New York's problem is the city is inhabited by far too many immigrants who come to this country to escape what they then vote for it seems to me. (See 1 below.)
==
Class warfare will not go away. (See 2 below.)
===
Having transformed America by wrecking our health care system, Obama and Progressive's next goal, in furthering the transformation of America, is to wreck our educational system beyond what government has already accomplished. (See 3 below.)
|
===
The New York Times has decided to go all out to elect Hillary by making sure 'what difference does it matter' does not matter. (See 5 below.)
===
Some humor: "
Okay, here's the reason why baby diapers have brand names such as "Luvs" and "Huggies", while undergarments for old people are called "Depends".
When babies poop in their pants, people are still gonna Luv'em and Hug'em.
When old people poop in their pants, it "Depends" on who's in the will.
There now, wasn't that simple? "
===
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1) COMMITTING CITYCIDE: FROM NEW YORK TO SEATTLE, VOTERS EMBRACE FISCAL DESTRUCTION
By Stella Paul
As the Big Apple’s tax base shrinks, its municipal costs skyrocket, increasing the urgency that it get its financial house in order. So I’ll make a bold prediction: New Yorkers may someday regret electing a man who says he does not believe in the free market system.
“Everything you heard about me is true…I am not a free-marketeer…I believe in the heavy hand of government,” Mayor-Elect Bill de Blasio recently told a meeting of major real estate developers.
The developers reportedly “were shocked and speechless” by his “scary” radicalism, but what should they have expected? De Blasio’s first job out of graduate school was raising funds for the revolutionary Sandinistas in Nicaragua. For his honeymoon, he illegally whisked his bride to Cuba, and he’s proudly trumpeted his support for “democratic socialism.”
Is this the guy to tackle New York’s runaway pension costs, which have ballooned in the last decade from $1.4 billion to $8.3 billion? Buoyed by his landslide victory, de Blasio recently emerged from a White House meeting with President Obama to proclaim, “Fighting inequality is the mission of our times.”
Somehow, I doubt he’ll fight for equality by demanding that New York’s 300,000 municipal union workers start to contribute towards their medical benefits.
So far, de Blasio’s economic program seems to consist of two parts: attempting to frighten away productive taxpayers, and throwing sops to the powerful government unions that helped to elect him.
Thus, he murmurs about fighting inequality by creating mandatory early childhood programs, which will require thousands of brand-new union teaching jobs.
And where will he get the money for this educational utopia? Wall Street is hollowing out, as banks relocate their highly paid investment bankers, analysts, and financial advisors to cheaper locations in Florida and Salt Lake City. Only 167,000 people now work at Wall Street securities firms, down from 191,000 in 2008. But don’t expect these sobering financial facts to stop de Blasio’s big spending. Like all hard-core leftists, he seems to regard the rich as an inexhaustible source of filthy lucre, to be miraculously cleansed once palmed by a politician.
Amazingly, this erstwhile reader of Barricade magazine isn’t the most radical city politician lately to sweep into power. Meet Kshama Sawant, the avowed socialist soon slated to bring her special brand of excitement to Seattle’s City Council.
Sawant recently encouraged Boeing machinists to “take over the factories, and shut down Boeing’s profit-making machine.” Irked by Boeing’s refusal to meet union workers’ contract demands, Sawant advised, “The only response we can have if Boeing executives do not agree to keep the plant here is for the machinists to say the machines are here, the workers are here, we will do the job, we don’t need the executives. The executives don’t do the work, the machinists do.”
Now that Boeing’s 31,000 machinists have rejected the “best and final” labor deal for building the new 777x airliner, Boeing is actively seeking other states in which to build its next generation twin-aisle jet. Right-to-work states like South Carolina are panting in anticipation of winning the potential deal for the job-generating airliner plant. Governor Niki Haley has already contacted Boeing to argue for the Charleston area, which has attracted 6,000 Boeing jobs in just five years.
But Kshama Sawant remains unperturbed by the prospect of losing thousands of good Washington state jobs.
You see, she dislikes the whole idea of building commercial airliners, anyway. “We can re-tool the machines to produce mass transit like buses, instead of destructive, you know, war machines,” she said.
Good luck, Seattle, in achieving any kind of fiscal sanity with Kshama Sawant on deck. Especially with your recent $5 billion in tax hikes.
Both New York and Seattle are such extraordinarily desirable places to live that voters may assume that high times will continue forever, as residents sacrifice to remain there.
But Detroit provides the ultimate cautionary tale. The goose that once laid automotive riches has passed on to the celestial choir, and the best way nowadays to get rich in Detroit is as a bankruptcy lawyer. On July 18, 2013, Detroit filed the largest municipal bankruptcy case in U.S. history, owing to its staggering $18.5 billion in debt.
Some 20,000 stray dogs now roam Detroit’s abandoned areas; 47% of its taxable real estate parcels are delinquent even for their 2011 tax bills and its population collapsed by over 60% from its 1950 peak.
As we try to calculate what went so spectacularly wrong, keep in mind this basic principle: If competition is the essence of a healthy economy, it’s also vital to maintain a healthy political system.
The term of Detroit’s last Republican mayor, Louis Miriani, ended in 1962. Since then, the city has been as rigidly ruled by one party as any Communist nation.
In fact, for decades, voters in most failing U.S. cities have elected Democratic monopolies: St. Louis, now boasting a 26 percent poverty rate, last had a Republican mayor in 1949; Philadelphia, at a 28 percent poverty level, ushered out its last Republican mayor in 1952; and, remarkably, Newark, N.J., with a 26.1 percent poverty rate, hasn’t had a Republican mayor for 106 years.
As New York and Seattle voters may discover in coming years, committing citycide happens in three stages. First, the government pursues big utopian dreams requiring public spending on crack. Second, taxpayers take flight as in come crime, decay and general collapse.
Finally, the city’s foreign occupier arrives. Guess who’s buying up Detroit? China. Bankrupt Motown is the now the fourth most popular American destination for Chinese real estate investors, now snatching up such iconic downtown buildings as the Downtown Free Press headquarters plus individual homes selling for half the price of a pair of leather shoes.
Well, we can always hope that the Chinese bring back some old-fashioned capitalism to America’s dying cities. Maybe they can teach Bill de Blasio the virtues of the free market
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)The Evolution of Class Warfare in America
As the Big Apple’s tax base shrinks, its municipal costs skyrocket, increasing the urgency that it get its financial house in order. So I’ll make a bold prediction: New Yorkers may someday regret electing a man who says he does not believe in the free market system.
“Everything you heard about me is true…I am not a free-marketeer…I believe in the heavy hand of government,” Mayor-Elect Bill de Blasio recently told a meeting of major real estate developers.
The developers reportedly “were shocked and speechless” by his “scary” radicalism, but what should they have expected? De Blasio’s first job out of graduate school was raising funds for the revolutionary Sandinistas in Nicaragua. For his honeymoon, he illegally whisked his bride to Cuba, and he’s proudly trumpeted his support for “democratic socialism.”
Is this the guy to tackle New York’s runaway pension costs, which have ballooned in the last decade from $1.4 billion to $8.3 billion? Buoyed by his landslide victory, de Blasio recently emerged from a White House meeting with President Obama to proclaim, “Fighting inequality is the mission of our times.”
Somehow, I doubt he’ll fight for equality by demanding that New York’s 300,000 municipal union workers start to contribute towards their medical benefits.
So far, de Blasio’s economic program seems to consist of two parts: attempting to frighten away productive taxpayers, and throwing sops to the powerful government unions that helped to elect him.
Thus, he murmurs about fighting inequality by creating mandatory early childhood programs, which will require thousands of brand-new union teaching jobs.
And where will he get the money for this educational utopia? Wall Street is hollowing out, as banks relocate their highly paid investment bankers, analysts, and financial advisors to cheaper locations in Florida and Salt Lake City. Only 167,000 people now work at Wall Street securities firms, down from 191,000 in 2008. But don’t expect these sobering financial facts to stop de Blasio’s big spending. Like all hard-core leftists, he seems to regard the rich as an inexhaustible source of filthy lucre, to be miraculously cleansed once palmed by a politician.
Amazingly, this erstwhile reader of Barricade magazine isn’t the most radical city politician lately to sweep into power. Meet Kshama Sawant, the avowed socialist soon slated to bring her special brand of excitement to Seattle’s City Council.
Sawant recently encouraged Boeing machinists to “take over the factories, and shut down Boeing’s profit-making machine.” Irked by Boeing’s refusal to meet union workers’ contract demands, Sawant advised, “The only response we can have if Boeing executives do not agree to keep the plant here is for the machinists to say the machines are here, the workers are here, we will do the job, we don’t need the executives. The executives don’t do the work, the machinists do.”
Now that Boeing’s 31,000 machinists have rejected the “best and final” labor deal for building the new 777x airliner, Boeing is actively seeking other states in which to build its next generation twin-aisle jet. Right-to-work states like South Carolina are panting in anticipation of winning the potential deal for the job-generating airliner plant. Governor Niki Haley has already contacted Boeing to argue for the Charleston area, which has attracted 6,000 Boeing jobs in just five years.
But Kshama Sawant remains unperturbed by the prospect of losing thousands of good Washington state jobs.
You see, she dislikes the whole idea of building commercial airliners, anyway. “We can re-tool the machines to produce mass transit like buses, instead of destructive, you know, war machines,” she said.
Good luck, Seattle, in achieving any kind of fiscal sanity with Kshama Sawant on deck. Especially with your recent $5 billion in tax hikes.
Both New York and Seattle are such extraordinarily desirable places to live that voters may assume that high times will continue forever, as residents sacrifice to remain there.
But Detroit provides the ultimate cautionary tale. The goose that once laid automotive riches has passed on to the celestial choir, and the best way nowadays to get rich in Detroit is as a bankruptcy lawyer. On July 18, 2013, Detroit filed the largest municipal bankruptcy case in U.S. history, owing to its staggering $18.5 billion in debt.
Some 20,000 stray dogs now roam Detroit’s abandoned areas; 47% of its taxable real estate parcels are delinquent even for their 2011 tax bills and its population collapsed by over 60% from its 1950 peak.
As we try to calculate what went so spectacularly wrong, keep in mind this basic principle: If competition is the essence of a healthy economy, it’s also vital to maintain a healthy political system.
The term of Detroit’s last Republican mayor, Louis Miriani, ended in 1962. Since then, the city has been as rigidly ruled by one party as any Communist nation.
In fact, for decades, voters in most failing U.S. cities have elected Democratic monopolies: St. Louis, now boasting a 26 percent poverty rate, last had a Republican mayor in 1949; Philadelphia, at a 28 percent poverty level, ushered out its last Republican mayor in 1952; and, remarkably, Newark, N.J., with a 26.1 percent poverty rate, hasn’t had a Republican mayor for 106 years.
As New York and Seattle voters may discover in coming years, committing citycide happens in three stages. First, the government pursues big utopian dreams requiring public spending on crack. Second, taxpayers take flight as in come crime, decay and general collapse.
Finally, the city’s foreign occupier arrives. Guess who’s buying up Detroit? China. Bankrupt Motown is the now the fourth most popular American destination for Chinese real estate investors, now snatching up such iconic downtown buildings as the Downtown Free Press headquarters plus individual homes selling for half the price of a pair of leather shoes.
Well, we can always hope that the Chinese bring back some old-fashioned capitalism to America’s dying cities. Maybe they can teach Bill de Blasio the virtues of the free market
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)The Evolution of Class Warfare in America
By Richard Winchester
Some people believe that when Marx and Engels began The Communist Manifesto (1848) with "[t]he history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles," they were the first to call attention to the importance of class conflict in politics.
That is wrong. Class struggles occurred throughout ancient, medieval, and modern European history, and authors like Thomas Jefferson, David Ricardo, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, to name just three who ante-date The Communist Manifesto, wrote about them (in 1787, 1817, and 1840, respectively).
Class conflict -- albeit historically more muted -- has also been a feature of American politics. Indeed, one of the most succinct statements of the economic -- i.e., class -- basis of politics can be found in James Madison's The Federalist #10 (11/22/1787). Writing about the origins of "factions" -- which are akin to political parties -- Madison wrote that "the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. ... The regulation of these ... interests forms the principal task of modern legislation[.]"
Partisan differences between social classes have been a feature of American electoral politics since at least the 1930s, when FDR's "New Deal Coalition" -- which was made up partly by people from the lower social orders -- faced off against the wealthy and upper-middle classes, many of whom backed the GOP. FDR's coalition began to come apart in the late 1940s and early 1950s but was mostly resurrected in the 1964 election. By the time George W. Bush won in 2000 and 2004, the New Deal coalition was gone.
Barack Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012, however, were marked by class conflict's resurgence. Harking back to FDR, who may have been his inspiration, Obama's appeals to class warfare are more blatant than those of most Democrats who ran for the presidency, from Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s to Bill Clinton in the 1990s. One also sees differences in how working-class individuals respond to appeals to class warfare by comparing blue-collar workers' opinions about inequality in the late 1950s with those of many persons from the lower classes today.
To anticipate the argument, many contemporary Democrats, especially the Obamians, are much more transparent in using class warfare to advance their agenda than were their partisan forebears (other than FDR and, perhaps, Truman). Sadly, appeals to class warfare fall on more receptive ears than would have been the case 50 or 60 years ago.
Franklin D. Roosevelt's penchant for appealing to class warfare to buttress his "New Deal" policies is well-known. Whether calling for higher income tax rates on the well-to-do or attacking "economic royalists," Roosevelt frequently used the bully pulpit to heighten class antagonisms.
Revisionists, such as Amity Shlaes, explain that, although aimed at the downtrodden "forgotten man," New Deal policies actually hindered the economic recovery that could have benefited the lower social orders. Sadly, however, FDR's frequent appeals to class warfare worked, in no small part, because key Republicans elites seemed oblivious of the fact that the Great Depression undermined the laissez-faire notions that GOP presidents from William McKinley to Calvin Coolidge had used successfully.
Perhaps FDR's most important legacy was to enshrine the notion that the central government, and most especially the president, was the key player in the nation's economic well-being. (One can trace that idea back to the Progressive tradition, which saw its first successes in Theodore Roosevelt's, and especially Woodrow Wilson's, administrations.) FDR's legacy was codified by the Employment Act of 1946.
By the end of the 1970s, however, FDR's legacy had turned to ashes, as it become more and more obvious that, as Ronald Reagan put it in his first Inaugural Address, "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Not many years later, Bill Clinton would say, in his 1996 State of the Union Address, "[t[he era of big government is over."
Unhappily, Clinton was mistaken. Barack Obama's election in 2008 was accompanied by his promise to "fundamentally transform" the United States by creating a European-style welfare state, with big government controlling over half the nation's Gross Domestic Product. More than any president since FDR, Obama has made explicit appeals to class warfare to advance his agenda. His calls for raising income taxes on the well-to-do -- defined variously as those making over $250,000 or $200,000 per year or whatever -- are too numerous to cite.
As his poll numbers have plummeted recently, Obama's appeals to class warfare have become even more blatant -- and some would also say more petulant. On December 4, 2013, for example, he declared that this generation's "defining challenge" is the growing income inequality between America's richest one percent and the rest of society.
There are multiple challenges to Obama's assertion. Blogs for The American Thinker by Henry Percy and Rick Moran illustrate why the left's obsession with "income inequality" is misplaced. Moran cites an op-ed by Robert Grady in The Wall Street Journal (12/22/13) that asserts that the focus on "income inequality" overlooks other, perhaps even more significant, features of wealth that alter America's portrait. Grady also cites a 2012 article inPolicy Review by Kip Hagopian and Lee Ohanian that further details the weaknesses of the left's "income inequality" mania.
If bloviating about "income inequality" by Obama, other left-wing Democrats, and denizens of the mainstream media -- which almost invariably means the same thing -- is misplaced, then why does it work?
Alas, the answer to that query tells us more about significant segments of today's public than it does about those bloviating about "income inequality."
Some Americans have always been jealous because others made more money or lived a tonier lifestyle. Figures in American history -- read, for example, Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879) -- and in fiction, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway -- are driven by envy, or at least by ambivalence about others' -- Jay Gatsby's -- wealth.
Appeals to working-class envy of the rich, however, have not always fallen on receptive ears. In 1959, Robert Lane published "The Fear of Equality" in The American Sociological Review. That article was based on Lane's in-depth interviews with working-class men in "Eastport" (New Haven), CT. The gist of Lane's piece is that many of these men found the very notion of equality unsettling. Rather than being consumed by envy, most wanted to get ahead by dint of their own efforts. They would have found calls for class warfare offensive.
There seems to have been a significant change in the character of many Americans from the lower social classes. Motivated, perhaps, by the explosion of entitlement programs since 1960, at least if Nicholas Eberstadt is correct, a not-so-subtle change in the American character has left sizable portions of people from the lower social orders driven by greed and envy.
These people have learned that being on the government dole, at the expense of those wealthier than they, is no longer a source of embarrassment.
If that is true, it little wonder that Obama and other leftists wage class warfare.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)
By Richard Winchester
Partisan differences between social classes have been a feature of American electoral politics since at least the 1930s, when FDR's "New Deal Coalition" -- which was made up partly by people from the lower social orders -- faced off against the wealthy and upper-middle classes, many of whom backed the GOP. FDR's coalition began to come apart in the late 1940s and early 1950s but was mostly resurrected in the 1964 election. By the time George W. Bush won in 2000 and 2004, the New Deal coalition was gone.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some people believe that when Marx and Engels began The Communist Manifesto (1848) with "[t]he history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles," they were the first to call attention to the importance of class conflict in politics.
That is wrong. Class struggles occurred throughout ancient, medieval, and modern European history, and authors like Thomas Jefferson, David Ricardo, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, to name just three who ante-date The Communist Manifesto, wrote about them (in 1787, 1817, and 1840, respectively).
Class conflict -- albeit historically more muted -- has also been a feature of American politics. Indeed, one of the most succinct statements of the economic -- i.e., class -- basis of politics can be found in James Madison's The Federalist #10 (11/22/1787). Writing about the origins of "factions" -- which are akin to political parties -- Madison wrote that "the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. ... The regulation of these ... interests forms the principal task of modern legislation[.]"
Barack Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012, however, were marked by class conflict's resurgence. Harking back to FDR, who may have been his inspiration, Obama's appeals to class warfare are more blatant than those of most Democrats who ran for the presidency, from Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s to Bill Clinton in the 1990s. One also sees differences in how working-class individuals respond to appeals to class warfare by comparing blue-collar workers' opinions about inequality in the late 1950s with those of many persons from the lower classes today.
To anticipate the argument, many contemporary Democrats, especially the Obamians, are much more transparent in using class warfare to advance their agenda than were their partisan forebears (other than FDR and, perhaps, Truman). Sadly, appeals to class warfare fall on more receptive ears than would have been the case 50 or 60 years ago.
Franklin D. Roosevelt's penchant for appealing to class warfare to buttress his "New Deal" policies is well-known. Whether calling for higher income tax rates on the well-to-do or attacking "economic royalists," Roosevelt frequently used the bully pulpit to heighten class antagonisms.
Revisionists, such as Amity Shlaes, explain that, although aimed at the downtrodden "forgotten man," New Deal policies actually hindered the economic recovery that could have benefited the lower social orders. Sadly, however, FDR's frequent appeals to class warfare worked, in no small part, because key Republicans elites seemed oblivious of the fact that the Great Depression undermined the laissez-faire notions that GOP presidents from William McKinley to Calvin Coolidge had used successfully.
Perhaps FDR's most important legacy was to enshrine the notion that the central government, and most especially the president, was the key player in the nation's economic well-being. (One can trace that idea back to the Progressive tradition, which saw its first successes in Theodore Roosevelt's, and especially Woodrow Wilson's, administrations.) FDR's legacy was codified by the Employment Act of 1946.
By the end of the 1970s, however, FDR's legacy had turned to ashes, as it become more and more obvious that, as Ronald Reagan put it in his first Inaugural Address, "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Not many years later, Bill Clinton would say, in his 1996 State of the Union Address, "[t[he era of big government is over."
Unhappily, Clinton was mistaken. Barack Obama's election in 2008 was accompanied by his promise to "fundamentally transform" the United States by creating a European-style welfare state, with big government controlling over half the nation's Gross Domestic Product. More than any president since FDR, Obama has made explicit appeals to class warfare to advance his agenda. His calls for raising income taxes on the well-to-do -- defined variously as those making over $250,000 or $200,000 per year or whatever -- are too numerous to cite.
As his poll numbers have plummeted recently, Obama's appeals to class warfare have become even more blatant -- and some would also say more petulant. On December 4, 2013, for example, he declared that this generation's "defining challenge" is the growing income inequality between America's richest one percent and the rest of society.
There are multiple challenges to Obama's assertion. Blogs for The American Thinker by Henry Percy and Rick Moran illustrate why the left's obsession with "income inequality" is misplaced. Moran cites an op-ed by Robert Grady in The Wall Street Journal (12/22/13) that asserts that the focus on "income inequality" overlooks other, perhaps even more significant, features of wealth that alter America's portrait. Grady also cites a 2012 article inPolicy Review by Kip Hagopian and Lee Ohanian that further details the weaknesses of the left's "income inequality" mania.
If bloviating about "income inequality" by Obama, other left-wing Democrats, and denizens of the mainstream media -- which almost invariably means the same thing -- is misplaced, then why does it work?
Alas, the answer to that query tells us more about significant segments of today's public than it does about those bloviating about "income inequality."
Some Americans have always been jealous because others made more money or lived a tonier lifestyle. Figures in American history -- read, for example, Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879) -- and in fiction, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway -- are driven by envy, or at least by ambivalence about others' -- Jay Gatsby's -- wealth.
Appeals to working-class envy of the rich, however, have not always fallen on receptive ears. In 1959, Robert Lane published "The Fear of Equality" in The American Sociological Review. That article was based on Lane's in-depth interviews with working-class men in "Eastport" (New Haven), CT. The gist of Lane's piece is that many of these men found the very notion of equality unsettling. Rather than being consumed by envy, most wanted to get ahead by dint of their own efforts. They would have found calls for class warfare offensive.
There seems to have been a significant change in the character of many Americans from the lower social classes. Motivated, perhaps, by the explosion of entitlement programs since 1960, at least if Nicholas Eberstadt is correct, a not-so-subtle change in the American character has left sizable portions of people from the lower social orders driven by greed and envy.
These people have learned that being on the government dole, at the expense of those wealthier than they, is no longer a source of embarrassment.
If that is true, it little wonder that Obama and other leftists wage class warfare.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)
ObamaCore Public Education
By Lee Cary
With the nationalizing of the American healthcare system well underway, nationalizing public education pre-K through 12 is the next big thing on the progressive agenda. Wait for it.
It will be called ObamaCore Education, for short
IhThe original 2008 Obama campaign Blueprint for Change document included a "Plan to Give Every American Child a World Class Education" and linked to a 15-page, single-spaced document entitle "Barack Obama's Plan For Lifetime Success Through Education." It offered a litany of proposals as part of a broad, federal intervention into America's public education system.
A case can be made that the regime would have been better off, in the long run, nationalizing public education before healthcare, because the fundamental transformation of education would have been easier.
How so? you ask.
The reasons for the relative ease -- compared to ObamaCare -- of installing ObamaCore Education were cited in the American Thinker back in June 2009.
"President Obama will proclaim public education K-12 as too crucial to the future of the nation to be left in the hands of volunteer citizen committees, also known as School Boards and Independent School Districts. And, the distribution of school financing is, Obama will say, too dependent on the varying affluence levels among the states, and within their divergent communities. All of America's youth are entitled to an equal opportunity to receive a world class education. Anything less is unfair. Equal opportunity demands equal funding. It doesn't take a crystal ball to see this coming.
The pragmatic case for uniform public education will cite economy-of-scale advantages whereby the federal government will eliminate multiple duplications of effort in a currently over-staffed management equation where every school district constructs its own buildings, buys its own materials, hires its own staff, and manages its own curriculum to its own state's standards. Why not centralize all those processes and save time, effort and money? will be the argument. Works for Wal-Mart.
Large metropolitan school districts that are almost all dismal failures will gladly turn over their responsibility to the federal government. Most teachers and administrators will welcome the opportunity to become GS workers and enjoy the benefits of greater and more equitable pay, plus relocation opportunities without compensation penalties. Many will welcome the end of the politico-educational fiefdoms called school districts.
Compared to the complexity of redesigning the American health care system, rationalizing the nationalizing of public education K-12 will be a snap. Most citizens will see no inherent danger in bringing central planning to public education. After all, central equals public, public equals central. So the argument will go.
Obama will claim that taxpayers will pay less for nationalized education since the increase in their federal taxes will be less than what they're now paying in local school taxes, which will go away. Lower taxes - that'll sell."
From the statists' perspective, nothing has changed since 2009 to lessen the validity of those arguments.
Recently, in a flurry of parroted articles, the elite media reminded us that U.S. public school students continue to be out-performed by students in other nations. For example:
- U.S. News on NBC News, December 3, 2013, "US teens lag in global education rankings as Asian countries rise to the top," states that "American teens scored below the international average in math and roughly average in science and reading, compared against dozens of other countries that participated in the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which was administered last fall."
- NPR, December 3, 2013, "U.S. Students Slide In Global Ranking On Math, Reading, Science," reports that "American 15-year-olds continue to turn in flat results in a test that measures students' proficiency in reading, math and science worldwide, failing to crack the global top 20."
- The Washington Post, December 2, 2013, "U.S. students lag around average on international science, math and reading test," noted that "While U.S. teenagers were average in reading and science, their scores were below average in math, compared to 64 other countries and economies that participated in the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA. That pattern has not changed much since the PISA test was first given in 2000."
The statist media is clearly lining up to help push for federal intervention into the nation's public schools. Good grief -- something has to be done! Big national problems require big federal government solutions.
In an ad attached to the Washington Post article cited above, the "experts at CTB/McGraw Hill" promote the effectiveness of the Common Core curriculum and direct interested persons on how to download the "eGuide" to Common Core. (You'll find a brief history of CTB/McGraw Hill here.) Like the drug and insurance companies that lined-up early to support ObamaCare, the textbook publishers will sign-on early for ObamaCore education. (Next time you child student brings home a glossy covered text book, research how much your school district paid for it, and the reasons for college professor authors and book publishers supporting nationalized education will become clear. It's about money.)
Our friends, neighbors and relatives who used the "other-nations-seem-to-be-able-to-do-it-better-than-us" argument to advance ObamaCare are being prepped by the media to make the same argument with regard to ObamaCore Public Education (or maybe it'll be HillaryCore -- where public education takes one, big, national village).
ObamaCare promoters will argue that it makes no sense for compulsory education to be variously administered in small fiefdoms led by independent school boards where the primary qualification to being elected is the ability to fog a mirror, and school board members need only be marginally literat
Proponents for changing the role of local school administrators will note how school district superintendents function more as local politicians and controversy firefighters than as professional educators. By comparison, imagine each local post office being its own free-standing enterprise instead of the smoothly-functioning, standardized, nation-wide machine that it is today.
We'll hear the case made that school teachers need to be focused on teaching to national standards so that when students transfer from one part of the country to another they don't have to be re-evaluated. Same for teachers.
Plus, it will facilitate a fairer distribution of educational funding so that, regardless of the socio-economic conditions of their home state, city of residence, and even neighborhood, U.S. students will benefit from the same educational opportunities available from sea-to-shining-sea.
The economic life of the nation depends, we'll be told, on the equality of America's public educational system. It's not only fair, it's...patriotic.
So it's coming -- the nationalization of America's public education. It'll come on the heels of ObamaCare's continuing success, as hardcore Democrats statists and moderate Republican statists work across the proverbial aisle to smooth out the few, initial, speed bumps in the ObamaCare on-line registration process, and compliant citizens align America's healthcare system with the world's other industrialized nations. So they won't make fun of us anymore. Nobody likes being made fun of. Or, better, nobody likes being the brunt of fun-making.
When that happens, what Professor Fedor Filippovich Korolev (1898-1971), Academy of Pedagogical Science of the U.S.S.R. wrote on 1970 on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of V.I. Lenin, in an article entitled "Lenin and Public Education," shall become true in America.
"Under the influence of the social ideas inherent in the October Revolution, the role of the school and of educational theory underwent a radical change in the course of the construction of socialism. From an instrument of class domination, the school became an instrument of profound social transformations and the spiritual renewal of the individual-an active and powerful force for social change.
"The formulation and solution of educational questions was inseparably connected with Lenin's broad, all-embracing programme of social transformation. His concept of education was firmly based on the education of the new man by whom such changes in society and man himself were to be brought about were part of a single process, and were interconnected. This explains the fact that whatever social process Lenin was analyzing, whatever the economic or political problems he was investigating, he never lost sight of educational questions, which remained constantly within his field of vision."
And progressives will be the ones we've been waiting for.
Or, grammatically, the ones for whom we've been waiting.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Indiscriminate charges of racism do more harm than good, as Martin Luther King well knew.
We just spent much of December quacking and arguing way too much about the views of Phil Robertson, one of the stars of the Duck Dynastyreality-TV series. Most of the attention focused on Robertson’s harsh, mean-spirited comments about gays and on the subsequent, short-lived decision of the cable network A&E to suspend him. But people saved plenty of ire for his comments, offered in an interview with GQ magazine, that when he grew up in Louisiana in the 1950s he never saw “the mistreatment of any black person” and that African Americans in that era didn’t have complaints about white people.
That’s an invitation to call Phil naïve, blind, or a liar. But such descriptions weren’t enough for Jesse Jackson, who said: “These statements uttered by Robertson are more offensive than the bus driver in Montgomery, Alabama, more than 59 years ago. At least the bus driver, who ordered Rosa Parks to surrender her seat to a white person, was following state law. Robertson’s statements were uttered freely and openly without cover of the law, within a context of what he seemed to believe was ‘white privilege.’” He wasn’t the only prominent liberal to go way over the top. MSNBC’s Michael Eric Dyson said Robertson and Duck Dynasty were “part of a majority-white supremacist culture.”
There have been sensible voices. Writing in Time magazine, linguistic scholar John McWhorter bluntly asked: “Phil Robertson is an old man of 67, and frankly, why should we care that his take on black history is not exactly enlightened?” Michael Myers, a Democrat who is executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition,said that overheated charges of racism hurt all of us “because we need everyone on board and everyone’s attention when we spot and fight real outbreaks of racism and skin color discrimination.” Accusing people of racism has become so tempting that even Republicans get in on the act occasionally. This month, George Gomez, the moderate GOP nominee who ran in the special election of June 2013 to fill John Kerry’s Senate seat in Massachusetts, had to apologize for likening two conservative activists to members of what he called the “Klan.” (He denied he was referring to the Ku Klux Klan but apologized nonetheless.)
Shouting “racism” in a crowded media and political theater has become a substitute for thought and debate in America. Liberals hated it in the 1950s when extreme conservatives such as those of the John Birch Society smeared many they disagreed with by labeling them “Communists.” A 1950s media “blacklist” that encouraged the non-hiring of Communist-party members and their allies is considered one of the greatest affronts to civil liberties ever, even though it was basically the kind of “boycott” many on the left are fond of today.
Today, it damages our discourse when a respected figure such as Oprah Winfrey suggests that some critics of President Obama are racist. “There’s a level of disrespect for the office that occurs and that occurs in some cases and maybe even many cases because he’s African American,” she said while on tour to promote her latest movie. As evidence she cited Joe Wilson’s shout-out during Obama’s 2010 State of the Union message — the GOP representative cried “You lie!” as Obama enumerated some of Obamacare’s intended boons. Of course, Wilson’s outburst was inappropriate and disrespectful. But does Winfrey really want to make the argument today — after PolitiFact labeled “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep it” the “lie of the year” for 2013 — that President Obama didn’t lie when promoting Obamacare ?
You don’t have to be Oprah Winfrey to have a platform that lets you make unsubstantiated charges of racism. ABC’s Cokie Roberts, normally a calm analyst, dismissed the Supreme Court’s June decision that set some limits on federal interference in local election laws, casting it as a throwback to the days when blacks were blocked from voting in many states. “At the moment, what’s going on about voting rights is downright evil,” she said on ABC. What kind of reactionary laws are states trying to pass? Voter-ID laws that are backed by clear majorities in all key demographic groups, including Hispanics and African Americans. And laws asking people to show they are U.S. citizens, a clear requirement for voting.
The truth is that race does remain a raw wound in the American political psyche, and we need to talk about it. But the emphasis should be on talking rather than scoring cheap political points. If we actually had an honest conversation about race, it would include voices and views that the media now overlook because they don’t fit the storyline.
Take the George Zimmerman–Trayvon Martin case. When basketball legend Charles Barkley appeared on CNBC after Zimmerman’s acquittal, Maria Bartiromo asked him, as an aside, what he thought about the case. “Just looking at the evidence, I agree with the verdict,” he said. Then he laced into the media for damaging race relations with their coverage. “It gave every white person and black person who’s racist a platform to vent their ignorance,” he complained. “Racism is wrong in any shape or form. A lot of black people are racist, too. I think sometimes when people talk about racism, they act like only white people are racist. There are a lot of black people who are racist. . . . I don’t think the media has clean hands.” You won’t be surprised to learn that Barkley’s indictment of the media received scant coverage beyond CNBC. (By the way, Barkley is an Obama supporter whotold Jay Leno on The Tonight Show in late 2011 that he was thrilled with Obama’s prospects: “As a Democrat who loves the president, I am downright giddy. There ain’t no way we can lose to them idiots.”)
Careless accusations of racism can sometimes do as much damage to race relations as the expression of prejudice and ignorance can. Both can poison the political well for everyone. As my colleague Kevin D. Williamson points out in the latest issue of National Review, the Reverend Martin Luther King was always careful with accusations of racism. “He often pointed out that Barry Goldwater was not himself a racist,” even though he voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Williamson notes. King had been told that Goldwater had worked hard to desegregate the Air National Guard in Arizona and had donated his own money for a lawsuit to desegregate a Phoenix high school. “Another reason that MLK did not call Senator Goldwater a racist is that he did not wish to look like a fool,” Williamson writes. Would that those who claim the mantle of King today were so careful in their research and so restrained in their language.
Fighting racism is important business. It shouldn’t be sullied or cheapened by those who too often treat the term as the easiest political club to grab.
— John Fund is a national-affairs columnist for National Review Online.
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5)NYT: No, Really, the Benghazi Attacks Were Fueled by That YouTube Video
By Lee Cary
Indiscriminate charges of racism do more harm than good, as Martin Luther King well knew.
With the nationalizing of the American healthcare system well underway, nationalizing public education pre-K through 12 is the next big thing on the progressive agenda. Wait for it.
It will be called ObamaCore Education, for short
IhThe original 2008 Obama campaign Blueprint for Change document included a "Plan to Give Every American Child a World Class Education" and linked to a 15-page, single-spaced document entitle "Barack Obama's Plan For Lifetime Success Through Education." It offered a litany of proposals as part of a broad, federal intervention into America's public education system.
A case can be made that the regime would have been better off, in the long run, nationalizing public education before healthcare, because the fundamental transformation of education would have been easier.
How so? you ask.
The reasons for the relative ease -- compared to ObamaCare -- of installing ObamaCore Education were cited in the American Thinker back in June 2009.
"President Obama will proclaim public education K-12 as too crucial to the future of the nation to be left in the hands of volunteer citizen committees, also known as School Boards and Independent School Districts. And, the distribution of school financing is, Obama will say, too dependent on the varying affluence levels among the states, and within their divergent communities. All of America's youth are entitled to an equal opportunity to receive a world class education. Anything less is unfair. Equal opportunity demands equal funding. It doesn't take a crystal ball to see this coming.The pragmatic case for uniform public education will cite economy-of-scale advantages whereby the federal government will eliminate multiple duplications of effort in a currently over-staffed management equation where every school district constructs its own buildings, buys its own materials, hires its own staff, and manages its own curriculum to its own state's standards. Why not centralize all those processes and save time, effort and money? will be the argument. Works for Wal-Mart.Large metropolitan school districts that are almost all dismal failures will gladly turn over their responsibility to the federal government. Most teachers and administrators will welcome the opportunity to become GS workers and enjoy thebenefits of greater and more equitable pay, plus relocation opportunities without compensation penalties. Many will welcome the end of the politico-educational fiefdoms called school districts.Compared to the complexity of redesigning the Americanhealth care system, rationalizing the nationalizing of public education K-12 will be a snap. Most citizens will see no inherent danger in bringing central planning to public education. After all, central equals public, public equals central. So the argument will go.Obama will claim that taxpayers will pay less for nationalized education since the increase in their federal taxes will be less than what they're now paying in local school taxes, which will go away. Lower taxes - that'll sell."
From the statists' perspective, nothing has changed since 2009 to lessen the validity of those arguments.
Recently, in a flurry of parroted articles, the elite media reminded us that U.S. public school students continue to be out-performed by students in other nations. For example:
- U.S. News on NBC News, December 3, 2013, "US teens lag in global education rankings as Asian countries rise to the top," states that "American teens scored below the international average in math and roughly average in science and reading, compared against dozens of other countries that participated in the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which was administered last fall."
- NPR, December 3, 2013, "U.S. Students Slide In Global Ranking On Math, Reading, Science," reports that "American 15-year-olds continue to turn in flat results in a test that measures students' proficiency in reading, math and science worldwide, failing to crack the global top 20."
- The Washington Post, December 2, 2013, "U.S. students lag around average on international science, math and reading test," noted that "While U.S. teenagers were average in reading and science, their scores were below average in math, compared to 64 other countries and economies that participated in the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA. That pattern has not changed much since the PISA test was first given in 2000."
The statist media is clearly lining up to help push for federal intervention into the nation's public schools. Good grief -- something has to be done! Big national problems require big federal government solutions.
In an ad attached to the Washington Post article cited above, the "experts at CTB/McGraw Hill" promote the effectiveness of the Common Core curriculum and direct interested persons on how to download the "eGuide" to Common Core. (You'll find a brief history of CTB/McGraw Hill here.) Like the drug and insurance companies that lined-up early to support ObamaCare, the textbook publishers will sign-on early for ObamaCore education. (Next time you child student brings home a glossy covered text book, research how much your school district paid for it, and the reasons for college professor authors and book publishers supporting nationalized education will become clear. It's about money.)
Our friends, neighbors and relatives who used the "other-nations-seem-to-be-able-to-do-it-better-than-us" argument to advance ObamaCare are being prepped by the media to make the same argument with regard to ObamaCore Public Education (or maybe it'll be HillaryCore -- where public education takes one, big, national village).
ObamaCare promoters will argue that it makes no sense for compulsory education to be variously administered in small fiefdoms led by independent school boards where the primary qualification to being elected is the ability to fog a mirror, and school board members need only be marginally literat
Proponents for changing the role of local school administrators will note how school district superintendents function more as local politicians and controversy firefighters than as professional educators. By comparison, imagine each local post office being its own free-standing enterprise instead of the smoothly-functioning, standardized, nation-wide machine that it is today.
We'll hear the case made that school teachers need to be focused on teaching to national standards so that when students transfer from one part of the country to another they don't have to be re-evaluated. Same for teachers.
Plus, it will facilitate a fairer distribution of educational funding so that, regardless of the socio-economic conditions of their home state, city of residence, and even neighborhood, U.S. students will benefit from the same educational opportunities available from sea-to-shining-sea.
The economic life of the nation depends, we'll be told, on the equality of America's public educational system. It's not only fair, it's...patriotic.
So it's coming -- the nationalization of America's public education. It'll come on the heels of ObamaCare's continuing success, as hardcore Democrats statists and moderate Republican statists work across the proverbial aisle to smooth out the few, initial, speed bumps in the ObamaCare on-line registration process, and compliant citizens align America's healthcare system with the world's other industrialized nations. So they won't make fun of us anymore. Nobody likes being made fun of. Or, better, nobody likes being the brunt of fun-making.
When that happens, what Professor Fedor Filippovich Korolev (1898-1971), Academy of Pedagogical Science of the U.S.S.R. wrote on 1970 on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of V.I. Lenin, in an article entitled "Lenin and Public Education," shall become true in America.
"Under the influence of the social ideas inherent in the October Revolution, the role of the school and of educational theory underwent a radical change in the course of the construction of socialism. From an instrument of class domination, the school became an instrument of profound social transformations and the spiritual renewal of the individual-an active and powerful force for social change."The formulation and solution of educational questions was inseparably connected with Lenin's broad, all-embracing programme of social transformation. His concept of education was firmly based on the education of the new man by whom such changes in society and man himself were to be brought about were part of a single process, and were interconnected. This explains the fact that whatever social process Lenin was analyzing, whatever the economic or political problems he was investigating, he never lost sight of educational questions, which remained constantly within his field of vision."
And progressives will be the ones we've been waiting for.
Or, grammatically, the ones for whom we've been waiting.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We just spent much of December quacking and arguing way too much about the views of Phil Robertson, one of the stars of the Duck Dynastyreality-TV series. Most of the attention focused on Robertson’s harsh, mean-spirited comments about gays and on the subsequent, short-lived decision of the cable network A&E to suspend him. But people saved plenty of ire for his comments, offered in an interview with GQ magazine, that when he grew up in Louisiana in the 1950s he never saw “the mistreatment of any black person” and that African Americans in that era didn’t have complaints about white people.
That’s an invitation to call Phil naïve, blind, or a liar. But such descriptions weren’t enough for Jesse Jackson, who said: “These statements uttered by Robertson are more offensive than the bus driver in Montgomery, Alabama, more than 59 years ago. At least the bus driver, who ordered Rosa Parks to surrender her seat to a white person, was following state law. Robertson’s statements were uttered freely and openly without cover of the law, within a context of what he seemed to believe was ‘white privilege.’” He wasn’t the only prominent liberal to go way over the top. MSNBC’s Michael Eric Dyson said Robertson and Duck Dynasty were “part of a majority-white supremacist culture.”
There have been sensible voices. Writing in Time magazine, linguistic scholar John McWhorter bluntly asked: “Phil Robertson is an old man of 67, and frankly, why should we care that his take on black history is not exactly enlightened?” Michael Myers, a Democrat who is executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition,said that overheated charges of racism hurt all of us “because we need everyone on board and everyone’s attention when we spot and fight real outbreaks of racism and skin color discrimination.” Accusing people of racism has become so tempting that even Republicans get in on the act occasionally. This month, George Gomez, the moderate GOP nominee who ran in the special election of June 2013 to fill John Kerry’s Senate seat in Massachusetts, had to apologize for likening two conservative activists to members of what he called the “Klan.” (He denied he was referring to the Ku Klux Klan but apologized nonetheless.)
Shouting “racism” in a crowded media and political theater has become a substitute for thought and debate in America. Liberals hated it in the 1950s when extreme conservatives such as those of the John Birch Society smeared many they disagreed with by labeling them “Communists.” A 1950s media “blacklist” that encouraged the non-hiring of Communist-party members and their allies is considered one of the greatest affronts to civil liberties ever, even though it was basically the kind of “boycott” many on the left are fond of today.
Today, it damages our discourse when a respected figure such as Oprah Winfrey suggests that some critics of President Obama are racist. “There’s a level of disrespect for the office that occurs and that occurs in some cases and maybe even many cases because he’s African American,” she said while on tour to promote her latest movie. As evidence she cited Joe Wilson’s shout-out during Obama’s 2010 State of the Union message — the GOP representative cried “You lie!” as Obama enumerated some of Obamacare’s intended boons. Of course, Wilson’s outburst was inappropriate and disrespectful. But does Winfrey really want to make the argument today — after PolitiFact labeled “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep it” the “lie of the year” for 2013 — that President Obama didn’t lie when promoting Obamacare ?
You don’t have to be Oprah Winfrey to have a platform that lets you make unsubstantiated charges of racism. ABC’s Cokie Roberts, normally a calm analyst, dismissed the Supreme Court’s June decision that set some limits on federal interference in local election laws, casting it as a throwback to the days when blacks were blocked from voting in many states. “At the moment, what’s going on about voting rights is downright evil,” she said on ABC. What kind of reactionary laws are states trying to pass? Voter-ID laws that are backed by clear majorities in all key demographic groups, including Hispanics and African Americans. And laws asking people to show they are U.S. citizens, a clear requirement for voting.
The truth is that race does remain a raw wound in the American political psyche, and we need to talk about it. But the emphasis should be on talking rather than scoring cheap political points. If we actually had an honest conversation about race, it would include voices and views that the media now overlook because they don’t fit the storyline.
Take the George Zimmerman–Trayvon Martin case. When basketball legend Charles Barkley appeared on CNBC after Zimmerman’s acquittal, Maria Bartiromo asked him, as an aside, what he thought about the case. “Just looking at the evidence, I agree with the verdict,” he said. Then he laced into the media for damaging race relations with their coverage. “It gave every white person and black person who’s racist a platform to vent their ignorance,” he complained. “Racism is wrong in any shape or form. A lot of black people are racist, too. I think sometimes when people talk about racism, they act like only white people are racist. There are a lot of black people who are racist. . . . I don’t think the media has clean hands.” You won’t be surprised to learn that Barkley’s indictment of the media received scant coverage beyond CNBC. (By the way, Barkley is an Obama supporter whotold Jay Leno on The Tonight Show in late 2011 that he was thrilled with Obama’s prospects: “As a Democrat who loves the president, I am downright giddy. There ain’t no way we can lose to them idiots.”)
Careless accusations of racism can sometimes do as much damage to race relations as the expression of prejudice and ignorance can. Both can poison the political well for everyone. As my colleague Kevin D. Williamson points out in the latest issue of National Review, the Reverend Martin Luther King was always careful with accusations of racism. “He often pointed out that Barry Goldwater was not himself a racist,” even though he voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Williamson notes. King had been told that Goldwater had worked hard to desegregate the Air National Guard in Arizona and had donated his own money for a lawsuit to desegregate a Phoenix high school. “Another reason that MLK did not call Senator Goldwater a racist is that he did not wish to look like a fool,” Williamson writes. Would that those who claim the mantle of King today were so careful in their research and so restrained in their language.
Fighting racism is important business. It shouldn’t be sullied or cheapened by those who too often treat the term as the easiest political club to grab.
— John Fund is a national-affairs columnist for National Review Online.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5)NYT: No, Really, the Benghazi Attacks Were Fueled by That YouTube Video
5)NYT: No, Really, the Benghazi Attacks Were Fueled by That YouTube Video
By Guy Benson
The New York Times has published a new account of the deadly 9/11/12 terrorist attacks against two US compounds in Benghazi, Libya. Reporter David Kirkpatrick's sources, some of whom are anonymous, say there is little indication that international terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda were involved in the attack. Kirkpatrick's story also claims that the raids were not "meticulously planned," and were, in fact, touched off by an obscure YouTube video trailer that some say denigrated Islam. A snippet from the piece:
Some on the Right are denouncing this version of events as historical revisionism designed to rehabilitate Hillary Clinton's reputation on the matter. Some of this criticism is warranted. The 'no Al Qaeda role' revelation reads like political parsing. The Islamist militia that carried out the attacks (Ansar al-Sharia) is widely viewed as an offshoot of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb. Whether AQ's central command ordered or approved the lethal ambush seems trivial in light of the facts: Extremist groups sacked the US consulate, assassinated our ambassador, and shelled a separate CIA enclave in the city over the course of many hours, murdering four Americans in total. Emails sent between the State Department and Libyan officials on September 12 acknowledged Ansar al-Sharia's role in the bloodshed. It was terrorism from the start. CNN has alsoreported that at least three members of Al Qaeda took part in the attacks. For what it's worth, Rep. Peter King is hammering the Times' story as "misleading," and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers has asserted that Benghazi was an "Al Qaeda-led event:"
If the supposedly infamous 'Innocence of Muslims' online video played some role in galvanizing the raid by offering a thin "justification" to set the murders in motion, that's also a historical footnote. It also contradicts the sworn testimony of Gregory Hicks, Amb. Stevens' second in command in Libya at the time of the attack. Hicks called the online video a "non event" in Libya, adding that he personally informed Sec. Clinton that the melee was a coordinated terrorist attack within hours of the bloodshed beginning. In the aftermath of the killings, the Obama administration falsely claimed that the violence had spun out of "spontaneous protests" over the clip, a fable that Kirkpatrick's reporting also debunks. His sources describe the raid as a planned incident, enabled by the striking lack of security forces at the diplomatic compound. "There was even less security at the compound than usual," the story reads. Rep. Rogers -- who has access to reams of classified intelligence -- is also unambiguous in his conclusion: "[Benghazi] was a pre-planned, organized terrorist event."
Remember, Islamist violence against Western targets in Benghazi (including two smaller assaults on the scandalously under-protected US compound) had escalated in the months leading up to 9/11. The British had pulled their people out of the city, and American officials on the ground had begged for more security. Those requests were denied by Hillary Clinton's State Department. Whistleblower Eric Nordstrom testified that Sec. Clinton "absolutely" would have been aware of the situation. Then, as the administration debated which talking points to disseminate to the public in the wake of the murders, officials at State requested that references to terrorism red flags be scrubbed from the final version. Ed Morrissey writes that Kirkpatrick's investigation "doesn't even begin" to address "the larger and more important" mysteries surrounding the attacks. He lists a handful of outstanding questions that still, all these months later, demand serious answers:
That last question in especially interesting in light of accusations like this. I'll add just one more: How is it remotely acceptable that nearly 16 months after Islamists sacked a US consulate and murdered a sitting ambassador, zero people have been held accountable? A handful of State Department officials (at least one of whom appears to have been a total scapegoat) served time in the political penalty box, but were quietly reinstated a few months later. Two major figures in the cover-up were promoted. And none of the terrorists have been brought to justice, even though we identified and located several of the "suspects" months ago. TheWashington Post reported earlier this month that US efforts to detain those responsible have "stalled."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Guy Benson
The New York Times has published a new account of the deadly 9/11/12 terrorist attacks against two US compounds in Benghazi, Libya. Reporter David Kirkpatrick's sources, some of whom are anonymous, say there is little indication that international terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda were involved in the attack. Kirkpatrick's story also claims that the raids were not "meticulously planned," and were, in fact, touched off by an obscure YouTube video trailer that some say denigrated Islam. A snippet from the piece:
Some on the Right are denouncing this version of events as historical revisionism designed to rehabilitate Hillary Clinton's reputation on the matter. Some of this criticism is warranted. The 'no Al Qaeda role' revelation reads like political parsing. The Islamist militia that carried out the attacks (Ansar al-Sharia) is widely viewed as an offshoot of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb. Whether AQ's central command ordered or approved the lethal ambush seems trivial in light of the facts: Extremist groups sacked the US consulate, assassinated our ambassador, and shelled a separate CIA enclave in the city over the course of many hours, murdering four Americans in total. Emails sent between the State Department and Libyan officials on September 12 acknowledged Ansar al-Sharia's role in the bloodshed. It was terrorism from the start. CNN has alsoreported that at least three members of Al Qaeda took part in the attacks. For what it's worth, Rep. Peter King is hammering the Times' story as "misleading," and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers has asserted that Benghazi was an "Al Qaeda-led event:"
If the supposedly infamous 'Innocence of Muslims' online video played some role in galvanizing the raid by offering a thin "justification" to set the murders in motion, that's also a historical footnote. It also contradicts the sworn testimony of Gregory Hicks, Amb. Stevens' second in command in Libya at the time of the attack. Hicks called the online video a "non event" in Libya, adding that he personally informed Sec. Clinton that the melee was a coordinated terrorist attack within hours of the bloodshed beginning. In the aftermath of the killings, the Obama administration falsely claimed that the violence had spun out of "spontaneous protests" over the clip, a fable that Kirkpatrick's reporting also debunks. His sources describe the raid as a planned incident, enabled by the striking lack of security forces at the diplomatic compound. "There was even less security at the compound than usual," the story reads. Rep. Rogers -- who has access to reams of classified intelligence -- is also unambiguous in his conclusion: "[Benghazi] was a pre-planned, organized terrorist event."
Remember, Islamist violence against Western targets in Benghazi (including two smaller assaults on the scandalously under-protected US compound) had escalated in the months leading up to 9/11. The British had pulled their people out of the city, and American officials on the ground had begged for more security. Those requests were denied by Hillary Clinton's State Department. Whistleblower Eric Nordstrom testified that Sec. Clinton "absolutely" would have been aware of the situation. Then, as the administration debated which talking points to disseminate to the public in the wake of the murders, officials at State requested that references to terrorism red flags be scrubbed from the final version. Ed Morrissey writes that Kirkpatrick's investigation "doesn't even begin" to address "the larger and more important" mysteries surrounding the attacks. He lists a handful of outstanding questions that still, all these months later, demand serious answers:
The New York Times has published a new account of the deadly 9/11/12 terrorist attacks against two US compounds in Benghazi, Libya. Reporter David Kirkpatrick's sources, some of whom are anonymous, say there is little indication that international terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda were involved in the attack. Kirkpatrick's story also claims that the raids were not "meticulously planned," and were, in fact, touched off by an obscure YouTube video trailer that some say denigrated Islam. A snippet from the piece:
Some on the Right are denouncing this version of events as historical revisionism designed to rehabilitate Hillary Clinton's reputation on the matter. Some of this criticism is warranted. The 'no Al Qaeda role' revelation reads like political parsing. The Islamist militia that carried out the attacks (Ansar al-Sharia) is widely viewed as an offshoot of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb. Whether AQ's central command ordered or approved the lethal ambush seems trivial in light of the facts: Extremist groups sacked the US consulate, assassinated our ambassador, and shelled a separate CIA enclave in the city over the course of many hours, murdering four Americans in total. Emails sent between the State Department and Libyan officials on September 12 acknowledged Ansar al-Sharia's role in the bloodshed. It was terrorism from the start. CNN has alsoreported that at least three members of Al Qaeda took part in the attacks. For what it's worth, Rep. Peter King is hammering the Times' story as "misleading," and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers has asserted that Benghazi was an "Al Qaeda-led event:"
If the supposedly infamous 'Innocence of Muslims' online video played some role in galvanizing the raid by offering a thin "justification" to set the murders in motion, that's also a historical footnote. It also contradicts the sworn testimony of Gregory Hicks, Amb. Stevens' second in command in Libya at the time of the attack. Hicks called the online video a "non event" in Libya, adding that he personally informed Sec. Clinton that the melee was a coordinated terrorist attack within hours of the bloodshed beginning. In the aftermath of the killings, the Obama administration falsely claimed that the violence had spun out of "spontaneous protests" over the clip, a fable that Kirkpatrick's reporting also debunks. His sources describe the raid as a planned incident, enabled by the striking lack of security forces at the diplomatic compound. "There was even less security at the compound than usual," the story reads. Rep. Rogers -- who has access to reams of classified intelligence -- is also unambiguous in his conclusion: "[Benghazi] was a pre-planned, organized terrorist event."
Remember, Islamist violence against Western targets in Benghazi (including two smaller assaults on the scandalously under-protected US compound) had escalated in the months leading up to 9/11. The British had pulled their people out of the city, and American officials on the ground had begged for more security. Those requests were denied by Hillary Clinton's State Department. Whistleblower Eric Nordstrom testified that Sec. Clinton "absolutely" would have been aware of the situation. Then, as the administration debated which talking points to disseminate to the public in the wake of the murders, officials at State requested that references to terrorism red flags be scrubbed from the final version. Ed Morrissey writes that Kirkpatrick's investigation "doesn't even begin" to address "the larger and more important" mysteries surrounding the attacks. He lists a handful of outstanding questions that still, all these months later, demand serious answers:
That last question in especially interesting in light of accusations like this. I'll add just one more: How is it remotely acceptable that nearly 16 months after Islamists sacked a US consulate and murdered a sitting ambassador, zero people have been held accountable? A handful of State Department officials (at least one of whom appears to have been a total scapegoat) served time in the political penalty box, but were quietly reinstated a few months later. Two major figures in the cover-up were promoted. And none of the terrorists have been brought to justice, even though we identified and located several of the "suspects" months ago. TheWashington Post reported earlier this month that US efforts to detain those responsible have "stalled."
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