http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2013/03/12/breaking-inspector-general-report-on-racialist-disfunction-inside-doj/?print=1 Today the Department of Justice inspector general released a report on potential Labor secretary nominee Tom Perez’s DOJ Civil Rights Division. The timing of the release to coincide with his nomination was certainly accidental, because the report paints a damning portrait of the DOJ unit he managed. The full report is here. The 250-page […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323826704578354683011933850.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop
President Obama does a neat John D. Rockefeller imitation these days, taking credit for soaring domestic oil and gas production as if he planned it that way. Not quite. As a new Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports shows, “All of the increased [oil] production from 2007 to 2012 took place on non-federal lands.”
The research outfit reports that thanks to the innovation of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling on private and state lands, the U.S. in fiscal 2012 produced 6.2 million barrels of oil daily, up from 5.1 million barrels as recently as fiscal 2007. Private industry’s technological advances, operating under state regulation, increased U.S. production last year at the fastest rate in the history of the domestic industry, which drilled its first commercial well in 1859.
The story on federal lands is the opposite. The CRS study finds that federal oil production fell more than 23% from fiscal 2010 to fiscal 2012 and is today below what it was in 2007. The federal share of total U.S. oil production has slid under Mr. Obama to 26% in fiscal 2012 from 31% in fiscal 2008.
The story is the same in natural gas, with overall production climbing 20% since fiscal 2007 even as “production on federal lands has remained static or declined each year over the same period.” Production on non-federal lands grew 40% since 2007, while production on federal lands fell by a hard-to-believe 33%. The federal share of total natural gas production in 2007 was 27.8%. Today it’s 15.5%.
This sharp drop in production on federal lands is the direct result of Obama Administration policies. They include the drilling moratorium imposed after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill, followed by a limit on new drilling permits—the notorious “permitorium.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/03/another_hockey_stick.html Green forces, eager to promote their theories of global warming, appear to be practicing intellectual recycling. Is this the return of the notorious hockey stick – which, in 2001, was the central dogma of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) believers ? This quasi-religious faith in catastrophic AGW still remains a prerequisite for membership in scientific […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/03/training_syrian_rebels_to_conquer_golan_heights_and_shoot_down_israeli_aircraft.html
No, they don’t say it quite like that. But after years of hypocrisy, the Obama administration has admitted that while it declined to arm Syrian rebels directly for fear that weapons would end up in the hands of al-Qaeda forces, it has been quietly vetting and training anti-Assad forces while others provided weapons all around. Now the training is out in the open, and Secretary of State Kerry has pledged $60 million in “non-lethal aid” to the rebels. (Plus $250 million to Egypt, while Israel may take a hit of $150 million from sequestration — makes you wonder.)
American assistance is supposed to go only to “moderate” rebels, but arms have been flowing freely, paid for by American “allies” Qatar and Saudi Arabia and moving through Turkey. Recently, a source with ties to Israeli intelligence claimed that a supply line has been running from Bosnian extremist groups, outside the control, influence, or even vision of the U.S. and its allies. Libya and al-Qaeda in Iraq have also been conduits for weapons to rebel militias, and last week, 48 Syrian government soldiers and officials were killed in Anbar Province, an al-Qaeda stronghold.
Israel expects to see any and all weapons, including some of the estimated 15,000 surface-to-air missiles the U.S. admits “disappeared” from Libya, aimed in its direction.
More than a year ago, Maj. Gen. Avi Kochavi, chief of IDF Intelligence, warned that al-Qaeda had moved into the buffer zone that separates Israel and Syria, which had been at least nominally in the hands of U.N. peacekeepers since 1974. Last week, Syrian rebel groups captured 21 Filipino peacekeepers from their Golan Heights enclave and caused others to flee into Israel. Croatia announced that it is removing its 100 soldiers, and Israel fears that others may follow. Kochavi said that should Assad fall, the rebels would aim straight at Israel; Syrian rebel groups agree.
http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/4863
Of the 57 inaugural addresses delivered by presidents of the United States, a mere 17 have been second inaugurals. Very occasionally — as in the case of Abraham Lincoln’s, which is inscribed on a wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington — and in the case of George W. Bush’s, the second inaugural has been better than the first. So what trajectory is America going to follow for the next four years, as judged by Obama’s second inaugural address on the National Mall?
Second inaugurals have seen soaring, but also disappointing, oratory, ranging wildly in terms of their rhetoric, yet rarely — if ever — has one revealed actual cowardice, which is what President Barack Obama’s did when he delivered it to an audience of hundreds of thousands from the West Front of the Capitol on Monday January 21.
It was cowardly because if he had enunciated the highlights of his policy agenda during the election only ten weeks previously, he would have lost. Gay marriage rights, climate change regulations, healthcare costs, entitlements, voting without proper ID and registration, the legalisation of illegal aliens, and gun control are all important issues in American politics. Yet they were ones that Obama either largely ignored or strenuously downplayed during the presidential election in order to win his “historic” 51.1 per cent to 47.2 per cent popular vote victory over Mitt Romney. Had he emphasised those issues in his campaign — which in his second inauguration speech he put at the top of his agenda for his next term — he would undoubtedly have put off the 2 per cent of electors who would have needed to change their votes in order for Romney to win. His true liberal agenda has only emerged now it is too late for the American people to vote against it.
In his 18-minute, 2,100-word speech, Obama delivered a paean to big government, something that only truly resonates with a minority of Americans. Union membership in the private sector has fallen from 24 per cent of workers in 1973 to 7 per cent in 2011, for example, although over the same period in the public sector it rose from 23 per cent to 37 per cent. This was more of a State of the Union speech masquerading as an inauguration speech, so replete was it with policy statements and digs at opponents, as opposed to the overarching worldview expected of presidents on such occasions. One suspects it will not be inscribed on any walls anytime soon.
In almost all political speeches there is some banality, of course — Obama actually said: “You and I, as citizens, have the power to set this country’s course” — but close analysis of Obama’s banalities gives clues to his intentions. For this was the “You didn’t build that” speech, full of what government had achieved for the country, albeit through the repeated use of the straw man argument, as in: “No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation, and one people.” The fact that nobody has ever suggested that one single person could train all America’s hundreds of thousands of maths and science teachers makes that sentence as otiose as: “Together, we determined that a modern economy requires railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce; schools and colleges to train our workers.” Small wonder that Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell has interpreted the speech as meaning that “the era of liberalism is back. His unashamedly far-left-of-centre speech certainly brings back memories of the Democratic Party in ages past.”
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2906/the_cowed_west_strikes_again nother attack on free speech. Another cowed governmental response. Another speaker in hiding. Another incident for the media to ignore. Ah, just another day in the West. The latest outrage comes from the city of Arnhem in the Netherlands, where a doctoral student who interviewed a group of teenaged Muslim-Turkish immigrants on TV about […]
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
The old paradigm that a country has the right to decide who enters it has been decisively overturned in Europe, it’s under siege in such first world countries as America, Canada, Australia and Israel by the creed that says it’s the human rights obligation of every nation to accept every refugee.
Given a chance a sizable portion of the third world would move to the first, a minority because of oppression and a majority because the opportunities and freebies are much better there. Even low ranked first world nations still find themselves swamped with refugees looking to move in.
International law does not assign any priority to a nation’s citizens over any person who happens to stray across the border. At the ground level that means the end of borders and the end of citizenship which is why immigration isn’t just a touchy issue in Arizona, it’s a touchy issue in Sydney, Tel Aviv and Birmingham. You can hardly open a newspaper of the liberal persuasion without being treated to another group of refugees in some troubled part of the world walled up behind fences and trying to get over to London, Sydney or New York.
This sort of thing can’t be called immigration anymore, it’s a straightforward migration and it has no apparent limits. However many you take in, there will be more waiting and always burdening you with an unsolvable crisis.
One approach is to try and stabilize whatever crisis they are supposedly escaping from. Too many Libyans running away to Italy? Just bomb their dictator and they’ll go home again. At least that’s the theory, it doesn’t work too well in practice. For one thing Libya is more dangerous and unstable than it was under Gaddafi. Stabilizing it would require an Iraq level investment of money and manpower, and Iraq isn’t stable either. And London is still full of Iraqi refugees dating back to the 1980’s.
The disparities that make migration aren’t fixable, but nor is mass migration a viable option. There’s a reason that the refugees are running away and they are often part of the problem. Every nation is troubled in its own way and mass migration imports those troubles. It’s why beheadings have come north of the border and the Jihad has set up shop in countless Western cities.
The melting pot myth was that people leave their identities behind to join in a mass identity. That worked only marginally back in the day, it doesn’t work at all today when the refugees are immersed in their Little Mogadishus, which have popped up in a frightening amount of American cities foretelling the day when those cities will become as violent and broken as the original Mogadishu.
In place of the melting pot is the No Go Zone, which is the inverse of integration, it sets up tribal encampments in major cities which run on the laws of the tribe. That sort of thing has always been around in one form or another and it is survivable in limited numbers so long as those zones don’t also become factories of violence. That’s the difference between Amish Country and a Muslim banlieue, it’s also the difference between separatism and supremacism.
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=3693 The 13th annual Herzliya Conference kicked off on Monday afternoon with the usual PowerPoint presentations illustrating that we Israelis feel more confident about the state of our nation than is commonly perceived. This, according to graphs and charts, is an internal strength which will stand us in good stead when confronting the many external […]
http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/130312 Britain’s Prince Charles is currently on an official visit to Jordan, Oman and Qatar. But stepping foot in nearby Israel by any member of the British royal family is officially banned by the British Foreign Office. Prince Charles’ latest trip is one more of the many routine visits by various members of the royal […]
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/03/12/even_bob_schieffer_has_limits
HOW DARE SALLY QUINN OR CARL BERNSTEIN BASH THE CATHOLIC CHURCH…AND RUSH IS ABSOLUTELY RIGHT IN ASKING:
“Now, I just want to ask you, would Sally Quinn or Carl Bernstein or any two other American liberals ever go on television and say that Islam has to recognize people of other color and homosexuals if it’s to remain relevant? Would they ever say that? Would they ever go on TV and warn these militant Islamists, “Hey, look, you guys, unless you start recognizing women, tell ’em to get rid of the burqa and people of other color and homosexuals, you are going to become irrelevant.”
RUSH: The College of Cardinals is now entering the Sistine Chapel to begin the conclave to elect the next Vicar of Christ. For those of you in Rio Linda, that would be the next pope. For those of you who are Italian, it would be Il Papa.
You may not know this. Yesterday on CBS, Slay the Nation, they had a roundtable. Bob Schieffer had Washington Post columnist Sally Quinn and Carl Bernstein on from Vanity Fair. Bernstein of Woodward and Bernstein fame. And they were talking about the church, the Catholic Church, and the selection of the new pope. Listen to this.
QUINN: It’s on the way to irrelevancy if they don’t start including women, and certainly people of other color, and ultimately homosexuals. And so, I mean, they’re all against homosexuality, even though so many priests are gay, that it seems…
SCHIEFFER: Now you can’t say that as a fact. I mean…
BERNSTEIN: Well, if you have friends in the priesthood…
