op ed review 2/8
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
Number of Full-Time Jobs as Percent of Population Is Lowest
It’s Ever Been
President Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast: "….remember that during the Crusades and
Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ….(more
recently) slavery…Jim Crow….”
“Obama preaches tolerance to the wrong religion: He took his
text from the first chapter of the Book of Moral Equivalence and let the choir
have both barrels…….the president’s invoking the Crusades — the last Crusader
left Europe for Jerusalem 700 years ago — sounds like something remembered from
a radical mosque. He’s preaching tolerance to the wrong congregation.”
“White House Won’t Reveal Who
Attended Obama’s Secret Meeting With
Muslim Leaders”
State Department admits it lied about who sponsored the Muslim
Brotherhood visit.
“Obama Urges Illegals
to ‘Sign Up’ For Amnesty”
A top Iranian military leader brags that the US has been
“begging us” to sign a nuclear deal.
Cuba demands that American diplomats
to scale back aid for dissidents as a condition before the two countries can
reopen embassies in each other's capitals.
An Oregon bakery will have to pay a gay couple up to
$150,000 for refusing to bake them a wedding cake two years ago, government
officials announced.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/oregon-bakery-pay-gay-couple-refused-cake-article-1.2103577
A new Associated Press-GfK poll shows most believe
wedding-related businesses should be allowed to deny service to same-sex
couples for religious reasons.
Gallup: “5.6%
Unemployment…..if you are so hopelessly out of work that you've stopped looking
over the past four weeks -- the Department of Labor doesn't count you as
unemployed. …….If you perform a minimum of one hour of work in a week and are
paid at least $20 -- maybe someone pays you to mow their lawn -- you're not
officially counted as unemployed….Few Americans know this……If you have a degree in chemistry or math and
are working 10 hours part time because it is all you can find -- in other
words, you are severely underemployed -- the government doesn't count you in the
5.6%...There's no other way to say this. The official unemployment rate,
which cruelly overlooks the suffering of the long-term and often permanently
unemployed as well as the depressingly underemployed, amounts to a Big Lie.”
It’s not every day you see you see the chairman and CEO of
the Gallup polling organization come out and declare the official unemployment
rate number is…“a big lie” Only 44 Percent of U.S. Adults Work 30 Hours a Week or More with a Regular Paycheck
Do we want government running the Internet? IRS Chief: "We Still Have (computer) Applications That Were Running When JFK Was
President"
After ISIS execution, angry King Abdullah quotes Clint
Eastwood to U.S. lawmakers….after news broke that ISIS had burned to death a
Jordanian pilot in a cage.
“Jordan’s King Abdullah ibn al-Hussein, who has trained as a
pilot, may fly a bomber himself on Thursday in the country’s retaliation
against the ISIS.”
Jordan will likely face criticism for executing five
terrorists in retaliation for the Islamic State´s incineration of one of its
pilots. It shouldn´t. The ugly reality is that Jordan´s response is the only
appropriate one.
“The Wheels on Chris Christie’s Campaign Bus Are Coming Off
Before It Even Rolls”
Jeb Bush doesn’t get it:
"it's not possible in a free
country to completely control the border without us losing our freedoms and
liberties." He even suggested the mayor of Detroit use immigration to
"repopulate" the city.
Twenty-six states are suing the federal government over
President Obama’s executive actions on immigration, but U.S. senators
representing 10 of those states are taking the opposite approach in Washington.
President Barack Obama has quietly handed out an extra 5.46
million work permits for non-immigrant foreigners who arrived as tourists,
students, illegal immigrants or other types of migrants since 2009.
Nearly 1 MILLION border-crossing illegal immigrants have
received US work permits during Obama's presidency, shocking documents reveal…
China launched a secret 100-year modernization program that
deceived successive U.S. administrations into unknowingly promoting Beijing’s
strategy of replacing the U.S.-led world order with a Chinese
communist-dominated economic and political system, according to a new book by a
longtime Pentagon China specialist.
__________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Thomas Sowell 2/4
In his recent trip
to India, President Obama repeated a long-standing pattern of his — denigrating
the United States to foreign audiences. He said that he had been discriminated
against because of his skin color in America, a country in which there is, even
now, “terrible poverty.”
Make no mistake
about it, there is no society of human beings in which there are no rotten
people. But for a President of the United States to be smearing America in a
foreign country, whose track record is far worse, is both irresponsible and
immature.
Years after the last
lynching of blacks took place in the Jim Crow South, India’s own government was
still publishing annual statistics on atrocities against the untouchables,
including fatal atrocities. The June 2003 issue of National Geographic
magazine had a chilling article on the continuing atrocities against
untouchables in India in the 21st century.
Nothing that
happened to Barack Obama when he was attending a posh private school in Hawaii,
or elite academic institutions on the mainland, was in the same league with the
appalling treatment of untouchables in India. And what Obama called “terrible
poverty” in America would be called prosperity in India.
The history of the
human race has not always been a pretty picture, regardless of what part of the
world you look at, and regardless of whatever color of the rainbow the people
have been. If you want to spend your life nursing grievances, you will never
run out of grievances to nurse, regardless of what color your skin is. If some
people cannot be rotten to you because of your race, they will find some other
reason to be rotten to you. The question is whether you want to deal with such
episodes at the time when they occur or whether you want to nurse your
grievances for years, and look for opportunities for “payback” against other
people for what somebody else did. Much that has been said and done by both
President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder suggests that they are in
payback mode.
Both have repeatedly
jumped into local law enforcement issues, far from Washington, and turned them
into racial issues, long before the facts came out. These two men — neither of
whom grew up in a ghetto — have been quick to play the role of defenders of the
ghetto, even when that meant defending the kinds of hoodlums who can make life
a living hell for decent people in black ghettos. Far from benefitting ghetto
blacks, the vision presented by the Obama administration, and the policies
growing out of that vision, have a track record of counterproductive results on
both sides of the Atlantic — that is, among low-income whites in England as
well as low-income blacks in the United States.
In both countries,
children from low-income immigrant families do far better in schools than the
native-born, low-income children. Moreover, low-income immigrant groups rise
out of poverty far more readily than low-income natives. The January 31st issue
of the distinguished British magazine The Economist reports that the
children of African refugees from Somalia do far better in school than
low-income British children in general. “Somali immigrants,” it reports,
“insist that their children turn up for extra lessons at weekends.” These are
“well-ordered children” and their parents understand that education “is their
ticket out of poverty.”
Contrast that with
the Obama administration's threatening schools with federal action if they do
not reduce their disciplining of black males for misbehavior.
Despite whatever
political benefit or personal satisfaction that may give Barack Obama and Eric
Holder, reducing the sanctions against misbehavior in school virtually
guarantees that classroom disorder will make the teaching of other black
students far less effective, if not impossible. For black children whose best
ticket out of poverty is education, that is a lifelong tragedy, even if it is a
political bonanza to politicians who claim to be their friends and defenders.
The biggest
advantage that the children of low-income immigrants have over the children of
native-born, low-income families is that low-income immigrants have not been
saturated for generations with the rhetoric of victimhood and hopelessness,
spread by people like Obama, Holder and their counterparts overseas.
_______________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“The progressive project of maximizing the number of people dependent
on government is….aided by the acid of insecurity that grows rapidly when the
economy does not. Anxious and disappointed people are susceptible to
progressives' blandishments about the political allocation of wealth and
opportunity – ‘free’ this and that. By making slow growth normal, iatrogenic
government serves the progressive program of defining economic failure down.”
-George Will
________________________________________________________________________
ISLAM
We are in the middle of a hot war in the Middle East, with
constant terror attacks all over the world, including the United States,
Europe, and Asia. The enemy is called violent Islam, or radical Islam, or
fascist Islam, or reactionary Islam, or merely "orthodox Islam." For
fifty years, Muslims did not actively practice jihad against the West – until
Jimmy Carter betrayed our ally the shah of Iran, and therefore empowered the
first jihad-preaching Islamofascist regime in the world, the mullahcracy of
Iran. Because Carter was the weak horse, millions of Muslims around the world
sensed a change in the wind – and that is why jihad is now breaking out all
over…”
President Obama claims that 99.9%
of Muslims reject radical Islam. This is nonsense on stilts. Daniel Pipes has
long argued that between 10 to 15% of Muslims subscribe to radical Islam. Pipes
uses the term Islamist to describe this 10 to 15%. By this, Pipes means Muslims
who want the establishment of an Islamic caliphate which would impose Shariah
law. Not all of these Muslims necessarily support terrorism to bring this
about, but a large number certainly do.
Seattle Muslims demand sacking of teacher who showed
Muhammad cartoons
Pro-Hamas students at the University of California at Davis
chanted “Allahu akbar” at Jewish students filing out of a student government
vote calling on the college to divest from companies who do business in Israel.
The 8 to 2 vote passed the council on Thursday, the latest in a series of council
resolutions passed by students at UC campuses at Berkeley, San Diego, Santa
Cruz, Irvine, and Riverside. The council urged the university regent to divest
from companies like Caterpillar Inc. and Raytheon, which provide military
equipment to Israel.
________________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
John Judis, co-author of the 2002
book The Emerging Democratic Majority, now says that majority has come and
gone. That’s the thesis of his important National Journal article “The Emerging
Republican Advantage.”
Media attacks on GOP White House hopefuls contrast sharply
with the kid-glove treatment of Democrats. We saw the same one-sided vetting in
the 2012 and 2008 campaigns. But this time, hits on Republicans are coming
earlier than ever. Republican candidates haven´t even officially thrown their
hats into the ring. Yet they´ve been blasted with a barrage of negative press
in an orchestrated attempt to turn voters off to the entire GOP field and take
down any threats against Hillary Clinton´s coronation.
“Cruz Control for America? Damned right. These times call
for someone who does not fear the media, the Democrats, or the Washington/New
York Republican establishment. We need someone who will plant a flag and draw a
line in the sand, and mean it. These times require someone who realizes that
the biggest threat to the country today is Washington – a realization that for
too long America has been held hostage to "how Washington works,"
when it´s Washington that should operate in light of how America works. Ted
Cruz fits the bill.”
The video of ISIS barbarians burning to death a Jordanian
pilot sure makes one empathize with Israel. Thirty years ago, Israel was an
oasis of sanity surrounded by nation-states essentially hostile but essentially
tamed. Now, Israel is surrounded by an exploding movement of bloodthirsty ISIS
murderers. Contrary to what President Obama would have you believe, the I in
ISIS doesn’t stand for International. What is exploding around Israel in the
Middle East is now a modern death cult. Only in a culture as warped and
backwards as the Middle East could a video of a human being burned alive in a cage
attract supporters. Yet the American left wailed about Abu Ghraib
for months.
Turns out the former Marine, supposedly suffering from PTSD,
who killed Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle, never saw combat duty, but did spend a
lot of time with Islamist prisoners. Was
he converting to Islam?
___________________________________________________________________________
NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
10 Dangerous Things Every
Kid Should Do
Five Ways Liberals Ignore Science
Three worst Super Bowl ads and
why they´re bad for America
Where do the world's 2,089 billionaires live? For the first time, India has more
billionaires than Britain or Russia.
_________________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
“No free government was ever
founded or ever preserved its liberty, without uniting the characters of the
citizen and soldier in those destined for the defense of the state…. Such are a
well regulated militia, composed of the freeholders, citizen and husbandman,
who take up arms to preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights
as freemen.”
-Josiah Quincy Jr.,
posted by gary at
3:11 PM
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