op ed review 8/31
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch recently obtained
a Department of Defense training manual which lists people who embrace
“individual liberties” and honor “states’ rights,” among other characteristics,
as potential “extremists” who are likely to be members of “hate groups.”
“Obama's Syria
plans in disarray after Britain
rejects use of force. White House forced
to consider unilateral strikes against Assad after British PM unexpectedly
loses key motion on intervention.”
“Commentators said it was the first time a British prime
minister had lost a vote on war since 1782, when parliament effectively
conceded American independence by voting against further fighting to crush the
colony's rebellion.”
If Obama decides to attack the Syrian
regime, he has ensured – for the very first time in history – that the United States
will be fighting on the same side as al-Qa’ida
The U.S.
intelligence community has an intelligence-gathering colossus of 107,035
employees, but remains unable to provide critical information to the president
on a range of national security threats.
The initial firestorm surrounding the Internal Revenue
Service’s targeting of conservative groups may have subsided, but tea party
leaders say the situation has only become worse and may lead to more lawsuits
against the embattled agency.
Tea party activists are planning to rally outside of House
Speaker John A. Boehner’s Ohio office on
Tuesday, telling the Republican speaker that if he doesn’t use this year’s
spending fight to defund the health care law, it will hence be known to them as
“BoehnerCare.” “If he funds it, he will own it,” said Janet Porter, president
of Faith2Action, one of the groups participating in the rally.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/aug/26/tea-party-obamacare-now-boehnercare/#ixzz2d6QWwec8
On Tuesday, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin signed the petition to defund
Obamacare, throwing her support behind the efforts of Senators like Mike Lee
(R-UT) and Ted Cruz (R-TX). "This beast must be stopped--not funding it.
Today, Todd and I joined with many of our fellow citizens to urge those in the
U.S. Senate to not fund Obamacare."
Obama Taps Bill Clinton to Make Case for Obamacare
Obama: Sex Ed for Kindergartners ‘Is the
Right Thing to Do’
“Harvard Study: No Correlation Between Gun Control and Less
Violent Crime”
The much ballyhooed efforts to repeal the Stand Your Ground
law in Florida
have suffered an ignominious and well-deserved death. An enormous and
bi-partisan majority of Florida
legislators —72%– this week overwhelmingly declined to hold a special session
for the purpose of even debating the repeal of SYG.
http://legalinsurrection.com/2013/08/efforts-to-repeal-stand-your-ground-falter-fail-backfire//#more
A military court sentenced Maj. Nidal Hasan to death for the
2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood, giving the
Army psychiatrist a path to the martyrdom he appeared to crave in the attack on
unarmed fellow soldiers.
Obama releases message congratulating American Muslims on many
achievements and contributions they have made to American society.
“Obama uses the March on Washington to attack his opponents.”
Sen. Tim Scott, R.-S.C., the only African American serving
in the United States Senate, wasn't invited to the event commemorating the 50th
anniversary of Martin Luther King's march on Washington,
though a host of Democratic luminaries spoke on the steps of the Lincoln
Memorial.
Rewriting history: LA
Times claims Democrats led passage of Civil Rights Act in 1964.
Ronald Reagan´s family has hit out at the producers of a new
Hollywood film for allegedly portraying the
former President as a racist. The Republican icon is played by British actor
Alan Rickman in The Butler, which tells the story of a black man who served in
the White House for 34 years. However, his son claims that the portrayal
implies that Reagan was prejudiced against black people, when in fact he helped
the cause of African-Americans and showed friendship to the real White House
butler.
The University of Notre Dame, a Catholic school, will admit
illegal immigrants and provide them with financial aid.
Students in a rural Kentucky county — and their parents —
are the latest to join a growing national chorus of scorn for the healthy
school lunches touted by first lady Michelle Obama. “They say it tastes like
vomit,” said Harlan County Public Schools board member Myra Mosley at a
contentious board meeting last week
_______________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Rich Lowry, 8/22
Henry Adams said that politics is the systematic
organization of hatreds. For the left, over the past year it has seemed at
times to be the systematic organization of hatred of Ted Cruz. The freshman
senator is not the first Texan to be so honored. In fact, the state isn’t
holding up its end if, at any given moment, it isn’t throwing onto the national
scene at least one Republican reviled by the other side.
The party’s highest-profile Texans, George W. Bush and Rick
Perry, tended to match inarticulateness with cowboy swagger and lend themselves
to mockery as intellectual lightweights. Bush went to Yale and Harvard Business School,
yet no one naturally thinks of him as an Ivy Leaguer. The two Lone Star State governors played into the left’s
stereotypes so nicely that if they didn’t exist, Gail Collins would have had to
make them up.
Cruz is different — a Princeton
and Harvard man who not only matriculated at those fine institutions but
excelled at them. Champion debater at Princeton.
Magna cum laude graduate at Harvard. Supreme Court clerkship, on the way to Texas solicitor general
and dozens of cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Cruz is from the intellectual elite, but not of it, a tea
party conservative whose politics are considered gauche at best at the storied
universities where he studied. He is, to borrow the words of the 2009 H.W.
Brands biography of FDR, a traitor to his class.
And his classmates. A Daily Beast piece the other day quoted
fellow Princetonians who apparently can’t believe he turned out this way, “a
man of calcified thinking, dangerously impervious to facts.”
Democrats and liberal pundits would surely dislike Cruz no
matter where he went to school, but his pedigree adds an extra element of
shocked disbelief to the disdain. “Princeton
and Harvard should be disgraced,” former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell exclaimed
on MSNBC, as if graduating a constitutionalist conservative who rises to
national prominence is a violation of the schools’ mission statements. It
almost is. Princeton and Harvard aren’t quite
the École Nationale d’Administration, the French school that trains that
country’s political class, but they are close.
In a Washington Post column a year ago, Dana Milbank noted
Cruz’s schooling and concluded almost entirely on that basis that his tea party
politics must be a put-on, that he is, underneath it all, an “intellectually
curious, liberal-arts conservative.” Note the insulting assumption that an
interest in books and ideas automatically immunizes someone from a certain kind
of conservative politics.
One of the left’s deepest prejudices is that its opponents
are stupid, and Cruz tramples on it. Chris Hayes of MSNBC actually says he
fears Cruz’s brilliance. So should congressional witnesses. At hearings, Cruz
has the prosecutorial instincts of a … Harvard-trained lawyer. Watching
Attorney General Eric Holder try to fend off Cruz’s questioning on the
administration’s drone policy a few months ago was like seeing a mouse cornered
by a very large cat.
Cruz hasn’t played by the Senate rules that freshmen should
initially be seen and not heard. In fact, he joined the upper chamber with all
the subtlety of a SWAT team knocking down a drug suspect’s front door.
For people who care about such things — almost all of them
are senators — this is an unforgivable offense. At another hearing, this one on
guns, as Cruz says the highest commitment of senators should be to the
Constitution, another senator can be heard muttering that he doesn’t like being
lectured. Chairman Pat Leahy (probably the mutterer) eventually cuts him off
and informs him he hasn’t been in the Senate very long.
Cruz lacks all defensiveness about his positions, another
source of annoyance to his opponents, who are used to donning the mantle of
both intellectual and moral superiority.
None of this is to endorse all of Cruz’s tactical judgments
or to deny he can irk his own side of the aisle at times.
His push to defund Obamacare this fall is a grass
roots-pleasing slogan in search of a realistic path to legislative fruition.
Cruz never explains how a government shutdown fight would bring about the
desired end. The strategy seems tantamount to believing that if Republican
politicians clicked their wing tips together and wished it so, President Barack
Obama would collapse in a heap and surrender on his party’s most cherished accomplishment.
It is no secret that Cruz has presidential aspirations. Even
if he ascends no higher, though, he will be a force in the Senate. He could
spend decades making liberals recoil at what Princeton
and Harvard hath wrought.
________________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
"The Constitution doesn't grant us freedoms; it
prohibits government from taking them. Nearly all of us, at one time or
another, refer to our 'constitutional right to free speech.' While this common
phrase may seem harmless, it points to a larger misunderstanding of where our
rights come from -- a misunderstanding that undermines many of our most
fundamental policy debates. The fact is, the U.S. Constitution protects our
God-given rights from government. The government does not (as the phrase above
implies) grant those rights to us as citizens. This is perhaps the most widely
misunderstood aspect of our system of government."
-Ed
Feulner
"Viewers of the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday night
were treated to a bizarre dance routine from former Disney child actress Miley
Cyrus.... If you're unfamiliar with the term, 'twerking' is a dance move that
dispenses with all the other subtleties of dance to deliver pelvic thrusts and
butt wiggles. ... Sexualizing young people is an important mission of the Left.
They want little girls to jump right from teddy bears to Planned
Parenthood. That helps dissolve the bonds of family, which is a fading bastion
of independence and self-reliance against collective power. ... Children are
powerfully influenced by popular culture. They yearn for guidance and
inspiration from the adult world. They receive the lesson transmitted by crap
like the MTV Video Music Awards. Kids a bit younger than Miley Cyrus remember
what she used to be, and they see what she is now. They see the road stretching
between those points, and they follow it.”
-John Hayward
"I cannot count the number of times I heard liberal
professors and liberal writers quote the phrase: 'When fascism comes to America, it
will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.' The phrase is brilliant.
There is actually no threat to America
of fascism coming from the right. The essence of the American right, after all,
is less government; and fascism, by definition, demands ever larger government.
Therefore, if there is a real fascist threat to America, it comes from the left,
whose appetite for state power is essentially unlimited."
-Dennis Prager
________________________________________________________________________
BOOKS
Thousands line up for Mark Levine book signing. Crowd circles town
The Founders bequeathed Americans a method to bypass the
federal government and amend the Constitution, empowering two thirds of the
states to call an Amendments Convention. In the wake of Mark Levin´s
bestselling book, The Liberty Amendments, proposing just such a convention,
entirely unnecessary alarms have been raised by even some of the leading lights
of conservatism, based on an incomplete reading of history and judicial case
law. Phyllis Schlafly is a great American and a great leader, but her
speculations about the nature of the Constitution´s “convention for proposing
amendments" are nearly as quaint as Dante´s speculations about the solar
system.
__________________________________________________________________________
ISLAM
A Christian woman explains why she faces hanging in Pakistan
for the crime of ‘blasphemy’.
“I’m sure by now you’ve heard of the “Million Muslim March”
planned in Washington D.C. on 9/11…..in response to the march, a
bunch of bikers are planning their own party in DC on 9/11…with two million
people. Thousands of America’s
patriotic bikers are organizing an enormous counter protest to the planned
Million Muslim March on DC this Sept. 11. The Facebook Page, “2 Million Bikers
to DC,” has over 18 thousand “likes,” as of Thursday morning and individual
state chapters of riders…..last time anyone checked, nine Muslims had signed
up.”
_________________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
Those who are wondering why Al Gore chose to publicly
resurface in a Washington Post interview last Thursday with that paper’s
ever-pliable Journolist founder Ezra Klein only need to look in three places.
First, there’s the recently revealed empirical evidence that the “global
warming” movement’s claim that climate change is causing increased extreme
weather events isn’t true. Second, there’s a new summary of historical research
which blows up the movement’s infamous core “hockey stick” chart forecasting
unprecedented, accelerating warming. Finally, there’s a new report due to
arrive in a month from an increasingly desperate United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate….
__________________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
You might as well try to teach a snake to juggle as hope the
Obama administration will think strategically. The “peace president” is about
to embark on his third military adventure, this time in Syria, without having learned the lessons of his
botched efforts in Afghanistan
and Libya.
He hasn’t even learned from the Bush administration’s mistakes — which he
mocked with such delight.
Have George W. Bush and his band of cowboy neo-cons retaken
the White House? If only. This time the
secretary of state is John Kerry, who launched a political career opposing the
Vietnam War. The defense secretary? Chuck Hagel, who revived his career by
quitting his party after the Iraq
war. They’re part of a team that
includes Vice President Joe Biden, who once vowed to impeach any president that
goes to war without congressional approval. And, of course, President Obama,
who became president in large part because, as a junior senator, he voted
against the Iraq
war….What’s up with all that?
Nothing better illustrates the impossibility of killing a
federal entitlement than the fraud-riddled Obamaphone program. The $2.1 billion
giveaway, funded by a tax on every cellphone service contract, is a
well-documented boondoggle — an estimated 41 percent of the phones go to
ineligible recipients. Earlier this month, my former intern, Jillian Melchior,
was able to obtain three of the free phones on the streets of New York City without telling a single fib.
Melchior, now a reporter for National Review, says the service reps who signed
her up seemed completely uninterested in whether she was eligible for the
program — she isn’t. While
President Obama’s flat and uninspiring message to America: I have a big government dream
________________________________________________________________________
NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
Faces of Evil in a Violent Underclass
Four Lincoln
Quotes Progressives Always Get Wrong
Hubble telescope spots 'cosmic caterpillar' that's six
TRILLION miles long, formed by harsh winds from some of our hottest stars
_________________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
"Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when
we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people
that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but
with his wrath?"
-Thomas
Jefferson
_________________________________________________________________________
LATE NITE
Leno: John Kerry
said its "undeniable" that the president of Syria is using weapons of mass
destruction. Kerry said President Obama needs to build a coalition of countries
and attack soon, no matter what others might say. Today former President George
Bush said, “Hey, good luck with that. Let me know how it works out.”……..Vice
President Joe Biden said today that “Syria must be held
accountable." Unfortunately, the Obama administration has never employed
an accountant, so they have no idea how to do that……The treasury secretary has
now asked Congress to raise the debt limit for borrowing more money as soon as
possible. The secretary of the treasury said if Congress doesn't act soon, the
government will have to work with only the money it has now. You know, like the
rest of us do..........The treasury secretary said we will be out of money by
October. Here's my question. What happened to all that money we gave them last
April 15th, huh?
posted by gary at
8:46 AM
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