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April 2017

MY SAY: VOGUE ON SYRIA

Anna Wintour, world famous garmentologist, Hillaryac and Obama supporter is editor of Vogue Magazine.

In 2011 the magazine tucked among its ad pages featuring $20,000.00 pocketbooks and other expensive must have accessories, a column praising Asma-al Assad, the wife of Bashar al Assad titled “A Rose in the Desert.”

Here is what the article said about Syria:

“Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East, possibly because, as the State Department’s Web site says, “the Syrian government conducts intense physical and electronic surveillance of both Syrian citizens and foreign visitors.” It’s a secular country where women earn as much as men and the Muslim veil is forbidden in universities, a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings, but its shadow zones are deep and dark. ”

Rather Vague on Syria wouldn’t you say?????rsk

Barack Obama’s presidency will be defined by his failure to face down Assad The US president’s indifference to chemical warfare led to the trail of violence that reached as far as Europe

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad 17 December 2016

On Friday, near Palmyra, 14 tanks and an anti-aircraft system were destroyed in an air strike on Isis. Palmyra recently fell to the jihadists after the Syrian regime and its allies diverted forces to Aleppo, leaving the ancient city under-defended.

This was a repeat of events last year when, on the advice of the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani, the regime deployed troops away from Palmyra to the strategically significant metropolis of Aleppo. The planes struck Palmyra on the same day Suleimani was photographed treading the city’s rubble. But the planes weren’t Russian or Syrian: they belonged to the US-led international coalition. While the US has its own reasons for battling Isis, in this case it was picking up the slack from the regime.

Palmyra has only symbolic significance for Assad. Aleppo was the prize, and, with the world watching impotent, the regime was able to starve and bludgeon its population into surrender. The regime was aided by Russian bombers and special forces, Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Hezbollah mercenaries, and a horde of sectarian militias from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan – but, above all, it was aided by American indifference.

In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic magazine earlier this year, President Obama said he was “very proud” of the moment in 2013 when, against the “overwhelming weight of conventional wisdom”, he decided not to honour his own “red line”, allowing Assad to escape accountability for a chemical attack that had killed more than 1,400 civilians.

Obama may be alone in this judgment. A year earlier, seemingly on a whim, he had set a red line on the use of chemical weapons at a time when none were being used. The red line was, in effect, a green light to conventional killing. But the regime called Obama’s bluff – and, predictably, he backed down. No longer fearing punishment, the regime escalated its tactics.

Nearly four times as many people were killed in the two years after the chemical attack as had died in the two years before. Obama’s abandonment discredited Syria’s nationalist opposition and empowered the Islamists. It helped Isis emerge from the shadows to establish itself as a major force. Together, these developments triggered a mass exodus that would displace over half the country’s population. And as the overflow from this deluge started trickling into Europe, it sparked a xenophobic backlash that has empowered the far right across the west.

These, however, weren’t the only consequences of Obama’s retreat. The inaction also created a vacuum that was filled by Iran and Russia. Emboldened by his unopposed advances into Ukraine and Syria, Putin has been probing weaknesses in the west’s military and political resolve – from provocative flights by Bear bombers along the Cornwall coast to direct interference in the US elections.

The post-second-world-war international order is on the verge of collapse. In January, when Obama leaves office, he will be leaving the world a lot less stable than even his predecessor.

But in his valedictory press conference, last Friday, Obama defended his policy on Syria – albeit with logic whose fractures even his eloquence could not conceal. Inverting cause and consequence, he cited Russian and Iranian presence in Syria as his reason for not confronting Assad (neither was there in August 2013); he cited the disunion among rebels as the reason for not supporting them (they fragmented because they were denied meaningful support); and he cited the fear of deeper American involvement as his justification for restraint (even though a year later it would lead to a far bigger deployment across two states).

The administration’s response to the neoconservative depredations of the past decade was to revert to old dogmas: the dogmas of “realism”. Under the influence of doctrinaire realists, Obama concluded that the Arab world was not ready for democracy; it needed “strongmen”. The strongmen would protect the west against the twin threats of terror and migration. This logic led the US to back Nouri al-Maliki’s sectarian government after the controversial 2010 election in Iraq; it also led it to tolerate Assad. Syria was defined narrowly as a counterterrorism problem.

PASSOVER MESSAGE FROM FAMILY SECURITY MATTERS BY RUTH KING

All of us at Family Security Matters wish all our readers and supporters a sweet and happy Passover

This week Jews will gather with friends and family to celebrate Passover. We will recount the hardships of slavery in Egypt and the harsh oppression by the Pharaoh. We will rejoice in the rescue by Moses who demanded freedom for our people. We will recite the ten plagues that were unleashed on the Egyptians when the Pharaohs refused to free the Jews .The Pharaoh finally relented but when the Jews were leaving he sent an army to capture them and return them to enslavement. We will cheer when we retell how the waters of the Red Sea miraculously parted giving the Jews an escape, and the waters returned drowning the pursuing army.

Then, we will have a moment of silent prayer in memory of the martyrs of the Warsaw Ghetto who courageously rebelled on Passover in April of 1943 and held off the well-armed Nazis for over a month.

Finally, we will recount another miracle- the return of the Jews to Israel in 1948 when the seas again parted- this time for the steel hulls of vessels bringing besieged and beleaguered and traumatized survivors of the Genocide of World War 2 to safety and succor in the Jewish state of Israel.

Then we will eat, drink and be merry.

But, the story of Passover continues with great consequences:

The book of Exodus says that after crossing the Red Sea, Moses led the Jews into the Sinai, where they spent 40 years wandering in the wilderness. After travelling through the desert for nearly three months, they camped before Mount Sinai and it was there that God made a covenant with Moses and revealed the Ten Commandments on two stone tablets that codified the mandate to create a just and humane society and govern the lives of Jews and all decent people and nations. There are actually 613 commandments which cover every aspect of life-even hygiene and diet, but the Decalogue- the Ten Commandments are the most famous.

Think about that. At a time and place of local mores that sanctioned and celebrated murder and pillage and tyranny, these laws set forth principles of morality which have lasted for millennia.

Until 2005 The Ten Commandments were prominently displayed in courts, schools, churches and public grounds. In 2005 rulings on the presentation of religious symbols and sacred text on Texas public property, the US Supreme Court justified displays like the Ten Commandments but with the caveat that such displays must be clearly secular and not cross the line into proselytizing.

However, in a ruling on the display of the Ten Commandments in Kentucky courthouses, the justices ruled 5 to 4 that public officials were not motivated by a secular purpose in ordering the courthouse display but sought to advance religion in violation of the separation of church and state.

The debate continues with the ACLU pitted against all public displays of the Ten Commandments and determined citizens of all religions who fight to uphold their rights to display them. There are prominent jurists and scholars who continue to argue on that subject. In spite of these controversies, The Ten Commandments continue to inspire all the world’s religions and all decent societies- religious as well as secular.

Here, in this great nation we live in freedom from intimidation, oppression and harassment because those founding fathers who sought to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” were religious Christians who were informed and guided by the Bible and the Ten Commandments which were revealed more than 3,000 years ago to Moses and the Jewish people on their way to their homeland in Israel.

Notre Dame Students Say Vice President Makes Them Feel “Unsafe” Daniel Greenfield

It’s spring.

That means robins gotta chirp, chipmunks gotta hop and crybullies gotta bully while crying that they feel unsafe because other people who disagree with them exist. This latest tragedy takes place at Notre Dame which thought that it could pacify campus crybullies by inviting Pence instead of Trump. Surely not even campus crybullies could claim that Mike Pence makes them feel triggered.

Right.

Vice President Mike Pence’s scheduled commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame has prompted a protest by senior students who say that Pence’s presence on campus will make them “feel unsafe.”

Students Immane Mondane and Jourdyhn Williams have started a #NotMyCommencementSpeaker campaign against Pence’s May 21 address.

#NotMyEnglishLanguage.

“For me personally, [Pence] represents the larger Trump administration,” Mondane told the university’s newspaper. “His administration represents something, and for many people on our campus, it makes them feel unsafe to have someone who openly is offensive but also demeaning of their humanity and of their life and of their identity.”

Well there we go. The VP is offensive. Therefore we can’t have him on campus or it will traumatize local leftists.

Meanwhile Obama, whose administration represented the denial and demeaning of much of the country, had to be invited. Otherwise that would make the same folks feel unsafe. Meanwhile safe space culture is making students feel unsafe about expressing their views on campus left the crybullies accuse them of making them feel unsafe.

Sessions Gets Serious About Border Enforcement The Obama-era lawlessness, failure to enforce our immigration laws, is over. Matthew Vadum

The Obama administration’s hands-off approach to border security is a thing of the past, Attorney General Jeff Sessions dramatically declared at a border crossing as he vowed to bring felony charges against those who unlawfully enter the U.S. multiple times.

Enforcement action against criminal aliens will now be given the highest priority. President Obama said much the same thing over his years in office, promising to deport the worst members of the illegal alien community. He did little to carry out his pledge.

The announcement by Sessions comes two weeks after he said the Trump administration was moving forward with cutting off federal law enforcement grants to local governments that shield illegal aliens, especially violent felons, from federal immigration authorities.

Sessions is hoping that with more than $4.1 billion in U.S. Department of Justice grants at stake in the current federal fiscal year ending Sept. 30, sanctuary jurisdictions won’t be able to afford to continue flaunting federal immigration law. The U.S. government is also threatening to rescind monies already granted from such governmental units.

The so-called sanctuary city movement is a key component of today’s left-wing activist repertoire. Its supporters are the soft-headed souls who carry protest signs emblazoned with the red-herring of a slogan “no human being is illegal” and who apply all the usual smear-adjectives – including racist, xenophobic, and Islamophobic – to anyone who supports having secure borders.

Sessions is pressing ahead with plans to make it easier to hire new immigration judges to hear cases at the border and to keep those individuals accused of violating immigration laws detained in facilities at the border, presumably for the sake of efficiency.

Sessions said 25 judges have already been deployed to detention centers on the U.S.-Mexico border, according to Politico. Another 50 judges will be “on the bench” later this year. A separate 75 judges will be added in fiscal 2018 at a cost of $80 million.

The “Resistance” Democrats are a Terrorist Party The Democrats have committed to overthrowing our government. Daniel Greenfield

What does #Resistance really mean? It means the overthrow of our government.

In this century, Democrats rejected the outcomes of two presidential elections won by Republicans. After Bush won, they settled for accusing him of being a thief, an idiot, a liar, a draft dodger and a mass murderer. They fantasized about his assassination and there was talk of impeachment. But elected officials gritted their teeth and tried to get things done.

This time around it’s “radically” different.

The official position, from the Senate to the streets, is “Resistance.” Leftist media outlets are feeding the faithful a fantasy that President Trump will be brought down. There is fevered speculation about the 25th Amendment, a coup or impeachment due to whatever scandal has been manufactured last.

This fantasy is part clickbait. Leftist media outlets are feeding the worst impulses of their readers. But there is a bigger and more disturbing radical endgame.

The left can be roughly divided into moderates and radicals. The distinction doesn’t refer to outcome; both want very similar totalitarian societies with very little personal freedom and a great deal of government control. Instead it’s about the tactics that they use to get to that totalitarian system.

The “moderates” believe in working from within the system to transform the country into a leftist tyranny. The “radicals” believe that the system is so bad that it cannot even be employed for progressive ends. Instead it needs to be discredited and overthrown by radicalizing a revolutionary base.

Radicals radicalize moderates by discrediting the system they want to be a part of. Where moderates seek to impose a false consensus from within the system, radicals attack the system through violent protests and terrorism. Their goal is to set off a chain of confrontations that make it impossible to maintain civil society and polarize the backlash and chaos into consolidating the left for total war.

That is what “Resistance” actually means.

Copy, Paste, Enter Stanford University A qualified black student could fill the slot taken by the pro-black applicant whose ‘essay’ was a lame display of duplication. By Deroy Murdock

Ziad Ahmed is one lucky young man. Earlier this month, Stanford University invited him to join its Class of 2021. While this alone is a huge and rare honor, what generated headlines was the essay on Ahmed’s application. Asked “What matters to you, and why?” the Princeton, N.J., high-school senior wrote: “#BlackLivesMatter.” And then he repeated it 100 times.

“I didn’t think I would get admitted to Stanford at all, but it’s quite refreshing to see that they view my unapologetic activism as an asset rather than a liability,” Ahmed told Sarah A. Harvard of the website Mic. Ahmed, a Muslim American of Bangladeshi descent, pointed out why his essay was nothing more than an exercise in mindless duplication:

“The insistence on an explanation is inherently dehumanizing,” he said. “Black lives have been explicitly and implicitly told they don’t matter for centuries, and as a society — it is our responsibility to scream that black lives matter because it is not to say that all lives do not matter, but it is to say that black lives have been attacked for so long, and that we must empower through language, perspective, and action.”

Now that prose, whether you consider Black Lives Matter a civil-rights organization or a band of racial arsonists who inspire fatal attacks on law-enforcement officers, would have been worthy of a college-admissions application. Instead, Ahmed, who interned on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, produced something reminiscent of the sets of standards that Bart Simpson writes on the chalkboard at Springfield Elementary School. For instance:

I saw nothing unusual in the faculty lounge.

I saw nothing unusual in the faculty lounge.

I saw nothing unusual in the faculty lounge.

I saw nothing unusual in the faculty lounge.

I saw nothing unusual in the faculty lounge.

I saw nothing unusual in the faculty lounge.

Ahmed’s “essay” also recalls a shocking scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 thriller The Shining. Mentally disturbed author Jack Torrance (menacingly portrayed by Jack Nicholson) has been very busy writing his new novel on his typewriter. It turns out that page after page after page of his manuscript reads:

All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.

All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.

The Pitfalls of Single-Payer Health Care: Canada’s Cautionary Tale Before America resigning themselves to socialized medicine, flummoxed legislators should consider the experience of our neighbors to the North. By Candice Malcolm

In the Netflix series House of Cards, President Frank Underwood campaigned for the White House by telling Americans, “You are entitled to nothing.” The fictional president — a Democrat, no less — was forthright with American voters about the unaffordable and unsustainable structure of America’s entitlement programs, and he was rewarded at the polls.

In real-life America, unfortunately, there is no such courageous honesty from the political class. Even many in the Republican party, once the stalwart force fighting against the growth of big government, are now resigned to contemplating a government takeover of the health-care industry in the wake of their failure to repeal and replace Obamacare. Charles Krauthammer, for example, woefully predicts that President Trump will opt for single-payer health care. F. H. Buckley, meanwhile, optimistically calls for Trump to look to the Canadian model of universal coverage.

There’s just one problem: The Canadian model of universal coverage is failing.

Assessing Canada’s Single-Payer System

The Canada Health Act (CHA), introduced in 1984, governs the complicated fiscal agreement between the provinces, who administer health services, and the feds, who manage their health-insurance monopoly and transfer funds to the local governments. Unlike in the United Kingdom, where health care is socialized and hospitals are run by the National Health Service, in Canada health care is technically delivered privately, although given the Kafkaesque regulations and restrictions that govern it, the system is by no means market-based. In fact, Canada’s government-controlled health-care system has become more restrictive than communist China’s.

Debates about health-care policy typically revolve around three key metrics: universality, affordability, and quality.

Canada passes the first test with flying colors: Every resident of the country is insured under the CHA, with covered procedures free at the point of delivery. While medical providers are independent from the federal government, they are compelled to accept CHA insurance —and nothing else — by a prohibition on accepting payments outside the national-insurance scheme so long as they wish to continue accepting federal health-transfer funds. The spigot of money from Ottawa thus ensures a de facto government monopoly in the health-insurance market.

The CHA provides and ensures universal coverage from the top down. In Canada, the government determines what procedures are medically necessary. Bureaucrats, not doctors, decide which procedures and treatments are covered under the CHA — based on data and statistics rather than on the needs of patients. While private insurance does exist — an OECD report found that 75 percent of Canadians have supplementary insurance — it applies only to procedures and services that fall outside the CHA — including dental work, optometric care, and pharmaceutical drugs.

When it comes to affordability, the Canadian system also passes, if just barely. Canadians pay for health insurance through their taxes; most never see a medical bill. But that doesn’t mean the system is affordable. Au contraire, it relies almost entirely on current taxpayers to subsidize the disproportionately large health-care needs of elderly Canadians in their final few years of life. Rather than pre-funding the system to deal with the coming tsunami of aging Baby Boomers, Canada’s provincial governments pay and borrow as they go — and rank among the most indebted sub-sovereign borrowers in the world. According to Don Drummond, an economist appointed by Ontario’s Liberal government to help fix its finances, Canada’s largest province is projected to see health-care costs soar to the point where they will consume 80 percent of the entire provincial budget by 2030, up from 46 percent in 2010.

Trump’s Syria Strike Was Constitutional The Framers gave presidents broad powers to take the lead in matters of national security, and they gave Congress the power to cut off funding. By John Yoo

In ordering Friday’s strike on a Syrian airbase, President Donald J. Trump sent the U.S. military into combat without Congress’s blessing. He has punished the Assad regime for its use of sarin nerve gas on its own people and only begun to correct the mistakes the Obama administration made when it allowed the Syrian civil war to metastasize into a conflict that is destabilizing the Middle East.

For its troubles, however, the Trump administration has come under fire from his conservative flank. Libertarian senator Rand Paul demands that Trump seek congressional authorization, while distinguished conservative law professor Mike Paulsen and National Review editor Kevin Williamson argue in these pages that the strikes violate the Constitution. Their arguments add to the outrage of Trump supporters, such as Ann Coulter, who tweeted: “Those who wanted us meddling in the Middle East voted for other candidates.”

This time, President Trump has the Constitution about right. His exercise of war powers rests firmly in the tradition of American foreign policy. Throughout our history, neither presidents nor Congresses have acted under the belief that the Constitution requires a declaration of war before the U.S. can conduct military hostilities abroad. We have used force abroad more than 100 times but declared war in only five cases: the War of 1812, the Mexican-American and Spanish-American wars, and World Wars I and II.

Without any congressional approval, presidents have sent forces to battle Indians, Barbary pirates, and Russian revolutionaries; to fight North Korean and Chinese Communists in Korea; to engineer regime changes in South and Central America; and to prevent human-rights disasters in the Balkans. Other conflicts, such as the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, and the 2003 Iraq War, received legislative “authorization” but not declarations of war. The practice of presidential initiative, followed by congressional acquiescence, has spanned both Democratic and Republican administrations and reaches back from President Trump to Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington.

Common sense does not support replacing the way our Constitution has worked in wartime with a radically different system that mimics the peacetime balance of powers between president and Congress. If the issue were the environment or Social Security, Congress would enact policy first and the president would faithfully implement it second. But the Constitution does not duplicate this system in war. Instead, our Framers decided that the president would play the leading role in matters of national security.

If the issue were the environment or Social Security, Congress would enact policy first and the president would faithfully implement it second.

Obama Is America’s Version of Stanley Baldwin Both leaders put their successors in a dangerous geopolitical position. By Victor Davis Hanson

Last year, President Obama assured the world that “we are living in the most peaceful, prosperous, and progressive era in human history,” and that “the world has never been less violent.”

Translated, those statements meant that active foreign-policy volcanoes in China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and the Middle East would probably not blow up on what little was left of Obama’s watch.

Obama is the U.S. version of Stanley Baldwin, the suave, three-time British prime minister of the 1920s and 1930s. Baldwin’s last tenure (1935–1937) coincided with the rapid rise of aggressive German, Italian, and Japanese Fascism.

Baldwin was a passionate spokesman for disarmament. He helped organize peace conferences. He tirelessly lectured on the need for pacifism. He basked in the praise of his good intentions.

Baldwin assured Fascists that he was not rearming Britain. Instead, he preached that the deadly new weapons of the 20th century made war so unthinkable that it would be almost impossible for it to break out.

Baldwin left office when the world was still relatively quiet. But his appeasement and pacifism had sown the seeds for a global conflagration soon to come.

Obama, the Nobel peace laureate and former president, resembles Baldwin. Both seemed to believe that war breaks out only because of misunderstandings that reflect honest differences. Therefore, tensions between aggressors and their targets can be remedied by more talk, international agreements, goodwill, and concessions.

Ideas such as strategic deterrence were apparently considered by both Baldwin and Obama to be Neanderthal, judging from Baldwin’s naÏve efforts to ask Hitler not to rearm or annex territory, and Obama’s “lead from behind” foreign policy and his pledge never to “do stupid sh**” abroad.

Obama issued various empty deadlines to Iran to cease enriching uranium before concluding a 2015 deal that allowed the Iranians to continue working their centrifuges.

Aggressors clearly assumed that Obama’s assurances were green lights to further their own agendas without consequences.

Iran routinely threatened U.S. Navy ships, even taking ten American sailors into custody early last year. Obama issued various empty deadlines to Iran to cease enriching uranium before concluding a 2015 deal that allowed the Iranians to continue working their centrifuges. Iran was freed from crippling economic sanctions. And Iran quietly received $400 million in cash (in the dead of night) for the release of American hostages.