BOOKS Comments turned off

Peter Smith: The Platitudes of a Pantywaist President

Posted By on June 23rd, 2016

“Unfortunately Obama is not alone. The European big three — Cameron, Hollande and Merkel — all parrot the ‘religion of peace’ hoax. Mind you, let’s put it in perspective, they don’t have the same aversion to referring to radical Islamic terrorism; and, so far as I know, have not gone so far as Obama in purging all references to the religion that dare not speak its name from the lexicon of their military and security agencies. The words Islam, sharia law, and jihad are verboten apparently. The words extremism and terrorism, and now presumably ‘thuggism’, are allowed provided they are devoid of any link to Islam. We are in serious trouble. Islamists are beheading infidels and the Commander-in-Chief is parsing his language to cloud the threat. In these circumstances, whether he offends tender sensibilities or not, Trump is what the Western world needs now. Love sweet love will have to wait for a different time.”

The only thing more certain than the next Islamist assault is the parade of world leaders who can be counted to mouth their kumbaya pieties, even as the blood is wiped off the walls. In this, if nothing else, President Obama is the undisputed world leader.
Though the roots of ISIS go back a fair way it did not begin coming to prominence until President Obama withdrew remaining US troops from Iraq in December, 2011, leaving behind, as he put it, “a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq.” And it was after that, in April, 2013, that al-Baghdadi announced its formation. Yet, wall-to-wall conservative commentators apparently believe that defeating ISIS is the key to preventing the recent atrocities in Orlando, in San Bernardino, in Brussels, and in Paris.

Talk about memory loss. The London, Madrid, Bali and Mumbai bombings and countless other Islamist attacks occurred before ISIS was a glint in al-Baghdadi’s eye. Thomas Jefferson was fighting Muslim Tripoli pirates at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It is the religion stupid! And if and when ISIS is defeated, whatever that looks like, the religion, and its integral supremacist ideology, will persist. The only permanent solution is to degrade and marginalize Islam itself so that its remaining fundamentalist adherents resemble a small group of whacko religious snake dancers.

The religion cannot be saved. It cannot be saved because its very scripture is immutable and corrupting. That’s it, full stop, no argument. Where it holds sway warped views bloom: e.g., support for sharia law, religious intolerance, the inferiority of women, death for apostasy, and for blasphemy, heresy, homosexuality and adultery. Does anyone think that is a coincidence?

Sure, external and home-grown terrorists have to be killed. But the creed of Islam has to be confronted. The made-up hateful words of Allah and the hateful sayings and doings of his earthly amanuensis Mohammed cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged and infect hundreds of millions of people, here now and still to be born. It is a plague on humanity and must be confronted as resolutely as Reagan confronted ‘the evil empire’ and all that it stood for.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

John O’Sullivan An Epitaph That Might Yet Be Written

Posted By on June 23rd, 2016

Not to say ‘I told them so’, but in June, 1975, I wrote to lament Britain’s dismissal of old friends, traditions and, indeed, national self-esteem itself. All these years later, as UK voters make their verdict known, I yearn to hear that decades of folly and false promise are finally at an end.
On June 4, 1975, I sat down at my clattering typewriter in the offices of the Daily Telegraph in Fleet Street and embarked on a melancholy task. As one of the leader-writers opposed to Britain’s membership of the European Economic Community (as it was then called), I had been asked by editor Bill Deedes to write a fairly light account of the referendum campaign that would appear on morning of the vote. Bill said he wanted my squib to offset the solemnity of the editorial, but my suspicion was that he was a secret No voter who wanted it to offset the Telegraph’s admonition to vote Yes.

In principle Bill could have ordered a “No” editorial, but pressure from the establishment for an endorsement of Britain’s EU membership was so overwhelming in 1975 that it would have seemed eccentric, unpatriotic, even treasonous. So I read through “the files” of the previous month and started bashing it out:

From the Establishment and the respectable anti-Establishment, from the Economist and the New Statesman, from the Lord Feather [of the TUC] and Mr Campbell Adamson [of the CBI], from Mr Wilson and Mr Heath, from the Royal Commission Volunteers to “Actors and Actresses for Europe”, from the farthest reaches of the civilized West End, the same advice, the same dire predictions of life outside the Market (“God, it was hell out there in 1972”), the same comforting assurances of a bright future inside, less ecstatic admittedly than similar forecasts before we had entered (“Come in, come in, the water’s lukewarm”) have been proclaimed with an almost religious fervour.

Religion itself had been conscripted for the European cause. The Bishop of London, preaching in St Paul’s, had said that those concerned about sovereignty were guilty of the heresy “My Country Right or Wrong” which was “essentially selfish and inward-looking”. As for Big Business, that spoke with one voice: the CBI’s Ralph Bateman declared that it would be “madness” to leave the EEC, and Mr Barrie Heath told the workers at Guest, Keen & Nettlefolds that membership of the EEC was not a political issue at all.

“Is he Sir Barrie?” asked Mr Enoch Powell, the leading right-wing campaigner for a No vote. “No? Well, he soon will be.” He was too—given a knighthood three years later “for services to exporting”.

Australia played a discreet part too:

There was a commendable reluctance on the part of overseas dignitaries to interfere in Britain’s internal political arguments. Mr Gough Whitlam, for instance, revealed how he had virtuously resisted the blandishments of certain anti-Marketeers to call for Britain’s withdrawal. Why had he refused? Because he did not wish Britain to lapse into the sad decline of Spain, he declared in neutral Australian tones.

But that, of course, might have been delivered in the spirit of “Let them have what they want—good and hard” in revenge for Heath’s betrayal of the Antipodes and the Commonwealth in the European negotiations. At least I sort of hope so.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Why Is the U.S. Embracing Iran – AGAIN? by Peter Huessy

Posted By on June 23rd, 2016

“You will see we are not in any particular animosity with the Americans,” Ayatollah Khomeini said, and promised to President Jimmy Carter that Iran would be a “tolerant democracy.”

Although the State Department has in its just released annual report on world-wide terror designated Iran as the world’s premier state sponsor of terrorism, the Obama administration has assisted Iranian militias in Iraq with air support, provided intelligence to Hezbollah’s allies on Israeli air strikes, and has steadfastly refused to use any military force against any elements of the Assad regime.

America is apparently bent on repeating — yet again — the historic wrong turn it took in 1979 by once again embracing the radical Islamic regime in Iran. Why would the U.S. administration think doing the same thing again will have a different outcome?

Senior leaders from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are in Washington, meeting with top U.S. diplomatic and defense officials, and are deeply concerned America has significantly worsened the situation in the Middle East by creating a “strategic partnership” with Iran.

Thirty-seven years ago, former American President Carter paved the way for Iran’s Islamic theocratic dictatorship to come to power according to newly declassified secret documents, reports the BBC Persian News Service. The documents show that former President Carter pledged to “hold back” the Iranian military from attempting a coup, which would have prevented the return of the exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini from France.

The documents also reveal that the Carter administration believed –erroneously– that bringing the Ayatollah Khomeini into power in Iran, and in the process abandoning the Shah, would preserve American interests, keep the Soviets out of the region, protect U.S. allies, and ensure the flow of oil to the world’s industrial nations.

In one of his many messages to President Jimmy Carter, Khomeini played into that belief. “You will see we are not in any particular animosity with the Americans,” Khomeini said and promised that Iran would be a “tolerant democracy.”

Unfortunately, the mullahs did not stop their terrorist ways; and the U.S. government, through successive administrations, did not stopped them, either.

The Reagan administration, for example, deployed “peacekeepers” to Lebanon under Congressionally mandated rules of engagement that, tragically, only facilitated the Iranian- and Syrian-directed bombings of the U.S. Beirut Marine barracks and embassy.

Then, the Clinton administration refused to lift an arms embargo and provide weapons to Muslims in the former Yugoslavia, ensuring that Iranian weapons and influence would fill the void.

The result of decades of the U.S. policy in Iran is that since Islamic terrorists took power in Tehran in 1979, Iran has murdered thousands of Americans[1] in addition to those killed in the bombings in Lebanon, the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the African embassies, and the World Trade Towers in New York.

U.S. court decisions have so far held Iran responsible for more than $50 billion in damages owed to American citizens for these terror attacks directed by the mullahs and their terrorist proxies.

America’s military has also suffered. Thousands of American and allied soldiers have been killed and maimed by Iranian Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Iraq and Afghanistan.[2]

It could be argued that the United States has at times had to make deals with unsavory countries. It was allied with the Soviet Union, for instance, in the fight to destroy Nazism in World War II. So, the thinking might go, a genuine agreement to eliminate Iran’s nuclear weapons program might require some compromise and thus a type of “partnership”.

The Obama administration has, in fact, sought to justify its embrace of Iran by citing the assumed benefits from a nuclear agreement with Iran.[3] But the current “nuclear deal” with Iran is not a real agreement. The Iranians never signed it.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Obama’s Fracking Comeuppance A judge he appointed rebukes an anti-drilling regulation as lawless.

Posted By on June 23rd, 2016

Another day, another judicial rebuke to President Obama’s contempt for the rule of law. On Wednesday a federal judge struck down an oil and gas drilling rule imposed with no statutory authority.

In 2015 the Bureau of Land Management published new regulations about well construction and water management for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, that takes place on federal and Indian lands. The BLM asserted “broad authority” to control oil and gas operations on the basis of laws that were passed in 1920, 1930, 1938, 1976 and 1982 and were allegedly ambiguous. Thus the agency said it deserved the benefit of the interpretive doubt that the courts call Chevron deference.

Abusing Chevron is an Obama specialty. But BLM’s overreach was notably egregious because Congress passed an energy law in 2005 that stripped the executive branch of fracking jurisdiction and gave that power to the states.

The BLM argued that Congress’s choice didn’t matter because the bureau wasn’t mentioned by name in the 2005 law. That claim inspired Judge Scott Skavdahl of Wyoming—an Obama appointee—to conduct a remedial seminar in the Constitution’s separation of powers.

Under the BLM argument, Judge Skavdahl writes, “there would be no limit to the scope or extent of congressionally delegated authority BLM has. . . . Having explicitly removed the only source of specific federal agency authority over fracking, it defies common sense for the BLM to argue that Congress intended to allow it to regulate the same activity under a general statute that says nothing about hydraulic fracturing.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Obama Empties Innovative Classrooms Carl Barney thought he was doing a good deed by going nonprofit. The feds still want to kill his schools.By Allysia Finley

Posted By on June 23rd, 2016

The Obama administration’s relentless campaign against for-profit colleges is succeeding: More than 180 have closed in the past two years. The Education Department projects that 1,400 vocational programs educating 840,000 students won’t survive its gainful-employment rule, which ties federal student aid to debt and earnings.

But the administration isn’t content with shutting down for-profits: Now regulators and prosecutors are even going after a businessman who waved the white flag and converted his vocational schools into nonprofits. With this administration, it’s a sin if you ever tried to make a buck.

In 2012 Carl Barney merged the CollegeAmerica, Stevens-Henager College, Independence University and California College San Diego with the nonprofit Center for Excellence in Higher Education (CEHE), which promotes reforms in college philanthropy. The 75-year-old British immigrant, who had been the for-profit colleges’ sole proprietor, tells me that he wanted to reduce his day-to-day responsibilities and channel more resources into education rather than paying taxes. “I didn’t want to be as involved,” he says. “I wanted to put more money back into the colleges.” He became the chairman of the new group of nonprofit colleges.

As the merger was being completed in 2012, Colorado Attorney General John Suthers, a Republican, began an investigation. In November 2014, the AG sued CEHE. According to the complaint, the colleges duped students into enrolling with deceptive ads such as one promising to help them “make more money and have a real career.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Justice Department Announces Biggest Medicare Fraud Crackdown About 300 people arrested over alleged scams of military health program, home health care By Devlin Barrett

Posted By on June 23rd, 2016

Federal agents have arrested roughly 300 suspects in what officials call their largest crackdown on Medicare fraud, with charges ranging from taking illegal payments for marketing medications to false physical-therapy claims.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced the crackdown Wednesday, citing cases around the country where prosecutors say they found a wide variety of health-care fraud that totaled about $900 million in losses.

In California, officials have charged a man with receiving illegal payments for marketing compound medications, the costs of which were paid by Tricare, a program for members of the military, veterans and their families.

Previously, authorities have said compound-prescription sales involving Tricare were generating hundreds of millions of dollars in fraudulent transactions. The medications are specially mixed by pharmacists, often to treat pain, and often sell for thousands of dollars per prescription.

Other suspects charged in the crackdown include the managers of physical-therapy clinics in New York City that allegedly laundered money, paid kickbacks and billed Medicare and Medicaid for unnecessary treatments for patients.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Victor Sharpe : Islam is Islam is Islam

Posted By on June 23rd, 2016

To quote the old proverb: “If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, it must be a duck.” So it is with Islam. There is no radical Islam, no hijacked Islam, no corrupted Islam, no extreme Islam and no moderate Islam: There is simply Islam.

I remember listening as far back as in 2010 to then White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, answering questions from reporters about the planned 15 story high mosque mere yards from ground zero. It was revealing as he said:

“I think you’ve heard this administration and the last administration talk about the fact that we are not at war with a religion but with an idea that has corrupted a religion.”

There again was that oft repeated phrase that the religion of Islam has been corrupted. But did Gibbs and his boss, Barack Hussein Obama, truly believe that Islam is a peaceful religion and not without a major pillar called jihad with its dire implications for all non-Moslems or, as the Muslim world impudently describes them: infidels.

We hear the phrase by well-meaning but misguided individuals that Islam means peace. No. Islam means submission; not submission to the will of the people, as in a democracy, but solely to the will of Allah. And Moslems may not question the teachings of their prophet, Mohammed.

Islam also teaches that it is superior to all other religions. It is Islam über alles. The Moslem is taught that Judaism and Christianity perverted the will of Allah, and that Islam received the superior revelation requiring, therefore, that Jews and Christians ultimately submit to Islam.

Islam bases its ideology on five pillars – Witness to Allah and his prophet Mohammed; Prayer five times daily facing Mecca and the Ka’ba; Alms giving to the poor and to the mosque; Fasting during the month of Ramadan and Pilgrimage to Mecca.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Is Antisemitism the New ‘Normal’ in Europe? Judith Bergman

Posted By on June 23rd, 2016

In Michel Houellebecq’s dystopian novel, Submission (2015), which takes place in an imaginary France ‎in 2022, when the Muslim Brotherhood has won elections and rules the country in alliance with the Socialists, the non-Jewish protagonist, a professor at the Sorbonne, tells his Jewish student, who is escaping to Israel with her family, that there ‎can be “no Israel for me.” This is one of the most poignant observations in the book.‎

Another is the protagonist’s reflection that the increasing violence, even the gunshots in the streets of Paris as a ‎civil war threatens to explode during the run-up to the elections, has become the ‎new normal: something that everyone is resigned to as an inevitable fact, barely reported in the ‎media and treated as unremarkable by his fellow lecturers. Even after the Muslim Brotherhood wins the ‎elections, and the Sorbonne is turned into an Islamic university, with all that this entails, his colleagues treat ‎this development as nothing out of the ordinary. Houllebecq’s indictment against the silence and ‎complicity of his fellow intellectuals in the face of the Islamist encroachments on French society is ‎scathing. As a matter of course, in the new France, where freedom of speech comes at a prohibitive ‎price, Houllebecq now has to live under 24-hour police protection. Submission, by the way, was published on the day of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks.‎

The resignation and the precarious pretense that everything is normal in the face of rapidly deteriorating ‎circumstances, is a predictable human reaction, testimony to the sometimes practical but lamentable human capacity for adaptation to most circumstances, whatever they may be. ‎Historically, Jews have excelled in this discipline, simply because they had no choice. Just like Houllebecq’s ‎protagonist, they had nowhere else to go. However, whereas there “can be no Israel” for the lost ‎professor, today, unlike the last time Jews were threatened on a large scale in Europe, there is an Israel ‎for the Jews. Uniquely among all the peoples of Europe, the Jews have a welcoming place to go. ‎Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of Western European Jews choose to stay put in Europe.‎

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Obama’s disintegrating strategy The president’s willful ignorance helps Islamic State fight its ideological war. Jed Babbin

Posted By on June 23rd, 2016

Obama’s “strategy” against ISIS and the rest of the terrorist world has disintegrated. You can’t fight Islamic terrorists with political correctness tying your hands.

Throughout his presidency, Barack Obama has maintained his willful ignorance of the fact that weakness against terrorists abroad, coupled with weakness against them at home, add up to more than the sum of their parts. To defeat terrorists, we need to have policies at home and strategies abroad that are integrated and support each other.

From the State Department came a petition of dissent, signed by dozens of employees, asking for military action against Syria’s Bashar Assad. If many in the State Department — the last bastion of diplomatic wimpery — are calling for military action, the president’s policies must have disintegrated.

And they have, as CIA Director John Brennan said last week. Mr. Brennan said that two years of President Obama’s war against the Islamic State, or ISIS, haven’t even disrupted its ability to conduct terrorist attacks globally. This despite the president’s insistence that ISIS is suffering low morale and loss of territory.

The Orlando nightclub massacre, committed by a man claiming allegiance to ISIS, leaves Mr. Obama’s shattered policies in stark relief.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

VENEZUELA IS PROOF SOCIALISM ALWAYS CAUSES MISERY BY BENJAMIN WEINGARTEN

Posted By on June 23rd, 2016

The great man-caused disaster of the last century is not global warming. It is socialism.

Consider the utter tragedy playing itself out in Venezuela, a formerly relatively prosperous, resource-rich, Western nation that now faces the economic, political and cultural abyss after embracing the Bernie Sanders-on-steroids policies the Left always promises will bring about justice, fairness and equality.

As one heart-wrenching account details:

In the last two years Venezuela has experienced the kind of implosion that hardly ever occurs in a middle-income country like it outside of war. Mortality rates are skyrocketing; one public service after another is collapsing; triple-digit inflation has left more than 70 percent of the population in poverty; an unmanageable crime wave keeps people locked indoors at night; shoppers have to stand in line for hours to buy food; babies die in large numbers for lack of simple, inexpensive medicines and equipment in hospitals, as do the elderly and those suffering from chronic illnesses.

Venezuela indeed has experienced a war, but not one involving armies. The nation has waged a war on liberty itself.