Democrat's stunt over Gun Control provides noanswers how to keep weapons out of the hands
of terrorists.
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o
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A family friend and fellow memo reader wrote this about what people think concerning large families. I found it interesting and wanted to pass along.
Is this type of stereotyping the same as profiling? (See 1 below.)
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Glick on Obama and the moderate Muslims.
Caroline poses, why has Obama rejected moderate Muslims at every turn? There is no rational reason. Does Obama seek to leverage radical Muslims over moderates? If so why?
As for myself, I believe he truly wants to diminish the influence of the "evil" West.
One of his first prominent acts, after entering The White House, was the return of Churchill's bust closely followed by his Cairo speech, apologizing for America, followed by his support of The Muslim Brotherhood and his call for Mubarak's overthrow. And, it has gone downhill ever since when it comes to how he has responded to radical Muslims, even to the point he cannot manage to put the words together.
Obama has not made America stronger. He has weakened our nation economically, militarily and politically. He has divided our nation through wedge issues (gun control, climate change, police brutality, wealth disparity etc.), he has restrained our energy independence and the list of his outrageous and purposeful behaviour continues.
He has praised thugs and sent White House staff to their funerals but plays golf when a general is buried, he began by assuming a campus policeman was profiling a black professor and has supported the questionable/radical "Black Lives Matter Movement" and before that the radical's "Occupy Wall Streeters."
Was Shakespeare right but wrong on location? Is there something rotten in D.C? Perhaps we are being subjected to a Trojan Horse full of Muslim discontent and hate. Is America the frog in Obama's boiling water?
The more I stand back and connect dots, I see a Seu"rat" Pointillist Painting. Again, you decide. (See 2, 2a, 2b and 2c below.)
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Why deal in facts when hysteria wins the day. (See 3 below.)
I watched tonight, on the evening news, pictures of wild eyed Liberals screaming about the gun control wedge issue yet offering not one workable solution. First, they resorted to the old bait and switch tactic and made guns the issue because they know if they attribute the killings to radical Muslims that would be correct but politically incorrect and they are so virtuous.
Second, they used their parade not to solve the unsolvable problem we and all civilized people face but to raise money so they can persist with their nonsense.
Their tactics are right out of Alinsky and other radicals 's play books on how to bring down a lawful society where law and order rule, or used to, because they cannot make progress when it does. They need to create fear and violence through a raucous approach to energize the nut cases who buy their garbage yet, know not what they are purchasing.
I post a lot of cartoons etc. because pictures often tell a story more effectively than words.
This says it all.
If you want four more years of this radical approach then vote for Hillary because she will wedge you between radicalism and ineptitude. She already stated she is going to put Bill in charge of solving our economic issues apparently acknowledging she is incapable of doing so.
She told us yesterday all the things she is prepared to give away so as to get elected as if she has the slightest clue what the consequences of her pandering will do to the economy Bill will be managing.
Even if Trump wins, the stupidity of American liberals will remain . Common sense, practical solutions have succumbed to craziness. No wonder America's future has become a roll of the dice and our destiny is so unpredictable.
This is the change Obama sought to bring to our shores from wherever he was born and subsequently lived and he has been imminently successful.
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I have said time and again, in previous memos, the courts remain the one best hope to save our Republic from Obama's overreach.
Supreme Court Strikes Down Obama’s Action Regarding Amensty by Presidential Executive Order
Yesterday a Federal Judge blocked an Obama Interior Department could not set stricter standards for hydraulic fracturing on public lands.
Just last month a critical component of Obamacare was struck down by the courts.
Today, the Supreme Court ruled and Obama’s executive order to grant amnesty is null and void.
Piece by piece, President Obama’s assault on the Constitution is being rolled back. (See 4 below.)
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I believe the Brits decided they were tired of losing their national identity and that the Wendell Wilkie One World concept had not proven beneficial. The market is over-reacting.
I also believe the Brit's vote signals their distrust of politicians and can be interpreted as a not too subtle negative message for Hillary that her campaign could be in trouble. Why? Because Obama's efforts, on behalf of Britain staying in the E.U, was rejected and she is running as his clone.
The mood of people worldwide, their anger at establishedment is quite evident. After the initial negativity is absorbed things will settle down as they generally do.
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Dick
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1)
The Bias Against Big Families and the Rise of Childless Cities
Oh, the bias against big families—especially religious families.
Take this recent Washington Post headline: “Stop assuming that families with lots of children are religious.” Or how about this one from Babble: “This is why you should never judge that mom in the grocery store with five kids.” Where does this naked assumption that there is something decidedly strange about having lots of kids come from?
In the first story, we learn the supposedly remarkable news that even people who have the same number of kids as Mormons, Catholics and Orthodox Jews aren’t necessarily like-minded religious zealots. But when you look like a religious zealot, you are going to be treated like a religious zealot:
‘Not at three. But as soon as we had four, people assumed we were very religious,’ Lindsay Bartleson said. Now she and her husband, who describe themselves as a secular humanist and an agnostic, are up to five kids. ‘People assume. They’ll come up and start talking about God to us. Which is a little awkward at times.’
But non-religious parents sometimes report feeling judged, not welcomed, by religious parents. Tracey Stoner explained that she finds it hard “to find support as a large family that’s not religious.” Stoner has found Facebook groups meant to be supportive of big families who are nevertheless unfriendly to her preferences. “Sometimes I’ll post a photo of my family. They’ll see a picture of my daughter where she’s wearing shorts and a shirt. They’ll blast me for that,” Stoner said. “Because she’s not wearing a dress.”
Jessica Roberts says she gets stares at the grocery store when she and her kids are walking the aisles, but in her case, she isn’t letting the judgement get her down. “Sometimes I wish I could just tell people how much of a miracle it is that I could have any children, but especially to be blessed with 5 (almost 6!),” she says. Is she referring to a religious gift from God? Not really. She’s referring to the fact that having been diagnosed at age fourteen with stage-four alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma, a childhood cancer, she had no expectation she would ever be able to have any babies. It is wonderful to read that she has embraced her happy circumstances and chosen to have a big family. But why is a potentially deadly disease a necessary justification for robust procreation?
The answer is because large families are so rare these days. There just aren’t that many big families around, so when they do appear in public it causes a stir. I assure you I speak from experience. We have four children, and even when there were three kids we got comments about our “big family.” Nowadays when I am out with all the kids, I’m used to comments that range from “God bless you” (which I appreciate) to “Woah! You must be busy” (not appreciated). I’ve stopped counting all the ways in which recreational institutions, even those geared to children—museums, zoos—can’t seem to imagine family sizes larger than three children when they design membership categories. But maybe the reason isn’t the size of my family so much as where my family and I reside: namely, an urban center.
Ali Modaress and Joel Kotkin chronicled the decline of large families living in cities across America for the summer 2013 issue of City Journal and found that the “childless city” was a new and worrisome trend:
Increasingly, our great American cities, from New York and Chicago to Los Angeles and Seattle, are evolving into playgrounds for the rich, traps for the poor, and way stations for the ambitious young en route eventually to less congested places. The middle-class family has been pushed to the margins, breaking dramatically with urban history.
The authors note the decline in population among the youngest set (age fourteen and under) especially in cities. “Many urban school districts—such as Chicago, which has 145,000 fewer school-age children than it had a decade ago—have seen enrollments plummet and are busily closing schools.” Cities will have to find a way, Kotkin and Modaress note, “to welcome back families, which have sustained cities for millennia and given the urban experience much of its humanity.” Their point is that for reasons both economic and communal, families have to be able to reside in cities of their choosing. I’m sure their research about the economics of cities is important, but I find the argument over what families bring to a community even more compelling.
The reality is that America is in the midst of a crisis of community. People do not associate in the way they used to—see the work of Charles Murray and Robert Putnam for evidence—and that is causing bad outcomes for kids as well as adults, especially among the working class and the poor. Perhaps this longing for a sense of community is one reason some folks who otherwise might not have ended up with four or more kids are deciding to have multiple offspring; you don’t have to go looking for too much more of a community when you have a small army at home. As mother-to-seven Tracey Stoner told the Washington Post, “We have a party every day.”
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2)COLUMN ONE: OBAMA AND THE MODERATE MUSLIMS
By Caroline Glick
In the 15 years since September 11, first under Bush, and to a more extreme degree under Obama, the US has refused to name the enemy that fights America with the expressed aim of destroying it.
US President Barack Obama in the Oval Office at the White House [File]. (photo credit: Reuters)
US President Barack Obama in the Oval Office at the White House [File]. (photo credit: Reuters)
As far as the White House is concerned, Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s top reporter, is President Barack Obama’s unofficial mouthpiece.
This was one of the many things we learned from The New York Times in David Samuels’s profile of Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes.
In the course of explaining how Rhodes was able to sell Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, despite the fact that it cleared Iran’s path to a nuclear arsenal while giving the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism more than a hundred billion dollars, Samuels reported that “handpicked Beltway insiders like Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic… helped retail the administration’s narrative.”
Given his White House-assigned role, Goldberg’s explanation of Obama’s refusal to discuss radical Islam is worthwhile reading. It reflects what Obama wants the public to believe about his position.
On Wednesday Goldberg wrote that in Obama’s view, discussing radical Islam is counterproductive because it harms the moderates who need to stand up to the radicals.
“Obama,” he wrote, “believes that [a] clash is taking place [not between Western and Muslim civilization but] within a single civilization, and that Americans are sometimes collateral damage in this fight between Muslim modernizers and Muslim fundamentalists.”
Pointing out that there are Muslim fundamentalists, Obama has argued to Goldberg, will only strengthen them against the modernizers.
Over the past week, prominent conservative commentators have agreed with Obama’s position.
Eli Lake from Bloomberg and Prof. John Yoo writing in National Review, among others, criticized presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump for speaking openly about radical Islam. Like Goldberg, they argued that Trump’s outspokenness alienates moderate Muslims.
But what moderate Muslims is Obama trying to help? Consider his treatment of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
Sisi is without a doubt, the most outspoken and powerful advocate of a moderate reformation of Islam, and of Islamic rejection of jihad, alive today.
Sisi has staked his power and his life on his war to defeat the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic State and jihadist Islam in general.
Sisi speaks openly about the danger of jihadist Islam. In his historic speech before the leading Sunni clerics at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University on January 1, 2015, Sisi challenged the clerics to reform Islam.
Among other things he said, “I address the religious clerics. We have to think hard about what we are facing…. It is inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire Islamic nation to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world.
Impossible! “That thinking – I am not saying ‘religion,’ but ‘thinking’ – that corpus of texts and ideas that we have held sacred over the years, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world!…
“Is it possible that 1.6 billion people [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants – that is 7 billion – so that they themselves may live? Impossible! “I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution. You imams are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move…because this Islamic nation is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost – and it is being lost by our own hands.”
Certainly since September 11, 2001, no Muslim leader has issues a clearer call for moderation in Islam than Sisi did in that speech. And he has continued to speak in the manner ever since.
No other Muslim leader of note has put everything on the line as Sisi has to defeat the forces of jihad both on the field and in the mosques.
Moreover, Sisi has put his anti-jihadist belief into action by expanding security cooperation between Egypt and Israel and by bringing the Gulf states into his undeclared alliance with the Jewish state.
He has also acted to end the demonization of Israel in the Egyptian media.
Obviously, supporting Sisi is a no-brainer for a leader who insists that his goal is to empower moderate Muslims. And yet, far from being Sisi’s greatest supporter, Obama opposes him.
Since Sisi led the Egyptian military in overthrowing the Obama-backed Muslim Brotherhood regime as it was poised to transform Egypt into a jihadist terrorist state, Obama has worked to undermine him.
Obama has denied Sisi weapons critical to his fight with ISIS in Sinai. He has repeatedly and consistently chastised Sisi for human rights abuses against radical Islamists who, if permitted to return to power, would trounce the very notion of human rights while endangering the US’s key interests in Middle East.
Then there is Iran.
If Obama fears radical Islam, as Goldberg insists that he does, why did he turn his back on the Green Revolution in 2009? Why did he betray the millions of Iranians who rose up against their Islamist leaders in the hopes of installing a democratic order in Iran where women’s rights, and minority rights are respected? Why did he instead side with the radical, jihadist, terrorism-supporting, nuclear weapons-developing and -proliferating ayatollahs? And why has Obama striven to reach an accommodation with the Iranian regime despite its continued dedication to the destruction of the US? Goldberg’s claim that Obama is interested in empowering Muslim moderates in their fight against radicals doesn’t pass the laugh test.
Obama’s actual schemes for relating to – as opposed to acknowledging, fighting or defeating – the forces of jihad involve empowering those forces at the expense of the moderates who oppose them.
Yes, there are exceptions to this rule – like Obama’s belated assistance to the Kurds in Syria and Iraq. But that doesn’t mean that empowering Islamic jihadists at the expense of moderate Muslims is not Obama’s overarching strategy.
In the case of the Kurds, Obama only agreed to help them after spending years training Syrian opposition forces aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood. It was only after nearly all of those forces cut contact with their American trainers and popped up in al-Qaida-aligned militias that Obama began actively supporting the Kurds.
Then there is his behavior toward American jihadists.
Almost every major jihadist attack on US soil since Obama took office has been carried out by US citizens. But Obama has not countered the threat they pose by embracing American Muslims who reject jihad.
To the contrary, Obama has spent the past seven- and-a-half years empowering radical Muslims and Islamic groups like the pro-Hamas terrorism apologists from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).
This week The Daily Caller reported that MPAC President Salam al-Marayati, is serving as an adviser to the US Department of Homeland Security.
Marayati accused Israel of responsibility for the September 11 attacks on the US, and has called on Muslims not to cooperate with federal counter-terrorism probes. According to the report, Marayati has visited the White House 11 times since 2009.
The Daily Caller also reported that a Syrian immigrant to the US was hired to serve as a member of Obama’s task for on “violent extremism” last year.
Laila Alawa, who joined the task force the day she received US citizenship, referred to the September 11 attacks as an event that “changed the world for good.”
According to the Daily Caller, her task force called for the administration to avoid using the terms “jihad” and “Shari’a” in discussing terrorism – as if Obama needed the tip.
So far from helping Muslim moderates, Obama’s actual policy is to help radical Muslims. In stark opposition to his talking points to Goldberg, since he entered office, Obama has worked to empower radical Muslims in the US and throughout the Middle East at the expense of moderates. Indeed, it is hard to think of an anti-jihad Muslim leader in the US or in the Middle East whom Obama has supported.
The victims in Orlando, San Bernadino, Garland, Amarillo, Boston and beyond are proof that Obama’s actual policies are not making America safer. The rise of ISIS and Iran makes clear that his actual policies are making the world more dangerous.
Maybe if his actual policies were what he claims they are, things might be different today. Maybe White House support for anti-jihadist Muslims combined with a purge of all mention of jihad and related terms from the federal lexicon would be the winning policy. But on its face, it is hard to see how forbidding federal employees from discussing jihadists in relevant terms makes sense.
How can enforcing ignorance of a problem help you to solve it? How does refusing to call out the Islamic extremists that Islamic moderates like the Green revolutionaries and Sisi risk their lives to fight weaken them? How does empowering jihad apologists from CAIR and MPAC help moderate, anti-jihad American Muslims who currently have no voice in Obama’s White House? Eli Lake argued that it was by keeping mum on jihad that then-president George W. Bush and Gen. David Petraeus convinced Sunni tribal leaders in Iraq to join the US in fighting al-Qaida during the surge campaign in 2007-2008.
The same leaders now support ISIS.
A counter-argument to Lake’s is that Bush’s policy of playing down the jihadist doctrine of the likes of al-Qaida had nothing to do with the Sunni chieftains’ decision to side with the US forces.
Rather, they worked with the Americans first because the Americans paid them a lot of money to do so. And second, because they believed the Americans when they said that they would stay the course in Iraq.
They now side with ISIS because they don’t trust America, and would rather live under ISIS rule than under Iranian rule.
In other words, for them, the question wasn’t one of political niceties, but of financial gain and power assessments. And that remains the question that determines their actions today.
In the 15 years since September 11, first under Bush, and since 2009, to a more extreme degree under Obama, the US has refused to name the enemy that fights America with the expressed aim of destroying it.
Maybe, just maybe, this is one of the reasons that the Americans have also failed to truly help anti-jihadist – or moderate – Muslims. Maybe you can’t help one without calling out the other.
2a)
HOW MUCH OF OUR CULTURE ARE WE SURRENDERING TO ISLAM?
- The same hatred as from Nazis is coming from Islamists and their politically correct allies. We do not even have a vague idea of how much Western culture we have surrendered to Islam.
- Democracies are, or at least should be, custodians of a perishable treasury: freedom of expression. This is the biggest difference between Paris and Havana, London and Riyadh, Berlin and Tehran, Rome and Beirut. Freedom of expression is what gives us the best of the Western culture.
- It is self-defeating to quibble about the beauty of cartoons, poems or paintings. In the West, we have paid a high price for the freedom to do so. We should all therefore protest when a German judge bans “offensive” verses of a poem, when a French publisher fires an “Islamophobic” editor or when a music festival bans a politically incorrect band.
It all occurred in the same week. A German judge banned a comedian, Jan Böhmermann, from repeating “obscene” verses of his famous poem about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. A Danish theater apparently cancelled “The Satanic Verses” from its season, due to fear of “reprisals.” Two French music festivals dropped Eagles of Death Metal — the U.S. band that was performing at the Bataclan theater in Paris when the attack by ISIS terrorists (89 people murdered), took place there — because of “Islamophobic” comments by Jesse Hughes, its lead singer. Hughes suggested that Muslims be subjected to greater scrutiny, saying “It's okay to be discerning when it comes to Muslims in this day and age,” later adding:
“They know there's a whole group of white kids out there who are stupid and blind. You have these affluent white kids who have grown up in a liberal curriculum from the time they were in kindergarten, inundated with these lofty notions that are just hot air.”
As Brendan O'Neill wrote, “Western liberals are doing their dirty work for them; they're silencing the people Isis judged to be blasphemous; they're completing Isis's act of terror.”
A few weeks earlier, France's most important publishing house, Gallimard, fired its most famous editor, Richard Millet, who had penned an essay in which he wrote:
“the decline of literature and the deep changes wrought in France and Europe by continuous and extensive immigration from outside Europe, with its intimidating elements of militant Salafism and of the political correctness at the heart of global capitalism; that is to say, the risk of the destruction of the Europe and its cultural humanism, or Christian humanism, in the name of 'humanism' in its 'multicultural' version.”
Kenneth Baker just published a new book, On the Burning of Books: How Flames Fail to Destroy the Written Word. It is a compendium of so called “bibliocaust,” the burning of books from Caliph Omar to Hitler, and includes the fatwa on Salman Rushdie. When Nazis incinerated books in Berlin they declared that from the ashes of these novels would “arise the phoenix of a new spirit.” The same hatred is coming from Islamists and their politically correct allies. We do not even have a vague idea of how much Western culture we have surrendered to Islam.
Theo Van Gogh's movie, “Submission,” for which he was murdered, disappeared from many film festivals. Charlie Hebdo's drawings of the Islamic prophet Mohammed are concealed from the public sphere: after the massacre, very few media reprinted these cartoons. Raif Badawi's blog posts, which cost him 1,000 lashes and ten years in prison in Saudi Arabia, have been deleted by the Saudi authorities and now circulate like forbidden Samizdat literature was in the Soviet Union.
After the massacre of Charlie Hebdo's staff, very few media reprinted their Mohammed cartoons. Pictured above, Stéphane Charbonnier, the editor and publisher of Charlie Hebdo, who was murdered on January 7, 2015 along with many of his colleagues, is shown in front of the magazine's former offices, just after they were firebombed in November 2011.
After the massacre of Charlie Hebdo's staff, very few media reprinted their Mohammed cartoons. Pictured above, Stéphane Charbonnier, the editor and publisher of Charlie Hebdo, who was murdered on January 7, 2015 along with many of his colleagues, is shown in front of the magazine's former offices, just after they were firebombed in November 2011.
Molly Norris, the American cartoonist who in 2010 drew Mohammed and proclaimed “Everyone Draw Muhammad Day,” is still in hiding and had to change her name and life. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York pulled images of Mohammed from an exhibition, while Yale Press banned images of Mohammed from a book about the cartoons. The Jewel of Medina, a novel about Mohammed's wife, was also pulled.
In the Netherlands, an opera about Aisha, one of Mohammed's wives, was cancelled in Rotterdam after the work was boycotted by the theater company's Muslim actors, after it became evident that they would be a target for Islamists. The newspaper NRC Handelsblad headlined its coverage “Tehran on the Meuse,” the river that passes through the Dutch city.
In England, the Victoria and Albert Museum took down Mohammed's image. “British museums and libraries hold dozens of these images, mostly miniatures in manuscripts several centuries old, but they have been kept largely out of public view,” The Guardian explained. In Germany, the Deutsche Opera cancelled Mozart's opera Idomeneo in Berlin, because it depicted the severed head of Mohammed.
Christopher Marlowe's “Tamburlaine the Great,” which includes a reference to Mohammed being “not worthy to be worshipped,” was rewritten at London's Barbican theater, while Cologne's Carnival cancelled Charlie Hebdo's float.
In the Dutch town of Huizen, two nude paintings were removed from an exhibition after Muslims criticized them. The work of a Dutch Iranian artist, Sooreh Hera, was yanked from several Dutch museums because some of the photographs included the depictions of Mohammed and his son-in-law, Ali. According to this disposition, one day London's National Gallery, Florence's Uffizi, Paris' Louvre or Madrid's Prado might decide to censor Michelangelo, Raffaello, Bosch and Balthus because they offend the “sensibility” of Muslims.
The English playwright Richard Bean has been forced to censor an adaptation of Aristophanes's comedy, “Lysistrata”, in which the Greek women hold a “sex strike” to stop their men from going to war (in Bean's script, Muslim virgins go on strike to stop suicide bombers). Several Spanish villages stopped burning effigies of Mohammed in the commemoration ceremony celebrating the reconquest of the country in the Middle Ages.
There is a video filmed in 2006, when the death threats against Charlie Hebdo became worrisome. Journalists and cartoonists are gathered around a table to decide on the next cover for magazine. They speak about Islam. Jean Cabu, one of the cartoonists later murdered by Islamists, puts the issue this way: “No one in the Soviet Union had the right to do satire about Brezhnev.”
Then another future victim, Georges Wolinski, says, “Cuba is full of cartoonists, but they don't make caricatures about Castro. So we are lucky. Yes, we are lucky, France is a paradise.”
Cabu and Wolinski were right. Democracies are, or at least should be, custodians of a perishable treasury: freedom of expression. This is the biggest difference between Paris and Havana, London and Riyadh, Berlin and Tehran, Rome and Beirut. Freedom of expression is what gives us the best of the Western culture.
Thanks to the Islamists' campaign, and the fact that now only some “crazies” still venture in the exercise of freedom, are we now going to be just fearful? “Islamophobic” cartoonists, journalists and writers are the first Europeans since 1945 who have withdrawn from public life to protect their own lives. For the first time in Europe since Hitler ordered the burning of books in Berlin's Bebelplatz, movies, paintings, poems, novels, cartoons, articles and plays are literally and figuratively being burned at stake.
The young French mathematician Jean Cavailles, to explain his fateful involvement in anti-Nazi Resistance, used to say: “We fight to read 'Paris Soir' rather than 'Völkischer Beobachter'.” For this reason alone, it is self-defeating to quibble about the beauty of cartoons, poems or paintings. In the West, we have paid a high price for the freedom to do so. We should all therefore protest when a German judge bans “offensive” verses, when a French publisher fires an “Islamophobic” editor or when a music festival bans a politically incorrect band.
Or is it already too late?
Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.
Related Video: Giulio Meotti on “The Death of Free Speech in Europe “
2b) ILLINOIS STATE GOVERNMENT SET TO ESTABLISH MUSLIM-AMERICAN ADVISORY COUNCIL
By Robert Spencer
“The 21-member council, whose volunteer members would be appointed by the governor as well as leaders in the House and Senate, would advise the governor and General Assembly on issues affecting Muslim Americans and immigrants, including relations between Illinois and Muslim-majority countries….The act specifies that members would serve two-year terms and should bring expertise in a variety of areas including higher education, business, international trade, law, immigration and health care.”
Does Illinois have a Christian-American Advisory Council? A Jewish-American Advisory Council? A Hindu-American Advisory Council? A Buddhist-American Advisory Council? Of course not. Defenders of the Muslim-American Advisory Council might respond that such councils aren’t needed, because Jews and Christians and Hindus and Buddhists aren’t facing “hate” the way Muslims are — except that isn’t true, as Jews are targeted in hate crimes far more often than Muslims, and Christians are being viciously persecuted in many areas of the world — by Muslims.
The real reason why a Muslim-American Advisory Council is about to be established in Illinois (Rauner wouldn’t dare refuse to sign the bill) is because some Muslims are jihad terrorists. The underlying assumption here is that if Muslims get special privileges and access, they might stop killing non-Muslims. The special accommodation is a direct reward for bad behavior — it’s the behavior of an abused spouse being extra nice to the abuser, hoping the abuse will stop. It won’t.
“Muslims hope for Rauner’s signature on advisory council bill,” by Manya Brachear Pashman, Chicago Tribune, June 20, 2016:
“Muslims hope for Rauner’s signature on advisory council bill,” by Manya Brachear Pashman, Chicago Tribune, June 20, 2016:
There might not be a budget, but Illinois could become the first state with a law on the books that gives Muslims a formal voice in government.
The creation of an Illinois Muslim-American Advisory Council is one of more than 400 bills awaiting Gov. Bruce Rauner’s signature. It landed on the Republican governor’s desk shortly before presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump renewed his call to ban Muslims entering the U.S., after a shooter of the Islamic faith killed 49 people at an Orlando, Fla., nightclub.
Muslim leaders say Rauner’s signing of the bill would send a welcome message to the community that Illinois does not condone Trump’s approach. The governor’s office said he is reviewing the bill.
“Given all that is going on with the misinterpretation about Islam and the interests and concerns of the Muslim American community, it’s almost obligatory on behalf of a governor of this state and all governors to have such a body,” said Kareem Irfan, a Chicago lawyer who led an earlier iteration of the council under Gov. Pat Quinn. “So we’re not subject to the whims of each governor, it would be good to make this a lasting institutional body.”
Along with a number of other minority advisory councils, the Muslim council that existed under Quinn dissolved when Rauner took office last year, Irfan said. This year’s hostile political climate prompted Muslim community leaders to propose a resolution that would restore it, and lawmakers took it one step further by proposing a statute that would establish the council more formally.
Sen. Jacqueline Collins, D-Chicago, a co-sponsor of the bill, said she hopes restoration of the council in the form of a law will be the first of many efforts to ensure the governor considers minority perspectives.
“We need to encourage our Muslim Americans to be civically engaged and participate,” Collins said. “If you don’t participate, the fringe elements establish the policy.”
The 21-member council, whose volunteer members would be appointed by the governor as well as leaders in the House and Senate, would advise the governor and General Assembly on issues affecting Muslim Americans and immigrants, including relations between Illinois and Muslim-majority countries. Through monthly meetings and two public hearings per year, members also would serve as liaisons between state agencies and communities across Illinois.
The act specifies that members would serve two-year terms and should bring expertise in a variety of areas including higher education, business, international trade, law, immigration and health care. Staff from certain state agencies would serve as ex-officio members.
Rep. Barbara Wheeler, R-Crystal Lake, who voted against the bill last month, said state employees shouldn’t be wasting their time monitoring advisory councils and lawmakers shouldn’t be wasting their time on “feel-good” legislation when there’s no state budget. She said moderate Muslims should more clearly denounce “Islamic radicals — whatever the Republicans are willing to say and Hillary Clinton isn’t.”
“It’s not an anti-Muslim thing,” she said. “It’s the duty and responsibility of the Muslim American community to figure out how to help us understand whom our enemies are. I don’t believe it’s the state of Illinois’ responsibility to do that.”
Illinois has long been a leader in policies affecting and protecting Muslims, the third-largest religious group in the state next to Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants. In May 2001, 29 state senators, including then-state Sen. Barack Obama, sponsored a bill making it a misdemeanor for any business to sell meat and other products falsely labeled halal, foods permitted by the faith. And in 2005, lawmakers urged federal agencies to come up with a list of charitable organizations, including Muslim charities, that Americans could contribute to without fear of prosecution.
In 2009, busloads of Muslims headed to Springfield for the first annual Muslim Action Day, an organized lobbying effort for issues affecting the community. Quinn issued an executive order setting up an advisory council during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in 2011.
Rauner recently hosted an interfaith prayer breakfast at the executive mansion, where the executive director of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago gave a reading from the Quran.
Hoda Hawa, director of policy and advocacy for the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Washington, D.C., cautiously applauded the legislation, as long as its stated purpose was authentic. There have been too many instances when law enforcement has enlisted the Muslim community for the purpose of surveillance, not civic engagement, she said.
“If this council is just for security purposes, they should be clear about that,” Hawa said. “It would be quite concerning to set up an advisory council that’s out there gathering intelligence. That really erodes trust.”…
2c)
2c)
Hillaryism
“I believe in an America always moving toward the future.”
— Hillary Clinton, June 21
This was not the most important line in Clinton’s Ohio economic policy speech, only the most amazing. Surely there cannot be a more vacuous, meaningless piece of political rhetoric. Every terrestrial entity from nematode to the United States of America moves forward into the future quite on its own, thank you. Where else is there to go?
To be fair, however, spouting emptiness is tempting when you have the impossible task of running as the de facto incumbent in a ragingly “change” year. Clinton is trapped by circumstance. She’s the status quo candidate, Barack Obama’s heir, running essentially on more of the same when, after two terms and glaring failures both at home and abroad, Americans are hardly clamoring for four more years.
Historically speaking, they almost invariably do not. Which is why for the last 60 years, with only one exception, whenever one party has held the White House for two terms, it’s been unceremoniously turfed out. (The one exception: 1988, when Ronald Reagan was rewarded with a third term to be served by George H.W. Bush.)
How little does Clinton have to offer? In her recent speeches, amid paragraph upon paragraph of attacks on Donald Trump, she lists the usual “investments” in clean energy and small business, in school construction and the power grid, and of course more infrastructure.
That’s about as tired a cliche as taking the country into the future. Ever heard a candidate come out against infrastructure? Even Trump waxes poetic about the roads and bridges he will rebuild, plus erecting that beautiful wall.
Haven’t we been here before? All those shovel-ready infrastructure projects to be funded by Obama’s $830 billion stimulus? Where did the money go? Yet the one area of agreement among all candidates of all parties is that our infrastructure is crumbling still.
Defending the status quo today is a thankless undertaking. It nearly cost Clinton the Democratic nomination. Bernie Sanders campaigned loudly and convincingly against the baleful consequences of the Obama years — stagnant wages, income inequality and a squeezing of the middle class. Clinton was forced to echo those charges while simultaneously defending the president and policies that brought on the miseries.
Not easy to do. She is left, therefore, with a pared and pinched rationale for her candidacy. She promises no fundamental change, no relief from the new normal of slow growth, low productivity and economic stagnation. Instead, she offers government as remediator, as gap filler. Hillaryism steps in to alleviate the consequences of what it cannot change with a patchwork of subsidies, handouts and small-ball initiatives.
Hence the $30 billion she proposes to soften the blow for the coal miners she will put out of business. Hence her cure for stagnant wages. Employers are reluctant to give you a wage hike in an economy growing at 1 percent. So she will give it to you instead by decreeing from Washington a huge increase in the minimum wage.
Hillaryism embodies the essence of modern liberalism. Having reached the limits of a welfare state grown increasingly sclerotic, bureaucratic and dysfunctional, the mission of modern liberalism is to patch the fraying safety net with yet more programs and entitlements.
It reflexively rejects structural reform. (That’s the project of Paul Ryan and his Reformicons.) The triangulating Bill Clinton was open to structural change, most notably in his 1996 welfare reform. Hillaryism is not..
She is offering herself as safety-net patcher. A worthy endeavor, perhaps, but, compared with the magic promised first by Sanders, now by Trump, hardly scintillating. Hence her campaign strategy: platitudes (the future), programs (a dozen for every constituency) and a heavy dose of negativity. Her speeches go through the motions on “vision,” while relentlessly attacking Trump as radical, extreme and dangerous.
Her line of argument is quite straightforward: I’m the devil you know — experienced, if flawed; safe, if devious; reliable, if totally uninspired. I give you steady incrementalism. Meanwhile, the other guy is absurdly risky. His policies on trade, immigration and national security threaten trade wars, social unrest and alienation from friends and allies abroad.
The only thing missing from the Clinton campaign thus far is the nuclear option. Lyndon Johnson charged that Barry Goldwater was going to blow up the world. Literally. Johnson’s “Daisy” commercial counts down to a mushroom cloud.
Somewhere in the bowels of Clinton headquarters, a smart young thing is working on a modern version. Look for it on a TV near you
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3)Very Interesting Facts About Gun Control
There are 30,000 gun related deaths per year by firearms.
That is not disputed.
What is never shown though, is a breakdown of those deaths to put them in perspective; as compared to other causes of death.
• 65% of those deaths are by suicide which would never be prevented by gun laws
• 15% are by law enforcement in the line of duty and justified
• 17% are through criminal activity, gang and drug related or mentally ill persons
• 3% are accidental discharge deathsSo technically, "gun violence" is not 30,000 annually but drops to 5,100.
Still too many?
Well, first, how are those deaths spanned across the nation?
• 480 homicides (9.4%) were in Chicago
• 344 homicides (6.7%) were in Baltimore
• 333 homicides (6.5%) were in Detroit
54% increase over prior years)• 119 homicides (2.3%) were in Washington DC (a
So basically, 25% of all gun crime happens in just 4 cities. All 4 of those cities have strict gun laws so it is not the lack of law that is the root cause.
This basically leaves 3,825 for the entire rest of the nation or about 75 per state.
That is an average because some States have much higher rates than others.
For example, California had 1,169. Alabama had 1.
Now, who has the strictest gun laws by far?
California of course but understand, it is not the tool (guns) driving this. It is a crime rate spawned by the number of criminal persons residing in those cities and states. So if all cities and states are not created equal, then there must be something other than the tool causing the gun deaths.
Are 5,100 deaths per year horrific?
How about in comparison to other deaths?
All death is sad and especially so when it is in the commission of a crime but that is the nature of crime. Robbery, death, rape, assault; all are done by criminals to victims and thinking that criminals will obey laws is ludicrous. That's why they are criminals.
But what of other deaths?
• 40,000+ die from a drug overdose – THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR THAT!
· 36,000 people die per year from the flu, far exceeding the criminal gun deaths
• 34,000 people die per year in traffic fatalities (exceeding gun deaths even if you include suicide)Now it gets good
• 200,000+ people die each year (and growing) from preventable medical malpractice.
• You are safer in Chicago than you are in a hospital!
• 710,000 people die per year from heart disease.
Time to stop the cheeseburgers!
So what is the point?
If Obama and the anti-gun movement focused their attention on heart disease, even 10%, a decrease would save twice the lives annually of all gun related deaths (including suicide, law enforcement, etc.).
Simple, easily preventable 10% reductions!A 10% reduction in malpractice would be 66% of the total gun deaths or 4 times the number of criminal homicides.
So you have to ask yourself, in the grand scheme of things, why the focus on guns?
It's pretty simple.
Taking away guns gives control to governments.
This is not conspiracy theory; this is a historical fact.
Why is it impossible for the government to spill over into dictatorship?
Why did the Japanese not even attempt to attack California in WWII?
Because as they put it, there is a gun behind every blade of grass.
The founders of this nation knew that regardless of the form of government, those in power may become corrupt and seek to rule as the British did.
They too tried to disarm the populace of the colonies because it is not difficult to understand; a disarmed populace is a controlled populace.
Thus, the second amendment was proudly and boldly included in the constitution.
It must be preserved at all costs.
So the next time someone tries to tell you that gun control is about saving lives, look at these facts and remember these words from Noah Webster
"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe.
The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power."
4)
Obama's executive action protecting illegal aliens blocked in 4-4 Supreme Court deadlock
Barack Obama’s immigration program to protect some families from deportation relief remains blocked by a court order, after the supreme court deadlocked in a 4-4 tie, a decision crucial to the president’s legacy.
The opinion represents a significant blow to Obama during his final months in office. It will allow Republicans to claim victory in their argument that he overreached presidential powers and failed to protect America’s borders.
It comes in an election year in which immigration has proven a bitterly divisive issue in the battle to succeed him.
The court had heard arguments in April over whether to revive Obama’s plan to spare roughly 4 million undocumented immigrants – those who have lived illegally in the US at least since 2010, have no criminal record and have children who are US citizens or lawful permanent residents – from mass deportations that would rip many families apart.
The president took the unilateral action after House Republicans thwarted bipartisan legislation providing a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants that was passed by the Senate in 2013.
But his executive action was challenged by 26 states, all of which are led by Republican governors (California, which has a significant immigrant population but is led by a Democratic governor, did not join). They argued that Obama had overreached and does not have the power to effectively change immigration law.
A federal judge in Texas ruled in their favour and the fifth US circuit court of appeals upheld that decision last November.
The supreme court’s 90-minute hearing in April considered the argument over the recent expansion of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) and the creation of Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (Dapa).
It noted the importance of a two-word phrase the administration used to describe the status of immigrants under the programmes: lawful presence. The states argued that it gives the immigrants more rights than federal law allows.
The hearing also illustrated the current 4-4 split between conservative and liberal justices on the court. Sonia Sotomayor and other liberals grilled Scott Keller, the solicitor general of Texas, while the conservative justices challenged the US solicitor general, Donald Verrilli, acting for the government.
Keller asserted that Dapa is an unprecedented unlawful assertion of executive power and one of the biggest changes in immigration policy in American history. Sotomayor fiercely disputed this.
The states also raised concerns that deferred action opens the way for immigrants to gain authorisation to work, eligibility for benefits and obtain driver’s licences with the financial burden that would entail in a state such as Texas.
Verrilli asserted the president’s authority to set priorities for immigration enforcement. But Justice Anthony Kennedy questioned whether the president can defer deportations for millions of people without congressional authorisation, saying “that is a legislative task, not an executive task”.
He added: “It’s as if the president is defining the policy and the Congress is executing it. That’s just upside down.”
With the late justice Antonin Scalia’s seat unfilled, there were fears of a 4-4 tie that would leave in place the appeals court ruling that blocks the plan and prevent Obama from trying to revive it while he remains in office.
Outside the supreme court that day, more than a thousand demonstrators gathered in defence of Obama’s programme, afraid that family members could be separated from one another. They marched with banners that said “Keep Families Together” and chanted: “We’re home and here to stay, undocumented and unafraid.”
The case has political purchase in an election year in which the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, has pledged to round up and deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants, described Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and promised to build a wall along the border.
Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, said recently: “I strongly believe that these executive actions that are rooted in law and precedent will be upheld, but the fate of these policies, and of the millions of people who were impacted by them, will be in the hands of the next president.
“If Donald Trump is that president, he has pledged to eliminate Daca and Dapa on day one. He has said he will create a ‘deportation force’ to round up 11 million people. He will tear apart families, separate parents and children, rip young people out of school and workers from their jobs. He has even said he will undermine that most fundamental American value – that if you are born here, no matter who your parents are or where they came from, you are an American.”
Copyright © 2016 theguardian.com. All rights reserved.
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