DEFINING AMERICAN RIGHTS
John Kerry in Germany: ‘In America, you have the right to be stupid …
www.examiner.com/…/john-kerry-germany-america-you-have-the-ri..5 days ago – On Tuesday, at a Youth Connection Berlin conference, John Kerry talked about how freedom of speech allows people in the US to say …
EXERTING THAT RIGHT IN EGYPT:
Kerry: U.S. releasing millions in aid to Egypt, but with promise of …
www.foxnews.com/…/kerry-takes-unity-message-to-egyptian-preside…Cached
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4 hours ago – U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with Egypt’s president Sunday, wrapping up a visit to the deeply divided country with an appeal for unity …
AND PEERING THROUGH “THE WINDOW” OF OPPORTUNITY FOR DIPLOMATIC SOLUTIONS:
US Secretary of State John Kerry talks Syria, Iran in Saudi Arabia – Go
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, in Saudi Arabia for talks with Saudi and Gulf Arab officials, said Monday the window of opportunity for a diplomatic solution to … (EVERYTHING)
AND MAKING NEW BEST FRIENDS:
Abbas to meet Kerry in Saudi Arabia, official says | Maan News …
maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=571208
33 mins ago – BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — President Abbas will meet with US Secretary of State John Kerry in Saudi Arabia on Monday, a Palestinian Authority …
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443493304578039040237714224.html
Texas Pushes $10,000 Degree
Gov. Perry Renews Call for Low-Cost College Education as Student Debt Loads Rise
For sale: a college education for $10,000 or less.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry is renewing his call for such lower-cost undergraduate degrees, in what he hopes will be the state’s signature response to the national problem of rising college tuition and student debt.
“A $10,000 degree provides an opportunity for students to earn a low-cost, high-quality degree that will get them where they want to go in their careers and their lives,” the Republican governor said in a statement last week. The governor has repeatedly urged schools to find ways to teach students more efficiently.
Ten Texas colleges have responded to the governor’s challenge, first made a year ago. Angelo State University, a 7,000-student school in west Texas, announced Wednesday it will offer a $10,000 degree starting next fall. The 10 schools educate more than 50,000 students, or roughly 10% of the undergraduates at public universities in the state, but don’t include the state’s flagship public universities, such as the University of Texas at Austin.
As details of the colleges’ plans have emerged, so have skeptics who question the financial and academic viability of pricing college at a fraction of the roughly $30,000 that students at Texas public universities pay on average over four years. They say reaching the $10,000 goal in some cases involves big scholarships for select students rather than real reductions in the cost of providing an education, and thus the path to a low-cost degree still isn’t open to large numbers of students.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ryan-mauro/media-miss-islamists-at-the-national-prayer-breakfast/print/
Dr. Benjamin Carson captivated the media’s attention with his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, but another attendee deserved some of the spotlight: Sayyid Syeed, the interfaith liaison for the Islamic Society of North America, who was recorded in 2006 saying, “[O]ur job is to change the constitution of America.”
The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) originates in the Muslim Brotherhood, but has been embraced on a bi-partisan basis. FBI sources reporting back to the mid-1980s identified it as a Brotherhood front. In 2007, the U.S. government designated ISNA an unindicted co-conspirator in the terrorism-financing trial of the Holy Land Foundation, listing it as a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity.
A 1991 Brotherhood memo, which describes its “work in America as a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within,” likewise mentions ISNA and several of its components as its fronts. In 2009, a federal judge upheld ISNA’s designation as an unindicted co-conspirator because of “ample” evidence linking it to Hamas.
The same 1991 memo lays out how the Brotherhood network must “posses a mastery of the art of ‘coalitions,’ the art of ‘absorption,’ and the principles of ‘cooperation.’” It explicitly talks about using the “hands” of the “nonbelievers” to advance its agenda.
The work of ISNA and its allies in forging interfaith partnerships is undoubtedly a fulfillment of this directive. ISNA has used these interfaith relationships to slam its critics as “Islamophobes,” as it did at an event on January 15 at the First Congregational United Church of Christ in Washington, D.C.
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/michellemalkin/sharia-education-in-texas/print/ Texas is a right-minded red state, where patriotism is still a virtue and political correctness is out of vogue. So how on earth have left-wing educators in public classrooms been allowed to instruct Lone Star students to dress in Islamic garb, call the 9/11 jihadists “freedom fighters” and treat the Boston Tea Party participants […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/342054/greatest-threat-peace-robert-zubrin Last week, the Partnership for a Secure America (PSA), led by former Democratic representative Lee Hamilton and former Republican senator Warren Rudman, released a letter signed by 36 other formerly important people insisting that the United States must take action on climate change for national-security reasons. The letter begins: The effect of climate change […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/341991/fossil-fuel-divestment-stanley-kurtz
STANLEY KURTZ IS AUTHOR OF OUTSTANDING BOOKS ON THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION:
Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities by Stanley Kurtz (Aug 2, 2012)
Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism by Stanley Kurtz (Oct 19, 2010)
Slowly but surely, America’s free-enterprise system has been bleeding cultural support. To be sure, Occupy Wall Street’s open anti-capitalism flamed out, and direct challenges to the system are few. Yet appearances are deceiving. Just prior to the 2012 election, a series of polls showed the millennial generation (ages 18–30) about evenly split between positive attitudes toward capitalism and socialism. We needn’t take that support for socialism literally in order to recognize that America’s free-enterprise system is facing a legitimacy crisis, especially among the young. The manner in which millennials resolve their generation’s uncertainties over capitalism will likely determine the fortunes of the Republican and Democratic parties for years to come. The millennials were pivotal in 2012, after all. So we need to keep an eye on them. Consider an issue that has so far gotten only limited media play, and yet offers a ready glimpse of free enterprise under cultural pressure: the campus movement to divest from fossil fuels.
In a referendum held in November of 2012, 72 percent of participating Harvard undergraduates called on their university to sell off the stock in any large fossil-fuel company held in the school’s $32 billion endowment, by far the largest in the nation. That vote drew significantly higher student turnout and support than a 1990 measure pressing Harvard to divest from South Africa, when apartheid was still in force. Indeed, the avowed purpose of the divestment campaign now sweeping America’s colleges — it was active on 256 campuses at last count — is to make this nation’s leading energy companies as repugnant as apartheid was. Ultimately, the goal is to drive America’s energy producers out of the fossil-fuel business.
Cue the eye-rolls. Oil companies may not win popularity contests these days, yet few of us want to prevent them from selling us fuel, much less to treat them as virtual holocaust perpetrators for doing so. Some might even suspect America’s big energy producers of performing the occasional public service — like, say, powering the economy, strengthening the middle class, and reducing income inequality by creating hundreds of thousands of well-paying blue-collar jobs, securing our energy independence and thereby stripping rogue states and big-power rivals of the capacity to blackmail us with oil, and correspondingly reducing the need for American military intervention on foreign shores.
Never mind. Growing numbers of students are convinced that oil companies are, in the words of author and activist Bill McKibben, “reckless like no other force on Earth.” After all, in the face of global warming, our energy giants persist in extracting and selling us a seemingly endless supply of carbon-based fuels. The divestment movement aims to jolt into action a public allegedly in denial about catastrophic global warming. Once aroused by the academy’s urgent warnings, voters will supposedly compel Big Energy to abandon its massive oil, gas, and coal reserves and leave the vast bulk of them forever unused in the earth.
Silly as it may seem, we need to pay careful attention to what these young people are telling us. Fossil-fuel divestment is economics Lena Dunham–style: an embarrassingly naïve and apparently futile stance by those who nonetheless hold the power to swing elections and shift the culture. When nearly three-quarters of voting Harvard undergraduates elect to treat the companies that power our economy as pariahs, it’s time to take notice. Energy is so fundamental — in a sense, fossil fuels are the economy — that our climate wars increasingly serve as proxies for a battle over the status and even the existence of America’s free-market system. Look carefully at the fossil-fuel divestment campaign and you’ll find a new and potentially more damaging incarnation of Occupy Wall Street.
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/israel-alert-locusts-hit-neighboring-egypt-18645877
Israel is on a locust alert as swarms of the destructive bugs descend on neighboring Egypt ahead of the Passover holiday.
Israel’s Agriculture Ministry set up an emergency hotline Monday and is asking Israelis to be vigilant in reporting locust sightings to prevent an outbreak.
Locusts have a devastating effect on agriculture by quickly stripping crops.
Swarms of locusts have descended on Egypt, raising fears they could spread to Israel.
The locust alert comes ahead of the Passover festival, which recounts the biblical story of the Jewish exodus from Egypt. According to the Bible, a plague of locusts was one of 10 plagues God imposed on Egyptians for enslaving and abusing ancient Hebrews.
http://pjmedia.com/michaelledeen/2013/03/04/jeff-sessions-for-president/?singlepage=true
I LIKE THE CHARISMA CHALLENGED JEFF SESSIONS AND HE COULD PROBABLY GARNER ELEVEN VOTES…BUT PRESIDENT? THAT’S THE PROBLEM WITH THE GOP TODAY…THEY CONTINUE TO MINE IN DRIED OUT BEDS….THERE ARE PLENTY OF REALLY SMART REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS TO CONSIDER…..RSK
We found a leader, but hardly anybody noticed. Never mind Rubio and Ryan, or people named Bush. Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama is the best we’ve got, and he’s plenty good. In fact, his words on the Senate floor [1] when he implored his colleagues to reject the nomination of Jack Lew for Treasury secretary are as good as it gets. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard anything as elegant, compelling, honorable, and philosophically coherent as Sessions’ speech on the 27th of February.
You probably missed it, what with all the excitement of the epic gladiatorial combat between Bob Woodward and the White House, and the Hagel confirmation carnival, and the Rodman diplomatic mission to Pyongyang [2].
Sessions laid out Lew’s incredible record of catastrophic budget proposals, which, as Sessions noted, had been unanimously rejected by Congress and decimated in scholarly and editorial analyses. But all that, terrible though it was, and quite sufficient to disqualify anyone from running Treasury, was in a way the least of it. The worst was Lew’s nonchalance in lying to the Senate.
http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/irans-supporting-role-in-turkish-prime-ministers-anti-semitic-slur/?print=1 Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan got plenty of attention for his remarks at a UN forum in Vienna [1] last Wednesday, in which he equated Zionism to fascism, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism (not that Erdogan seems to object to anti-Semitism; but as Andy McCarthy notes [2], rational discourse is not Erdogan’s strong suit). What’s been […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2013/02/its-not-easy-being-red-and-green.html The left has never adapted to the transition from nationalistic wars to ideological wars. It took the left a while to grasp that the Nazis were a fundamentally different foe than the Kaiser and that pretending that World War 2 was another war for the benefit of colonialists and arms dealers was the behavior […]
