http://www.spectator.co.uk/life/mind-your-language/8927441/that-red-line-were-not-supposed-to-cross-what-exactly-is-it/ Last August President Barack Obama said that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would cross a red line. He repeated the phrase in December: red line. Why should the line be red and what happens if it is crossed? A simple, unhelpful answer is that the metaphor is taken from a safety gauge […]
In our thatched house deep in the Mekong Delta, we listened to the banned Voice of America, the volume low.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323744604578477250958085788.html?mod=hp_opinion
My father died three years ago. For months after his death, I had a recurring dream in which my entire family, my mother, siblings, aunts and uncles were together for a crawfish boil, Cajun and Vietnamese style. Amid the revelry and drone of the back-porch fans, I would see my father. But my euphoria would vanish as I realized that he, looking lost and out of place, was dead and should not be there.
Born in 1927 in Hue, Vietnam, my father took part in the nationalist resistance against the French occupation, serving in a reconnaissance unit. During one mission a bomb exploded, killing many. My father was taken prisoner and his parents were informed that he was MIA. For a while he was even mistakenly declared dead, and a sheet of paper commemorating his ultimate sacrifice for the country is one of the few possessions that have followed us over the years.
After he was released, my father moved to Saigon. He pursued many avenues to earn a living, and eventually founded a successful import and export company, trading auto parts. During the late 1950s and 1960s, he traveled to France, Holland and around Asia for work and pleasure.
I have pictures of him from this period—white shirt, sleeves rolled up, standing next to the Eiffel Tower; or in a business suit, leaning against a car, trench coat over one arm, a cigarette casually dangling from his lips. Upon my arrival, his fifth daughter, in the early 1970s, my father was at the peak of his career, happily married with six children, a generous sponsor to many friends and relatives.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jun/14/the-felonious-fibbers/ Thousands of Americans are languishing in federal prisons for lying to federal officials. Federal officials themselves often get a pass when they tell a whopper to Congress. It’s a double standard that must end. The problem starts at the top with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. His career in prevarication began as an […]
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jun/14/white-house-defends-high-bills-africa-trip/
GREAT BANG FOR TAXPAYERS’ BUCKS? WILL THE TRIP END TRIBAL WARS AND JIHADS IN AFRICA THAT KILLED MILLIONS? WILL MUGABE WHO DESTROYED ZIMBABWE MEND HIS WAYS? WILL WARLORDS AND THUGS WHO OPPRESS THEIR PEOPLE TRADE SPEARS FOR PLOWSHARES? WILL THE UPROOTING AND OUTRIGHT THEFT OF WHITE OWNED FARMS IN SOUTH AFRICA HALT?….RSK
The White House Friday defended the first family’s upcoming weeklong trip to Africa, which could cost taxpayers up to $100 million, as “great bang for our buck.”
“There will be a great bang for our buck for being in Africa because when you travel to regions like Africa that don’t get a lot of presidential attention, you tend to have very longstanding and long-running impact from the visit,” said Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser to President Obama.
The Obamas’ trip, at a time of “sequestration” budget cuts, will take them to Senegal, Tanzania and South Africa from June 26 to July 3. Citing a confidential planning document, the Washington Post reported that the trip will cost between $60 million to $100 million.
The excursion will involve military cargo planes airlifting 56 support vehicles, including 14 limousines, and three trucks to carry bulletproof glass panels to cover the windows where the first family is set to stay. A Navy aircraft carrier or amphibious ship with a fully staffed medical trauma center will be stationed offshore in case of an emergency.
Fighter jets will fly in shifts to provide around-the-clock protection over the president’s airspace. The trip will reportedly involve hundreds of Secret Service agents.
The president and first lady Michelle Obama also had planned to take a safari in Tanzania, which reportedly would have required a special counterassault team to carry sniper rifles in the event of a threat from wild animals. But the safari was canceled in favor of a trip to Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa, where Nelson Mandela was held as a political prisoner.
Mr. Rhodes said Mr. Obama already has traveled extensively to Asia and to Latin America, and he said some people think the president’s trip to Africa “is overdue.”
“Africa’s a critically important region of the world,” he said. “This is a deeply substantive trip and one that has been highly anticipated on the continent. And, frankly, there’s been great disappointment that the president hasn’t traveled to Africa until this point, other than a brief stop in Ghana.”
http://pjmedia.com/blog/this-is-not-the-kings-army-house-oks-war-powers-scolding/?print=1 The National Defense Authorization Act headed to the Senate after a significantly bipartisan passage in the House today contains a caveat added to remind President Obama of his responsibility to get permission from Congress before using military force. “This is not the King’s army,” said Rep. Scott Rigell (R-Va.), who introduced the NDAA amendment […]
http://pjmedia.com/blog/stop-the-farm-bill-fdrs-socialist-structure-still-violating-farmers/ The massive farm bill being considered by the House of Representatives — the Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act (H.R. 1947) — exemplifies the regulatory excess that characterizes the federal government today and which dominates our agricultural policy. Much of this government control began implementation in the 1930s, led by advisors and aides […]
http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/13/do-americans-love-big-brother/
It began with the Department of Justice seizing telephone logs of Associated Press reporters. Journalists were outraged by that attack on their First Amendment rights, but since the public really doesn’t much like the media, the storm faded. Then Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former CIA analyst, leaked documents to Britain’s Guardian newspaper, and the storm became a hurricane.
President Obama, in California on Friday to meet with China’s president, reassured Americans with, “Nobody is listening to your calls.” Too late. Intelligence experts had joined Snowden in a flurry of tell-all revelations.
Former FBI counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente beat Snowden to the punch by a month. Though unsupported by secret documents, Clemente answered a question from CNN’s Erin Burnett about what the FBI could learn about past telephone conversations. “We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said,” Clemente told Burnett, adding, “Welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak, whether we know it or like it or not.”
The following night, with CNN’s Carol Costello, Clemente amplified his comments and said all the content and every detail of communications — including phone calls, emails, online chats, credit card purchases and Web surfing — are automatically recorded and stored, including the words in every phone call.
Clemente was foreshadowed in 2006 by former AT&T engineer Mark Klein, who testified that AT&T had given the National Security Agency (NSA) full access to its customers’ phone calls and had also shunted all of its Internet traffic to the NSA from a secret room in its San Francisco office.
A new video has gone up.
“Early Zionist Settlement: First Aliyah” is now available.
You can see it directly via the following link:
http://zionism101.org/NewestVideo.aspx
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“Early Zionist Settlement: First Aliyah” looks at the first wave of Zionist immigrants, who began arriving in 1882. The young idealists who made up this immigration, or aliyah, wanted to pave the way for a national rebirth.
As Zeev Dubnow, a member of Bilu, the very first group of Zionist immigrants, wrote:
“The ultimate aim is to build up this land of Israel and restore to the Jews the political independence that has been taken from them for the past two thousand years.”
We encourage you to share information about “Zionism 101” with your friends, family, and co-workers, plus anyone else who is interested in learning about the most important development in modern Jewish history.
If you haven’t already, please watch our completed video series: ‘Founding Fathers,’ ‘Origins of Zionism,’ ‘Rivals to Zionism,’ and ‘Christian Zionism’.
No Constitution, No Borders, No USA
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2549/No-Constitution-No-Borders-No-USA.aspx
At what point does it become clear that we no longer inhabit America?
When we “Press 2,” not “1,” for English?
When a national Social Security Number syncs an electronic identity that the government hospital provided us at birth to track us till death?
When borders are no more, but the Surveillance State always knows where we are?
Ours is the age of dislocation before realization: The United States of America no longer exists. Why? How? The answer is simple, tragic and outrageous: Government officials, elected and unelected, with precious exceptions, no longer preserve, protect and defend the U.S. Constitution. Instead, they do whatever it takes to beat it, flout it and ignore it. Worse, We, the People, let them.
This can’t go on. Otherwise our-country-’tis-of-thee becomes a melody to be forgotten, a mirage of a tradition more storybook than real every day. Nowhere is this more the case, of course, than in Washington, D.C., where absolute unaccountability corrupts absolutely, where echoing down the cool, white marble halls of power, hollow men and women trample sovereignty and citizenship in a pathway to American betrayal. And I haven’t even gotten to Congress, busy “reforming” the illegal-alien crisis they antiseptically refer to as “immigration,” while considering passage of a $940 billion “farm bill,” 80 percent of which will fund food stamps. These two laws alone can institutionalize the lawlessness of the land and make countless more Americans wards of the state.
Meanwhile, there is in Washington a faceless power-mongery that lives and works in the shadows. City by city, rural state by rural state, its mechanisms of “immigration,” “refugee resettlement” and socialist government programs overwhelm a near-impotent citizenry with alien cultures, religions, languages and traditions.
There is no “melting pot” out there, nor is there even residual belief in one – particularly not on the part of the State. Most of our new peoples will never embrace American constitutional virtues en masse to perpetuate them because their own sponsor, their own lifeline, is the mega-state that brought them here and supports them.
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Understanding-politics-in-Israel-The-limousine-theory-316478
Into the Fray: How is it that, time after time, the electorate ends up with a gov’t adopting precisely the policy it urged voters to reject?
On the one hand, the state invests billions of dollars in building a modern army; purchasing state-of-the-art warplanes and constructing modern airfields; equipping and training reserve battalions; and deploying Arrow missiles. All this is right and proper and necessary. But on the other hand, it has permitted a situation to develop in which these selfsame modern, expensive systems are liable to be rendered irrelevant. On the basis of such wishful thinking, battles, and wars, are lost
– Yuval Steinitz, “When the Palestinian Army Invades the Heart of Israel,” Commentary, December 1, 1999.
To a dispassionate observer, unfamiliar with the mechanisms – and machinations – of Israeli politics, the events of the past two-and-a-half decades must seem to defy explanation, flying in the face of both logic and common sense, and a gross violation of the rationale of democratic principles.
To the vanquished the spoils?
Political realities in Israel since the early 1990s have shown that electoral victory has little bearing on the policies the resultant governments will pursue. Quite the reverse.
No matter how often the doctrine of political appeasement and territorial concession failed to win approval at the ballot box, it nevertheless continued to dominate the policy-making decisions of governments – even of those elected in express opposition to it.
Astonishingly, time and time again, the prescriptions of the vanquished became the policy of the victors.
Thus, Yitzhak Rabin, elected in 1992 on the basis of a series of hawkish “nays,” including rejection of negotiations with the PLO terrorist organization, radically switched his positions, transforming them all to dovish “yeas.”
The policy he adopted was indistinguishable from that promoted by the radical Left of the time – which failed to win voter support.
More dramatically, Ariel Sharon, elected in 2003 on a platform opposing any notion of unilateral withdrawal, adopted precisely this policy, advocated by his Labor Party rival, which was resoundingly defeated at the polls.
In 2009, shortly after his reelection as prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu’s regrettable volte face in the speech he delivered at Bar-Ilan University, accepting the establishment of a Palestinian state in Judea-Samaria, was a repudiation of the positions he presented to voters. Indeed, it was an endorsement of those of his opponents, who failed to win sufficient electoral support to form a government.
True, he did attempt to hedge his acquiescence with various unrealistic reservations and restrictions. However, this was of little avail. He had, for all practical purposes, capitulated intellectually and strategically, and in a stroke, fundamentally transformed the debate from one over whether there should, or should not, be a Palestinian state, to one over what the characteristics of the Palestinian state should be.
Conundrum I
In an article I wrote several years ago, titled “The Israeli Political System: How It Works and Why It Doesn’t,” I pointed to the following startling facts in Israel’s parliamentary history:
(a) For 20 of the 28 years between 1977 and 2005 – from the time the Likud first won the elections on a platform of Greater Israel, until a Likud-led government withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in stark contradiction to its electoral pledges – the Israeli prime minister came from the ranks of the Likud.
(b) When the Likud first came to power, not only was the entire Sinai Peninsula under Israeli control, but any suggestion of evacuating the Jordan Valley, dividing Jerusalem or withdrawing from the Golan was unthinkable.
(c) Yet today, well over a third of a century since Menachem Begin’s dramatic electoral victory, all the above are either already faits accomplis or acceptable topics in mainstream political discourse.
(True, lately, some reservations may be emerging as to the wisdom of withdrawal from the Golan. But this nascent realization is far more an outcome imposed by external events in Syria, than one generated by any informed process of internal discourse in Israel.) This demonstrates that while the right wing regularly wins elections, it never really gets to control the reins of power. This phenomenon has virtually nullified the significance of the Israeli democratic process, and can only be explained by the existence of some source of influence, extraneous to the political system, that imposes outcomes very different from those that should result from unhindered operation of the political routine.
