op ed review 12/21
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
A federal judge Tuesday ruled parts of President Obama’s
deportation amnesty to be unconstitutional, with a scathing memo dismantling
the White House’s legal reasoning and arguing that Mr. Obama tried to steal
Congress’ lawmaking powers.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/16/charles-hurt-welcome-to-lawless-obamas-america-hom/?page=2#ixzz3MAhheMWP
“President Obama’s unilateral legislative action violates
the separation of powers provided for in the United States Constitution as well
as the Take Care Clause, and therefore is unconstitutional,” Judge Schwab
declared in his Memorandum Opinion.”
Obama tries 'new approach' on Cuba with normalized trade
relations and diplomacy between Washington and Havana for the first time in a
half-century
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2877617/Cuba-releases-US-prisoner-Alan-Gross.html#ixzz3MGScQIBh
“This entire policy shift announced today is based on an
illusion, on a lie, the lie and the illusion that more commerce and access to
money and goods will translate to political freedom for the Cuban people,” said
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). “All this is
going to do is give the Castro regime, which controls every aspect of Cuban
life, the opportunity to manipulate these changes to perpetuate itself in
power.”
How stupid are the democrats on the Senate Intelligence
Committee for releasing the report on enhanced interrogation techniques during
the war on terror? The Taliban is now
demanding an international investigation into the human rights standards of the
United States.
Meanwhile, the Taliban murdered 132 children at a school in
Pakistan in a revenge mission for Pakistani schoolgirl activist Malala
Yousafzai being awarded the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize.
The Taliban terrorists allegedly burned a teacher alive and
made the students watch.
"The smaller the coffin, the heavier it is to
carry," said Pakistan's defense minister,
as funerals began for the 132 child victims of Tuesday's Taliban attack.
President Obama's statement condemning the mass murder fails
to blame the Taliban, just calling them “terrorists.”
Sen. Feinstein’s torture report backfires: A majority of Americans believe the CIA´s
“harsh interrogation tactics” were acceptable under the circumstances according
to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. And a plurality say they´d be
acceptable to use in the future to thwart potential terrorist threats.
The wealth gap between middle- and upper-income households
has widened to the highest level on record under Obama says a new report.
The Obama White House, at the behest of Hillary Clinton’s
State Department and New Jersey senator Robert Menendez, waived an immigration
ban against an Ecuadorian national after her family gave hundreds of thousands
of dollars to Democratic campaigns in 2012.
Trouble in socialist Sweden…..”Lightly burdened by war
guilt, Sweden was the first European state to declare itself the moral monitor
of the world. Sweden’s folkhem, or “people’s home,” was the gold
standard of welfare states; it was also the first to run out of money.……..Mass
immigration has dissolved Sweden’s social cohesion and overburdened the welfare
system.
A new NBC News-Wall Street Journal survey shows that Chris
Christie is at the bottom of the pack among the 2016 GOP hopefuls, with the
fewest number of voters saying they could support him for the nomination.
People Magazine’s worst selling issue this year? The one
with Hillary Clinton on the cover.
Unilateral disarmament:
The nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons is down 85 percent from cold
war levels. Says a State Department
spokesman, "We still have more work to do."
Attorney General Holder:
cross-dressing is now a civil right, covered by the Civil Rights Act.
Government Waste: The good news is the National Institutes
of Health pulled the plug on a national children´s health study because it was
fatally flawed. The bad news is they wasted 10 years and $1.3 billion before
they admitted it
A military recruitment program that grants accelerated
citizenship to legal immigrants has ground to a halt after the Pentagon
directed the armed services to make illegal immigrants eligible for the
program, too.
Newly released emails expose possible collusion between the
IRS and President Obama´s Department of Justice. The IRS originally claimed that Lois Lerner’s
emails were all missing. On November 22, however, the IRS Inspector General announced
that 30,000 of Lerner´s emails had been recovered. The emails not only reveal
efforts to bring criminal charges against conservatives and Tea Party groups,
they could signal a cover-up by the Obama administration.
Last week, the Health and Human Services Department
announced a plan to share your medical records with over 35 federal agencies —
all in the name of “health care,” of course.
Florida taxpayers spent close to $30 billion to implement a
class-size amendment, which voters adopted in 2002. The results are less than
overwhelming. There is little doubt that having fewer students per class,
particularly in lower grades, is generally beneficial, but it is hardly the key
to educational excellence. The quality of teachers, course material, parental
support and other factors can have far greater impact.
Earlier this month it was announced that Florida’s Capitol
would host a satanic holiday display - now the Michigan Capitol will follow
suit.
Atheists unveil anti-Christmas TV specials
Santa Claus is removed from elementary school concert over complaint he is ´too
religious´.
_________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Star Parker 12/15
The story is told
that when Tennessee frontiersman Davy Crockett served in the US Congress
(between 1827 and 1835) he voted for a bill appropriating $20,000 for relief
for victims of a fire that broke out in Georgetown.
When he returned
home, a constituent farmer chastised him for supporting the bill and for
“giving what is not yours to give.” The farmer told Crockett the constitution
does not grant Congress the power to give charity and if it did, “You will very
easily perceive what a wide door this would open for fraud and favoritism and
corruption, on the one hand, and robbing the people on the other.”
We are far from
those days. Supreme Court decisions over the years have opened the door for
rationalizing just about anything under the spending authority of the Congress.
Those who crafted the American constitution did not intend limitations on the
federal government’s role out of mean spiritedness. They did so out of a sense
of what would best serve the public. It stands to reason that bureaucrats
spending other people’s money - funds taken by force - is not going to produce
good results.
According to a 2012
Congressional Research Service report, and the staff of Senator Jeff Sessions
(R-Ala), who commissioned the report, combined annual federal and state
spending on antipoverty programs exceeds $ 1 trillion. About 75 percent comes
from the federal government.
These funds, which
include programs such as welfare, food stamps, low-income housing programs,
child care assistance, etc. are programs that mostly came onto the American
scene with the War on Poverty and, in that they are focused on helping the less
fortunate, are what it is usually considered charity. These programs are
notoriously wasteful and are too often counterproductive and motivated by
political gain rather than genuine sincerity to really help people. Funds
extracted from taxpayers, dispensed by bureaucrats, under rules and conditions
designed by other bureaucrats, remove personal responsibility from both the
giving and receiving ends of the equation.
In addition to
waste, unintended consequences of this social engineering has produced
government dependence, family breakdown, and removal of the sense on the part
of recipients that they bear responsibility for their own lives……
A new book by
Brookings Institution scholars Ron Haskins and Greg Margolis, “Show Me the
Evidence,” reviews “evidence-based” strategies for what works as a precondition
for federal funding of programs. But why
focus on trying to make government more efficient rather than on what
government should or should not do?
I run a non-profit
and I know what it means to deliver results in order to satisfy donors and
raise funds. It is no different than any commercial enterprise.
In my column last
week, I proposed 5 conservative reforms to help low income communities transition
off destructive government dependence. One idea is dollar for dollar tax
credits for private charitable contributions going to designated low-income zip
codes. Can there be any doubt if a
trillion dollars in private giving was going to low –income America, rather
government money, everyone would be better off?
Rather than trying
to fix government, let’s put it back in its constitutional place and restore
private decision-making and responsibility to American life.
________________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“Imagine a chief of police in a city where there has been a
rash of automobile hubcap thefts and he’s trying to capture the culprits.
Should he have his officers stake out and investigate residents of senior
citizen homes? What about spending resources investigating men and women 40 or
older? I would imagine that he would have greater success in capturing the
culprits by focusing most of his resources on younger people – and particularly
on young men. Doing so would more likely lead to the capture of the culprits
because hubcap theft is a young man’s game. My question to you is whether you’d
bring charges against the police chief because he used age and sex profiling –
and didn’t investigate seniors and middle-aged adults?”
-Walter Williams
“It’s fine to say Sony never should have green-lighted the
movie in the first place. That’s true of so much that Hollywood produces. The
point is it did. And America is effectively giving one of the most evil regimes
in human history a veto on our First Amendment. Where’s Captain America when
you need him?”
-Jonah
Goldberg
_______________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
Why did President Obama engineer a prisoner swap with
Communist Cuba involving Alan Gross, an American citizen who badmouthed his own
country mere hours after he arrived back on U.S. soil? It turns out that a
cabal of left-wing extremists helped to make Gross´s release happen.
CBS journalists compare voter ID laws to the violent, bloody
attacks on African Americans during civil rights marches in 1965.
_______________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
During the Lima Climate Change
Conference, Bolivian President Evo Morales reveals the environmental movement’s
core motivating philosophy. "The deep causes of global warming," he
complained, "are not being dealt with here. The origin of global warming
lies in capitalism. If we could end capitalism then we would have a
solution." His honesty is somewhat refreshing, if disconcerting all the
same. This war that's being orchestrated by alarmists is not against
fossil-fuel-emitting power plants, the greenhouse gas effect or rising sea
levels; it's against the free-market enterprise that springs from the
foundation of Liberty.
_______________________________________________________________________
ISLAM
Militants fighting for the Islamic State in Iraq have
unveiled their latest terror tactic - bombs containing hundreds of live
scorpions designed to spread fear among their enemies. Canisters packed with
poisonous varieties of scorpion are being blasted into towns and villages,
which explode on impact - scattering the scorpions and causing panic among the
innocent local population. Although scorpion bombs sound like something out of
a modern horror movie, the tactic is actually thousands of years old and was
first used by Iraqis fighting against the Roman Empire.
____________________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
Think Congress can´t stop President
Obama´s unilateral executive action on immigration? It can. All money spent by
the federal government is under the ultimate control of Congress. If they
choose, lawmakers can issue exquisitely detailed instructions on how federal
dollars are spent. For proof, look no further than the 1,695-page spending bill
passed by Congress over the weekend. A particular phrase, "none of the
funds," appears in the bill more than 450 times. In each case, Congress
used those words to dictate how money can and cannot be spent.
Sen. Ted Cruz and Sen. Elizabeth Warren are polar opposites,
a Tea Party conservative and an Occupy Wall Street socialist. Then there are
the similarities: Both were elected in 2012, both have Harvard on their resume
and both are mentioned as presidential material. But the media´s read of the
two demonstrates an unquestionable slant. Both senators have shaken up the
Senate over heavy spending and regulation. When Warren does it, she´s promoted
as a profile in courage, standing up for fairness. When Cruz does it, he´s a
selfish brat causing meltdowns.
Ann Coulter: In return for the tea party not being
spasmodic and pushing crazy candidates this election, the GOP establishment had
better abandon its corporate-benefactor-pleasing ways. People who voted
Republican took the attitude of “We’re giving you one more chance.” They are
not going to back off, and they can’t be tricked or lied to. They’re looking
the GOP in the eye and saying: We’re not fooling around: Amnesty is dead,
right? Republicans won by ignoring the establishment when it said, Don’t
criticize amnesty! and ignoring the tea party when it said, Let’s run
candidates like Christine O'Donnell!........Without the presidency,
Republicans' sole objective for the next two years is to keep sending Obama
bills that 80 percent of Americans will support. They can pass some great
legislation – and they’ll also force Democrats into votes that won’t be easy to
explain to their constituents.
Conservative talk radio icon Mark
Levin blasted his fellow Republican Party members during his most recent show,
slamming the leadership for caving on the budget and for, time after time,
ignoring basic constitutional principles. “The Constitution is in tatters,” he
said, adding that he was “one inch away” from breaking with the Republicans.
VDH: There are lots of hypocrisies surrounding the recently
released executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the
CIA’s detention and interrogation program. But they pale in comparison to the
current Democratic silence about President Barack Obama’s policy of targeted
drone assassinations. Since 2004, drones have killed an estimated 2,400 to
3,888 individuals in Pakistan alone.
Students are stunned to learn Hillary Clinton gets
chauffeured around everywhere, and by her own admission has not driven a car
since 1996.
A Conservative Waterloo: John
Boehner Must Go
__________________________________________________________________________
NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
AFA's 2014 Naughty or Nice listing of the top 100 retailers
helps you spend your hard-earned money with companies who aren’t embarrassed to
use the word “Christmas.”
Hillary Clinton’s letter to Santa:
_________________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
“To the frustrated, freedom from
responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint. They are eager
to barter their independence for relief from the burdens of willing, deciding
and being responsible for inevitable failure. They willingly abdicate the
directing of their lives to those who want to plan, command and shoulder all
responsibility.”
-Eric Hoffer
posted by gary at
9:50 AM
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