2011 In Review

As Hot Air walked through its top 50 viewed articles, it made me curious. What did the Truth Before Dishonor readers read in 2011? What were our hits?

After lying dormant for over a year, Truth Before Dishonor became active again at the very end of April, 2011… and came back stronger than ever, thanks in no small part to the stable of authors here, and to all the interested readers of course. So what did the visitors view in 2011?

The Top Ten most viewed articles in 2011:

10 The Bible Says Don’t Judge, Right?
A purely Christian and apolitical article debunking the “don’t judge” myth, which was, interestingly enough, originally published in March, 2010.

9 Democrat Civil Rights History
An April 2009 article which is mostly (but not entirely) a reprint of an older article Bob Parks wrote putting paid to the lie that Democrats have led the charge on Civil Rights (they fought against Civil Rights every step of the way).

8 Robert L Hymers III Is In Deep Doodoo
Robert L Hymers III and Lenny Dykstra get themselves in deep legal troubles, but the intent of the article was to show the major cultish power the Hymers clan has and the intimidation the Hymers clan practices.

7 Barack Obama: The Most Corrupt President Ever
Solyndra, Fast and Furious, New Black Panther Party, pressuring a 4-star General to lie under oath, and more.

6 Government Control v Free Market
Written in 2010, the photo says it all.

5 The Dixiecrat Myth
A complete debunking of the absurd Leftist claim that racist Democrats became Dixiecrats and then became racist Republicans over a 12-year stretch.

4 Israeli Atrocities?
The Fisking of yet another fraudulent Pallywood Jew-hating production.

3 The Bronze Medal goes to West Virginia Governor Special Election Results
A live-blog of the race that was much tighter than it would’ve been had the Democrats not passed ObamaCare against the public’s wishes.

2 the Silver Medal goes to Rule 5 Political Style
A bevy of beautiful Conservative women and a couple ugly Liberals.

And the Grand Champion, the Number One, Gold Medal winning, most viewed article of 2011 is New York 9th District Election Results
In the aftermath of Anthony Weiner showing his sausage, all of America — and many across the world — wanted to know: would a Republican take the Wiener seat? After all, as DNC spokes-bimbo Debbie Wasserman Schultz said, the district that had been Democrat-held since the 1920s was an especially difficult district for Democrats to win. What?

2012: The Year We’ve All Been Waiting For

As 2011 comes to a close and 2012 comes roaring in, expectations for the new year are high, especially in the political arena. As the events of 2009 brought about a major awakening in America, causing the historic 2010 elections (over 700 previously Democrat-held seats flipped Republican), just so the events of 2011 portend to a continued return to Constitutional sanity in 2012 as the disaster that has been our experimentation with Socialism continues to be erased.

But on this day, December 31, my thoughts return to the same thoughts as every December 31 for the past 30 years, and to one single, haunting song:

From all of us at Truth Before Dishonor to all of you who read us, may your New Year be more blessed than the old one and may your family be blessed.

Well, of course we were!

I was minding my own business, when SPC Pico said, “Dad, we need milk and sugar for pumpkin chocolate chip cookies. I said that I’d go get the necessary supplies and asked if we needed anything for dinner. “We’re having the cookies for dinner,” I was told.

Hamas has never pretended that they were interested in a two-state solution; when will Western liberals start to take Hamas at their word?

From Donald Douglas:

Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh Calls for Expulsion of Israel from ‘Blessed Land of Palestine’

Via Theo Spark:

The Hamas Prime Minister exhorted:

“We say today, explicitly, so it cannot be explained otherwise, that the armed resistance and the armed struggle are the path and the strategic choice for liberating the Palestinian land, from the [Mediterranean] sea to the [Jordan] river, and for the expulsion of the invaders and usurpers [Israel] from the blessed land of Palestine. The Hamas movement will lead Intifada after Intifada until we liberate Palestine – all of Palestine, Allah willing. Allah Akbar and praise Allah.

Also, at Jerusalem Post, “‘Arab world must stop Israel’s Judaization of J’lem’.”

Well, the genocide’s gotta start somewhere, I guess.

For some reason, many Westerners cannot seem to grasp a very simple fact: the Palestinians have really never been anything but honest and direct in their statements of their goals. They may, for strategic purposes, dissemble a bit for a specific audience or goal or diplomatic advantage, but they have always been completely honest in their general statements about what their goals are.

Were I to guess, I’d say that some of our friends on the left are so thoroughly ethnocentric that they really cannot understand different cultures might have different goals and different patterns of thinking and different ideas and different value systems. Given how our friends on the left so boldly proclaim themselves to be multiculturalists, so proudly tell us how sophisticated and educated and intellectual they are, yet when it comes to understanding those different cultures whose inclusion they support, they fail miserably. It’s almost as though liberal multiculturalism comes with its own intellectual handicap, that being that the multiculturalists cannot actually fathom how some people can be so different from them.

Oh, they are quite able to tell you about differences in language and religion and history and culture, but, in the end, they fail to be able to understand how those differences in language and religion and history and culture could lead people from other cultures to come to conclusions which are simply different, often radically different, from those to which the learned, liberal Westerners have come.

Even as savvy a man as former President Bill Clinton couldn’t really understand it. He worked very hard toward the end of his final term to broker a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. Then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak, facing an almost certain defeat for re-election, had every reason to be bold and aggressive in seeking a peace accord: it would have reversed Israeli politics and (probably) won his re-election campaign, and he would have gone down in history as a great diplomat and leader, who established a lasting peace and security for his country and the Levant in general. After intense negotiations, President Clinton presented Prime Minister Barak and Palestinian President Yassir Arafat a comprehensive proposal, one which President Clinton described, in his memoirs, as the best deal the Palestinians could ever hope to get, and that “Arafat’s rejection of my proposal after Barak accepted it was an error of historic proportions.”¹ President Clinton suggested that perhaps Mr Arafat might “not be at the top of his game any longer,”² anymore, but never could quite come around to the realistic conclusion that perhaps the Palestinians simply did not desire peace with Israel, but only victory over Israel.³

Many of our friends on the left simply cannot accept that idea. While they recognize that there are significant cultural differences between themselves and the Palestinians, since Western liberals want peace so badly, and think that it’s the only possible way, they just cannot grasp the notion that their conclusions are not shared by everyone else.
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¹ – Bill Clinton: My Life (New York: Alfred A Knopf) © 2004, p. 944
² – Clinton, p. 943
³ – I have a long, and not quite charitable, book review of former President Jimmy Carter’s book, We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan That Will Work, on CSPT. Mr Carter never recognized the possibility that the Palestinians simply do not accept any goal short of victory.

Sometimes unpleasant choices have to be taken

From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Philadelphia school nurse layoffs prompt ‘Occupy 440’ rally

By Kristen A. Graham, Philadelphia Inquirer Staff Writer

Mary Ann Sewell doesn’t just dispense aspirin and Band-Aids.

Sewell, the school nurse at Bok High in South Philadelphia, tends to 187 asthmatic teenagers. She treats insulin-dependent diabetics, kids with cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell anemia, and seizure disorders.

As part of its latest round of budget cuts, the Philadelphia School District will lay off 141 employees, including 47 nurses, effective Saturday. Sewell and about 50 others gathered at district headquarters Wednesday to protest.

They called it “Occupy 440,” a nod to the district building’s North Broad Street address. The protest was not organized by Occupy Philadelphia, but some Occupy Philadelphia members joined the cause.

Much more at the link. The story continues to tell the readers just how significant cuts in services will be with the layoffs of 47 school nurses. But the Philadelphia School District expects a budget shortfall of $629 million, and officials said recently that another $39 million had to be cut. Total new layoffs would be 141, with 47 school nurses among them.

The School District did not want to make those cuts; virtually every position within the School District can be justified in some way, and all of those positions performed specific functions. But if the School District doesn’t have the money to pay for all of those positions, then it doesn’t have the money to pay for all of them, and cuts have to be made somewhere. The School Board and the District administrators exist to set the budget and take those hard decisions. If the 47 nurses who are to be laid off are suddenly retained, then something else — and some other people’s jobs — will have to be cut to make up for the cost to retaining the nurses.

As it happens, your editor is married to a registered nurse, and certainly believes in the value of nurses as medical professionals. But your editor also knows that registered nurses can always find jobs. Indeed.com, a job search website, lists 2,161 job openings for registered nurses in the Philadelphia area,¹ ² paying $40,000 or more a year; of that, 1,633 pay $60,000 or more a year, 481 pay more than $80,000, 157 pay $100,000+, and 73 pay $120,000 or more.³ The editor’s sympathies tend to be more with the other people laid off, who have poorer job prospects.⁴

__________________
¹ – Accessed at 0804 on Thursday, 29 December 2011; the numbers are subject to constant change.
² – If the nurses being laid off are licensed practical nurses, or LPNs, rather than RNs, there are fewer jobs available, but the same site still lists 449 positions paying over $30,000.
³ – the higher paying jobs are included in the lower paying totals.
⁴ – Like, perhaps, former Superintendent Arlene Ackerman, who after receiving an almost $1,000,000 severance package, half of which comes from district coffers, had to file for unemployment.

There’s a hole in my debt ceiling, dear Liza, dear Liza

There’s a children’s song, “There’s a hole in my bucket,” that any parent has heard several thousand times too often, but it winds up circular. And so it is with the federal budget and the debt ceiling. But, not to worry, this isn’t like other debt ceiling problems. From The Wall Street Journal:

Treasury Sees U.S. Debt Near Limit By End Of Friday

By Jeff Bater

The U.S. debt will come within $100 billion of its ceiling on Friday, and the Treasury Department anticipates the Obama administration will begin steps to seek a $1.2 trillion increase in the limit.

A senior Treasury official on Tuesday told reporters the administration will need to let Congress know when the debt gets within $100 billion of the ceiling, expected to happen by the close of business Friday. Currently, the debt limit is $15.194 trillion, and it would be $16.394 trillion after an increase.

Under the Budget Control Act of 2011, the president submits a written certification to Congress when the debt subject to the limit is within $100 billion. Congress can consider “a joint resolution of disapproval.” If such a resolution is not enacted within 15 calendar days, the debt limit will be increased. If a resolution is enacted within the 15 days, the debt limit will not be increased. If Congress adopted such a resolution, the president could veto it.

I guess that there won’t be any debt ceiling fight this time. The President will tell the Congress that he is increasing the debt ceiling, and the House of Representatives, controlled by the Republicans, will probably vote a resolution of disapproval. The Senate, controlled by the Democrats will not vote on such, because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will not schedule a vote. If there happened to be a sufficient number of Democratic Senators who wanted to get on the record against the debt ceiling increase, Senator Reid might allow the vote, knowing that the President would then veto it. At that point, Senator Reid will have already arranged to have 35 or 36 Democratic Senators not up for re-election¹ available to sustain the President’s veto.²

But this situation only exists because the Congress, in the last debt ceiling bill, agreed to surrender their power to set the debt ceiling to the President, and the House of Representatives was controlled by the Republicans when that bill was passed; the Democrats don’t get all of the blame. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the Minority Leader, said at the time:

Never again will any president, from either party, be allowed to raise the debt ceiling without being held accountable for it by the American people and without having to engage in the kind of debate we’ve just come through.

Note Senator McConnell’s words: never again will any president be able to raise he debt ceiling without being held accountable. But, apparently the Congress won’t be held accountable, because they created a system which every single Member of Congress who is running for re-election could vote against it, and still not prevent it.

So, we have a debt ceiling, passed with great fanfare — and great relief — which is absolutely meaningless. The next time the debt ceiling is approached should be in late 2012, probably after the election rather than before it. The Republicans will be hammering on President Obama and the Democrats throughout the 2012 campaign for their reckless spending, but the Republicans had the power, all by themselves, to stop the increase in the national debt, and they lacked the courage to do so.
_________________________________________
¹ – Out of 53 Democratic Senators, 30 are not up for re-election in 2012, and 7 whose seats are up for re-election have decided to retire at the end of their terms.
² – Overriding a Presidential veto requires a ²/₃ super-majority in each House of Congress.

Something To Talk About

Did anyone else here read that old defense of The Empire from Star Wars, written long before the new movies came out, best summed up as “great, they killed the Emperor. Hello, power vacuum– who’s going to pay the police now? Who’s going to be in charge, the Hutts?”

In keeping with the season, I offer this from NRO:
Scrooge: The First 1 Percenter.

A sample:

Either way, such actions are not really going to do much to improve the human condition. I contend that Scrooge, before he became “enlightened,” was already doing more to help his fellow man than any of the other main characters we meet in A Christmas Carol. Moreover, by giving away a substantial portion of his accumulated fortune, he drastically reduced his ability to do even more good in the world.
Scrooge was a “man of business” and evidently a shrewd and successful one. Although Dickens fails to tell us exactly what line of business Scrooge is in, a typical 19th-century “man of business” could be expected to involve himself in many endeavors — what investment advisers today refer to as diversifying one’s risk. One can infer from A Christmas Carol that Scrooge was a financier, who lent money to both businesses and individuals. He also spent long hours at the Exchange, probably speculating on commodities, buying and selling government debt, and purchasing and selling shares in various joint stock companies.

We can also infer some things about Scrooge that Dickens does not tell us directly. He left boarding school early, supposedly because his father had a change of heart toward him and wanted him home. A lack of finances may also have had something to do with it, as Scrooge’s formal education ended early and he was apprenticed as a low-level clerk to a tradesman — Mr. Fezziwig. From this low start, Scrooge exhibited a relentless drive that eventually made him rich. Along the way, his business had to survive the Napoleonic Wars, adapt to the Industrial Revolution, and fight its way through several severe economic depressions. In fact, in the year A Christmas Carol was written (1843), Britain was just coming out of a five-year economic slowdown in which only the most nimble and carefully managed enterprises survived. During Scrooge’s business life, upwards of 100 businesses failed for every one that succeeded. Scrooge must have been a very good businessman indeed.

In a nutshell, he argues that it’s a bad thing in the long run that Scrooge ended his prior ways and turned to being generous; I don’t know if I’ve ever even read the actual story, but I recall that almost everyone tells me the Muppet Christmas Carol is accurate, and I could built a refutation of the article from that; when I originally read the Star Wars one, I couldn’t– I just knew it was somehow wrong.

I already cheated and read the comments, but would anyone like to build a counter-argument here? (I do suggest reading the comments… at least, the ones that I saw so far….)

This could be a good conversation starter around the Christmas table– hopefully a safe one, too, if you keep it light!

We know that totalitarian dictatorships use torture to punish enemies of the state . . .

. . . but can anybody be fearing for his life and safety more than Kim Jong-un’s barber?

Syria Misses Bush

Found on Facebook from the Weekly Standard. http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/missing-bush_613588.html

Lights Of The Season, Season 3, Part XIX

A tribute to “big girls”.

Lights Of The Universe, Season 3, Part XVIII

DRJ from Patterico’s Pontifications liked this one in season 1.

Star Trekkin.

Where Can I Send Dead Flowers

North Korean Leader Kim Jong Il, 69, Has Died

Posted by Yorkshire on 18 December 2011, 10:33 pm

SEOUL, South Korea – DEVELOPING: Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s mercurial and enigmatic leader, has died. He was 69.

Kim’s death was announced Monday by state television from the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.

Kim is believed to have suffered a stroke in 2008 but appeared relatively vigorous in photos and video from recent trips to China and Russia and in numerous trips around the country carefully documented by state media.

The leader, reputed to have had a taste for cigars, cognac and gourmet cuisine, was believed to have had diabetes and heart disease.

The news came as North Korea prepared for a hereditary succession. Kim Jong Il inherited power after his father, revered North Korean founder Kim Il Sung, died in 1994.

In September 2010, Kim Jong Il unveiled his third son, the twenty-something Kim Jong Un, as his successor, putting him in high-ranking posts.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/12/18/north-korean-leader-kim-jong-il-6-has-died/#ixzz1gwopXjld

Needs No Splainin

Lights Of The Season, Season 3, Part XVII

If you need a little Breath Of Heaven, just watch these Christmas Lights dance to Mary’s Song as sung by Amy Grant.

An Original BO Administration Movie

Starring BO and Joe