op ed review 8/16
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
At least two classified messages on Hillary Clinton´s
home-brew email server contained top-secret intelligence including signal
intercepts and information from keyhole satellite conducted by the CIA and the
Pentagon´s satellite-spying National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
The chair of the House Select Committee on Benghazi said
Tuesday night that the new finding is a serious national security risk that
only came to light because his committee kept up pressure on Clinton.
Hillary finally hands over her server—after it's been
professionally wiped clean….. it is now beyond dispute that she had ultra-Top
Secret information and more that should never have left the State
Department. “Myriad criminal offenses
apply to this conduct.” (Don’t hold your breath for an indictment)
Democrats are worried that the furor surrounding Hillary
Clinton’s private email server will be prolonged and intensified after her
sudden move to hand it over to the FBI. Coupled with new polls that suggest
Clinton is vulnerable, Democrats are nearing full-on panic mode.“I’m not sure
they completely understand the credibility they are losing, by the second,”
said one Democratic strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “At
some point this goes from being something you can rationalize away to something
that becomes political cancer. And we are getting pretty close to the cancer
stage….
But the media has her back:
Four of the country´s largest newspapers on Wednesday kept the latest
developments in Hillary Clinton´s growing E-mail scandal off the front page
(one kept it out of the paper completely).
Socialist Bernie Sanders gaining on Hillary: Bernie Sanders' Eye-Popping West Coast Swing:
3 Days, 70,000 Cheering Supporters
Bernie overtakes Hillary in New Hampshire?
Bernie gets National Nurses Union endorsement.
A Washington, D.C., appeals court is set to hear arguments
later this year on new net neutrality rules, which critics say could lead to government
regulators censoring websites such as the Drudge Report and Fox News.
Iranian military official: ´We laugh´ when the US threatens
to attack.
Seattle Mayor Wants to Make the City More Sharia-Friendly
The Orlando International Airport will soon be opening a $350,000
Muslim prayer room.
Solazyme, a company that sells the military green
“alternative fuel” for $149 per gallon, has donated more than $300,000 to
Democratic candidates and committees.
Why California is blue:
A staggering 80% of Latino illegal immigrant families in California are
living in poverty and need government assistance. The Obama administration
wants to open to door to millions more.
Progressive policies drive more into poverty.
Marco Rubio is reaping the benefits of a breakout
performance in the first Republican presidential debate by winning over new
donors, earning praise from evangelical leaders and eagerly engaging in
political combat with Hillary Rodham Clinton over abortion.
She was relegated to the “kids table,” but Carly Fiorina’s
strong performance in last week’s GOP presidential debates propelled her into
the top tier in the crowded Republican field. Three new polls released Tuesday
put the former Hewlett-Packard CEO within the top five of 17 Republican presidential
candidates — a huge leap from the No.?14 spot she held prior to the Thursday
night showdown on Fox News.
President Obama´s proposed new overtime rule would benefit
fewer than 1 million workers by giving them a raise of less than $20 a week,
according to a new analysis from a right-of-center think tank. At the same time,
the rule would cost businesses $2.5 billion in compliance costs over the next
10 years, the American Action Forum found.
EPA causes environmental disaster in Colorado. The “River of Souls” turned into a toxic
wasteland of lead, arsenic, cadmium, and other contaminants. Will the
"protector" of the environment get investigated? If the EPA was a
private business, it would be facing the threat of millions of dollars in fines
and the accident would prompt a round of regulation. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/11/us/durango-colorado-mine-spill-environmental-protection-agency.html?_r=0
Would EPA officials foul up the Animas River on purpose in order
to secure superfund money?
They’re all citizens now….Jerry Brown Bans the Word ‘Alien’
from California Labor Law
Ferguson blows up again, riots, state of emergency
______________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Thomas Sowell 7/28
People who entered the United States illegally may be called
"undocumented" in politically correct circles, but what is all too
well documented is the utter irresponsibility of both political parties in
dealing with immigration issues.
Both Democratic and Republican administrations have left the
border with Mexico porous for years -- porous not just for Mexicans but for
anybody else, including terrorists from the Middle East.
Two very different issues have gotten jumbled together in
the political stew called "comprehensive immigration reform." The
first and most fundamental issue is whether we are going to have an immigration
policy at all. The second issue is: Just what should that immigration policy
be?
If we do not control our own border, then we do not have any
immigration policy. We may have immigration laws on the books, but if anybody
can cross the border that wants to, those laws are just words on paper and a
bad joke. Polls showing the surprisingly favorable reactions of some Republican
voters to Donald Trump's irresponsible generalities about immigrants probably
reflect many people's frustrations with politicians' weasel words on the
subject, and politicians' failure to do anything about a festering problem.
The recent murder of Kate Steinle in San Francisco by an
illegal immigrant with multiple felonies and multiple expulsions, followed by
multiple illegal returns to this "sanctuary city," has been galling
to many people. One immediate
consequence of this outrage has been a drive to pass "Kate's law"
prescribing mandatory prison time for anyone who has been expelled from this
country and comes back again illegally. That is overdue.
It is a painful sign of the deterioration of respect for law
that a new law has to be passed to prevent a "sanctuary city" from
obstructing justice, which is already a crime. The larger issue is control of
our own borders. We can debate forever whether building a fence is the best way
to do that. But too much time has been wasted already.
One thing is certain. Building a fence won't hurt. If other
things can be done to secure the border, then do those things as well. The
American people deserve some concrete reassurance that Congress is finally
getting serious. Donald Trump's sweeping smear of immigrants does not need to
be answered by an equally sweeping celebration of immigrants. Nor should we use
the old cop-out that "the truth lies somewhere in between." The truth
is wherever you find it. But too many politicians of both parties do not even
want to look for the truth.
Instead of holding extensive Congressional hearings, airing
all the arguments pro and con on immigration issues, and bringing out all the
available facts, some politicians seek to rush through "comprehensive
immigration reform" -- meaning some sweeping legislation that neither the
public nor the Congress has had time to consider. Congress did that when it
passed ObamaCare. Do we want to let immigration laws become something else that
we learn about only after the fact, when it is too late?
No doubt immigrants, like any other large group of human
beings, range from some of the best people to some of the worst. But it makes a
huge difference what the proportions are. What are the crime rates, the disease
rates, the automobile fatality rates, the educational records of the children
of immigrants from different countries?
Above all, we need the facts. There has been too much
rhetoric already. If our politicians are too gutless to bring out the facts,
perhaps some think tank or television station can hold an hour-long debate between
some proponent of expansive immigration and some opponent. Jason Riley of the
Manhattan Institute has written a book titled "Let Them In" and
columnist Ann Coulter has written a book on the other side titled "Adios,
America." Both cite empirical studies.
A spirited debate between knowledgeable and articulate
advocates could bring out which evidence stands up under scrutiny and which
does not. Regardless of who might "win" the debate, we could all
become more enlightened. This issue needs all the light it can get.
________________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
"After more than six years of Barack Obama in the White
House, have we learned nothing about the dangers of choosing a President of the
United States on the basis of sound bites, with no track record to check
against his rhetoric? ... [V]oting to put Obama in the White House was like
flying a plane through mountains at night. If we manage to get through the next
year and a half without crashing, should we try that gamble again?"
-Thomas
Sowell
"Obama announced last week the toughest environmental
regulations ever against coal. ... But the pain from the new Environmental Protection
Agency rules won’t be evenly distributed across America. Far from it. The
liberal coastal states will feel relatively modest jobs losses because they
rely less on manufacturing. ... It’s time to label the Obama green policies
what they truly are: steep taxes on red state America……. By 2040, China’s coal
power capacity alone will be nearly 4 times the current U.S. capacity. So the
Obama plan is all pain and no gain. It would be like trying to reduce unwanted
pregnancies in the third world by having Americans use more birth control.
Stupid."
-Stephen Moore
“The uninformed assumption made by judges, lawyers and
academics is that but for the fact of racial and sex discrimination, we all
would be distributed across occupations, educational backgrounds and other
socio-economic characteristics according to our percentages in the population.
Such a vision is absolute nonsense. … According to a recent study conducted by
Bond University in Australia, sharks are nine times likelier to attack and kill
men than they are women. Such a disproportionality leads to only one
conclusion: Sharks are sexist. Another disturbing sex disparity is that despite
the fact that men are 50 percent of the population and so are women, men are
struck by lightning six times as often as women. Of those killed by lightning,
82 percent are men. I wonder what whoever is in charge of lightning has against
men. Differences are seen by many as signs of inequality. Nobel laureate Milton
Friedman put it best: ‘A society that puts equality before freedom will get
neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of
both.’ Equality in conjunction with the general rules of law is the only kind
of equality conducive to liberty that can be secured without destroying
liberty.”
-Walter
Williams
_______________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
‘Climate change industry’
now a $1.5 trillion global business, growing between 17 and 24 percent annually
Obama released the EPA’s final rule for the “Clean Power
Plan” that gives the EPA the power to restructure our electric utility industry
nationwide. By their own admission, full implementation of the emissions
targets will avert only 0.018 degrees C of warming by the year 2100. I’m sure
we’ll all notice that much change in temps! But at least now we’ve “taken
action” to “save the planet.” The final rule is nearly 1,600 pages long, and
the regulatory impact analysis is nearly 400 pages long, so it will take a
while to figure out some of the fine points…..
As the president reveals his plan to reduce greenhouse gases
to save us from an apocalyptic atmosphere, I wish to remind people of three
things: 1. The true hockey stick of the
fossil fuel era: Global progress in total population, personal wealth and life
expectancy. This is truly amazing. To show how fossil fuels played a roll in
expanding the global pie, there are many more people alive today living longer
and enjoying a higher GDP. One has to wonder if someone against fossil fuels is
simply anti-progress. Ironic since many in the camp of anthropogenic global
warming like to label themselves “progressive.” They’re
certainly anti-statistic given something like this staring them in the
face. 2.The geological time scale of
temperatures versus CO2. As much as I struggle, I can’t see the linkage. Maybe
it’s like one of those books where you have to stare at it and cross your eyes
to see the picture. 3.EPA Administrator
Gina McCarthy admitted that the steps being taken would only prevent .01
degrees Celsius of warming…..Given the facts, I can’t help but wonder: Did
policymakers ever take Economics 101, or a course in how to read a chart?
______________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
In two appearances in recent days, in Washington State and
Oregon, socialist Bernie Sanders drew massive crowds of supporters that were
larger—for these two speeches alone—-than the combined crowds of every
Republican and Democrat running for president added together over the entire
weekend.
Hugo Chávez daughter is the richest individual in Venezuela.
On one hand NBCUniversal is telling us it is serious about
news objectivity, while on the other hand, and mostly under the radar, NBC is
funneling an astonishing $400 million in capital into two of the most extreme
left-wing news outlets in America: BuzzFeed and Vox. One need only watch 10
minutes of MSNBC to understand that NBC News is an extremist organization in
favor of open borders, partial birth abortion, the government setting CEO pay,
and destroying people’s lives through the pushing of the Climate Change hoax.
___________________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
It's a bad time to be poor and living in Seattle. Not only
is the city's minimum wage starving out its restaurants, the city passed an
ordinance that makes it that much harder for people to buy guns and ammo in
city limits — a policy that will disproportionately affect those with limited
means. First they target job prospects, then they take away the ability of
those in the lower income brackets to defend themselves. The Seattle City
Council unanimously approved a measure Monday that will impose a tax of $25 on every
gun and 5 cents on every round of ammunition sold in the city.
While illegal immigrants with horrendous criminal records
run rampant on American streets committing heinous crimes that the
administration and the Leftmedia try to downplay, Christians who want nothing
more than the freedom to practice their faith are being detained. "In
Iraq, they only had three choices: convert to Islam, death by the sword or
leave the country," Mark Arabo, head of the Minority Humanitarian
Foundation, told Fox News. "They've refused to convert, escaped slavery
and death — only to be imprisoned by our broken immigration system."
Arabo, whose parents came from Iraq to the U.S. in 1979,
went on to note a sad truth under the Obama administration: "The
disheartening thing is it seems that our border is open to anyone unless you're
a Christian fleeing genocide."
_________________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
"Our pretended treaties, then, being made with no
legitimate or bona fide nations, or representatives of nations, and being made,
on our part, by persons who have no legitimate authority to act for us, have
intrinsically no more validity than a pretended treaty made by the Man in the
Moon with the king of the Pleiades."
-Lysander
Spooner (1808-1887)
posted by gary at
10:15 PM
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