1. FOOD POLICE Reject Mom’s Homemade Lunch: State agent inspects sack lunches, forces preschoolers to purchase cafeteria food instead 2. OBAMA’S 2013 BUDGET: A Monument To Irresponsibility 3. VIDEO: Israeli Armor Saves American Lives – Defending American lives, redefining the future. 4. C-SPAN VIDEO: Senator Calls Out Obama Budget Director: ‘Will You Resign?’ Sessions To […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11437/pub_detail.asp
It was good news that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved the nation’s first nuclear power plants on February 9th, clearing the way for the construction of two reactors by Southern Company at its Plant Vogtle site near Atlanta, Georgia. The bad news is that these are the first new nuclear plants since 1978!
In a nation with a growing population and increasing need for electricity to power homes and businesses, it is nothing less than insane to not include nuclear energy in the mix of providers. Environmentalists immediately attacked the announcement using the usual scare campaigns.
Equally insane is the failure to provide the means to safely store the radioactive materials that result. Highly contested by environmentalists, the Nevada-based Yucca Mountain deep geological repository storage facility for spent reactor fuel was cancelled in 2009. Nevada’s Senator Harry Reid, Majority Leader in the Senate, played a major role in this disgraceful decision. The Obama administration terminated funding for the development of the site in 2011, leaving the nation with no long-term storage site.
http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2851/freedom-of-expression-un-human-rights-council
The history of reporting by UN frameworks on human rights in Israel has been characterized by biased mandates, false and unverifiable allegations, double standards and hypocrisy.
Part 1: Overview and Background:
1) By any objective standard, Israeli democracy is as robust and pluralistic as any in the world. There are no restrictions on any form of protest or advocacy, including very fierce and unpopular criticism of the government and military. No other democracy can claim to have greater freedom of expression, despite more than six decades of war and terrorism; threats of annihilation; and in parallel, the challenges of developing a cohesive society based on numerous divergent communities scattered for generations as Diasporas, many of which do not have traditions of pluralism and democracy.
2) Like other Israelis, I am aware that we are not a perfect society. As in others nations, we have flaws, and it is our responsibility to correct them. But aggressive campaigns to greatly exaggerate these imperfections, as part of the ongoing effort to delegitimize Israel facilitated by the soft-power of groups not subject to any democratic accountability, should not be assisted by a United Nations framework focusing on freedom of expression and freedom.
3) Israel systematically protects the rights of its minority populations to freedom of expression and to protest. For example, each year, Israeli police forces and government institutions facilitate Gay Pride parades in Jerusalem Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Eilat; marches on Human Rights Day; protests by the Islamic movement; and to mark the murder of Yitzhak Rabin.
4) Mass demonstrations on socio-economic issues were held in Summer 2011, and attest to Israel’s dynamic civil society and a culture of advocacy and peaceable protest. Israeli police facilitated these activities, blocking off roads and granting permits. The government responded to protestors’ demands positively, in the form of a task force to address their claims.
See No Islam, Hear No Islam — on The Glazov Gang
Eric Alan Bell, Nonie Darwish and Mark Tapson discuss the punishment for repeating what Islamic texts say.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/16/eric-allen-bell-nonie-darwish-and-mark-tapson-join-the-glazov-gang-1-1-1/
OBAMA’S PHONY RECOVERY
By DICK MORRIS
Published on TheHill.com on February 14, 2012
President Obama, faced with no recovery from the recession as he enters an election year, has come up with a handy political gimmick: Fake the statistics.
The economic data that portend recovery are totally and completely inventions of Obama’s political operation. The reality is that no recovery is taking place!
Economist James Fitzgibbon, of the Highlander Fund, explains how cooked the economic statistics on which the president bases his claims of recovery really are.
Begin with “gains” in the stock market. Fitzgibbon explains that they are no indication of changes in the public mood because the public isn’t doing the investing anymore. He notes that HFT (high frequency trade computers) now “account for 80 percent [of the market’s] daily business. No one else is left because they lost their money in 2008 and the public has fled the market … Total NYSE volume is 67 percent lower on average than in 2008. Volume is 29 percent lower this year compared to 2011. The prices [have] no serious meaning.”
Have consumers, as alleged, started borrowing again? Not really. Fitzgibbon explains that “credit use has surged only because the Obama administration changed the student loan program to a direct program and those loans are now counted as part of this metric. It is not comparable to anything prior to 2011.” And, he adds ominously, “massive credit card use as measured against actual verifiable sales shows the increase is in borrowed funds to pay for food! Not my idea of a healthy sign.”
http://rt.com/usa/news/truth-team-campaign-obama-195/
http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2012/02/obama-truth-team-unveils-spiffy-new.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/virginia-politics/post/obama-campaign-unveils-virginia-truth-team/2012/02/13/gIQAcYpDBR_blog.html
WILL THE OPINION OF 2 MILLION DEAD VOTERS WEIGH IN ALSO?…..RSK
President Obama’s reelection campaign rolled out its “Virginia Truth Team” on Monday, part of a national effort to enlist surrogates to push back against attacks on the incumbent’s record.
Obama speaks in Falls Church last week. (Susan Walsh – AP) Members of the team, which includes several prominent Virginia elected Democrats, can be expected to appear regularly in the media as November approaches, especially since the state is viewed as a key battleground by both parties. The campaign also announced the launch of a new Web site — www.barackobama.com/truthteam.
“The election is still nine months away, but the Republicans and their special interest allies have already launched unfounded, dishonest attacks to try to smear the President’s record,” said Brian Moran, chairman of the Democratic Party of Virginia, in a release announcing group.
(The full Truth Team membership is listed after the jump.)
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/02/15/colorado-student-reportedly-quits-choir-over-islamic-song/?cmpid=NL_FNTopHeadlines_20120215
Mesa County School District 51
A Colorado high school student quit the school choir after an Islamic song containing the lyric “there is no other truth except Allah” made it into the repertoire.
James Harper, a senior at Grand Junction High School in Grand Junction, put his objection to singing “Zikr,” a song written by Indian composer A.R. Rahman, in an email to Mesa County School District 51 officials. When the school stood by choir director Marcia Wieland’s selection, Harper quit.
“I don’t want to come across as a bigot or a racist, but I really don’t feel it is appropriate for students in a public high school to be singing an Islamic worship song,” Harper told KREX-TV. “This is worshipping another God, and even worshipping another prophet … I think there would be a lot of outrage if we made a Muslim choir say Jesus Christ is the only truth.”
Heartland Institute Responds to Stolen and Fake Documents
FEBRUARY 15, 2012 – The following statement from The Heartland Institute – a free-market think tank – may be used for attribution. For more information, contact Communications Director Jim Lakely at jlakely@heartland.org and 312/377-4000.
Yesterday afternoon, two advocacy groups posted online several documents they claimed were The Heartland Institute’s 2012 budget, fundraising, and strategy plans. Some of these documents were stolen from Heartland, at least one is a fake, and some may have been altered.
The stolen documents appear to have been written by Heartland’s president for a board meeting that took place on January 17. He was traveling at the time this story broke yesterday afternoon and still has not had the opportunity to read them all to see if they were altered. Therefore, the authenticity of those documents has not been confirmed.
Since then, the documents have been widely reposted on the Internet, again with no effort to confirm their authenticity.
Washington’s Support of Iran’s Mass Murders
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/15/obamas-support-of-iran%e2%80%99s-mass-murders/print/
As the present writer disclosed in an earlier article, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta revealed a strange duplicity during a CBS News interview on January 29th. When asked about the situation with Iran, Secretary Panetta responded with a surprising number of “ifs,” as though to give the impression that there may in fact be some doubt about the threat from Iran, that Iran may not be pursuing military nuclear capacity, and that there may as yet be no actionable intelligence to indicate that Iran intends to pursue a nuclear option. These “ifs” are very strange since Secretary Panetta must be aware of the public information about the Iranian pursuit of WMD capacity, the Iranian proxies and allies in South America that support Iran’s objectives, and Iran’s commitment to use its nuclear weaponry to destroy Israel and intimidate the West.1
Amazingly, President Obama demonstrated an even more overt duplicity at an interview during the Super Bowl with Matt Lauer. As ABC news reported, when Lauer questioned him over suggestions that Iran could retaliate to an American or Israeli attack by striking inside the United States, the president replied: “We don’t see any evidence that they have those intentions or capabilities right now.” No evidence that Iran has bellicose intentions or capabilities toward the United States? That response is contrary to very well-known facts, facts of which the president must be aware.
Iran is sending long-range missiles for deployment in Venezuela; Hezbollah is in Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil where it works with narcotraficants and gun runners; there is strong evidence that the Iranian secret service (the Pasdaran) is working with Hezbollah in South America; there is strong evidence for active Hezbollah sleeper cells in the USA; Iran’s work on missiles that could reach the USA from Lebanon was progressing until clandestine sabotage (believed by some to have been perpetrated by Israel) destroyed the entire manufacturing plant; in the fall of 2011, American security forces prevented the assassination of a Saudi diplomat on American soil, a plot which James R. Clapper, America’s top intelligence official, identified as an Iranian attack that would have killed about 150 innocent bystanders and that may harbinger more of such attacks in the future; FBI Director Robert Mueller and CIA Director David Petraeus testified at a Senate Intelligence hearing on “World Wide Threats” on January 31, informing the committee that Iran has the capabilities to build nuclear weapons whenever it wants to; the L.A. Times reported that U.S. intelligence agencies briefed that same Senate panel about Iranian leaders’ willingness to launch attacks against American targets and support bombings on American soil; and a recent Wall Street Journal article validates the threat of nuclear war posed by the current Iranian regime. Can the commander-in-chief of the world’s strongest army not know about this threat?
http://israel21c.org/people/parkinsons-pioneer
Parkinson’s pioneer By Abigail Klein Leichman
Prof. Moussa Youdim is the driving force behind breakthrough drugs to slow the progression of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, and continues to chalk up significant neurodegenerative drug innovations.
Prof. Moussa Youdim holding a capsule of Azilect, the first drug to slow the progression of Parkinson’s disease.
Haifa wasn’t such a hip place when a promising young researcher from Oxford arrived at the Israeli port city in 1977. His task was to establish the pharmacology department at the Technion Institute of Technology’s fledgling medical school.
“The medical school was only three years old, and it was like a desert here,” recalls Prof. Emeritus Moussa Youdim, now director of the Technion-based Eve Topf and US National Parkinson Foundation Centers of Excellence for Neurodegenerative Diseases Research.
“There was not even a decent restaurant. I had to put an incredible amount of effort into setting up the department, recruiting people and purchasing equipment as well as teaching and continuing my research.”