http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/egypt-and-the-new-constitution The journalistic gunslingers have been out in full force targeting General el-Sisi and the new Egyptian constitution. This criticism, by the way, is bipartisan; it comes from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. What it comes down to is persistent doubt that the government’s pledge to steer Egypt toward a new […]
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4660/iranian_supreme_leader_s_holocaust_denial_not_a_mistranslation
You can barely get into conversation with a Western peacenik or an Iranian diplomat on the subject of Iran without them trying to wriggle out of the extreme threats the regime has made to wipe out Israel or its vicious anti-Semitism by saying that this is all a mistranslation or it’s been taken out of context.
This matters enormously because the premise of the latest moves in Western policy towards the Islamic repubic is that we can take Iran at its word. If a) all they’re doing is lying to us and/or b) all the most damning charges against Iranian threats and rhetoric turn out to be true, we’re heading into the abyss.
As many countries and international institutions mark Holocaust Memorial Day on Monday, it is perhaps fitting that one of those “mistranslation” dragons can now be slain.
It has now been definitively established that Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is a Holocaust denier and that Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who charmed everyone at Davos a couple of days ago, has been lying through his teeth in saying that he is not.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/369574/dangerous-deal-john-r-bolton For nearly three decades, Iran’s ayatollahs have outfoxed and outmaneuvered Western counter-proliferation efforts. Tehran has repeatedly bested our diplomats, our spies, and, most especially, our gullible political leaders. In the Joint Plan of Action, reached in Geneva this November, the mullahs did it again, worsening the already-grim prospects for stopping or even slowing Iran’s […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/369600/print
Mike Huckabee just became a field general in the War on Women.
He inadvertently won his promotion with one sentence at the Republican National Committee winter meeting. To wit: “If the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it.”
Literally within minutes, the former Arkansas governor’s comment had become fodder for the vast political and media apparatus devoted to concocting a Republican war on women. His words had their own chyron on MSNBC, like a tornado or a bombing overseas. They instantly became a symbol of all that is allegedly wrong and can’t be fixed about the Republican party.
Needless to say, Huckabee’s statement wouldn’t pass muster as a summation of the Democrats’ position on the contraception mandate in the American Political Science Review. It was the sort of crude caricature of the other party that you tend to hear at . . . meetings of the political parties. Yet the manufacturers of the War on Women managed to take a sentence that should have been offensive to Democrats and make it offensive to half the human race.
The women’s magazines began mocking Huckabee on Twitter with the hashtag #CantControlMyLibido. What sort of blue-nose rube thinks that women can’t control themselves? Never mind that Huckabee attacked the view that women can’t control their libidos, and never mind that Cosmo has not heretofore been known as a publication devoted to the wonders of sexual restraint. The most prominent cover line on its current issue is “Fantasy Sex! 26 Ridiculously Hot Moves.”
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304691904579346523830566300
The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
—From ” Harrison Bergeron ” (1961), a short story by Kurt Vonnegut
The year was 2019 and Americans were finally on their way toward real equality. Not just equality in God’s eyes, or before the law, or in opportunity.
They were going to be equal every which way.
All this equality was due to bold new government action. There was the Decent Wage Act of 2017, which pegged the minimum wage to the (inflation-adjusted) average hourly wage of 2016. There was the NEW-AMT, which set a 55% minimum federal tax rate on individual income over $150,000 (or 80% for incomes above $500,000). There was the Unemployment Insurance Is Forever Act of 2018. There was the 2018 De Blasio-Waxman CEO Pay Act, which mandated a 9-to-1 ratio between the highest and lowest paid person in any enterprise.
http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2014/01/26/the-ten-worst-u-s-purveyors-of-antisemitism-3-thomas-friedman/?print=1
The Ten Worst U.S. Purveyors of Antisemitism, #3: Thomas Friedman
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was for a long time a particularly harsh critic of Israel. The criticism had a special edge, a sneer, to it. The Israelis were such idiots he almost couldn’t believe it.
As in a November 2009 column where Friedman asserted:
Right now [America] want[s] [peace] more than the parties…. Today, the Arabs, Israel and the Palestinians are clearly not feeling enough pain to do anything hard for peace with each other…. [T]hen I say, let them enjoy it. I just don’t want to subsidize it or anesthetize it anymore. We need to fix America. If and when they get serious, they’ll find us. And when they do, we should put a detailed U.S. plan for a two-state solution, with borders, on the table….
Full disclosure: Israelis don’t like this sort of thing. We don’t like being derided by a comfortable American Jew like Thomas Friedman for “not feeling enough pain,” not wanting peace. We don’t like being told that we and our rather peace- and democracy-challenged neighbors are on the same peace-refusing page, and a “detailed U.S. plan” is all it would take for flowers of harmony to sprout.
Then there was the March 2010 dust-up when Vice President Biden was here, and the Israeli Interior Ministry committed the terrific faux pas of announcing plans for apartments—for Jews, no less—in a Jerusalem neighborhood. Biden, Friedman wrote,
should have… flown home and left the following scribbled note behind: “Message from America to the Israeli government: Friends don’t let friends drive drunk. And right now, you’re driving drunk. You think you can embarrass your only true ally in the world, to satisfy some domestic political need, with no consequences? You have lost total contact with reality. Call us when you’re serious….”
Again, those damn idiot Israelis. If one were to veer into the psychological, one would note that in these outbursts Friedman himself is suffering embarrassment over what he sees as his boorish country cousins, and contrasting this rather emphatically with his American allegiance.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/kofi-annan-and-desmond-tutu-visit-iran-pay-tribute-to-ayatollah-khomeini/print/
Kofi Annan, along with some of the “elders” visited Iran. The Elders were a group founded by Nelson Mandela and includes such controversial figures as Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter.
Carter does not seem to have accompanied the Elders to Iran because a Carter hostage crisis featuring Jimmy Carter might have been a bit too much even for him, but Desmond Tutu came along.
According to Iranian media, the trip began “with a visit to the mausoleum of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini” where the former UN Secretary General who became notorious for both allegations of corruption and appeasement, “expressed certainty that with his presence at the mausoleum of Imam Khomeini, his mission in Iran would yield good results.”
Fars News described Annan as “paying tribute” to the mass murdering Ayatollah. Photos from Ahlul Bayt depicted Tutu, Annan and other Elders at the Khomeini mausoleum.
According to Iranian media, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani responsible for the murder of Iranian democratic activists in Europe, among other atrocities, questioned Annan, quoted the Koran and denounced the terrorism and oppression of colonial powers. It goes on to say that “Kofi Annan praised the role of the Islamic Republic, especially in the area of peace.”
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/why-obama-wont-call-saeed-abedinis-wife-on-the-glazov-gang/print/
This week’s Glazov Gang was hosted by Ann-Marie Murrell, the National Director of PolitiChicks.tv and joined by Dwight Schultz, a Hollywood Actor, and John Duffy, a Film Producer from the Bronx.
The Gang gathered to discuss Stop Giving Obama Radicals the Benefit of the Doubt. The discussion occurred in Part I and focused on the destructive forces Obama has brought into his administration.
The episode also analyzed Michelle Obama Sees Jane Fonda as a Role Model, How Obama Brought the Muslim Brotherhood into the Government, The Mullahs Say They Didn’t Agree to Anything, Why Obama Won’t Call Saeed Abedini’s Wife, and much, much more. Watch both parts of the two-part episode below:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/hillary-spins-benghazi/print/
At a keynote appearance before the National Automobile Dealers Association on Monday, Hillary Clinton began laying the groundwork for how she will respond to the Benghazi scandal during her likely 2016 presidential run. “My biggest, you know, regret is what happened in Benghazi,” she answered in response to a question asking her to identify “do-overs” during her stint as Secretary of State. She then proceeded to double down. “I mean, you know, you make these choices based on imperfect information,” she contended. “And you make them to, as we say, the best of your ability. But that doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be unforeseen consequences, unpredictable twists and turns.”
One is left to wonder what “imperfect information” Clinton was vaguely referring to in her response. The alleged “imperfect information” that led Clinton and company to lie for weeks about the nature of the attack? The “fog of war,” as Clinton previously described it? Of course, “imperfect information” had nothing to do with the Obama administration’s deceitful portrayal of the terrorist attack to the public. Declassified documents made public two weeks ago reveal that AFRICOM commander Gen. Carter Ham told members of the House Armed Services subcommittee that he learned about the “terrorist attack” on the consulate compound only 15 minutes after it commenced. ”My first call was to [Joint Chiefs of Staff General chairman] General Dempsey, General Dempsey’s office, to say, ‘Hey, I am headed down the hall. I need to see him right away,’” Ham testified on June 26, 2013. “I told him what I knew. We immediately walked upstairs to meet with Secretary [of Defense] Panetta.” Ham further testified that Dempsey and Panetta “had the basic information as they headed across for the meeting at the White House.”
The meeting to which Ham referred was a pre-scheduled session with President Obama at 5 p.m. EST. A Defense Department timeline reveals that this meeting occurred one hour and 18 minutes after the attack began. The meeting lasted half an hour. That means that Obama knew it was a terrorist attack on September 11, 2012, before the battle that lasted approximately eight hours was less than two hours old.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/walter-williams/the-politics-of-hate-and-envy/print/
Part of the progressive agenda is to create hate and envy. One component of that agenda is to attack the large differences between a corporation’s chief executive officer’s earnings and those of its average worker. CNNMoney published salary comparisons in “Fortune 50 CEO pay vs. our salaries” (http://tinyurl.com/c2b24rv). Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf’s annual salary is $2.8 million. CNN shows that it takes 66 Wells Fargo employees, whose average salary is $42,400, to match Stumpf’s salary. It takes 57 Wal-Mart employees, who earn $22,100 on average, to match CEO Michael Duke’s $1.3 million. At General Electric, 44 employees earning $75,300 a year match CEO Jeff Immelt’s $3.3 million salary. For people with little understanding, such differences seem patently unfair. Before touching on the fairness issue, let’s look at some high salaries that progressives ignore.
Forbes lists the “Highest-Paid Football Players 2013″ (http://tinyurl.com/kw4dv3d). Drew Brees, quarterback for the Saints, earned $40 million. If the average Saints organization employee earned $45,000, it would take almost 900 of them to match Brees’ salary. Patriots quarterback Tom Brady earned $31.3 million, and Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant earns $23.5 million for playing basketball. It would take the earnings of more than 1,200 workers making $45,000 a year to match the earnings of Brady and Bryant.
