Saturday, February 21, 2015

op ed review 2/22



THIS WEEK’S NEWS
A federal judge in South Texas temporarily blocked President Barack Obama's executive action on immigration, giving a coalition of 26 states time to pursue a lawsuit that aims to permanently stop the orders.
But the Obama administration plans to seek an emergency stay that would undo the injunction, halt depurations, and sign up illegal immigrants for work permits.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, believes that the Obama administration is “counterfeiting immigration documents” under the president’s immigration plan.

ISIS Beheads 21 Christians, Promises To ‘Conquer Rome, By Allah’s Permission’
President Obama defended the “true peaceful nature of Islam”  — saying terrorist groups like ISIS promote a “twisted interpretation of religion that is rejected by the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims.”
But what do polls of Muslims say?    20% of British Muslims sympathize with 7/7 bombers….31% of Turks support suicide attacks against Westerners in Iraq…..61% of Egyptians approve of attacks on Americans…. 26% of younger Muslims in America believe suicide bombings are justified….. One third of Palestinians (32%) supported the slaughter of a Jewish family, including the children.

The former director of the CIA said Thursday that President Obama “looks scared” to call members of al Qaeda, the Islamic State group and other terrorist organizations “Islamic.”
Attorney General Eric Holder tells reporters that the U.S. isn’t at war against ISIS:  “we´re not at a time of war.”
Meanwhile, a new Homeland Security intelligence assessment focuses on the domestic terror threat from “right-wing sovereign citizen extremists”.
ISIS may be financing itself by harvesting human organs.  “In the past few weeks, bodies with surgical incisions and missing kidneys or other body parts have been found in shallow mass graves.”

Only a few short weeks after Republicans took control of both branches of the Nevada state legislature and the Governor’s mansion here for the first time since 1929, GOP leaders aimed their new strength at Nevada´s powerful labor unions.

Longtime Obama administration political insider David Axelrod claimed (with a straight face) that the Obama administration “hasn´t been tainted by (even) a smidgen of scandal.”

Vice President Joe Biden took hands-on politics to a creepy new level Tuesday by “snuggling” new Defense Secretary Ashton Carter’s wife from behind during the swearing-in ceremony.

As it wanes, the Obama administration grows bold, and even reckless, on matters that send a thrill up the leg of its most leftward supporters. Its new attack on so-called armor-piercing ammunition — which is, in reality, a very broad attack on ammunition across the board — is a dangerous and destructive example of the administration’s late-days slide into rule-by-decree.

DNC Chair “Will switch position on marijuana if donor recants criticism...”

Here come the gay Nazis: A Washington State judge ruled this week that floral artist and grandmother Barronelle Stutzman must provide full support for gay weddings. The judge said the 70-year-old grandmother may lose not only her business, but also her home and savings because she lives her life and operates her business according to her religious beliefs.

Rudy Giuliani is in trouble with the mainstream media for saying that he does not believe that President Barack Obama “loves America.”
Asked if he wanted to apologize he said, "Not at all, I want to repeat it."

Presidential scholars put President Obama on the worst, not best, list by a margin of nearly three-to-one.

Anti Semitism spreads:”Thirty Madison, Wisconsin Homes Spray painted With Anti-Semitic Slurs”
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THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
National Review  2/20
In Washington, they are practically praying for a Christian terrorist. At a breakfast in January, President Obama reached all the way back to the Crusades for an example of violence purportedly motivated by Christian extremism. Days later, when three Muslims were murdered in Chapel Hill, social media erupted with demands that Christians be called upon to condemn the attacks in the same way that Muslims are called upon to condemn acts of Islamic terrorism, and the disappointment was palpable when the man charged with those murders turned out to be a militant atheist and Rachel Maddow fan who was angry about a parking dispute.

State Department flack Marie Harf, fresh off her jobs-for-jihadis bit, offered up Joseph Kony — a practitioner of Ancholi mystical traditions with 88 wives, a flair for Biblical apocalypticism, and, if we take him at his word, 13 spirits (one of them Chinese) dwelling within him — as an example of “Christian militant” terrorism. This isn’t new: Timothy McVeigh (agnostic) and John Salvi (a schizophrenic who believed himself to be one of the thieves crucified with Jesus and who obsessed over an imaginary scheme in which the Vatican would issue its own currency) have been presented from time to time as evidence that the violent jihadist tendency is not limited to the religion of which jihad is a central tenet.

Meanwhile, in the real world, President Barack Obama, who still believes that his job consists of giving speeches, convened a “Summit on Countering Violent Extremism,” the purpose of which was to provide a platform for the president to give a keynote speech. In it he insisted, as he does, that Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, and that arguments to the contrary only lend credibility to the Islamic terrorist organizations that have nothing to do with Islam. He cited a letter from a fifth-grader, a Muslim girl named Sabrina, who wrote: “If some Muslims do bad things, that doesn’t mean all of them do.” President Obama was impressed with these remarks — “the wisdom of a little girl,” he called them….

Of course, no sensible person walking the earth believes that every Muslim on the planet is an al-Qaeda sympathizer or an Islamic supremacist. The problem is that (1) some of the world’s Muslims do sympathize with Islamic-supremacist views, (2) there are an awful lot of them, and (3) Islamic organizations are the preeminent practitioners of terrorism around the world at the moment…..Radical Islam is a longstanding part of Islam, not an amendment to it.

One group of powerful Muslims who do not like hearing this: the regimes of U.S. allies from Morocco to Pakistan. President Bush was solicitous of their sensitivities as well. But if we have a common enemy, our Muslim allies cannot complain when we name it accurately. Indeed, it would be useful if they did so, too. The worst thing that one can be in Barack Obama’s world is a bigot. Racism is the original sin, and other forms of discrimination, from the genuine to the superficially similar, are corralled into the same moral category — which is why, for example, progressives treat traditional-marriage laws like the anti-miscegenation laws of old, even though homosexuality and race are fundamentally different human phenomena. To Obama’s mind, the frank acknowledgment that the world has a problem with savagery rooted in a particular religion is an invitation to invidious discrimination — an invitation to becoming something even lower than al-Qaeda. And so the endless cheerleading for Islam and the search for comparable acts of barbarism by Christians or others, the purpose of which is to make sensitive people feel that we aren’t singling out Islam for criticism and scrutiny.

Of course we are singling out the Islamic world for criticism and scrutiny — as we should..…the Islamic State is at the moment a much bigger problem for the Islamic world, which is bearing the brunt of its violence, than for the West.  But as the monuments in Washington, New York, and Pennsylvania remind us — as the victims of “workplace violence” at Fort Hood remind us, as the plugged-up bullet holes at LAX remind us — it is our problem, too.

Barack Obama is not the president of the world; he is the president of the United States, and his principal duty is seeing to our national security. Wishful thinking and sentimental letters from fifth-grade girls will not solve the problem — not when the president cannot even quite bring himself to say, honestly and forthrightly, what the problem is.


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FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“Liberalism is a moral manipulation that exaggerates inequity and unfairness in American life in order to justify overreaching public policies and programs. Liberalism undermines the spirit of self-help and individual responsibility. For liberals in academia, the fact that black college students earn lower grades and have a higher dropout rate than any group besides reservation Indians means that blacks remain stymied and victimized by white racism. Thus, their push for affirmative action and other race-based programs is to assuage their guilt and shame for America’s past by having people around with black skin color. The heck with the human being inside that skin.”
       -Walter Williams

"What kind of country is it that lets those who are not citizens decide who governs those who are? If any foreigner can now vote here, is the United States even a country anymore? If Congress doesn't stop it soon, de facto enfranchising of illegals will be our road to ruin."
    -Investors Business Daily

"Can you imagine the outcry if 21 Muslims had been beheaded by Christians? Where is the universal condemnation by Muslim leaders around the world? As we mourn with the families of those 21 martyrs, we'd better take this warning seriously as these acts of terror will only spread throughout Europe and the United States. ... The storm is coming."
     -Rev Franklin Graham
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ISLAM
ISIS Bans Cell Phones: Islamic State Chops Off Women´s Hands, Whips Men For Calling Their Relatives, Using Telephones

Just one week and a half after President Barack Obama linked the Crusades and Inquisition with “many terrible deeds done in the name of Christ” at the National Prayer Breakfast, ISIS has picked up and run with his meme.
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GLOBALONEY
Must be the global warming:  “Coldest Temps Since Late-1800s in East... “

Great Lakes “likely to have the most ice since records began,” says meteorologist…

-41F in Embarrass, MN

Rare snowstorm in Jerusalem
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ARTICLES
It's a bad day when the Harvard Kennedy School for Business and Government labels your policy a failure and blames it for actually exacerbating a situation. A new study shows the 2010 financial reform law known as the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act simply made "too big to fail" even bigger and increased the likelihood of greater risk and bailouts.

If there is anything out there that shows the real aim of the amnesty crowd after Judge Andrew Hanen´s ruling to halt President Obama´s executive amnesty, it´s their vow to achieve their unpopular ends "by any means necessary," with no regard for the law.

The story of the fallen Oregon governor is an account of corruption and a revelation into the nasty affairs of renewable energy.

The nanny state on steroids:  “The federal committee responsible for nutrition guidelines is calling for the adoption of “plant-based” diets, taxes on dessert, trained obesity “interventionists” at worksites, and electronic monitoring of how long Americans sit in front of the television.”

George W. Bush couldn’t always speak clearly. His successor can rarely see clearly. The see-no-evil president doesn’t glimpse Islam as the common denominator behind recent ugliness from Libya to Syria to Nigeria and points beyond. The speak-no-evil president dare not name the religion as the inspiration for vile acts but instead maintains that a perversion of the message of the Warrior Prophet motivates them.
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WISE WORDS
 “A university’s essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism – a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else.”
             -Richard Hofstadter


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