RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/print/wheres-the-concern-over-private-sector-furloughs

In 2009, President Obama told Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA), “Elections have consequences, and I won.” As with his healthcare law, amid this year’s impasse, he said “there will be no negotiations on the debt ceiling” and “I shouldn’t have to offer anything” in dealing with Republicans. To ensure that Americans got the message, the National Park Service was told “to make life as difficult for people as we can,” one frustrated ranger informed reporters.

As the White House, Democrats and Republicans remain at an impasse over debt limits, the budget and the growing disaster that is Obamacare, the situation has become surreal.

Some 800,000 federal workers were furloughed without pay, and the economic ripples caused many local businesses to lose revenues. The pain is palpable. But for government workers it is only temporary.

The House voted to restore the government employees’ paychecks once the brinkmanship is over; the Senate will almost certainly follow. That’s how previous shutdowns were handled. Moreover, the Defense Department has already brought back most of its 350,000 furloughed civilian workers.

However, those local private sector workers will never recoup their lost income – and that’s only the leading edge of the economic tsunami, and the way the President runs his Executive Branch.

Death benefits were withheld from grieving families of heroes killed in Afghanistan. The Park Service permitted House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to lead an immigration rally on the National Mall, but closed the World War II Memorial to aging veterans who had arrived on Honor Flights. The vets breeched the “Barackades,” and the “Spite House” backed off – but only for veterans, and not elsewhere.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-hyena-cure/ The World Health Organization estimates that 1 in 3 Somalis are mentally ill due to their country’s constant violence and abuse of the Khat narcotic. Somali science however came up with a surefire cure for the crazies. Lock the patient up in a room with a hyena and wait for the ugly beast to […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/robert-spencer/a-terror-mastermind-comes-to-new-york/ In a revealing move, the Obama Administration has announced its intention to try captured al-Qaeda jihad terrorist Abu Anas al-Libi in federal court in New York City. Al-Libi, who was involved in the jihad bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, has been held for the last week and a half […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/education-week/360874/wannabe-oppressed-stanley-kurtz

What do America’s college students want? They want to be oppressed. More precisely, a surprising number of students at America’s finest colleges and universities wish to appear as victims — to themselves, as well as to others — without the discomfort of actually experiencing victimization. Here is where global warming comes in. The secret appeal of campus climate activism lies in its ability to turn otherwise happy, healthy, and prosperous young people into an oppressed class, at least in their own imaginings. Climate activists say to the world, “I’ll save you.” Yet deep down they’re thinking, “Oppress me.”

In his important new book, The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse: Save the Earth, Punish Human Beings, French intellectual gadfly Pascal Bruckner does the most thorough job yet of explaining the climate movement as a secular religion, an odd combination of deformed Christianity and reconstructed Marxism. (You can find Bruckner’s excellent article based on the book here.) Bruckner describes a historical process wherein “the long list of emblematic victims — Jews, blacks, slaves, proletarians, colonized peoples — was replaced, little by little, with the Planet.” The planet, says Bruckner, “has become the new proletariat that must be saved from exploitation.”

But why? Bruckner finds it odd that a “mood of catastrophe” should prevail in the West, the most well-off part of the world. The reason, I think, is that the only way to turn the prosperous into victims is to threaten the very existence of a world they otherwise command.

And why should the privileged wish to become victims? To alleviate guilt and to appropriate the victim’s superior prestige. In the neo-Marxist dispensation now regnant on our college campuses, after all, the advantaged are ignorant and guilty while the oppressed are innocent and wise. The initial solution to this problem was for the privileged to identify with “struggling groups” by wearing, say, a Palestinian keffiyeh. Yet better than merely empathizing with the oppressed is to be oppressed. This is the climate movement’s signal innovation.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/361340/print

If you lose the spending war on the airwaves, you’re likely to lose on Election Day.

As Virginia’s gubernatorial race enters its final stretch, Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s campaign has been re-running an ad from earlier in the year.

The ad, “Too Important,” is designed to promote McAuliffe as a bipartisan dealmaker, but it also features outgoing governor Bob McDonnell quite a bit, as one of the heroes of the story, bedeviled by Cuccinelli and “tea-party Republicans” until McAuliffe arrives to save the day:

McAuliffe’s willingness to associate himself with McDonnell — over a tax increase! — points to the fallacy of one of the more popular theories of this year’s election in Virginia: that the scandal surrounding McDonnell’s acceptance of more than $145,000 in gifts and loans from a wealthy donor, Jonnie Williams Sr., CEO of Star Scientific, is hurting Cuccinelli. (McDonnell is limited to one term.)

The scandal certainly doesn’t help the Republican candidate, of course, but McDonnell regularly polled better than Cuccinelli this year, even after details of the scandal emerged.

A Quinnipiac survey in late August found 47 percent approving of McDonnell’s performance in office, with 39 percent disapproving; At the same time, that pollster found Cuccinelli with only 42 percent head-to-head against McAuliffe and only 35 percent saying they had a favorable opinion of Cuccinelli.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303382004579130042181662318?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop An ideal agreement would force Iran to stop all uranium enrichment. Most of the other alternatives are bad. Hopes are running high in many quarters that the West and Iran could begin to work out a deal over the Iranian nuclear program this week in Geneva. As the Iranian deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4018/islamist-trojan-horse First, the “closest enemy” must be destroyed, the leaders of Arab countries aligned with the West; after that, the “distant enemy, ” the Christian West. The masses of the Middle East thirst for the quality of life in the West as they see it through the media; the Islamist leaders desire the total alienation […]

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/10/10/mr-obama-presidency-is-no-place-for-amateurs/

Edward Klein is the former editor-in-chief of The New York Times Magazine. His latest book is “The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House” (Regnery 2012) which has just been released in paperback.

“I sit here all day trying to persuade people to do the things they ought to have sense enough to do without my persuading them,” Harry Truman once lamented. “That’s all the powers of the President amount to.”

As usual, the plain-speaking Truman got it right: presidential power is the power to persuade. Too bad the current occupant of the White House has never learned this basic lesson.

Barack Obama’s refusal to negotiate with the Republicans in Congress on the government shutdown is proof once again that he doesn’t understand the first thing about presidential leadership.

The one-time constitutional lawyer fails to grasp the fact that the president of the United States does not obtain results by giving orders.

Strangely enough, this one-time constitutional lawyer fails to grasp the fact that the president of the United States does not obtain results by giving orders.

Thanks to our Constitution’s separation of powers, he can’t get action without bargaining with Congress. The presidency and Congress are inextricably linked; one can’t govern without the other.

http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2013/10/16/prime-minister-netanyahu-hajj-amin-el-husseinis-animating-ideology-was-islam-not-nazism/ During his October 6, 2013 speech at Bar Ilan University, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alluded to the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin el-Husseini. Mr. Netanyahu characterized el-Husseini as, “the undisputed leader of the Palestinian national movement in the first half of the 20th century.” The Prime Minister highlighted the ex-Muft’s role in fomenting […]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/CEN-01-151013.html

A REVIEW OF Implosion: The End of Russia and What It Means for America by Ilan Berman

Since the fall of communism in 1991, Washington consistently underestimated Russia. American policy in consequence has crashed and burned repeatedly: in the Ukraine, where the American-backed “Orange Revolution” of 2004 collapsed in favor of an administration friendly to Moscow; in 2008, when America backed Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s attempt to incorporate Russian-majority provinces on Georgia’s borders; and in 2013, when Russia trumped American in the Middle East and took the diplomatic lead in the Syrian chemical weapons crisis.

American diplomats have had their heads handed to them byMoscow yet again. If they are so poor, how come they ain’t dumb? Americans play Monopoly; Russians play chess. Russia has found the fault lines in American policy and compensated for its light footprint with superior leverage. In particular, Russia has exploited the timidity of the last two US administrations towards Iran, presenting itself as the purveyor of a solution to problems it helped to create. In terms of technique, Moscow’s performance is praiseworthy, even if its intent is malicious.

Russia, to be sure, is in crisis. But Russia has been in crisis since Peter the Great build modern Russia with one foot in Siberia and the other in Eastern Europe. It is not a nation-state but an empire, badly constituted from the beginning. Russia always taxed its European provinces to support uneconomic expansion in its Far East, a policy that collapsed between the 1905 war with Japan and the 1914-1918 war with Germany. Russia regained its eastern influence in 1945 and lost it in 1989.

Its population has declined from a peak of 149 million in 1992 to 143 million in 2012 and threatens to decline even faster. Russia’s demographics are weak, although it is worth asking whether they are much weaker than in 1945, after Russia had lost 15% of its total population in war, not to mention a great deal of its productive capacity and infrastructure. That didn’t stop the Soviet Union from building thermonuclear bombs and ICBMs and beating America into space. The Soviet economy suffered from the equivalent of arteriosclerosis, but it nearly won the Cold War. Putin’s economy has suffered a string of self-inflicted failures, but that doesn’t remove Russia from the field.