MY SAY: # MARTIN LUTHER KING MATTERS

In his magnificent speech “I Have a Dream” delivered on August 28, 1963 Dr. King stated:

“But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ignited a movement in America that culminated in the landmark Civil Rights Act , that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Alas, he did not live to see its implementation and the effects of ameliorative policies. He was assassinated on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee by a racist criminal James Earl Ray.

Since his death, many hucksters have tarnished his legacy… among “preachers” such as Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan, to name only a few, and among thugs such as the old and new Black Panthers and the current racists of the #Black Lives Matter movement.

Dr. King would be appalled that under the administration of America’s first Black president, race relations in America are worse and introspection on both sides has diminished and been replaced with hardened prejudice.

His words matter more than ever……rsk

Why Republicans Lose the Narrative Battle: The Inspector-General Gambit To delegitimize Trump’s victory, the Left is setting the parameters of the controversy and the terms by which it will be discussed. By Andrew C. McCarthy

It is so frustrating to observe news coverage of Thursday’s announcement that the Justice Department’s inspector general will review the conduct of FBI and Justice Department officials tangential to — but, as I’ve explained, not at the core of — the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal. As usual, the Left understands exactly what they are choreographing, beginning with Friday’s screaming New York Times page-one headline that “Comey” is the subject of a new Justice Department probe. As always, the Left is setting the parameters of the controversy and the terms by which it will be discussed.

And as night follows day, Republicans are at sea, not knowing quite what is being investigated. Precisely because of the way Democrats have teed things up, Republicans have been hoodwinked into thinking that they must figure out where to come down on FBI director James Comey’s rollercoaster announcements during the campaign stretch run.

In other words: The Democrats are more than halfway home. Republicans figure nothing important has really happened yet. The Left knows it has already set the table. By the time the GOP grasps what’s happening, the public’s understanding of the controversy will be set in stone.

Let me try, again, to help.

Please understand: The charade now underway has nothing to do with determining whether Justice Department protocols were violated by the statements of FBI and Justice Department officials who revealed non-public investigative information — in Comey’s case, to the public at large. That’s the pretext for convening something that can be called a “Justice Department investigation” (which sounds like we’re looking to identify a culprit) by the inspector general (which sounds like the investigation must be non-partisan, even though the IG is an Obama appointee who works with, although often not under the supervision of, Obama’s chosen attorney general).

To the contrary, what is going on here is a battle, which Democrats are hell-bent on winning, between two competing narratives.

The Climate-Change Gang The Obama administration lawlessly rewards its supporters and punishes its enemies. By Scott Pruitt & Luther Strange — May 17, 2016

The United States was born out of a revolution against, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, an “arbitrary government” that put men on trial “for pretended offences” and “abolish[ed] the Free System of English laws.” Brave men and women stood up to that oppressive government, and this, the greatest democracy of them all, one that is governed by the rule of law and not by men, is the product.

Some of our states have forgotten this founding principle and are acting less like Jefferson and Adams and more like George III. A group of Democratic attorneys general has announced it intends to criminally investigate oil and gas companies that have disputed the science behind man-made global warming. Backed by green-energy interests and environmentalist lobbying groups, the coalition has promised to use intrusive investigations, costly litigation, and criminal prosecutions to silence critics of its climate-change agenda. Pretended offenses, indeed.

We won’t be joining this coalition, and we hope that those attorneys general who have joined will disavow it. Healthy debate is the lifeblood of American democracy, and global warming has inspired one of the major policy debates of our time. That debate is far from settled. Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind. That debate should be encouraged — in classrooms, public forums, and the halls of Congress. It should not be silenced with threats of prosecution. Dissent is not a crime.

Sadly, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this tactic of advancing the climate-change agenda by any means necessary. President Obama’s Clean Power Plan is a particularly noteworthy example. This EPA regulation, one of the most ambitious ever proposed, will shutter coal-fired power plants, significantly increase the price of electricity for American consumers, and enact by executive fiat the very same cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions that Congress has rejected.

The Clean Power Plan was promulgated without any consultation with Congress. No bills were debated, no votes were taken, and the representatives of the American people had no opportunity to object or offer their own suggestions. The checks and balances built into our system of government were simply ignored as inconvenient impediments to the president’s agenda.

Pruitt vs. the EPA By William L. Anderson

Follow the mainstream media (especially the New York Times), and one concludes that all of Donald Trump’s cabinet picks are straight out of Central Casting of villainy for the MSM narratives of Republicans. Jeff Sessions, for example, supposedly is a racist segregationist who would love to join the Ku Klux Klan — but holds back because some Klansmen smoke pot. And Scott Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general and Trump’s nominee for EPA administrator, wants us to die horrible deaths on a polluted, overheated planet.

An NYT headline last December 7 read, “Trump Picks Scott Pruitt, Climate Change Denialist, to Lead E.P.A.” In modern political speak, a “climate change denialist” is like a Holocaust denier. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, along with 17 Democratic state attorneys general, demands criminal prosecution of oil executives and scientists that do not acknowledge the view of climate change as outlined in the Democratic Party platform. According to the Times,

Mr. Pruitt, a Republican, has been a key architect of the legal battle against Mr. Obama’s climate change policies, actions that fit with the president-elect’s comments during the campaign. Mr. Trump has criticized the established science of human-caused global warming as a hoax, vowed to “cancel” the Paris accord committing nearly every nation to taking action to fight climate change, and attacked Mr. Obama’s signature global warming policy, the Clean Power Plan, as a “war on coal.”

Mr. Pruitt has been in lock step with those views.

“Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind,” he wrote in National Review earlier this year. “That debate should be encouraged — in classrooms, public forums, and the halls of Congress. It should not be silenced with threats of prosecution. Dissent is not a crime.”

Indeed, scientists are in disagreement about “the degree and extent of global warming” and while the NYT and its allies condemn anyone who veers from “climate-change orthodoxy,” this issue does need to be debated, and someone with political courage needs to be able to stand up against the political and media bullying of the Left. Pruitt’s article in National Review raises important legal, scientific, and, yes, moral questions about EPA policies under President Obama, but to question the climate orthodoxy pushed by the Left today invites massive pushback, and there will be a firestorm of opposition to the Pruitt nomination.

Environmentalists and their political and media allies will claim that if Pruitt is appointed and reverses some of Obama’s policies (and there is no way he can overturn everything that the EPA did in the past eight years), then Earth itself will suffer an irreversible environmental decline. For example, when Republicans called for very minor changes in environmental policies in 1995, NYT columnist Anthony Lewis screeched that Republicans “want feces to wash up on our beaches.”

Obama’s Mideast Legacy Is One of Tragic Failure by Alan M. Dershowitz see note please

Not just his Mideast policy- his entire eight years in office have been a tragic failure in the economy, defense, foreign policy, job killing regulations, corruption, lies, and the worst race relations in recent history. And you Mr. Dershowitz voted for him twice and promoted Hillary Clinton…..rsk

The Middle East is a more dangerous place after eight years of the Obama presidency than it was before. The eight disastrous Obama years follow eight disastrous George W. Bush years, during which that part of the world became more dangerous as well. So have many other international hot spots.

In sum, the past 16 years have seen major foreign policy blunders all over the world, and most especially in the area between Libya and Iran — that includes Israel, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey and the Gulf.

With regard to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, the Obama policies have made the prospects for a compromise peace more difficult to achieve. When Israel felt that America had its back — under both Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush — they offered generous proposals to end settlements and occupation in nearly all of the West Bank.

Tragically the Palestinian leadership — first under Yasser Arafat and then under Mahmoud Abbas — did not accept either offers from Israel Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Clinton in 2000-2001, nor Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s offer in 2008. Now they are ignoring current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s open offer to negotiate with no preconditions.

In his brilliant book chronicling American-Israeli relationship, Doomed To Succeed, Dennis Ross proves conclusively that whenever the Israeli government has confidence in America’s backing, it has been more willing to make generous compromise offers than when it has reason to doubt American support.

Obama did not understand this crucial reality. Instead of having Israel’s back, he repeatedly stabbed Israel in the back, beginning with his one-sided Cairo speech near the beginning of his tenure, continuing with his failure to enforce the red line on chemical weapons use by Syria, then allowing a sunset provision to be included in the Iran deal, and culminating in his refusal to veto the one-sided UN Security Council resolution, which placed the lion’s share of blame on the Israelis for the current stalemate.

Triggering: A Sharia State of Mind : Edward Cline

Is it my imagination or are today’s college students establishing a kind of secular Sharia, sans a mystical deity, without possessing an inkling of knowledge of Islamic law?

This column can be deemed Trigger Warning-worthy because it t mocks trigger warning addicts and others dependent on post-adolescence pacifiers.

Short of declaring reality off-limits, the number of things being declared persona non grata by college students seems to be multiplying.

However, is it my imagination or are today’s college students establishing a kind of secular Sharia, sans a mystical deity, without possessing an inkling of knowledge of Islamic law? It could go under another name most college students would be horrified by but unable to refute: Fascism. Historically, Fascism as a collectivist movement, relied on physical force to propagate and impose its various statist agendas, from Hitler’s racist supremacism, to the Perons’ class warfare against the upper and middle classes.

Sharia is a code of Islamic “law” that defines acceptable behavior and “codifies” do’s and don’ts for the average, gullible, brain-stunted Muslim. By its nature, and because of its purpose, it is totalitarian; it prescribes and governs virtually every action, decision, and choice of an individual.

Like Nazi ideology (and it is no coincidence that Islam is compatible with Nazism [National Socialism], and vice versa), Islam erases the individual, requiring him to live, breathe, and eat for Allah in across-the-board submission. It even prescribes his bodily functions and behavior in the bathroom.

In the totalitarian regimes, as the Germans found out after only a few months of Hitler’s rule, every detail of life is prescribed, or proscribed. There is no longer any distinction between private matters and public matters. “There are to be no more private Germans,” said Friedrich Sieburg, a Nazi writer; “each is to attain significance only by his service to the state, and to find complete self-fulfillment in his service.” “The only person who is still a private individual in Germany,” boasted Robert Ley, a member of the Nazi hierarchy, after several years of Nazi rule, “is somebody who is asleep.”

Your life purpose and goal as a Muslim is to join the Ummah, or the whole collective of Islam, around the globe, and you can join it by advancing the spread of Islam. (I’ve always nicknamed it “The Borg.”)

Journalists join together for panel on how to cover Trump BY Joe Concha

Journalists from The Huffington Post, Slate and Univision will gather days before Donald Trump’s inauguration to publicly discuss “how the news media can and should proceed to cover” the president-elect.

Slate will host the event next Wednesday, called “Not the New Normal.” CNN’s Brian Stelter will moderate the panel at New York University.

The focus of the discussion will include “how journalists and media companies at large can play a bigger role in making sure that fact prevails over fiction in the coming months and years,” according to Slate.

Slate’s editor-in-chief, Julia Turner, and Slate Group Chairman Jacob Weisberg — who hosts “Trumpcast,” a podcast dedicated to covering the president-elect — will participate in the panel.

Joining them will be Borja Echevarría, Univision Digital’s vice president and editor-in-chief; Huffington Post editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen; and New Yorker editor David Remnick.

Most of the panelists were staunchly critical of Trump during the campaign and have remained so since Election Day.

Tickets will cost $30, with proceeds benefiting the Committee to Protect Journalists.

This is the first time Slate has hosted a panel to discuss how to cover an incoming president.

This Druze Israeli silenced the ENTIRE UN in this shocking speech

Thanks to e-pal Nurit

http://www.israelvideonetwork.com/this-druze-israeli-just-silenced-the-entire-un-in-this-shocking-speech/

“Syria has the audacity to sit there and accuse Israel of human rights violations!!! Syria is a country that kills its own people. Israel is a country that goes to extreme measures to prevent the killing of even its enemy! You kill….Israel heals! How can the UN allow such talk in their building? Because the UN is a vile organization Israel should not be part of.”

Nizar Amer is a Druze-Israeli diplomat from the northern Druze village of Julis. In this speech, he gives a strong response back to Syria, proudly defending the State of Israel.
December 25, 2016

The UN and Obama’s Act of Aggression by Maria Polizoidou

UNSC Res. 2334 is an act of political aggression against foundation of the Judeo-Christian civilization and should be treated as such. The Jewish nation has every right to consider this attack as an act of war against it.

President Obama sometimes seems to have an indifference to historical truth that often borders on antagonism. Obama has again tried to re-write history by claiming that Greece, with the help of the winners of World War I, was an aggressive and imperialistic state that cared only to re-build its Empire against the Turks.

The notion that ancient non-Muslim nations are occupiers in their own lands, is repeated in the UN Resolution 2334.

Historically, Muslim forces began invading Syria in 634, and ended by conquering Constantinople in 1453. They invaded not only all of Turkey — obliterating the great Christian empire of Byzantium — but then went on to conquer all of North Africa, Greece, southern Spain, parts of Portugal and eastern Europe.

President Obama apparently did not learn about the Trojan War in school; he apparently never read Homer to know that the inhabitants of the Bosporus and much of Asia Minor were Greeks — just as he apparently never read the Bible, or the Greek and Roman historic records of the Jewish people and their capital, Jerusalem.

The US and the UN are not who determine what is historically true and what is not. These shameful votes should be reversed immediately; if not, all funding should be withdrawn from the United Nations. They are now, to paraphrase the words Vladimir Lenin, “paying for the rope with which members of the UN will hang them.”

If US President Barack Obama were uneducated, if his staff consisted of people who had never been taught history at school, if the government consisted of savages who have just emerged from the Amazon jungle, we could somehow “justify” their ignorance about the history of the Mediterranean and the Middle Eastern people.

But that is not what is going on. This ambush against Israel in UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which considers the Jewish people “occupiers” in their own ancient capital and the holiest part of it, is an act of jihad and an act of political violence – perpetrated by governments to achieve political goals.

This resolution did not randomly emerge from a historical moment, or as the result of political choices based on reasonable criteria to provide peace and stability in the region. It does not help either the Arabs living in the disputed territories — Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip – or the Israelis in any peace process. It is an act of vengeance against the foundations of Judeo-Christian civilization and should be treated as such. The Jewish nation has every right to consider this attack an act of war against it. It certainly is an act of war against the history of the Jews and the freedom, democracy, human rights, pluralism and rule of law that Israel represents in the Middle East.

President Obama and his government at the beginning of their service eight years ago turned against the history of the Greek nation with the same political aggression. Obama had a chance to do that when he went to the Turkish Parliament, on April 6, 2009.

Sadly, he did not acknowledge the genocide of the Greeks by the Turkish army under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Between 1913 and 1923, millions of Greeks who had lived in Turkey since before the great Christian Byzantine empire, were either slaughtered or driven out. According to some Greek historians, between 800,000 and 1,200,000 Greeks were slaughtered during this period; every year on September14, the State of Greece officially honors the memory of those who died in Asia Minor.

Instead, Obama gave political cover to what the Turks did by saying at the Turkish Parliament on April 6, 2009: “You freed yourself from foreign control, and you founded a republic that commands the respect of the United States and the wider world”.

The “foreign control” to which President Obama refers is the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, where the League of Nations was established. [1]

President Obama, in evident his enthusiasm to flatter the ego of Turkey’s current president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, “forgot” to mention some important events of that era. President Obama “forgot” all about the genocide of Greeks and Christians in Asia Minor by Mustafa Kemal’s Ataturk Turkish. Barack Obama methodically “murdered” historical truth, by ignoring the fact that the Greek army, after the end of World War I in 1918, was sent to Asia Minor under the instructions of the great powers and the winners of the war, to protect Christian populations from persecution, murders and rapes of Muslim Turkish. The Greek army did not go as an occupier but as a protector of human life and human rights.

Dissent Is Fashionable Again If fashion designers can refuse service to the Trumps based on principle, why can’t bakers and florists follow their own principles? By David French *****

There’s nothing quite like a change of power to expose hypocrisy. Yesterday, the Washington Post ran a long and flattering discussion of fashion designers who are just in anguish that their artistic talents could be abused in the service of a cause they despise. In other words, they don’t want to “dress” Melania or Ivanka Trump.

In an open letter rejecting the idea of working with the Trumps, designer Sophie Theallet said, “We value our artistic freedom, and always humbly seek to contribute to a more humane, conscious, and ethical way to create in this world.” She said, “As an independent fashion brand, we consider our voice an expression of our artistic and philosophical ideas.”

Post fashion critic Robin Givhan doesn’t just report on this choice, she goes out of her way to justify and explain it:

Like other creative individuals, Theallet sees fashion as a way of expressing her views about beauty and the way women are perceived in society. Fashion is her tool for communicating her world vision. In the same way that a poet’s words or a musician’s lyrics are a deeply personal reflection of the person who wrote them, a fashion designer’s work can be equally as intimate. In many ways, it’s why we are drawn to them. We feel a one-to-one connection.

You see, “clothes are commodities, certainly, but they also have an artful point of view that is distinctly personal.” That’s why, Givhan says, refusing to dress the Trumps “is not the equivalent of refusing service.” And so, Givhan concludes, “for those designers for whom fashion serves as their voice in the world, they should not feel obligated to say something in which they do not believe.”

I agree with Givhan. Don’t make anyone “dress” political figures they don’t like. Don’t make any artists use their talents to advance viewpoints they find offensive. There are designers who are happy to work with Trumps. Others aren’t. Big deal. Life goes on.

But if there is a single person who thinks that Sophie Theallet, Marc Jacobs, Derek Lam, and others have a right to refuse to dress the Trumps, but also believes that Christian bakers, photographers, and florists have to use their talents to celebrate gay weddings — there’s a word for you: Hypocrite. Indeed, you’re likely worse than a garden-variety hypocrite. You’re almost certainly malicious and elitist to boot.

Consider the parallels. Photographers, bakers, and florists are using their individual artistic talents not just to document but to celebrate an event. Many of them enter their profession to express their own views about “beauty” and do their work to glorify God. Their art is their best tool for “communicating their world vision.”

But all too many on the Left just don’t care. All that matters is that they refused to use their artistic talents for a gay couple. And aren’t LGBT people protected from discrimination? But wait, aren’t Melania and Ivanka also women? And aren’t women a protected class under nondiscrimination law also?