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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Mock Marriage and the Death of Freedom

Written on Tuesday, July 2, 2013 by J. Matt Barber
While poorly decided U.S. Supreme Court cases are a dime a dozen, prior to last Wednesday, two stood out among the most wretched and constitutionally groundless in American History. First was the 1857 Dred Scott decision. Among other things, it robbed African-Americans of both their U.S. citizenship and their dignity.
Next came the 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade. It has robbed over 55 million U.S. citizens of their very lives. For the first time in American history, the high court imagined a phantom constitutional right for women to dismember alive their own pre-born children.
Both of these cases are blights on American history. Fortunately, the first, Dred Scott, has been officially relegated to the dustbin of judicial disgrace, while the second, Roe v. Wade, continues to be used as justification for mass genocide. With each passing day, the bodies of the innocents pile-up like God’s chosen at Auschwitz.
Tragically, this past week we hit the unholy trifecta.  A third precedential abomination was added to the mix….To Read More….

Health Insurance Rates May Double, Triple for Healthy Americans

1 Jul 2013
According to a new Wall Street Journal analysis, healthy Americans may see their health insurance rates double or triple upon Obamacare’s January 2014 grand opening.
Insurance premiums for sicker Americans will become less expensive as healthier Americans are forced to buy coverage or additional coverage to what they currently have or face government fines and penalties.
The Journal examined figures from eight states to demonstrate the cost increases for healthier Americans....To ReadMore.....

Uncertainty and New Regulatory Burdens Hinder Recovery

by Richard Rush on July 2, 2013 · 0 comments
Since 2011, the Obama administration’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) has been reviewing significantly fewer rules than in prior years and taking longer to do so. Meanwhile, the growth of compliance costs and a great deal of uncertainty are hobbling businesses both large and small.
From 2011 to 2012 the average review time for all new regulations jumped from 58 to 79 days. Yet, that pales in comparison to the first five months of 2013, when average review time skyrocketed from 79 to 141 days……To Read More......

Club For the Galacticly Stupid


By Justin Sink Tuesday, July 2, 2013
Former NBA star Dennis Rodman said in a Sports Illustrated story published Tuesday that he believes he deserves to win a Nobel Peace Prize for his outreach efforts to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. [WATCH VIDEO]
"My mission is to break the ice between hostile countries,” Rodman told the magazine. “Why it’s been left to me to smooth things over, I don’t know. Dennis Rodman, of all people. Keeping us safe is really not my job; it’s the black guy’s [Obama's] job. But I’ll tell you this: If I don’t finish in the top three for the next Nobel Peace Prize, something’s seriously wrong.”....To Read More...

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Contraries: PBS Lessons in Green Housing and "Killing Shakespeare" for Common Core

By Mary Grabar Posted July 2, 2013

PBS classroom lesson on Community BuildingThis appeared here and I wish to thank Mary for allowing me to publish her work.  RK
While students flee for summer fun 'n sun, their teachers are preparing indoctrination lessons for the fall, with help from our government and our government-supported PBS. A "documentary film and strategic entertainment company," Kontentreal, produces propaganda films for PBS, which then distributes them to government schools. One is about Generation G, a generation of preteens anxious about the sustainability of the planet. It's filmed at the exclusive Sidwell Friends School attended by Sasha and Malia Obama.
PBS Teachers, in its most recent newsletter, promotes a lesson in collectivism for high school students called "Affordable Green Housing"--produced by Kontentreal. The focus is on "community," which means forcing people of all income levels to live together.
The promo video tells teachers that the lesson should focus on "fostering diversity" and being "environmentally responsible." It features a bunch of urban planning types around a table discussing how dehumanizing the free public housing was because it isolated the residents. Now they must be integrated into all neighborhoods. Forcing such mixed housing is much more "organic" than the patterns made by the real estate free market system.
All kinds of helpful pedagogical aids are given to teachers. (Such a great resourse!) They are told that students should be given discussion questions before watching the video. "Next day" suggested activities include three: 1) having students individually answer questions, 2) answer questions as a group, and 3) do a "group graffiti draw," with groups given colored markers based on their question. Students are to walk around the room and write the answers on large sheets of posted paper, making "graffiti walls."
So write on a "graffiti wall," because it's so much easier than sitting down and reading and writing a research paper on the fall-out of Great Society programs that devastated once thriving, safe--and diverse--inner-city neighborhoods! The pretend-graffiti wall will probably be the only kind of graffiti wall that the Sidwell students will ever have to worry about in their "green neighborhoods."
The irony of the "graffiti walls" will be lost because under the federal education program called Common Core high school students will be spending only about 25% of their time in English class reading literature and being exposed to real irony.
And when they do read literature, they will be able to do it through graphic novels.
According to Publishers Weekly, Diamond Book Distributors now has a wide offering of Common Core-compliant graphic books. The list was released at the recent American Library Association meeting in Chicago and features such offerings as Power Lunch with a healthful superhero with an apple in hand on the cover. It's for kindergartners and first-graders. Congressman John Lewis's March, about the civil rights movement, offers challenging pictures for high school students. Other high school offerings include A Comic Book History of Comics and Kill Shakespeare. Graphic adaptations of actual Shakespeare plays are not on the list, however, although graphic adaptations of other classics, like Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, and Native American "Classics" are. Here we have evidence about the "standards" of Common Core. Maybe it is appropriate that a title like "Kill Shakespeare" should appear on a list of Common Core compliant graphic books.

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END THE IRS!


Why growing movement demands abolition of scandal-plagued revenue agency - Even before the scandal broke, Americans already hated and feared the IRS. So how much worse could the agency’s reputation get?  Much worse. In May, it was revealed that the nation’s most disliked government agency has been secretly and illegally denying the civil rights of hundreds of conservative and Christian organizations and individuals. Although both the IRS and the White House tried to blame the whole ghastly mess on the poor judgment of a couple of rogue agents in Cincinnati, the truth gradually emerged: The abuse was widespread and officials at the highest levels of government had long been aware – yet had done nothing to stop it. Indeed, IRS employees have testified there is no way such pervasive and egregious abuses could have occurred without direction from above…To Read More…

Our President Needs a Science Lesson

Steve Maley (Diary) |
Of his new plan to address climate change, President Obama says:  This plan will cut the dangerous carbon pollution that contributes to climate change. For years, groups like the American Lung Association have warned us that carbon pollution threatens our health and the air our children breathe. We limit the mercury, sulfur, and arsenic in our air and water, but today, there are no federal limits on the amount of carbon pollution that power plants can pump into the air. That’s not safe. So we’ll work with states and businesses to set new standards that put an end to this limitless dumping of carbon.  Apparently our President choomed his way through high school science class…….And it’s the Climate Change community who accuse skeptics of being anti-science?....ToRead More….

‘Waist’ of money at Guantanamo Bay as detainees get prison’s ‘infidel’ gym replaced

By PAUL SPERRY
Last Updated: 7:59 AM, June 30, 2013
Americans are supposed to have sympathy for the accused terrorist detainees now on hunger strike to protest supposedly cruel conditions at the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.  “I don’t want these individuals to die,” President Obama recently lamented, adding he intends to close Gitmo and transfer the detainees to US prisons.  But just a few years ago, detainees got so plump from overeating hummus and other dishes from the camp’s Islamically correct menu that commanders specially ordered treadmills to help them lose weight.  Then they ordered them again — because they weren’t made by Muslims.
“Even the hunger strikers were gaining weight because of all the food, so we go out and buy all this exercise equipment and throw it in the rec yard,” a Gitmo official said of a 2007 requisition. “Within the first week, there were guys saying, ‘Hey, this stuff is made in the US — made by infidels — and we’re not going to use it.’  “So what did we do?” added the official, who requested anonymity. “We took all of that s--t out, gave it to the soldiers to use, and bought them equipment that was made in a Muslim part of the world.”  The Pentagon declined to comment….To Read More….

Is the Supreme Court the Final Word?

Rich Tucker June 30, 2013 at 4:53 pm
Supreme Court decisions are crucial, but they are not the final word. It’s our duty as American citizens to keep pushing back, through all three branches of government, against any proposal that violates the Constitution. That’s the way to make sure our union can endure for another 225 years.
Recently, the country marked the 225th anniversary of New Hampshire’s ratification of the Constitution, which made the document the law of the land. “Happy Birthday Constitution! Americans Still Don’t Get You,” National Journal’s headline proclaimed.
“In 2011, the University of Pennsylvania conducted a survey to see how familiar Americans were with their legal foundations,” the story noted. “The results were, well … we’ll just have to study harder for the next survey.” And indeed, it’s a bit depressing that a third of Americans couldn’t name a single one of the three (legislative, executive, judicial) branches of the federal government….To Read More….

Zoning, Property Rights, and the Myth of Benevolent Planners

by Marc Scribner on July 1, 2013  
Dartmouth economics professor Bill Fischel has posted “Fiscal Zoning and Economists’ Views of the Property Tax,” which will be a chapter in a revised edition of Fischel’s classic The Economics of Zoning Laws. Fischel provides a great overview of zoning, development, and property taxes, highlighting the important fact that zoning is fiscal in nature — that is to say, local governments use zoning to “preserve and possibly enhance the local property tax base.”
Fischel goes into much detail and posits that zoning makes the property tax more efficient. But the notion of fiscal zoning is an interesting one, something that is rarely discussed by the public or even members of the real estate press. Contrary the great myth of benevolent city planners getting together and using the best available evidence to scientifically apply land-use regulations that will maximize social welfare, land-use regulations are developed like most government “goods”: through competing self-interested special interest groups fighting over benefits in the political arena….To left-wing environmentalists like Echeverria, all building projects are harmful and all private property should be subject to the whims of people like him.......In reality, land-use regulation is conducted by highly politicized star chambers frequently captured by powerful, self-interested special interests seeking to maximize their private benefits at the public’s expense.........To Read More….

Can Bernanke Brake Without Derailing?

by Frank Shostak on July 1, 2013
According to most commentators, reducing monetary stimulus and winding down the balance sheet of the Fed without major economic disruptions is going to be a major challenge for US central bank policy makers. On Wednesday, June 19 Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, said that given an improved outlook on the economy, the US central bank may moderate the pace of monetary pumping. According to Bernanke, by mid-2014 the Fed may even end the purchasing of assets. …To Read More….

 

The Courage to be Utopian

Mises Daily:Tuesday, July 02, 2013 by Lawrence J. McQuillan
In “The Intellectuals and Socialism,”[1] Nobel laureate F.A Hayek shows how ideas gain acceptance in modern society. More importantly, he shows how to win the battle of ideas against supporters of big government. His thoughts provide us with an Independence Day meditation.
Over the long run, public intellectuals—Hayek called them “professional secondhand dealers in ideas”—wield an “all-pervasive” influence on public policy and politics by shaping public opinion.
A public intellectual need not be an original thinker, scholar, or expert in a field. He need not possess special knowledge or be particularly intelligent. But a public intellectual can readily talk and write on a wide range of subjects and he becomes acquainted with new ideas sooner than others. They serve as intermediaries in the spread of ideas.  Such intellectuals include journalists, teachers, ministers, lecturers, publicists; radio, television, and online commentators; writers of fiction, cartoonists, artists, actors, and even scientists and doctors who speak outside their fields of expertise…. Public intellectuals are the gatekeepers of ideas in modern society, and voters tend to follow them in the long run….. “It is no exaggeration to say that, once the more active part of the intellectuals has been converted to a set of beliefs, the process by which these become generally accepted is almost automatic and irresistible. .....What appeals to him are the broad visions, the spacious comprehension of the social order as a whole which a planned system promises.” …To Read More….

My Take – Original thinking is twofold; nuts and bolts thinkers who develop new products and services that benefit mankind and vacuous armchair intellectuals.  The first absolutely requires facts and understanding of how things actually work in order to achieve success.  The second merely dream dreams without any concept or understanding of how anything works in the real world.  Nor do they care because their ‘vision’ is so pure it can’t be contaminated with facts; just like the infamous five year plans implemented by Stalin that starved millions to death.  To them it’s the implementation of the dream that counts; not the outcome. 

The Left’s Newest ‘Civil Right’ — the Right to Be Murdered

July 1, 2013 By John Perazzo 27 Comments
In open defiance of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, New York’s City Council last week passed two bills aimed at curbing the NY Police Department’s practice of “stop-and-frisk,” which has been among the most effective crime-fighting tactics ever employed. One of the bills mandates the appointment of an independent inspector general to monitor the department for evidence that its use of stop-and-frisk may be unfairly targeting blacks and Hispanics; the other opens the door to racial profiling lawsuits against the NYPD. Black Councilman Donovan Richards (D-Queens), who prides himself on being a strong voice against profiling, says that he himself was once “dehumanized” by the experience of being stopped and frisked as a teen, and thus wishes to spare other minority youth the same pain.………The statistics above, it should be noted, raise a vital question that merits contemplation: If blacks constitute 66% of all violent offenders but only 53% of stop-and-frisk targets, and if whites are just 5% of violent offenders but fully 9% of stop-and-frisk targets, could it not be argued that it is actually whites, and not blacks, who are disproportionately “targeted” by stop-and-frisk?  …… And here’s another reasonable question that deserves an answer:….…To Read More….

 

What “White People” DO Understand About Rachel Jeantel

Written on Monday, July 1, 2013 by Marilyn Assenheim

On Wednesday and Thursday of last week, GlobalGrind went out of its way to advance The Lyin’ King’s vision of racial harmony. Both pieces received over 30,000 Facebook “likes.” Both opinion pieces established a premise, as fact, that white people can never understand the black condition. Both pieces went out of their way to reinforce that what was on display during Rachel Jeantel’s testimony in the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin trial, was not actually what was seen and heard. What makes this worth noting is that this is deliberate balkanization of a segment of America. It seeks to replace justice with self-serving cant……If any segment of Americans chooses to create a subculture, slang-uage and behaviors that intentionally segregates them from other Americans their choice does not forgive them their responsibility as Americans. There is still only one law in this nation; everyone must abide by it. Attempts to fashion oneself indecipherable by the rest of society, because of a perverted desire to preserve victimhood in perpetuity, is a despicable ambition. It is cowardly and, above all, wrong.

Any segment of the black community that clings to prejudice as a security blanket only reduces its own options. That ploy, straining an ever-more-tentative stranglehold on America’s evaporating guilt, is losing its power. As it should after a 200 year run. ….. To Read More...
 

Anonymous Jihad

After NSA leaks Jihadists flock to federally funded Tor network to hide activities
BY: Lachlan Markay July 1, 2013
Jihadists are seeking out more secure methods of online communications, including an avenue created by the U.S. government and financed by American taxpayers, in the wake of revelations about the U.S. monitoring of online messages.
The Tor network has become a go-to means for jihadists and criminals to communicate, raise money, and buy and sell illicit goods and services without fear of being identified or traced by intelligence or law enforcement officials.
The network uses technology called “onion routing” (Tor is an acronym for The Onion Router), which refers to layers of encryption that prevent governments or other users from obtaining information about users or websites hosted on the network….ToRead More….

Battle for Life Continues Today in Texas With Special Session

Katie Pavlich | Jul 01, 2013
The battle for life continues today in Texas as the second special session of the legislature begins. The first special session ended without a vote on a pro-life bill last week that would have banned abortions after five months and require abortion clinics in the state to meet the same medical standards as regular clinics in order to operate. The legislation, known as SB5, was killed after Democratic Texas Senator Wendy Davis filibustered for hours with rowdy pro-abortion protestors cheering her on.

Monday, Lt. Governor David Dewhurst will introduce SB1, which like SB5, limits abortions to five months and requires abortion clinics to meet a set of basic medical standards in order to operate….To Read More….

20 Questions for Wendy Davis

Monday, July 1, 2013
Texas state senator Wendy Davis has been on a whirlwind media tour since her filibuster (and a screaming mob) blocked a vote on a bill that would ban most abortions during the final four months of pregnancy and improve safety standards at abortion facilities.
Davis has been asked many questions–about her shoes, what it was like to stand and talk for so long, and whether she’s offended by Gov. Rick Perry. But you’ll have to search very hard to find a tough question challenging Davis to defend her opposition to bill. Just take a look at the 20 questions Davis had to answer during four interviews with well-respected, mainstream journalists at CNN, ABC, NBC, and CBS.
Here are the six (closely paraphrased) questions CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Davis last week:…… To Read More…. 




Chicago Cop Arrested Four Times in Seven Years Still Working, Makes $80K

30 Jun 2013

Chicago Police Officer Richard A. Rizzo has been arrested four times in the past seven years, but that’s not enough to get him fired from the department. Rizzo has been arrested for domestic battery, child endangerment and aggravated assault with a gun. Yet while members of the general public are expected to pay fines or go to jail, prosecutors have dropped charges against Rizzo each and every time.
The Chicago Sun-Times reports:

On Dec. 30, 2010, Rizzo was arrested for aggravated assault with a gun and domestic battery after a fight with a 40-year-old man and the man’s 18-year-old son. Both of them lived with Rizzo in a Garfield Ridge bungalow.

The arresting officers said Rizzo punched the older man, grabbed the gun, put the muzzle in the man’s eye and told him, “How about I shoot you in the face?”

A month later, on Jan. 31, 2011, Rizzo was arrested again, this time for domestic battery, after officers said he grabbed his girlfriend “by her throat and began to strangle her.” The arresting officers said she broke away and locked herself in a bedroom. They said Rizzo kicked in the door just before they arrived.

The officers “photographed alleged injuries to victim and damage to the bedroom door,” and the incident was referred to the city’s Independent Police Review Authority for investigation.

According to the Sun-Times, Rizzo has never been disciplined for violating Chicago Police Department (CPD) rules that “generally target officers who break the law or otherwise bring discredit upon the department…To Read More….

 

Beheading of Syrian Priest Boosts Fear for Christians Safety

Monday, July 1, 2013
Claims that a Catholic priest has been beheaded by jihadist rebels in Syria are drawing new attention to the plight of Syrian Christians, caught in the middle of a brutal struggle and said by campaigners to face an existential threat.
Last week the Vatican reported that a Catholic priest, Francois Murad, had been killed by militants who attacked a monastery in northern Syria on Sunday, June 23. Citing a report by the Franciscan “Custodian of the Holy Land,” Vatican press services initially reported that the priest had been shot and killed while trying to defend nuns and others sheltering at the monastery of St. Anthony.
A subsequent Vatican Radio report said the circumstances of Murad’s death were “not fully understood,” and added that those who attacked the monastery were reported to be “militants linked to the jihadi group Jabhat al-Nusrah.”
Then on Saturday, Catholic Online pointed to a gruesome video clip that has been posted online, and identified Murad as one of three men who are seen being decapitated by rebel fighters, as dozens of onlookers cheer, chant “Allahu akbar” and take photos. ……ToRead More…..  

Jimmy Carter: Christianity Mistreats Women as Much as Islam

30 Jun 2013693post a comment

Former President Jimmy Carter said on June 28 that both Christian and Islamic religious leaders share the blame for mistreating women across the world.
During an international conference on women and religion, Carter’s examples of religious authorities continuing doctrines of male superiority included the Catholic Church’s practice of banning women from the priesthood and some African cultures’ mutilation of the genitalia of young girls.
Describing these doctrines as theologically indefensible, Carter said they contribute to an environment in which political leaders passively accept violence against women, sex-trafficking, and inequality in the workplace….. To Read More.....
My Take – It’s one thing for the man to have been the leading candidate - until five years ago - for the title of the nation’s dumbest president; and that was saying something considering how many dumb presidents there have been; he continues to be dumb as dirt. 
His policies regarding the Middle East and the Shah of Iran set the groundwork for much of what is going on there now; his economic policies came to total fruition thirty years later causing the housing bubble due to his Community Reinvestment Act, and corresponding collapse and economic mess we are in now, and he continues to be dumb as dirt. 
His religious views are so tainted with left wing heresy that he can’t tell the difference between genital mutilation, which is nowhere commanded in the scriptures, and restrictions on women holding leadership roles in the Christian congregation, which is.   Carter was a disgrace as a president and he is a disgrace as a Christian; and he continues to be dumb as dirt. 

New Poll Finds “Tea Party” Top Terrorist Group In America


Quick! How many Americans have radical Islamists killed since 2001, counting terror attacks against civilians and war casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan? If you answered approximately 10,000 people, you are correct!
Next question: How many Americans have Tea Party members killed since the Tea Party’s creation? If you answered ZERO, you are correct!
Third and final question, which is multiple choice: Who do Obama supporters identify as the most dangerous terrorists in the world? (a) Radical Islamists or (b) Tea Partiers. If you answered (b), you are correct!......To Read More….

Monday, July 1, 2013

Islamic Rejectionism Will Turn Violent in Europe

By Anat Berko
In a 1996 interview, Hamas founder and leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin stated that "every Arab rule that does not rule by the law of Allah and his religion is to be rejected." That was 17 years ago, long before the so-called Arab Spring, the terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe and the "days of rage" declared by Muslim rioters worldwide; now the breathing spaces between the attacks get shorter, and turn into years of rage.
One would expect that Muslim immigrants, whose children were born in the West, would adapt, become part of the Western society and partake of its freedom -- otherwise, why did they immigrate? What we see, however, is the opposite. The beheading of a British soldier in London, and the murder of a soldier in France, are only the beginning of a wave of violence and a dictatorship of fundamentalists who will call the tune. The wave of riots and vandalism carried out by Muslim immigrants in France in 2005 was just a hint at what is to come. The immigrants are brainwashed in the mosques, the madrasas [Islamic religious schools] and informal discussion groups, all of which represent the West as worse than Sodom and Gomorrah…..To Read More…

Continent Adrift

TIM CONGDON July/August 2013
Has something gone wrong with us Europeans? We fancy ourselves as the bastion of parliamentary democracy, the champions of liberty, equality and fraternity, the home of the industrial revolution, the continent to which, above all, Fukuyama's "end of history" is meant to apply . . . And yet, economically, we seem to be going nowhere. In the six years from 2007 the gross domestic product of the European Union has not increased at all.
Perhaps we are wrong to equate GDP growth with "progress". One of the sobering lessons of the 20th century was that industrial expansion does not guarantee moral or cultural progress. All the same, most people would regard material progress — more output, crudely — as a crucial dimension of any larger notion of progress. In modern Europe it has now been absent for more than five years. Unless something changes soon, the ten years to 2017 could be the first peacetime decade since the 17th century to see no economic growth in the continent usually seen as the core of Western civilisation…..To Read More….

France Embraces the War on Terror

James Jay Carafano July 1, 2013
The world has turned upside down. A few years ago, it was common for Europeans to lecture Americans on how badly Washington had mishandled global terrorism. Terrorists should be treated as criminals, they said. The war metaphor was simply not appropriate.  Fast forward to this Thursday……A reporter asked Valls for his assessment of Obama’s speech. “Here is my answer,” Valls responded. “It will last a long time. I don't know if it’s global, regional or local, but the war against terrorism is far from being over.”…..Not far behind his list of worries was the domestic threat from self-radicalization. “We arrested youths in Southern France,” he stated, “they had an Al Qaeda flag in their window. They had almost no knowledge of Islam, but they were assembling a bomb.”  Finally, he warned that Al Qaeda is far from vanquished. “The Sahel is the frontline in the war against Al Qaeda,” he insisted. That is why France fought in Mali…..ToRead More….
My Take - There is nothing like reality to replace the stupidity of leftist ideology. 

An Elusive Dream

by Juliane Mendelsohn
While Americans have always rallied around their country in times of crisis, Europeans have abandoned the dream of a united Europe.
While the European Union was constructed as an economic union, its underlying idea has always been the dream of an integrating structure immersed in our common ideology, that of democracy. Democracy: the religion of the European Enlightenment, the mechanism of the ultimate empowerment of all peoples free and equal. Though not codified, when we say we believe in Europe, this forms both the structure and the content of our dreams.
For a while, integration and empowerment of the people of Europe was achieved solely by means of the free movement of capital. Banks and other financial institutions readily invested in projects outside their own economy. Then crisis struck. The last six years have been a desperate attempt to calm markets. We’ve had minimal success at this, while paying a huge and unacceptable price in the currencies of unity, democracy and the rule of law…ToRead More.
My Take – The commentary is meaningless because everyone….and I mean everyone….who tries to explain the failure of the EU fails to understand why the Union created by the United States succeeded and the Union created in Europe has failed. 
The U.S. succeeded for the very reason the EU is failing.  Although there were differences in the states, some even created to support singular religious groups, the thirteen colonies were largely a monoculture. Culturally they were mostly English and that became the common culture they all shared, understood, liked and could convey their thoughts in the same language....English! 
The second reason it succeeded was because these individual countries - The States - chose to come together and voted for the representatives to the central government.  A government that was supposed to be small and largely uninvolved in the States affairs.  In order to maintain states rights the founding fathers created a somewhat complex system for choosing these representatives to the central government.  Senators were chosen by the state governments as representatives of the state governments, much like an ambassador.  The representatives were chosen by the people to represent the common interests.   Both of these houses would have staggered terms in order to prevent a total change of government as a result of some hysterical crisis, maintaining a balance of power.   
The EU government is a bunch of non-representative bureaucrats that impose their will without restraint or reason.  It was totally different than the union created by the founding fathers of the United States.  The culture of Europe is no more mono-cultural now than it was before the EU was created.  The U.S. became a union to establish and preserve the concept of individual rights over a tyrannical government.  The EU came into existence devoted to the concept of central planning over individual rights.   With the EU’s idiotic regulatory impositions, central planning economic ideals, and mandate for imposing multiculturalism, they created a system that was very similar to the failed Soviet Union without the gulags.  The EU was doomed to failure from the beginning!  And now they are demanding that the U.S. adopt their regulatory insanity in order to create a new European/US trade agreement, such as the Precautionary Principle.  A concept that will make us as impotent, incompetent and unproductive as they are. The only question that needs to be answered here is this; who really needs who here?

Wind power kills birds. Birds that Greenies are supposedly FOND of.

By: Moe Lane (Diary) | June 29th, 2013

Look, the news that the extinct-for-the-area white-throated needletail bird had been spotted in Scotland – only to be promptly sucked into a wind turbine, accompanied by the screams of horrified amateur ornithologists – should not be surprising. Wind farms are Giant Scythes Of Swinging Doom, when it comes to birds.
  • The American Bird Conservancy rather desperately wants to support wind power, which is why they’re begging wind farms to somehow stop the darn things from being on track to kill a million birds a year in the USA by 2030.
  • Most of the articles that I’ve seen estimate that we’re killing about 40% to 60% of that now, with the real problem being that endangered species and raptors are disproportionately represented:
  • Wind farms kill golden eagles.
  • Wind farms endanger bald eagles.
  • Wind farms endanger whooping cranes.
  • At least one wind farm has been given preemptive forgiveness to kill a California Condor, which news came perilously close to causing actual mass aneurysms among bird conservationists.
  • The Obama administration has absolutely no plans to solve the problem. No interest, either. Birds don’t make campaign contributions.
  • Wind farms are killing birds in other countries, too....To Read More...
My Take - If there ever was anything that thoroughly shows how contemptuous the green movement is this is it. No matter how many times it is clearly demonstrated that DDT has nothing to do with egg shell thinning in bald eagles or any other bird for that matter, and that the robin became the most numerous bird in North American during those years...and that all bird populations actually increased during the DDT years; green acolytes rant insanely that it did cause egg shell thinning and the bird population was going to be decimated by DDT; therefore DDT had to be removed from the market.

No matter how many bald eagles wind mills kill they (just as insanely, and hypocritically) support the continued use of them.  And why?  Because the green movement isn't about birds or anything else in the environment; its about power and money and an insane hatred of humanity.

The Boomerang Effect: Union Bosses Fear ‘Collapse’ of Obama’s NLRB & Supreme Court Ruling

How union bosses' own strategy may have backfired on them

By: LaborUnionReport (Diary) | June 30th, 2013

Union bosses are worried, and rightly so. Very soon, the club that union bosses have been using to beat employers over the head with to change the labor relations landscape in America may get taken away from them and they are not happy. The problem is, union bosses wrote the playbook and their strategy is now coming back to haunt them–in spades…..To Read More….

 

Obama's global-warming claims demolished

President 'cherry-picks' facts 'with the same relentless care as Al Gore'
Bob Unruh joined WND in 2006 after nearly three decades with the Associated Press, as well as several Upper Midwest newspapers, where he covered everything from legislative battles and sports to tornadoes and homicidal survivalists. He is also a photographer whose scenic work has been used commercially.
Dubbed the “high priest of climate skepticism,” former Margaret Thatcher adviser Christopher Monckton has become a formidable foe of the movement claiming mankind is causing catastrophic “global warming,” noting that the average worldwide temperature has not risen in nearly two decades. So when President Obama recently announced his plan to bypass Congress and use his executive power to “fight climate change,” targeting the coal-energy industry, Monckton responded.  Some of what Obama said was simply copied from Al Gore’s writings on global warming, he said, and virtually everything was incomplete, misleading – or wrong.
Obama’s declarations included:…To Read More….

Sunday, June 30, 2013

It Can Happen Here

By Alan Caruba

This appeared here, and I wish to thank Alan for allowing me to publish his work. RK

“How the Jews Defeated Hitler” is the title of a new book by Dr. Benjamin Ginsberg PhD, subtitled “Exploding the Myth of Jewish Passivity in the Face of Nazism.” The title is counter-intuitive because, as is well known, the Nazis murdered six million Jews in Europe during the course of a deliberate genocide that has since become known as the Holocaust.

The author is a professor of political science and is chair of the Center for Advanced Governmental Studies at Johns Hopkins University and the book is more than just a history of that horrific period of history. It is not that long ago. I was a child at the time so, within the living memory of the survivors, their children and grandchildren, as well as others like myself around the world, it is living history.

The value of the book is the way it explains how many of the Jews of Europe, particularly those herded into ghettos, failed to grasp what was happening. “It was initially difficult for most Jews to believe that the Germans actually intended to kill them all.

Another major factor was that the Nazis ensured that they were disarmed and unable to defend themselves, as were others who opposed the regime.

Where resistance fighters emerged, Ginsburg notes that “Germany relied, especially in Western Europe, on the help of local police forces to deal with partisans, and, especially in France and Holland, whose local police were quite helpful.” In occupied France, “The French police helpfully compiled a card index of all the Jews of Paris by name, street, occupation, and nationality.”

Therein lies the fears and concerns of Americans as they slowly come to realize that their government not only knows where they live, but a great deal of information about them courtesy of the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Security Agency, right on down to their local law enforcement authorities.

If or when Obamacare is fully implemented, anonymous bureaucrats will be able to “target” selected Americans who are seeking medical care for death simply by denying it. No need to set up concentration camps to kill them en mass. Just as the little girl who needed a lung transplant that was initially denied by the Secretary of Health and Human Services, individuals identified as “patriots” or other enemies of the state could simply be allowed to die.

So, yes, it can happen here.

The focus of the present day animus against Jews in general—extremely active throughout the Middle East and a major trend in Europe—is the nation of Israel. Zionism, the political movement that supports Israel, is a handy substitute for anti-Semitism.

Dr. Ginsberg, however, notes that “In actuality, Israel’s founding was very much the result of the West’s postwar unwillingness to accept Jewish refugees. Governments that felt that even one Jewish refugee was one too many had to find someplace to resettle several hundred thousand Jews.” The State of Israel, like the mythical phoenix, literally rose from the ashes of Europe’s murdered Jews.

“To the Americans and eventually even to the British, the State of Israel seemed the least undesirable alternative. Within two decades of Israel’s creation (in 1948) though, the reasons for its existence were forgotten or had become irrelevant, and new configurations of political forces gave rise to a renewed European anti-Semitic discourse taking the form of anti-Zionism…The European Left loudly proclaims its anti-Zionism by denouncing Israel as a racist and apartheid state and calling for boycotts of Israeli products, citizens, and ideas.” The United Nations is a hotbed of anti-Semitism.

During World War II, however, Jews played leading roles in the partisan efforts to disrupt German aggression, often held leadership positions in the allied military forces and served within them, were active throughout the FDR New Deal administrations, supported the U.S. bond drives to finance the war, and were instrumental in breaking the codes of the Nazis and Empire of Japan. Jews were also the core of physicists and engineers who developed the atomic bombs that speeded the end of the war in the Pacific.

The same authoritarian and leftist forces, whether it is the rise of Islamic ambitions to conquer the world or the efforts of the Left to impose a one-world government via the United Nations or just to undermine the former power and position of the United States as a defender of freedom, are at work today.

You need not be a Jew to fear the growing centralization of power in the federal government.

If you are a gun-owner, you know that the Obama administration and some in Congress seek to amend and erode the Second Amendment in an effort to take your arms away from you; a common goal of fascism.

If you are a member of the Tea Party or a patriot movement, you now know that the Internal Revenue Service sought to deny applications for tax-exempt status needed for fund-raising.

If you fear that your Fourth Amendment right to privacy is being eroded then you know that the Constitution is under attack.

If you are concerned about government by executive order, then yes, it can happen here.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

Saturday, June 29, 2013

Issa Looks to Call Lerner Back to Capitol Hill

By Eliana Johnson  June 28, 2013 2:20 PM

Commitee chairman Darrell Issa suggested he is poised to call Lois Lerner back to Capitol Hill in the wake of a House Oversight Commitee vote on Friday that found she waived her Fifth Amendment right not to testify about the IRS’s targeting of tea-party groups. “The Committee remains focused on hearing Ms. Lerner’s full and truthful testimony,” the Republican congressman said in a statement.

Lerner, the former head of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations division, professed innocence before the committee in May before pleading the Fifth, setting off a debate about whether she had waived her rights.

Issa said at the commencement of Friday’s proceedings that he believed Lerner had done so. But it was South Carolina representative Trey Gowdy who went after the former IRS administrator the most aggressively. “That’s not how the Fifth Amendment works,” Gowdy said. “You’re not allowed to just say your side of the story. . . . She could have sat there and said nothing.”….To Read More….

Liberals Sanction Republican Bible-thumping, Just This Once

Written on Friday, June 28, 2013 by Benjamin Duffy

An historical event transpired this month in American politics that went largely unnoticed. For the first time in my lifetime, a Republican referenced scripture in support of his political agenda and he wasn’t compared to the mullahs of Iran.   The Republican was Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and he was speaking of course about “immigration reform”—his words, not mine. I kept waiting for him to be accused of wanting to replace civil law with the Bible and yet it never came.

“Now, we have an obligation to be responsible to our country and not do anything that hurts America but also our faith calls us to compassion,” said Rubio. “If you took compassion or the principle of compassion out of the Bible, it would be in tatters because it’s all over the place.”  The unwritten rule of American politics is that liberals may speak in Biblical terms but conservatives have to keep it secular. Pat Robertson is a menace, an advocate of creeping—and sometimes galloping—theocracy, while Jim Wallis is a respected clergyman with a passion for justice. The Catholic Church is free to advocate for more spending on social services but should keep its nose out of the abortion debate….To Read More…..

Another Federal Appeals Court Rules against Obama Administration’s Contraceptive Mandate

by Hans Bader on June 28, 2013
Contraceptives are easy to obtain, and forcing employers to include a broad array of contraceptives in employee health insurance makes as little sense as forcing an auto insurer to cover routine oil changes. Actually, it makes much less sense, since without an oil change, your car will eventually break down, but some people have no desire to ever use any contraceptive (and get by just fine without them).
But that did not stop the Obama administration from imposing a contraceptive mandate on employee health insurance, requiring even religious employers (with the exception of churches) to provide them (and not just contraceptives, but — more controversially — certain abortifacients). Some objectors, like Bishop Lori, have likened the administration’s demand that Catholic institutions provide contraceptive and abortifacient coverage to forcing a kosher deli to serve ham.
HHS Secretary Sebelius admits that she did not even seek a legal opinion about the legality of this mandate before imposing it, even though many legal scholars have since criticized it, and it created a political firestorm in 2012….To Read More…..