http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/285652
D.C.’s Forgotten Funds
$687 billion in unallocated money could pay for the payroll-tax cut.
Only in Washington could nearly $700 billion fester as Congress scrambles for cash.
Earth to the congressional leadership: There is precisely $687 billion in federal coffers, officially “unobligated” and, thus, available. Nonetheless, Democrats and Republicans are clobbering each other over how to finance a $185 billion one-year extension of the payroll-tax holiday to help Americans survive today’s economic hardship.
Predictably, Democrats hope to use this occasion to slap a ten-year, 1.9 percent surtax on those who earn at least $1 million. This would amplify their new battle cry: “Class war!”
Surprisingly, Republicans have proposed to raise Medicare premiums for prosperous seniors. Affluence testing of entitlements is long overdue. But without preparing the public, especially seniors, for this wise move, the GOP will bare itself to a brand-new round of left-wing lies, e.g., “Nothing gives Republicans more intense pleasure than starving Granny and shoving Gramps down the nearest storm drain.”
http://bigpeace.com/myon/2011/12/13/note-from-ranger-prosser-army-cares-more-about-afghan-people-than-soldiers/ Many people remember Command Sergeant Major Robb Prosser. Robb is the man who shot the man who shot Erik Kurilla. This firefight is described in Gates of Fire. I spent about five months with his unit in Iraq, and so Robb later invited me with his unit in Afghanistan. We were roommates in Kandahar. […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.1769/pub_detail.asp 1. Guess how many top-tier universities offer a course on Lady Gaga? 2. VIDEO: NewsBusters Satire: Who says Conservatives have no sense of humor? (12-13-11) 3. VIDEO: Watch Former U.S. Senator; Former N.J. Governor; past CEO of a major company, Jon Corzine (D.) respond to Congress: “Don’t know the answer, can’t confirm, I have […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11033/pub_detail.asp
Starting on December 12th in Washington, DC, a meeting is being held that jeopardizes freedom of speech as we currently understand it in the United States. The Obama Administration has invited the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation (“OIC,” formerly, The Organization of the Islamic Conference) to a meeting of “experts” to discuss the implementation of a UN resolution ostensibly targeting “religious intolerance.” Now, even if by combating “religious intolerance” the resolution were just targeting actual violations of freedom of religion (READ: violating rights, not hurting feelings), it still should raise a few eyebrows that the OIC is behind the resolution and was invited as a partner to these meetings. The Jeddah-based OIC includes as its members such “champions” of human rights and religious freedom and tolerance as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, and Iran.
Eric Holder Announces Opposition to Election Integrity Laws Posted By J. Christian Adams
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2011/12/13/eric-holder-announces-opposition-to-election-integrity-laws/
On Tuesday night, I spoke in Austin, Texas at a rally organized by True the Vote. It took place on the grounds of the LBJ library on the campus of the University of Texas. The rally was in response to Eric Holder’s announcement at the same place two hours later of a concerted Justice Department effort to oppose virtually every electoral integrity measure promoted by Constitutional conservatives and Republicans.
Holder’s announcement will have profound partisan results in the 2012 election because of his professed unwillingness to enforce laws to prevent voter fraud. Indeed, tonight he made clear his opposition to these laws, such as voter ID and even the requirement to register to vote in advance of an election.
http://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2011/12/14/poverty_doesnt_make_thieves__liberalism_does/print
This week, the Los Angeles Times reported a wave of theft plaguing area high schools. The objects at stake? Tubas. According to South Gate High School music teacher Ruben Gonzalez Jr., thieves broke into the band room and stole nothing but tubas. A few weeks before, thieves took eight sousaphones from a Compton high school. Either the original cast of “The Music Man” is criminally eager for a revival, or these thieves are selling the horns on the black market.
Now the left loves to claim that crime waves like this are caused by poverty. If you’re poor, the logic goes, you’ll have to steal a loaf of bread — or a trombone — to feed your child. Criminality thus becomes a moral act.
There’s only one problem with this logic: It’s absolutely wrong.
During the Great Depression, levels of crime actually dropped. During the 1920s, when life was free and easy, so was crime. During the 1930s, when the entire American economy fell into a government-owned alligator moat, crime was nearly non-existent. During the 1950s and 1960s, when the economy was excellent, crime rose again.
In Britain, where the social safety net is more like a social swaddling cloth, crime rates other than murder are significantly higher than in the United States. Actually, the highest rate of car theft in the world is in peaceful, socialist, unicorn-riding Switzerland. Next comes New Zealand. Then Britain, Sweden, Australia, Denmark, Scotland, Italy, Canada and Norway. That’s right — the U.S. isn’t even in the top ten.
Why is that? It’s not that these other countries are impoverished — far from it. It’s not that their poor are Dickensian urchins following the advice of newfangled Fagins. It’s that these countries have bred generations of people who think they are entitled to the property of others.
That mentality predominates in poor areas more than rich ones. There’s a reason for that: Those who succeed economically in a free market system do so based on the notion that they don’t deserve anyone else’s property unless they work for it. They don’t sit back waiting for someone to take care of them. They don’t wait for welfare checks. They go out into the world and earn their way forward.
http://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2011/12/14/port_whine_big_labors_occupunks/print Scruffy progressive protesters locked themselves together across railroad tracks, blocked traffic and shouted profanities at police on Tuesday in a coordinated “West Coast Port Shutdown.” Truckers lost wages. Shippers lost business. This is what the Occupy Wall Street movement calls “victory.” Aging Big Labor bosses toasted one another from the sidelines as they declared […]
http://www.hudson-ny.org/2658/nuclear-freeze
Over thirty years ago, the “Nuclear Freeze” was launched across Europe and in the United States. Its leaders pushed for an end to the US nuclear modernization program of President Reagan, knowing full well that an already modernized Soviet nuclear weapons enterprise would markedly shift what Moscow called the correlation of forces distinctly in its favor. Despite millions of dollars funneled into the campaign by the Kremlin, Reagan and his allies, most notably Britain’s Prime Minister Thatcher and Germany’s Helmut Kohl stood firm. The allies deployed what were known as INF forces in Europe, including US Pershing and Ground Launched Cruise Missiles, in Britain, Germany, Italy and Holland, and faced down the Soviet deployment of nearly 2,000 such rockets in both Europe and Asia.
While deploying such missiles was a close call–in the US Congress nearly 80% of Democrats refused to support the procurement of the missiles to be deployed in Europe—Reagan pulled the rug out from under the freeze advocates by proposing a “Zero-Zero” option. The US President said the US would refrain from deploying such missiles if the Soviets withdrew and eliminated all their already deployed missiles and stopped any further build-up.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/12/13/the-real-threat-to-peace-is-western-support-of-palestinian-rejectionism/
“Peace” has become such a dirty word…leaving it in the hands of barbarians to make or break a deal. The real threat is continuing to indulge the fantasy of an invented people and all their spurious and evil claims to Jewish patrimony and legitimacy in Palestine….and the continual and perverse determination to avoid the fact that the Arab war against Israel is and has always been a jihad…..rsk
As Jonathan correctly noted yesterday, it’s ridiculous to assert that Israeli-Palestinian peace is threatened by plans to build 40 new homes inside a settlement that everyone knows will remain Israeli under any agreement. But if UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon would like to see a genuine obstacle to peace, I suggest he study what happened at a conference of Mediterranean writers in Marseille last week: An Israeli author was kicked off a panel discussion because a Palestinian writer refused to sit at the same table with him.
http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Books/Article.aspx?id=246804&prmusr=Mp6NOhuVKb93PLNR06QJ92IpspwIXBsCF0CyMblcJ2DzJmw89TtxodGaMAzTOnKQ
Gertrude Himmelfarb’s new volume about ‘another aspect of Jewish experience’ in England counters the endless tomes documenting the philosophy of the country’s anti-Semites.Statue of Winston Churchill.
Jews who find a steady diet of books about the anti-Semitism of England’s learned classes more unpleasant than exploratory surgery will find a welcome antidote in Gertrude Himmelfarb’s scintillating and (mostly) optimistic historical essay, The People of the Book, about the counter-tradition she calls English “philosemitism.”
But that term, like “People of the Book” and “anti-Semitism,” is steeped in ambiguity, tainted in its origin and generally applied anachronistically.
The term “People of the Book” originated with Muhammad, and in the Koran, refers to Jews and Christians. It has pejorative overtones, as in “People of the Book! Why reject ye the Signs of Allah.”
Similarly “philosemitism” was originally pejorative; it was invented, like its opposite, anti-Semitism, by German Jewhaters.
They used it to disparage people they deemed “soft on the Jews.”
The term “anti-Semitism” itself was a pseudo-scientific euphemism for old-fashioned Jew-hatred, and is still invoked by devotees of the Arab cause: “How can I be called an anti-semite [spelled thus] when I support the Semites called Arabs?” The answer is that anti-Semites don’t hate “Semites”; they hate Jews.
Himmelfarb, without denying either the pioneering role of England’s anti- Semites (the inventors of the blood libel, the first to expel their country’s Jewish population) or their recent resurgence, tries to balance it with “another aspect of Jewish experience – the respect, even reverence, for Jews and Judaism displayed by non-Jews before and after the Holocaust.”
