Tuesday, September 30, 2014

World Must Understand That Anti-Semitism is a Universal Problem, Israeli Envoy Tells The Algemeiner (INTERVIEW)

World Must Understand That Anti-Semitism is a Universal Problem, Israeli Envoy Tells The Algemeiner (INTERVIEW):



Gideon Behar, Israel's Envoy for combating anti-Semitism, during his visit to New York.
“Anti-Semitism is not a Jewish problem. It concerns Jews, but it’s a global and universal problem.” So says Ambassador Gideon Behar, the Israeli diplomat who is spearheading his country’s efforts to combat the revival of anti-Semitism across the world.

Behar, the director of the Department for Combating Antisemitism at the Israeli Foreign Ministry, has been in the job since 2011. Prior to that, his work centered on the Middle East and Africa. Having served in the Foreign Ministry’s department dealing with Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, he rose to the rank of ambassador, appointed in 2006 as the head of Israel’s diplomatic mission in the west African state of Senegal. After five years in Africa, he returned to Israel to concentrate on the fight against anti-Semitism – which means that these days, he spends much of his time focused on events in Europe.

In a lengthy interview with The Algemeiner in New York, where he discussed his work with Jewish advocacy groups, academics and others, Behar was keen to talk about the impact of the recent Gaza war on Jewish communities abroad. “When we looked at what was happening in Europe, we noticed that in places like Poland, Bulgaria and Romania, there was no rise in anti-Semitism,” he said. “Those countries that were once communist didn’t experience the levels of anti-Semitism that we saw in western Europe.” While eastern Europe is certainly not free of Jew-hatred – at several points in the conversation, Behar talked with concern about Jobbik, the neo-Nazi Hungarian party that has grown markedly in popularity – he emphasized that in western Europe, there has been an alarming crossover between anti-Israel rhetoric and demonstrations, and violent attacks on Jews, often carried out by Muslims.

There are, Behar said, four principal sources of anti-Semitism today: the Arab and Islamic world, the neo-fascist right, the radical left and online – during Israel’s operation in Gaza, social media platforms and website comment sections bristled with anti-Semitic invective, often from anonymous contributors. Anywhere where there are acute social, economic or political problems, Behar argued, is fertile soil for anti-Semitism. That also applies to those countries, especially in Europe, which Behar described as undergoing an “identity crisis.” The spectacle of Hungarian fascists unveiling a statue of the country’s pro-Nazi wartime ruler, Admiral Miklos Horthy, as well as the images from Greece of supporters of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party offering Hitler salutes, suggests to Behar that Europe has not quite gotten over its deadly recent past.

How, though, can a phenomenon that surfaces from Venezuela to Turkey, and that has rightly been described by scholars as “the longest hatred,” be countered effectively? Behar is modest about what is possible and he doesn’t claim that anti-Semitism will eventually disappear. But its toxic influence can, nonetheless, be ameliorated – and education, Behar believes, is key.

Teaching students about the Holocaust can help, Behar insists. He spoke with pride about a project to teach schoolchildren in Cyprus the history of the Holocaust, aided by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance authority in Jerusalem. The children were encouraged to participate in an essay competition, with the authors of the best entries rewarded with a trip to Israel.

“We should make the Holocaust relevant to our time,” Behar said. “It’s not only a historical event. The world today is not free of atrocities, genocide and war – look at what is happening in Syria and Iraq with Islamic State. The potential for mass atrocities is still there, which is why the lessons of the Holocaust must remain in our minds.”

In Behar’s view, the strategy of the Islamic State terrorist group echoes that of the Nazis during the previous century. “You start with the minorities in order to control the majority,” Behar said. “That’s what the Nazis did to the Jews, and this is what the Islamic State is doing today – they are killing minorities like Christians, Yezidis and Kurds in order to dominate the majority.”

While the universal message of the Holocaust is not in doubt, is Holocaust education an effective tool for countering anti-Semitism today? Behar acknowledges that alongside outright Holocaust denial, there is a great deal of what he calls “Holocaust distortion.” The aim, he says, should be to protect the Holocaust and its legacy from political manipulation. “Holocaust education shouldn’t be an instrument to promote a certain ideology or agenda,” Behar said. “It’s part of the heritage of humanity. We were the victims, but the crime was against humanity as a whole.”

In that regard, Iran, which has long promoted both Holocaust denial and distortion, is a main area of concern for Behar. “Iran is the only state which promotes anti-Semitism as an official policy.” Asked whether the same might be said of Turkey, whose recently elected president Recep Tayip Erodgan  infamously depicted Israel as “worse than Hitler,” Behar replied that while he condemned the comments of the Turkish leader, Turkey as a state has not used anti-Semitism in the manner of Iran. Critically, Behar said, Turkey has not sponsored terrorist attacks on diaspora Jewish communities, as Iran did when its agents bombed the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994.

What of the future? Behar was reluctant to come across as a prophet of doom, but duty requires him to tell it as he sees it. “It’s unthinkable that 70 years after Hitler, Jews can’t walk safely in the streets,” he said. American Jews, he added, have an important role to play in boosting the morale of Jewish communities in Europe, Latin America and other regions where anti-Semitism is on the rise. “Show solidarity and put more resources into the fight,” he urged.

Original enclosures:

Diana West: Ignoring Islam’s Hostile Nature Endangers National Security

Diana West: Ignoring Islam’s Hostile Nature Endangers National Security:

On Monday, Frank Gaffney and Breitbart put on a program, live in Washington and web-streamed, about national security. One of the speakers was Diana West, author of American Betrayal, which describes Moscow’s infiltration of US institutions over decades.

In Monday’s speech, West drew comparisons between Islam and communism, both of which have had strange taboos surrounding the public description of their true natures.



We currently hear the Big Lie every day, that Islam is a “Religion of Peace” and the barbaric acts of terror in the name of Islam really don’t represent the “true” Islam. Political luminaries from President George Bush to Secretary of State John Kerry have assured the American people that violent jihad is a misunderstanding of Mohammad’s teachings, even though the Koran has over 100 verses that urge violence toward non-believers.

Diana West notes that communism has a similar history of not being held accountable for its crimes against humanity.



Diana West at National Security Action Summit: “Sharia Outlaws the Liberties We in the West Hold Sacred” Breitbart.com, September 30, 2014

Editor Note: Historian Diana West delivered these remarks at National Security Action Summit II on Monday, September 29. The event was hosted by EMPact America, in partnership with Breitbart News Network and the Center for Security Policy.

For anyone still puzzled as how it could be that our leaders and pundits keep hammering home the big lie that Islam has nothing to do with jihad, that the religion of conquest is a “religion of peace,” it’s important to know that such widespread brainwashing is nothing new.

Just as today’s opinion-makers seek to divorce Islam from its impact — brutal conquest, forced conversion, religiously sanctioned sex slavery, beheadings — past opinion-makers worked equally hard to divorce Communism from its impact — brutal conquest, forced collectivization, concentration camps (Gulags), mass murder.

It worked. Unlike Nazism, Communism has never been judged guilty or even held responsible for the carnage and suffering it has caused. On the contrary, it remains a source of “liberal” statist ideas such as Obamacare. My recent book American Betrayal delves deeply into this dangerous double standard. In short, this double standard not only enables collectivist policies to strangle our remnant republic, but also explains why American students can find a drink called Leninade, emblazoned with a hammer and sickle, for sale up the road at University of Maryland. It’s also why silkscreens of Warhol’s Chairman Mao, history’s top mass murderer, are sought-after items for the homes of the wealthy.

There are no such trendy portraits of Hitler, and who would want them? Who would want to swig a bottle of Hitlerpop, decorated with a swastika? So, why Leninade? Not only does the stench of death not follow the Communist murder-cult, the brand lives.

Barring a tsunami of common sense, I predict that Islam, the brand, will remain separate in the public mind from the violence and repression it causes and has caused for more than a millennium. That’s certainly the direction leaders from both political parties have been relentlessly herding us in for over a decade, insisting against all reason — against all sacred Islamic texts — that “Islam is peace.”

Thus, while contending with this cycle of expansionist jihad — a recurrence that should be familiar from Islamic history were it, too, not subject to whitewash — we must simultaneously withstand a campaign of lies designed to subvert our understanding of how Islam, in fact, has everything to do with beheadings and other violence both in the Islamic world and now in the West — and, why more than a decade of “nation-building” “counterinsurgencies” in Afghanistan and Iraq were domed from the start.

And yes, such whitewashing has happened before. Seventy years ago, Americans and British and other allies fought against a cruel Nazi totalitarian dictatorship in alliance with an equally cruel Communist totalitarian dictatorship. As far as body counts go, our great Soviet ally had already piled up more bodies than Hitler would. To sell this to We, the people, Americans were introduced to “Uncle Joe” Stalin. We were told that Communism had changed; that Moscow wanted only secure borders. We were told, you might say, “Communism is peace.” Anti-communist books went of style; investigations into Communist penetration went into mothballs. At the end of WWII, yes, Hitler’s 12-year Reich was destroyed, but Stalin’s evil empire had engorged fully half of Europe. Communism-is-peace-brainwashed people were stunned. But Americans were told they had won the “good war” for liberty over tyranny, and we have celebrated ever since.

Whitewashing follows whitewashing, so, also obscured was the transformation Communism wrought here at home, where agents of influence, fellow travelers, and dupes worked to advance Moscow’s will just as Soviet tanks (and agents, too) imposed it abroad. The conventional wisdom, however, remains suspended in the amber of the “Red Scare,” the 1950s period during which anti-Communist “witch-hunters” searched for “Reds under the bed” — all allegedly in vain. Never mind that many hundreds of confirmed American traitors, loyal to the Kremlin, had infiltrated the federal government and other institutions in previous decades. The important thing, says the conventional wisdom to this day, is not to connect the dots and examine whether these proxies for Stalin influenced the “American Century.”

But the facts indicate they did. Just to mention examples rarely taught in school, agents of Stalin’s influence inside the Roosevelt administration helped subvert and topple such anti-Communist leaders in Europe as Draza Mihailovic in the Balkans, and the free Polish government in exile, clearing the way for Communist regimes. They helped destroy the anti-Communist leader Chiang Kai-shek in China, thus aiding the rise of Mao – who, a la “Uncle Joe,” was presented to the American public as an “agrarian reformer.” Mao would kill at least 60 million people and set in motion events that would draw Americans into two disastrous wars in Korea and Vietnam, killings tens of thousands of young American men.

I could go on, about how at the end of World War II, Soviet plans for Germany and slave labor reparations were put over, how the UN was fostered by a Soviet agent named Alger Hiss, how the IMF was fostered by another Soviet agent name Harry Dexter White. Much of this still-hidden history at least makes it clear why our traditions are today a shambles, where cultural relativism comes from, why it’s unlikely Congress will ever repeal Obamacare, why our college campuses are outposts of Marx.

Society, however, seems to prefer silence. It prefers to burnish the gilded reputation of Franklin Roosevelt, for example, rather than reckon with the fact he presided over the biggest national security disaster in U.S. history — the massive infiltration of the U.S. government by agents of a foreign power.

And today? Islam’s prophet Mohammed is exempt from criticism — a key point of Islamic law — just as Joseph Stalin used to be — a rule of the Communist police state. Islam’s history of repression, too, is off limits to strategic planners just as Communism’s once was as well. “Mustn’t offend the Russians,” went the WWII-era mantra against “red-baiting.” “Mustn’t offend Muslims” is the mantra against “Islamophobia” today. In this way, these belief systems, both hostile to our constitutional liberties, remain protected by silence.

This silence has already cost thousands of American lives in our time.

It started right after 9/11, as soon as President Bush declared Islam was a religion of peace, officially delinking Islam from specifically Islamic jihad. Official policy to this day absolves Islam of jihad, and, most recently, absolves Islam of the jihadists known as the Islamic State.

This see-no-Islam policy has also been deeply flawed basis of 13 years of nation-building failure in Iraq and Afghanistan under the sorry banner of couninteriinsugency, or COIN, doctrine. Retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor sums the problem up this way: “The entire COIN strategy is a fraud perpetuated on the American people. The idea that we are going to spend a trillion dollars to reshape the culture of the Islamic world is utter nonsense.”

I maintain It would have been widely seen as utter nonsense had Islam and its law, Islam and jihad, Islam and dhimmitude, been under open consideration rather than tightly under wraps. Instead, the last two presidents sent Americans to die for nations whose constitutions, written with American support, enshrine sharia — Islamic law.

And what does that mean? Quite simply, sharia outlaws the liberties we in the West hold sacred: freedom of religion, freedom of speech, equal rights before the law, and more. Such prohibitions themselves are sacred to Islam. Indeed, Islamic “liberty,” or “hurriyya,” couldn’t be more different from our own. It is defined by a slavish devotion to sharia. This tells us — or should have — that infidel armies, infidel governments, were never going to win “hearts and minds,” or “trust,” of Islamic peoples — the linchpin of the COIN theory — no matter how much our people bribed, bled or died.

This deduction is confirmed by the most recent polling data compiled by Pew. These data tell us that 91 percent of Iraqis believe sharia should be “the law of the land.” That percentage is exceeded by only one country: Afghanistan, where fully 99 percent agree sharia should be “the law of the land.”

What does a US lawmaker, a COIN strategist, do with data like this? If that lawmaker, that strategist wants to be a mover and shaker in Washington, DC, he forgets about them. Whatever he does, he doesn’t connect any dots. History shows our leaders rarely do. And somehow, they still end up on pedestals.

More Lies: Watchdog Finds Government "Greatly Exaggerated" Success In Funding Small Businesses Last Year

More Lies: Watchdog Finds Government "Greatly Exaggerated" Success In Funding Small Businesses Last Year:

New investigations by the Small Business Administration (SBA) Office of Inspector General have found SBA Administrator Maria Contreras-Sweet's announcement that small businesses received 23.39% of all federal contracts was greatly exaggerated. As WaPo reports, Federal agencies overstated their success last year in contracting with small businesses that face socio-economic disadvantages finding $400 million worth of contracts that agencies gave to ineligible firms but still counted toward their targets. Rather stunningly, the report found of the top 100 recipients of the highest dollar amount of federal small business contracts, over 75% were actually current large businesses. Trust...







As The Washington Post reports,

Federal agencies overstated their success last year in contracting with small businesses that face socio-economic disadvantages, according to a watchdog report released Wednesday.



The Small Business Administration’s inspector general’s office said it identified $400 million worth of contracts that agencies gave to ineligible firms but still counted toward their targets.



The findings are significant because 2013 was the first year that the Obama administration claimed to have met the federal government’s small-business contracting goals. The flawed numbers led to inaccurate reports to Congress and the American people, according to the report.
And as MarketWatch adds,

The most recent data from the Federal Procurement Data System indicates of the top 100 recipients of the highest dollar amount of federal small business contracts, over 75% were actually current large businesses.



...



The first SBA Inspector General investigation that uncovered fraud in federal small business contracting was released in 1995. In 2003 an investigation by the Government Accountability Office found over 5,000 large businesses were receiving federal small business contracts.



The American Small Business League (ASBL) has launched a national campaign to secure a Government Accountability Office (GAO) and FBI investigation to uncover the specific individuals that were responsible for the two decades of fraud that have been uncovered at the SBA.
*  *  *
So much for caring about the middle-class and small business... but we assume this won't be mentioned on the mainstream media platforms that need access to The White House.

Transgenderism Is A Mental Illness, Not A Civil Rights Issue - John Hawkins - Page 1

Transgenderism Is A Mental Illness, Not A Civil Rights Issue - John Hawkins - Page 1:



'via Blog this'

Think Tank: Vouchers Have Saved Taxpayers $1.7 Billion

Think Tank: Vouchers Have Saved Taxpayers $1.7 Billion:

The various school voucher programs created around the United States since 1990 have saved taxpayers over $1.7 billion since their inception, argues a new report from a school choice group. With 505,000 vouchers dispersed in that time frame, the total averages out to about $3,400 per voucher student, per year.

The report was released Tuesday by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, an education reform organization founded by Nobel-winning economist Milton Friedman which primarily advocates for the creation of school voucher programs. It looked at ten different voucher programs that were created in six states and the District of Columbia from 1990 through 2010. Twelve additional voucher programs created since 2010 were not a part of the research.

The alleged savings occur when the money spent on a voucher is less than the variable cost of educating the student receiving it in a public school. For example, Ohio’s Educational Choice Scholarship Program offers vouchers to students who attend failing public schools to attend private schools instead. In 2011, the average variable cost for a student at one of the eligible  failing schools was calculated to be $7,776, while the average cost of a voucher was only $3,855, a difference of $3,921. With 13,733 students participating in 2011, that year’s savings are calculated to be almost $54 million.

According to the report, savings are rapidly increasing as more programs are created and more students participate. While all existing voucher programs saved under $100 million throughout the 1990s, by 2011 annual savings were above $300 million and rising by tens of millions a year.

“As policymakers consider ways to balance their state budgets in 2015, school vouchers absolutely must be a part of their toolkits,” Robert Enlow, President of the Friedman Foundation, said in a statement. “Parents already are demanding school choice. Taxpayers should be, too.”

Researchers took pains to ensure the savings could be calculated properly. Many public education costs, such as the cost of buildings and facility maintenance, are largely fixed in the short term and do not reduce even when enrollment drops. To avoid finding savings where none would actually occur, the researchers only considered the average expenditures on areas such as teacher salaries and student supplies that track enrollment more directly even in the short-term. The report also attempts to factor in the cost of students who would have attended private schools even without a voucher, and who thus cost the state extra money rather than creating savings.

While opponents of vouchers often argue the programs divert funds away from the majority that still attends public schools, the report’s author says vouchers often wind up helping public schools as well.

“Voucher savings typically are plowed right back in to the public school system,” author Jeff Spalding said. “Taxpayers have no idea that vouchers are generating a savings for public education budgets.” Enlow added, however, that more transparency is needed in state governments to adequately track what ultimately ends up happening with voucher savings, since the Foundation found no instances of governments returning them to taxpayers via tax breaks.

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In Vienna, Edelstein warns: Indifference to anti-Semitism is not an option

In Vienna, Edelstein warns: Indifference to anti-Semitism is not an option:

Edelstein praised European leaders for speaking out against anti-Semitism in their countries.

Report: Enviro Lawsuits Enrich Greens, Hurt Endangered Species

Report: Enviro Lawsuits Enrich Greens, Hurt Endangered Species:

An increasing number of lawsuits from environmental groups under the Endangered Species Act have been used to bilk taxpayers for millions of dollars in attorneys fees and made it harder for federal officials to fund species recovery programs.

A report by the pro-oil and gas Western Energy Alliance (WEA) details how two prominent environmental groups have used increasing amounts of litigation to get more animals put on the endangered species list — a tactic that is costing taxpayers money and diverting federal officials from developing programs to get animals off the endangered list.

“Lawsuits are a lucrative business for environmental groups since the federal government often reimburses attorney fees at taxpayer expense,” said Jack Ekstrom, chairman of Western Energy Alliance. “Attorneys for the environmental lobby line their pockets and organizations flood the agency with listing petitions for species that are not truly endangered to boost their fundraising.”

WEA found that since 2011, environmental groups have petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to “list more than three species per month on average and more than 38 per year.” A good chunk of these petitions came from the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and WildEarth Guardians (WEG) — both of which agreed with the government in 2011 to limit future ESA petitions.

“In a flippant disregard for the spirit of the agreements, CBD delivered a large 53-species petition to FWS less than a year after the settlements were approved,” WEA noted in its report. “Between them, WEG and CBD have been plaintiffs on 14 different lawsuits challenging listing decisions on 35 different species, or nearly 40% of those filed since the settlement agreements.”

Getting an animal listed under the Endangered Species Act is no small matter. A listing can thwart economic development over vast swaths of land in the name of conservation. The western U.S. has been hit particularly hard by ESA listings, as environmentalists and some politicians have tried to use litigation to put huge tracts of land off-limits to oil, gas and coal extraction.

The ultimate goal of an ESA listing is to recover the species, but so far only 2 percent of listed species have been recovered. WEA says this is because the ESA has been abused by green groups to push their agenda and get reimbursed by taxpayers.

While WEA gives no exact figure on how much in attorneys fees CBD and WEG have gotten, they note that the Equal Access to Justice Act allows green groups to be reimbursed for suing the government.

“Environmental groups overload the government with far too many listing petitions and then sue for missing deadlines,” said Kathleen Sgamma, WEA’s head of government and public affairs. “This diverts resources away from actual species recovery and into litigation and bureaucratic process.”

Recently, western states have been battling environmentalists and federal officials over the potential listing of the sage grouse under the ESA. The sage grouse is basically a prairie chicken that lives in sagebrush country in the western U.S. and southern parts of Canada.

For years, federal agents and states have been working on agreements to prevent the sage grouse from being listed under the ESA, but that tacit agreement has been threatened by environmentalists who want to see the grouse listed and development stopped in its habitats.

Both CBD and WEG are pushing to have the sage grouse listed under the ESA.

“WildEarth Guardians has redoubled efforts to protect sage-grouse and the Sagebrush Sea so that future generations might continue to enjoy this spectacular species,” the group says on its website. “We are party to litigation to expedite listing under the ESA; we challenge destructive land uses in sage-grouse range; we advocate voluntary grazing permit retirement in sagebrush steppe; and we will formally request designation of sagebrush reserves on [Bureau of Land Management] land to conserve sage-grouse and other sagebrush-dependent species.”

WEA has opposed efforts to have the sage grouse listed under the ESA, saying such a listing would hurt local sage grouse conservation efforts and stymie economic development in the west.

“Never before has such a wide-ranging and numerous species been seriously considered for listing under the ESA,” said WEA’s Ekstrom. “Given the sizable range of the sage grouse’s habitat, a listing would be devastating across the West. Vast energy resources would be off limits and jobs lost.

FWS has until September 2015 to decide whether or not it will list the sage grouse under the ESA.

Neither CBD nor WEG responded to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

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Environmentalism Hurts Poor Families Worst

Environmentalism Hurts Poor Families Worst:

EPA_HQ

EPA Headquarters in Washington D.C.
News for low-income households facing another brutal winter in New England is again bleak. One of the largest energy providers in the region announced recently that energy costs for a typical household could top $150 a month this winter — a 37 percent increase over just last year.
For many poorer families, that $40 per month increase will force a choice between purchasing enough food to feed a cold family or warming the bedrooms they return to — malnourished, or suffering otherwise from a lack of household resources to fund Obama’s jihad on affordable energy.

Yet not a sentence of concern has been uttered from the environmental alarmists in the Obama administration and its radical  EPA as the poor disproportionately carry the burden of “green energy.”

“Green energy,” named for invoking images of green in nature, is defined by the EPA as energy “whose generation has zero/negligible environmental impacts.” But the human toll for the “zero/ negligible environmental impacts” of this energy is yet uncharacterized. Perhaps images of the inefficient energy options that force blue-lipped children to sleep in unheated bedrooms would be more aptly labeled “blue energy.”

EPA head — and, ironically enough, Massachusetts native — Gina McCarthy has presided over the Obama administration’s assault on New England’s poor.

Under McCarthy, regulations have killed the future of affordable coal-fired energy, inexpensive natural gas development is at risk, and once-alternative options are now more limited than ever before in recent memory — highlighted by the 80 percent of traditional wood stoves (as in, burning wood for heat … if it gets more “green” than that, let me know) now banned by the EPA from production and sale in the United States.

I write this as a transplanted New England native, who grew up three miles down a dirt road in a log home with a wood stove (that’s now illegal to manufacture) to supplement home heating expenses. The neighbors who already struggle through the winter months to make ends meet now face the unnecessary, expensive consequences of Obama’s policies.

It is on the backs of these New England families the EPA is pursuing its radical mission to kill efficient energy production, masked by the unproven, abstract goal of clean air and cool temperatures — both things New Englanders actually possesses in excess.

But, realistically, who actually cares? New Englanders vote reliably with the party of environmental radicalism and the poor families suffering most couldn’t afford to scratch a check to a Super PAC or take a Saturday to campaign if they wanted to.

If energy prices are ever to stop increasing year over year, the people of New England and the rest of the American people must decide if they’re willing to make abundantly clear to those elected office that the well-being of families comes before any political agenda — and that statement must start now.

Martha Coakley and Mike Michaud, the Democrat candidates for Governor in Massachusetts and Maine respectively, each hold long, uncompromised records supporting Obama’s “blue energy” agenda, along with dozens of candidates from each state. If the people of New England and the United States want to send a message about the well-being of themselves and their neighbors to Washington and state capitols like Boston and Augusta, the loudest megaphone opens at 7:00 a.m. on November 4.
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Iraqi Forces Can’t Keep ISIS Out of Badhdad

Iraqi Forces Can’t Keep ISIS Out of Badhdad: In five raids, Britain has yet to drop one missile. The Sunni coalition won’t bomb in Syria. The ever-growing coalition includes few who are willing to engage in more than lip service. Such is the state of the Obama coalition to defeat ISIS. Meanwhile, one ISIS unit is a mile outside Baghdad and others are…


And yet another trusted government institution bites the dust

And yet another trusted government institution bites the dust:

Will the last federal government agency to retain the public trust please turn out the lights?

Obama’s narcissism a threat to national security

Obama’s narcissism a threat to national security:

We mention President Obama’s narcissism not as an exercise in name-calling but because it continues to be relevant to how he conducts himself in office, and it’s not pretty.

This undeniable character trait was on full display in his interview with Steve Kroft of “60 Minutes,” in the sense that he simply cannot entertain the possibility, much less — infinitely less — admit the possibility that he has made a mistake or exercised poor judgment.

If anything remotely positive happens on his watch, he presumes to take full credit for it — way more than the normal opportunistic politician. With the killing of Osama bin Laden, for example, Obama boasts as if the raid were his initial idea and he delivered the kill shot. Most people in his position would play down their role in such an event and give credit to our special forces personnel who made it happen.

But when things are going poorly, Obama either candy-coats the reality or pretends he’s an outsider powerless to do anything but complain about it. No president has ever been so committed to eschewing accountability.

News outlets are reporting that Obama acknowledged that his administration was surprised by the strength of the Islamic State, sort of. He lays the blame for any such underestimates at the feet of Jim Clapper, his director of intelligence. Isn’t Clapper in the administration? It’s as if Obama is every bit as mystified by Clapper’s alleged oversight as the rest of us and as if he has no culpability for it whatsoever.

ut it’s even worse than that. For the truth is that this wasn’t some kind of mistake in intelligence. Our intelligence services were fully aware of the strength and danger the Islamic State posed months and months ago and were aware of its aggressive pursuit of territorial expansion. It’s not that we underestimated the Islamic State; it’s that we overtly ignored it or that Obama was literally out to lunch — or on the golf course.

Journalist Eli Lake reported that one former senior Pentagon official was flabbergasted in watching Obama’s “60 Minutes” performance. “Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bulls—-ing,” said the official.

Liberals were relentless in accusing President George W. Bush of lying about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction leading up to our attack on Iraq, even though he was reasonably relying on the best intelligence estimates from our own intelligence services and those of most other nations. He believed that Saddam Hussein had these weapons based on intelligence and on Saddam’s behavior. Bush acted on that intelligence, for which he has been called a liar by egregious liars.

Obama, by contrast, had actionable intelligence and didn’t act and is now acting as though he was personally unaware of it. Well, if his director of intelligence had that information, is it even conceivable he wouldn’t have passed it on to Obama? Only if he knew Obama wouldn’t care or wouldn’t act on it in any event.

So if Clapper knew of the nature and extent of the Islamic State threat and didn’t pass it on to Obama because he knew he wouldn’t act on it, that’s Obama’s fault. If he knew and didn’t pass it on for some other reason, that’s Obama’s fault for having such a knucklehead in such a critically important position affecting our national security. If Obama now knows that Clapper knew and didn’t pass this information on to him, he should either resign himself (for creating the impression that he didn’t want to know about such matters) or fire Clapper for not telling him. You feel me? It’s Obama’s fault any way you look at it.

I suspect that Clapper either didn’t report to Obama because he knew Obama didn’t want to hear it or did report to him but he didn’t read it or he read it but refused to even consider acting on it because to do so would have contradicted his firmly held position that we had to remove ourselves entirely from Iraq. Obama is continuing in this stubbornly irresponsible posture today, even if he has reluctantly allowed airstrikes, because he has announced that he will not even consider ground forces in that area — no matter how dramatically the Islamic State threatens our national security and that of our allies.

Obama’s narcissism is a clear and present danger to the security interests of the United States for a host of reasons. He refuses to accept accountability for his decisions or failed policies and thus won’t change course when reality proves him wrong. He won’t realistically assess threats when they contradict his worldview-driven perceptions. And he won’t take action if by doing so he would be tacitly admitting he was wrong before.

I suspect that even Democratic Party leaders and those in his administration who have the sense to grasp the reality of the threat to world stability posed by radical Islamists are shaking their heads in private over the bizarre, surreal character who leads their party but refuses to lead the United States of America.

David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney. His latest book is “Jesus on Trial: A Lawyer Affirms the Truth of the Gospel.”

Original enclosures:

How School Choice Saves Money

How School Choice Saves Money:

Jason Bedrick

School choice programs expand educational opportunity, but at what cost?

Opponents of school choice frequently claim that vouchers and scholarship tax creditssiphon” money from public schools and increase the overall cost of education to the taxpayers. However, these critics generally fail to consider the reduction in expenses associated with students switching out of the district school system, wrongly assuming that all or most school costs are fixed. When students leave, they claim, a school cannot significantly reduce its costs because it cannot cut back on its major expenses, like buildings, utilities, and labor. But if that were true, then schools would require little to no additional funds to teach additional students. A proper fiscal analysis considers both the diverted or decreased revenue as well as the reduction in expenses related to variable costs.

A new study by Jeff Spalding, Director of Fiscal Policy at the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, does exactly that. The study examines the fiscal impact of 10 of the 21 school voucher programs nationwide, finding a cumulative savings to states of at least $1.7 billion over two decades. Spalding, the former comptroller/CFO for the city of Indianapolis, is cautious, methodical, and transparent in his analysis. He walks readers through the complex process of determining the fiscal impact of each program, identifying the impact of each variable and explaining equation along the way. He also makes relatively conservative assumptions, such as counting food service and interscholastic athletics as fixed costs even though they are variable with enrollment. Critically, Spalding accounts for those students who would have attended private school anyway, explaining:

One common complicating factor is student eligibility. If a voucher program allows students already enrolled in a private school to qualify, then those students do not directly relieve the public school system of any costs. Thus, there is a new public cost incurred for the vouchers provided to those students, but no corresponding savings for the public school system. Anytime voucher eligibility extends to students not currently enrolled in a public school, the net savings calculation must include that complicating factor.
States save money when the variable cost of each student to the district schools is greater than the cost of the voucher, accounting for the students who would have attended private school anyway. After wading through each state’s byzantine school funding formula, Spalding calculated that the voucher programs reduced expenditures across all 10 programs by $4.5 billion over two decades while costing states $2.8 billion, producing $1.7 billion in savings.

In the last 40 years, government spending on K-12 education has nearly tripled while results have been flat. Moreover, the Census Bureau projects that the elderly will make up an increasingly larger share of the population in the coming decades, straining state budgets with spending on health care and retirement benefits. Schools will have to compete with hospitals and nursing homes for scarce resources.

In other words, our education system needs to become more effective and financially efficient, fast. Large-scale school choice programs promise to do both.


Articles: Poverty In The Black Community Is The Result of Culture Not Racism

Articles: Poverty In The Black Community Is The Result of Culture Not Racism:
"Until the black community looks inward to solve its problems, nothing will change. Many problems in the black community are the result of a self-imposed inferiority complex. That is why it infuriates me so much to hear race baiters telling poor blacks that they are victims. The victim mindset causes complacency and impotence of action in an individual. One reason that the black community has regressed instead of progressed is due to the victim mindset that has caused cognitive blindness and mental paralysis. Blacks cannot continue to blame society for how blacks Americans are perceived.  The black community must examine its culture and its effect on the lives of the individuals in the black community.

"




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The Loss of Ethics in America

The Loss of Ethics in America:

Wikipedia tells us that ethics, sometimes known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct, often addressing disputes of moral diversity.

That’s the long way of saying “doing the right thing when no one is watching.”

A large part of ethics is, and has been sustained, by faith. But we are beginning to see a nation that is questioning faith while trying to establish a non-religious common conscience. Good luck on that… Take a stroll down the back streets of Los Angeles or Chicago and tell me how well that’s doing. This establishment of enlightened morality can really only be done by exercising one code of human behavior in which we all obey and apply the same set of rules.

When we do that, we find ourselves back at the tenets of faith.

ethicsI believe that science and human compassion continue to raise the bar on society, but it’s ethics that keeps us from slipping backwards. Even so, ethics are constantly challenged by power and money – truth and honesty are constantly threatened by the almighty dollar and of course, government has become more and more ethics challenged.

James Macgregor Burns said, “Divorced from ethics, leadership is reduced to management, and politics to mere technique.” Today we find ourselves in a struggle not just with injustice, but the baseness of avarice and twisted ideology. We either fix this or we perish.

In America we are losing the fight to preserve ethics. Schools no longer practice any ethics-bound philosophy, unless it relates to race. We no longer salute the flag, or pray together, or honor the founding fathers who built this nation on moral conscience.

I’m reminded of the quote by the great writer C.S. Lewis – “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make a man a more clever devil…”

I think in our search for more of everything we have lost the essence of what is really important, and we have re-defined character. We look to become cogs in the wheel, failing to seek out the magical essence inside each of us that spins the eternal mechanism.

Now, more than ever before, it is the responsibility of all sound men and women to stand and protest – to return us to the common denominator of morality.





Somehwhere on the Road to Key West



Michael Reisig has been writing professionally for 15 years.

He is an award-winning newspaper columnist and a best-selling novelist.

Be sure to check out his latest best seller, Somewhere on the Road to Key West.
You can see more of Michael’s work and a short biography at Amazon.com.





Amtrak Shouldn't Get to Write Its Own Ticket

Amtrak Shouldn't Get to Write Its Own Ticket:

Ilya Shapiro

Article One, Section One of the Constitution vests “all legislative powers” in Congress. The sovereign power to make laws comes from the people, so their representatives—Congress—should make those laws.

It sounds simple enough, but once the federal government started ballooning in size and regulating everything under the sun, that simple understanding had to go. There was too much governing for Congress to handle on its own, so the courts adjusted, allowing a proliferation of government agencies to exercise lawmaking power, within certain guidelines.&

We’ve now apparently gotten to the point, however, that there’s so much governing to do that it’s too much for the government to handle on its own. In a case now before the Supreme Court, Amtrak—the for-profit, quasi-public entity that the federal government has deemed private for these purposes—has been given a part to play in making laws to regulate its competitors in the rail transportation industry.

If you think this sounds like a far cry from “all legislative powers” being vested in Congress, you’re not alone. The Association of American Railroads, which represents the rail companies subject to these regulations, sued the Department of Transportation, arguing that the Passenger Rail Improvement and Investment Act of 2008 unconstitutionally vests federal legislative power in a private entity by giving Amtrak the ability to set rail standards (in conjunction with the DOT). AAR has battled through the federal courts, most recently winning in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and is now trying to preserve that victory before the Supreme Court.

Cato, joined by the National Federation of Independent Business, has filed a brief supporting AAR. We argue that this case is different from other cases where courts have found prudential reasons for not enforcing the nondelegation doctrine, the concept that Congress can’t delegate its own legislative powers. As we explain, the judicial administrability, political accountability, and necessity arguments in favor of liberal delegation of lawmaking powers are far less valid in the context of delegation to private entities. Further, apart from these prudential concerns, the Court has vigilantly enforced these important structural limitations on delegation and should continue to do so here.

It’s perhaps too late to expect the courts to meaningfully rein in the massive delegation of power to the administrative state—though we should limit that delegation to implementation of law rather than actual legislation—but, as our brief explains here, it could be much worse. Many agencies are already dominated by the private interests they’re supposed to regulate (a dynamic known as “regulatory capture”), but allowing a private entity to secure a legislative role in governing its competitors not only exacerbates the problems that the administrative state already poses, it makes a mockery of the Constitution and erodes one more important structural protection for liberty.

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Dept. of Transportation v. Association of American Railroads on December 8, with a decision expected in the spring.


Obama Was Warned Repeatedly of Consequences of Withdrawal from Iraq

Obama Was Warned Repeatedly of Consequences of Withdrawal from Iraq:

Top government officials and military brass repeatedly warned of the consequences of sticking to a timetable on full Iraq War troop withdrawal, but President Obama proceeded with the plan in 2011.

U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker cautioned against such a move in the years beforehand.

“I am certain that abandoning or drastically curtailing our efforts will bring failure,” he said in 2007. “An Iraq that falls into chaos or civil war will mean massive human suffering, well beyond what has already occurred within Iraq’s borders.”

He told PBS later that he and Gen. David Petraeus refused to talk about timetables during that time.

“To set an arbitrary timeline is just telling the enemy how long he has to wait,” he said.

Adm. Michael Mullen said the consequences of setting a timeline could be “very dangerous” in a Fox News Sunday interview in 2008, and retired Gen. Jack Keane said in 2011 that the Obama administration was “taking steps towards losing this peace” in Iraq with full withdrawal of troops.

“When we walk away at the end of conflicts, it has a tendency not to work,” he said.

Former Obama Defense Secretary Leon Panetta acknowledged in a CBS interview this month that he was not confident in the administration’s plan to pull out at the time.

“I thought it was important for us to maintain a presence in Iraq,” he said.

The consequences: the rise of the terrorist group ISIL and the full destabilization of the country in the years since. In January, these violent extremists overran Ramadi and Fallujah and have seized large swathes of land in Iraq and Syria. Obama pawned responsibility off to CIA Director James Clapper and others for underestimating the threat in a recent 60 Minutes interview, but the facts are intelligence officials have been warning about ISIL for months.

The Daily Beast quoted one former Pentagon official as saying, “Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bullshitting.”

Obama tried to re-write history once already in the ongoing Iraq debacle by trying to pass responsibility for full troop withdrawal to the Bush administration.

Yet, it was President George W. Bush who may had the most prescient view of all about pulling all troops out of Iraq too early, during remarks to the press on July 12, 2007.

“To begin withdrawing before our commanders tell us we’re ready would be dangerous for Iraq, for the region and for the United States,” Bush said. “It would mean surrendering the future of Iraq to al Qaeda. It’d mean that we’d be risking mass killings on a horrific scale. It’d mean we’d allow the terrorists to establish a safe haven in Iraq to replace the one they lost in Afghanistan. It’d mean we’d be increasing the probability that American troops would have to return at some later date to confront an enemy that is even more dangerous.”

Defense Leaders Warn of Tomahawk Missile Shortage

Defense Leaders Warn of Tomahawk Missile Shortage:

As the United States steps up its battle against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS), defense leaders on Capitol Hill are raising concerns about a looming shortage in the Tomahawk missile supply, a key offensive weapon that the Navy has deployed against militant strongholds in Syria and elsewhere.

The U.S. Navy’s current reliance on the Tomahawk, known as “the world’s most advanced cruise missile,” comes just months after the Obama administration attempted to significantly cut funding for the weapon and then eliminate it completely it in 2016, a move that drew heavy criticism from defense experts and lawmakers.

With the military relying on the weapons in its strikes against ISIL targets in Syria, defense leaders have begun to warn that the Pentagon could quickly run through its Tomahawk stockpiles, a problem exacerbated by defense budget cuts known as sequestration, defense sources say.

The House Armed Services Committee (HASC) is now expressing concern that the Pentagon has “insufficient weapons inventories” and that the Obama administration’s proposed termination of the Tomahawk missile program in fiscal year 2016 would worsen “a deficient inventory problem,” according to defense insiders and sources close to the committee.

The U.S. Navy deployed 47 Tomahawks last week during its strikes in Syria, which amounts to 47 percent of its planned purchases of the weapon in 2015, according to the American Thinker. There are currently enough Tomahawks left “for roughly 85 days of a campaign, at the current rate of use,” the report states.

With a stockpile of about 4,000 Tomahawks—and the administration still contending that cuts are needed despite its reliance on the missile—defense insiders warn that the inventory could quickly run low as the military campaign against ISIL continues in Syria and Iraq.

“You could see that if you’re starting to really ramp up [use] and be more aggressive, it wouldn’t take you too long to expend a significant portion of that [inventory],” one defense insider told the Washington Free Beacon. “If you’re firing 600 to 800 during a campaign … it starts to chip away at it pretty fast.”

About 200 Tomahawks were used in the brief 2011 military campaign in Libya; 2,000 have been deployed since the program’s inception.

The low stockpile of Tomahawks has highlighted how deepening defense cuts are impacting on-the-ground realities, according to Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R., Calif.), HASC’s chairman.

“As we saw in this week’s airstrikes against ISIL, Tomahawk missiles are among the most valuable and precise tools in our military arsenal,” McKeon said in a statement provided to the Free Beacon. “They provide unmanned, all-weather, deep-strike attack capability against both fixed and mobile targets which makes them particularly useful against terrorist groups like ISIL that transcend nations and borders.”

McKeon and his colleagues have fought against the Obama administration’s cuts to the Tomahawk and have attempted to restore funding in part.

“I was deeply troubled that in this year’s budget request, DoD called for significantly reducing the number of Tomahawks in the arsenal and even recommended suspending their entire production line beginning in 2016,” McKeon said. “That is why all four House national security committees, including the Armed Services Committee, rebuffed the administration’s request and restored the Tomahawks.”

“Unfortunately,” McKeon added, “this a prime example of the types of dangerous cuts our military leaders are being forced to consider under the new sequestration budget regime. It is my hope that the next Congress will reverse sequestration and ensure that vital national security programs like the Tomahawk system are adequately funded.”

Rep. Randy Forbes (R., Va.), a member of the Armed Services Committee, also expressed concern about limiting production of the Tomahawk missiles in the face of new military campaigns.

“All four of Congress’ defense committees have rejected the administration’s reckless plan to suspend the Tomahawk production line beginning in 2016 and have moved to add additional missiles to the budget,” Forbes told the Free Beacon in a statement.

“As recent operations in the Middle East show, it is essential that the United States have the sophisticated land-attack capability contained in the Tomahawk missile, especially for striking high-value targets in areas that have advanced air-defense systems,” he said. “Even more alarming, because a replacement for the Tomahawk is still years away, it would be a foolish decision to shut down the Tomahawk industrial base and leave the nation without a hot production line.”

The administration originally sought to cut the Tomahawk missile program by $128 million under its fiscal year 2015 budget proposal. It also aimed to fully eliminate production of the missile by year 2016, according to budget documents released by the Navy.

Additionally, the Obama administration sought to reduce the actual number of Tomahawk missiles acquired by the United States in 2015 from 196 last to just 100, a proposal that all four congressional defense committees rebuffed in a notable show of solidarity.

The procurement of Tomahawks was slated to drop to zero in 2016 under the president’s original budget proposal.

Now the administration is relying heavily on the very same missile it had sought to eliminate.

“Ninety-five percent of the munitions that we dropped were precision-guided munitions. And that includes the Tomahawk missiles, which are very precise,” a senior Obama administration official said on background during a conference call last week with reporters on the strikes in Syria against ISIL.

Between Iraq and Syria, the use of Tomahawks could be significant in the coming months and years, insiders say.

“It’s difficult for anyone to say how much is enough,” said the defense insider. “How can you know for certain? God forbid you end up fighting a two front war.”

The other concern is that as the administration seeks to ramp down procurement of the Tomahawk, a working replacement for the missile is still years off. And once production of the Tomahawk is ended, it becomes much more difficult to restart the program if more missiles are needed.

“Without a suitable replacement it would be unwise to shut off that production line,” said the defense source. “It’s not like flipping a switch to reactivate suppliers who have been turned off.”

Mackenzie Eaglen, a former Defense Department official, explained that while the stockpile should be adequate into the near future, replenishments will be needed during the next year.

“Given the fact that most military officials are predicting a years-long campaign against ISIL, there is little doubt that some replenishment will be required over the next 12 months,” said Eaglen, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). “If and when that happens, it will call into question the Navy plan to shut down this production line.”

“Congress was already moving in that direction to reverse Navy plans regarding Tomahawk, but this air war is sure to solidify them,” she explained.

A Defense Department official did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the issue.

How to Defeat the Left: Understand the Enemy

How to Defeat the Left: Understand the Enemy:

Take_No_Prisoners_HorowitzI recently read a great new book by former radical Leftist David Horowitz called “Take No Prisoners: The Battle Plan for Defeating the Left.”
I’ve read a number of Horowitz’s books and articles over the years and enjoyed them, but I was keenly attracted to this book when I heard about it primarily for two reasons.

First, I am a life-long conservative, only growing more conservative as I learn more about history and about the way the world works. Since high school, I have been battling the Left and their corrosive ideology.

Second, I have reached a level of disgust with my own camp (Republicans, and even many self-professed conservatives) that threatens to erupt into the vomiting stage. With the advent of the Tea Party movement five years ago, it has become apparent that the leadership of the GOP not only is afraid of leading conservatively, they are actually dead-set against it. Republican leadership is worse than worthless in the fight against the Left. I’ve often observed that the GOP couldn’t find real political victory with both hands and a flashlight, if it stumbled over it.

And sadly, many self-professed conservatives have so latched their wagon to the GOP that they, too, are willing to abandon principle in favor of gutless “pragmatism.”

But I know that there are still many conservatives out there who want to win, who want to fight to preserve this last best hope of earth God has given us in America. They just need to understand the nature of the enemy we face, in order to be able to effectively deal with it. So many Republicans and conservatives have been misled into thinking that liberals just have “different views,” that Leftists are really just nice people who are “mistaken.” What these Republicans and conservatives woefully fail to understand is that the Left is NOT interested in what is good for America–they are interested only in transforming America into a glorious socialist utopia.

If Republicans and conservatives could ever bring themselves to understand and face the nature of the threat to our great nation, I have to believe they would finally pull their heads out, get serious about this war, and finally treat liberals like what they are: the enemy.

So I plan to share a few excerpts from “Take No Prisoners” over the coming days, in the hopes that Republicans and conservatives might become enlightened–or at least more informed–about the nature of our current conflict, that they will buy a copy of the book, and read it…and then get to work. We’ve lost (forfeited) a lot of ground, and time is short.

This is the first passage I bookmarked when I was reading the book:

If Democrats priority were fixing government problems, would they have failed to produce a budget for four straight years, as they did during Obama’s first term, in the midst of a financial crisis?

If Democrats were pragmatists, wouldn’t they have immediately sought a bipartisan approach to the crisis that confronted them when they took office in January 2009?

This is exactly what Obama promised he would do during the campaign, and it’s one of the reasons he was elected.

But it is the opposite of what he did when he entered the Oval Office, and launched the most divisive legislation–ObamaCare–since the Civil War.

Instead of focusing on jobs and the economy, he spent his first two years pushing a massive new entitlement program.

If Obama and the Democrats were concerned about dealing with the jobs crisis, they would not have used their monopoly of power to pursue a new trillion-dollar social program opposed by half the nation, and by every Republican in Congress.

But they were not as interested in addressing the crisis as they were in using it as leverage to launch their society-transforming schemes.

The Democrats made ObamaCare their priority because they are social missionaries whose goal is to fundamentally transform the United States of America, as Obama warned five days before the 2008 election.

Creating a massive new government program that would absorb one-sixth of the economy and make every American dependent on government for his health needs was the first item on the Democrats’ missionary agenda. They saw it as a milestone on the way to a brave new future.

That is the way Progressives think, and their opponents had better understand what that means. Progressives are not in politics to tinker with the existing system, although they understand that tinkering and fixing problems along the way will gain them votes. They are in politics to transform the way Americans live.

Why do Progressives not see that the future they are promoting has already failed elsewhere?

First, because they see history as something to transcend, not as providing a resevoir of experience from which they must learn.

Second, because in their eyes, the future is an idea that has not yet been tried. If socialism failed in Europe, it’s because they weren’t the ones implementing it, and the conditions weren’t right to make it work.

The very grandeur of their ambition turns Progressives into zealots. They dream of using the power of the state to make everyone equal, and to take care of everyone’s needs. They are going to legislate and dictate social equality and social justice.

How intoxicating is that idea?

It explains why Progressives approach politics differently from conservatives. It doesn’t matter to Progressives that the massive entitlement programs they created–Social Security and Medicare–are already bankrupt. They can take care of that by making wealthy people pay their fair share.

Progressives believe that if they can appropriate enough money and accumulate enough power, they can make their glorious future work.

Everything Democrats do, and every campaign they conduct, is about mobilizing their political resources to bring about this result. It is about social transformation, one program and one candidate at a time.

No Republican in his right mind thinks like this.

Of course, Progressives also seek the power and perks of office for their own sake. What makes them different from other politicians is not these petty ambitions, but the grand mission. The vision of a noble future that they will bring about salves their consciences, and puts urgency into their crusades, while encouraging their destructive attacks.
The post How to Defeat the Left: Understand the Enemy appeared first on American Clarion.

Twilight of the Summer Moonbat

Twilight of the Summer Moonbat:

It has been awhile since we pointed out the bankrupt nature of the moonbat left. 


We have a good excuse thanks to Jim Geraghty's post last week at NRO, Funeral Services for the Anti-War Movement Will Be Held Next Week.

Born in 2002, the anti-war movement suffered ill health since 2009 & collapsed in front of the White House Tuesday.
You need to read the whole thing as he has some great links that flesh out the details ... including one of mine from 2011;

“There never was an anti-war movement. Deep down, I think – most of us knew that anyway. It was an anti-Bush movement. War had nothing to do with it – it was all about the Left finding a way to regain power.”




Liberals as Low Information Voters

Roger L. Simon » Liberals as Low Information Voters:

"In a recent months I have been startled by many examples of this. In a casual conversation, an Ivy League graduate and author of several best-selling books asked me what I meant by “quantitative easing,” although it has been one of the keys to the economic policies of the last half-dozen years. Since the man is highly intelligent, my conclusion was he didn’t want to know about such details because they would lead to him having to examine long-held assumptions, assumptions it would be uncomfortable to question for a whole set of reasons.  Remember, these are people who voted for Obama, twice, and now are just becoming aware that many of us consider him the worst president ever and have pretty good reasons.  And the public is beginning to agree with us. This is hard to process."


'via Blog this'

Administration Insider Says Obama Lying About ISIS Warnings

Administration Insider Says Obama Lying About ISIS Warnings:



From the Oval Office, U.S. President Barack Obama speaks on the phone with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Sept. 27, 2013.
Daily Mail – President Barack Obama’s intelligence briefings have provided him with specific information since before he won re-election in 2012 about the growing threat of the terror group now known alternatively as ISIS and ISIL, an administration insider told MailOnline on Monday.

‘Unless someone very senior has been shredding the president’s daily briefings and telling him that the dog ate them, highly accurate predictions about ISIL have been showing up in the Oval Office since before the 2012 election,’ said a national security staffer in the Obama administration who is familiar with the content of intelligence briefings.

Read full story.

Original enclosures:

How Green Is Europe?

How Green Is Europe?: A superficial look might indicate great achievements. Yet a closer view reveals how far the European renewables have to go, and what irrational choices are made to meet EU green energy quotas.


Monday, September 29, 2014

Report: Corrupt Veterans Affairs Executive Lied Under Oath, Engaged In Fraud

Report: Corrupt Veterans Affairs Executive Lied Under Oath, Engaged In Fraud:

A report released by the inspector general for the Veteran Affairs Department (VA) has discovered incredible levels of fraud and abuse, detailing extensive retaliation against whistleblowers, Federal News Radio reports.

Along with whistleblower harassment come findings of lying to investigators and procurement fraud, with the main culprit being Susan Taylor, the deputy chief procurement officer in the Veterans Health Administration’s Procurement and Logistics Office (VHA).

The 82-page report shows that Taylor used her office for private gain in awarding a contract to FedBid, a reverse auction service, whose executives also interfered in the process by preventing the VA from operating in an honest and impartial manner.

According to a shocking revelation from the inspector general, FedBd, in its own words, planned to “‘storm the castle,’ use a ‘heavy-handed- puncher,’ to ‘rally the troops up on the Hill,’ have ‘enough top cover to overwhelm,’ to ‘unleash the hounds,’ to ‘assassinate [Mr. Frye's] character and discredit him,’ and to keep ‘close hold’ of nonpublic information.'”

This came after Jan Frye, VA deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Acquisition and Logistics, pushed back against the use of reverse auctions twice. A tip off from a group of vendors about the relationship between Taylor and FedBid instigated the investigation, which began around 18 months ago. The inspector general quickly found that Taylor had pressured her staff to use the services of FedBid, saying that it was ‘free,’ even though it emphatically was not.

Investigators then spent the next 18 months cataloging information about how Taylor “improperly disclosed non-public VA information to unauthorized persons, misused her position and VA resources for private gain, and engaged in a prohibited personnel practice when she recommended that a subordinate senior executive service (SES) employee be removed from SES during her probation period.”

Taylor worked closely with FedBid executives in crafting responses to assignments given to her by her supervisors at VHA. When her supervisor questioned the point of hiring FedBid in the first place, Taylor sent a frank email to FedBid executives, asking for advice on how to best respond. Taylor’s complete lack of discretion extends back to 2007, when she began work at the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the report found.

Although the inspector general sent the case over to the Department of Justice (DOJ) for criminal prosecution, the DOJ instead deferred to the VA, hoping that the agency will take appropriate administrative actions. While the VA agreed with the findings, the agency says it will take 90 days to see what sort of administrative action it will take against Taylor, despite the fact that Taylor lied under oath.

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The U.N. Has A Dirty Secret, You Won’t Believe The Hate They Are Funding

The U.N. Has A Dirty Secret, You Won’t Believe The Hate They Are Funding:

The ‘peaceful’ religion is at it again! Muslims have started to do something so troubling, that even these Fox New’s Anchors couldn’t believe what they were reading. Just watch their reaction as they release what they have been hearing on

The post The U.N. Has A Dirty Secret, You Won’t Believe The Hate They Are Funding appeared first on Q Political.

Obama's narcissism a threat to national security

Obama's narcissism a threat to national security:

We mention President Obama’s narcissism not as an exercise in name-calling but because it continues to be relevant to how he conducts himself in office, and it’s not pretty.

This undeniable character trait was on full display in his interview with Steve Kroft of “60 Minutes,” in the sense that he simply cannot entertain the possibility, much less – infinitely less – admit the possibility that he has made a mistake or exercised poor judgment.

If anything remotely positive happens on his watch, he presumes to take full credit for it – way more than the normal opportunistic politician. With the killing of Osama bin Laden, for example, Obama boasts as if the raid were his initial idea and he delivered the kill shot. Most people in his position would play down their role in such an event and give credit to our special forces personnel who made it happen.

But when things are going poorly, Obama either candy-coats the reality or pretends he’s an outsider powerless to do anything but complain about it. No president has ever been so committed to eschewing accountability.

News outlets are reporting that Obama acknowledged that his administration was surprised by the strength of the Islamic State, sort of. He lays the blame for any such underestimates at the feet of Jim Clapper, his director of intelligence. Isn’t Clapper in the administration? It’s as if Obama is every bit as mystified by Clapper’s alleged oversight as the rest of us and as if he has no culpability for it whatsoever.

David Limbaugh’s brand new book applies a lawyer’s skepticism to the Gospel of Christ and documents his own spiritual journey. Order “Jesus on Trial”

But it’s even worse than that. For the truth is that this wasn’t some kind of mistake in intelligence. Our intelligence services were fully aware of the strength and danger the Islamic State posed months and months ago and were aware of its aggressive pursuit of territorial expansion. It’s not that we underestimated the Islamic State; it’s that we overtly ignored it or that Obama was literally out to lunch – or on the golf course.

Journalist Eli Lake reported that one former senior Pentagon official was flabbergasted in watching Obama’s “60 Minutes” performance. “Either the president doesn’t read the intelligence he’s getting or he’s bulls––ing,” said the official.

Liberals were relentless in accusing President George W. Bush of lying about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction leading up to our attack on Iraq, even though he was reasonably relying on the best intelligence estimates from our own intelligence services and those of most other nations. He believed that Saddam Hussein had these weapons based on intelligence and on Saddam’s behavior. Bush acted on that intelligence, for which he has been called a liar by egregious liars.

Obama, by contrast, had actionable intelligence and didn’t act and is now acting as though he was personally unaware of it. Well, if his director of intelligence had that information, is it even conceivable he wouldn’t have passed it on to Obama? Only if he knew Obama wouldn’t care or wouldn’t act on it in any event.

So if Clapper knew of the nature and extent of the Islamic State threat and didn’t pass it on to Obama because he knew he wouldn’t act on it, that’s Obama’s fault. If he knew and didn’t pass it on for some other reason, that’s Obama’s fault for having such a knucklehead in such a critically important position affecting our national security. If Obama now knows that Clapper knew and didn’t pass this information on to him, he should either resign himself (for creating the impression that he didn’t want to know about such matters) or fire Clapper for not telling him. You feel me? It’s Obama’s fault any way you look at it.

I suspect that Clapper either didn’t report to Obama because he knew Obama didn’t want to hear it or did report to him but he didn’t read it or he read it but refused to even consider acting on it because to do so would have contradicted his firmly held position that we had to remove ourselves entirely from Iraq. Obama is continuing in this stubbornly irresponsible posture today, even if he has reluctantly allowed airstrikes, because he has announced that he will not even consider ground forces in that area – no matter how dramatically the Islamic State threatens our national security and that of our allies.

Obama’s narcissism is a clear and present danger to the security interests of the United States for a host of reasons. He refuses to accept accountability for his decisions or failed policies and thus won’t change course when reality proves him wrong. He won’t realistically assess threats when they contradict his worldview-driven perceptions. And he won’t take action if by doing so he would be tacitly admitting he was wrong before.

I suspect that even Democratic Party leaders and those in his administration who have the sense to grasp the reality of the threat to world stability posed by radical Islamists are shaking their heads in private over the bizarre, surreal character who leads their party but refuses to lead the United States of America.



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