Saturday, May 2, 2015

Shorter post, but interesting political news today

Update

Friday was a tough day. In the morning before rehab I had a call from Donna Payne. My Marine buddy from Folsom, LA, who got his lung five days before me, is in the new Orleans VA with Pneumonia. That late Friday evening, I saw Facebook posts offering condolences to our friend Mike Briggs on the death of his wife, Norma, also a dear friend, wonderful person and our Scottish Country Dance Teacher when we first arrived in Madison. I didn't believe it at first, I thought it had to be a misunderstanding. We just had lunch at their home on April 20 with four other friends. Though she was 79, she appeared in good health, showing those who braved the cool wind around her lovely garden. And gone ten days later. Extra hard on Mike, as he is recovering from a hip transplant he underwent on April 24. She was saying how glad she was to see me up and about. As a colonial tombstone in my district said, "Man knoweth not his time." ~Bob

Please join me in considering a donation to this worthwhile charity with a proven track record in dealing with disaster situations. According to Charity Navigator, 97% of donations go to programs rather than administrative costs and other expenses ( Interesting contrast to Clinton Foundation, which spends only 15 percent on programs) Americares, 88 Hamilton Av., Stamford, CT 06902 or you can go to their website Americares.org and donate by credit or debit card. There is a tab for Napal earthquake relief. --Chuck

Random Thoughts for May, 2015. By Robert A. Hall

General News and Comment


Oops: Bill Clinton 'Mistakenly' Misreports Taxable Income as Tax-Free Donations. By Guy Benson
Excerpt: It acknowledged in response to POLITICO’s questions that it mischaracterized as foundation donations money from the China Overseas Real Estate Development and the U.S.-Islamic World Conference. That money was actually honoraria paid for Bill Clinton speeches by those entities, said foundation officials, who added this week those were the only mistakes “we are aware of.”


Progressive Hypocrite: George Soros reportedly could face up to $7B tax bill, after delaying payment for years
Excerpt: George Soros may soon face a monumental tax bill -- of nearly $7 billion -- after years of playing hard-to-get with the IRS. Despite Soros having advocated for higher taxes on the wealthy, the liberal billionaire reportedly has delayed paying his own for years thanks to a loophole in U.S. law. That loophole was closed by Congress in 2008. But before that, Bloomberg reports, Soros used it to defer taxes on client fees. Instead, he reinvested them in his own fund, and they grew tax-free. 


Interesting: The Unburied Truth About Jim Jones. By A. J. Delgado
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/377369/unburied-truth-about-jim-jones-j-delgado
Excerpt: he Sacrament, a new suspense film closely based on the 1978 Jonestown massacre, illustrates the extremes to which leftism corrupts and the ends to which its philosophy can ultimately lead. ... the Jonestown massacre itself is only dimly known to contemporary Americans, and the details of the event are often ignored by news and academia. It is, after all, an inconvenient story, in which a Communist community, led by a committed Marxist and ’60s Bay Area radical, came to a horrifying end. Following the mass suicide, the mainstream media spun the story into one of religious fanaticism rather than leftist fanaticism. Had a right-winger persuaded followers to join him in retreating from society and building their own enclave, then held them prisoner and ultimately persuaded or forced them to take their own lives in some sort of revolutionary act, Jonestown would be taught more widely in schools than Abe Lincoln. Instead, when Jonestown is addressed, the Marxism of the People’s Temple is whitewashed and the story is packaged as one of a religious cult gone awry, or as a warning against the perils of organized religion.

Cleveland Teachers Union Fights For Right To Wear Jeans, Flip Flops, BEER T-SHIRTS. By Eric Owens
Excerpt: Michelle Pierre-Farid, the district’s chief academic officer, explained that most teachers won’t have to adjust their wardrobes to meet this new standard. However, Pierre-Farid said, she and other school district officials have seen some teachers lounging into work wearing jeans, T-shirts and the like on ordinary workdays. Once, Pierre-Farid remembered, she saw a teacher wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a beer can. On other occasions, she has seen impressively short skirts and feet festooned with flip-flops. Students already have a dress code, Pierre-Farid noted. (I still wear a coat and tie to church, despite all the jeans, tee-shirts and shorts, for fear my grandmother will rise from her grave, grab me by the earlobe and march me home to change. When I was in school, male teachers wore coats and ties, and we had to wear collared shirts and no jeans. Not saying that was why we got a better education, but part of the decline for sure. ~Bob

Remember the Lusitania. By George F. Will
Excerpt: Owning a fragment of history — a Gettysburg bullet, a Coolidge campaign button — is fun, so in 1968 Gregg Bemis became an owner of the Lusitania. This 787-feet-long passenger liner has been beneath 300 feet of water off Ireland’s south coast since a single German torpedo sank it 100 years ago Thursday. It contains the 4 million U.S.-made rifle bullets and other munitions that the ship had been carrying from neutral America to wartime Britain.

How The U.S. Won the Vietnam War. By Mark Nuckols 
Excerpt: Well, the Communists won the military phase of the war, only to lose the peace. Under the gross mismanagement and inefficiency that are the hallmarks of communism, the Vietnamese suffered 17 years of post-war misery and poverty. Vietnam became such an economic basket case that the rulers in Hanoi realized that the country was broke, and that financially broke countries can’t afford the military means to defend their sovereignty. They capitulated. In 1991 the Communist regime began introducing free market reforms to at least partially liberate the economy from the communist bureaucracy that was stifling economic growth. Since then, foreign investors have become the main driver of Vietnam’s economy. 

Video: Opinion Journal: Vietnam’s Legacy: American Weakness Abroad


Rising Dragon News

China, Russia to Hold First Joint Mediterranean Naval Drills
Excerpt: According to news from USNI, China and Russia will hold joint naval drills in mid-May in the Mediterranean Sea. The maneuvers will be the first time the two countries will hold military exercises together in this part of the world. According to the Chinese Defence Ministry, China and Russia have held naval drills in Pacific waters, but never before in the Med.

Gun News

Victim fatally shoots alleged carjacker near Minute Maid Park
Excerpt: The victim told Houston police he was getting in his SUV when a gunman walked up and demanded the keys. That's when the SUV's owner pulled out a gun of his own and opened fire, killing the suspect at the scene. Police said another suspect, possibly a lookout, ran away.

Suspected robber shot in South Seattle
Excerpt: Seattle police were called to Martin Luther King Jr. Way South and South Othello Street just after 1:30 p.m. for a report of gunfire. Officers found a 19-year-old man with gunshot wounds to his thigh and calf, as well as a broken arm, according to Seattle police.
Witnesses told investigators that the wounded man had attempted to rob another man outside a nearby store, police wrote in a news release. “The target of the robbery drew a gun and opened fire on the 19-year-old,” police wrote.

Race Card News

Friend of Charged Cops on Fox: Freddie Gray Was a ‘Great Witness’ for Us. By Josh Feldman 
Excerpt: And perhaps one of the most striking things this cop told Megyn Kelly is that Gray snitched for the cops. They told Kelly that in this case, like in many other cases, Gray would “put on a show” and resist and show that he wasn’t cooperating with the police, but once he got to the station, he was a “great witness.” Gray apparently “helped the department solve many crimes and different acts of violence.”


Excerpt: That half of the officers are black appears to dispel the notion that the death of Gray was racially motivated, but the debate raged on social media:

MSNBC Wonders if Thug is the New "N" Word
Excerpt: Only at MSNBC could people wonder if the word thug was the new N-word. (Ya can't fix stupid! --JB. Obama called the rioters in Baltimore thugs. Nazis are thugs. Skinheads are thugs. Aryan Nation are thugs. MSNBC personnel are just, well, see below. ~Bob)


Worth Reading: David Simon on Baltimore’s Anguish: Freddie Gray, the drug war, and the decline of “real policing.” By Bill Keller
Excerpt: David Simon is Baltimore’s best-known chronicler of life on the hard streets. He worked for The Baltimore Sun city desk for a dozen years, wrote “Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets” (1991) and with former homicide detective Ed Burns co-wrote “The Corner: A Year In The Life Of An Inner-City Neighborhood”1 (1997), which Simon adapted into an HBO miniseries. He is the creator, executive producer and head writer of the HBO television series “The Wire” (2002–2008). Simon is a member of The Marshall Project’s advisory board. He spoke with Bill Keller on Tuesday. BK: What do people outside the city need to understand about what’s going on there — the death of Freddie Gray and the response to it? DS: I guess there's an awful lot to understand and I’m not sure I understand all of it. The part that seems systemic and connected is that the drug war — which Baltimore waged as aggressively as any American city — was transforming in terms of police/community relations, in terms of trust, particularly between the black community and the police department. Probable cause was destroyed by the drug war. It happened in stages, but even in the time that I was a police reporter, which would have been the early 80s to the early 90s, the need for police officers to address the basic rights of the people they were policing in Baltimore was minimized. 

Worth Reading: Stand Up for Baltimore's Real Victims. By Daniel Greenfield
Excerpt: There are real victims in Baltimore. They are the hundreds of thousands of people who have been forced out by riots, crime and misery. You can see some of the real victims still hanging on, trying to run stores on thin margins, sweeping up broken glass and talking about how they called the police and no one answered. They, and not Freddie Gray and his fellow criminals, are the real victims. They're not just the victims of the thugs threatening their lives and destroying their livelihood. They're also the victims of wealthy and powerful politicians like Sheila Dixon, Rawlings-Blake and Barack Obama. (Greenfield is not holding back on this one, not at all. And the sad thing is that it's hard to figure out how things will ever get better in Baltimore, if the people keep voting in incompetents and crooks, for whom the whole trip to power is about playing the race deck day in and day out, and who somehow don't become objects of scorn and lessons for the people in who NOT to elect. But then again, suppose some honest, principled person got elected to be Mayor. He or she would be facing such a longstanding mess with such enormous inertia that you wonder how they could possibly start to really turn things around. When 30 years of incompetence and decline have set the stage, industry has left, people have left, the tax base is down, all kinds of things need repair or rebuilding, how can anyone turn over some new leaf and reverse all the negativity and get all the civil servants to pitch in and work harder than ever before, get the unions to give concessions, and get the citizens to feel a lot better about their city and their lives and their opportunities? I sure don't know! But they sure need something a whole lot better than they have now. --Del)

Marilyn Mosby Called For Special Prosecutor In Michael Brown Case But Refuses Calls For Recusal [VIDEO]
Excerpt: “It is clear that your husband’s political future will be directly impacted, for better or worse, by the outcome of your investigation,” Baltimore Fraternal Order of Police president Gene Ryan said after Mosby’s charging announcement....Mosby is also close to Billy Murphy Jr., the attorney representing the Gray family. Murphy donated $5,000 to Mosby’s political campaign and was a member of her transition committee following her November election, the Baltimore Sun reported. (Gee, in the Old West, they'd have gotten 6 horses and made 6 nooses and put the cops on the horses and lynched them right there. Notably, Mosby used the pronoun "our," not separating herself as a public servant seeking true, legitimate justice, but rather joining the black liberation/Nation of Islam, SEIU, etc., folks. Also did not condemn those "youth" who looted, burned, cut fire hoses, threatened/harmed first responders and did a lot of damage to the grocery store that donated to the senior center in the area and destroyed the CVS drug store that filled their prescriptions....and also their homes. But that is all approved by the black liberation community. --Barb)

“Activist” Unleashes Vile Anti-American Rant While She Desecrates The Flag
Excerpt: In honor of Eric Sheppard—a black college student wanted in Georgia after his gun was allegedly found on campus during a series of protests—a few black Atlanta women are making their own videos while they stomp on the American flag. As previously reported by Campus Reform, a group of African-American protesters walked on the American flag at Valdosta State University to protest white supremacy and the “genocide” of African-Americans in the nation. Sheppard, one of the organizers of the protest, went missing last week after campus police found his backpack unattended on campus with his gun inside. He is a member of the New Black Panther Party and describes himself as a terrorist against white people. 

Obamacare/Government Healthcare News

Ohio Obamacare expansion costs $3 billion in first 15 months. By Jason Hart 
Excerpt: Americans’ tax burden is already $3 billion heavier because of Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare. By putting more able-bodied, working-age childless adults on Medicaid than Kasich projected, Obamacare expansion is reducing incentives to work and threatening traditional Medicaid recipients’ access to care faster and at greater cost than anticipated. After Kasich expanded Medicaid unilaterally, a state panel approved $2.56 billion in Obamacare spending for the expansion’s first 18 months. The money was meant to last until July, but it ran out in February.

"You're Greener than Gore" News


Harvard Poll: Young Americans Are Becoming Global Warming Skeptics. by Michael Bastasch
Excerpt: A Harvard Public Opinion Project, reported by the Harvard Political Review, found that the “assumption that younger adults are more liberal when it comes to global warming does not hold up; if anything, they are even more skeptical.” Not only that, but young Americans are not very supportive of government efforts to regulate carbon dioxide.
The Harvard poll found that the “youngest survey respondents were more conservative than any other age group, with only 28 percent of 18 to 20-year-olds” agreeing that the government should do more to fight global warming. The survey also found that only “eight percent [of young people are] in strong agreement with that statement.”

Religion of Peace News

The Marshall Island's Cautionary Tale. By Caroline Glick
Excerpt: On Tuesday, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps forcibly commandeered the Maersk Tigris as navigated its way through the Straits of Hormuz. Iran controls the strategic waterway through which 40 percent of seaborne oil and a quarter of seaborne gas transits to global markets. The Maersk Tigris is flagged to the Marshall Islands. The South Pacific archipelago gained its independence from the US in 1986 after signing a treaty conceding its right to self-defense in exchange for US protection. According to the treaty, the US has “full authority and responsibility for security and defense of the Marshall Islands.”

ISIS militants execute 600 Yezidis northern Iraq. By Sarbaz Yousef and Ali Isso
Excerpt: On Friday the so-called Sharia Court of the Islamic State group (IS/ISIS) reportedly executed 600 hostages from the Yezidi community of Shingal (Sinjar) in the Talafar district in northern Iraq. The group piled the bodies into the well of Alo Antar on al-Ayyadiya highway, local sources reported. Shahin Shingali, a fighter in the ranks of the Peshmerga forces, stated to ARA News that since Friday the IS radicals transferred nearly 700 Yezidi hostages to Talafar.

Speaking Out About Islam Could Become Hate Crime
Excerpt: Great Britain has an Islam problem, as do many European countries. Many Muslims fail to assimilate. They want to bring their Muslim culture, religion, and laws with them and displace the existing way of life. They freely admit this. In fact, Islamic leaders have made it clear that the long-term goal is to make Great Britain into a caliphate.

"We have the Swords"- Nasheed from Islamic State's Ajnad Media. By Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi
War poetry from ISIS. The West used to have War Poetry--Kipling, Alan Seeger. Now we have Metrosexual Musings, without rhyme or meter as that takes work and thought. Must not forget "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" by Julia Ward Howe. " I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel, As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal, Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel..." ~Bob

Excerpt: In a tweet last month, Jund al Aqsa, an al Qaeda-linked jihadist group in Syria, identified Adel Radi Saker al Wahabi al Harbi as its fallen military commander. Al Harbi was wanted by the US government, had previously served as the deputy leader of al Qaeda's Iran network, and was a member of al Qaeda's so-called "Khorasan Group."

Video: Arab Muslim Slave Trade Of Africans: 140+ million slaves
Worth Hearing. ~Bob

Too little, too late: A seat at the table in Afghanistan. By Heather Barr
Excerpt: For years, Afghan women have advocated for their rightful place in talks about the future of Afghanistan. They’ve been shut out, put off, ignored, given token roles and patronized with promises that they don’t need to be there themselves — the men in the room will look after them. (Doesn't matter. Anything the Taliban concede to women will go out the window once they are in power and can enforce their version of Shari'a Law. The Qur'an makes it quite clear that "men are in charge of women. See my poem, written a few years ago. "When the Taliban Come back." http://tartanmarine.blogspot.com/2009/11/when-taliban-comes-back.html.
~Bob)

Cowards: 145 American Writers Think Honoring Charlie Hebdo is 'Islamophobic.' By Phyllis Chesler
Excerpt: Salman Rushdie, a writer who knows what it is to pay the price for having criticized Islam and is also a former President of PEN had this to say: They are "six authors in search of character." He is right. They do not know how to stand up to the false charge of "Islamophobia." (Cowards. Not one of them would have a problem mocking Christians or Jews, because they won't come after you with AK-47s. ~Bob)

Islamic State demands $23 million for Christian hostages. By Robert Spencer, JihadWatch.org
Excerpt: They’re acting in full accord with Islamic law. Here is a salient passage on this issue from a Shafi’i manual of Islamic law: When an adult male is taken captive, the caliph considers the interests … (of Islam and the Muslims) and decides between the prisoner’s death, slavery, release without paying anything, or ransoming himself in exchange for money or for a Muslim captive held by the enemy. (Umdat al-Salik o9.14)

Muslim cleric: Jews “malignant tumor” that “can only be treated by eradication.” By Robert Spencer, JihadWatch.org
Excerpt: This is not what the world considers hate speech. What the world considers hate speech is opposing this.

IS Hides Heavy Weaponry at Religious Sites. They know that jets won’t shell mosques and churches, Iraqi official says. By Sardar Sattar
Excerpt: A member of the Nineveh Province council has revealed that Islamic State (IS) hides heavy weapons in mosques and churches in Mosul to avoid air strikes. Hanin Ghado said in a press conference on 29th April that IS insurgents mostly settle in the densely populated areas of Mosul to hide themselves among civilians, and they use mosques and churches to store heavy weapons. Ghado said, “They use the mosques and churches because they know that the coalition jets won’t shell holy locations.

*****
Robert A. Hall is a Marine Vietnam Veteran who served five terms in the Massachusetts State Senate. He is the author of The Coming Collapse of the American Republic. http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Collapse-American-Republic-prevent/dp/1461122538/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1304815980&sr=1-5 For a free PDF of Collapse, e-mail him at tartanmarine(at)gmail.com. Hall’s eleven books are listed here:

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