Stop Already With Benghazi! What difference does it make!
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Rubio made a very gracious withdrawal/suspension speech last night and it spoke to his decency and he should have a good future in politics should that be his choice. This was not the time for what Rubio had to offer and no doubt I believe he was undone by his youth, political immaturity, appeared too hungry and ill prepared beyond passionate speechifying.
Voters are not optimistic and running an optimistic campaign did not click. Voters are angry, they are disgusted by the economy, the decline in our standing in the world, fed up with a president who has nothing to offer that makes sense and who they no longer trust to do right by America.
Voters no longer believe the solution to the mess we find ourselves in is through either political party. They are looking for an outside human being in which they can repose their faith and they are being forced to choose between candidates that force them to make extreme decisions. One is an outsider who comes across as a loose cannon and the other is a person who is a retread insider who is not trusted, not liked and a lousy campaigner.
As I recently wrote we are being offered a Hobson Choice.
As for Cruz, Kasich and Sanders they are fighting an uphill battle. Cruz stands the better chance but he is still a long shot. Kasich is the one with the most accomplishments and a very solid record but he comes across more as a nice preacher type than a man possessed of strong presidential timber.
Bernie should don lederhosen, move to a Socialist nation in Europe, sit atop a mountain and yodel.
Cruz is a younger version of Trump. More in control of himself but equally calculating. His challenge to The Donald is all because of his calculating ways and conduct in The Senate.
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You too can turn yourself into a computer:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/
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Prager on Obama. (See 1 below.)
and
The smartest man in the room who comes up with the dumbest of stratgeies. (See 1a below.)
and What about Hillary? (See 1b and 1c below.)
===
Star Parker deservedly receives Reagan Award! (See 2 below.)
and
Six months ago Allen West wrote about Muslim conversions in Germany. (See 2a below.)
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Dick
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1) Leader of the Democratic Party....
You're looking at the biggest Political CON-ARTIST/ LIAR in American history.By: Dennis PragerI have been broadcasting for 31 years and writing for even longer than that. I do not recall ever saying on the radio or in print that a president is doing lasting damage to our country.I did not like the presidencies of Jimmy Carter (the last Democrat I voted for) or Bill Clinton. Nor did I care for the “compassionate conservatism” of George W. Bush. In modern political parlance “compassionate” is a euphemism for ever-expanding government.But I have never written or broadcast that our country was being seriously damaged by any president. Until now. So it is with great sadness that I write that President Barack Obama has done and continues to do major damage to America. The only question is whether this damage can ever be undone.
This is equally true domestically and internationally.Domestically, his policies have had a grave impact on the American economy. He has overseen the weakest recovery from a recession in modern American history. He has mired the country in unprecedented levels of debt: about $9.5 trillion in just seven years (this after calling his predecessor “unpatriotic” for adding nearly $5 trillion in eight years).He has no method of paying for this debt other than printing more money –- thereby surreptitiously taxing everyone through inflation, including the poor he claims to be helping, and cheapening the dollar to the point that some countries are talking about another reserve currency –- and saddling the next generations with enormous debts.
With his 2,500-page Affordable Care Act, he has made it impossible for hundreds of thousands, soon millions, of Americans to keep their individual or employer-sponsored group health insurance; he has stymied American medical innovation with an utterly destructive tax on medical devices; and he has caused hundreds of thousands of workers to lose full-time jobs because of the health-care costs imposed by Obamacare on employers.
His Internal Revenue Service used its unparalleled power to stymie political dissent. No one has even been held accountable for that.
His ambassador to Libya and three other Americans were murdered by terrorists in Benghazi, Libya. No one has even been blamed for that. The only blame the Obama administration has leveled was on a video maker in California who had nothing to do with that assault.
In this president’s White House, the buck stops nowhere.
Among presidents in modern American history, he has also been a uniquely divisive force. It began with his forcing Obamacare through Congress –- the only major legislation in American history to be passed with no votes from the opposition party.
Though he has had a unique opportunity to do so, he has not only not helped heal racial tensions, he has exacerbated them to unheard of proportions. His intrusions into the Trayvon Martin affair (“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon”) and into the confrontation between a white police officer and a black Harvard professor (the police “acted stupidly”) were completely unwarranted, irresponsible, demagogic, and, most of all, divisive.
He should have been reassuring black Americans that America is in fact the least racist country in the world –- something he should know as well as anybody, having been raised only by whites and being the first black elected the leader of a white-majority nation. Instead, he echoed the inflammatory speech of professional race-baiters such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
He has also divided the country by economic class, using classic Marxist language against “the rich” and “corporate profits.” (Social Justice)
Regarding America in the world, he has been, if possible, even more damaging. The United States is at its weakest ever, has fewer allies, and has less military and diplomatic influence than at any time since before World War I.
One wonders if there is even a single remaining ally nation that trusts him. And worse, no American enemy fears him in the least. If you are a free movement (the democratic Iranian and Syrian oppositions) or a free country (Israel), you have little or no reason to believe that you have a steadfast ally in the United States under the leadership of Barack Hussein Obama.
Even non-democratic allies no longer trust America. Barack Obama has alienated our most important and longest standing Arab allies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Both the anti–Muslim Brotherhood and the anti-Iran Arab states have lost all respect for him. They see him as weak and stupid.
And his premature complete withdrawal of American troops from Iraq has left that country with weekly bloodbaths.
Virtually nothing Barack Obama has done has left America or the world better since he became president. Nearly everything he has touched has been made far worse than it ever was before.
He did, however, promise before the 2008 election that “We are just five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” That is the one promise he has kept.
The scary thing about all this is how myself and many, many others like me have been sounding the alarm about this man even before he was elected. And yet the media embraced him as their little darling, liberals embraced him as their savior, many Americans thought it would be fashionable to have a black president and so they fell for him. Virtually nobody really seemed concerned.And here is what really keeps me awake at night. Now the likes of Hillary Clinton, a washed up woman who has no accomplishments we can pint to except getting our ambassador and some other good men killed in Benghazi and is now under investigation, and she is the front runner on the Democratic ticket! And close on her heels is Bernie Sanders, a whacked out socialist who wants to tax us even more so he can give away lots of free stuff.Because of all this, I must now ask this question -
What does it take for the American people to WAKE UP?
1a)
Barack Obama’s Revolution in Foreign Policy
When you think you’re the smartest person in the room, it’s tempting to make up your own grand strategy.
By Niall Ferguson
It is a criticism I have heard from more than one person who has worked with President Obama: that he regards himself as the smartest person in the room—any room. Jeffrey Goldberg’s fascinating article reveals that this is a considerable understatement. The president seems to think he is the smartest person in the world, perhaps ever.
Power corrupts in subtle ways. It appears to have made Obama arrogant. As described in Goldberg’s story, he is impatient to the point of rudeness with members of his own administration. His response to Secretary of State John Kerry when he hands him a paper on Syria is: “Oh, another proposal?” “Samantha, enough,” he snaps at the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. “I’ve already read your book.” We learn, too, that he “secretly disdains … the Washington foreign-policy establishment.”
The president is also bluntly critical of traditional American allies. He is said to have told Prime Minister David Cameron that Britain “would no longer be able to claim a ‘special relationship’ with the United States” if it did not “pay [its] fair share” by increasing defense spending. The Pakistanis and the Saudis get especially short shrift here, as—predictably—does Israel.
“Bibi, you have to understand something,” he tells the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. “I’m the African American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this house. I live in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States. You think I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I do.” Netanyahu may have wondered what exactly in Obama’s biography gives him such insight into the present-day predicament of Israel.
The president is also dismissive of a number of past presidents as strategists. “We dropped more ordnance on Cambodia and Laos than on Europe in World War II,” he tells Goldberg, “and yet, ultimately, Nixon withdrew, Kissinger went to Paris, and all we left behind was chaos, slaughter, and authoritarian governments that finally, over time, have emerged from that hell.” So much for Nixon and Kissinger.
He is equally dismissive of “mythologies” about Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy. The release of the American hostages in Iran had “nothing to do with … Reagan’s posture, his rhetoric, etc.” Invading Grenada did not help “our ability to shape world events.” The Iran-Contra affair “wasn’t successful at all.” Nor was Reagan’s withdrawal of U.S. forces from Lebanon in 1983. These views are not necessarily wrong. Instead, it is the president’s tone that jars—the sarcasm that Goldberg notes. The same tone is manifest in Obama’s sole comment on his immediate predecessor. “As I recall, because apparently nobody in this town does,” he says, “Putin went into Georgia on Bush’s watch, right smack dab in the middle of us having over 100,000 troops deployed in Iraq.”
Is there anyone to whom Obama does not feel himself superior? The surprising answer is President George H.W. Bush’s national-security adviser, Brent Scowcroft. “I love that guy,” Obama is quoted as saying. This will come as no surprise to readers of his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, but most people will scratch their heads. The president explains: “I am … an idealist insofar as I believe that we should be promoting values, like democracy and human rights” not only out of self-interest, but also because “it makes the world a better place.” But “you could call me a realist in believing we can’t, at any given moment, relieve all the world’s misery. … We’ve got to be hardheaded … and pick and choose our spots. … There are going to be times where our security interests conflict with our concerns about human rights.”
Which brings us to Syria, the central foreign-policy failure of the Obama presidency. The grim details of what has happened as the Syrian Civil War has escalated are all too familiar: a death toll of 470,000 according to the Syrian Center for Policy Research, nearly 4.8 million refugees according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and a flood of displaced persons and migrants arriving in Europe by sea at a rate of roughly 100,000 a month. Aside from the human suffering, the escalation of the conflict has had grave strategic consequences, not least of which has been the return of Russia to the region as a major player for the first time since the early 1970s.
The consequences of American non-intervention in Syria have, in some ways, been as bad as the consequences of American intervention in Iraq, though fewer American lives and dollars have been expended. Yet the realist in Obama has no regrets. Goldberg does future historians a valuable service by setting out in detail the president’s reasoning.
The president dragged his feet on Syria for three reasons. First, having been elected partly on the strength of his opposition to the Iraq War, he was and remains in principle reluctant to deploy U.S. troops (though not U.S. drones). In 2009, he felt the Pentagon had “jammed” him into approving a troop surge in Afghanistan; four years later, he felt he was being jammed again. Second, he misread the Arab Spring, initially equating protesters in Tunisia and Tahrir Square with Rosa Parks and the “patriots of Boston.”
Third, Obama regretted succumbing to pressure from his own advisers as well as from European allies to intervene in Libya in 2011. When similar pressures were brought to bear on him over the red line he himself had drawn regarding the use of chemical weapons in Syria, Obama revolted. On August 30, 2013—after consulting only Denis McDonough, his chief of staff—he decided to call off planned air strikes against the Syrian government, telling McDonough of his “long-standing resentment: He was tired of watching Washington unthinkingly drift toward war in Muslim countries.”
The president’s rationalizations of his U-turn need not detain us (“Assad would place civilians as ‘human shields’ around obvious targets … U.S. missiles would not be fired at chemical-weapons depots, for fear of sending plumes of poison into the air,” and so forth). The point is that if those arguments had been any good, there would have been no need to circumvent his own cabinet and advisers.
Susan Rice was “shocked.” When he found out that evening, Kerry told a friend: “I just got fucked over.” Even Vice President Joe Biden was on the other side of the argument (“big nations don’t bluff”). The usually loyal Gideon Rose, the editor of Foreign Affairs, thought it was a mistake. So did the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan. So did the king of Jordan. And so, of course, did Hillary Clinton.
When she later made public her criticism of Obama’s handling of Syria, Obama became “rip-shit angry,” according to a senior adviser. It was at this time that the White House went demotic with the facile slogan: “Don’t do stupid shit.” According to Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national-security adviser for strategic communication, “the questions we were asking in the White House were ‘Who exactly is in the stupid-shit caucus? Who is pro–stupid shit?’”
August 30, 2013 was Obama’s “liberation day,” writes Goldberg—“the day he defied not only the foreign-policy establishment and its cruise-missile playbook, but also the demands of America’s frustrating, high-maintenance allies.” It was the day he finally threw out “what he calls, derisively, the ‘Washington playbook … [the] playbook … that presidents are supposed to follow … [the] playbook that comes out of the foreign-policy establishment.’”
One of the more remarkable aspects of the president’s defense of his Syrian flip is the role played in it by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. As Goldberg writes:
At the G20 summit in St. Petersburg, which was held the week after the Syria reversal, Obama pulled Putin aside … and told the Russian president “that if he forced Assad to get rid of the chemical weapons, that that would eliminate the need for us taking a military strike.” Within weeks, Kerry, working with his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, would engineer the removal of most of Syria’s chemical-weapons arsenal.Now, some of us would argue that the foreign-policy establishment’s playbook said “Keep the Russians out of the Middle East” for a reason. Some of us would point to the sharp escalation of violence in Syria since Putin sent Russian bombers into action in the country. But, no, the president is one step ahead of us again. Letting Putin into the Syrian conflict, we learn from Goldberg, is known in Obama’s National Security Council as the “Tom Sawyer approach”—meaning “that if Putin wanted to expend his regime’s resources by painting the fence in Syria, the U.S. should let him.” Smart! Except that if any of Tom Sawyer’s friends had taken Putin’s approach to fence-painting, there would quickly have been no more fence to paint.
At first sight, all Obama has done has been to exclude Syrian stability from the A-list of U.S. vital national interests. Goldberg mentions “a handful of threats in the Middle East” that the president decided early on “conceivably warranted direct U.S. military intervention”: the threat posed by al-Qaeda, any threat to the continued existence of Israel, and the related threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iran. By contrast, “the danger to the United States posed by the Assad regime did not rise to the level of these challenges.” On this point the president has been consistent.
This analysis helps explain why the president underestimated—and still underestimates—the Islamic State, the principal beneficiary of the Syrian disaster. In a 2014 interview, as is well known, he called the group a “jayvee team.” More recently, he has come up with a new analogy. ISIS, the president has explained to his advisers, is like the Joker in the Batman movie The Dark Knight. When the Joker started decapitating American citizens, the president abandoned his policy of non-intervention in Syria. But his low-intensity air campaign against ISIS has conspicuously failed to destroy the organization.
“One of the top goals of the American national-security apparatus in Obama’s last year,” we learn, is to assassinate the “so-called caliph of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.” Well, the strategy worked with bin Laden, right? Decapitation of the organization is a sufficient response because, as the president tells Goldberg: “ISIS is not an existential threat to the United States.” He “frequently reminds his staff that terrorism takes far fewer lives in America than handguns, car accidents, and falls in bathtubs do.” (Maybe so, but bathtubs are not actively plotting to kill us.)
There is, however, a second reason why Obama downplays the threat posed by ISIS: He remains more worried about “the sort of panic … that would manifest itself in anti-Muslim xenophobia” than about Islamic extremism itself. Those who believe in a “violent, radical, fanatical, nihilistic interpretation of Islam” are, the president insists, “a tiny faction.” But this view is very hard to reconcile with the president’s own observation to Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull that Indonesia—where he lived for several years as a child—has been moving, in Goldberg’s words, “gradually … from a relaxed, syncretistic Islam to a more fundamentalist, unforgiving interpretation”:
Large numbers of Indonesian women, [Obama] observed, have now adopted the hijab, the Muslim head covering. Why, Turnbull asked, was this happening? Because, Obama answered, the Saudis and other Gulf Arabs have funneled money, and large numbers of imams and teachers, into the country … [funding] seminaries that teach the fundamentalist version of Islam.The “tiny faction” theory of Islamic extremism is also hard to reconcile with the conduct of the country on which the president has placed the biggest bet of his career: Iran.
Not intervening in Syria may have been the toughest decision of Obama’s presidency, but it shrinks to strategic insignificance alongside his deal with Iran to slow down that country’s nuclear-arms program. The president assures Goldberg that he “actually would have” struck Iran’s nuclear facilities if he had seen the Iranians “break out,” or get to the brink of acquiring nuclear weapons. Yet the essence of his deal is that Iran’s breakout has merely been postponed—and Iran’s brazen testing of ballistic missiles in recent days strongly suggests that Tehran sees it that way.
The president may yet prove to be the smartest person in the world, or at least the smartest person in Washington. Perhaps Iran will become more politically liberal in the 10-year life span of the nuclear deal. Perhaps, too, the world will realize that climate change is a more serious, existential threat than, say, Islamic extremism. And perhaps future presidents will thank Obama for his “pivot” to Asia, which reflects his belief that the rise of China is a more important strategic challenge than the disintegration of the Middle East.
In the words of Defense Secretary Ash Carter, the president “consistently asks, even in the midst of everything else that’s going on, ‘Where are we in the Asia-Pacific rebalance? Where are we in terms of resources?’” We read of a possible U.S. naval base in Vietnam, part of the president’s strategy to check China’s ascendancy in Asia. “If you look at how we’ve operated in the South China Sea,” he tells Goldberg (in language that will not endear him to President Xi Jinping), “we have been able to mobilize most of Asia to isolate China in ways that have surprised China, frankly.”
Goldberg concludes his important and illuminating article by crediting Obama with “a set of potentially historic foreign-policy achievements … the opening to Cuba, the Paris climate-change accord, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, and … the Iran nuclear deal.” The key word here is “potentially.”
If you think you are smarter than every foreign-policy expert in the room, any room, then it is tempting to make up your own grand strategy. That is what Obama has done, to an extent that even his critics underestimate. There is no “Obama doctrine”; rather, we see here a full-blown revolution in American foreign policy. And this revolution can be summed up as follows: The foes shall become friends, and the friends foes.
In the Middle East, Israel and Saudi Arabia are out, Iran is in. Similarly, in the Far East, China is out, Vietnam is in. As for a special relationship, the president would rather have one with Cuba than Britain. Nothing could better illustrate the extent of Barack Obama’s repudiation of the “foreign-policy establishment.”
Yet grand strategies are judged by their consequences, not by their intentions, and in the Middle East—not to mention North Africa and parts of South Asia—the consequences are not looking pretty.
If the arc of history is in fact bending toward Islamic extremism, sectarian conflict, networks of terrorism, and regional nuclear-arms races, then the 44th president will turn out to have been rather less smart than the foreign-policy establishment he so loftily disdains.
1b) Hillary’s scandals would have sunk anyone else
A political order hijacked by a brutal and cynical opportunist motivated only by a lust for power? No, not the current convulsions being caused by Donald Trump but the American TV drama House of Cards.I binge-watched the whole of its fourth series virtually as soon as it was released on Netflix earlier this month. Yes, I confess: I am a House of Cards addict. Sad, but true.It’s not just a mesmeric portrayal of politics as psychopathy (think Macbeth on star-spangled steroids), sucking those who crave power into a spiral of lies, corruption and violence. It also provides a cameo of American pork-barrel politics in which power accrues only to those who can most effectively buy up people and access.With remarkable prescience, it illustrates too how a presidential election can spin out of the control of party managers. Viewing these episodes while simultaneously watching the implosion of the Republican party blurs disconcertingly the line between fiction and reality.What makes House of Cards especially delicious is its allusion to current political players. Although there is more than a whiff of Richard Nixon about the fictional US president, Francis Underwood, he and his wife Claire are clearly modelled in part on the Clintons as exemplars of unparalleled ruthlessness.This is not so much a marriage as a political partnership from hell, dominated for good measure by first lady Claire. Her capacity for merciless scheming leaves even the president in the shade. Icily controlled, she reveals tantalising flashes of emotional turbulence but remains an enigma. The only unambiguous thing about her is her amoral and limitless ambition.Remind you of someone? Exactly. Yet Hillary’s campaign for the Democratic nomination has been all but eclipsed as media coverage of the US election has been sucked into the Trumpian black hole.Despite the remarkable support achieved by Bernie Sanders, the Jeremy Corbyn of the American scene, Hillary is widely considered a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination, as she has been from the start.This is astounding. Hillary has form as long as your arm, yet nothing seems to touch her.Take President Obama’s recent remarks about Libya. The western-backed removal of Colonel Gaddafi created a vacuum filled by Islamists, turning the country into a base for Islamic State and a lethal arsenal for global terror.Astonishingly, Obama laid the blame for this at the door of David Cameron and the former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Cameron and Sarkozy certainly made a mistake in backing Gaddafi’s removal. The driving force of the entire operation though, against strong official advice that the aftermath would be uncontrollable, was the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton.She brushed aside concerns in the intelligence community that the wrong people might come to power. She dismissed warnings from Nato and US security officials that Libyan weapons might fall into the hands of extremists.Instead, she pressed the case of the Libyan rebels and helped to escalate the mission from an attempt to prevent a threatened massacre of civilians to regime change. She bears a heavy responsibility for making the world even more dangerous as a result of this debacle. Yet in the wake of Obama’s remarks, this stain on the record of a potential commander-in-chief has been barely mentioned.Urgent questions also remain about whether she did too little to prevent, and then misled the world about, the attack in 2012 on the US mission in Benghazi which led to the murder of ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.While she was first lady, she and Bill Clinton were engulfed by a slew of scandals. These involved allegations of financial impropriety, cronyism, intimidation, corruption, cover-ups, obstruction of justice and even a death in mysterious circumstances.All of these could be, and were, dismissed as the inventions of the Clintons’ numerous enemies. Now, though, Hillary is enmeshed in a scandal that would have instantly destroyed the presidential hopes of anyone else.The FBI is investigating the charge that, while Hillary was secretary of state, she and her staff put national security at risk by placing large amounts of classified information on a private email server, itself a criminal offence, and subsequently deleted some of it when the balloon went up.Although her former IT specialist has been given immunity by the Justice Department so he can testify against her, few believe even now that Hillary will fail to become the Democratic presidential nominee.One reason why both Trump and Sanders are doing so well is that the American people have risen up in revolt against an entire political class that is seen to be in the pockets of vested interests.Except, of course, there is no greater manipulative tool in politics right now than standing up against those who manipulate politics. That’s what Trump has understood. The more outrageous, inconsistent or out-to-lunch you are, the more people love it. They think it means you really are what you seem to be. And that’s the neatest trick of all.Many Americans believe as a result that the choice facing them at November’s presidential election could well be between Mussolini and Lucrezia Borgia. Underwoods, please take note. Roll on 2017 and series five.
1b)Hillary’s Soft Despotism
She prefers the hidden authoritarianism of the vast and growing administrative state.
Donald Trump is Hitler. Donald Trump is a fascist. Donald Trump is a dictator.Certainly Mr. Trump has a mouth, and he’s not afraid to use it. He also speaks to adoring crowds who cheer when he says to respond in kind to activists trying to disrupt his rallies. Even so, the over-the-top claims that Mr. Trump is the new Il Duce may be distracting attention from the soft despotism that Tocqueville deemed the far likelier menace to American liberties.
This kind of authoritarianism doesn’t come with goose steps or brown shirts or large populist movements. It prefers bureaucracy to bombast. It presents itself as a solution to the complexities of modern government, and it’s called the administrative state.
Philip Hamburger—a Columbia law professor and author of the 2015 book “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?”—defines the administrative state as the substitution of regulatory edicts for laws passed by the people’s elected representatives. In the American iteration, at least, this often means the same federal agency that writes the rules also enforces and adjudicates them—a confluence of powers Madison once called the “very definition of tyranny.”Mr. Hamburger maintains that the threat of the administrative state is nothing new, notwithstanding the assumption of some conservatives who would date it to the progressive theories of Woodrow Wilson or the rise of the New Deal. By contrast, Mr. Hamburger says the Founders well understood this threat, familiar as they were with English constitutional history and the centuries-long struggle to limit the extralegal prerogatives of kings (Star Chambers anyone?).
Now, it’s certainly possible that a President Trump would seed the federal agencies with men and women who would abuse their powers for Trumpian outcomes. In real life, however, the compulsion to decree to one’s neighbor what’s best for him (and use the federal government to enforce it) is an affliction of modern American liberalism. In other words, the kind of people Hillary Clinton, if elected, would rely on to fill the federal bureaucracies, every last one of them eager and willing to impose rules on the American people that would never fly in Congress.
What kind of rules and regulations? Here are a few instances from recent years:
• In the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, the IRS targets groups regarded as enemies of the president—pro-Israel, pro-life, pro-tea-party, etc. When this became public, its officials, including the new IRS commissioner, John Koskinen, make clear their contempt for congressional panels trying to investigate.
• In a frontal assault on religious liberty, the Department of Health and Human Services issues a mandate that would force the Little Sisters of the Poor, Catholic nuns who run homes for the elderly poor, to offer their employees contraceptives the sisters regard as a violation of their faith. They are threatened with fines of $100 per employee per day if they refuse, which adds up to $70 million a year—equal to about a third of their operating budget.
• Andy Johnson builds a pond on his Wyoming property to provide water for his horses and cattle after securing all the required local and state permits. The Environmental Protection Agency steps in and accuses him of violating the Clean Water Act (even though he in fact has created a wetlands) and orders him to undo what he’d done—or face fines of $37,500 per day. As Mr. Johnson fights, he has racked up accumulated fines of $20 million.
According to the most recent edition of “Ten Thousand Commandments”—the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s annual survey of federal regulations—in 2014 federal agencies issued 3,554 regulations while Congress passed only 224 new laws. That is 16 new regulations for every new law.
The result is the effective transfer of power from the American people acting through their elected representatives to the American people being told what to do—and threatened with crushing fines if they do not—by federal bureaucracies that use the vague congressional language in everything from Dodd-Frank to the Affordable Care Act to impose their own interpretations. Even worse, under the Supreme Court’s 1984 Chevron decision, the courts are basically told they must defer.
President Obama didn’t create rule by the administrative state. But he may have best captured its spirit two years ago when, in response to a question about congressional resistance to his agenda, he declared his pen mightier than the law: “I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward.”
And he has.Now he hopes to pass the pen to Mrs. Clinton. And surely the one Hillary promise we can all believe is that, when it comes to ruling by executive fiat and using the federal bureaucracies to impose her agenda, she stands to outdo even Mr. Obama.Which leaves us here: At a moment when the media is thick with characterizations of Donald Trump as the new Hitler, America might do well to devote some attention to the soft despotism of the woman who promises to further embolden this unelected, unaccountable and out-of-control fourth branch of government.
2)===========================================================
Black Americans and Reagan Ideals
By Star ParkerI was recently made very proud, and also very humbled, by receiving the Ronald Reagan Award, given at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference by the American Conservative Union.
Regarding the award, ACU says: "The winners of this award, our highest honor, are not household names, but the men and women working in the trenches, who sacrifice and, in so doing, set an example for others."
I write about this at the risk of coming off as the opposite of humble. After all, Star, really -- announcing your award to the world?
I'm writing about it because of the chaotic time we are in now, and because, no, it is not about Star Parker. It is about America and working to save our country.
It is important that Americans, and particularly minority Americans, see that there is a hardworking American black woman who shares the ideals of Ronald Reagan and believes that America is an anointed nation with a mission.
What are those ideals? Traditional values, limited government, free markets and a strong national defense.
But let's specifically talk about race and the vision of America as a free nation under God.
Nothing has torn this nation apart more than race. We fought a bloody civil war over it. And even today, 240 years after the nation's founding, it continues to tear us apart.
Too many black Americans don't sign on to the idea of America as a free nation under God. They are consumed with anger and cynicism because of a genuinely brutal American history toward people of color.
Instead of seeing the nation as one founded on eternal truths imperfectly applied by men of flesh and blood, they choose to see the nation as fatally flawed from the beginning. So they participate with enthusiasm in the project of the left to transform America from being a free nation under God to a secular, welfare state. And sadly, the more the USA becomes exactly this, blacks themselves pay the highest price for these distortions of human truth.
It is particularly sad that black Americans, who attend church with greater frequency than any other ethnic group, who, more than any other ethnic group, tell pollsters that religion plays a central role in their lives, sign on to the party of meaninglessness and nihilism, the party of abortion, homosexuality and socialism.
The civil rights movement was supposed to be about freedom. The dream, in the words of Dr. King, was "free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last."
Then instead of it being about freedom, it became about payback. It became about government, welfare and diversity as an ideal unto itself.
The culture of blame and victimhood has now moved beyond blacks and is capturing the spirit of the whole nation. But still, blacks pay the highest price. Broken families and a spirit of helplessness have frozen black unemployment and poverty at twice the national average for half a century.
Failed public schools are destroying black children. Yet black support for Hillary Clinton is as strong as ever, despite her support of these public schools and self-serving teachers unions. Clinton stands against parental empowerment and school choice.
Look around. America is proof that anyone with a healthy spirit and the right values can rise above the worst circumstances and that even the best circumstances cannot save a sick spirit and sick values.
Our national soul has become dangerously mired in negative energy. There are far too few people turning eyes upward to the heavens, taking responsibility for their own lives and respecting their neighbors as God's unique creations.
This is what America is about. This is what President Reagan was about. And it's also what Star Parker is about, which is why I am humbled to receive the Ronald Reagan Award.
2a)
Christians in Europe waking up to BIG surprise from Muslim refugees
There is a phenomenon occurring in Europe — mainly Germany – that’s been alluded to but has not received broad attention. We all know Christianity is not exactly on the rise in Europe, while Islam seems to be spreading. However, in Germany there seems to be something quite perplexing occurring: Muslims converting to Christianity.
As reported by Christian Today, “Without saying it, some Muslim migrants now in Germany are converting to Christianity in the hope of improving their chances of being granted refugee status and winning asylum, reports said.
Government officials and church leaders are aware of this but are still giving everybody the benefit of the doubt. After all, the German government has been telling the thousands of Muslim migrants that they need not convert to Christianity since German Chancellor Angela Merkel herself has made it known that Islam “belongs in Germany,” the Daily Mail reported.
Despite this, many Muslim migrants continue to embrace Jesus Christ to the delight of church leaders. In Berlin, for instance, hundreds of mostly Iranian and Afghan asylum seekers have changed faiths at the evangelical Trinity Church. Many are claiming that true realization of the wonders of Christianity, which Islam does not have, prompted them to make move.
Silas, a 25-year-old Iranian man, is one of these converts who are now living in Berlin, according to Charisma News. When asked what really prompted him to change religion, Silas said his spiritual transformation came after he read the Bible that a friend lent to him. “When I started to read the Bible, it changed me. … At first, I didn’t want to be a Christian, I just wanted to understand it. But the more answers I got, the more I … realized I was finding God,” he said. He then realized that “Islam was a big lie.”
Pastors in Germany are pointing out that although Christian converts have better chances of staying for good in Germany—since they can now claim that they would face persecution in their home country if they are sent back—this is not the reason why many are embracing Christ.
n Afghanistan and Iran, for example, conversion to Christianity by a Muslim could be punished by death or imprisonment. Thus, the German government is unlikely to deport converted Iranian and Afghan refugees back home. The fact is, by converting to Christianity, they also face persecution from Muslims in Germany who have decided to stick to their faith, church leaders said. The Muslim population in Germany is estimated at 4 million.”
When I was in Afghanistan, I remember the case of one Abdul Rahman who was arrested in February 2006. His crime? He was an Afghan who had left the country, converted to Christianity, and returned as an aid worker. His own family turned him in and he faced execution as an apostate — seriously folks. We found out about this and began to ask ourselves, why are we here? So much for tolerance, since we were told about not displaying our faith and such. We were beat up about showing respect for Muslims, well, “when tolerance becomes a one way street it leads to cultural suicide.”
I am not amazed Muslims are converting to Christianity. There is power in God’s word and it is about true spiritual freedom and eternal hope — life. Islam itself – well, the word means submission. In Christianity it is about acceptance of God’s grace and submitting your will to His in guiding your life. And folks, let’s be honest, if you decide to renounce your Christian faith, no one is going to arrest you under penalty of death.
Yes, I do pray this isn’t a tactic of taqiyya, lying and deceiving infidels to further Islam. I pray this is something being done sincerely, allowing our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to come into their hearts and save their souls. Perhaps we should bombard ISIS controlled areas with leaflets that attack their ideology and denounce what they’re doing. Perhaps we should put out more comparisons of an unreformed belief system as opposed to Judaism and Christianity.
Yep, I hear the secular humanists and atheists already fuming about separation of church and state. I remember what happened to my mentor and founding member of U.S. Army Special Operations Detachment (Delta), Lieutenant General Jerry Boykin when in uniform he professed his faith and that it will allow our defeat of Islamo-fascism.
However, this is a battle of ideas and ideology — doggone, even President Obama continues to say it. So what ideas, what ideology stand in contrast to that of ISIS, al-Qaida, Boko Haram, Al Shabab, Hamas, Hezbollah, Taliban, Islamic Jihad, Al Quds and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Fatah…you get my drift. It appears to me this enemy has no problem with attacking Christians — they kind of have a very long history of doing such.
We shared with you a story about the clock ticking, 5-10 years there may not be any Christians in the Middle East. And for those of you who are intelligent enough to know history, Jews and Christians were there long before that cheeky fella Mohammad brought his sword.
Perhaps Silas (named after an apostle), has come to realize that Christianity doesn’t come with a sword invoking terror and intimidation. But as the Christian Today piece states, these recent converts not only face the dark specter of being returned to their homelands — such as Abdul Rahman — they face the growing Islamic jihadist movements in Europe. We’ve reported here about the rise in crime and rape in Sweden against native Swedes, but now we may see vicious attacks against Christian converts — a new dynamic. After all, the Koran and hadiths are clear about the punishment for apostasy: death.
We hear all this chatter about moderate Muslims and why don’t they speak out? It’s simple, we in the West fail to recognize the enemy they face and refuse to confront and defeat them. There are people who live in and amongst the militant jihadists who will kill anyone not subscribing to their dogma. We have folks who fail to realize why it’s vital to castigate the enemy as they refer to themselves.
This is a battle of ideas and ideology and I just gotta tell ya folks perhaps the best weapon against Islamo-fascism and Islamic jihadists is this; “The Full Armor of God,” Ephesians 6:10-17, (NIV),
To the Muslims who are converting to Christianity I have one word: welcome. And I have a commitment to make to you, that I will take up the jawbone of a donkey as Samson, stand as he did at Rock Lehigh and crush these bastards who assail you.
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