http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2013/07/19/will-the-senate-rubber-stamp-powers-contempt/?print=1 Refusing to answer proper questions in a legitimate governmental hearing is contemptuous – not just in the rhetorical sense but in the legal sense. To analogize: In court proceeding, if a witness refuses to provide a responsive answer to a question, the judge will strike the nonresponsive answer from the record and direct the […]
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-perspective/071713-664096-immigration-bill-filled-with-millions-special-interests-webhedand160-immigration-bill-millions-in-slush-funds-to-special-interests.htm?p=full
The avowed purpose of the immigration bill passed by the Senate and pending in the House is to provide a “path to citizenship” for the illegal immigrants in exchange for tough new enforcement measures that would prevent other such incursions in the future.
But buried deep within the immigration bill are hidden multimillion-dollar slush funds for left-wing nonprofit groups to provide services to the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants now in the U.S. Once enacted, the slush funds would total almost $300 million over three years and grow over time.
Reviewing the massive legislation, it’s obvious that lawyering would be needed. The 1,100-page proposal is a network of legal requirements and protections, waivers and exceptions, including a new “provisional immigrant” status (the first phase of legalization for illegals), appeals of adverse rulings, stays of deportation, applications for work visas, and countless other such guarantees.
Within this thicket of new rights are features that would vastly increase the flow of immigrants to perhaps 30 million or 40 million over the next decade. One is a set of “chain immigration” clauses, legalizing the spouses and children of illegals.
Another is the Dream Act, fast-tracking legal status for aliens of any age who came here before they were 16 (how this would be proved is not clear). A third is a “blue card” temporary visa that could be converted to permanent status and used by future illegals to get legal in a hurry.
Of course, a Spanish-speaking immigrant would likely know nothing of this maze of loopholes, benefits and protections and would on his own be unable to exploit them. So the bill sets up a fund of $50 million to aid illegals seeking “provisional” status, filing appeals, blocking efforts at deportation, obtaining naturalization, and so on.
The groups receiving the $50 million to give such assistance would be nonprofit “immigrant- serving” organizations whose staffs have “demonstrated qualifications, experience and expertise in providing quality services to immigrants.” Agents of such groups would be paid by the government to guide the illegals through the intricate processes in the legislation.
‘Chock-Full’ Of Pork
The bill provides a sizable slush fund for leftward groups in the immigrant serving, advocacy and lobbying business. As Sen. John Cornyn, R-Tex., puts it, the bill is “chock-full of de facto earmarks, pork barrel spending, and special interest sweeteners.”
Though the nonprofit agencies getting the money aren’t named in the bill, their identities can be deduced from the history and politics of the issue.
Foremost among such groups is the National Council of La Raza (meaning “the race,” or alternatively, “the people”), a group that opposes current U.S. immigration laws, defends illegals, and long promoted amnesty measures. It’s also an organization with significant leverage at the Obama White House and its former senior executive helped draft the Senate bill.
La Raza is already a recipient of federal grants and contracts — running at $8 million to $10 million per year — and would arguably be at the head of the line to receive new funding.
A second, allied group, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, says it receives no federal money but would likely qualify for subsidies under this legislation. READ MORE AT SITE
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/07/18/Intelligence-and-the-Cold-War
How could there be anything left to say about World War II and the Cold War that hasn’t been said already?
We know the narrative, start to finish. In researching my new book, American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (St. Martin’s Press), I was shocked to learn that’s not the same thing as understanding what really happened.
That probably won’t make sense until you find yourself, as I did, staring at the brick wall that somehow blocks the body of intelligence history from entering the general flow of the narrative we know so well. Bringing them together–intelligence history with general history–changes almost everything. It actually alters the course of history, and with plenty of applications for the post-9/11 age.
Any chronicle or biography of mid-to-late 20th century U.S. history that fails to acknowledge the post-USSR revelations of intelligence and FBI archives in Moscow and Washington is hemmed in by this same wall. Surprisingly, that describes almost every chronicle and biography on the shelf today.
What accounts for this, in effect, mass mental block? We might blame various constraints, including the absence of precedence. But what accounts for this absence of precedence? Here is where we encounter the conditioned reflex of the average, college-educated American.
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=5041
On Thursday morning, Israeli President Shimon Peres made a statement about the decision on the part of the European Union to engage in boycotts, divestment and sanctions against any Israeli goods or services produced or undertaken beyond the 1967 borders — including the teachings of Hebrew University professors.
Rather than condemning this move as state-sponsored anti-Semitism, Peres waxed poetic about his respect for the EU. He then criticized the “timing” of the release of its anti-Israel resolution, and urged that the EU “give peace a chance.”
After all, he pointed out, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has been in Jordan all week, and he is on the verge of making a real breakthrough on the Palestinian-Israel front.
“The supreme efforts that [Kerry] has made will bear fruit on both sides,” Peres assured. Couldn’t the EU at least postpone its plans for a while?
“Nothing will happen if you wait a few months,” Peres admonished. “This is a critical period. Don’t spoil [Kerry’s chances].”
By the end of the day, however, it was the Palestinian Authority that nixed negotiations. The only thing surprising about this obvious outcome of Kerry’s sixth visit to the region since taking up his post was the media reportage indicating that peace talks were finally about to resume. So rampant were the rumors on this score that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office was forced to dispel accusations that he had consented to begin negotiations with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas by accepting the 1949 armistice lines as a precondition for sitting down at the proverbial table.
http://unitedpatriotsworldwide.com The Jihad to Forcibly Convert Hindu Girls to Islam, Rages On The Jihad to Forcibly Convert Hindu Girls to Islam, Rages On: The Jihad to convert Hindu girls is continued unabated under the indifferent attitude of Pakistani authorities. In recent months, seven Hindu girls have been targeted in the conversion to Islam campaign. Of […]
In the new Danish film “The Hunt,” Mads Mikkelsen plays a kindergarten teacher named Lucas who is wrongfully accused of sexually abusing the students. What begins as an offhand comment by Klara, a little girl whose feelings are hurt by his perceived rejection of her affection, soon escalates into the proverbial witch hunt, made worse by the fact that the people in charge believe that they are doing what is necessary to protect the children – always remember what paves the road to hell…. Despite the numerous times when viewers are hard pressed to understand why Lucas, a demonstrably sensitive man, can’t instantly guess which child made the accusation and why, the charges take on a life of their own, gaining in intensity that we are forced to accept as a given. Lucas’ life takes a nightmarish turn as he is dismissed from his job, alienated by his colleagues and most of his friends and considered a degenerate pariah by the entire community. His personal life is thrown into turmoil as his teenage son leaves the mother who is divorced from Lucas and comes to live with him , attempting to defend him and putting himself in harm’s way in so doing. Eventually, Lucas descends into a personal breakdown, confronting the father of the young accuser in church on Christmas eve. This symbolically crucified man does not turn the other cheek.
One year later, we learn that the mass hysteria is understood to be a lie as the children claim to have been in Lucas’ basement in a house that has none. We see Lucas restored to amity with his friends, the forlorn little accuser, the community and even the girlfriend whom Lucas discarded when faced with even a hint of her doubts. At first, I thought that this was the fantasy of a ruined man but the director turns out to be a moralist who wants us to believe that the rituals of hunting which are intrinsic to the community culture have a link of causality with the events of Lucas’ downfall. Unfortunately, this metaphor is too thin to be sustainable. One could make a better argument that mass hysteria has periodically been induced by religious beliefs and political movements that have scapegoated various groups throughout history. One could also argue that peer pressure and mob psychology are better explanations for understanding the willingness of children to acquiesce in lying about experiences they never had. Most significant is the danger of adult manipulation of children which can be expanded to the notion of government manipulation of populations to ensure willingness to conform to outlandish perverted behavior – as in Nazi Germany at its most extreme. Any of these analogies would have yielded a deeper understanding of how an innocent man can be destroyed by his friends whereas the reference to killing innocent animals remains superficial and feels tacked on. After having created a disturbing portrait of how quickly and easily moral disintegration can spread, the director leaves us with a cliche that has been overused cinematically and is far too general to yield thoughtful or conclusive resonance.
The books and articles by Bat Ye’or on Islam and jihad, dhimmitude and the collapse of Oriental Christianity, Eurabia and the Muslim-Christian anti-Zionist alliance, compose an oeuvre of historic proportions and scholarly significance. In a period of some thirty years she wrote five major works that substantiated with massive evidence the historic persecution of Jews and Christians (dhimmis) under Islamic rule and the contemporary Arab project for the Islamization of Europe and the West.
A young refugee from Egypt who migrated to England, “a small woman, fragile, shy” as she writes in the preface of her latest book, Understanding Dhimmitude, Bat Ye’or has invested extraordinary energy (with the assistance and encouragement of her late husband David Littman) in the education of a generation about hidden histories, malevolent schemes, insidious incremental long-term processes, treacherous elites, and human sufferings, which are markedly unknown to public awareness.
Bat Ye’or has now offered the reading public a condensation of “twenty-one lectures and talks on the position of non-Muslims in Islamic Societies” under the title of Understanding Dhimmitude. This book resonates with heart-pounding anxiety, yet buoyed by human empathy for the oppressed and humiliated dhimmis, denied dignity and rights, crushed under what the Quran calls “Allah’s religion.”
Unlike her other works that detail the scope and horror of Muslim subjugation and contempt for demeaned infidel non-Muslims in the distant past and until today, offering a broad canvas from Pakistan to Morocco, and the awful spoliation of Copts in Egypt and Armenians in Turkey, Assyrians in Iraq and Christians in southern Sudan, this most recent book provides the reader with rigorous conceptual clarity of the historic global Islamic jihad and its universal caliphal ambitions for mankind. The only legitimate religion, as always, is Islam alone. And its divine mandate, as she explained in a talk at St. Paul’s Church in London in 2003, is nothing less than to rule the world and implement Quranic law.
Most Americans don’t understand economics. And they don’t understand it because it is boring. Economics has been labeled the “dismal science” mainly because so many economists have turned the drama of human entrepreneurship into a series of stock phrases, statistic equations, and nonsensical memes.
In his new book, Knowledge and Power, economist and philosopher George Gilder liberates capitalism from the chains of economic jargon. Capitalism, he writes, is not about supply and demand or command and control: it is about information. More specifically, it is about surprise – new information being added to the system, changing it in mind-bending and stupefying ways. The term “information theory” is drawn from the world of technology, Gilder explains: “information is not order but surprise….[information] is entropy. It is disorder, deformations of order, disruptions of equilibrium. It is indeterminism and surprise. And entropy is freedom of choice. This insight is at the heart of the information theory of capitalism.”
Most economists focus almost entirely on the conditions of equilibrium: how do we achieve full employment? How do we prevent recessions? How can government intervene in the economy to help certain segments of the market?
But this is the opposite of how economics should work. Both on the right and on the left, everyone focuses on the system, rather than on providing the stability in structure that allows free radicals to change the world. The heroes of this vision are either consumers, on the one hand, or no one, on the other.
A North Korean ship trying to sneak missiles through the Panama Canal after leaving Havana was seized by Panamanian authorities this week. Somebody tipped off the Panamanians that the vessel was carrying illegal drugs.
Instead, while searching under sacks of Cuban sugar the Panamanians found the ship crammed with missiles and mucho military contraband. (Nuke-rattling North Korea has been under a UN arms embargo since 2006.)
Upon getting caught red-handed the ship’s North Korean captain and crew went berserk. The hysterical captain was crippled by a heart-attack then tried committing suicide by slitting his throat. The crew ran amok sabotaging the ship’s unloading cranes and battled with the Panamanian police. No fatalities were reported and the crazed North Koreans were eventually subdued, arrested and incarcerated inside an old U.S. naval base.
A proud Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli announced the spectacular bust whereupon Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen issued a press-release. “This incident should serve as a wakeup call to the [Obama] Administration, which over the past few months has been leading an apparent effort to normalize relations with Cuba, that it cannot continue to engage the Castro regime,” read the statement by the former Chairwoman of the House Committee on Foreign Relations. “This revelation confirms once again that Pyongyang must be re-designated on the State Sponsor of Terrorism list as it continues to cooperate with the Cuban regime, a designated State Sponsor of Terrorism country, in order to undermine U.S. interests.”
At first Raul Castro tried threatening the Panamanians behind the scenes with stern diplomatic notes. Then last Saturday, in the manner of Don “Da Godfather” Corleone sending Tom “consigliere” Hagen to Hollywood for a chat with director Jack Woltz, Castro sent his “Vice Foreign Minister” (court eunuch) Rogelio Sierra Díaz to Panama for a “chat” with President Martinelli, whose response was identical to Woltz’s. So Castro’s court eunuch scurried home with his tail between his legs.
But instead of the famously equine and bloody Corleone response, Castro — on the hot-seat, without leverage and without any room to maneuver — issued a half-heated mea culpa, claiming the two anti-aircraft missile systems, nine missiles, two Mig-21 fighter jets and 15 jet engines hidden on the ship. The North Koreans were going to repair the items and promptly return them to Cuba, says a straight-faced Castro.
Last month North Korea’s military chief, General Kyok Sik Kim, and a much-bemedaled entourage visited Cuba and stayed for a week-long meeting with, among others, Raul “El Guapo” Castro himself. We came “to find colleagues in the same trench: the Cuban comrades,” snapped the scowling North Korean general.
My formal education effectively ended in the eighth grade. I attended a Catholic parochial school for eight years. I do retain memories of that experience, some of them not so fondly but now recalled with humor. One is of a nun aptly named Sister Barbarossa, of the order of St. Joseph, a six-foot-plus ogre tough enough to beat up the school’s football players, and with a permanently red face that reflected a high blood pressure problem, congenital anger, or constant inebriation. She would persecute the disobedient and dream up unusual punishments. She often whacked my knuckles with a wooden ruler for doodling instead of studying, and many times made me sit in the leg space beneath her desk and kicked me with her brogans.
Another nun, Sister Angela, one day decided to introduce the notion of “government” to our seventh grade class. We would elect a class “president” by secret ballot. I thought so little of the idea – I couldn’t imagine what benefit there was in having a pretend “president” – that on my ballot I entered the name of a classmate who was as dumb as a doorknob (I don’t think he could even read) and given to epileptic fits and whom we’d been instructed to be kind to. When he had a seizure, he would foam at the mouth and it would take six of us to hold him down because he would acquire the strength of two Sister Barbarossas.
In any event, Sister Angela grew red in the face when she read my ballot. “Who,” she demanded, “put Robert’s name on this ballot???” The class gasped as one. Robert, who as a rule sat like a vegetable at his desk, seemed to smile. But, then, he always seemed to be smiling.
Without a tinge of guilt, I raised my hand. Sister Angela chewed me out, and subsequently informed my parents of my act of cruelty. My parents chewed me out, and sent me to my room without dinner. (Steadfast Catholics, in a later year they burned my small library after I declared my atheism, but that’s another story.)
