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How to Enable Islam…and Evil by Edward Cline

Posted By on February 17th, 2016

Daniel Greenfield, in his Sultan Knish columns, writes about Islam from a perspective that is 100% objective and rational, a perspective I wish more people were capable of grasping. They don’t need to emulate his writing style or acquire as in-depth knowledge of Islam as his to appreciate the value he offers readers, indeed, offers the nation. Grasping the unchanging and unchangeable nature of Islam is a simple exercise in non-contradictory identification. A is A. Islam is Islam.

“Bad” Islam is just “Good” Islam in a bad mood, he writes. “Bad” Islam has nothing to do with Islam. It’s as though “Bad” Islam were not quoting from the Koran, but from the Peanuts cartoons and the translation always gets skewed in the process.

Greenfield is not an Islam-basher for the sake of bashing Islam. With his unbeatable gift for irony, he unleashes the same no-holds-barred passion as he bashes phony politicians (is there a difference?), and phony technologies (like solar and wind power), and phony humanitarians who profit from phony charities and leave chump change for the alleged beneficiaries (re Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, the Clintons, George Clooney, and two or three dozen more extraordinarily rich people who want to “do good”). The private organizations “resettling” Muslim “refugees” in American cities, and which are paid and subsidized by the U.S. government, are a case in point.

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Bernie Sanders: Socialist, Progressive, Jew Edward Alexander

Posted By on February 17th, 2016

In the course of his mercurial rise to national prominence, Senator Bernard Sanders has diligently affixed the adjective “democratic” to the “socialism” that is the name of his desire for America. Unlike the semi-educated “millennials”and historical amnesiacs who now flock to him, he is old enough and smart enough to recall such monstrosities as Germany’s “National Socialism,” the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” (and its numerous Eastern European satellites), and — lest we forget — the Oceania of Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, where Ingsoc, (Newspeak for English socialism) is the political ideology of totalitarianism. With that single adjective, Sanders seems to align himself (but only up to a point) with such estimable figures as Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, who founded Dissent magazine in 1954 primarily to declare their severing of ties to Bolshevism. They also made, in Howe’s words, “the indissoluble connection between democracy and socialism a crux of our thought.”

If, however, the connection is really indissoluble, why did Howe, and why does Sanders, find it necessary, compulsively, always to insert the qualifier “democratic”? Does this not suggest that socialism is inherently undemocratic? At least the socialist George Orwell recognized that in societies like the Russia and China of his day, where there is no private property and therefore no separate economic power, the ruling class looks upon political power as its essential and exclusive end; in a thoroughly socialist society, all jobs come under the direct control of political authorities. Orwell understood that a free market is the necessary, although not sufficient, condition of a free society. But Senator Sanders gives no indication that he comprehends how a free market keeps the organization of economic activity from the control of political authority and thus severely limits the coercive power of the state. (What Sanders does understand very well is that, to quote Orwell himself: “The mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist. . .” )

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The Supreme Court Vacancy Explained (in 250 Words)By Charles Lipson

Posted By on February 17th, 2016

No. 1: No nominee for the high court can get through the Senate before the election. No one.

No. 2: President Obama and the Democratic candidates for president know that. So do Republicans. All God’s children know it.
No. 3: Since the nominee will not be approved, Obama will use the opportunity to advance other goals. He will propose someone who burnishes his own progressive credentials and shows why control of the court depends on the November election. Putting Senate Republicans in an awkward position would be a nice bonus. But the target is November.

No. 4: Obama will nominate someone whose demographic characteristics help in the contests for president and U.S. Senate. That is not just his main criterion. It is his only one. The candidate could be from a purple state. Or a Latino. Or openly gay. Having finished law school would be a plus.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MY SAY: A RECOMMENDED BOOK

Posted By on February 16th, 2016

Now that so many opinions, columns, politicians are focusing on the next appointment to the Supreme Court, let me recommend a book that explains how important it is to replace Antonin Scalia with a learned and principled and genuine Conservative. rsk

“The Supreme Court vs. The Constitution: You don’t have to be a lawyer to understand how Supreme Court Justices have recently substituted their own elitist views for Constitutional guarntees that protect the average American’s security and values”By Gerald Walpin

They’re on a “rampage,” writes Gerald Walpin, one of the country’s top litigators, in his astonishing new book, The Supreme Court Vs. The Constitution.And it takes just five of them to lay waste to the rights of 300 million Americans.

A mostly bare majority of justices of the United States Supreme Court, the only judicial body enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, have spent recent decades reversing, revoking and rescinding the fundamental guarantees of that sacred document to the people of America.

They’ve freed thousands of murderers, rewritten sound and time-tested laws, crippled religious liberty, enabled the spread of pornography and immorality. They have ignored the letter and spirit of the Constitution and its amendments in grabbing power that rightfully belongs to the Executive and Legislative branches, the states − and, ultimately, the people.

Gerald Walpin, who prosecuted criminals and pursued crooked bureaucrats as a federal Inspector General nominated by President George W. Bush and confirmed by the U.S. Senate, and, many years before, as a top prosecutor for the Department Of Justice in New York, dramatically sets out the deliberate push by a bare majority of Supreme Court justices to usurp the role of our country’s elected lawmakers and executives.

The justices time and again seize the rightful authority of those we elect to represent us, and with unchallengeable arrogance undermine the “inalienable rights” that long have made the United States the world’s brightest beacon of freedom, democracy, and personal security.

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Why Leftists Want to Draft Women A real military or social justice brigades? Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on February 16th, 2016

Hillary Clinton had endorsed forcing women to register for a draft. Now the issue is taking on new urgency. Despite the left’s anti-draft posturing, it has fond memories of its protests during the Vietnam War and it is the biggest supporter of bringing back the draft. Proposals to move to a draft army invariably come from Democrats in Congress and left-wing pundits who believe that a draft will create a higher barrier to any future conflict. Forcing women to register raises the barrier even higher.

And anything that makes it harder for the military to function properly is also part of that agenda.

But the debate over the role of women in the military is also a subset of the bigger debate about the role of our military. The military no longer exists to win wars or even to fight them.

Nobody thinks that Obama will fight China if it tries to take Taiwan or even Japan. If North Korea attacks, our people will have no air support while Kerry pleads with Kim Jong Un to allow them to be evacuated. Obama refused to provide military equipment to Ukraine. If Russian troops march into Poland, Putin knows quite well that NATO or no NATO, we won’t be there.

A global warming treaty, no matter how invalid and unenforceable, will be zealously followed by the White House to the letter. But security agreements and defense pacts are utterly worthless.

Obama is not going to stand up to any major power. That’s a given. He’ll deliver another speech explaining that they’ve isolated themselves and are on the wrong side of history. But that fighting them would only make matters worse. Unless Europe starts deporting Muslims, we are not going to be fighting any world powers or even any countries with any military capabilities worth mentioning.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MISNAVIGATING AMERICA: RACHEL EHRENFELD

Posted By on February 16th, 2016

As if seven years of Obama’s efforts to diminish the world’s superpower were not enough, recent events in the Middle East highlight the need for American leadership capable of righting the ship.

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter’s statement that the U.S. sailors “obviously had misnavigated” two boats into Iran’s territorial waters illustrates the administration’s mindset of blaming America first, as well as its efforts to neuter America’s defense forces.

This was exacerbated by Secretary John Kerry’s thanks and “gratitude to Iranian authorities for their cooperation,” for releasing the ten sailors whose boats were hijacked by the terrorist designated Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Once again he demonstrated his acquiescence to Iran and inaptness to represent America’s interests.

President Obama’s foreign policy in the Middle East thus far, included the enabling of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, accelerating Iranian intervention in the Middle East, and elevating the regime’s influence on the international stage.

Lifting the sanctions and filling the coffers of the terrorist theocracy of Iran with more than $100 billion, not only increased the funding of Iran’s terrorist activities and groups but also served to justify the Iranian Revolution agenda.

Expressions of the regime’s appreciation of these American concessions were exhibited this week by millions who marched in celebration of the 35th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution. The government organized demonstrators carried signs calling for “Death to America” while chanting “Death to Obama” and “Death to Kerry.”

Obama’s illusionary ‘red-line’ on Syria’s chemical weapons was made worse when the U.S. agreed to Assad regime’s demands that limited inspection and controlled the inspectors access even at the sites they were allowed into. While 1,300 metric tons of weapons-grade chemicals were removed from Syria, this was only part of Assad’s arsenal. Some of what was left behind was seized and used by ISIS. But none of that stopped Obama from celebrating his alleged success.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Islamic Supremacists to University: Equality of Faiths Be Damned Muslim takeover of campus all-faith quiet room causes uproar at German university. Stephen Brown

Posted By on February 16th, 2016

While Western civilization often caves in nowadays to demonstrations of Islamic supremacy one small, appeasing step at a time, a European academic institution firmly stood its ground recently and upheld Western values against one such Islamist test probe.

The Technical University of Dortmund (TUD) in Dortmund, Germany, finally had enough of Muslim students bullying others, especially women, after the former had taken over for a prayer room an area the university had set aside as a quiet space for all students. Located in the physics building, TUD recently closed the facility.

“We set up the “Quiet Room” in 2012,” said university spokeswoman Eva Prost in an interview with Der Spiegel magazine. “A few months after that, there were already endeavours to make a Muslim prayer room out of it.”

The university had originally intended the room to be a “religion and world-view neutral” space to accommodate students of different faiths attending TUD from around the world. Until 2012, it was reported Catholic and Protestant institutions near the university had provided such students with rooms for this purpose.

“Our “Quiet Room” was rather an offer to everyone who was looking for peace and a place to rest in the often stressful, daily life of a university,” said Prost, adding that it was permitted to say a prayer there “if it did not disturb others or exclude anyone from use of the room.”

But instead of relieving stress, the TUD’s well-intentioned idea was rather to cause a lot of it.

University officials may have been unfamiliar with the doctrine of Islamic supremacy, which claims the superiority of Islam over all other religions, when they made the decision to open such a facility. Along with the equality-of-faiths-be-damned attitude, inherent in Islamic supremacism is also a condemnation of a fundamental, underlying value of Western civilization, that of tolerance.

In America, Omar Ahad, a co-founder of the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), probably summed up best the Islamic supremacist doctrine. When making a speech in California, he stated: “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.”

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The Progressives’ Phony Democracy The fears of the Founders and the prophecies of Tocqueville are on their way to becoming reality. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on February 16th, 2016

The sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia has sharpened the divide between the progressives’ idea of technocratic federal power, and the Constitution’s limited government that Scalia eloquently championed for almost 30 years. This division has a long history that transcends the failed presidency of Barack Obama.

The Democratic Party grew out of opposition to the elitist Federalists, whose president John Adams was known as “His Rotundity” for his girth and alleged aristocratic tendencies. James Madison in 1792 established the contrast between the two parties that persists to this day: the Federalists were “more partial to the opulent,” and believed that “government can be carried on only by the pageantry of rank, [and] the influence of money and emoluments.” Those who would become Democrats, Madison wrote, believed “in the doctrine that mankind are capable of governing themselves,” and he charged that power lodged “into the hands of the few” is “an insult to the reason and an outrage to the rights of man.” In short, the Democrats were about power to the people rather than to privileged elites.

Two centuries later, the Democratic Party still uses the rhetoric of democracy, and castigates the Republicans as the tools of greedy corporations and crypto-fascist plutocrats––“Wall Street” and the “Koch brothers” being the shorthand for this nefarious cabal. Yet in their policies and practices, the Democrats are now the true elitists who have narrowed government “into the hands of the few,” even within their own party. Consider the recent two presidential primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire. In the popular vote Bernie Sanders tied Hillary in Iowa and wiped her out in New Hampshire. Yet Hillary ended up with more delegates––394 to Sanders’ 44. Why? Because there are 712 “superdelegates,” Congressmen, governors, some mayors, and certain party apparatchiks. Each superdelegate is worth about 10,000 of one citizen’s vote. So much for believing “mankind are capable of governing themselves.”

Much more dangerous for the country has been the consolidation and concentration of power in the federal government, and its metastasizing regulatory agencies and expansive presidential reach, a goal of progressive ideology starting with Theodore Roosevelt. Of course, early progressives continued to use democratic rhetoric to mask this undemocratic inflation of the chief executive’s constitutional authority, and their tyrannical assaults on the people’s autonomy and freedom. Roosevelt spoke of the “triumph of a real democracy,” and Woodrow Wilson touted the “sovereignty of self-governing peoples.” Opposed to this “people” were the “sinister special interests” that “beat back the forces that strive for social and industrial justice,” as Roosevelt put it, and the “invisible empire” of “bosses and their employers, the special interests,” in Wilson’s words. Sound familiar?

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More Economic Nonsense from Trump By Jared Meyer

Posted By on February 16th, 2016

Railing against corporations that leave America to relocate to another country is a winning tactic. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has fully endorsed this strategy during his stump speeches. When speaking about American business expats, he recently told supporters at a campaign rally in New Hampshire, “You can tell them to go f*** themselves.”

Many economic factors, stretching from labor costs to regulatory burdens to foreign demand, have led U.S. companies to move some or all of their operations out of America. But one of the main causes, especially when it comes to relocating a corporation’s headquarters abroad, is America’s internationally uncompetitive corporate-tax system.

The fault lies with the federal government, not corporate managers fulfilling their legal duties. Despite Trump’s rather heated rhetoric, his own tax plan shows that he fully understands this cause when he is not tossing applause lines to his supporters.

America’s combined federal and average state corporate-tax rate of 39 percent is the highest in the developed world. But it was not always this way. America missed the global party when it came to lowering corporate tax rates.

Since 1988, the average corporate-tax rate for 34 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries has fallen from 44 percent to 25 percent. Over that time, the U.S. rate actually increased. Even the Nordic countries that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders so admires have lower corporate-tax rates than America does. Finland has a corporate tax rate of 20 percent, Sweden’s is 22 percent, and Denmark’s is 24 percent.

American companies also have to pay federal taxes on the income that they earn overseas if they bring that money back to America. This is the case even though these earnings were already taxed by another country. Besides the United States, only five other OECD countries tax corporate income earned outside their borders, down from 19 in the 1990s.

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Ted Cruz’s ‘Slap in the Face’ to Our Military Was Disgraceful — That’s Why I Support Marco Rubio By REP. Mike Pompeo (R-KANSAS)

Posted By on February 16th, 2016

— Mike Pompeo represents Kansas’s Fourth Congressional District and serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Select Committee on Benghazi. He is a graduate of West Point and an Army veteran.

There is only one Republican presidential candidate that has a proven, courageous, and conservative record on national security: Marco Rubio. Contrast him with Senator Ted Cruz who says he is prepared to defend America, but repeatedly finds a way to vote against that very goal. When we need leadership, Cruz plays politics with America’s national security. Put another way: Cruz is pro-military when he passes a soldier in uniform, but he abandons that same soldier when he does not vote to raise active-duty pay or provide our warriors with the tools they need to accomplish their critical missions.

I am a West Point graduate and an Army veteran. In Congress, I represent South Central Kansas, home to McConnell Air Force Base. I am proud to serve on the House Intelligence Committee and every day I see the lifesaving work of our men and women in uniform. I serve with Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina on the Benghazi Committee and came to Congress alongside Trey and South Carolina senator Tim Scott. All three of us believe in Marco’s ability to keep our families safe and have endorsed him.