Saturday, March 21, 2015

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

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