Displaying posts published in

2016

The States Fight Back The Obama administration’s attempt to dictate bathroom policy encounters great resistance. By Jake Curtis

The federal government’s increasingly oppressive treatment of state governments has not gone unnoticed. In fact, this treatment has prompted an interesting development. Following the Obama administration’s issuance of its May “Dear Colleague” letter relating to local school districts’ transgender-student policies, close to half of the states have made the decision to sue the federal government.

The Founders’ original understanding of federalism did not envision subservient states that exist only to serve the federal government. Nor did it contemplate overbearing states. It stood for a competitive arrangement, whereby the federal government exercised clearly enumerated powers while states remained within the sphere of reserved powers. And a competitive environment among the states ensured a limit on the growth of state government.

Unfortunately, this constitutional framework has been eroded at a frightening pace over the last seven years. As I recently noted, while the transgender letter issued by the Departments of Justice and Education is the most recent and well-known letter, the Obama administration has been very effectively utilizing federal agencies to bypass both Congress and state governments.

But since the administration’s issuance of the letter, a very encouraging development has occurred. Numerous states, local units of government, and parents have stood up and demanded the federal government defend the legal positions it has taken in the letter. And they are doing so not in the name of “states’ rights,” but in order to reestablish a constitutionally prescribed form of competitive federalism.

Even before issuance of the Dear Colleague letter, a group of Illinois parents stood up to the departments by filing a complaint in the Northern District of Illinois. After initially resisting the Department of Education’s demands to alter its policy relating to the use of bathrooms and changing facilities by a transgender student, the school district finally relented and entered into a “Locker Room Agreement and Restroom Policy” whereby transgender students were free to use any facility they chose.

A group of over 50 parents has fought back, claiming the agreement represents a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act because it exceeds the department’s statutory jurisdiction, authority, and limitations, is arbitrary and capricious, and is without observance of procedure. The complaint also alleges violations of the fundamental right to privacy, Title IX, and both the Illinois and the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Acts.

How Hillary Lied to Parents of Benghazi Dead Yes, Trump stepped in it by attacking the Khans, but where is the media outrage over Hillary’s lies to the Benghazi parents? By Deroy Murdock

Donald J. Trump really knows how to stick his foot in his mouth. And then his calf. And then his thigh. If he keeps going, he will be in real trouble.

The Republican presidential nominee’s protracted fight with Ghazala and Khizr Khan has been a wholly unnecessary and incredibly unhelpful distraction from the fight he needs to wage against Hillary Clinton and her collectivist dream: to preserve Obamaism and protect the policies that have enfeebled America overseas and slowed GDP growth to a near-standstill — 1 percent, on average, for the first half of 2016.

Trump’s battle with the mother and father of the late U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan — who was killed in action in Iraq in June 2004 — is cold, foolish, and self-destructive. When the Pakistani-born parents of this American military hero condemned Trump’s proposed limits on Muslim immigration, he should have let their words roll away, like raindrops on an umbrella. Instead, Trump grabbed that umbrella and smacked the Khans with it — even as Republicans recoiled, and Democrats danced jigs of joy.

Trump should know what any candidate for fifth-grade class president already understands: Don’t attack the mother of a dead soldier. Trump must make it easier to keep the support of conservatives and Republicans who need him to demolish Crooked Hillary.

All of that said, Trump’s long-distance jousting with the Khans is nowhere as egregious as Clinton’s in-your-face lies to Patricia Smith — mother of Sean Smith, an American diplomat whom al-Qaeda-affiliated radical Islamic terrorists murdered in the September 11, 2012, Benghazi massacre.

Hillary stared right at this mourning mother as her son lay in a casket just feet away, at Andrews Air Force Base that September 14.

As Smith told the Republican National Convention, “When I saw Hillary Clinton at Sean’s coffin ceremony, just days later, she looked me squarely in the eye and told me a video was responsible.”

Hillary Clinton denies this. In fact, she questioned Smith’s mental capacity. The Democrat standard bearer told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, “I don’t hold any ill feeling for someone who in that moment may not fully recall everything that was or wasn’t said.”

However, strong evidence arose yesterday to corroborate Smith’s account and underscore the question with which she closed her emotional convention speech: “If Hillary Clinton can’t give us the truth, why should we give her the presidency?”

Donald Trump, Postmodern Candidate Trump defies all political orthodoxy and confounds any attempts at explanation or prediction. By Victor Davis Hanson

Early 20th-century modernism ignored classical rules of expression. But late 20th-century postmodernism blew up those rules altogether.

Barack Obama was a modernist candidate. He turned out vast numbers of young and minority voters, mastered new social media, and in 2008 overturned the old-guard Democratic furniture such as Hillary Clinton.

In contrast, Donald Trump has simply destroyed normal politics. Unlike Obama with his record Wall Street fundraising of 2008 and 2012, Trump has raised almost no money. He ignores endorsements from political kingpins. Trump has organized no serious voter registration drives. His convention was bizarre, showcasing his kids instead of party bosses and special-interest groups.

How about internal polling? Trump seems to have none.

Sophisticated opposition research? Zilch.

Standard talking points? Not so much.

Teleprompted speeches? Trump prefers ad hoc stream of consciousness.

Candidates are supposed to avoid the pitfalls of press conferences as much as possible — and prep for days when they are obligated to give them. Not Trump. He thrives on unscripted rants to the press without much worry about what he says.

Candidates dislike and fear reporters, and so seek to flatter them. Trump openly insults them and occasionally kicks them out of his press conferences.

Modern politicians generally avoid getting pulled into nasty, lose-lose fights. Trump welcomes brawls against all comers.

Hillary Clinton has taken huge quid pro quo contributions from rich people as she damns the influence of big money in politics. Trump cannot seem to find any big donors. He trashes crony capitalist insiders on the grounds that he used to be one himself.

Traditional politicians such as Mitt Romney were perfectly groomed and rarely appeared without tailored suits. Modernist politicians such as Obama like to be photographed on the golf links appearing young, hip, and cool, wearing shades and polo shirts.

But Trump defies both traditional and nontraditional tastes by wearing loud, long ties, combing his dyed-yellow hair over a bald spot, and tanning his skin a strange orange hue.

Politicians attack each other while faking politeness. The coolest do it with nuance. Not Trump. He uses taboo words like “liar” and “crooked.”

Modernist candidates voice platitudes about border enforcement. But only a postmodern one would demand that Mexico pay for a wall.

SHOCK REPORT: Military-Aged Men Extremely Over-Represented in EU Refugee Asylum Applications

Recall when Donald Trump cast doubt on the intentions of many of the Syrian refugees by claiming a disproportionate number were “young, strong men”? Most media quickly attempted to debunk his claim.

Well, Trump’s claim now seems borne out by data from the Pew Research Center.

A shocking report released yesterday on European asylum applications in 2015 shows that, indeed, the refugees are disproportionately represented by “military-age” adult males — to an alarming degree.

A majority of the applicants came from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq in what has become the biggest demographic shift in Europe since the fall of the Soviet Union.

From the Pew report:

As a result, about four-in-ten asylum seekers in Europe in 2015 (42%) were young men ages 18 to 34. This was also true for most leading origin countries: 39% of those from Syria were young men, as were 38% of those from Afghanistan and 47% of those from Iraq. Young adult males made up a larger share of asylum seekers from some origin countries. For example, roughly three-fourths of asylum seekers from Gambia (80%), Pakistan (76%) and Bangladesh (76%) were young adult men in 2015.

The demographic profile of asylum seekers in destination countries varies considerably. About four-in-ten asylum seekers applying in Germany (39%) in 2015 were young adult males, about the same level as asylum seekers to Europe (42%) as a whole. In Hungary, about half (51%) of asylum seekers were more young adult men. In Sweden, just 28% of asylum seekers were young men in 2015. Meanwhile, young adult men made up 74% of asylum seekers in Italy, the highest share of any country in 2015.

Europe has also seen a spike in the number of unaccompanied minors (children under 18 who arrived in Europe without adult guardians) applying for asylum in recent years. Between 2008 and 2015, 198,500 unaccompanied minors applied for asylum in the European Union, Norway and Switzerland, of which nearly half (48% or about 96,000) arrived in 2015. Among all first-time asylum applications in 2015, nearly 7% were from unaccompanied minors, the highest share since data on unaccompanied minors became available in 2008.

For purposes of comparison, of the 4.8 million Syrian refugees the UN has registered, the population split is nearly even: 50.3 percent were men, 49.7 percent were women. And yet, the Syrian refugees who applied for asylum in Europe last year were 71 percent male to 29 percent female.

Paris Bus Attacked With Molotov Cocktails, Men Shout “Allahu Akbar” Where was the media?

https://pjmedia.com/video/paris-bus-attacked-with-molotov-cocktails-men-shout-allahu-akbar/

The mainstream media haven’t been reporting this: men, who were shouting “Allahu Akbar,” destroyed a passenger bus in Paris this past week, using molotov cocktails and explosives. See video at site.

Arabs Must Turn a New Page with Israel by Fred Maroun

We must look at Israel not as foreign presence, which it is not, but as a unique and remarkable component of the Middle East that enriches the region.

The creation of such a Palestinian state under today’s conditions is likely to result in a Hamas-dominated state that is violently hostile towards Israel. The Palestinian Authority must be transitioned into a peaceful and stable entity before it can be expected to run a state.

Binyamin Netanyahu recently suggested an approach to make the peace initiative work, but Arab League Secretary-General Nabil al-Arabi rejected it out of hand. This is not how harmonious relationships between nations are built.

“We must all rise above all forms of fanaticism, self-deception and obsolete theories of superiority.” — Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat, addressing Israel’s parliament on November 20, 1977.

This is part two of a two-part series. The first part examined the mistakes that we Arabs made in our interactions with Israel.

There is much that we can do to improve our relationship with Israel — if we want to — and there is good reason to think that it would be in both our short- and long-term interest if we did. The most critical change is in approach. Changing that would start to repair the foundation of the relationship and would provide a basis for mutual respect and trust, without which any solution would remain fragile.
Understand Israel

We must see the real Israel rather than the monstrosity that Arabs have been brainwashed to see. We are so afraid to call Israel by its real name that we refer to it as the “Zionist entity”. The name is “Israel”; as written in Haaretz, “Israel has been the name of an ethnic group in the Levant going back at least 3200 years”.

The standard Arab narrative about Israel is that it is the result of Western colonialism. This language has also been adopted by many, who claim that “settler colonialism that began with the Nakba … in 1948”, implying that all of Israel is a colony. This claim is not true, and no healthy relationship can be built while one side keeps repeating lies about the other.

Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, a people with a long and complex history on that land. Attempts to kill them and exile them came from many sources over the centuries, including the Assyrians, Babylonians, Romans and the Crusaders. These are historical facts.

Israel’s then Prime Minister Golda Meir said in 1973, “We Jews have a secret weapon in our struggle with the Arabs — we have no place to go”. No matter how much pressure Arabs put on Jews to leave, they are not going anywhere; in fact, that pressure only hardens their resolve. Israel is their home.

We must look at Israel not as foreign presence, which it is not, but as a unique and remarkable component of the Middle East that enriches the region.
Not our enemy

We must stop calling Israel our enemy. We deliberately chose to make Israel our enemy when we attacked it, rather than accept the existence of a tiny Jewish state in our midst.

Israel (including the annexed Golan Heights and East Jerusalem) is only 19% of British Mandate Palestine (which included Jordan), on which Britain promised in 1924 to build a “Jewish National Home”. Israel is so small that it would have to be duplicated 595 times to cover the entire Arab world.

We made self-defeating decisions in our relationship with Israel, based on the belief that it is our enemy and that we can only deal with it though force — but the tiny state of Israel is not a threat to the Arab world.

Every year, Palestinians hold rallies, often violent ones, to commemorate the Nakba (“catastrophe”) , which is they give ton to the Arab loss in the war of 1948/49. They carry keys, symbolizing the keys to homes that their ancestors fled during that war. This commemoration, like much of the Arab rhetoric about Israel, is a one-sided view that demonizes Israel while it absolves Arabs of all responsibility for starting and continuing a conflict that resulted in decades of violence as well as displacements of both Arabs and Jews.

Iran Is Cheating on the Nuclear Deal, Now What? by Majid Rafizadeh

One year into the nuclear deal, two credible and timely intelligence reports reveal that Iran has no intention of honoring the terms of the deal, which, anyway, it never signed.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency revealed that the Iranian government has pursued a “clandestine” path to obtain illicit nuclear technology and equipment from German companies “at what is, even by international standards, a quantitatively high level.”

A secret agreement, obtained by the Associated Press, discloses that Iran’s nuclear deal would not only lift constraints on Iran’s nuclear program after the nuclear deal, but it will also do so long before the deal expires — including the installation of thousands of centrifuges, five times more than what it currently possesses, as well enriching uranium at a much higher pace.

The more the White House ignores Iran’s violations of the nuclear accord, the more Iran will be emboldened to violate international laws and the terms of the nuclear agreement.

On July 14, 2015, Iran and the six world powers known as the P5+1 (China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States) reached an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. The deal was intended to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions and put a hold on Tehran’s nuclear development.

President Obama promised that the deal is not based on trust rather anchored in verification. Nevertheless, the following revelations of confidential documents as well as the following breaches of the nuclear agreement by Iran, reveal otherwise.

On paper, the nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), stipulates a series of regulations, monitoring mechanisms, and restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities. But how can the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) maintain these transparency standards and follow through on the proposed regulations? How can the IAEA be sure to detect all illicit nuclear activities in the 18th largest country in the world?

Iran has a history of deceiving the IAEA by conducting clandestine nuclear activities, as it did in Arak, Natanz, and Ferdow.

Khizr Khan’s writings discovered subordinating US Constitution to sharia law By Thomas Lifson

He was presented to the nation as a Constitution-loving (he carries a pocket copy, dontcha know!) immigrant who just happens to be from Pakistan, but it turns out that Khizr Khan is a recognized scholar on sharia law. And in his published writings, he seems to approve of subordinating the Constitution to Allah’s own sharia. Paul Sperry reports at Breitbart:

Khizr M. Khan has published papers supporting the supremacy of Islamic law over “man-made” Western law — including the very Constitution he championed in his Democratic National Convention speech attacking GOP presidential nod Donald Trump.

In 1983, for example, Khan wrote a glowing review of a book compiled from a seminar held in Kuwait called “Human Rights In Islam” in which he singles out for praise the keynote address of fellow Pakistani Allah K. Brohi, a pro-jihad Islamic jurist who was one of the closest advisers to late Pakistani dictator Gen. Zia ul-Haq, the father of the Taliban movement.

Khan speaks admiringly of Brohi’s interpretation of human rights, even though it included the right to kill and mutilate those who violate Islamic laws and even the right of men to “beat” wives who act “unseemly.”

Brohi has quite a few “accomplishments” for Khan to admire:

[Brohi] restored Sharia punishments, such as amputations for theft and demands that rape victims produce four male witnesses or face adultery charges. He also made insulting the Muslim prophet Muhammad a crime punishable by death. To speed the Islamization of Pakistan, he and Zia issued a law that required judges to consult mullahs on every judicial decision for Sharia compliance.

And as for Khan’s wife, the silent Gold Star Mother:

Brohi goes on to argue that human rights bestowed by Islam include the right of men to “beat” their wives.

“The best statement of the human rights is also to be found in the address delivered by the prophet [Muhammad] so often described as his last address,” Brohi said, quoting: “ ‘You have rights over your wives and they have rights over you. You have the right that they should not defile your bed and that they should not behave with open unseemliness. If they do, God allows you to put them in separate rooms and to beat them but not with severity.’”

Khan touted the supremacy of sharia:

Obama dances the jizya By Richard Butrick

When Jefferson and John Adams went to call on Tripoli’s envoy to London, Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman, they asked him by what right his Barbary pirates raided American ships, stole their cargo, killed, enslaved, and ransomed their crews. As Jefferson later reported to Secretary of State John Jay, and to the Congress, the ambassador answered

that [the right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

That was in the early 1800s. Seems little has changed regarding the mindset of the leaders of the Ummah. Now it turns out that Obama (Kerry?) clandestinely ransomed four American captives held by Iran.

The Obama administration secretly airlifted $400 million in cash to Iran in January at the same time Tehran was releasing four jailed Americans, payment that a top congressional Republican is calling “ransom.” The Wall Street Journal, citing U.S. and European officials and congressional sources, reported that the administration procured the money from central banks in Switzerland and the Netherlands. The money was stacked on wooden pallets and flown to Tehran in an unmarked cargo plane.

The Iranians know desperation when they see it and Obama was desperate for the appearance of success in the Middle East. Seems we have a president more concerned with his image than with the honor and reputation of the U.S. and its citizens. Compare this to Stephen Decatur, the hero of the Tripoli wars:

Government Expansion in the West and Its Economic Consequences By Herbert London

It is clear based on this stage of political evolution in the West that democracy – to the extent it has meaning – is a form of inclusiveness, expanding the horizons of political participation. On one level it makes sense — why should anyone be denied participation when interests in the aggregate are why we employ the term “representative government”?

The issue as it has now developed is that extensive political involvement results in economic hazards. A government accountable to the electorate regulates to satisfy one constituency or another, borrows money for real and perceived needs, and debases the soundness of the currency for its own political advantage.

Extension of political involvement also means that a “servile” class of those who do not work, but must be supported, are part of the democratic mosaic. Recognizing the imperfections in a free market, compassion has become a moral anodyne. The moral life, in which virtue is a constraint on certain behavior, retreats before a relativism that abjures judgment. So far in the direction of relativism have we gone that it is freedom that must be defined, not slavery. Freedom once meant the capacity to choose along with facing the consequences of that choice. There are burdens attached to freedom. Now freedom is being able to do what one wants assuming the state accepts you as a member of the servile class.

There is a price to be paid for the condition. Every Western nation is in debt. The U.S. level is about to reach $20 trillion, with liabilities at least three times that sum. Deficits in fiscal budgets are the pattern, with the only question being the level of the deficit. The conditions are dicey but political inclusiveness militates against change. The politics of the era makes change a rhetorical claim, not a realistic policy option. Imagine the consequence of trying to reduce entitlement spending?

Senator Bernie Sanders campaigns on free tuition. The British take great pride in a single-payer health care system that has put great strain on national finances. Greece is effectively bankrupt because the state has assumed the role of parent and insurer. Even the once affluent Germany is facing financial hardship in its attempt to incorporate a million migrants into its governmental system.