Saturday, July 20, 2013

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.

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’
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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
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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
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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
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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.

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