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October 2016

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

MY SAY: THINK VEEP IT’S IMPORTANT

By on October 6th, 2016

Governor Pence was impressive in the debate. Don’t dismiss the importance of the Vice President. Here is an updated version of a column I wrote in 2012 published by Family Security Matters.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/think-veepits-important

“….An active Vice-President can influence policy, be an effective spokesman for legislation, and if necessary take over the administration and finish an interrupted term. A vice president is also poised to run for election and complete the agenda of a successful predecessor.The Vice President is first in the line of succession to a President who is removed, resigns, becomes incapacitated or dies. The Vice President as designated by our Constitution, is also the President of the Senate and can break tie votes. That can be crucial in a closely divided Congress.

In the past, electors in the Electoral College, were permitted two votes and the candidate who came in second became the Vice President almost automatically but since 1940 the candidate chooses the potential Vice-President.

The only modern Presidential candidate who did not pick a Veep and had Congress do it for him was Adlai Stevenson, a pompous poseur who lost to Dwight Eisenhower whose Vice President was Richard Nixon.

The qualifications for Vice President are exactly like those for President ….an individual must:

Be a natural born U.S. citizen
Be at least 35 years old
Have resided in the U.S. at least 14 years

Although the President is limited to only two terms, a Vice-President has no limit of terms. Thus, Joe Biden can be Vice-President for life as long as a Democrat is President. And Al Gore could do so too. In fact, Al Gore could have become President if Bill Clinton had been removed from office after the impeachment. He would have had almost two full years to cool America.

What a chilling thought.

The office of Vice President has evolved greatly. At one time it was seen as ceremonial and virtually a sinecure. However, the influence and prestige of the office grew markedly in the last century. Perhaps because a seemingly unprepared and unprepossessing figure like Harry Truman became a worthy successor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

President Roosevelt who was ill for much of his time in office actually had two Vice Presidents before Harry Truman. John Nance Gardner, a governor of Texas was the Veep in the first two terms (1933-41). Gardner did not think much of the office. He is quoted as saying “the office is not a bucket of warm piss.”

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POLITICS Comments turned off

From Greek Tragedy to American Therapy The heroism of facing challenges has been replaced by the victimization of enduring microaggressions. By Victor Davis Hanson see note please

By on October 6th, 2016

“To appreciate American heroism, we might read Sophocles’ Antigone or E. B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed — and watch a lot less Sunday football.” I just finished reading “With the Old Breed”…..quite possibly the best book I ever read on heroism in war…..rsk

The Greeks gave us tragedy — the idea that life is never fair. Terrible stuff for no reason tragically falls on good people. Life’s choices are sometimes only between the bad and the far worse.

In the plays of the ancient dramatists Aeschylus and Sophocles, heroism and nobility only arise out of tragedies.

The tragic hero refuses to blame the gods for his terrible fate. Instead, a Prometheus, Ajax, or Oedipus prefers to fight against the odds. He thereby establishes a code of honor, even as defeat looms.

In contrast, modern Americans gave the world therapy.

Life must always be fair. If not, something or someone must be blamed. All good people deserve only a good life — or else.

A nation of victims soon becomes collectively paralyzed in fear of offending someone. Pay down the $20 trillion debt? Reform the unsustainable Social Security system? Ask the 47 percent of the population that pays no income tax to at least pay some?

Nope. Victims would allege that such belt-tightening is unfair and impossible — and hurtful to boot. So we do nothing as the rendezvous with financial collapse gets ever closer.

Does anyone think a culture of whiners can really build high-speed rail in California? Even its supporters want the noisy tracks built somewhere away from their homes.

Even animals get in on the new victimhood. To build a reservoir in drought-stricken California means oppressing the valley elderberry longhorn beetle or ignoring the feelings of the foothill yellow-legged frog.

America’s impoverished ancestors at 15 years of age may have rounded Cape Horn on a schooner or ridden bareback over the Rockies.

Not today’s therapeutic college youth. They have been so victimized by racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and other -isms and -phobias that colleges often provide them “safe spaces,” outlaw “microaggressions” and demand “trigger warnings” to avoid the un-nice.

What would our grandfathers think?

As teenagers on D-Day, they found no safe spaces on Omaha Beach. A storm of steel from thousands of SS killers proved more than a “microaggression” at the Battle of the Bulge. Generals did not give their freezing GIs mere “trigger warnings” about a half-million Chinese Red Army soldiers crossing the Yalu River during the Korean War.

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IMMIGRATION, POLITICS Comments turned off

Hillary and ‘Undocumented’ Aliens Are illegal aliens really just “immigrants” who lack documentation? Michael Cutler

By on October 6th, 2016

The excuse “my dog ate my homework” supposedly explains why a student failed to bring a homework assignment to class, but it is an excuse that no one believes. It is not limited students who fail to do their homework, but has come to be the cliché excuse for anyone not completing an assignment who provides a lame excuse that everyone knows is a lie.

Politicians, pollsters and pundits who are advocates for open borders and the creation of immigration anarchy seek to minimize the true significance of aliens entering the United States without inspection and, of critical importance in this particularly perilous era, without vetting.

Their strategy to deceive Americans is to employ the equivalent excuse of the dog eating homework by saying that these illegal aliens entered the United States “without documentation,” thus shifting attention from the fact that millions of aliens entered the United States stealthily, without inspection.

This is the strategy of Hillary Clinton and her immigration anarchy accomplices.

The inspections process is conducted at America’s 325 ports of entry located along the northern and southern borders of the United States, at seaports that lie along our nation’s 95,000 miles of coastline and at international airports by the arm of DHS known as CBP (Customs and Border Protection), and is supposed to prevent the entry of aliens who pose a threat to the safety of America and Americans.

When a student fails to turn in an assignment his/her teacher will normally press that errant student about why the homework really was not completed, demonstrating the teacher’s dissatisfaction with the excuse.

Yet the obvious question that is never asked about illegal aliens who enter the United States without inspection who claim to be “undocumented” is, “What really happened to their documents?” Did they ever have a passport or other identity documents? Did they somehow lose them on their way to the United States? Did they destroy them before running our borders because they know that their names on those passports would show up on terror watch lists or on lists of international fugitives?

Before we go any further, it is vital to understand that the documents we are talking about are not library cards or credit cards. These are cards that, under law, are supposed to provide reliable evidence about the true identity of the bearer. This is a matter of national security.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Senate Must Act Now to Stop Obama’s Climate Change Treaty Obama and the UN work together to tie Trump’s hands if he is elected president. Joseph Klein

By on October 6th, 2016

The United States Senate must act urgently to save its treaty approval authority from irreversible damage inflicted by President Obama with the complicity of the United Nations. Congress has already allowed President Obama to get away with putting in force his Iran nuclear deal with no more than a pro forma review. His administration considered it a “political” arrangement, not a treaty. Now the Obama administration has doubled down with the Paris Agreement on climate change, which was negotiated last December and signed by President Obama in April. For domestic consumption, the administration contends that the Paris Agreement on climate change is no more than an “executive agreement,” which does not require Senate concurrence. However, for the purposes of making it legally binding on the United States under international law, the Obama administration has colluded with the United Nations Secretariat to designate the Paris Agreement as a treaty. In fact, in her October 5th press release regarding the latest developments of the agreement, U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power referred to the accord as a “treaty” that is on the verge of being enacted. Aside from legally binding requirements to periodically report on each state party’s progress in meeting individual country’s greenhouse gas emission reduction commitments previously submitted in writing to the UN, the Paris Agreement contains provisions that appear to impose additional legally binding financial commitments.

The Paris Agreement on climate change will go into legal effect thirty days after at least 55 countries, whose greenhouse gas emissions represent at least 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, have presented the legal instruments necessary under their domestic laws to become formal parties. Once the Paris Agreement goes into legal force, a state party can only withdraw upon at least three years notice. With India and the European Union countries added to the United States and China as well as scores of other countries, the thresholds are about to be met – but only if U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are included in calculating the 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions total. In order for the U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to be counted, and the U.S. to be bound legally to the Paris Agreement after the thresholds are met, Obama had to find a way around submitting the Paris Agreement to the U.S. Senate for approval while still having it deemed a treaty under international law. His scheme was to enlist the help of the United Nations Secretariat, which has placed a universal climate change agreement at the top of its agenda.

With an eye on the upcoming U.S. presidential election and the possibility that Donald Trump, who opposes the climate agreement, would win, the Obama administration and UN officials worked feverishly to accelerate the member state ratification process necessary to allow the Paris Agreement to go into legal effect. Patricia Espinosa, the UN’s climate chief, said it wouldn’t be “feasible” for Trump to change the terms of the Paris Agreement once it did go into effect. So it was a race against the clock.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, POLITICS Comments turned off

Bill Whittle’s Firewall: Debating Hillary, Part 3: Energy and Climate Change Didn’t President Obama promise us unlimited prosperity from this new Green economy eight years ago? And four years ago?

By on October 6th, 2016

During the recent presidential debate, Hillary Clinton returned to the same line we’ve been fed for eight years: there’s an economic boom waiting in the Green Economy.

No, there isn’t. In Part 3 of this 6 part series, Bill takes apart Hillary’s energy plans and examines the consequences to the planet.

Transcript below:

CLINTON: Take clean energy. Some country is going to be the clean- energy superpower of the 21st century.

And here’s what we can do. We can deploy a half a billion more solar panels. We can have enough clean energy to power every home. We can build a new modern electric grid. That’s a lot of jobs; that’s a lot of new economic activity.

Wait. Didn’t President Obama promise us unlimited prosperity from this new Green economy eight years ago? And four years ago?

In fact, didn’t President Obama take $500 million dollars of taxpayer money – that’s five hundred MILLION dollars of YOUR MONEY, and give it to a solar cell company called Solyndra? And didn’t $500 million of our dollars go poof! after Solyndra then went bankrupt? Your party is so financially stupid that you poured money into a company that went bankrupt AFTER you stole $500 million from the American people to prop it up.

Solyndra went bankrupt because your entire idea is bankrupt. Renewables do not scale up to even 5% of our total energy needs because we need energy at night and on cloudy days and on days with no wind. The giant IVAN-pah solar plant outside of Las Vegas, heavily touted by your party’s President, sucked up another one thousand, five hundred million dollars of taxpayer money, and now we find that it is not able to run without continued subsidies? Why? Because the electricity generated by the giant IVAN-pah solar plant in Nevada costs about $200 / megawatt-hour, compared to $35 / megawatt-hour for clean burning natural gas.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Bill Whittle’s Firewall: Debating Hillary, Part 2: The Financial Crisis Democrats caused the problem, then Democrats took credit for solving it.

By on October 6th, 2016

In Part 2 of this 6 part series, Bill Whittle flips Hillary’s claim that the 2008 financial crisis was caused by tax cuts for the wealthy, and explains who the REAL villains are…

Transcript below:

CLINTON: Well, let’s stop for a second and remember where we were eight years ago. We had the worst financial crisis, the Great Recession, the worst since the 1930s. That was in large part because of tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy, failed to invest in the middle class, took their eyes off of Wall Street, and created a perfect storm.

You left out a few things here. Back in 1977, Democrat Jimmy Carter passed the Community Re-Investment Act, designed to put money back into poorer communities. Now in short, the government eventually passed laws FORCING banks to write mortgages to people whose credit and income would not otherwise have qualified them, back in the days of sound risk / reward calculations. When the government essentially guaranteed bad mortgages, they completely changed the incentive structure of banking. Banks no longer cared about making SENSIBLE LOANS to people who could pay them back; since the government was going to pay off even bad loans then the smart play is to write AS MANY MORTGAGES AS POSSIBLE. When Republicans repeatedly pointed out this growing danger in the mid 2000’a, Democrats called them racists who hated the poor.

So. Democrats caused the problem, then Democrats took credit for solving it. Which as near as I can tell is the entire history of the Democratic Party.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Obama Aids Iranian Nuclear Terror New information exposes old lies about the nuclear deal. Daniel Greenfield

By on October 6th, 2016

Senator Obama opposed naming Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps a terror group even while it was closely involved in organizing attacks against American soldiers in Iraq. Then, as part of his dirty deal with Iran, he secretly sent a fortune in foreign cash on airplanes linked to the IRGC.

And, as another part of the secret ransom deal with Iran, he lifted UN sanctions on Bank Sepah.

The United States has gone after plenty of banks for aiding terror finance, but Bank Sepah is somewhat unique in that it is a financial institution actually owned and operated by Islamic terrorists.

Bank Sepah is an IRGC bank. The IRGC, despite Obama’s denials, is an Islamic terror group with American blood on its hands. It is to Shiite Islam what ISIS is to Sunni Islam. And even the Democrats know it.

After the Khobar Towers bombing, which killed 19 Americans, President Clinton sent a message to the leader of Iran warning that the United States had evidence of IRGC involvement in the attack.

More recently, Secretary of State John Kerry admitted that the IRGC have been “labeled as terrorists” when discussing how the Shiite terror organization will benefit from Obama’s sanctions relief.

Bank Sepah however had been sanctioned for something bigger than terrorism. The scale of bombings it was involved in could make the Khobar Towers attack seem minor. Sepah had been sanctioned for being “involved in nuclear or ballistic missile activities.”

Among other activities, it had helped Iran buy ballistic missile technology from North Korea.

Iran’s nuclear weapons program would only be halfway complete if it gets the bomb. It also needs missiles to be able to strike Israel, Europe and eventually America. That’s where North Korea and Bank Sepah come in. Bank Sepah helps keep Iran’s ballistic missile industry viable. By delisting it, Obama aided Iran’s ballistic missile program just as he had earlier aided its nuclear program.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

ISIS Calls for Random Knife Attacks in Alleys, Forests, Beaches, ‘Quiet Neighborhoods’ By Bridget Johnson

By on October 6th, 2016

ISIS’ Al-Hayat Media Center issued the second issue of its magazine Rumiyah, meaning Rome, in English, Turkish, German, French, Indonesian, Russian, Arabic and Uyghur. The design of the magazine is more simple than ISIS’ English-language Dabiq. It’s also much shorter: 38 pages compared to the 82 pages in the last issue of Dabiq.

In the first issue of Rumiyah, which debuted a month ago, jihadists were advised to target teens playing sports after school or even flower sellers hawking blooms on the street.

In the new PDF issue distributed widely via social media and Google Drive, an article on terror tactics assures would-be jihadists that “one need not be a military expert or a martial arts master, or even own a gun or rifle in order to carry out a massacre or to kill and injure several disbelievers and terrorize an entire nation.”

A footnote in the article states that ISIS won’t be using the term “lone wolf,” but “just terror operations” — “just” as an adjective for “justice.” Al-Qaeda calls lone operations “open-source jihad.”

Hinting that the article is one in a forthcoming series about terror tactics, ISIS focused on the benefits of knives to help potential terrorists with the “ocean of thoughts” that “might pour into one’s mind” when considering an attack.

“Many people are often squeamish of the thought of plunging a sharp object into another person’s flesh. It is a discomfort caused by the untamed, inherent dislike for pain and death, especially after ‘modernization’ distanced males from partaking in the slaughtering of livestock for food and the striking of the enemy in war,” the unbylined article states. “However, any such squirms and discomforts are never an excuse for abandoning jihad.”

ISIS suggested a “campaign of knife attacks” in which the attacker “could dispose of his weapon after each use, finding no difficulty in acquiring another one.””It is explicitly advised not to use kitchen knives, as their basic structure is not designed to handle the kind of vigorous application used for assassinations and slaughter,” the article states, further advising “to avoid troublesome knives, those that can cause harm to the user because of poor manufacturing.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

For Next UN Secretary-General, A Managerially Incompetent Socialist By Claudia Rosett

By on October 6th, 2016

In the race for the next United Nations secretary-general, the Security Council has narrowed the field of candidates from a remaining 10 to precisely one: and the winner is, former Prime Minister of Portugal Antonio Guterres. It could have been worse — but not by much. Guterres brings to the job a record that suggests he is a perfect fit to head a UN that is prone to overreach, mismanagement, waste, fraud, abuse and government meddling in every aspect of life — provided we all want even more of the same.

That’s not what you’re reading in most press reports right now, where news of Guterres as top pick for the next UN secretary-general seems to consist largely of recycled public relations materials from the UN, related officials, and the Portuguese government. Guterres was roundly praised on Wednesday by Russia’s ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin (“we have a clear favorite”) and America’s Ambassador Samantha Power (who called Guterres “a candidate whose experience, vision and versatility across a range of areas proved compelling”).

So who is this man, Antonio Guterres, who so impressed the UN envoys of both Presidents Putin and Obama?

Along with a stint as prime minister of Portugal from 1995-2002, Guterres also served as president of the Socialist International, from 1999-2005, following a stint as vice-president of the organization from 1992-1999. As the Daily Caller reminds us, the Socialist International is “a global network of national socialist parties seeking to establish ‘democratic socialism’ around the world,” an endeavor that in the late 1980s included funding the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

From 2005-2015, Guterres served as high commissioner of the UN agency for refugees (UNHCR), garnering experience which he and the Portuguese government advertised as one of his chief qualifications to head the UN Secretariat. In nominating Guterres for the post of UN secretary-general, Portugal’s Prime Minister Antonio Costa wrote that Guterres throughout his tenure as the UN’s high commissioner for refugees “showed exemplary understanding of and respect for the values of the United Nations,” ushering in all sorts of marvelous “reform and innovation.”

That sounds great, except the UN’s own auditors took a far less laudatory view of Guterres’s performance. This April the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services issued an audit report identifying a series of “critical” lapses by the UNHCR under Guterres’s management. That audit was obtained by Fox News editor-at-large George Russell, who published a story on June 7 headlined “UN refugee agency handed over hundreds of millions to partners without monitoring.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Obama, criticizing Jewish settlements in Middle East, pushes Muslim settlements in US By Ed Straker

By on October 6th, 2016

President Obama criticized Israel for constructing new settlements in what Israel calls Judea and Samaria and what the Palestinians call the West Bank.

In an uncommonly harsh statement, the State Department “strongly condemned” the move, asserting that it violated Israel’s pledge not to construct new settlements and ran counter to the long-term security interests Israel was seeking to protect. …

The new settlement, one of a string of housing complexes that threaten to bisect the West Bank, is designed to house settlers from a nearby illegal outpost, Amona, which an Israeli court has ordered demolished.

Settlements have poisoned the relationship between Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu from the earliest days of the administration. Mr. Obama demanded that Israel halt construction as a gesture to draw the Palestinians back to the bargaining table. Mr. Netanyahu complained that the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, frittered away most of the 10-month moratorium before sitting down to talk.

Jews have lived in Judea and Samaria for thousands of years. In more recent times, the area became depopulated because of repeated pogroms, or massacres, of Jews by the Palestinians. Now Jews are moving back to Judea. They are not taking any homes from Palestinians; rather, they are setting up shop on empty hilltops, turning barren desert into homes, farms, schools, and businesses.

Obama sees that as a threat. He isn’t bothered by Arabs living in Israel, but he wants territory he has unilaterally decided belongs to the Palestinians to be Judenrein, or free of Jewish people.

Curiously, Obama also has no problem with Muslim settlements in America. In fact, he aggressively pushes them. He has given green cards to over a million Muslims in his eight-year presidency. Many of these Muslims live in insular communities one could call “settlements.”

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