RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444025204577547141392397120.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion

Last night New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg made an extraordinarily dangerous and radical pronouncement. He was appearing on CNN’s “Piers Morgan Tonight” when the host asked him: “Why do so many Americans not feel angry enough to demand further gun control?” Here’s his answer:

Well, I would take it one step further. I don’t understand why the police officers across this country don’t stand up collectively and say, we’re going to go on strike. We’re not going to protect you. Unless you, the public, through your legislature, do what’s required to keep us safe.

After all, police officers want to go home to their families. And we’re doing everything we can to make their job more difficult but, more importantly, more dangerous, by leaving guns in the hands of people who shouldn’t have them, and letting people who have those guns buy things like armor-piercing bullets.

The Puffington Host reports that Bloomberg is not standing behind his statement: “According to a tweet from New York Times reporter Kate Taylor, Bloomberg tried to walk that statement back on Tuesday. ‘I don’t mean literally go on strike,’ Bloomberg said, according to Taylor. ‘In fact in New York they can’t go on strike–there’s a law against it.’ ”

We are unable to comprehend what Bloomberg could have in mind when he says he didn’t mean his comment “literally.” Last year, when lefties went hysterical over “violent” and “eliminationist” rhetoric from the right, it was clear that almost all of the examples they cited were not literal. Politicians and political observers have long drawn metaphors from the language of combat. Some such metaphors, like the word “campaign,” are so ingrained in the language that they are dead ones.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303933704577532994127093660.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
ANDREW ROBERTS’ BOOK THE STORM OF WAR IS ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS ON WORLD WAR 11…..RSK

Enjoy the sports competition, but shield yourself from the self-congratulation about world peace.

The 2012 Olympiad, which opens in London on Friday, will doubtless witness another astonishing exhibition of sporting endurance and excellence. It will also see yet another outburst of utter drivel from its organizers about what the Games themselves can achieve for the human spirit. Enjoy the former by all means; abjure the latter at all costs.

“The longest national Olympic torch relay in history will create a spirit of community and world citizenship,” claimed the president of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge, in 2009, adding this year that, “Through the Olympic spirit, we can instill brotherhood, respect, fair play, gender equality and even combat doping.” Like every IOC president, he is repeating the view of the modern Games’ inventor, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who in 1892 stated that the Olympic ideal represented, “The true Free Trade of the future; and the day it is introduced the cause of peace will have received a new and strong ally.”

For all that the IOC trots out these platitudes, the fact remains that if anything it has caused more international bitterness and resentment than it has calmed. Far from finding “a new and strong ally” in the Games, the cause of world peace has been betrayed by the IOC time and again.

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/07/the_commies_commie.html

The Communist who’s the subject of the stunning new biography by Paul Kengor is Frank Marshall Davis. He’s the black poet, journalist, and activist whom the young Barack Obama hung out with as a teenager in Hawaii, then wrote a weird, disturbingly affectionate poem about entitled “Pop” while a student at Occidental College. He’s the man whom President Obama describes as his mentor in the latter’s autobiography, Dreams from My Father.

Here’s Kengor’s summary of the man our president so admires:

Frank Marshall Davis was a pro-Soviet, pro-Red China, card-carrying member of Communist Party USA (CPUSA). His Communist Party card number was 47544. He did endless Soviet propaganda work in his newspaper columns, at every juncture agitating and opposing U.S. attempts to slow down Stalin and Mao in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He favored Red Army takeovers of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Central and Eastern Europe as a whole. In China, he urged America to dump the “fascist” Chiang in support of Mao’s Red forces. He wanted communist takeovers in Korea and Vietnam. He was adamantly, angrily anti-NATO, anti-Marshall Plan, anti-Truman Doctrine. He argued that U.S. officials under President Harry Truman — whom he portrayed as a fascist, racist, and imperialist — and under secretaries of state George Marshall and Dean Acheson were handing West Germany back to the Nazis, while Stalin was pursuing “democracy” in East Germany and throughout the Communist Bloc. He portrayed America’s leaders as “aching for an excuse to launch a nuclear nightmare of mass murder and extermination” against the Chinese and the Soviets — and eager to end all civilization.

Wait, it gets better — sorry, worse. Once again, here’s Kengor’s summary of our president’s beloved mentor’s political views:

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/07/what_peace_process.html

As Mitt Romney heads to Israel this week, he would do himself and us a real favor were he to take along Deception: Betraying the Peace Process, the book published by the invaluable Palestinian Media Watch. Deception, co-authored by PMW’s Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik, is a collection of their regular reports. So Governor Romney can just dip in and out and still be abreast of the plot.

These are in-house translations of the everyday fare transmitted to Palestinians and Israeli Arabs by the PA-controlled media — TV, radio, and newspapers. It is an understatement to call these reports scary. After reading them, one might be excused for asking, “What peace process?”

The book is divided into three main categories. First is non-recognition of Israel, which includes denying Israel’s history and erasing it from all maps. Second is incitement of hatred — the demonization of Israel, indeed of all Jews. And the third category is the promotion of violation of Jews and the glorification of terror against Jews. An additional fourth section is devoted to a look at a PA-funded youth magazine, Zayzafuna. Featured among the exhortations for children to keep clean and study hard are poems submitted by the kids themselves. A typical example, this one from a high-school student:

Oh flower of the valleys, oh my Jerusalem

Oh mother of Arabness and of the Arabs,

I belong to you since my birth

And to your soil after my death…

If only I were a sword and a gun to liberate you, oh Palestine.

The authors admit that the book is “sometimes repetitive.” However, “the volume and repetition are part of the PA message itself.” Thus, certain names and themes are repeated over and over until their memories are secure — or as we would say, ad nauseam.

http://www.bikyamasr.com/73546/kuwait-police-arrest-detain-man-for-drinking-in-public-during-ramadan/
Kuwait police arrest, detain man for drinking in public during Ramadan

DUBAI: It is illegal to drink or eat in public in Kuwait during the holy month of Ramadan, where Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset.

Over the weekend, Kuwaiti police said they made the first arrest of someone who failed to abide by their strict conditions during the holy month.

Police have indicated that a police patrol saw an “Asian drinking water from a bottle during the day.”

http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/
2012.07.24 (Parwan, Afghanistan) – Two Afghans and an American engineer are machine-gunned by Sunni fundamentalists.
2012.07.23 (Baghdad, Iraq) – Six Shiites are blown to bits by Sunni bombers while relaxing at a cafe.
2012.07.23 (Bauchi, Nigeria) – Sharia advocates set off a bomb near a local bar, killing a 6-year-old boy.
2012.07.23 (Sadr City, Iraq) – Sunni bombers strike at the heart of a Shiite slum, slaughtering at least twenty-one with two car bombs.
2012.07.23 (Taji, Iraq) – Forty-two people are killed in a series of al-Qaeda bombings outside a housing complex.
2012.07.22 (Hyderabad, Pakistan) – Two Christians are shot to death by Muslim radicals.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2012/07/24/Romney-attacks-Obama-foreign-policy-VFW

“Obama does not have any ground on which to stand on his domestic policy. It’s now becoming clear that his record on foreign policy is, if possible, even worse. And Mitt Romney is beginning to go on the offensive.”

Today, Mitt Romney spoke at the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) National Convention in Reno, Nevada. For one of the first times in the campaign – certainly the first time since his brilliant and straightforward speech at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) – Romney came out swinging. And he hit the mark.

He went right at Obama from the outset:

[H]as the American economy recovered?

Has our ability to shape world events been enhanced, or diminished?

Have we gained greater confidence among our allies, and greater respect from our adversaries?

And, perhaps most importantly, has the most severe security threat facing America and our friends, a nuclear-armed Iran, become more or less likely?

These clear measures are the ultimate tests of American leadership. And, by these standards, we haven’t seen much in the President’s first term that inspires confidence in a second.

These are the questions upon which Romney can realistically stake his re-election bid. And Romney didn’t stop there. He delivered body-shot after body-shot:

The President’s policies have made it harder to recover from the deepest recession in seventy years … exposed the military to cuts that no one can justify … compromised our national-security secrets … and in dealings with other nations, given trust where it is not earned, insult where it is not deserved, and apology where it is not due.

And he posed the contrast between his own vision of American exceptionalism and Obama’s, largely by focusing on the concept that this must be an “American Century”:

Like a watchman in the night, we must remain at our post – and keep guard of the freedom that defines and ennobles us, and our friends. In an American Century, we have the strongest economy and the strongest military in the world. In an American Century, we secure peace through our strength. And if by absolute necessity we must employ it, we must wield our strength with resolve. In an American Century, we lead the free world and the free world leads the entire world.

If we do not have the strength or vision to lead, then other powers will take our place, pulling history in a very different direction. A just and peaceful world depends on a strong and confident America. I pledge to you that if I become commander-in-chief, the United States of America will fulfill its duty, and its destiny.

Romney had especially harsh words for Obama’s planned military cuts:

Today, we are just months away from an arbitrary, across-the-board budget reduction that would saddle the military with a trillion dollars in cuts, severely shrink our force structure, and impair our ability to meet and deter threats. Don’t bother trying to find a serious military rationale behind any of this, unless that rationale is wishful thinking. Strategy is not driving President Obama’s massive defense cuts. In fact, his own Secretary of Defense warned that these reductions would be “devastating.” And he is right.

http://news.yahoo.com/al-qaida-claims-responsibility-iraq-killings-085958176.html BAGHDAD (AP) — An al-Qaida affiliate group in Iraq has claimed responsibility for Monday’s wave of attacks that killed 115 people across the country and wounded hundreds others. In a statement posted Wednesday on a militant website, the Islamic State of Iraq said the “blessed foray” marked the beginning of a campaign it calls […]

http://spectator.org/archives/2012/07/24/is-huma-abedin-the-new-alger-h/print

Washington GOP Establishment hits Bachmann for fighting Muslim Brotherhood.

Is Huma Abedin the new Alger Hiss?

Is Huma Abedin to the Muslim Brotherhood what Alger Hiss was to the Soviet Union?

Why are Republican Senator John McCain, Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rodgers (R-MI) acting in the growing Abedin controversy as Washington Establishment Democrats of the 1940s did in the Hiss episode? Which is to say, writing off the dangers of a foreign enemy whose goal is to infiltrate the U.S. government — because, well, the people in question are part of the Washington Establishment?

And last but certainly not least, why is the Republican Establishment pursuing a losing strategy in the war against Islamic radicalism? Is it returning to the losing strategy it pursued during the Cold War — a strategy that was overturned over Establishment opposition by Ronald Reagan’s victorious “we win, they lose” strategy?

These questions arise because of McCain’s vehement attack on Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. Bachmann, along with four other conservative House members (Louis Gohmert of Texas, Trent Franks of Arizona, Thomas Rooney of Florida and Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia), has written a series of hotly controversial letters.

What did Bachmann and the others do to infuriate McCain? And draw a rebuke from Boehner and Rodgers?

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/austria-province-to-join-growing-ban-on-religious-circumcisions-1.453361

Austria province to join growing ban on religious circumcisions. Governor of Vorarlberg state-run hospitals to suspend circumcisions motivated by religious custom, a week after a similar decisions was made by two Swiss hospitals.
The governor of Vorarlberg has told hospitals run by Austria’s westernmost province to suspend circumcisions motivated by religious custom, citing a German regional court ruling that the practice amounted to causing criminal bodily harm.

Markus Wallner says he sees the German decision last month, arising from the case of a child whose circumcision led to medical complications, as “precedence-setting judgment.”

He told provincial hospitals Tuesday not to perform the procedure except for health reasons until the legal situation is clarified in Austria.

The decision does not affect religiously motivated circumcisions performed outside hospitals run by the Vorarlberg government, and comes a week after two Swiss hospitals announced that they would temporarily stop performing circumcisions.

On Thursday, the Zurich children’s hospital announced that it was temporarily halting circumcision operations. “We are in the process of evaluating the legal and ethical stance in Switzerland,” said Marco Stuecheli, a spokesman for the hospital.

“There can be complicated cases where the mother of a child wants a circumcision but the father is opposed to it,” he added.