Monday, July 14, 2014
Meet the medical student who wants to bring down a popular quack
Benjamin Mazer is a third-year medical student at the University of Rochester. Last year, after becoming increasingly concerned with the public-health impact of Dr. Mehmet Oz's sometimes pseudoscience health advice, he decided to ask state and national medical associations to do something about it.
"Dr. Oz has something like 4-million viewers a day," Mazer told Vox. "The average physician doesn't see a million patients in their lifetime. That's why organized medicine should be taking action."
Last year, Mazer brought a policy before the Medical Society of the State of New York—where Dr. Oz is licensed—requesting that they consider regulating the advice of famous physicians in the media. His idea: Treat health advice on TV in the same vein as expert testimony, which already has established guidelines for truthfulness. I asked Mazer about what inspired the policy, and what became of his efforts.
Julia Belluz: So you're the medical student who wants to bring down Dr. Oz?
Benjamin Mazer: I'm definitely not the only one. This issue was brought up by a number of physicians I worked with during my family medicine clerkship. We had all of this first-hand experience with patients who really liked his show and trusted him quite a bit. [Dr. Oz] would give advice that was really not great or it had no medical basis. It might sound harmless when you talk about things like herbal bills or supplements. But when the physicians' advice conflicted with Oz, the patients would believe Oz.
JB: Tell me about the policy you proposed. How did doctors react?
BM: I wrote policy for the Medical Society of the State of New York [where Dr. Oz is licensed] and the American Medical Association asking them to more actively address medical quackery on TV and in the media—specifically Dr. Oz.
The New York policy was passed in modified form. Organized medicine in New York is aware of what Dr. Oz is saying and how he is able to fall through the gaps of regulation. Many New York physicians testified at their annual meeting about the harm they are seeing happen day-to-day with their own patients. Patients stop taking proven medications in favor of "natural" medications that Dr. Oz promotes. Many patients trusted Dr. Oz more than their own family doctors and this conflict hurt the doctor-patient relationship.
When we brought the policy to the American Medical Association, they reaffirmed existing policy instead of our resolution asking them to take action against inappropriate medical testimonials on TV. The AMA basically thought they were doing enough with existing policy.
JB: Why don't you think the policy was picked up at the national level?
BM: Organized medicine is a slow beast. Also, some people might be underestimating the harms he's doing. Many physicians and certainly much of the public often ask, "What's the harm in an herbal pill or new diet?" The indirect harms can be great.
Organized medicine has an interest in protecting physicians as a profession. They want to maintain the prestige, trust, and income that physicians have historically received in the US. In order to protect the profession as a whole, organized medicine sometimes has to protect individual doctors, even if they are not acting in the best interest of patients. The AMA may fear that undermining Dr. Oz could undermine overall trust in doctors.
JB: Was there a particular patient who inspired this crusade against TV quackery?
BM: The patient who inspired the policy I wrote was an older woman in her 60s who had a lot of the classic, chronic health problems we deal with in America. She was overweight, she had diabetes, heart disease. And so the physician I was working with was recommending these oral diabetes medications that are pretty standard fair. She had watched the Dr. Oz Show featuring green coffee-bean supplements—and how it was great to lose weight—and she was convinced this was going to be a huge impact on her weight.
We tried to politely express concerns that this probably wasn't going to be effective because there's no evidence for it. She refused the diabetes medications. The hope she had placed in the green coffee-bean extract was part of that.
JB: What do you think is the impact of Dr. Oz's sometimes dubious health advice?
BM: I think these things impede the doctor-patient relationship. These doctors are actually doing a great job. But the trust people are placing with Dr. Oz—when their family physicians even nicely try to contradict him—disrupts their relationship.
JB: As a physician, what are you thinking when you hear Dr. Oz say he believes in magic?
BM: The movement in medicine has been toward evidence-based medicine because physicians had done things by their gut and belief for hundreds of years. Most physicians would agree it's only through the scientific process and evidence that we were able to make huge differences in medical care. It's insulting to talk about important medical issues and drugs as if it they were a matter of belief. It degrades all that work that has been done.
JB: If you could talk to Dr. Oz, what would you say to him?
BM: I would probably say that he does have the health interest of his viewers in mind. But in the long term, undermining good science and the relationship patients have with their current physicians is probably doing much more harm than good. If they're not going to listen to advice from physicians—who are providing good, evidence-based advice—if they're going to listen to other doctors on the show, it's going to do more harm than good.
SOURCE
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Federal judge orders IRS to explain lost Lerner emails ‘under oath’
A federal judge has ordered the IRS to explain "under oath" how the agency lost a trove of emails from the official at the heart of the Tea Party targeting scandal.
U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan gave the tax agency 30 days to file a declaration by an "appropriate official" to address the computer issues with ex-official Lois Lerner.
The decision came Thursday as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, which along with GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill has questioned how the IRS lost the emails and, in some cases, had no apparent way to retrieve them.
The IRS first acknowledged it lost the emails in a letter to senators last month.
"In our view, there has been a cover-up that has been going on," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. "The Department of Justice, the IRS, had an obligation, an absolute obligation ... to alert the court and alert Judicial Watch as soon as they knew when these records were supposedly lost."
The IRS says it lost the emails in 2011 when Lerner's computer crashed. At the time, Lerner headed the IRS division that processes applications for tax-exempt status. She has since retired.
During the court hearing, Sullivan indicated he wanted the portion of the declaration on the computer issues to be wide-ranging, saying "that's about as broad as I can make it."
It also emerged at the status hearing that a Treasury Department inspector general probe into the matter is underway.
The lawyer representing the IRS, Geoffrey Klimas, argued that any further discovery in this case might impede the IG's investigation.
Sullivan seemed leery of that argument and also asked that the IRS official speak to that subject in the explanation the agency submits.
Further, Sullivan ordered that the IRS official explain how Lerner's files may be recovered through "other sources."
SOURCE
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Hamas Co-opts Leftmedia
Hamas Orders Civilians to Die in Israeli Airstrikes: Order comes down to ignore warnings from Israel, stay inside
Hamas’ Interior Ministry has ordered residents of the Gaza Strip to remain in their houses if they are about to be bombed by the Israelis, a move that effectively turns citizens into human shields and is intentionally meant to boost the casualty rate, according to a copy of the order published by Hamas.
Israel warns Gaza residents of air strikes before they take place so innocent civilians have time to flee and seek shelter.
The latest Hamas order that citizens ignore Israel’s warnings and stay put is a clear effort by the terror group to increase the death count and apply pressure on Israel to cease its military campaign meant to end Hamas’s attacks.
“The interior ministry warned citizens about Israel sending messages telling them to leave their houses,” according to translations of the official Arabic statement provided by Oren Adaki, an Arabic language specialist at Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).
“The goal of these actions is to create confusion among the citizens,” the Interior Ministry said, instructing “all citizens to not heed these messages from Israel.”
“The goal of these messages is terrorizing citizens and to cause panic among them,” read the statement, which instructs Palestinians to “not do what the messages instruct them to do,” Adaki explained.
“The ministry [is] calling all our people not to deal or pay attention to the psychological warfare carried out by the occupation through rumors that broadcast across his media and delivering publications and communications on the phones of citizens, and the lack of response for each of these means, which aims to weaken the domestic front in light of great steadfastness of our people to face the aggression,” the Hamas Interior Ministry for National Security stated on Thursday in an order published in English and Arabic.
The Israeli military attempts to communicate with Palestinians and warn them of upcoming attacks via paper leaflets, text messages, and phone calls, among other means.
Hamas is notorious for intentionally putting citizens in harms way in order to maximize body counts and portray Israel as an aggressor.
The terror group often fires rockets from heavily populated civilian areas and uses schools, mosques, and hospitals as bases for their military operations.
The Interior Ministry also demanded that Egypt fully open its border crossing with the Gaza Strip and allow the free flow of people and goods.
“The Interior Ministry [is] demanding Egyptian authorities to urgent [sic] open of the Rafah crossing to deal with humanitarian cases and to alleviate the difficult conditions in the strip,” the statement reads.
Israeli Ambassador to U.S. Ron Dermer criticized Hamas’ disregard for innocent life during a speech on Capitol Hill Wednesday.
“We are dealing with an enemy that not only has no respect for our civilians,” Dermer said, explaining that the terror group is “hoping to kill as many Israeli civilians as possible.”
“They also have no respect for their own civilians,” Dermer added, criticizing the group for putting its people in harms way.
SOURCE
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Sending pink slips to a war zone
By Jonathan Hendershott
In a stunning display of callousness, the Defense Department has announced that thousands of soldiers — many serving as commanding officers in Afghanistan — will be notified in the coming weeks that their service to the country is no longer needed.
Last week, more than 1,100 Army captains — the men and women who know best how to fight this enemy because they have experienced multiple deployments — were told they’ll be retired from the Army.
The overall news is not unexpected. The Army has ended its major operations in Iraq and is winding down in Afghanistan. Budget cuts are projected to shrink the Army from its current 520,000 troops to 440,000, the smallest size since before World War II.
What is astonishing is that the Defense Department thought it would be appropriate to notify deployed soldiers — men and women risking their lives daily in combat zones — that they’ll be laid off after their current deployment.
As one Army wife posted on MilitaryFamily.org, “On some level I knew the drawdowns were inevitable, but I guess I never expected to be simultaneously worried about a deployment to Afghanistan and a pink slip because my husband’s service is no longer needed.”
Yet the issues go far beyond thanklessness. The nation should worry about the increased national-security risk of separating such a large pool of combat-experienced leaders. The separated soldiers are those who carry the deepest knowledge base of counterinsurgency operations.
A senior Defense Department official warned: “If the force is smaller, there’s less margin for error. Let’s face it — things are pretty uncertain out there.”
Commenting on the extraordinarily large number of captains being retired, Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. John Campbell said: “In other times, they’d probably continue to stay in the Army. But these are not normal times.”
Indeed not. While mass layoffs in the private sector generate front-page headlines, the media have largely ignored the reduction of our military. But who can blame them?
The war-weary public doesn’t want to hear that the cuts put the country at risk.
After more than a decade of fighting, even the most faithful — who used to rally behind the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan by sending CARE packages filled with cookies, candies and reminders of home — have moved on with their lives, with few thoughts of the soldiers still serving there.
And for far too many, a soldier is an uncomfortable reminder of what we have failed to do in the Middle East.
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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Sunday, July 13, 2014
Breathtaking lawlessness
The Supreme Court has restrained the executive branch—for now
America’s federal executive branch has met some setbacks as of late. Two recent Supreme Court rulings have constrained the administration’s impulse to act as it wishes. Yet, the mere fact that the administration has overreached as it has—and would have continued to do so had the court not stopped it—should send us a clear warning: The instincts of executive power are always toward accumulating more power. In both cases, the court found, the administration clearly ignored the express instructions of the Constitution in favor of its own convenience.
The first decision concerned an attempt by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to restrict the emission of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act. But the Clean Air Act’s emissions strictures posed a problem, because they would require the agency to restrict emissions above a certain threshold from stationary sources. Carbon dioxide is emitted in large amounts from even small sources, so applying the Clean Air Act would mean subjecting schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings to the same standards as industrial power plants.
The EPA, realizing how unpopular this would be, took it upon itself to rewrite the law, issuing what it called a “tailoring rule,” a scheme my colleague Marlo Lewis described as an act of “breathtaking lawlessness.” The attempt to amend, in the absence of congressional intent, clear, numerical, statutory provisions was a stark usurpation by the executive branch. Remember, the Constitution vests all legislative power in Congress.
The court agreed. Writing for the court, Justice Antonin Scalia said that it was “patently unreasonable—not to say outrageous—for EPA to insist on seizing expansive power that it admits the statute is not designed to grant.” The court said the EPA was “laying claim to extravagant statutory power over the national economy,” and that if the court agreed with it, it “would deal a severe blow to the Constitution’s separation of powers.” Yet this shot of good sense came with a bitter chaser (more on that later).
In the second decision, just last week, the court found unconstitutional President Obama’s recess appointments of some members of the National Labor Relations Board whose nominations had been blocked in the Senate, because the Senate had not declared itself to be in recess. The administration argued that it was entitled to use the power whenever “the Senate is not open for business.”
The court rejected that view unanimously. As Case Western University law professor Jonathan Adler observed, “None of the justices were willing to accept the position of the Obama Administration, which was unnecessarily extreme. In choosing to make the recess appointments in the way it did, such as by not following precedents set by prior administrations (including Teddy Roosevelt) and filling some Board spots that the Senate never had time to fill, the Administration adopted a stance that was very hard to defend, so it could not attract a single vote.” (My organization, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, filed an amicus brief in the case before it reached the Supreme Court.)
The administration’s expansive view of its own enumerated powers is disturbing. But it should not be surprising. It is in the nature of executive power to seek to accrue more power. Throughout history, executives have claimed more power for themselves, whether by imperial decree or the new variant of “pen and phone.” And they’re not just raiding the legislature. Executives have a tendency to usurp judicial power too, whether by Star Chamber or administrative court.
This is why free societies must always be on guard against executive “mission creep.” As James Madison said, “There are more instances of the abridgment of freedoms of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.”
Now, about that chaser. In its decision on the EPA rule (where the court only slightly limited the agency’s ability to regulate emissions from stationary sources), four of the nine justices agreed that the EPA should have the power to rewrite the law. When the English Parliament gave Henry VIII such a power in 1539, the philosopher David Hume later said that it “made by one act a total subversion of the English constitution.” In other words, basic freedom from executive law-making survived by just one vote last week.
So, while the idea of liberty is extremely resilient, its practical restraint on government by such means as constitutions is always fragile. The question therefore must be whether we can develop “antifragile” institutions of liberty.
Perhaps. The developing “sharing economy” might be seen as a “sharing constitution” in its early stages. Uber’s righteously defiant reaction to the Commonwealth of Virginia’s “cease and desist” orders may be an indicator of a way forward. Yes, the road from Virginia traffic court to constitutional convention is a long one, but could we be seeing an “application revolution” in action that increases citizens’ power over runaway executive magistrates?
SOURCE
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Yes, the left hates America
By Tom Toth
The left hates America. That’s why they want to fundamentally transform it.
When Barack Obama first ventured to occupy the Oval Office, the purpose of his presidency would be to “fundamentally transform of United States.” An ear-pleasing term for far-left activists excited to move on from the George W. Bush administration with the progressive freshman Senator for Illinois, and a term that was spoken with absolute truth and intention.
Fundamental transformation is a change to the core, the very fiber of what makes up the subject of the transformation.
In this case, it’s the United States. The desire for fundamental transformation of America begins with Obama’s base. A recent poll conducted by Pew Research found that only 40 percent identifying as “solid liberals” feel proud to be an American—a strikingly low number especially when considering that the poll was taken after a half decade of a “solid liberal’s” second term in the White House. What exactly needs to happen for the other 60 percent of liberals to be proud of the United States?
The Affordable Care Act has passed, transforming the entire United States healthcare system into a bureaucratic monstrosity that’s somehow managed to work even less efficiently than the rest of Washington’s sluggish government programs.
The IRS was used to successfully target Conservative groups and their donors over the course of two campaign cycles, financially stifling limited government non-profits organizations from receiving legal non-profit status and disproportionately auditing those who financially supported their operations.
The EPA made regulations that have killed the future development of coal plants and new regulations arbitrarily cutting 30 percent of carbon dioxide “pollutants” threaten the stability of the entire energy development industry.
NASA’s highest operational priority is “to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science.”
The United States completely pulled out of Iraq, opening the door for Islamic radicals to pillage and plunder the cities American servicemen and women died to control. Any doubts about these Caliphate-seeking crazies were wiped away by images this week of the tomb of the Biblical Prophet Jonah in Mosel, Iraq being sledgehammered. In Afghanistan, Obama’s given an arbitrary American exit date to Islamic militants so that they can prepare to do the same.
The United States Department of Justice is no longer enforcing immigration laws and hundreds of thousands are crossing across the United States’ sovereign borders without fear of deportation.
The demands from the far left base that voted Barack Obama into office have been dually fulfilled—but the pride is still not there. The nation has still not been fundamentally transformed.
The Tea Party represents the America that the left wants fundamentally transformed. Barack Obama and the 60 percent of liberals who are not proud to be Americans resent what America is, where it came from, what its values are, and the citizens who tirelessly advocate for that America.
Barack Obama sees his time in office screaming toward an abrupt end with his primary mission yet to be fulfilled. Before that inevitable day, he’s doing everything in his power to see America, as everyday Americans know it, brought to its knees (see: IRS targeting, refusal to enforce federal law).
“The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened that any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” If America is still indeed great, then Americans are capable of achieving what Alexis de Tocqueville observed two hundred years ago about our ability to fix the mess our representatives in government are bound to create.
Until that happens however, the fight for fundamental transformation rages on.
SOURCE
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Chimpanzee intelligence is determined by their genes not their environment, researchers say
A chimpanzee’s intelligence is largely determined by the genes they inherit from their parents, reveals a new study.
It found Chimpanzees raised by humans turn out to be no cleverer than those given an ape upbringing.
Research into chimp intelligence could help scientists get a better handle on human IQ, say scientists.
The study involved 99 chimpanzees, ranging in age from nine to 54, who completed 13 cognitive tasks designed to test a variety of abilities.
The scientists then analysed the genetics of the chimps and compared their ability to complete the tasks in relation to their genetic similarities.
Genes were found to play a role in overall cognitive abilities, as well as the performance on tasks in several categories, the scientists discovered.
This is because while genes also play a major role in human intelligence, factors such as schooling, home life, economic status, and the culture a person is born in complicate the picture.
Previous studies have suggested that genetics account for around a quarter to a half of variations in human intelligence.
The new research involving 99 chimpanzees from a wide range of ages showed that genes explained about 50% of the differences seen in their intelligence test scores.
Chimps raised by human caretakers did no better in the tasks than individuals brought up by their chimpanzee mothers.
'Intelligence runs in families,' Dr. William Hopkins from the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, who ran the study, said.
'The suggestion here is that genes play a really important role in their performance on tasks while non-genetic factors didn’t seem to explain a lot. So that’s new.'
He believes the experiment could shed new light on human intelligence. 'Chimps offer a really simple way of thinking about how genes might influence intelligence without, in essence, the baggage of these other mechanisms that are confounded with genes in research on human intelligence.
'What specific genes underlie the observed individual differences in cognition is not clear, but pursuing this question may lead to candidate genes that changed in human evolution and allowed for the emergence of some human-specific specialisations in cognition.
SOURCE
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Why Countries Must Pay Their Debts
Many countries have, over the past few decades, sought debt restructuring from the IMF and other international institutions, and others have sought outright cancellation of their debts, such as Mexico in 1982 and 1994, Russia in 1996, Argentina in 2001, and Hungary in 2010.
Debt cancellation for the world’s poorest countries in the wake of the 2005 Gleneagles Summit has made such cancellations seem acceptable in the course of international affairs. As a result of this, as well as a result of rapid economic growth in the developing world, debt as a percent of gross national income has fallen significantly
Yet debt remains a persistent problem in many countries. Headlines have been grabbed in recent weeks by Argentina’s most recent rumbling about debt repayment. A recent U.S. federal court ruling, which was then upheld by the Supreme Court, instructs Argentina to repay its American creditors. Argentina’s president, Christina Fernandez de Kirchner, has accused the U.S. government of being unfair, and even extortionate.
The case of Argentina reveals the problem with debt forgiveness: it gives the perverse incentive to governments to run up debts they know they will not have to pay. America should stick by its guns and ensure the repayment of its loans.
People are more irresponsible when they do not face the consequences of their actions. The same is true of states. When a state is not liable for the risks it takes, it has an incentive to increase its risk. This is the case in debt cancellation. When the developing country does not have to pay off its debt, it has no reason to concern itself with spending loans effectively; if things get bad they can simply have their debt forgiven.
The moral hazard problem causes the further perverse incentive for elites within countries to allow their people to suffer as a means of expediting acknowledgment by the creditor countries that they cannot possibly pay off their debts. It is pure folly to allow countries to renege on their lawfully accrued debts.
When one state, or group of states, is awarded a debt cancellation, fear of similar provisions being made for other states may be aroused in investors. This will lead to panic and movement of investment funds from developing world economies, which are already considered relatively more risky, to safer investments in the developed world.
By paying off their debts, however painful such payments may be in the present, not having to kowtow to creditors ensures their independence and engenders respect, rather than pity or contempt in a country’s neighbors. Default breeds contempt.
Developing countries must resolve their internal corruption and organizational problems that prevent them from effective development. In the case of Argentina, Ms. Kirchner must accept responsibility for her government’s profligacy and quit acting like a petulant child.
More HERE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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Friday, July 11, 2014
Even Leftists Question Obama's Immigration Policies
Barack Obama is in Texas doing four fundraisers instead of visiting the geographical line that passes for a border. Republican Gov. Rick Perry declined Obama’s invitation to meet for an Air Force One photo op, suggesting that they have a more substantive meeting. The subject: Immigration. The new flood of illegals is overwhelming border states, the Border Patrol and the nation. And it’s almost entirely by design.
Obama has now urged Congress to provide $3.7 billion in emergency funding to deal with the “humanitarian crisis” his own policies created. Of course he didn’t quite put it that way. By some estimates, we are already spending $252 per day per illegal child, but the president’s go-to plan for any crisis is more spending. And as Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) notes of Obama’s emergency request, “That’s $60,000 per child.”
Update: Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) says, “This isn’t a funding problem, it’s an enforcement problem. … I’d be happy to give the president $3.7 billion to secure the border if I thought he’d actually do it. But time and again President Obama has shown that he cares more about the interests of illegal immigrants than of law abiding citizens. Congress shouldn’t give President Obama a single penny until we see him use the current resources to secure the border, increase interior enforcement, and reduce illegal immigration.”
Supposedly, the money is only part of an aggressive response to the crisis. The funds would be divided among various agencies – the Department of Health and Human Services to care for children, and the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement for “border security” and transporting children. But there’s also some funding included for fighting wildfires in the West. Naturally.
The plan originally included hiring additional immigration judge teams and expediting immigration repatriation proceedings, but after angry pro-illegal immigration groups began complaining, Obama backpedalled. “It would take away their right to council, right to proper screening,” Leslie Holman, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, whined. “It would undermine completely due process.” So, the extra judicial teams and the expedited hearings are out.
Of the children, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest explained they’re not trying to avoid authorities – they want to be found. The kids expect that after the detention nonsense they’ll be allowed to remain in the country. Join the gravy train. Earnest hopes Congress will act promptly with the emergency requests – otherwise Obama might just have to do something on his own.
Officials claim that these immigrants are entering the U.S. to escape violence in their homelands, but a leaked DHS security report tells a different story. The fact that virtually no one is ever deported motivates these kids more than poverty or violence. In 2013, only 0.1% of illegal Central American minors were deported. It may be dangerous to cross Mexico, but the potential rewards are great.
The report also says, “The same family members or sponsors are appearing several times to claim different children from the custody of U.S. authorities.” And almost all of the families are illegals too.
Even some Democrats are now criticizing the Big O’s handling of this mess, and his media toadies are questioning how he’ll escape it. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) complained, “With all due respect to the administration, they’re one step behind. They should have seen this [flood of children] coming a long time ago.” Not only that, Cuellar said, “If he wants to do the fundraisers first and then after that stop by the border, it’s not too far away. I think it would be good for him to put a face to it, but, again, it looks like he’s dug in, not wanting to come.”
The Leftmedia, too, is growing alarmed, though in their typical sycophantic way. NBC News presented the crisis facing Obama with grave concern. “Obama can’t afford the perception that his policies have encouraged an uncontrolled flow of young people across the border,” NBC reporter John Harwood said. “He’s got to do something to stem that tide.” It’s more than perception.
USA Today’s Susan Page described the border mess as a potential “Katrina moment” for Obama. “This is unacceptable to more than Republicans on immigration, the situation we have there,” she said. “And boy is that going to anger some of his core constituents who have wanted him to do more on immigration, not less.” The trouble with her analogy is that George W. Bush didn’t create the hurricane.
The Associated Press perhaps unintentionally lays bare the president’s craven political strategy, saying he “wants to keep the focus of the debate in this midterm election” on Republicans he’s “accused of blocking progress on a comprehensive overhaul of America’s immigration laws.” Still, however, the AP casts the president as a victim of circumstances, saying, “He announced … that, due to a lack of progress on Capitol Hill, he was moving forward to seek out ways to adjust U.S. immigration policy without congressional approval.” Furthermore, this “crisis has put him in the difficult position of asking Congress for more money and authority to send the children back home at the same time he’s seeking ways to allow millions of other people already in the U.S. illegally to stay.”
It’s not surprising to see hurt feelings in the media, though, as Media Research Center President Brent Bozell observed: “Imagine after Katrina that reporters are getting ready to go to New Orleans, and the Bush administration says to reporters, ‘Now one thing: no recording devices, no questions, no interacting with staff or children, no photos and no interviews. But other than that you can cover Katrina,’” he said. “The response would be that this is the statement of a dictatorship.” And yet too often they’re barely able to muster any real criticism of Obama.
The president may wax eloquent about “humanitarian” needs, but make no mistake – he will use the kids flooding across the border as nothing more than political pawns to advance his agenda.
SOURCE
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Immigration atrocity: The story of Bryan Price and Oleksandra Bronova
Bryan Price is a U.S. Marine veteran who married his wife Oleksandra, a Ukrainian national. The two are legally married, however after violence broke out in Ukraine this past spring, the two fled the violence and relocated to Mexico.
Oleksandra Bronova graduated from Cambridge University. She speaks five languages and could be a productive member of whatever country would take her in. She literally had to flee a civil war and hoped that having legitimately married an American, she could immigrate legally to the United States.
Seeing everything that was going on at the border, how illegal aliens being let into the country no-questions-asked, Bryan and Oleksandra gathered up their belongings and headed to the nearest border crossing. Upon reaching the crossing, the two handed the border patrol agent their marriage certificate and a binder full of documents proving that Oleksandra was a refugee fleeing her war-torn country.
However, unlike the Hispanic children who were being let into the country scot-free, Oleksandra was immediately handcuffed by border patrol and separated from her husband.
The couple had planned on trying to get a special entry into the United States, and if things went wrong, the two planned to return to their home in Mexico to try a different approach. They never got that opportunity. Rather than being turned away, Oleksandra was arrested and she has spent the past two weeks in a MAXIMUM SECURITY PRISON!
Tell Congress to intervene and stop the Obama administration from holding Oleksandra Bronova in a maximum-security prison while gang members are being set free!
So let’s get this straight… a Hispanic mother comes to the country and gets a slap on the wrist and a Greyhound ticket to anywhere in the country. But when a Marine veteran’s wife, a refugee from a war-torn country, comes with legitimate paperwork to try and enter the country, she gets thrown in a maximum-security Prison?
This couple didn’t do anything wrong. They didn’t sneak into the country… they approached a border checkpoint with documents in hand in search of help. If they were denied, they planned on returning to Mexico and seeking help through other channels. And instead of welcoming this Cambridge graduate and veteran’s wife into the country, we threw her in the worst prison we possibly could…
This is shameful! What is wrong with this country? Where did we go wrong?
Words can’t describe how angry I am at how the Obama administration is handling this border crisis. The fact that 300,000 illegal aliens have been caught-and-released since APRIL is shocking. But what is even worse is the fact that while Democrats are chomping at the bit to hand out lollipops to illegal aliens (aka future Democrat voters), legitimate immigrants like Oleksandra are being refused entry.
This woman didn’t try to break into this country. She hasn’t asked for a handout or government assistance. She doesn’t want ANYTHING from you and I, other than a chance to live out her life with her American husband away from war-torn Ukraine.
And instead of hearing her out and putting her in touch with someone who could help, she was arrested and thrown into a maximum-security prison.
This woman doesn’t belong in prison… she belongs at home with her husband!
When we focused on the military father who was going to lose custody of his daughter because he was deployed and couldn’t appear in court, we got tons of likeminded Conservatives to hammer Congress with thousands of faxes. And that ultimately got the attention of a handful of Congressmen who got involved in the case.
We need to do the same thing here! We need everyone to stand up and call attention to the hypocrisy of the Democrats’ amnesty push. This isn’t about fixing our immigration system. If it was, Oleksandra Bronova wouldn’t be in a maximum-security prison simply because she asked to be admitted into the United States!
Tell Congress to intervene and STOP the Obama administration from holding Oleksandra Bronova in a maximum-security prison while gang members are being set free!
Saddened by the state of our country,
SOURCE
**************************
IAF destroys homes of all Hamas commanders, kills senior members
In recent air strikes on Gaza, all of the homes of Hamas brigade commanders have been destroyed, Israel Radio reported early on Wednesday.
According to a report by the Palestinian news agency Ma'an, one of the homes targeted was that of senior Islamic Jihad terrorist Hafiz Mohammed Hamad. In the strike early on Tuesday, Hamad and five of his family members were reportedly killed.
In a separate incident, a joint IDF-Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) operation struck a vehicle containing a commander of Hamas's naval commando unit, Muhammad Sa'aban, aged 24, on Tuesday.
Palestinian media reported that four Hamas people in total were killed in the targeted strike on the vehicle.
Sa'aban's commando unit operated in northern Gaza, security forces said. He was immediately killed in the strike. Sa'aban was a resident of Jabalia in Gaza.
The strike came hours after the IDF launched Operation Protective Edge in an effort to quell increased rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israel in recent weeks.
Later on Tuesday, the air force struck three homes in Gaza used by Hamas as command and control centers for enabling rocket fire against Israel.
The homes belonged to Muhammad Sba'at, a senior member of Hamas's rocket launching formations in Beit Hanount, who was involved in several recent rocket attacks against Israel, Amin Ibrahim Al-Alba'an, a Hamas member, and Abu Jarad, a Hamas member from northern Gaza who has been engaged in terrorism against Israel.
Palestinians said six people were killed and about 25 wounded in one of the houses attacked.
Some 100 targets in Gaza have been struck by the IAF since the operation began, including homes used by Hamas and Islamic Jihad members, underground rocket launchers, underground attack tunnels, remote rocket launch infrastructure, training camps, and additional centers of terrorist activities.
Since midnight Tuesday, some 30 rockets fired from the Gaza Strip have exploded in Israel.
The Iron Dome anti-rocket system has intercepted six rockets.
Palestinians say that a total of 24 people have been killed in IAF strikes since Operation Defensive Edge began.
SOURCE
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It’s Not True that 20 Million Americans Gained Coverage Under Obamacare
A new report from the Commonwealth Fund claims 20 million Americans “gained coverage under the Affordable Care Act as of May 1.” But a closer look at that number reveals it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
First, the authors, Dr. David Blumenthal, president of Commonwealth, and Vice President Sara Collins, get to the 20 million by adding together 1 million young adults who gained coverage under a parent’s policy, 8 million consumers who selected a marketplace plan, 5 million who purchased directly from an insurer, and 6 million who enrolled in Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Also, the authors admit the 20 million figure does not distinguish between those who were previously insured and those who were not – even though the previously insured would not be “gaining” coverage but merely replacing one form of coverage with another.
And what about those 5 million who purchased coverage outside the exchanges? Is it fair to say they “gained” coverage because of the ACA? The authors site a Congressional Budget Office April 2014 report. Indeed, the CBO said, “[R]oughly 5 million people will enroll in ACA-compliant plans outside of the exchanges each year from 2014-2024.” (Page 9)
However, in the following paragraph, the CBO writes, “In the absence of the ACA, 9 million to 10 million people would have enrolled in nongroup coverage each year from 2014 through 2024, CBO and [the Joint Committee on Taxation] estimate. With roughly 5 million people expected to enroll in nongroup plans in years after 2015 under the ACA (excluding those people who purchase policies in the exchanges), that number will be 4 million to 5 million lower under the ACA than the number projected in the absence of the law.” (Emphasis added)
CBO is clearly projecting that net enrollment in the non-exchange individual market will decline (presumably because CBO believes that a portion of current individual market enrollees will seek subsidized replacement coverage in the exchanges as a result of the law). Therefore, here again, those 5 million projected enrollees do not represent a “gain” in coverage.
The 20 million figure sounds like a breakthrough, but the truth is the gains in coverage are not as strong as they are portrayed.
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
Barack Obama is in Texas doing four fundraisers instead of visiting the geographical line that passes for a border. Republican Gov. Rick Perry declined Obama’s invitation to meet for an Air Force One photo op, suggesting that they have a more substantive meeting. The subject: Immigration. The new flood of illegals is overwhelming border states, the Border Patrol and the nation. And it’s almost entirely by design.
Obama has now urged Congress to provide $3.7 billion in emergency funding to deal with the “humanitarian crisis” his own policies created. Of course he didn’t quite put it that way. By some estimates, we are already spending $252 per day per illegal child, but the president’s go-to plan for any crisis is more spending. And as Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) notes of Obama’s emergency request, “That’s $60,000 per child.”
Update: Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) says, “This isn’t a funding problem, it’s an enforcement problem. … I’d be happy to give the president $3.7 billion to secure the border if I thought he’d actually do it. But time and again President Obama has shown that he cares more about the interests of illegal immigrants than of law abiding citizens. Congress shouldn’t give President Obama a single penny until we see him use the current resources to secure the border, increase interior enforcement, and reduce illegal immigration.”
Supposedly, the money is only part of an aggressive response to the crisis. The funds would be divided among various agencies – the Department of Health and Human Services to care for children, and the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement for “border security” and transporting children. But there’s also some funding included for fighting wildfires in the West. Naturally.
The plan originally included hiring additional immigration judge teams and expediting immigration repatriation proceedings, but after angry pro-illegal immigration groups began complaining, Obama backpedalled. “It would take away their right to council, right to proper screening,” Leslie Holman, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, whined. “It would undermine completely due process.” So, the extra judicial teams and the expedited hearings are out.
Of the children, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest explained they’re not trying to avoid authorities – they want to be found. The kids expect that after the detention nonsense they’ll be allowed to remain in the country. Join the gravy train. Earnest hopes Congress will act promptly with the emergency requests – otherwise Obama might just have to do something on his own.
Officials claim that these immigrants are entering the U.S. to escape violence in their homelands, but a leaked DHS security report tells a different story. The fact that virtually no one is ever deported motivates these kids more than poverty or violence. In 2013, only 0.1% of illegal Central American minors were deported. It may be dangerous to cross Mexico, but the potential rewards are great.
The report also says, “The same family members or sponsors are appearing several times to claim different children from the custody of U.S. authorities.” And almost all of the families are illegals too.
Even some Democrats are now criticizing the Big O’s handling of this mess, and his media toadies are questioning how he’ll escape it. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) complained, “With all due respect to the administration, they’re one step behind. They should have seen this [flood of children] coming a long time ago.” Not only that, Cuellar said, “If he wants to do the fundraisers first and then after that stop by the border, it’s not too far away. I think it would be good for him to put a face to it, but, again, it looks like he’s dug in, not wanting to come.”
The Leftmedia, too, is growing alarmed, though in their typical sycophantic way. NBC News presented the crisis facing Obama with grave concern. “Obama can’t afford the perception that his policies have encouraged an uncontrolled flow of young people across the border,” NBC reporter John Harwood said. “He’s got to do something to stem that tide.” It’s more than perception.
USA Today’s Susan Page described the border mess as a potential “Katrina moment” for Obama. “This is unacceptable to more than Republicans on immigration, the situation we have there,” she said. “And boy is that going to anger some of his core constituents who have wanted him to do more on immigration, not less.” The trouble with her analogy is that George W. Bush didn’t create the hurricane.
The Associated Press perhaps unintentionally lays bare the president’s craven political strategy, saying he “wants to keep the focus of the debate in this midterm election” on Republicans he’s “accused of blocking progress on a comprehensive overhaul of America’s immigration laws.” Still, however, the AP casts the president as a victim of circumstances, saying, “He announced … that, due to a lack of progress on Capitol Hill, he was moving forward to seek out ways to adjust U.S. immigration policy without congressional approval.” Furthermore, this “crisis has put him in the difficult position of asking Congress for more money and authority to send the children back home at the same time he’s seeking ways to allow millions of other people already in the U.S. illegally to stay.”
It’s not surprising to see hurt feelings in the media, though, as Media Research Center President Brent Bozell observed: “Imagine after Katrina that reporters are getting ready to go to New Orleans, and the Bush administration says to reporters, ‘Now one thing: no recording devices, no questions, no interacting with staff or children, no photos and no interviews. But other than that you can cover Katrina,’” he said. “The response would be that this is the statement of a dictatorship.” And yet too often they’re barely able to muster any real criticism of Obama.
The president may wax eloquent about “humanitarian” needs, but make no mistake – he will use the kids flooding across the border as nothing more than political pawns to advance his agenda.
SOURCE
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Immigration atrocity: The story of Bryan Price and Oleksandra Bronova
Bryan Price is a U.S. Marine veteran who married his wife Oleksandra, a Ukrainian national. The two are legally married, however after violence broke out in Ukraine this past spring, the two fled the violence and relocated to Mexico.
Oleksandra Bronova graduated from Cambridge University. She speaks five languages and could be a productive member of whatever country would take her in. She literally had to flee a civil war and hoped that having legitimately married an American, she could immigrate legally to the United States.
Seeing everything that was going on at the border, how illegal aliens being let into the country no-questions-asked, Bryan and Oleksandra gathered up their belongings and headed to the nearest border crossing. Upon reaching the crossing, the two handed the border patrol agent their marriage certificate and a binder full of documents proving that Oleksandra was a refugee fleeing her war-torn country.
However, unlike the Hispanic children who were being let into the country scot-free, Oleksandra was immediately handcuffed by border patrol and separated from her husband.
The couple had planned on trying to get a special entry into the United States, and if things went wrong, the two planned to return to their home in Mexico to try a different approach. They never got that opportunity. Rather than being turned away, Oleksandra was arrested and she has spent the past two weeks in a MAXIMUM SECURITY PRISON!
Tell Congress to intervene and stop the Obama administration from holding Oleksandra Bronova in a maximum-security prison while gang members are being set free!
So let’s get this straight… a Hispanic mother comes to the country and gets a slap on the wrist and a Greyhound ticket to anywhere in the country. But when a Marine veteran’s wife, a refugee from a war-torn country, comes with legitimate paperwork to try and enter the country, she gets thrown in a maximum-security Prison?
This couple didn’t do anything wrong. They didn’t sneak into the country… they approached a border checkpoint with documents in hand in search of help. If they were denied, they planned on returning to Mexico and seeking help through other channels. And instead of welcoming this Cambridge graduate and veteran’s wife into the country, we threw her in the worst prison we possibly could…
This is shameful! What is wrong with this country? Where did we go wrong?
Words can’t describe how angry I am at how the Obama administration is handling this border crisis. The fact that 300,000 illegal aliens have been caught-and-released since APRIL is shocking. But what is even worse is the fact that while Democrats are chomping at the bit to hand out lollipops to illegal aliens (aka future Democrat voters), legitimate immigrants like Oleksandra are being refused entry.
This woman didn’t try to break into this country. She hasn’t asked for a handout or government assistance. She doesn’t want ANYTHING from you and I, other than a chance to live out her life with her American husband away from war-torn Ukraine.
And instead of hearing her out and putting her in touch with someone who could help, she was arrested and thrown into a maximum-security prison.
This woman doesn’t belong in prison… she belongs at home with her husband!
When we focused on the military father who was going to lose custody of his daughter because he was deployed and couldn’t appear in court, we got tons of likeminded Conservatives to hammer Congress with thousands of faxes. And that ultimately got the attention of a handful of Congressmen who got involved in the case.
We need to do the same thing here! We need everyone to stand up and call attention to the hypocrisy of the Democrats’ amnesty push. This isn’t about fixing our immigration system. If it was, Oleksandra Bronova wouldn’t be in a maximum-security prison simply because she asked to be admitted into the United States!
Tell Congress to intervene and STOP the Obama administration from holding Oleksandra Bronova in a maximum-security prison while gang members are being set free!
Saddened by the state of our country,
SOURCE
**************************
IAF destroys homes of all Hamas commanders, kills senior members
In recent air strikes on Gaza, all of the homes of Hamas brigade commanders have been destroyed, Israel Radio reported early on Wednesday.
According to a report by the Palestinian news agency Ma'an, one of the homes targeted was that of senior Islamic Jihad terrorist Hafiz Mohammed Hamad. In the strike early on Tuesday, Hamad and five of his family members were reportedly killed.
In a separate incident, a joint IDF-Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) operation struck a vehicle containing a commander of Hamas's naval commando unit, Muhammad Sa'aban, aged 24, on Tuesday.
Palestinian media reported that four Hamas people in total were killed in the targeted strike on the vehicle.
Sa'aban's commando unit operated in northern Gaza, security forces said. He was immediately killed in the strike. Sa'aban was a resident of Jabalia in Gaza.
The strike came hours after the IDF launched Operation Protective Edge in an effort to quell increased rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israel in recent weeks.
Later on Tuesday, the air force struck three homes in Gaza used by Hamas as command and control centers for enabling rocket fire against Israel.
The homes belonged to Muhammad Sba'at, a senior member of Hamas's rocket launching formations in Beit Hanount, who was involved in several recent rocket attacks against Israel, Amin Ibrahim Al-Alba'an, a Hamas member, and Abu Jarad, a Hamas member from northern Gaza who has been engaged in terrorism against Israel.
Palestinians said six people were killed and about 25 wounded in one of the houses attacked.
Some 100 targets in Gaza have been struck by the IAF since the operation began, including homes used by Hamas and Islamic Jihad members, underground rocket launchers, underground attack tunnels, remote rocket launch infrastructure, training camps, and additional centers of terrorist activities.
Since midnight Tuesday, some 30 rockets fired from the Gaza Strip have exploded in Israel.
The Iron Dome anti-rocket system has intercepted six rockets.
Palestinians say that a total of 24 people have been killed in IAF strikes since Operation Defensive Edge began.
SOURCE
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It’s Not True that 20 Million Americans Gained Coverage Under Obamacare
A new report from the Commonwealth Fund claims 20 million Americans “gained coverage under the Affordable Care Act as of May 1.” But a closer look at that number reveals it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
First, the authors, Dr. David Blumenthal, president of Commonwealth, and Vice President Sara Collins, get to the 20 million by adding together 1 million young adults who gained coverage under a parent’s policy, 8 million consumers who selected a marketplace plan, 5 million who purchased directly from an insurer, and 6 million who enrolled in Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Also, the authors admit the 20 million figure does not distinguish between those who were previously insured and those who were not – even though the previously insured would not be “gaining” coverage but merely replacing one form of coverage with another.
And what about those 5 million who purchased coverage outside the exchanges? Is it fair to say they “gained” coverage because of the ACA? The authors site a Congressional Budget Office April 2014 report. Indeed, the CBO said, “[R]oughly 5 million people will enroll in ACA-compliant plans outside of the exchanges each year from 2014-2024.” (Page 9)
However, in the following paragraph, the CBO writes, “In the absence of the ACA, 9 million to 10 million people would have enrolled in nongroup coverage each year from 2014 through 2024, CBO and [the Joint Committee on Taxation] estimate. With roughly 5 million people expected to enroll in nongroup plans in years after 2015 under the ACA (excluding those people who purchase policies in the exchanges), that number will be 4 million to 5 million lower under the ACA than the number projected in the absence of the law.” (Emphasis added)
CBO is clearly projecting that net enrollment in the non-exchange individual market will decline (presumably because CBO believes that a portion of current individual market enrollees will seek subsidized replacement coverage in the exchanges as a result of the law). Therefore, here again, those 5 million projected enrollees do not represent a “gain” in coverage.
The 20 million figure sounds like a breakthrough, but the truth is the gains in coverage are not as strong as they are portrayed.
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
Thursday, July 10, 2014
Eric Holder Attacks Another Voter ID Law!
The right to vote is paramount in our society. No one is denying that. However, just as it is important to protect voter rights, it is equally important to ensure that illegal voters do not cancel out American voters.
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that voter fraud exists. Melowese Richardson was a poll worker in Ohio who was caught voting for President Obama more than once. When she was released from prison early, she received a hero’s welcome from Al Sharpton and the Democratic Party.
Then you read stories of how 3000 registered voters in Florida listed a single UPS store as their address. Nothing to see here, just three thousand people registered to vote in FLORIDA out of a storefront…
The sad thing is that even a few hundred fraudulent votes can swing an election one way or another.
George W. Bush won Florida and then the Presidency by a 500-vote margin. Five hundred and thirty seven votes ultimately decided the 2000 Presidential election.
It is no coincidence that instances of voter fraud, when they are discovered, come from so-called “swing states.” There’s no need to push for illegal votes in states like New York and California. The risk isn’t worth the reward because these states already vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. However, when entire states can potentially be decided by a few hundred votes, all of a sudden voter fraud seems a lot more tempting.
To clamp down on voter fraud, many states have passed Voter ID requirements. Instead of just asking a prospective voter to sign his or her signature, many states now require voters to show a photo ID before they are allowed to enter the booth.
This is a common sense solution to a problem that could truly have catastrophic consequences. We are talking about electing representatives with the power to take the United States to war. We are talking about electing presidents with access to nuclear launch codes. Elections are serious business and the least we can do is ensure that only authorized individuals are casting their ballots.
This logic hasn’t stopped Attorney General Eric Holder from attacking states with Voter ID requirements. Even though the Supreme Court of the United States upheld Indiana’s Voter ID law as constitutional, Eric Holder’s Justice Department continues to target Voter ID states!
Asking for Voter ID is not a crime! Tell Congress to protect the sanctity of the vote and STOP Eric Holder from attacking states’ Voter ID laws!
Now, Eric Holder has announced that he is suing the State of North Carolina for its “discriminatory” Voter ID law.
This is a talking point that the Left loves to throw around. They argue that forcing citizens to show a photo ID at a polling place would place an unnecessary burden on poor and minority communities where few possess photo identification.
The problem with this ridiculous liberal argument two-fold:
First of all, it is next to impossible to survive in twenty-first century America without a driver’s license or some other form of ID. You need photo identification to board an airplane, rent an apartment, open a bank account, and to apply for government assistance programs like food stamps and Medicaid. You need a photo ID to drive a car, buy cigarettes or alcohol, receive medical treatment at a hospital, and buy a firearm. You need a photo ID to buy cough medicine, get married, travel abroad, and to get a job.
To suggest that living in America without some form of government-issued identification is normal is absolutely ridiculous! If the number of people without photo ID really is so large, the government should spend less time suing states like North Carolina and more time helping these people get to their local DMVs!
Second of all, Voter ID laws are not a new phenomenon and every shred of evidence out there suggests that these photo identification requirements actually increase voter turnout, especially in minority communities!
From 2011 to 2013, when Texas instituted its own Voter ID law, turnout in off-year state-wide referendum elections increased by 63%! In many predominantly Hispanic districts, voter turnout increased four-fold over this time period. If requiring photo identification is so racist, wouldn’t we expect to see less minority voters after the law went into effect?
The same is true for North Carolina, the very state that Eric Holder is suing. When you compare primary election turnout from 2010 (before the Voter ID law) to 2014 (after), the data shows that voter turnout increased across the board, particularly among African American voters where it increased by 29.5%.
How can Voter ID be racist if it increased African American voter turnout in North Carolina by 29.5%???
Eric Holder doesn’t care about facts. He just regurgitates the same stale Democrat talking points in order to go after the President’s opposition.
Voter ID isn’t racist! The only thing racist is the fact that the Democrats think minority voters are too poor or stupid to figure out how to obtain a photo identification card!
We need to protect our electoral system. With what is going on at the Southern Border, Voter ID is more important now than it ever has been. Together, we can rally behind this and stop Eric Holder from targeting North Carolina’s law.
But that isn’t good enough! We need to force Congress to institute a national Voter ID law! When the alternative is having illegal aliens pick our Representatives, Senators, and Presidents, we simply cannot afford to leave our electoral system vulnerable to fraud!
SOURCE
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Obama: treacherous or incompetent?
For many, it is difficult to decide whether Barack Obama is intentionally trying to destroy the United States or that he is doing so as a consequence of some type of ideology-induced stupidity.
The damage wrought through the implementation of his absurd and impractical liberal "solutions" to national problems is readily evident.
When Barack Obama was inaugurated on January 20, 2009 the national debt of the United States was $10,626,877,048,913. As of Jun 26, 2014, the debt was $17,512,592,730,102.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), in 2007 on the eve of the recession, there were 146.6 million Americans working. Today, after six years of the Obama Administration, there are 145.8 million Americans in jobs, 800,000 below the previous peak. Since Obama came into office in 2009, 7.2 million people have left the workforce, making the true unemployment rate 8.3 percent, not 6.1 percent. Median household income is down almost $2,300 from what it was when Obama took office. Real wages are lower than they were in 1999. Growth in the first quarter of this year was a negative 2.9%, the biggest downward revision from the agency's second GDP estimate since records began in 1976.
In April, prior to the present massive and growing surge in illegal minor immigration, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) said Obama has created an "open borders" situation by failing to enforce U.S. immigration law. One could fairly conclude that the current crisis was a deliberate policy decision because the Obama indicated that he would expand Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a program that offers amnesty for illegal immigrant children and provides an incentive for exactly the type of mass illegal invasion we are witnessing on our southern border.
There should be little doubt that Obama's open borders policy is meant to fundamentally transform the country's demographics, produce millions of additional Democratic voters and welfare recipients and permanently undermine the national security of the United States.
The ATF "Fast and Furious" scheme, likely designed to erode Second Amendment rights, allowed weapons from the U.S. to "walk" across the border into the hands of Mexican drug dealers. The ATF lost track of hundreds of firearms, many of which were used in crimes, including the December 2010 killing of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry.
Obama's IRS targeted his perceived political enemies, conservative and pro-Israel groups, prior to the 2012 election. Questions are being raised about why this occurred, who ordered it, whether there was any White House involvement and whether there was an initial effort to hide who knew about the targeting and when. Obama apparently lied when he told Fox News' Bill O'Reilly that there was "not even a smidgen of corruption" in IRS activities.
The Obama administration knew about allegations of secret waiting lists at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) as early as 2010, although, on May 19, 2014, White House spokesman claimed Obama learned about the scandal only recently through press reports.
The unfolding sectarian violence in Iraq is just the latest crisis where the Obama administration seemingly has been caught off guard. From the Veterans Affairs scandal to Russia's swift annexation of Crimea, news of the world somehow keeps taking Obama and his team by surprise. Or are they just lying to camouflage flawed or failed policies, which have harmed the United States?
The attack on our "consulate" in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 was perhaps the most egregious of Obama's many foreign policy failures because four Americans needlessly died due to a failure to provide adequate protection both before and during the attack.
Obama falsely blamed an internet video as the cause of the attack to hide the truth: the resurgence of jihadists in Muslim Brotherhood-governed Egypt, the continuing demand for the Blind Sheikh's release (which underscored the jihadists' influence), and the very real danger that jihadists would attack the embassy (which demonstrated that al-Qaeda was anything but "decimated").
It is likely that a clandestine operation supplying weapons through Turkey to the Syrian rebels was being run out of Benghazi. Efforts were made not to draw attention to what was happening there. That could explain why local militias were paid to provide security, why requests for increased security were denied and why the US military was either unprepared to respond or told not to do so.
A Benghazi cover-up may have also prevented a thorough examination of the possible passivity or complicity of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood government in the attacks in Cairo and Benghazi and the potentially dangerous consequences of arming Islamic factions in Syria over which the US has little control, where the weapons we supplied may someday be used against us.
It should be obvious that Obama lied about Benghazi, he lied about Obamacare, the IRS, the VA scandal and in countless other instances.
Nevertheless, the liberal media remain willfully ignorant, will not report the truth and continue to protect Obama, regardless of the costs to the country.
Obama will survive in office until public awareness of his administration's treachery matches its level of incompetence and exceeds the media's capacity to tolerate corruption.
Jimmy Carter made mistakes. Barack Obama, a creator of crises, practices deceit and the willful betrayal of trust.
It does matter whether the damage inflicted upon our country results from ineptitude or premeditation.
It is ideology-induced treachery.
SOURCE
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The Daydream and the Nightmare
by PEGGY NOONAN
Obama isn't doing his job. He's waiting for history to recognize his greatness
I don't know if we sufficiently understand how weird and strange, how historically unparalleled, this presidency has become. We've got a sitting president who was just judged in a major poll to be the worst since World War II. The worst president in 70 years! Quinnipiac University's respondents also said, by 54% to 44%, that the Obama administration is not competent to run the government. A Zogby Analytics survey asked if respondents are proud or ashamed of the president. Those under 50 were proud, while those over 50, who have of course the longest experienced sense of American history, were ashamed.
We all know the reasons behind the numbers. The scandals that suggest poor stewardship and, in the case of the IRS, destructive political mischief. The president's signature legislation, which popularly bears his name and contains within it the heart of his political meaning, continues to wreak havoc in marketplaces and to be unpopular with the public. He is incapable of working with Congress, the worst at this crucial aspect of the job since Jimmy Carter, though Mr. Carter at least could work with the Mideast and produced the Camp David Accords. Mr. Obama has no regard for Republicans and doesn't like to be with Democrats. Internationally, small states that have traditionally been the locus of trouble (the Mideast) are producing more of it, while large states that have been more stable in their actions (Russia, China) are newly, starkly aggressive.
That's a long way of saying nothing's working.
Which I'm sure you've noticed.
But I'm not sure people are noticing the sheer strangeness of how the president is responding to the lack of success around him. He once seemed a serious man. He wrote books, lectured on the Constitution. Now he seems unserious, frivolous, shallow. He hangs with celebrities, plays golf. His references to Congress are merely sarcastic: "So sue me." "They don't do anything except block me. And call me names. It can't be that much fun."
In a truly stunning piece in early June, Politico's Carrie Budoff Brown and Jennifer Epstein interviewed many around the president and reported a general feeling that events have left him-well, changed. He is "taking fuller advantage of the perquisites of office," such as hosting "star-studded dinners that sometimes go on well past midnight." He travels, leaving the White House more in the first half of 2014 than any other time of his presidency except his re-election year. He enjoys talking to athletes and celebrities, not grubby politicians, even members of his own party. He is above it all.
On his state trip to Italy in the spring, he asked to spend time with "interesting Italians." They were wealthy, famous. The dinner went for four hours. The next morning his staff were briefing him for a "60 Minutes" interview about Ukraine and health care. "One aide paraphrased Obama's response: 'Just last night I was talking about life and art, big interesting things, and now we're back to the minuscule things on politics.' ''
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
****************************
Wednesday, July 09, 2014
Clinton was fired for obstructing Nixon probe: book
Hillary Clinton might be hoping no one buys “Nixon’s Secrets” — Roger Stone’s new book marking the 40th anniversary of the Watergate scandal.
Stone — a Nixon staffer who is so partisan he has a tattoo of his old boss’ face on his back — reports that Clinton was fired as a staff lawyer for the House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee for “writing fraudulent legal briefs, lying to investigators and confiscating public documents.”
Yale Law School grad Clinton was 26 in 1974 when she started working for the committee that was investigating whether or not there was enough evidence to impeach or prosecute President Nixon for the Watergate affair.
Clinton’s boss, Jerry Zeifman, the general counsel and chief of staff to the Watergate Committee, claims he fired her because she was working to impede the investigation and undermine Nixon’s defense.
“Hillary’s lies and unethical behavior goes back farther — and goes much deeper — than anyone realizes,” Zeifman told Fox News in 2008. When asked why he fired Clinton, Zeifman responded, “Because she is a liar.”
In 2008, after Hillary campaigned in his home state of Connecticut, Zeifman wrote that he regretted “I had not reported her unethical practices to the appropriate bar associations . . . Nixon clearly had right to counsel, but Hillary . . . wrote a fraudulent legal brief and confiscated public documents to hide her deception.”
SOURCE
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Burgeoning Regulations Threaten Our Humanity
Insofar as mainstream economics may be said to make moral-philosophical assumptions, it rests overwhelmingly on a consequentialist-utilitarian foundation. When mainstream economists say that an action is worthwhile, they mean that it is expected to give rise to benefits whose total value exceeds its total cost (that is, the most valued benefit necessarily forgone by virtue of this particular action’s being taken). But nearly always the economists make no attempt to evaluate as part of their benefit-cost calculus any costs that might be incurred as a result of how and by whom the action is taken.
Often they verge on the assumption that benefits and costs exist apart from those who take the action, even though this assumption clashes with the foundational principles of their science. Thus, in benefit-cost calculations, economists often attach a value to certain expected benefits (e.g., the dollar value of lives saved as a result of a safety regulation) and compare this value to the dollar outlays by the government that imposes and enforces the regulation and by the private parties who are compelled to comply with it, often at great private expense.
I cannot recall, however, ever seeing a benefit-cost computation that attaches any cost valuation to the loss of freedom by the regulated parties. It is as if it matters not at all that an action is mandated, as opposed to freely chosen. Freedom itself is, in effect, considered worthless, and hence its loss entails no sacrifice regarded as worthy of receiving weight in the calculation.
On the basis of such procedures, at least in a pro forma sense, countless regulations and laws have been imposed on the public willy-nilly. Apart from the many questions that might be raised even in the context of the usual benefit-cost study, one who values freedom cannot help but be struck by how entire societies have been overwhelmed by suffocating regulations and by how drastically people’s freedoms have been curtailed, all under the presumption that each drop of this deluge constituted a net improvement in social well-being. Insofar as the trampled freedom is concerned, the motto seems to have been: nothing valued, nothing lost.
In a more fundamental sense, the essence of such mainstream benefit-cost calculations boils down to a glorification of the material and the measurable and a complete denial of the spiritual. With such a mentality, rulers justify making each of us a puppet at the end of the strings they pull and jerk. That we value above all the capacity to make our own decisions, to shape—insofar as the laws of nature and economics permit—the contours of our own lives matters not a whit to our rulers and their apparatchiki. They know what is best for us to do and to refrain from doing—indeed, they have the numerical studies to prove that they know best!
Freedom, however, needs no benefit-cost justification. To deprive us of it is to deprive us of a priceless part of what makes us human beings, rather than programmed robots or puppets on strings. For too long people have deferred to the imagined expertise and superior judgment of those who presume to rule them even in the tiniest details of their daily lives. Little by little, as mentalities adjust to such continuously growing controls, people are losing not only latitude for self-direction, but a core part of their very humanity.
In the most economically developed parts of the world, this process has already proceeded so far that one wonders whether the Communists’ vision of creating a New Man was so far-fetched after all. For the sake of our humanity, for the sake of our very souls, we must challenge the continuation of this onslaught. No doubt you and I may sometimes decide badly in one way or another, but unless we have the freedom to make decisions for ourselves—and, as the necessary correlate, the obligation to bear full responsibility for any harm we cause in the process—we shall ultimately find ourselves in that horrifying dystopia where everything that is not required is forbidden and where we are no longer truly human at all.
SOURCE
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When Government Spending Made Sense
Did you know that in the year 1803 President Thomas Jefferson presided over the purchase of 828,000 square miles (529,920,000 acres) of land west of the Mississippi River, the so-called Louisiana territory, consisting of all or part of 15 present day U.S. states and two Canadian provinces, by the government of the United States of America, for the sum of only $15 million dollars – just $300 million in the value of today’s dollars?
For that we Americans got all of today’s Aransas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska, parts of Minnesota, most of North and South Dakota, northeastern New Mexico, northern Texas, and the parts of Montana, Wyoming and Colorado east of the Continental Divide, plus Louisiana west of the Mississippi River, including the City of New Orleans.
You see, in 1803 our politicians were frugal and Thomas Jefferson got us real value for our money. That’s when government spending made sense. He bargained with France for more than half a billion acres – about a third of the land in present day America – for a paltry .04 cents per acre.
Sadly, today it’s a far different story. Our nation is now in debt to the tune of more than $17 trillion, $583 billion, and $720 million dollars – a sum which is rapidly escalating by the second. Federal spending during just this year alone as of today’s date totals more than $3 trillion, $514 billion, and $738 million dollars.
President Jefferson, in 1803 could have purchased the entire planet Earth for less than a fraction of what our government is spending in 2014.
Compare that with today’s government spending sprees. Last year, for just one example, the Pentagon spent $572 million to buy only 30 Russian-built military helicopters for Afghan security forces. All of that money has been flushed down the toilet as America is pulling out of Afghanistan and the Taliban will be taking over the country and the helicopters.
Jefferson spent only about half that much money and we lucky Americans received in perpetuity about a third of the land in our entire nation. We’ll own that land forever and it cost us less than 30 Russian helicopters abandoned in Afghanistan. Would you rather have 828,000 square miles of prime American heartland or 30 Russian made helicopters for twice the price to donate to Afghani terrorists?
Our politicians today are spending on a cost adjusted basis in just one day more than what Thomas Jefferson spent during his entire presidency and the average American citizen is getting absolutely nothing to show for it.
Today we have American unmanned military drones costing almost $4 million each falling out of the sky and crashing like dead flies at the rate of more than 400 drones lost in only the last 12 years. They’ve slammed into homes, farms, runways, highways, waterways and, in one case, an Air Force C-130 Hercules transport plane in midair.
The military owns about 10,000 of these unmanned drones, and by 2017, the armed forces plan to fly drones from at least 110 bases in 39 states, plus Guam and Puerto Rico. No one in the government expects any of these drones to last very long. They’re disposable.
Our politicians today have no qualms about disposing of $4 million dollars like so many dirty tissues of Kleenex. I think it’s about time that they and their legions of government bureaucrats started spending again like it was done in 1803.
That was when government spending made sense
SOURCE
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Poor Billionaire (Relatively Speaking)
by DON BOUDREAUX
Suppose that you are Nicholas Woodman. You awaken one morning and discover from a news report that Bill Gates is 55 times – 55 times! - financially richer than you are. How do you feel? Envious? Of course. Relatively deprived? How could you not suffer such a deflating sentiment?
In an absolute sense, you must admit, you live quite well. You are one of the richest human beings ever to trod this earth (and, indeed, one of the richest to trod it in the relatively prosperous early 21st century). Yet you understand from the “Progressive” ethos that what really matters is not one’s absolute standard of living over the course of a lifetime. Instead, what matters (according to this ethos) is relative financial rankings today – that is, how much $$$ you are currently worth relative to how much $$$ other people are currently worth. If other people have a great deal more money than you have, you are deprived. You are entitled to feel envious and to pontificate about the immorality of such financial inequality.
So even though you, Nicholas Woodman, currently have a net worth of $1.3 billion, your financial wealth remains a paltry 1.8 percent of Bill Gates’s financial fortune of $72 billion. Should you complain? Should you demand government action to ‘redistribute’ some of Gates’s wealth to you?
Anyone who knows that you, Nicholas Woodman, are on the 2013 Forbes list of 400 richest Americans would think you to be insufferably envious, appallingly ungrateful, pathetically insensitive, unspeakably greedy, and, indeed, likely mentally unbalanced if you complained and moaned about how much more financial wealth Bill Gates currently has relative to the amount of financial wealth that you have. You, after all, have daily and easy access to an array of goods and services that most people in the world can only dream, with futility, of ever enjoying. And historically, your consumption possibilities – what you can and do daily consume – is indescribably greater than what any of your ancestors until just a generation or two ago could consume. So why are you complaining?
You answer: “Because, relative to the richest American, I’m financially poor.” And indeed, financially you have virtually nothing compared to Mr. Gates. (What, after all, is a puny $1.3 billion relative to $72 billion?)
And yet I’m quite confident that no one would think your complaints to be justified. I for sure would not think that your complaints are justified (should you in fact, rather than in my simple hypothetical here, actually issue such complaints).
So why do we in America today think it appropriate for middle-income (or even “poor”) Americans to complain about the financial wealth of rich Americans? Middle-income, and even “poor,” Americans are among the richest human beings ever to breathe. The goods and services that ordinary and “poor” Americans today consume on a daily basis are far larger in volume and far grander in variety than what most people on the globe today consume on a daily basis – and unimaginably greater than what ordinary (and even “rich”) people throughout most of history consumed on a daily basis. Even Louis XIV never spoke in real time with anyone who was not within earshot of Louis’s royal voice.
In 2012 (the latest year for which I can find reliable data), the mean household income of the top 5 percent (income-wise) of American households was only 28 times larger than the mean household income of the bottom 20 percent (income-wise) of American households. (The mean household income of the top 20 percent of American households was only 16 times larger than the mean household income of the bottom 20 percent of American households.)
And the minimum annual income necessary for a household to be in the top one percent in the U.S. in 2012 – just above $394,000 – means that even some one-percenter households have annual incomes that are ‘only’ 34 times larger than the annual incomes of the typical households in the bottom quintile.
In other words, the difference in the current financial income of a typical bottom-quintile American household in 2012 from that of each of the incomes of even some households in the top one percent is smaller than is the difference in the current financial status of Forbes‘s lowest-ranked American billionaire, Nicholas Woodman, (on its list of the 400 wealthiest Americans for 2013) and that of America’s wealthiest tycoon (Bill Gates).
So riddle me this: if we believe (as I suspect most of us do believe) that Nicholas Woodman would have no business envying or otherwise fretting about the size of Bill Gates’s fortune relative to his own, why do so many of us accept as appropriate the envying and fretting by middle-class and poor Americans about the size of the fortunes of the top ten or top one percent? I can see no good reason.
I understand that in the above I do not distinguish as carefully as I would in other contexts the differences between household incomes and individual incomes. Nor do I – again, as carefully as I would in other contexts – either explain the especially great hazards of using data on household incomes (as opposed to individual incomes) or distinguish between income and wealth. But none of these distinctions is relevant for the point of this post, which is that the difference between the financial well-being (however measured) of the person (Woodman) at the bottom of the Forbes‘s list of 400 richest Americans and that of the person (Gates) at the top of that list is greater than is the difference between the financial well-being of even poor Americans and that of many Americans in the top five percent or even the top one percent.
If billionaire Woodman ought not complain about the wealth (or income) of Bill Gates, then ordinary and even ‘poor’ Americans ought not complain about the wealth (or income) of the typical person or household in the top 20, 10, 5, or 1 percent.
SOURCE
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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Tuesday, July 08, 2014
Dangerous Times: Obama the Betrayer
“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Which of those solemn promises has Barack H. Obama not betrayed? I can’t think of a single one.
If Obama is different from other presidents, it’s not for the color of his skin, which is just a PR hustle to blackmail suckers into proving they aren’t racists. No: Obama will be historic for his fanatical leftism, which has no precedent in American history. The biggest headline is Obama’s ideology, not his race.
The left is a revolutionary cult, one that has no compunctions about violations of laws or human rights – for what they imagine to be a utopian cause, of course. But every single power cult in history is all for love and peace – once it takes over. Head-chopping Muslims sing the song of love and peace just as well as the left.
Just consider two quotes.
Karl Marx, 1848: “… there is only one means to shorten, simplify and concentrate the murderous death throes of the old society and the bloody birth pangs of the new, only one means – revolutionary terrorism."
Vladimir Lenin, 1918: “the fundamental feature of the concept of dictatorship of the proletariat is revolutionary violence.”
Terrorist killings of innocent civilians are exactly the same as deliberate murder under domestic criminal law. But the left has legitimized terrorism when it is directed against bourgeois society. That is the key to their moral perversion. That is also why Obama does not object to terrorism “as such.” If he cared about Islamist terrorism in Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and all the rest, he would also have to reject the Mau Mau terrorism that brought his dreamed-of father to power in Kenya. (Jomo Kenyatta quickly kicked him out of the post-colonial government.) In any case, Obama and the indoctrinated network that now controls the United States government consider terrorism “in a good cause” justifiable – which is why they do not mind 9/11/01 and the whole rise of jihad terrorism in the last forty years. If anything, the hard left wing of our foreign policy establishment is full of excuses for clear crimes against humanity.
So far, Obama has shown utter contempt for the U.S. Constitution, for our military, and for the crucial duties of the Department of Justice, the Border Patrol, and the IRS. The hard left at the core of the Democratic Party is essentially Obamanist, as expressed by Rep. Joe Garcia.
The real problem is therefore not a single human being called Obama, but an entire political apparatus that turns out Obamas like robots. Hillary is an Alinsky acolyte, and Alinsky was simply another revolutionary agitator – now called “community organizer” by our party-line press. Alinsky’s biggest innovation was to make common cause with organized crime in Chicago.
Starting with the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s, radical Muslims joined the Alinsky axis to make the toxic triangle of revolution, criminal mafias, and reactionary Islamism.
The historian Bat Ye’or wrote in her book, Eurabia:
[Beginning in 1973,] the combination of a powerful Eurabian lobby with ... European political, media, and educational systems produced throughout the EU that uniform political thinking known as “political correctness”... Dissenters were harshly censured in universities, books, and the media.
Exactly the same media-political fear regime was implemented in the United States. These events were not coincidental. In many cases, we know exactly which politicians and media empires were bought by Gulf oil dollars. Starting with the Clintons, we have seen state mafias gain national power – first the Dixie Mafia, and now the Chicago Machine. Obama is simply the logical outcome of forty years of indoctrination in our politics, education, and media.
We can now see these toxic forces converging in the purposeful sabotage of our southern border. The Sinaloa cartel is the biggest drug cartel in Chicago, and it received weapons from our DOJ during the “Fast and Furious” smuggling program. Valerie Jarrett met with “immigration activists” (like La Raza) in the weeks before the assault on our border. Iran’s terrorist arm Hezb'allah has agents colluding with drug mafias and people smuggling all over South America. Breaking down our southern borders serves all three.
It’s impossible to know where Obama has done the most damage – at home or abroad. The Middle East is now breaking down into that much-feared regional war, with Russia, Syria, Iran, Turkey, and Iraq converging on the Saudi- and Qatar-supported murder gangs of ISIS and ISIL, which now number in the tens of thousands. To add to the turmoil, the United States has helped to supply and train AQ barbarians in Jordan and Turkey, to join their bloodstained brothers wherever they decide to strike next.
All these bloody disasters can be attributed to U.S. and European policies in support of Islamofascist radicals. Jimmy Carter allowed Ayatollah Khomeini to take power in Iran, which is now within weeks of possessing a nuclear bomb. Western politicians like Jacques Chirac enabled Saddam Hussein in Europe and the U.N., leading directly to suicidal immigration flows of millions of Muslims from the badlands of Pakistan to all the capitals of Europe. The EU supported the Turkish Islamofascist party of Recip Erdoğan, now fighting the Turkish Salafist party. The Clintons failed to pursue Osama bin Laden after the first World Trade Center bombing in New York in 1993. Major money flows have been going from the ultra-radical Muslim Brotherhood to the Carter and Clinton centers.
But it took Obama to betray Egypt’s Mubarak, the single greatest pillar of peace in the Middle East for four decades. It was Obama who overthrew Gaddafi, and dissolved Libya into a bloody civil war that still continues. It was Obama who directed Ambassador Stevens to smuggle vast quantities of Libyan arms to the Syrian rebels, including the worst of the worst, the Al Nusrah gang, which killed children in the Christian village of Ma’aloula. It was Obama who supported the rise of the MBs in Egypt – the very people who assassinated Anwar Sadat forty years ago for making peace with Israel. Today, it is Obama who is preparing to surrender Afghanistan to the woman-hating Taliban, and who is refusing to help our U.S.-promoted Baghdad government to ward off the latest assault by primitive savages.
(Baghdad is now getting jet planes from Russia and an invading army from Iran and Syria, whose loyalties nobody knows. But they sure don’t like us.)
In sum, Obama has presided over the most malignant foreign policy in U.S. history.
This is not an accident. This policy was planned and executed by radical leftists like Susan Rice and Valerie Jarrett, corrupt media barons like the New York Times, and Islamofascists like John Brennan. They include the same Big Media corporations that control our “mainstream” media. They also include famous Silicon Valley high-tech companies like Apple and Google, who support Obama’s Progressive Policy Institute, and George Soros, who supports the anti-Israel front group J Street. Google’s vice president for North African sales was indeed directly involved in agitating for the Arab Spring, which our media simultaneously discovered and headlined, only to lead to Muslim Brotherhood despotism in Egypt.
It is very hard to know if we will come out of this mad state of affairs intact. America has teetered on the edge of Marxist disaster once before in its history, during the FDR and Truman years, when the fruits of the Manhattan Project were instantly transmitted to Stalin in Moscow, who was able to explode his own copycat bomb as early as 1949. Leftist betrayal is not new, nor is it unusual.
If you believe delusionally that the “bourgeois” nation-state is the enemy of all that is good and decent, and that destroying it will bring about utopia, smuggling nuclear secrets to Jozef Stalin becomes a great gift to humanity. Once you accept delusional cult beliefs, the end simply justifies the means. And delusional cults are a dime a dozen in human history.
As the Wall Street Journal wrote this week:
The American image has been tarnished by the progressives who took control of the U.S. government in 2009. They set about to expand the state's power, which was exactly what had destroyed the productive drive and creative skills of the post-World War II Russians and Chinese. They made a hash of health insurance, grossly distorted finance and destroyed personal savings by manipulation of the credit markets. They conducted a war on fossil fuels, handing a victory to Russia, which uses its hydrocarbon exports to exercise political influence in Europe. They weakened the dollar by running up huge national debts and wasted the nation's substance on silly projects like "fighting global warming."
Obama’s mentors shared a bitter hatred for middle-class values, starting with his mother and father, followed by his Muslim madrassa teachers in Jakarta, then Frank Marshall Davis in Hawaii, on and on, culminating in Jerry Wright, who calls our culture of freedom and productive work “middleclassness” – a direct translation of Marx’s “bourgeoisie,” the enemy that must be destroyed.
What is different about the Obama left is not the basic doctrine of revolutionary destruction. What’s different is the new alliance between the radical left and jihadist Islam. According to Bat Ye’or, that alliance goes back to the 1970s, after the Arab oil embargo, when Wahhabi and Khomeinist Muslims started to buy politicians by the barrel in Europe and America. Obama is the culmination of decades of Muslim influence-buying, which now controls much of our media, politics, and educational system.
Today, we are seeing that alliance emerge in the Muslim world, where the Western left has consistently supported murderous jihadist movements and regimes.
Obama has supported mass-killing regimes in the Middle East against more moderate, stabilizing rulers: Mubarak, Gaddafi (much better than today’s civil war in Libya), Maliki (ditto for Iraq), Karzai (ditto for Afghanistan). Instead, Obama consistently favors al-Qaeda-linked killer gangs in Syria and the biggest sponsor of terrorism, Iran. His treatment of our longtime allies has been atrocious. Betrayal is his middle name.
The hokey “spontaneous” immigrant wave of children and criminals is just another example of hard-left agitprop – in this case culminating in massive, deliberate child endangerment and probable abuse.
Obama’s self-appointed mission in life is to destroy the most productive and beneficial culture in history. Obama personally taught Alinsky’s Rules to his ACORN followers, and Alinsky called us “the enemy.” That word is used in war, and radicals like Obama and Malcolm X are bitter warlike agitators. (The old word for “community organizer” was “communist agitator”). Radicals like Obama read their revolutionary heroes literally, just like any Bible-quoting fundamentalist preacher.
The civilized world has a great ability to recover from disaster, as it showed three times in the last century. But each time the resistance has had to be led by those who tell the truth. Sane and sensible people today cannot rely on our twisted media, and we cannot believe our broken politicians. We have new web technologies at our fingertips that allow us to throw out the bums – be they RINOs, leftist radicals, or Islamofascists. Eventually our confused voters will figure it out – but don’t expect other people to make it happen.
Everything depends on telling the truth, and you and I must take full responsibility for doing so. Nobody else will do it for us.
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Revisiting ‘Freedom Summer’
Was it really the summer Martin Luther King's dream began to die?
Fifty years ago, civil rights activists began Freedom Summer. Or, I should say, some people who held themselves out as “civil rights activists” did so.
PJ Media’s Ron Radosh recently referred to a PBS documentary on the event, which the public network described as the summer when “more than 700 student volunteers from around the country joined organizers and local African Americans in a historic effort to shatter the foundations of white supremacy in what was one of the nation’s most viciously racist, segregated states.” More modestly stated, it was an effort to register black voters en masse.
Or was it? A recent revelation should cause objective historians to take a very hard second look at how and why Freedom Summer came to be, and at what really transpired in Mississippi that summer. From here, it appears that a campaign which has long been considered a civil rights movement milestone was really the beginning of the legitimate civil rights movement’s interment.
A June 19 Politico Magazine remembrance by historian Josh Zeitz shed new light on its leaders’ true intentions.
Zeitz apparently feels that he’s now in the historical clear to acknowledge and even celebrate motivations which, if widely known at the time, would have outraged millions of Americans of good will who had been moved by the nonviolence of Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers to accept the need for landmark legislation — the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — to enforce the right to vote, and to formally outlaw segregation in schools, workplaces, and public accommodations based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Though it wasn’t formally passed by the House and signed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson until July 2, the legislation’s passage had been certain since June 19 when it cleared the Senate.
Zeitz, an open Democrat, lays bare what he admiringly acknowledges “was in many ways a very cynical strategy.”
Was it ever, as it involved deliberately placing northern white kids in mortal danger:
"The architects of Freedom Summer were shrewd, pragmatic veterans of a brutal street fight … they wagered that if white students from prominent Northern families were arrested, beaten and illegally jailed—as they fully expected they would be—the federal government would finally recognize its responsibility to intervene in Mississippi....
The goal, explained (organizer Bob) Moses in advance of the summer project, was to create a political crisis. “Only when metal has been brought to white heat can it be shaped and molded,” he said. John Lewis … predicted that if white students were placed in harm’s way, “the federal government will have to take over the state … out of this conflict, this division and chaos, will come something positive.” ...
Though Moses rejected the charge that … (they) planned “to get some people killed so the federal government will move into Mississippi,” he also maintained that “no privileged group in history has ever given up anything without some kind of blood sacrifice.”
Zeitz’s attempt to draw a parallel between Freedom Summer and the previous year’s Birmingham Campaign led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. falls flat. Of course, Birmingham organizer King knew that serious violence in what was then known as “Bombingham” was virtually guaranteed. But he didn’t need to, and didn’t, recruit naive white Northern guinea pigs who could not possibly have been prepared to fully protect themselves in an incredibly hostile environment to ramp up the national pressure which became the catalyst for achieving passage of the Civil Rights Act. It should also not be forgotten that Mississippi’s culture of racial violence at the time was far worse than Alabama’s, or that King was not involved with Freedom Summer.
I’m not convinced that Freedom Summer needed to happen at all.
It’s not as if the federal government stood still after the act’s passage. In a late-June op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, Robert Schenkkan showed that President Lyndon Baines Johnson went all-in with tangible enforcement:
Jim Crow began to die, in part because LBJ well understood that passing laws was one thing and enforcing them quite another. Just as he had been determined to muscle the bill through Congress, Johnson was determined to see the law carried out by every executive power at his command.
More HERE
There is a new lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- on his usual vastly "incorrect" themes of race, genes, IQ etc
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For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated) and Coral reef compendium. (Updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten.
List of backup or "mirror" sites here or here -- for when blogspot is "down" or failing to update. Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
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