The Changing Patterns Of U.S. Immigration: What The Presidential Field Should Know : Joel Kotkin

Public concern about illegal immigration, particularly among older native-born Americans, as well as the the rising voting power of Latinos, all but guarantees that immigration is an issue that will remain at the forefront in the run-up to the 2016 elections. Nor is this merely a right-wing issue, as evidenced in the controversy over “sanctuary cities”; even the progressive Bernie Sanders has expressed concern that massive uncontrolled immigration could “make everybody in America poorer.”

Yet despite the political heat, there is precious little dispassionate examination of exactly where immigrants are coming from, and where in the U.S. they are headed. To answer these questions, we turned to demographer Wendell Cox, who analyzed the immigration data between 2010 and 2013 for the 52 metropolitan statistical areas with populations over a million.

One would think listening to the likes of Donald Trump that the country is awash with hordes of unwanted newcomers from Mexico and Central America. But sorry, Donald, the numbers show a changing picture in terms of who is coming, as well as the places that they choose to settle.

EPA’s Toxic Spill Shows It’s Still The Worst Regulatory Agency In History (But Perhaps I Understate): Henry Miller *****

“EPA’s science is shoddy, and its scientists and administrators routinely manipulate it to fit their radical policy agendas. Moreover, transparency is less important in government regulation than the content of decisions. Putting it another way, transparency is desirable, but arriving at the right decisions about public health and environmental protection is what is paramount.The EPA has long been intellectually, scientifically and ethically bankrupt, arguably the worst regulatory agency in the history of the world. But perhaps I understate.”

An EPA cleanup crew on August 5 accidentally caused a breach in an abandoned gold mine in the southwestern part of Colorado, spilling three million gallons of highly toxic mining waste that contaminated waterways in Colorado and New Mexico. Then the agency failed to notify downstream jurisdictions whose drinking water and recreational waterways were threatened.

To veteran EPA watchers, such monumental screw-ups are not surprising.

When I began my fifteen-year tenure at the FDA during the Carter Administration, I had been a lab scientist and had little knowledge of government. I soon discovered that there were foibles of various kinds at the numerous regulatory agencies I interacted with, but EPA made by far the biggest impression. Their bureaucrats regarded science not as the basis for policy and decisions on individual products, but as a tool to be tortured to achieve ideological ends.

To my astonishment, I found that there were entire groups within EPA whose function it was to lie to the Office of Management and Budget and to Congress about the rationale for and impacts of their proposed regulations. And over the years, I discovered that there is a kind underground railway that conveys the most incompetent, disaffected and anti-industry employees from other regulatory agencies to EPA, creating a miasma of flawed governance.

Arab Immigration to Historic Palestine: A Survey by Richard Mather

There is a very old and rare book called Palestina ex monumentis veteribus illustrata, written by Hadriani Relandi, a mapmaker and scholar from Utrecht, and published in 1714. It documents Redlandi’s trip to Palestine in 1695/96. On his travels he surveyed around 2,500 places that were mentioned in the Tanakh and/or Mishnah, and he carried out a census of the people who resided in such places. He made some very interesting discoveries. For a start, he discovered that not a single settlement in Palestine had a name that was of Arabic origin. Instead the names derived from Hebrew, Roman and Greek languages.

Another interesting discovery was the conspicuous absence of a sizeable Muslim population. Instead, he found that most of the inhabitants of Palestine were Jews, along with some Christians and a few Bedouins. Nazareth was home to less than a thousand Christians, while Jerusalem held 5,000 people, mostly Jews. Gaza was home to around 250 Jews and about the same number of Christians. The only exception was Nablus where around 120 Muslims lived, along with a handful of Samaritans, whose ancestors belonged to the northern tribes of Israel.

American “Manifest Destiny” Heads to the Holy Land in 1847

thanks to Joan Swirskyfor this…..rsk-
William Francis Lynch (1801-1865) was a naval officer who served in both the U.S. Navy and the Confederate Navy. In the 1840s he proposed to the United States Government to undertake a voyage to the Holy Land to explore and map the Jordan River and the Dead Sea.

Lynch conducted his mission with a crew of 16 sailors in 1847 and published his findings in his book, Narrative of the United States’ Expedition to the River Jordan and the Dead Sea. Lynch did not include a photographer in his entourage, but a crewman did provide illustrations for his book.

Lynch’s motives appeared to be part patriotic, religious, and scientific. He wrote, “We [Americans] owe something to the scientific and Christian world, and while extending the blessing of civil liberty in the south and west [otherwise known as “Manifest Destiny”], may well afford to foster science and strengthen the bulwarks of Christianity in the east.”

Lynch was also a strong adherent of “restorationism” (a precursor to Christian Zionism) — a belief that the Jewish people must return to the Holy Land to fulfill their biblical prophecy of the “Second Coming.” The belief drove many Americans, including American presidents, to advocate for the establishment of a Jewish homeland.

Along the route, Lynch described raging rapids in the Jordan River, difficult terrain, strange flora and fauna, warring Arab tribes, and suffering Christian and Jewish communities.

ANDREW HARROD: YES, ISLAM IS DIFFERENT FROM OTHER RELIGIONS

“What are Western policymakers frequently talking about when they are talking about religion? Islam.”

So wrote Transatlantic Academy Senior Fellow Michael Barnett in his report “Faith, Freedom and Foreign Policy: Challenges for the Transatlantic Community,” which was presented during a recent Georgetown University Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs panel that focused on Islam while unconvincingly minimizing that religion’s fundamental differences with other faiths.
Elaborating on Barnett’s report, George Mason University professor Peter Mandaville spoke about the globally popular opinion that religion is superfluous in world affairs, and pointed to a “secular bias” in modern bureaucracies, noting that the American Constitution’s establishment clause often raises questions about the government’s involvement in religion. Berkley Center Senior Fellow Jocelyne Cesari cited Soviet Dictator Josef Stalin’s famous quote, “The Pope! How many divisions has he got?”

Caroline Glick: The Anti-Peace Demonstration

“For all their talk about Middle East peace, Obama and his advisors are not at all interested in achieving it.”
The US has striven to achieve peaceable relations between the states of the Middle East for nearly 70 years. Yet today, US government is disparaging the burgeoning strategic ties between the Sunni Arab states and Israel.

In a briefing to a delegation of visiting Israeli diplomatic correspondents in Washington last week, a senior Obama administration official sneered that the only noticeable shift in Israel-Arab relations in recent years is that the current Egyptian government has been coordinating security issues “more closely” with Jerusalem than the previous one did.

“But we have yet to see that change materialize in the Gulf.”

If this is how the US views the state of Israel’s relations with the Arabs, then Israel should consider canceling its intelligence cooperation with the US. Because apparently, the Americans haven’t a clue what is happening in the Middle East.

American Jewry’s fateful hour By Caroline Glick

If the communal leadership and its members fail to fight, American Jews will find themselves communally disenfranchised.
American Jewry is being tested today as never before. The future of the community is tied up in the results of the test.

If the Jews of America are able to mount a successful, forceful and sustained opposition to President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, which allows the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism to become a nuclear-armed state and provides it with $150 billion up front, then the community will survive politically to fight another day.

If the communal leadership and its members fail to fight, American Jews will find themselves communally disenfranchised.

THE GREEN SOCIALISTS OF MARS: DANIEL GREENFIELD

We live in a strange world in which the weather is a subject of furious political debate. People have been arguing about the weather ever since the first rainstorm caught the first man without the umbrella that he did not yet know how to make, but they didn’t hold political debates over it.

For the last fifty years, the anti-weather side has been insisting that the world is headed toward a Frostean apocalypse of ice or fire. The calm biblical assertion that “Seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease” was replaced by the terrifying certainty that the planet would soon turn into Mars or Venus; either too hot or too cold.

The end of weather was here. Instead of stable rhythms and cycles that might last for months or centuries, there was a runaway weather apocalypse that would culminate in unlivable conditions.

The doomsday predictions roll out daily without any regard to scientific or experiential reality. The more the predictions fail to match up, the more urgently Warmists insist on immediate action. The harder it snows, the more articles appear warning that snow may soon be a thing of the past.

FOR HILLARY IT’S ALWAYS “A VAST RIGHT WING CONSPIRACY”

http://leany.com/Conspiracy/hillary_clinton_transcript.htm

“Conspiracy theory: In January 1998, just after allegations surface of a presidential affair with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky, Hillary Clinton goes on TODAY and dismisses the matter as a “feeding frenzy.” She stresses that the president has denied the suggestions of an affair. She goes on to tell Matt Lauer: “The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.”

Hillary Clinton Sneers at Republicans: ‘It’s Not About Benghazi… It’s Not About Emails’ by Charlie Spiering

During a campaign appearance in Iowa, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton angrily denounced Republicans for trying to bring her down by demanding answers for her deleted email server and her failure to prevent the terrorist attacks in Benghazi.

Clinton made her remarks at the Iowa Democratic Wing Ding Dinner, launching a partisan defense of her record.

Choking up and coughing, after speaking well over her allotted 20 minute speaking slot, she began criticizing Republicans for attacking her for decades referring to the attacks the brought the Citizens United lawsuit to the Supreme Court.

“Now I’m in their crosshairs again,” she said reminding them of the opposing corporations and “right wing operatives” that were trying to block her agenda.

“Now they’ll try and tell you that this is about Benghazi, but it’s not,” she said, referring to the attacks as a “tragedy” that should be prevented in the future.