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OK so it is very politically incorrect but it is also funny as hell if you have a mordant sense of humor.
Wow, this courageous patient should be an inspiration to us all. From all appearances he looks to be well treated and professionally taken care of. It is encouraging to see that there are two healthcare providers treating this man for a serious migraine headache condition. http://truenewsusa.blogspot.
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If Obama is busy buying the Afghan Air Force, Russian Helicopters maybe he should insist they be built in his newly announced economic zones. (See 1 below.)
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For those who read these memos you know I underwent knee surgery Dec 19. My surgeon was Carlton Savory of The Hughston Clinic in Columbus, Ga..
Carlton has a lot of experience in what they call redos and when he was in service was stationed at Fort Bragg and then became Chief of Orthopedics at Walter Reed before coming to Hughston.
Several of my friends, who have been patients of Carlton, suggested I go to him and I was also encouraged by Tad Wilson who performed my first two knee transplants.
Since my third surgery, I can at least state my knee is straighter and I am now trying to get beyond 85 degrees of bending. My therapists has set a goal of 100 and believes I can get there. My ultimate goal is to get back to playing tennis and living a more normal life.
I have nothing but praise for all my surgeons, their staff and assistants and my scar tissue problem is something no one anticipated.
I write this not only to bring you up to date on myself but also to attest to the fact that we are fortunate to live in a country that has perfected such fine medical care and it is tragic what Obama and his radical'do gooders' have undertaken to improve what already was the best.
Yes, no doubt our medical system needed 'fixing' from a cost standpoint and yes, there were those who were not covered by some form of insurance. However, the plan Obama has proposed and continues to stubbornly demand, because his pride would be injured if he admitted he broke what worked, is not the solution.
In an earlier memo, I cited the English essayist who wrote "The Burning of A Roast Pig." It was a satire about a native who wanted to roast a pig and did so by setting fire to his house in the process.
Everything in life, particularly now that we have increased technological capabilities of informing, seems to have become politicized and we are not only worse off but also more divided than ever.
There is no profession I know of that renders perfection. Mistakes are made, tragedies occur. Witness the recent young girl who is brain dead after a tonsillectomy. Then there are those who cannot afford the best legal advocacy and go to jail or endure longer sentences due to ineptitude and the list of tragedies is endless.
Furthermore, the poor do not have the same advocacy enjoyed by those of means so the government is their fall back.
What I find disturbing and even unAmerican, is that this president sought to allegedly even the playing field by suggesting the financially advantaged take advantage of the disadvantaged and Obama even went to the extreme by lying. No one, in their right mind, believes life is fair, everything is just and there are no abuses. Humans are flawed and I daresay humans will continue to be flawed long after I am gone.
There will always be those on the bottom because there is not enough room for everyone to be on the top. What our nation has accomplished, however,is more good for more people than any other nation so there must be something extraordinary about our Constitution and the way we have governed ourselves and been governed.
That said, I submit attempting to do right is never justified by doing wrong and this is why I am angered by this president's methods, by his questionable leadership and his abject unwillingness to admit that others have ideas that might be preferable or, at the very least, are worth considering. But no, he impugns their motives and integrity claiming they are anti this or anti that.
His reactions are not that of a statesman. They are the reactions of an insecure and deeply flawed and disturbed personality.
Obama is a fraud and America is worse because of it and certainly our health care system is being negatively effected by his foibles .
My observations are not motivated by racial prejudice. They are based on what I have observed, what I have experienced and learned. I find Obama to be disingenuous. I do not believe he has the best interest of my nation in mind notwithstanding, his syrupy and self serving demagogic speeches. His every actions seem to be motivated by some political consideration and putting down those who question his policies.
Consequently, I repeat, Obama is not only one of the worst presidents I have experienced but is the most dangerous and I have lived under some turkeys being 80 years of age. (See 2 below.)
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Krauthammer speaks out against academic liberal bigotry.
Just one more example how liberals are allowed to finesse their prejudice and escape being held accountable by their adoring press.
Even worse, many Liberal Jews are either indifferent or remain silent. (See 3 below.)
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My friend, John Podhoretz, is not willing to throw the towel in regarding Hillary's chances of becoming the Democrat nominee. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1) Russian Helicopters for sale...
Does anyone remember Barack Obama's great promise of the campaign of 2012? He did not make a promise to America nor to Americans. He did not make a promise to fellow politicians. Unlike so many of his promises, he is keeping this one. His promise was to Vladimir Putin of Russia.What is Obama doing to keep his promise to Putin? Everyone remembers the hot mike incident in 2012 when Barack Obama pleaded with Russian President Dmitri Medvedyev to give him time until the election. After the election, he promised Vladimir Putin, through Medvedyev, he would be more "flexible."
Now we have seen this flexibility.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Barack Obama is going to spend almost $700 million dollars of taxpayer money to buy Russian helicopters for the Afghan Air Force. But wait. Just like those TV commercials, this gets better. When Congress passed the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act, it had an interesting provision. Congress included, as a part of that law a prohibition on the United States buying helicopters from Rosoboronexport, the Russian manufacturer of the Mi-17 helicopter.Unfortunately as always happens, when such laws are passed, Congress always gives the Regime an escape hatch. The law stated that Obama could buy from Rosoboronexport if the Secretary of Defense certified it was in the interest of National Security. And of course, the Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel , a man committed to destroying the US military immediately signed off on that certification. Where do we even start with this one?Congress is outraged over this with Senators and Representatives from both parties writing letters about this. Of course, this is Congress' fault for allowing a law to be written with such an escape hatch. More importantly, Americans need to be asking just what the hell the Obama Regime is doing.Why are we spending $700 million dollars with a Russian arms manufacturer? Why are we even giving the Afghans these helicopters?If we are going to give them helicopters, which we really shouldn't, then why not give them American made helicopters and put Americans to work?
if we are going to give the Afghans Russian helicopters, the ones we are giving them are an old Cold War design. There are hundreds of used MI-17 helicopters floating around the world. Why are we paying to give the Afghans brand new helicopters?In the era of the Sequester, isn't there something better we can do with $700 million? American Medicare cancer patients are being turned away from hospitals and are being denied life saving treatment because of budget cuts. The American military is being gutted to the point of ineffectiveness because of budget cuts.Or consider this. The United States Air Force is grounding 17 squadrons because of $591 million dollars in budget cuts. Our Air Force is not able to do its mission because it lacks the money to fly but we have the money to give Afghanistan $700 million dollars in Russian helicopters.
2)The Holder Effect
By Russ Vaughn
In spite of the best efforts of the liberal media to first suppress news reports about the Knockout Game phenomenon, and then, when that failed, to poo-poo the idea that any such thing as this violent and obviously race-based crime even existed, the truth will out. Thanks to the internet, the liberal elites who censor the output of the major news organizations can no longer cover up events that fail to depict contemporary life as they wish it to be. But even if you don't hear about it or read about it from one of their publications or networks, your chances of learning about these crimes are much better today than just a few years ago when the so-called mainstream media could effectively bury what was unfavorable to their vision of fit to print.
This inability to totally control the dissemination of news now causes the media establishment to put even more than their normal amount of spin on their output when they are forced to cover an issue or risk looking foolish for the outright denial of an ongoing crime wave that everyone knows is growing. For instance, when they are forced to cover this offense, they still will not use the actual name of Polar Bear Hunting because of its all too obvious racial implications. Unable to ignore it any longer, they play it down -- especially the racial aspects of it, because that may put our black president, his black attorney general, and all those black and liberal white lawyers in Holder's civil rights division in a bad light because they aren't investigating what appears to be serial hate crime.
Which of course is true; our president is silent on what is a matter of growing public concern primarily among white Americans, who constitute, to date, all but one of the victims of this criminal game. That he remains silent when it is a particularly supportive and primarily Democrat demographic, white Jewish Americans, who appear to be the most at-risk group, offers even greater testament that the Obama administration and the Holder justice department are deliberately disinclined to prosecute hate crimes where blacks are the perpetrators and whites are the victims. Jewish Democrats should take heed of this policy where race trumps ideological loyalty.
The latest example of a Knockout Game attack is going to make this head-in-the-sand policy a bit difficult to maintain but they are trying their best. The Daily Caller's lead article from that day has the goods on a young black thug who assaulted an elderly white woman in Rochester, NY recently -- and I do mean the goods, with Facebook videos , photos , and audio boasting that should enable the Rochester Police Department to put him away for a stretch on charges of harassment. Harassment? Yep -- according to the RPD spokesperson, Sgt. Elena Correia, the crime committed by the appropriately self-styled True Goon Tocool Sneekey, appears to be harassment, not felony assault, even though True Goon allegedly struck the woman full in the face with his fist at the end of a roundhouse left. That's some fairly serious harassment by anyone's definition. And this is not RPD's first attempt to play down this despicable crime. I'd dearly love to see that portion of the New York criminal code that Sgt. Correia claims to define such an act of felonious assault as harassment, wouldn't you? Makes you wonder that if some white gun-loving male punched his wife in the face with his fist if that would be handled by the politically correct Rochester Police Department as a case of domestic harassment, hmmm? Any bets?
It is becoming increasingly disturbing that it is not just the Obama administration and the brown-nosed media that have attempted to sweep this new criminal activity under the rug but these local police departments. It's happening all over the country, and not just in the major urban centers. I call this racialization of the law and criminality the Holder Effect, for it was the relatively new attorney general who famously announced that his justice department would side with his people.
Of course, the Holder justice department has not ignored the Knockout Game entirely. A recent such attack in Houston has been charged as a federal hate crime, and the perp is going to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Anyone care to guess the races of the perp and the victim? Mind you, I'm not defending the despicable behavior of this racist and probably mentally unbalanced jerk -- just making the observation that out of the hundreds of these crimes that have occurred, the first Knockout Game perp to be charged by the justice department with a hate crime, and done so with great swiftness, is white.
Holder Effect, indeed...
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3)
How to fight academic bigotry
For decades, the American Studies Association labored in well-deserved obscurity. No longer. It has now made a name for itself by voting to boycott Israeli universities, accusing them of denying academic and human rights to Palestinians.
Given that Israel has a profoundly democratic political system, the freest press in the Middle East, a fiercely independent judiciary and astonishing religious and racial diversity within its universities, including affirmative action for Arab students, the charge is rather strange.
Made more so when you consider the state of human rights in Israel’s neighborhood. As we speak, Syria’s government is dropping “barrel bombs” filled with nails, shrapnel and other instruments of terror on its own cities. Where is the ASA boycott of Syria?
And of Iran, which hangs political, religious and even sexual dissidents and has no academic freedom at all? Or Egypt, where Christians are being openly persecuted? Or Turkey, Saudi Arabia or, for that matter,massively repressive China and Russia?
Which makes obvious that the ASA boycott has nothing to do with human rights. It’s an exercise in radical chic, giving marginalized academics a frisson of pretend anti-colonialism, seasoned with a dose of edgy anti-Semitism.
And don’t tell me this is merely about Zionism. The ruse is transparent. Israel is the world’s only Jewish state. To apply to the state of the Jews a double standard that you apply to none other, to judge one people in a way you judge no other, to single out that one people for condemnation and isolation — is to engage in a gross act of discrimination.
And discrimination against Jews has a name. It’s called anti-Semitism.
Former Harvard president Larry Summers called the ASA actions “anti-Semitic in their effect if not necessarily in their intent.” I choose to be less polite. The intent is clear: to incite hatred for the largest — and only sovereign — Jewish community on Earth.
What to do? Facing a similar (British) academic boycott of Israelis seven years ago, Alan Dershowitz and Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg wrote an open letter declaring that, for the purposes of any anti-Israel boycott, they are to be considered Israelis.
Meaning: You discriminate against Israelis? Fine. Include us out. We will have nothing to do with you.
Thousands of other academics added their signatures to the Dershowitz/Weinberg letter. It was the perfect in-kind response. Boycott the boycotters, with contempt.
But academia isn’t the only home for such prejudice. Throughout the cultural world, theIsrael boycott movement is growing. It’s become fashionable for musicians, actors, writers and performers of all kinds to ostentatiously cleanse themselves of Israel and Israelis.
The example of the tuxedoed set has spread to the more coarse and unkempt anti-Semites, such as the thugs who a few years ago disrupted London performances of the Jerusalem Quartet and the Israeli Philharmonic.
Five years ago in Sweden, Israel’s Davis Cup team had to play its matches in an empty tennis stadium because the authorities could not guarantee the Israelis’ safety from the mob. The most brazen display of rising anti-Semitism today is the spread of the “quenelle,” a reverse Nazi salute, popularized by the openly anti-Semitic French entertainer, Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala.
In this sea of easy and open bigotry, an unusual man has made an unusual statement. Russian by birth, European by residence, Evgeny Kissin is arguably the world’s greatest piano virtuoso. He is also a Jew of conviction. Deeply distressed by Israel’s treatment in the cultural world around him, Kissin went beyond the Dershowitz/Weinberg stance of asking to be considered an Israeli. On Dec. 7, he became one, defiantly.
Upon taking the oath of citizenship in Jerusalem, he declared: “I am a Jew, Israel is a Jewish state. . . . Israel’s case is my case, Israel’s enemies are my enemies, and I do not want to be spared the troubles which Israeli musicians encounter when they represent the Jewish state beyond its borders.”
Full disclosure: I have a personal connection with Kissin. For the past two years I’ve worked to bring him to Washington to perform for Pro Musica Hebraica, a nonprofit organization (founded by my wife and me) dedicated to reviving lost and forgotten Jewish classical music. We succeeded. On Feb. 24, Kissin will perform at the Kennedy Center Concert Hallmasterpieces of Eastern European Jewish music, his first U.S. appearance as an Israeli.
The persistence of anti-Semitism, that most ancient of poisons, is one of history’s great mysteries. Even the shame of the Holocaust proved no antidote. It provided but a temporary respite. Anti-Semitism is back. Alas, a new generation must learn to confront it.
How? How to answer the thugs, physical and intellectual, who single out Jews for attack? The best way, the most dignified way, is to do like Dershowitz, Weinberg or Kissin.
Express your solidarity. Sign the open letter or write your own. Don the yellow star and wear it proudly.
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I wrote a book with the subtitle: “Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States Unless . . .” Unfortunately, I wrote it in 2005 and published it in 2006 — and my answer to the “unless” wasn’t Barack Obama, but Rudy Giuliani.
My book did about as well as it deserved to do. Still, its central contention — that Hillary would be the 2008 Democratic nominee — was entirely uncontroversial when I wrote it, when I published it and for a year afterward.
And it would be entirely uncontroversial now for 2016.
This time she comes into the race with seemingly insuperable advantages: The best-known Democrat besides the president, she has every benefit of her last name and none of the disadvantages and is revered by many in her party.
But all that was true before 2008 as well. So let me caution everyone else against making the same assumption in 2014 that I made in ’05 and everybody else made in ’06.
If Mrs. Clinton were a Republican, political history suggests she’d very likely be the nominee, because the GOP has a long history of picking “the next guy in line.” (Ronald Reagan came in second for the nomination in 1976, then won it in 1980. The elder George Bush finished second in ’80 and won in ’88. Bob Dole was No. 2 in ’88 and the nominee in ’96; John McCain, second in 2000 and the nominee in ’08.Mitt Romney , basically the runner-up in ’08, won the nomination in ’12.)
Only twice in the past 50 years has someone who’d never run before carried the GOP banner: Barry Goldwater in 1964 (lost) and George W. Bush in 2000 (won).
Not so for the Democrats. George McGovern got the nomination in 1972 out of nowhere, as did Jimmy Carter in ’76. Michael Dukakis hadn’t run before he was the nominee in ’88, nor had Bill Clinton when he won in ’92. John Kerry in 2004 and Obama in ’08 each won on his first try.
Only three times in the past half-century has the Democratic next-in-line secured the nomination, and in each case, the party failed to take the White House: Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Walter Mondale in 1984 and Al Gore in 2000.
So history is actually against Mrs. Clinton on the basis of her inevitability. Democrats tend not to like veterans of the presidential race running for the highest office and don’t like to pick the obvious choice. Nor, it seems, do voters in the general election.
Yet you can’t beat someone with no one, which is why the underground Clinton campaign is doing everything possible to make it seem she’s the inevitable choice, and to keep others from considering a run.
But there’s never “no one.” Someone will challenge her. The two obvious possibilities are Vice President Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, the new, left-populist senator from Massachusetts who has positioned herself as the friend of the consumer and the enemy of the banks.
It’s hard to see the logorrheic Biden making it all the way through to the nomination without blowing himself up. And Warren may be able to raise money like crazy, but her appeal outside the Northeast and MSNBC left is unclear.
So who else? In the past week, riding out of the West, the Hillary spoiler has appeared on the horizon. He is Brian Schweitzer, the ex-governor of Montana. An expert on energy policy , a former rancher and soil engineer, he’s disarming and funny, and he knows how to talk in an interesting way about issues because he’s from a purple state where Democrats don’t dominate.
He’s considering the run. He’s been to Iowa. He’s a new face to many Democrats, who’ll discover that he’s as populist as Warren and as vociferously anti-war as Howard Dean ever was.
There may be other non-Hillarys to emerge, but Schweitzer’s a pretty good model. And there will be one. Hillary Clinton won’t sail to the nomination. No one ever does.
Take the scar tissue on my authorial pride as proof.
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