op ed review 7/21
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
After interviewing nearly three dozen
people in the George Zimmerman murder case, the FBI found no evidence that
racial bias was a motivating factor in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, records
released Thursday show. Even the lead
detective in the case, Sanford Det. Chris Serino, told agents that he thought
Zimmerman profiled Trayvon because of his attire and the circumstances — but
not his race.
Rasmussen poll shows only 34% disagreed with the not-guilty
verdict for George Zimmerman in the shooting death of teenager Trayvon Martin.
This is a major blow to a mainstream media that for 15 months has almost
uniformly called for Zimmerman´s head.
The February 2012 shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon
Martion might never have happened if school officials in Miami-Dade County
had not instituted an unofficial policy of treating crimes as school
disciplinary infractions.
George Zimmerman haters throughout the media have carped and
whined about the fact that there weren’t any African-Americans on the
jury. But it was revealed that a
potential black juror had been struck by the prosecution for committing the
crime of being a Fox News watcher.
“Senate Majority Leader Rich Trumka, er, Harry Reid held a
gun to the head of Republicans on the filibuster, Republicans blinked, and
President Obama and the AFL-CIO will now get their nominees confirmed for the
cabinet and especially a legal quorum for the National Labor Relations Board.
Cut through all the procedural blather and that´s the essence of the Senate´s
"deal" over the 60-vote filibuster rule.”
A veteran IRS worker testified on Thursday that officials
from a Washington
office led by a political appointee intervened in the screening of Tea Party
applications, saying publicly for the first time the IRS chief counsel´s office
was involved in the controversial program.
Noonan: The IRS
scandal was connected this week not just to the Washington office—that had been
established—but to the office of the chief counsel. That is a bombshell—such a
big one that it managed to emerge in spite of an unfocused, frequently
off-point congressional hearing
Democrats doggedly pursuing a far-reaching immigration bill
are counting on help from Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s running mate
last year and an unlikely candidate for delivering the centerpiece of President
Barack Obama’s second-term agenda.
With open enrollment in Obamacare’s exchanges set to start
in fewer than three months, the law’s supporters are attempting to change the
subject from Obamacare’s many delays and glitches. Instead, they’re mounting a
campaign to sell the unpopular measure to the public. President Obama yesterday
gave a speech on Obamacare, trying to justify the fact that premiums continue
to rise, violating his 2008 campaign promise.
But there’s another helpful chart that shows how Obamacare will work,
and it’s taken from an official report released by government auditors. “The
process for determining subsidy eligibility could require 21 different steps,
involving at least five separate entities.”
Great moments in socialized medicine: “Labour faced its ‘darkest moment’ yesterday
over its stewardship of the (National) Health Service as a devastating report
laid bare an appalling catalogue of failings at 11 hospitals where ‘thousands’
of patients needlessly died.”
Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott formally announced he's
running for governor, “hoping to seize the fiercely socially conservative
mantle of Gov. Rick Perry that has helped make Texas the country's largest red state.”
Vice President Biden spent only about 20 hours in Trinidad and Tobago on his recent six day
trip through South America and the Caribbean,
but the hotel bill for the vice president, his entourage and the
advance team came in at about $245,000 for an estimated 1,134 room
nights.
Rep. Howard Coble (R-N.C.) said Thursday morning that
President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama are using Air Force One and other
official aircraft as their "personal toys”
More than two years after her upstart Senate campaign rocked
the Delaware
political world, tea party candidate Christine O'Donnell found out that her
private tax records may have been breached.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry signed sweeping new abortion
restrictions. The bill will require
abortion clinic doctors to have hospital admitting privileges, restrict
abortions to surgical centers, dictate when abortion-inducing drugs can be
taken and ban abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy.
“Once a baby starts looking like a baby, people tend to
think it ought to be protected, a view that seems to be shared by our
enlightened European brethren. Most of
Europe has bans on abortion ranging from 10 to 22 weeks, and the major
countries have first trimester bans — Portugal at 10 weeks, Germany and Spain
at 14 weeks, Italy effectively at the end of the first trimester. France is at 14
weeks as well, and it even mandates a one-week waiting period for all abortions.”http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/071613-663963-late-term-abortion-battle-in-texas.htm#ixzz2ZazhczuU
The Boston
bomber suspect has been rewarded with his photo on the cover of Rolling
Stone. Tsarnaev’s “fluffed and buffed”
image outraged one police photographer in Massachusetts, who released these photos to
the press. He’s been suspended.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2369810/Dzohokhar-Tsarnaev-pictures-Dramatic-new-pictures-moment-Boston-Bomber-emerged-boat.html#ixzz2ZV7m2HMr
_______________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
What Do You Do When The Oppressed Are Their Own Worst
Oppressors?
Spengler, July 15
I believe in civil rights as much now as I did then. That’s why it’s painful
to watch the degeneration of the NAACP with its silly petition to persuade the
Justice Department to bring a civil rights case against George Zimmerman. The
leaders of what used to be a civil rights movement want to talk about
everything but the main problem afflicting black people in the United States.
That is the breakdown of the black family. Just 29% of black women over the age
of 15 were married in 2010, according to the Census Bureau’s comprehensive
Current Population Survey. That compares to 54% of white women. At all ages,
black women were about half as likely to be married as white women. That is an
astonishing number. The percentage of out-of-wedlock births has risen from 18%
in 1980 to 40% in 2010. 29% of white births were non-marital, against 73% for
black births. That’s nearly three-quarters of all black births. Young black men
without a high school diploma are more likely to be in jail than to be
employed, reports the Pew Institute: Collateral Costs details the concentration
of incarceration among men, the young, the uneducated and African Americans.
One in 87 working-aged white men is in prison or jail compared with 1 in 36
Hispanic men and 1 in 12 African American men. Today, more African American men
aged 20 to 34 without a high school diploma or GED are behind bars (37 percent)
than are employed (26 percent). The report also shows more than 2.7 million
minor children now have a parent behind bars, or 1 in every 28. For
African American children the number is 1 in 9, a rate that has more than
quadrupled in the past 25 years. The worst oppressors of young black men are
older black men who abandon their children. And the second-worst oppressors of
young black men are other young black men. 94% of black murder victims are
killed by blacks. The accelerating decline of the black family portends a much
worse situation in the future. Why have civil rights organizations and black
clergy wagered their reputations on the Zimmerman case? It is hard to avoid the
conclusion that the issues that really concern African-Americans simply are too
painful to discuss. Five years after the ultimate boost to self-esteem — the
election of the first black president — things are getting worse faster. If
black leaders — from Barack Obama and Eric Holder on down — can’t talk about
the real problems, the prospects for the future are frightening indeed.
Postscript: Conservatives should view African-Americans’
emotional response to the death of Trayvon Martin with empathy. What makes the
incident so hard to bear is that so many young black men die every day through
involvement in violent crime. Trayvon Martin, whatever his past misbehavior
might have been, did not have a record of violent crime, and was carrying no
weapon when he confronted George Zimmerman. He was not lost to society as so
many black youth sadly are lost. The emotion is understandable in a community
that is suffering terrible losses, and finds intolerable the loss of this
particular young man. But that does not excuse the likes of Eric Holder for
manipulating these emotions for political advantage, nor does it excuse the
NAACP and the rest of the so-called civil rights establishment for its
demagoguery.
North Carolina
GOP: ‘Thank You, New York Times’
________________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“Attempting to make Trayvon Martin a poster boy for
"hate crimes" diverts attention from a terribly inconvenient truth:
that a grossly disproportionate number of murder victims in any year are black
men, women and children -- about 9,000 annually. And most of these victims are
murdered by other blacks -- with only a handful of cases that might be
associated with racism. In Obama's hometown of Chicago alone, since the death of Trayvon
Martin, there are more than 700 murdered black people, almost all of them
killed by black or Hispanic gangbangers. Obama hasn't mentioned a single one of
these deaths, because those lives have no political value other than the errant
claim that "gun control" would solve the problem.”
-Mark Alexander
"The motivations of [George] Zimmerman were quite easy
to understand if you cared to. He lived in a neighborhood with a lot of break
ins and the police were ineffective to stop it. So he tried to help out, and
when he saw a teenager he didn't recognize, he confronted the kid and talked to
the police. Now, you can question whether Zimmerman's actions were sensible,
but his motivations are very easy to comprehend if you're interested in
treating him like a fellow human being. But no. A lot of people want to see him
as this inhuman monster who just decided to murder a minority. They are bigots,
and bigotry keeps them from seeing others as a human being. And these same
bigots questioned everything about Zimmerman's story while being really
unconcerned about what led Trayvon to bashing a man's head into the pavement.
Because, again, they're bigots; they're not operating with rational
minds."
-Frank J. Fleming
“In the 20-day period of the Zimmerman trial, the Chicago
Sun-Times reported four minors ... were gunned down in the president's adopted
hometown of Chicago.
Those victims will not be adopted as a cause by Sharpton & Co. Their deaths
generated zero coverage by the national 'news' media. Like the jurors, most
Americans saw the confrontation between Zimmerman and Martin as unnecessary and
tragic. But that doesn't make it a murder. It doesn't make it an occasion for
our 'news' media to pander to liberal 'civil rights' leaders and sound the
wildly inaccurate alarm that America
hasn't moved an inch on racial matters since 14-year-old Emmett Till was
murdered in 1955."
-Brent Bozell
"The conventional wisdom evolves. Yesterday, Washington was merely
broken, gridlocked, dysfunctional. The passive voice spread the blame evenly.
Today it's agreed that Republican obstructionism is the root of all evil -- GOP
resistance having now escalated to nihilism and indeed sabotage. Sabotage
carries a fine whiff of extralegal, anti-constitutional vandalism. This from
media mandarins who barely bat an eyelash when President Obama unilaterally
suspends parts of his own health-care law -- just as he unilaterally stopped
enforcing current immigration laws for 1.7 million young illegal immigrants,
thereby enacting by executive order legislation that had failed in Congress. So
much for faithfully executing the laws."
-Charles Krauthammer
__________________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
People’s World is the flagship publication of Communist
Party USA, and the successor publication to the Daily Worker. It recently
carried back-to-back articles that were very revealing of a dubious but old
tradition among the American left. To wit: America’s communists have always
found allies—useful idiots, dupes—among the liberal/progressive left, the
mainstream Democratic Party, and (especially) the religious left. As to the
latter, I’m ever reminded of the words of the late Herb Romerstein, who told
me: “The religious left; they were the biggest suckers of them all.”
_________________________________________________________________________
BOOKS
“FrontPage Mag readers almost
certainly are familiar with British journalist Melanie Phillips from her book Londonistan, which chronicled England’s
multicultural slide into submission to Islam, or from her more recent book The
World Turned Upside Down, about the West’s slide into secular mass
derangement. But few readers may know about Phillips’ own journey from the
political left to social conservatism. She takes us on that journey in the
short autobiography she just released called “Guardian Angel: My Story, My Britain” This quick and compelling memoir of her
personal and professional life “is the story of my culture war: the account of
my battles with the hate-mongering left.” It spans her youth and her decades as
a journalist, editor, prominent columnist, and author, reflecting the
disturbing changes in British culture and society that she witnessed along the
way. Those changes left two Britains
in their wake: one “adhering to decency, rationality, and duty to others,” and
the left, “characterized by hatred, rampant selfishness, and a terrifying
repudiation of reason.”
“In 1977 she joined the staff of
the progressive Guardian, one of Britain’s most influential
newspapers. The attitude there: “we
were the embodiment of virtue itself… We were the left; therefore everyone who
was not the left was the right. The right was evil; everyone not on the left
was therefore evil… and everything not on the left was politically extreme.”
The significance of this was that the left had hijacked the middle ground and
substituted its own extreme values as the center of political and moral
gravity.”
_________________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
African Americans benefit from Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” self-defense
law at a rate far out of proportion to their presence in the state’s
population, despite an assertion by Attorney General Eric Holder that repealing
“Stand Your Ground” would help African Americans.
Of all the many changes that the Obama administration has
enacted over the last five years, the least remarked upon are the strange
changes in our vocabulary. To fathom the shifting meaning of words, here is a
guide to the new Obama lexicon. Affordable Care Act: Mostly unaffordable,
uncaring, and inactive. Assault Weapon: Paint your .22 black and add a plastic
handle. Associated Press: Leakers who dared to challenge the White House
monopoly. Baby: Punishment for a mistake. Benghazi:
We won’t have any more because one video-maker is now in prison.
"It´s getting
harder to ignore what appears to be a burning desire on Obama´s part to destroy
the great and glorious house called America."
It’s not difficult to peg precisely when the American sitcom
moved away from following the lives of mature adults to idealizing the lives of
overgrown adolescents. But there’s no question that two generations of
Americans have now grown up in a world where virtually everyone worth watching
on television is a twentysomething to thirtysomething without a home, a spouse,
children, or even a solid job in many cases.
Lindsay Rodman is a Harvard-educated lawyer who delved into
women studies as an undergraduate at Duke. She is also a Marine Corps officer.
Now assigned to the Pentagon as a lawyer, Capt. Rodman has viewed the growing
debate over sexual assault in the military with growing alarm. Her concern: the
Pentagon´s study on sexual assault has exaggerated the scope of the problem,
leading to Draconian "solutions" from Capitol Hill that will only
make things worse.
_________________________________________________________________________
NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
If you look at this timeline that lists the objectively
terrible media behavior in the early days of the Zimmerman case last year, you
will see how crucial NBC´s fraudulent editing of a 911 call was in setting a
media and political narrative that falsely claimed George Zimmerman is racist.
This malicious edit made it look as though Zimmerman was profiling Trayvon
Martin as black, when he was simply answering a dispatcher´s question:
Obamacare’s six inconvenient truths
10 Ways ObamaCare Is
Not Working As It´s Supposed To
5 Things Every Parent Needs to Know About “The
Common Core” standards.
They could be pictures of another planet
or the set of a science fiction movie. But it is in fact an amazing phenomenon
created by accident in the middle of the Nevada Desert.
The otherworldly images show Fly Geyser, a little-known attraction described as
one of the most beautiful sights in the state. Located 20 miles north of
Gerlach, in Washoe
County, it was
accidentally created in 1916 during well drilling
_____________________________________________________________________________
LEGAL OPINIONS
Obama’s decision to “suspend” the employer mandate of the
Affordable Care Act has no support in precedent and dramatically shifts the arc
of presidential power. The Affordable Care Act has no provision giving the
president power to suspend or postpone the mandate. The law requires employers
with 50 or more full-time workers to provide health-insurance coverage or pay a
penalty. Section 1513(d) of the act — titled “Effective Date” — stipulates that
this mandate “shall apply” after “December 31, 2013.” Which part of “shall” gives the president the
power to ignore the law that he signed with such fanfare? If the president can
change the effective date to Dec. 31, 2014, what prevents him from changing the
date again, along with other provisions? As Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) asked: “This
was the law. How can they change the law?”…..If the president has the
discretion to ignore laws that he prefers not to exist, the constitutional
limits of presidential authority have the restraining power of air.”
Prof of Criminology:
“…..people like Obama, Holder, and Sharpton demanded a prosecution.
Therefore, it fabricated out of whole cloth an 11 year old victim out of a 17
year old, manufactured whiteness for Zimmerman (and if Zimmerman is a white
Hispanic, why isn't Obama a white black?), and concealed a ton of evidence to
boot. All of the preceding shows that while the prosecution will never admit
it, their underlying theory of the case was this: violent assault and battery
predicated on imaginary racism is justified, and lawful resistance by an
imaginary racist to violent assault and battery done by a member of a
governmentally preferred race amounts to
murder -- since the "racist" deserved his beating.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/07/what_the_zimmerman_prosecution_did_not_do_and_why.html#ixzz2ZVDAuDy0
____________________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human
freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-William Pitt
______________________________________________________________________
LATE NITE
Leno: Al-Qaida's No.
2 man in Yemen
was killed this week by a drone strike. He was doing a cover shoot for Rolling
Stone and they were able to pinpoint him…….President Obama told a group of
school children that broccoli was his favorite food, and they believed him.
Then he told them Obamacare would reduce the deficit and the kids all busted
out laughing…….President Obama told a group of school children that broccoli is
his favorite food. You know, it's one thing to lie to the voters, but when
you’re lying to kids, come on.
posted by gary at
8:12 AM
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