NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Student Veterans Suffer as the VA Scrambles to Catch up with Disability Claims By Joel Gehrke —

Posted By on November 3rd, 2015

The VA Solved Its Disability Backlog by Putting Other Veterans in a Jam
It has been a frustrating semester for veterans trying to get their education benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“Still waiting on checks from August, September, October and now November,” one man wrote in a comment on the VA’s Facebook page for beneficiaries of the Post-9/11 GI Bill. “What do you expect people to do? How do you expect people to survive?”

That complaint has been festering for months, even as the VA struggled to resolve another problem: the disability-claims backlog that emerged as a national scandal last year. As it happens, the two issues are related. As the longstanding deadline for resolving the disability-claims backlog approached, Veterans Benefits Administration officials shifted manpower from the education claims to the disability crisis — thereby making progress on one logjam by creating another.

In July, a VA spokesman acknowledged that the department was going to miss the September 30, 2015, deadline for clearing the disability-claims backlog that had been set in 2013. Officials now hope to solve the problem by the end of 2015.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Rubio’s Spotty Senate Attendance Is a Dumb Argument against His Candidacy By Jim Geraghty —

Posted By on November 3rd, 2015

Marco Rubio’s recent habit of missing votes in the Senate is suddenly an issue in his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination.

The kerfuffle started with a question from CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla, one of the moderators running last Wednesday’s third Republican primary debate. Quintanilla asked Rubio about a Florida Sun-Sentinel editorial that sternly criticized Rubio’s lack of attendance in the Senate as he runs for president, and called on him to resign his seat. Rubio turned his answer into a complaint about “the bias that exists in the American media today,” which won the audience to his side — and allowed him to beat back the ill-advised attack that followed from rival Jeb Bush.

“Jeb, I don’t remember . . . you ever complaining about John McCain’s vote record,” Rubio said, to more applause. “The only reason why you’re doing it now is because we’re running for the same position, and someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you.”

If you’re going to call on Marco Rubio to resign his Senate seat, you’ll have to do better than that.

Yes, Rubio has missed a lot of votes this year — 99 out of 294, to be exact. But running for president requires an intense travel schedule, and there’s no indication that Rubio regularly missed votes before launching his campaign. Prior to this year, Rubio had missed only 77 of 1143 votes — 6 percent of them — as a senator. Even with this year’s spotty attendance record, Rubio’s overall attendance rate remains high — he’s only missed 176 of 1,437 votes in almost five years in the Senate.

BOOKS Comments turned off

China’s Children and Climate Change — the Left Is against Them Both By Jeremy Carl

Posted By on November 3rd, 2015

They came for Feng Jianmei without warning. She was seven months pregnant. They kidnapped her, strapped her down, and killed her unborn child because she and her husband could not pay their fine. “They” were Chinese government officials, and their tactics were standard practice in China since the implementation of the one-child policy in 1979. Unlike so many instances of this practice, which typically occur in shadows, this one, committed in 2011, broke into international news after a photo of the distraught mother holding her dead baby was posted on a popular Chinese blog.

When China announced the end of its one-child policy last week, the general response from the mainstream media was positive, with many articles appropriately and unequivocally condemning the policy and praising its demise (though not enough stories noted that the Chinese government will continue to control the basic reproductive status of its citizens who wish to have more than two children).

But amid the general approbation, several stories in the mainstream media have partially and in some cases wholly justified the coercive and Orwellian policy, which caused millions of forced and sex-selective abortions, almost 200 million sterilizations, an epidemic of child kidnapping, and the abandonment of girl babies. Furthermore, to judge from both mainstream media sources and the most-recommended-reader views expressed at some top liberal websites, many liberals, when freed by the anonymity of Internet commentary, actually endorse China’s barbaric policies, in the name of their alleged environmental and climate benefits.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Jeb’s Graceless Decline By Charles C. W. Cooke

Posted By on November 3rd, 2015

Writing with uncharacteristic acidity in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan offered up an explanation as to why Jeb Bush has thus far failed to deliver on his promise. “Reporters,” Noonan proposed, have tended to assume without cynicism that Bush must be a “national candidate” because he is part of a “national family.” The last few weeks have served to disabuse us of that notion.

We have learned, Noonan records, that Jeb is “only a governor” — no more guaranteed success or assured of greatness than any aspirant with a less recognizable surname. Certainly, his pedigree has ensured that the supply side of his campaign would be taken care of: For almost half a century now, America has been furnished with an ample supply of ambitious, well-funded Bushes. On the demand side, however, things have been far less rosy. If, as I consider likely, Bush eventually recognizes that his overtures have been met with jaded indifference, he will have struck an inadvertent blow for meritocracy and demonstrated an age-old truth, to boot: However much polish and gold the masters of the universe can dispense, there is no easy way to sell a superfluous product. Surveying the present scene, critics of both the “establishment” and that protean supervillain “money” should be breathing a touch more easily.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Sorry, Social Justice Warriors: Political Correctness Has Peaked By David French —

Posted By on November 3rd, 2015

If you’re Social Justice Warrior, you’re a liar. You actively spread absurd falsehoods about the nature of men, women, sex, and culture that can’t withstand even the slightest scrutiny. You change history and conceal facts to fit preferred narratives, even when it costs human lives. You claim the best of intentions yet achieve the worst of outcomes. And through it all, you hate the very nation and political system that have granted you the liberties you so grotesquely abuse.

If you’re a Social Justice Warrior, you’re intolerant. Because your lies can’t withstand scrutiny, you wall yourself off in comfortable enclaves and then ruthlessly suppress dissent within your chosen communities. From that secure ground, you then strike out, seeking to expand your territory by walling off the arts, the academy, pop culture, and even athletics, silencing because you can’t persuade and punishing those you can’t silence.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Tooth-Gnashing in the Republican Establishment The establishment needs to stop patronizing the grass-roots and listen to their concerns. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 3rd, 2015

Republicans should be upbeat. They control by large margins the state legislatures and governorships. The Supreme Court is a bit more conservative than liberal. The House and Senate are both run by Republicans.

President Obama, after veritably wrecking his party, has for some time scarcely polled above 45 percent in approval ratings — even after borrowing $8 trillion to spread the wealth, pandering to special interests, echoing nonstop the assertions of his iconic status, and blaming all his failures on his predecessors and opponents.

In addition, parties usually do not succeed in winning the presidency for three consecutive terms. Nor do orphaned presidential elections — ones in which the incumbent president or vice president is not running — usually go to the party that currently holds the White House.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

David Archibald China’s Implacable Belligerence

Posted By on November 3rd, 2015

Unthinkable as it may be after all these decades of nuclear-enforced peace, Beijing’s determination to make the South China sea its own is day-by-day raising the likelihood that a full-blown shooting war will erupt. Australia’s prospects in such a conflict are especially parlous
China’s preoccupation with its past humiliation by foreign powers didn’t start with the communists: a public holiday, National Humiliation Day, was instituted by the Nationalists in 1927. Similarly, Chinese irredentism isn’t just a recent phenomenon. Chinese primary school textbooks from 1938 have a map of China that extends well beyond its current borders in all directions. Now the map in Chinese passports includes the South China Sea as Chinese territory, as well as parts of India on its northern border.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Iran’s Parliament Says ‘Death to America’ Chant Is the ‘Symbol of the Islamic Republic’ Posted By Robert Spencer

Posted By on November 3rd, 2015

As he was concluding the calamitous nuclear agreement with Iran last summer, John Kerry asked the Iranians [1] to cut out the “Death to America” chants. (This was not long before he told [2] an astonished world that the chants did not really mean that the Iranian mullahs wanted to kill us.)

In yet another indication of just how disastrous the nuclear deal really is, the Iranians have not only rejected Kerry’s request, but are ramping up the genocidal rhetoric. On Monday [3], 192 of the 290 members of the Iranian Majlis (Parliament) declared:

The martyr-nurturing nation of Iran is not at all prepared to abandon the slogan of “Death to America” under the pretext of a nuclear agreement.

Remember: in an Islamic context, a “martyr” is not simply someone who dies for his faith. It is is someone who takes hold of the Qur’an’s promise of Paradise to those who “kill and are killed” for Allah (9:111). If the Iranian nation is “martyr-nurturing,” it is raising a generation of killers.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Rubio Gets His First Endorsement from a Fellow Senator By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on November 3rd, 2015

The Republican Senate caucus has been divided in its endorsements of candidates in the 2016 presidential primary, but a Colorado freshman has decided to formally back a senator who helped him with his own campaign last year.

Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), who served in the House before defeating Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) a year ago, announced his support today for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

Rubio stepped in with a Spanish-language ad, released by the Chamber of Commerce, on behalf of Gardner in May 2014. More than one in five residents of Colorado is Hispanic.

Rubio and Gardner serve together on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, along with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Interview: Michael Walsh Goes Inside The Devil’s Pleasure Palace By Ed Driscoll

Posted By on November 3rd, 2015

The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau. What an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight for!

—Ludwig von Mises, as quoted in the preface to The Devil’s Pleasure Palace.

This is a book about how we got here. It is also a book about good and evil; about creation and destruction; about capitalism and socialism; about God, Satan, and the satanic in men; about myths and legends and the truths within them; about culture versus politics; about the difference between story and plot. It is about Milton versus Marx, the United States versus Germany, about redemptive truth versus Mephistophelean bands of illusion and the Devil’s jokes. It concerns itself with the interrelation of culture, religion, sex, and politics— in other words, something herein to offend nearly everybody.

And, I hope, to inspire. For the taboos of our culture are also its totems, and the political arguments that rage around them are symptomatic of both disease and good health, of infection and immunity. They are not simply battlefields in the larger contemporary culture war— they are the culture war, a war that has been raging since the Garden of Eden but that manifests itself today in the unceasing attack of cultural Marxism (which molts and masquerades under many names, including liberalism, progressivism, social justice, environmentalism, anti-racism, etc.) upon what used to be called the Christian West.