http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323854904578264233733676680.html?mod=WSJ_article_LatestHeadlines Climate change is back on the agenda in Washington after President Barack Obama‘s call to action in his second inaugural address. And while polls suggest that public belief that manmade causes are behind warmer temperatures isn’t yet back to the levels seen in the middle of the last decade, concern about climate change is […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323539804578263793332301584.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop An appeals court says his recess appointments are unconstitutional. President Obama has shown increasing contempt for the constitutional limits on his power, and the courts are finally awakening to the news. A unanimous panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Friday that the President’s non-recess recess appointments are illegal and an […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324039504578263772492524536.html?mod=WSJ_hps_LEFTTopStories
By MELANIE TROTTMAN, JESS BRAVIN and MICHAEL R. CRITTENDEN
A federal appeals court ruled Friday that President Barack Obama violated the Constitution in filling labor board vacancies, a decision that could reshape a long-standing practice by U.S. presidents to make recess appointments.
A federal appeals court ruled that President Obama violated the Constitution when he bypassed the Senate to fill vacancies on a labor panel. Aaron Zitner reports on Lunch Break. Photo: AP.
Such appointments—which bypass Senate approval to install top administration personnel—have been used by presidents for at least 90 years. But in the past two decades, Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton ratcheted up use of the tactic to avert congressional obstacles. Friday’s decision, if it holds, would restrain that power.
The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the National Labor Relations Board for the past year has lacked the quorum required to conduct most business because three board members were named by Mr. Obama in recess appointments the court ruled invalid.
The decision strips the board of key powers and could void some of its actions over the past year.
The board made more than 200 case rulings last year, including a decision that protected workers from being fired for complaining about working conditions on sites like Facebook, FB +1.48% and a decision that gave greater rights to unions in employee-discipline cases.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/01/no_mere_existence_for_israel.html Inauguration weekend has come and gone, and with it the preceding “No Blank Check for Israel” rally on Saturday, January 19, 2013. Rally participants first assembled in Farragut Square to hear various speakers and then marched through adjoining streets to Pennsylvania Avenue between Lafayette Square and the White House where President Barack Obama two […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/338863/obama-simulacrum-mark-steyn
This administration sneers at reality and its consequences.
If I’m following this correctly, according to one spokesperson for the Marine Corps Band, at Monday’s inauguration Beyoncé lip-synced to the national anthem but the band accompanied her live. However, according to a second spokesperson, it was the band who were pretending to play to a pre-recorded tape while Beyoncé sang along live. So one or other of them were faking it. Or maybe both were. Or neither. I’d ask Chuck Schumer, the master of ceremonies, who was standing right behind her, but he spent the entire performance staring at her butt. If it was her butt, that is. It might just have been the bulge of the Radio Shack cassette player she was miming to. In an America with an ever more tenuous grip on reality, there’s so little to be sure of.
Whether Beyoncé was lip-syncing to the band or the band were lip-syncing to Beyoncé is like one of those red pill/ blue pill choices from The Matrix. Was President Obama lip-syncing to the Founders, rooting his inaugural address in the earliest expressions of American identity? (“The patriots of 1776 . . . gave to us a republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed.”) Or maybe the Founders were lip-syncing to him as he appropriated the vision of the first generation of Americans and yoked it (“preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action”) to a statist pitch they would have found utterly repugnant.
The whole event had the air of a simulacrum: It looked like a presidential inauguration, but the sound was tinny and not quite in sync. Obama mouthed along to a canned vocal track: “We reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.” That’s great! It’s always reassuring to know the head of state is going to take issue with all those people wedded to the “belief” that America needs either to shove every granny off the cliff or stake its newborns out on the tundra for the wolves to finish off. When it comes to facing the music, Obama is peerless at making a song and dance about tunes nobody’s whistling without ever once warbling the real big numbers (16 trillion). But, like Beyoncé, he’s totally cool and has a cute butt.
A couple of days later, it fell to the 45th president-in-waiting to encapsulate the ethos of the age in one deft sound bite: What difference does it make? Hillary Clinton’s instantly famous riposte at the Benghazi hearings is such a perfect distillation that it surely deserves to be the national motto of the United States. They should put it on Paul Krugman’s trillion-dollar coin, and in the presidential oath:
“Do you solemnly swear to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States?”
“Sure. What difference, at this point, does it make?”
It is better to tell the truth about Islam and be called ‘Islamophobe’ than to lie about this religion to appease the Moslems’ ear. —Daniel Pipes is an American historian, writer, and political commentator. He is the founder and director of the Middle East Forum and its Campus Watch project, and the editor of its […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/338892/apes-pigs-and-f-16s-andrew-c-mccarthy
When you arm Islamists, you become a willing participant in your own undoing.
When Mohamed Morsi dehumanizes Jews as “the descendants of apes and pigs,” there’s an elephant in the room. We find it here:
Those who incurred the curse of Allah and His wrath, those of whom some He transformed into apes and swine, those who worshipped evil — these are many times worse in rank, and far more astray from the even Path!
You see, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood mahoff–turned–president did not conjure up the apes-and-pigs riff on his own. When Morsi fulminates that Muslims “must not forget to nurse our children and grandchildren on hatred towards those Zionists and Jews, and all those who support them,” he is taking his cues straight from the Koran. Or rather, from the Holy Koran, as “progressive” American politicians take pains to call it in the off hours from their campaign to drive every last vestige of Judeo-Christian culture from the public square.
The excerpt above is not from the Life and Times of Mohamed Morsi. It originates with that other Mohammed. Specifically, it is Sura 5:60 of the Koran, the tome Muslims take to be the immutable, verbatim commands of Allah, as revealed to the prophet. And as Andrew Bostom illustrates (with a disquieting amplitude of examples), the verse is not an outlier. It states an Islamic leitmotif.
Contrary to the fairy tale weaved by apologists for Islamists on both sides of America’s political aisle, Jew hatred is not a pathogen insidiously injected into Islam by the Nazis (with whom Middle Eastern Muslims enthusiastically aligned). Nor did the ummah come by it through exposure to other strains of anti-Semitism that blight the history of Christendom. Jew hatred is ingrained in Islamic doctrine. Consequently, despite the efforts of enlightened Muslim reformers, Jew hatred is — and will remain — a pillar of Islamist ideology.
You may recall hearing this little ditty from the Hamas charter — often echoed by ministers of the Palestinian Authority and in the preachments of Brotherhood jurist Yusuf al-Qaradawi, on whose every word millions hang weekly on al-Jazeera (or is it al-Gore?):
The Day of Resurrection will not arrive until the Muslims make war against the Jews and kill them, and until a Jew hiding behind a rock and tree, and the rock and tree will say: “Oh Muslim, Oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!”
