op ed review 11/16
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
President Obama is planning to suspend deportations and legalize millions of illegal
immigrants -- as early as next Friday, a source close to the White House told
Fox News.
Here comes another wave of illegal’s: “Minors in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras will receive
refugee status in the United States as of December, according to a plan
announced yesterday by the country's vice president, Joe Biden..”
75% of Americans Reject Executive Amnesty
Who’s pushing amnesty?
Major donations from some of the nation’s wealthiest liberal
foundations, including the Ford, Carnegie, and the Open Society Foundations of
George Soros. Over the last decade those
donors have invested more than $300 million in immigrant organizations.
Morale among officers at Immigration and Customs
Enforcement, already low, has reached a new bottom as illegal immigrants
expecting amnesty from President Obama taunt and ridicule the overworked
officers, according to a new report.
Conservatives in the House and Senate want to stay one step
ahead of President Obama, as he readies executive amnesty. Conservatives are calling for a series of
short-term bills or continuing resolutions to fund the government, a strategy
that would give Republicans more leverage to halt Obama’s policies if and when
he decides to go it alone on immigration.
A grieving father is asking President Obama to bring his
son, who was killed by an illegal alien, back to life with an executive
order. “While your Executive Order pad is out, can you write one to bring
my son and the tens of thousands (actually over 100,000) killed by illegal
aliens back to life and to bring our destroyed families back together?” asks
Don Rosenberg in a letter to Obama. His son Drew was killed by an illegal alien
who ran over him in 2010. In the
letter, Rosenberg notes that President Obama’s administration refused to deport
the illegal alien who killed his son.
Obama's insurance policy': DC chuckles after GOP congressman
rules out impeaching Obama because – 'Have you met Joe Biden?'
It’s not a safety net, it’s a hammock: 40% women, 28% men, 39% youth don't want a
job anymore. Bureau of Labor Statistics:
“The largest group of people not in the labor force are those who don’t
want a job”, a remarkable statement on the nation’s work ethic.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/giving-up-40-women-28-men-39-youth-dont-want-a-job/article/2556177
It official in Alaska:
Republican challenger Dan Sullivan has defeated Democratic incumbent
Mark Begich in the midterm elections. Among other things, Dan Sullivan is a
Marine combat veteran.
Obama agreement with China: U.S. to make sharp carbon reductions by 2025;
China gets to keep increasing emissions until 2030. China is the
world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, and has passed the US as the
world’s largest economy, but we will strangle ours further to “save the planet.”
A key architect of Obamacare has been caught openly boasting
about taking advantage of, what he calls, “the stupidity of the American
voter.” In the midst of his explanation,
Gruber bragged about the multiple deceptions the Obama White House perpetrated
on the American people.
A liberal admits:
“And so even I have to admit, as a supporter, that Obamacare was built
and sold on a foundation of lies. No way around it……”
Mr. Gruber says he was willing to say and do whatever it
took to advance the scheme, and now it’s clear why. Obamacare made Mr. Gruber a
multimillionaire at the expense of the taxpayers. “Taxpayers paid millions for
the deceptions of the Obamacare architect.”
Gallup: GOP Congress More Popular Than Obama. As things stand today, Republicans in
Congress enjoy a 42% approval rating. Obama, on the other hand, sits at a 39%
approval rating. His disapproval rating sits at a whopping 56%.
With the walloping Republicans gave Democrats in the midterm
elections, the GOP stands one Louisiana Senate runoff away from completely
controlling Southern politics from the Carolinas to Texas.
In the aftermath of the midterm elections, an LDS bishop in
Los Angeles set off fireworks by asserting in a blog that Mormon Sen. Harry
Reid was not worthy to enter one of the faith’s temples for his support of
Democratic Party stances.
The Republicans’ romp may have permanently turned coal
country from blue to red. Democrats’ support in coal areas may never come
back.”
NYT: “GOP Establishment Gears up
for Civil War Against Tea Party”
Couple fined for refusing to host same-sex wedding on
their farm……were ordered to pay a total of $13,000 — a $10,000 fine to the
state and another $1,500 to each member of a lesbian couple to compensate them
for “mental anguish.’’ All because the Giffords, devout Christians, refused to
hold a same-sex wedding ceremony on the property on which they live, work and
have raised a daughter, 17, and a son, 21.
Pope Francis demoted an outspoken conservative American
cardinal who has been highly critical of the pontiff´s reformist leadership of
the Roman Catholic Church.
Salon.com has a funny way of honoring the military right
before Veterans Day: an offensive column
Sunday titled, "You don’t protect my freedom: Our childish insistence on
calling soldiers heroes deadens real democracy" with the sub-head
"It´s been 70 years since we fought a war about freedom. Forced troop
worship and compulsory patriotism must end." The reaction on social media
was swift and merciless.
_________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Progressivism's Last
Call
J.R. Dunn
The 2014 midterms
were more than an average election. They were more than simply a rejection of
Obama and his schemes, more than a flogging for the Democrats, more than a
simple party shift like 1994. Put aside control of both Senate and House, a
near sweep of governorships, and a vastly larger GOP footprint in the
statehouses. This year’s midterms marked the third -- and perhaps final --
rejection of the progressive program in the past century.
The chief selling
point of progressivism, in its various guises -- liberalism, socialism,
communism -- has always been its purported “inevitability.” Progressivism was
“scientific,” “rationalist,” the sole suitable ideology to lead the fumbling
masses into the bright utopian future. Only shambling Morlocks -- Christians,
conservatives, Southerners, Midwesterners -- could deny this obvious truth.
Sensible, intelligent people -- the better people -- could only agree.
The slow collapse of
the Marxist imperial states should have demonstrated clearly that
progressivism, was neither scientific, nor rational, nor inevitable. It was a
system based on deprivation and misery with a definite, and very short,
half-life. An ideology operating in defiance of human nature, which has its own
form of rationality and operates by its own rules despite any and all attempts
to systemize it.
The most obnoxious
thing about all this was the way that the conservative and traditional elites
bought into the leftist paradigm. With no apparent faith in their principles,
their country, or their fellow citizens, they consistently bowed to the leftist
argument……This response overlooked the fact that Americans have rejected
progressivism at every opportunity. Three times they have been offered the
progressive utopia. Three times they have pushed it away.
The first time was,
of course, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The New Deal’s almost pure record
of failure has been overshadowed by WW II, to the extent that the postwar
rejection of FDR’s nanny state has been lost……The second great progressive effort
was the Great Society, an attempt by Lyndon B. Johnson to arrange the United
States along the model of his Texas ranch. By the 60s, virtually all of
America’s institutions -- government, the academy, media -- were sold
completely on rationality and inevitability. The nation would be run by
committees of experts, utilizing big machines called “computers” (well out of
the reach of the average prole). There would be a place for everything with
everything in its place. And all done for the good of the Common Man. LBJ’s
brand of progressivism collapsed into abject failure due to the Vietnam War,
the mass public revolt that goes under the name of “the 60s,” and a complete
misunderstanding as to how an economy works. Deficit spending accompanied by
finagling with the currency by both Johnson and Nixon resulted in the 1970s
stagflation, a lost decade culminating in the disgrace of Jimmy Carter. Rejection
of socialism was completed with the election of that throwback Ronald Reagan,
who cut down the progressive monolith as much as he could in two short terms
and as a result remains the most beloved and admired president of the modern
era.
Which brings us to
attempt three -- the “Transformation,” I guess we’ll call it. The flaw here
arose from the selection of a completely uneducated and possibly ineducable
candidate to carry it out. Barack Obama checked all the boxes and touched all
the bases during his career without, it seems, ever learning a single thing
worth knowing. The tell with this man was the fact that he utterly lacks the
humility that has marked men of wisdom since Confucius and Socrates. According
to Obama, he was “a better speechwriter than his speechwriters,” a better
economist, better banker, better planner, and so on down the line to poodle groomer,
than anyone living. Obama committed the greatest crime against intelligence: he
didn’t know what he didn’t know.
Paradoxically, this
grotesque flaw served the country well. In his abject blindness, Obama raged
ahead with “transformation” with no hesitation or sense of caution. People who
actually knew things would have been more careful. Not Obama, who truly
believed that he could operate the way the generalissimos did in his adopted
country of Indonesia -- give his orders, flick the fly whisk, and move on. He
knew nothing of history or the economic record -- or even that there was such a
thing as a record. He had no Plan B’s or fallbacks in case anything went wrong
-- what could possibly be the point? He was Obama -- what could go wrong?....
But the Barackian
Transformation unfolded on the public stage, under the full spotlight, overseen
by one of the purest narcissists ever to practice politics on the North
American continent. Every move was telegraphed, every effort underlined, every
last syllable amplified, every gesture outlined in neon. And every last inch of
it has collapsed.
As of 2014, 95
million people have left the workforce (most of them women). This constitutes a
lost generation, embittered and yearning for better days. ObamaCare has not collapsed
only because it has not yet been put into effect…The national debt and deficit,
already at levels beyond human comprehension, have been multiplied furiously
over the past few years, to a point where they can never be repaid and will
require other forms of action. (Forget “laying the debt on our grandchildren”
-- it is to laugh, as they say in one of them foreign countries. Believe me,
that debt will be inflated or devalued to zero long before it reaches the
grandkids. We’re going to pay for every last nickel -- I kid you not.) Obama
even figured out a way to assure that the financial industry would make no
effort to support a recovery by treating them to a trillion and a half dollar
handout, none of which was loaned out or put to work in industry, but safely
invested, thus decoupling the stock market from the economy as a whole.
The disastrous
nature of the “Transformation,” in economic terms alone, is beyond rational
calculation. Which does not mean that its effects are invisible. A man out of
work for six years may not grasp the process in detail, but he does know that
he’s broke.
By 2014, the end
result of progressivism, in the basic, bread and butter economic sense, was
clear to all but the willfully blind. While the administration has made a number
of attempts to distract attention through increasing racial animosities and the
“War on Women,” none of this has worked. For the first time in a century, the
trajectory of progressivism was clear and unmistakable. The progressive ideal
has been stripped naked in the public square, its illusions ripped into
tatters, its rhetoric flensed of meaning, its promises rendered null -- and all
this inflicted by its own supporters and acolytes. The American people beheld,
and recoiled at what they beheld. Last week it came up for the vote. The voters
rejected it in toto.
The dream is over.
The progressive spell is broken. The long witch’s dance of the left is ending
through sheer exhaustion. The edifice of left-wing power has been rent in twain
by the rock of the American republic.
This does not mean
that leftism is dead and gone. Or that Obama will disappear in a blue flash…..We
may see yet another attenuated adolescent in the White House, preaching the
same dead slogans and demanding the same demented actions. There will still be
leftists clogging the landscape as the 22nd century dawns.
But the nightmare
will not come to pass. The dream of the Founders will not be curtailed, the
Republic will not be strangled. Because in 2014, the American people said,
“No.”
Obama was the high
tide mark for the progressive movement of the United States. They had a clear
shot, and they blew it. They have failed in a way that they will not understand
for years to come. Americans simply cannot be bought off.
What conservatives
must do is rub it in -- underline it, hammer it, let no opportunity pass to shout
the death of progressivism. The GOP will attempt to soothe their “friends
across the aisle.” The Northeast Corridor conservatives, our intellectuals in
their blue blazers and bow ties, will wring their hands about how “unseemly”
triumphalism is. Forget them. In the end, it was and will be the people of this
country who set the agenda.
There’s a reason why
three strikes means “out” in baseball -- the classic American game. Three is a
magic number, the number of the Trinity, the number of good luck, but also the
number of the last gasp of the drowning man, the sniper’s guaranteed kill on a
lit match. Three is the number of hope for the decent, the innocent, and the good,
of finality for the wicked, the useless, and the corrupt.
The left has had its
three tries -- we will see that they don’t get a fourth.
________________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
"An educational crisis has struck Minneapolis' public
schools: Black students have a tenfold higher chance of suspension or expulsion
than white students. And superintendent Bernadeia Johnson wants to 'disrupt
that in any way that I can.' Her solution: refusing to suspend black and
Hispanic students. ... The left in America believes that overlooking actual
solutions in favor of happy talk about institutional racism helps minority
students. It achieves precisely the opposite, making light of misbehavior and destroying
the chances for better education for those who seek to gain it. They get
suspended more often because they misbehave more often. The achievement gap
will never be closed, so long as school districts across the country punish
good students, reward bad ones and let political correctness trump educational
necessity."
-Ben Shapiro
_______________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
Happy Veterans Day from the Left: Lefties don’t believe in patriotism: “you don’t protect MY freedom..”
Wave? What wave? House
Democrats ended Election Day controlling fewer seats than they have in nearly
80 years, but Nancy Pelosi isn’t conceding anything. “I do not believe what happened
the other night is a wave.”
A leading liberal think tank in Washington, D.C., has begun
enlisting its associates in an “all-hands-on-deck effort to support” the Obama
administration as it seeks to ink a nuclear deal with Iran by the end of the
month, according to emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
__________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
Minnesota shatters snow record from 1898...
Denver shatters record for cold set in 1882…
_______________________________________________________________________
ISLAM
Islamists have blown up the great Armenian Christian church
in Syria, built in dedication to the one and a half million Armenians slaughtered
by the Turks during the 1915 genocide,” All of the church archives, dating back
to 1841 and containing thousands of documents on the Armenian holocaust, were
burned to ashes, while the bones of hundreds of genocide victims, packed into
the church’s crypt in memory of the mass killings 99 years ago, were thrown
into the street beside the ruins. Armenia was the first nation in the world to
adopt Christianity as its official religion, in the early years of
the 4th century AD.
ISIS says it has beheaded US aid worker Peter Kassig.
The Washington Post reports that the Washington National
Cathedral will host a Muslim prayer service this Friday for the first
time. The Post reports this as a
feel-good story.
____________________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
The scale of the Democratic Party’s losses over the course
of the Barack Obama era is becoming clear, and they are vast. On Saturday,
Politico reported that Democrats are coming to the grim realization that much
of the party’s talent pool was crushed on Tuesday. A generation of Democrats
lost in the Obama era.
The two midterm elections have hollowed out the Democratic
Party
In a newly surfaced video, one of
Obamacare’s architects admits a “lack of transparency” helped the Obama
administration and congressional Democrats pass the Affordable Care Act. “Lack
of transparency is a huge political advantage,” says the MIT economist who
helped write Obamacare. “And basically, call it the stupidity of the American
voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing
to pass.”
So it turns out there is an
Obamacare death panel after all. It has nine members and it operates out of a
marble building directly across the street from the Capitol. When the Supreme
Court on Friday announced that it would take up another challenge to the
Affordable Care Act in March, it delivered the threat of two mortal blows to
the signature achievement of the Obama presidency. It raised the possibility
that the justices, who narrowly spared the law in 2012, will in June come out
with a new ruling that would dismantle the law on different grounds.
Despite the image of Francis as a
man of dialogue and compromise, he is regarded in Rome as the most
authoritarian pope in decades……What does this apparently inter-ecclesiastical
dispute matter to the wider world? In the first place, it shows how the only
large global institution that represents what might be called the traditional
view of the family and society is divided, and that division is clearly bad for
those who care about the future of the family and civil society. On a more
positive note: This could mark the last rally of a certain Sixties mentality in
rapid decline. Unless they are weathervanes tilting with the wind of ambition,
the priests and bishops ordained since Saint John Paul II and Pope Benedict
have nothing in common with the bell-bottomed theology that, at least for a
season, has been revived in Rome.
Joni Ernst´s feat this week was one that many thought was
impossible: a Republican victory in a blue state that Obama won twice, and the
first woman ever elected to Congress from Iowa. Not only did Ernst win a U.S.
Senate seat, she clobbered her Democratic opponent by an 8-point margin. So how
did she pull it off in a state that has so long resisted making women its top
leaders?
There is a great divide in the
Hispanic community on immigration that has not received much media play and
that is because the mainstream media thinks all Hispanics are alike. We
definitely are not and amnesty is what divides us the most.
_________________________________________________________________________
NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
Great slideshow
showing how absurd “assault weapon” bans are.
The 239th birthday of the United States Marine Corps, and
´Madison Rising,´ one of our most patriotic contemporary artistic treasures,
has created a special video production capturing the panoply of services from
these men and women in uniform who speak Latin. “If this doesn´t get your heart
pounding, you´re dead.”
Kissing bug' disease infects OVER 300,000 people in the US...most
of whom don't know they have the parasite referred to as 'the new AIDS'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2827116/Kissing-bug-disease-infected-300-000-people-don-t-know-parasite-referred-new-AIDS.html#ixzz3IcB6XKJV
__________________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
“The deterioration of every
government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.”
-Charles-Louis De Secondat
posted by gary at
1:30 PM
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