RUTHFULLY YOURS

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 […]

http://www.ynetnews.com/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506,L-4266256,00.html

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 […]

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/jewish_gal_shows_up_ioc_with_gold_6OBzi2VCkaszwS0ij3n7OI

It wasn’t a gloved-fist salute from the medal stand, but Jewish-American gymnast Aly Raisman made quite a statement yesterday by winning a gold medal and invoking the memory of the Israeli athletes killed 40 years ago in Munich.

Raisman finished first in the women’s floor exercise, but she deserves to have another medal draped around her neck for having the chutzpah to face the world and do what needed to be done and say what needed to be said.

At the same Olympic Games where bigoted organizers stubbornly refuse to honor the slain athletes with a moment of silence, 18-year-old Raisman loudly shocked observers first by winning, then by paying her own tribute to 11 sportsmen who died long before she was born.
GYM DANDY: Jewish-American gymnast Aly Raisman dazzles the London Games yesterday with her Olympic gold-medal floor routine set to the crowd-pleasing “Hava Nagila.”
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And if that weren’t enough, she won her event with the Hebrew folk song “Hava Nagila” playing in the background.

“Having that floor music wasn’t intentional,” an emotional but poised Raisman told reporters after her performance.

“But the fact it was on the 40th anniversary is special, and winning the gold today means a lot to me.”

Then Raisman stuck the landing.

“If there had been a moment’s silence,” the 18-year-old woman told the world, “I would have supported it and respected it.”

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/davidhornik/israel%e2%80%99s-sinai-dilemmas/ On Sunday night, terrorists at the Egyptian-Israeli border stormed a checkpoint and massacred 16 Egyptian border guards there. They then drove two vehicles toward Israel with the aim of perpetrating a mass-casualty attack against Israeli civilians—thwarted by the combined efforts of the Israeli ground forces and air force. Yet, according to official statements of […]

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/humberto-fontova/che-guevara-idolator-%e2%80%9cfeels-pain%e2%80%9d-of-pinochet%e2%80%99s-victims/

In the Robert Redford production The Motorcycle Diaries, Mexican-born actor Gael Garcia Bernal reveled in the role of Ernesto Guevara. “I cannot remember when I didn’t know about Che,” he sighed during an interview in 2004:

“Che has so much to do with your ideals as a young man. His mythification, Che the icon, is not three-dimensional. To have the T-shirt doesn’t mean much. With the film, we wanted to bring that character closer to ourselves.”

Now, in the movie “No,” Bernal is playing the role of Rene Saavedra, a Chilean PR man mounting a press campaign against Chilean President Augusto Pinochet during a 1988 referendum. The movie’s title “No” refers to how the Bernal character wants Chileans to vote regarding Pinochet’s continuation as Chilean President.

“This made me realize the profound pain caused by the (Pinochet) dictatorship and it hit me hard,” he told The Associated Press this week in Santiago Chile. “The director wanted to make a movie about the history of what went on in 1988, as well as an introspection and reflection on democracy.”

While prepping for his role as Che in The Motorcycle Diaries, Bernal admits to often visiting Cuba for coaching by the Stalinist regime’s KGB-founded propaganda ministry. The regime co-founded by Che Guevara has banned voting under penalty of firing squad and prison for half a century.

After 14 years in power, Pinochet allowed a vote that ousted him. After 53 years, the regime co-founded by Che Guevara still outlaws it.

But we search in utter vain for any expression of “pain” felt by Bernal on behalf of Cubans, or any “reflection” by him (on the extinction of) Cuban democracy for a period over three times as long as its absence in Chile.

But why pick on Gael Garcia Bernal?

Back in 2006, Fidel Castro got sick and seemed on his deathbed shortly before Augusto Pinochet passed away. So both names were much in the news. This provided a controlled setting, a veritable laboratory, for testing media bias.

The terms “human rights abuses,” along with “murders and tortures” appeared consistently in the articles on one Latin American leader, while being almost completely absent from stories about the other.

One leader jailed more political prisoners as a percentage of population than Stalin—and for three times as long. Modern history’s longest-suffering political prisoners languished in the prisons and forced-labor camps established by his regime. According to the Harvard-published “Black Book of Communism,” he executed 16,000 subjects by firing squad. These ranged in age from 16 to 68 and included women, at least one of them pregnant. According to the scholars and researchers at the Cuba Archive, his regime’s total death toll—from torture, prison beatings, machine gunning of escapees, drownings, etc.—comes to more than 100,000. According to Freedom House, 500,000 Cubans have suffered in his gulag and torture chambers. Today, 53 years after the establishment of the totalitarian police state, political prisoners still languish in his regime’s prisons for quoting Martin Luther King and Gandhi.

He is the one where the news articles omitted the terms “human rights abuses, torture and murders” and where “gains in health care and literacy” predominated

One led a coup to oust a Marxist regime that had been declared unconstitutional by his nation’s legislature and Supreme Court. In the “dirty war” immediately following the coup, 3,000 people were killed and 30,000 arrested. Within a few years, all had been released or exiled.

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/

Some are concerned that voting machines will alter the results of the 2012 election. A new book by John Fund and PJ Media’s Hans von Spakovsky demonstrates that all of us should be concerned about the machinery of American elections, not the machines themselves.

Who’s Counting: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk (Encounter Books, 2012) is essential to understanding the electoral mechanisms that will decide the November elections. The authors debunk voter fraud deniers with case after case of fraud, and explain how the fraud affects public policy.

Consider the clown who went to Congress, Al Franken. Who’s Counting asks and answers the question “Would Obamacare have passed without voter fraud?” The answer, according to the authors, is no.
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They document how felons like Sabrina Ruth Hall illegally voted for Franken. When she was asked on camera if her vote might have helped Franken, she unashamedly replied, “I don’t know, but I hope it did.” Naturally, Eric Holder has failed to prosecute Hall under 42 U.S.C. § 1973gg-10(2), a statute which criminalizes casting an illegitimate ballot in a federal election.

But Holder isn’t alone in failing to uphold the rule of law. The authors also call out John Kingrey, the head of the Minnesota County Attorneys Association. Minnesota actually makes it a crime for a prosecutor to fail to investigate when presented with sworn evidence of voter fraud. Why didn’t Kingrey advocate investigations into the rampant election fraud in 2008? According to Kingrey, that course of action “diverted resources from the job that we want to do.” Kingrey was more interested in engagement on legislation related to bong water.

Von Spakovsky and Fund document how the left is outgunning conservatives on election process weaponry. While the Minnesota recount was occurring, GOP lawyers were armed with clipboards and pens. In contrast, for Franken’s “scanners, laptops, and other mobile devices were used to keep track of every single disputed ballot in every county in Minnesota. Decisions made by local election boards were immediately uploaded to a cloud database set up by the campaign so that [Franken’s team] knew exactly what vote totals were for each candidate … at every point in time.”

The authors also describe the vast and well-funded apparatus of vote fraud deniers and their litigation counterparts like the NAACP LDF, Brennan Center for Justice, and the wholly partisan League of Women Voters.

Sometimes the activities of the partisans take comic turns, as happened to the League of Women Voters in a challenge to the Indiana voter ID law. The LWV had produced a “victim” who could not vote because she purportedly lacked photo ID. It turns out that she couldn’t vote in Indiana because she had produced a Florida driver’s license, was registered to vote in Florida, and declared a Florida homestead exemption. Such is the stuff that partisans like the League of Women Voters will use to attack election integrity measures, as documented in Who’s Counting.