op ed review 4/12
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
This past month may be remembered as the moment the United
States lost its role as the leader of the global economic system.
Illegal immigrant children surge across border at highest
rate since last summer’s peak
Munich, Anyone? Obama’s Iran Agreement in Translation
“Deal so good for Iran they don't even need to cheat.”
Poll suggests that Obama is twice as popular in Cuba as he
is in the United States.
A new Rasmussen poll shows the vast majority of Americans do
not believe the federal government is aggressive enough with deporting illegal
immigrants.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s lead is wilting
against leading Republican presidential candidates in three critical swing
states, Colorado, Iowa and Virginia, and she finds herself in a close race with
U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky in each state, according to a Quinnipiac
University Swing State Poll released today. In head-to-head matchups, every
Republican candidate effectively ties her in Colorado….
A year ago, the VA scandal involving extreme wait times and
cover-ups broke. President Obama pledged urgent reforms, and Congress gave him
billions to fund them……so far, nothing´s changed.
The Army is "only generating enough readiness for
immediate consumption" while grappling with cuts that have left only a third
of the service´s brigades ready, the chief of staff said Wednesday.
A female infantry experiment implemented by the Obama
administration has come to a close without the results they wanted to see. The
Marine Corps Times reports, “The two-and-a-half year period in which the Marine
Corps' Infantry Officer Course became gender-integrated for research will end
without a single female graduate.
The Left, incensed that owners of Memories Pizza would
decline to cater a same-sex wedding because of religious conscience, tried to
protest the pizza parlor serving a one traffic-light Indiana town out of
existence. Due to the threats, Kevin O'Connor closed his shop for eight days.
But he reopened April 9 to a full restaurant and not a protester in sight. (Crowdfunding
campaign by supporters raised more than $842,000 for the grateful owners.)
In 2010, Washington State voters overwhelmingly rejected
Initiative 1098 and its' imposition of a new state income tax. Voters crushed
it at the ballot box with a 64.15% NO vote. It lost in every single county,
including King. Nonetheless, last week,
every House Democrat ignored that citizen mandate and voted to impose a new
state income tax.
__________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Phyllis Schlafly 3/3
The Obama Democrats
have an audacious scheme for winning future elections. They just plan to import
5,000,000 non-citizens and credential them as voters who will, in gratitude,
vote Democratic.
The way this devious
formula works is stunningly simple. Just get the new Republican Congress (under
Speaker John Boehner and Sen. Mitch McConnell) to pass a full-funding bill for
Homeland Security without any exception for the funding of Obama's illegal
executive amnesty, which will allow Obama to give work permits, Social Security
numbers and driver's licenses to five million illegal aliens.
Once the 5 million
so-called undocumented persons are given those valuable documents, there is no
way to stop them from voting. That conclusion is drawn from the testimony of
voting experts such as Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who told the U.S.
House Oversight Committee on Feb. 12, "It's a guarantee it will happen."
Kobach's warning was reinforced by testimony before the same committee by Ohio
Secretary of State Jon Husted, who noted that the 5 million non-citizens would
receive the "same documents that federal law requires the states to
recognize as valid forms of identification for voter registration." And
once an alien registers to vote, Secretary Kobach said, it is "virtually
impossible" to remove him from the voter rolls….
In case the illegal
aliens need spending money, they can collect a special handout from the U.S.
taxpayers called Earned Income Tax Credit, which was designed to help parents
who are working to support their families. IRS Commissioner, John Koskinen,
told the Senate Finance Committee on Feb. 3 that as soon as the illegal aliens
receive their Social Security numbers, they will be allowed to go back and
claim the EITC for up to three previous years in which they worked illegally. What
about the employers who illegally hired these people? They will get off
scot-free, even though documentation clearly exists to prosecute and punish
them.
Opponents of amnesty
were cheered by the news that a federal judge issued an injunction against
Barack Obama's unconstitutional and illegal executive amnesty. The judge ruled
in favor of the lawsuit filed by the new Texas governor, Greg Abbott, along
with 25 other states. Obama's outgoing attorney general, Eric Holder, has
promised to appeal, and don't expect any help from Holder's replacement. His
designated successor, Loretta Lynch, has already testified that she thinks
Obama's executive actions are perfectly legal.
Meanwhile, Obama's
5,000,000 amnestied illegals allowed to remain in our country can cash in on
free health care plus schooling for their kids, including free lunch, breakfast
and even dinner. I heard one public school superintendent complaining on
television that he now has 40 languages spoken in his school, and nobody has
yet added up the costs that this burden imposes on the taxpayers.
Of course, these
illegals will become eligible for all sorts of America's generous welfare
benefits. This includes food stamps, Obamaphones, Medicaid, WIC, Social
Security disability and dozens of other handouts. Most important is that the illegals take jobs
from American citizens. The Obama administration brags that the official
unemployment rate is only 5.6 percent, but that number is misleading because it
doesn't include anyone who stopped looking for work four weeks ago.
As many as 30
million Americans are either out of work or extremely underemployed. If you
work just one hour per week for a payment of at least $20, you can't be counted
as unemployed in the official government statistics.
The 5 million
beneficiaries of Obama's executive action would be added to the already high
number of foreigners who enter our labor force each year. They include 1.1
million legal immigrants, 700,000 guest workers on temporary visas, plus
roughly a half-million work permits, which the Obama administration has been
handing out each year to various categories of non-citizens who are not
eligible for employment under the law.
It's no wonder that
the Center for Immigration Studies could report last year that literally 100
percent of all net new jobs in the past decade have gone to immigrants and
foreign workers. Fewer working-age Americans are employed today than in 2000.
Celebrate 50 years since the release of Phyllis Schlafly's
monumental A Choice Not an Echo, the book that launched the conservative
resurgence of the late 20th century. This special updated and expanded edition
contains 50 percent new material placing the book in its historical context and
applying the book's lessons to the issues of today.
_______________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“With sanctions lifted, its economy booming and tens of
billions injected into its treasury, why would Iran curb rather than expand its
relentless drive for regional dominance? An overriding objective of these
negotiations, as Obama has said, is to prevent the inevitable proliferation —
Egypt, Turkey, the Gulf states — that would occur if Iran went nuclear. Yet the
prospective agreement is so clearly a pathway to an Iranian bomb that the
Saudis are signaling that the deal itself would impel them to go
nuclear. You set out to prevent proliferation and you trigger it. You set out
to prevent an Iranian nuclear capability and you legitimize it. You set out to
constrain the world’s greatest exporter of terror threatening every one of our
allies in the Middle East and you’re on the verge of making it the region’s
economic and military hegemon. What is the alternative, asks the president?
He’s repeatedly answered the question himself: No deal is better than a bad
deal.”
-Charles
Krauthammer
“Capital punishment clearly doesn’t deter every murderer,
but does it deter any would-be murder? It seems obvious it must. Deterrence is
a red herring because the function of the death penalty isn’t simply to scare a
would-be murderer with the corpse of a convicted one; it is also to inform an
entire society about what we take seriously.”
-Jonah
Goldberg
_______________________________________________________________________
BOOKS
The next book by former Vice President Dick Cheney is aimed
directly at President Barack Obama. Cheney´s "Exceptional: Why the World
Needs a Powerful America" will be published on Sept. 1 by Threshold
Editions, the publisher announced Tuesday. The book, co-authored by Cheney´s
daughter Liz Cheney, contends that Obama has abandoned a decades-long tradition
of American global leadership.
_______________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
The Mask Slips on the Climate Scam: “We’re always told that revenue from emissions
trading or a carbon tax will be used for energy and climate change adaptation
purposes. But (Gov.) Inslee has let the mask slip and made obvious that it is a
lie. Liberal politicians especially are
drooling for a carbon tax as a new revenue source. It isn’t going to be rebated
to taxpayers. It isn’t going to be used
as a bargaining chip for a decent tax reform.
It’s going to be used to pay for more government goodies.”
The sustainability movement on college campuses across the
country is not merely the work of a bunch of wacky students doing the harmless
things that kids grow out of. It "distorts college curricula and cuts off
free inquiry on important questions," said a new study from the National
Association of Scholars. Sustainability: Higher Education´s New Fundamentalism
begins with the explanation, " ´Sustainability´ is a key idea on college
campuses in the United States and the rest of the Western world." And
while it might seem like "just a new name for environmentalism," it
"really marks out a new and larger ideological territory.
__________________________________________________________________________
ISLAM
What caused nearly 150 deaths at Kenya’s Garissa University
College last week? The Associated Press summarizes: “The attackers separated
Christian students from Muslim ones and massacred the Christians.” But the White House response just blamed it
on generic “terrorism.”
On the day Fort Hood victims finally received their Purple
Hearts, “a 20-year-old man has been charged with planning a suicide bomb attack
against the Fort Riley military base in Kansas, in an alleged plot to support ISIS. John T. Booker, of Topeka, was arrested while
trying to arm what he thought what a 1,000-pound bomb inside a van near the
base. “Booker also goes by the name
Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, which might give a clue as to his motive.”
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who helped his brother plant
pressure-cooker bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, is guilty on all 30 counts. Tsarnaev's mother
said, "America is the real terrorist and everyone knows that,"
adding, "My boys are the best of the best."
ISIS insurgents blew up a Christian church on Easter
Sunday. The militants reportedly planted
explosives inside the 80-year-old Church of the Virgin Mary in Tel Nasri in
Syria´s northeastern province of Hassakain.
_____________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
There used to be a time in the American political landscape
when Republicans could forcefully articulate their policy positions to sway
public opinion. In the Obama era, facts have given way to spin and message
discipline—two areas in which the GOP appears to run upfield into the political
headwinds while Democrats always appear to be running downfield and on the
attack. Consider the storm surrounding the Indiana governor and the Religious
Freedom and Restoration Act he signed last week. To listen to congressional
Democrats and the mainstream news media……you would think that Republicans have
declared war on the LGBT community, when nothing of the sort has occurred. How
did this happen? Quite simply, Democrats know how to manipulate both the press
and get the desired political spin to constantly keep Republicans on the
defensive while looking guilty.
Propaganda: The overreaction by politicians and advocacy
groups to Indiana´s religious freedom law is distressing enough. Worse is the
fact that big companies are now amplifying the disinformation campaign. Apple
CEO Tim Cook wasn´t the only business executive to condemn Indiana´s law, but
he was the most prominent. And, like others, he merely added to the confusion
while exposing his hypocrisy. In his Sunday Washington Post op-ed, Cook
complained that Indiana is part of a "new wave of legislation"
designed to discriminate against gays. New wave? Nineteen states already have
laws substantially like Indiana´s — most of them enacted over a decade ago.
Interesting story about New York City’s Success Academy. “Though it serves primarily poor, mostly
black and Hispanic students, Success is a testing dynamo, outscoring schools in
many wealthy suburbs, let alone their urban counterparts.” As you would expect, the New York Times just
has to put a negative spin on it: too
rough on the students, too stressful for the teachers, etc.
The Obama administration smeared and lied about Bowe
Bergdahl’s platoon mates when they knew they were telling the truth about the
deserter Bergdahl. A military investigation discovered that Bergdahl was hoping
to escape to Uzbekistan and then to Russia. The Obama White House accused Bergdahl’s
platoon mates of “swiftboating” him….
___________________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
“Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes.
The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still
demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute
power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity.”
-Eric
Hoffer
posted by gary at
12:00 PM
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