,’ ‘The Audacity of Hope’ and ‘Of Thee I Sing,’ totaled between $250,000 and $2.1 million.

“The Obamas have a 30-year mortgage on their Chicago home worth between $500,000 and $1 million…”

OpenSecrets.org estimates the Obama’s net worth at $11,830,000.

Then we have the Demo-Progressive leadership in Congress.

In 2010, The Hill reported that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi had an estimated net worth of $35.2 million,

“House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (P-CA) saw her net worth rise 62 percent last year, cementing her status as one of the wealthiest members of Congress.

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2012/05/17/tea-party-should-oppose-latest-terrorist-bill-of-rights/

The Tea Party Should Oppose Latest Terrorist Bill of Rights

The reckless crew is at it again.

Libertarian extremists, who purport to be the face of the tea party movement, and their pals on the Lawyer Left, whose obsession is more rights for mass-murderers, are again making common cause. Their target, once more, is the detention procedure codified in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This time the ringleaders are Representatives Justin Amash (R., MI) and Adam Smith (D., WA). With a new NDAA up for consideration, these congressmen are reprising the starring role played a few months back by Sen. Rand Paul (R., KY). I argued in opposition to Sen. Paul’s gambit here and here.

Under the Smith-Amash amendment, if al Qaeda were to dispatch the second coming of Mohamed Atta & Co. to execute another 9/11-style atrocity in the United States, but this time the FBI managed to apprehend them, they would be given the full rights of American civilian defendants. They could not be detained under the laws of war, they could not be held at Guantanamo Bay for trial by military commission. Instead, they would be treated like garden variety crooks: given Miranda warnings, quickly assigned counsel, held in a civilian prison, eligible for prompt bail hearings, entitled to the full breadth of discovery mandated by civilian due process, and given a full-blown, Grade-A civilian trial in a civilian federal court – just like the trial the Obama administration tried to give Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other surviving 9/11 plotters until public outrage and congressional opposition induced the administration to back down.

Naturally, you won’t be hearing that from the congressmen and their allies – like Rep. Ron Paul, who has come out in support. They know if the wages of their bill were properly understood, they would swiftly be dismissed, including by most Tea Partiers, who are not anti-government but pro-limited government and thus appreciate that national defense is a paramount federal role.

So instead, the congressmen repeat Sen. Paul’s pitch, claiming to be defending the rights of American citizens. They maintain, as Senator Paul did, that the 2012 NDAA expanded the powers of the president to designate American citizens as enemy combatants, to have the military round them up, and to lock them up and throw away the key. Their hysteria is amplified by the likes of the John Birch Society’s outlet, The New American, which asserts that, under the NDAA, Americans could “be subject to military tribunals such as the one currently considering the case of the so-called ‘Gitmo Five’” – i.e., the ongoing military prosecution of KSM and his cohorts. Not to be outdone, Rep. Paul chimes in, “I don’t believe a republic can exist if you permit the military to arrest American citizens and put them in secret prisons and be denied a trial.”

http://www.hinckleyforsenate.com/

ON THE ISSUES PLEASE GO TO http://www.hinckleyforsenate.com/issues

Get government out of the way of job creators.

• Balance the Federal Budget

Repeal Obama Care and replace it with interstate insurance options and competition, small business healthcare pooling and real tort reform

Repeal and replace our 67,000-page tax code.

I believe energy independence is a national priority. I will work to develop a domestic energy plan that weans America off foreign oil within 10 years. I believe in exploring America’s own abundant natural resources through offshore drilling, ANWR, and beyond.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/05/americans_understanding_islamic_world_better_than_george_w_bush.html Wednesday, former President George W. Bush delivered a speech in Washington, D.C. at an event entitled “Celebration of Human Freedom,” sponsored by his presidential foundation, the George W. Bush Institute. The former president observed astutely that “freedom is a powerful force but it does not advance on wheels of historical inevitability.” But then Mr. […]

http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2012/05/16/obama-by-the-numbers/?singlepage=true A friend sent me the following graphs. I’d seen, indeed posted here, some of them already; some were new to me. Taken together they tell a sorry story of failure. Advertisement      

The Death of the Hockey Stick?

http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-death-of-the-hockey-stick/?print=1

People who have been following the climate debate closely know that one of the most controversial and key elements of the controversy is the so-called “hockey stick” — a graph of supposed global temperature over the past centuries that ostensibly shows a dramatic increase in average temperature in the last century or so (the upward swoop of the graph at that point is the business end of the stick, with regard to the puck). It vaulted its inventor, Michael Mann of Penn State University, to climate stardom, with associated acclaim and government grants, when he first presented it in the late ’90s. It was the visual basis of much of the hysteria in recent years, from Al Gore’s Oscar-winning crockumentary [1] to bogus reports [2] from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Unfortunately for those promoting the theory (and the potentially economically catastrophic policy recommendations supposedly supported by it), recent events indicate that the last basis of scientific support for the hockey stick may be crumbling. But to understand this, a little background is necessary.

Ultimately, in addition to Mann’s claim for the dramatic recent uptick (which we are supposed to presume was a result of the late industrial revolution and equally dramatic increase in carbon monoxide into the atmosphere as a result of the liberation of carbon from burning long-buried fossil fuels), Keith Briffa of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England controversially declared, based on Eurasian data, that the well-documented Medieval Warm Period (MWP), from around 950 to 1250 CE — the European Middle Ages — didn’t actually exist.

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012/05/16/53000-dead-voters-found-in-florida/?print=1

53,000 Dead Voters Found in Florida

I have learned that Florida election officials are set to announce that the secretary of state has discovered and purged up to 53,000 dead voters from the voter rolls in Florida.

How could 53,000 dead voters have sat on the polls for so long? Simple. Because Florida hadn’t been using the best available data revealing which voters have died. Florida is now using the nationwide Social Security Death Index for determining which voters should be purged because they have died.

Here is the bad news. Most states aren’t using the same database that Florida is. In fact, I have heard reports that some election officials won’t even remove voters even when they are presented with a death certificate. That means that voter rolls across the nation still are filled with dead voters, even if Florida is leading the way in detecting and removing them.

But surely people aren’t voting in the names of dead voters, the voter fraud deniers argue. Wrong.

Keaton

Consider the case of Lafayette Keaton. Keaton not only voted for a dead person in Oregon, he voted for his dead son. Making Keaton’s fraud easier was Oregon’s vote by mail scheme, which has opened up gaping holes in the integrity of elections. The incident in Oregon just scratches the surface of the problem. Massachusetts and Mississippi are but two other examples of the dead rising on election day.

Florida should be applauded for taking the problem seriously, even if Eric Holder’s Justice Department and many state election officials don’t.

Related: League of Women Voters Aren’t Nonpartisan.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/15/health/exhibition-traces-the-emergence-of-jews-as-medical-innovators.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

The young man who applied to medical school in the spring of 1933 had graduated from Dartmouth College with good grades, a keen interest in medicine and, according to the university official who interviewed him, a nice sense of humor.The application did not ask about religion, but the interviewer surmised it. “Probably Jewish,” he wrote in a scribbled evaluation, “but no unpleasant evidence of it.”

The handwritten note was found in the admissions files of the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University. After the implementation of quotas, the proportion of Jews in the student body fell to less than 5 percent in 1938 from nearly half in 1920.

The note is displayed in an exhibition called “Trail of the Magic Bullet: The Jewish Encounter With Modern Medicine, 1860-1960,” on view at Yeshiva University Museum in Manhattan. The exhibition offers a rare look at a topic few patients ever stop to consider: the emergence of European and American Jews as innovators in medicine, despite their status as outsiders frequently scorned by the medical establishment.

While some religions place ultimate responsibility for healing in divine hands, “Jews don’t see a conflict between faith and medicine,” said Alan M. Kraut, a professor of history at American University who helped put together the exhibition and has written extensively about immigration and health.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/300131/uncovering-early-islam-daniel-pipes

The year 1880 saw the publication of a book that ranks as the single most important study of Islam ever. Written in German by a young Jewish Hungarian scholar, Ignaz Goldziher, and bearing the nondescript title Muslim Studies (Muhammedanische Studien), it argued that the hadith, the vast body of sayings and actions attributed to the Islamic prophet Mohammed, lacked historical validity. Rather than provide reliable details about Mohammed’s life, the hadith, Goldziher established, emerged from debates two or three centuries later about the nature of Islam.

(This is like today’s Americans debating the Constitution’s much-disputed Second Amendment, concerning the right to bear arms, by claiming newly discovered oral transmissions going back to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Obviously, their quotations would inform us not what was said 225 years ago but about current views.)

Since Goldziher’s day, scholars have been actively pursuing his approach, deepening and developing it into a full-scale account of early Islamic history, one that disputes nearly every detail of Mohammed’s life as conventionally understood — born in a.d. 570, first revelation in 610, flight to Medina in 622, death in 632. But this revisionist history has remained a virtual secret among specialists. For example, Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, authors of the synoptic Hagarism (Cambridge University Press, 1977), deliberately wrote obliquely, thereby hiding their message.

Now, however, two scholars have separately ended this secrecy: Tom Holland with In the Shadow of the Sword, and Robert Spencer with Did Muhammad Exist? As their titles suggest, Spencer is the bolder author, and so is my focus here.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/

Writing about Israel is a booming field. No news agency, be it ever so humble, can avoid embedding a few correspondents and a dog’s tail of stringers into Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, to sit in cafes clicking away on their laptops, meeting up with leftist NGO’s and the oppressed Muslim of the week
At a time when international desks are being cut to the bone, this is the one bone that the newshounds won’t give up. Wars can be covered from thousands of miles away, genocide can go to the back page, but, when a rock flies in the West Bank, there had better be a correspondent with a fake continental accent and a khaki shirt to cover it.

Writing about Israel isn’t hard. Anyone who has consumed a steady diet of media over the years already knows all the bullet points. The trick is arranging them artistically, like so many wilted flowers, in the story of this week’s outrage.

Israel is hot, even in the winter, with the suggestion of violence brimming under the surface. It should be described as a “troubled land.” Throw in occasional ironic biblical references and end every article or broadcast by emphasizing that peace is still far away.

It has two types of people; the Israelis who live in posh houses stocked with all the latest appliances and the Arabs who live in crumbling shacks that are always in danger of being bulldozed. The Israelis are fanatical, the Arabs are passionate. The Israelis are hate-filled, while the Arabs are embittered. The Israelis have everything while the Arabs have nothing.