op ed review 2/2
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
“A Small, Incoherent State of the Union Address”
President Obama´s 43-point State of the Union speech and
second term agenda will cost taxpayers nearly $40 billion more annually if
fully implemented, with over half -- $20.2 billion -- just to reform
immigration, according to the National Taxpayers Union Foundation.
Nearly Half of America Lives Paycheck-to-Paycheck
The head of the Drug Enforcement Administration is now
openly criticizing President Obama for his recent comments over the question of
marijuana legalization….”…she said her lowest point in 33 years in the DEA was
when she learned they’d flown a hemp flag over the Capitol on July 4.”
With twenty-four months to go until the first votes are cast
in the Republican presidential primary, Democratic pollster PPP surveys the
country and finds Mike Huckabee atop the field: He´s at 16% to 14% for Jeb
Bush, 13% for Chris Christie, 11% for Rand Paul, 8% each for Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio,
and Paul Ryan, 6% for Scott Walker, and 5% for Bobby Jindal.
Hillary Clinton holds a commanding 6 to 1 lead over other
Democrats heading into the 2016 presidential campaign, while the Republican
field is deeply divided with no clear front-runner, according to a new
Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Each week, it seems another Democrat lawmaker announces
their retirement from Congress. On Thursday, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) joined
the growing list. It is only January, but 11 Democrat lawmakers have said they
are quitting at the end of this current term.
A Gallup Poll in late January showed that more and more
states are becoming Republican.
Gallup
Obama approval numbers suggest shifting Electoral College map
A new poll shows that fully 63 percent of Americans have
either little no confidence Obama will make the right decisions. The public is
evenly split on whether Obama is honest and trustworthy.
Speaking at the United States Conference
of Mayors, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said the approximately 11
million people who are in the country illegally have “earned the right to be
citizens.”
The House Republican leadership’s framework for overhauling
the nation’s immigration laws will call this week for a path to legal status —
but not citizenship — for many of the 11 million adult immigrants who are in
the country illegally….some of the party’s leading strategists and conservative
voices are urging that the immigration push be abandoned, or delayed until next
year, to avoid an internal party rupture before the midterm elections. “It’s
one of the few things that could actually disrupt what looks like a strong
Republican year,” said William Kristol, editor of the conservative magazine The
Weekly Standard, calling an immigration push “a recipe for disaster.”
Sen. Jeff Sessions:
“The president's own economic adviser recently noted that there are three
unemployed people for every job available. Wages today have been flat since
2000. Last year, a record one in five American households received food stamps.
This is a national emergency. So what is the president's proposal? With three
job seekers for every open job, he proposes doubling the number of guest
workers entering every year, granting immediate work permits to millions of
illegal immigrants, and tripling the number of new immigrants.”
Ann Coulter: “As
House Republicans prepare to sell out the country on immigration this week,
Phyllis Schlafly has produced a stunning report on how immigration is changing
the country. The report is still embargoed, but someone slipped me a copy, and
it’s too important to wait…..Schlafly's report overwhelmingly demonstrates that
merely continuing our current immigration policies spells doom for the
Republican Party….”
A sobering new study
finds that liberals drink more alcohol than conservatives.
Cancer-stricken Sen. Tom Coburn revealed Tuesday that his
health insurance under Obamacare doesn’t cover his oncologist.
In Washington State,
some sick kids have been denied specialty care due to Obamacare,
“Senate Republicans Develop The Most Credible Plan Yet To
´Repeal And Replace´ Obamacare”
At the Grammys, Katy Perry dressed up as a witch and was
"burned at the stake" in her act while gay couples were married to
the song "same love." Popular Christian gospel singer Natalie Grant
walked out of the Grammys after witnessing a series of performances that even
the mainstream entertainment media admitted were occult in nature.
Republicans are positioning “school choice” — sending public
dollars to charter schools, vouchers, virtual schools and other alternatives to
traditional public schools — as a way to address income inequality in this
election year and connect with low-income, minority voters.
China’s recent test of a new ultra-high speed strike vehicle
highlights growing concerns that Chinese military advances will overtake those
of the United States in as few as five years
“UK
Tea Party Surges to Become Country's 'Most Favored' Political Movement”
_______________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Howie Carr 1/26
Now We’re All Dopes
Marijuana makes you stupid. Nobody wants to acknowledge the
obvious fact, but that’s what this whole legalization debate is all about.
That’s why most of the candidates for governor, of both parties, have come out
against legalization, even if they have to obfuscate why they’re opposed to the
Colorado-ization of Massachusetts.
After all, the pols can’t offend that pivotal ganja-American
voting bloc, assuming they can remember to vote in November. It’s left to
comedians like Jay Leno Thursday night to poke around the truth: “Doctors warn
that pot smoking impairs young people’s thinking, which of course makes them
much more likely to sign up for Obamacare.”
Speaking of which, is it a coincidence that America’s best-known
marijuana smoker thinks there are 57 states, that they speak Austrian in
Austria and pronounces “corps” as “corpse.” And Barry was the brains of the
Choom Gang.
Don’t flatter yourself, potheads — you’re not martyrs. No
one wants to put you in jail. This isn’t 1971, and by the way, even in 1971,
hardly anyone in Massachusetts
was ever sent to the can for simple possession of weed. The NSA is not tracking
any pot smokers, and neither is the IRS. They’re too busy harassing the real
enemies of society, like the Tea Party, and I don’t mean “Texas tea.”
No, the issue here is, when you legalize something, you get
more of it. Think gambling, illegal aliens. It’s in everyone’s best interest,
including the Cheech and Chong community, to minimize the number of people who
are finishing life at home in their spare time. It’s not that people who smoke
weed go crazy, a la “Reefer Madness.” It’s that a lot of them stop going
anywhere, except to the refrigerator.
If you smoke and it’s not a problem, good for you. Keep
tokin’ up. You obviously have no problems maintaining your stash, and no one’s
going to bother you. Just ask Aaron Hernandez. He never got lugged until he
started shooting people.
The
“George-Washington-used-hemp-to-make-uniforms-for-the-Continental-Army-dude”
crowd always claims that marijuana isn’t as dangerous a drug as alcohol. That’s
essentially what Obama said, and it’s true. But so what? Most stoners are also
pounding down the Bud Lights big time, at least after working hours. And that’s
a problem. As Bob Dylan once said of combining alcohol and marijuana: “Like a
fool I mixed them/ An’ it strangled up my mind/ An’ now people just get uglier/
An’ I have no sense of time.” Exactly. And you can’t drive worth a damn either.
The libertarian position is that everyone has the
unalienable right to get bleeped up. That was Ron Paul’s real platform all
those years, not reining in the Federal Reserve. The only “reserve” his voters
cared about was the extra box of Twinkies out in the Volkswagen bus. The defect
with the Ron Paul argument is that we now live in a welfare state. If you
decide to quit working and devote your entire stoned life to rolling the
perfect joint and deconstructing the collected oeuvre of Jimi Hendrix and his
Band of Gypsies, the taxpayers are now on the hook for supporting you.
I am a taxpayer. I protest. Millions of Obama voters are
already leeching off me, they’ve got me working like a coal-mine pony. I need a
little help here on the second shift. Sorry
dude, I know it’s a bummer, totally, but that’s the way life is — there’s
always a lot of sticks, stems and oregano mixed in there with the buds.
________________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“Though sports and Hollywood
personalities earn multiples of CEO salaries, you’ll never find leftists and
progressives picketing and criticizing them. Why? The strategy for want-to-be
tyrants is to demonize people whose power they want to usurp. That’s the
typical way tyrants gain power. They give the masses someone to hate.”
-Walter Wiliams
“Americans may look back in a few decades and see that 2007
was the year that production of electricity peaked in the United States
and our nation began powering down. This may make many on the environmentalist
left … very happy. But it will not make life better for you, your children or
your grandchildren…..As President Obama moves forward with his plans for
America’s future energy production and economic well-being, Americans should
remember that Obama’s science and technology adviser declared 19 years ago that
‘a world of zero net physical growth’ was something that ‘needs to be faced up
to eventually.’”
-Terrence Jeffrey
“Government-driven inequality is the reason why, as
hard-working families across the country struggle to make ends meet, six of the
10 wealthiest counties in America
are now suburbs of Washington,
DC. Throughout the last five
years, President Obama has promised an economy for the middle class; but all
he’s delivered is an economy for the middle-men.”
-Sen.
Mike Lee
________________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
Pete Seeger, the folk singer and
unrepentant communist who died Tuesday at age 94, is being celebrated by
President Barack Obama as a civil rights hero who tried to “move this country
closer to the America
he knew we could be.”
Osama bin Laden was a freedom
fighter and the U.S. is a
“neocolonial power,” according to a California
state university teacher whose writings are required reading for his political
science students.
First there were needle exchanges. Now, supporters of a plan
to hand out clean crack pipes to San Francisco drug users say they’re not
swayed by city opposition and plan to hand them out anyway.
CBS analyst Mellody Hobson, whose husband George Lucas is
worth $7.3 billion, appeared on This Morning to slam excessive salaries for
corporate bosses.
________________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
Freezing weather stuns the South
Schools close for snow in Florida.
________________________________________________________
SO WHAT’S THE STATE OF THE UNION?
By the numbers:
10.4 million:
Americans unemployed.
7.8 million: Americans
working part-time who would like to work full-time.
46%: 18- to
34-year-old Americans unemployed under Obama (many of whom voted for him).
63%: Labor force
participation rate as of January 2014 under Obama.
1978: The last time
the labor force participation rate was this low.
46.5 million:
Americans now living in poverty.
6.7 million: Americans
who have fallen into poverty under Obama.
47.6 million:
Americans receiving food stamps.
19.4 million:
Americans added to food stamp rolls under Obama.
$3,827: Decline in
median household income under Obama.
721,000: Construction
jobs lost under Obama.
528,000: Manufacturing
jobs lost under Obama.
44%: Recent college
graduates in jobs that do not require a college degree.
_______________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
“The Imperial Presidency of Barack Obama”, Wall Street
Journal, by Sen. Ted Cruz
“Who’s ‘godless’ now? Russia
says it’s U.S.” At the height of the Cold War, it was common
for American conservatives to label the officially atheist Soviet
Union a “godless nation.” More than two decades on, history has
come full circle, as the Kremlin and its allies in the Russian Orthodox Church
hurl the same allegation at the West. “Many Euro-Atlantic countries have moved
away from their roots, including Christian values,” Russian President Vladimir
Putin said in a recent keynote speech. “Policies are being pursued that place
on the same level a multi-child family and a same-sex partnership, a faith in
God and a belief in Satan. This is the path to degradation.” Says the head of the Russian Orthodox Church: “The general political direction of the
[Western political] elite bears, without doubt, an anti-Christian and
anti-religious character,”
Andrew McCarthy, “The GOP and Social Issues: Another
Perspective” Democrats may disappoint
their base, but they are never ashamed of it. Former terrorists, communists,
race-mongering rabble-rousers, scandal-ridden pols, big-thinkers who’ve been
wrong about every important policy question for decades – far from shoving them
out the door and into obscurity, the left elevates them to stardom in academe,
politics, media and entertainment. They are transformed into cultural icons,
their sordid pasts rationalized as passionate opposition to the right’s
backwardness. Leaders of the left have no yearning for approval from the right;
conservatives are there to be caricatured, a constant source of new villains to
keep the old “us versus them” themes fresh. Republican leadership, by contrast,
craves approval by the left, particularly the media. The GOP often seems
embarrassed by its conservative base, which inconveniently resists the constant
pressure to relent on matters of principle; to abide the imposition of immoral
debt obligations on future generations rather than make adult spending
decisions in the present; and to view modern problems as so complex that only
government action can “solve” them. When the GOP tells social conservatives the
time has come to shelve the issues that most concern them, it is essentially
telling them, “How we are portrayed by the other side is of greater importance
than how we serve our side – meaning: you.”
“After this week’s GOP State
of the Union response, it has become undeniable that someone (everyone?) in the
Republican machine has no idea what they’re doing, and that is the generous
assessment. The other option is that Republican leadership is deliberately sabotaging
the midterm elections.”
Tammy Bruce: “Is the
GOP deliberately trying to sabotage the 2014 midterms?”
If you also suffered through the State of the Union address,
you heard him praise Obamacare, claim he would slash bureaucracy, and of
course, fight for income equality. Obama pandered to the ladies, his tone
becoming more passionate with every overly emotional word: “Today, women make
up about half our workforce. But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a
man earns”…..You have probably heard that statistic—77 cents on the dollar. Speech
after speech from the left side of town…..
A McClatchy review of White House salaries
shows that when the same calculations that produced the 77 cents is applied to
the White House, the average female pay at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is also less
than the average male pay.
___________________________________________________________________________
NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
Hypnotic animation of Earth shows
how the freezing Polar Vortex has penetrated
so deep into North America it has pushed
the Gulf Stream south
________________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
“Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole
world will be clean.”
-Goethe
__________________________________________________________________________
LATE NITE
Leno: According to a
new study, smog is drifting across the Pacific Ocean from China and
polluting our West Coast. Can't we make anything in this country anymore?..... President
Obama is getting serious about this NSA spying scandal. He told the nation that
the NSA will not be used "for the purpose of suppressing or burdening criticism
or dissent." You see, that's what the IRS is for. That’s their job.
Fallon: Yesterday the Denver Broncos and the Seattle
Seahawks advanced to the big game, which means this year’s Super Bowl will have
teams from the two states where recreational marijuana is legal. Or as pizza
delivery men put it, "Pray for us."
posted by gary at
11:07 AM
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