Tails82
Lord of Terror++
Loyal Vassal
still...sipping?
Posts: 34,373
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Post by Tails82 on Aug 20, 2013 10:20:53 GMT -5
abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/nj-governor-sign-ban-gay-conversion-therapy-19997560Republicrat approves ban on pro-straight propaganda Assemblyman Tim Eustace, who sponsored the bill and is openly gay, described the therapy as "an insidious form of child abuse."My, it must be a miserable life for girls who like boys and boys who like girls. In a note accompanying the bill, Christie said he believes people are born gay and that homosexuality is not a sin. That view is inconsistent with his Catholic faith, which teaches that homosexual acts are sins.
Gay rights activists applauded the ban but pushed for more.Of course. Gay rights groups say the practice of conversion therapy is damaging to young people because it tells them that it's not acceptable to be whoever they are.Any therapy tells someone to be different. That's why you go to therapy. If someone wants to seek help for their condition, why is this not allowed? How does it make any sense for liberals to push (taxpayer-funded) genital mutilation and other disgusting things which are irreversible, why is it acceptable to play into someone's delusions and help them injure themselves, but it's now "unethical" if someone has a change of heart and wants your help? To anyone seeking therapy: government knows better than you do. You don't deserve help. No one can be allowed to speak about it with you, ever. You're a lost cause. That's the message being sent here. online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324747104579022723029024470.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTopA Policy on Egypt—Support Al Sisi
On the subject of Egypt: Is it the U.S. government's purpose merely to cop an attitude? Or does it also intend to have a policy?
An attitude "deplores the violence" and postpones a military exercise, as President Obama did from Martha's Vineyard the other day. An attitude sternly informs the Egyptian military, as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) did, that it is "taking Egypt down a dark path, one that the United States cannot and should not travel with them." An attitude calls for the suspension of U.S. aid to Egypt, as everyone from Rand Paul (R., Ky.) to Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) has.
An attitude is a gorgeous thing. It is a vanity accountable to a conscience. But an attitude has no answer for what the U.S. does with or about Egypt once the finger has been wagged and the aid withdrawn. When Egypt decides to purchase Su-35s from Russia (financed by Saudi Arabia) and offers itself as another client to Vladimir Putin because the Obama administration has halted deliveries of F-16s, will Mr. Graham wag a second finger at Moscow?
Perhaps he will. Our diminished influence in Egypt may soon be reduced to nil, but at least our hands will be clean.
Or we could have a policy, which is never gorgeous. It is a set of pragmatic choices between unpalatable alternatives designed to achieve the most desirable realistic result. What is realistic and desirable?
Releasing deposed President Mohammed Morsi and other detained Brotherhood leaders may be realistic, but it is not desirable—unless you think Aleksandr Kerensky was smart to release the imprisoned Bolsheviks after their abortive July 1917 uprising.
Restoring the dictatorship-in-the-making that was Mr. Morsi's elected government is neither desirable nor realistic—at least if the millions of Egyptians who took to the streets in June and July to demand his ouster have anything to do with it.
Bringing the Brotherhood into some kind of inclusive coalition government in which it accepts a reduced political role in exchange for calling off its sit-ins and demonstrations may be desirable, but it is about as realistic as getting a mongoose and a cobra to work together for the good of the mice.
What's realistic and desirable is for the military to succeed in its confrontation with the Brotherhood as quickly and convincingly as possible. Victory permits magnanimity. It gives ordinary Egyptians the opportunity to return to normal life. It deters potential political and military challenges. It allows the appointed civilian government to assume a prominent political role. It settles the diplomatic landscape. It lets the neighbors know what's what.
And it beats the alternatives. Alternative No. 1: A continued slide into outright civil war resembling Algeria's in the 1990s. Alternative No. 2: Victory by a vengeful Muslim Brotherhood, which will repay its political enemies richly for the injuries that were done to it. That goes not just for military supremo Abdel Fattah Al Sisi and his lieutenants, but for every editor, parliamentarian, religious leader, businessman or policeman who made himself known as an opponent of the Brotherhood.
Question for Messrs. Graham, Leahy and Paul: Just how would American, Egyptian, regional or humanitarian interests be advanced in either of those scenarios? The other day Sen. Paul stopped by the Journal's offices in New York and stressed his opposition to any U.S. policy in Syria that runs contrary to the interests of that country's Christians. What does he suppose would happen to Egypt's Copts, who have been in open sympathy with Gen. Sisi, if the Brotherhood wins?
As it is, the people who now are most convinced that Mr. Obama is a secret Muslim aren't tea party mama grizzlies. They're Egyptian secularists. To persuade them otherwise, the president might consider taking steps to help a government the secularists rightly consider an instrument of their salvation. Gen. Sisi may not need shiny new F-16s, but riot gear, tear gas, rubber bullets and Taser guns could help, especially to prevent the kind of bloodbaths the world witnessed last week.
It would be nice to live in a world in which we could conduct a foreign policy that aims at the realization of our dreams—peace in the Holy Land, a world without nuclear weapons, liberal democracy in the Arab world. A better foreign policy would be conducted to keep our nightmares at bay: stopping Iran's nuclear bid, preventing Syria's chemical weapons from falling into terrorist hands, and keeping the Brotherhood out of power in Egypt. But that would require an administration that knew the difference between an attitude and a policy.The unions want to go Hostess on Detriot: online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324747104579022781831032554.htmlPension Funds Dispute Math in Detroit Bankruptcy
Now, as pensions, unions and residents rushed to meet a Monday deadline to oppose the Chapter 9 bankruptcy proceedings—the largest-ever municipal filing—the pensions are saying the emergency manager relied on a report that used overly conservative assumptions on the returns the funds earn on their investments, which led to the ballooning of their projected shortfall. The report, by a consulting firm, was commissioned by the city in its preparation for the July bankruptcy filing.
Officials with the emergency manager say their estimates are financially sound and are more realistic than the pension funds' own assumptions.
The funds and others argued in their filings that cutting benefits earned by the city's employees and retirees would violate the state constitution. The city's largest public employee union, Michigan Council 25 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said in a court paper that the city's emergency manager "hastily commenced" the Chapter 9 filing to "slash pension and other post-employment benefit obligations."
Bill Nowling, a spokesman for Mr. Orr, said the federal bankruptcy case would trump any state constitutional protection for public pensions, adding that an exhaustive report by Mr. Orr, who was appointed by Mr. Snyder in March, found that the city has been running out of cash for years with no options left to pay billions in debt.
According to the report prepared by consultancy Milliman, Detroit pension funds should expect a return of only 6.3% to 6.57% a year, even as Mr. Orr's team is relying on a more optimistic 7% return. With those numbers, the city might actually have underestimated the shortfall, according to the report.online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324747104579022733718342984.htmlLast week, the Obama administration revealed that three Planned Parenthood affiliates would be among the groups receiving federal dollars to educate Americans about the Affordable Care Act. The announcement did not go unnoticed by conservative Republicans who want to defund ObamaCare...GOP Rep. Diane Black of Tennessee, a pro-life advocate, says that the Planned Parenthood grants are tantamount to "the federal funding of abortion providers."
Republicans, along with some Democrats, were angrier still at where the money is coming from. Originally, the Obama administration said it would spend $54 million on this so-called Navigators program, but the amount was recently upped to $67 million. The extra $13 million will come from ObamaCare's Prevention and Public Health Fund (PPHF). That the administration is sliding funds around so easily from one purpose to another confirms for many ObamaCare skeptics that the $12.5 billion dedicated to the PPHF is essentially a slush fund to pad the budgets of leftwing advocacy groups.
The administration's decision to use ObamaCare dollars for whatever purpose it wishes is especially ironic given the sequestration debate, where the White House has argued that it doesn't have the authority to move money from one account to another. This was the administration's excuse for the temporary shutdown of air traffic control towers at busy airports this spring. The administration said it needed specific legislative authority from Congress to restore the funding of many essential services. But it has not sought such authority when it comes to funding what it wants with ObamaCare appropriations.Why haven't we impeached him yet?
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Post by kode54 on Aug 20, 2013 17:08:37 GMT -5
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Post by Chromeo on Aug 20, 2013 19:50:56 GMT -5
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Post by kode54 on Aug 21, 2013 7:53:56 GMT -5
We all know about the corroding influence that hardcore pornography has on people. After all, teh UK only legalized it back in 2000. It looks like they want to make it illegal again. Thank the Almighty God that children won't be able to see pictures or videos of people fucking, and that they'll do the sensible thing and just strip and play Doctor and maybe fuck while they're at it. Birth control by abstinence works well, too. All you have to do is tell horny teenagers that they're not supposed to fuck until they get married, and they simply won't fuck. It's as easy as that. And if that doesn't work at first, tell them that they'll have an eternity of torture and suffering waiting for them if they break God's laws. We Know this for sure, because some guys wrote it in a book over 1000 years ago, and that means it comes straight from The Man Himself.
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Tails82
Lord of Terror++
Loyal Vassal
still...sipping?
Posts: 34,373
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Post by Tails82 on Aug 21, 2013 8:48:54 GMT -5
Dunno why we would deliberately lower expectations. If we say little j ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ ✔ohnny got an F and that's the same as little j ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ ✔immy getting an A, it makes a joke out of both of them. It devalues the hard work the other kid did. We shouldn't blame the kid who got an A just because someone else got an F. We certainly shouldn't be pouring money into making more F students. But it's what we do with comprehensive sex ed. www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/08/20/in_the_face_of_obama_s_malaise_economy_seek_success_and_when_you_find_it_be_proud_of_itThere's more sad, disappointing news. This is kind of an offshoot of the general theme that there is a malaise that's just a haze, a fog that's just hanging over the country. And it's down to the surface. It's at street level. Even people who are doing well are not happy. Even people who are succeeding and doing well, there's something wrong out there. Everybody senses it. Even people on the left. The people on the left are miserable because they know that everything they believe in fails. Nothing works!
Do you realize after four and a half years of Obama we're supposed to be in utopia here? Four and a half, almost five years of Barack Obama, we are supposed to be in eternal bliss, total happiness. Everybody who wants a job is supposed to have one. Everybody who wants a house is supposed to have one. Everybody who wants to be able to afford to live however they want to live is supposed to be able to. None of it's happened. Now, the left, just in general, is unhappy. No matter what they get of what they want, it's never enough. But they really thought that this was it.
Finally, their messiah, utopia, everything they believe in, national health care, you name it. The only thing they haven't gotten is the official sanction of gay marriage and gun control. But pretty much everything else they wanted they got it, or they're on track for it, and they're just as miserable as everybody else. And I would contend to you they're miserable because they're incapable of happiness. I think the ideology, liberalism, does not permit happiness. You have to be mad all the time to be a liberal. You have to see unfairness, injustice, depression, recession, bigotry, racism, homophobia everywhere you look, to be a good liberal. You can't be happy. It's one of the many reasons why I don't think these people should ever be trusted with power.
There's no optimism. There's no good cheer. There's no laughter. There's no happiness, by virtue of who they are. They run around and they talk about all the anger on our side, extremism, and these people, no matter where you look, are enraged. In general they're enraged. But they're really mad now because they're living amidst incontrovertible proof that everything they believe doesn't work.
Look at the lofty hopes and expectations that they placed on Obama, compared to what he is. He's just another guy out there. He's not particularly good at anything, except talking. But he doesn't make anybody feel better. He doesn't comfort anybody. So, all of that hope that they invested, it's not manifesting itself. Nothing's working out. Nothing's going right. And when you do succeed, when you do feel happy, others make you feel guilty about it, so it makes you pull back on either being successful or hiding the success or prosperity that you have. That is not healthy.
Now, two stories here, one from the Cato Institute: "Report: Welfare Pays More than Minimum Wage, Discourages Workers." Let me summarize this for you. The Cato Institute has found that the equivalent wage value of welfare has increased in 33 states since 1995. Cato found the benefits in the District of Columbia expanded by nearly $7,000 to a total package equivalent to $50,000 in wages. You can get on welfare in Washington if you access everything available to you to the tune of $50,000! Why work?
Now, the people doing this, they no doubt think they're in on something good. This is not good, folks. This is not the kind of thing happening in a superpower country, where not working and basically being worthless pays you more than a job you've spent tens of thousands of dollars being educated to learn to do. All of this has a deleterious effect.
New York Post: "When Welfare Pays Better Than Work -- Hereâs an offer for you: $38,004 per year, tax free. No work required. Apply at your local welfare office. The federal government funds 126 separate programs targeted towards low-income people, 72 of which provide either cash or in-kind benefits to individuals." And they say we have no room to cut the budget? That is absurd.
Never feel guilty because you're making the most of the one life you've got. You've only got one. There's not a do-over. Now, there are do-overs when you screw up, but you only have one chance. Every day you spent wallowing in self-pity or depression is a day you cannot get back. It's a lost day. Every day that you spend feeling offended at something or outraged at something is a day you have given up the power of your own determination, and you're letting others determine how you feel. That is the prism of liberalism, that is the prism of statism, is to spread misery equally and to convince as many people as possible that overwhelming success just isn't possible, and when it is attained, it's unfair and unjust.
We had a call from a Millennial last week who made a great point. Not only are they mired in stagnation, they have been made to feel they don't have any choices, and they have been led to believe that their parents' lifestyle created all of the messes that we have. Their parents caused global warming. Their parents caused all this stuff. The excesses, the earning too much money, the excessive lifestyle. They've been guilt tripped all over the place, and they've been led to believe that anything they do that's enjoyable is punishing somebody else or destroying the planet or what have you.
I mean, folks, it is really horrible what has been done to these minds. I mean these are young skulls full of mush, just by virtue of their age. They have been polluted and perverted with the idea that enjoying life and succeeding is a betrayal, that it's unfair, that it's unjust. And so they've just got guilt all over the place. And then even when they do want to strike out, they don't see that they've got any choice left. And they're hearing all this talk about their generation being the first one that will not do better than their parents, and they believe it, they hear this, they believe it, because people of authority are saying it. People in the media, guests in the media, members of the administration, these are people, these are authority figures. They've been educated, trained to believe them.
Remember what started all this with me was when I saw a story about how depressed they are, and I reacted what I thought was a very appropriate way. "Well, you voted for it. What do you expect? Okay, why don't you learn from it and realize that you voted for people that misled you. You voted for panacea that's not possible. You voted for things that were tangential. I mean, you couldn't even put your arms around 'em. Hope and change, all this wonderful, feely-touchy, goody stuff, none of it was real. So wake up and don't make that mistake again."www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/08/20/millennials_are_losing_faith_in_the_country_not_obamaOkay, folks, I'm holding here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers a piece at Forbes magazine by a Millennial. Her name is Maura Pennington...It's a funny piece in places, and I think it illustrates this fog I described, this fog of depression that has drifted in that's making everybody feel ... just not right. Something is wrong. It's hard to put your finger on it, but things just aren't right. "Millions Of Millennials Live at Home and Support the Policies That Keep Them There." Now, she's not in favor of that. That's the point here. The real nut of this is toward the end of it, but let me share with you how Maura Pennington begins the piece.
"In Man's Search For Meaning, Austrian psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, and founder of logotherapy, Viktor Frankl discusses the 'existential vacuum.' It is an internal emptiness and lack of purpose. In a life with logos or meaning, anything can be endured. Without it, a person is lost. Frankl watched men in the German camps succumb who might otherwise have survived simply because they had nothing to hold onto."
Without meaning...
Now, we all know everybody wants their life to have meaning. This is why... Well, this explains many things. Everybody wants to matter, and liberals use that to ensnare or entrap people. For example, a person who thinks they're nothing or nobody because they're not on television, because they're not followed by a lot of people on Twitter, or because nobody cares about them like they care about the Kardashians or whatever. They want to matter, too! They want to matter.
So what do they do?
Well, they hear that they can save the world from global warming by, oh, buying a hybrid car, or not eating meat, and they become evangelists for this. It really is, in the case of young people, not so much they've adopted liberalism as an ideology. It's more that they're trying to grab on to something to give their lives meaning...If you don't have a religious belief, if you don't have a faith in something larger than yourself, if you haven't learned that life is about much more than just you, you're gonna be miserable, 'cause you're gonna be constantly searching for something that's solid. A lot of people then glom on to Gaia or the global warming religion, a tree or a bush or some such thing. Mother Earth in toto. Back to Maura Pennington here.
"When the greatest excitement today for twenty-somethings are hybrid baked goods, a list of 37 random tokens of nostalgia, or going on an endless string of meaningless Internet-facilitated dates, I have found myself surrounded by nihilists. Those who are married or finished medical school already may exempt themselves. Anyone with a legal partner or a life in service of others may wait until middle-age to experience the solitary struggle of a crisis of meaning.
"The lost ones instead are those approaching thirty with no savings, no interest in anything but the near-term future, and no profitable outlet for creativity besides solipsistic online forums," meaning posting comments to blogs. She says, "The lost ones are smart. They pay attention to what goes on in the world. They read the news along with the lists of 37 GIFs. Yet what can they do?
"They have minimal discretionary income and their free time is spent unwinding from occupations that force them to look at backlit words for eight hours (a computer screen) or deal with whining strangers. They are fully adults and can't boast of anything their parents had at this age besides better means of communication," meaning they're not doing as well as their parents. "I hear my peers say, 'I'm lost.'
"I say, 'Yes, of course.' Almost 22 million twenty-somethings live with their parents, myself for the second time currently included, though economists tell us that this is technically a 'recovery' from a 'recession' and not just one long, dragging depression of next-to-no growth..." See, what she's saying here is she and her cohorts are being told that we're in a recovery, and they know they're not. They know this isn't a recovery!
They're in a "long, dragging depression of next-to-no growth for our country and for the development of individuals who thought for sure they could have had an apartment by now." All these expectations they had, they haven't realized them. The economy is not there for 'em. They all voted -- or 60% of 'em voted -- for Obama, thinking that this magic was gonna happen. They bought the hype. They bought the lies.
They bought the salesmanship of the Obama campaign. He was an empty canvas! "Paint him! Whatever you want him to be, he is. Whatever problem you've got, he's gonna solve. Whatever problem there is, his existence is gonna fix it." And they've grown to realize that they're waiting around for other people to do this magic, and it hasn't happened, and rather than lose faith in Obama, they're losing faith in the country, and that's a little bit of the Limbaugh Theorem.
"People could start an affinity group of some kind, since one in four Millennials has no religious affiliation," and no religious affiliation means no meaning in life. No religious affiliation means no faith in something larger than yourself. That's unhealthy. "Americans could stop supporting anti-growth politicians pushing agendas that strangle the economy, weaken the dollar, and surreptitiously erode civil liberties, but let's be serious: 60% of those ages 18-29 reelected President Obama.
"So, what's left? ... Frankl would tell the lost ones to find a will to meaning in this world, but finding purpose can be put off, even if the abyss persists and they pester the rest of the world as impotently self-involved non-starters, for lack of ever finding a self or a start." She says in the ending paragraph: "Be someone who solves the harder puzzle we've been given. Consider that this isn't the first time young people have faced a sluggish economy and then investigate what made growth possible in the past."
I thought about it during the break, and Obama, in fact, even trying to convince people that this level of unemployment, the lack of a future, this is the new normal. That the past, when America was robust and great, that was fake. That was unjust. That was brought about by an unjust, immoral founding. Now we're getting this is the way it was always intended to be, and you are gonna have to deal with it. And that's just not so. This cannot be allowed to be the new normal. We're not gonna put up with it. We cannot allow people to have lost faith in America. That's a little bit of an expansion on the Limbaugh Theorem. They're still not holding Obama accountable for it, and that has to change.blog.heritage.org/2013/08/19/more-single-moms-have-never-married/Forty-four percent of single mothers have never been married. This is 11 times the percent of never-married single mothers in 1960...The percent of unwed births also grew dramatically over the same period. Today, over 40 percent of all children are born to single women, compared with less than 10 percent in 1960.
Today, less than half (46 percent) of American children who reach age 17 have been raised by their continuously married, biological parents. This is taking a toll. Children do best when raised by their married mother and father. They are at lower risk of engaging in substance abuse, delinquent behavior, and early sexual activity, and they are less likely to drop out of high school or suffer abuse.
Today, most of the breakdown of the American family is happening in low-income and working-class neighborhoods, but many of these men and women desire to get married. Yet without the social support, it often is an elusive dream.I thought divorce and birth control and mass murder would solve all this by now. Oh wait, all liberal policies do is create a bunch of new problems. We didn't have to deal with this before the left came along. Policies which make broken homes easier lead to more broken homes? Who saw that coming? online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324108204579020851300268912.htmlThe U.S. Should Back the Army
If the Muslim Brotherhood wins, say goodbye to the peace treaty with Israel and stability in Sinai.
Egypt has not yet succumbed to all-out civil war, as Syria has, but it's getting close. So are Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Somalia. Tensions are more than simmering in Nigeria, Mali, Algeria and Sudan, and there is no guarantee that Tunisia, Jordan, Bahrain and Pakistan will remain stable.
This is a pattern. Discrete crises in collapsing Middle Eastern and African countries are giving way to broader regional chaos, which is now a geostrategic factor in its own right.
After the Cold War, America briefly provided a modicum of protection and stability to this broad swath of territory. That time has passed. Under President Barack Obama, the U.S. withdrew militarily from Iraq and is doing so now in Afghanistan. It abandoned long-standing allies under pressure, like Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, and Arab monarchies wonder when their turn will come.
Even when the U.S. intervened in March 2011 to oust Libya's Moammar Gadhafi, it relinquished the field so entirely that four Americans were assassinated with impunity only 18 months later. Mr. Obama's Syria policy fundamentally misreads Russia's objectives and refuses to confront the real Syrian problem: Iran. And as we saw three weeks ago, when the U.S. shut down almost two dozen embassies and consulates, civis americanus sumâthe idea that Americans abroad can expect their government to protect themâis losing its force.
This is the depressing context that the White House faces as it decides the next steps to take on Egypt. The U.S. cannot pretend that the Egyptian conflict is a dispute capable of being resolved through political compromise within a framework of representative government. Such conditions do not exist.
The Muslim Brotherhood is not a normal political party as Westerners understand that term. It is an armed ideologyâa militia that fires on its opponents and burns down churches. Justice Robert Jackson once said of American communists that they "assert as against our Government all of the constitutional rights and immunities of individuals, and at the same time exercise over their followers much of the authority which they deny to the Government." The same can be said of the Brotherhood. It is, as Jackson also said of the Communists, "a state within a state."
We need not dwell on the Brotherhood's Islamist ideology to grasp its authoritarian nature. It desires confrontation with Egypt's military because it rejects the legitimacy of any government it does not control. The Brotherhood, therefore, shares full blame for the continuing carnage. Should it ever regain power, whether through free elections or otherwise, it will never let go, as Mohammed Morsi was busy demonstrating in his year as president.
Opposing the Brotherhood are Egypt's military and a collection of citizens who refuse to live under an authoritarian theocracy: Coptic Christians, pro-democracy intellectuals, a middle class that desires a functioning economy, and women who do not yearn for the burqa. Without the military's support, however, this group would be hopelessly outmatched.
Today's struggle is ultimately between the Brotherhood and the army. Like it or not, it is time for the U.S. to choose sides.
Hand-wringing about abstract political theories or calling on all sides to exercise restraint is divorced from Egypt's reality. Such rhetoric doesn't advance U.S. interests, and earns America the contempt of Egyptians across the board...The U.S. should support the military because even with its obvious flaws, it is more likely to support the palpable U.S. interests at stake. Three are basic.
First, it is in the U.S. interest to have an Egyptian government committed to upholding the Camp David Accords with Israel, the foundation of U.S. Middle East policy since 1979. The Muslim Brotherhood assassinated Anwar Sadat in 1981 for negotiating Camp David, and it has never accepted it. Mr. Morsi foreshadowed abrogating or gutting Camp David as soon as practicable during his presidential campaign. With Iran nearing its long-sought nuclear capability, America and Israel would be worse off than before 1979. The U.S. is doing little to stop Iran, but we can still save Camp David. Backing Egypt's military is the best bet.
Second, and closely related: If the Sinai Peninsula slips from Cairo's control, terrorists like Hamas (a Brotherhood subsidiary) and al Qaeda will use the area as a haven and a highway for smuggling arms to Gaza for use against Israel and to both sides in the Syrian civil war. Egypt's army is far more likely to prevent this nightmare scenario than the Brotherhood.
Third, for purely economic reasons, the Suez Canal must remain open. Annually, some 14% of global shipping and 30% of oil supplies pass through the canal. The Brotherhood is far more susceptible to suicidal impulses if it means harming the West. Egypt's military does not prize martyrdom.
For these reasons and more, the U.S. should continue providing military assistance, which hopefully still provides some measure of continuing leverage. Three decades of affording Egypt's office corps with military training has created powerful connections that cutting off aid would irreparably damage. America's $1.3 billion in annual military aid is minimal compared to what the Saudis could provide in the U.S.'s absence, but its political symbolism remains important. Moreover, the U.S. should worry about an opportunistic Vladimir Putin stepping in to fill its shoes, eager to reverse Moscow's historic setback when Sadat expelled the Soviets from Egypt.www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/08/20/day_2_the_art_of_persuasionThat LA Times piece that ran, I guess it was either Saturday or Sunday. It was the woman who didn't agree with a thing that her father agreed with. Her father was a big fan of this program. It came time to put him in an assisted living center, and she thought that I was just the devil incarnate, hated women, hated gays, hated blacks. I mean, every cliche.
Yet her father, who she described as brilliant, multiple degrees, psychiatrist, very intelligent, her father was a big fan...Anyway, it came time to put him in an assisted living center, and they're going through his stuff and she finds a bunch of Rush Limbaugh caps, and she said, "Dad, can we just get rid of this stuff? Come on, now, Dad."
And finally her dad said to her (paraphrasing), "Look, yeah, I like Rush Limbaugh. But I love you more, and if it means that much to you, we'll ditch the caps." And then she wrote about how tough it is to come together and what can we all do. Well, that piece apparently generated a tremendous amount of letters-to-the-editor response in the LA Times, and they gave it its own segment. Every letter to the editor that the LA Times published yesterday was somewhat critical of the author of the story.
Here's one from guy named Wayne in Santa Monica, California. "The opinion piece makes a clear point that conservatives have known for a while: Liberals are closed-minded and will never compromise or even consider anyone else's beliefs but their own. The author's story made it clear that her father had to compromise by giving up the hats (and how silly was that?) but she never made any offer to consider his point of view. Why didn't she agree to sit with him on the porch sipping tea while giving the show a listen to see what it was her father liked about it so much? The only way for peace in that family was for the conservative to abandon his beliefs, not the liberal. And they call conservatives closed-minded."
That was one letter. It was from Santa Monica. The next letter was from Tom Bunzel from Los Angeles. The woman is Madeline Janis. "Note to Madeline Janis: You and your father did not transcend the ideological divide -- only he did...She makes the unfounded assumption that her father is wrong politically but condescendingly 'forgives' him to show her love -- and then wonders why we have political polarization and gridlock."
And then the last letter that was published, Miriam Jaffe of Thousand Oaks. "Where's the humanity? Would it have hurt to reach across the gulf of ideology she touts and offer comfort to a dying man to say: 'Dad, even though I can't stand Rush Limbaugh, his caps mean a lot to you, so take them along because you mean more to me than my ideology.'"
But her ideology trumped everything. Her ideology had to dominate. It had to triumph over her own father. Now, I'm sure the LA Times got some letters in support of the author, but they published these three, at least on the website. I don't actually have the dead-tree edition. So they must have felt the need to balance it or something. Anyway, I found it interesting. |
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Post by kode54 on Aug 21, 2013 9:32:06 GMT -5
Dunno why we would deliberately lower expectations. If we say little j ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ ✔ohnny got an F and that's the same as little j ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ ✔immy getting an A, it makes a joke out of both of them. It devalues the hard work the other kid did. We shouldn't blame the kid who got an A just because someone else got an F. We certainly shouldn't be pouring money into making more F students. But it's what we do with comprehensive sex ed. Indeed, I learned more from erotic stories and porn than I ever did from sex education, both from school and my parents. |
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Tails82
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Post by Tails82 on Aug 21, 2013 9:44:00 GMT -5
"California signs bill letting transgender students choose restrooms/lockerrooms"
Measures Barney Frank said would go too far, so I guess you can say I finally agree with him on something.
So how many kids have to be abused before we rethink this one? How many predators are going to use this loophole for unrestricted access?
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Post by Chromeo on Aug 21, 2013 9:52:33 GMT -5
35 years
no justice no peace fuck the police
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Post by kode54 on Aug 21, 2013 10:14:46 GMT -5
Transgender people are sexual predators? That's news to me.
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Post by Chromeo on Aug 21, 2013 10:21:23 GMT -5
I learned more from erotic stories and porn than I ever did from sex education, both from school and my parents. Same basically >_> I don't understand how people with even a little experience can be bad at sex when there are so many ways to learn technique from study... but I guess SOME people don't want to do the theory work to get really good at something, all the better for us intelsextuals I guess. |
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Tails82
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Post by Tails82 on Aug 21, 2013 10:54:21 GMT -5
Transgender people are sexual predators? That's news to me. Predators can claim they're "transexual" and get a pass, is what I mean. Real ones are just weird. But knowing them, they probably do get a sexual release being somewhere they don't belong. |
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Tails82
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Post by Tails82 on Aug 22, 2013 8:57:41 GMT -5
Where's the national outrage? Where are all the leftist marches? Where are the flash mobs looting random stores to bring about that good old "social justice"? Haven't heard the KKK put up a bounty or target random houses, like the left did with Zimmerman. online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324165204579027210701741336.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTopThree teenagers were charged Tuesday in the killing of a white college student in Duncan, Oklahoma, and part of the story is what didn't happen. There was no saturation cable TV coverage, no press conference featuring Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, and no statement from the Oval Office. The death of Christopher Lane, while as troubling as that of Trayvon Martin, will not become a national touchstone of racial and cultural debate or reflection.
But maybe it should. A 22-year-old Australian from Melbourne, Lane was attending East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma, to pursue his dream of playing that American pastime, baseball. He was visiting the parents of his girlfriend in Duncan after the two had recently returned from visiting Australia. Lane was jogging down a street on Friday evening when, according to prosecutors, he was shot in the back.
Police chief Dan Ford said that 17-year-old Michael Dewayne Jones, who drove the car and was charged with accessory to murder after the fact, told police that the three boys were bored and had killed Lane for "the fun of it." Prosecutor Jason Hicks said 16-year-old Chancey Allen Luna was sitting in the rear of the car when he fired a .22 caliber revolver and killed Lane.
There won't be any debate over "stand your ground" laws or self-defense in this case because Lane had no chance to defend himself...If only Mr. Sharpton and his fellow black leaders paid attention to what was missing in the lives of those three teenagers. Maybe President Obama would even care to use it as one of his teachable moments.www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/08/21/drive_bys_try_to_ignore_australian_student_murdered_by_bored_teens_obsessed_with_violent_rap_lyricsLet me ask you a question. Even if you have gotten bored, did you ever think about just randomly going out and killing somebody?
Did you ever think about doing that when you were bored?
We all do get bored. None of us are bored during these three hours. But you're on your own when the program ends -- and when you get bored, do you ever think, "You know what? Let's go shoot somebody!" Well, that's what these three guys did in Oklahoma. They got bored and said, "Let's go shoot a white guy!" Folks, I gotta tell you, there's something else about this. This is Trayvon Martin in reverse, only worse.
This was nowhere near self-defense. I mean, this is just cold-blooded, first-degree recreational, for the fun of it, because they were bored, murder. And you have, what is it? Two black guys and a white guy in the group. No matter where you look in the media, it's not a racial event. Nothing about is racist. This is the epitome of media irresponsibility. It's a classic illustration of just what role the mainstream media is playing in the destruction of American culture and society.
There has been more outrage in the mainstream media, more attention paid in the mainstream media to that stupid clown story at the Missouri State Fair than there has been to this wanton murder in Oklahoma. I had this story yesterday with the photos. It had the three perps and a picture of the victim, and I purposely did not say one word about it. I was conducting my own personal study to find out how long it would take the mainstream media to get to a story like this that happened in Oklahoma, where the victim is white and two of the perpetrators are black.
They're not paying much attention to it at all. They're not focusing on the racial component of any of the people involved in this. We have not heard from the Reverend Sharpton, the Reverend Jackson, the NAACP. We haven't heard from anybody. There has not been anywhere near the outrage, the intensity, even that we got on this state fair clown story. (interruption) I know you could read stories on it yesterday.
Snerdley's sending me a note that he read three stories on it yesterday, and race wasn't mentioned. He only learned today that two of the teenagers were black. He heard the story yesterday, and he only heard today that two of the shooters were black. If you go to the Facebook page of one of the suspects, you'll notice how often the suspect quotes rappers, especially rap lyrics about killing people. You go to this guy's Facebook page and all over it is almost worship for the lyrics of rappers who talk about killing people.
Yet we don't hear one peep about curtailing the violence that is celebrated in rap and the rest of the thug culture. Instead, they earn millions of dollars and endless rewards and profound fame. They are chosen to endorse products all over this country. It's as destructive as it can be. It's excused by the left because, they tell us, "It's cultural, Mr. Limbaugh! You wouldn't understand."
The Trayvon Martin shooting? I'll just tell you something: From Obama on down, they didn't care about Trayvon Martin. All that mattered was that incident offered them an opportunity to advance their political agenda. This doesn't. Everything to these people is political. There's nothing about this Oklahoma shooting that will allow the left or the Democrats to advance their political agenda. This harms their agenda, so that's why the media is not trumpeting it.
That's why they're just reporting it in a perfunctory way. You know, after the shootings in Tuscon and any number of other instances, the news media immediately tried to blame right-wing talk radio, or the Tea Party. Brian Ross at ABC! Within seconds of an event like that happening -- Tucson, Trayvon Martin, you name it -- it's "Let's go find out what talk show host they listen to!" Well, now we've got evidence these shooters celebrate and worship rappers and lyrics talking about killing people, and the media can't be bothered.
So what they're doing, they're very reluctantly covering this story, and they're not making a big deal about it at all. And to the extent that they are covering it, it is to focus once again on gun violence. The only problem for the Drive-By Media trying to use the shooting in Oklahoma to promote gun control is that none these kids are old enough to own a gun, in any state in the country. So what good do gun control laws do? There are laws on the books which prohibit people of their age from having them. But they had 'em. And they used them.
But this story in the Herald Sun had some of the earliest and most complete reporting on the case, and this story also makes points that no one in the US Drive-By Media will make, such as what appears to be the involvement of the shooters in the Crips. Apparently the shooters either idolized and held in great reverence role models, if you will, the Crips, or else they were members...The US media is putting most of the blame on guns, which is like blaming lynchings on the rope. But that's what they're doing. No blame placed on the thug culture. But if there had been an opportunity to find a way to include right-wing talk radio in this story, they would have found it.If the guy did get to defend himself, and something bad happened to the black aggressors, I suppose the press would label him "white Australian" and he'd have his citizenship revoked or something like that. And he'd be on trial for daring to cross a black man who wanted to kill him. History would just be repeating itself. online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324165204579026972238177540.htmlThe Obama presidency is starting to feel like an out-of-body experience. What, exactly, is going on?
Earlier this summer, Mr. Obama began touring the country—Galesburg, Ill., Warrensburg, Mo., and other down-and-out burgs—outputting speeches about the plight of the middle class. On Thursday he gives the speech in Buffalo and then in Syracuse, N.Y., at Henninger High School...The president gives essentially the same speech everywhere. In part it is a meditation on the meaning of middle class—"Americans are gritty, resilient and work hard." In part it is populist paranoia—"forces that have conspired against the middle class for decades."
Is anyone listening to these speeches? Do they matter?
For all the time and effort, his middle-class audience remains unimpressed...After the first year, [Obama's job approval] declined to about 35% and there it sits, bumping along at one third, while disappointment pours forth year after year at 60%. The public likes his historic presidency, but never seems to have believed he knew much of anything about the real economy, which the middle class wakes up to each day.
In a presidency whose unemployment rate has been stuck between 7% and 9%, with millions of middle-class people no longer trying to find work, why does Mr. Obama keep pushing the pie in the sky of windmills and solar panels?
It has become difficult to escape the conclusion that at bottom Mr. Obama is a familiar figure in American public life—an upper-middle-class political Brahmin bent on forcing the masses to participate in his understanding of what is good. The Obama administration is the Ford Foundation on steroids.
The idea that Mr. Obama is mainly a protégé of the community organizer Saul Alinsky and of Chicago's streets is off the mark. Saul Alinsky would have laughed at the idea of telling out-of-work Chicagoans that what they needed was jobs in "wind and solar."
Barack Obama is leading the noblesse-oblige left. His Climate Action Plan and the Affordable Care Act (also a relentless opinion-poll loser) are ideas created by people with privileged IQs for everyone else. Like it or lump it.
He complains a lot in these speeches about receiving no support for his ideas from Congress. But recall that the Obama climate-control/kill-coal legislation perished in a Senate controlled by Democrats in 2010, because senators from such heartland states as Ohio, West Virginia, Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, North Dakota, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Minnesota feared middle-class anger over lost jobs and higher energy costs.
Still, one has to credit the steely fanaticism of the noblesse-oblige left. Here last week was Mr. Obama's new EPA administrator, Gina McCarthy, speaking in Boulder, Colo., about her intention to impose the president's anti-carbon goals through executive order: "We're going to do this this year, next year, the following year, until people understand these are not scary things to do." Let them eat wind.
One cannot avoid the irony of Mr. Obama giving this edition of the speech today in upstate New York—whose gasping local economies resemble Cold-War East Germany because Gov. Andrew Cuomo won't oppose the anti-fracking sentiments of upper-class New Yorkers such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Yoko Ono and Lady Gaga.
The crown-jewel of the Obama presidency, the Affordable Care Act, is sprung from the same mind-set. Designed on a computer screen by academic architects, ObamaCare will direct millions of middle-class or poor people into public health-care exchanges or expanded Medicaid. None of this law's deliverers, from the president himself on down, would be caught dead sending their own families to the bargain-basement medical care in these plans.
Teamster President James Hoffa's recent letter to the White House on ObamaCare could not have been more explicit: "The ACA will shatter not only our hard-earned health benefits, but destroy the foundation of the 40-hour work week that is the backbone of the American middle class."
Someday there will be a well-endowed Obama Foundation to pursue what's left of the various visions that aren't imposed by executive order in the Obama presidency's next three years. The American middle class had better lay in plenty of backbone between now and 2016.online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323665504579026870971679630.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinionIs Anything Private?If economic differences are the business of government, why not relationships? Where does it stop? Course we know with the Chromeses it does not stop: the state interfering with genetic "defectives" and sterilizing or killing them or something like that. The only time he thinks abstinence would work, apparently, by virtue of their "inferior" conditioning or whatever you wanna call it. Shaming everyone else into thinking like him and following statist commands. I suppose all it would take is Obama-style magic oratory, to capture their attention and enthrall them into admitting they don't belong on this planet and neither do their kids. And if the mandates don't work we'll just say the problem's been solved anyway, while simultaneously saying problems exist but they're Bush's fault. www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/08/21/there_s_no_virtue_in_not_owning_a_car_or_being_successfulJust like Obama-era unemployment was spun as "funemployment," now young people are being told to live with less. It's great. Accept national decline. Do not pursue dreams. |
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Post by kode54 on Aug 22, 2013 13:49:16 GMT -5
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Post by Chromeo on Aug 22, 2013 14:34:17 GMT -5
..man the right wing media is garbage full stop posting by talking into my phone lolthe story doesn't even have anything to do about the democratsand anyway it seems Fair if someone's won the contest for 5 years they should probably step aside |
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Tails82
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Posts: 34,373
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Post by Tails82 on Aug 23, 2013 9:31:22 GMT -5
online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324619504579028771149266090.htmlIt's been over a year since the Archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Francis George, submitted his resignation letter—mandatory when princes of the Catholic Church turn 75—to then- Pope Benedict XVI. In a highly unusual turn of events, Benedict was the one who resigned. That left Cardinal George—whose intellectual vigor is matched by a forceful defense of the church—still on the job.
Some wish he weren't. In late July, eight Illinois state lawmakers signed an open letter criticizing Cardinal George, among others, for threatening to end the church's financial support for a rights group. The church had cited the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, because the group came out for the legalization of same-sex marriage in May. The politicians—all Catholic Democrats—said the threat of a funding withdrawal was "not worthy of the church we know, love and respect." They said Cardinal George and others were using "immigrants and those who seek to help them as pawns in a political battle."They were made pawns the instant the group lost sight of its immigration goals to focus on pushing a lie. And of course Democrats remain outraged that their guys are not automatically entitled to a magic stream of money, no matter what they do (the mass-murdering fraudsters at Planned Parenthood say hi) In response to the politicians and other critics, Cardinal George—never one to mince words—took to the pages of the archdiocese's newspaper, the Catholic New World, to respond. "It is intellectually and morally dishonest to use the witness of the church's concern for the poor as an excuse to attack the church's teaching on the nature of marriage," he wrote in an August column. He reminded the politicians that "the church is no one's private club," adding that in a few years they would "stand before this same Christ to give an account of their stewardship.
"Jesus is merciful," the cardinal warned. "But he is not stupid."
This isn't the first time Cardinal George's gloves have come off. In the church's ongoing battle with the administration over part of ObamaCare, Cardinal Timothy Dolan has been among the most visible critics. As president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, he has articulated the religious-freedom issue raised by the insistence of the Department of Health and Human Services that the church provide insurance that covers contraception for all its employees, in violation of church teachings.
But it was Cardinal George who was the most blunt. In a February video interview with the Catholic News Service, he criticized the Obama administration for behaving "as if a right to free contraception were now a constitutional right" that presumes to supersede "the genuinely constitutional right of freedom of religion." In this, Cardinal George announced, the church "will simply not cooperate." In the same vein, he predicted in the Catholic New World in November 2012 that "the greatest threat to world peace and international justice is the nation state gone bad, claiming an absolute power, deciding questions and making 'laws' beyond its competence."
Cardinal George's newspaper column often reads now like a battle plan against government overreach. He recently decried how "this tendency for the government to claim for itself authority over all areas of human experience flows from the secularization of our culture. If God cannot be part of public life, then the state itself plays God."
The cardinal takes a particularly grim view of what this intrusion by government could mean for church and state relations. More than once he has warned for dramatic effect that, "I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square."www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/08/22/rush_injects_race_into_oklahoma_murderThe president's spokesperson, this guy sitting in for the spokeskid, Jay Carney; his name is Josh Earnest. He didn't even know about the shooting in Duncan, Oklahoma. He didn't even know about it. He said that Obama didn't know about it, and there was the most amazing headline in a Drive-By Media website today: "Rush Limbaugh Inserts Race into Story in Oklahoma." I kid you not.
Rush Limbaugh inserts race? Who the hell inserted race in the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman case when there wasn't any?...Folks, it is mind numbing, the denial these people are in. In the Zimmerman-Martin case you had Barack Obama himself injecting race into it. There was no racial component. The racial component had to be manufactured all because there was a black victim. When the victim is black, it's gonna be racism no matter what unless the perpetrator is black. Then it's gonna be ignored. But they had to even add the descriptive term "white" to Zimmerman's "Hispanic" in order to create a racial incident, when there wasn't any. The whole Trayvon Martin-Zimmerman situation, there was no racial aspect to it, other than the one the left manufactured for the purposes of advancing its agenda.
Here you have two black perps, wannabes in the Crips or the Bloods or what have you, targeting a white guy because they were bored. Their getaway driver happened to be white, a little bit of a mitigating factor, it is said. The Reverend Jackson issued a statement yesterday that said he "frowned" on the incident. So you have headlines out there, "Rush Limbaugh Injects Race." Well, one of the three teenagers charged in the thrill kill of an Australian college student in Oklahoma last week has previously posted racist tweets on his Twitter account.
You see, as far as the Democrats and left are concerned, this thing yesterday in Oklahoma, whenever it was, it was about guns. It's about violence. It's about guns, and we gotta get rid of guns because guns cause violence. Just ignoring what was right in front of their faces. This continuing focus on guns, I'll tell you, it's rather obvious to me. The Democrat Party's pandering to all minorities is literally destroying people in these minority groups. The Democrat Party is just destroying lives, and they are taking everybody with 'em.
"The Daily Caller reported that the tweets belonged to James Francis Edwards, 15. One tweet from his account reads, '90% of white ppl are nasty. #HATE THEM.' Another post read, 'Ayeee I knocced out 5 woods since Zimmerman court! '"
"Woods" is a derogatory term for white people. Not Tiger. Woods is a derogatory term for white people. "Police Chief Dan Ford said the victim, Chris Lane, 22, appeared to have been chosen at random, saying in a variety of media interviews since Friday's killing that one suspect told officers that he and other boys were bored and that they followed Lane and killed him for 'the fun of it.'"
So one of the perps claims to have knocked out five white people since the Zimmerman trial, very happy and proud about it. The same guy claims that 90% of whites are nasty, and he hates them. But it is your host, your beloved daily radio raconteur, Rush Limbaugh, who injected race into this story. Why does the left protect racism? They're doing so here in the killing of this Australian college student. Why does the left promote division, as in the creation of George Zimmerman as a "white Hispanic"? Why does the left promote dependency, 50 million or more on food stamps? This is their business plan. This is how they stay in power.online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323665504579028983339691094.htmlDouble-Secret Probation for Bashar
It was a year ago this week that President Obama first warned Syrian dictator Bashar Assad that the use or even the mere movement of chemical weapons was a "red line" that "would change my calculus." Mr. Obama repeated that warning more than once as evidence mounted that Assad has used chemical weapons, and as U.S. intelligence confirmed the finding...Assad's use of chemical weapons has had no discernible impact on the President's "calculus," with the Administration backing away even from its reluctant pledge earlier this year to supply some Syrian rebels with small arms.
There has also been no impact on Assad's calculus. The dictator knows he can count on the diplomatic and military support of Russia, which dismissed Wednesday's attack as a "preplanned provocation" by rebels seeking international sympathy. Iran and Hezbollah also won't flag in their military backing for Damascus.
But Assad also realizes that Mr. Obama is desperate to stay out of Syria, never mind the damage being done to U.S. interests and the spillover harm to Jordan and others in the region. And he knows that no one else in the West will act against him if American won't. Assad's behavior has grown commensurately more brazen as a result.
The dynamic played out again this week as the world saw what appears to be Assad's latest chemical attack: rows of corpses, some of them of infants, bundled in white sheets. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights puts the number of confirmed dead near Damascus at 130. Other estimates go as high as 1,300. The attack—which if confirmed would be the worst chemical attack since Saddam Hussein used sarin, VX and other chemical agents at Halabja in 1988—is especially brazen because it comes as U.N. inspectors arrived in Syria to verify claims of chemical weapons use...The regime has so far not permitted inspectors, who have permission to visit only three sites in Syria, from visiting the scene of the attack.
Mr. Earnest: "So the United States will be consulting with our allies and our partners on the United Nations Security Council about this, because this is and should be a top priority of the United Nations."
Q: "But what about the U.S. policy should make Assad feel threatened in any way, feel like he shouldn't do this again?"
Mr. Earnest: "Well, this is not just a U.S. policy, but there is broad international agreement."
Q: "But the broad international community's response, I mean, what about that is threatening to him at this point?"
Mr. Earnest: "Well, I can't speak to what he may or may not find threatening. There is no doubt that we condemn in the strongest possible terms the use of chemical weapons. . . . So there are a range of consequences for the actions that have possibly taken place."
Q: "But that's what I don't understand. I mean, what are the consequences?"
Mr. Earnest: "Well, again, it's hard for me to speak to whether or not they feel threatened. But there is a broad international view that the use of chemical weapons is completely unacceptable. Even some people who may disagree with us on some aspects of our policy related to Syria should be able to agree that the use of chemical weapons is completely unacceptable, and should be able to support a robust and impartial, credible investigation into reports that chemical weapons may have been used.
"Again, how this is going to affect our policy as it relates to the Assad regime, we'll continue to involve our consultations with our international partners. . . . So what's happening is a terrible situation."
Yes, a terrible situation. Even, one might say, "completely unacceptable."
We sympathize with Mr. Earnest, sort of, in his attempts to defend his boss's record of poll-taking, red-line-in-the-sand drawing, and policy indifference masquerading as moral outrage. But it would be nice to think that, when the next chemical attack takes 100 or 1,000 lives and the White House reacts with similarly hollow protests, someone in the Administration might have the decency to resign.www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/08/22/wsj_makes_rush_s_longstanding_point_on_paying_for_health_care_introducing_market_forces_and_driving_down_costThe benefits of paying for health care online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324619504579028920138950330.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinionIn case you've forgotten, "Al Gore was vice president of the United States from 1993-2001." The Washington Post's Ezra Klein delivers that news in setting up an interview with Gore, who is known these days mostly as an alarmist advocate of global warmism.
Gore uses the interview to claim vindication for his 2006 "documentary," "An Inconvenient Truth": "You mentioned my movie back in the day. The single most common criticism from skeptics when the film came out focused on the animation showing ocean water flowing into the World Trade Center memorial site. Skeptics called that demagogic and absurd and irresponsible. It happened last October 29th, years ahead of schedule, and the impact of that and many, many other similar events here and around the world has really begun to create a profound shift."
The reference is to Hurricane Sandy, a Category 2 storm when it struck the Northeastern U.S., flooding parts of New York and New Jersey, including downtown Manhattan...But if we roll the film--which is less than scintillating, but the clip lasts less than 2½ minutes--we find that what Gore predicted in "An Inconvenient Truth" was something far direr than a storm and a flood. He predicted that lower Manhattan--along with vast and heavily populated swaths of Florida, California, the Netherlands, China, India and Bangladesh--would be permanently submerged owing to higher sea levels.
Klein didn't ask the obvious follow-up question, but maybe he never saw "An Inconvenient Truth." After sitting through 2½ minutes of it, we can hardly blame him. But even if Klein was unaware of Gore's deception, surely Gore knows what he said in his own movie--which is to say that it is impossible to summon any doubt that he deliberately misrepresented its content.
In a New York Times op-ed today, physicist Adam Frank bemoans what he sees, not implausibly, as a decline in public respect for science. One of his observations is worthy of Fox Butterfield: "In 1989, when 'climate change' had just entered the public lexicon, 63 percent of Americans understood it was a problem. Almost 25 years later, that proportion is actually a bit lower, at 58 percent."
After a quarter-century of wildly alarmist predictions that have failed to pan out--often with specific dates now in the past--we'd say the five-point decline Frank cites is dismayingly low. And while Al Gore isn't a scientist, the Climategate scandal showed that some scientists are no more scrupulous than he is.
"What has been lost," Frank writes, "is an understanding that science's open-ended, evidence-based processes--rather than just its results--are essential to meeting [mankind's] challenges." Just so. It has been lost in no small part because scientists and others claiming the authority of science have given their political objectives priority over the patient empiricism of the scientific method--and even, as in Gore's case, over basic veracity.Global warmers like Al "Jazeera" Gore are dirty liars, always have been, always will be. 21st century con artists who swindle fools. Plus Ça Change
* "Global Warming Tipping Point Close?"--headline, ClimateArk.com, Jan. 27, 2004
* "Warming Hits 'Tipping Point' "--headline, Guardian, Aug. 11, 2005
* "Earth at the Tipping Point: Global Warming Heats Up"--headline, Time, March 26, 2006
* "Global Warming 'Tipping Points' Reached, Scientist Says"--headline, NationalGeographic.com, Dec. 14, 2007
* "Twenty Years Later: Tipping Points Near on Global Warming"--headline, Puffington Host, June 23, 2008
* "Global Warming: Those Tipping Points Are Closer Than You Think"--headline, WSJ.com, April 29, 2009
* "Have We Reached the Tipping Point for Planet Earth?"--video title, StudioTalk.tv, May 11, 2010
* "Must-Read Hansen and Sato Paper: We Are at a Climate Tipping Point That, Once Crossed, Enables Multi-Meter Sea Level Rise This Century"--headline, ThinkProgress.org, Jan. 20, 2011
* "Earth: Have We Reached an Environmental Tipping Point?"--headline, BBC website, June 15, 2012
* "In spite of the continued released [sic] of 90 million tons of global warming pollution every day into the atmosphere, as if it's an open sewer, we are now seeing the approach of a global political tipping point."--Al Gore, interview with Washington Post, Aug. 21, 2013www.climatedepot.com/2013/08/21/2899-record-cold-temps-vs-667-record-warm-temps-in-u-s/2899 Record cold temps vs 667 record warm temps in U.S.Guess which ones got reported? online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324747104579022983043566454.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTopJobless Blacks Should Cheer Background Checks
Research suggests that employers who use them are less likely to racially discriminate.
The Obama administration took one on the chin earlier this month when a federal court ruled that companies may use criminal-background checks in hiring without being guilty of racial discrimination. Employers are thrilled about the decision, obviously. Less obvious is that the black unemployed, whose numbers have swelled under President Obama, also have reason to cheer.
The case dates to 2009, when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Freeman Co., an event management firm. The EEOC alleged that the company's criminal-background checks for job applicants discriminated against blacks, who in general are more likely than other groups to have criminal histories.
Judge Roger Titus of the U.S. District Court in Maryland disagreed. In his Aug. 9 ruling, he said that checking a person's criminal history is "a legitimate component of a reasonable hiring process." Employers "have a clear incentive to avoid hiring employees who have a proven tendency to defraud or steal from their employers, engage in workplace violence, or who otherwise appear to be untrustworthy and unreliable."
The meat of the ruling, however, is the court's blistering takedown of the government's "expert" report, authored by an outside statistician who attempted to establish that Freeman's criminal-background checks disproportionately harmed black job-seekers. Judge Titus described the report as "an egregious example of scientific dishonesty," its analysis "laughable," "skewed" and full of "cherry-picked data." He concluded that the "mind-boggling-number of errors" rendered the EEOC's "disparate impact conclusions worthless." There are "simply no facts here to support a theory of disparate impact resulting from any identified, specific practice."
It's bad enough that the Obama administration is using dodgy numbers to bring bogus racial discrimination cases. But the whole premise of the EEOC's campaign against criminal-background checks may be off-base if the goal is to increase job opportunities for minorities, ex-offenders or anyone with a spotty work history.
On the contrary, an October 2006 study in the Journal of Law and Economics, "Perceived Criminality, Criminal Background Checks, and the Racial Hiring Practices of Employers," found that "employers that check criminal backgrounds are in general more likely to hire African Americans," according to Harry Holzer of Georgetown University and his two co-authors. "[T]he adverse consequence of employer-initiated background checks on the likelihood of hiring African Americans is more than offset by the positive effect of eliminating statistical discrimination." These researchers surmise that employers who can screen for prison records are less likely to rely on prejudice when hiring.
Alas, the Obama administration doesn't seem much interested in the research showing that employers who perform criminal background checks are more likely to hire black applicants than employers who do not. The EEOC hasn't ruled out an appeal of the Freeman decision, and it is moving ahead with similar lawsuits filed in June against retailer Dollar General and a U.S. subsidiary of car maker BMW."Those lousy racist white people must be up to no good somewhere!"
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Spinning round and round like the deadly hands of a radium clock. 
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