Saturday, November 22, 2014

op ed review 11/23



THIS WEEK’S NEWS
More “transformation of America”:  Obama announces amnesty for millions illegal immigrants   “It is so ordered” 
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2843174/We-not-going-deport-Obama-announces-amnesty-millions-anchor-baby-parents-illegal-immigrant-children-long-ve-five-years.html#ixzz3Jid7DHmh Obama’s unilateral amnesty will add as many foreign workers to the nation’s legal labor force as the total number of new jobs created by his economy since 2009.
House Speaker Boehner responded, saying that the president has not only refused to listen to the American people, but in doing so has sabotaged efforts to enact immigration legislation, punished those who have obeyed the law, and encouraged others to come here illegally, putting their lives at risk.  Boehner pledged that the House would take action to protect the rule of law and the Constitution in the face of what the president himself has described as the actions of an “emperor.”
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio announced that he is filing a lawsuit against President Obama for the executive action he is taking on immigration.
Texas leaders are united in opposition and ready to battle President Barack Obama over his unilateral attempt to protect millions of illegal immigrants from being deported.
The Associated Press fact-checked President Obama’s statements about the unilateral actions he's taking on immigration and found many “omissions” (lies). Here’s just one:  Obama: "Although this summer, there was a brief spike in unaccompanied children being apprehended at our border, the number of such children is now actually lower than it's been in nearly two years." THE FACTS:…..it was more than a "brief spike."…in 2011 it was 16,000 children. In 2012, it was 24,000 children, in 2013 it was 38,800. In the last budget year, more than 68,361 children were apprehended crossing the border.
100,000  more illegals are expected next year to flood over the U.S.-Mexico border.
Last week, on a Friday no less, Joe Biden executed a full usurpation of immigration law that had nothing to do with Presidential Executive Orders.  Vice-President Joe Biden announced the latest White House scheme, setting the table for a massive, economy-crushing influx of dependent people from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador – yet few were paying attention.
In his 2006 autobiography entitled “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream,” then-Senator Barack Obama argued that an influx of illegal immigrants into the United States “threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans and puts strains on an already overburdened safety net.”
Obama once warned that executive action on immigration would amount to “violating our laws” and would be “very difficult to defend legally.”

The United States now ranks below 20 other countries on “personal freedom”. Citizens of countries including France, Uruguay, and Costa Rica now feel that they enjoy more personal freedom than Americans.
Germany is now the world's favorite country, knocking the United States from its longtime perch at the top of the ratings, which measure "twenty-three different attributes that make up the six overall dimensions on which national image is based."

Senate Democrats filibustered the Keystone XL pipeline on Tuesday, in a vote that reverberated from Louisiana, where a key democratic senator’s career is now likely doomed, to the broader national Democratic Party, where environmentalists have emerged triumphant in a divisive internal battle with labor unions. “(Democrats) have lost their way, their purpose and their base,” said the President of the Laborers’ International Union of North America.
Two Protestant pastors, concerned about rapidly-changing government definitions of marriage, have started a movement encouraging priests and ministers to refuse to perform civil marriages.

In addition to the five terrorists traded for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the :Pentagon also paid a ransom, which ended up being stolen by an Afghan con man.

Outrageous:  Race baiting Attorney General Eric Holder likens the shooting of Michael Brown to the 1955 murder of Emmett Till after an event where a tree was planted in Till´s memory on Capitol Hill.
 “Mike Brown Body Lays In Unmarked Grave As Parents Jet Set Around Making Money off His Death…”

MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, the Obamacare architect who bragged about deceiving the “stupid” American people to secure passage of Obamacare, has been paid an estimated $5.2 million by the federal government and 12 state governments for consulting services to assist in the design and implementation of the Affordable Care Act.
The videos Democrats never wanted to see keep coming. A day after President Obama tried to distance himself from a top health-care architect who said voter “stupidity” led to ObamaCare’s passage, a video surfaced of Obama praising the offensive professor for his bright ideas.

Keystone stuck at 59 votes

Just as school boards across the country scramble to meet new federal limits for punishing black students, Obama´s educrats now want them to hit racial quotas for academic performance, too….Breathtaking in its scope, the 37-page edict warns school boards that they have to reach the same equity, based on "disparate impact" statistics, in: 1) advanced placement courses; 2) gifted and talented programs, 3) distribution of funds, 4) school facilities; 5) technology; and, 6) teacher talent, experience and diversity.  Those who don't get their numbers right risk forfeiting federal funding and being investigated for discrimination.
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THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
John Hinderaker 12/21
“On Obama’s Illegal Usurpation, Jeff Sessions Speaks For Us”

We will have more to say about President Obama’s unconstitutional nullification of the nation’s immigration laws in the days to come; likely, before the night is over. But for now, let’s quote Senator Jeff Sessions, who has been the hero on this issue for a long time. Better than anyone else, Sessions has drawn the connection between the open borders movement that is supported by business magnates and those who live in gated communities, and American workers who are already suffering, and whose wages will be driven down by mass immigration of low-skilled workers. Which is the whole point, if you are the Chamber of Commerce:

“President Obama’s executive amnesty violates the laws Congress has passed in order to create and implement laws Congress has refused to pass. The President is providing an estimated 5 million illegal immigrants with social security numbers, photo IDs and work permits—allowing them to now take jobs directly from struggling Americans during a time of record immigration, low wages, and high joblessness.  This amnesty plan was rejected by the American people’s Congress. By refusing to carry out the laws of the United States in order to make his own, the President is endangering our entire Constitutional order.”

We can’t say it too often: under Article II of the Constitution, the President’s most fundamental duty is to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Barack Obama has made a mockery of his oath of office. He is a scofflaw.

“The President’s plan will apparently also allow many illegal immigrants to receive green cards and become legal permanent residents—meaning they can access almost all U.S. welfare programs, have lifetime work authorization, obtain citizenship, and sponsor foreign relatives to join them in the U.S.”

I didn’t listen to Obama tonight–duty has its limits–but I’m pretty sure he didn’t mention welfare or chain immigration.

“Law enforcement has warned this unprecedented amnesty will unleash a “tidal wave” of new illegal immigration flooding into American neighborhoods at taxpayers’ expense. The President’s plan also calls for boosting foreign worker programs for IT companies that experts tell us displace U.S. workers and keep wages low. The President’s unconstitutional action is a direct threat to our republican system of government and will have catastrophic consequences for the American people. It must be stopped. And the way to stop it is by using Congress’ power of the purse. The House should send the Senate a government funding bill which ensures no funds can be spent for this unlawful purpose. If Reid’s Senate Democrats vote to surrender their own institution to an imperial dictate and block the measure, then the House should send a short-term funding measure so the new GOP majority can be sworn in and pass a funding bill with the needed language. Congress has no higher duty than to protect the American people and our Constitution. The President’s action is a threat to every working person in this country—their jobs, wages, dreams, hopes and futures. For years, the American people have begged and pleaded for a lawful system of immigration that serves the nation and makes us proud—but the politicians have refused, refused, refused.  It is time to stand strong for the American people. It is time to champion the interests of those constantly neglected on the question of immigration: the men and women and children we represent—the citizens of this country to whom we owe our ultimate allegiance. Every American must ask their Senator where they stand.”

That is, of course, the bottom line: to whom does our federal government owe its loyalty? To Americans who are struggling in the evolving world economy, made worse by the current administration’s inept economic policies? Or to citizens of Mexico, Honduras and other nations, who already have a home but–understandably!–would prefer to take their chances in the U.S.? It seems obvious to me that the President of the United States owes a fiduciary duty, not to human beings generally, wherever they may reside and of whatever country they already are citizens, but rather to Americans.

But that is not how Barack Obama sees it. Worse, he is willing to act in an obviously unconstitutional manner, not to benefit Americans, but to benefit citizens of other countries. It is hard to imagine a worse betrayal of his oath of office.


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FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“This week, America held its collective breath as it waited on the grand jury indictment verdict for Officer Darren Wilson. … [F]acts do not matter to those attempting to rectify what they perceive as an unjust universe. … Wilson was a white cop; therefore, he was the Racist White Establishment. Brown was a black teenager; therefore, he was the Innocent Black Victim. The parts have already been written; Wilson was merely unlucky enough to land the starring role. And so we expect riots no matter what the outcome of the indictment. Should Wilson escape indictment due to complete lack of evidence, the utopians and their rioting henchmen will attribute that acquittal to the Racist White Establishment. Should he be indicted, the utopians and their rioting henchmen will cite Wilson as merely the latest example of the Racist White Establishment. … [A] society that doesn’t value truth cannot survive.”
              -Ben Shapiro
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MOVIES
Clint Eastwood’s “Sniper”  "This lefty (Academy Awards) crowd isn't going to gather around a Navy SEAL best known for killing people."
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LEFTIST WATCH
The Communist Party USA handed out leaflets at Saint Louis University on Wednesday. The Communists urged students to “take AmeriKKKa if the murdering pig walks.”
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GLOBALONEY
1,360 cold weather records broken in one week!

Record snowfall in Michigan for November…..The previous record of 28.2 inches was set in 1895.

Between 3 and 6 feet of snow and plunging temperatures sets records in New York.

Environmentalists bundled up to withstand the frigid blast of Arctic weather to protest against Democrats who have pledged to vote in favor of the $8 billion Keystone XL pipeline.
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ISLAM
Two Palestinians armed with a meat cleaver and a gun killed four people in a Jerusalem synagogue on Tuesday. Palestinians in the Gaza Strip celebrate by handed out candy and brandished axes in praise of the deadly attack.
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ARTICLES
“The reason President Obama and his handmaidens of despotism cannot say how many illegals they are going to legalize is because they haven’t yet figured out how many they need. Literally, they need to add up exactly how many illegals they need in Texas to shut those loud and rowdy Texans up once and for all. And Florida — how many do they need to get that Election Night nail-biter solidly into the Democrat column? And what about Ohio? If the Democrats could just shut down all that plain, middle-America, common-sense spewing from all those bowling alleys and karaoke bars, then they could have a fairly iron grip on this country for a long, long time….”

“On November 4, in a healthy exercise of democracy, voters around the country registered their dismay with the governing party and swept them out of power in Congress and in scores of state legislatures. Yet, this president is not only refusing to respect the results of the election, he is thumbing his nose at the Constitution itself.”

Just a few years ago, a prominent national Democrat (guess who) firmly and unequivocally rejected the idea that the president of the United States could singlehandedly enact an amnesty program for millions of illegal immigrants. In 2011, for example, this Democrat reminded us that “there are laws on the books that Congress has passed,” and that therefore it would not be permissible for the president to “suspend deportations through executive order.” In 2013, this same Democrat noted that granting a unilateral amnesty for adults residing in our country illegally was “not an option,” because it would amount to “ignoring the law.”
Caught on Camera: Obama Called Exec Immigration Action Illegal… 25 Times!

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Monday encouraged the GOP´s newest members of Congress to “embrace compromise.”

How Eisenhower solved illegal border crossings from Mexico.

The Internal Revenue Service, which claims to be so understaffed that it can’t bother to collect unpaid taxes or search backup tapes for Lois Lerner’s “missing” e-mails, apparently has plenty of time to read the comment threads on conservative blogs that have been critical of the agency

VDH:  "The last but long gasp of the Obama administration is characterized not so much by deceit and incompetence as by growing chaos. Everything appears to be coming apart."
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NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
Obama Then vs Obama Now - a Montage of On-Camera Contradictions

Kleenex story:  Soldier reunited with the dog that saved his life.

“I bet you can’t handle this much Gruber in one sitting”

Under Obama, U.S. personal freedom ranking slips below France
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WISE WORDS
“[T]he people are always most in danger when the means of injuring their rights are in the possession of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion.”
                 –Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 25

Sunday, November 16, 2014

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.

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.
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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.


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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
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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.
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GLOBALONEY Minnesota shatters snow record from 1898...

Denver shatters record for cold set in 1882…
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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.
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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.
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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'

WISE WORDS
“The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.”
                  -Charles-Louis De Secondat