op ed review 2/15
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
Illegal immigrants are eligible for tax refunds — even if
they haven’t paid taxes. …“if you get a Social Security number and you work,
you’ll be eligible to apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit.” …..according to
the IRS’ own website, a filer can receive a check up to $6,143 when they have
“three or more qualifying children.”
“Obama claims 1 in 5 women in America have experienced rape
or attempted rape. Wow, just wow. Gone
are the days that the president makes false claims that 1 in 5 women will be
sexually assaulted while in college. Now 20 percent of all women in America
have been raped or nearly raped. And 25 percent of American women — not just
college women — have experienced domestic violence.”
Obama claims climate change directly impacts more Americans than terrorism
Obama amnesty creates loophole for illegal immigrants to
vote in elections
FCC commissioner said President Obama is about to succeed in
his attempt to take “alarmingly unprecedented direct involvement” into the
FCC’s plan to regulate the internet, which he explained will mean “billions of
dollars in new taxes,” slower broadband speeds and “less competition.”
Obama hints that he will kill conservatism with immigration.
Obama warns companies not
to complain about ObamaCare.
While Obama Plays with Selfie Stick for BuzzFeed, ISIS
Closes In on U.S. Marines in Iraq
“The full-moon extent of the Obama world view still survives
in his second National Security Strategy which lists among its national
security priorities the need to “be a champion for … people with disabilities;
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) individuals; displaced persons;
and migrant workers.”
I don’t remember this level of scrutiny into Obama’s past: “Washington Post investigates Scott Walker
college years”
“Why they fear Scott Walker”
In a dissenting opinion joined by Justice Antonin Scalia,
Justice Clarence Thomas excoriated his fellow justices for refusing to
temporarily stop enforcement of a federal district judge´s ruling that
overturned the marriage laws of the state of Alabama and ordered Alabama to
recognize as legal "marriages" unions between two people of the same
sex.
Everyone in Colorado from Republicans to marijuana moguls
wants to stop welfare cash from being used to buy recreational pot, but
standing in their way are the state’s formidable legislative Democrats.
Republican FCC Commissioner Slams
‘Obama’s 332-Page Plan To Regulate The
Internet’
What could go wrong? The
Obama administration is going to offer the Iranian regime technical aid for its
nuclear program in exchange for “less jihad” in the region.
Rep. Mia Love Decries New ‘Slavery’ Of ‘Being Dependent On
People In Power’ At RNC Black Outreach Event
Second Amendment advocates landed a major victory on
Wednesday after a federal judge declared the longstanding federal interstate
handgun transfer ban to be unconstitutional.
__________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
George Will 1/21
America’s national character will have to be changed if
progressives are going to implement their agenda. So, changing social norms is
the progressive agenda. To understand how far this has advanced, and how
difficult it will be to reverse the inculcation of dependency, consider the
data Nicholas Eberstadt deploys in National Affairs quarterly: America’s welfare state transfers more than
14 percent of gross domestic product to recipients, with more than a third of
Americans taking “need-based” payments. In our wealthy society, the government
officially treats an unprecedented portion of the population as “needy.”
Transfers of benefits to individuals through social welfare
programs have increased from less than 1 federal dollar in 4 (24 percent) in
1963 to almost 3 out of 5 (59 percent) in 2013. In that half-century,
entitlement payments were, Eberstadt says, America’s “fastest growing source of
personal income,” growing twice as fast as all other real per capita personal
income. It is probable that this year a majority of Americans will seek and
receive payments.
This is not primarily because of Social Security and
Medicare transfers to an aging population. Rather, the growth is overwhelmingly
in means-tested entitlements. More than twice as many households receive
“anti-poverty” benefits than receive Social Security or Medicare. Between 1983
and 2012, the population increased by almost 83 million — and people accepting
means-tested benefits increased by 67 million. So, for every 100-person
increase in the population there was an 80-person increase in the recipients of
means-tested payments. Food stamp recipients increased from 19 million to 51
million — more than the combined populations of 24 states.
What has changed? Not the portion of the estimated
population below the poverty line (15.2 percent in 1983; 15 percent in 2012).
Rather, poverty programs have become untethered from the official designation
of poverty: In 2012, more than half the recipients were not classified as poor
but accepted being treated as needy. Expanding dependency requires erasing
Americans’ traditional distinction between the deserving and the undeserving
poor. This distinction was rooted in this nation’s exceptional sense that
poverty is not the unalterable accident of birth and is related to traditions
of generosity arising from immigrant and settler experiences.
Eberstadt’s essay, “American Exceptionalism and the
Entitlement State,” argues that this state is extinguishing the former. America
“arrived late to the 20th century’s entitlement party.” The welfare state’s
European pedigree traces from post-1945 Britain, back through Sweden’s interwar
“social democracy,” to Bismarck’s late-19th-century social insurance. European
welfare states reflected European beliefs about poverty: Rigid class structures
rooted in a feudal past meant meager opportunities for upward mobility based on
merit. People were thought to be stuck in neediness through no fault of their
own, and welfare states would reconcile people to intractable social
structures.
Eberstadt notes that the structure of U.S. government
spending “has been completely overturned within living memory,” resulting in
the “remolding of daily life for ordinary Americans under the shadow of the
entitlement state.” In two generations, the American family budget has been
recast: In 1963, entitlement transfers were less than $1 out of every $15; by
2012, they were more than $1 out of every $6.
Causation works both ways between the rapid increase in
family disintegration (from 1964 to 2012, the percentage of children born to
unmarried women increased from 7 to 41) and the fact that, Eberstadt says, for
many women, children and even working-age men, “the entitlement state is now
the breadwinner of the household.” In the past 50 years, the fraction of
civilian men ages 25 to 34 who were neither working nor looking for work
approximately quadrupled.
Eberstadt believes that the entitlement state poses
“character challenges” because it powerfully promotes certain habits, including
habits of mind. These include corruption. Since 1970, Americans have become
healthier, work has become less physically stressful, the workplace has become
safer — and claims from Social Security Disability Insurance have increased
almost sixfold. Such claims (including fraudulent ones) are gateways to a
plethora of other payments.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a lifelong New Deal liberal and
accomplished social scientist, warned that “the issue of welfare is not what it
costs those who provide it but what it costs those who receive it.” As a
growing portion of the population succumbs to the entitlement state’s
ever-expanding menu of temptations, the costs, Eberstadt concludes, include a
transformation of the nation’s “political culture, sensibilities, and
tradition,” the weakening of America’s distinctive “conceptions of
self-reliance, personal responsibility, and self-advancement,” and perhaps a
“rending of the national fabric.” As a result, “America today does not look
exceptional at all.”
_______________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“Mr. Obama proposed
no funding next year for private school scholarship vouchers in the District of
Columbia. The $20 million annual program, which began under George W. Bush, has
proven extremely effective. Thousands of kids have benefited from these
scholarships – which typically amount to about $8,000 to $10,000 a year. That’s
still about one-third lower than what it costs to ‘educate’ students in the
district’s public schools. Almost all students who get the money are blacks and
Latinos. … Several years ago, when President Obama tried to shut down the
program, black and Hispanic parents locked arms with Republicans in Congress
who support the program and marched in front of the Capitol. That was an
amazing optic. In the 1960s and 1970s, civil rights leaders and ‘community
activists’ fought against laws that prevent[ed] blacks from getting in to the
public schools. Now, liberals refuse to let them out. … Republicans must go on
the offensive on school choice. A quality education is the best anti-poverty
program ever invented. This is the best path to reducing income inequality. …
Democrats are on the wrong side on this issue. They put unions ahead of kids.
Let’s hope Republicans in Congress not only restore funding of this program but
expand its budget so that every poor child in Washington, D.C., can get the
education that Barack Obama’s daughters do.”
-Stephen Moore
________________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
Top advisers to the billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer
helped run a green group, financed in part by Steyer himself, that is at the
center of a corruption scandal that has forced the Democratic governor of
Oregon to resign.
Rep. Cummings: “People Come to Government
To Feed Their Souls”
Young Oakland Girls Called ‘Radical Brownies’ Learn Social
Justice Instead Of Selling Cookies
Obama secretly partied with
Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn at a wedding last summer
St. Louis University to erect monument
to anti-cop protests
_____________________________________________________________________
ISLAM
French artist’s calls for religions to “coexist” end in
brutal beating by local Muslims, who found the idea of coexistence “very
offensive”.
Mother of four charged in Chicago
with helping ISIS and Al Qaeda (+video)
President Obama has called the terror attack on Jews in a
kosher supermarket in Paris last month an act of random violence, rather than a
terror attack or an antisemitic attack.
______________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science
scandal ever. New data shows that the
“vanishing” of polar ice is not the result of runaway global warming. When future generations look back on the
global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than
the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire
panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as
having warmed much more than the actual data justified.
Global warming? New
York to drop to 20 BELOW ZERO on Sunday as Mayor de Blasio urges all residents
to stay indoors.
Reporters told to stop covering ´irrelevant´
climate change critics
________________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
Europe slouching towards Mecca: “It sounds like some kind of mysterious
demographic whodunnit: "The case of the missing Jews." Except it´s no
real mystery. After years of hostility, both at the government and personal
level, declining fertility rates and growing emigration, Jews now make up their
smallest share of Europe´s population in hundreds of years, according to a new
report from the Pew Research Center. This is of course tragic for Jewish
families that have lived in Europe for generations, but it´s especially bad for
European culture and science, two areas where Jews have had an especially
dominant role.”
Krauthammer: “His
secretary of defense says, “The world is exploding all over.” His attorney
general says that the threat of terror “keeps me up at night.” The world bears
them out. On Tuesday, American hostage Kayla Mueller is confirmed dead. On Wednesday,
the U.S. evacuates its embassy in Yemen, a country cited by President Obama
last September as an American success in fighting terrorism….Not to worry, says
his national security adviser…..Obama calls his policy “strategic patience.”
That’s a synonym for “inaction,” made to sound profoundly “strategic……This
passivity — strategic, syntactical, ideological — is more than just a reaction
to the perceived overreach of the Bush years. Or a fear of failure. Or bowing
to the domestic left. It is, above all, rooted in Obama’s deep belief that we —
America, Christians, the West — lack the moral authority to engage, to project,
i.e., to lead……If, during the very week Islamic supremacists achieve “peak
barbarism” with the immolation of a helpless prisoner, you cannot take them on
without apologizing for sins committed a thousand years ago, you have prepared
the ground for strategic paralysis. All that’s left is to call it strategic
patience.”
As Greg Abbott takes the reins as the 48th Governor of
Texas, political operatives on the right should take a closer look at his
campaign and learn a lesson or two for 2016. The 2014 election cycle was a very
good year for Republican candidates across the country, but the challenge of
re-claiming the White House in 2016 is staring us directly in the face. And
while Attorney General Abbott’s 20+ point win in the gubernatorial election
seems like a foregone conclusion in hindsight, it was not always a sure thing.
“Media’s Lack of Curiosity About
Killer of Muslims in North Carolina”
Can A Liberal Commit a Hate Crime? Apparently not.
___________________________________________________________________________
NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
As the media’s digs at Scott Walker’s lack of a degree (he
left Marquette in his senior year in perfectly good standing to take a job)
fall flat and as he correctly refuses to answer whether he believes in the
theory of evolution because it is irrelevant to the presidency, I’ve decided to
help them out by creating a Questionator -- spin it Left for Democrat
candidates and Right for Republicans…. Then they can spend even more time on
the important part of their craft -- haircuts, wardrobe and makeup. I’ll give
you a sneak preview so you can watch it at work:
Spin Left -- Dem candidate: What’s it like to be a
parent/grandparent?
Spin Right -- Do you believe in micro- or macro-evolution
and why?
Spin left -- Boxers or briefs?
Spin right -- Do you believe in global warming (machine
coughs) I mean climate change?
Spin left -- Do you prefer peace or war?
Spin right -- What’s the name of the deputy assistant
minister for sewage disposal in Upper Volta?
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/02/the_media_questionator_and_my_isis_airlift_strategy_.html#ixzz3Royvfz1e
_________________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
“[L]iberty can have nothing to fear from the judiciary
alone, but would have everything to fear from its union with either of the
other departments.”
–Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 78
posted by gary at
1:59 PM
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