Thursday, April 24, 2014

More political news

Short health update: Thursday morning, April 24, I had blood work, a chest x-ray and a clinic appointment. The doctor concluded that the infection is cleared up and took me off the home IV antibiotics (yea!). There is a tiny spot in the lung that may be the last vestiges of it, which should clear up, but they will watch in case it is something else, probably with another x-ray and CT scan in two weeks. Meanwhile, my oxygen is staying in the safe range running only 2 lpm walking around, which is a great improvement. The back pain from muscle spasms when I cough is down to "seriously annoying but tolerable" from the "confess to war crimes" level it was over the weekend, but I'm babying it. Breathing still labored with activity, but not due to lack of O2. Surgical bronchoscopy Monday, April 28, to debride more slough and to remove the stent. How it goes after that will be an indication of my chances. So I continue to march. ~Bob

Ukraine crisis: Russia 'to respond if its interests' attacked
Excerpt: Russia will respond if its interests in Ukraine are attacked, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said, drawing a parallel with the 2008 Georgian war. Speaking to Russian state TV channel RT, Mr Lavrov also accused the US of "running the show" in Ukraine. And in a statement, Russia's foreign ministry repeated its call for Ukraine to withdraw military units from the country's east. (So, Barack, how's that "reset" of foreign policy with Russia going? Better get the 1980s on the phone, see if you can borrow that foreign policy you sneered at in 2012. ~Bob)

The High Cost of Liberalism: Part II. By Thomas Sowell 
Excerpt: Liberals can be disarming. In fact, they are for disarming anybody who can be disarmed, whether domestically or internationally. Unfortunately, the people who are the easiest to disarm are the ones who are the most peaceful -- and disarming them makes them vulnerable to those who are the least peaceful. We are currently getting a painful demonstration of that in Ukraine

U.S. sends 600 troops to Poland, Baltics in message to Russia over Ukraine
Excerpt: In a move to reassure Russia’s neighbors, the United States will send some 600 paratroopers to Poland and the Baltics starting tomorrow as part of an open-ended military commitment prompted by Moscow’s actions in Ukraine. (The masters of euphuisms in the Obama administration changed it from "The War on Terror" to "Overseas Contingency Operations." Now, maybe it should be, "Speed Bump Bluff Operations." How'd you like to be one of 600 troopers in the path of a Russian Guards Division? ~Bob)

Worth Reading: Ignoring Single-Parent Families in the Inequality Debate
Excerpt: The rise of single-parent families over the last 50 years is the strongest correlate of inequality in the United States, yet few politicians and researchers will even address the issue when they talk about inequality, say Robert Maranto, a professor in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and researcher Michael Crouch. The United States has seen a rapid decline in the traditional two-parent family: In 1960, more than 76 percent of African-Americans and almost 97 percent of whites were born to married couples. Today, only 30 percent of black children are born to married couples. For white children, that figure is 70 percent. Hispanics had an out-of-wedlock birthrate of more than 50 percent in 2006. With out-of-wedlock births and high divorce rates, one quarter of American children live in single-parent homes. This is twice the rate in Europe. ...Just 2 percent of children raised in two-parent families experience poverty long-term, while more than 20 percent of children in single-parent families live in long-term poverty. Penn State sociologist Molly Martin estimated in 2006 that 41 percent of economic inequality generated between 1976 and 2000 was the result of changed family structure. According to researchers at the Brookings Institution, the U.S. poverty rate would be a full 25 percent lower today if the U.S. family structure resembled that of 1970.

The High Cost of Liberalism: Part III. By Thomas Sowell 
Excerpt: Income inequality has long been one of the liberals' favorite issues. So there is nothing surprising about its being pushed hard this election year. If nothing else, it is a much-needed distraction from the disasters of ObamaCare and the various IRS, Benghazi and other Obama administration scandals. Like so many other favorite liberal issues, income inequality is seldom discussed in terms of the actual consequences of liberal policies. When you turn from eloquent rhetoric to hard facts, the hardest of those facts is that income inequality has actually increased during five years of Barack Obama's leftist policies.

Cliven Bundy Under Fire for ‘Negro’ Comments, Wondering Whether Blacks Would Be ‘Better Off as Slaves, Picking Cotton’
Excerpt: “And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he continued. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

Authorities investigate alleged racial threat in Stoughton
Excerpt: The family of the 18-year-old man told police a letter sent to their home in Stoughton included a photo showing two men hanging from a tree, with his picture superimposed onto one of the men, according to a posting on the newspaper's website.

Global Warming’s Upside-Down Narrative. By Bjørn Lomborg
Excerpt: With the completion of the latest report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we can now see that this narrative is mostly wrong. The first installment of the IPCC report showed that there is indeed a climate problem – emissions of greenhouse gases, especially CO₂, lead to higher temperatures, which will eventually become a net problem for the world. This result was highly publicized. But the report also showed that global warming has dramatically slowed or entirely stopped in the last decade and a half. Almost all climate models are running far too hot, meaning that the real challenge of global warming has been exaggerated. Germany and other governments called for the reference to the slowdown to be deleted.

Progressives Fight to Keep Poor Kids Trapped in Failing Schools. With NYC's per pupil spending at $20,000, why can't public schools afford pens? By Jim Epstein 
Excerpt: But as Annaly Lopez' story demonstrates, charters are chipping away at the two-tiered system that already exists by providing parents a way around the greatest injustice of urban education, which is that the quality of a child's school is often determined by where her parents can afford to live. Unlike traditional public schools, charters don't discriminate by address, so they provide opportunities for students like Renee to have the same high quality education as rich kids. (Because it's not about the kids. It's about power and money which comes from votes, and the teachers' unions supply votes to fight charters in their own economic interests, to hell with the kids. ~Bob)

Worth Reading: Veteran’s Discrimination. By Larry Provost
Excerpt: A recent New York Times editorial, authored by an academic student, says that Vietnam Veterans are behind white supremacist groups, ostensibly due to their military training. Such an editorial was a poorly disguised, and poorly researched, attempt at hiding a political agenda behind academia. The author focused on a few bad Veterans in the op-ed, but missed the overall picture of the millions of honorable Vietnam Veterans. Vietnam Veterans are honorable heroes and they served us well. They fought and won a war that the politicians lost. 

Excerpt: Never let it be said that pity is not profitable. No where is this more evident than with the ultra-liberal Gannett Company. For those of you whom the name Gannett doesn't ring a bell, this is the media giant that produced America's first "cartoon newspaper", USA TODAY. Last year Gannett made $2.2 billion dollars. They own some 600 newspapers and print publications across the nation as well as dozens of TV stations. And they have done more for liberal socialism than any politician could ever hope to do. You see, Gannett deals in pity. They use the monstrous power of their media foot print to publish a very narrow swath of news coverage that champions big government power and the great crusading for "victimhood". And when the facts get in the way, they just print the myth, as long as it complies with their editorial position.

Worth Reading: When Government Looks More Like Foe than Friend. By Ben S. Carson
And if you disagree with Dr. Carson, you're a racist! ~Bob)Excerpt: It is quite interesting to see, though, that those same bureaucrats refuse to enforce some of our federal border-protection laws and other domestic policies with which they disagree. Perhaps Reid's time could be better spent explaining why it is acceptable for the federal government to pick and choose which laws it wishes to enforce. The senator readily referred to the Bundys and their supporters as "domestic terrorists," but the current administration is reticent about applying the same term to Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who admitted slaughtering more than a dozen people in 2009 at Fort Hood in Texas. What does this tell us about our government and its perceptions and alignments?

Political Competition, Not Racism, Changes Voter Alignments. By Michael Barone
Excerpt: You can find a more nuanced and thoughtful analysis in Jonathan Chait's recent New York magazine article, "The Color of His Presidency." Chait, a liberal, starts off by noting that the post-racial America that Obama seemed to promise in his 2004 national convention speech and his 2008 campaign has not come into being. On the contrary, "Race, always the deepest and most volatile fault line in American history," he writes, "has now become the primal grievance in our politics, the source of a narrative of persecution each side uses to make sense of the world." Many liberals see racism in every criticism of the Obama presidency, even though, as Chait points out, Bill Clinton met with similar and in some cases more strident opposition.

Worth Reading from the Left: The Color of His Presidency. By Jonathon Chait
Excerpt: A different, unexpected racial argument has taken shape. Race, always the deepest and most volatile fault line in American history, has now become the primal grievance in our politics, the source of a narrative of persecution each side uses to make sense of the world. Liberals dwell in a world of paranoia of a white racism that has seeped out of American history in the Obama years and lurks everywhere, mostly undetectable. Conservatives dwell in a paranoia of their own, in which racism is used as a cudgel to delegitimize their core beliefs. And the horrible thing is that both of these forms of paranoia are right. . (It's hard to get the full article, but what you can read is interesting. ~Bob)

Worth Reading: No One Cares How Many Predictions Earth Day Founders Got Wrong. By Chriss W. Street
Excerpt: Over the last 44 years Earth Day has often been hijacked by political opportunists and faux scientists, but it is great fun to look back and see just how wrong the original Earth Day environmental experts were about the science and the future: “Air pollution… is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” Kenneth Watt, Ecologist. “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” Sen. Gaylord Nelson. ... “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” George Wald, Harvard Biologist. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” Paul Ehrlich. ... “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.” Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day.

Hillary Clinton is Worthless - Literally
Excerpt: I get a lot of email from friends (and enemies) of Eagle Rising, and sometimes I get junk mail too. The other day one of our great readers sent this awesome joke that should make you and other voters think. It centers on the wife of Green Bay Packers great Brett Favre. In a news conference Deanna Favre announced she will be the starting QB for the Packers next season. Deanna asserts that she is qualified to be the starting QB because she has spent the past 16 years married to Brett while he played QB for the Packers. I challenge you to name a single accomplishment from Hillary Clinton that isn’t personal in nature. From her years as Secretary of State? From her years as a Senator from New York? Even her time as a simple lawyer… remember why she got fired from the Watergate investigation? Her employer, Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat said, “Because she was a liar. She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.

Worth Watching: This ad from GOP Senate candidate Monica Wehby will make you cry
Excerpt: Monica Wehby, a pediatric neurosurgeon running for the U.S. Senate in Oregon, has released a new ad that will make you shed a tear. The ad, "Trust," features Lexi Liebelt, a woman who, when she was 21-weeks pregnant, was told by her doctor that her pregnancy needed to be aborted due to problems with the spinal cord. “The world stopped,” Liebelt says over sad music.

Shale Boom Sends U.S. Crude Supply to Highest Since 1930s
Excerpt: The U.S. is stockpiling the most crude in more than eight decades, thanks to the shale boom. Inventories rose 3.52 million barrels last week to 397.7 million barrels, the highest level since 1931, according to the Energy Information Administration. U.S. production has surged as the combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, unlocked supplies trapped in shale formations in the central U.S., including the Bakken in North Dakota and the Eagle Ford in Texas

Happy St. George's Day! By Mark Steyn
http://www.steynonline.com/1180/happy-st-george-day
Excerpt: April 23rd is England's unofficial national holiday - unofficial because, under Blairite devolution, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and selected Muslim neighborhoods of Greater London, Yorkshire and the Midlands are all nations, but English nationalism is a dark demon that must never be loosed upon the land. At the turn of the century, Tony Blair's ministry was gung-ho for Celtic nationalism and parliaments in Edinburgh, Belfast and Cardiff, but for England all the government was prepared to offer was a subdivision into artificial regions that commanded no loyalty and could therefore be safely entrusted with "regional assemblies". Even this was abandoned, and in the years after 9/11 English nationalism was further complicated by the fact that, unlike St Andrew, St Patrick and St David, the patron saint of England had a starring role in the new clash of civilizations: St George's was the crusader cross, the banner England's soldiers took across a continent to reclaim Jerusalem for Christendom.

The Land Grabbing Feds
Excerpt: The BLM is apparently considering whether or not to federalize some 90,000 acres of land on the Texas side of the Red River separating Texas andOklahoma. The BLM says that in 1986, the feds successfully grabbed some 140 acres of land in that area and therefore has the precedent to grab 90,000 more acres. ...The federal government already controls broad swaths of land in most Western states, including nearly 85 percent of Nevada, 70 percent of Alaska, and 60 percent of Utah.

America’s power grid at the limit: The road to electrical blackouts
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2014/04/23/americas-power-grid-at-the-limit-the-road-to-electrical-blackouts/#ixzz2zkQdLs00
Americans take electricity for granted. It powers our lights, our computers, our offices, and our industries. But misguided environmental policies are eroding the reliability of our power system.... Environmental policies established by Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are moving us toward electrical grid failure.

A group called the Citizens Commission on Benghazi has come out with a damning report on events and decisions that led up to the deadly attack in Benghazi, Libya that left four Americans dead..... The commission also says that Islamists attacked the US facility in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, not intending to kill US Ambassador Christopher Steven, but to kidnap him. The attackers intended to grab him and use him to bargain for the release of “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdul Rahman, the mastermind of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center in New York. (What I said all along. Muslim Brotherhood had visas and lunch at White House petitioning for release of Blind Sheik in months prior to attempt. Obviously with blessing of all agencies and all in power. They did not anticipate radical Islam's hatred of gays, which press would prefer to downplay. --Barb)

Democrat: Iraq War Vet Not Up For ‘Real Job’
Excerpt: A Democratic candidate for governor of Maryland is defending comments he made Monday in which he suggested his opponent, an Iraq war veteran, was not up to the task of a “real job.”

Torquemada Invades America
Excerpt: Torquemada has landed in America. This nation of free and open inquiry has been seized by totalitarians who refuse to entertain other points of view. The debate about global warming is over say adherents of this position. When, if ever, has the debate about any scientific issue been over?

Good News: IRS Pays $1 Million in Bonuses to Employees Who Owe Back Taxes. By Guy Benson
Excerpt: The Internal Revenue Service has paid more than $2.8 million in bonuses to employees with recent disciplinary problems, including $1 million to workers who owed back taxes, a government investigator said Tuesday. (Guess they weren't Tea Party members. ~Bob)
           
Group finds duplicate voters around Virginia
Excerpt: A crosscheck of voter rolls in Virginia and Maryland turned up 44,000 people registered in both states, a vote-integrity group reported Wednesday. And that’s just the beginning. “The Virginia Voters Alliance is investigating how to identify voters who are registered and vote in Virginia but live in the states that surround us,” Alliance President Reagan George told the State Board of Elections.

The Adolescent President. By George Will 
Excerpt: Recently, Barack Obama – a Demosthenes determined to elevate our politics from coarseness to elegance; a Pericles sent to ameliorate our rhetorical impoverishment – spoke at the University of Michigan. He came to that very friendly venue – in 2012, he received 67 percent of the vote in Ann Arbor's county – after visiting a local sandwich shop, where a muse must have whispered in the presidential ear. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., had recently released his budget, so Obama expressed his disapproval by calling it, for the benefit of his academic audience, a “meanwich” and a “stink burger.” Try to imagine Franklin Roosevelt or Dwight Eisenhower or John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan talking like that. It is unimaginable that those grown-ups would resort to japes that fourth-graders would not consider sufficiently clever for use on a playground.

Moving Up and Down the Income Ladder
Excerpt: Their findings challenge the notion that class structure in the United States is rigid and unchanging: Twelve percent of the U.S. population will move into the top 1 percent of the income distribution for at least one year. Thirty-nine percent of Americans will spend at least one year in the top 5 percent, 56 percent of Americans in the top 10 percent, and 73 percent of Americans will spend at least one year in the top 20 percent of the income distribution.
Only 0.6 percent of the U.S. population will spend 10 consecutive years in the top 1 percent of the income distribution. In short, Rank and Hirschl found that the public perception of a "static" 1 percent -- and a static 99 percent -- is at odds with reality. And, they found that income movement goes both ways -- not only will most Americans experience at least one year of affluence, but 54 percent of Americans will also experience poverty or near poverty at least once. Other studies confirm these results. An IRS study of the top 400 American taxpayers between 1992 and 2009 found that only 2 percent of those on the list were on it for at least 10 years.

Important: Probe: DHS watchdog cozy with officials, altered reports as he sought top job. By Carol D. Leonnig
Show me our shocked face. ~Bob. Excerpt: The top watchdog for the Department of Homeland Security altered and delayed investigations at the request of senior administration officials, compromising his independent role as an inspector general, according to a new report from a Senate oversight panel. Charles K. Edwards, who served as acting DHS inspector general from 2011 through 2013, routinely shared drinks and dinner with department leaders and gave them inside information about the timing and findings of investigations, according to the report from an oversight panel of the Homeland Security and Government Operations Committee. A year-long bipartisan investigation by the panel also found that Edwards improperly relied on the advice of top political advisers to then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and acquiesced to their suggestions about the wording and timing of three separate reports.

Excerpt: I just received a forwarded email from an old marine who was mourning the death of one of his old comrades from the Army of The Republic of Vietnam. I too mourned the death because I know of the heartbreak of millions of ARVN troops who lived lives of quiet desperation after the North Vietnamese Communists took over that country in 1975. My Vietnamese brother-in-law fought for his country, right along side we Americans. When the war was declared over, and we all came home, the war for our Vietnamese allies would continue. My brother-in-law was stripped of his South Vietnamese uniform and shipped off to a Vietnamese "re-education camp". There he was tortured, fed slop that a hog wouldn't eat, beaten repeatedly, and when they had defeated his spirit completely, they sent him home to die. And this he did...he died painfully and at a painfully young age. His crime; fighting for his country.

Obamacare News

"The most transparent administration in history" hides the numbers. Again. You can subscribe to this blog at ncpa.org for free. ~Bob Excerpt: The new announcement that the Census Bureau is completely changing its Current Population Survey (CPS) questions about health insurance coverage (see previous post here) is devastating for those of us who do health research. We have all known for years — decades — that the CPS count of the insured isn’t especially accurate. The questions it asks are about full-year coverage but people tend to answer based on their current status. It chronically under-reports Medicaid enrollment — the actual head count from Medicaid programs is always higher than indicated in the survey. The same is probably true for employment-based coverage. It has often been criticized for being weak on foreign language questions. Massachusetts, for example, has a significant population of people who speak Portuguese and that state thought the CPS failed to capture those people. ... But despite all this, the CPS numbers were very useful. It is an enormous survey of 78,000 households, and since it also asks about employment and income, it is possible to look at very detailed demographic categories. The error rate appears to occur throughout the data, it is not concentrated in any one demographic group, so it is not a factor in comparing sub-groups.

Worth Reading: What Sweden Teaches Us About ObamaCare
Excerpt: The United States can look to Sweden for a preview of America's health care future, says Per Bylund, a professor at the Hankamer School of Business at Baylor University.
Sweden is routinely praised as an example of a successful socialist country, but its health care industry suggests something else entirely. While Sweden's universal health care system is consistently ranked as one of the best quality-wise, the country has an access problem. Swedish patients face incredibly long wait times simply to get an appointment with a doctor, even having to wait for emergency care. Certain procedures have multiyear wait times, and treatment is sometimes denied altogether. As of 2013, Sweden's National Board of Health and Welfare reported that the average wait time from initial referral to start of treatment for "intermediary and high risk" prostate cancer was an incredible 220 days. One 80-year-old Swedish woman recently had to wait four hours before an ambulance arrived. And no ambulance at all came to a one-month-old infant who suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. This rationing is due to the gap between the number of people seeking care and the capabilities of health care providers -- and the United States can expect to see the same results thanks to ObamaCare.

Comment on Good for Thee but not for me
A GOP Senator filed the lawsuit in January against U.S. Office of Personnel Management Director Katherine Archuleta and her department over a rule allowing members of Congress and their staff members to receive subsidies for their health care coverage if they chose plans through Obamcare exchanges. This is a matter that was debated in Congress, and turned down. So an appointed member of Mr. Obama's Administration is going to just do what they feel like doing anyhow, which is to insulate people in Congress and their staffs from feeling the full effects of ObamaCare costs. This is a case of the privileged not having to live up to the rules they have inflicted on everyone else in the country. The rules on subsidies in the original ObamaCare package apply to people with low incomes. No one in Congress or on their staffs qualify for having low incomes! But Mr. Obama wants them to get taken care of anyway, this is of course the famous "Chicago politics." It is an affront to every American that those in Congress and working there would get subsidies for being on the health care system that no one else in the country in their income brackets would receive. This is a kind of payoff, and being done by what is really illegal executive overreach. And we are supposed to believe that our leaders are really concerned with "social justice"? --Del

Excerpt: In a world where Lois Lerner continues to be paid, news that taxpayers will probably be sending Kathleen Sebelius checks for the rest of her life is hardly surprising: According to the Daily Caller, in just a few days Sebelius will qualify for a $10,000 per year pension, plus some nice health care perks — for life. 

How the ACA Could Collapse: Court cases involving religion have a way of stopping big social legislation. By Amity Shlaes
Excerpt: Cases involving religious details, however, do have a way of stopping big social legislation, and not only because they violate the principles of the religious denominations involved. Regardless of the Court’s decision, even pro-choice Jews, Unitarians, and Muslims may eventually change their views on the ACA precisely because of Hobby Lobby and cases like it. (Shales is the author of the excellent biography Coolidge. ~Bob)

How Being a Doctor Became the Most Miserable Profession
Excerpt: Simply put, being a doctor has become amiserable and humiliating undertaking. Indeed, many doctors feel that America has declared war on physicians—and both physicians and patients are the losers. Not surprisingly, many doctors want out. Medical students opt for high-paying specialties so they can retire as quickly as possible. Physician MBA programs—that promise doctors a way into management—are flourishing. The website known as the Drop-Out-Club—which hooks doctors up with jobs at hedge funds and venture capital firms—has a solid following. In fact, physicians are so bummed out that 9 out of 10 doctors would discourage anyone from entering the profession. (As I said when Obamacare passed, we have destroyed the best healthcare system in the world. i don't think we can get it back. ~Bob)

ACA Does Not Help the Nation’s Poor! By Harry R. Jackson, Jr. 
Excerpt: Now that the ACA has been in effect for a few months, the unintended consequences of the law are becoming clearer. ... But not much has been made of the ACA’s effect on the segment of population it was supposed to help the most: the poor. Little discussed in the thousands of pages of the ACA bill were its deep cuts to Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) payments.

Washington State threatens to send Obamacare costs through the roof. #obamacare. By Moe Lane 
Excerpt: There are three major elements to healthcare plan decisions: Cost: How much does it cost per month or year, just to have it? Deductible: How much does the consumer have to kick in for any given procedure? Network: Who is willing to take you on as a patient, if you use that plan? With me so far? Good. What Obamacare does is turn all of this into a zero-sum game.

New State Rules Could Limit Cheaper Health Plans With 'Narrow Networks'
Excerpt: The practice of offering relatively inexpensive health plans with bare-bones provider networks has created tension between making health care affordable and keeping it accessible. It’s set to come to a head this week in Olympia. The growth of “narrow networks” in Washington comes as the Affordable Care Act limits the ability of insurance companies to control their costs. That’s made it harder to offer plans at a range of prices — something the companies want to do as they compete for comparison shoppers on the health exchanges.

Religion of Peace News

9/11 Museum Film Slammed for Offending Muslims. By Sandy Fitzgerald
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/al-Qaida-911-museum-Muslims/2014/04/23/id/567327#ixzz2zoEw6FdD
Excerpt: Religious leaders are slamming a documentary to be shown at the nation's premier 9/11 museum because it might make people believe Islam was responsible for the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. Already the lone imam on an interfaith advisory group to the National September 11 Memorial Museum has quit in protest at the seven-minute documentary. (The truth is, that none of the Muslim leaders want anything shown or said that brings together the fact that these men committed an horrendous atrocity, and that they were motivated by religious fanaticism. Muslim sensitivity has been raised to tremendous heights, and there is no way to factually treat 9/11 without upsetting at least some of them. And I don't mean to be unfeeling, but the real answer is "get over it". Islamism and jihadism are part of Islam, just as fanatics have been part of Christianity and other religions, and there's no use in trying to act as if this association doesn't exist. When IRA fanatics were blowing up innocent people in Northern Ireland and England, Catholics could not deny that they were Catholics, extremists not living up to the tenets of the Faith, but still associated with the religion. Everybody knew it wasn't all Catholics, and everybody has heard ad infinitum that it isn't all Muslims. To keep making fervent protests about this doesn't help the image of Muslims. --Del)

Watchdog Investigates Possible Chlorine Gas Attack in Syria
Excerpt: The watchdog agency that monitors compliance with the global chemical weapons treaty said Tuesday it was looking into allegations that chlorine gas was used in a raid on a Syrian village earlier this month

Aid Efforts for Syria Have Failed, U.N. Chiefs Say
Excerpt: Two months after the United Nations Security Council ordered Syria’s warring parties to allow access for humanitarian aid to civilians, the heads of five United Nations agencies warned on Wednesday that diplomacy had failed and that the desperate plight of civilians in many parts of the country was getting worse. . (Failed? With Hillary and Kerry involved? Color me shocked. Turns out Barack "Redline" Obama's "Assad must go" policy is now an, "Assad can keep his health plan" policy. ~Bob)

More Heavy Weaponry for Syrian Rebels? By Joseph Klein 
Excerpt: President Obama is considering ramping up military support to the Syrian rebels, who are increasingly dominated by jihadists. American anti-tank missiles have already appeared in videos in the hands of rebel forces. According to an April 21st report in Time Magazine, the White House is now considering sending the rebels shoulder-fired surface-to-air anti-aircraft missiles known as manpads. In the wrong hands, such missiles could be used to take out commercial aircraft.

Liberals ould not care less bout this real "war on Women." ~Bob). Excerpt: In 2013, as many as 202 women were murdered in the name of Karo-kari (honour killing) in Sindh, Special Home Secretary Sindh informed the Senate Functional Committee on Human Rights on Monday. The secretary also stated that at least 28 honour killing cases have been reported in 2014 thus far.

Second Somali MP killed in Mogadishu in 24 hours
Excerpt: The attacks, thought to be by the Al Qaeda-linked Islamic rebels of al-Shabaab, come as the government is wrapping up a three-day conference on improving security in the capital.

Seven killed in China-Vietnam border shootout
Excerpt: A deadly gun battle along the China-Vietnam border has left seven people dead, including five Chinese migrants and two Vietnamese border guards. According to local officials, a shootout erupted when Vietnamese border guards tried to turn back a group of Chinese citizens entering their country illegally. ... Vietnamese media has reported that the Chinese citizens were from the far Western Muslim Province of Xinjiang where human rights groups say there is persecution of local ethnic Uighurs. (Uighurs are the Muslim minority that has carried out jihad attacks in China. ~Bob)

3 Americans Are Killed by Guard at Afghan Hospital
Excerpt: Among the dead was a pediatrician from Chicago, Dr. Jerry Umanos, who had worked at the Cure hospital since 2005.

1 comment:

  1. I will be thinking of you on the 28th. My thoughts and prayers are with you always.

    Robin

    ReplyDelete