Displaying posts categorized under

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Reshaping America’s Views of Veterans Fully realizing the benefits that vets can bring to civilian life means changing the distorted way they are perceived. By David McCormick…..See note please

One of the ways to help our veterans is to shut down the useless and corrupt Veterans Administration…..see FAILING OUR VETERANS- A NATIONAL DISGRACE

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/failing-our-veterans-a-national-disgrace

A newspaper writer laments: “On their return home after their long absence from society, and from industry, many of these brave men . . . find it difficult to get the opportunity at once to return to their old avocations. Their places in the workshops or elsewhere are filled up; and having but little money, and having lost to some extent the facility for securing employment or the friends who might have helped them to find it, they are greatly discouraged and disheartened, and their families suffer.”

Sound familiar? That’s the New York Times in June 1865. And yet here we are, 150 years on, with vets dying while waiting for medical care, 50,000 vets homeless, unemployment among post-9/11 vets consistently above the average, and just half of those who go to college actually finishing.

The tragedy persists, despite repeated recitations of the grim facts. We can’t change how America treats vets until we change how America perceives them. That requires stories, not facts. As the supreme storyteller Joseph Conrad said, “My task is to make you hear, to make you feel, and, above all, to make you see.”

Obama Has Just Begun By Victor Davis Hanson

How much damage can he do in his last year of office?

Insidiously and inadvertently, Barack Obama is alienating the people and moving the country to the right. If he keeps it up, by 2017 it will be a reactionary nation. But, counterintuitive as it seems, that is fine with Obama: Après nous le déluge.

By sheer force of his personality, Obama has managed to lose the Democratic Senate and House. State legislatures and governorships are now predominantly Republican. Obama’s own favorable ratings rarely top 45 percent. In his mind, great men, whether Socrates or Jesus, were never appreciated in their time. So it is not surprising that he is not, as he presses full speed ahead.

Obama certainly has doubled down going into his last year, most recently insisting on letting in more refugees from the Middle East, at a time when the children of Middle Eastern immigrants and contemporary migrants are terrorizing Europe. What remaining unpopular executive acts might anger his opponents the most? Close down Guantanamo, let thousands more refugees into the United States, free thousands more felons, snub another ally, flatter another enemy, weigh in on another interracial melodrama, extend amnesty to another million illegal aliens, make global warming laws by fiat, expand Obamacare, unilaterally impose gun control? In lieu of achievement, is the Obama theory to become relevant or noteworthy by offending the public and goading political enemies?

NONIE DARWISH MOMENT: THE TRUTH ABOUT THE SAN BERNARDINO TERROR ATTACK

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/12/06/nonie-darwish-moment-the-truth-about-the-san-bernardino-terror-attack/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Nonie Darwish Moment. An ex-Muslim who is the author of The Devil We Don’t Know, Nonie focuses on The Truth About The San Bernardino Terror Attack, stressing how it is high time to stop shaming Americans for wanting to protect their nation.

Don’t miss it!

The Internet Of Things (IoT) Has Arrived – What You Should Know By Chuck Brooks

We have entered a new era of scientific breakthroughs and technological applications that will change life as we know it. Accelerated technological development is transforming our civilization. The pace of innovation is growing so rapidly that it is becoming exponential as each year passes.

Futurist Dr. Michio Kaku characterizes this blazing technological shift as moving from the “age of discovery” to the “age of mastery.”

This next decade beckons many new technological discoveries and applications. This includes genetic engineering and regeneration of body parts, new cures for diseases, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, nano-technologies, robotics, ultra-high speed trains and self-driving cars, renewable energies, sustainable agriculture, big data, 3-D Printing, digital security, quantum computing, mobility, and paper thin flexible personal computers.

If you read the MIT Technology Review on a weekly basis, you will be provide continual insights into the trends of disruptive transformation. It also important to know some key stats and terms … and implications of the Internet of Things (IoT):

A New Word for the Dictionary of Cant By Roger Kimball

Watching the disgraceful performance of Attorney General Loretta Lynch at FBI Director James Comey’s press conference yesterday about the slaughter in San Bernardino, I was reminded that the word “evolve” has lately been enlisted in the lexicon of evasive bureaucratic mendacity. She couldn’t bring herself to utter the word “terrorism,” much less the term “Islamic,” but she opened the press conference with a content-free sack of emetic clichés, chief of which was the obfuscatory observation that no one should conclude anything about this latest murderous rampage because the news from San Bernardino “continues to evolve.” It is, she cautioned a few sentences later, “an evolving investigation,” so . . .

So what? So just push some papers around and wait until people calm down and we can get on with the important business of discussing “climate change” and otherwise pursuing Barack Obama’s stated goal of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” from a capitalist dynamo where limited government and individual liberty are the watchwords to a bastion of central planning and regulatory paralysis. Last night, Loretta Lynch explained herself further when addressing a group of Muslims in Washington, D.C. Her “greatest fear” since the slaughter in Paris last month was not Islamic terrorism but “retaliatory violence” against innocent Muslims. At that event, Lynch made no mention of the massacre in San Bernardino, where two Islamic radicals, a husband and wife team, murdered 14 and wounded 21.

Eyes Wide Shut: Political Correctness and Islam : Edward Cline

Remember that “Attack Watch” slogan of Obama’s near the end of his first term, “If you see something, say something,” when he was trying to get Americans to inform on other Americans who were vocally critical of him? In this case, Syed Farook’s neighbors saw something, but didn’t say anything, for fear of being labeled racists or Islamophobes or profilers.

Stephanie Condon wrote in a CBS report in September 2011, “Conservatives mock Obama’s ‘AttackWatch.com,”:

Anticipating a nasty fight in 2012, President Obama’s re-election campaign on Tuesday launched a site, called AttackWatch.com , designed to push back against attacks on the president’s record.

“We all remember the birth certificate smear, the GOP’s barrage of lies about the Affordable Care Act, and the string of other phony attacks on President Obama that we’ve seen over the past few years,” Jim Messina, Obama for America’s campaign manager, wrote in an email to the president’s supporters. “There are a lot of folks on the other side who are chomping at the bit to distort the President’s record. It’s not a question of if the next big lie will come, just when — and what we’re prepared to do about it.”

Peter Smith Terror Incognita

It is there, dead ahead and clear as day, the looming lee shore of terror, intolerance, tribal savagery and the liberties of all curtailed in the name of defending against an enemy our leaders perversely refuse to recognise, let alone name
Just suppose it were possible to shoot people in the name of a religion and have the leader of the Free World, together with his media sycophants, deplore gun ownership among potential victims. Just suppose it were possible to shoot people in the name of a religion and have the leader of the Free World, together with his media sycophants, refuse to blame and name the religion. Just suppose it were possible to shoot people in the name of a religion and have the leader of the Free World, together with his media sycophants, mainly fret about a potential backlash against followers of the religion.

That, indeed, would be cunning plan of Baldrick proportions. And it would, of course, be completely fanciful to imagine it would ever work. Wouldn’t it?

One “expert” on CNN explained that the attack in San Bernardino was likely to be workplace violence. But the interviewer asked how come Syed Farook’s wife, Tashfeen Malik, having left their 6-month-old baby at home, was with him, gun in hand? He responded smoothly that he may have enjoined her in his disgruntlement. But the interviewer, who inexplicably continued to take this nincompoop seriously, asked how come they attacked in combat gear? That is unusual, the nincompoop agreed, without this at all affecting his opinion that the massacre was most likely work-related.

Jihad in San Bernardino and Jihad Denial – on The Glazov Gang

http://jamieglazov.com/2015/12/05/jihad-in-san-bernardino-and-jihad-denial-on-the-glazov-gang/

In response to the recent Jihadist attack in San Bernardino and Obama’s and the media’s ongoing and unsurprising denial of the Islamic nature of Islamic terror attacks, we are running The Glazov Gang’s feature episode in which Ann-Marie Murrell interviewed Jamie Glazov about the true nature of Jihad-Denial and what impulses spawn it.

Jamie explained exactly why the Left engages in willful blindness about the Islamic threat and the huge price the West is paying in deceiving itself about the real enemy we face.

Don’t miss it!

Ancient Freedom Fighters How Hanukah and ancient Israel inspired the birth of the United States. By Josh Gelernter

Because it’s celebrated during the Christmas season, Hanukah is badly understood. It’s not a Jewish Christmas, or even — strictly speaking — a religious holiday. It was the ancient Israelis’ Fourth of July, and its (true) story was deeply influential in the creation of the United States.

A little background: In the earliest historical (non-biblical) records, the land of Israel — which corresponds to modern Israel, the West Bank, and western Jordan — was divided into two Hebrew kingdoms, Israel in the north and Judea in the south. In 720 b.c., the Kingdom of Israel was conquered by Assyria, and its inhabitants were sold into slavery; these are the so-called “ten lost tribes”; of the original twelve Hebrew tribes, ten lived in Israel, and the other two, Judah and Benjamin, in Judea. (Virtually all modern Jews descend from those two tribes.) After conquering Israel, the Assyrians laid siege to the Judean capital, Jerusalem. The siege failed, and peace terms were negotiated. Instead of being annihilated, Judea became a client state of the Assyrian Empire.

When Assyria began its decline in the seventh century b.c., Judea regained its independence. It stayed independent until 586 b.c., when it was conquered by the Babylonian Empire. In 539 b.c., Babylon fell to the Persian Empire, wherein Judea remained until 332 b.c., when it — along with the rest of the world — was conquered by Alexander the Great.

Alexander had a soft spot for the Jews (possibly because his teacher, Aristotle, had studied with a Jew; possibly because a Jewish legend predicted that a Greek would vanquish the Persian Empire). He annihilated Gaza, but passed through Judea in peace, reportedly stopping in Jerusalem to give an offering at the Temple. Judea became part of the Greek Empire, but the Judeans were allowed to maintain their independent legislative-judicial system, and to continue to practice Judaism.

When Alexander died, his empire was split up by his generals. Judea became the northernmost part of the Ptolemaic (Greek–Egyptian) kingdom until 200 b.c., when it was captured by the (Syrian–Greek) Seleucids. At first, the Seleucids granted the Jews permission to continue to “live according to their ancestral customs,” but that decree was revoked in 175 b.c., when Judea was invaded by King Antiochus IV, who was determined to put it under direct Seleucid control. He captured Jerusalem, banned Judaism, and dedicated the Jewish Temple to Zeus. This is where the story of Hanukah begins.

The Attorney General of the United States Is Disgracing Herself By David French

In her response to what appears to be a deadly, ISIS-motivated domestic terror attack, Attorney General Loretta Lynch has offered an almost Onion-level self-parody of liberal pieties.

Per Obama administration protocol, the attorney general was determined to never let a crisis go to waste. There is now a “wonderful opportunity and wonderful moment to really make significant change,” Lynch declared the day after 14 innocent Americans were murdered and 23 injured at the hands of a Muslim couple who’d reportedly pledged allegiance to ISIS. And what is this change? New gun-control measures, of course, including stripping the constitutional rights (without due process) of Americans often arbitrarily placed on the vastly over-inclusive terror watch list.

Lynch addressed the Muslim Advocate’s tenth-anniversary dinner and declared that she is concerned about an “incredibly disturbing rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric . . . that fear is my greatest fear.” Her greatest fear is — not terrorism — but a nonexistent Islamophobic backlash? ISIS has demonstrated that it can bring down passenger jets, strike the heart of a great Western capitol with urban assault teams, and inspire horrible carnage in California. We also know that ISIS has pledged to keep attacking the U.S. and possesses chemical weapons. Yet it’s politically incorrect speech that strikes fear into the heart of our attorney general.