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October 2013

RUTHIE BLUM: IGNORANCE EQUALS SURRENDER

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=5943 If further evidence were needed to show that the rise of abbreviated Internet lingo has led to a dangerous decline in literacy, it was provided in spades this week. As part of an educational series commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, the Israel Defense Forces has been tweeting posts relating to […]

NETANYAHU VS. IRAN ON THE GLAZOV GANG

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/obamadontcare-on-the-glazov-gang/

This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by intellectual Michael Chandler, Conservative TV and Movie Star Morgan Brittany and Filmmaker Orestes Matacena (“Two de Force“).

This week the Gang discussed Netanyahu vs. Iran. The discussion occurred in Part II (starting at the 12:50 mark) and focused on when Israel will have to make its move against the Mullahs’ bomb. The dialogue was preceded by an analysis of Republicans are Jihadists? — which analyzed how the Left uses the words against its political opponents that it never dares utter about Islamic terrorists.

Part II:

Don’t miss Part I of this special episode which shed light on Secrets Behind the Shutdown and ObamaDon’tCare:

Part I:

To watch previous Glazov Gang episodes, Click here.

BRUCE BAWER: PASSAGE TO MARSEILLES

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-bawer/passage-to-marseille/print/ Marseille, with a population of something under a million, is France’s second largest city, and, as the BBC reported last year, “it’s likely to become the first Western European metropolis where the majority of the population will be Muslim.” With a candor for which it has not always been known, the BBC acknowledged that […]

DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE BATTLE OF THE REDSKINS

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-battle-of-the-redskins/ Over the summer, those two legendary sources of sports coverage, Salon Magazine and MSNBC, or as they are known in some places the S Word and the M Word, announced that they would begin referring to the Redskins football team as the R Word. Ordinarily liberals would not be too eager to call a […]

REZA ASLAN- A CHARLATAN EXPOSED BY AYMANN JAWAD AL-TAMIMI

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/aymenn-jawad-al-tamimi/reza-aslan-authority-on-islam-and-the-middle-east/ An author who came to widespread attention during the past couple of months over the release of his book Zealot (July 2013) on the life Jesus, Reza Aslan has been known primarily as an authority on Islam and the Middle East. He has been hailed by an array of commentators, most notably the celebrity […]

DEROY MURDOCK: SOURPUSS-IN-CHIEF AMPLIFIES THE SHUTDOWN PAIN

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/360974/print As the federal shutdown grinds on, Team Obama’s message to the American people is sadly consistent: Shove it — as painfully as possible. Obama’s strategic sadism disregards regular Americans’ basic needs and tortures those who resist. And if this damages people, so what? “We are winning,” a senior administration official told the Wall Street […]

DANIEL JOHNSON: WHO’S AFRAID OF BARACK OBAMA?

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4247/who_s_afraid_of_barack_obama
While no longer accepting any special responsibility on the world stage, Obama pretends that we are all citizens together. Like Hamlet the President soliloquises; he does not act

On March 4, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson gave his second inaugural address. “We are provincials no longer,” he declared. “The tragic events of the thirty months of vital turmoil through which we have just passed have made us citizens of the world.” Five months before, he had been re-elected on the slogan: “He kept us out of the war.”

But in the meantime, the Germans had resumed unrestricted submarine warfare. By the time Wilson spoke, he had resolved to side with the Allies. The true significance of American intervention in a European conflict would extend far beyond its ultimately decisive impact on the war itself. Wilson grasped that the United States was acknowledging that its “manifest destiny” now embraced defending liberty and justice, not only on a continental but on a global scale: “There can be no turning back.”

Wilson was drawing on a long history of thinking about what it might mean to be a citizen of the world, going back at least to Immanuel Kant’s vision of “perpetual peace”. Even Machiavelli recognised ethical constraints on rulers, as Phillip Bobbitt shows in his new study of the Renaissance sage, The Garments of Court and Palace. What we would call genocide and ethnic cleansing “are such vile practices, not only incompatible with a Christian way of life but with any civilised form of living, that every man should abhor such methods and decide to live as a private citizen rather than rule at the cost of such devastation to others”.

FIGHTING CLIMATE CHANGE BY KILLING EAGLES? ROBERT BRYCE

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303342104579099060830782406.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

Why isn’t the wind industry subject to the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act?

For some environmentalists, the threat of climate change is so great that we must allow wind turbines to kill bald and golden eagles. The argument I’ve heard is that renewables, including wind energy, will reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Less carbon dioxide reduces the threat posed by climate change, which benefits eagles and other wildlife.

In other words, we have to kill eagles in order to save them.

If this sounds far-fetched, consider the notice that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published in the Federal Register on Sept. 27. It seeks public comment on a proposed permit that will allow a wind project to kill up to five golden eagles over a five-year period, despite their protected status under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.

The permit is sought for the Shiloh IV Wind Project in Solano County, Calif. If it is granted, it would formally recognize a legal double standard that is already in existence with regard to wildlife protection in America.

Wind projects routinely violate the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, but no wind farm has ever faced a single prosecution. Meanwhile, companies in the oil and gas industry and other sectors are routinely indicted for violating those same statutes.

The illegal bird kills are not insubstantial. On Sept. 11, some of Fish and Wildlife’s top raptor biologists published a study in the Journal of Raptor Research that found the number of eagles killed by wind turbines increased to 24 in 2011 from two in 2007. In all, some 85 eagles have been killed since 1997. Joel Pagel, the study’s lead author, recently told me that the figure is “an absolute minimum.” Among the carcasses: six bald eagles.

ALAN CARUBA: THE FACE OF TYRANNY

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-face-of-tyranny?f=puball The history of civilization dating back some five millennia is one of unrelenting tyranny, rapaciousness, arrogance, and stupidity. The players and the places changed, but the slaughter was unremitting, the suffering broken only by occasional brief periods of peace, good weather and crops. For most of the past, war, famine, and disease killed most […]

EDWARD CLINE: OBAMA’S EXECUTIVE DISTORTION

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/just-like-a-tyrant-obamas-executive-extortion

Like King Canute, President Barack Obama is ordering the tide of disaffection to cease and roll back into the ocean. He has even closed the ocean. Obama does not subscribe to Francis Bacon’s dictum that “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” No, his power-lusting ambition allows him to assert: “Nature and men will obey me because I command it.”

The malicious, vindictive character of President Barack Obama’s behavior over the refusal of the House to pass a budget that would fund Obamacare (or the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) and also raise the debt ceiling is open for all to see. He has ordered all national parks, and even private parks and businesses that do not receive federal funds but which are on federal property or even adjacent to it, closed, with cement or metal barricades, orange cones, and National Park “rangers” stationed to stop people (when they can) from entering any of those venues.

His actions are nothing but petty, extortionate, and venal. “I will have my way, and you will suffer pain until I get my way,” is his message. “I don’t care if you’re WWII vets or Korean War vets or just tourists who have suddenly found their vacation plans literally barricaded, until you press the House to let me have my way, you won’t be enjoying those parks, even though your tax dollars pay for them. Tough. I’m the boss. Deal with it.”

Although the federal government’s shutdown is the first in seventeen years, Obama’s actions are evocative of the Crown’s policies over the American colonies 248 years ago, when, against the advice of many members of the House of Commons and even some members of the House of Lords, Parliament passed the Stamp Act. Chief Justice of the King’s Bench Lord Mansfield (William Murray) approved of the Stamp Act as within the powers of Parliament and the Crown. The Gentleman’s Magazine of March 1765 noted:

“Lord Mansfield, as speaker, and the Earls Gower and Marchmont, by virtue of a commission from his majesty gave the royal assent to the following bills:…” and about nine are listed, one of which reads: “for laying a stamp duty in the British colonies in America.”

Although a brief & somewhat inconspicuous report, it is an exceedingly historic one, as this is the official notice–in a British publication no less–of the King’s approval of the Stamp Act. Schlesinger has under the date of March 22, 1765 a lengthy entry which begins: “In passing the Stamp Act, the English Parliament sets its first direct tax on the American colonies. The intent of this act is to raise adequate funds, together with the revenues from the 1764 Sugar Act, to support at least one-third of the total cost to British of maintaining a military organization in the colonies…”

As early as December, 1764, Prime Minister George Grenville, author and advocate of the Stamp Act of March 1765, sought Mansfield’s opinion on the legality of the tax. Mansfield replied*:

“…Though the question certainly does not want this, or any other authority, yet it will be a striking alteration to ignorant people, and an unanswerable argument ad homines; and, therefore, I wish you would employ somebody to look with this view into the origin of their power to tax themselves and raise any money at all.”

Now, let’s look at the Supreme Court ruling on the legitimacy or legality of Obamacare, and the key statement of Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion. The New York Times reported on June 28th, 2012:

“The Affordable Care Act’s requirement that certain individuals pay a financial penalty for not obtaining health insurance may reasonably be characterized as a tax,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. “Because the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness.” [Italics mine]