op ed review 6/16
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
Gallup
poll finds former president Bush more popular than Obama.
Congress and the State Department’s inspector general are
examining allegations that senior officials working under Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton may have suppressed investigations into suspected
criminal activity among U.S.
diplomats abroad — including the alleged solicitation of prostitutes by an
ambassador in Europe
Hillary’s Legacy of Scandals
The White House assures that tracking our every phone call
and keystroke is to stop terrorists, and yet it won´t snoop in mosques, where
the terrorists are. That´s right, the government´s sweeping surveillance of our
most private communications excludes the jihad factories where homegrown
terrorists are radicalized.
One person whose privacy was not invaded by U.S.
intelligence was Tamerlan Tsarnaev, as he repeatedly visited the al Qaeda
online magazine Inspire for its recipe “Build a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your
Mom.”
CBS poll: 58% disapprove
of government collecting phone records.
Rassmussen: 57% Fear
Government Will Use NSA Data to Harass Political Opponents
Sequester? What
sequester?: President Obama and his
family will be going to Africa later this month on a trip that is expected to
cost taxpayers $60 to $100 million, according to the Washington Post. "Military
cargo planes will airlift in 56 support vehicles, including 14 limousines and
three trucks loaded with sheets of bullet-proof glass to cover the windows of
the hotels where the first family will stay. Fighter jets will fly in shifts
giving 24-hour coverage over the president’s airspace so they can intervene
quickly if an errant plane gets too close.”
A member of the U.S. Army Band who said he was reprimanded
for having anti-Obama bumper stickers on his personal car, serving Chick-fil-A
sandwiches at a party and reading books written by conservative authors like
Sean Hannity is now facing Article 15 charges – which cropped up shortly after
he went public with his complaints.
A Texas
high school principal threatened to sabotage a valedictorian’s appointment to
the U.S. Naval Academy after the student delivered a speech that referenced God
and the U.S. Constitution.
The Obama Administration “strongly objects” to a proposed
amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act on that would have
protected the religious rights of soldiers – including evangelical Christian
service members who are facing growing hostility towards their religion.
A pro-life legal group, Alliance Defending Freedom, released
audio of a 2012 phone call between an IRS agent and the head of a Texas pregnancy
counseling group. During the phone call, IRS agent Sherry Wan is heard
lecturing Ania Joseph about how she can’t have a tax exemption and also push
her religious beliefs— a bit of advice that would be quite interesting to every
church in America.
Senator Rand Paul told a conservative Christian audience
that, "There is a war on Christianity" being waged by "liberal
elites' and "worldwide as well. Sen. Paul has been actively courting the
conservative Christian community for months.
Obamacare: States are
starting to roll out details about the Obamacare exchanges. Some potential participants may be surprised
at the figures: $2,000 deductibles, $45 primary care visit co-pays, and $250
emergency room tabs. : Is a $2,000 deductible 'affordable?'
The Ohio Department of Insurance announced that, based on the rates
submitted by insurers to date, the average individual-market health insurance
premium in 2014 will come in around $420, “representing an increase of 88
percent” relative to 2013.
Dozens of lawmakers and aides are so afraid that their
health insurance premiums will skyrocket next year thanks to Obamacare that
they are thinking about retiring early or just quitting.
More white people died in the U.S. last year than were born,
a surprising slump coming more than a decade before the census predicts that
the ranks of white Americans will drop with every passing year.
For the first time, America´s racial and ethnic minorities
now make up about half of the under-5 age group and will be a majority by this
year or next.
?????Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., voted with Senate Democrats
today to kill an amendment by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, that would have
required the federal government to secure the border first before granting
legalization to currently illegal immigrants. All four Republican members of
the bipartisan Gang of Eight immigration group voted for Majority Leader Harry
Reid’s, D-Nev., motion to table the Grassley amendment.
You can’t make this stuff up……The former host of “Erotica
Night” at a Baltimore
bookstore will be the number two official at the CIA. On Wednesday, Barack
Obama nominated Avril Danica Haines to be the Deputy Director of the CIA,
replacing Michael Morell, who took much of the blame for editing the Benghazi talking points.
Third-Graders Introduce Obama at
lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender pride event at the White House
The Obama administration has concluded that Syrian President
Bashar Assad's government used chemical weapons against the rebels seeking to
overthrow him and, in a major policy shift, President Obama has decided to
supply military support to the rebels.
This would be the same Syrian rebels that pledged their
allegiance to al-Qaeda leader Sheik Ayman al-Zawahri. What could go wrong?
“Syrian rebels
execute a 14-year-old boy for insulting Islam”
China
takes over space. A Chinese manned spacecraft blasted off with three
astronauts on board on Tuesday on a 15-day mission to an experimental space lab in the latest step
towards the development of a Chinese space
station.
_______________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Immigration reform to gag on
Wesley Pruden, 6/14
Sometimes the only antidote for poison is more poison. The
body politic just can’t take it any more and throws up everything. The result
would suit the Democrats just fine.
The Democrats pushing immigration reform want the issue, not
the reform, and they think a defeat they could hang on the Republicans could
give them a shot at keeping the Senate and taking the House next November. Then
they could enact a law to give everybody who wants one an American passport.
This would guarantee unanimous election results, like those in the squalid
places the illegals are fleeing.
There’s lots for everybody to gag on, which is how Sen.
Harry Reid, the Las Vegas
bag man in charge of running the charade in the Senate, is determined to
preserve as many poison pills as he can. He has to preserve as much of the
stink as he can to keep the Republican gag reflex working.
The main sticking point continues to be border security,
which the Democrats have been promising for decades - and the border continues
to be the sieve they want it to be. The border can be the party’s ATM machine,
stuffed full of prospective new voters. Once here, the illegals can be put in
the Democratic voter bank to be “withdrawn” once they’re legalized. Until then,
the Hispanics already here and legal are expected to show their gratitude in
the usual way. Passing out citizenship this way is the modern equivalent of the
old custom of passing out turkeys on Christmas eve. There’s always an appetite
for turkey.
If there was a semblance of good faith on the part of the
Democrats, they would leap to establish security on the border; this has been
the promise in all the amnesty schemes, and authentic border security is as
ephemeral as ever. The bag man took pains to humiliate Sen. Chuck Grassley of
Iowa, a key Republican voice on immigration matters, as the floor debate
opened, by gleefully tabling his amendment to make the border secure before
granting amnesty to the 11 million (or more) illegals already here.
“The so-called open and fair process” promised by the
Democrat and the so-called Gang of Eight senators who wrote the bill – four
Democrats and four Republican wishy-washies – “is a farce,” Mr. Grassley told
the Senate on Thursday. “This is not the right way to start off on a very
important bill.” But that assumes there’s a real attempt to get authentic
reform and organize an orderly welcome for legal immigrants. But that’s a
foolish assumption. The four wishy-washies – Marco Rubio of Florida,
John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona and
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina
– followed the Democrats to kill the border-security amendment.
The debate was occasionally
interrupted Thursday with outbursts of candor and even of conscience. Sen.
Chuck Schumer of New York, the chief negotiator behind the Gang of Eight, said
the Senate might as well pass the bill without amendments because it will take
“years and years and years” to make the border secure, so why try. “Years and
years and years” means “never.”
Other amendments are coming, and Harry Reid will have to
decide whether to keep the bill “pure” or offend one of the key constituencies
of the party, which is eager to replace the melting pot. That pot produced the
greatest country the world has ever seen, but the fashion now is the salad
bowl, with competing loyalties, selfish interests and grasping ambitions. Sen.
Patrick Leahy of Vermont
proposes to enable gay caballeros to claim same-sex “partners” as family, and
give them green cards ahead of others who have been waiting in line for years.
“If this bill has something in it that gives gay couples
immigration rights and so forth,” Mark Rubio, perhaps suffering a fit of
conscience, told a radio interviewer, “it kills the bill, and I’m done.” Mr.
Rubio, who sometimes sounds like he wants to be a voice of sanity, told
interviewer Andrea Tantaros that the immigration bill as written “has no
chance” of passage. “If the border situation is not improved in this bill, this
bill won’t pass. It won’t pass the Senate and it has no chance in the House. It
won’t become law and we’re wasting our time.”
And that’s just the way President Obama and the Democrats
want it. They can spend the year between now and next November drowning the
Hispanics in foam and froth about the evil Republicans. It’s low, mean and
cynical, but that’s how politics works, some of the time.
http://www.prudenpolitics.com/node/3028?utm_source=P&P%20Auto%201&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=7516
________________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
"As a senator and presidential candidate, Obama
routinely tore into the Patriot Act as if it was worse than the Espionage Act
of 1917. Now, not only is he using the Patriot Act to spy on, well, pretty much
everyone, his Justice Department actually used the Espionage Act to label a
journalist a possible co-conspirator in espionage. But after the schadenfreude
wears off, the question remains: Is this bad policy? ... After every terrorist
attack, everyone always asks, 'Why didn't the government connect the dots?'
Well, what the NSA is doing is connecting dots. ... I don't have much
confidence in this administration. But I don't have an abundance of confidence
in government generally. That's one of the things I love about America: The
default position is to be skeptical of government, no matter who's in charge.
... The arrival of 'big data' ... creates opportunities for government (and
corporations) that were literally unimaginable not long ago. ...we're in
uncharted territory, and a healthy dose of old-fashioned American skepticism
seems warranted, no matter who's in charge."
-Jonah Goldberg
__________________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
The endless campaign of the left: Organizing for Action has big plans for the
summer. The advocacy group that grew out of the president´s campaign is
planning its first national TV ad buy next week with spots promoting Obamacare.
And the group is targeting 75 congressional districts for a push on immigration
this summer, with a special focus during the August congressional recess.
Pelosi: Late-Term Abortions are ´Sacred Ground´
Pelosi also said Thursday that one of government’s functions
is to help Americans achieve “fulfillment.”
_________________________________________________________________________
BOOKS
“American Betrayal: The Secret
Assault on Our Nation’s Character” by Diana West. “Even a reader of some acquaintance with the
matter of Soviet penetration of American institutions---governmental,
intellectual, cultural---will reel at Diana West's collation of recent
scholarship on this topic: the "honeycombing" depth of communist
subversion and occupation, truly boggles the mind. But Ms. West goes beyond
mere history. Her real intent is archaeology: to uncover the roots of America's
current corruption, visible now in our moral relativism and inability to
understand the nature and extent of the menace from our Islamist foe---a foe
self-declared, and one which, like communism, uses extensive deception as part
of its determined attack.”
________________________________________________________________________
CONSERVATIVE STRATEGY
The @Large Conference held recently in Baton Rouge, Louisiana
brought people together from around the country to discuss issues related to
black conservatives. In a time when the GOP is talking ´outreach´, the
conference was an important first step in the Republican party reclaiming its
heritage as the party of individual rights, colorblind justice and equality of
opportunity. The panelists and speakers also showed that many black
conservatives are right in line with the new generation of Republican
rabble-rousers like the late Andrew Breitbart, pushing against the radical left
and the GOP establishment with fierce conviction.
It should come as no surprise but, for some, it probably
will. A June 1 – 4, 2013, Gallup poll of the political landscape ahead of the
2016 presidential election shows that New Jersey’s outspoken Governor, Chris
Christie, is America’s favorite Republican. Unfortunately for Christie, he is
also Republicans least favorite Republican.
Two very different views of Sarah Palin:
“Certain people are
born gifted with "It" -- something that compels you to watch them.
Sarah Palin is one such individual. Though politically tarred,
feathered, and run out of town on a rail by the left and a few spineless
Republicans, I pray for the day when my favorite gladiator Sarah Palin returns
to the arena.”
“Those of us devoted to building a conservative movement
capable of winning elections had come to view the former governor as the symbol
of everything, and I do mean everything, wrong with the modern conservative
movement.”
It’s RICO time! How to Stop the Obama Administration Crime
Wave
_______________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
While some initially championed Edward Snowden, the 21st
century mole holed up in Hong Kong, as a
martyr, there also appears to be a growing backlash against the former NSA
contractor. And as the story slowly unfolds, one key question stands out: is
Snowden the heroic whistleblower he claims to be or something more sinister?
As if Tea Partiers needed any more evidence that Big
Government is out to get them, along come Edward Snowden and operation PRISM.
It was bad enough that the tax man had been yanking their chain: Everyone knows
the IRS is a bunch of jerks. But the NSA combing through people’s phone calls
and emails? That’s a whole different level of sinister.
CBS News announced that correspondent Sharyl Attkisson's
computer was hacked by "an unauthorized, external, unknown party on
multiple occasions," The hacking occurred about the time she was
reporting on the Benghazi attack and how her sources called into question the
Obama administration’s narrative.
The dreamers, brains and cranks who built the Internet hoped
it would be a tool of liberation and knowledge. So the first mystifying thing
for some here is how the leading companies — including Microsoft, Google,
Yahoo, Apple and Facebook — apparently made it easier for the National Security
Agency to gain access to their data. Only Twitter seems to have declined. The
companies deny directly working with the government on the project, called
Prism. But they have not been exactly eager to talk about how they are working
indirectly and where they would draw the line.
Did you hear the big news? Hillary’s on Twitter. Yep, she
went live at noon Monday, making jokes about her hair and pantsuits and,
according to one breathless report, “fueling speculation” that she’ll run for
president by saying her future job is “TBD”— to be determined. Bill and Chelsea
chipped in, too. OMG, stop the presses! There was another bit of breaking Clinton news that same
day, but nothing nearly as important. It seems there were some hooker scandals
at the State Department during her watch, and that one of our ambassadors also
has a sick fondness for other people’s children…..
We have a major disagreement about who should be in charge
of our 100,000 public schools that educate 50 million American children. To put
it simply, Democrats want a national school board; Republicans favor local
control.
____________________________________________________________________________
NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
Mickey Kaus has produced an excellent, easy-to-use “pocket
guide” to the reasons why the Schumer-Rubio immigration reform bill (S.744) is
fraudulent.
New movie may change the way America views nuclear power
Trailer:
The Secret Life of a Cat:
Amazing….
___________________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
"The
champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a
system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a
resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but
they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but
they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they
want to make the government omnipotent."
-Ludwig von Mises
______________________________________________________________________
LATE NITE
Leno: The big story
continues to be 29-year-old Edward Snowden, the man behind the leaking of the
NSA spy scandal. Speculation is that Snowden is hiding in Hong Kong and could
be working for China.
Hey, let's get real. Aren't we all pretty much working for China?........Some
experts believe the privacy scandal will hurt the NSA. Are they crazy? Do you
know how many people want to join now that they've heard the guy who blew the
whistle is a high school dropout, making almost $200,000 a year, with a poll
dancer girlfriend, and he’s living in Hawaii?
People are lining up to get this job…There are reports that female terrorists
are being fitted with exploding breast implants. How many guys are going to use
this as an excuse? "Honey, I'm not looking at her breasts. I'm working for
Homeland Security."……..According to a Gallup poll, President Obama's approval
rating has dropped to 45 percent. Luckily for Obama, he has "impeachment
insurance." It's called "Joe Biden."
posted by gary at
7:52 AM
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