Step in Obama’s Climate Action Plan, without a price tag, will assess risks and then tell landowners “this is how you need to manage.” http://pjmedia.com/blog/new-usda-climate-hubs-to-school-farmers-ranchers-on-climate-change/?print=1 WASHINGTON — President Obama enacted part of his promised Climate Action Plan today with the creation of regional “Climate Hubs” to coordinate a global warming response with farmers, ranchers and […]
http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2014/02/05/the-gop-and-social-issues-contd-confronting-the-gay-marriage-question/?print=1
Here at Ordered Liberty, I weighed in a few days back on the discussion Roger Simon and Bryan Preston were having about whether the Republican Party should de-emphasize social issues. Some other points are worth making.
The first is that not all “social issues” are created equal.
I don’t think either Roger or Bryan suggested otherwise. To recap how we got here, while Roger’s headline referred generally to “social conservatives” (“How Social Conservatives Are Saving Liberalism”), his post homed in on gay marriage. In rebuttal, Bryan did not delve deeply into the substance of gay marriage; instead, he broadened the debate to consider how a conservative retreat on gay marriage would fit into a pattern of surrender on social issues across the board. It is those issues that inspired the demographic known as “social conservatives” to, as Bryan says, “get into politics in the first place.” Thus, he contends, de-emphasizing them would cause social conservatives to disengage from politics. I agree. As argued in my post, the GOP cannot win elections with major defections from this critical component of its base.
Yet, it confuses matters to speak of “social issues” as one indiscriminate bunch, and to imply that each should be handled the same “no compromise” way. Just as every skirmish in the culture war is not equally significant, different social issues are of varying importance.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304851104579359141941621778?mod=WSJ_hp_RightTopStories
U.S. News
Sniper Attack Knocked Out Substation, Raises Concern for Country’s Power Grid
SAN JOSE, Calif.—The attack began just before 1 a.m. on April 16 last year, when someone slipped into an underground vault not far from a busy freeway and cut telephone cables.
Within half an hour, snipers opened fire on a nearby electrical substation. Shooting for 19 minutes, they surgically knocked out 17 giant transformers that funnel power to Silicon Valley. A minute before a police car arrived, the shooters disappeared into the night.
To avoid a blackout, electric-grid officials rerouted power around the site and asked power plants in Silicon Valley to produce more electricity. But it took utility workers 27 days to make repairs and bring the substation back to life.
Nobody has been arrested or charged in the attack at PG&E Corp.’s Metcalf transmission substation. It is an incident of which few Americans are aware. But one former federal regulator is calling it aterrorist act that, if it were widely replicated across the country, could take down the U.S. electric grid and black out much of the country.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303942404579362851183447872?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop There are 7.8 million Americans working part-time who want full-time work, including a fry cook whose restaurant cut his hours to avoid Affordable Care Act mandates and confronted President Obama in an online Q&A last week. “We can’t survive. It’s not a living.” Mr. Obama changed the subject to raising the minimum wage. But […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/370367/cbos-obamacare-scorecard-editors
Obamacare by the numbers, according to the Congressional Budget Office — labor lost: equivalent of 2.5 million full-time jobs over the next decade; insurance enrollment: down 1 million from earlier first-year estimate; cost: $1.2 trillion over the next decade; number of Americans uninsured: 30 million.
Which is to say: We are spending $1.2 trillion and taking a blowtorch to the work force in order to fund a semi-public insurance system that still leaves tens of millions uncovered. And that’s assuming that CBO has not taken too rosy a view of Obamacare, which it may well have.
There is more wrong with Obamacare than a bumble-thumbed website.
The White House has tried, with hilarious results, to spin the labor-force data, emphasizing the CBO’s estimate that the so-called Affordable Care Act will cost the economy the equivalent of 2.5 million full-time jobs not because there will be a pink-slip bloodbath at Walmart but because fewer people will chose to work, or will choose to work fewer hours, once their federally subsidized health insurance makes the prospect of quitting their jobs less enticing. In the considered view of the Obama administration, that is good news. We are happy to see that the White House seems finally to have stumbled upon the concept of economic incentives — give people less reason to work and they will work less. But the administration still does not seem to be able to get its collective head around the fact that American workers are not just hungry mouths that have to be filled with paychecks: They are people who provide economically valuable goods and services. Those 2.5 million out of the work force may be happier at their leisure, but the economy as a whole will be substantially worse off without their contributions. We could, in theory, simply have the federal government deliver checks to every household and allow each and every one to follow his bliss as he sees fit, but the shelves of the grocery stores soon would be empty. The depth of the Obamacare crater in the labor force isn’t some abstract unemployment rate, but the lost value of the work those Americans would have done.
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/370329/print Welcome to the “year of action.” In last week’s State of the Union address, the president vowed to do whatever he must to help the economy, even if that means working around Congress: “What I offer tonight is a set of concrete, practical proposals to speed up growth, strengthen the middle class, and build […]
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/02/04/sandra-fluke-files-to-run-for-congress/
WAXMAN IS REALLY AWFUL …WILL FLUKE BE WORSE?…. A FLUKE IS A BOTTOM FEEDING FISH…RSK
This ridiculous story has given us the headline of the day, from Jammie Wearing Fool.
Woman Who Can’t Afford Her Own Birth Control Scrapes Up Money to File for Congressional Run
That’s the headline that Fluke deserves. She ought to be a figure of ridicule. She’s a longtime Georgetown Law student, who told Congress that she can’t afford her own $9 a month birth control. Helpless she may be, but that’s not stopping her from taking her incompetence and inexperience straight to power over the rest of us.
Let’s see how the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake treats Fluke’s ambitions. Here is his lead sentence.
Women’s rights activist Sandra Fluke appears to be moving forward with a run for Congress.
Wait, what about the Little Sisters of the Poor? They’re the nuns who oppose the same abortifacient mandate that Fluke supports. Are they not women? Do they not have rights? To Aaron Blake, the nuns are not women and they do not have rights.
Sandra Fluke is not a “women’s rights activist.” She is a government-power advocate.
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2014/02/04/the-exhausted-us-economy-and-a-lesson-for-republicans/?print=1 When employment hit an air pocket in December, most analysts brushed off the dreadful jobs number as an anomaly, or a function of the weather. They chose to believe Ben Bernanke rather than their lying eyes. It’s hard to ignore a second signal that the U.S. economy is dead in the water, though: on […]
The Ten Worst U.S. Purveyors of Antisemitism, #2: Students for Justice in Palestine P. David Hornik
http://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2014/02/02/the-ten-worst-u-s-purveyors-of-antisemitism-2-students-for-justice-in-palestine/
Students for Justice in Palestine is a vicious, violent, antisemitic organization that hopes to contribute to Israel’s destruction. With U.S. campuses a hotbed of antisemitic and anti-Israeli agitation driven mainly by Muslim and leftist organizations, the Anti-Defamation League has called SJP the “most ubiquitous” of these groups.
SJP was founded by Islamic and Marxist activists at Berkeley in 2001. One of its cofounders, Hatem Bazian, is a senior lecturer at UC Berkeley who won notoriety in 2004 by calling for an intifada in the United States. Before cofounding SJP, Bazam was a student activist at San Francisco State University and, according to Rabbi Doug Kahn, “more responsible than any other student on campus for trying to make life miserable for Jewish students.” That included working to keep students with Jewish last names out of student government.
SJP’s other cofounder is Snehal Shingavi, a Marxist and member of the International Socialist Organization. Shingavi, now at the University of Texas at Austin, made a national splash in 2002 when he offered a course at Berkeley on “Palestinian Resistance” and said conservatives need not apply. He has praised the Taliban, Iraqi terror, and Hamas, and his collaboration with Bazian was a classic case of the Red-Green Alliance.
SJP, which is closely allied with American Muslims for Palestine, has kept growing and now has about 90 chapters at American universities. It held its first national conference at Columbia in 2011. There it promulgated its “Points of Unity,” which state that SJP is
committed to ending Israel’s occupation and colonization of all Arab lands…. It calls for respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194.
In line with this destroy-Israel agenda, based in part on a nonbinding GA resolution that was unequivocally rejected by the Arab world at the time, SJP mounts “apartheid wall” displays on campuses, campaigns for divestment from Israel, equates Israelis with Nazis, disrupts events with Israeli and pro-Israeli speakers—and worse.
Students for Justice in Palestine has a history of subjecting Jewish students and faculty to violence, intimidation, and harassment. There have been numerous incidents, and these are just examples:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/cbs-edits-out-cruzs-criticism-of-obama/print/
Telephone recordings between Muhammad Zawahiri and Egypt’s ousted president?
This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Ann-Marie Murrell, the National Director of PolitiChicks.tv, Dwight Schultz, a Hollywood Actor, and Tommi Trudeau, the Producer of “Groovy Foods.”
The Gang gathered to discuss Al-Qaeda’s Commands to Morsi. The discussion occurred in Part II (starting at the 7:50 mark) and analyzed the alleged telephone recordings between ousted Egyptian president Muhammad Morsi and Muhammad Zawahiri, al-Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri’s brother.
The episode also analyzed CBS Edits Out Cruz’s Criticism of Obama, Lies of the State of the Union, Malik Obama’s Terrorist Scarf, Hillary “Regrets” Benghazi and much, much more. Watch both parts of the two-part episode below:
