op ed review 7/6
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
Barack Obama is the least popular living president, a new
survey shows.
The Clinton Foundation set up a fundraising arm in Sweden
that collected $26 million in donations at the same time that country was
lobbying Hillary Rodham Clinton’s State Department to forgo sanctions that
threatened its thriving business with Iran.
Among all the rivers of money that have flowed to the
Clinton family, one seems to raise the biggest national security questions of
all: the stream of cash that came from 20 foreign governments who relied on
weapons export approvals from Hillary Clinton’s State Department. Federal law
designates the secretary of state as “responsible for the continuous
supervision and general direction of sales” of arms, military hardware and
services to foreign countries. In practice, that meant that Clinton was charged
with rejecting or approving weapons deals — and when it came to Clinton
Foundation donors……
A CNN poll released Tuesday shows that Hillary Clinton’s
favorability rating with the public is in a serious, measurable freefall.
In a major blow to environmental activists, the Obama
administration said Thursday that the controversial drilling technique known as
fracking has not caused any widespread impacts on drinking water, removing a
key argument among those who want to limit U.S. oil-and-gas development.
“America is no longer 'indispensable', and that's bad news
for Britain” After six decades serving
as the global policeman, the United States is now signaling its retreat from
the world.
You might be surprised to learn that the data necessary to
draw congressional districts with equal numbers of eligible voters does not
exist. We have no national citizen database that tells us how many citizens
live in each district around the country. “What about the U.S. Census?” you
might be wondering…..that data has no information about which of those people
are citizens and which are not.
Watch for the crime wave:
3,700 illegal immigrant ‘Threat Level 1’ criminals released into U.S. by
Department of Homeland Security.
In 37 consecutive polls performed throughout the past 21
years on the issue of abortion, Gallup has found that a majority of Americans
surveyed say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.
The Thin Gruel of the Hastert Prosecution. We should all be concerned about Dennis
Hastert's strange indictment…….The fundamental problem in the Hastert case is
simple: what, exactly, is the crime?
“Fearless Fiorina is just what GOP needs to top Hillary”
“Keep Hillary-Slayer Carly in this Thing”
Teachers complain, chaos reigns as St. Paul schools spend
millions on ‘white privilege’ training
Close enough for government work. “TSA missed weapons, explosives in 95% of
security tests.”
After five months of forums, fundraising appearances and
trips to the early states, the 2016 Republican nomination contest is as
unsettled as ever, with no candidate receiving more than 11 percent support and
seven candidates all within three points of one another, according to a new
Washington Post-ABC News poll.
A recent Rasmussen poll shows that 76% of Americans — and
58% of Democrats — support voter ID laws. http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/may_2015/support_remains_strong_for_showing_photo_id_before_voting
IRS confirms illegals can get back-taxes under Obama amnesty
Disney is firing tech employees and replacing them with
(legal) foreigners. [A]bout 250 Disney employees were told in late October that
they would be laid off. Many of their jobs were transferred to immigrants on
temporary visas for highly skilled technical workers, who were brought in by an
outsourcing firm based in India. Over the next three months, some Disney
employees were required to train their replacements to do the jobs they had
lost.
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THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
The Soft-Soaping Of Socialism In The U.S.
6/1 Investor’s Business Daily
Bernie Sanders is coming on as a presidential contender,
while polls show surprisingly large parts of the public look favorably on the
socialism he espouses. The public apparently has forgotten socialism's record.
For years, Sanders, an avowed, unapologetic socialist, was
viewed as an anomaly of U.S. political life, an eccentric whose atypical
ideology reflected the supposed quirkiness of his home state of Vermont. Now
that's changed, and with Democrats worried about the scandals surrounding their
top candidate, Hillary Clinton, Sanders is attracting ever-bigger audiences on
the campaign trail. Polls show him at 15% of the Democratic tally.
Maybe that's because Sanders is portrayed in the media as
"a normal guy" — as a Washington Post headline put it — while liberal
media doyen Bill Moyer headlined a [news item "Despite What Corporate
Media Tells You, Bernie Sanders' Positions Are Mainstream." In the
Huffington Post, Distinguished Professor Peter Dreier of Occidental College,
one of Barack Obama's alma maters, declared, "Bernie Sanders' Socialism Is
as American as Apple Pie."
Such is the new narrative about Sanders, 73, whose ideology
grew out of the same 1930s roots as all past socialist movements, even as
America since the Reagan era has moved toward free markets and taken much of
the world with it. Sure, Sanders calls himself a "democratic
socialist" and says that his model is the all-encompassing welfare state
of Sweden, not the Soviet Union. No comment from him, however, about the
reforms that Sweden has made over the last decade to rid itself of the state
embrace that's choked economic life or the demographic losses endured as the
young move out or lose interest in forming families.
Also under the democratic socialist banner is Venezuela,
where citizens have lost not only all their prosperity and access to goods but
their civil freedoms as well. Every last government agency there has been
politicized since the 1998 election of Hugo Chavez, ending civil society, while
the separation of powers has been rubbed away in the name of "the
revolution." As a result, political dissidents have been thrown in prisons
without trial. Others have lost the right to leave the country. Still more have
had their businesses expropriated. More still have been victims of political
thuggery from government-sponsored private goons.
Like Sweden, Venezuela is no country for young men. A study
of professors at Gervasio Rubio Rural Pedagogic Institute reported last week in
El Universal showed that large numbers of Venezuela's young would rather deal
drugs than go to school. The Los Angeles Times over the weekend ran a long
piece on the dilemma of Venezuela's two most prominent classical music stars —
conductor Gustavo Dudamel and pianist Gabriela Montero — on coming to terms
with the horror of Venezuela's regime. It explored the ideas of each as to how
and whether music mattered and if it can bring change. But not once did the
long, detailed piece mention the source of Venezuela's demise: socialism.
Sanders' ideas come from places where they've been tried and
failed horribly. And there's little doubt that what he's peddling would have
the same result here. The disturbing thing is, none of this gets out. Instead,
amid a nonstop drumbeat of the wonderful normalcy of socialism in the U.S.
against the experiences elsewhere, polls of Americans show an increasingly
favorable view of it.
Gallup poll found in 2010 that 61% of liberals and 20% of
conservatives viewed socialism positively. Let's hope the trend doesn't
continue, and that socialism's real record gets out to spare us the mistakes
that result every time and every place it's been tried.
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/060115-755173-the-soft-soaping-of-socialism-in-the-us.htm#ixzz3bvq0vVg5
______________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
"Obama keeps using this term 'communities of color.' He
acts as if black people got dropped in from outer space, and cops don't know
what to do with them. ... Cops know how to deal with people who commit crimes.
Every time there is talk about 'communities of color,' that they are
overwhelmingly incarcerated, it's communities of color that are overwhelmingly
committing crimes."
-Kevin Jackson, black
conservative commentator
“African-Americans have been
loyal to the Democratic Party, but there is a group of African-Americans that
feel that the Democratic Party has not been loyal to us. ... We have a large,
disproportionate number of people who are impoverished. We have a
disproportionate number of people who are incarcerated, we have a
disproportionate number of people who are unemployed, the educational system
has totally failed, and all of this primarily has been under Democratic regimes
in our neighborhoods. So, the question for me becomes, how can our
neighborhoods be doing so awful and so bad when we’re so loyal to this party
who is in power? It’s a matter of them taking complete advantage of our
vote."
-Chicago pastor Corey
Brooks
_______________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
NOAA fiddles with climate data to erase the 15-year pause in
global warming.
_______________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
The chic, Leftist media and political elites have slowly dominated,
transformed and debased the Judeo-Christian freedom culture that created and
sustained the United States for 225 years. What was isn’t anymore, and what is
now isn’t what we think it is either. That’s because the
secular/socialist/distributive movement has gradually distorted and replaced
common English language that once unified the nation by introducing a lexicon
that might just have been sent to us from other galaxies.
The New York Times is pleased to report a poll that finds
that not only are Americans concerned with inequality but they want the
government to go after the rich and redistribute their wealth. "Nearly six in 10 Americans said
government should do more to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor, but
they split sharply along partisan lines. Only one-third of Republicans
supported a more active government role, versus eight in 10 of Democrats."
“American Socialism’s Day in the Sun?” Leftwing politicians are in electoral retreat
across most of the western world. The one exception is the United States. At 15
per cent in the Democratic polls, Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont, is
riding higher than any US socialist since Eugene Debs ran for the White House a
century ago…..A surprisingly large chunk of Democrats are happy to break the US
taboo against socialism.
“Why Is America Moving Left?” Statistics from the most recent Gallup poll
indicate that Americans’ moral views have become increasingly liberal over the
past 14 years, with U.S. citizens tending to approve of behavior they would
have deemed immoral or sinful just a generation ago. The biggest change
percentage-wise has been in Americans’ positive moral evaluation of polygamy
and human cloning, both of which more than doubled since first measured by
Gallup in the early 2000s. In 2003, a mere 7% thought that polygamy was morally
acceptable, whereas in 2015, the figure has grown to 16%. Similarly, the recent
poll found that 15% of Americans
There is an insidious meme afoot that in the Obama era
Democrats have been heroically restraining themselves by clinging to moderate
policies while ideologically extreme Republicans have gone hog-wild in the
pursuit of conservative purity. Today’s Democratic Party makes common cause
with the criminals who burn down poor people’s neighborhoods in American
cities. And yet the Right is somehow alleged to be more susceptible to
“extremism.”
______________________________________________________________________
ISLAM
The Islamic State is building a terrorist society complete
with medical centers, central kitchens, weapons factories, oil companies and
schools, according to an analysis of the group’s copious social media
dispatches. And it is waging a slick media campaign to staff those
institutions. On Twitter and elsewhere, it depicts its land conquests as the
Muslim promised land. The message is aimed at enticing educated Westerners from
Europe, Canada and the U.S. to come to Iraq and Syria to run what leader Abu
Bakr al-Baghdadi calls a caliphate, or Islamic State.
Minneapolis Muslims prefer Sharia, want blasphemy laws in US
Men brace for 'beard patrols' in Iraq's ISIS-held Mosul
The man shot and killed by an F.B.I. agent and a Boston
police officer had been under surveillance by terrorism investigators because
he was planning to behead a police officer.
_______________________________________________________________________
BOOKS
Is there any way to reverse the trend toward ever more
intrusive, bossy government? Things have gotten to such a pass, argues Charles
Murray, that only civil disobedience might -- might -- work. But the chances
are good enough, he says, that he´s written a book about it: "By the
People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission." Murray has a track record
of making seemingly outlandish proposals that turn out to be widely accepted
public policy. His 1984 book "Losing Ground" recommended the radical
step of abolishing all welfare payments. A dozen years later, the federal
welfare reform act took a long step
Phyllis Schlafly: Ann
Coulter lives up to her reputation of issuing warnings and political comment
nobody else dares to say in her newest book, “Adios, America!” It’s aptly
titled; she makes the case that it is goodbye to the America we know and love
if we don’t stop diluting our population with people who don’t love America,
don’t respect our Constitution and laws, don’t even speak our language and
commit all sorts of unspeakable crimes.
Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute who
authored “Are Cops Racist?”, is on the mark with her analysis on the crime
reversal, calling it the "Ferguson Effect." The net result of the
"Ferguson Effect" is that police officers are backing off out of
concern that they will fall into the bottomless pit of faux narratives like the
"hands up, don't shoot" charade propagated by Obama, Holder, their
Leftmedia and leftist race-bait agitators. As a result, crime is rapidly
rising. In Baltimore, arrests in May were down 56% as a measure of active policing
— and the simultaneous rise in all categories of crime is the result. St. Louis
Police Chief Sam Dotson told Mac Donald, "The criminal element is feeling
empowered."
______________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
The 10 most dangerous cities in
America with populations above 200,000 are all managed, top to bottom, by
Democrats. They are: Detroit, Oakland, Memphis, St. Louis, Cleveland,
Baltimore, Milwaukee, Birmingham, Newark and Kansas City. Notably, most of
these cities are also subject to some of the most stringent gun control laws in
the nation. And five of them — Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Milwaukee and
Newark — are among the most impoverished in America. In fact, almost all of the
top 50 most dangerous and impoverished cities have been under Democrat control
for many years.
Pro-Con on the trade deal:
Krauthammer is pro:
That free trade is advantageous to both sides is the rarest
of political propositions — provable, indeed mathematically. David Ricardo did
so in 1817. The Law of Comparative Advantage has held up nicely for 198 years.
Terrence Jeffrey is con:
The Obama administration has granted the draft of this massive
deal more secrecy than a Hillary Clinton email. Documents related to it are
classified, and members of Congress can review them in a secured room……This
Obama-Malaysia-Vietnam deal that Boehner-McConnell want to fast track through
Congress raises many questions. The most obvious: Is there any such thing as
free trade with unfree countries?......It will put American workers into
competition with nominally American companies that move more of their capital
and jobs abroad -- where they will be able to exploit cheap labor in
less-than-free countries and evade the often-excessive U.S. regulation and
taxation Obama himself advances.
_________________________________________________________________________
NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
This clip of Hillary Clinton is going viral on social media.
Why? Just watch: In this Vine-length snippet, Hillary uncomfortably instructs
supporters requesting her signature to “go to the end of the line.” The optics
aren’t great, with the candidate appearing cold and put-upon by her own fans.
The conservative opposition research group America Rising — which does much
invaluable work — began circulating the video, captured by one of their
“trackers.” When I wondered about context on Twitter, one of the organization’s
representatives was kind enough to email me the full 17-minute video, which
I’ve since
___________________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
“The mobs of the great cities add just so much to the
support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body. 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
posted by gary at
8:51 AM
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