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How can I revere MLK and have nothing but contempt for Obama and then be called a racist?
Facts are just not part of Liberal lexicon! (See 1 and 1a below.)
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Judge Jeanine minces no words:http://www.israpundit.com/
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Bnghazi is like a leaky faucet that drips, drips, drips. (See 2 below.)
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Setting the record straight. (See 3 below.)
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Roubini sees a bubble forming. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)Obama: Perhaps Racism Has Something to Do with My Ugly Approval Ratings?
By Daniel Doherty
The president has a new theory as to why he’s not as popular as he once was:racism.
To a certain extent…okay. Maybe some Americans are blinded by their hatred for this president because of his race, and therefore would never approve of the job he’s doing in office -- as sad as that is to admit in print. But of course this is a very, very small percentage of the population overall. And furthermore, these malcontents would never have approved of him in the first place. So how does he explain a demographic that never liked him, much less approved of his job performance, now suddenly jumping ship? Doesn’t make much sense if you ask me; there must be another explanation.
This seems like a lame excuse from an increasingly desperate president. A better explanation for his sinking approval numbers is perhaps the most recent jobs report, his foreign policies missteps, and his foundering signature health care law. But, according to him, evidently his race -- not his job performance -- is contributing to his unpopularity.
The truth is a lot more complicated.
1a) Fact-Free Liberals
By Thomas Sowell
Someone summarized Barack Obama in three words -- "educated," "smart" and "ignorant." Unfortunately, those same three words would describe all too many of the people who come out of our most prestigious colleges and universities today.
1a) Fact-Free Liberals
By Thomas Sowell
Someone summarized Barack Obama in three words -- "educated," "smart" and "ignorant." Unfortunately, those same three words would describe all too many of the people who come out of our most prestigious colleges and universities today.
President Obama seems completely unaware of how many of the policies he is trying to impose have been tried before, in many times and places around the world, and have failed time and again. Economic equality? That was tried in the 19th century, in communities set up by Robert Owen, the man who coined the term "socialism." Those communities all collapsed.
It was tried even earlier, in 18th century Georgia, when that was a British colony. People in Georgia ended up fleeing to other colonies, as many other people would vote with their feet in the 20th century, by fleeing many other societies around the world that were established in the name of economic equality.
But who reads history these days? Moreover, those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the left -- which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study -- are not likely to get much attention.
The net results are bright people, with impressive degrees, who have been told for years how brilliant they are, but who are often ignorant of facts that might cause them to question what they have been indoctrinated with in schools and colleges.
Recently Kirsten Powers repeated on Fox News Channel the discredited claim that women are paid only about three-quarters of what a man is paid for doing the same work.
But there have been empirical studies, going back for decades, showing that there is no such gap when the women and men are in the same occupation, with the same skills, experience, education, hours of work and continuous years of full-time work.
Income differences between the sexes reflect the fact that women and men differ in all these things -- and more. Young male doctors earn much more than young female doctors. But young male doctors work over 500 hours a year more than young female doctors.
Then there is the current hysteria which claims that people in the famous "top one percent" have incomes that are rising sharply and absorbing a wholly disproportionate share of all the income in the country.
But check out a Treasury Department study titled "Income Mobility in the U.S. from 1996 to 2005." It uses income tax data, showing that people who were in the top one percent in 1996 had their incomes fall -- repeat, fall -- by 26 percent by 2005.
What about the other studies that seem to say the opposite? Those are studies of income brackets, not studies of the flesh-and-blood human beings who are moving from one bracket to another over time. More than half the people who were in the top one percent in 1996 were no longer there in 2005.
This is hardly surprising when you consider that their incomes were going down while there was widespread hysteria over the belief that their incomes were going up.
Empirical studies that follow income brackets over time repeatedly reach opposite conclusions from studies that follow individuals. But people in the media, in politics and even in academia, cite statistics about income brackets as if they are discussing what happens to actual human beings over time.
All too often when liberals cite statistics, they forget the statisticians' warning that correlation is not causation. For example the New York Times crusaded for government-provided prenatal care, citing the fact that black mothers had prenatal care less often than white mothers -- and that there were higher rates of infant mortality among blacks.
But was correlation causation? American women of Chinese, Japanese and Filipino ancestry also had less prenatal care than whites -- and lower rates of infant mortality than either blacks or whites.
When statistics showed that black applicants for conventional mortgage loans were turned down at twice the rate for white applicants, the media went ballistic crying racial discrimination. But whites were turned down almost twice as often as Asian Americans -- and no one thinks that is racial discrimination.
Facts are not liberals' strong suit. Rhetoric is.
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2) The drip, drip, drip of Benghazi
By Joseph Curl
Another day, another revelation on Benghazi.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times and is now editor of the Drudge Report. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.
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3)Palestine is a Geographical Area, Not a Nationality
At a breakfast event Friday, Roubini cited "frothiness" in housing, junk bonds and potentially bitcoins, according to Fortune. The situation could play out into a financial crisis in the next two to three years, Roubini says.
He sees economic growth accelerating this year, but not enough to boost the wages of average Americans. That, in turn, will starve the economy of the consumer spending and debt reduction it needs to thrive, Roubini explained.
U.S. GDP growth averaged an annualized 2.6 percent during the first three quarters of 2013.
"The question is whether we have gotten to sustainable growth that is not based on bubbles," Roubini said. "Not yet."
As for stocks, he believes earnings growth is decelerating, stating that equities aren't in a bubble now, but they are expensive.
Not everyone agrees. University of Pennsylvania finance professor Jeremy Siegel sees the Dow Jones Industrial Average heading for 18,000 to 18,500.
"I still think we are below fair market value, so I still think we've got 10 to 15 percent to get there in the markets," he told CNBC.
The Dow closed at 16,458.56 Friday.
Meanwhile, Roubini doesn't believe the energy boom in the United States will have as great of an impact in the price of oil as many believe. Since many countries in the Middle East are dependent on oil revenue, lower revenue could lead to instability in the area, which usually results in higher oil prices.
In addition, Roubini said the United States is underinvesting in infrastructure and education, which will worsen the income inequality problem.
"Capital will do well, and skilled labor will do well," he noted. "Blue collar workers, not as much."
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2) The drip, drip, drip of Benghazi
By Joseph Curl
Another day, another revelation on Benghazi.
The “bipartisan” Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last week put out a scathing report on the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on U.S. diplomatic outposts in Libya, citing “systematic failures” that led to the death of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
While the heavily redacted report released to the American public spread the blame, the committee repeatedly pointed the finger at former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s State Department.
In perhaps the most significant finding, the report said the intelligence community (IC), including
the CIA, NSA and Pentagon, among others, delivered many warnings on the growing threats in Benghazi, but the State Department failed to take them seriously and increase security.
“Finding 1: In the months before the attacks on September 11, 2012, the IC provided ample strategic warning that the security situation in eastern Libya was deteriorating and the U.S. facilities and personnel were at risk in Benghazi,” the report said.
More: “The IC produced hundreds of analytic reports in the months preceding the September 11-12, 2012, attacks, providing strategic warning that militias and terrorist and affiliated groups had the capability and intent to strike the U.S. and Western facilities and personnel in Libya.”
Those “analytic reports” came with stark titles. “Libya: Terrorists Now Targeting U.S. and Western Interests,” said one from June 2012. “Terrorism: Conditions Ripe for More Attacks, Terrorist Safe Haven in Libya,” said another. And, “Libya: Terrorists to Increase Strength During Next Six Months.”
The committee’s conclusion: “Given these developments and the available intelligence at the time, the committee believes the State Department should have recognized the need to increase security to a level commensurate with the threat, or suspend operations in Benghazi.”
The new report also ripped the State Department for what it did after the attack. “In finished reports after September 11, 2012, intelligence analysts inaccurately referred to the presence of a protest at the Mission facility before the attack based on open source information and limited intelligence, but without sufficient intelligence or eyewitness statements to corroborate that assertion. The IC took too long to correct these erroneous reports, which caused confusion and influenced the public statements of policymakers.”
In the days after the attack, the Obama administration dispatched the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, to the Sunday talk shows to detail what the White House knew. She said on Sept. 16 that the attackers gathered “spontaneously” to protest at the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi. Within days, security footage from inside the compound proved there was no protest, but months later, Mrs. Clinton asked: “Was it because of a protest or because of guys out for a walk one night and decided to go kill some Americans? At this point what difference does it make, senator?”
What’s more, the report concluded that terrorists connected to al Qaeda were in fact present at the attack — contradicting what a December article in The New York Times asserted. “Individuals affiliated with terrorist groups, including AQIM (al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb), Ansar al-Sharia, AQAP (al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula), and the Mohammad Jamal Network (which the State Department says is connected to al Qaeda), participated in the September 11, 2012, attacks,” the report said.
In fact, the report uses the word “terrorist” 70 times — something it took the president and his minions weeks to use. Later reports show the White House knew within hours that the attack was terrorism.
The bipartisan report was devastating to hard-left political pundits, who have been pushing the notion that Benghazi is all smoke and no fire. And at least two seized on an absolutely despicable angle.
“What the Senate report found was that they actually agreed — a bipartisan agreement on the facts — which was that the attack was preventable, and they raised several areas where it could have been prevented, like
Ambassador Stevens unfortunately refusing help from Central Command General [Carter] Ham when it was offered — twice,” Democratic talking head Hillary Rosen said on CNN.
Bloviator Piers Morgan went a step further. “Is it fair to also say that he as the ambassador should have done more to react to direct warnings that he was given on numerous occasions?”
Democrats will continue to grasp at straws, but the latest report clearly signals that Congress needs to reopen all investigations to get to the bottom of what top Obama officials knew and when they knew it. And Hillary Rodham Clinton should be front and center of the probes.
A Republican senator, Susan Collins of Maine, summed up the report in one trenchant sentence: “A broken system overseen by senior leadership contributed to the vulnerability of U.S. diplomats … in one of the most dangerous cities in the world, and yet the secretary of state has not held anyone responsible for the system’s failings.”
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times and is now editor of the Drudge Report. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.
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3)Palestine is a Geographical Area, Not a Nationality
Eli E. Hertz
The Arabs invented a special national entity in the 1960s called the Palestinians, specifically for political gain. They brand Israelis as invaders and claim the geographic area called Palestine belongs exclusively to the Arabs.
The word Palestine is not even Arabic. It is a word coined by the Romans around 135 CE from the name of a seagoing Aegean people who settled on the coast of Canaan in antiquity – the Philistines. The name was chosen to replace Judea, as a sign that Jewish sovereignty had been eradicated following the Jewish revolts against Rome.
In the course of time, the Latin name Philistia was further bastardized into Palistina or Palestine. During the next 2,000 years, Palestine was never an independent state belonging to any people, nor did a Palestinian people, distinct from other Arabs, appear during 1,300 years of Muslim hegemony in Palestine under Arab and Ottoman rule.
Palestine was and is solely a geographic name. Therefore, it is not surprising that in modern times the name ‘Palestine’ or ‘Palestinian’ was applied as an adjective to all inhabitants of the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River – Palestine Jews and Palestine Arabs alike. In fact, until the 1960s, most Arabs in Palestine preferred to identify themselves merely as part of the great Arab nation or citizens of “southern Syria.”
The term ‘Palestinian’ as a noun was usurped and co-opted by the Arabs in the 1960s as a tactic initiated by Yasser Arafat to brand Jews as intruders on someone else’s turf. He presented Arab residents of Israel and the Territories as indigenous inhabitants since time immemorial. This fabrication of peoplehood allowed Palestinian Arabs to gain parity with the Jewish people as a nation deserving of an independent state.
Historically, Before the Arabs Fabricated the Palestinian People as an Exclusively Arab Phenomenon, No Such Group Existed
Countless official British Mandate-vintage documents speak of ‘the Jews’ and ‘the Arabs’ of Palestine – not ‘Jews and Palestinians.’
Ironically, before local Jews began calling themselves Israelis in 1948 (the name ‘Israel’ was chosen for the newly-established Jewish state), the term ‘Palestine’ applied almost exclusively to Jews and the institutions founded by new Jewish immigrants in the first half of the 20th century, before independence.
Some examples include:
• The Jerusalem Post, founded in 1932, was called the Palestine Post until 1948.
• Bank Leumi L’Israel was called the “Anglo-Palestine Bank, a Jewish Company.”
• The Jewish Agency – an arm of the Zionist movement engaged in Jewish settlement since 1929 – was called the Jewish Agency for Palestine.
• The house organ of American Zionism in the 1930s was called New Palestine.
• Today’s Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, founded in 1936 by German Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany, was called the “Palestine Symphony Orchestra, composed of some 70 Palestinian Jews.”
• The United Jewish Appeal (UJA) was established in 1939 as a merger of the United Palestine Appeal and the fundraising arm of the Joint Distribution Committee.
Encouraged by their success at historical revisionism and brainwashing the world with the ‘Big Lie’ of a Palestinian people, Palestinian Arabs have more recently begun to claim they are the descendants of the Philistines and even the Stone Age Canaanites. Based on that myth, they can claim to have been ‘victimized’ twice by the Jews: In the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites and by the Israelis in modern times – a total fabrication.
Archeologists explain that the Philistines were a Mediterranean people who settled along the coast of Canaan in 1100 BCE. They have no connection to the Arab nation, a desert people who emerged from the Arabian Peninsula.
Contradictions abound, Palestinian leaders claim to be descended from the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Jebusites and the first Christians. They also co-opt Jesus and ignore his Jewishness, at the same time claiming the Jews never were a people and never built the Holy Temples in Jerusalem.
There Has Never Been a Sovereign Arab State in Palestine
The artificiality of a Palestinian identity is reflected in the attitudes and actions of neighboring Arab nations who never established a Palestinian state. It also is expressed in the utterances and loyalties of so-called Palestinians.
Only twice in Jerusalem’s history has it served as a national capital. The first time was as the capital of the two Jewish Commonwealths during the First and Second Temple periods, as described in the Bible, reinforced by archaeological evidence and numerous ancient documents.
The second time is in modern times as the capital of the State of Israel. It has never served as an Arab capital for the simple reason that there has never been a Palestinian Arab state.
The rhetoric by Arab leaders on behalf of the Palestinians rings hollow, for the Arabs in neighboring lands, who control 99.9 percent of the Middle East land, have never recognized as a Palestinian entity. They have always considered Palestine and its inhabitants part of the great ‘Arab nation,’ historically and politically as an integral part of Greater Syria.
The Arabs never established a Palestinian state when the UN offered a partition plan in 1947 to establish “an Arab and a Jewish state” (not a Palestinian state, it should be noted). Nor did the Arabs recognize or establish a Palestinian state during the two decades prior to the Six-Day War when the West Bank was under Jordanian control and the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian control; nor did the Palestinians clamor for autonomy or independence during those years under Jordanian and Egyptian rule.
Well before the 1967 decision to create a new Arab people called ‘Palestinians,’ when the word ‘Palestinian’ was associated with Jewish endeavors, Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, a local Arab leader, testified in 1937 before a British investigative body – the Peel Commission – saying: “There is no such country [as Palestine]! Palestine is a term the Zionists invented! There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries, part of Syria.
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4)Roubini: Fed Beginning to Create BubblesM
The economy isn't strong enough to stand on its own two feet, and the assistance provided by the Federal Reserve is beginning to create bubbles, says New York University economist Nouriel Roubini.
At a breakfast event Friday, Roubini cited "frothiness" in housing, junk bonds and potentially bitcoins, according to Fortune. The situation could play out into a financial crisis in the next two to three years, Roubini says.
He sees economic growth accelerating this year, but not enough to boost the wages of average Americans. That, in turn, will starve the economy of the consumer spending and debt reduction it needs to thrive, Roubini explained.
U.S. GDP growth averaged an annualized 2.6 percent during the first three quarters of 2013.
"The question is whether we have gotten to sustainable growth that is not based on bubbles," Roubini said. "Not yet."
As for stocks, he believes earnings growth is decelerating, stating that equities aren't in a bubble now, but they are expensive.
Not everyone agrees. University of Pennsylvania finance professor Jeremy Siegel sees the Dow Jones Industrial Average heading for 18,000 to 18,500.
"I still think we are below fair market value, so I still think we've got 10 to 15 percent to get there in the markets," he told CNBC.
The Dow closed at 16,458.56 Friday.
Meanwhile, Roubini doesn't believe the energy boom in the United States will have as great of an impact in the price of oil as many believe. Since many countries in the Middle East are dependent on oil revenue, lower revenue could lead to instability in the area, which usually results in higher oil prices.
In addition, Roubini said the United States is underinvesting in infrastructure and education, which will worsen the income inequality problem.
"Capital will do well, and skilled labor will do well," he noted. "Blue collar workers, not as much."
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