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February 2016

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“Confession Time: We Texans Know About Ted Cruz” By Donna Garner

By on February 4th, 2016

SIDE NOTE: From Janet Levy- I’m not sure where the candidates stand on ethanol production and its blending with gasoline but there are some SERIOUS negatives involved:

1) Per gallon, ethanol contains about 30% less energy than gasoline.
2) Ethanol production results in higher food prices as land used for food production produces corn for transportation fuel.
3) Ethanol mixtures increase gas prices as oil companies are forced to blend specified amounts of ethanol into their products.
4) Ethanol damages engines – cars, boats, lawn mowers, etc.
5) Burning ethanol increases air pollution adding 22% more hydrocarbons to the atmosphere than burning gasoline.

“In all fairness, we Texans have had a sizeable advantage over the rest of the country because we have followed Ted Cruz’s life and career for many years. What makes many of us Texans value Ted Cruz so highly is because of his proven record to stand for the Constitution even if it means alienating other people.

We Texans well remember the horrible crime committed by illegal immigrant José Ernesto Medellín in 1993. Two innocent girls, 14-year old Jennifer Ertman and 16 year-old Elizabeth Peña, were walking home in Houston and decided they would take a shortcut through a secluded area. José and members of his “Black and White” street gang captured and repeatedly raped and murdered both girls. At José’s trial, the details of his handwritten confession indicated that after the girls were raped, he stomped on the neck of one girl and strangled her with a belt. The other girl was strangled with a shoelace: José held one end of the shoelace while another boy held the other end, watching while it cut into the girl’s throat.

José was convicted and sentenced to death, but that is not the end of the story.

In 2004 while President George W. Bush was in the White House and Condoleezza Rice was the Secretary of State, the judicial arm of the United Nations (a.k.a., International Court of Justice, World Court) decided that José’s case should be reopened because he had not been informed by the police of his right to contact his consulate even though José had lived as an illegal immigrant in the U. S. almost all of his life!

Gov. Greg Abbott was the Texas Attorney General at the time, and Ted Cruz was his Solicitor General whose job as lawyer for the state of Texas was to defend the laws and the Constitution of the State of Texas and represent Texas in litigation. Both Gov. Abbott and Ted Cruz agreed that the World Court had no right to subject state and federal courts to the authority of the United Nations.

Unfortunately, because of particular political circumstances at the time, President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and the U. S. Solicitor General Paul Clement (all Republicans and all people Ted Cruz respected highly) decided that Texas should obey the World Court’s decision. This would have meant that José Ernesto Medellín, a rapist, torturer, and murderer of two young girls, could have been set free.

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Obama and Black Lives Matter Fight for a Violent Slasher The Democratic Party puts criminals first and victims last. Daniel Greenfield

By on February 4th, 2016

There was never a better candidate for a police bullet in San Francisco than Mario Woods.

Mario Woods, a member of the Oakdale Mob, slashed a man with a knife. Then he threatened cops with a knife, warning them “You’re not taking me today.” SFPD officers hit him with beanbags and pepper spray and he still wouldn’t go down or drop the knife.

He taunted the officers, saying, “You better squeeze that mother___ and kill me.”

Then Woods moved toward a crowd of people while still holding the knife. And cops shot him.

It should have been the most open and shut case in history. This wasn’t Clint Eastwood’s Inspector Harry Callahan drawling, “Do you feel lucky, punk?” while staring at a downed bank robber. It was the prototype for a case in which the SFPD went by the book and tried their best to keep the punk alive.

The officers had done everything possible to stop a violent criminal by using non-lethal methods despite the risk to their own safety. They only opened fire once Mario Woods became a danger to civilians.

Mario Woods was a career criminal and a gang member who had recently gotten out after serving time for armed robbery. Two of the police officers were black. Only one officer out of five was white. There was no possibility of arguing that the shooting of Mario Woods was racially motivated.

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Merkel’s Deadly Misstep The dark and tragic details of what the German chancellor’s open-door “refugee” policy really caused. Stephen Brown

By on February 4th, 2016

When German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced last August that her government would allow unregistered refugees to come to Germany, she set off the biggest migrant wave since the Second World War.

Despite the negative effects this huge influx of people has had on the German economy and society, such as the mass sexual molestation and rape of hundreds of women last New Year’s Eve in Cologne, increased crime and concerns for personal safety among native Germans, supporters of Merkel’s action believe it was nevertheless justified by the humanitarian emergency and the need to save lives.

But in an exclusive and revealing interview with the German newspaper Die Welt, an internationally recognised migration and Third World expert, Paul Collier, author of the book Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World, convincingly debunks this myth. Collier, a former director of the World Bank who currently holds an economics professorship at Oxford University, believes Merkel’s open-doors decision “…did not save a single Syrian from death.”

“Despite best intentions, Germany has, instead, dead people on its conscience,” Collier told Die Welt. “Many people understood Merkel’s words as an invitation and only after that did they actually set out on the dangerous journey, sacrifice their savings and entrust their lives to dubious smugglers.”

Meant as a humanitarian gesture, Collier maintains Merkel’s announcement had the opposite effect in regard to migrants’ safety and well-being. The refugees, he said, were already in safe, third states, such as Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, and did not come to Germany directly from “war and crisis countries.” But it was this “invitation” that caused them to leave these relatively safe havens, where most lived in tolerable conditions, and risk their lives on the arduous trip to Germany.

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The Islamic Rape and Murder of Christian Boys Another Muslim world phenomenon being imported into the West. Raymond Ibrahim

By on February 4th, 2016

A group of Muslim men recently went into a Christian district in Pakistan, abducted a 7-year-old boy, and took turns gang raping him before finally strangling him to death with a rope. Locals found the child’s body dumped in a field the next day:

[T]he body was sent for post-mortem examination which revealed that the 7-year-old was killed after being brutally raped…. Speaking to The Express Tribune, a local said, “The suspects belonged to rich families and were drunk when they kidnapped the child and took him to their dera where they raped him.

Interestingly, while the NY Daily News, the Independent, and other media state that the boy was seized from a “Christian district,” the original report, published by one Kashif Zafar in the International New York Times’ Express Tribune, avoids mentioning the religious identity of either rapists or raped. It even fails to mention that this atrocity took place in Pakistan and merely names the region, Bahawalnagar, in both the title and body of the report, though few have any clue what country Bahawalnagar is located in.

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Obama at Muslim Brotherhood-linked Mosque: “Muslim Americans Keep Us Safe” And: “Islam has always been part of America.” Really? Robert Spencer

By on February 4th, 2016

When Barack Obama visited the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Islamic Society of Baltimore on Wednesday, he said: “The first thing I want to say is two words that Muslim Americans don’t hear often enough: Thank you.”

While Obama has been President, Muslims have murdered non-Muslims, avowedly in the cause of Islam, at Fort Hood, Boston, Chattanooga, and San Bernardino, and attempted to do so in many, many other places. Imagine if armed Baptists screaming “Jesus is Lord” had committed murder, and explained that they were doing so in order to advance Christianity, in four American cities, and had attempted to do so in many others. Imagine that those killers were supporters of a global Christian movement that had repeatedly called for attacks on U.S. civilians and declared its determination to destroy the United States.

Imagine how incongruous it would be in that case for the President of the United States to visit a church and say: “The first thing I want to say is two words that Christian Americans don’t hear often enough: Thank you.” And imagine how unlikely it would be that Barack Obama would ever have done that.

But his visit to the Islamic Society of Baltimore was the apotheosis of the Muslim victimhood myth, as he signaled yet again to the world (and worldwide jihadis) that in the U.S., Muslims are victims, victims of unwarranted concern over jihad terror, and thus that concern is likely to lessen even more, as Obama dismantles still more of our counter-terror apparatus.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

White House Ignores Mounting Failures in Afghanistan By Mark Moyar

By on February 4th, 2016

‘We have made gains over the past year that will put Afghanistan on a better path,” said Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter on January 27, in a message of congratulations to outgoing commander General John Campbell. But the upbeat pronouncements of top administration officials are inconsistent with nearly all the information coming out of Afghanistan. On the day after Carter’s statement, the latest quarterly report from the Pentagon’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction observed, “In this reporting period, Afghanistan proved even more dangerous than it was a year ago. The Taliban now controls more territory than at any time since 2001.” An independent assessment by Bill Roggio of the Long War Journal also concluded that the Taliban has rapidly extended the terrain it controls since President Obama announced the official end of the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan. The U.S. has the ability to blunt the Taliban’s momentum, but a President who refuses to recognize the problem is not likely to provide the necessary resources.

​Is There a War in Afghanistan?

On December 21, a Taliban suicide-bombing attack at Bagram air base killed six Americans. On January 5, an American Special Forces soldier, Staff Sergeant Matthew McClintock, died and two others were wounded in Helmand province while assisting Afghan forces. As of mid-2015, American Green Berets were still accompanying their Afghan counterparts on six to ten missions per week, according to Major General Sean Swindell, commander of the Coalition’s special-operations forces. Forty times per week, Americans were providing Afghan special-operations forces with intelligence, logistical support, air cover, or other assistance. In December, Stars & Stripes reported, “U.S. troops are increasingly being pulled back into battle to aid overstretched Afghan forces.”

From the vantage point of the White House, these activities do not amount to war. On the White House website, a list of President Obama’s accomplishments says he “responsibly ended the U.S. combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Shortly before the President’s final State of the Union address, National Security Council spokesman Ned Price tweeted, “The U.S. ended two costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing home 90% of 180K troops deployed.” In the address itself, President Obama offered nary a word of thanks to the 9,800 troops who remain. He mentioned the country only once, as part of a list of places where “instability will continue for decades.”

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Far from American Headlines, Iran Keeps Humiliating U.S. Sailors By David French

By on February 4th, 2016

Jihadist reality is a stubborn thing. Politically correct spin and naïve optimism always fails in the face of persistent aggression. Regarding Iran, the Obama administration’s grotesque misstatements in the aftermath of Iran’s capture and public humiliation of American sailors should now join its post-Benghazi lies in the hall of shame. Before discussing the most recent developments, let’s review the lowlights.

Three weeks ago Iranian Revolutionary Guards intercepted two U.S. Navy “riverine” boats they claimed had wandered into Iranian territorial waters. They forced the sailors onto their knees, taped an American officer apologizing, and then broadcast the images and apology to the world. In response, administration officials actually bragged about their handling of the incident and defended Iran.

Vice President Joe Biden called Iran’s actions “standard nautical practice.” An hour after Iran released its humiliating footage, Secretary of State John Kerry actually thanked “Iranian authorities” for their “cooperation in swiftly resolving this matter” (though he did later say that the footage made him “very angry.”) Secretary of Defense Ash Carter compared Iran’s actions to the way the U.S. provides “assistance to foreign sailors in distress” and also expressed his appreciation to Iran.

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The Buchanan Boys The Trump voters aren’t a new phenomenon. By Kevin D. Williamson

By on February 4th, 2016

Donald Trump’s performance in this year’s Iowa caucuses was identical to Pat Buchanan’s in 1996: second place, enjoying the support of approximately one in four Republican caucus-goers. Trump’s campaign, like Buchanan’s, is powered by the resentment and anxiety of the white working class.

Trump is this year’s celebrity mascot for the Buchanan boys.

The Buchanan boys are economically and socially frustrated white men who wish to be economically supported by the federal government without enduring the stigma of welfare dependency. So they construct for themselves a story in which they have been victimized by elites and a political system based on interest-group politics that serves everyone except them. Trump is supported by so-called white nationalists, as Buchanan was before him, but the swastika set is merely an extreme example of the sort of thinking commonly found among those to whom Trump appeals.

If you want to understand the patron-client model behind the appeal of a man such as Pat Buchanan, then begin by consulting one of the keenest political minds of our time: Pat Buchanan. In a memo to Richard Nixon, he sketched out his model: “There is a legitimate grievance in my view of white working-class people that every time, on every issue, that the black militants loud-mouth it, we come up with more money. . . . If we can give 50 Phantoms to the Jews, and a multi-billion dollar welfare program for the blacks . . . why not help the Catholics save their collapsing school system?”

The Jews Buchanan is writing about here presumably were those in Jerusalem rather than those in Brooklyn, but the conflation of overseas national-security projects with domestic interest-group politics is hardly restricted to self-conscious white nationalists. Bernie Sanders complains that money spent overseas ought to be spent servicing his constituents’ interests at home, and Trump dreams of turning our foreign adventures into a profit-making scheme, looting oil and other assets from foreigners to fund the British-style socialist health-care system of his dreams.

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America’s Economy Is ‘Mostly’ Free? Washington Needs to Back Out of the Marketplace

By on February 4th, 2016

— Ben Sasse is the junior Republican U.S. senator from Nebraska and former president of Midland University. Jim DeMint, president of the Heritage Foundation, was formerly a Republican U.S. senator from South Carolina.

The land of the mostly free and the home of the brave.”

That sounds wrong, and it is. But “mostly free” is how the U.S. economy rates in the recently released 2016 Index of Economic Freedom. This is bad news for Americans in general, and especially unfortunate for our poorest, most vulnerable citizens.

A joint research product of the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal, the Index measures the economic freedom of nations based on ten criteria, including the rule of law, size of government, regulatory efficiency, and market openness. These factors affect how easily Americans from Nebraska to New York can climb ladders of opportunity, start businesses, and make a better life for their families. These are the things that really matter.

Nations such as Switzerland and Australia continue to rank among the ten freest economies in the world, while North Korea and Cuba remain on the bottom rungs — their citizens the victims of crippling economic repression.

The good news is that the average score for the 189 nations analyzed rose again this year. In other words, economic freedom overall advanced globally for the fourth year running. The bad news: Economic freedom declined here in the United States.

Our 2016 score is only 75.4 out of a possible 100 — well below the 80 points required to earn a “mostly free” rating. Indeed, the new score ties our previous worst — set in 1998. Put another way, all U.S. advances in economic freedom logged in the last 18 years have now been wiped out. As Americans, we shouldn’t have to settle for anything short of excellence — that’s not who we are.

America is exceptional because we are free. We are unique in history because we haven’t stood in line to ask a king, a court, or a bureaucracy for our freedoms. We have invented and invested, collaborated, and created great products, businesses, and services without government micromanagement.

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The Regrettable Decline of Higher Learning By Victor Davis Hanson

By on February 4th, 2016

What do campus microaggressions, safe spaces, trigger warnings, speech codes, and censorship have to do with higher learning?

American universities want it both ways. They expect unquestioned subsidized support from the public, but also to operate in a way impossible for anyone else.

Colleges still wear the ancient clothes of higher learning. Latin mottos, caps and gowns, ivy-covered spires, and high talk of liberal education reflect a hallowed intellectual tradition.

In fact, today’s campuses mimic ideological boot camps. Tenured professors seek to indoctrinate young people in certain preconceived progressive political agendas. Environmental-studies classes are not very open to debating the “settled science” of man-caused, carbon-induced global warming – or the need for immediate and massive government intervention to address it. Grade-conscious and indebted students make the necessary ideological adjustments.

Few sociology courses celebrate the uniquely American assimilationist melting pot. Race, class, and gender agenda courses – along with thousands of “studies” courses – have been invented. A generation of politicized professors has made the strange argument that they alone have discovered all sorts of critical new disciplines of knowledge – apparently unknown for 2,500 years – to ensure that graduates would be better educated than ever before.

Universities have lost their commitment to the inductive method. Preconceived anti-Enlightenment theories are established as settled fact and part of career promotion. Evidence is made to fit these unquestioned assumptions.

Two unfortunate results have predictably followed.

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