op ed review 8/18
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
In another setback for Obamacare, the administration has
delayed until 2015 a significant consumer protection in the law that limits how
much people may have to spend on their own health care.
Washington,
D.C.’s health insurance exchange
has awarded a $375,000 grant to abortion provider Planned Parenthood to help enroll
Obamacare participants.
In a story that has remained largely under the mainstream
media radar, Congress announced late last month that it would finally
investigate the Aug. 6, 2011 helicopter crash in Afghanistan that resulted in
38 deaths, including 22 members of SEAL Team 6, made famous three months
earlier when they killed Osama Bin Laden. Grieving family members insist that
soldiers in the elite unit were placed in unnecessary danger by the
recklessness of the Obama administration, whose actions they characterized as
criminal.
“During his Wednesday appearance on Jay Leno's "Tonight
Show,' President Obama made three factual gaffes. Were Obama a Republican,
these gaffes would have led news coverage for the next forty-eight hours. Not
only did most of the media ignore or downplay these gaffes; the Associated
Press went so far as to cover one of them up….The media not reporting on or
making an issue of an Obama gaffe has become the norm over the last five years.
This is the first time I'm aware of, though, in which a major news outlet went
so far as to correct a gaffe in order to fool its readers into believing it
never happened.”
The president's dog was separately airlifted in a MV-22
Osprey to the family vacation at Martha’s Vineyard.
Tax dollars at work: U.S. Pays $1.5 Mil to Help Brazilian Women
Quit Smoking.
Not a single person showed up at the Georgetown waterfront Tuesday for a climate
change agenda event put on by Organizing for Action, the shadowy nonprofit
advocacy group born out of President Obama’s 2012 campaign. The event page for the “Climate Change Day of
Action Rally” disappeared after rainy weather appeared to drive away whatever
people planned to attend. The embarrassing showing follows the news that only
one volunteer stayed for an OFA Obamacare event in Centreville, Va., last week
to work the phones.
The fallout from a Missouri
rodeo clown’s mockery of President Obama continued as the Missouri State Fair
said it will force all clowns to undergo sensitivity training and the head of
the state rodeo-clown organization resigned.
The double standard, the hypocrisy over treatment of
Democrats and Republicans, with a touch of racism and sexism thrown in, is
clearly playing out in different attitudes towards images of Democrats and
Republicans. While liberal heads are exploding about a President Barack Obama
(D) clown mask at the Missouri State Fair, liberal heads were relatively
intact--as were, alas, Republican heads--19 years ago when a private rodeo
allowed bulls to charge a President George H. W. Bush (R) mannequin near
Philadelphia, The Gateway Pundit reminds us. Back in 1994, the cowboys used
George Bush dummies at the Woodstown, Pennsylvania
rodeo.
There are no polls showing Ted Cruz leading the 2016
Republican presidential field in the Iowa.
A PPP survey last month found Cruz in sixth place in the state, behind Rand
Paul, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio. But after a
particularly well-received appearance at a conservative event in Ames, Iowa
over the weekend, there seems little doubt that Cruz, who has been in the U.S.
Senate all of eight months, is zooming toward the front of the GOP pack in the
nation’s first-voting state.
A sudden influx of illegal immigrants from Mexico requesting
asylum is overwhelming immigration agents in San Diego, forcing agencies to
rent hotel rooms for some undocumented families and release others to cities
around the U.S. illegal immigrants have learned they can attempt to get asylum by
using a few key words -- namely, by claiming they have a "credible
fear" of drug cartels. “This
clearly has to have been orchestrated by somebody,” said former U.S. Attorney
for Southern California Peter Nunez. “It's beyond belief that dozens or hundreds
or thousands of people would simultaneously decide that they should go to the U.S.
and make this claim.”
The U.S. Air Force said that a well-known drag queen group
was invited to perform on base during a “Diversity Day” celebration because
drag is a “symbol of gay pride and unity. But the performance sparked outrage
among some airmen who called the drag show “totally offensive and
inappropriate.”
On August 12, Joe DiGenova, attorney for one of the Benghazi whistleblowers, told Washington D.C.´s WMAL that
one of the reasons people have remained tight-lipped about Benghazi
is because 400 U.S. missiles
were "diverted to Libya"
and ended up being stolen and falling into "the hands of some very ugly
people." DiGenova represents Benghazi
whistleblower Mark Thompson. He told WMAL that he "does not know whether
[the missiles] were at the annex, but it is clear the annex was somehow
involved in the distribution of those missiles."
Bono: “Capitalism takes more people out of poverty than
(foreign) aid”
_______________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Thomas Sowell 8/6
It is hard to read a newspaper, or watch a television
newscast, without encountering someone who has come up with a new
"solution" to society's "problems." Sometimes it seems as
if there are more solutions than there are problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns
out that many of today's problems are a result of yesterday's solutions.
San Francisco and New York are both
plagued with large "homeless" populations today, largely as a result
of previous housing "reforms" that made housing more expensive and
severely limited how much housing, and of what kind, could be built. The
solution? Spend more of the taxpayers' money making homelessness a viable
lifestyle for more people.
Education is a field with endless reforms, creating endless
problems, requiring endless solutions. One of the invincible fallacies among
educators is that all sorts of children can be educated in the same classroom.
Not just children of different races, but children of different abilities,
languages, and values. Isn't it nice to think so? I suspect that even most
conservatives would prefer to live in the kind of world conjured up in the
liberals' imagination, rather than in the kind of world we are in fact stuck
with. The result is that many very bright children are bored to the point of
becoming behavior problems, when the school work is slowed to a pace within the
range of students who are slower learners. By federal law, even children with
severe mental or emotional problems must be "mainstreamed" into
classes for other students -- often in disregard of how much this disrupts
these classes and sacrifices the education of the other children. Parents who
complain about the effect of these "solutions" on their own
children's education are made to feel guilty for not being more
"understanding" about the problems of handicapped students. Nothing
is easier for third party busybodies than being "understanding" and
"compassionate" at someone else's expense -- especially if the
busybodies have their own children in private schools, as so many public school
educators do.
Whether in housing, education or innumerable other aspects
of life, the key to busybody politics, and its endlessly imposed
"solutions," is that third parties pay no price for being wrong. This
not only presents opportunities for the busybodies to engage in moral preening,
but also to flatter themselves that they know better what is good for other
people than these other people know for themselves.
Right now, there are people inside and outside of government
who are proposing new restrictions on how you may or may not visit the national
parks that your taxes support. Among their proposals is doing away with trash
cans in these parks, so that visitors have to take their trash out with them. Just
how they would enforce this, when millions of people are visiting places like
Yosemite or Yellowstone, is something the
busybodies need not bother to think through -- much less pay a price, when
trash simply accumulates in these parks after trash cans are removed.
ObamaCare is perhaps the ultimate in busybody politics.
People who have never even run a drugstore, much less a hospital, blithely
prescribe what must be done by the entire medical system, from doctors to
hospitals to producers of pharmaceutical drugs to health insurance companies. This
includes federal laws requiring the turning over of patients' confidential
medical records to the federal government, where these records can be looked at
by politicians, bureaucrats and whoever can hack into the government's
computers. Neither you nor your doctor has a right to keep this information
confidential.
What could lead anyone to believe that they have either the
right or the omniscience to dictate to hundreds of millions of other people?
Our educational system may have something to do with that, with their constant
promotion of "self-esteem" and especially their emphasis on
developing "leaders." Our schools and colleges are turning out people
who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do. The
price of their self-indulgence is the sacrifice of our freedom. If we don't
defend ourselves against them, who will?
________________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
"While speaking outside Phoenix… the president rejected accusations
of favoring 'socialism' in the housing markets. 'I know that sounds confusing
to folks who call me a "Socialist,"' he said. 'I think I saw some
posters there on the way in.' 'But,' he continued, 'I actually believe in the
free market.' ... The reality is that the president hasn't embraced free-market
capitalism. Instead, he's embraced crony capitalism in the alternative energy
markets, socialism for the bank bailouts, neo-feudalism with higher taxes and
Fed policies, fascism with the healthcare markets, and statism with the ongoing
programs that have spied on American citizens. The only hope for this country
is real, accountable capitalism. Sadly, we don't have any champions of this
philosophy in the administration."
-Garrett Baldwin
"U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin has ruled that New York City's so-called
stop-and-frisk approach to crimefighting is unconstitutional, a form of
'indirect racial profiling.' ... Blacks and Hispanics make up 87 percent of
stop-and-frisk targets, which is in fact lower than the share of crime suspects
who are black and Hispanic... Two points must be kept in mind: One, the police
are looking for suspects in reported crimes and working from victim
descriptions. Two, there is something that comes between the stop and the frisk
-- namely, questioning. If a police officer sees behavior that he believes is
suspicious, he may initiate a conversation with the target, especially if that
target fits the description of a suspect in a criminal investigation. If, after
questioning, the officer believes that he has probable cause to frisk, he may
do so. That is a long way from randomly hassling every non-white person within
eyesight of a police officer. ... It is possible that the standards for
conducting stops are too loose, but there is no standard that takes into
account reality that will not see blacks and Hispanics stopped at rates
disproportionate to their share of the population. Judge Scheindlin can declare
reality unconstitutional, but that does not change the facts of the case."
-National Review
"Why is gun control the only policy we're allowed to
discuss when horrific murders occur? In the liberal mindset, 'root causes' of
crime begin and end with the Second Amendment. But who pays the price when our
public guardians fail to secure our borders, refuse to deport serial criminal
offenders, and enable drug-crazed menaces to prey upon innocent citizens?"
-Michelle Malkin
"Hey, Obama just arbitrarily delayed another part of
Obamacare. At this rate, there will be no active parts of Obamacare left for
Republicans to defund. I remember that old School House Rock song about how a
bill becomes a law, but they totally left out the part where the president can
just change implementation of the law in 'consultation with businesses.'
They'll have to add a whole other verse for that part."
-Frank Fleming
________________________________________________________________________
BOOKS
On the first day of its release, Mark Levin´s “The Liberty
Amendments: Restoring the American
Republic” reached the #1
spot in sales on Amazon.com--not just for political books, but all books.
Download from Kindle for $11.
__________________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently
released its “State of the Climate in 2012” report, which states that
“worldwide, 2012 was among the 10 warmest years on record.” But the report
“fails to mention [2012] was one of the coolest of the decade, and thus
confirms the cooling trend…..“To no one’s surprise, the report gives the reader
the impression that warming is galloping ahead out of control,” writes
Gosselin. “But their data shows just the opposite.” Although the NOAA report
noted that in 2012, “the Arctic continues to warm” with “sea ice reaching
record lows,” it also stated that the Antarctica
sea ice “reached a record high of 7.51 million square miles” on Sept. 26, 2012.
Buried in a lengthy Washington Post article about President
Obama’s environmental policy is an illuminating anecdote about just how
debatable the administration views climate change — namely, not at all: In an
agency-wide address to employees Aug. 1, (Interior Secretary Sally) Jewell took
the unusual step of suggesting that no one working for her should challenge the
idea that human activity is driving recent warming. “I hope there are no
climate-change deniers in the Department of Interior,” she said.
_________________________________________________________________________
ACTIVISM
“You already know that
we’re going have great speakers at this year’s Defending the American
Dream Summit, like Governors Rick Scott
and Bobby Jindal and Senators Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson and Marco Rubio. This year though we’ve reserved a whole
section of Universal Studios to ourselves the first night of the convention
__________________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
Break out either the champagne or the sharpened stones,
because it’s well past time that we found some sort of consensus on a question
which has been chomping at our collective heels for the last two presidential
election cycles. And with a bit of focus, we might actually come to some
conclusions as to how we handle this before the Hillary/Christie Show sucks up
all of the Nielson ratings. I speak, of course, of the now seemingly eternal
battle over the GOP primary battle and the unending complaints that the party’s
voters seem to keep electing squishy moderates.
President Obama asserted the
unilateral power to "tweak" inconvenient laws in last Friday's news
conference, underscoring his Administration's increasingly cavalier notions
about law enforcement. So it's good that the judiciary—a coequal branch of
government, in case the Administration forgot—is starting to check the White
House………The professors and pundits who fret about the Imperial Presidency go
into hibernation when the President is a Democrat, so it is crucial that the
courts reject Mr. Obama's increasing contempt for constitutional limits.
_________________________________________________________________________
NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
The 25 Stupidest Liberal Quotes Of The Last Decade
The 25 Best Quotes From Thomas Sowell
Incredible pictures of the Perseid meteor shower at its best
________________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
"In framing a
government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty
lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and
in the next place, oblige it to control itself."
-James Madison
"There are more
instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent
encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."
-James Madison
posted by gary at
9:27 AM
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