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Keep Swinging, Mr. President Golfing is the best thing Barack Obama does. By Kevin D. Williamson

Posted By on August 28th, 2016

Set aside Barack Obama the private man, about whom even now relatively little is known. The most likeable thing about Barack Obama the public man is his dedication to golf.

Conservatives hate President Obama’s commitment to his tee times. Or at least we pretend to. The talk-radio ranters and the cable-news mouthholes have tried to bully the president out of his leisure, going on and on about his putting around Martha’s Vineyard or Porcupine Creek while the world burns or Baton Rouge is submerged.

Those complaints are partly insincere — something has to fill up the minutes between doggie-vitamin commercials — and partly are an indirect complaint about media bias. Yes, the same press that savaged George W. Bush for his golfing and for his allegedly excessive vacation schedule has nothing to say about President Obama’s following that example. That is the way of things: Jackie Kennedy spent a little coin sprucing up the White House and she was single-handedly conferring “class” on the nation at large; Nancy Reagan bought a new set of china and it was the biggest crisis since Suez. The New York Times sniffed at Mrs. Reagan for ordering $200,000 worth of new Lenox for White House formal dinners; Mrs. Obama spent $290,000 on a single painting (by Alma Thomas) when she was redecorating a room in the White House — nothing. Mrs. Obama’s painting was not paid for by taxpayers, but then neither was Mrs. Reagan’s China, the tab for which was picked up by the nice people at the J. P. Knapp Foundation.

The hypocrisy should be noted, and complained about, but we should not let it make asses of us, if we can avoid it.

So Barack Obama likes his golf game.

There are some obvious and practical reasons not to discourage President Obama’s sporting pursuits. The most obvious of them is that every hour Barack Obama spends on the links is an hour he is not wrecking the republic, distorting its character, throwing monkey wrenches into its constitutional machinery, or appointing sundry miscreants and malefactors to its high offices. If golf is the only prophylactic we have against him, then Scotland’s second-greatest contribution to modern civilization is to be celebrated for doing work that the Supreme Court and Congress can’t quite manage.

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Back to Campus, Where Due Process Is a Myth By Tom Knighton

Posted By on August 28th, 2016

Colleges are supposed to be places of learning. However, many argue they’ve become liberal indoctrination centers, dedicated to churning out legions of progressive zombies who can parrot the Democratic Party’s platform verbatim — yet can’t actually do anything useful to support themselves, or society.

Liberals, unsurprisingly, deny this.

However, there appears to be a movement afoot on college campuses that should alarm liberals, conservatives, and libertarians alike.

By now, most readers of this site are bound to be familiar with the persecution of men suspected of sexual assault on campuses throughout the nation. And yes, using “persecution” rather than “prosecution” is intentional. Prosecution implies they will be put through the unalienable rights-based American legal system. That isn’t true anymore.

As your kids head off to school, they should be aware that sexual assault isn’t the only situation where college officials now figure silly things like due process should be completely ignored:

The University of California-San Diego routinely hides the identity of witnesses that could help students accused of wrongdoing exonerate themselves, departing from its own rules on who is “relevant” to an investigation.

This policy, which has been applied against accused students for at least the past five years, was not publicly known until 11 months ago. A state appeals court fleshed out its existence in a due-process lawsuit against the school by a student who was found responsible for cheating and expelled.

That court struck down UCSD’s ruling against Jonathan Dorfman, saying it had no legal reason to withhold the identity of “Student X” — whose test answers Dorfman allegedly copied — from him.

The claim that Dorfman copied answers from “Student X” would assume the two sit near one another. However, without knowing the identity of the student, Dorfman can’t establish whether he was sitting near “Student X” on the day of the exam or not.

So how did they “prove” his guilt? CONTINUE AT SITE

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There is no moral basis to oppose Trump By J. Marsolo

Posted By on August 28th, 2016

On August 19, 2016, Douglas Ernst, of The Washington Times, reported that William Bennett, former secretary of education and author of the Virtues books, declared that holier-than-thou so-called Republicans and conservatives should put the interests of our country above their “vanity” and “moral superiority.” Bennett said: “Donald Trumpdoes not need to speak to the ‘Never Trumpers,’ some of my friends – or maybe former friends – who suffer from a terrible case of moral superiority and put their own vanity and taste above the interest of the country,”

There are many articles and comments here at American Thinker and other websites setting forth the reasons why we should vote for Trump to defeat Hillary. A brief summary of the reasons is that Hillary is a lying crook who will be the third term of Obama. Obamacare will be here to stay, and a Hillary Supreme Court will weaken the Second Amendment by upholding state and local laws on owning and carrying firearms. The nanny state will grow with more regulations. There will be no wall on the southern border, and illegal immigration will continue. Further, Hillary will allow immigration of Syrian and other Middle Eastern “refugees” without proper vetting, which will increase terrorist attacks in our country.

Hillary’s past misdeeds are too much to recount, such as Whitewater and covering up Bill’s rape of Juanita Broaddrick and other sexual misconduct. Worse are the current email scandal, where she destroyed emails relating to her work as secretary of state, and her activities on behalf of the Clinton Foundation. But the absolute worst is her failure to provide the requested security at Benghazi and then compounding it by lying that the cause was a video. She lied to help Obama win the 2012 election and to maintain her political viability. And now she runs an ad attacking Trump for saying that Mrs. Khan had nothing to say while Mr. Khan attacked Trump at the Democrat convention. Hillary has no shame and no conscience, and she will do and say anything to make money and get power.

The NeverTrumpers act, as Bennett said, from “moral superiority.” They say it is only a choice of the lesser evil, and they cannot vote for evil. This is complete nonsense. There is nothing evil about Trump. You may not like some of his words and statements, but there is nothing evil about his conduct. Covering up a rape, using the office of secretary of state to make money, destroying the email evidence and lying about it, and lying to the mother of Sean Smith are evil. There is no moral equivalence between the conduct of Hillary and the words of Trump.

The NeverTrumpers do not act from “moral superiority” because there are not legitimate facts to support a claim that the choice between Hillary and Trump is a choice between two evils.

As Bennett says, if you care about the best interests and welfare of our country, then you have to vote for Trump to defeat Hillary. It is common sense based on the facts.

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TOP 10 INNOCENT WOMEN EXECUTED IN IRAN — AN ANNI CYRUS VIDEO

Posted By on August 28th, 2016

On this new special edition of Anni Cyrus’s “Top 10”, Anni focuses on The Top 10 Innocent Women Executed in Iran, asking us to never forget them — and to reflect on the true meaning of Sharia:

And make sure to watch another special Anni Cyrus Top 10 in which Anni discusses the Top 10 Facts About Pre-Islamic Iran, sharing why she is so proud to unveil these facts today — and why the Mullahs never will.

http://jamieglazov.com/2016/08/27/top-10-innocent-women-executed-in-iran-an-anni-cyrus-video/

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Hillary Clinton’s for-profit university problem by Drew Griffin, Curt Devine and Scott Zamost

Posted By on August 28th, 2016

Note from Dr. John A…..”Bill gets a cool $17.6 million (!!) merely for being an ‘inspiration’ (!!) to students at a for-profit university; university gets favourable treatment from the Administration while Hillary is Secretary of State..”
It’s got all the makings of a conspiracy theory.

After Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, Bill Clinton received $17.6 million in payments from a for-profit university. Since that time, another organization with a connection to that university received almost $90 million in grants from an agency that’s part of the State Department.

Critics of the Clintons have cried foul. But is there really something shady going on?

There is no shortage of connections between the Clintons and Laureate International Universities. Laureate is a for-profit university — the same kind Hillary Clinton has railed against for saddling students with huge debts.

“[Students] find little support once they actually enroll, or they graduate and discover that, when it comes to finding a job, their degree isn’t worth what they thought,” she told an audience last year.

Laureate has about one million students worldwide, mostly in Latin America, with five schools in the United States.

Laureate has faced investigations in Brazil over whether students were getting what they paid for, and in Chile concerning its for-profit status. U.S. students have complained the school failed to deliver on its promised degree programs.

In addition, three of the five schools Laureate operates in the United States are under what the U.S. Department of Education calls “heightened cash monitoring” because of potential problems with its “financial responsibility.” The school told CNN it disagrees with the government’s methodology.

The Clinton campaign told CNN that the candidate intends to hold for-profit colleges accountable.

“Hillary Clinton has made it clear that all for-profit institutions should be held to the same standards and she will crack down on law-breaking for-profits by expanding support for federal regulators to enforce laws against deceptive marketing, fraud, and other illegal practices.”

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All Clubs at Harvard Have to Be Gender Neutral—Except Women’s Clubs

Posted By on August 27th, 2016

When classes reconvene at Harvard this fall, the all-female Seneca Organization, which promotes female empowerment among Harvard’s students, will officially go “gender neutral,” in accordance with new Harvard policy guidelines. But it won’t actually have to admit any men.http://heatst.com/culture-wars/all-clubs-at-harvard-have-to-be-gender-neutral-except-womens-clubs/

How does that work? you might ask.

How does that work? you might ask.

Although male-only “final clubs” gear up for war with the administration, which has told them their members won’t be considered for scholarships or leadership positions if they remain male-only, Harvard’s Dean of Student Affairs reportedlyassured the Seneca group that it could “could continue to operate as it always has.” All it has to do is make semantic changes to its bylaws.

“Like Women in Business or Latinas Unidas, although men may apply, our membership can be made up wholly of women without incurring the sanctions of the administration’s new policy,” the group’s leader told Seneca’s members in an email.

The administration insists that Seneca can violate the new rules because it has 501(c)(3) non-profit status, and isn’t “purely social.” But Harvard’s policy seems to carry no such official exceptions; the only quality that invokes the rule’s drastic punishment is that the club is gender-specific.

An attorney who is consulting with one of Harvard’s single-gender final clubs about the policy called the Seneca exception “a very convenient carve-out.”

The new elastic interpretation also seems to coincide with outcry from Harvard’s all-female groups, who want the gender-inclusive policy enforced, just not against them. A group called the Crimson Women’s Coalition has demonstrated against the policy several times, claiming that women’s-only groups are “safe spaces” for female students, and that welcoming men opens those organizations to the possibility of sexual assault.

“By removing… spaces for women, Harvard is making our campus less safe for women,” one student protester told a crowd of demonstrators in May, just after the gender-inclusive policy had passed.

It seems, now, Harvard is actually figuring out how best to accommodate campus feminists.

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Zoos Are Polluting Our Children’s Minds With Dangerous Gender Stereotypes (Study) !!!!????By Emily Zanotti

Posted By on August 27th, 2016

The sociology department of the University of Pennsylvania is tackling only the most important issues of our time.

It has a paper in the most recent issue of Social Psychology Quarterly examining the various ways zoos are cesspools of dangerous gender stereotypes that parents (intentionally or inadvertently) reinforce with their kids. You’ll have to pay to read the full article (or have a subscription to Social Psychology Quarterly), but you can get the gist of the paper from its abstract.

The study says that adults seem to want to characterize zoo animals according to “binary” gender terminology, forcing the camels and penguins and elephants of this world to conform to either “male” or “female,” even though those particular zoo animals haven’t truly examined whether they would like to identify as their birth gender. Although zoology does allow for checking the actual sex of an animal, adults should, apparently, refrain from referring to zoo animals as a “girl” or a “boy,” unless they’ve asked the said animals.

Another problem: Parents tend to use zoo exhibits to model traditional family roles. The study says “adults mobilize zoo exhibits as props for modeling their own normative gender displays.”

Talking about “mother” and “father” animals, then, forces children to believe in traditional, gender constructs, which could harm their psyches as they grow older. Children will question whether their parents will love them even if they don’t fit a typical gender definition—all because that giraffe was characterized as male or female.

All of this makes the search for one’s place on the gender spectrum a difficult journey, apparently. No doubt, the UPenn sociology department would recommend that signs in zoos be changed to reflect a more fluid approach to wild animal sexuality.

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Europe: The Substitution of a Population by Giulio Meotti

Posted By on August 27th, 2016

In one generation, Europe will be unrecognizable.

Eastern Europe now has “the largest population loss in modern history”, while Germany overtook Japan by having the world’s lowest birth rate.

Europe, as it is aging, no longer renews its generations, and instead welcomes massive numbers of migrants from the Middle East, Africa and Asia, who are going to replace the native Europeans, and who are bringing cultures with radically different values about sex, science, political power, culture, economy and the relation between God and man.

Deaths that exceed births might sound like science fiction, but they are now Europe’s reality. It just happened. During 2015, 5.1 million babies were born in the EU, while 5.2 million persons died, meaning that the EU for the first time in modern history recorded a negative natural change in its population. The numbers come from Eurostat (the statistical office of the European Union), which since 1961 has been counting Europe’s population. It is official.

There is, however, another surprising number: the European population increased overall from 508.3 million to 510.1 million. Have you guessed why? The immigrant population increased, by about two million in one year, while the native European population was shrinking. It is the substitution of a population. Europe has lost the will to maintain or grow its population. The situation is as demographically as seismic as during the Great Plague of the 14th Century.

This shift is what the British demographer David Coleman described in his study, “Immigration and Ethnic Change in Low-Fertility Countries: A Third Demographic Transition.” Europe’s suicidal birth rate, coupled with migrants who multiply faster, will transform European culture. The declining fertility rate of native Europeans coincides, in fact, with the institutionalization of Islam in Europe and the “re-Islamization” of its Muslims.

In 2015, Portugal recorded the second-lowest birth rate in the European Union (8.3 per 1,000 inhabitants) and negative natural growth of -2.2 per 1,000 inhabitants. Which EU country had the lowest birth rate? Italy. Since the “baby boom” of the 1960s, in the country famous for its large families, the birth rate has more halved. In 2015, the number of births fell to 485,000, fewer than in any other year since the modern Italy was formed in 1861.

Eastern Europe now has “the largest population loss in modern history”, while Germany overtook Japan by having the world’s lowest birth rate, when averaged over past five years. In Germany and Italy, the decreases were particularly dramatic, down -2.3% and -2.7% respectively.

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“As a Growth Industry Antisemitism Has Become Immense … Jeremy Corbyn is … a Primitive Troglodyte”

Posted By on August 27th, 2016

“We are living in a crazy time … in a world of total and absolute chaos … As a growth industry antisemitism has become immense … Europe is under siege … Jeremy Corbyn is promoting the worst form of leftist antisemitism and he himself is a primitive troglodyte … ”

That’s just part of Isi Leibler’s compelling introduction to Dr Manfred Gerstenfeld discussing “the British Disease”.

To quote the uploader of this long video, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs:

“In recent months, a large number of extreme anti-Semitic expressions by elected representatives of the British Labour Party have come to light. The publicity has forced Labour, which is under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, to investigate antisemitism, Islamophobia, and racism in the party. The antisemitism issue is overshadowed by the many consequences of Brexit, which include a major crisis in Labour.

Dr Manfred Gerstenfeld is the former Chairman of the Board of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. His many books deal with European-Israeli and European-Jewish issues. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Journal for the Study of Anti-Semitism, and the International Leadership Award by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.”

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NPR’s Climate Propaganda: Arrogance Masquerading as Self-Sacrifice The idea that people should stop bearing children because of the threat of climate change is preposterous. By Jeremy Carl

Posted By on August 27th, 2016

David Harsanyi has already written a fine critique about the recent NPR story “Should We Be Having Kids in the Age of Climate Change?”, but the entire NPR article is such a bit of weapons-grade stupidity that as someone who works professionally on energy and climate policy, I need to offer an even more forceful rebuttal.

It’s hard to know what’s more shocking and depressing—that there are large numbers of people out there who take nonsense like this seriously or that our government-funded radio network has reporters credulous enough to report on it without a trace of mockery.

Nobody knows what will happen to our future climate, and you can find estimates from serious scholars ranging from the dire to the optimistic (I lean fairly strongly toward the latter view). But betting that climate will cause catastrophic disruption to human populations, at least in countries like America – changes so disruptive that they would make child-bearing a bad idea – is simply, based on history, a terrible bet. NPR’s piece is a pure form of climate propaganda in which arrogance, both on the part of the reporter and her subjects, masquerades as self-sacrifice.

The article informs us that “scientists and world leaders agree” that a change of over two degrees Celsius ”would trigger cataclysmic consequences” (scientists are agreed on no such thing, and not having crystal balls, it wouldn’t matter if they did agree—they simply can’t know).

One of the stars of the NPR article, Travis Rieder, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins with one child, claims to know about ethics, but he clearly knows nothing about history, which, at least in the developed world, has been rife with failed predictions of environmental doom and a continued under-estimation of human resiliency (a finding extensively documented 35 years ago by economist Julian Simon and built on by countless scholars since).