RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://spectator.org/archives/2012/08/13/romney-ryan-the-turnaround-boy

Who else but Paul Ryan for veep, indeed?

Mitt Romney’s choice of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan as his running mate demonstrates a boldness and strength in Romney that few other actions could have proved. Ryan is the best choice logically, politically, and substantively and, in Ryan, Mr. Romney has chosen a running mate that is his peer, not just a caboose on a long, heavy campaign train.

As I wroteback in April, Ryan is a fact-driven choice that will help Romney among all the key groups — conservatives, moderates, and independents alike — who can now be motivated enough to turn out and vote.

The first fact is that Ryan is Romney’s peer: a man of strong character and political achievements who could be a powerful part of a Romney administration. As the Almanac of American Politics says of Ryan, he is “regarded as an intellectual leader in the GOP for his unrivaled influence on fiscal matters.” That intellectual horsepower is one of the first things that come up whenever you talk to the people who know Ryan best, the House members who have worked with him for years.

One of them is Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), one of the strong conservatives who has been fighting the good fight against Obama’s spending spree. (Pence is running for governor of Indiana this year.) Shortly after Romney and Ryan appeared on Saturday announcing Ryan’s selection, Pence told me, “I have known and worked with Paul Ryan for the past twelve years and count him as a personal friend. Paul has the character, intellect and optimistic vision our next president will need at his side to turn this economy around and put Hoosiers back to work. Paul Ryan also possesses an understanding of the federal budget that our next administration will need to restore fiscal solvency and save future generations from massive deficits and debt.”

Ryan’s intellect is matched by his debating and speaking skills. In February 2010, at Obama’s “summit meeting” on Obamacare, Ryan –politely and firmly — schooled the president on the devastating impact Obamacare will have on the budget, on Medicare, and on our economy. After Joe Biden dissed the Republicans by saying they weren’t qualified to speak for the American people, Ryan told Obama: “…I respectfully disagree with the vice president about what the American people are or are not saying or whether we’re qualified to speak on their behalf. So we are all representatives of the American people. We all do town hall meetings. We all talk to our constituents. And I’ve got to tell you, the American people are engaged. And if you think they want a government takeover of health care, I would respectfully submit you’re not listening to them.” (It’s worth watching the whole six-minute video you’ll findhere.)

Ryan is the logical and substantive choice because Obama and congressional Dems have made it clear — by pre-emptively demonizing Ryan’s budget “Roadmap” — that they will make the roadmap a key issue this year. They want to continue demonizing it, making false accusations such as that it won’t cut the deficit and will destroy Medicare. Who better to not only defend it, but to take the fight to Obama and Biden than the man who wrote the Ryan Roadmap?

The latest version of the Ryan plan — which has twice passed the House by large margins — was scored in 2010 by the Congressional Budget Office. On January 27, 2010 CBO reported:

• Federal government debt and spending — on Obama’s course –will reach 223% of the Gross Domestic Product by 2040. Ryan’s plan reduces that to 99%. (That was before Obamacare, which adds –according to the Senate Budget Committee Republicans — about $17 trillion in unfunded debt over the next 75 years.)

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Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz23QAvO0Wy
Social Security surplus dwindles as boomers retire
Associated Press
Sunday, August 12, 2012
News
As millions of baby boomers flood Social Security with applications for benefits, the program’s $2.7 trillion surplus is starting to look small. Since 2010, Social Security has been paying out more in benefits than it collects in taxes, adding to the urgency for Congress to address the program’s long-term finances. Read more…

Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz23QBL1E8D

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/robert-spencer/christie%e2%80%99s-embrace-of-islamo-fascists/ New Jersey Governor Chris Christie held an Iftar dinner at the Governor’s Mansion in late July. He took the opportunity to declare himself a foursquare tool of jihadists and Islamic supremacists, and even adopted their language in deriding those who have pointed out how he has allowed himself to be compromised by them. Christie […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/humberto-fontova/chick-fil-a-mayor-vernon-gray-and-%e2%80%9chate-speech-%e2%80%9d/print/

For expressing the opinion of the majority of voters in the 31 states where gay marriage was put to a vote, Chick-fil-A’s president Dan Cathy is accused of “hate speech” by D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray. Such is the mayor’s revulsion that he has threatened to mimic Lester Maddox circa 1962 and stand at his city gates wielding an ax handle to bar restaurant Chick-fil-A’s entry into his municipal domain.

Washington D.C’s black mayor is a prominent patron of his hometown restaurant/bookstore Busboys and Poets, billed by its owner as “The Cultural Hub of the Black Community,” and known as “a haven for writers, thinkers and performers from America’s progressive social and political movements.”

This restaurant features posters of Che Guevara on its walls and Che Guevara’s books in its adjoining bookstore. Busboys and Poets also sponsors tours of Cuba in partnership with Castro’s Stalinist regime. Every penny spent by Mayor Gray’s starry-eyed constituents on these Potemkin tours lands in the pockets of the only regime in the Western Hemisphere to herd thousands of men and boys into forced labor camps at Soviet-bayonet point for the crime of fluttering their eyelashes, flapping their hands and talking with a lisp. Every penny spent in Cuba by these progressive writers and artists enriches the only regime in the Western Hemisphere to fuel bonfires with Orwell’s Animal Farm, The UN Declaration of Human Rights and the writings of Martin Luther King Jr.

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/what-the-ryan-choice-means-for-november/

Last week’s poll numbers seemingly confirmed the doubts about democracy’s viability expressed in last week’s column. After a barrage of outrageous smears fired off by the Obama campaign, which accused Romney of killing a woman with cancer and failing to pay any income tax, Obama is leading Romney by 7-9 points. Coming on top of the continuing approval of Obama’s economically disastrous, class-envious assault on the “rich,” the success of patent lies in improving Obama’s numbers makes one think that democracy’s critics may be right: most people lack the ability to see past their selfish, short-term interests and make electoral decisions that benefit the state as a whole.

But let’s not give up on democracy yet. Mitt Romney’s pick of Paul Ryan as his vice-presidential candidate should give us hope that maybe a critical mass of Americans will rise above petty self-interest and do what must be done to keep the United States from morphing into California on its way to becoming Greece on steroids.

Judged solely on political expediency, Romney’s choice seems a disaster. According to “one of the country’s most prominent and influential conservatives,” as the Huffington Post claims of its anonymous commentator, Ryan is too much like Romney, a wonky white guy too polished and detached from the average American. Ryan, this unknown Solon continues, can’t deliver any electoral votes, is too obsessive about the deficit, has been tarred by his zeal to reform Medicare, and fails the “3 A.M. crisis call” test. No wonder some Democrats are happy about the choice. “Democrats are gleefully united in bashing Rep. Paul Ryan,” Politico’s John Bresnahan writes, “blasting him as the author of the controversial ‘Ryan budget,’ claiming his proposals ‘end Medicare,’ and warning that his policies will return the country to the ‘trickle-down economics’ of the 1980s and the presidency of George W. Bush.”

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/frontpagemag-com/not-for-conservatives-only-on-the-brewster-gang/ On this week’s Brewster Gang, Eric Allen Bell, Dwight Schultz and Susan Olsen gathered to discuss Not For Conservatives Only. The discussion focused on why mostly conservatives are confronting the truth about Islamic totalitarianism — while the Left shows complete indifference. Below is Part I of a three part series. We will run Part […]

http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2012/08/11/egypt-there-goes-the-free-media/?print=1

So can you write “Arab Spring,” “free elections,” “democracy in Egypt,” and such things 100 times? This just might be somewhat in contradiction to the fact that:

Muslim Brotherhood President al-Mursi has just removed the two commanding generals of the Egyptian military. Does he have a right to do this? Who knows?There’s no constitution. That means all we were told about not having to worry because the generals would restrain the Brotherhood was false. Moreover, the idea that the army, and hence the government, may fear to act lest they lose U.S. aid will also be false. There is no parliament at present He is now the democratically elected dictator of Egypt. True, he picked another career officer but he has now put forward the principle: he decides who runs the army. The generals can still advise Mursi. He can choose to listen to them or not. But there is no more dual power in Egypt but only one leader. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces which has run Egypt since February 2011 is gone. Only Mursi remains and Egypt is now at his mercy.

Oh and to put the icing on the cake, Mursi will apparently decide who will be on the commission that writes the new Consttitution.

Behind the scenes note: Would Mursi dared have done this if he thought Obama would come down on him like a ton of bricks? Would the army give up if they thought America was behind it? No on both counts.

This is a coup. Mursi is bound by no constitution. He can do as he pleases unless someone is going to stop him. And the only candidate–the military–is fading fast, far faster than even we pessimists would have predicted.

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/

A witch hunt to track down whistleblowers has commenced at Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security. Sources tell PJ Media that DHS policy drafts regarding amnesty programs have been pipelining to Republican congressional offices. As a result, political appointees at DHS are feeling the heat and have commenced a witch hunt to track down the sources of the leaks – conducting interviews bordering on interrogations.

One such policy draft sent straight to GOP congressional offices included a memo titled “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.” A July draft of the document shows an effort by DHS political appointees to suspend laws against illegal aliens remaining in the United States. Another source tells PJ Media that DHS doesn’t want robust standards to establish the actual identities of the illegal aliens. They have been instructed to overlook inconsistent tax records and other red flags about the actual identity of the aliens.

The DHS amnesty draft also reveals embarrassing errors, such as not labeling Hawaii as part of the United States.

The memo obtained by PJ Media inartfully states:

The centers, which are located throughout the United States and its outlying territories to include Hawaii, Guam, and Saipan, facilitate the capture of fingerprints and biometric data.

The policy draft specifically allows some illegal aliens to remain in the United States even if they are convicted of a crime – as long as the crime was punishable by five days or less.

http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/the-un-file-let-us-now-thank-sudan/?singlepage=true

Sudan’s regime is not, as a rule, a venture that inspires thank you notes. Sudan is a sinkhole of repression, violence, and even slavery. Its president, Omar al-Bashir, is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide. Its security forces are notorious for arbitrary arrests, rape, and torture, which, as the U.S. State Department notes, they usually commit with impunity. And, courtesy of Amnesty International, you can read here about the case of 23-year-old Layla Ibrahim Issa Jumul, who just last month, convicted in Sudan of adultery, was sentenced to be stoned to death.

Now, as UN Watch notes, “It’s Official: Genocidal Sudan Running Uncontested for U.N. Human Rights Council Seat.” Word of this, first reported by UN Watch, had been circulating for weeks. The UN General Assembly, which oversees the Human Rights Council, and votes on who fills these seats, had coyly refrained until this past week from posting Sudan’s candidacy on the web site for the Human Rights Council elections. But here it is, the official site, where Sudan now shows up as one of five African nations running for five seats allotted in this election to Africa. In other words, Sudan’s run is uncontested. Unless competition materializes before the election takes place this November, it’s highly likely that Sudan will win a seat on the UN Human Rights Council.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/no-future-in-france-dire-times-for-french-jews/?print=1

“Any time young people approach me in order to get married, I ask them various questions about their future. Eighty percent of them say they do not envision any future in France.” This is what one rabbi in Paris told me last week. I heard similar statements from other French rabbis and lay Jewish leaders: “We have a feeling the words are on the wall now,” one leader in the Lyons area confided to me. “It is not just our situation in this country deteriorating; it is also that the process is much quicker than expected.”

Even the chief rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, may be sharing that view now. A philosopher (holding a prestigious French agrégation degree in philosophy), a graduate of the French Rabbinical School in Paris, and a former student at some of the most orthodox yeshivoth (Talmudic academies) in Jerusalem, Bernheim was until recently very eager to reconcile traditional Judaism with Europe’s “open society.” He has just devoted a book to France as a nation and how Jews can contribute to France’s public debates (N’oublions Pas De Penser La France [1]), and in 2008, the year he was elected chief rabbi, he coauthored a book on Judeo-Christian dialogue (Le Rabbin et le Cardinal [2]) with Cardinal Philippe Barbarin.

Despite all that, Bernheim suddenly warned Jewish leaders a few weeks ago about a growing “rejection” of Jews and Judaism in France, something he linked to the global passing of “Judeo-Christian values” in French society as a whole.

The immediate reason for Jewish pessimism in France and for Bernheim’s change of heart may be the Toulouse massacre [3] last March: the murder in cold blood of three Jewish children and a Jewish teacher by Mohamed Merah, a Muslim terrorist, on their school’s premises. This crime, instead of instilling more compassion and understanding towards the Jewish community, has actually generated more anti-Jewish violence and hate talk, as if Merah was not seen as a vile thug but rather as a model by parts of the population.