op ed review 3/22
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
Largest transfer of wealth in history? If implemented, President Barack Obama’s
executive actions granting temporary amnesty and federal benefits to nearly 4
million illegal aliens in the United States will end up costing American
taxpayers about $1.3 trillion in Social Security and Medicare benefits, and
about $20 billion more in retroactive tax credits, according to Robert Rector,
senior research fellow for Domestic Policy Studies at the Heritage Foundation.
Obama buys stunning
three-acre oceanfront mansion in Hawaii made famous in the “Magnum P.I.”
television series, for $8.7 million.
Obama Urges Soviet-Style Voting Laws. Forcing Americans to vote under threat of
legal penalty would help to fundamentally transform America, President Obama
told a town hall-style meeting in Cleveland yesterday. It is the latest radical
leveling scheme that flows from the president’s totalitarian impulses.
The Obama administration set a new record again for more
often than ever censoring government files or outright denying access to them
last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, according to a new
analysis of federal data by The Associated Press.
Hillary’s private email server: “Was Hillary Clinton running her own rogue
intel operation?”
Haitians Protest Outside Hillary Clinton’s Office Over
‘Billions Stolen’ by Clinton Foundation
Just How Bad Is it for Hillary?
Fundamental transformation of the armed forces: Using language that once kept open gays out
of the military, the commanding officer of the Navy Nuclear Power Training
Command is using identical language to remove a Christian Chaplain from his
duties. The Commander says certain kinds of Christian teachings are harmful to
“unit cohesion” and “military readiness.”
The EPA wants to watch you in the shower and see how much
water you’re using.
U.S. Threatens Sanctions Against Israel, Makes Excuses for
Iran
The “mantra of a movement” was a myth. Washington Post
columnist Jonathan Capehart penned a mea culpa expressing his regret that he
ever supported the “hands up, don’t shoot” rallying cry — admitting it was
“wrong, built on a lie.”
Howard Schultz, Horrible Boss
If you need a conversation starter with your Starbucks’
barista, try this: What’s up with all the black mob violence? Just as the
coffee giant announced its employees would be educating their customers about
race relations, large-scale episodes of black mob violence were breaking out
across the country.
Dick Cheney in
Playboy Magazine pulls no punches, blasts Obama arguing that he is a worse
president than Jimmy Carter.
“Pope Francis to Dine
with Gay and Transgender Inmates”
Federal workers ordered to probe their ‘unconscious bias’ on
race, sexuality
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THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Islam as a Victim Civilization
Mona Charen 2/18
President Obama's
scolding of Western civilization at the National Prayer Breakfast ("Lest
we get on our high horse...") may go down in history as the emblematic
moment of his presidency. It was atrociously ill timed and characteristically
sophomoric. My colleague Jay Nordlinger observed that Obama sounded just like
the students in the 1980s who, when presented with evidence of the Soviet
gulag, would respond with the rejoinder: "Well, what about racism?"
During the Cold War,
we called this the "moral equivalence" fallacy, because however grave
our flaws were (and some were serious), they didn't exist on the same plane as
those of the Soviet Union or China or Cambodia or North Korea or the other
communist nations that amassed a body count of more than 90 million souls in
their seven decades of tyranny. There were other reasons the moral equivalence
argument was fallacious (We had independent courts, a free press and other
mechanisms for fighting injustice; they had none of those.), but that didn't
prevent it from issuing from the mouths of nominally educated people until the
Berlin Wall was hacked to pieces. And even after.
Yet what we have in
the Obama administration isn't moral equivalence -- it seems to border on
self-hatred. Jihadist barbarians are burning captives in cages, beheading
Christians, gunning down French cartoonists, blowing up Buddhist statues,
attacking Hindu businessmen in Mumbai, targeting Jews for execution, starving
Yazidis and taking 8-year-old girls into sex slavery, yet Obama cannot express
simple outrage and determination to stop them.
Apparently, that's
not the way his mind works. He seems to say to himself, "I don't want my
people to feel superior to the 'other.' After all, which civilization is the
guiltiest on planet Earth? Ours! If the Muslims are committing some atrocities
these days, it's only because we drove them to it by the Crusades and the
Spanish Inquisition and colonialism and supporting dictatorships and creating
the State of Israel." That is
exactly the kind of reductive, ahistorical, shallow, tendentious drivel a
student could easily imbibe at Columbia or Harvard unless he tried hard to
avoid it. Obama sought it out, as he confirms in his (first) autobiography.
Though he has come
to power in an era when everyone except the village idiot understands that
radical Islam is a worldwide menace claiming (mostly Muslim) victims on every
continent, and that it has gained serious footholds even in formerly moderate
nations like Turkey, this president and his party are so solipsistic that they
cannot even see the Islamic world in its own terms. He and they can see it only
as a victim of the West.
In the universities,
they teach that victim classes -- blacks, women, you know the list -- are
incapable of certain sins. Blacks, for example, are held to be incapable of
racism because racism is defined as holding offensive racial opinions and
wielding power. Because blacks supposedly lack power, they cannot be racists.
Obama appears to be
judging the entire Islamic world that way. Because it has been a victim (it
hasn't, but leave that to one side), it cannot be giving rise to savage
offshoots. Any crimes committed in the name of Islam are adventitious.
Accordingly, Maj. Nidal Hasan's jihadi attack at Fort Hood was labeled "workplace
violence." Faisal Shahzad's unsuccessful attempt to blow up Times Square
was called a "lone wolf" attack. When ISIS began its trail of torment, Obama
denied that the organization was truly Islamic. Attorney General Eric Holder
refused to identify Islamic extremism as a motive for worldwide terrorists.
After ISIS cut off the head of American Steven Sotloff, Secretary of State John
Kerry said, "The real face of Islam is not what we saw yesterday, when the
world bore witness again to the unfathomable brutality of ISIL terrorist
murders."
With each passing
day, this administration's refusal to speak plainly about radical Islamic
terrorists becomes more and more surreal. King Abdullah of Jordan says it.
President Sisi of Egypt says it. European leaders say it. The United Arab
Emirates has published a list of 80 terrorist groups around the world -- all of
them Muslim. This week, the White House
is hosting an international conference on "countering violent
extremism." The administration promises that the conference will
"work to address the underlying conditions that can help foster violent
extremism such as poverty, inequality and repression. This means supporting
alternatives to extremist messaging and greater economic opportunities for
women and disaffected youth." What "extremist messaging" would
that be? The Christian Science Monitor?
This is gibberish.
The administration uses language to impede thought rather than to elucidate it
-- which suits the jihadis very well.
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FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“Some liberal pundits have suggested that Obama’s [idea of a
comprehensive climate] deal might force Republican candidates to take unpopular
positions on climate change in the 2016 cycle. It might. But Republicans have a
far more powerful case to make about the Democrats' disregard for the norms of
American lawmaking. It’s too bad that the GOP has done so little to stop him.
We live in a political environment where progressive goals are treated as moral
endeavors and Constitutional constraints are treated as procedural
inconveniences that can be bypassed for the good of the nation – nay, the
world. No president has been as openly contemptuous of checks and balances as
this one. If there are no repercussions, he might only be the first in a long
line of presidents we say that about.”
-David Harsanyi:
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GLOBALONEY
Don´t worry about the snow and ice! Meteorologists claim this winter was actually the warmest on record
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LEFTIST WATCH
Top violator of women´s rights around the world? That would be Israel, says the UN?????
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ISLAM
The Mind of Muhammad.
“(Koran Chapter 33) is like a wild theme park ride that races in and out
of numerous topics…..In the 73 verses that make up the chapter, Muhammad covers
the following, using the God-voice he adopted for the Koran: He recaps a recent
battle with the Meccans and excoriates people who were afraid to fight and die
for him; he gloats about his extermination of the men and boys of one of the
Jewish tribes of Yathrib, the confiscation of their property, and the
enslavement of their women and children; he authorizes himself to take as many
wives as he likes, permits himself to marry the wife of his adopted son,
forbids himself from taking any more wives after he has taken as many as he
likes, but allows himself sex slaves. As
the verses of this “revelation” continue, Muhammad imposes full body and face
cover for women when outside the home, threatens people with humiliating
punishment in the afterlife for annoying him, threatens to murder his critics,
prohibits the practice of adoption, and dishes up images of sadistic torture in
Hell awaiting people who don’t believe in him. He also praises himself as a “lamp
spreading light,” and holds his behavior as a “beautiful pattern” for people to
follow if they want to score well with Allah.”
A group affiliated with the Islamic State published a list
of addresses purportedly belonging to about 100 U.S. service members late
Friday night, calling for their beheadings.
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HUMOR
Gov. Scott Walker at the Gridiron Dinner: Hillary Clinton
isn´t here tonight. When I asked why, I was told you couldn´t afford her. When
Jeb Bush was governor in Florida, he had to deal with a left-wing dictator just
90 miles from his border. I can relate: I have the same thing with Rahm
Emanuel. The staff exodus in this administration has begun. Pretty soon, the
only one left reporting to Valerie Jarrett will be President Obama.
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ARTICLES
Woman raised by lesbian moms comes
out against gay marriage
Colon: “There are
very few influential conservatives in Hollywood and the mainstream media. There
are tons of useful idiots in Hollywood and the mainstream media and the reason
they can be so easily manipulated by Marxists is that they are either clueless
or supportive of communists in their industry. I was just as uninformed until I
did my homework and it would be quite a game changer if the truth was ever
exposed to the low-info voters. That may be wishful thinking on my part because
I suspect that these low-info voters don´t want to hear negative facts about
beloved celebrities…..”
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WISE WORDS
“Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They
forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone.”
-Bastiat
“It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a
republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the
heart of its laws and constitution.”
-Thomas
Jefferson