Thursday, May 2, 2013

Old Jarhead’s Political SitRep for May 2, 2013


Old Jarhead’s Political SitRep for May 2, 2013
Robert A. Hall

Spring hit Chicago Tuesday. Trees coming out, flowers in bloom, temps in the 80s, 3 shot dead, 16 wounded. Mostly black victims, I suspect, but Obama didn’t mention if any of them would have looked like his son, because they were mostly shot by black gangbangers. Traveling, but able to post a few items between meetings. ~Bob

Worth Viewing: Tribute to Vietnam Veterans
From students at the college of the Ozarks.

Worth Reading: Nine things you’ll learn from Pew’s poll of the world’s Muslims
http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/01/nine-things-youll-learn-from-pews-poll-of-the-worlds-muslims/#ixzz2S8mAvC9y
Excerpt: 1.) A majority of Muslims in several countries think adulterers and apostates should be put to death.

Interesting Chart: Sharia do like it
Excerpt: A new study reveals what Islam means in different countries. (The freedom to choose your faith, and leave one you no longer find to be true or speaking to your soul, is a fundamental one -- and more than 70 percent of Muslims in Pakistan, Jordan, Afghanistan, and Egypt believe it should be legal to kill you for leaving Islam. –Jim Geraghty)

Three arrested for allegedly helping suspect after Boston bombings
Excerpt: Two college friends of the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing were accused Wednesday of trying to cover up his involvement by removing evidence from his dorm room and a third was charged with lying to the FBI.

Six ways the GOP can make the Massachusetts Senate race competitive
Excerpt: The Republican establishment breathed a sigh of relief when Boston businessman Gabriel Gomez won Tuesday's GOP primary in the Massachusetts special Senate race, believing he represents the party's best chance at an unlikely pick-up in liberal Massachusetts. Gomez, a Hispanic, former Navy SEAL investment firm executive, has the type of outsider credibility and centrist leanings the GOP hopes will play well against 18-term Rep. Ed Markey, the Democratic nominee. 

Excerpt: The Securities and Exchange Commission has issued subpoenas to firms and individuals connected to the leak last month of a federal funding decision that appeared to cause a surge in stock trading of several major health companies.

Excerpt: How much do you think Medicare will pay a doctor or a nurse for keeping a patient out of the hospital? Answer: zero. That’s pretty amazing when you consider that Medicare’s hospitalization insurance (Part A) is spending about $250 billion every year. Yet it allocates not one thin dime for keeping-patients-out-of-the-hospital activities. If you go down the list of about 7,500 tasks that Medicare pays doctors to perform, you’ll discover that reducing hospitalization just isn’t there.

Excerpt: The Department of Agriculture announced a $4 million dollar, expanded-eligibility plan to increase food stamp access at farmers markets this week.

Obama housing nominee: Most white people won’t vote for black candidate, should be excluded from ‘democratic process’
http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/01/obama-housing-nominee-most-white-people-wont-vote-for-black-candidate-should-be-excluded-from-democratic-process/#ixzz2S8mvGe8y
Excerpt: President Obama’s pick to head the Federal Housing Finance Agency once said that a “majority of white voters” would never vote for a black candidate and that they should be excluded from “the democratic process.”

Botched ObamaCare rollout tops Democratic fears for 2014 election
Excerpt: Anxious Democrats fear a botched implementation of ObamaCare could dash their hopes of controlling the House and Senate for President Obama’s last two years in office. At his press conference Tuesday, Obama acknowledged “glitches and bumps” in the law’s rollout, but some congressional Democrats fear much worse.

Expanding Medicaid Didn’t Lead To Big Health Gains In Oregon, Study Finds
Excerpt: Although expanding Medicaid coverage to some low-income Oregon residents substantially improved their mental health and reduced financial strains on them, it didn’t significantly boost their physical health, according to a study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Four in 10 Americans Unaware ObamaCare Is Law of the Land
Excerpt: More than three years after the Affordable Care Act ("ObamaCare") was signed into law, Americans are still confused about what the bill does and whether or not it is even law. A new Kaiser Family Foundation public opinion poll finds that a large percentage of the lay public is unclear about the legal status of ObamaCare or whether Medicaid should be expanded.

Green Jobs Versus Real Jobs. By Kathleen Hartnett White
Excerpt: The federal environmental laws passed shortly before and after the first Earth Day played an important role in this record, but technologies and efficiencies created by the private market were the drivers. Americans are fortunate that prosperity has allowed absorption of the high cost of environmental controls. The level of environmental quality achieved in the U.S. remains a dream for declining and developing economies where jobs to secure basic sustenance remain the overarching priority.

How the Wheels Came Off for Fisker
Excerpt: One year ago, one of the highlights of any electric car aficionado's garage would have surely been the Fisker Karma, a $100,000 plug-in hybrid electric car with great aesthetic beauty. But for all its beauty, the car is riddled with software errors, design flaws and malfunctioning parts. Fisker, like many other companies that received U.S. loans for green-friendly initiatives, is on the brink of failure, says the Wall Street Journal. Many buyers of the high-priced vehicles have demanded refunds as stagnant gas prices have simultaneously reduced demand for electric cars. Fisker, based in Anaheim, California, recently missed a loan payment and has already dismissed most of its staff and hired bankruptcy lawyers. Only a last-minute rescue could save Fisker from failing like other automobile upstarts like DeLorean Motor Co. or Tucker Corp.

10 Lessons from Cyprus. By Desmond Lachman
Excerpt: By destroying Cyprus’s bank-centric business model and by imposing severe austerity on the country within a euro straitjacket, the International Monetary Fund–European Union bailout package for Cyprus is likely to lead to the literal collapse of the Cypriot economy over the next year and to Cyprus’s exit from the euro. Such a course of events will have important ramifications for the rest of the European Monetary Union. When the dust settles and future historians seek to draw lessons from Cyprus’s sorry experience in the euro, they will likely draw the following conclusions.

China Cyberspies Outwit U.S. Stealing Military Secrets. By Michael Riley and Ben Elgin 
Excerpt: Beginning at least as early as 2007, Chinese computer spies raided the databanks of almost every major U.S. defense contractor and made off with some of the country’s most closely guarded technological secrets, according to two former Pentagon officials who asked not to be named because damage assessments of the incidents remain classified.

Obama’s Lifeline to the Boston Bomber. By Matthew Vadum 
Excerpt: The Obama administration is reportedly negotiating a plea bargain that would spare the life of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and that could allow the FBI to continue interrogating the suspect about other terrorist plots.

Bloomberg’s Banana Republic. By Daniel Greenfield
Excerpt: Bicycles are one of the obsessions of Mayor Bloomberg and his transportation secretary Janette Sadik-Khan. Khan is the granddaughter of Imam Alimjan Idris, a Nazi collaborator and principle teacher at an SS school for Imams under Hitler’s Mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini. The bio of his son, Wall Street executive Orhan Sadik-Khan, frequently mentions the bombing of the family home in Dresden and surviving trying times after World War II. It neglects to mention that the times were only trying because their side was losing.

Hating the Flag. By Bruce Bawer 
Excerpt: Of course, once you’ve reached the point of having to discuss whether your country’s commemoration of its freedom and independence should be turned into a UN-style tribute to diversity and divided loyalties, the horse has already fled the barn. The point isn’t to ban or not to ban – it’s to shape a society in which immigrants, let alone their children, wouldn’t ever think of showing up with some other flag.

The Monotonous Middle East. By Victor Davis Hanson 
Excerpt: Yet insidiously, the Middle East is becoming irrelevant. The discovery of enormous new oil and gas reserves along with the use of new oil-recovery technology in North America and China is steadily curbing the demand for Middle Eastern oil. Soon, countries such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Iran are going to have less income and geostrategic clout. In both Iran and the Gulf, domestic demand is rising, while there is neither the technical know-how nor the water to master the new art of fracking to sustain exports.

NBA Player 'Comes Out' -- but Tolerance Cuts Both Ways. By Larry Elder
Excerpt: Tolerance cuts both ways. What happens to a player who says, "I think homosexuality is a sin," or, "Got no problem playing with or against him, but I don't approve of his lifestyle"? Or a player who asks: "What's all this business about 'bravery'? What Collins does behind closed doors is his business. Why do I need to know about it?"

The Myth of the ‘Homegrown Terrorist.’ By Michael Ledeen
Excerpt: The Myth of the Day is… that there are normal Americans who, on their own, and certainly without any input from foreign countries or terrorist groups, up and become terrorists. Such persons exist — from the Unabomber to those who have slaughtered innocents in our schools or movie theaters — but they are not the sorts that I’m talking about, the sorts the myth commonly refers to. The myth and the phrase are typically applied to actual or would-be killers who are motivated by strong ideological or religious beliefs.

Tweet from @davidfrum
As Syrian war reduces to Iran v. al Qaida, it gets harder to choose sides 

Confirmed: Black and Hispanic Families Lost Most Wealth Under Obama
Excerpt: Despite their overwhelming support for radical Barack Obama, blacks and Hispanics lost the greatest percentage of wealth during the Obama years.

Worth Reading: Is Thinking Obsolete? By Thomas Sowell
Excerpt: It is always amazing how many serious issues are not discussed seriously, but instead simply generate assertions and counter-assertions. On television talk shows, people on opposite sides often just try to shout each other down. There is a remarkable range of ways of seeming to argue without actually producing any coherent argument.

Tsarnaev family received $100G in benefits
Excerpt: The Tsarnaev family, including the suspected terrorists and their parents, benefited from more than $100,000 in taxpayer-funded assistance — a bonanza ranging from cash and food stamps to Section 8 housing from 2002 to 2012, the Herald has learned.

Russia Delivers New Al-Qaida Warning To U.S.
Excerpt: Russia delivered to the Obama administration a list of the names of al-Qaida members among the Syrian rebels, who are receiving arms shipments coordinated by the U.S., according to informed Middle Eastern security officials. The list, the officials added, demonstrates the U.S. is failing to vet the rebels being supported by the West for ties to al-Qaida and other jihad groups.

Obama's Borrowed More Per Household ($53,616) Than Median Household Earns ($50,502)
Excerpt: Under President Barack Obama, the federal government's debt has increased by an amount per household that exceeds the annual median household income.

Obama Protects Islam At All Costs
Excerpt: All over the world, Christianity is under attack. Muslim countries are murdering, torturing and incarcerating people for one reason, and one reason only, their Christian faith. Here in America our government sits on its collective hands and white washes or conveniently ignores the acts of violent Islamists that continue to plan to take more lives.

Jason Collins 'outs' himself, but fails to tell ex-fiancé he's gay
Excerpt: Basketball's Jason Collins made headlines recently by telling the world he's actually homosexual, but the one person he didn't notify was his long-time ex, as reported by the New York Daily News on April 30, 2013. The jilted Carolyn Moos claims that her former fiancé of eight years, Boston Celtics center Jason Collins, failed to notify her that he was homosexual, despite the fact that the two had been planning their nuptials for almost a decade. (Uhhh....the eight year waiting period should have been a clue. MasterGuns)

Dick Durbin at May Day Immigration Rally: Communists? What Communists?
Excerpt: On Wednesday, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) joined nearly two thousand trade unionists, open communists, socialists, anarchists and illegal aliens at Chicago's May Day march and rally.

1 comment:

  1. Regarding the Chinese spies purportedly beating us at every turn - the same was said of the Soviets from the end of WWII until the USSR collapsed. Unhappily, I think the Chinese might be smarter than their one time vassals....

    ReplyDelete