Saturday, January 3, 2015

op ed review 1/4



THIS WEEK’S NEWS
Obama golfs in Hawaii;  sends Joe Biden to speak at slain cop´s memorial.
It’s not a slowdown — it’s a virtual work stoppage. NYPD traffic tickets and summonses for minor offenses have dropped off by a staggering 94 percent following the execution of two cops — as officers feel betrayed by the mayor and fear for their safety,
The man who cold-bloodedly shot Officers Ramos and Liu gets a shocking amount of sympathy and understanding from the New York Times.
Three shots were fired at two Florida deputies conducting traffic enforcement.

Soldiers have to relocate wedding to accommodate Obama´s golf game
"Queen of Mean” Michelle Obama has forced out another White House staffer – the First Family’s personal chef! Kitchen magician Sam Kass got fed up with Michelle’s snippy comments and told the Obamas to take his apron and shove it, insiders told The National ENQUIRER. “He just couldn’t take it – the relentless nitpicking, over petty little details that drove him insane. She thinks she’s Marie Antoinette!”

60% of republicans prefer a new House Speaker

Michigan now has more food stamp recipients than it does public school students.

Before Christmas, Arizona finished its 2nd Congressional District recount, showing Republican Martha McSally beating incumbent Democrat Ron Barber by 167 votes. This means there will be 247 Republicans in the House in the 114th Congress — one more than was elected to the House in the 80th Congress in 1946. It’s the most Republican House since the one elected in 1928.

Long Lines Expected At California DMV Friday As Undocumented Immigrants Apply For Licenses
How shocking!  More than 90 Percent of a Group of Illegal Immigrants from the Surge This Summer Never Showed Up to Their Immigration Hearings.

Bad news for trial lawyers?  Plain old bad luck plays a major role in determining who gets cancer and who does not, according to researchers who found that two-thirds of cancer incidence of various types can be blamed on random mutations and not heredity or risky habits like smoking.

Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan on Monday declared the "defeat" of the U.S. and its allies in the 13-year-old war, a day after the coalition officially marked the end of its combat mission.
America’s top Special Forces general in charge of fighting ISIS confesses that the US is clueless.
Obamacare hits small business hard in 2015

President Obama’s health care adviser Jonathan Gruber warned while he was writing Obamacare in 2009 that it “would definitely not be affordable.”

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and his allies are reportedly leading a purge of conservatives in Arizona to pave the way for an easier reelection bid should McCain decide to run for reelection in 2016.

Planned Parenthood clinics boast that they did 327,653 abortions in fiscal year 2014.

“A crack-smoking daughter and a Mexican-American wife detained at customs for lying about $19k in clothes and jewelry: Why Jeb Bush might not run for president.  But House Speaker John Boehner is eager for a centrist GOP candidate; a Capitol Hill aide close to him told MailOnline he 'will go to the mat for Jeb'”
The Second Amendment Foundation today filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Tacoma, seeking a permanent injunction against enforcement of portions of Initiative 594, the 18-page gun control measure that took effect Dec. 4 2014, alleging that “portions of I-594…are so vague that a person of ordinary intelligence cannot understand their scope,” and that other parts violate the Second Amendment outright. http://www.ammoland.com/2014/12/second-amendment-foundation-spearheads-federal-lawsuit-against-washington-state-i-594/#ixzz3NmbSEc97
Washington Post White House reporter talks about how he regrets not snapping a photograph of President Obama during his vacation in Hawaii under a rainbow.
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THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Victor Davis Hansen  12/31
Gasoline prices are on the verge of crashing down to below $2 a gallon. The price of oil may dip below $50 a barrel.  Even with renewed demand from a global economic resurgence, energy prices continue to fall. The U.S. has suddenly become the world's largest combined producer of oil and natural gas……

The world in general, and the United States in particular, supposedly had already burned more oil than was left under the Earth. Under President Barack Obama, gasoline prices had soared. When he entered office in January 2009, gas prices averaged around $1.60 per gallon. Four years later, by spring of 2013, gas prices had climbed beyond $3.50 a gallon.

The Obama administration never much worried about high energy costs. During the 2008 campaign, Obama promised that, "Under my plan ... electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket." Shutting down coal plants and using higher-priced but cleaner natural gas would pave the way for an even pricier mandated wind and solar generation. In the vice presidential debates of 2008, Joe Biden mocked Sarah Palin for the supposedly mindless campaign mantra of "Drill, baby, drill." Biden intoned that, "It will take 10 years for one drop of oil to come out of any of the wells that are going to be drilled."

The energy secretary-designate, the professorial Steven Chu, in 2008 had unwisely voiced a widely held but wisely unspoken progressive belief that, "Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe" -- or about $9 a gallon.  Just two years ago, when up for re-election, Obama reminded Americans, "We can't just drill our way to lower gas prices."

Obama ridiculed the Republican idea of lowering gas to $2 a gallon through new oil-recovery techniques. "They're already dusting off their three-point plans for $2 gas," Obama mocked. "I'll save you the suspense: Step one is drill, step two is drill, and step three is keep drilling."

Such easy rhetoric was backed by action -- or lack of it. The Keystone XL pipeline was put on permanent hold. New fracking leases on federal lands were postponed. Huge areas of oil- and gas-rich federal lands were put off-limits. Some blue states stopped fracking. Money poured into solar schemes like Solyndra.

Decreased use of expensive energy was deemed desirable. Cash-strapped commuters would be forced to drive less, thereby advancing the noble cause of curbing supposed manmade global warming. Federal subsidies flowed for high-speed rail. Wind, solar and other alternate energies could at last become competitive. Cap-and-trade legislation looked as if it might sail through Congress.

Unfortunately for the Obama administration, the new age of sky-high oil prices proved an economic disaster. The natural cycle of recovery never quite followed the end of the recession in mid-2009, as U.S. budget and trade deficits soared. Abroad, all the wrong countries were empowered as never before. The late Hugo Chavez used his oil windfall in Venezuela to subsidize subversion throughout Latin America. Petrodollar-rich Russian President Vladimir Putin charted a confident anti-American foreign policy. Iran used its growing riches to step up progress toward producing a nuclear bomb while upping subsidies to terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah.
Then, finally, oil and gas prices plunged due to the "drill, baby, drill," can-do attitude of the private sector. Americans should thank the U.S. oilman -- from the drillers in the field to the engineers behind the scenes -- who did the impossible. They vastly increased the supply of what was supposedly a permanently declining resource, and thereby helped to crash prices.

Oilmen, not the government, returned hundreds of billions of dollars to American consumers. They, not Ivy League experts and Wall Street grandees, kick-started the economy where federal subsidies had failed to. They, not the policies of the Obama administration or the rhetoric of Secretary of State John Kerry, weakened our enemies.

Almost everything Obama tried for six years in an effort to rev the economy -- from near-zero interest rates and $1 trillion annual budget deficits to Obamacare and vast increases in entitlements -- has failed. His foreign-policy stances of resets and leading from behind led to chaos and emboldened enemies. Yet the United States economy is slowly recovering with cheap energy. Consumers have more money. Industries are returning to U.S. soil.

Abroad, spendthrift oil producers such as hostile Iran, Russia and Venezuela are nearly broke. Friendly rivals such as Japan and the European Union can't compete with the U.S. energy edge.  What Obama once ridiculed is now saving him from himself -- after he had championed policies that nearly destroyed him.

The Greeks had a word for it: irony. 

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FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“Recall that the 2005 best-seller ‘Freakonomics’ made a huge splash with the claim that Roe v. Wade was responsible for the drop in crime America experienced starting in the 1990s. The theory, simplified for space, was that fewer unwanted babies began to be born after 1973. These aborted babies did not turn 18 in 1991 and, accordingly, did not commit crimes, leading to the dramatic drop in crime. It turns out that the study on which the ‘Freakonomics’ authors based their chapter on abortion and crime was authored by none other than Jonathan Gruber (and others). … Considering that 30 percent of abortions are obtained by African-American women, though they constitute just 13 percent of the female population, Gruber was in effect arguing that reducing the number of poor black children was, not to put too fine a point on it, a positive good. One cannot begin to imagine the outcry if a conservative academic (that rare specimen) had published similar conclusions… [W]hat’s more revealing is the casual readiness to calculate lost lives as so many numbers on a balance sheet. If it makes you uncomfortable that such a person helped design Obamacare, you’re not alone.”
               -Mona Charen
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LEFTIST WATCH
Bernie Sanders´s 12-Point Socialist Plan for America Every committed revolutionary needs a plan.

Many of the glossy new signs being carried by the protesters of the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” and “I Can’t Breathe” thugs are printed by RevCom (seen printed at the bottom of many of their signs). A quick investigation reveals that “RevCom” is shorthand for “Revolution Communists” with connections to Weather Underground. How odd… almost like the connection between Obama and Bill Ayers… huh?

The former national chairman of the New Black Panther Party and current national president of Black Lawyers for Justice, Malik Zulu Shabazz said 2015 is the time to “build up that army” and go “to the gun range.
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ISLAM
Arab terrorists have released a "How to stab a Jew" video, and its going viral in Palestine.  “The guide to killing Jews teaches that after stabbing the victim, the knife should be twisted to maximize wounds and cause death.”

Al-Qaeda urges ´lone wolves of Jihad´ to explode passenger planes

Al Qaeda issued the latest edition of its online magazine on Christmas Eve with a step-by-step manual on how to breach airport security and bomb passenger planes.
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ARTICLES
The Overrated Candidate: The Case Against Jeb Bush
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NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
Dellingpole:  2015 – Your Handy Month By Month Guide To The Year Ahead

Wild Card Weekend Cheat Sheet


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