RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/inside-the-warmist-faith/

For those of us who might have thought (hoped?) that the climate-change hysteria of a couple of years ago was already on its way into the dustbin of history, the New York Times ran a piece on August 11 insisting that the danger is more urgent than ever. “Until recently,” wrote Northern Arizona University earth scientist Chirstopher R. Schwalm, Clark University geographer Christopher A. Williams, and Kevin Schaeffer of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, “many scientists spoke of climate change mainly as a ‘threat,’ sometime in the future. But it is increasingly clear that we already live in the era of human-induced climate change, with a growing frequency of weather and climate extremes like heat waves, droughts, floods and fires.” In the Times piece, which is apparently a précis of a recent essay in the journal Nature-Geoscience, the three authors argued that the recent drought in the American West, in its length and severity, represented a radical departure from previous droughts, and that climate models suggest that “this extreme event could become the new normal.” Their prescription: to prevent “a multidecade megadrought,” we must “reduce fossil-fuel emissions.” And their conclusion: “there can be little doubt that what was once thought to be a future threat is suddenly, catastrophically upon us.”

Yeah, whatever. I might be more inclined to take this sort of thing seriously if I hadn’t paid attention to Climategate and spent several days in December 2009 at the Copenhagen Climate Conference, which took place shortly after that scandal. Never have I seen a supposedly scientific event that was so thoroughly disconnected from science and suffused with politics – and so easily confused with religion. Climategate, it will be recalled, exposed the fact that global-warming boosters in the scientific community had been engaged in efforts, as a Wall Street Journal editorial put it, “to fit the data to their conclusions while attempting to silence and discredit their critics.” As I wrote at the time, it was no surprise that Climategate didn’t spell a quick end to the climate-change scam, for the scam wasn’t really about science at all but about politics – about having an excuse to target capitalist countries (above all the U.S.), which, as the dogma told us, was desecrating the environment and destroying the ozone layer.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/time-for-liberals-and-progressives-to-get-new-labels/

We need to find a new label for the ideology espoused by leftist Democrats. “Liberal” doesn’t accurately describe the party of blinkered intolerance, fanatical certainty, and an eagerness to destroy freedom in order to achieve some dubious utopia. “Progressive” is more historically accurate for ideas that go back to a movement that started in the late 19th century. But it still suggests that lefties are the party of improvement and the future, when in fact they are reactionaries recycling failed ideas about as au courant as a Nehru jacket and a puka-shell necklace.

These labels, moreover, function like newspeak in Orwell’s 1984. They suggest that lib/progs are tolerant champions of individual freedom and rights, skeptical of old-fashioned group identity, believers in nuance and complexity, open to new ideas that challenge authority, and respectful of difference and diversity. Liberals fancy themselves the party of reason and truth, their views and ideas the consequence of education and nuanced thinking, and their prescriptions and policies the only viable way to improve human life and eliminate suffering and oppression.

Flip through any newspaper at random and you will find examples that show today’s lib/progs are exactly the opposite of those flattering clichés. Take global warming, back in the news recently after the announcement that last year’s average temperature was the highest on record. “The science is settled,” the lib/progs scold us, and there is a “consensus” that human activity is warming the planet to dangerous levels and causing more frequent catastrophic weather events. Those who challenge this “consensus” are “deniers,” either stooges of the oil companies or hopelessly ignorant rubes irrationally closing their eyes to an inconvenient truth.

But as Matt Ridley writes in The Wall Street Journal, this “settled science” in fact reflects a “monopoly that clings to one hypothesis (that carbon dioxide will cause dangerous global warming) and brooks less and less dissent. Again and again, climate skeptics are told they should respect the consensus, an admonition wholly against the tradition of science.” Thus the respecters of “complexity” and “science” unscientifically simplify the planet’s most complex system, one the mechanics of which we as yet don’t fully understand––certainly not enough to assert as revealed truth that increases in a trace gas in the atmosphere can drive the whole system. And the vicious shunning and slandering of anyone who practices the skepticism of received paradigms that has driven modern science, reveals that the champions of “diversity” and “tolerance” of ideas that challenge authority are in fact intolerant and irrational, more interested in ideology than in truth, and slaves to self-appointed authorities.

Similarly, the supposed believers in individual freedom and autonomy are the first to sacrifice both to the coercive power of the state and its bureaucratic minions. The most notorious recent example is the directive from Health and Human Services that Catholic institutions and businesses have to provide their employees with contraceptives including abortifacients, thus violating their religious beliefs. The lib/progs who regularly squeal about a fabricated First Amendment right to view pornography on a public library computer are perfectly happy to destroy that same amendment’s protection of the free exercise of religion and religious speech.

But this is just a more visible example of a phenomenon that has become so common that we hardly notice it anymore. Universities and colleges, those supposed lib/prog bastions of free inquiry and freewheeling debate, have been in the forefront of using institutional power to police speech and proscribe anything that violates the lib/prog ideology. The latest offender is the University of Delaware and its “anti-bullying” prohibition. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the university defines “bullying” as “[a]ny deliberately hurtful behavior, usually repeated over time, with the desired outcome of frightening, intimidating, excluding or degrading a person.” Examples include “teasing,” “ridiculing,” and “spreading of rumors.” As FIRE points out, “The broad wording of this policy makes it highly vulnerable to abuse, with the potential to silence a great deal of protected speech such as parody and satire (which often ridicule their targets) and political speech.”

So the same people who call Republican women “sluts,” who accuse the Tea Party of being “racist,” who depict black Republican Representative Allen West punching an old white woman, and who imply that Mitt Romney is a “felon,” a tax cheat, and possibly a murderer of a little old lady, are so worried that an 18-year-old might be teased and get his feelings hurt that they are willing to gut the First Amendment. So much for the “diversity” of ideas and the “tolerance” of opposing viewpoints, so much for the fealty to individual rights and the value of dissent against orthodoxy.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-greenfield/egypt%e2%80%99s-muslim-brotherhood-begins-descent-into-tyranny/

Barely two months after taking power, the Muslim Brotherhood has wasted no time in swiftly taking Egypt down the road to a totalitarian state. Its latest target is Al-Dustour, a Christian-owned newspaper, which had condemned President Morsi’s ties to Hamas as a threat to Egyptian national security. Al-Dustour was accused of sedition and stirring up sectarian discord—the latter is code for insulting Islam. Most dangerously, Al-Dustour implied that the Rafah attack had been backed by Morsi’s own Hamas allies to enable him to crack down on the domestic opposition.

Al-Dustour is not the first newspaper to be targeted by the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood has already used its parliamentary position to name dozens of new editors for Egypt’s major state-owned newspapers, including Al-Ahram. Akhbar Al-Youm, the second-largest newspaper in Egypt, will be run by a descendant of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Bana.

In response to the Islamist hijacking of the Egyptian press, many reporters have spoken out against the move and some have even gone on strike. But the Muslim Brotherhood’s assault on Al-Dustour is a warning that the days of independent newspapers opposed to the regime are numbered. Both Obama and the Muslim Brotherhood have suggested Islamist Turkey as the model for the new Egypt. Now the Muslim Brotherhood is imitating Erdogan’s crackdown on the military as well as his totalitarian control over the Turkish press.

In addition to the Muslim Brotherhood’s assault on the press, one television network, Al Fareen, has already been taken off the air. More are certain to follow. Khaled Salah, the editor of the Youm7 newspaper, was assaulted by Muslim Brotherhood protesters demanding the closure of AlFareen and the arrest of anyone who criticizes Morsi and the Brotherhood.

The Rafah attack by Islamist terrorists plotting to invade Israel that killed 16 Egyptian soldiers has been exploited by the Brotherhood to launch a domestic crackdown on the opposition. The Brotherhood has issued a statement blaming Israel for the attack. But in reality Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood have been the true beneficiaries of the violence.

Morsi has used the attack to sack top Egyptian military leaders including Egypt’s Defense Minister, its Chief of Staff, its head of the General Intelligence Service, its chief of the Presidential Guard and its head of the Republican Guard. The purge had little to do with making Egypt safer and a great deal to do with Morsi and the Brotherhood seizing the opportunity to displace their only real rivals in the country’s tangled power structure.

The Brotherhood has crowned itself with the “revolutionary” label, describing any attack on its power as an attack on the January 25 Revolution and its martyrs. That familiar use of language emphasizes that Egypt is a revolutionary state and is constantly struggling against seditious and subversive forces. And revolutionary states suppress dissent against revolutionary power through state terror.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s statement cynically conflated the Rafah attack with outcries and protests by the domestic opposition and exploited the deaths of Egyptian soldiers at the hands of Morsi’s allies to call for a crackdown on domestic opposition to the Brotherhood. It demanded harsh action against “the instigators of vandalism and subversion throughout the land and against their collaborators and agents involved in causing this deliberate confusion, chaos and mayhem across Egypt under the pretext of exercising freedom.” And it urged Egyptians to report any “subversion” to the authorities.

Another Muslim Brotherhood statement accused the Mossad of being behind the attack and followed that with a call for Egyptian military control of Sinai. Egypt trashing the Camp David Accords and rolling back whatever security there was in the Sinai for a hostile border between the two countries is not in Israel’s interests—but it is part and parcel of the Brotherhood’s war agenda.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/314030/cairo-packs-egypt-s-media-elliott-abrams The recent sacking of all of Egypt’s top military officials by its new Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohammed Morsi, was met with considerable approval in the West, including the United States. After all, the argument goes, he was elected, and don’t we all favor civilian control of the military? Why call this a Brotherhood power […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444318104577587322446430152.html?mod=opinion_newsreel

America’s real interests, he understands, come from our deepest values.

Last summer, the chairman of the House Budget Committee made a foray into foreign-policy land with a speech to the Alexander Hamilton Society in Washington, D.C. About 100 people showed up, and it got next to no coverage. That should now change—and not just because Paul Ryan’s views on America’s role in the world are no longer a matter of one Wisconsin congressman talking.

Here, in CliffsNotes form, is what the speech tells us about Mr. Ryan. First, that he’s an internationalist of the old school; in another day, he would have sat comfortably in the cabinets of Harry Truman, Jack Kennedy or Ronald Reagan. Also, that he believes in free trade, a strong defense, engagement with our allies—and expectations of them. Also, that he wants America to stay and win in Afghanistan. Furthermore, that he supports the “arduous task of building free societies,” even as he harbored early doubts the Arab Spring was the vehicle for building free societies.
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Columnist Bret Stephens provides an update on the Syrian civil war and military shake-up in Egypt. Photos: Associated Press

It tells us also that Mr. Ryan has an astute understanding of the fundamental challenge of China. “The key question for American policy makers,” he said, “is whether we are competing with China for leadership of the international system or against them over the fundamental nature of that system.”

What Mr. Ryan’s speech really tells us, however, is that he knows how to think.

Most foreign-policy speeches by American politicians take the form of untidy piles of verities and clichés. Here, for example, is Barack Obama on China: “As we look to the future, what’s needed, I believe, is a spirit of cooperation that is also friendly competition.” Here he is on the U.N.: “The United Nations can either be a place where we bicker about outdated differences or forge common ground.” Here he is to the British Parliament: “The time for our leadership is now.”

Mr. Ryan doesn’t have the president’s reputation for eloquence. Nor do his speeches ride on the windy drafts of “Yes We Can.” But unlike Mr. Obama, his speeches communicate ideas and arguments, not pieties and emotions.

Thus this speech begins not with a cliché but with a contention: “Our fiscal policy and our foreign policy are on a collision course.” It proceeds, briefly, to demonstrate the point quantitatively: Defense spending in 1970 consumed 39% of the federal budget but takes only 16% today. In the proverbial guns-to-butter ratio, our veins are already clogged.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444184704577587144261496760.html?mod=WSJ_article_MoreIn_Opinion The level of economic commentary during the presidential campaign has not been high. Democrats have accused Mitt Romney of the crime of shipping jobs abroad while at Bain Capital, and Mr. Romney has responded by denying the charge. No one takes the economically appropriate position for a job outsourcer: “Yes, I shipped some jobs […]

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012/08/14/holder-racial-preferences-needed-for-national-security/?print=1

The Eric Holder Justice Department has filed this brief in the United States Supreme Court defending racial preferences at the University of Texas. (Texas, by the way, is also vigorously defending the racial preferences.) Abigail Fisher, who is white, is challenging race preferences that cost her a slot at the University of Texas law school. Because the racial spoils go to Obama’s most loyal political constituency, people of color, naturally Eric Holder’s Justice Department is defending them by spending your tax dollars paying lawyers to write the brief.

None of that is a surprise. What is surprising is the argument the Justice Department makes in the brief — that racial preferences are vital to national security:

It is a pressing necessity in an era of intense competition in the global economy and ever evolving worldwide national-security threats. The government, moreover, has a vital interest in drawing its personnel — many of whom will eventually become its civilian and military leaders — from a well-qualified and diverse pool of university and service-academy graduates of all backgrounds who possess the understanding of diversity that is necessary to govern and defend the United States.

This might mark the first time the ideologues in the administration have placed national security topmost among their priorities — even if it is a phony argument.

Let’s consider one of the lawyers who signed the brief. Thanks to PJ Media’s Pulitzer-nominated/submitted Every Single One series, we know a great deal about the radical backgrounds of well over 100 new hires in the Justice Department. Sharon McGowan is a new Holder career civil service hire in the Appellate Section of the Civil Rights Division.

Sharon McGowan

Hans von Spakovsky at PJ Media:

Sharon McGowan: Prior to joining the Section, Ms. McGowan spent six years as a staff attorney at the ACLU, working on its Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) & AIDS Project. Her claim to fame there was that she brought a lawsuit against the Library of Congress on behalf of a Special Forces veteran who was denied a job after announcing his/her intention to transition from male to female. The case resulted in a dubious ruling by a hard-core liberal Clinton appointee (James Robertson, who mercifully has since retired from the bench) that Title VII’s prohibition on sex discrimination also protects individuals who are undergoing sex-change operations. Judge Robertson’s decision notwithstanding, I’m fairly confident that’s not what Congress had in mind when it passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Mia Love: The GOP’s Rising Star in Utah’s 4th Congressional District By Tom Thurlow

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/08/mia_love_the_gops_rising_star_in_utahs_4th_congressional_district.html

The Republican Party has a rising star in Utah’s newly created 4th congressional district: Tea Partier and former Saratoga Springs, Utah mayor Mia Love. If elected, the 36-year-old mother of three will be the GOP’s first black female member of Congress.

As with other Tea Party candidates, Love is not enamored with the out-of-control spending and economic mismanagement of the Obama administration. “I am laser-focused on getting our fiscal house in order and getting people back to work,” she told me in a recent e-mail exchange. “My pet issues are attacking the debt, reducing spending and fixing the economy.”

Love’s website is filled with strong conservative positions. “Washington does not have a revenue problem; it has a spending problem. Balancing the budget is only part of the solution. We must cut federal spending to begin to restore America’s economic strength and citizen liberties.”

If elected, Love plans on opposing the regulations of the Environment Protection Agency, known for its recent rules that will shut down much of the coal industry and throw millions out of work. The Departments of Energy and Education are also on her opposition list. “We must rein in some regulatory agencies and eliminate others,” she added.

Love has also pledged that if elected to Congress, she will join fellow black Republican Allen West as a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, which she hopes to “change from the inside out.” She recently told ABC News, “I told Congressman West to hang in there; reinforcements are coming.”

“I believe fiscal discipline, limited government, and personal responsibility are vital to a stronger America,” Love said. “Nowhere is this message more important than among the lawmakers who profit from promoting an unsustainable entitlement system rife with failed poverty programs that perpetuates the culture of government dependency and discourages self-reliance among black Americans. This is the antithesis of Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream.”

Paul Ryan recently appeared in Utah to campaign for Love before his pick as vice presidential nominee. He told a local newspaper that “we need people who are sincere reformers who will do what it takes to get the country back on track. I see that kind of person in Mia — a real leader with natural leadership skills, who’s not afraid to make tough calls and do what needs to be done to save the country from a debt crisis.”

Love would know about managing public money and making tough decisions. Her website recounts how as councilmember and later mayor of Saratoga Springs, Love oversaw extreme growth followed by economic retrenchment that meant having to cut city services. After examining the city’s needs, Love and the city council made the necessary cuts to keep essential city services and keep taxes low. Following her election, one of Love’s first acts as mayor was to reduce the property tax. She points out that while many cities saw their credit ratings cut, the City of Saratoga Springs, Utah, was one of the few municipalities that weathered the financial crisis and kept its highest-possible rating with Standard and Poor’s.

Love is the proud daughter of Haitian immigrants who came to the United States with only $10, hoping to achieve the American dream. While her mother cleaned houses and worked at a nursing home, her father worked for a painting company and drove school buses and cleaned toilets for a local school.

“I am a product of that hard work,” she told Yahoo News, “a product of the American dream.”

President Obama’s recent comments about successful people not succeeding on their own struck a nerve with her. “Entrepreneurs are the backbone of the U.S. economy,” Love told me. “Obama basically said that success is not about individual effort and that is ridiculous. My dad scrubbed toilets. He did it himself. Obama didn’t scrub toilets for him.”

Recently Love was campaigning, and she came across an owner of a bar-be-que restaurant who was also incensed about Obama’s comments. “He told me that this election is not political for him; it is completely personal. His small business affects everything in his life. He told me, ‘having you walk into my business and ask how I am doing and what we can do to make it better is important to me.'”

Understandably, liberals are getting nervous. In a recent analysis of the race, The Daily Kos called Mia Love a “token black Republican” and said that she was “one of the two African Americans in Utah not playing for the Jazz [basketball team].”

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2012/08/13/Egypt-Refusing-All-Contact-With-Israel-Post-Government-Shakeup
With a large Egyptian military buildup ongoing on the Sinai Peninsula, and coup-like consolidation of power to the Muslim Brotherhood over the weekend, Egypt is now refusing to speak to Israel. After last week’s attack on the Israeli border by Islamist militants operating out of the Sinai, Israel agreed to ease the restrictions of the 1979 peace treaty on Egyptian military operations in the Sinai, hoping Egypt would be able to bring the increasing lawlessness on the peninsula under control.

“It is too early to say what will happen because everything is evolving in Egypt, but we are following what is happening there with great concern”, said an Israeli government official. “Military cooperation is more necessary than ever to re-establish order along the border and in Sinai. The new leadership in the Egyptian army knows that, but the question is what does the Egyptian leadership want? This question has not yet been answered because the new Egyptian government is refusing all contact with Israel”.

http://times247.com/
Michelle uses cancer scare on campaign trail
Who knew that cancer would emerge as a leitmotif of the Obama campaign? First Lady Michelle Obama is the latest to invoke cancer on the campaign trail, but she did so to tout Obamacare rather than attack Mitt Romney directly.

“But this election is also a choice about the health of our families,” Mrs. Obama said at a fundraiser this evening. “We all know these stories — the grandparents who couldn’t afford their medications; the families going broke because a child got sick; the woman dying of cancer whose insurance company wouldn’t cover her care. And let me tell you something, that’s what kept Barack going day after day.”

Moments later, she asked (without naming Romney), “Do we want these reforms to be repealed? Because there are those who do. Or do we want the people we love to have the care they need? That’s the choice we face.”

Read more: http://times247.com/articles/flotus-gop-would-repeal-law-that-saves-women-from-dying-of-cancer#ixzz23bqF0KBn

Romney reaps over 40 percent of key youth vote
For the first time since he began ru…
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Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz23bqUXRh3

State workers forced to attend Democratic dinner
The Gateway Pundit
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Blogs
State workers forced to attend Democratic dinner
Whistle-blower documents reveal that Illinois state employees were forced to attend a Jesse Jackson Jr.-Nancy Pelosi dinner on the taxpayer dime. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz23bqtvXhD
Ryan rips Obama on Keystone, energy policy
Los Angeles Times
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
News
Vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan riled the crowd of a Colorado high school Tuesday by criticizing President Obama’s energy policies and pledging to lift regulations and open the Keystone Pipeline, a promise that went over well with an exuberant crowd here. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz23brBSs4m
Islamists named editors of Egypt state-run media
Investigative Project on Terrorism
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
News
A controversy has erupted over the appointment of Islamist editors for Egypt’s state-run media, reports Al-Masri Al-Youm’s English language website, the Egypt Independent. The move allows Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood to translate political dominance to media monopolization. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz23brU2AXC