Friday, January 31, 2014

Surprise, Surprise!


This financial crisis is forcing governments and business at all levels to make some tough decisions.
If things continue like this for much longer, there's a real risk that we may have to lay Fred off…
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Surprise!!! (See 1, 1a and 1b below.)
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Disunion purposeful?  You decide. (See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1)  Obama's Brother joins Hamas, says 'Jerusalem is ours; We are Coming'
While in Sanaa, Yemein in 2010, President Barack Obama’s brother Malik Obama was at an event billed as the Orphans Development Fund (ODF) Conference. It’s quite the ironic title considering a group photo Malik is in that he has posted to his website. In the photo, he can be seen wearing a Hamas scarf (keffiyeh) that bears a well-known Palestinian slogan – ‘Jerusalem is ours – WE ARE COMING!’ It also includes a map of Palestine that says, ‘From the River to the Sea!’ In other words, Malik is saying, THERE IS NO ISRAEL.

Scarf translated: Jerusalem is ours – WE ARE COMING!

Malik: Expressing support for Hamas at an 'orphan' conference.
Here is Malik Obama’s boss (Malik works for him officially in his capacity as IDO Executive Secretary), Suar al-Dahab during a visit to Gaza last year at a Hamas event with the group’s Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Notice he’s wearing a similar keffiyeh at a conference entitled, ‘Aiding Jerusalem and Gaza”:

Malik’s boss, Suar al-Dahab, wearing a similar keffiyeh in Gaza.
Here is Malik in 2010, with al-Dahab in Khartoum, Sudan during the Islamic Da’wa Organization (IDO) conference, presided over by Sudan’s terrorist leader Omar al-Bashir, who belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood and is wanted for crimes against humanity:

Malik Obama and Suar al-Dahab.
Like British politician George Galloway, Malik is comfortable associating with those who support the message emblazoned on these scarfs:

British politician George Galloway and Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh with similar scarfs.

Galloway and Haniyeh, wearing and surrounded by keffiyehs.
Just in case we’re told that Malik was conned into wearing such a hateful and racist symbol like Swedish King Carl Gustaf and his wife Queen Sylvia were, consider a few things. Carl and Sylvia quickly took the keffiyeh’s off after having them placed on them by an opportunist and distanced themselves from the message.
Malik is a much different story.

Swedish King Carl Gustaf and Queen Sylvia: deceived into wearing hateful keffiyehs.
Malik reads and speaks fluent Arabic as do many in his family, like cousin Musa Ismail Obama and uncle Sayyid, who’ve been to at least one prominent Wahhabist university in Saudi Arabia. Barack recited the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer with a ‘first-rate accent’ according to the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof.

Musa Obama and Sayyid Obama at Umm al-Qura University.
The keffiyeh (or scarf) doesn’t just say, ‘Al Aqsa is ours and is not their temple’. It also says ‘Innana Qadimun’, which translates to mean ‘We are marching forward’. This famous battle command which is a reference to the prophecy that some day the Muslim world will march on Jerusalem and then the trees and stones will cry out, ‘here is a Jew hiding behind me… come O Muslim, come and kill him’.
Here is Khansa, the Mother of the Resistance movement, donning the keffiyeh:

Khansa, mother of the Resistance movement, dons the keffiyeh.
This is a photo of Khansa sandwiched between Haniyeh (L) and Hamas leader Khalid Mash’al, who is donning the keffiyeh in this picture:

Khansa between Hamas Prime Minister and Hamas leader Khalid Mash’al.
Those who see this as a matter of guilt by association run into some major problems. President Barack Obama and Malik are much closer than is being admitted publicly. In an interview published in GQ Magazine last July, Malik took offense at the characterization of him and the president as being merely ‘half’ brothers:
“Everyone’s referring to us as half, quarter,…step, things like that,” he says, displeased even by the taste of those words. “I think that’s like weights and measures. This didn’t even occur to us until he became president, until he gained prominence. And now we’re sort of like celebrities.
“But this is a streak of ignorance,” he adds. “Here in Africa we don’t think of each other as ‘half’ this or that. In an extended family, someone is your brother even if he is just in your clan. So I…am Obama.”
A photo of Malik as best man at Barack’s wedding tends to back up the claim:

Malik best man at Barack’s wedding.
So do photos of Malik visiting Barack at the White House on more than one occasion:

Barack and Malik in the Oval Office.
In the same GQ interview, Malik insists that he and his brother (the word ‘half’ left out in deference to Malik) are indeed close:
Ask Malik how often he and his brother talk nowadays and he boasts that it’s about once a year, as though that’s proof of their intimate bond. “Of course we’re close!” Malik says, just a bit too loudly. “I’m the one who brought him here to Kogelo in 1988! I thought it was important for him to come home and see from whence his family came—you know, his roots.”
OBAMA LIED ABOUT HIS FAMILY
As for Barack’s take on the relationship with his brother, well, he doesn’t say much about it but Barack has a history of dishonesty when it comes to being forthcoming about how close he is to his family. Late last year, Barack had to admit that he’d stayed with his uncle Onyango during the former’s days at Harvard. Prior to the admission, the American public had been told that Barack never met his uncle. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney put forth a very unbelievable explanation for the inconsistency.

Onyango Obama: Barack lied about knowing him.
Another Obama brother – Mark Ndesanjo Obama – accused the President of lying about their relationship as well, after Barack said the two had only met one time, presumably during the President’s visit to China in late 2009. Ndesdanjo insists they met several times, dating back to the 1980′s, during an interview with Laura Ingraham, via National Review:
“I heard that after the meeting we had in Beijing and I can tell you I was floored by it — I don’t know why he said it,” Ndesandjo said to Laura Ingraham, adding that he had met the president several times over the years and still isn’t sure what his motivation was for making the claim. “I think he was being president and was not being my brother,” Ndesandjo said.
Ok, so according to Barack, he only met his brother Mark once and that meeting was in China, right?

Barack and brother Mark Ndesanjo Obama met in China in 2009.
If Barack only met Mark once (in China), how does he explain this photo of Mark in the White House ten months earlier, half-way around the world during Barack’s inauguration (Mark is circled and Malik is on the far left)?

Mark Ndesandjo Obama at White House for Barack’s inauguration in 2009.
The point here is that Barack cannot be trusted to issue a full disclosure when it comes to the relationships he has with his family members.
Once again, this leads us to his relationship with Malik. How is it that Malik received 501(c)(3) status for his Barack H. Obama Foundation in less than 30 days and had it illegally backdated 38 months by Lois Lerner? If Barack had anything to do with it, history says he might be lying if he denies it. In order to come full circle here, Malik’s foundation is tied to a State Sponsor of Terrorism in Sudan.
As we’ve said before, Lois Lerner should be granted immunity and compelled to testify about why she granted tax exempt status to a man who is tied to terrorism and just so happens to be the brother of the President of the United States.

Lerner: Granted Malik Obama’s foundation illegal tax exempt status.
If Osama bin Laden’s driver was convicted of material support for terrorism, shouldn’t Malik be brought up on charges of supporting Omar al-Bashir, a world-renowned terrorist? After all, the Egyptian government wants Malik Obama to appear for questioning about this.



“Iran's rulers are not open to engagement no matter what mix of carrots and sticks are offered.” Peter Beinart, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, attributed that remark to me on a National Public Radio show last week. I emailed to ask him when I had said it. He quickly came back with a link to a piece I wrote for National Review Online in 2011, just after it was revealed that agents of the Islamic republic had planned to blow up a ritzy Washington, D.C. restaurant while the Saudi ambassador and other diners were enjoying their risotto Armani and penne integrali Valentino. “Wow!” I thought. “What a memory Beinart has!”
Not exactly. A few days later, he published a piece attacking as hypocrites and warmongers those Republican and Democratic congressmen favoring a bill that would tee up additional sanctions on Iran should negotiations fail. To support his case, Beinart assigned “two talented college students … to investigate” — meaning they dug up quotes from “some of the most prominent commentators now justifying new sanctions.” Since such commentators are, he said, “allies” of the members of Congress supporting the sanctions-in-waiting bill, their quotes reveal what those members really believe. (A rather tenuous thesis, don't you think? )
My words — along with those of Max Boot, Matthew Kroenig, Joshua Muravchik, Bill Kristol, Eliot Cohen and Abe Greenwald — were included. Beinart further noted: “After I quoted May on the radio last week, he emailed to explain that he considers 'diplomacy' and 'engagement' to be different things.” Yes, I do make that distinction. Allow me to explain why.
Beinart earns part of his living as an associate professor of journalism and political science at the City University of New York. I would hope that when he's not assigning his students to investigate us “prominent commentators,” he's familiarizing them with significant thinkers of the past.
For example, Carl von Clausewitz, the early 19th century German military theorist, famously said: “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” Zhou Enlai, the Chinese communist leader, took that a step further when he pronounced: “All diplomacy is a continuation of war by other means.”
If this is the view that Iran's rulers embrace — if, in other words, they don't buy into such fuzzy and fashionable Western notions as “confidence building” and “conflict resolution” — Beinart and others (not least in the Obama administration) are wrong to believe that Iranian diplomats are pursuing “engagement,” or a “peace process,” or, to use the older diplomatic lingo, rapprochement and detente.
Actually, it's pretty clear that Iran's rulers are proponents of machtpolitik: “Negotiations do not require concessions,” Iranian parliamentarian Ali Motahari recently said. “Negotiations are a tool for us to receive concessions.” And last week, Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, warned U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry: “[A] direct conflict with America is the strongest dream of the faithful and revolutionary men around the world. … Muslim leaders for years have been preparing us for a decisive battle.”
Ignoring such evidence, Beinart accuses me and others of attempting “to torpedo talks while blaming Iran for their failure.” Iranians, he argued on the radio program, “bravely” went to the polls last spring and elected Hassan Rouhani — whom Beinart believes is a “moderate”– as Iran's president. Beinart goes on to say that “to justify new sanctions as a means of settling the Iranian nuclear dispute 'without the use of force' is patently dishonest.”
In truth, no one knows whether increased economic pressure will convince Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader (“the title itself is repugnant to decent modern ears,” writes Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic — of which Beinart was once editor), that his nuclear weapons program is more liability than asset, endangering rather than strengthening his regime. But even if the odds are against a good outcome (that would be my judgment) surely muscular diplomacy is preferable to feckless diplomacy — which only emboldens authoritarians, as long historical experience has established.
I'd also turn Beinart's accusation around. I suspect that he and most of those who oppose even the threat of tougher sanctions are not saying what they really believe: that they want President Barack Obama to accept what he has called “unacceptable”: Iran's rulers — self-proclaimed jihadist revolutionaries and the world's leading sponsors of terrorism — becoming nuclear-armed and, before long, the hegemon of the Middle East.
I further charge that they've given no serious thought to what that would mean for America and the West — e.g., the end of nuclear nonproliferation and the likelihood of a nuclear “cascade”; Iran gaining enormous leverage over much of the world's global oil supplies and, by extension, Europe's economy; Iran becoming an existential threat to Israel and Saudi Arabia and other nations.
Which brings to mind two other Clausewitz quotes: “To secure peace is to prepare for war,” and “the best strategy is always to be very strong.” Perhaps Beinart might assign his talented college students a paper on those themes.
Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on national security.

1b)  Harvey Silverglate: Justice Goes After the GOP

Investigating Chris Christie's administration, indicting another prominent Republican. Is it political?




 By  


Is Eric Holder's Justice Department driven by a political agenda, or are the department's recent prosecutorial decisions simply signs of overzealousness?
The Justice Department has focused on two prominent Republicans, announcing a corruption indictment of former Virginia Gov. Robert McDonnell and launching an active and very public criminal investigation into the antics of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's administration. In doing so, federal prosecutors have created at least the appearance that they are targeting two men who have been touted as plausible candidates for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016.
A reading of the McDonnell indictment raises the obvious question of why the feds are charging someone who, as governor, engaged in conduct that is run-of-the-mill political activity in virtually all jurisdictions, but especially in states, like Virginia, whose laws quite clearly allow it. Certainly Mr. McDonnell and his wife, Maureen, don't come off well in the indictment. She in particular is painted as greedy even by political standards. Both are charged with receiving expensive gifts as well as loans from businessman Jonnie R. Williams Sr., whose commercial dietary supplements were promoted by the governor. Mr. McDonnell and his wife also invited Mr. Williams to dinners and events at the governor's mansion and arranged audiences for him with state health officials.
Mr. McDonnell's legal team responded to the accusations in a blistering motion in federal court in Richmond on Jan. 21, the day the indictment was announced, asserting that the activities alleged against Mr. McDonnell are no different from those of political figures nationwide. To charge Mr. McDonnell on these counts would, according to the defense, suggest an "untested, novel construction of the federal bribery statutes" that would put every state—and, for that matter, federal—officeholder in jeopardy of federal indictment.
The defense motion points out that Anthony Troy, a former Democratic attorney general of Virginia, "conducted an in-depth investigation into this issue" and concluded that since Mr. Williams and his company "neither sought nor received any special benefits from any public official," no crime was committed. Defense counsel argue that "political courtesies" extended to campaign donors or to generous friends are not crimes under any reasonable interpretation of the federal bribery statutes.
The attorney general testifies during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Jan. 29. Getty Images
Were it otherwise, notes the unusually acerbic motion, "President Obama's recent visit to DreamWorks DWA +2.23% studio in Hollywood, a company run by one of his top donors," would put Mr. Obama into the same club as Mr. McDonnell. As much could be said of every president who has awarded ambassadorships to campaign donors.
The investigation into the Christie administration by U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman (a registered Democrat) likewise raises eyebrows. The story is by now familiar: In the run-up to the New Jersey gubernatorial election, the Christie administration asked the mayor of Fort Lee, Democrat Mark Sokolich, to support the governor's re-election bid. Mr. Sokolich declined. In return, it is alleged that Mr. Christie's office coordinated with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to invent a four-day traffic study that closed two lanes approaching the George Washington Bridge, thereby creating epic traffic jams in Fort Lee.
Further suspected wrongdoing involves claims that the Christie administration abused its power to distribute federal disaster funds after Hurricane Sandy, withholding funds from another Democratic mayor who wasn't being sufficiently helpful with a development project favored by Mr. Christie.
The notion that a federal felony is committed when state officials reward political friends and punish enemies in this manner has become surprisingly widespread within the Justice Department. Because of vague and broad federal criminal statutes, there isn't much in public or political life these days that is not an arguable ground for an indictment. Obviously lost on federal prosecutors is the irony that their prosecutions of state politicians often create the same appearance of bias that the feds consider criminal when it is seen at the state and local level.
With the careers of two popular Republican governors—who might have been destined for national office—hanging in the balance, such suspicions of federal prosecutorial partisanship have become inevitable. But given that such federal prosecutions for state political activities abound, one must not be too quick to conclude that the department's motives are purely partisan. There may be some nonpartisan recklessness too.
Consider Justice's behavior in Massachusetts, a state dominated by a long-entrenched Democratic political machine that also has a U.S. attorney championed by Ted Kennedy and appointed by Barack Obama. Former state probation department officials are about to go on trial for awarding jobs to candidates sponsored by Democratic state legislators in exchange for support in departmental appropriations. U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz is applying a bizarre theory of criminality to this patronage—and her efforts recently received a black eye when it was learned that recommendations for hiring positions were made not only by state legislators, but also by judges and even the chancellor of Boston College, the Rev. J. Donald Monan.
There's no telling whether the feds can succeed in criminalizing "politics as usual" in a state where the legislature and judiciary have routinely failed to adopt the Justice Department's prescription for an acceptable political culture. What has become clear, however, is that the department's war against local politicians will continue, and that its motivations will lie somewhere between the quest for federal power and partisan politics.
Mr. Silverglate is the author of "Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent" (Encounter Books, updated in paperback 2011).
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2)  Obama's State of Disunion

His operating method has been social and political division.

By Dan Henninger

The 2008 campaign phrase "hope and change" will haunt future histories of the Obama presidency.
Many Americans voted Barack Obama into the White House for that reason alone. That reason is gone. The notion that this president would unify the nation by allowing people to summon their better spirits, as he promised, faded fast.
Even Mr. Obama's supporters see now that his operating method wasn't unification, but political and social division. Support for the president among the independents who gave him 52% of their vote in 2008 has fallen into the 30s.
Dividing the nation in his first term so that some Americans would vote in anger against his opposition was clearly the game plan from the start. He repeatedly scapegoated "the wealthiest" and the "1 percent." In 2012 when House Republicans published their deficit-reduction proposals, Mr. Obama dismissed the document as "laughable," "social Darwinism" and "antithetical to our entire history."
After four years of the politics of divide-and-conquer, Mr. Obama had stirred sufficient resentment in his political base to win a second term. What he has produced entering the sixth year of his presidency is a nation in a state of disunion.
This includes not only the famous 1%, but also the upper-middle class, Southern states, charter schools, politically active conservatives, private businesses, the Catholic church, electric utilities, doctors driven out of ObamaCare's health networks and those famous partisans, the Little Sisters of the Poor.The pollsters at Gallup wrote last week that Mr. "Obama is on course to have the most politically polarized approval ratings of any president." Segments of the U.S. population see themselves not just in disagreement with the Obama administration, but as the target of its policies.
All have been vilified, investigated, audited or sued by the president himself, Eric Holder's Justice Department, the National Labor Relations Board, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency and, not least, the Internal Revenue Service. Last year's most remarkable polling number from Gallup said in December that 72% of Americans regard big government as the greatest threat to the U.S. They got the message.
Even ObamaCare has contributed. The law's rules pit the healthy against the unhealthy by forcing them to pay higher premiums to subsidize the unhealthy. Catholics, some of whom might have supported ObamaCare, see their hospitals as singled out for retribution by their government.
The administration's supporters dismiss complaints about the in-your-face tenor of the Obama presidency as conservative sour grapes. "We won," they say, "get over it." OK, you won, but what have you done with it? Where's the upside?
The slow fade of hope is revealed in last week's Fox News poll, with 74% saying the country feels as if it's still in a recession, no matter that the real one ended in early 2009. It's hard to pretend hope is coming when, five years after the 2008 election, December's monthly jobs report said 347,000 Americans have given up looking for work. That's your real income inequality—the legions of chronically unemployed Americans who now have no earned income whatsoever.
In his speech, Mr. Obama pitched the causes of weak employment back "more than three decades." This 30-year-old problem has three major policy solutions available to him in 2014: tax reform, pending free-trade legislation and immigration reform. All require doing business with the other party in Congress. He can't, and by personal disposition doesn't want to. The speech made that clear.

Progressives justify coerced public policy with their belief that what they are doing is good. Setting aside several hundred years of unhappy world history with this notion, a glitch always occurs in the U.S.: Because the Founding Fathers designed an arduous system for producing progress, the far left has never been able to put its most purebred ideas consistently across the legislative goal line. Too many citizens resist. One might say the same of the far right, but they're not running anything just now. In frustration—and Mr. Obama is nothing if not frustrated—the White House is defaulting, as the left does everywhere, to direct executive action. We are at the dawn of the Unilateral Presidency.
Instead, Mr. Obama said his overdue promise of change is going to roll in on a cascade of unilateral executive orders and directives from his regulatory bureaucracies. (This includes sentencing Joe Biden to reforming all the federal job-training programs, another 30-year failure.)
How can this be good, if the price is more national disunion than we have now? Disunion is a dangerous political virus that sends a nation as complex as the U.S. toward a state of permanent, embittered opposition, which can be difficult for mere politicians to set right. We're about there.
Barack Obama could have allowed some accommodation to decompress the discord and political tension. For example, he could have lifted the economy with a bipartisan cut in the corporate tax rate in his first term. Instead, he raised taxes on "the wealthiest," and defined them as people with before-tax incomes above $200,000. Instead, the IRS audited his opponents. Get over it? Not anytime soon.
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Thursday, January 30, 2014

Speaking Sense To Black America But Will It Sink in or Can It? Chervis' Book!


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One of their own tries to speak sense to them. Will it sink in? Can it?  (See 1 below.)
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Egyptian journalist points the way.  (See 2 below.)
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Israeli Defense Minister, Ya'alon, continues to disagree with America's approach towards Iran but in a somewhat more muted tone.  (See 3 below.)
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This could be an ad from ComCast:
http://www.youtube.com/embed/0ilMx7k7mso
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"Four Little Words" was a song and now could be a torpedo.  (See 4 below)
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Teachers can make a great difference if they are allowed the freedom to teach in the way they know best and have the ability and desire.  (See 5 below.)
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One of my late father's most respected partners has written a book about his life and his relationship with my father.

The book is entitled: "Newspaper Boy"  Chervis Isom is the author and he is in the process of placing the book on Amazon, but until then anyone interested in buying the book may review the website: www.thenewspaperboy.net    He e mailed me that: " if my name- Chervis Isom- is added to the search line, the website pops right up.  Without my name, there is a lot of confusion with a movie by a similar name.  The website contains a summary of the book, a list of endorsements by writers and an author bio. "

Chervis gave me the book in draft form before it was edited and it is a delightful story  of a wonderful man who has become a revered lawyer. The kind of lawyer my father made sure comprised his entire firm which is now known as Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwaell and Berkowitz, having merged with former Sen. Howard Baker's firm.
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Dick
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1) Black America: Stop The Insanity!
By Lloyd Marcus

Remember that spiky-haired blonde fitness guru all over TV years ago?  Her famous line was "Stop the insanity!"  As a commonsense-thinking black conservative, I offer the same clarion call to fellow black Americans: "Stop the insanity!"
Why do you continue sleeping with the enemy, voting for liberal Democrats whose policies imply that you are inferior, stupid, and culturally immoral?  When the NAACP and Democrats claim that requiring a photo ID disenfranchises blacks, such implies we are stupid.  For the life of me, I do not understand why millions of blacks are not highly insulted by this absurd claim.  Do blacks fly?  Do blacks drive cars?  Do blacks cash checks?
When Democrats and liberals accept over 70% out-of-wedlock births and fatherless households as a cultural norm in the black community, I am offended.  And yet, I am called a sellout.
Liberal Democrats' policies and programs have destroyed the black family and continue to devastate the black community.  Meanwhile, blacks vote monolithically for Democrats and politically beat up anyone, black or white, who offers commonsense solutions.  For crying out loud, stop the insanity!
God forbid that a black person dare to think outside the liberals' we-be-simpleminded-blacks-in-need-of gov'ment-intervention-to-survive box.  Blacks becoming successful the old-fashioned way -- by earning it -- does not cut it with Democrats and liberals. Liberal media and Democrats grab such uppity blacks by their afros and politically drag their black derrières kicking and screaming back to the liberal Democrat plantation.
There, such blacks are strung up in the public square with their naked backs exposed, made an example for any other conservative-leaning blacks contemplating their escape.  Beaten, battered, and broken black conservatives are flogged within an inch of their political lives with countless articles and operative pundits calling them a stupid n*****, Uncle Tom, and traitor to their race.
A prime example of a black overlord of the Democrat liberal plantation attempting to rein in a black escapee is North Carolina NAACP Chapter President Rev. William Barber.  Black race-baiters typically use Black History Month and Martin Luther King Day to trash America for purposes of extortion.
In celebration of MLK Day, Rev. Barber called black conservative and Tea Party American Senator Tim Scott a puppet, saying, "A ventriloquist can always find a good dummy." 
Senator Scott is about applying commonsense solutions to issues plaguing our country.  Thus, once again, any black who does not view him- or herself as a victim of an eternally racist white America, entitled and in need of lowered standards and expectations, is a dummy, a tool of white Republicans -- a stupid self-loathing n*****.  This is not an exaggeration.
I have been called these names and worse by Democrats and liberals for many years every time I suggest that blacks stop having babies out of wedlock, stop dropping out of schools, stopping killing each other, stop blaming whitey, and assume personal responsibility for their lives.  To me, this is true black empowerment.
I do not know what it is going to take for black America to see the light -- to understand the betrayal of a majority of the modern civil rights coalition.  If these so-called advocates truly gave a hoot about blacks, they would celebrate extraordinary black conservative achievers such as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and businessman extraordinaire Herman Cain.  These blacks should be held high for black youths to see what can be achieved in the greatest land of opportunity on the planet via education, hard work, and good choices.
And yet, these blacks are despised by the white liberals and black civil rights leaders.  Why?  In a nutshell, these blacks nuke the Democrats' and liberals' entitlement and big-government narratives.
So while black America believes that white conservative Republicans are burning the midnight oil plotting ways to keep blacks down, Democrats and liberals are the ones keeping blacks enslaved.
With the liberal mainstream media in the Democrats' back pocket as complicit liberal plantation gatekeepers, I will continue praying for divine intervention while pounding on the plantation masters' door.  Let my people go!  My fellow black Americans, it truly is time to stop the insanity.

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2)
MEMRI: Egyptian Journalist: We Should Attack Hamas Terrorists in Gaza until
They Kiss Egyptian Shoes


In a January 9, 2014 interview on Faraeen TV, Egyptian journalist Muhammad
Hassan Al-Alfi said: "We should discipline [Hamas] just as Israel did... We
must strike them so they learn to respect the Egyptian shoe," adding: "Only
then will they kiss that shoe and learn what Egypt is worth."

Following is an excerpt:

Muhammad Hassan Al-Alfi: I pray that Allah deems every word that I ever
wrote in defense of the Palestinian cause to be a sin, for which He will
reckon with on Judgment Day, because they are not worthy of what he have
done for them. Our sons were killed and our economy was ruined in wars
fought for their sake. We fought for their sake, and now, they are fighting
against us, kidnapping our sons [in Sinai] and killing them.

The terrorist camps in Gaza must be attacked. The Al-Qassam Brigades, which
train them and send them over here, must be attacked. We should discipline
them just as Israel did. We should not just retaliate. When you are weak,
you get hit. We must strike them so they learn to respect the Egyptian shoe.

TV Host: Exactly.

Muhammad Hassan Al-Alfi: Only then will they kiss that shoe and learn what
Egypt is worth.

[...]

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) is an independent,
non-profit organization providing translations of the Middle East media and
original analysis and research on developments in the region. Copies of
articles and documents cited, as well as background information, are
available on request.
MEMRI holds copyrights on all translations. Materials may only be used with
proper attribution.
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3)Israel MoD Boss Blasts US Mideast Missteps
Warns of Iranian Hegemony as Washington Pivots From Region
By BARBARA OPALL-ROME


TEL AVIV — Two weeks after apologizing for a scathing attack on US Secretary
of State John Kerry and the US-led Mideast peace drive, Israeli Defense
Minister Moshe Ya’alon delivered a relatively temperate, yet no less
critical assessment of US policy and its impact on the region.

In a Jan. 28 address kicking off an annual security conference here, Ya’alon
assailed Washington for disengaging from conflict zones, relinquishing its
role as global policemen and succumbing to an interim deal with Iran which
he assailed as an “historic fumble.”

Unlike his tirade against Kerry, whom Ya’alon blasted as “inexplicably
obsessed” with pursuing an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal unworthy of “the
paper it was printed on,” the MoD boss offered a constructive assessment of
a strategically shifting region.

Washington, said Ya’alon, will remain the world’s sole superpower, despite
“the current situation, when the United States decides to disengage from
conflict zones and is unenthusiastic about serving as the world’s
policeman.”

While the US is challenged in the region by Russia and China, “there is no
one that wants to step into the shoes of the United States.”

Russia is leading in the Syrian theater by default, Ya’alon told a gathering
of Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), due to
Washington’s decision to “lower its profile.”

According to Ya’alon, a former head of military intelligence and Israel
Defense Forces chief of staff, only two nations divide the world into
territorial sectors of operational responsibility: the United States and
Iran.

And while Washington has disengaged forces from Iraq and is drawing down
from Afghanistan, Iran is rushing into those countries and elsewhere around
the globe to fill the vacuum with terror and export a “messianic,
apocalyptic” version of Islamic revolution, he said.

“The United States has its commands and Iran has its Corps. … It’s a regime
that is now well received in the world despite the fact that it continues to
spread its balance of terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, the Palestinian
theater in Gaza, South America, Asia and Africa,” Ya’alon said.

On the US-led drive to reach a two-state peace deal, Ya’alon dismissed as
“legend” claims that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a main source of
Sunni-Shi’a wars and other troubles roiling the region.

“There is an argument between us and our friends about the [larger regional
significance] of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But you can’t hang what’s
happening in the Middle East on this conflict,” he insisted.

He also rejected arguments articulated by the US government, most world
powers and many experts in Israel that failure to conclude a Palestinian
peace deal deters Saudi Arabia and other moderate Sunni states from forging
a united front against Iran.

“People in the Arab countries don’t raise the Palestinian issue; it’s only
lip service for external consumption. What does the Palestinian issue have
to do with the Iranian threat?”

In a televised interview presented Jan. 28 at the same INSS event, Palestine
Authority President Mahmoud Abbas utterly dismissed Ya’alon’s assertions,
insisting that 57 Arab and Islamic states — “from Mauritania to Indonesia” —
would grant “full recognition” of Israel once a two-state deal was
concluded.

“The opportunity for peace might not return,” Abbas told attorney, INSS
fellow and former Israeli peace negotiator Gilead Sher.

But Ya’alon, a prominent, yet relatively pragmatic hawk in the
right-of-center coalition government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, said peace with the Palestinians “apparently won’t be realized in
my generation.”

It is way too premature, he insisted, to consider US-crafted security
arrangements when Palestinians are unwilling to accept Israel’s right to
exist in the region as a sovereign homeland for the Jewish people.

“You can’t talk about security coming from unmanned aerial vehicles and
sensors. As long as the Israeli flag does not appear on their map, and
Palestine extends from Rosh Hanikra [bordering Lebanon in the north] to
Eilat [at the Red Sea]…. As long as they are unwilling to declare an end of
conflict and end of claims until the last Palestinian refugee is satisfied,
what is there to discuss? This is the essence of the conflict.”
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4)

Will: Four words could sink ACA


This is news to me, but I did not read the entire 2700 page ACA. Since GA. and 35 other states did not establish an exchange and uses the federal exchange they are not eligible for subsidies. Or will Obama make more adjustments to the law?  
 By George Will
Someone you probably are not familiar with has filed a suit you probably have not heard about concerning a four-word phrase you should know about.
The suit could blow to smithereens something everyone has heard altogether too much about, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (hereafter, ACA).
Scott Pruitt and some kindred spirits might accelerate the ACA’s collapse by blocking another of the Obama administration’s lawless uses of the Internal Revenue Service.
Pruitt was elected Oklahoma’s attorney general by promising to defend states’ prerogatives against federal encroachments and today he and some properly litigious people elsewhere are defending a state prerogative that the ACA explicitly created.
If they succeed, the ACA’s disintegration will accelerate.
Because under the ACA, insurance companies cannot refuse coverage because of an individual’s pre-existing condition. Because many people might therefore wait to purchase insurance after they become sick, the ACA requires a mandate to compel people to buy insurance. And because many people cannot afford the insurance that satisfies the ACA’s criteria, the ACA mandate makes it necessary to provide subsidies for those people.
The four words that threaten disaster for the ACA say the subsidies shall be available to persons who purchase health insurance in an exchange “established by the state.”
But 34 states have chosen not to establish exchanges.
So the IRS, which is charged with enforcing the ACA, has ridden to the rescue of Barack Obama’s pride and joy. Taking time off from writing regulations to restrict the political speech of Obama’s critics, the IRS has said, with its breezy indifference to legality, that subsidies shall also be dispensed to those who purchase insurance through federal exchanges the government has established in those 34 states. Pruitt is challenging the IRS in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Oklahoma.
The IRS says its “interpretation” of the law is “consistent with,” and justified by, the “structure of” the ACA. The IRS means that without its rule, the ACA would be unworkable and that Congress could not have meant to allow this. The ACA’s legislative history, however, demonstrates that Congress clearly wanted subsidies available only through state exchanges.
Some have suggested that the language limiting subsidies to state-run exchanges is a drafting error. Well.
Some of the ACA’s myriad defects do reflect its slapdash enactment. But the four potentially lethal words were carefully considered and express Congress’ intent.
Congress made subsidies available only through state exchanges as a means of coercing states into setting up exchanges.
In Senate Finance Committee deliberations on the ACA, Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., one of the bill’s primary authors, suggested the possibility of making state-run exchanges the sole source of subsidies because only by doing so could the federal government induce state cooperation with the ACA.
Then the law’s insurance requirements could be imposed on states without running afoul of constitutional law precedents that prevent the federal government from commandeering state governments.
If courts disallow the IRS’ “interpretation” of the law, the ACA will not function as intended in 34 states with 65 percent of the nation’s population. If courts allow the IRS’ demarche, they will validate this:
By dispensing subsidies through federal exchanges, the IRS will spend tax revenues without congressional authorization. And by enforcing the employer mandate in states that have only federal exchanges, it will collect taxes — remember, Chief Justice John Roberts saved the ACA by declaring that the penalty enforcing the mandate is really just a tax on the act of not purchasing insurance without congressional authorization.
If the IRS can do neither, it cannot impose penalties on employers who fail to offer ACA-approved insurance to employees.
If the IRS can do both, Congress can disband because it has become peripheral to American governance.
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5)  Great teacher!!!
Back in September of 2005, on the first day of school, Martha Cothren, a Military History teacher at Robinson High School in Little Rock , did something not to be forgotten. On the first day of school, with the permission of the school superintendent, the principal and the building supervisor, she removed all of the desks out of her classroom.

When the first period kids entered the room they discovered that there were no desks.

'Ms. Cothren, where are our desks?'

She replied, 'You can't have a desk until you tell me how you earn the right to sit at a desk.'

They thought, 'Well, maybe it's our grades.'

'No,' she said.

'Maybe it's our behavior.'

She told them, 'No, it's not even your behavior.'

And so, they came and went, the first period, second period, third period. Still no desks in the classroom.

Kids called their parents to tell them what was happening and by early afternoon television news crews had started gathering at the school to report about this crazy teacher who had taken all the desks out of her room.

The final period of the day came and as the puzzled students found seats on the floor of the deskless classroom, Martha Cothren said, 'Throughout the day no one has been able to tell me just what he or she has done to earn the
right to sit at the desks that are ordinarily found in this classroom.

Now I am going to tell you.'

At this point, Martha Cothren went over to the door of her classroom and opened it.

Twenty-seven (27) U.S. Veterans, all in uniform, walked into that classroom, each one carrying a school desk. The Vets began placing the school desks in rows, and then they would walk over and stand alongside the wall. By the time the last soldier had set the final desk in place those kids started to understand, perhaps for the first time in their lives, just how the right to sit at those desks had been earned.

Martha said, 'You didn't earn the right to sit at these desks. These heroes did it for you. They placed the desks here for you.  They went halfway around the world, giving up their education and interrupting their careers and families
so you could have the freedom you have.

Now, it's up to you to sit in them. It is your responsibility to learn, to be good students, to be good citizens. They paid the price so that you could have the freedom to get an education. don't ever forget it.'

By the way, this is a true story. And this teacher was awarded Veterans of Foreign Wars Teacher of the Year for the state of Arkansas in 2006. She is the daughter of a WWII POW.
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