A Smoking Gun for Us 'Stupid American Voters'

Recently, a very disturbing video emerged that contains the metaphorical smoking gun concerning President Obama’s many lies about Obamacare. This should remove any lingering doubt that we’re dealing with a fascist-type administration.

Of course, there should be no need for a smoking gun, because it is now undeniable that Obama lied on his major selling points about the Affordable Care Act. Unlike many Democrats in falsely accusing President George W. Bush of lying about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, I don’t use the term “lie” lightly.

I don’t mean that Obama made good-faith statements about his bill that he honestly believed at the time but would later turn out to be erroneous. I am not even suggesting that he made promises he knew would be difficult to fulfill that he ultimately could not. I am saying that he made statements that he knew to be false when he made them.

Obama said countless times, despite knowing better, that if Americans liked their health care plans and their doctors, they could keep them. He said that average health care premiums for a family of four would decrease by some $2,500. He said his bill would be budget-neutral. His administration talked out of both sides of its mouth in characterizing the bill variously as a tax and as a penalty, depending on which label served his interests at the time. Team Obama assured us that employer-based plans would not be wedged out.

No one should need further proof of these multiple and oft-repeated lies, but should you need more, there is indeed more – and it’s explosive and hot off the presses.

The Daily Caller reports that in a newly surfaced video, Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber, an MIT professor, made some stunning admissions concerning how the administration presented the bill and how it overtly deceived the public because the bill never would have passed otherwise.

To understand the administration’s contempt for the American people, it is important for you to watch the video. (It’s on YouTube, titled “GRUBER: ‘Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage.”) But in case you cannot, here is what Gruber said: “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure (the Congressional Budget Office) did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. OK? So it’s written to do that. In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said healthy people are going to pay in – you made explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money – it would not have passed. … Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically, that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass. … Look, I wish (health economist) Mark (Pauly) was right (that) we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.”

You can see the mindset that these people have. There is no mistaking it. They know better than we “stupid” American people what is good for us, so they’ll do whatever is necessary, including purposely deceiving us, to advance their political agenda.

This is the stuff of outright tyrants – arrogant, unaccountable, cavalier despots. This is political fascism. This is not representative government. This type of behavior nullifies the Constitution and disenfranchises the American people.

It’s one thing to have strong ideological views. It’s altogether another to impose those views at any cost and in derogation of the people’s rights. This is who this president is. These are the people he surrounds himself with.

Obama and his team are not chastened, much less repentant, over the recent election results. They remain undeterred, and they intend to continue using whatever means they deem necessary, in their self-assessed superior wisdom, to accomplish their political ends, beginning with immigration.

It’s hard to believe that this man was ever elected and exceedingly harder to believe he was re-elected, but it is now quite clear that even he and his team believe he wouldn’t have been able to achieve re-election or advance much of his agenda had he been truly honest and transparent about his aims and the effects of various bills.

If you were unaware of or in denial about Obama’s character and his willingness to deceive and act against the will of the American people before – despite other smoking guns, such as those concerning his lies on the Benghazi, Libya, attacks – you have no excuse now.

Two dangerous years remain in Obama’s term. Even Democrats who might agree with many of Obama’s remaining agenda items have a duty to oppose his further abuse of our system, including on immigration. But whether or not they step up, it is imperative that Republicans take a hard line against any such corrosive acts against the rule of law and our Constitution.

SOURCE

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Arizona voters did something that could stop Obama's unconstitutional moves

Voters in Arizona approved Proposition 122, an important amendment to the state constitution that enshrines nullification, or anti-commandeering. Specifically, it allows the state to “exercise its sovereign authority to restrict the actions of its personnel and the use of its financial resources to purposes that are consistent with the Constitution.”

This amendment, approved by a 2.8% margin, will make it easier for Arizonans to refuse to enforce federal laws, forcing Washington to do its own dirty work. Under the provision, voters could hold referendums on withholding state resources from enforcing Obamacare, federal impingement on American’s Second Amendment rights, NSA spying programs, and other measures, according to the Tenth Amendment Center.

Other states have considered nullification measures as a method of pushing back on the massive, unconstitutional expansion of federal government by un-elected bureaucrats in federal agencies under President Barack Obama or any future White House occupant, but this is believed to be the first amendment to a state constitution with such a broad scope.

Arizonans could have held such referendums at any time, but adding this language to the state’s constitution means that such referendums will now be statutory, rather than constitutional, making it easier — and far less expensive — to get on the ballot for the people to decide.

“Simply put, the amendment enshrines a process to refuse state cooperation with unconstitutional federal acts in the state constitution,” the report said, citing a statement from Judge Andrew Napolitano that state refusal to participate in federal programs makes them “nearly impossible to enforce.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has consistently upheld actions by states to refuse to implement federal programs. The report cites four key decisions — Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), New York v. US (1992), Printz v. US (1997) and National Federation of Businesses v. Sebelius (2012).

James Madison, writing in Federalist #46, said that two of the most important “means of opposition” to the federal government were the “disquietude of the people” and their “refusal to co-operate with the officers of the Union.” Arizona just added to its constitution the means for its citizens to express both more readily.

It is sincerely to be hoped that other states will follow the example of The Grand Canyon State, but for now, it’s a good day to be an Arizonan.

SOURCE

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Republicans Can Upend the Democrat Race Narrative

Many realities utterly anathema to Democrats' divide-and-conquer strategy for winning elections revealed themselves last Tuesday. Yet perhaps the one that threatens their future far more than any other is the reality that, for the first time in decades, the Democrat race narrative is starting to crumble. Suddenly, black America’s invariably reliable allegiance to their party is in play.

For the last half-century, Democrats successfully painted the entire GOP as the “racist” party. The enormity of that success cannot be overstated, as Democrats managed to take American history completely out of the equation while doing so. History that reveals the Republican Party was established by anti-slavery activists, while it was Democrats who flocked to the Ku Klux Klan following its establishment as a Tennessee social club. In the middle of the 20th century, the “Dixiecrats,” including segregationists such as Alabama Public Safety Commissioner “Bull” Connor and former Georgia Gov. Lester Maddox, emerged. It was Connor who ordered the use of police dogs and fire hoses to disperse civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham during the spring of 1963. It was Maddox who refused to serve black customers in his restaurant, brandishing an axe handle in the process. And then there was the late Democrat Sen. Robert Byrd, who served over 50 years in that chamber, despite not only being a member of the KKK but a leader of his local chapter.

Many black Americans have no idea a higher percentage of Republicans than Democrats supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and were also responsible for ending a Democrat filibuster preventing a vote on the bill in the Senate.

What black Americans do know is that Democrats ultimately captured their hearts and souls, not only to the point of getting their votes, but to the point where any who dared stray from the Democrat plantation faced the kind of ostracizing best exemplified by the pathetic treatment afforded Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Emerge, a now-defunct black news monthly, portrayed Thomas as a lawn jockey on its cover with the heading “Uncle Thomas, Lawn Jockey for the Far Right.” USA Today columnist and Pacifica Radio host Julianne Malveaux hoped aloud that “his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease,” because he is “a reprehensible person.” Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown claimed Thomas was “legitimizing the views of the Ku Klux Klan,” a view shared by Jesse Jackson.

All of this was and is perfectly acceptable in Democrat circles, where even now the only “authentic” black Americans are those on the liberal side of the political ledger. Thus it is no surprise that Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), the first black senator elected in the South since the Reconstruction era, received an “F” from the NAACP, because he doesn’t believe in “civil rights” according to NAACP president Ben Jealous. What Scott really doesn’t believe in is the progressive agenda. Nor is it any surprise that execrable New York Congressman Charles Rangel expressed his belief that all southern Republicans “believe that slavery isn’t over and they think they won the Civil War,” implying all those GOP victories last Tuesday were attributable to racism. “I meant that they used to call themselves ‘slave-holding states,’” Rangel declared.“ They’ve been frustrated with the Emancipation Proclamation. They became Republicans, then Tea Party people.”

No one’s more frustrated than Rangel and other Democrats who see the writing on the wall. Their angst is undoubtedly exacerbated by the election of Utah Rep. Mia Love, the first black Republican woman elected to Congress in a state where the population is less than 1% black. Love is actually far more problematic than Scott because she also pokes a hole in another cherished Democrat narrative, a.k.a. the GOP’s “war on women.”

Yet while the cracks in the Democrat race narrative are beginning to show, those fissures can only be widened when the Right learns to be proactive and frame the argument. An exchange between Bill Kristol, the conservative publisher of The Weekly Standard, and CNN commentator Jay Carney, former White House Press Secretary, is illustrative. When Carney expressed the idea that GOP support for voter ID is racist, Kristol merely disagreed. What Kristol should have said is that there is nothing more racist than the notion that black Americans are inherently incapable of procuring an ID, and that Carney should be ashamed of making the kind of sweeping generalizations that are the essence of racism.

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gets it exactly right. “The idea that you would play such a card and try fear-mongering among minorities just because you disagree with Republicans, that they are somehow all racists, I find it appalling. I find it insulting,” she said, specifically referring to a Democrat flyer disseminated in Georgia warning blacks that “if you want to prevent another Ferguson” you’d better get to the polls and vote Democrat.

It didn’t fly. Republican David Perdue handily won the Senate race against Democrat Michelle Nunn by eight percentage points.

Furthermore, there were potentially seismic indications of black disenchantment with Democrats before Election Day. On Friday, July 11 in Chicago, what started out as a protest against the violence that had resulted in 189 people being shot and 33 killed in that month alone turned into an Obama bash-fest. One black resident accused the president of “forsaking the African-American community and African-American families.”

Sadly, it’s nothing new. Democrats have conspired to maintain an odious narrative of black victimhood and GOP racism since the 1960s.

What more and more black Americans may now be realizing is the party they’ve hitched their wagon to for five-plus decades is still telling them things have barely changed for the better, if they have changed at all – and that maybe, just maybe, 50 years of unquestioning allegiance producing virtually no improvement means it’s time for a change.

In short, the Grand Old Party has been handed a grand opportunity to make serious inroads into the black community. The quickest way to blow that opportunity? Hop on board the comprehensive immigration reform train. The stats tell the story all the rosy rhetoric surrounding immigration reform can’t obscure: In Oct., black America’s unemployment rate remained double that of whites, 41,000 black Americans lost their jobs, and their labor force participation rate declined by 114,000 – all in an economy improving for everyone else.

It’s time the GOP made it clear to black America that they have their backs and stand in stark contrast to Barack Obama and Democrats, both eager to legalize millions of illegals who will further devastate black employment prospects. This is nothing less than a sellout of black America, and it is incumbent on the GOP to explain that Democrats see it as a reasonable tradeoff for unassailable power – power that is only possible because Democrats take black support for granted.

The opportunity to forge a new racial narrative is at hand. The Democrats' racial playbook is old and tired, the race card is more than maxed out. All that is needed is some serious GOP outreach in black communities over the next two years. Memo to the GOP: Those two years may buy you another four, including a Republican president in 2016.

SOURCE

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GOP adds another Senate seat as Sullivan wins Alaska

Republican candidate Dan Sullivan defeated Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Begich in Alaska’s U.S. Senate race Wednesday.  The win gives the GOP eight Senate pickups in the midterm elections. The party is also seeking a ninth seat in Louisiana’s runoff in December.

Sullivan ran a confident campaign, ignoring the debate schedule Begich established and setting his own terms.

He pledged to fight federal overreach, talked about energy independence and at seemingly every opportunity, sought to tie Begich to President Barack Obama and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, who are unpopular in Alaska.

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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Far-Left Hollywood actress to sue conservative publisher

Liberal Hollywood actress and darling of Planned Parenthood, Lena Dunham, is gunning for the Freedom Center and Truth Revolt --- and now I urgently need your help to build up our legal defense fund.

You might have read about it on the Drudge Report or seen it in The Hollywood Reporter, The Daily Mail, the Los Angeles Times, or People Magazine or any other mainstream media outlet...

Leftwing Hollywood feminist Lena Dunham is threatening to sue Truth Revolt and the David Horowitz Freedom Center, because we wrote an article in which we quoted her book, Not That Kind of Girl!

Who is Lena Dunham, you may wonder? She is the New Hot Thing-a leftist actress who is the darling of the liberal media; who has been one of Obama's most rabid backers; who has been in America's face as a supporter of what she calls "reproductive rights" and "female sexuality"; and who teams up with groups such as Emily's List and Planned Parenthood to try to tilt the playing field in favor of leftwing causes.

She's also a best selling author whose new book causes the flesh to crawl because, among other things, of the way it describes her relationship with her younger sister. This part of Not That Kind of Girl caught our eye, which is why we described it, using Dunham's own words, in Truth Revolt.

Without going into detail, I'll just say that it's very disturbing, especially coming from someone who has presented herself as so very progressive and such a critic of sexual abuse --- and in particular, a spokesperson against the right's fictitious War on Women.

Whether you want to call what Dunham wrote an admission of sexual abuse or just a very progressive view of sibling relations is up to you. What is not up for debate is that she wrote some bizarre and graphic passages that Truth Revolt quoted -- and the next thing we knew, we had a letter from her attorney, threatening suit for defamation.

In his "cease-and-desist" letter, Dunham's lawyer stated "Our client intends to vigorously pursue all possible legal remedies available to her . . . Remedies available to my client include, without limitation, actual damages to her personal and professional reputation which likely would be calculated in the millions of dollars [plus] punitive damages." The letter demanded that the story be immediately removed.

The letter also stated: "Demand is further made that you immediately print a prominent public apology and retraction at all media whereat you published the Story, stating that the Story is false, that you regret having published it, and that you apologize to Ms. Dunham and her family for having published it."

We refused to comply with these demands. In response to the attorney's threat, we stated: "We refuse. We refuse to withdraw our story or apologize for running it, because quoting a woman's book does not constitute a "false" story, even if she is a prominent actress and leftwing activist. Lena Dunham may not like our interpretation of her book, but unfortunately for her and her attorneys, she wrote that book - and the First Amendment covers a good deal of material she may not like."

Our lawyer advises us that we have a strong legal defense, based on the First Amendment, and we fully expect to prevail. But the costs of defending a case are high, and now we could be facing $250,000 in legal defense costs-a negligible sum for someone like Dunham, but a serious expense for us.

Lena Dunham is a very public figure that stars and directs the HBO show "Girls." She has made a career out of shocking her audiences and exploiting her celebrity to push hard-left causes. Her book is certainly fair game, as are questions about her sickening conduct with regard to her sister. That is what the First Amendment is for and what it protects.

Truth Revolt criticized Dunham. Dunham fired back on Twitter, and her sycophants in the media covered for her. But she didn't stop there. She decided, as leftists often do, that to silence critics is more appealing than simply utilizing her own freedom of speech under the First Amendment. People like Dunham want to be as "provocative" and "edgy" as they choose. But when anyone calls them on their conduct they want to unplug the microphone.

So, she ordered her attorney to issue this letter threatening suit. If she does sue, the Freedom Center and Truth Revolt are prepared to go to the wall in defense of free speech. Lawsuits can be incredibly expensive, especially when the other side is a major entertainer with millions in the bank and fellow Hollywood leftists urging her to silence a fearless conservative publication like Truth Revolt. But we will do what needs to be done to protect the First Amendment.

Via email.  You can donate to the defense here

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Salon sneers at the Military on Eve of Veterans Day, saying: 'It's been 70 years since we fought a war about freedom.'

It could be argued that America has faced no serious external threat to its freedoms since the war of independence.  But is that the point of past and present American military deployments?  In keeping with  the Leftist lack of feeling for others, the Salon writer is indifferent to attacks on the freedom of other people. People such as the victims of Hitler or ISIS are not worth defending, apparently

Salon.com has a funny way of honoring the military right before Veterans Day.

David Masciorta penned an offensive column Sunday titled, "You don’t protect my freedom: Our childish insistence on calling soldiers heroes deadens real democracy" with the sub-head "It's been 70 years since we fought a war about freedom. Forced troop worship and compulsory patriotism must end." The reaction on social media was swift and merciless. The Salon Twitter account used a shortened version of the column's sub-headline to promote clicks to its site:

At the risk of polluting this site with Mr. Maciorta's leftist ranting, let's just take a quick look at his "argument":

"One of the reasons that the American public so eagerly and excitedly complies with the cultural code of lionizing every soldier and cop is because of the physical risk-taking and bravery many of them display on the foreign battleground and the American street. Physical strength and courage is only useful and laudable when invested in a cause that is noble and moral. The causes of American foreign policy, especially at the present, rarely qualify for either compliment. The “troops are heroes” boosters of American life typically toss out clichés to defend their generalization – “They defend our freedom,” “They fight so we don’t have to.”

No American freedom is currently at stake in Afghanistan. It is impossible to imagine an argument to the contrary, just as the war in Iraq was clearly fought for the interests of empire, the profits of defense contractors, and the edification of neoconservative theorists. It had nothing to do with the safety or freedom of the American people. The last time the U.S. military deployed to fight for the protection of American life was in World War II – an inconvenient fact that reduces clichés about “thanking a soldier” for free speech to rubble. If a soldier deserves gratitude, so does the litigator who argued key First Amendment cases in court, the legislators who voted for the protection of free speech, and thousands of external agitators who rallied for more speech rights, less censorship and broader access to media."

Salon's choice of subjects got an immediate reaction on Twitter

More HERE

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Border Patrol Stripping Agents Of Their Rifles

The Obama administration loathes its own agents -- because they want to do their job

The News 4 Tucson Investigators have uncovered that some U.S. Border Patrol agents have lost a key part of their arsenal. And that has agents who patrol along the border here, extremely worried.

We learned that U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Offices of Border Patrol and Training and Development are inspecting the quality of agents’ M4 carbines throughout Border Patrol sectors nationwide. But agents tell us, some of those M4s have not been replaced. And, we’ve learned, agents are required to share rifles amongst each other.

“There’s a lot of agents that are pretty upset over it,” said Art del Cueto, president of the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector union. “We know it’s a dangerous job. We know what we signed on for but we want to have as much of the equipment as we need to perform the job.”

The M4 carbine is used by the U.S. military and by Border Patrol agents. It’s even used by the Border Patrol’s tactical unit, BORTAC. Agent Brian Terry was carrying the M4 when he was shot and killed in December 2010.

Del Cueto tells us that because some of those M4s have not been replaced, agents are pooling their weapons, which makes it difficult to personalize the settings on a rifle, such as the sights.

“The problem is they are now pool guns so what happens is instead of having their individual ones they have sighted in they’re having to use a pool weapon that you don’t know who used it before you,” del Cueto said.

Customs and Border Protection released a statement to the News 4 Tucson Investigators last week, stating: “CBP’s Offices of Border Patrol and Training and Development are jointly inspecting the serviceability of M4 carbines throughout Border Patrol Sectors nationwide. Some of (the) inspected M4 carbines were deemed unserviceable and removed from inventory to alleviate safety concerns. Inspections will continue to ensure the unserviceable M4 carbines are repaired or replaced for reintroduction into the field. No further information is available at this time.” ...

Prather believes removing some of the rifles maybe politically motivated. He says he was told that many of these guns are being removed for issues that are easily repaired like the firing pin and bolt.

He broke down a M4 as he spoke.

“This weapon is designed to be able to be in a battle situation, changed out rather quickly even so fast that modern weapons have areas to hold spare bolts,” he said.

That makes him suspicious that the agency could be disarming its agents.

The U.S. government has enough surplus weapons that every local yokel Sheriff’s department gets machine guns and armored vehicles on your tax dollars.  But the Border Patrol agents are getting their rifles confiscated by the Border Patrol.  It sort of makes you think that the administration is trying to cause an invasion, no?

So it’s worse that sending weapons South of the border to criminal cartels in an attempt to shore up the case for a demand letter to FFLs.  Now we want to ensure that agents who want to stop the criminals aren’t armed.  There’s your administration and your tax dollars at work.

SOURCE

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The Bureaucrats’ Secret Buying Spree

Oh, to be a bureaucrat in the U.S. federal government! What other jobs pay just as much or more than similar work done in the private sector, but with much, much more generous benefits? Which would appear to be even more generous than we previously knew, thanks to the discovery of a surprising new perk by Scott McFarlane of Washington, D.C.’s NBC affiliate, News4 I-Team: taxpayer-funded purchase cards with no accountability!

The federal government has spent at least $20 billion in taxpayer money this year on items and services that it is permitted to keep secret from the public, according to an investigation by the News4 I-Team.

The purchases, known among federal employees as “micropurchases,” are made by some of the thousands of agency employees who are issued taxpayer-funded purchase cards. The purchases, in most cases, remain confidential and are not publicly disclosed by the agencies. A sampling of those purchases, obtained by the I-Team via the Freedom of Information Act, reveals at least one agency used those cards to buy $30,000 in Starbucks Coffee drinks and products in one year without having to disclose or detail the purchases to the public....

The I-Team, using the Freedom of Information Act, received a list of “micropurchases” made by the Dept. of Homeland Security at Starbucks vendors nationwide in 2013. The list includes dozens of transactions, including in Washington, D.C., and Maryland. Several of the purchases were made at an Alameda, California, Starbucks vendor and cost more than $2,400 each, just below the $3,000 threshold for which purchases need not be publicly disclosed. After reviewing the I-Team’s findings, Rep. John Mica (R-FL), chair of a U.S House Oversight subcommittee said, “When you have $10,000 being spent at one Starbucks by DHS employees in one city in six months, someone is abusing the purchasing permission that we have given them.”

Now, multiply that single abuse by a single federal government bureaucrat for spending $10,000 at a single Starbucks location by the federal government’s two million civilian employees, and that goes a very long way to explaining how the bureaucrats’ secret buying spree can add up to a bill that totals $20 billion dollars.

More HERE

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Anti-Israel Jews object to having a light shone upon them

In October 2014, 40 professors of Jewish studies published a denunciation of a study that named professors who have been identified as expressing “anti-Israel bias, or possibly even antisemitic rhetoric.” While the 40 academics claimed they reject anti-Semitism totally as part of teaching, they were equally critical of the tactics and possible effects of the AMCHA Initiative report, a comprehensive review of the attitudes about Israel of some 200 professors who signed an online petition during the latest Gaza incursion that called for an academic boycott against Israeli scholars.

Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) is troubled that a group of largely Jewish professors denounced a study which had as its core purpose to alert students to professors who have demonstrated, in a public forum, that they harbor anti-Israel attitudes. Since the individuals named in the report teach in the area of Middle East studies, they are also likely to bring that anti-Israel bias into the classroom with them, and students, therefore, would obviously benefit from AMCHA’s report.

SPME questions why the 40 academics would oppose such a report of bias that indicates where professors’ stand politically, especially, as in this case, when those anti- Israel attitudes are extremely germane to their area of teaching, namely Middle East studies.

As AMCHA co-founder Tammi Benjamin noted, “I don’t understand why a professor has freedom of expression to sign a boycott petition and we don’t have freedom to say, "Look who signed the boycott petition".

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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Conservatives are more disgusted by animal mutilation than are liberals

That is the finding of the article below.  See particularly their Table 4.  Seeing a ripped apart animal didn't disturb American liberals much at all.  Given the mass-murdering ways of socialists when they get untrammelled power (Lenin, Stalin. Mao, Hitler, Castro etc) that should not be much a of a surprise -- to say nothing of the Leftist indifference to abortion.  They have the psychopath's emotional shallowness and indifference to suffering in others. They are basically very nasty people.  Despite Leftist pretensions, it is conservatives who really feel for others.

The findings below are really quite striking.  The brain activity observed across a lot of brain regions in response to an image of a mutilated animal was quite a strong predictor of political orientation.  Conservatives were really stirred up by the image whereas liberals were not.  You can tell pretty reliably where a person is politically by how much suffering disgusts him

Rather vaguely, the authors of the article interpret their results as showing that conservatives have a general negativity bias. But their own results refute that. There was NOTHING general in the responses of conservatives. The authors used a number of different stimuli but it was only the mutilated animal that evoked a strongly differentiated response. It could be argued that the results show conservatives to have a weak stomach but if a strong stomach goes with being relaxed about mass-murder and killing babies,a weak stomach would seem highly desirable. The monstrous description of killing the unborn as "choice" showed Leftist hard-heartedness long before the research below did

Nonpolitical Images Evoke Neural Predictors of Political Ideology

By Woo-Young Ahn et al.

Summary

Political ideologies summarize dimensions of life that define how a person organizes their public and private behavior, including their attitudes associated with sex, family, education, and personal autonomy [ 1, 2 ]. Despite the abstract nature of such sensibilities, fundamental features of political ideology have been found to be deeply connected to basic biological mechanisms [ 3–7 ] that may serve to defend against environmental challenges like contamination and physical threat [ 8–12 ].

These results invite the provocative claim that neural responses to nonpolitical stimuli (like contaminated food or physical threats) should be highly predictive of abstract political opinions (like attitudes toward gun control and abortion) [ 13 ].

We applied a machine-learning method to fMRI data to test the hypotheses that brain responses to emotionally evocative images predict individual scores on a standard political ideology assay.

Disgusting images, especially those related to animal-reminder disgust (e.g., mutilated body), generate neural responses that are highly predictive of political orientation even though these neural predictors do not agree with participants’ conscious rating of the stimuli.

Images from other affective categories do not support such predictions. Remarkably, brain responses to a single disgusting stimulus were sufficient to make accurate predictions about an individual subject’s political ideology.

These results provide strong support for the idea that fundamental neural processing differences that emerge under the challenge of emotionally evocative stimuli may serve to structure political beliefs in ways formerly unappreciated.

SOURCE

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Backgrounder on the Middle east

The author is an American Kurd working for the U.N.

After thinking about your comment on the Kurds, and what the Press won't tell you, I thought you might like the perspective of someone whose spent a bit of time over here, and what I know from my personal experience of being over here, which is a perspective the general American public is clueless about because of our bought and paid for media.

So let me start by defining the players:

Arab Sunni Islam: They believe there was only one prophet, Mohammad, and that anyone that believes otherwise is an infidel.  They hate Israel, and don't acknowledge their existence. They were allies of the Nazi's in WWII.

Arab Shia (Shi'ite) Islam: They believe that there were follow-on prophets after Mohammad.  These "Prophets" are known as "Imam's" and their word is god's law, anyone who doesn't believe as they do is an Infidel.  They hate Israel, and don't acknowledge their existence.  They were allies of the Nazi's in WWII as well.

That's the primary difference between these two groups, but both are radical in their view of Islam, (wahhabism - the ultra conservative or orthodox belief in Islamic law, created by the Saudi royal family - think Amish v.s. Modern Christianity) and feel that anyone that doesn't believe like they do, is ok to kill as defined by their version of the Quran.

They all believe in Sharia law as greater than any government, and both sects believe in a Caliphate, or Islamic State forming again one day like the Ottoman Empire, which was the last one prior to the breakup after WW1.  That's why you see Christians being culled and killed in places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Turkey, Jordan, Lybia, Syria, etc. ............ as both sides believe Christianity to be an abomination, and are intolerant of anything but their own religion.  Yes even in the countries we consider 'allies', like Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, U.A.E, etc. (Pretty much all the oil producing countries, and places with royal families)

80+% of the Arab Muslim population, whether Sunni or Shia, support what is going on with ISIS - as they are supporting ethnic cleansing of Christians and other beliefs which are non-Muslim.

There are no civilian casualties when bombing ISIS, as if they aren't pointing a gun, they are in direct support of the ISIS fighters, so don't believe a word the media says about civilian casualties. The military knows this, but the media doesn't have a clue.

Now for the Kurds.  The Kurds are a dispersed ethnic group, across the entire Middle East, and predominantly live in Kurdistan, Turkey, northern Syria, and northern Iraq, where there has traditionally been peace. Kurds comprise anywhere from 18% to 25% of the population in Turkey, 15-20% in Iraq, 9% in Syria, 7% in Iran and 1.3% in Armenia.  In all of these countries except Iran, Kurds form the second largest ethnic group. Roughly 55% of the world's Kurds live in Turkey, about 18% each in Iran and Iraq, and a bit over 5% in Syria. They are purportedly the descendents of King Solomon, and are Persian in ancestry.  They encompass a variety of religions: they are Islam, Yarsan (Muslim, but non-confrontational), Yazidis (Christian theology), Zoroastianism (Ahura Mazda - Persian religion), Judaism (yes, there are Kurdish Jews), and Christianity.

While I was in Iraq, it was in Irbil where private western financial capital was flowing, (not U.S. government bribes, like in the south) in building three to five star resorts like Marriot, Best Western, Howard Johnson, and was the only area considered "safe" enough in the entire country to walk the streets without body armour outside the wire.  Investment capital was flowing there, not in Bagdad as one might think, as the Kurds have a very European mindset, and are the only place in Iraq, and in the Middle East as a whole, where their public schools allowed girls to be educated.  They are thought as chattels everywhere else, including places like Abu Dubai, Qatar, Kuwait, etc., who are supposed to be our allies.

The Kurds have the Peshmerga, which has always been feared by both Sunnis AND Shia, because the Kurds have been used as canon-fodder for generations when under Arab control, and now that they have autonomy in northern Iraq, they despise most Arabs, which has the Royal families worried.  What scares them even more, is the Female Peshmerga --  which are so feared by ISIS, they are avoiding the Peshmerga wherever they can, which is why you don't see much in the way of conflict against the Kurds in the north.

All we have to do in order to get rid of ISIS, which all rumours indicate is being funded by both the Saudis, and the Yemenis, is to arm the Kurds, and tell them Iraq is theirs for the taking.  They have a 375,000 man/woman standing army in the Peshmerga, and only need the weapons to do the job.  They don't want our help on the ground, but welcome our air support.  It's the smart move to not get re-engaged in another Saudi-Prince-dictated war.

Hope that helps you to understand a bit about this side of the world, and why picking any allies against ISIS, puts us in bed with other terrorists, like Hamas, and Hezbollah, or puts us in cooperation with Iran, unless we do the right thing, and pick helping just the Kurds.  If Israel was very smart, they would come to the aid of the Kurds, join forces, and make us all look like idiots, as the Kurds and the Israelis together could clean out the entire Middle East with ease.

Via email

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Too much time on the present, not enough time on the past crusades

Imperialism was invented in the Middle East and the Jihadis are its modern-day exponents

“Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.” — Will Durant

We are forever hearing the Muslim world using the term “Crusader” in reference to the West when accusing us of every evil that has ever befallen them, as though we had invented colonialism and exploitation or the acquisition of booty in the pursuit of empire.

One of the most prevalent characteristics of the jihadist—when he’s not using the religion of Islam to justify his savagery—is his habitual revision and/or obfuscation of actual Middle Eastern history. Always careful to avoid turning back the pages far enough to reveal how Islam’s religious parvenus actually pioneered the very idea of imperialism and colonial rule, the jihadist must overlook the fact that long before there was a Palestine “occupied” by a State of Israel, there was also a Palestine when Jews lived absent the presence of religiously intolerant Arab Muslims. Today’s “pro-Palestinian” protester vehemently refuses any discussion regarding the awkward historical truth defining who is actually occupying who in the land of Israel.

Efraim Karsh has noted, “Contrary to the conventional wisdom, it is the Middle East where the institution of empire not only originated (for example, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Iran, and so on) but where its spirit has also outlived its European counterpart.” We are now accustomed to seeing anti-Zionism placards at any event arranged for the purpose of protesting against the State of Israel, as though any Jew should be ashamed of admitting to being a Zionist. Unlike the Islamic imperialist (read: jihadist), the Zionist doesn’t want to rule the world and hold indigenous captives under his thumb. Rather he simply wants to return to the land of Israel, his ancient homeland, and live there in peace, safely out of reach of the Islamic imperialist.

But the jihadist will travel back in history only so far as Jabotinsky and Herzl, as though Zionism began with them. Never mind the fact that Jabotinsky and Herzl and their Zionism saved many Jews from the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Sobibor, or repatriated into Israel those Jewish survivors who walked out of the darkness of Eastern Europe at the end of WW2, the jihadist, in his madness, erroneously sees only a mirror image of himself and Islam’s imperialistic tendencies in the Zionism of the Jew.

This is why the nefarious Protocols of the Elders of Zion has become the Arab Muslim’s most popular proof for his vitriol against the Jews of Israel. Never mind the ancient history of Zionism, that this same Zionism predates even the Muslim Arab invasion of ancient Israel, the Islamist sees only Jabotinsky and Herzl and the Jewish refugee fighting (and winning) his way back into what had been for so long a preponderant Arab Muslim Palestine.

The Arab Muslim, the original jihadist, has never been willing to tolerate a sovereign Jewish state, regardless the evidence of a perpetual Jewish presence in the land of Israel. As Jamil Mardam, Syria’s Foreign Minister, told Herzl’s friend Moshe Shertok back in 1943, “You won’t find a single Arab leader who would voluntarily acquiesce in your becoming the majority in Palestine…there can be no mutually agreed settlement as no Arab statesman will accept a Jewish majority.” Islam’s jihadist is willing to look only so far back into the history of the Middle East as serves his religion’s imperialistic dictates. About the fate of the Jews, even Jews running from the Holocaust, he couldn’t care less.

For every European and American kingmaker who travelled to the Middle East “to do the impossible for the ungrateful,” to borrow a phrase from Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, there was always an Arab Muslim waiting there who dreamed of empire and was more than willing to accept their money, even at the expense of the common Arab who was simply trying to raise a family and live in relative security. The reasons given today to justify Islamic jihad are simply born of a religiously taught hatred of everything Western but have no valid connection to the real history of the Middle East and therefore no credence when used to inculpate the West for the volatile instability of the region.

Arab Muslim empires rose and then came crashing down long before Western powers took their turn at exploiting the Middle East’s natural resources. One has only to take a short read into the history of Islam’s many kings and caliphs to realize that the jihad waged back then, with Arab Muslim killing Arab Muslim, was not at all dissimilar to the jihad waged today, with Arab Muslim killing Arab Muslim, Jew and Christian: jihad, not because there is any sense to it, or because there is an end that could possibly justify the means, but only because Islam and its tenets advocate jihad and for no other reason.

The jihadist is not interested in ancient history and how that history can never justify his crimes against humanity. The jihadist is only interested in the last twenty four hours and the measure of harm he has loosed into the world.

SOURCE

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Oprah the hater

She still hates America even though it has given her so much  -- in money and otherwise

Oprah Winfrey made some shocking comments in a recent interview with BBC, when she alluded that the only reason someone wouldn’t like President Barack Obama is if they were a racist.

When the interviewer asked Oprah if she thought people were against Obama because he was black, she responded, “There’s no question.”

She went on to say that she thinks “there’s a level of disrespect for the office that occurs. And that occurs in some cases because he’s African American. There’s no question about that. And it’s the kind of thing no one ever says, buy everybody is thinking.”

Apparently Oprah isn’t aware that her comments don’t set her apart. Instead, they group her with a slew of Obama supporters that claim that disapproval of the president stems from either religious or racial discrimination. And she clearly hasn’t paid attention to stations like MSNBC or “celebrities” like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

She certainly isn’t alone in her accusations, but continued on to make a statement about racisms in general, stating that “As long as people can be judged by the color of their skin, problem’s not solved.”

So when does Oprah see racism coming to an end?

“There are still generations of people, older people, who were born and bred and marinated in it, in that prejudice and racism,” Oprah said, “and they just have to die.”

That’s right, according to Oprah, when everyone who ever had a racist ancestor dies, America will be set free from all of its problems.

SOURCE

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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Is Obama a psychopath?

 Coach Dave Daubenmire correctly diagnoses Obama's pathology below

I am not asking this with my tongue in my cheek. I am as serious as a judge. As I sit here and write, I am listening to Mr. Obama's press conference. Something is very wrong with this guy. He is either mentally ill or demon possessed. Either choice is a possibility. But something is definitely wrong with him. He seems somehow inhuman.

I’ve lived my entire life in a world of athletic competition. I understand the human emotion that is associated with winning and losing. I grew up with the opening theme of ABC's Wide World of Sports continuously playing in my head. (If I close my eyes I can hear the voice of Jim McKay bouncing around the corners of my brain.)

The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat brings with it emotions. That is why we watch sports. We love the human drama of athletic competition. That's why we have press conferences after games. We love to hear the emotional reaction to winning and losing.

President Obama is a hollow man. He has no feelings. He feels no emotions. The human drama of competition seems to have no outward effect on him.

Can I be blunt? He got his butt kicked. Every talking head on the tube is pointing the finger at his unpopularity. “The bloom is off of the rose. It is a direct repudiation of his policies. The era of Obama is over.” It is as if everyone knows it but him.

Politics is nothing more than a beauty contest, and Obama has been voted off of the island. But he acts as if he still owns the island. There seems to be no agony in his defeat. It is not normal. His emotions do not line up with reality. He is either sick or he is possessed. I'm not laughing. I am serious.

His party rejected him. The American people rejected him. His fawning media has turned their affections in a different direction, yet he shows no emotion. I watch him on the TV. I watch him in his press conference. I watch his eyes as he responds to the media's questions. I believe he is a sick, dangerous man.

I Googled the word ‘sociopath’. “A person with a psychopathic personality whose behavior is antisocial, often criminal, and who lacks a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience.”

Bingo. That's him. That's the guy living the life of President of the United States.

I went a bit further and Googled “Characteristics of a Sociopath.” Read it for yourself. Permit me to summarize. You recognize his mental illness by these traits.

- An oversized ego.
- Lying and showing manipulative behavior.
- Incapable of showing empathy.
- No lack of shame or remorse.
- Staying eerily calm in dangerous situations.
- Behaving irresponsibly or with extreme impulsivity.
- Having few close friends.
- Being charming ---but only superficially.
- Living by the pleasure principle.
- Showing disregard for societal norms.
- Having intense eyes.

The man is either sick or non-human. He does not react like a normal human being.

Consider this from the article:

“Sociopaths can be very charismatic and friendly -- because they know it will help them get what they want. “They are expert con artists and always have a secret agenda,” Rosenberg said. "People are so amazed when they find that someone is a sociopath because they’re so amazingly effective at blending in. They’re masters of disguise. Their main tool to keep them from being discovered is a creation of an outer personality."

As M.E. Thomas described in a post for Psychology Today: "You would like me if you met me. I have the kind of smile that is common among television show characters and rare in real life, perfect in its sparkly teeth dimensions and ability to express pleasant invitation."

Reading that gives me the willies...how about you?

No emotions. Cold. Calculating. He doesn't even know that he lost. He is unaware that he has been rejected. He acts as if it is business as usual while the entire Democratic Party is wishing for a moving van out in front of the White House.

In my coaching career I lost a lot of games. I know how it feels. I know how it makes you react. He has destroyed his party. His friends are running for cover. But he acts as if he has just won.

Sociopaths are dangerous. Some famous sociopaths in recent history include Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gazy.

You laugh at me. You ridicule what I say because I compare him to serial killers. Go ahead. Laugh. He displays all of the characteristics of the above mentioned goons. They were charismatic and likeable.

SOURCE

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Removing the root cause of car attacks on Israelis

In the postmortems of the terrorist car attacks in Jerusalem, it is easy to see the writing on the wall.

Ibrahim al-Akary, the terrorist who on Wednesday ran over crowds of people waiting to cross the street and catch the Jerusalem Light Rail, was the brother of one of the terrorist murderers freed in exchange for IDF hostage Gilad Schalit. He had placed the photograph on his Facebook page of Moataz Hejazi, the terrorist killed by police after shooting Yehuda Glick outside the Begin Heritage Center last Wednesday.

A few days before Abdur Rahman Slodi got into his car and mowed down three-month-old Chaya Zissel Braun and a dozen other pedestrians two weeks ago, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas exhorted the Palestinians to prevent Jews from visiting the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, by all means possible.

The question is, what was the trigger and how was it pulled?

Today the main factor unifying al-Qaida and Islamic State and their sister groups and followers in the region and worldwide is ideology. They all share the same hatred of the West, of all religions other than Islam and of all competing forms of Islam. They all seek the establishment of a global caliphate that will rule the world under the banner of Islam.

As Pace notes, they see themselves as soldiers in a long-term struggle. Their goal is not necessarily to conquer their target populations. Rather they seek to make life impossible for target societies. Mass chaos sowed by constant, low intensity, near-scatter-shot attacks can over time be sufficient to break the will of a targeted society or military organization to fight them.

Ideology is not something that people pick up or discard quickly or easily. For a person to be attracted to the jihadist cause he has to undergo indoctrination over a significant period of time. You cannot incite a person to strike if he hasn’t already been indoctrinated in a manner that makes him amenable to your incendiary call to action.

And this brings us back to the Palestinians and the trigger for the attacks conducted by independent or semi-independent terrorist operatives.

With the exception of Pakistani students in madrassas, few societies have undergone the mass indoctrination that the Palestinians have undergone over the past 20 years of Palestinian Authority rule. From the cradle to the grave, and most significantly in the school system, Palestinians are indoctrinated to hate Jews and seek the violent destruction of Israel. They are told that it is an Islamic duty to fight Jews and destroy Israel. This is as true in regular PA schools as it is in schools run by the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA).

We are experiencing today in Jerusalem a decentralized terrorist campaign rooted in the 20-year indoctrination of the Palestinians.

Yes, Hamas and Fatah still operate terrorist cells and units that are members of terrorist hierarchies. But at the same time, they have used a model similar to al-Qaida’s in developing semi-independent and wholly independent networks of operatives and operational cells. These independent cells are highly motivated and are willing to wait until they receive generalized signals from their leadership to strike.

So it was for instance in June with the kidnapping and murder of the three teenagers in Gush Etzion. A few weeks before the kidnapping took place, from his home in Qatar, Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal remarked that Hamas needed more hostages to trade for jailed terrorists.

The terrorists in Hebron were motivated to strike. With the financial assistance of Saleh al-Arouri, the Hamas ideologue and operational commander in Turkey, they were able to purchase what they needed for the kidnapping. And when Mashaal said the time had come to kidnap Israelis, the countdown to the kidnap and murder of Naftali Fraenkel, Gil-Ad Shaer and Eyal Yifrah began.

The cell was isolated and tiny. Mashaal’s order was indirect.
In the case of the violence in Jerusalem, indoctrination in UNRWA schools in places like Shuafat refugee camp where Akary lived, not to mention throughout Judea, Samaria and Gaza, has raised generations of Arabs who hate Israel and Jews.

Owing to this indoctrination, when presented with mass incitement by preachers in the mosques, and most importantly by the official Palestinian Authority media, these calls for violence are immediately embraced on a massive scale. Indeed, the comfort level that the Arabs of Jerusalem feel today in supporting terrorism may well be unprecedented.

In dealing with this burgeoning, decentralized terrorist campaign, aside from taking action to protect bus stops with various barricades, Israel needs to go after the triggers.  It needs to break up the indoctrination system.  And it needs to destroy the Palestinian leadership’s ability to communicate their incendiary messages.

Since UNRWA schools operating in Jerusalem engage in anti-Semitic indoctrination, Jerusalem municipal authorities must give them the choice of using Israeli textbooks or shutting down. If Israel wishes to assert its sovereignty, UNRWA schools would be a good place to start. Beyond that, preachers in mosques who incite murder and call for the destruction of Israel should be arrested.
As for the PA’s communications networks, all of the radio and television signals operating in the PA come from the Israeli electromagnetic spectrum. It is time to shut them down.

As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated on Wednesday, Abbas is directly inciting the murderous attacks on Jerusalem through the PA media organs. The way to protect Jerusalem is to remove him and his Hamas partners from the airwaves.

In the long term, it is imperative that Israel provide incentives to both the Jerusalem Arabs and the Palestinians to integrate peacefully with Israeli society. But before the government can seriously engage in this task, it needs to destroy the triggers of this terrorist onslaught.

It is not enough to complain about Palestinian indoctrination and incitement. It is time for Israel to end them.

SOURCE

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Why Obama Hates Netanyahu

The writer below is too polite to mention it but I think a major reason why Obama hates Netanyahu is that Netanyahu is a real man -- while Obama has never been anything but a parasite

Obama's foreign policy was supposed to reboot America's relationship with the rest of the world. Old allies would become people we occasionally talked to. Old enemies would become new allies. Goodbye Queen, hello Vladimir. Trade the Anglosphere for Latin America's Marxist dictatorships. Replace allied governments in the Middle East with Islamists and call it a day for the Caliphate.

Very little of that went according to plan.

Obama is still stuck with Europe. The Middle East and Latin American leftists still hate America. The Arab Spring imploded. Japan, South Korea and India have conservative governments.

And then there's Israel. The original plan was to sideline Israel by focusing on the Muslim world. Instead of directly hammering Israel, the administration would transform the region around it. The American-Israeli relationship would implode not through conflict, but because the Muslim Brotherhood countries would take its place.

That didn't work out too well. Instead of gracefully pivoting away, Obama loudly snubbed Netanyahu. A photo of him poking his finger in Netanyahu's chest captured the atmosphere. Netanyahu delivered a speech that Congress cheered. And Obama came to see him as a domestic political opponent.

The torrent of anti-Israel leaks from the administration is a treatment usually reserved for political opponents. The snide remarks by White House spokesmen and the anonymous personal attacks on Netanyahu in the media echo domestic hate campaigns out of the White House like Operation Rushbo.

Netanyahu wasn't just the leader of a country that the left hated. He had become an honorary Republican.

When Obama met with him, Netanyahu firmly but politely challenged him on policy. He has kept on doing so ever since, including during his most recent visit. At a time when most leaders had gotten the message about shunning Romney, Netanyahu was happy to give him a favorable reception. Netanyahu clearly wanted Romney to win and Obama clearly wished he could pull a Clinton and replace Netanyahu. But Netanyahu's economic policies were working in exactly the same way that Obama's weren't.

The two men hate each other not only on a personal level, but also on a political level.

Netanyahu had successfully pushed through a modernization and privatization agenda that on this side of the ocean is associated with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper or Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. It's likely what Romney would have done which is one more reason the two men got along so well. Obama's visible loathing for Romney is of a piece with his hatred for Netanyahu.

He doesn't just hate them. He hates what they stand for. That's why Harper and Netanyahu get along so well. It's part of why Obama and Netanyahu get along so badly.

More HERE

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A new recipe

I rarely update my recipe blog these days but I have just put up a recipe for a diet curry

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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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Leftist rage

Rage is what Leftists do

What is best in life? Well, experiencing Tuesday night’s meltdown at Democratic Underground is certainly nowhere near the top of the list, but it was halfway entertaining — for a Tuesday night.

Below are the greatest hits from a night filled with intense rage, frustration, more rage, sadness and confusion among users at the interactive leftist website.

FLyellowdog: ”This whole election is leaving me with some very scary feelings. And I’m simply sick…physically sick…and emotionally drained.”

tinfoil hat YouTube screenshot Ephemeral Rift

sammy750: “The GOP is the biggest scandal of the century. Huge voter suppression and fixing the voting machines so they didn’t register right. The GOP is the biggest fraud, AG Holder will be busy undoing all the GOP fraud wins”

global1: “So The American Voters Have Rewarded The ReThugs For Shutting Down The Government….obstructing everything President Obama wanted to accomplish; sticking with the NRA; refusing to raise the minimum wage; refusing to deal with the immigration issue; piling more debt on students/student loans; voting to repeal ACA over 50 times when the American People finally had some relief on health insurance; and the list goes on and on. What is wrong with the American People. They believe the lies. They like to be lied to. They vote against their better interests.”

akbacchus_BC: “This is what I do not understand, how could the Rethugs get elected again? What is wrong with some Americans? Did Democrats not vote? Now the President cannot get anything done unless it is by Executive Order. I really wish the President could tell the rethugs to piss off and sign as much policies by Executive Order and piss them off more and they cannot impeach him, bunch a idiots. This President tried to work with the assholes but man, they did not want to work with him.”

hedgehog: “So, MSNBC is predicting the Republicans hold the House – How? Is it all due to gerrymandering?”

Beatle: “What the fuck is the matter with this nation? Things aren’t getting better, they’re getting worse, and as hard as we try and yell and cuss, no one is doing shit about all the criminality going on with the banks, politicians, and anyone that breaks the law as long as they’re filthy rich. I’m so fucking pissed off right now I can’t see straight. My blood pressure is sky high. I need to take it easy.”

KingCharlemagne: “I am deeply disappointed in my fellow Americans tonight. The suffering that will ensue was and is mostly entirely preventable. So I am disappointed that we shall have to endure this suffering for at least 2 years now because Americans could not see through the lies sold to them by this pack of charlatans, demagogues and scalawags. Yes, the Democrats largely ran away from President Obama after allowing the Republicans to frame the race as “Obama, Obama, Obama” and that bespeaks a party in trouble. But in the final analysis, voters chose to vote against their self-interest and against the interest of their compatriots for what? To ‘send a message’ to Dems? The reality is that things will not get better in the next two years. They will get worse and possibly much, much worse. And so I am disappointed that my fellow Americans chose a path that will cause suffering for their countrymen when I have to believe most of them did not seek to cause such suffering.”

BlueDemKev: “MSNBC has called Colorado for Gardner. WTF, Colorado? Are you that pissed off because Pres. Obama asked Congress for some token gun regulations after 20+ elementary school students were slaughtered just a week before Christmas?”

Ampersand Unicode: ”I’m actually scared — as in can’t-sleep-tonight-Halloween-came-five-days-late scared — of the GOP fascists taking over the Kennedy state. I voted for Coakley but am not optimistic because of all the endorsements Baker has gotten and the past history of electing GOP governors (Romney, Weld). I’m also looking to leave because MA just voted to keep the filthy casinos. Also, there is a gun store that just popped up out of nowhere down the street from my house on a main street. I no longer feel safe in my neighborhood or my state. Should I find a way to move to Vermont where Bernie and the sane people live? Or if I can’t afford to leave, should I just do myself in? I honestly am terrified that we’re living in the decline of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Reich.”

DebJ: “Tonight doesn’t make me wish I had quit smoking. An early death would be merciful compared to a long slow one with insufficient nutrition and no health care, which is what is coming up. I’m torn, can’t decide in which order to cry and vomit and get sick.”

2naSalit: “If anyone thinks we, as a nation, have any chance of saving ourselves from our wanton disregard for the biosphere which supports our existence, this election has proven we don’t really give a rat’s ass about our own sorry asses (or that of anyone else). Unless there is some major infrastructure destroying catastrophe that some of us survive before the biosphere is toast, our species is in for some big trouble. I suspect we are in for a lot more trouble than any of us have bargained for. With our distractions keeping us from looking around and seeing how destructive our way of life has become and that we could have each personally done something to change it… and we have no one but ourselves to blame. So brace yourselves for the gloom and doom of losing your habitat, like most other species have been facing for quite a while now, because we’re next on the menu.”

CK_John: “I think the President has to put resignation on the table and not give them the satisfaction of being impeached.”

whereisjustice: “If you’ve been to Asia and witnessed the slums and factory farms filled with impoverished workers, the US has just taken another step in that direction tonight. Sure, we’re not there yet. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t going to get there. Like global warming, the change isn’t noticeable when all you look at is your backyard thermometer. It’s coming. Sooner or later it is going to catch up with you and your children.”

upaloopa: “So now that we have nothing more to lose how about taking our party on a hard turn to the left. Let’s come up with every progressive idea we can and put together a liberal platform for 2016. Never compromise with the devil”

brett_jv: “I wish I could chalk it up to ‘All this election PROVES is that 50% the people who showed up to vote in 6 states … are mouth-breathing, brain-washed, Faux-Watching knuckle-draggers’, but the reality is, it goes MUCH deeper than that. Nearly 1/2 the country are this way. This is proof that lies and propaganda … work. This election shows that a great many people in this country … are actually either morons, or they are evil.”

zelduh: “Can we PLEASE let them secede? I think it is time to acknowledge that uniting the North and the South is a three hundred fifty year-old failed experiment. Next time any political leader in the South mentions that they want to secede, we should jump at the opportunity to untangle the country from the Red states. This country cannot have clean air, water and earth in many states, because Republicans. This country cannot have science in many states, because Republicans. This country cannot have rational, thoughtful, logical gun regulations, because Republicans. Women cannot exercise control over their own bodies in many states, because Republicans.”

SOURCE

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100% of Newly Elected GOP Senators Campaigned on Repealing Obamacare

Every new GOP senator who won in last night’s election campaigned on repealing Obamacare.

Senators Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), David Perdue (R-Ga.), Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), James Lankford (R-Okla.), Steve Daines (R-Mont.), Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), and Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) all ran on a platform of repealing Obamacare.

Gardner touted patient-centered care and a full repeal and replacement of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA), otherwise known as Obamacare.

“Small businesses and the American people cannot afford President Obama’s countless new regulations and tax increases. There is a right way and a wrong to improve our country’s healthcare system, and the President’s healthcare law just isn’t working. We need patient-centered care and lower costs. It is not too late to start over with a full repeal and replacement of the President’s healthcare law,” Gardner said in a statement.

Daines echoed those statements, also calling to repeal and replace Obamacare.

“Every American wants healthcare at a reasonable cost. No American wants a complicated plan full of false promises, special political favors, and costs we cannot afford. We should repeal Obamacare and implement an affordable health care system that actually improves the quality of health care,” he said.

Perdue noted on his campaign page that he was one of the millions who had their personal health care policy cancelled and would support free market solutions to replace Obamacare.

“Obamacare is an overreaching federal program that will actually reduce the quality of health care and increase costs. I am one of the millions of Americans that had my personal policy cancelled after being told I could keep it. To make matters worse, Obamacare is discouraging full-time job creation. The consequences of politicians passing a massive bill without reading it continue to emerge. We need to repeal Obamacare and replace it with more affordable free market solutions,” Perdue said on his campaign page.

Cotton signed the Club for Growth’s “Repeal-It!” pledge which states, “I hereby pledge to the people of my district/state upon my election to the U.S. House of Representatives/U.S. Senate to sponsor and support legislation to repeal any federal health care takeover passed in 2010, and replace it with real reforms that lower health care costs without growing government.”

Ernst and Tillis have said they would repeal Obamacare.....

Louisiana’s Senate GOP candidate, Bill Cassidy, has also voiced support for the repeal of Obamacare, listing 10 reasons why it should be replaced. As a practicing physician, Cassidy has said that the ACA would drive up costs, endangers access to care, destroys jobs and increases taxes just to name a few.

“By definition, a law that creates over 150 boards, bureaucracies, and commissions does not empower patients. Repealing this law is the first step to enacting real health care reform that lowers costs and expands access to quality health care for all Americans,” Cassidy said.

SOURCE

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How Democrats Lost the absurd 'War on Women'

Democrats with double-X chromosomes (and some with a Y one) were on a mission to end the supposed Republican “war on women.” Flanked by gender-driven generals nationwide vying for votes, and applauded by the likes of DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, these crusaders took to the campaign trail on a quest to bring fallopian freedom to the fairer sex everywhere.

But when their day of glory came, they went down to defeat, and went down hard.

Not once, not twice, but in state after state across the nation where voters recognized the hyperbolic rhetoric as smoke and mirrors distracting from the absence of real policy proposals, and where they tired of seeing sensible discussions discarded in favor of a campaign-trail version of the Vagina Monologues. Democrats may have treated women voters as ignorant dupes, but it didn’t work.

Take Sandra Fluke, for example, the poster child for unbridled sex, whose core political ideology centers on the demand for government-provided contraception to support her sexual escapades. She gained national fame by testifying to Congress of the need for contraception she and other young women couldn’t possibly pay for themselves (even for $9 a month at Walgreens). Fluke failed in her bid for California State Senate – losing by more than 21 points. War on women? Voters didn’t buy it.

Or consider progressive darling Wendy Davis, who famously filibustered in the Texas State House for the right to dismember unborn babies at the latest stages of pregnancy. Davis lost her bid for Texas governor by a whopping 21 points – the worst showing for Democrats in a Texas gubernatorial race since 1998. What’s more, Davis couldn’t even win among women, losing by nine points among all women and 25 points among married women. War on women? Don’t use that lie to mess with Texas.

Then there was Colorado Sen. Mark Udall, who might as well have been a woman given his campaign was so focused on the “war on women” that the press dubbed him “Mark Uterus.” Even the reliably liberal Denver Post grew tired of Udall’s single-issue campaign and instead endorsed his pro-life Republican opponent, Corey Gardner. Udall lost his Senate seat, winning only 52% of women voters among his typically Democrat-leaning constituency. War on women? Coloradans weren’t that high.

And that’s not to delve into the details of the “war on women” candidates endorsed by sex-magazine Cosmopolitan. Of the 12 candidates backed by Cosmo (none of whom, incidentally, were Republican), only two won. Aside from Fluke and Davis, Tuesday’s losers included Staci Appel (Iowa), Mary Burke (Wisconsin), Alison Lundergan Grimes (Kentucky), Michelle Nunn (Georgia), Amanda Renteria (California), and Rep. Carol Shea-Porter (New Hampshire).

Might these losses actually suggest the war on women is real? Could these women’s gender have sunk them?

Not so fast. Women actually did win on Election Night – and win big. But many were women whose political aims extended beyond abortion and contraceptives to issues women – and men – actually care about: the economy, national security, federal spending and out-of-control debt. Rather than insulting women by insinuating their vote is based purely on particular feminine needs, the conservative women who ran and won actually believe females are capable of rising above their hormonal cycles to critically evaluate the issues facing our nation.

Take Joni Ernst, for example. Forget an imaginary “war on women.” This combat veteran actually fought in a real war – Iraq. Now, she’s poised to become the first female senator from Iowa and the first female veteran in the Senate. War on women? Ernst was too busy vowing to make Washington’s big spenders squeal to claim imaginary oppression.

Or take conservative Mia Love of Utah, who made history by becoming the first black Republican woman elected to the U.S. House. War on women? Only if you look at how women have suffered under Obama’s failed policies.

Then there’s Elise Stefanik of New York, who at age 30 just became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. War on women? As an unashamed pro-life advocate, Stefanik was automatically disqualified from joining the ranks of the war’s self-declared victims.

Speaking of abortion, the “war on women” mantra also failed on the ballot initiative level. Voters in Tennessee, for example, voted to amend the state’s constitution to clarify that it does not require taxpayer funding for or guarantee any right to abortion. War on women? Only if you count the millions of unborn women who have been slaughtered in the name of “choice.”

As political analyst Charles Krauthammer so accurately noted, “I think this is the end of the ‘War on Women,’ and the Democrats have lost it.”

Here’s the bottom line: Burdened by this administration’s policy disasters and absent any real plans to remedy the mess, Democrats sought to divert attention from their stunning failures by campaigning on a phony “war on women.” But women didn’t buy it. Instead, it backfired, and backfired big.

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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GOP does well at State level



After a day of double-checking partisan composition numbers in the more than 6,000 legislative races this year, the extent of Republican success in legislative and governor’s elections is mostly clear. Suffice it to say, it was a banner election for the GOP.

There are two pieces still undecided. Control of the Colorado House remains up in the air pending tallies in several very close races. The Alaska governor is still undecided and will not be settled until absentee ballots are collected and tabulated. And ,of course, all of the results are preliminary pending certification and recounts. It does appear, though, that all is settled at the state level except for the Colorado House and Alaska governor.

Republicans ran the table, taking the majority in 10 legislative chambers previously held by Democrats. Those chambers were:

Colorado Senate (conceivable that Dems could still hold on after recounts)

Maine Senate
Minnesota House
Nevada Assembly
Nevada Senate
New Hampshire House
New York Senate
New Mexico House
Washington Senate
West Virginia House.
The West Virginia Senate is currently tied at 17 D-17 R.

For governors, Republicans netted three after switching seats in Arkansas, Illinois, Maryland and Massachusetts. Democrat Tom Wolf won a governorship in Pennsylvania.

Factoring in all of those changes, here are the bottom line numbers (the Nebraska unicameral Legislature is nonpartisan):
Legislatures: 29 R, 11 D, 8 split and 1 undecided (CO)
Chambers: 67 R, 29 D, 1 tied and 1 undecided (CO House)
Governors: 33 R, 16 D and 1 undecided (AK)
State governments: 23 R, 7 D, 18 divided and 1 undecided (AK)

It appears that Republicans will have a net gain of between 350 and 375 seats and control over 4,100 of the nation’s 7,383 legislative seats. Republicans gained seats in every region of the country and in all but about a dozen legislative chambers that were up this year.

Remarkably, given the Republican wave that swept across the nation, Republicans emerged from the election controlling exactly the same number of state governments as they controlled before the election. Democrats lost many chambers and governors, but most of those states now have divided state government.

Alaska could still stay Republican if incumbent governor Sean Parnell pulls out a victory. He currently trails his challenger by more than 3,000 votes.

The sharp increase in divided state governments could lead to gridlock. Legislators and governors, however, are more likely to seek compromise especially when it involves the budget since all states but one must pass balanced budgets every year.

A Republican wave swept over the states, leaving Democrats at their lowest point in state legislatures in nearly a century.

Everything went in the direction of the GOP as Republicans seized new majorities in the West Virginia House, Nevada Assembly and Senate, New Hampshire House, Minnesota House and New York Senate, The West Virginia Senate is now tied. All results are unofficial pending recounts.

Control of several legislative chambers was still up in the air early Wednesday as counting continued in several tight races that will determine control of the Colorado Senate, New Mexico House and Maine Senate.

The lone bright spot for Democrats was holding majorities in the Iowa Senate and Kentucky House.

The overall number of divided state governments will increase with changes in governor in places such as Massachussets, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Maryland along with the legislatures in West Virginia, Minnesota and New York.

The Vermont legislature will have to choose the state's governor because incumbent Democrat Peter Shumlin did not pass the 50 percent threshold. The Democratic General Assembly will almost certainly install Shumlin as governor.

Fun facts:

Ted Kennedy Jr., son of the late U.S. senator and a nephew of President John F. Kennedy, was elected to the Connecticut Senate on his first try for policial office. Democrats held onto their majority despite a furious push from Republicans.

Teenager Saira Blair was part of the Republican surge in West Virginia, so she will become the nation’s youngest legislator at the age of 18 when she takes her oath of office.

Update 10:21 a.m. ET: Republicans pad their wins by taking control of Washington Senate, Colorado Senate and New Mexico House. State legislative chambers now stand at 66 Republican, 28 Democrat,  one tie and two undecided.

SOURCE

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The Most Important  Gains Might Be GOP Governor Wins

Gov. Scott Walker, a likely 2016 presidential contender, is arguably the most admired Republican governor among party members of all stripes for his exemplary governing of a blue state while simultaneously successfully fighting off multiple assaults by the entire Wisconsin Democrat party.

After inheriting a massive deficit from his Democrat predecessor, Walker now has the state nearly $1 billion in black. He cut taxes by more than $2 billion, spurring an economic revival that reduced unemployment from 7.7% to 5.5% and raised per capita income by 9%. Confidence in the state’s economy among employers skyrocketed.

Perhaps more than anything else though, he won the respect and admiration of decent Americans for his stalwart stand against the massive barrage of every dirty trick in the Democrat playbook, including false charges of campaign financing violations by Democrat district attorneys, all of which were summarily tossed out of court. Walker’s third win in four years only solidifies his 2016 presidential résumé.

Gov. Sam Brownback of Kansas likewise governed as a fiscal conservative, although his opponents were often those in his own party. He wants to reform Kansas' economy and winnow down its unfunded liabilities. His most controversial act involved cutting the state’s personal income tax by nearly half, one of the largest tax cuts in the state’s history. He also rejected the feds' money meant for setting up an exchange under ObamaCare. His efforts angered a number of “moderate” Republican lawmakers, and as payback, they stymied several of his other agenda items.

In fact, a number of “moderate Republicans” were so angry with Brownback that they formed a group named “Republicans for Davis,” his far-left Democrat challenger in yesterday’s election. The group grew to 104 members, 53 of whom are former legislators, including 37 who’ve long been out of office, but all are still politically active in the party. That 104 “Republicans” would do their best to replace a Republican with a far-left governor might indicate that Brownback lacks some negotiating skills, but it speaks volumes more about those Republicans.

Brownback’s win undermines the Leftmedia narrative of a repudiation of his conservative fiscal policies. In fact, a large percentage of conservatives and their allies see his work as a giant step in the right direction, and Kansas voters gave him a second term.

SOURCE

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Judge Rejects the 'Disparate Impact' Fraud

Attorney General hopeful Tom Perez’s race-based justice scheme surfers a major setback

On Monday, one of the Obama administration’s foremost racial arsonists was given his comeuppance by a federal judge. Labor Secretary Thomas Perez, who is on the American left’s short list for replacing U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, was informed by Judge Richard J. Leon that his effort to find housing discrimination where none existed amounted to “wishful thinking on steroids.”

Perez sought to apply the policy of “disparate impact” to housing. Judicial Watch explains this contemptible concept. “Under the theory of ‘disparate impact,’ a defendant can be held liable for discrimination for a race-neutral policy that statistically disadvantages a specific minority group even if that negative ‘impact’ was neither foreseen nor intended,” they write. “In such cases, defendants can be forced to pay for harm caused not by their own actions, but by economic and statistical realities, even if beyond their control.” (italics original)

Leon wasn’t buying it. He characterized the attempt to legitimize disparate impact as a vehicle to expand the possibility of filing discrimination cases as “hutzpah (sic) (bordering on desperation).” “This is yet another example of an administrative agency trying desperately to write into law that which Congress never intended to sanction,” he wrote, adding that the arguments made by Obama administration attorneys were “nothing less than an artful misinterpretation” of the law.

The law to which Leon referred is the Fair Housing Act, administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). In February 2013, HUD made disparate impact a policy tool, one the administration employed to build discriminatory cases against mortgage lending institutions that garnered them hundreds of millions of dollars.

In July of that year, Wells Fargo paid a $175 million settlement after the Department of Justice (DOJ) accused the bank of discriminating against thousands black and Hispanic borrowers – based on loan analyses made by the bank and its independent brokers from the years 2004 and 2009. Wells Fargo admitted no wrongdoing, claiming it was settling to avoid even costlier litigation expenses. That windfall was topped by a record-setting $335 million settlement made by Bank of America in 2011, following allegations of discrimination by Countrywide Lending, purchased by Bank of America in 2008. Once again the feds used disparate impact to allege that minority borrowers had received less favorable borrowing terms than whites.

Perez is an old hand at this shakedown racket. In 2011, the DOJ created the Fair Lending Unit staffed with more than 20 lawyers, economists and statisticians, determined to ferret out discriminatory lending practices at the more than 60 banks that were targeted at the time. The man in charge of that division was Special Counsel for Fair Lending Eric Halperin. Halperin ultimately answered to none other than Tom Perez, who headed the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.

That would be the same Tom Perez who compared bankers to KKK Klansmen, insisting the only difference between the two groups was that bankers discriminate “with a smile” and “fine print,” but were nonetheless “every bit as destructive as the cross burned in a neighborhood.”

That would also be the same Tom Perez who in 2010 railed against the housing meltdown “fueled in large part by risky and irresponsible lending practices that allowed too many Americans to get unsustainable or unaffordable home loans.” It was then he promised that once the Fair Housing Unit was up and running, it “will use every tool in our arsenal, including, but not limited to, disparate impact theory.”

Perez is determined to protect disparate impact theory from being adjudicated by the Supreme Court. On Nov. 7, 2011 the Court agreed to hear Magner v. Gallagher, a case about racial discrimination in housing. As the Weekly Standard reveals, a Supreme Court decision on the theory was utterly anathema to Perez, whose effort to make the case “go away” became his self-admitted “top priority.” The case was about several property owners who alleged that St. Paul, Minnesota’s ramped up enforcement of the city’s housing code for rental units reduced the availability of low-income rentals, creating a disparate impact affecting black Americans. The district court tossed the suit, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit reinstated it, complete with the concept of disparate impact. The city appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court, which was poised to decide for the first time whether disparate impact cases pursued under the auspices of the Fair Housing Act can be brought before the courts.

Perez, who has referred to disparate impact as the “lynchpin” of his civil rights agenda, didn’t want to take that chance. He managed to get the city to drop its case from the Supreme Court docket. Judicial Watch provided some of the sordid details, noting they had obtained documents “under the Minnesota Data Practices Act, showing that St. Paul City Attorney Sara Grewing arranged a meeting between the then-chief of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, current Secretary of Labor Tom Perez, and Mayor Chris Coleman a week before the city’s withdrawal from the case, captioned Magner v. Gallagher. Following Perez’s visit, the city withdrew its case and thanked DOJ and officials at HUD for their involvement.”

In June of 2013, the Supreme Court agreed to hear another case revolving around disparate impact. Township of Mount Holly v. Mount Holly Gardens Citizens concerned the town’s efforts to redevelop a blighted neighborhood. A group of renters filed suit alleging the move violated the FHA because the majority of the renters were non-white and they were unable to afford the new mid-priced, single-family dwellings. The district court dismissed the argument ruling all the renters were equally affected. The Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit reversed that ruling, basing their decision on disparate impact.

Once again Perez prevailed, getting Mt. Holly to drop the case, and once again preventing the Supreme Court from issuing a ruling on disparate impact. Judge Leon noticed. In a stunning rebuke of Perez himself, Leon accused the Labor Secretary of gaming the system, timing cases and arranging the aforementioned settlements he found “particularly troubling.”

It ought to trouble every American that the Obama administration remains determined to codify racial discrimination based on the idea that statistics can be a viable substitute for actual intent. To image how absurd this theory truly is, one need only apply it to the National Basketball Association where a “disproportionate” number of black American athletes, relative to the percentage of the nations’s overall population, earn a living.  Should white college basketball players who weren’t drafted by the NBA be able to file a lawsuit alleging discrimination, based on nothing more than that statistical discrepancy? Absent the necessity of proving intent to discriminate, the power of the government to file discrimination charges become virtually unlimited.

Leon noted there was nothing in the wording of the FHA or anything he read regarding Congress’s intent when it passed the FHA that supported HUD’s interpretation of the law. He further noted that complying with disparate impact theories would force various entities to compile information on a number of factors, including race, religion, gender, etc., that those entities are often banned from obtaining under state law.

Perez may be forced to work overtime yet again. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project. State officials have been sued by the Inclusive Communities Project, a Dallas-based group advocating integrated housing. The ICP alleges the state allocated a disproportionate number of federal low-income housing tax credits to minority neighborhoods, a practice that “makes dwellings unavailable in particular areas, thereby perpetuating residential segregation in the Dallas area,” the group said in court papers.

The Equal Credit Opportunity Act used to hammer Wells Fargo and Bank of America may also be affected by the ruling. Miami attorney Paul Hancock, who filed a brief backing the Lone Star state on behalf of business groups led by the American Bankers Association, illuminated the implications if the Court decides to leave the theory of disparate impact intact. “It really pushes more toward advancement of racial quotas as the only way to avoid legal claims,” he said in a phone interview.

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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