Oxfam’s lopsided logic On the face of it, Oxfam is as irreproachable as motherhood and apple-pie. Who can be against its declared goals of combating hunger and promoting justice? Oxfam’s confederation and its familiar charity shops are fixed features in some 90 countries worldwide. Founded in the city of Oxford in 1942, it crusaded for […]
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4160/marine-le-pen-chauprade Le Pen’s worldview seems comes from the man sitting next to her, Aymeric Chauprade, who taught geopolitics at the Joint Defense College of the French army, until he was fired after writing a book in which he voiced the possibility that that the 9/11 attacks might have been part of a deliberate plot conceived […]
WILLKOMMEN TO DEUTSCHLANDSTAN…JUST AS GISELE BAT YE’OR PREDICTED IN HER BOOK “EURABIA”….RSK
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4155/germany-muslim-friendly
Muslims attending the gathering were offended by the insinuation that Islam could be radical or violent, and demanded instead that the German government take steps to make “Islam equal to Christianity” in Germany. They were equally unwilling to discuss the main item on the official conference agenda: “Gender Equality as a Common Value,” and refused even to acknowledge that there might be any connection between Islam and forced marriage.
While focusing his energy on expanding the rights if Muslims in German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière has been largely silent about the responsibility of Muslim immigrants to take measures to integrate better into German society.
Germany’s new coalition government is signaling that it wants better relations with the country’s Muslim community.
In a series of newspaper, television and radio interviews, Thomas de Maizière—who was recently sworn in as Germany’s new interior minister—has announced a series of pro-Muslim initiatives apparently designed to defuse escalating tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims there.
Among other policy initiatives, Maizière says the government plans to change German immigration laws to make it easier for Muslim immigrants to obtain dual-citizenship and thus to maintain religious and cultural links to their countries of origin.
Maizière also says he intends to give Muslims more say in setting the agenda of the government’s ongoing dialogue with the Islamic umbrella groups that represent the estimated 4.5 million Muslims now living in the country.
While focusing his energy on expanding the rights of Muslims in Germany, Maizière has been largely silent about the responsibility of Muslim immigrants to take measures to integrate better into German society.
Step in Obama’s Climate Action Plan, without a price tag, will assess risks and then tell landowners “this is how you need to manage.” http://pjmedia.com/blog/new-usda-climate-hubs-to-school-farmers-ranchers-on-climate-change/?print=1 WASHINGTON — President Obama enacted part of his promised Climate Action Plan today with the creation of regional “Climate Hubs” to coordinate a global warming response with farmers, ranchers and […]
http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2014/02/05/the-gop-and-social-issues-contd-confronting-the-gay-marriage-question/?print=1
Here at Ordered Liberty, I weighed in a few days back on the discussion Roger Simon and Bryan Preston were having about whether the Republican Party should de-emphasize social issues. Some other points are worth making.
The first is that not all “social issues” are created equal.
I don’t think either Roger or Bryan suggested otherwise. To recap how we got here, while Roger’s headline referred generally to “social conservatives” (“How Social Conservatives Are Saving Liberalism”), his post homed in on gay marriage. In rebuttal, Bryan did not delve deeply into the substance of gay marriage; instead, he broadened the debate to consider how a conservative retreat on gay marriage would fit into a pattern of surrender on social issues across the board. It is those issues that inspired the demographic known as “social conservatives” to, as Bryan says, “get into politics in the first place.” Thus, he contends, de-emphasizing them would cause social conservatives to disengage from politics. I agree. As argued in my post, the GOP cannot win elections with major defections from this critical component of its base.
Yet, it confuses matters to speak of “social issues” as one indiscriminate bunch, and to imply that each should be handled the same “no compromise” way. Just as every skirmish in the culture war is not equally significant, different social issues are of varying importance.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304851104579359141941621778?mod=WSJ_hp_RightTopStories
U.S. News
Sniper Attack Knocked Out Substation, Raises Concern for Country’s Power Grid
SAN JOSE, Calif.—The attack began just before 1 a.m. on April 16 last year, when someone slipped into an underground vault not far from a busy freeway and cut telephone cables.
Within half an hour, snipers opened fire on a nearby electrical substation. Shooting for 19 minutes, they surgically knocked out 17 giant transformers that funnel power to Silicon Valley. A minute before a police car arrived, the shooters disappeared into the night.
To avoid a blackout, electric-grid officials rerouted power around the site and asked power plants in Silicon Valley to produce more electricity. But it took utility workers 27 days to make repairs and bring the substation back to life.
Nobody has been arrested or charged in the attack at PG&E Corp.’s Metcalf transmission substation. It is an incident of which few Americans are aware. But one former federal regulator is calling it aterrorist act that, if it were widely replicated across the country, could take down the U.S. electric grid and black out much of the country.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303942404579362851183447872?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop There are 7.8 million Americans working part-time who want full-time work, including a fry cook whose restaurant cut his hours to avoid Affordable Care Act mandates and confronted President Obama in an online Q&A last week. “We can’t survive. It’s not a living.” Mr. Obama changed the subject to raising the minimum wage. But […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/370367/cbos-obamacare-scorecard-editors
Obamacare by the numbers, according to the Congressional Budget Office — labor lost: equivalent of 2.5 million full-time jobs over the next decade; insurance enrollment: down 1 million from earlier first-year estimate; cost: $1.2 trillion over the next decade; number of Americans uninsured: 30 million.
Which is to say: We are spending $1.2 trillion and taking a blowtorch to the work force in order to fund a semi-public insurance system that still leaves tens of millions uncovered. And that’s assuming that CBO has not taken too rosy a view of Obamacare, which it may well have.
There is more wrong with Obamacare than a bumble-thumbed website.
The White House has tried, with hilarious results, to spin the labor-force data, emphasizing the CBO’s estimate that the so-called Affordable Care Act will cost the economy the equivalent of 2.5 million full-time jobs not because there will be a pink-slip bloodbath at Walmart but because fewer people will chose to work, or will choose to work fewer hours, once their federally subsidized health insurance makes the prospect of quitting their jobs less enticing. In the considered view of the Obama administration, that is good news. We are happy to see that the White House seems finally to have stumbled upon the concept of economic incentives — give people less reason to work and they will work less. But the administration still does not seem to be able to get its collective head around the fact that American workers are not just hungry mouths that have to be filled with paychecks: They are people who provide economically valuable goods and services. Those 2.5 million out of the work force may be happier at their leisure, but the economy as a whole will be substantially worse off without their contributions. We could, in theory, simply have the federal government deliver checks to every household and allow each and every one to follow his bliss as he sees fit, but the shelves of the grocery stores soon would be empty. The depth of the Obamacare crater in the labor force isn’t some abstract unemployment rate, but the lost value of the work those Americans would have done.
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/370329/print Welcome to the “year of action.” In last week’s State of the Union address, the president vowed to do whatever he must to help the economy, even if that means working around Congress: “What I offer tonight is a set of concrete, practical proposals to speed up growth, strengthen the middle class, and build […]
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/02/04/sandra-fluke-files-to-run-for-congress/
WAXMAN IS REALLY AWFUL …WILL FLUKE BE WORSE?…. A FLUKE IS A BOTTOM FEEDING FISH…RSK
This ridiculous story has given us the headline of the day, from Jammie Wearing Fool.
Woman Who Can’t Afford Her Own Birth Control Scrapes Up Money to File for Congressional Run
That’s the headline that Fluke deserves. She ought to be a figure of ridicule. She’s a longtime Georgetown Law student, who told Congress that she can’t afford her own $9 a month birth control. Helpless she may be, but that’s not stopping her from taking her incompetence and inexperience straight to power over the rest of us.
Let’s see how the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake treats Fluke’s ambitions. Here is his lead sentence.
Women’s rights activist Sandra Fluke appears to be moving forward with a run for Congress.
Wait, what about the Little Sisters of the Poor? They’re the nuns who oppose the same abortifacient mandate that Fluke supports. Are they not women? Do they not have rights? To Aaron Blake, the nuns are not women and they do not have rights.
Sandra Fluke is not a “women’s rights activist.” She is a government-power advocate.
