What Ever Happened To Personal Responsibility? Arrogance At The V.A. Beauty and Ugliness.

The arrogance of The State Department claiming it
will take 70 years to release Clinton e mails is the
equivalent of them spitting in taxpayer's faces.
This is why I rail, as I do, against a government
that is both corrupt and unworthy of its existence.
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Is it wise to continue feeding the hand that bites us and if it is can we at least have a report from our State Department and Congressional Committees explaining what the benefits are?  Taxpayers are entitled to this at a minimum.(See 1 below.)

And recently the head of Obama's  V.A told waiting vets they should be happy they were not in Disney where the lines are longer.  The arrogance of this man is simply overwhelming and he remains in office at the pleasure of Obama.
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Sowell on 'is personal responsibility obsolete/dead?' (See 2 below.)
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What happens post The Iran Deal continues to matter. (See 3 below.)
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Thar's gold in them bloody sands.  (See 4 below.)

and

My friend Toameh continues to report on Abbas' problems within his own ranks but the West continues to ignore. (See 4a below.)
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It is way past the time for the 'baby' candidate of the Republican Party to change his tune and get serious about what he will do about running our nation and which programs he will offer.

As for Hillary, I would not expect her to engage in press conferences because she has so much to hide and is always allowed to do so.
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Now for some morphing:

Part 1 - 50 of the Most Beautiful Women

and

Now for something not so beautiful:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/44vzMNG2fZc

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Finally why history and facts are important but no one cares these days:


Michelle Obama reminded attendees of a Naturalization Ceremony  recently that the Founding Fathers weren't born in America.  The ceremony for 50 new U.S. citizens was held at the National Archives in Washington , D.C.
   
She said during her speech, referring to the Declaration of Independence, "It's amazing that just a few feet from here where I'm standing are the signatures of the 56 Founders who put their names on a Declaration that changed the course of history, and like the 50 of you,  none of them were born American - they became American."
  Excuse me?  Did she actually mean that those who signed the Declaration of Independence and participated in the drafting of the Constitution were not born in America?   
Benjamin Franklin was born in Pennsylvania.
Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and James Madison were born in Virginia.
John Adams was born in Massachusetts.
Only eight of the 56 were not born in America. Surely she knew this.
   
But, then again, maybe not.  After all, she is a Harvard graduate. Isn't she?
  
   
And by the way, THE CONSTITUTION WAS NOT SIGNED IN WASHINGTON D.C.!  It was signed in Philadelphia!
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   Dick
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1)

UNBELIEVABLE!!! How they vote in the United Nations: Below are the actual voting records of various Arabic/Islamic States which are recorded in both the US State Department and United Nations records: Kuwait votes against the United States 67% of the time. Qatar votes against the United States 67% of the time. Morocco votes against the United States 70% of the time. United Arab Emirates votes against the United States 70% of the time. Jordan votes against the United States 71% of the time. Tunisia votes against the United States 71% of the time. Saudi Arabia votes against the United States 73% of the time. Yemen votes against the United States 74% of the time. Algeria votes against the United States 74% of the time. Oman votes against the United States 74% of the time. Sudan votes against the United States 75% of the time. Pakistan votes against the United States 75% of the time. Libya votes against the United States 76% of the time. Egypt votes against the United States 79% of the time. Lebanon votes against the United States 80 % of the time. India votes against the United States 81% of the time. Syria votes against the United States 84% of the time. Mauritania votes against the United States 87% of the time.  U S Foreign Aid to those who hate us: Egypt, for example, after voting 79% of the time against the United States, still receives$2,000,000,000annually in US Foreign Aid. Jordan votes 71% against the United States and receives $192,814,000 annually in US Foreign Aid. Pakistan votes 75% against the United States receives $6,721,000,000 annually in US Foreign Aid. India votes 81% against the United States receives $143,699,000 annually in US Foreign Aid.

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2)

Is Personal Responsibility Obsolete?

By Tom Sowell

Among the many disturbing signs of our times are conservatives and libertarians of high intelligence and high principles who are advocating government programs that relieve people of the necessity of working to provide their own livelihoods.

Generations ago, both religious people and socialists were agreed on the proposition that "he who does not work, neither shall he eat." Both would come to the aid of those unable to work. But the idea that people who simply choose not to work should be supported by money taken from those who are working was rejected across the ideological spectrum.

How we got to the present situation is a long story, but the painful fact is that we are here now. Among the leading minds of our times, including Charles Murray today and the late and great Milton Friedman earlier, there have been proposals for ways of subsidizing the poor without the suffocating distortions of the government's welfare state bureaucracy.

Professor Friedman's plan for a negative income tax to help the poor has already been put into practice. But, contrary to his intention to have this replace the welfare state bureaucracy, it has been simply tacked on to all the many other government programs, instead of replacing them.

It is not inevitable that the same thing will happen to Charles Murray's plan, but I would bet the rent money that there would be the same end result.

Just what specific problem is so dire as to cause some conservatives and libertarians to propose that the government come to the rescue by giving every adult money to live on without working?

Poverty? "Poverty" today means whatever government statisticians in Washington say it means -- no more and no less. Most Americans living below the official poverty line today have central air-conditioning, cable television for multiple TV sets, own at least one motor vehicle, and have many other amenities that most of the human race never had for most of its existence.

Most Americans did not have central air-conditioning or cable television as recently as the 1980s. A scholar who spent years studying Latin America has called the poverty line in America the upper middle class in Mexico.

Low-income neighborhoods suffer far more from social degeneration, including high rates of crime and violence, than from material deprivation.

Welfare state guarantees of not having to work, however the particular policies are applied, are not a solution. Relieving people of personal responsibility for their own lives, however it is done, is a major part of the problem.

Before there can be a welfare state in a democratic country, there must first be a welfare state vision that becomes sufficiently pervasive to allow a welfare state to be created. That vision, in which people are "entitled" to what others have produced, is at the heart of the social degeneration that can be traced back to the 1960s.

Teenage pregnancies, venereal diseases, dependency on government and murder rates were all going down during the much disdained 1950s. All reversed and shot up as the welfare state, and the social vision behind the welfare state, took over in the 1960s.

That vision featured non-judgmental rewards and non-judgmental leniency toward counterproductive behavior, whether crime or irresponsible sex and its consequences. But relieving people from the responsibilities and challenges of life is doing them no favor. Nor is it a favor to society at large.

American society has become more polarized under the welfare state vision. Nor is it hard to see why. If we are all "entitled" to benefits, just by being present, why are some entitled to so little while others have so much?

In an entitlement context, all sorts of "gaps" and "disparities" automatically become "inequities," and a reason for lashing out at others, instead of improving yourself. Only in a society in which rewards are based on contributions is there any reasonable reply to the question as to why Bill Gates has so much and others so little.

The track record of divorcing personal rewards from personal contributions hardly justifies more of the same, even when it is in a more sophisticated form. Sophisticated social disaster is still disaster -- and we already have too much of that.

Too many social problems are conceived of in terms of what "we" can do for "them." After decades of massive expansions of the welfare state, the answer seems to range from "not very much" to "making matters worse."

Undaunted, people in a number of countries are coming up with new proposals that are variations on the theme of government-provided income -- which amounts to relieving people from personal responsibility.

Yet even some conservatives and libertarians are coming up with proposals for more "efficient" versions of the welfare state -- namely direct cash grants for life to virtually all adults, instead of the current hodgepodge of overlapping bureaucratic programs.

Charles Murray recognizes that "some people will idle away their lives" under his proposal. "But that is already a problem," he says, and therefore is no valid objection to replacing the current welfare state with a less costly alternative.

Everyone recognizes that there are some people unable to provide for their own survival -- infants and the severely disabled, among others. But providing for such people is wholly different from a blanket guarantee for everybody that they need not lift a finger to feed, clothe or shelter themselves.

The financial cost of providing such a guarantee, though huge, is not the worst of the problems. The history of what has actually happened in times and places where people were relieved from the challenge of survival by windfall gains is not encouraging.

In both England and the United States, the massive expansion of the welfare state since the 1960s has been accompanied by a vast expansion in the amount of crime, violence, drug addiction, fatherless children and other signs of social degeneration.

Maybe that was just coincidence. But there have been too many coincidences in too many very different times and places where people were relieved from the challenge of survival by windfall gains of one sort or another.

In 16th and 17th century Spain -- its "golden age" -- the windfall gain was gold and silver looted by the ton from Spanish colonies in the Western Hemisphere. This enabled Spain to survive without having to develop the skills, the sciences or the work ethic of other countries in Western Europe.

Spain could buy what it wanted from other nations with all the gold and silver taken from its colonies. As a Spaniard of that era proudly put it, "Everyone serves Spain and Spain serves no one."

What this meant in practical terms was that other countries developed the skills, the knowledge, the self-discipline and other forms of human capital that Spain did not have to develop, since it could receive the tangible products of this human capital from other countries.

But once the windfall gains from its colonies were gone, Spain became, and remained, one of the poorest countries in Western Europe. Worse, the disdainful attitudes toward productive work that developed during the centuries of Spain's "golden age" became a negative legacy to future generations, in both Spain itself and in its overseas offshoot societies in Latin America.

In Saudi Arabia today, the great windfall gain is its vast petroleum reserve. This has spawned both a fabulously wealthy ruling elite and a heavily subsidized general population in which many have become disdainful of work. The net result has been a work force in which foreigners literally outnumber Saudis.

Some welfare states' windfall gains have enabled a large segment of their own citizens to live in subsidized idleness while many jobs stigmatized as "menial" are taken over by foreigners. Often these initially poor foreigners rise up the economic scale, while the subsidized domestic poor fail to rise.

Do we really want more of that?

British historian Arnold Toynbee proposed the "challenge and response" thesis that human beings advance when there are challenges they must meet. The welfare state removes challenges -- and has produced many social retrogressions.

Those with the welfare state vision often want to remove challenges even from games by getting rid of winning and losing. That is consistent with their overall assumptions about life. But it seems very inconsistent for conservatives and libertarians to support plans whose net effect would be to reduce the inherent challenges of life for still more people.
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Why Iran’s Post-Deal Terror Matters

JONATHAN S. TOBIN

As we learned in the last month, the “echo chamber” of White House spin repeated by the liberal mainstream media helped justify the Obama administration’s push for a nuclear deal with Iran. At the heart of that big lie was the notion that the Islamist regime was moderating and that it was incumbent on the United States to, as President Obama put it, help it “get right with the world.” That was always a myth since the talks began before the elevation of the faux moderate Hassan Rouhani to the presidency in a faux election, but even in the months since the deal began to be implemented, we’ve seen more proof that Iran isn’t changing. Tehran’s decision to continue testing ballistic missiles and the strengthening of the most radical elements in key positions already made it clear that it wasn’t interested in a rapprochement with the West. But the latest piece of evidence of the contradiction at the heart of the administration’s signature foreign policy achievement doesn’t come from its critics or even from reports inside Iran. It comes from the same State Department that has been otherwise engaged lately in Stalinist-style efforts to bury the truth about its lies about Iran.

The release late last week of the annual State Department report on terrorism covering the year 2015 is a reminder of just what kind of a nation it is that the U.S. has enriched immeasurably with the end of economic sanctions and rewarded with more than $100 billion in released frozen assets. The following concluding paragraph from the section on Strategic Assessment says it all:

Iran remained the foremost state sponsor of terrorism in 2015, providing a range of support, including financial, training, and equipment, to groups around the world – particularly Hizballah. Iran continued to be deeply involved in the conflict in Syria, working closely with the Asad regime to counter the Syrian opposition, and also in Iraq where Iran continued to provide support to militia groups, including Foreign Terrorist Organization Kata’ib Hizballah. In addition, it was implicated for its support to violent Shia opposition group attacks in Bahrain. Iran was joined in these efforts by Hizballah, which continued to operate globally, as demonstrated by the disruption of Hizballah activities in Peru in 2014 and Cyprus in 2015.

Let’s be clear that the administration never exactly claimed that Iran would cease supporting terrorism or even stop threatening Israel with destruction. The theory that the administration would sometimes put forward about the Iran deal was that the nuclear issue was separate from other concerns. If the president and his partisan apologists were right and Iran was stopped from getting a nuclear weapon, that would be a good thing and a goal worth pursuing even as the U.S. remained worried about its other activities. It’s also true that the U.S. has a certain strategic ambivalence about Iran since it has become to some extent a tacit ally in the struggle against ISIS.

To those who brought up Iran’s bad behavior, the answer has been that the world is a complicated place, and the U.S. relationship with Iran was equally complicated. We were assured that the U.S. would continue to work against Iran’s terrorist activities while trying to make it less dangerous via diplomacy.

But the conceit at the core of this thesis has always been wrong. Iran doesn’t want to get right with the world. Nor has it been forced to give up its nuclear program as the president promised four years ago when he was running for re-election. Despite the boasts of the administration about its great achievement — claims that were repeated by Hillary Clinton in what was the least persuasive moment of her otherwise effective foreign policy speech denouncing Donald Trump last week — the deal does not eliminate the threat of an Iranian bomb. To the contrary, not only does it leave in place Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and allow it to continue its most advanced work, it will expire in a decade after which the regime will be able to quickly move toward a weapon.

But just as discouraging is the fact that the cost of getting Iran to agree to that delay is enormous in terms of pumping up its failing economy and ending efforts to isolate it. The relevance of the State Department’s terrorism report to the deal is that the resources Tehran — and most specifically the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps — will now have at its disposal to further its terror campaign will now greatly increase.

The IRGC is significant because it is not merely a terror group; it’s a terrorism conglomerate.  It has a hand in the funding of terrorism around the world and is a major player in the Iranian economy, which owns many state-run businesses. As the New York Times reported earlier this year, very little of the foreign investment that is pouring into Iran since the sanctions collapsed are going to the private sector in that country. Almost the entire vast windfall in cash is going to state-run companies, many of which are controlled by the IRGC.

That means the only immediate effect of the deal is to help make it easy to continue and intensify the same activities that the State Department correctly points out make it so dangerous.

All of this illustrates again how self-contradictory the administration’s Iran policy has become. As our Max Boot noted last week, the tacit alliance against ISIS is not only of questionable utility, at best, it means exchanging the rule of one terrorist regime for another as Iran’s terror proxies in Iraq that are mentioned in the State Department report will dominate the country, not the Baghdad government backed by the U.S.

All this also shows how hard it will be for Obama’s successor to undo the damage that has been done by the nuclear pact and a policy of appeasement of Iran. Iran is using its terrorist proxies to advance its goal of regional hegemony in the Middle East. That threat that has forced Saudi Arabia to look to Israel rather than to a United States that no longer seems willing to stand up against Tehran. Add to that the fact that Iran is now immeasurably richer and that the new economic ties with Europe make it impossible to re-impose international sanctions, and it's easy to see how much more dangerous the world has become as a result of Obama’s nuclear diplomacy. The fact that the confirmation of this dismal prospect comes from his own State Department rather than critics seems to be lost on the administration and its cheerleaders who helped sell the country on this unfolding disaster.

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4)

ISIS MADE $2.4 BILLION LAST YEAR, SAY ANALYSTS

The Islamic State has diversified its income streams by increasing taxes and does not look like it will collapse soon, according to analysts.

The Islamic State's gold dinar

The Islamic State made $2.4 billion in 2015, making it the richest terrorist group in the world by a substantial margin, according to the Center for the Analysis of Terrorism as reported by The Economic Times.

Despite losing territory and suffering airstrikes against its oil refineries, the group maintained income by increasing taxes on the estimated eight million people under its control from $360 million to $800 million in 2015. The Islamic State’s income for 2015 was $500 million less than its income the previous year.

The report’s authors concluded that “ISIS's military defeat is not imminent … as things stand, ISIS economic collapse remains some way off in the mid-term.”

The Islamic State continues to brutally assert dominance over its dominion. On Thursday, 19 Yazidi girls were publicly burned alive in iron cages in Mosul, according to ARA News. “They were punished for refusing to have sex with ISIS militants,” local media activist Abdullah al-Malla told ARA News.

Nor are the Islamic State’s activities limited to the territories it controls in Syria and Iraq.

An alleged sleeper cell consisting of four Syrian men planningterrorist attacks in Dusseldorf was arrested on Thursday. One of the men had turned himself into authorities in Paris on February 1 and provided evidence against his fellow conspirators. It took German police four months to gather enough evidence to arrest the other three.

One of the suspects had filed for asylum. But the head of the German Police Trade Union has said that to run background checks on all refugees entering Germany would be unaffordable and that such a policy is too late.

“It would have been useful in the second half of last year to create conditions for background checks on all people who came to us, in fact, before they traveled [to Germany]. But that is past history now, as we cannot afford it,” he said, according to Russia Today.

At the moment the German Justice Ministry is investigating 180 terror suspects who have either returned from or have links to Syria.

4a) PALESTINIANS: THE FATAH MESS

By Khaled Abu Toameh

After many years of being gagged, Fatah's young guard is finding its voice. But while members of this faction wish to see a “changing of the guards at the Palestinian palace,” this does not mean that they have changed their attitude towards Israel.

Fatah's young guard is neither interested in, nor authorized to, give up the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees — or even take the basic step of recognizing Israel as a Jewish state. In short, the actors might change, but the same show will go on.

The international community, meanwhile, is busy burying its head in the sand of Abbas's very messy backyard. The participants at the Middle East peace conference held in Paris last week may have missed the latest revolt against the PA president. Had they been paying attention, instead of calling for a two-state solution, they might have demanded that Abbas and his Fatah faction get their acts together, and include Israel in the show. Perhaps they also would have mentioned that this ought to happen before Hamas takes over the West Bank and creates another Islamist regime there, too.

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas is once again facing insurrection — this time from the young guard in his ruling Fatah faction.

Even autocracy has its limits, and after many years of being gagged, Fatah's young guard is finding its voice.

This renewed power struggle between the young and the old guard is probably a positive sign. It seems to signal the Palestinians wish to see new faces in power. However, just because members of this faction wish to see a “changing of the guards at the Palestinian palace” does not mean that they have changed their attitude towards Israel.

This young guard, in fact, is neither interested in, nor authorized to, give up the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees — or even take the basic step of recognizing Israel as a Jewish state.

In short, the actors might change, but the same show will go on.

But change is sometimes good. Injecting new blood into the old and corrupt political system known as the Palestinian Authority might be a start.

So who is behind this move to introduce changes into the Palestinian leadership and what is the goal of that drive? Will the effort have any impact on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

The latest campaign is being waged by senior Fatah officials belonging to the Fatah Revolutionary Council – one of the factions' two important decision-making bodies (the second is the Fatah Central Committee). The Revolutionary Council, Fatah's legislative body, has more than 80 members, most of whom are regarded as representatives of the young guard in the faction.

Last week, more than half the members of the Fatah Revolutionary Council signed a petition calling for a “correctional revolution” in their faction. Some Palestinians see the petition as marking the beginning of a “revolution within a revolution.” The petition, which calls for major reforms in Fatah, is first and foremost directed against Abbas and his old guard colleagues in the Palestinian leadership.

The petition carries the signatures of several Fatah officials who until recently were considered Abbas loyalists. Abbas is thus being challenged even by those who were until now considered within Fatah among his staunch supporters. This challenge joins the one issued by several other Fatah officials, who have come out in public against Abbas's autocratic rule.

The petition signed by the Fatah “rebels” calls for holding long-overdue elections for the faction, and accuses Abbas of marginalizing young leaders and refusing to share powers. Divisions and internal squabbling in Fatah have effectively paralyzed its ability to hold new elections or approve reforms and changes. That is another reason why Fatah is not keen on the idea of elections. Under the current circumstances, Hamas's chances of winning remain extremely high.

Moreover, the Fatah mess has created massive schism. Never, in its fifty years of existence, has Fatah been so divided. Some of its top brass have already defected to Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. Some quit Fatah because they lost hope in its ability to reform and get rid of the icons of corruption in the faction. Others went to Hamas and Islamic Jihad because they support the armed struggle against Israel and are not prepared for any compromise.

The internecine Fatah war has breached the bounds of the faction, and even of the Palestinians. This strife should gain the attention all involved in efforts to reach a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After all, Fatah is the Palestinian party that is regarded as Israel's “peace partner.” Moreover, this is the faction that claims it wants to lead the Palestinians towards statehood. The international community is doing business with Fatah. What happens within Fatah's walls should therefore be of intense international concern.

The “revolution within a revolution” taking place within Fatah ought to set off alarm bells in the international community. Fatah's extreme current weakness casts serious doubt on its ability to deliver peace with Israel and oversee the establishment of a Palestinian state. One might look back just a single decade and remember that in only 2006, Fatah's venality caused it to lose the Palestinian parliamentary election in the West Bank and caused Fatah's collapse and its forcible expulsion from the Gaza Strip. The big winner: Hamas.

One man, one vote, one time? Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh (left) and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas (also president of the Palestinian Authority) are pictured voting in the last election for the Palestinian Legislative Council, which took place in 2006.

The international community, however, is busy burying its head in the sand of Abbas's very messy backyard. The participants at the Middle East peace conference held in Paris last week may have missed the latest revolt against the PA president. Had they been paying attention, instead of calling for a two-state solution, they might have demanded that Abbas and his Fatah faction get their acts together, and include Israel in the show. Perhaps they also would have mentioned that this ought to happen before Hamas takes over the West Bank and creates another Islamist regime there, too.

Khaled Abu Toameh is an award-winning journalist based in Jerusalem.

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