http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/30/homeland-security-loses-track-of-1-million-foreign/ The Homeland Security Department has lost track of more than 1 million people who it knows arrived in the U.S. but who it cannot prove left the country, according to an audit Tuesday that also found the department probably won’t meet its own goals for deploying an entry-exit system. The findings were revealed as […]
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/31/a-soap-opera-for-hillary/
Hillary Clinton has lived her life in a soap opera, and now NBC will make one about her. The writers of NBC’s projected four-part miniseries have lots to work with. Bubba and his loose zipper could have been the inspiration for Anthony Weiner, though Mr. Weiner was never accused of rape and has violated only the law of common sense.
The lead role goes to Diane Lane, a contributor to far-left causes, such as MoveOn.org, and an Oscar nominee for her role in “Unfaithful.” Experience is the best teacher, and Hillary learned a lot living with a faithless zipper in the White House. “The script will begin with [Mrs.] Clinton living in the White House,” says an NBC spokesman, “as her husband is serving the second of his two terms as president.” To avoid an X-rating, the writers will have to make up a lot of stuff.
The Clintons are said to be livid about the comparisons to Anthony Weiner, but Huma Abedin, the Weiner missus, dined in Washington Monday night with Phillippe Reines, Hillary’s press spokesman, at the fashionable Chinese restaurant Meiwah, and if they met to talk about the script, they had similar tales to talk about. Earlier in the day, Hillary lunched at the White House with President Obama, a lunch described as “mostly social,” with no spicy Szechuan or Hunan dishes. The corporate suits at Comcast, which owns NBC and MSNBC, say their miniseries is only about attracting viewers and making money, not politics. Tying the series to the 2016 elections is only about “event programming.” Indeed.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/354724/tom-cotton-presumptive-candidate-eliana-johnson
The former soldier is raising funds, winning praise, and worrying Democrats.ELIANA JOHNSON
Tom Cotton may be the only one who has not acknowledged that he will make a bid for the Senate in next year’s midterm elections. He’ll attempt to pick off Arkansas senator Mark Pryor, who is considered one of the most vulnerable Democratic incumbents in the country. Widely viewed as Pryor’s strongest potential challenger, Cotton, a freshman congressman, could be an essential player in Mitch McConnell’s quest to reclaim a Senate majority. And, though he’s not talking about it — yet — Cotton is playing the role of Senate candidate, and Democrats are already trying to bring him down.
Cotton, a farm boy from Yell County, Arkansas, who carried his district by nearly 20 points last year, has not officially announced his candidacy, but he is fundraising aggressively. The conservative hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer and former Romney foreign policy adviser Dan Senor last month hosted a fundraiser for him in New York City that hauled in over $100,000 from high-dollar Republican donors including Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam. There, according to one attendee, Senor joked about Cotton’s looming senatorial bid, “just to acknowledge the elephant in the room.” “The subtext was, ‘Okay, we all know why we’re here, but let’s not put Tom in a tough spot — and no one did,” says the source. Cotton was happy to ignore the subject, too. The ever-restrained congressman “did not say a word about running.”
Sources say that the Harvard Law school graduate, who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, is also building his war chest at home in Arkansas. GOP fundraiser Noelle Nikpour tells me that, in surveying the 2014 landscape, Republican strategists view Pryor’s seat as a “relatively cheap” one to pick up. Nikpour estimates that it will cost between 7 and 8 million dollars to mount a challenge to Pryor. The bang-for-your-buck aspect of the potential matchup is “one reason the race is attracting national attention,” she explains. Nonetheless, David Ray, communications director for the Arkansas Republican party, cautions that money will not determine the outcome of the race: “Pryor is going to be well-funded, there’s no doubt about that. A race like this is going to be more about message than it is about resources.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/354686/irs-employees-just-say-no-obamacare-deroy-murdock Obamacare sickens even union workers and Big Labor bosses. Obamacare has few friends, if any, and hardly anyone likes having it around. Obamacare is like an ugly, socially awkward kid who transfers into grade school at mid-year and then spends the rest of the semester eating alone in the cafeteria while being giggled about […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/354801/print Embattled Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner and an attorney in the Federal Election Commission’s general counsel’s office appear to have twice colluded to influence the record before the FEC’s vote in the case of a conservative non-profit organization, according to e-mails unearthed by the House Ways and Means Committee and obtained exclusively by National […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/napolitanos-failing-homeland-report-card Four years after heading the Department of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano announced she will depart in September. Wishing her well, U.S. President Barack Obama claimed the “American people are safer and more secure thanks to Janet’s leadership in protecting our homeland against terrorist attacks.” Apparently, neither Obama nor Napolitano have read the November 2012 […]
“The estetic, spiritual, recreation, and educational values of such an area (proposed Artic National Wildlife Range) are those one cannot put a price tag on any more than one can on a sunset, a piece of poetry, a symphony, or a friendship.” Ginny Hill Wood Testimony to Congress Fairbanks, 1959 Conservation and aviation […]
http://www.steynonline.com/5644/the-graffiti-on-the-wall
Setting Islam to one side, there is a horrible enfeebling fatalism on both sides of that demographic line. As I wrote in my “alarmist” book seven years ago, the future belongs to those who show up for it, and the nations that built the modern world — which is to say the last half-millennium of human history — have collectively checked in to one of those Swiss euthanasia clinics. In 1905, Theodore Roosevelt spoke to the National Congress of Mothers about the citizen who consciously forgoes “the blessings of children”: “Why,” he declared, “such a creature merits contempt as hearty as any visited upon the soldier who runs away in battle, or upon the man who refuses to work for the support of those dependent upon him, and who though able-bodied is yet content to eat in idleness the bread which others provide.”Today, millions of able-bodied citizens are content to eat in idleness the bread provided by others, and it is a long time since Europeans were called on to fight any battle. But a society that has nothing to die for has nothing to live for. Only the Portuguese can change the destination they’re headed to: have a kid, have two or three, and vote for the possibility of a future.
Timing is everything, even in apocalyptic doom-mongering. When my book America Alone came out in 2006, the conventional wisdom was that its argument about Europe’s demographic death spiral was “alarmist” (The Economist). Seven years on, it’s so non-alarmist that even the Washington Post is running stories about the Continent’s “plummeting” birth rates. The Post’s focus was on a small corner of the Portuguese interior, wherein their reporter met Maria Jesus Rodrigues, 87, who recently moved into the old folks’ home from her nearby village. The youngest resident is 57. Not in the old folks’ home, but in the village. That’s to say, the entire parish qualifies for membership in the AARP, which regards you as a potentially “retired person” from the age of 50.
“Retirement” is an invention of the 20th century, and will not long outlive it. When everyone’s a senior, nobody is — because, if there are no young people around to pave the roads, police the streets, weed your garden, fix your roof, give you a bed bath, and change your feeding tube, you’re going to have to do it yourself. In The Children of Men, P. D. James’s dystopian novel of a world turned mysteriously barren, the roads are potholed and broken, and the buildings crumbling, for want of a sufficiently able-bodied population to maintain them. By 2021, the year Lady James’s story is set in, much of inland Portugal will be approaching the same condition — not through biological affliction, but through a kind of silent mass consensus that this is no longer a world worth bringing children into. “A country without children is a nation without a future,” warned Aníbal Cavaco Silva, Portugal’s president, in 2007, since when the fertility rate has nosedived. Why would you have a kid in Portugal? The country’s youth-unemployment rate is over 40 percent. In Spain it’s 57 percent, and in Greece just shy of 63 percent.
I don’t know the rest of the country terribly well, but I love Lisbon, and I love returning there. There is something about the jacarandas in bloom that always reminds me of a brief youthful fling long ago. Because I was young, and she was young and lovely, I find it sad to think of Portugal as a geriatric ward with insufficient “carers” to change the bedpans. Today, Lisbon remains an architecturally splendid city — a beautiful museum, as one Commonwealth foreign minister described it to me after a flying visit. But the buildings are defaced from top to toe with graffiti, which the stylish Portuguese ladies bustling through the upmarket boutiques no longer even notice. Even as a beautiful museum, Lisbon is already decaying. “The writing on the wall” is from Belshazzar’s feast, but who knows his Bible in post-Christian Europe? So, even when the writing is all over every wall, nobody sees it.
http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/life-in-the-twilight/?print=1 The Good News America is in great shape energy-wise. We have more gas and oil reserves than ever before. Indeed, the United States could shortly become the world’s largest exporter of coal. Our cheaper power rates may bring energy-intensive industry back from Europe and Asia. If America’s small colleges are nearly broke and our […]
http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/iran-sets-its-sights-on-un-disarmament-committee/?print=1 Disarming is not a word you’d normally associate with the government of Iran. But the context here is the United Nations, so normal is not exactly a word that applies either — especially not in the case of Iran’s affinity for UN bodies officially tasked with promoting disarmament (of which the UN has many, […]
