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Iran’s Mirage: More Humiliation to Follow by Lawrence A. Franklin

Posted By on November 9th, 2015

The Rouhani-Zarif façade of civility toward the West was enough to persuade the vain, delusional and acquisitive in Western leadership circles that change had finally come again to Iran. However, no amount of Persian tea or Iranian rosewater-drenched ice cream shared between Kerry and Zarif can drown out the deceptive hoax of the JCPOA. Before the ink was dry, Khamenei and the security services announced that the agreement has no standing in Iran.

To punctuate the point, Tehran arrested a prominent Iranian-American businessman, Siamak Namazi, and a Lebanese-American, Nazar Zaka, to add to its collection of fraudulently-charged hostages: Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian; former marine Amir Hekmati; Pastor Saeed Abedini, and retired FBI agent Robert Levinson.

Just in case the U.S. needed one more symbolic kick, the regime closed down the first KFC fast food restaurant in Tehran on Monday, just one day after it opened.

In the end, it matters little what the government, people, or even the theocratic institutions think is in Iran’s best long-term interests.

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Iran: Poets Face 99 Lashes and Prison by Amir Taheri

Posted By on November 9th, 2015

“She writes something but means something else.” — Tehran Islamic Prosecutor.

The irony in all this is that Ekhtesari is not a political poet. In fact, she has written that those who try to use poetry for politics betray both.

The sentencing was made easier thanks to a recent lecture by “Supreme Guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, laying down the rules of what he believes “good Islamic poets” should observe when writing poetry.

The poet Sa’id Sultanpour was abducted on the day of his wedding and shot dead in a Tehran prison. Rahman Hatefi-Monfared had his veins cut and was left to bleed to death in the notorious Evin Prison.

“I hope to see the day when no one is sent to jail in this land for writing poems.” — Mehdi Mussavi, convicted poet.

Does a seminar on reforming the meter and rhyme schemes of Persian poetry violate “Islamic values” and threaten the foundations of the Islamic Republic of Iran?

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Don’t Let the EPA Run Out the Clock Legal victory alone won’t save states from Obama’s carbon crusade. By Thomas Pyle

Posted By on November 9th, 2015

Last month, a majority of the states sued the federal government over the so-called Clean Power Plan, the centerpiece of President Obama’s climate agenda. As the states explained, the president’s carbon regulation “unlawfully expands the federal government’s regulatory power over electricity production and consumption in nearly every State.” The suit will wind its way through the courts, with legal resolution years away.

Although legal challenges are necessary, they are not enough. If states have any chance of defeating the EPA’s attempt to take control over our energy choices, they must mobilize all three branches of government.

The EPA’s carbon regulation forces states to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 32 percent, on average, by 2030. The limits are so strict that many states will be forced to shut down affordable energy sources, mandate more-expensive sources, and join regional cap-and-trade schemes — all of which will drive up energy prices, to the detriment of the poor and middle class.

States have responded by suing the Obama administration and requesting a stay of the rule. And while legal scholars across the political spectrum agree that the EPA has a weak case, pinning our hopes on a legal victory is a mistake. In fact, it is a mistake the EPA is counting on states to make.

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Democrats Asked for Obamacare but Now Try to Duck Out of Paying for It By Kevin D. Williamson

Posted By on November 9th, 2015

Congressional Democrats led by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are quietly working to repeal the “Cadillac tax,” a 40 percent excise on certain expensive health-insurance policies enacted as part of the so-called Affordable Care Act, which grows less affordable by the minute.

The Cadillac tax was never going to be long-lived. It was a lie from the beginning, a part of the great fiction that allowed Democrats to claim that Barack Obama’s signature health-insurance initiative would add “not one dime” to the deficit, as the president repeatedly insisted. But the tax was and is bitterly opposed by important Democratic constituencies: the AFL-CIO and the American Federation of Teachers, the members of which enjoy very generous health-care programs (the teachers at your direct expense, suckers) and don’t much like paying taxes despite their endless nattering about the need to make sure everybody pays his “fair share.”

The teachers’ unions, it should be noted, are the biggest political spenders in the country — not the NRA, not the Koch brothers, not the Chamber of Commerce or Big Oil or Big Whatever. In the private sector, unions are in decline and have been for decades, mainly because extortion is a terrible business model in the long term. But in the public sector — in government — unions rule the roost, which is why they run the Democratic party in spite of their relatively small overall numbers. Hillary Rodham Clinton cannot be president without the support of the teachers’ unions, period, and so she supports repealing one of the main revenue-generating measures attached to Obamacare.

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Ben Carson: Where Was the Media’s Interest in Obama’s Relation to the Rev. Wright, Frank Davis, Bill Ayers . . . ? By John Fund

Posted By on November 9th, 2015

It’s been less than two weeks since CNBC’s train wreck of a debate exposed just how much of a double standard the mainstream media can have against GOP presidential candidates.

Now a new example comes in the attack on Ben Carson for saying in his autobiography that he was offered a full scholarship to West Point. In a news conference on Friday, Carson said the offer from Army officials was informal and he never in fact applied to the military academy, which is how he described it in his book Gifted Hands, first published in 1990:

I was offered a full scholarship to West Point. I didn’t refuse the scholarship outright, but I let them know a military career wasn’t where I saw myself going. . . . As overjoyed as I felt to be offered such a scholarship, I wasn’t really tempted. . . . I wanted to be a doctor. . . . Each college required a ten-dollar non-returnable entrance fee sent with the application. I had exactly ten, so I could apply to only one.

Carson has also been questioned by CNN about why several people who knew him growing up don’t recall that he had exhibited anger or violence. Carson noted that most of the people the media has talked to knew him in high school, and that his last “violent episode” occurred in the ninth grade, before he had a religious conversion. Carson said that he did try to stab someone, “a relative who does not want to be subjected to the media.”

RELATED: Sorry, Media, You Won’t Destroy Ben Carson

But Carson’s news conference was most memorable for his willingness to push back against the media:

I do not remember this level of scrutiny for one President Barack Obama when he was running. In fact I remember just the opposite. I remember people saying, ‘Oh, we won’t really talk about that. We won’t talk about that relationship. Well, Frank Marshall Davis, well, we don’t want to talk about that. Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, well he don’t really know him. All the things that Jeremiah Wright was saying, oh, not a big problem.

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Obama’s Unwavering Hostility to Israel By Anne Bayefsky —

Posted By on November 9th, 2015

Much ink has been spilled blaming the state of U.S.–Israel relations on the poor personal rapport between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu. The fact is that huggable Barney the Purple Dinosaur could have been Israel’s elected leader, and the relations would have been equally hostile.

For seven decades from the moment of Israel’s birth — through five wars, one campaign, eight operations, two “uprisings,” and years of terrorism — Palestinian Arabs have done everything possible to avoid living peacefully side by side with a Jewish state.

This isn’t ancient history. It’s today.

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Andrew McIntyre Perilous Pontifications

Posted By on November 9th, 2015

While St Peter’s heir no doubt means well, his encyclical is a master class in the treachery of good intentions. As Ian Plimer writes in ‘Heaven and Hell’, the green crackpottery Pope Francis embraces and endorses can only hobble the creation of wealth and mire the Third World in perpetual poverty

HEAVEN AND HELL: The Pope condemns the poor to eternal poverty
Professor Ian Plimer
Connor Court, 2015, 348pages, $29.95
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One hopes this new book by Professor Ian Plimer will shake the media from its gullible complacency and set it to confronting the gigantic fraud that the IPCC and hack scientists, avaricious governments, corrupted universities, and all the other self-interested parties riding the climate-change gravy train persist in preaching and promoting. While Plimer’s international best-seller, Heaven and Earth, did much to encourage scepticism and independent thought, the treatment it was meted by the liberal media, most notably at the shamelessly partisan ABC, won’t see me holding my breath.

Launched this month, Heaven and Hell is a frontal attack on the absurd, science-free claims peddled by, of all people, Pope Francis in his recent encyclical, Laudate ‘Si. As Plimer puts it, the documemnt is “science-free, an anti-development, anti-market enthusiastic embrace of global green left environmental ideology.”

Plimer goes straight for the jugular in demolishing the misrepresentations, false claims, erroneous predictions, fraudulent science and falsification of raw data –“a cardinal sin” — that represent the dubious basis for the papal pronouncement. The complete lack of any verified theory to explain, adequately and demonstrably, why and how carbon dioxide is heating the world is, of course, key to his critique.

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Defense Secretary: ‘I Wouldn’t Take for Granted That the Russians and Iranians Are Aligned’ By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on November 9th, 2015

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter argued at the Reagan Defense Forum on Saturday that Russia and China pose a “potentially more damaging” threat than terrorist groups like ISIS because of “their size and capabilities.”

“Russia appears intent to play spoiler by flouting these principles and the international community. Meanwhile, China is a rising power, and growing more ambitious in its objectives and capabilities,” Carter said. “Of course, neither Russia nor China can overturn that order, given its resilience and staying power. But both present different challenges for it.”

He reminded the Reagan Library audience that his recent trip to Asia was his third as Defense secretary.

Carter stressed that “in the face of Russia’s provocations and China’s rise, we must embrace innovative approaches to protect the United States and strengthen that international order.”

Russia, he said, “violated sovereignty” of Ukraine and Georgia and is “actively trying to intimidate the Baltic states,” while “throwing gasoline on an already dangerous fire” in Syria.

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Stabbing Intifada Continues Apace in Israel By Michael Walsh

Posted By on November 9th, 2015

The stabbing intifada may only just recently have come to America, but over in Israel, it’s now practically a daily occurrence.

A civilian security guard on Sunday shot a female Palestinian assailant who stabbed and lightly wounded him, as he stood at his post, just outside the Betar Illit settlement, which is located a short distance away from Jerusalem.

The incident was caught on the municipalities security cameras. An emergency dispatcher saw a Palestinian woman on one of the cameras who she believed looked suspicious. The woman, 22-year-old Halva Aliyan, was dressed from head to toe in traditional black garb, with only her face showing. She carried a purse and walked toward the gate of the city, which has a population of 47,000.

The dispatcher alerted the security guard who then stopped her and asked to see her identification card, which showed that she was born in the nearby Palestinian city of Bethlehem. As the guard focused on checking her card, Aliyan slowly reached into her purse and pulled out a knife. She then lunged at the guard and quickly tried to stab him.

Trigger warning — this will make your blood boil.

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A Tale of Two Shootings By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 9th, 2015

Obama and his MSM operatives live in a world of fable.

In August of 2014 Michael Brown, 18, 6-foot-4, 290 lbs., robbed a store in Ferguson [1], Missouri. Brown (who apparently had recently used marijuana) assaulted the clerk, then walked down the middle of the street before being stopped by city police officer Darren Wilson, who tentatively matched Brown as one of the possible suspects in the recent robbery.

Brown almost immediately assaulted Wilson and went for his gun, which discharged. He then ran, but reversed course and charged the officer, who shot Brown numerous times until he collapsed and died.

Those facts are now not in dispute and were the eventual conclusions of both local and state authorities. An investigation from Eric Holder’s Justice Department confirmed that Wilson’s behavior was justified. Immediately after Brown’s death, riots overwhelmed Ferguson [2]. The shooting soon became a national rallying movement and begat the new “Black Lives Matter” movement. The latter adopted as its slogan the purported last words of Brown — “hands up, don’t shoot!” — a plea that, according to both reliable witnesses and the investigations, was entirely fabricated post facto. Nevertheless, it resonated and was voiced by professional athletes, celebrities, the news media [3], and members of Congress.