New York state is investing $500 million from the Buffalo Billion, plus an additional $250 million from other sources, to build a 1.2 million-square-foot manufacturing facility on part of the old site of Republic Steel in south Buffalo.
The Buffalo Billion program championed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo is a bold and costly experiment in economic development that is beset by secrecy and politics, and banking on a company with a history of losing money.
The program — hailed in Buffalo but resented across much of the rest of New York — has been promoted as both a catalyst for rejuvenating the western New York economy and a model for other upstate regions.
But the management of the Buffalo Billion by the Cuomo administration has raised eyebrows — and concerns — in some quarters.
Consider:
•One of Cuomo’s largest campaign contributors from the Buffalo area has been awarded contracts to develop two of the three facilities that will house companies recruited to set up shop in Buffalo. The state’s original solicitation for a developer to build a massive solar panel manufacturing plant included a requirement that might have limited the pool of respondents to just one firm, LPCiminelli, whose owner has contributed $96,500 to Cuomo’s campaign during his two races for governor. The state later relaxed the requirement, but awarded the contract to Louis Ciminelli’s firm anyway.
About this illustration: A non-exhaustive Internet search indicates that the illustration (above) may well be the cover of a 1960 comic book for Catholic schools published by the Catechetical Guild. Whatever it is, the cartoon beautifully captures a conventional fallacy regarding the Cold War: namely, that while “domino”-nations fell to Communism the world over, the good ship USA remained secure, fighting off the external foe. Even if the USA is headed toward the “Red Iceberg” in the picture, Uncle Sam and the republic are still the same as ever. Sure, a single Hiss or a pair of Rosenbergs might pop up from time to time, but, systemically speaking, Communist subversion, Communist influence, are what happened Over There. Not here. Never here.
American Betrayal, of course, argues that the evidence overwhelmingly reveals this idea to be so much “court history” in critical need of revision.
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Allen Weinstein, renowned expert on Soviet espionage in America and co-author of the landmark study, The Haunted Wood, died this week. He was 77.
Jews Against Themselves is about the new forms taken by Jewish apostasy in an age when Jewish existence is threatened more starkly and immediately than at any time since the Hitler era.
I have not attempted a systematic taxonomy of all the species of Jews arrayed under the genus “enemies of Israel,” a monumental task that would require an encyclopedia to include the following: Jewish progressives against Israel; Jewish queers against Israel; Haredim against Israel; Holocaust survivors against Israel; children of Holocaust survivors against Israel; Jewish Voice for Peace; grandchildren of Holocaust survivors against Israel; survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto against Israel; J Street; Jewish postmodernists against Israel; Jewish Berkeley professors against Israel; post-Zionists against Israel; Jewish members of MESA (Middle East Studies Association) against Israel; Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods (JBIG, also called, seasonally, London’s Jewish Christmas carolers against Israel); and so on and on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
Juan Cole, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, claims right-wing Jews and an “Islampohobic network” were “a key influence” to Dylann Roof’s rampage that killed nine people at a black church in Charleston, S.C.
“The Muslim-hatred of the Geert Wilders and Marine LePens in Europe, for which Daniel Pipes, and Pamela Geller, and the whole Islamophobic network are cheerleaders and enablers, was a key influence on Dylann Roof, according to his manifesto,” Cole writes on his popular blog, Informed Comment.
But as The College Fix points out, and one commenter noted, Roof’s manifesto makes no mention of Pipes, Geller, Wilders, Muslims, or Islam.
Cole then pivots to where Roof would have found “that white Europeans are being victimized by immigrants,” citing one of his older posts about Anders Breivik, who killed 77 youths in Norway in a 2011 attack, as The College Fix reports.
A New York Times best seller and former Washington Post reporter has released a new book in which he reveals that President Bill Clinton has a ‘secret’ mistress whose visits are so well known amongst his security staff that she has been given the playful nickname, ‘Energizer.’ Ronald Kessler’s book, titled The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of Presidents, is set to be released in early August. Excerpts were obtained by the New York Post.
One source in the book claims ‘Energizer’ has no problem getting inside the Clintons’ home in Chappaqua, New York.
“You don’t stop her, you don’t approach her, you just let her go in,” the source is quoted as saying.
Another source that had gotten a good view of ‘Energizer’ claims that she may have had some … ahem … enhancements.
The school has backtracked for now but this isn’t over by a long shot. Such actions smack of the purges of Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” or “Great Leap Forward” into Communism.Not only are students taught claptrap and forced to realign their values with politically correct balderdash but they are subjected to punishment for defending their values, going against the arbitrarily instituted new “norms,” voicing “incorrect” opinions and refusing to engage in “new speak.”If someone has male DNA and genitalia, they are now “courageous” to declare themselves “female.” If they want to don tanning gel and dreadlocks, they can be trans-racial. (A recent Rasmussen survey found that 35% of whites and 54% of blacks felt that former fake black NAACP leader, Rachel Dolezal, was NOT being deceitful).
Heather can have two mommies, Jennifer can have two daddies, Caitlin can celebrate Fathers’ Day in a dress with décolletage, Christianity is evil, Israel, NOT Hamas, commits war crimes defending the lives of its citizens, Islam is a “religion of peace,” ISIS has “nothing to do with Islam,” Al Qaeda is a “JV team” that was defeated, Iran can have nukes and serve on the U.N. Women’s Rights Board with the blessings of the E.U. and U.S., the American flag can be banned as inflammatory, a Stars and Stripes t-shirt can be declared a “micro-aggression,” a U.S. soldier can spend years in the brig for killing a terrorist, a military officer can be fired for teaching the enemy’s ideology, CO2 can be redefined as a pollutant rather than a life force, human life is equivalent to the life of a Delta smelt, rivers can have the same rights as people, bird-killing (up to 1 billion per year) wind turbines are environmentally sound, “global warming” or “climate change” (the climate has ALWAYS changed) is a more dangerous threat to the world than the global jihad and the Marxist Left, having an abortion can be a more “loving” act than breeding “eaters,” chewing a pop tart into the shape of a gun can be grounds for elementary school suspension, sending Oreos in school lunches warrants chastising notes to nutritionally-challenged parents, purchasing a 32 oz. soda is illegal but you can buy two 16s, refusing to bake a cake for a homosexual wedding can result in big fines and curtains for your business…and so much more. (I’ve barely gotten started)!
Isn’t the “fundamental transformation of America” grand? Janet Levy
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/06/24/california-school-backtracks-on-common-core-opt-out-punishment/
Pros and cons of Common Core
A California high school where a majority of juniors opted out of Common Core testing has backed off of plans to ban the students from using the school’s parking lot and from taking part in senior class activities after parents and education groups raised a fuss.
Arrest Benjamin Netanyahu and any other “suspected” Israeli war criminals wherever and whenever you can get your hands on them. That is the shocking bottom line of a scandalous report released today from the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.
The report emanates from a board of inquiry the Council created in the midst of the 2014 Gaza war. In legalese, the call to arrest Israelis either for trial before the International Criminal Court (ICC), or before any court in any country that the U.N. labels “fair,” reads like this:
The board “calls upon the international community … to support actively the work of the International Criminal Court in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory; to exercise universal jurisdiction to try international crimes in national courts; and to comply with extradition requests pertaining to suspects of such crimes to countries where they would face a fair trial.”
Usually the first challenge I face in writing my commentaries is to come up with a concise title that captures the most salient part of the issue I am writing about. Today I found this task easy, I simply borrowed the headline from CBS News’ Face the Nation article that quoted none other than Congressional Representative Devin Nunes, the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.
That headline is concise and echoes the very same concerns I have had in reviewing all of the publicly available information on the issue of threats posed by international terrorists.
While I was speaking to the packed room, a woman I did not know, sitting in the front row, slowly shook her tear-stained head in disbelief and muttered softly … barely audible … “I never thought I would hear these words in this building.”
The woman, it turns out, was of Iraqi Jewish ancestry. The building was the iconic United Nations Headquarters in Manhattan, astride the East River. The event was in a hall routinely used by the UN Security Council. The day was June 1, 2015. The occasion was the proclamation of “International Farhud Day [2]” at the UN as a live global event broadcast by UN TV.
[3]Farhud in an Arabic dialect means violent dispossession. The words I spoke that gripped the woman listening described in detail how the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, leader of the Arab community in Mandate Palestine, organized a blood-curdling massacre by Nazi-allied Arabs against Baghdad’s peaceful Jewish community on June 1-2, 1941. The ensuing mass rape, beheading, murder, burning, and looting spree [4] was the first step in a process that throughout the Arab world effectively ended 2,600 years of Jewish existence in those lands. Ultimately, some 850,000 to 900,000 Jews were systemically pauperized and made stateless in a coordinated forced exodus from the Arab world.
Many Sephardic Jews consider the 1941 Farhud, which murdered and maimed hundreds, to be their Kristallnacht.
This is a fictional account of a meeting between a female journalist and a touring Islamist cleric. How do we know it’s fictional? In real life, the J-school educated reporter wouldn’t be scarpering in fear of Allah’s retribution. She would be making excuses for the inexcusable
Grand Mufti Ishalfulyu Ifi Khan, the well-known Islamic scholar now living in England, is spending two weeks travelling around Australia explaining the benefits of Sharia law. Intrepid, young and irreverent reporter Lois Long catches up with him in Melbourne.
“Welcome to Australia, Mufti baby,” Lois says, as she holds out her hand.
“Assalamu Alaykum, which means peace be upon you, young lady. But I am sorry, I must refuse your hand in case it drives me to distraction.”
“Well, I gotta admit, I sometimes have that effect on men. So, Mufti, you’re forgiven.”
