Washington Mall gunman Arcan Cetin, a Turkish Muslim migrant, reblogged this on his Tumblr.
Subhan Allah means Glory to Allah, the Islamic deity. Jannah is paradise. Ummah is the Islamic nation.
This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Nonie Darwish Moment with Nonie Darwish, the author of The Devil We Don’t Know.
Nonie discusses Why Leftists Fear ‘Law And Order’ Talk More Than Terror, unveiling the destructive leftist agenda vis-à-vis Sharia.
Don’t miss it!
And make sure to watch the special edition of The Glazov Gang that presented the Lejla Colak Moment with Lejla Colak, a brave Bosnian journalist who survived Islam.
Lejla discussed My Escape From Islam’s Rape and Death Sentence and sent her gratitude to Anni Cyrus and all others for snatching her out of the hell that Sharia’s guardians had planned for her.
The president once noted that slavery’s legacy was a part of America’s DNA. The genius of his grievance is that it’s inextinguishable, as in no possibility of reconciliation and definitive settlement. ‘White privilege’ is forever—or, at any rate, as long as a social-justice warrior finds it useful.
Barack Obama, during the 2008 presidential campaign, was presented to the people of the United States—and, more broadly, to the people of the world—as the candidate best suited to play the role of unifier. President George W. Bush had been the Great Divider but now the time had come for everyone to put those discordant days behind us and embrace the one we had been waiting for, and so begin an era of repair and restoration. A sizeable proportion of Americans continue to approve of President Obama—close to 50 per cent in some polls—and yet the blistering populist campaigns pursued by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump (and, in a sense, Ted Cruz) throughout the current presidential campaign season suggest that his time in office has increased discord in the country.
Barack Obama positioning himself as the Healer-in-Chief was always a problematic notion. Edward Klein’s The Amateur (2012) is vitriolic in tone and underestimates Obama’s political savvy, and yet his rationalisation of Obama’s original popular appeal—masterminded by political consultant David Axelrod—remains relevant:
[Axelrod] performed a brilliant piece of political legerdemain … He devised a narrative for Obama in which the candidate was presented as a black man who would heal America, not divide it, a moderate non-partisan who would rescue America, not threaten it.
Candidate Obama, the politician with the most radical voting record in the US Senate, could be trusted by mainstream America to bring the nation together.
President Obama has failed as national peacemaker because he is not a “centrist” or mediator. The provenance of his systematic worldview can be found in the thinkers of the New Left, from Frank Marshall Davis and Edward Said to Jeremiah Wright. The Reverend Wright’s “God damn America!” outburst encapsulates the New Left’s aversion to the fundamentals of America’s capitalist democracy. America is not to be healed so much as reconfigured. The great ideological fissure in the United States, then, is between their so-called libertarian-socialism—the “spirit of 1968” as Dinesh D’Souza has tagged it—and a revolution with far deeper roots: the “spirit of 1776”.
Edward Klein’s insight is only one explanation for why so many Americans failed to grasp the sharp nature of Barack Obama’s ideology. Not the least of these is that the forty-fourth president long ago took a leaf out of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (1971). President Obama, in short, eschews the pitfalls of the “rhetorical radical”. He avoids the undisguised anger and belligerence common to many activists and, in its place, adopts the public persona of what Alinsky called the “radical realist”. This could be summed up in four words: Don’t frighten the horses. Thus, Barack Obama typically expresses himself with the poise and equanimity of a venerable conciliator, and yet a more contentious outlook is invariably at work.
We could start with the Dallas shootings. On July 7, 2016, Michael Xavier Johnson ambushed and shot police officers, murdering five and injuring nine others. The police officers were on duty to ensure the security at a Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstration in the city. Dallas Police Chief David Brown disclosed that Johnson—killed near the scene of his crime—had been a follower of the BLM movement and had “stated he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers”. The chief organiser of this particular BLM protest, the Reverend Jeff Hood, did acknowledge that, with the benefit of hindsight, he might have chosen a different rallying call from “God damn White America!” to lead off the day’s march. Nevertheless, the BLM leadership team, not surprisingly, disavowed any culpability for the assassination of the police officers. Not even Quanell X’s New Black Panther Party wanted to take responsibility for Dallas. Quanell X acknowledged that Johnson had once been a member of his organisation but added that he was subsequently expelled for violating the party’s “chain of command” and advocating the acquisition of more weapons. All of this, of course, might be disingenuous but so was Barack Obama’s response.
After Congress turned down President Obama’s request to enact a law regulating power plants’ greenhouse-gas emissions, the Environmental Protection Agency turned to the states—not with a request, but with instructions to carry out the president’s energy policy. The EPA’s “Clean Power Plan” now faces the scrutiny of the nation’s chief regulatory review court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
If the Constitution’s federalism is to endure, the Clean Power Plan must be struck down.
The Constitution establishes a federal government of limited and enumerated powers while the states retain a plenary “police power,” subject only to the specific limitations of federal law. This is what Justice Anthony Kennedy called the Constitution’s “genius”: It “split the atom of sovereignty” to ensure accountability when meeting both local and national concerns, while fostering rivalry between the two levels to curb excessive political ambition that might threaten liberty.
Only in recent decades did politicians learn how to realize their ambitions through collusion. The federal government now entices states with transfer payments to establish and administer social-welfare programs. And, in schemes that the courts describe as “cooperative federalism,” it offers states the choice to regulate their citizens according to federal dictates, as an alternative to the feds regulating directly and having states get out of the way.
Even these approaches were not enough for the Obama administration to cajole the states to carry out its energy agenda. So it resolved to obliterate one of the last vestiges of the Constitution’s vertical separation of powers: the bar on federal commandeering of the states and their officials to carry out federal policy.
The Clean Power Plan is enormously complicated, but its overall approach is straightforward. Previous emissions regulations have focused on reducing emissions from particular facilities, but this one relies on shifting electricity generation from disfavored facilities (coal-fired power plants) to those the EPA prefers (natural gas and renewables). The EPA then determined what, in its view, is the maximum amount of such shifting that each of the nation’s regional electric grids could possibly accommodate and calculated the emissions reductions.
Parcel those figures out by state, factor in additional reductions due to estimated efficiency improvements at older plants, and the result is state-specific reduction targets. The states can elect to achieve those targets themselves—or, if they decline, the EPA will do it for them. “Textbook cooperative federalism,” says the EPA.
Not quite. Whether or not the states choose to implement the plan directly, it leaves them no choice but to carry out the EPA’s federal climate policy. That’s because the EPA can destroy but not create. It can regulate emissions of existing facilities, but it lacks the legal authority to facilitate the construction and integration of new power sources, which is ultimately the only way to achieve the plan’s aggressive targets.
That duty falls to the states, which the plan depends upon to carry out what the EPA calls their “responsibility to maintain a reliable electric system.” Doing nothing, as in the cooperative federalism scenario, is not an option. CONTINUE AT SITE
Mr. Blinder is a professor at Princeton, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and an informal adviser to the Hillary Clinton campaign. rsk
One summer day in 1938, Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan took off from Brooklyn, N.Y., on a flight to Ireland—even though his flight plan called for going to California. Corrigan claimed he flew east rather than west by mistake—hence his nickname. But he was a skilled pilot, and people argue to this day whether he was a fool or a scoundrel whose request to fly to Ireland had been denied.
So it is with Donald Trump. He says so many ridiculous things that it’s hard to know when he’s displaying abysmal ignorance and when he’s deliberately lying. This ambiguity holds across the board, on virtually all issues and even on basic facts, but I’ll restrict myself to economic issues.
His signature policy remains building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, for which our southern neighbors will pay. But has anyone told him that the net migration flow across that long border has been southbound for years now? Yes, more people are crossing into Mexico than into the U.S. Wrong way, Donald.
Mr. Trump insists that the U.S. Treasury designate China a currency manipulator—meaning that Beijing is intervening in foreign-exchange markets to keep the yuan undervalued. That was probably true a few years ago, but it is pretty clear now that the yuan would depreciate if the Chinese let it float—making China an even fiercer competitor. Wrong way again, Donald.
Mr. Trump once stunned the financial world by declaring that “I would borrow, knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal.” A deal? Does that mean a partial default on U.S. debt—a very bad move for the world’s premier asset? And by the way, Mr. Trump’s spending and tax-cut proposals—which keep on coming—would raise the deficit by amounts that can only be called huge. Wrong way, Donald.
Climate change used to be something to which only scientifically minded policy wonks paid attention. Now it’s so palpable that even China has ratified the Paris agreement to limit carbon emissions. Yet Mr. Trump insists that climate change is a hoax. A hoax? Perpetrated by thousands of conspiring scientists in dozens of countries? You’d think that any sentient businessman would scoff at such an idea. Yet Mr. Trump rants on, trying to push the whole world the wrong way. CONTINUE AT SITE
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals hears arguments Tuesday in a challenge to President Obama’s use of unilateral federal and executive power to impose his climate agenda. The case is a watershed for the Constitution’s separation of powers that will echo well beyond this Administration.
In the name of reducing carbon emissions, the Environmental Protection Agency’s so-called Clean Power Plan, or CPP, requires states to reorganize their energy economies across electric plants, energy-intensive industries and even households. In February the Supreme Court stayed enforcement of the CPP—an extraordinary rebuke—after some 28 states sued, arguing the plan usurps their authority under the Constitution.
The EPA asserted such authority under a brief and heretofore inconsequential backwater of the 1970 Clean Air Act known as section 111(d). No one who supported that law voted to, and the statutory text does not, empower the EPA to address climate change. But the CPP requires the states to carry out federal policy instructions even if they refuse to submit their own compliance plans.
In the American system of cooperative federalism, the federal government is supreme and can pre-empt state laws, and it often does. The EPA has the power, for example, to impose efficiency improvements or air-quality standards on existing power plants. But with the CPP it is stretching this power to unprecedented levels and commandeering state resources.
At the heart of cooperative federalism is the right of refusal—states must retain the power to opt out of any federal scheme. If that scheme is grounded in a law passed by Congress, the feds can take over and regulate themselves. In this case the EPA has no authority to do anything of the kind.
Even if the CPP explicitly banned coal-fired power, the EPA cannot mandate that states switch to solar panels and wind turbines. The agency can destroy but it cannot create. Here the EPA is expecting that states will undertake the extensive and costly preparation and regulation to compensate for lost carbon power because they have no other choice to keep the lights on. The EPA is happy to let states take responsibility for problems the EPA is creating.
The Supreme Court has often policed and struck down such commandeering. In 1992’s New York v. United States, the High Court invalidated a command to states related to low-level radioactive waste, while 1997’s Printz v. United States overturned a provision on background checks for gun purchasers. As recently as the ObamaCare cases of 2012, the Court ruled that the law’s Medicaid expansion was an unconstitutionally coercive “gun to the head” and gave states the right to opt out.
CONTINUE AT SITE
John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer. A specialist in espionage and terrorism, he’s also been a Navy officer and a War College professor. He’s published four books. http://observer.com/2016/09/the-fbi-investigation-of-emailgate-was-a-sham/
From the moment the EmailGate scandal went public more than a year ago, it was obvious that the Federal Bureau of Investigation never had much enthusiasm for prosecuting Hillary Clinton or her friends. Under President Obama, the FBI grew so politicized that it became impossible for the Bureau to do its job – at least where high-ranking Democrats are concerned.
As I observed in early July, when Director James Comey announced that the FBI would not be seeking prosecution of anyone on Team Clinton over EmailGate, the Bureau had turned its back on its own traditions of floating above partisan politics in the pursuit of justice. “Malfeasance by the FBI, its bending to political winds, is a matter that should concern all Americans, regardless of their politics,” I stated, noting that it’s never a healthy turn of events in a democracy when your secret police force gets tarnished by politics.
As I observed in early July, when Director James Comey announced that the FBI would not be seeking prosecution of anyone on Team Clinton over EmailGate, the Bureau had turned its back on its own traditions of floating above partisan politics in the pursuit of justice. “Malfeasance by the FBI, its bending to political winds, is a matter that should concern all Americans, regardless of their politics,” I stated, noting that it’s never a healthy turn of events in a democracy when your secret police force gets tarnished by politics.
Just how much Comey and his Bureau punted on EmailGate has become painfully obvious since then. Redacted FBI documents from that investigation, dumped on the Friday afternoon before the long Labor Day weekend, revealed that Hillary Clinton either willfully lied to the Bureau, repeatedly, about her email habits as secretary of state, or she is far too dumb to be our commander-in-chief.
Worse, the FBI completely ignored the appearance of highly classified signals intelligence in Hillary’s email, including information lifted verbatim from above-Top Secret NSA reports back in 2011. This crime, representing the worst compromise of classified information in EmailGate – that the public knows of, at least – was somehow deemed so uninteresting that nobody at the FBI bothered to ask anybody on Team Clinton about it.
This stunning omission appears highly curious to anybody versed in counterintelligence matters, not least since during Obama’s presidency, the FBI has prosecuted Americans for compromising information far less classified than what Clinton and her staff exposed on Hillary “unclassified” email server of bathroom infamy.
May 7, 2015, was a banner day for Britain’s Conservative Party. After five years of uneasy coalition government, the Conservatives easily gained an overall majority in the UK parliament — defying the pundits’ expectations.
For the pollsters, it was an unmitigated disaster. They had predicted a dead heat, with polling averages suggesting that the Conservatives and their rival party, Labour, would each win 34% of the popular vote. Not one firm had put the Conservatives more than a single percentage point ahead. Yet when the votes were tallied, the Conservatives won 38% to Labour’s 31%.
Nine months later, a panel of political scientists and survey experts delivered a damning post-mortem on the pollsters’ performance. They considered several possible explanations: Were “shy” Conservatives lying about their voting intentions? Was Labour undermined by “lazy” supporters who couldn’t be bothered to vote? No, the report concluded, there was a more fundamental problem with the pollsters’ methods: They had polled too many Labour supporters. In other words, their polling samples simply hadn’t been representative of the real electorate.
It was an astonishing conclusion. The cardinal rule of survey research is that the sample has to be representative of the population you are interested in. How could the pollsters have screwed up so monumentally?
Quite easily, if you consider the perfect storm that has buffeted the polling industry in recent years. As the way in which we use our phones and the internet has shifted, it has become harder and more expensive to recruit representative samples — just as the media companies that commission most election polls have been hit by declining revenues.
“There’s nothing in the US that makes us immune.”
ID: 9676414
US pollsters face exactly the same pressures as their British counterparts. And while they’ve so far avoided major embarrassment, the next few years will provide a serious test of their ability to keep calling elections correctly.
“There’s nothing in the US that makes us immune,” Courtney Kennedy, director of survey research with the Pew Research Center in Washington DC, told BuzzFeed News.
Random sampling is how it used to be done.
Loretta Sanchez on the Issues
Rated +1 by AAI, indicating a mixed Arab/Palestine voting record. (May 2012)
This November, Republicans will do their best to keep the Senate in Republican hands, and that won’t be easy. Republicans currently have a Senate majority of four, but they will be fending off strong Democrat challenges in ten states they currently represent. The Democrats have only two seats at risk of turning Republican — Nevada and Colorado — and polls show that Colorado is almost out of reach.
On November , the Republicans will probably lose seats in Wisconsin and Illinois, and at the moment there’s no better than a 50–50 chance that they’ll hold Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire. Even so, it’s possible that the most important Senate race is California’s. Let me explain.
California chooses Senate candidates with a “jungle primary:” Every primary candidates, no matter his party, appears on one ballot, and the top two finishers advance to the general-election ballot in November. Predictably, the top two finishers were Democrats, so no matter what happens on Election Day, the Senate seat of Barbara Boxer, who is retiring, is going to remain in Democratic hands. Consequently, the race has gotten very little attention, and next to none nationally. It should be getting attention, though — a lot of attention. Because it’s not just a race between two Democrats; it’s a race between a relatively moderate Democrat and a contemptible, corrupt, repulsive Democrat.
The relatively moderate Democrat is Loretta Sanchez, the representative from California’s 46th congressional district, in Orange county. She has called her self a “Blue Dog Democrat”; she is somewhat fiscally conservative, more reasonable about gun rights than the average Democrat, has taken a harder line on terrorism than the average Democrat, and — representing one of the largest Vietnamese expat communities in the country — has vocally opposed closer relations with Vietnam’s Communist government.
The contemptible, corrupt, repulsive Democrat she’s running against is Kamala Harris, California’s attorney general. After covertly shot video of Planned Parenthood employees appeared to implicate Planned Parenthood in federal crimes relating to the collection and sale of fetal tissue for research, Harris launched an investigation not into Planned Parenthood, or any of those employees, but into the journalist-activist who made the videos, David Daleiden.
In a time when “narrative” has supplanted factual reporting, Fox’s Bret Baier’s evening news program is usually an oasis in the desert. So I winced when he asserted, amid Thursday’s report on the deadly Charlotte rioting — euphemized by the media as “unrest” and “protest” – that blacks are significantly more likely than whites to be killed by police.
It echoed the distortion peddled by the Chicago Tribune in July, when “officer involved” shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana led not merely to “unrest” but to a massacre of cops in Dallas. African Americans, the paper claims, are two and a half times more likely than Caucasian Americans to be killed by police.
Are they really? The Trib says so, but only after adjustments are made for the marked population difference between the two races. But wait a second: If there is so plainly a bounty on black men – if the chances that a young African American will be killed in a police encounter are so uniquely high that our cities are in upheaval, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is on permanent alert, and black parents nationwide feel compelled to have “the talk” with their kids – then why is statistical fiddling necessary to portray this crisis?
Because there isn’t a crisis – unless we’re talking about one that is wholly manufactured.
The exceedingly inconvenient fact of the matter for the “cops are preying on black men” narrative is that far more whites than blacks are killed in confrontations with police. Last year, in fact, it was roughly twice as many.
The social justice warriors can’t have that, of course. So, making like Olympic judges from the old Soviet bloc they so resemble, today’s narrative repairmen knead the numbers to make the story come out right. The spin becomes “fact,” dutifully repeated in press coverage and popular discussion.
In this instance, the hocus-pocus is to factor in that, although there are 160 million more whites than blacks in the country, this 62 percent portion of our population accounts for “only” about half of “police involved” fatalities (49 percent). Blacks, by contrast account for an outsize 24 percent of the deaths despite being only 13 percent of population.
