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Friday, May 25, 2012
Sen. Reid Blocks Ban on $4 Billion Illegal Immigrant Tax Credit Loophole
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'The Amateur' to debut at Number One on the New York Times bestseller lists
Edward Klein’s new book about President Obama, The Amateur, has already made some news, particularly with regard to allegations that an ally of Obama’s offered the odious Reverend Jeremiah Wright a $150,000 bribe to keep his mouth shut during the 2008 presidential campaign. And the title of the book is a quote from Bill Clinton, who was said to be urging his wife to challenge Obama for the Democrat nomination in 2012.
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Left Targets Chief Justice Roberts To Save ObamaCare
5.23.12
IBD:
The Judiciary: Controlling the politically insulated federal courts, especially the Supreme Court, has long been atop the left's to-do list. Since it doesn't own Chief Justice John Roberts, now the game is to shame him.
The battle over retaining the liberal politicization of the courts, symbolized by Chief Justice Earl Warren's tenure, goes back at least as far as President Nixon's failed nominations of Clement Haynsworth and Harrold Carswell in 1969-70; extended to the "borking" of President Reagan's nomination of Judge Robert Bork in 1987; and ultimately sank to the bottom of the gutter in the character assassination of President George H.W. Bush's appointee, Justice Clarence Thomas, in 1991.
President Obama took political meddling with the Supreme Court a step further when he stood before some of the justices assembled within the Capitol for his first State of the Union address. From that platform, he referred to the court's McCain-Feingold ruling, charging that "the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that, I believe, will open the floodgates for special interests."
Last month, the president contended that if the high court ruled ObamaCare unconstitutional, it would mean "an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law" — which is the Supreme Court's duty of judicial review that it has "somehow" carried out since Marbury v. Madison in 1803, and which the Warren Court did in landmark liberal cases such as Brown v. Board of Education and Griswold v. Connecticut.
Legal icon of the left Laurence Tribe soon appeared to explain that his former Harvard Law student didn't really mean it. But despite the dubious alibis, Obama is obviously once again miming the president to whom he most wishes to be compared.
He may not be trying to pack the court with six new Supreme Court justices, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, but he certainly seems to think he might get his way with a conservative justice or two through public intimidation.
As the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist once noted, "President Roosevelt lost the Court-packing battle, but he won the war for control of the Supreme Court" — not only through appointments during his long tenure, but also through his rhetorical pressure.
Obama has been joined by legal commentators of the left such as George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen. Writing in the latest issue of the New Republic, Rosen warns the chief justice of the United States that ObamaCare is "John Roberts's moment of truth."
Rosen contends that "In addition to deciding what kind of chief justice he wants to be, he has to decide what kind of legal conservatism he wants to embrace."
This was a favorite pastime of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy — instructing conservatives on the differences between acceptable and unacceptable versions of the political philosophy of which he was a mortal enemy.
A 5-4 vote against ObamaCare would render Roberts' hopes of establishing a less-divided high court "an irredeemable failure," Rosen declares.
Further, a Roberts vote against ObamaCare "would also be abandoning the association of legal conservatism with restraint — and resurrecting the pre-New Deal era of economic judicial activism with a vengeance ... when crusading judges struck down progressive economic regulations in the name of hotly conservative economic doctrines that a majority of the country didn't favor."
The pre-New Deal court? Why not just come out and accuse Roberts of thinking the Dred Scott slaveholder rights ruling wasn't really all that bad?
Roberts' thinking may not be as well-identified as that of Justices Scalia, Thomas, or even Alito. But we can be sure of this:
He's enough of his own man not to be cowed by politically motivated appeals — whether they come from a president or a lefty magazine.
IBD:
The Judiciary: Controlling the politically insulated federal courts, especially the Supreme Court, has long been atop the left's to-do list. Since it doesn't own Chief Justice John Roberts, now the game is to shame him.
The battle over retaining the liberal politicization of the courts, symbolized by Chief Justice Earl Warren's tenure, goes back at least as far as President Nixon's failed nominations of Clement Haynsworth and Harrold Carswell in 1969-70; extended to the "borking" of President Reagan's nomination of Judge Robert Bork in 1987; and ultimately sank to the bottom of the gutter in the character assassination of President George H.W. Bush's appointee, Justice Clarence Thomas, in 1991.
President Obama took political meddling with the Supreme Court a step further when he stood before some of the justices assembled within the Capitol for his first State of the Union address. From that platform, he referred to the court's McCain-Feingold ruling, charging that "the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that, I believe, will open the floodgates for special interests."
Last month, the president contended that if the high court ruled ObamaCare unconstitutional, it would mean "an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law" — which is the Supreme Court's duty of judicial review that it has "somehow" carried out since Marbury v. Madison in 1803, and which the Warren Court did in landmark liberal cases such as Brown v. Board of Education and Griswold v. Connecticut.
Legal icon of the left Laurence Tribe soon appeared to explain that his former Harvard Law student didn't really mean it. But despite the dubious alibis, Obama is obviously once again miming the president to whom he most wishes to be compared.
He may not be trying to pack the court with six new Supreme Court justices, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, but he certainly seems to think he might get his way with a conservative justice or two through public intimidation.
As the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist once noted, "President Roosevelt lost the Court-packing battle, but he won the war for control of the Supreme Court" — not only through appointments during his long tenure, but also through his rhetorical pressure.
Obama has been joined by legal commentators of the left such as George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen. Writing in the latest issue of the New Republic, Rosen warns the chief justice of the United States that ObamaCare is "John Roberts's moment of truth."
Rosen contends that "In addition to deciding what kind of chief justice he wants to be, he has to decide what kind of legal conservatism he wants to embrace."
This was a favorite pastime of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy — instructing conservatives on the differences between acceptable and unacceptable versions of the political philosophy of which he was a mortal enemy.
A 5-4 vote against ObamaCare would render Roberts' hopes of establishing a less-divided high court "an irredeemable failure," Rosen declares.
Further, a Roberts vote against ObamaCare "would also be abandoning the association of legal conservatism with restraint — and resurrecting the pre-New Deal era of economic judicial activism with a vengeance ... when crusading judges struck down progressive economic regulations in the name of hotly conservative economic doctrines that a majority of the country didn't favor."
The pre-New Deal court? Why not just come out and accuse Roberts of thinking the Dred Scott slaveholder rights ruling wasn't really all that bad?
Roberts' thinking may not be as well-identified as that of Justices Scalia, Thomas, or even Alito. But we can be sure of this:
He's enough of his own man not to be cowed by politically motivated appeals — whether they come from a president or a lefty magazine.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
UFT boss Mulgrew caught having sex with guidance counselor, scandal quashed: suit
UFT President Mike Mulgrew was caught “in flagrante delicto” with a guidance counselor at William Grady HS, where he taught before becoming the union’s boss, a bombshell lawsuit charges.
The accusation that Mulgrew was seen having sex with a co-worker in a woodshop at the vocational school, and that it was hushed up, comes in a rambling 73-page suit filed in Brooklyn federal court last week by Andrew Ostrowsky, a math teacher at Frank Sinatra HS of the Arts in Manhattan.
Ostrowsky, 35, names Mayor Bloomberg, Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, Mulgrew and the UFT, claiming the teachers union conspired with school officials to quash the scandal. It accuses the city of using the favor to “extort” labor concessions.
The suit claims that a custodian found Mulgrew and Emma Camacho-Mendez together at the Brooklyn school, and that the custodian and principal were “sworn to secrecy and denial.”
It charges the pair were shielded by then-UFT President Randi Weingarten to avoid embarrassment to the union leadership.
“Mulgrew was embroiled in a meretricious scandal for which anyone else would have been fired, ending his career as an educator,” the suit claims.
Mulgrew’s spokesman, Dick Riley, gave a curt response: “This lawsuit is a catalog of absurd, false charges which we expect the court to dismiss.”
Camacho-Mendez, now a UFT official, said, “I have no comment on that. It’s the first I’ve heard of such an allegation. I have nothing to say to you.”
The lawyer who filed the suit, Joy Hochstadt, told The Post she is seeking evidence of the alleged tryst.
“Everyone has only hearsay knowledge, but almost everyone in the school talked about it,” the suit says.
Several former staffers at Grady HS have told The Post they believed Mulgrew and Camacho-Mendez, who is married, were romantically involved, and there were rumors of an encounter on a drafting table at the time.
“The sex thing, it’s between them and nobody’s business,” one said. “The thing that upset me is the patronage job to Mendez — rewarding her with a high-paying job with my union dues.”
In 2005, soon after the alleged incident, Mulgrew became UFT vice president for career and technical high schools. Around the same time, Camacho-Mendez transferred to the HS of Telecommunication Arts and Technology in Brooklyn, but got a part-time job in Mulgrew’s union office.
She was later given the full-time position of UFT liaison for special education. She gets two paychecks — $22,000 in UFT compensation on top of her $85,000 city salary, although she’s no longer a guidance counselor. In 2010, Mulgrew presented Camacho-Mendez with a UFT award.
“No one ever heard of this woman until Mulgrew brought her on board,” said a longtime UFT rep. “She had no union credentials.”
Mulgrew was tapped to finish Weingarten’s term in 2009, when she left to head the American Federation of Teachers. In April 2010, he was elected to a three-year term to succeed her.
One of the most powerful labor leaders in the country, the fiery Mulgrew has fought Mayor Bloomberg and the Department of Education on such issues as reversing the last-in, first-out policy in laying off teachers; plans to close struggling schools; and the public release of teacher ratings.
The UFT pays Mulgrew $250,400 a year, plus benefits.
Ostrowsky, a 10-year veteran, claims in the suit he’s being “targeted” for termination because an assistant principal gave him his first “unsatisfactory” rating last December. Supervisors also ordered him to undergo a DOE medical/psychological exam, but he wasn’t found to be unfit.
Hochstadt, who has sued the DOE over its notorious “rubber rooms” for teachers accused of misconduct, filed a similar suit for Ostrowsky last month in Manhattan Supreme Court.
She added the alleged sex scandal and coverup to the federal case, which complains the UFT has betrayed members by caving in to the DOE on several issues. Under one agreement, teachers “excessed” from closing schools, no matter their seniority, must work as substitutes until another school hires them. Walcott last week proposed buyouts for most of 831 educators in the Absent Teacher Reserve.
Ostrowsky seeks a purging of any negative documents in his file, and more than $600,000 in damages, including payment for “defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress.”
SOURCE: New York Post
The accusation that Mulgrew was seen having sex with a co-worker in a woodshop at the vocational school, and that it was hushed up, comes in a rambling 73-page suit filed in Brooklyn federal court last week by Andrew Ostrowsky, a math teacher at Frank Sinatra HS of the Arts in Manhattan.
Ostrowsky, 35, names Mayor Bloomberg, Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, Mulgrew and the UFT, claiming the teachers union conspired with school officials to quash the scandal. It accuses the city of using the favor to “extort” labor concessions.
It charges the pair were shielded by then-UFT President Randi Weingarten to avoid embarrassment to the union leadership.
“Mulgrew was embroiled in a meretricious scandal for which anyone else would have been fired, ending his career as an educator,” the suit claims.
Mulgrew’s spokesman, Dick Riley, gave a curt response: “This lawsuit is a catalog of absurd, false charges which we expect the court to dismiss.”
Camacho-Mendez, now a UFT official, said, “I have no comment on that. It’s the first I’ve heard of such an allegation. I have nothing to say to you.”
“Everyone has only hearsay knowledge, but almost everyone in the school talked about it,” the suit says.
Several former staffers at Grady HS have told The Post they believed Mulgrew and Camacho-Mendez, who is married, were romantically involved, and there were rumors of an encounter on a drafting table at the time.
“The sex thing, it’s between them and nobody’s business,” one said. “The thing that upset me is the patronage job to Mendez — rewarding her with a high-paying job with my union dues.”
In 2005, soon after the alleged incident, Mulgrew became UFT vice president for career and technical high schools. Around the same time, Camacho-Mendez transferred to the HS of Telecommunication Arts and Technology in Brooklyn, but got a part-time job in Mulgrew’s union office.
She was later given the full-time position of UFT liaison for special education. She gets two paychecks — $22,000 in UFT compensation on top of her $85,000 city salary, although she’s no longer a guidance counselor. In 2010, Mulgrew presented Camacho-Mendez with a UFT award.
“No one ever heard of this woman until Mulgrew brought her on board,” said a longtime UFT rep. “She had no union credentials.”
Mulgrew was tapped to finish Weingarten’s term in 2009, when she left to head the American Federation of Teachers. In April 2010, he was elected to a three-year term to succeed her.
One of the most powerful labor leaders in the country, the fiery Mulgrew has fought Mayor Bloomberg and the Department of Education on such issues as reversing the last-in, first-out policy in laying off teachers; plans to close struggling schools; and the public release of teacher ratings.
The UFT pays Mulgrew $250,400 a year, plus benefits.
Ostrowsky, a 10-year veteran, claims in the suit he’s being “targeted” for termination because an assistant principal gave him his first “unsatisfactory” rating last December. Supervisors also ordered him to undergo a DOE medical/psychological exam, but he wasn’t found to be unfit.
Hochstadt, who has sued the DOE over its notorious “rubber rooms” for teachers accused of misconduct, filed a similar suit for Ostrowsky last month in Manhattan Supreme Court.
She added the alleged sex scandal and coverup to the federal case, which complains the UFT has betrayed members by caving in to the DOE on several issues. Under one agreement, teachers “excessed” from closing schools, no matter their seniority, must work as substitutes until another school hires them. Walcott last week proposed buyouts for most of 831 educators in the Absent Teacher Reserve.
Ostrowsky seeks a purging of any negative documents in his file, and more than $600,000 in damages, including payment for “defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress.”
SOURCE: New York Post
Did Lib Tweets Play a Role in ex-RFK Wife's Suicide?
RFK ‘squeeze’ play - New love had wife’s old life
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s latest squeeze, actress Cheryl Hines, had been flaunting their relationship online in the weeks before his wife hanged herself.
And her posts show that she virtually hijacked the life that Mary Richardson Kennedy had lived.
It wasn’t just that she was dating Bobby Jr. and taking Mary’s place at his side at various Riverkeeper galas and events.
Hines also had struck up friendships with two of Mary’s best friends, Kerry Kennedy and Glenn Close, according to her tweets.
The “Curb Your Enthusiasm” blonde even tweeted about talking football with Mary and Bobby Jr.’s 11-year-old son, Aiden.
“Rabid, unhinged New England zealotry by 10-yr.-old Aidan Kennedy has nearly turned me into Pats fan,” Hines wrote Feb. 5.
The actress has since taken down her Twitter page “@realcherylhines.”
Her posts, however, were archived by the site Topsy.
She deleted the account around May 16 — the day Mary Kennedy hanged herself.
Throughout Hines’ Twitter tear, Mary was isolated in her Bedford mansion, drowning in sorrow, alcohol and debt.
American Express had filed a civil suit against Mary on April 16 for $32,000, according to documents obtained by The Post.
After her death at 52, the company pulled the suit.
Mary was embarrassed as her estranged husband carried on his high-profile romance with Hines, sources said.
“She faced losing her kids, and his relationship with Cheryl Hines was humiliating. At an event last month, he walked the red carpet with Cheryl as a couple and took the kids,” a source told The Post last week, referring to the Riverkeeper Annual Fisherman’s Ball in late April.
It wasn’t just public events, though, that Hines attended with Bobby Jr., 58.
Mary had been a close friend of “Fatal Attraction” star Glenn Close. They’d been so tight that Close sang at Mary’s funeral Saturday.
But it was the 46-year-old Hines, not Mary, who accompanied Bobby Jr. to Close’s April 15 birthday celebration.
Kerry Kennedy — the person who had first introduced Mary to her brother — posted a picture of Close, Bobby Jr. and Hines arm-in-arm on Twitter.
Hines tweeted that day: “I got to tell #GlenClose what an inspiration she has always been to me.”
Just the day before, Hines also tweeted about stopping at a local Westchester burger joint where Mary used to take her and Bobby’s kids.
“At Armonk’s Burgers & Shakes in Armonk, NY. So, sooooo good,” she wrote.
Kerry Kennedy, who would later write a eulogy for Mary, tweeted a picture of Hines, Bobby Jr. and singer Jackson Browne at a restaurant.
“Cheryl and Jackson Browne were amazing on stage and off,” she wrote April 28 after a California education fund-raiser that Hines attended with Bobby Jr.
Hines’ spokeswoman said only that her client’s “thoughts and prayers are with the family.’’
Kerry Kennedy didn’t return a request for comment.
SOURCE: New York Post
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s latest squeeze, actress Cheryl Hines, had been flaunting their relationship online in the weeks before his wife hanged herself.
And her posts show that she virtually hijacked the life that Mary Richardson Kennedy had lived.
It wasn’t just that she was dating Bobby Jr. and taking Mary’s place at his side at various Riverkeeper galas and events.
Hines also had struck up friendships with two of Mary’s best friends, Kerry Kennedy and Glenn Close, according to her tweets.
The “Curb Your Enthusiasm” blonde even tweeted about talking football with Mary and Bobby Jr.’s 11-year-old son, Aiden.
The actress has since taken down her Twitter page “@realcherylhines.”
Her posts, however, were archived by the site Topsy.
She deleted the account around May 16 — the day Mary Kennedy hanged herself.
Throughout Hines’ Twitter tear, Mary was isolated in her Bedford mansion, drowning in sorrow, alcohol and debt.
American Express had filed a civil suit against Mary on April 16 for $32,000, according to documents obtained by The Post.
After her death at 52, the company pulled the suit.
Mary was embarrassed as her estranged husband carried on his high-profile romance with Hines, sources said.
It wasn’t just public events, though, that Hines attended with Bobby Jr., 58.
Mary had been a close friend of “Fatal Attraction” star Glenn Close. They’d been so tight that Close sang at Mary’s funeral Saturday.
But it was the 46-year-old Hines, not Mary, who accompanied Bobby Jr. to Close’s April 15 birthday celebration.
Kerry Kennedy — the person who had first introduced Mary to her brother — posted a picture of Close, Bobby Jr. and Hines arm-in-arm on Twitter.
Hines tweeted that day: “I got to tell #GlenClose what an inspiration she has always been to me.”
Just the day before, Hines also tweeted about stopping at a local Westchester burger joint where Mary used to take her and Bobby’s kids.
“At Armonk’s Burgers & Shakes in Armonk, NY. So, sooooo good,” she wrote.
Kerry Kennedy, who would later write a eulogy for Mary, tweeted a picture of Hines, Bobby Jr. and singer Jackson Browne at a restaurant.
“Cheryl and Jackson Browne were amazing on stage and off,” she wrote April 28 after a California education fund-raiser that Hines attended with Bobby Jr.
Hines’ spokeswoman said only that her client’s “thoughts and prayers are with the family.’’
Kerry Kennedy didn’t return a request for comment.
SOURCE: New York Post
Flashing headlights to warn of speed trap protected by the First Amendment: judge
Man who warned drivers of a deputy parked nearby was exercising his right to free speech, says judge
Flashing headlights to warn drivers of a speed trap is protected by the First Amendment, a circuit judge ruled.
A judge ruled Tuesday that a man who flashed his headlights to warn drivers of a nearby police speed trap was exercising his right to free speech, the Orlando Sentinel reported.
Ryan Kintner, 25, of Lake Mary, Florida, was ticketed last August in Seminole County for what police said was a violation of a state traffic law that outlined appropriate headlight use.
Kintner contested the ticket and sued the Seminole County Sheriff's Office for violating his civil rights, reported the Sentinel.
The circuit judge hearing the case ruled last October that using headlights for communication didn't fall under the state law.
After a second hearing, the judge took his ruling a step further Tuesday, saying Kintner was protected by his constitutional right to free speech under the First Amendment.
County police agreed to stop issuing tickets for flashing headlights last September, a month after Kintner filed the suit.
A spokesperson for the Seminole county Sheriff’s Office said she wouldn’t comment specifically on the court ruling, but said the office is pleased the ambiguity in the language of the state law had been clarified. Invididuals are not to be cited for flashing lights into ongoing vechicles under the law, she said.
According to the suit, Kintner was home when he saw a deputy park and pull out his radar gun. Kintner then got in his car, drove a couple of blocks away, parked and started flashing his lights at incoming traffic to warn other cars, the paper reported.
At an earlier hearing Circuit Judge Alan Dickey said, "If the goal of the traffic law is promote safety and not to raise revenue, then why wouldn't we want everyone who sees a law enforcement officer with a radar gun in his hand, blinking his lights to slow down all those other cars?" reported The Crime Report.
“I have nothing against officers," Kintner said in an August interview with the Sentinel. "But when you cross a line and get into free speech, I feel it's gone too far."
SOURCE: New York Daily News
A judge ruled Tuesday that a man who flashed his headlights to warn drivers of a nearby police speed trap was exercising his right to free speech, the Orlando Sentinel reported.
Ryan Kintner, 25, of Lake Mary, Florida, was ticketed last August in Seminole County for what police said was a violation of a state traffic law that outlined appropriate headlight use.
Kintner contested the ticket and sued the Seminole County Sheriff's Office for violating his civil rights, reported the Sentinel.
The circuit judge hearing the case ruled last October that using headlights for communication didn't fall under the state law.
After a second hearing, the judge took his ruling a step further Tuesday, saying Kintner was protected by his constitutional right to free speech under the First Amendment.
County police agreed to stop issuing tickets for flashing headlights last September, a month after Kintner filed the suit.
A spokesperson for the Seminole county Sheriff’s Office said she wouldn’t comment specifically on the court ruling, but said the office is pleased the ambiguity in the language of the state law had been clarified. Invididuals are not to be cited for flashing lights into ongoing vechicles under the law, she said.
According to the suit, Kintner was home when he saw a deputy park and pull out his radar gun. Kintner then got in his car, drove a couple of blocks away, parked and started flashing his lights at incoming traffic to warn other cars, the paper reported.
At an earlier hearing Circuit Judge Alan Dickey said, "If the goal of the traffic law is promote safety and not to raise revenue, then why wouldn't we want everyone who sees a law enforcement officer with a radar gun in his hand, blinking his lights to slow down all those other cars?" reported The Crime Report.
“I have nothing against officers," Kintner said in an August interview with the Sentinel. "But when you cross a line and get into free speech, I feel it's gone too far."
SOURCE: New York Daily News
Feds offer amnesty to hundreds of LIRR pension disability scammers
Fraudster retirees wouldn't have to pay back their ill-gotten gains
Amnesty offer was sent to more than 1,500 Long Island Rail Road workers who retired early. If they admit making a fraudulent claim by July 6, they won't have to repay their ill-gotten gains, but if they wait until Aug. 10, they would have to return 50% of the money.
ARTICLE CONTINUES>>>
ARTICLE CONTINUES>>>
How Facebook could destroy the U.S. economy
Commentary: Too-big-to-fail mentality replays the dot-com bubble
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Facebook just joined a “troubled club,” warns the Economist. Now it’s just another “endangered public company.”
Yes, endangered. The number of public companies has declined 37% since 1997. The number of IPOs has dropped from 311 annually before 2000 to 99 in the past decade. Meanwhile, the smart CEOs and the Super Rich are “going private,” to avoid government red tape restricting capitalism. FULL STORY at Market Watch>>
Yes, endangered. The number of public companies has declined 37% since 1997. The number of IPOs has dropped from 311 annually before 2000 to 99 in the past decade. Meanwhile, the smart CEOs and the Super Rich are “going private,” to avoid government red tape restricting capitalism. FULL STORY at Market Watch>>
EXCLUSIVE: Analysis finds Wisconsin’s Act 10 saving taxpayers big
May 22nd, 2012
By M.D. Kittle Wisconsin Reporter
MADISON — While a lightning rod for controversy and recall, Wisconsin’s Act 10 has paid significant dividends to taxpayers, according to a new analysis by the Beacon Hill Institute for Public Policy Research, at Suffolk University in Boston.
Act 10, which curbed collective bargaining for most unionized public employees, in the whole has saved taxpayers more than $1 billion............ READ THE FULL STORY
By M.D. Kittle Wisconsin Reporter
MADISON — While a lightning rod for controversy and recall, Wisconsin’s Act 10 has paid significant dividends to taxpayers, according to a new analysis by the Beacon Hill Institute for Public Policy Research, at Suffolk University in Boston.
Act 10, which curbed collective bargaining for most unionized public employees, in the whole has saved taxpayers more than $1 billion............ READ THE FULL STORY
Should Democrats stop Bain Capital attacks?
May. 22, 2012
Arena Ref: David Mark
Politico (Arena):
Ex-Rep. Artur Davis
Former congressman (D-Ala.); fellow, Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics:
It's hard to imagine a more instructive couple of days for those who want to know where the Democratic Party's head is at: its only high-profile African American moderate just got a brushback pitch for leaning in too close to the Independent thought zone; the Obama camp looks ominously like a cult of personality that tolerates no dissent; and the reelection campaign just doubled down on the European leftist notion that business is fair only when it operates in a sanitized, risk free manner.
As for Booker, my hope is that the pushback won't turn him into just another faux centrist who won't risk offending his base. He already looks a little less brave and a lot more conventional after the forgive me video from the bunker he released on Sunday. In fairness, a public servant with his gifts and history with Obama deserved much better.
Arena Ref: David Mark
Politico (Arena):
Former congressman (D-Ala.); fellow, Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics:
It's hard to imagine a more instructive couple of days for those who want to know where the Democratic Party's head is at: its only high-profile African American moderate just got a brushback pitch for leaning in too close to the Independent thought zone; the Obama camp looks ominously like a cult of personality that tolerates no dissent; and the reelection campaign just doubled down on the European leftist notion that business is fair only when it operates in a sanitized, risk free manner.
As for Booker, my hope is that the pushback won't turn him into just another faux centrist who won't risk offending his base. He already looks a little less brave and a lot more conventional after the forgive me video from the bunker he released on Sunday. In fairness, a public servant with his gifts and history with Obama deserved much better.
Exclusive - The Vetting - Barack Obama, the First Tea Partier
by John Sexton
May 23rd, 2012
Breitbart.com:
In 2009, President Barack Obama reportedly called members of the Tea Party "teabaggers." It turns out that our fourth greatest president, first in so many things, may have been the first "teabagger" himself, as seen in the 1997 photograph above. Yes, that really is Barack Obama wearing a regimental coat and carrying a tricorn hat in his hand. And that flag behind him really is a Gadsden flag, with its serpent and its "Don't Tread On Me" slogan. You may want to let all of this sink in a bit, especially if you're a Tea Party-bashing progressive.
Neither Democrats nor the media have been particularly kind to the Tea Party. There is hardly space to go through all the times the Tea Party has been compared to terrorists (including by the Vice President) or fascists, or the many times it has been accused of racism by progressives in supposedly mainstream news outlets. That's a book-length story of its own.
But given the photo above, it is certainly a good time to think back upon some of the ridicule Tea Party members were forced to endure for evoking the Revolutionary War era by their dress and choice of symbols.
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow was one of many who saw mockery of the "teabaggers" as the first recourse. (The word was used so often by liberals in 2009 that Oxford made it a Word of the Year finalist.) Liberal sites like Talking Points Memo presented attendees who dressed up the way Obama did above as weirdos. The ever-predictable Bill Maher got hoots from his audience when he donned his own tricorn hat (complete with dangling tea bags) to bash the Tea Party on TV.
President Obama blamed the "teabaggers" for his failures, according to Jonathan Alter's book The Promise: President Obama, Year One, complaining that his own 2009 stimulus "helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans." (Vice President Joe Biden is blaming them still.)
Yet in the dramatic battles over trumped up charges of Tea Party racism and extremism, Obama never mentioned his own "Tea Party" episode--and neither has anyone in the media, even as Obama's allies and friends on the left ridiculed the Tea Party for seeking to make the same symbolic connections to the country's founding.
The media's failure is all the more glaring, given that the forgotten photograph has been in plain view for fifteen years. It appeared on the front page of Chicago's Hyde Park Herald on July 9th, 1997, and was taken by legendary photographer Nancy Campbell Hays. (The larger version of the image is below this article. The original, which was donated to the University of Chicago, is not yet available for public view; the image obtained by Breitbart News was very dark, and so it was lightened in Photoshop).
The Herald's caption below the photograph read:
Hey, look over here! Something catches the attention of Sen. Barack Obama (13th), Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie (25th), Ald. Toni Preckwinkle (4th) and Stephanie Franklin as they lead the annual "4th on 53rd" parade.
In 1997, Obama was beginning his first term as a state senator in Illinois. He and his fellow politicians were asked to lead the "4th on 53rd" parade, which is Hyde Park's 4th of July celebration--one not too different from many other places in America, it turns out. All the politicians who attended were expected to dress the part. The Herald even published a story the week before, on July 2nd, confirming in advance that Obama would be "wearing colonial attire."
With most politicians, wearing colonial dress for a public celebration like the 4th of July would be considered a bit colorful, but not extraordinary.
In Obama's case, it's more like proof of hypocrisy.
Since 2009, the ridicule of Tea Party signs and costumes has been so constant from Obama, the mainstream media, and the left that Glenn Beck encouraged people to stop dressing up so as not to give them an excuse.
It didn't work, though. The NAACP still saw the costumes as part of a disturbing, nationalist impulse:
The Revolutionary War-era costumes, the yellow “Don’t tread on me” Gadsden flags from the same era, the earnest recitals of the pledge of allegiance, the over-stated veneration of the Constitution, and the defense of “American exceptionalism” in a world turned towards transnational economies and global institutions: all are signs of the over-arching nationalism that helps define the Tea Party movement.
So, by the NAACP's logic, it would appear that Barack Obama is an over-arching nationalist, and perhaps a racist, antisemitic nativist as well.
That, or the left has been engaged in three years of juvenile character assassination to protect a guy who never got the memo about the worrisome deeper meaning of regimental coats and tricorner hats.
EXCLUSIVE: Obama's DOJ Forces University to Allow 38 Year Old Male To Access Women's Restrooms
By Tony Listi
May 23, 2012
CampusReform.org:
A letter from the Department of Justice (DOJ) caused the University of Arkansas at Ft. Smith (UAFS) early this month to reverse policy and allow a 38-year old anatomically male-student permanent use of women's bathrooms on campus despite opposition from female students.
The university made the reversal on "advice of counsel" after receiving a letter the DOJ sent in response to a complaint that a single, self proclaimed "transgender" student filed with the DOJ's Civil Rights Division.
"Because of the stance we took, the individual filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Justice," Mark Horn who is the vice president of university relations explained in an interview with Campus Reform on Tuesday.
Jennifer Braly, the student who filed the complaint, calls himself "transgender" with a "gender identity disorder." Braly, however, remains anatomically a man and is currently raising money online for Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS).
Braly filed the complaint with the DOJ after the university initially told him to use the campus's several gender-neutral bathrooms instead of the women's restrooms.
"Some saw me using the women' public restrooms and complained," explained Braly in her online appeal for donations for surgery. "[O]ne problem to this is there are not unisex bathrooms in every building. Especially the two main buildings where most of my classes are, so I have to go to a completely different building to use the restroom."
The university offered to convert more current bathrooms into gender-neutral restrooms, but still Braly was unsatisfied and decided to sue.
"We tried to make reasonable accommodation and to find a common ground, converting the number of bathrooms on campus to gender-neutral," Horn from UA said on Tuesday.
Finally, however, it was the letter from DOJ that convinced the legal department and administrators at UA to yield to Braly's demands.
"[T]he office of civil rights basically made its expectations through the attorney and the decision was made to respond to that direction," said Horn. "[T]he DOJ complaint caused revisiting of our thinking."
"In the eyes of the law this individual [Braly] is entitled to use the bathroom that she identifies with," Horn concluded.
But in the eyes of at least some female students at UA, anatomy still matters.
''I disagree with allowing a male to use the female restrooms," Amanda Shook, a senior at UA told Campus Reform on Wednesday. "Even if they are a transgendered person, they are still a man, and should have to use the men's restroom."
Both DOJ and UA so far have refused to release the letter in question despite multiple requests from Campus Reform.
DOJ told Campus Reform that the records "pertain to a currently active Civil Rights Division enforcement and access to the records should therefore be denied pursuant to 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(7)(A) since disclosure thereof could reasonably be expected to interfere with Civil Rights Division enforcement proceedings."
Braly also did not respond to requests from Campus Reform for comment by time of publication.
Hat Tip: MichaelSavage.com
May 23, 2012
CampusReform.org:
The university made the reversal on "advice of counsel" after receiving a letter the DOJ sent in response to a complaint that a single, self proclaimed "transgender" student filed with the DOJ's Civil Rights Division.
"Because of the stance we took, the individual filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Justice," Mark Horn who is the vice president of university relations explained in an interview with Campus Reform on Tuesday.
Jennifer Braly, the student who filed the complaint, calls himself "transgender" with a "gender identity disorder." Braly, however, remains anatomically a man and is currently raising money online for Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS).
Braly filed the complaint with the DOJ after the university initially told him to use the campus's several gender-neutral bathrooms instead of the women's restrooms.
"Some saw me using the women' public restrooms and complained," explained Braly in her online appeal for donations for surgery. "[O]ne problem to this is there are not unisex bathrooms in every building. Especially the two main buildings where most of my classes are, so I have to go to a completely different building to use the restroom."
The university offered to convert more current bathrooms into gender-neutral restrooms, but still Braly was unsatisfied and decided to sue.
Finally, however, it was the letter from DOJ that convinced the legal department and administrators at UA to yield to Braly's demands.
"[T]he office of civil rights basically made its expectations through the attorney and the decision was made to respond to that direction," said Horn. "[T]he DOJ complaint caused revisiting of our thinking."
"In the eyes of the law this individual [Braly] is entitled to use the bathroom that she identifies with," Horn concluded.
But in the eyes of at least some female students at UA, anatomy still matters.
''I disagree with allowing a male to use the female restrooms," Amanda Shook, a senior at UA told Campus Reform on Wednesday. "Even if they are a transgendered person, they are still a man, and should have to use the men's restroom."
Both DOJ and UA so far have refused to release the letter in question despite multiple requests from Campus Reform.
DOJ told Campus Reform that the records "pertain to a currently active Civil Rights Division enforcement and access to the records should therefore be denied pursuant to 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(7)(A) since disclosure thereof could reasonably be expected to interfere with Civil Rights Division enforcement proceedings."
Braly also did not respond to requests from Campus Reform for comment by time of publication.
Hat Tip: MichaelSavage.com
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Stealth 'gun control' threatens Illinois
Illinois gun owners now face a brand new attack on their Constitutionally guaranteed, fundamental human right of the individual to keep and bear arms. With gun rights advocates in Illinois having started in the last few years to find their voices and realize their power, the legislature's forcible citizen disarmament advocates are resorting to furtiveness in their efforts to impose new infringements on that which shall not be infringed.
From an Illinois State Rifle Association (ISRA) alert
From an Illinois State Rifle Association (ISRA) alert
Nurse refuses student inhaler during asthma attack
School says medical release form lacked parent's signature
DELTONA, Fla. - Volusia County School officials stand by a Deltona High School nurse's decision to refuse a student his inhaler during an asthma attack, citing a lack of a parent's signature on a medical release form.
"It's like something out of a horror film. The person just sits there and watches you die," said Michael Rudi, 17. "She sat there, looked at me and she did nothing."
FULL STORY at ClickOrlando.com
DELTONA, Fla. - Volusia County School officials stand by a Deltona High School nurse's decision to refuse a student his inhaler during an asthma attack, citing a lack of a parent's signature on a medical release form.
"It's like something out of a horror film. The person just sits there and watches you die," said Michael Rudi, 17. "She sat there, looked at me and she did nothing."
FULL STORY at ClickOrlando.com
Ahmadinejad, Farrakhan & The Black Panthers: Shocking New Details on Their Meeting & the ‘Beast’ Axis That Was Forged
According to New Black Panther Chairman Malik Zulu Shabazz:
Envisions the “glory” of “paroling on the Israeli embassy with a hundred New Black Panthers” fighting for Palestine.
Fighting white people is an “international struggle against a common enemy.”
Whites are trying to “divide the non-white” population against each other
Because “half of Africa” was involved in slavery “we say Africa owes us reparations, too.”
Black radicals should seek “alliances that are possible right now with people who got solid track records of being against this beast [white people].”
Shabazz “stands on solid ideological ground” with “His Excellency, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”
“Mahmoud Ahmadinejad” understands “the dynamics and the politics of world revolution.”
Shabazz discussed “bringing natural gas and oil and other reparations into the black nation, and other things - unmentionable” with Ahmadinejad.
There were “fifty Imams in the meeting“ and ”Minister Farrakhan is sitting in the first seat in the front.”
There are “just as many Arabs who hate this white man as we do” and the Black Panthers should ally themselves with radical Islam.
The Blaze has much more>>>
Fighting white people is an “international struggle against a common enemy.”
Whites are trying to “divide the non-white” population against each other
Because “half of Africa” was involved in slavery “we say Africa owes us reparations, too.”
Black radicals should seek “alliances that are possible right now with people who got solid track records of being against this beast [white people].”
Shabazz “stands on solid ideological ground” with “His Excellency, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”
“Mahmoud Ahmadinejad” understands “the dynamics and the politics of world revolution.”
Shabazz discussed “bringing natural gas and oil and other reparations into the black nation, and other things - unmentionable” with Ahmadinejad.
There were “fifty Imams in the meeting“ and ”Minister Farrakhan is sitting in the first seat in the front.”
There are “just as many Arabs who hate this white man as we do” and the Black Panthers should ally themselves with radical Islam.
The Blaze has much more>>>
Watch Fox’s interview with the HunterRogers and his mother, Gina.
Hunter is the school student verbally accosted by an Obama radical who is paid for teaching.
New Black Panther Field Marshal: Whites ‘Should be Thankful We’re Not Hanging Crackers By Nooses…Yet, Yet, Yet’
According to National Field Marshal for the New Black Panthers King Samir Shabazz:
“I love white-on white-crime, because that is the best crime.”
“I hate the g*ddamn white man, woman, and child, grandma, aunt, uncle, Pappa Billy Bob, and whoever else.”
“You should be thankful we’re not running around here hanging crackers by nooses and all that kind of stuff — yet, yet, yet”
He has a “wet dream about killing the g*ddamn cracker.”
“We don’t allow faggots and lesbians” in the New Black Panther Army
Envisions a world where every black person is “ready to bang on this cracker”
Wants to take over neighborhoods “block by block” so “crackers…or even the developer” would be scared to come into them
“We’re taught to send this cracker to the cemetery… so kiss ‘em goodbye”
More at The Blaze
“I love white-on white-crime, because that is the best crime.”
“I hate the g*ddamn white man, woman, and child, grandma, aunt, uncle, Pappa Billy Bob, and whoever else.”
“You should be thankful we’re not running around here hanging crackers by nooses and all that kind of stuff — yet, yet, yet”
He has a “wet dream about killing the g*ddamn cracker.”
“We don’t allow faggots and lesbians” in the New Black Panther Army
Envisions a world where every black person is “ready to bang on this cracker”
Wants to take over neighborhoods “block by block” so “crackers…or even the developer” would be scared to come into them
“We’re taught to send this cracker to the cemetery… so kiss ‘em goodbye”
More at The Blaze
British Army will have to rely on civilian drivers, reserves and foreign armies
In the most significant reforms the Army in half-a-century The Daily Telegraph has learnt that as few as five infantry battalions totalling 2,500 soldiers will be cut but a further 17,500 jobs will go mainly from logistics troops, engineers and artillery.
MORE HERE>>
For Some Democrats, Bush Is To Blame-Forever And Ever
In the early days of the Obama administration, a lot of people, including some Republicans, weren't much bothered by the new president's tendency to blame his predecessor for the nation's problems. After all, Barack Obama did inherit a mess from George W. Bush. The voters were inclined to give Obama time to turn things around.
But how much time? Certainly a year was reasonable. And so, as Obama's one-year mark approached in 2010, many political analysts assumed he would stop blaming Bush for the nation's woes. The conversation would change from the problems Obama inherited to the effectiveness of his efforts to fix them.
But a year passed, and Obama and his supporters continued to point the finger at Bush. At that point, nearly everyone assumed that when Obama's two-year mark came, he would certainly have to stop blaming his predecessor.
But no -- Obama kept at it, all the way through the three-year mark. And now, in the president's fourth year in office, with his re-election campaign under way, some of the president's defenders have come up with something new entirely. They're not only still blaming Bush for the problems of the Obama administration -- they're blaming Bush for anticipated problems in Obama's second term, should he win one.
Specifically, a number of commentators on the left have come up with a scenario in which they blame Bush for nearly all future federal budget deficits until at least 2019.
MUCH MUCH MORE AT TOWNHALL>COM>>>>
But how much time? Certainly a year was reasonable. And so, as Obama's one-year mark approached in 2010, many political analysts assumed he would stop blaming Bush for the nation's woes. The conversation would change from the problems Obama inherited to the effectiveness of his efforts to fix them.
But a year passed, and Obama and his supporters continued to point the finger at Bush. At that point, nearly everyone assumed that when Obama's two-year mark came, he would certainly have to stop blaming his predecessor.
But no -- Obama kept at it, all the way through the three-year mark. And now, in the president's fourth year in office, with his re-election campaign under way, some of the president's defenders have come up with something new entirely. They're not only still blaming Bush for the problems of the Obama administration -- they're blaming Bush for anticipated problems in Obama's second term, should he win one.
Specifically, a number of commentators on the left have come up with a scenario in which they blame Bush for nearly all future federal budget deficits until at least 2019.
MUCH MUCH MORE AT TOWNHALL>COM>>>>
Udder nonsense: Raw-milk confiscations begin
Officials now showing up at citizens' front doors FULL STORY
Did You Know That Obama’s Blackstone Backers Laid Off Over 800 People? Beck Explains
Obama’s condemnation of private equity hinges on the familiar narrative that the industry is renown for commandeering companies and slashing jobs, leaving untold numbers jobless — which is why it is doubly ironic that Blackstone has done just that. In August of 2006, just two months after closing the deal to purchase Travelport Ltd., Blackstone Group fired “scores of employees,” who, according to the Wall Street Journal, were “lugging boxes of personal belongings to their cars.” Blackstone laid of 841 employees, or 10% of Travelport’s workforce, and recouped its investment almost immediately.
Beck reviewed a mere fraction of the employees who lost their jobs and have suffered dire consequences as a result of Blackstone’s buyout.
Watch as Beck dissects President Obama’s latest fact versus fictional reality>>>
Catholic Priest Says A Schoolgirl Who Went Missing In 1983 Was Kidnapped For Vatican Sex Parties
Father Gabriel Amorth, who was ordained in 1954 and has carried out more than 70,000 exorcisms, made the claim to Italian newspaper La Stampa as police examine the contents of mobster Enrico De Pedis's tomb for clues about the 1983 disappearance of 15-year-old Emanuela Orlandi.
FULL STORY>>>
Vermont ordinance could ban pro-lifers from protesting at Planned Parenthood clinic
BURLINGTON, VERMONT, May 22, 2012, (LifeSiteNews.com) – The city council of Burlington, Vermont, has passed a new ordinance that could have the effect of banning pro-life protesters from exercising their right to protest in front of the town’s Planned Parenthood facility.
More on this Constitutional infringement.... HERE
More on this Constitutional infringement.... HERE
Evangelicals respond to Catholic lawsuits: ‘We are all Catholic now’
Article Continues.....
Ohio Judge Permits Student To Wear "Jesus Is Not A Homophobe" Tee Shirt Whenever He Wants. And Pays Him.
As usual, the Waynesville, Ohio public school had to back down against the powerful gay Lamda Legal organization which lawyered up for a gay student who wanted to wear a "Jesus Is Not A Homophobe" tee shirt in school. Well, the student, not knowing much about Jesus to begin with, should have understood that Jesus fears nothing, but he will judge many things, such as adultery, homosexuality, etc. if there is no repentance. I asked the Ohio judge, who made the decision, if a student could be allowed to wear a shirt saying, "God Judged Sodom and Gomorrah."
The said judge, Michael Barrett, appointed by George W. Bush,no less, also awarded the gay teen $20,000 of the school district's money. The ACLU and similar orgs have taken discipline out of schools, and replaced it with a no rules pandemonium. Schools simply back down from lawsuits initiated by their liberal lawyer brethren.
Judges are people,too, so why not drop one a line?
Honorable Judge Michael Barrett United States District Court Southern District Of Ohio (Open Letter) Potter Stewart U.S. Courthouse, Room 239 100 East Fifth Street Cincinnati, Ohio 45202
READ MORE HERE
The said judge, Michael Barrett, appointed by George W. Bush,no less, also awarded the gay teen $20,000 of the school district's money. The ACLU and similar orgs have taken discipline out of schools, and replaced it with a no rules pandemonium. Schools simply back down from lawsuits initiated by their liberal lawyer brethren.
Judges are people,too, so why not drop one a line?
Honorable Judge Michael Barrett United States District Court Southern District Of Ohio (Open Letter) Potter Stewart U.S. Courthouse, Room 239 100 East Fifth Street Cincinnati, Ohio 45202
READ MORE HERE
LA Times Vets Ann Romney's Horses
The Los Angeles Times refuses to disclose the contents of a video tape in its possession that reportedly shows Barack Obama lavishing praise on his friend Rashid Khalidi, a close associate of Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat, at a 2003 Chicago dinner party sponsored by the Arab American Action Network and attended by Bill Ayers. The Times does, however, have all kinds of time to vet Ann Romney, going so far as to dig into a lawsuit she was part of involving a horse:
BREITBART.COM has the FULL STORY
Open Carry Teen Optimistic About his Day in Court
Eighteen-year-old Sean Combs (not 'Puffy') was arrested last April by police because he was walking around town with a rifle slung over his shoulder. He'd just received his M1 Garand for his birthday and he was showing the gun to several other teenagers. Cops showed up on the scene and asked to see his ID. Combs declined, but after a few more police showed up Combs decided to give in. The police moved to arrest him the moment he reached for his ID.
FULL STORY HERE>>>
Pelosi slams measure to protect military chaplains from being forced to hold gay weddings
WASHINGTON, May 22, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Democrat House leaders including Nancy Pelosi have opposed a measure to ensure military chaplains are not forced to perform same-sex “marriages,” arguing that it is based on a “manufactured crisis” and therefore unnecessary - a response strongly criticized by chaplain advocates.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday echoed sentiments issued by the Obama White House regarding the conscience language, part of a defense spending bill, saying that “there’s nothing that says that chaplains act against their faith.”
CNSNews.com, which had queried Pelosi about the language, then asked, “So why would you not support the provision that protects them?”
CONTINUE READING>>
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday echoed sentiments issued by the Obama White House regarding the conscience language, part of a defense spending bill, saying that “there’s nothing that says that chaplains act against their faith.”
CNSNews.com, which had queried Pelosi about the language, then asked, “So why would you not support the provision that protects them?”
CONTINUE READING>>
African American leaders blast NAACP 'gay marriage' support
Washington D.C., May 23, 2012 / 02:03 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The NAACP's recent endorsement of “gay marriage” drew harsh criticism from within the African American community for misrepresenting civil rights and undermining families.
Read Entire Story>>
Read Entire Story>>
Boston Archdiocese Bails on Religious Freedom Lawsuit
On Monday, May 21, Cardinal Dolan, President of the USCCB, applauded 43 dioceses, hospitals, schools and church agencies for filing 12 lawsuits around the nation saying the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services contraception coverage mandate violates religious freedom.
The Boston Archdiocese was not one of those dioceses.
St. Anthony of Padua said, “Actions speak louder than words” and the actions of Cardinal O’Malley make it increasingly obvious that our Cardinal is lacking in courage.
Here is an excerpt from the AP report on the news:
NEW YORK – Roman Catholic dioceses, schools, and other groups sued the Obama administration Monday in eight states and the District of Columbia over a federal mandate that most employers provide workers free birth control as part of their health insurance.
The 12 federal lawsuits represent the largest push against the mandate since President Obama announced the policy in January. Among the 43 groups suing are the University of Notre Dame, the Archdioceses of Washington and New York, the Michigan Catholic Conference, and the Catholic University of America.
“We have tried negotiation with the administration and legislation with the Congress, and we’ll keep at it, but there’s still no fix,’’ said New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. “Time is running out, and our valuable ministries and fundamental rights hang in the balance, so we have to resort to the courts now.’’
The suits bring the total number of cases now pending over the mandate to more than 30.
The Archdiocese of Boston did not join the effort, although it supports the legal challenges. “There is no need for every single diocese or other Catholic organization to sue,’’ Terrence Donilon, archdiocese spokesman, said in a statement. “The various plaintiffs reflect a broad cross-section of Catholic institutions, and together they represent the wide variety of issues, impacts, economic consequences, and divergent facts that exist among Catholic organizations nationwide.’’
In other words, while the Archdioceses of New York, Washington and St. Louis; the Dioceses of Dallas, Fort Worth, Pittsburgh, Rockville Centre, Springfield, Ill., Erie (PA), Jackson and Biloxi (Miss.) and others, along with the University of Notre Dame and the Catholic University of America; and Our Sunday Visitor dig in and fight the battle (see here for list), the Boston Archdiocese will sit back and do nothing. All the plaintiffs are being represented pro bono by the law firm Jones Day, so the out-of-pocket cost to Boston would be zero.
BCI literally is almost speechless upon hearing that Boston is bailing. Several times in recent months Cardinal O’Malley has called publicly for courage. Now he fails to demonstrate it via his actions.
September 2011 at diocesan Red Mass for lawyers and jurists: “We are called upon to defend the gospel of life with courage and resolve…Your very profession invests in all of you a great responsibility to ensure that all laws are just.”
November 2011 at the “ad limina” visit to Rome: Here is most of the CNS story reporting on this:
Bishops from northeastern US begin ‘ad limina’ visits with prayer
By Cindy Wooden, Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Praying together at the tombs of the Apostles Peter and Paul and meeting Pope Benedict XVI should be a moment for bishops to reconfirm and strengthen their faith, said Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley of Boston.
In his homily, the cardinal told his fellow bishops that after Jesus’ arrest in the garden of Gethsemane, “Peter flees. He’s trying to follow the Lord at a safe distance, something we all try to do at one time or another. But Peter discovers it’s impossible; you can only follow the Lord up close.”
“Jesus doesn’t ask Peter if he’s excelled in his intellectual prowess or his organization skills or his fundraising capacity or his Myers-Briggs score. Jesus only asks, ‘Do you love me?’” he said.
Peter’s love for the Lord brought him to Rome, the cardinal said, but — according to legend — as persecution grew Peter decided to flee again. Leaving the city, he saw the risen Lord and asked him, “Quo vadis?” (“Where are you going?”), and Jesus replied he was going to Rome to be crucified again. Peter renewed his faith and returned to the city where he met a martyr’s death.
“Each of us has gone through a ‘quo vadis’ moment or two in our vocation as bishops,” the cardinal said. “Hopefully, our being together at the tomb of Peter and close to Benedict will renew us in our generosity, courage and faith in following Jesus up close so that we can say with all our hearts what Peter said, ‘Lord you know all things. You know that I love you.’”
The comment by Terry Donilon suggests that Cardinal O’Malley and the Boston Archdiocese are, like Peter, fleeing and trying to keep a safe distance from this crucial issue. Apparently, the hope for renewal of courage nearby the tomb of Peter from last November has already worn off. More and more, when the Cardinal calls upon the Catholic faithful to have courage, the words ring hollow because he fails to match his actions with his words.
We close today with a quote sent by a reader from Edmund Burke, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” That is what is happening in Boston on this issue. We hope and pray that those who have the courage to fight will prevail, and those currently lacking the courage to fight will realize they are allowing evil to triumph and will change their ways.
SOURCE: Boston Catholic Insider
The Boston Archdiocese was not one of those dioceses.
Here is an excerpt from the AP report on the news:
NEW YORK – Roman Catholic dioceses, schools, and other groups sued the Obama administration Monday in eight states and the District of Columbia over a federal mandate that most employers provide workers free birth control as part of their health insurance.
The 12 federal lawsuits represent the largest push against the mandate since President Obama announced the policy in January. Among the 43 groups suing are the University of Notre Dame, the Archdioceses of Washington and New York, the Michigan Catholic Conference, and the Catholic University of America.
“We have tried negotiation with the administration and legislation with the Congress, and we’ll keep at it, but there’s still no fix,’’ said New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. “Time is running out, and our valuable ministries and fundamental rights hang in the balance, so we have to resort to the courts now.’’
The suits bring the total number of cases now pending over the mandate to more than 30.
The Archdiocese of Boston did not join the effort, although it supports the legal challenges. “There is no need for every single diocese or other Catholic organization to sue,’’ Terrence Donilon, archdiocese spokesman, said in a statement. “The various plaintiffs reflect a broad cross-section of Catholic institutions, and together they represent the wide variety of issues, impacts, economic consequences, and divergent facts that exist among Catholic organizations nationwide.’’
In other words, while the Archdioceses of New York, Washington and St. Louis; the Dioceses of Dallas, Fort Worth, Pittsburgh, Rockville Centre, Springfield, Ill., Erie (PA), Jackson and Biloxi (Miss.) and others, along with the University of Notre Dame and the Catholic University of America; and Our Sunday Visitor dig in and fight the battle (see here for list), the Boston Archdiocese will sit back and do nothing. All the plaintiffs are being represented pro bono by the law firm Jones Day, so the out-of-pocket cost to Boston would be zero.
BCI literally is almost speechless upon hearing that Boston is bailing. Several times in recent months Cardinal O’Malley has called publicly for courage. Now he fails to demonstrate it via his actions.
September 2011 at diocesan Red Mass for lawyers and jurists: “We are called upon to defend the gospel of life with courage and resolve…Your very profession invests in all of you a great responsibility to ensure that all laws are just.”
November 2011 at the “ad limina” visit to Rome: Here is most of the CNS story reporting on this:
Bishops from northeastern US begin ‘ad limina’ visits with prayer
By Cindy Wooden, Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Praying together at the tombs of the Apostles Peter and Paul and meeting Pope Benedict XVI should be a moment for bishops to reconfirm and strengthen their faith, said Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley of Boston.
In his homily, the cardinal told his fellow bishops that after Jesus’ arrest in the garden of Gethsemane, “Peter flees. He’s trying to follow the Lord at a safe distance, something we all try to do at one time or another. But Peter discovers it’s impossible; you can only follow the Lord up close.”
“Jesus doesn’t ask Peter if he’s excelled in his intellectual prowess or his organization skills or his fundraising capacity or his Myers-Briggs score. Jesus only asks, ‘Do you love me?’” he said.
Peter’s love for the Lord brought him to Rome, the cardinal said, but — according to legend — as persecution grew Peter decided to flee again. Leaving the city, he saw the risen Lord and asked him, “Quo vadis?” (“Where are you going?”), and Jesus replied he was going to Rome to be crucified again. Peter renewed his faith and returned to the city where he met a martyr’s death.
“Each of us has gone through a ‘quo vadis’ moment or two in our vocation as bishops,” the cardinal said. “Hopefully, our being together at the tomb of Peter and close to Benedict will renew us in our generosity, courage and faith in following Jesus up close so that we can say with all our hearts what Peter said, ‘Lord you know all things. You know that I love you.’”
The comment by Terry Donilon suggests that Cardinal O’Malley and the Boston Archdiocese are, like Peter, fleeing and trying to keep a safe distance from this crucial issue. Apparently, the hope for renewal of courage nearby the tomb of Peter from last November has already worn off. More and more, when the Cardinal calls upon the Catholic faithful to have courage, the words ring hollow because he fails to match his actions with his words.
We close today with a quote sent by a reader from Edmund Burke, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” That is what is happening in Boston on this issue. We hope and pray that those who have the courage to fight will prevail, and those currently lacking the courage to fight will realize they are allowing evil to triumph and will change their ways.
SOURCE: Boston Catholic Insider
Why Barack Obama got married
WND Exclusive: Jack Cashill says Michelle 'rooted him in the African-American experience'
As Ed Klein reveals in his eye-opening new book on Barack Obama, “The Amateur,” our current president chose to become a Christian for purely political reasons.
“I can tell you that I made it easy for him to come to an understanding of who Jesus Christ is,” the Rev. Jeremiah Wright told Klein, “and not feel that he was turning his back on his Islamic friends and his Islamic traditions and his understanding of Islam.”
Obama, always ambitious, needed a base in Chicago’s black community, and Wright’s large, politically wired church provided it. Wright acknowledges as much.
As with his choice of a church, Obama’s selection of a bride was fragrant with calculation, not only on an emotional level but also on a political level. To run for office in Chicago, Obama needed a wife and not just any wife.
And yet after four years in Chicago, and 10 years on the mainland, Obama was still a swinging single. To the degree that he was dating women, they were likely all white.
Sort of like the way Fannie Mae bundled subprime loans into a generic CDO, Obama was able to create a “composite” white woman for his 1995 memoir, “Dreams from My Father.”
Obama could not afford to dwell on any white woman, let alone multiple white women, in a memoir that was written to get him elected mayor of Chicago. The black women at the core of his future constituency would not approve.
Obama-friendly biographer David Remnick suggests this in his 2010 book, “The Bridge.” A black campaign worker in South Carolina tells him that Obama’s selection of a black wife, particularly a dark-skinned one, “matters to people here.”
Princeton political scientist Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a black female who had attended Obama’s church, elaborates, “I don’t think Obama could have been elected president if he had married a white woman.” She adds, “Had he married a white woman, he would have signaled that he had chosen whiteness.”
Thus in “Dreams,” right after telling his half-sister Auma about the mystery white woman, Obama adds, “There are several black ladies out there who’ve broken my heart just as good.”
Obama biographer David Maraniss may have found a couple of Obama’s white girlfriends, but I would bet that he and the Chicago office of the FBI will not be able to find any of these black heartbreakers.
The one black woman Obama speaks of at any length in “Dreams” is “Regina,” a girl from Chicago he meets at Occidental College. Obama describes her as “a big, dark woman who wore stockings and dresses that looked homemade.”
And although Obama has no romantic interest in Regina, Remnick rightly describes her as a “harbinger” of Michelle, more literary device than flesh and blood woman. It is she who sets him on his journey to find his inner African-American.
“Her voice.” Obama writes, “evoked a vision of black life in all its possibility, a vision that filled me with longing – a longing for place, and a fixed and definite history.”
The home life Regina describes – “evenings in the kitchen with uncles and cousins and grandparents, the stew of voices bubbling up in laughter” – proves a powerful lure for Obama.
In “Dreams,” it is Regina who convinces Obama to abandon the name “Barry.” “Do you mind if I call you Barack?” she asks. “Not as long as you say it right,” he answers.
In 1995, Obama had no idea just how famous he would become. He did not anticipate that others would discover that the “right” way to say his name was the way his father had, BARR-ick, not buh-ROCK. Still, this re-branding would actually help pave his way to the presidency.
Obama was back in Chicago after a year at Harvard when he met his future wife. In Obama’s 2006 book, “Audacity of Hope,” Obama writes, “I met Michelle in the summer of 1988 while we were both working at Sidley & Austin.”
But did Obama really meet Michelle at Sidley & Austin? And was it actually 1988? In 2009, speaking to university students in Russia, Obama wondered out loud, “I don’t know if anyone will meet their future wife or husband in class like I did.”
No, in fact, Obama did not meet Michelle in class, and it was not 1988. He met her at Sidley & Austin in 1989. As shall be seen, there are some serious date manipulations in the Obama narrative. This is not one of them. This is what happens when other people write your books.
It is only toward the very end of “Dreams” that Michelle comes into the picture, and she fulfills the core promise of Regina’s vision.
As described in “Audacity,” Michelle’s kitchen sounds suspiciously like Regina’s – “uncles and aunts and cousins everywhere, stopping by to sit around the kitchen table and eat until they burst and tell wild stories and listen to Grandpa’s old jazz collection and laugh deep into the night.”
“Dreams” culminates in Obama’s wedding to Michelle.
At his most passionate, Obama says of his new bride, “In her eminent practicality and Midwestern attitudes, she reminds me not a little of Toot [his grandmother].” That description must surely have warmed Michelle’s heart.
But then again Obama did not select Michelle for her warmth or her heat. He almost surely chose her for future votes. She rooted him in the African-American experience. He could not get elected in Chicago without a woman quite like her.
At the peak of the Rev, Wright flare-up, Obama played his Michelle trump card. “I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slave owners,” he boasted in his bellwether speech on race, “an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters.”
Once out of Chicago, however, Michelle – “For the First Time in My Adult Lifetime, I’m Really Proud of My Country” – Obama has proved only slightly more of an asset than Jeremiah Wright.
Posted May 17th, 2012
As Ed Klein reveals in his eye-opening new book on Barack Obama, “The Amateur,” our current president chose to become a Christian for purely political reasons.
“I can tell you that I made it easy for him to come to an understanding of who Jesus Christ is,” the Rev. Jeremiah Wright told Klein, “and not feel that he was turning his back on his Islamic friends and his Islamic traditions and his understanding of Islam.”
Obama, always ambitious, needed a base in Chicago’s black community, and Wright’s large, politically wired church provided it. Wright acknowledges as much.
As with his choice of a church, Obama’s selection of a bride was fragrant with calculation, not only on an emotional level but also on a political level. To run for office in Chicago, Obama needed a wife and not just any wife.
And yet after four years in Chicago, and 10 years on the mainland, Obama was still a swinging single. To the degree that he was dating women, they were likely all white.
Sort of like the way Fannie Mae bundled subprime loans into a generic CDO, Obama was able to create a “composite” white woman for his 1995 memoir, “Dreams from My Father.”
Obama could not afford to dwell on any white woman, let alone multiple white women, in a memoir that was written to get him elected mayor of Chicago. The black women at the core of his future constituency would not approve.
Obama-friendly biographer David Remnick suggests this in his 2010 book, “The Bridge.” A black campaign worker in South Carolina tells him that Obama’s selection of a black wife, particularly a dark-skinned one, “matters to people here.”
Princeton political scientist Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a black female who had attended Obama’s church, elaborates, “I don’t think Obama could have been elected president if he had married a white woman.” She adds, “Had he married a white woman, he would have signaled that he had chosen whiteness.”
Thus in “Dreams,” right after telling his half-sister Auma about the mystery white woman, Obama adds, “There are several black ladies out there who’ve broken my heart just as good.”
Obama biographer David Maraniss may have found a couple of Obama’s white girlfriends, but I would bet that he and the Chicago office of the FBI will not be able to find any of these black heartbreakers.
The one black woman Obama speaks of at any length in “Dreams” is “Regina,” a girl from Chicago he meets at Occidental College. Obama describes her as “a big, dark woman who wore stockings and dresses that looked homemade.”
And although Obama has no romantic interest in Regina, Remnick rightly describes her as a “harbinger” of Michelle, more literary device than flesh and blood woman. It is she who sets him on his journey to find his inner African-American.
“Her voice.” Obama writes, “evoked a vision of black life in all its possibility, a vision that filled me with longing – a longing for place, and a fixed and definite history.”
The home life Regina describes – “evenings in the kitchen with uncles and cousins and grandparents, the stew of voices bubbling up in laughter” – proves a powerful lure for Obama.
In “Dreams,” it is Regina who convinces Obama to abandon the name “Barry.” “Do you mind if I call you Barack?” she asks. “Not as long as you say it right,” he answers.
In 1995, Obama had no idea just how famous he would become. He did not anticipate that others would discover that the “right” way to say his name was the way his father had, BARR-ick, not buh-ROCK. Still, this re-branding would actually help pave his way to the presidency.
Obama was back in Chicago after a year at Harvard when he met his future wife. In Obama’s 2006 book, “Audacity of Hope,” Obama writes, “I met Michelle in the summer of 1988 while we were both working at Sidley & Austin.”
But did Obama really meet Michelle at Sidley & Austin? And was it actually 1988? In 2009, speaking to university students in Russia, Obama wondered out loud, “I don’t know if anyone will meet their future wife or husband in class like I did.”
No, in fact, Obama did not meet Michelle in class, and it was not 1988. He met her at Sidley & Austin in 1989. As shall be seen, there are some serious date manipulations in the Obama narrative. This is not one of them. This is what happens when other people write your books.
It is only toward the very end of “Dreams” that Michelle comes into the picture, and she fulfills the core promise of Regina’s vision.
As described in “Audacity,” Michelle’s kitchen sounds suspiciously like Regina’s – “uncles and aunts and cousins everywhere, stopping by to sit around the kitchen table and eat until they burst and tell wild stories and listen to Grandpa’s old jazz collection and laugh deep into the night.”
“Dreams” culminates in Obama’s wedding to Michelle.
At his most passionate, Obama says of his new bride, “In her eminent practicality and Midwestern attitudes, she reminds me not a little of Toot [his grandmother].” That description must surely have warmed Michelle’s heart.
But then again Obama did not select Michelle for her warmth or her heat. He almost surely chose her for future votes. She rooted him in the African-American experience. He could not get elected in Chicago without a woman quite like her.
At the peak of the Rev, Wright flare-up, Obama played his Michelle trump card. “I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slave owners,” he boasted in his bellwether speech on race, “an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters.”
Once out of Chicago, however, Michelle – “For the First Time in My Adult Lifetime, I’m Really Proud of My Country” – Obama has proved only slightly more of an asset than Jeremiah Wright.
Posted May 17th, 2012
China fake parts 'used in US military equipment'
21 May 2012
updated at 22:35 ET
BBC News
The failure of a single electronic part in any military plane could pose safety and national security risks and imposes higher costs on the Pentagon, the report said
Vast numbers of counterfeit Chinese electronic parts are being used in US military equipment, a key Senate committee has reported.
A year-long probe found 1,800 cases of fake parts in US military aircraft, the Senate Armed Services Committee said.
More than 70% of an estimated one million suspect parts were traced back to China, the report said.
It blamed weaknesses in the US supply chain, and China's failure to curb the counterfeit market.
The failure of a key part could pose safety and national security risks and lead to higher costs for the Pentagon, the committee said.
US servicemen rely on a variety of "small, incredibly sophisticated electronic components" found in night vision systems, radios and GPS devices and the failure of a single part could put a soldier at risk, the report said.
It highlighted suspect counterfeit parts in SH-60B helicopters used by the Navy, in C-130J and C-27J cargo planes and in the Navy's P-8A Poseidon plane.
After China, the UK and Canada were found to be the next-largest source countries for fake parts.
'Avoiding scrutiny'
The committee criticised China for failing to shut down counterfeit manufacturers and said that committee staff wanting to travel to China for the investigation had not been granted visas.
"Counterfeit electronic parts are sold openly in public markets in China," the report said.
"Rather than acknowledging the problem and moving aggressively to shut down counterfeiters, the Chinese government has tried to avoid scrutiny," it added.
But the report said that use of Department of Defense programmes such as the Government-Industry Data Exchange Program (GIDEP), designed to log suspected fake parts, were "woefully lacking".
Between 2009 and 2010 the GIDEP only received 217 reports relating to suspected fake counterfeit components, the majority of which were filed by just six companies, it said. Only 13 reports came from government agencies.
The report also said that in some cases the US defence department had reimbursed contractors for the costs they incurred as a result of their failure to spot fake components in their own supply chain - giving companies no incentive to weed out counterfeits themselves.
But it praised the National Defense Authorization Act, signed into law on 31 December 2011 by President Barack Obama, which aims to stop counterfeit parts from entering the country and would cut down on sourcing components from unknown suppliers.
The report's focus on China comes as the US is beginning the task of "pivoting" its defence strategy towards the Asia-Pacific region.
The Pentagon is also preparing to absorb about $450bn (£285bn) of cuts over the next decade.
But it could face cutbacks of a further $500bn if mandatory across-the-board spending cuts come into effect at the end of 2012, after Congress failed to reach a deficit reduction plan last year.
updated at 22:35 ET
BBC News
Vast numbers of counterfeit Chinese electronic parts are being used in US military equipment, a key Senate committee has reported.
A year-long probe found 1,800 cases of fake parts in US military aircraft, the Senate Armed Services Committee said.
More than 70% of an estimated one million suspect parts were traced back to China, the report said.
It blamed weaknesses in the US supply chain, and China's failure to curb the counterfeit market.
The failure of a key part could pose safety and national security risks and lead to higher costs for the Pentagon, the committee said.
US servicemen rely on a variety of "small, incredibly sophisticated electronic components" found in night vision systems, radios and GPS devices and the failure of a single part could put a soldier at risk, the report said.
It highlighted suspect counterfeit parts in SH-60B helicopters used by the Navy, in C-130J and C-27J cargo planes and in the Navy's P-8A Poseidon plane.
After China, the UK and Canada were found to be the next-largest source countries for fake parts.
'Avoiding scrutiny'
The committee criticised China for failing to shut down counterfeit manufacturers and said that committee staff wanting to travel to China for the investigation had not been granted visas.
"Counterfeit electronic parts are sold openly in public markets in China," the report said.
"Rather than acknowledging the problem and moving aggressively to shut down counterfeiters, the Chinese government has tried to avoid scrutiny," it added.
But the report said that use of Department of Defense programmes such as the Government-Industry Data Exchange Program (GIDEP), designed to log suspected fake parts, were "woefully lacking".
Between 2009 and 2010 the GIDEP only received 217 reports relating to suspected fake counterfeit components, the majority of which were filed by just six companies, it said. Only 13 reports came from government agencies.
The report also said that in some cases the US defence department had reimbursed contractors for the costs they incurred as a result of their failure to spot fake components in their own supply chain - giving companies no incentive to weed out counterfeits themselves.
But it praised the National Defense Authorization Act, signed into law on 31 December 2011 by President Barack Obama, which aims to stop counterfeit parts from entering the country and would cut down on sourcing components from unknown suppliers.
The report's focus on China comes as the US is beginning the task of "pivoting" its defence strategy towards the Asia-Pacific region.
The Pentagon is also preparing to absorb about $450bn (£285bn) of cuts over the next decade.
But it could face cutbacks of a further $500bn if mandatory across-the-board spending cuts come into effect at the end of 2012, after Congress failed to reach a deficit reduction plan last year.
9/11 ‘truther’ leading Egyptian presidential race
By Ben Birnbaum
May 21, 2012
The Washington Times
An Islamist who believes that the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States were an American conspiracy is the front-runner in Egypt’s presidential race, a new poll shows.
Abdel-Moneim Abolfotoh, formerly a leading figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, led the field of 13 candidates with 32 percent of the vote in a survey released Monday by the Washington-based Brookings Institution.
Mr. Abolfotoh expressed his views on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in an interview last year with Egypt scholar Eric Trager.
Mr. Trager, now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, quoted Mr. Abolfotoh as saying:
“It was too big an operation …. They [the United States] didn’t bring this crime before the U.S. justice system until now. Why? Because it’s part of a conspiracy.”
Egyptians will vote Wednesday and Thursday in their first presidential election since the toppling of Hosni Mubarak last year. If none of the candidates wins a majority, the two top vote-getters will compete in a runoff next month.
A ‘liberal Islamist’?
The 61-year-old Mr. Abolfotoh, who left the Brotherhood last year, has been dubbed a “liberal Islamist” by some reporters partly because he said he believes that a Christian should be able to run for president - a view that put him at odds with the Brotherhood’s leadership.
In a recent Egyptian television interview, Mr. Abolfotoh qualified that position. He said that, while parties are free to nominate whomever they want, Egypt “cannot have a president who does not have an Islamist orientation.”
The Washington Institute’s Mr. Trager said that “the notion that Abolfotoh is some kind of progressive is farcical.”
“He is a longtime Muslim Brother, a founder of the Islamist student movements of the 1970s, and somebody who still calls for implementing the Shariah,” he said. “His falling out with the Brotherhood was over differences regarding strategy and internal administration, not ideology.”
Mr. Abolfotoh has been endorsed by al-Gama’a al-Islamiya, a jihadist group the State Department designated as a terrorist organization.
“Given that he was endorsed by a terrorist organization and has called the peace treaty with Israel a national-security threat, it is highly unlikely that Egypt’s foreign-policy will remain friendly to U.S. interests if he’s elected,” Mr. Trager added.
Mr. Abolfotoh’s candidacy has seen several lucky breaks lately.
First was the disqualification last month of hardline preacher Hazem Abu Ismail from the race. The Salafist Nour Party, which had backed Mr. Abu Ismail, later threw its support to Mr. Abolfotoh.
Story Continues →
May 21, 2012
The Washington Times
An Islamist who believes that the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States were an American conspiracy is the front-runner in Egypt’s presidential race, a new poll shows.
Abdel-Moneim Abolfotoh, formerly a leading figure in the Muslim Brotherhood, led the field of 13 candidates with 32 percent of the vote in a survey released Monday by the Washington-based Brookings Institution.
Mr. Abolfotoh expressed his views on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in an interview last year with Egypt scholar Eric Trager.
Mr. Trager, now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, quoted Mr. Abolfotoh as saying:
“It was too big an operation …. They [the United States] didn’t bring this crime before the U.S. justice system until now. Why? Because it’s part of a conspiracy.”
Egyptians will vote Wednesday and Thursday in their first presidential election since the toppling of Hosni Mubarak last year. If none of the candidates wins a majority, the two top vote-getters will compete in a runoff next month.
A ‘liberal Islamist’?
The 61-year-old Mr. Abolfotoh, who left the Brotherhood last year, has been dubbed a “liberal Islamist” by some reporters partly because he said he believes that a Christian should be able to run for president - a view that put him at odds with the Brotherhood’s leadership.
In a recent Egyptian television interview, Mr. Abolfotoh qualified that position. He said that, while parties are free to nominate whomever they want, Egypt “cannot have a president who does not have an Islamist orientation.”
The Washington Institute’s Mr. Trager said that “the notion that Abolfotoh is some kind of progressive is farcical.”
“He is a longtime Muslim Brother, a founder of the Islamist student movements of the 1970s, and somebody who still calls for implementing the Shariah,” he said. “His falling out with the Brotherhood was over differences regarding strategy and internal administration, not ideology.”
Mr. Abolfotoh has been endorsed by al-Gama’a al-Islamiya, a jihadist group the State Department designated as a terrorist organization.
“Given that he was endorsed by a terrorist organization and has called the peace treaty with Israel a national-security threat, it is highly unlikely that Egypt’s foreign-policy will remain friendly to U.S. interests if he’s elected,” Mr. Trager added.
Mr. Abolfotoh’s candidacy has seen several lucky breaks lately.
First was the disqualification last month of hardline preacher Hazem Abu Ismail from the race. The Salafist Nour Party, which had backed Mr. Abu Ismail, later threw its support to Mr. Abolfotoh.
Story Continues →
Obama Bundler Corzine Snagged $8.4 Million in Year Before MF Global Collapse
Posted by Jammie
May 21, 2012 at 9:35 pm
JammieWF.com:
According to Obama a central theme of his campaign will be to claim Mitt Romney has no idea how to create jobs and grow the economy. Funny coming from a guy who still has this thug Jon Corzine working as a bundler for him. Obviously Corzine is experienced at creating jobs based on his recent history, right?
Former MF Global Holdings Ltd. CEO Jon S. Corzine received more than $8 million in cash and stock options in the months leading up to the brokerage’s collapse, according to recently filed bankruptcy documents.
Corzine, a former New Jersey governor and co-chairman of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., received a bonus of $1.25 million in addition to his salary of about $1.8 million last year. He also was awarded $5.35 million in now-worthless stock options. Corzine resigned from MF Global last fall, just days after the brokerage’s collapse over its losing bets on European sovereign debt.
Other MF Global insiders, including Chief Operating Officer Bradley Abelow, also saw big pay days. Abelow, who is still working at the firm, was paid $2.7 million in cash, including a $1.25 million bonus, plus restricted stock valued at $1.5 million.Neither Corzine’s lawyer, Andrew Levander, nor Abelow’s lawyer, Gary Naftalis, could be reached for comment.He should be in a holding cell without bail. Then he could be reached for comment.
May 21, 2012 at 9:35 pm
JammieWF.com:
Former MF Global Holdings Ltd. CEO Jon S. Corzine received more than $8 million in cash and stock options in the months leading up to the brokerage’s collapse, according to recently filed bankruptcy documents.
Corzine, a former New Jersey governor and co-chairman of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., received a bonus of $1.25 million in addition to his salary of about $1.8 million last year. He also was awarded $5.35 million in now-worthless stock options. Corzine resigned from MF Global last fall, just days after the brokerage’s collapse over its losing bets on European sovereign debt.
Other MF Global insiders, including Chief Operating Officer Bradley Abelow, also saw big pay days. Abelow, who is still working at the firm, was paid $2.7 million in cash, including a $1.25 million bonus, plus restricted stock valued at $1.5 million.Neither Corzine’s lawyer, Andrew Levander, nor Abelow’s lawyer, Gary Naftalis, could be reached for comment.He should be in a holding cell without bail. Then he could be reached for comment.
HHS signs $20M PR contract to promote healthcare law
By Sam Baker
05/21/12 06:06 PM ET
The Hill:
The Health and Human Services Department has signed a $20 million contract with a public-relations firm to highlight part of the Affordable Care Act.
The new, multimedia ad campaign is designed to educate the public about how to stay healthy and prevent illnesses, an HHS official said.
The campaign was mandated by the Affordable Care Act and must describe the importance of prevention while also explaining preventive benefits provided by the healthcare law. The law makes many preventive services available without a co-pay or deductible, and provides new preventive benefits to Medicare patients.
The PR firm Porter Novelli won the contract after a competitive bidding process. The $20 million contract was first reported by PR Week. Porter Novelli did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
05/21/12 06:06 PM ET
The Hill:
The Health and Human Services Department has signed a $20 million contract with a public-relations firm to highlight part of the Affordable Care Act.
The new, multimedia ad campaign is designed to educate the public about how to stay healthy and prevent illnesses, an HHS official said.
The campaign was mandated by the Affordable Care Act and must describe the importance of prevention while also explaining preventive benefits provided by the healthcare law. The law makes many preventive services available without a co-pay or deductible, and provides new preventive benefits to Medicare patients.
The PR firm Porter Novelli won the contract after a competitive bidding process. The $20 million contract was first reported by PR Week. Porter Novelli did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Classroom Obama argument goes viral, teacher suspended
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
ROWAN COUNTY, N.C. -- A Rowan County high school teacher has been suspended following the release of a YouTube video in which she is heard yelling at a student in class and telling him it's wrong to criticize President Barack Obama.
The Salisbury Post reported that Tonya Dixon-Neely's class at North Rowan High School was discussing Obama and Republican candidate Mitt Romney when the conversation turned to accusations that Romney bullied someone as a teenager.
One of the students had asked whether President Obama had ever bullied a fellow classmate.
Obama admitted to pushing a classmate while being taunted by other students in his autobiography "Dreams from My Father."
The argument ensued while one student's cell phone videotaped the heated discussion.
In the video, the teacher could be heard shouting at a student that criticizing President Obama could get someone arrested.
The recorded time of the video is about nine minutes long and no faces were shown.
The teacher was recorded screaming, "You will not disrespect the president of the United States in this classroom."
The student retorted "I'll say what I want."
The student said Obama was "just a man," "not a God."
The video went viral last Friday when it was viewed more than 1,000 times, and by Monday evening, the video had close to 450,000 views on YouTube
The school system said the incident can serve as a learning experience.
(Copyright ©2012 ABC11-WTVD-TV/DT. All Rights Reserved - The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
ROWAN COUNTY, N.C. -- A Rowan County high school teacher has been suspended following the release of a YouTube video in which she is heard yelling at a student in class and telling him it's wrong to criticize President Barack Obama.
The Salisbury Post reported that Tonya Dixon-Neely's class at North Rowan High School was discussing Obama and Republican candidate Mitt Romney when the conversation turned to accusations that Romney bullied someone as a teenager.
One of the students had asked whether President Obama had ever bullied a fellow classmate.
Obama admitted to pushing a classmate while being taunted by other students in his autobiography "Dreams from My Father."
The argument ensued while one student's cell phone videotaped the heated discussion.
In the video, the teacher could be heard shouting at a student that criticizing President Obama could get someone arrested.
The recorded time of the video is about nine minutes long and no faces were shown.
The teacher was recorded screaming, "You will not disrespect the president of the United States in this classroom."
The student retorted "I'll say what I want."
The student said Obama was "just a man," "not a God."
The video went viral last Friday when it was viewed more than 1,000 times, and by Monday evening, the video had close to 450,000 views on YouTube
The school system said the incident can serve as a learning experience.
(Copyright ©2012 ABC11-WTVD-TV/DT. All Rights Reserved - The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Dad saves boy before car plunges down cliff -- and gets pair of traffic tickets
By Greg Wilson
Published May 21, 2012
FoxNews.com
Frank Roders' Jeep took a bath, but he saved his son.
A New Jersey dad got the scare of his life when his 5-year-old son almost ran off a steep embankment, and though the man saved the boy from falling, he couldn't stop his Jeep from going over the precipice and into a river below.
The reward for his ordeal? Two traffic tickets from local police.
Frank Roder, a construction worker from the town of Winfield Park, had taken his son, Aidan, down to the Rahway River to feed ducks Thursday. But when he stopped briefly before settling on a parking space, the impatient boy jumped out and took off -- straight toward a ledge 35 feet above the river, Roder recalled.
"He hopped out, and I thought that was OK, I was just going to park," Roder, 38, said, but "he just took off, made a beeline for the edge."
The panic-stricken father jumped out of the cab of his 2006 Jeep Commander and raced after the errant boy, catching him just feet from the edge.
That's when Aidan, eyes as big as saucers, looked behind Roder and said, "Um, Daddy ..."
Roder turned in time to see the Jeep nosedive down the embankment and land in the muddy water.
Roder hugged the boy and waited as Union County police converged on the scene over the next few hours. A crane pulled the Jeep out, and amazingly, it started right up, though Roder is pretty sure his insurance company will count it as totaled.
He was counting his blessings when a young cop approached him and handed him two tickets. One was for failure to produce the insurance card, which was somewhere in the waterlogged cab. The other was for failing to use his emergency brake.
"I couldn't believe it," Roder said. "He said, 'If you would have taken the five seconds to apply the brake, this never would have happened!'
"I say, 'Really? And if I did and my boy stepped over the edge and fell instead of the Jeep, then were would I be?' He says, 'Jail, for child endangerment.'"
Too awful to contemplate is the fact the Roder almost took his newborn daughter along for the ride.
"At the last minute, I told my wife to take her," Roder said. "I can't even think about that."
Union County Police Chief Daniel Vaniska told FoxNews.com that his officers have some discretion about when and when not to write a ticket. But he said he just didn't have enough information to second-guess what this officer did.
"It probably could have gone either way," Vaniska said. "I can't comment on the discretionary practices of an officer, but certainly, the fellow will have an opportunity to tell his story in court."
Municipal Court is where Roder might get some sympathy -- and maybe forbearance on those tickets, which are for $50 and $60. His date is May 30.
"I don't care, I'll pay it," Roder said. "It's just the principle. When something like that happens so fast, I could give a rat's a-- about the car."
Published May 21, 2012
FoxNews.com
A New Jersey dad got the scare of his life when his 5-year-old son almost ran off a steep embankment, and though the man saved the boy from falling, he couldn't stop his Jeep from going over the precipice and into a river below.
The reward for his ordeal? Two traffic tickets from local police.
Frank Roder, a construction worker from the town of Winfield Park, had taken his son, Aidan, down to the Rahway River to feed ducks Thursday. But when he stopped briefly before settling on a parking space, the impatient boy jumped out and took off -- straight toward a ledge 35 feet above the river, Roder recalled.
"He hopped out, and I thought that was OK, I was just going to park," Roder, 38, said, but "he just took off, made a beeline for the edge."
The panic-stricken father jumped out of the cab of his 2006 Jeep Commander and raced after the errant boy, catching him just feet from the edge.
That's when Aidan, eyes as big as saucers, looked behind Roder and said, "Um, Daddy ..."
Roder turned in time to see the Jeep nosedive down the embankment and land in the muddy water.
Roder hugged the boy and waited as Union County police converged on the scene over the next few hours. A crane pulled the Jeep out, and amazingly, it started right up, though Roder is pretty sure his insurance company will count it as totaled.
He was counting his blessings when a young cop approached him and handed him two tickets. One was for failure to produce the insurance card, which was somewhere in the waterlogged cab. The other was for failing to use his emergency brake.
"I couldn't believe it," Roder said. "He said, 'If you would have taken the five seconds to apply the brake, this never would have happened!'
"I say, 'Really? And if I did and my boy stepped over the edge and fell instead of the Jeep, then were would I be?' He says, 'Jail, for child endangerment.'"
Too awful to contemplate is the fact the Roder almost took his newborn daughter along for the ride.
"At the last minute, I told my wife to take her," Roder said. "I can't even think about that."
Union County Police Chief Daniel Vaniska told FoxNews.com that his officers have some discretion about when and when not to write a ticket. But he said he just didn't have enough information to second-guess what this officer did.
"It probably could have gone either way," Vaniska said. "I can't comment on the discretionary practices of an officer, but certainly, the fellow will have an opportunity to tell his story in court."
Municipal Court is where Roder might get some sympathy -- and maybe forbearance on those tickets, which are for $50 and $60. His date is May 30.
"I don't care, I'll pay it," Roder said. "It's just the principle. When something like that happens so fast, I could give a rat's a-- about the car."
Winning Battles, Losing Wars
May 20, 2012 - 1:43 pm - by Victor Davis Hanson
PJMedia:
Can We Still Win Wars?
Given that the United States fields the costliest, most sophisticated, and most lethal military in the history of civilization, that should be a silly question. We have enough conventional and nuclear power to crush any of our enemies many times over. Why then did we seem to bog down in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan? The question is important since recently we do not seem able to translate tactical victories into long-term strategic resolutions. Why is that? What follows are some possible answers.
No—We Really Do Win Wars
Perhaps this is a poorly framed question: the United States does win its wars—if the public understands our implicit, limited strategic goals. In 1950 we wanted to push the North Koreans back across the 38th parallel and succeeded; problems arose when Gen. MacArthur and others redefined the mission as on to the Yalu in order to unite the entire Korean peninsula, a sort of Roman effort to go beyond the Rhine or Danube. Once we redefined our mission in 1951 as one more limited, we clearly won in Korea by preserving the South.
In Vietnam, the goal of establishing a viable South was achieved by 1974. Congress, not the president or the military, felt the subsequent peace-keeping commitments and air support were too costly. They allowed a renewed Northern invasion that led to a second and lost war, and then were surprised that the North Vietnamese proved to be not campus radicals but hardcore Stalinists.
Panama, Grenada, and Serbia were successful small enterprises. In the first Gulf War, the strategic aim was to oust Saddam from Kuwait—or so we said. That succeeded, though it did not solve the problem of what Saddam would in the future do with his vast oil revenues. In the second war, the mission was to remove him, birth a democracy, and then leave Iraq better than before. That more ambitious aim too succeeded—not, however, without enormous costs.
Our strategic objective in Afghanistan was to oust the Taliban and ensure that it did not return to host terrorists on Afghan soil. The former mission was done over a decade ago, the latter hinges on the Afghans themselves after we leave. We vowed to rid Libya of Gaddafi and we did—and did not exactly promise that what followed would be immediately better than what we removed. In such special pleading, the U.S. has won its wars as it has defined them. Note the great success of the Cold War that ended with the destruction of the Soviet Empire.
Not So Fast
But wait—North Korea was on the ropes and now over a half-century later still threatens our interests, and with nukes no less. Should not the destruction of that system have been the real aim of the Korean War? North Vietnam united the country under a communist government, whatever way you cut it. Iraq was a mess, and its democracy may in time prove no more than an Iran-backed Shiite autocracy. In Afghanistan, does anyone think our Afghan partners will keep out the Taliban after our departure? Are the Libyan riffraff that took over all that better than Gaddafi as they kill tribal rivals, hunt down blacks, and desecrate military cemeteries? What exactly were we doing in Lebanon and what did we do after terrorists killed 241 of our people?
Strategy, What Strategy?
Why, then, does the use of American military forces not guarantee sure victory? The most obvious answer ib why we argue over the results of our interventions is an inability to articulate our strategic objectives—what exactly do wish to see follow from our use of force and for how long and at what cost? Do we wish to rid the world of Bashar al-Assad? We could do that quite easily and probably without ground troops. But would the region be more or less stable? Would Iran suffer a blow or find ways to fund more terrorists? Would the collateral damage from funding insurgents or bombing be worse or not as bad as the current Assad toll? Would the insurgents prove reasonable, or more like those in Egypt and Libya—or even worse? Many of our problems seem to hinge on explaining to the public what we wish to do, why so, how, at what cost it is to be accomplished, and what we want things to look like when we’re through.
Off the Table
Then there is the question of restraint—the inability to use our full forces to their full effect, in the manner that we did in World War I or World War II. From 1945 to 1989 the Cold War defined and limited the rules of engagement, given the nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union and its various trouble-causing clients who hid behind it. In Vietnam and North Korea there were certain options that were off the table because of fear the Soviets or Chinese might strike elsewhere or the fighting could descend into a nuclear exchange. “Limited” wars are now the new normal when so many countries can claim a nuclear patron.
Law, not War
But in the last twenty years there is an even greater restraint to operations—a moral, if not smug, self-restraint that has turned fighting from a quest for victory into a matter of jurisprudence in which how we fight a war is more important than what we actually achieve. The old Neanderthal formula — we will level your cities, defeat and humiliate your military, impose our system of government upon you, and then give you our aid and friendship as you reinvent yourself as a free-market capitalist democracy — certainly worked with Germany, Japan, and Italy.
But does anyone believe that we could have bombed Saddam as we did those in Hamburg? The country that tore itself apart over waterboarding three confessed terrorists who had an indirect hand in the murder of 3,000 Americans seems ill-equipped to inflict the sort of damage on enemies that in the past made them accept both defeat and redemption. War is now a matter of legality, or nation-building before, not after, the enemy is fully defeated, and that means, given the unchanging nature of man, that it is very difficult to win a war as in the past. Note, in this context, Obama’s drone campaign, which he expanded seven- or eight-fold upon inheriting it from Bush. Is it not the perfect liberal way of war? There is no media hand-wringing over collateral damage; no burned faces, charred limbs, headless torsos on the evening news; no U.S. losses; no prisoners at Guantanamo. There is only a postmodern murderous video game and a brief administration chest-thump that “we’ve take out 20 of the top 30 al-Qaeda operatives.”
Wars of Choice
We are forgetting yet another wild card: since World War II, all our serial fighting in Asia, Central America, the Pacific, and Africa has involved optional wars—fighting that did not question the very existence of the U.S. Other than a few stand-offs with the Cold War Soviets at places like Berlin or Cuba, the United States had not faced an existential threat since the end of World War II. September 11 might have posted such a challenge, since had bin Laden or his epigones been able to repeat the initial attacks, then air travel as we know it would have ceased, along with the idea of an open, modern commercial economy.
But other than the efforts to go after al-Qaeda, most of our fighting has been optional—whether in Somalia or Libya—and that makes it hard to galvanize the American public. (Which also explains why administrations try to hype WMD, or Saddam, or al-Qaeda, or Gaddafi, or the monstrous Assad in order to turn these peripheral threats into existential enemies.) In optional wars, the public can disconnect, as fighting can be conducted without disruption of the civilian economy. Victory or defeat does not immediately either please or endanger the public at home. And the result is that our leaders do not necessarily wage these wars all out, with the prime directive of winning them. (Note how the monster-in-rehab Gaddafi, whose children were buying off Western academics and putting on art shows in London, by 2011 was back in our imaginations to the 1986 troll, and how the Assads of Vogue magazine are once again venomous killers.)
Too Rich to Fight?
Then there are classical symptoms of Catullan otium: societies that become leisured like ours grow complacent (otium et reges prius et beatas perdidit urbes). They see military activity of all sorts coming at the expense of social redistributive programs: each dollar in aid campaigning abroad comes at the loss of one less new expansion in Medicare or Medicaid. Why then spend money overseas, when we could redistribute it for bread and circuses at home? A cruise missile is not seen as a wise investment in deterrence, but as a boondoggle that means one less Head Start center.
In postmodern America, we are all removed from mayhem, the killing of game for dinner, the sight of blood altogether. War is something “they” do, not our far more sophisticated selves, who have far greater claims on the federal treasury. Given that the therapeutic society of iPhones and Facebook believes that human nature has transcended violence, and no longer is prone to Thucydidean irrationality like fear, honor, or perceived self-interest, we believe that Libyan rebels are sort of like errant protestors of Occupy Wall Street, or the sometimes corrupt Chinese communist apparat that can be persuaded to be nice to Tibetans. That means war no longer involves good and evil, much less the elemental dirty means of using the former to destroy the latter.
Or Too Poor to Fight?
But wait, we are $16 trillion in debt, with serial $1 trillion budget deficits. Indeed, we are $9 trillion more in debt than when we went into Afghanistan. Any intervention now requires us to borrow the money from someone else. The truth is that for years we have been like Rome around AD 300 or Britain circa 1950—lots of supposed responsibilities, not enough money budgeted to fulfill them. The idea of a nation gearing up to smash an enemy when it has borrowed over $16 trillion on mostly social entitlements and pay-outs makes war a bad, if not absurd, investment.
On to Syria—or not?
With all this in mind, consider Bashar al-Assad. There is a growing movement in the press and Congress to go into Syria—either by arming the rebels, training them, or providing them air cover. But while we know that we have the power to do so (or rather can borrow the money from the Chinese to do so), do we have a strategic aim? What should Syria look like after the war (a constitutional state that would not support Iran, fund Hezbollah, undermine Lebanon, start a war with Israel, or build another reactor)?
Are U.S. arms and influence without ground troops able to see those laudable aims realized, or would a post-Assad Syria end up like Libya or Egypt—and would that still be better or worse than the present-day Syria, for us, for Christians and other minorities, for Israel, etc.? It is not enough to state the obvious: Assad is a U.S. enemy and a monster who is killing his own; we have the ability to take him out; ergo, we should.
Yet the same calculus applies to dozens of renegade states. If some advisor, pundit, general, or senator wants to go into Syria, then he must explain why Syria is more important than, say, the Congo or Somalia or the Sudan (or that we are following strategic self-interest in the Middle East, not humanitarianism)—and why we can leave the nation a far better place than under Assad, and how that is possible, given the nature of the dissidents and the fact it is the Middle East.
Remember, there is also an ironclad law about the Middle East, one we keep forgetting: Arab intellectuals (many of them educated or residing in Western universities) hate the U.S. for backing dictators; they hate the U.S. for intervening to remove them; they hate the U.S. for trying to impose postbellum democracy upon them; and they hate the U.S. for staying clear and letting Arabs be Arabs on their own.
Take out Saddam—”you created him in the first place”; stay to rebuild the country—”a neo-imperial enterprise to impose your values on a traditional society”; stay away and let him kill his own, or allow his successors to kill each other—”a callous disregard for the suffering of innocent others.”
Remember the critiques of Gulf War I and Gulf War II:
Gulf War I: a needlessly large coalition that curbed our options, a hyped-up war that did not warrant the huge forces we deployed, a shake-down of our allies to turn war into a money-making enterprise, a cynical disregard for the Shia and Kurds who yearned for democracy, a video-game war in which we slaughtered the inept without incurring much risk or danger;
Gulf War II: a too-small coalition that did not win international respect, too few forces deployed for the mission, a wasteful enterprise that did not demand monetary contributions from our allies, a naïve romance that Arabs could craft their own democracy, a dirty war in which we needlessly exposed our troops to mayhem and death.
Common denominator: whatever a Bush was for, critics were against.
We should posit one simple rule about intervening in the Middle East from now on. Please some honesty: we intervene for strategic advantage (no apologies for that), not humanitarianism. If those who advocate taking out Assad claim that it is to stop the bloodshed, then they must explain why there—and not where far more are slaughtered in Africa.
Again, state the proposed mission, debate the need and envisioned cost, articulate the strategic outcome, and then obtain it with overwhelming force—or otherwise forget it.
Also read:
Who Is Barack Obama? The Question that Won’t Go Away
PJMedia:
Can We Still Win Wars?
Given that the United States fields the costliest, most sophisticated, and most lethal military in the history of civilization, that should be a silly question. We have enough conventional and nuclear power to crush any of our enemies many times over. Why then did we seem to bog down in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan? The question is important since recently we do not seem able to translate tactical victories into long-term strategic resolutions. Why is that? What follows are some possible answers.
No—We Really Do Win Wars
Perhaps this is a poorly framed question: the United States does win its wars—if the public understands our implicit, limited strategic goals. In 1950 we wanted to push the North Koreans back across the 38th parallel and succeeded; problems arose when Gen. MacArthur and others redefined the mission as on to the Yalu in order to unite the entire Korean peninsula, a sort of Roman effort to go beyond the Rhine or Danube. Once we redefined our mission in 1951 as one more limited, we clearly won in Korea by preserving the South.
In Vietnam, the goal of establishing a viable South was achieved by 1974. Congress, not the president or the military, felt the subsequent peace-keeping commitments and air support were too costly. They allowed a renewed Northern invasion that led to a second and lost war, and then were surprised that the North Vietnamese proved to be not campus radicals but hardcore Stalinists.
Panama, Grenada, and Serbia were successful small enterprises. In the first Gulf War, the strategic aim was to oust Saddam from Kuwait—or so we said. That succeeded, though it did not solve the problem of what Saddam would in the future do with his vast oil revenues. In the second war, the mission was to remove him, birth a democracy, and then leave Iraq better than before. That more ambitious aim too succeeded—not, however, without enormous costs.
Our strategic objective in Afghanistan was to oust the Taliban and ensure that it did not return to host terrorists on Afghan soil. The former mission was done over a decade ago, the latter hinges on the Afghans themselves after we leave. We vowed to rid Libya of Gaddafi and we did—and did not exactly promise that what followed would be immediately better than what we removed. In such special pleading, the U.S. has won its wars as it has defined them. Note the great success of the Cold War that ended with the destruction of the Soviet Empire.
Not So Fast
But wait—North Korea was on the ropes and now over a half-century later still threatens our interests, and with nukes no less. Should not the destruction of that system have been the real aim of the Korean War? North Vietnam united the country under a communist government, whatever way you cut it. Iraq was a mess, and its democracy may in time prove no more than an Iran-backed Shiite autocracy. In Afghanistan, does anyone think our Afghan partners will keep out the Taliban after our departure? Are the Libyan riffraff that took over all that better than Gaddafi as they kill tribal rivals, hunt down blacks, and desecrate military cemeteries? What exactly were we doing in Lebanon and what did we do after terrorists killed 241 of our people?
Strategy, What Strategy?
Why, then, does the use of American military forces not guarantee sure victory? The most obvious answer ib why we argue over the results of our interventions is an inability to articulate our strategic objectives—what exactly do wish to see follow from our use of force and for how long and at what cost? Do we wish to rid the world of Bashar al-Assad? We could do that quite easily and probably without ground troops. But would the region be more or less stable? Would Iran suffer a blow or find ways to fund more terrorists? Would the collateral damage from funding insurgents or bombing be worse or not as bad as the current Assad toll? Would the insurgents prove reasonable, or more like those in Egypt and Libya—or even worse? Many of our problems seem to hinge on explaining to the public what we wish to do, why so, how, at what cost it is to be accomplished, and what we want things to look like when we’re through.
Off the Table
Then there is the question of restraint—the inability to use our full forces to their full effect, in the manner that we did in World War I or World War II. From 1945 to 1989 the Cold War defined and limited the rules of engagement, given the nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union and its various trouble-causing clients who hid behind it. In Vietnam and North Korea there were certain options that were off the table because of fear the Soviets or Chinese might strike elsewhere or the fighting could descend into a nuclear exchange. “Limited” wars are now the new normal when so many countries can claim a nuclear patron.
Law, not War
But in the last twenty years there is an even greater restraint to operations—a moral, if not smug, self-restraint that has turned fighting from a quest for victory into a matter of jurisprudence in which how we fight a war is more important than what we actually achieve. The old Neanderthal formula — we will level your cities, defeat and humiliate your military, impose our system of government upon you, and then give you our aid and friendship as you reinvent yourself as a free-market capitalist democracy — certainly worked with Germany, Japan, and Italy.
But does anyone believe that we could have bombed Saddam as we did those in Hamburg? The country that tore itself apart over waterboarding three confessed terrorists who had an indirect hand in the murder of 3,000 Americans seems ill-equipped to inflict the sort of damage on enemies that in the past made them accept both defeat and redemption. War is now a matter of legality, or nation-building before, not after, the enemy is fully defeated, and that means, given the unchanging nature of man, that it is very difficult to win a war as in the past. Note, in this context, Obama’s drone campaign, which he expanded seven- or eight-fold upon inheriting it from Bush. Is it not the perfect liberal way of war? There is no media hand-wringing over collateral damage; no burned faces, charred limbs, headless torsos on the evening news; no U.S. losses; no prisoners at Guantanamo. There is only a postmodern murderous video game and a brief administration chest-thump that “we’ve take out 20 of the top 30 al-Qaeda operatives.”
Wars of Choice
We are forgetting yet another wild card: since World War II, all our serial fighting in Asia, Central America, the Pacific, and Africa has involved optional wars—fighting that did not question the very existence of the U.S. Other than a few stand-offs with the Cold War Soviets at places like Berlin or Cuba, the United States had not faced an existential threat since the end of World War II. September 11 might have posted such a challenge, since had bin Laden or his epigones been able to repeat the initial attacks, then air travel as we know it would have ceased, along with the idea of an open, modern commercial economy.
But other than the efforts to go after al-Qaeda, most of our fighting has been optional—whether in Somalia or Libya—and that makes it hard to galvanize the American public. (Which also explains why administrations try to hype WMD, or Saddam, or al-Qaeda, or Gaddafi, or the monstrous Assad in order to turn these peripheral threats into existential enemies.) In optional wars, the public can disconnect, as fighting can be conducted without disruption of the civilian economy. Victory or defeat does not immediately either please or endanger the public at home. And the result is that our leaders do not necessarily wage these wars all out, with the prime directive of winning them. (Note how the monster-in-rehab Gaddafi, whose children were buying off Western academics and putting on art shows in London, by 2011 was back in our imaginations to the 1986 troll, and how the Assads of Vogue magazine are once again venomous killers.)
Too Rich to Fight?
Then there are classical symptoms of Catullan otium: societies that become leisured like ours grow complacent (otium et reges prius et beatas perdidit urbes). They see military activity of all sorts coming at the expense of social redistributive programs: each dollar in aid campaigning abroad comes at the loss of one less new expansion in Medicare or Medicaid. Why then spend money overseas, when we could redistribute it for bread and circuses at home? A cruise missile is not seen as a wise investment in deterrence, but as a boondoggle that means one less Head Start center.
In postmodern America, we are all removed from mayhem, the killing of game for dinner, the sight of blood altogether. War is something “they” do, not our far more sophisticated selves, who have far greater claims on the federal treasury. Given that the therapeutic society of iPhones and Facebook believes that human nature has transcended violence, and no longer is prone to Thucydidean irrationality like fear, honor, or perceived self-interest, we believe that Libyan rebels are sort of like errant protestors of Occupy Wall Street, or the sometimes corrupt Chinese communist apparat that can be persuaded to be nice to Tibetans. That means war no longer involves good and evil, much less the elemental dirty means of using the former to destroy the latter.
Or Too Poor to Fight?
But wait, we are $16 trillion in debt, with serial $1 trillion budget deficits. Indeed, we are $9 trillion more in debt than when we went into Afghanistan. Any intervention now requires us to borrow the money from someone else. The truth is that for years we have been like Rome around AD 300 or Britain circa 1950—lots of supposed responsibilities, not enough money budgeted to fulfill them. The idea of a nation gearing up to smash an enemy when it has borrowed over $16 trillion on mostly social entitlements and pay-outs makes war a bad, if not absurd, investment.
On to Syria—or not?
With all this in mind, consider Bashar al-Assad. There is a growing movement in the press and Congress to go into Syria—either by arming the rebels, training them, or providing them air cover. But while we know that we have the power to do so (or rather can borrow the money from the Chinese to do so), do we have a strategic aim? What should Syria look like after the war (a constitutional state that would not support Iran, fund Hezbollah, undermine Lebanon, start a war with Israel, or build another reactor)?
Are U.S. arms and influence without ground troops able to see those laudable aims realized, or would a post-Assad Syria end up like Libya or Egypt—and would that still be better or worse than the present-day Syria, for us, for Christians and other minorities, for Israel, etc.? It is not enough to state the obvious: Assad is a U.S. enemy and a monster who is killing his own; we have the ability to take him out; ergo, we should.
Yet the same calculus applies to dozens of renegade states. If some advisor, pundit, general, or senator wants to go into Syria, then he must explain why Syria is more important than, say, the Congo or Somalia or the Sudan (or that we are following strategic self-interest in the Middle East, not humanitarianism)—and why we can leave the nation a far better place than under Assad, and how that is possible, given the nature of the dissidents and the fact it is the Middle East.
Remember, there is also an ironclad law about the Middle East, one we keep forgetting: Arab intellectuals (many of them educated or residing in Western universities) hate the U.S. for backing dictators; they hate the U.S. for intervening to remove them; they hate the U.S. for trying to impose postbellum democracy upon them; and they hate the U.S. for staying clear and letting Arabs be Arabs on their own.
Take out Saddam—”you created him in the first place”; stay to rebuild the country—”a neo-imperial enterprise to impose your values on a traditional society”; stay away and let him kill his own, or allow his successors to kill each other—”a callous disregard for the suffering of innocent others.”
Remember the critiques of Gulf War I and Gulf War II:
Gulf War I: a needlessly large coalition that curbed our options, a hyped-up war that did not warrant the huge forces we deployed, a shake-down of our allies to turn war into a money-making enterprise, a cynical disregard for the Shia and Kurds who yearned for democracy, a video-game war in which we slaughtered the inept without incurring much risk or danger;
Gulf War II: a too-small coalition that did not win international respect, too few forces deployed for the mission, a wasteful enterprise that did not demand monetary contributions from our allies, a naïve romance that Arabs could craft their own democracy, a dirty war in which we needlessly exposed our troops to mayhem and death.
Common denominator: whatever a Bush was for, critics were against.
We should posit one simple rule about intervening in the Middle East from now on. Please some honesty: we intervene for strategic advantage (no apologies for that), not humanitarianism. If those who advocate taking out Assad claim that it is to stop the bloodshed, then they must explain why there—and not where far more are slaughtered in Africa.
Again, state the proposed mission, debate the need and envisioned cost, articulate the strategic outcome, and then obtain it with overwhelming force—or otherwise forget it.
Also read:
Who Is Barack Obama? The Question that Won’t Go Away
Obama Labor Board Slapped Yet Again
Fred Wszolek
May 21, 2012
Townhall.com:
For just over a year now and since the failure of the Employee ‘Forced’ Choice Act (EFCA) to receive a vote in the 111th Congress, union bosses have been desperate to obtain the “payback” they believe is owed to them. Big Labor is beside itself that its membership numbers continue to dwindle despite giving half a billion dollars in campaign contributions to President Obama and Congressional Democrats.
In the absence of employees voluntarily choosing to join unions, labor bosses have decided to force them into collective bargaining units in an effort to line their own pockets. More than a year ago, an official with the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) stated clearly that “administrative action” was the means labor would pursue to forcibly unionize workers and increase their number of dues-paying members.
Over the course of the last year, we have seen union bosses in concert with President Obama working to enact portions of EFCA through regulatory fiat. Unelected bureaucrats at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) have made decisions and issued job-killing rulings that could never pass in Congress, because they hurt workers and businesses, at a time the country struggles to recover from one of the most significant economic downturns in American history.
The NLRB is supposedly an “independent” federal agency which oversees relations between employers and organized labor in the private sector. During the Obama Administration, however, it has become the principal means by which union bosses see their anti-business agenda enacted. Worse yet, a number of the unelected bureaucrats on the Board have never gone before the U.S. Senate nor been confirmed as President Obama recess appointed them even though Congress was in session.
That has led to news this past week that a federal judge nullified a recent ruling by Obama’s labor board concerning “ambush elections.” The regulation rushes employees into making an uninformed decision concerning the formation of a collective bargaining unit, which is critically important to future of their livelihoods. It also severely disadvantages employers as they would struggle to gain access to the resources they need to make a fair case against professional labor organizers. Businesses could have as few as seven to 10 days from the petition filing to ensure their side of the story is told.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg wrote in his opinion that, “According to Woody Allen, 80 percent of life is just showing up. When it comes to satisfying a quorum requirement, though, showing up is even more important than that. Indeed, it is the only thing that matters – even when the quorum is constituted electronically. In this case, because no quorum ever existed for the pivotal vote in question, the Court must hold that the challenged rule is invalid.”
According to The Wall Street Journal, “As manipulative was the way President Obama’s NLRB appointees raced the new rules into the Federal Register and violated the normal standards of administrative procedure. In December 2011, former union lawyer Craig Becker's recess appointment to the labor board was about to expire, which with two seats vacant would have deprived the five-member NLRB of a quorum. When the final rule came up, the NLRB’s lone Republican commissioner, Brian Hayes, did not cast a vote. He was given only a matter of hours on the NLRB’s electronic ballot system before the Democratic majority went ahead and published it that day, without anyone requesting a response.”
In fact, the two member minority-majority ordered the Board’s Solicitor to issue the rule without Brain Hayes noting off on it, which is directly contrary to NLRB procedures governing the issuance of cases. They also – for the first time in the agency’s history – refused to permit a dissenting Board member the time to consider the rule they were adopting and issue a dissent with the majority, a critical role in the deliberative process.
In the end, the new rule has been shelved for the time being, but labor’s handpicked government regulators are not ceding any ground. Shortly after Judge Boasberg’s decision, NLRB Chairman Mark Pearce stated, “We continue to believe that the amendments represent a significant improvement in our process and serve the public interest by eliminating unnecessary litigation. We are determined to move forward.”
In the process of formulating the original rule, the NLRB received more than 65,000 comments from Americans with the vast majority opposing the change. Next, the NLRB recently issued its own 2011 annual report showing union elections normally only take 38 days, which is well below the agency’s goal of 42.
The reality is that there is absolutely no need for the ambush election rule outside of rewarding the President’s top political contributor. The business community must continue to ensure employees and employers vocally oppose this job-killing regulation. Even the government bureaucrats at the NLRB must be made to understand there will be political repercussions associated with their reckless behavior.
May 21, 2012
Townhall.com:
For just over a year now and since the failure of the Employee ‘Forced’ Choice Act (EFCA) to receive a vote in the 111th Congress, union bosses have been desperate to obtain the “payback” they believe is owed to them. Big Labor is beside itself that its membership numbers continue to dwindle despite giving half a billion dollars in campaign contributions to President Obama and Congressional Democrats.
In the absence of employees voluntarily choosing to join unions, labor bosses have decided to force them into collective bargaining units in an effort to line their own pockets. More than a year ago, an official with the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) stated clearly that “administrative action” was the means labor would pursue to forcibly unionize workers and increase their number of dues-paying members.
Over the course of the last year, we have seen union bosses in concert with President Obama working to enact portions of EFCA through regulatory fiat. Unelected bureaucrats at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) have made decisions and issued job-killing rulings that could never pass in Congress, because they hurt workers and businesses, at a time the country struggles to recover from one of the most significant economic downturns in American history.
The NLRB is supposedly an “independent” federal agency which oversees relations between employers and organized labor in the private sector. During the Obama Administration, however, it has become the principal means by which union bosses see their anti-business agenda enacted. Worse yet, a number of the unelected bureaucrats on the Board have never gone before the U.S. Senate nor been confirmed as President Obama recess appointed them even though Congress was in session.
That has led to news this past week that a federal judge nullified a recent ruling by Obama’s labor board concerning “ambush elections.” The regulation rushes employees into making an uninformed decision concerning the formation of a collective bargaining unit, which is critically important to future of their livelihoods. It also severely disadvantages employers as they would struggle to gain access to the resources they need to make a fair case against professional labor organizers. Businesses could have as few as seven to 10 days from the petition filing to ensure their side of the story is told.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg wrote in his opinion that, “According to Woody Allen, 80 percent of life is just showing up. When it comes to satisfying a quorum requirement, though, showing up is even more important than that. Indeed, it is the only thing that matters – even when the quorum is constituted electronically. In this case, because no quorum ever existed for the pivotal vote in question, the Court must hold that the challenged rule is invalid.”
According to The Wall Street Journal, “As manipulative was the way President Obama’s NLRB appointees raced the new rules into the Federal Register and violated the normal standards of administrative procedure. In December 2011, former union lawyer Craig Becker's recess appointment to the labor board was about to expire, which with two seats vacant would have deprived the five-member NLRB of a quorum. When the final rule came up, the NLRB’s lone Republican commissioner, Brian Hayes, did not cast a vote. He was given only a matter of hours on the NLRB’s electronic ballot system before the Democratic majority went ahead and published it that day, without anyone requesting a response.”
In fact, the two member minority-majority ordered the Board’s Solicitor to issue the rule without Brain Hayes noting off on it, which is directly contrary to NLRB procedures governing the issuance of cases. They also – for the first time in the agency’s history – refused to permit a dissenting Board member the time to consider the rule they were adopting and issue a dissent with the majority, a critical role in the deliberative process.
In the end, the new rule has been shelved for the time being, but labor’s handpicked government regulators are not ceding any ground. Shortly after Judge Boasberg’s decision, NLRB Chairman Mark Pearce stated, “We continue to believe that the amendments represent a significant improvement in our process and serve the public interest by eliminating unnecessary litigation. We are determined to move forward.”
In the process of formulating the original rule, the NLRB received more than 65,000 comments from Americans with the vast majority opposing the change. Next, the NLRB recently issued its own 2011 annual report showing union elections normally only take 38 days, which is well below the agency’s goal of 42.
The reality is that there is absolutely no need for the ambush election rule outside of rewarding the President’s top political contributor. The business community must continue to ensure employees and employers vocally oppose this job-killing regulation. Even the government bureaucrats at the NLRB must be made to understand there will be political repercussions associated with their reckless behavior.
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