http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346349/radical-islam-once-again We are in the midst of the least-suspenseful investigation ever launched by American law enforcement. Hundreds of investigators are seeking leads around the world to discover the motive of the Boston Marathon bombers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. This probe is considered a foray into the unknown, and perhaps the unknowable. “Do you have any […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346317/obama%E2%80%99s-psychodramas
Unlike Sandy Hook and gun control, the Tsarnaev case teaches real lessons about immigration.
Barack Obama has a habit of trying to energize his legislative agenda by stoking the fires of emotionally charged current events — and in ways usually illogical and incoherent. The shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords and the horrible mass murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School were cited as reasons for rapid enactment of new gun-control laws — even though the proposed tougher registration rules would not have prevented either mayhem.
Tightening up the process for legal acquisition of firearms would not much hinder the mentally ill from getting their hands on guns. And the various measures needed to stop a crazy Adam Lanza or Jared Lee Loughner would be mostly intolerable for liberal or conservative civil libertarians — incarcerating far more of the mentally unhinged, censoring the depiction of gratuitous and violent use of guns in video games and films, confiscating the vast pools of semi-automatic rifles and handguns owned by private citizens. No matter. Sandy Hook and the shooting of Gabby Giffords were still arguments to shame opponents — in the president’s words, “lying” opponents — into accepting the administration’s proposals.
Furthermore, the politically driven distortion of recent gun violence was aimed not just at passing gun-control legislation, but also at demonizing opponents for the 2014 elections. That is why President Obama’s political guru, David Axelrod, almost immediately floated the idea that the catalyst for the Boston violence was “tax day,” in a not-so-subtle insinuation that just maybe some right-wing tea-party types had set off the bombs. That theme soon metamorphosed among the Left into charges that right-wing-inspired sequestration had curbed law-enforcement vigilance and that right-wing opposition to laws against acquiring explosives had enabled the bombers.
In President Obama’s State of the Union Address this February, he cited current inclement weather to argue for renewed efforts to implement some type of cap-and-trade taxes and to grant more subsidies of “sustainable energy” (e.g., wind and solar): “Heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and floods — all are now more frequent and intense. We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen, were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science — and act before it’s too late.”
Such weather hysteria brings to mind candidate Obama’s bizarre claim in May 2007 that the tornado in Greensburg, Kan., killed 10,000 people. (“In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died — an entire town destroyed.”) The tornado actually killed ten or eleven people. In that particular abuse of current events, Obama was not trying to hype global warming; he was trying to blame incumbent president George Bush — as if the supposed dearth of Kansas National Guardsmen (you see, according to Obama, most of them had been sent off to Iraq) meant that 10,000 innocent people had perished for want of emergency attention.
Note that despite the psychodramatic “before it’s too late” reference to Superstorm Sandy, recent weather data show that the planet has not heated up in the last 15 years, despite a vast increase in the worldwide levels of carbon releases into the atmosphere. Moreover, the fact that the United States, almost alone among industrial countries, is beginning to cut its rate of carbon emissions is due almost entirely to the transition from coal to natural gas for generating electricity. Yet natural gas is a sort of politically incorrect fuel not usually seen as green enough for environmentalists.
http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2013/04/22/recognizing-that-radical-islam-is-our-enemy-lessons-from-the-cold-war/?print=1 Let us no longer speculate about the motive for the actions of the Tsarnaev brothers: despite growing up in the United States, both became adherents of radical Islam. This truth, in our politically correct age, we are not supposed to mention. To do so in liberal circles is to be accused of Islamophobia. Ignoring the […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/04/mosque-related_violence.html President Obama has done all he can these past five years to manipulate language and facts in order to exonerate Islam and Moslems from terrorist attacks committed in the U.S. by Moslems in the name of Islam and jihad. After Nidal Hassan at Fort Hood mowed down numerous innocents while chanting “Allahu Akbar,” Mr. […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/tamerlan_tsarnaev_and_a_lesson_to_the_inhabitants_of_the_world.html What’s in a name? In the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, an understanding of the man after whom he is named is essential to grasp to historic forces on whose behalf he allegedly embraced cruel terror, bringing along his kid brother Dzhokhar. The late Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen Muslim, […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/can_a_president_who_has_promised_to_stand_with_the_muslims_protect_americans.html In Obama’s Audacity of Hope, he stated, “I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in any ugly direction.” He also asserted in Bob Woodward’s Obama’s Wars, “We can absorb [another] terrorist attack.” These are two straightforward statements that raise the question of whether a man who has been seemingly obsessed […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324874204578438913145965432.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Flight Delays as Political Strategy
The FAA furloughs traffic controllers rather than cut other spending.
President Obama’s sequester scare strategy has been a political flop, but his government keeps trying. The latest gambit is to force airline flight delays until enough travellers stuck on tarmacs browbeat enough Republicans to raise taxes again.
This week the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) began furloughing each of its air-traffic controllers for one day out of every 10 to achieve roughly $600 million in savings this fiscal year. The White House dubiously claims that the furloughs are required by the sequester spending cuts enacted in 2011.
Capitol Hill Republicans say the White House is free to make other cuts instead. House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman Bill Shuster suggests the FAA first take a whack at the $500 million it’s spending on consultants, or perhaps the $325 million it blows on supplies and travel.
In case there’s any doubt about the President’s ability to prioritize, at least two GOP Senators, Jerry Moran and Roy Blunt, have written bills to clarify Mr. Obama’s authority to make sensible spending decisions. He’s not interested, and Senate Democrats have blocked such reforms. Making smart choices about federal sending would spoil the fun of creating flight delays and then blaming Republicans.
So this week the FAA has managed to turn the first stages of a 5% budget cut into hours of delays at the nation’s airports. The furloughs are landing on air-traffic controllers as much as they are on less vital FAA jobs. Officials at the Department of Transportation, the FAA’s parent bureaucracy, say it would be bad for morale to impose heavier furloughs on the employees who don’t direct airplanes. DOT has also ruled out any reductions in the FAA workforce to achieve the needed savings, along with most other obvious options that a private business would explore.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-01-230413.html
Turkey’s economy came to a dead stop during the first quarter, but the country’s credit bubble continues to grow.
Under the headline “Ankara’s Economic Miracle Collapses”, I argued a year ago in the Middle East Quarterly that Turkey’s economic prowess had more hype than substance. The government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had financed a consumer bubble with a huge trade deficit financed by short-term interbank loans. The consumer boom is gone, but the credit bubble continues, with bank lending still expanding by 30% a year despite the stalled economy.
Turkey’s current account deficit remains in the red-alert region of nearly 10% of GDP, and it continues to finance the deficit with short-term interbank borrowings. Bubbles like this eventually blow up.
Turkey cannot blame global economic conditions, because emerging market economies are growing at 5.5% this year in the International Monetary Fund’s estimate while Turkey is not growing at all. Turkey’s government debt remains quite low at just 36% of GDP, but private-sector debt – especially short-term foreign debt – has tripled in the past four years.
Most of the US$80 billion in short-term money that Turkey has borrowed since 2010 probably came from the Gulf states, which have a strategic interest in preserving a Sunni power with an army larger than Iran’s. This largesse cannot continue indefinitely, though. Turkey’s central bank promised to reduce its foreign deficit by reducing growth. Now the growth is gone, but not the deficit. The galloping increase in bank debt indicates that Turkish banks are lending their customers just enough to pay the interest on past loans.
This puts Erdogan’s political future in question. His Justice and Development Party (AKP) won the past two national elections on the strength of its economic record. Many Turks are caught in a consumer debt spiral, borrowing to pay a 32% interest rate on credit card obligations. Consumer spending has already started to fall. A few months more of this and Erdogan’s mandate will start to crumble.
The numbers tell the story.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/21/diaper-free-babies-elimination-communication_n_3125617.html?icid=maing-grid10%7Chtmlws-main-bb%7Cdl34%7Csec1_lnk2%26pLid%3D302354
Elimination Communication: Diaper-Free Trend Gets First Ever Week-Long Celebration (POLL)
The first annual Go Diaper Free! Week starts today. Spearheaded by Andrea Olson, author of EC Simplified: Infant Potty Training Made Easy, the event is an effort to raise awareness of EC or Elimination Communication, DNAInfo reports.With coverage on the local New York City news site and in The New York Times this weekend, parents online certainly have potty training top of mind.
According to the Times, Elimination Communication, which the newspaper first reported on in 2005, is now “finding an audience in the hipper precincts of New York City.” Specifically, both The Times and DNAInfo point to a store in the hipster mecca of Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where growing numbers of new parents are attending Diaper Free in NY meetups. These gatherings include information sessions and are B.Y.O.P. (bring your own potty) — but there is a restroom.
So, what is Elimination Communication and why are parents doing it? EC is “NOT potty training,” the homepage of Diaper Free Baby states clearly. “It is a gentle, natural, non-coercive process by which a baby, preferably beginning in early infancy, learns with the loving assistance of parents and caregivers to communicate about and address his or her elimination needs.” In other words — no diapers, some mess and lots of holding baby over the potty, bowls or containers and even the street, as needed. It is, along with breastfeeding, co-sleeping and babywearing, sometimes considered an integral part of attachment parenting.
As Olson details on her website, the goals of EC range from being environmentally friendly — Go Diaper Free! Week is timed to coincide with all things green that have grown out of Earth Day festivities — to fostering a stronger connection between parent and baby. “I love that I can tell when he needs to go,” Kaitlin McGreyes, a special education teacher from Queens, New York, who started her son Cesar with EC as a newborn, told DNAInfo. “And [I] have an idea of what might be bothering him.”
Proponents of EC, like Olson, point to other cultures around the world that don’t wait until age 3 to potty train. And, while it may be a messy endeavor, especially for parents and babies on-the-go in New York City, The Times says that a spokeswoman for the city’s health department didn’t call EC a health hazard — just a “general sanitation issue.” Over at Mommyish, blogger Maria Guido takes that sentiment a beat further:
“I’ve often thought about how much it must suck to be sitting in a dirty diaper – so I can understand where these parents are coming from. I’m not knocking ‘elimination communication’ as a practice. I just think it’s totally gross to have your child urinating in the street. Is that wrong of me?”
Some pediatricians criticize EC for other reasons. The Times spoke to one doctor who is “skeptical” of an infant being able to learn when he or she has to go to the bathroom. And in response to a story about 6-month-old Izabella Oniciuc, whose parents said she was completely toilet trained, pediatric urologist Dr. Steve Hodges wrote in his Huffington Post blog that the practice results in “damaging habits” for baby, namely “chronic holding … the root cause of virtually all toileting problems, including daytime pee and poop accidents, bedwetting, urinary frequency and urinary tract infections.”
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3681/muslim-family-next-door
Where are the articles by moderate Muslims condemning the prominent Muslims who beg Allah to strike infidels with cancer and disease? No practicing Muslim has openly condemned such prayers, or named the sheikhs who urge these brutalities.
The neighbors of the Chechnyan Muslim family whose sons were responsible for the Boston Marathon terror attack said they were stunned by the news and that this nice Muslim family was known for its generosity and kindness. Many Americans often ask, “What about the Muslim family next door? They are really nice people.”
Some of the nicest people I know are Muslims, but that must never blind us from understanding the risk we are taking when we allow the building of hundreds of mosques financed by Saudi Arabia, as well as millions of Muslims to migrate into America at a time of a fierce, if sophisticated, desire by Islamist groups to spread Islam throughout the world, and to radicalize impressionable youths by stoking anger against the Western nations, people and values.
The existence of nice, educated Muslims should also never blind us from seeing the deep problems within the ideology of Islam and its jihadist goals. Muslims themselves admit that Islam is more than a religion – that it is, in fact, a state, legal system and a military institution—with the goal, as one’s holy duty, of bringing Islam to the rest of the world, a desire often enshrined deep in the hearts of Muslims.
Even though our visible problem is with the Muslim jihadists, the so-called “moderate” Muslims have often been silent enablers and defenders, perhaps from inertia, misinformation or fear of reprisals against them, including death threats to them and members of their family should they speak out.
Terrorists could never be as powerful as they are without the prayers, and especially the material support, of Islamic nations, governments and people. A Muslim Egyptian friend — one of the nicest people you will ever meet — visiting in 1994, was crying in front of the television while praying for the people of Chechnya to declare independence from Russia and declare their country an Islamic State ruled by Sharia law.
The critiques of Islam by this author are never written for the purpose of condemning people; naturally, there are good and bad people in every culture. My deep concern springs from the ideology of Islam: it has had such dark implications on Islamic society, forcing many, otherwise perfectly fine people, to enact unthinkable terror, as others stand silently by. Islam is the only religion that requires its followers to kill those who do not believe in Allah, and to take revenge in the name of Allah. In the Quran, holy vengeance and retaliation are commanded for Muslims: “O ye who believe! Retaliation is prescribed for you. He who transgresseth after this will have a painful doom.” [Koran 2:178]. Or: “We shall take vengeance (Muntaquimun) upon the sinners.” [32:22] The translation of the Arabic word “Muntaquimun” meaning vengeance is often watered down in translation by using the word punishment or retribution instead.
