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Why do we keep bringing up old news? Must be a right wing conspiracy . (See 1 below.)
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Sowell once more. (See 2 below.)
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| WHAT'S NEW ON PJTV.Com | |
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Using recent examples, Lt. Col. Allen B. West demonstrates how the political left aggressively attacks its opponents. He also shares his firsthand experience dealing with the left’s tactics of demonization and delegitimization, especially on issues like race. Tune in to find out how he fights for his values, and how you can too.
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Obama tells the graduates at Ohio State his view of the Constitution and it is mostly unlike anything the founders of our nation had in mind. (See 3 below.)
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Can Gomez 'seal' Markey's fate? (See 4 below.)
What does Sanford's win in S. Carolina mean? (See 4a below.)
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The Benghazi testimony today was just more evidence of a bungling White House, followed by an attempt to cover what happened up by altering the facts and finally, lying and sending Sec. Rice to tell a story many times on Sunday that did not square with facts.
The major media and news lapdogs will do nothing because they have a vested interest in covering for their prize president and their hopeful anointed future candidate - Hillary. Time will tell whether she can survive Benghazi.
Odds are she can because she escaped being disbarred by White Water but she could be subsequently sunk by her own party's candidates seeking to follow Obama.
The major media and press have lost all credibility and that is a very sad and dangerous circumstance.
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Dick
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1)RAVI’S RESPONSE TO THE BOSTON TRAGEDY
It has been a little over two weeks since the atrocity was committed in Boston by the murderous intent of two young men. University students supposedly on scholarships, family on welfare payments, and all the benefits of receiving, with no moral obligation. How sad it is to see the face of that little eight-year-old boy who had just come to have a fun day with his family only to become a part of the death list and a victim of a cold blooded and calculated act. What parent can ever get over that? What country can afford to not stop and ask “why” until we know the truth?
How does one make judgments on such matters? How do we examine our own beliefs so as to deny such people with violent intent their murderous goals?
I travel an awful lot. I visit countries that do not like Americans. With that prejudice in many a country, I am quizzed as to why I am there. In the Middle East on more than one occasion I have been asked to come and meet the Chief of Intelligence and quizzed. This is the way my last quizzing went in Syria about three years ago:
“Mr. Zacharias, we know you are visiting here. We just want to caution you not to get engaged in any political activity or make any comments on politics.”
I assured them I would honor that. Then he went on to say, “But you are very welcome here. We need people like you.”
It was astounding to hear that. Why would he make such a comment when the prevailing religion there was not my faith, nor what I came to preach? For one, he knew the Christians there posed no threat to the regime but were a peaceable minority. The rest of the conversation made it clear. But there was obviously more to why he said that. I asked, “Can you tell me what you think of the situation in this part of the world?”
With beads in his hand as he compulsively scrolled through them out of sheer habit, he quietly said, “I don’t give this part of the world more than five years, and this whole place will blow up.” Rather taken aback by such a drastic pronouncement, I asked him what he meant. It was clear that they knew of rebellious forces working to topple the government and spread turmoil in that area. Ironically, when it all happened, including his own assassination, our media naively branded it “The Arab Spring.” Really? Is that what we are witnessing in Libya, in Egypt, in Iran after the Shah? Is that what spring looks like politically?
This ignorance or deliberately distorted way of thinking, supporting bloody and ruthless acts to supposedly topple dictators, is precisely what that part of the world is now experiencing. Suddenly, revolutions are the “in” thing and any establishment is at risk, as forces that destabilize are gleefully supported by the media elite, the intellectual elite, and the entertainment elite. We pontificate without the slightest understanding of history, religion, or of cultural distinctives. The average citizen is once again sacrificed at the altar of demagogic factions each seeking the power to enforce and dictate.
This abysmal failure in the media elite, to understand history and worldview, now puts America facing possible extinction herself. Those are not overstated words.
When one gets on to a plane, you hear, “Your safety is our first priority.” Evidently, in the journey of life itself, our power brokers don’t feel the same for their citizens. A visitor’s rights seem to be the first priority; those who seek our destruction are given greater privileges than our children who enjoy and love this land.
Something is wrong. Dreadfully wrong. Our definitions are at an all-time confusion, our values at an all-time low, our fiscal policies at an all-time danger, our beliefs at an all-time peril, and yet we want to tell our young people that we are building for their future.
Do our leaders ever sit down and read the primary sources to understand what lies beneath these worldviews to which we are pandering? We brand a religion “peaceful” or “great” without even reading its text. Only an uninformed person can make such sweeping statements. This does not assure us that our safety is a priority.
There is so much one can say on what needs to be done to provide for our safety. I simply resist the temptation and will not go into all of that, but rather respond in two ways. First, we must ask our political representatives to convene a formal study on this particular worldview of millions who have explicitly or implicitly screamed for our destruction. Adolf Hitler told the world what he was planning to do. The naïve of that time did not take him seriously. It took one of the bloodiest and most senseless wars in history to stop that genocide orchestrated by him. What will it take for us to wake up to the avowed threat of our time?
Second, I suggest that the rights we give our immigrants must be granted only by strict means of scrutiny. I went through that when I first moved to the west. My brother and I were quizzed thoroughly. I respected that. But that was over four decades ago. We are now politically correct and politically endangered at the same time. As I write this, I am about to depart for one particular country. I will be there for five days. To get a visa, I had to list all the countries I have visited in the last ten years. That was a task and a half. Did I object? No. They are protecting their political system and they have a right to demand of me disclosure that they feel is necessary to keep their values intact. Anyone without subversive intent will not be afraid of such scrutiny.
But in our homeland we have become so all-encompassing that the only thing we don’t have any more is “values.” Interestingly, that was a term coined by the nihilists and existentialists to replace absolutes. When absolutes went, values came. When counter values came, our own values went. When our own values went, we watch a little eight-year-old boy blown to bits and the ones doing it tweet to their friends “LOL.” Such subversives do not fear our legal system. They know the perverse way in which their defenders can use it.
When hate can laugh, decency is crying and America stands at the crossroads of choosing the path of Right or else to bury what is right in the ever-shifting quicksand of so called “rights.”
This is a sad day as we mourn the decimation in Boston. But sadder days are ahead unless we understand what we are dealing with here. What happened in Boston was a deadly atrocity. Our failure to stem the rot will be a suicidal tragedy. We have confused what is lawful with what is legal.
Chesterton said it well: “For under the smooth legal surface of our society there are already moving very lawless things. We are always near the breaking-point when we care only for what is legal and nothing for what is lawful. Unless we have a moral principle about such delicate matters as marriage and murder, the whole world will become a welter of exceptions with no rules. There will be so many hard cases that everything will go soft.”
This is America today. We do not know the essential difference between what is lawful and what is legal. Our moral reasoning is dying before our eyes. Nobody knows this better than the lawless.
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2)Words That Replace Thought
If there is ever a contest for words that substitute for thought, "diversity" should be recognized as the undisputed world champion.
You don't need a speck of evidence, or a single step of logic, when you rhapsodize about the supposed benefits of diversity. The very idea of testing this wonderful, magical word against something as ugly as reality seems almost sordid.
To ask whether institutions that promote diversity 24/7 end up with better or worse relations between the races than institutions that pay no attention to it is only to get yourself regarded as a bad person. To cite hard evidence that places obsessed with diversity have worse race relations is to risk getting yourself labeled an incorrigible racist. Free thinking is not free.
The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that the government has a "compelling interest" in promoting diversity -- apparently more compelling than the 14th Amendment's requirement of "equal protection" of the law for everybody.
How does a racially homogeneous country like Japan manage to have high quality education, without the essential ingredient of diversity, for which there is supposedly a "compelling" need?
Conversely, why does India, one of the most diverse nations on Earth, have a record of intergroup intolerance and lethal violence today that is worse than that in the days of our Jim Crow South?
Even to ask such questions is to provoke charges of unworthy tactics, and motives too low to be dignified with an answer. Not that the true believers in diversity could answer anyway.
Among the candidates for runner-up to "diversity" as the top word for making thought obsolete is "fair."
Apparently everyone is entitled to a "fair share" of a society's prosperity, whether they worked 16-hour days to help create that prosperity or did nothing more than live off the taxpayers or depend on begging or crime to bring in a few bucks.
Apparently we owe them something just for gracing us with their presence, even if we feel that we could do without them quite well.
At the other end of the income scale, the rich are supposed to pay their "fair share" of taxes. But at neither end of the income scale is a "fair share" defined as a particular number or proportion, or in any other concrete way. It is just a political synonym for "more," dressed up in moralistic-sounding rhetoric. What "fair" really means is more arbitrary power for government.
Another word that shuts down thought is "access." People who fail to meet the standards for anything from college admission to a mortgage loan are often said to have been denied "access" or opportunity.
But equal access or equal opportunity is not the same as equal probability of success. Republicans are not denied an equal opportunity to vote in California, even though the chances of a Republican candidate actually getting elected in California are far less than the chances of a Democrat getting elected.
By the same token, if everyone is allowed to apply for college admission, or for a mortgage loan, and their applications are all judged by the same standards, then they have equal opportunity, even if the village idiot has a lower probability of getting into the Ivy League, and someone with a bad credit history is less likely to be lent money.
"Affordable" is another popular word that serves as a substitute for thought. To say that everyone is entitled to "affordable housing" is very different from saying that everyone should decide what kind of housing he or she can afford.
Government programs to promote "affordable housing" are programs to allow some people to decide what housing they want and force other people -- taxpayers, landlords or whatever -- to absorb a share of the cost of a decision that they had no voice in making.
More generally, making various things "affordable" in no way increases the amount of wealth in a society above what it would be when prices are "prohibitively expensive." On the contrary, price controls reduce incentives to produce.
None of this is rocket science. But if you don't stop and think, it doesn't matter whether you are a genius or a moron. Words that stop people from thinking reduce even smart people to the same level as morons.
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3)Graduates, Your Ambition Is the Problem
Obama's commencement speech at Ohio State on Sunday would have perplexed the Founders.
By ROGER PILON
Civic education in America took a hit on Sunday when President Obama, giving the commencement address at The Ohio State University, chose citizenship as his theme. The country's Founders trusted citizens with "awesome authority," he told the assembled graduates. Really?
Actually, the Founders distrusted us, at least in our collective capacity. That's why they wrote a Constitution that set clear limits on what we, as citizens, could do through government.
Mr. Obama seems never to appreciate that essential point about the American political order. As with his countless speeches that lead ultimately to an expression of the president's belief in the unbounded power of government to do good, he began in Columbus with an insight that we can all pretty much embrace, at least in the abstract. Citizenship, Mr. Obama said, is "the idea at the heart of our founding—that as Americans, we are blessed with God-given and inalienable rights, but with those rights come responsibilities—to ourselves, to one another, and to future generations."
Well enough. But then he took that insight to lengths the Founders would never have imagined. Reading "citizenship" as standing for the many ways we can selflessly "serve our country," the president said that "sometimes, we see it as a virtue from another time—one that's slipping from a society that celebrates individual ambition." And "we sometimes forget the larger bonds we share, as one American family."
Not for nothing did he invoke the family, that elemental social unit in which we truly are responsible to one another and to future generations—by law, by custom, and, ideally, in our hearts. But only metaphorically is America a family, its members bound by tendrils of intimacy and affection. Realistically, the country is a community of individuals and private institutions, including the family, with their own interests, bound not by mutual love but by the political principles that are set forth in the Constitution, a document that secures and celebrates the freedom to pursue those interests, varied as they might be.
Alas, that is not Mr. Obama's vision. "The Founders left us the keys to a system of self-government," he went on, "the tool to do big and important things together that we could not possibly do alone." And what "big and important things" cannot be done except through government? On the president's list are railroads, the electrical grid, highways, education, health care, charity and more. One imagines a historical vision reaching as far back as the New Deal. Americans "chose to do these things together," he added, "because we know this country cannot accomplish great things if we pursue nothing greater than our own individual ambition."
Notice that twice now Mr. Obama has invoked "individual ambition," and not as a virtue. For other targets, he next counseled the graduates against the "voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's the root of all our problems, even as they do their best to gum up the works."
The irony here should not go unnoticed: The opponents that the president disparages are the same folks who tried to save the country from one of the biggest pieces of gum now in the works: Mr. Obama's own health-care insurance program, which today is filling many of its backers with dread as it moves toward full implementation in a matter of months.
None of that darkens Mr. Obama's sunny view of collective effort. What does upset him, still, is the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis: "Too many on Wall Street," he said, "forgot that their obligations don't end with their shareholders." No mention of the Federal Reserve, or Fannie Mae,FNMA +9.88% Freddie Mac,FMCC +7.58% the Community Reinvestment Act, or the many other "big and important things" government undertook before the crisis hit, things that explain the disaster far better than any Wall Street greed. None of that fits in Mr. Obama's morality play. For that matter, neither do the Constitution's checks and balances. When the president laments that "democracy isn't working as well as we know it can," he is not talking about those big, misbegotten public projects but about the Washington gridlock that has frustrated his grander plans.
From George Washington to Calvin Coolidge, presidents sought mostly to administer the laws that enabled citizens to live their own lives, ambitiously or not. It would have been thought impertinent for a president to tell a graduating class that what the country needs is the political will "to harness the ingenuity of your generation, and encourage and inspire the hard work of dedicated citizens . . . to repair the middle class; to give more families a fair shake; to reject a country in which only a lucky few prosper."
A more inspiring message might have urged graduates not to reject their own country, where for two centuries far more than a lucky few have prospered under limited constitutional government—and even more would today if that form of government were restored.
Mr. Pilon is vice president for legal affairs at the Cato Institute and director of Cato's Center for Constitutional Studies.
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4)A SEAL vs. the Machine
By Elise Cooper
Gabriel Gomez, the Republican nominee for the Senate in Massachusetts, will be facing off against the Democratic nominee, Congressman Ed Markey in the June 25th special election. Gomez is a former SEAL Lieutenant, who served from 1991 to 1996.
As evidenced by his new ad, Markey is obviously running scared, currently only four percentage points ahead of Gomez. The ad has Gomez and Bin Laden side by side and talks about how a group of former national security and military figures "shamelessly" called out the president for linking classified information for political purposes. The ad atrociously links Gomez with the terrorist and implies his comments were unpatriotic. The Democratic tactics are obviously designed to distract attention from both the congressman's and the Obama Administration's record on terrorism. American Thinker had the pleasure of interviewing Gabriel Gomez to contrast his views with the congressman, including how this ad and Markey's victory comments show hypocrisy and distortion.
During his fifteen-minute victory speech, Markey basically takes a page from the Liberal handbook. He spoke about his desire to overturn Citizens United, a Supreme Court case allowing unlimited political spending, and protecting entitlement programs; although he does not mention how he will do it. He talks about his record on gun control, stating, "We need to make the NRA (National Rifle Association) stand for Not Relevant Anymore," and listed climate change as one of the most important issues facing America today.
Gomez started the conversation with American Thinker by saying Ed Markey is a "poster boy for term limits," having served for thirty-seven years. When Markey was first elected in 1976, Gomez was playing Little League baseball, and the debt was less than a trillion dollars, not even close to the seventeen trillion today. "I want to pass off a better country to the next generation. If we continue on the same economic path my four young children will not have the same opportunities that I had as a youngster. Markey represents the past, whereas I represent the future."
The former SEAL is not surprised by Markey's outrageous ad and personal attacks, since the congressman does not want to talk about Democratic policies toward terrorism. In looking at Markey's record, there are several bills that he voted against which tied law enforcement and intelligence officials' hands. He voted against a 2006 bill that would have expanded the president's powers to conduct electronic surveillance of suspected terrorists without obtaining a warrant from a secret court. Markey also voted against reauthorizing or making permanent provisions of the Patriot Act, voted against a bill that would have barred the use of federal funds to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center, and voted to allow some Guantanamo detainees to stand trial in the U.S.
Markey's record and his campaign focus on everything but the economy and terrorism. On the other hand, Gomez sees the Boston terrorist bombing as a reminder to all Americans that "we live in a very dangerous world. I finished running the Boston Marathon just before the bombs exploded with my entire family watching. I spoke early of needing to hold this terrorist as an enemy combatant. Now we hear there is a connection to a Jihadi network. Since he [Dzhokhar Tsarnaev] was read his Miranda Rights, something the Democrats make a habit of doing, he has lawyered up, and we might never know the answer to the where, when, how, and who he trained with. Delaying reading him Miranda Rights does not mean he eventually could not have been tried in Federal Court. After having four people killed and over 250 people hurt, some severely, I don't think the people of Massachusetts want to hear about Mirandizing a terrorist."
There is also the contrast between the two candidates on gun control. Gomez noted that his experiences as a SEAL have influenced him considerably regarding issues. He would never vote for a ban "on any type of gun. I am a firm believer in the 2nd Amendment. Every law-abiding citizen should be allowed to buy any type of gun they want. I am coming from a unique position since as a Navy SEAL I have fired every one of these weapons. It is not about the weapon. It is about enforcing the laws and making sure background checks are thoroughly done when a gun is sold, in all cases."
Being in the military, he knows how important national defense is to this nation. He would not have voted for sequestration because "the military cuts were not done in a thoughtful and balanced way. This administration and Congress, through these cuts, have tied one arm behind their backs as the world becomes more volatile. They called up a virus and mailed it to themselves. Those that served this nation should know we still have their back."
Gomez is hoping that the people of Massachusetts will realize him to be a pragmatic candidate. He is the son of Columbian immigrants brought up to be a proud American, and has dedicated his life to giving back to his country. He wants everyone to understand, "I have had huge challenges in my life, including becoming a SEAL. I am prepared and focused on the mission at hand just as I was trained to do as part of a SEAL team. I would rather be part of a solution than stay on the sidelines and complain. I will approach this job with a military man's discipline, a father's sensitivity, and a businessman's experience."
4a)The Meaning of Mark Sanford's Win
By Sean Trende
It’s difficult to divine much significance from special elections. They are one-off events, often marked by low turnout and unique candidates. Put differently, a single data point can’t tell us but so much about a future event that will have 435 data points.
So the conventional wisdom floating around about Mark Sanford’s win Tuesday strikes me as more or less correct. Despite all of his warts, Sanford was running in a South Carolina district that had voted for John McCain by 13 points, and where whites account for almost 75 percent of the voters. Elizabeth Colbert-Busch is reasonably liberal, and Sanford’s voting record was pretty reliably conservative. This race basically turned out how we should have anticipated; Sanford ran about three or four points behind an expected Republican performance, due to his personal issues.
But I think there is some meaning, albeit very modest, in the fact that this race turned out as it did. Democrats probably need a wave -- a historically big wave, in fact -- to take back the House in 2014.
This result isn’t consistent with such a wave beginning to form, suggesting that Democrats aren’t yet where they need to be if they hope to take back the House. If anything -- and this is extremely hard to quantify -- I would have expected Sanford’s personal issues to force him more than four points behind Mitt Romney’s showing in the district. Combined with some of the polling we’re seeing from the Massachusetts Senate race and the Virginia governor’s contest, this gives a very slight sense that the needle could be pointing more toward modest Republican gains. But I think the best we can say is that Sanford’s election is consistent with the range of outcomes I suggested last week: Between a five-seat Democratic gain and a 10 seat Republican gain.
Over-performances in special elections aren’t unique to wave elections (think Republican Bill Green’s win in a 63 percent Carter district on Manhattan’s Upper East Side before the relatively placid midterms of 1978), but wave elections are typically preceded by good special election results for the party riding the wave. In 1974, for example, Democrats won a series of historically Republican seats in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and California. In 1993, Kay Bailey Hutchison captured Democrat Lloyd Bentsen’s Senate seat, while solid GOP wins the next year in Oklahoma and Kentucky for House seats set the stage for the ’94 midterms. In 2005, Democrats enjoyed Paul Hackett’s unusually strong showing in OH-02. In early 2010, we of course had Scott Brown’s win. (1982 is the only recent wave midterm that wasn’t preceded by an unusually strong showing by the out-party.)
This shouldn’t be surprising. When the national mood turns against a party (or for it), we should expect to see the effects of that to some degree in all elections, special or otherwise.
Indeed, in the lead-up to the 2008 Democratic wave, we saw Democrats win seats against Republican opponents in Illinois’ 14th District (55 percent Bush in ’04, although Illinoisan Obama carried it in 2008), Louisiana’s 6th District (57 percent McCain in ’08) and Mississippi’s 1st District (62 percent McCain in ’08). All of the Republicans running in these elections were flawed, though arguably none was as badly flawed as Sanford.
In fact, South Carolina’s 1st District is not entirely impervious to wave elections. In 2008, Republican Henry Brown, Sanford’s bland, mostly unobjectionable successor, won re-election by only four points in a version of the district that was a point more Republican than the currently configured one. His opponent was not a traditional southern Democrat. In fact, Linda Ketner’s profile probably fit the district worse than Colbert-Busch’s: She was openly gay, endorsed same-sex marriage, wanted a cap on carbon emissions, and supported a withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
Given all of this, if Tuesday’s special election had been run in 2008, or in the run-up to 2008, Sanford probably would have lost. At best, it would have been a nail-biter for the GOP. That’s not how it turned out. Instead we got a result suggesting that the current state of play is about what you’d expect given a president with a 48 percent job approval: pretty close to neutral, or perhaps a bit favorable toward the GOP.
Of course, that’s only the state of play today. In 2009, I wrote an article that was almost the photo negative of this one in the wake of Democrat Scott Murphy’s close win over Republican Jim Tedisco in upstate New York. Obviously the tide turned against Democrats between then and the 2010 elections. There is still time for the tide to turn against either party between now and the 2014 midterms.
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