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August 2013

EDWARD CLINE: NUDGING US TO SERFDOM****

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/nudging-us-to-serfdom

One may say of that human poltergeist, Cass Sunstein, even though he left the Obama administration for the elitist fields of academic Elysium, “He’s back….”
On January 30th, Maxim Lott of Fox News reported:

The federal government is hiring what it calls a “Behavioral Insights Team” that will look for ways to subtly influence people’s behavior, according to a document describing the program obtained by FoxNews.com. Critics warn there could be unintended consequences to such policies, while supporters say the team could make government and society more efficient.

Lost on all these advisors and bureaucrats is the truism that the most “efficient” society is a free one – not what they have in mind at all. An “efficient” society, if the notion has any meaning at all, is one in which the element of initiated force is morally absent from human relationships. Initiated force, whether physical or in terms of fraud or indirect force, in an “efficient” society would be treated as a crime.

“Unintended consequences” can only mean the expansion of government power over everyone’s lives, and in every instance of expansion it has caused deleterious consequences in society itself. Most of these consequences are either intended, viewed as “good,” or remain unacknowledged by our de facto wardens. For example, the 16th Amendment (and its Civil War and Reconstruction Era predecessors), sanctioning a tax on private incomes, has grown from one that was a mere single digit percentage of private income of all kinds, to over 80% of it if one doesn’t have a pricy tax attorney or CPA to juggle the books and take advantage of a mare’s nest of loopholes, exemptions, and special categories. The federal income tax code has swollen from 400 pages to nearly 74,000 pages – and counting.

ALAN CARUBA: A MILITARY IN DECLINE

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/a-military-in-decline Wars are often unpredictable. The outcome of such conflicts is also unpredictable, but defeat in future conflicts is now being “baked into the cake” and I suspect most Americans are totally unaware of how serious this threat is. You can be sure potential and actual enemies are calculating the odds. A recent USA Today […]

MY SAY: ABOUT THOSE NBC, CNN MOVIES ON HILLARY CLINTON

The networks are shilling for Hillary Clinton for 2016.

Why not a documentary on Condoleeza Rice?- Her biography is surely more inspiring and she did it on her own merits and she was certainly as inept as Secretary of State as Hillary was, without the lies. Will the Hillary flicks show her making that dangerous corkscrew landing in the Balkans which she fabricated during the 2008 campaign? And what will she wear to that famous interview where she said the Monica story was a fabrication of a “right wing conspiracy?”

But never mind that, the real story is that sexy and beautiful Diana Lane will play Hillary Clinton. Who will play Huma Abedin or Monica Lewinsky or Suha Arafat or Paula Jones- all those comely women in Hillary’s bio?

Will George Clooney play Bill Clinton or Vince Foster?

Stay tuned…..

THE RISE OF AL QAEDA AND WHY THE ADMINISTRASTION LIED ABOUT BENGHAZI: ROGER SIMON

http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2013/08/04/why-the-administration-lied-about-benghazi/?print=1 For nearly a year, we have had no answer to why the administration lied about Benghazi — why it told the world, not to mention the parents of our murdered SEALs at the funeral of their sons, that the cause of that fatal conflagration was an anti-Islamic video no one saw, when the various […]

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: OBAMA’S WATERGATES

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/355157/obamas-watergates-victor-davis-hanson Denial, evasion, “Let me be perfectly clear” — is this 2013 or 1973? The truth about Benghazi, the Associated Press/James Rosen monitoring, the IRS corruption, the NSA octopus, and Fast and Furious is still not exactly known. Almost a year after the attacks on our Benghazi facilities, we are only now learning details of […]

BRET STEPHENS; THE AL QAEDA THAT OBAMA FORGOT

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323968704578649913043517142.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

The short distance between the president’s rhetoric on terror and its empirical disproof.

In May, Barack Obama told an audience at the National Defense University that the core of al Qaeda was “on the path to defeat.” The “future of terrorism,” Mr. Obama predicted, would involve “more localized threats,” on the order of “the types of attacks we faced before 9/11,” such as the 1988 Lockerbie bombing or the 1983 attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut. “Dealt with smartly and proportionately,” he added, “these threats need not rise to the level that we saw on the eve of 9/11.” He ended by calling for repeal of the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force—Congress’s declaration of war on al Qaeda.

On Monday, the front page of The Wall Street Journal ran with this headline: “Regrouped al Qaeda Poses Global Threat.” The second shortest distance in Washington now runs between an Obama speech and its empirical disproof.

The news, of course, is that 19 U.S. embassies and consulates in Africa and the Middle East will be shuttered until Saturday. This is on account of electronic intercepts of terrorist communications, collected by Edward Snowden’s former employers at the National Security Agency and described by Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R., Ga.) as “very reminiscent of what we saw pre-9/11.” Vice President Joe Biden has delivered closed-door briefings to Congress; Rep. Peter King (R., N.Y.) has warned the attacks could come in Europe, the U.S., or as “a series of combined attacks”; Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) calls the threat “a big deal.”

BRUCE THORNTON: EPITAPH FOR A FOREIGN POLICY

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/epitaph-for-a-foreign-policy/print/ If you still doubt that Barack Obama has disastrously bungled our foreign policy, check out this video. In it Egyptian singer Salma Elmasry brutally insults Obama for supporting the Muslim Brothers and Islamists in general, her vulgar insults laced with an image of our President sporting a bin Laden cap and beard, and another […]

SEE THIS VIDEO ON BOSTON’S TERROR MOSQUE

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/boston-terror-mosque/

Why are the most powerful people in Massachusetts embracing a hotbed of violent Islamic jihad?

Editor’s note: The following video details the shocking truth about the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, including the organization’s terrorist ties and connections to state political leaders.

UNCOVERING ISRAEL’S PAST: CHRISTOPHER CARSON

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/christopher-s-carson/uncovering-israels-past/print/

How modern archaeology is turning the movement to minimize Israel’s biblical history on its head.

It seems that many educated liberals who wish Israel didn’t exist are turning to archaeologists to succor their agendas.

These archaeologists are called biblical “minimalists,” and loosely affiliate themselves with the “Copenhagen School” of archaeology. They believe that the scientific evidence in the dirt is irrefutable—there was no Moses, there was no Exodus, there was no period of the “Judges,” there was not a Conquest of Caanan by Joshua or anyone else, and there was no glorious “United Monarchy” of King David and Solomon to guide Jewish hopes for the future of Jerusalem. There was no Ark of the Covenant with its Ten Commandments.

For example, in his 2001 wild bestseller, co-written with Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, Professor Israel Finkelstein argued that “an archaeological analysis of the patriarchal, conquest, judges, and United Monarchy narratives [shows] that while there is no compelling archaeological evidence for any of them, there is clear archaeological evidence that places the stories themselves in a late 7th-century BCE context.” David and Solomon were really “tribal chieftains ruling from a small hill town, with a modest palace and royal shrine.” He has declared that those who disagree with his conclusions are like those “who think the earth is flat. And at that point, I cannot argue with them.”

Desperation in the Benghazi Coverup: Jed Babbin

http://spectator.org/archives/2013/08/05/desperation-in-the-benghazi-co

A congressional select committee could offer immunity to the CIA’s dispersed, intimidated survivors.

You can always tell the depth of an event’s illegality by the measures people take to cover it up. By that measure, the conduct of President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and David Petraeus leading up to the terrorist attack that killed four Americans on 9/11 2012 must be must be so sufficiently wrongful that, if revealed, they could lead to the president’s impeachment.

How else can we gauge what is apparently the most energetic coverup in modern history? We know, from several sources, that the survivors of the attack — not on the consulate, but on the CIA annex — number a few dozen or more. We also know from those sources that almost all of their names have been concealed from Congress in the course of the coverup.

Those sources also reveal that the CIA has required those survivors to sign confidentiality agreements binding them to never disclose what they were doing in the days or months leading up to the 9/11-12 attack. Keep in mind that good old Joe Wilson — the former ambassador sent to Niger by the CIA to “learn” what Iraq had done to acquire uranium — wasn’t required to sign any confidentiality agreement, hence his ability to become a Democratic political attack dog instantly after Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage leaked his wife’s CIA employment to reporter Robert Novak.

The Joe Wilson episode and the CIA requirement imposed on the Benghazi survivors is entirely consistent with the political conduct we’ve seen from the CIA in the past dozen years.

And it gets worse. Last week, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) disclosed that the CIA’s involvement in covering up the Benghazi scandal goes much further. He said that the CIA was not only requiring the Benghazi survivors to change their names, it is also spreading them around the country in a CIA version of a witness protection program. In this case, the witnesses are being protected from ever telling the truth to the media or testifying before Congress.

We now also know that the CIA’s Benghazi veterans are being required to submit to monthly polygraph tests to check on their behavior: they are being required to answer if they’ve leaked to Congress or the press every time they are polygraphed.