Wednesday, September 30, 2015

KILLING BABIES: IT’S OBAMA ADMINISTRATION POLICY

KILLING BABIES: IT’S OBAMA ADMINISTRATION POLICY

To me, the most shocking moments in the Planned Parenthood videos are the several instances where people associated with the organization appear to talk about killing babies who have been born alive, and selling their organs. I could hardly believe that this was true, and yet it clearly seems to be implied by PP employees themselves. If true, I thought it was a major scandal, worthy of criminal prosecution.
Evidently I was naive. Many people, apparently, already knew about this practice. In fact, killing babies and selling their body parts is officially supported by the Democratic Party. We know this because of the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which has passed the House. The Act declares that “If an abortion results in the live birth of an infant, the infant is a legal person for all purposes under the laws of the United States, and entitled to all the protections of such laws.” It makes it a crime to kill a baby that has been born alive in the course of an attempted abortion–which, I take it, would include situations, as described in the Planned Parenthood videos, where the abortion appointment comes too late, and the baby is born in the normal course before he or she can be aborted.
I would have thought that killing a baby is already proscribed as murder, but the House doesn’t want to take any chances. What is the Obama administration’s position on the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act? You can read it here:
H.R. 3504 [the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act] would impose new legal requirements related to the provision of abortion services in certain circumstances, which would likely have a chilling effect, reducing access to care.
If the President were presented with H.R. 3134 or H.R. 3504, he would veto them.
So Barack Obama is officially in favor of killing babies that are born alive, and selling their organs.
For many years, I wrote nothing about abortion, never having taken much interest in the issue. But the Planned Parenthood videos have been an eye-opener, for me as for many others. I had no idea that such corruption is not only being permitted, but is financed by a half billion taxpayer dollars. If the Democrats, hungry to profit a few measly dollars from the sale of body parts, can’t draw the line at murdering babies who are born alive, they are far sicker than I realized. Let’s get the House bill through the Senate, and let Obama fulfill his threat to veto it. That will make for an interesting Rose Garden press conference.

Good Riddance, John Boehner

Good Riddance, John Boehner
By Thomas Sowell 

RACIAL DISPARITIES CONFOUND WASHINGTON POST

RACIAL DISPARITIES CONFOUND WASHINGTON POST

In separate articles, today’s Washington Post takes up two racial disparities revealed by recent studies. The first pertains to “degree selection.” Danielle Douglas-Gabriel reports:
African-American and Hispanic students disproportionately earn more bachelor’s degrees in low-paying majors, putting them at higher risk for financial instability after graduation, according to a new study from Young Invincibles, an advocacy group. . . .
The highest paying majors through mid-career were primarily in science, technology, engineering and math-related fields, while the lowest were in law enforcement, education, and professional studies.
Researchers found African-Americans are overrepresented in four of the six lowest-paying fields; the same is true for Hispanic students in three of the six majors at the bottom of the income ladder.
What explains the disparity?
There is no singular reason for the disparities within majors, but centuries of racial discrimination, uneven budgetary support for K-12 education and poor academic advising and student support contribute to the problem, said Tom Allison, deputy director of policy and research at Young Invincibles, and one of the authors of the study.
This is the kind of analysis you’d expect from a liberal advocacy group, and some of it may have merit. But there’s a much more obvious and straightforward explanation that is missing from the Post’s story — college mismatch caused by racial preferences.
If stands to reason that if a student is admitted into a college with grades and test scores well below those of most other students, he or she will be less likely than others to take courses in difficult subject areas such as science and engineering. As Gail Heriot and others have pointed out, research shows that this phenomenon does, in fact, play out. It’s the most obvious explanation for why African-American and Hispanic students tend to pursue the least rigorous course offerings and disciplines.
The second disparity highlighted today by the Post is that black teachers aredisproportionately quitting jobs in inner-city public schools. In Washington, D.C., for example, the portion of the teaching force that is white more than doubled between 2003 and 2011 (from 16 percent to 39 percent), while the share of black teachers shrank from 77 percent to 49 percent. Attrition was a big driver of this shift.
The Washington experience is the most dramatic result found by the study about which the Post reports (by the left-leaning Albert Shanker Institute). But the trend was the same in the eight other school districts analyzed.
The Shanker Institute says that its study raises questions about whether those school systems are doing enough to maintain a diverse teaching corps. But what, short of discriminating against white teachers, can the school systems do to retain African-American teachers?
The answer depends on the cause of the disparity in quit rates. Post reporter Lyndsey Layton quotes professor Richard Ingersoll, who helped write the study. He says that minority teachers quit because of working conditions in their schools.
Thanks, prof. But what conditions drive them to quit in greater numbers than their white counterparts?
Ingersoll cites “standardized curriculum that’s scripted and sometimes micromanaged.” This, he says, “drives teachers nuts.” But why would it drive black teachers more nuts than white teachers? The Post doesn’t say and I can’t think of a plausible reason.
Here’s an alternative explanation: black teachers may be more frustrated by the indiscipline of their students who (this being the city) tend predominantly to be black, and more discouraged by restrictions on their ability to impose discipline.
I’m speculating here. However, the Shanker study itself argues that minority teachers have higher expectations for minority students than white teachers do. And the study cites discipline problems as a reason for high teacher quit-rates among minorities (the Post doesn’t mention this). The study concludes that minority teachers are leaving because they want more classroom discretion and autonomy. It seems likely that an important area in which they crave discretion and autonomy is student discipline.
In any event, I found it interesting, though hardly surprising, that the Post reflexively explained the two racial disparity stories of the day in terms suitable to liberals — past racial discrimination, insufficient spending, standardized curriculum — while ignoring explanations, one of them obvious, that a conservative might advance.

Hillary Clinton’s Empire of Dirt (DP: Worth the time to read--best Hillary deconstruction yet)

Hillary Clinton’s Empire of Dirt
The more she castigates others, the more she convicts herself.
By Victor Davis Hanson 

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

What Ben Carson Got Right about whether a Muslim Should Be President

What Ben Carson Got Right about whether a Muslim Should Be President

By Charles C. W. Cooke 

GOP lawmaker: Obama saying ‘up yours’ to Congress

GOP lawmaker: Obama saying ‘up yours’ to Congress

Greg Nash
Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) on Tuesday said President Obama’s executive order regarding the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge could be summed up as: “Up yours.”
Young claimed the executive order announced earlier this year to recommend designatingnearly all 20 million acres in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) as wilderness to prevent oil and gas drilling is reflective of President Obama’s general attitude toward the legislative branch.
“We have a president that says ‘up yours’ to the Congress," Young said on the House floor, bringing his hand to his nose and wiggling his fingers for emphasis. "That’s not the way to run this business. We have a responsibility as congressmen to do our job."
The Alaska Republican offered an amendment to prohibit the use of funds to implement the revised conservation plan for the Arctic refuge during debate on the 2016 Interior Department appropriations bill. His amendment was adopted on a voice vote in the GOP-controlled House.
“When the president oversteps his bounds, we should take and accept our responsibility. And this is a law he cannot do, but he says, ‘I can do it,’ ” Young said.
“Between EPA and the Department of Interior, they’re trying to cripple this nation — trying to cripple my state,” Young added.
A wilderness designation would require congressional approval. But the Fish and Wildlife Service has already begun to manage the area as wilderness pending lawmakers’ consideration.
Rep. Betty McCollum (D-Minn.) defended the executive actions as a means of environmental preservation.
“The coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge is one of the few places in our nation that remains pristine and undisturbed,” McCollum said.
— Timothy Cama contributed.

THE CLOCK FAKER GOES INTERNATIONAL


The story of Ahmed Mohamed is one of the most revealing of our time. Ahmed, a 14-year-old Texas student whose father keeps running for president of Sudan, took apart a clock and stuck the clock’s workings in a case with a lot of wires, dummied up to look like a suitcase bomb. (I assume everyone understands that such bombs use timers, i.e., clocks.) He claimed to have invented or built a clock, when in fact he had merely dismantled and disguised one. Why did he do this? He wanted school authorities to think that he had brought a bomb to school so he could expose their “racism.” Neil Munro sums it up:
The boy’s device was a commercial 120-volt alarm clock, first dismantled and then placed in a case where the screen could not be seen by any users. [Ed.: Great clock!] The boy also left the clock’s innards exposed, so when the power-cord was plugged in, the clock could electrocute anyone who reached inside the case to turn the alarm on or off. The device’s intended purpose was so obscure, in fact, that puzzled police and teachers thought it was a hoax-bomb.
Which evidently was what Ahmed had in mind. His ploy worked like a charm: the story was big news nationwide, and Barack Obama invited the boy to the White House, while he was also feted by Google, MIT and others. Needless to say, Obama didn’t invite the boy who was suspended from elementary school for biting a pop tart into the shape of a gun to the White House. So this story isn’t about the silliness of zero tolerance school policies, it is about…what, exactly?
Ahmed himself explains on a Turkish web site:
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet DavutoÄŸlu, who is New York for the 70th United Nations General Assembly, has met with 14-year-old student Ahmed Mohamed, who was detained at school by the police in Texas when a teacher thought a clock he had made was a bomb.
Mohamed was among the invitees of a reception in New York on Sept. 25, which was also attended by Prime Minister DavutoÄŸlu. …
 n_89024_1
Speaking to reporters before the reception, Mohamed said he was excited to meet the Turkish prime minister.
“Despite everything, we should always be creative, even when others turn you down,” said Mohamed.
“My dream is to raise consciousness against racism and discrimination,” he said, adding that he would like to visit Turkey in the future.
Mohamed, a Muslim teenager, became an overnight celebrity after a teacher confiscated his clock and alerted school officials when it started beeping in one of his classes.
I take it that “racism and discrimination” means taking note of the fact that Muslims commit an awful lot of terrorist acts. Although, to be fair to the principal and teachers at Ahmed’s school, they would have reacted the same way regardless of who brought a fake suitcase bomb to school. The pop tart kid, after all, was no Muslim. Which is why Google and MIT took no interest in him.

Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   9/29/2015

    Quake Lake; comments on issues

Here’s a bit more of the history of “Quake Lake, Montana” (searchable by title or as “Quake Lake” in Wikipedia). It’s worth your time to read about, as I said last week, “the aftermath of one of the greatest natural disasters we had never heard of. In 1959, under a full August moon, a 7.5 magnitude earthquake shook the whole Yellowstone/Hebgen Lake area (located several miles from West Yellowstone). The ground under the lake literally tilted, raising the south and east shores up 12 to 20 feet—leaving a visible bluff, including the shore in front of our site. Only after driving the north shore of Hebgen Lake, on Hwy 287, and reading the numerous informational signs did we put our bluff together with the disastrous earthquake.
While the shores on our end, and the Madison Arm which was the primary source of the reservoir, lifted 20+ feet, the northern shore, including lodges and homes, dropped by 15 to 20 feet. If you fill a shallow pan with water and raise one side ever so slightly, you will see a small-scale effect of such a geological phenomenon.
The water sloshed toward the dam at the northwest end, topped over the dam and washed away several cabins of a beachfront lodge (partly submerged still). The owner/manager of the lodge ran in desperation past her false teeth on a counter to make a leap across the widening gap to the rising hillside. Her Malamute dog likewise found the bank and led the woman, in her nightgown, around crevices and cracks caused by the quake. In all, 28 people died, mostly below the dam in campgrounds and cabins, some in their sleep as boulders crushed them.
One heartbreaking story recounted a woman with her 3 children who watched dad cling to a tree against the 100+mile-an-hour winds created by the downstream landslide. He, as well as 2 of the children, perished in front of the surviving mom and child. 250 campers and cabin residents gathered below the dam on a hilltop while nurses who’d been camping triaged and treated the injured. The full moon and car headlights, instrumental in their immediate predicament, showed that they were cut off; the authorities thought the dam had failed until one of the camper’s notes reached them. Air Force Helicopters dropped smokejumpers for rescue.
Earthquake Lake resulted from a massive landslide several miles downstream, which rushed downhill over 100 miles per hour leaving an earthen dam, behind which a lake built up to a depth of 190 feet. To this day, house-sized boulders balance, long end up, where they came to rest over a hundred feet above the earth and rock dam.
Large earth-moving equipment was quickly organized and brought to the slide and dam to create a spillway allowing the rising waters from the Madison River to dissipate and gradually carry away enough of the debris to remove the threat of structural failure and downstream devastation. We then took in the multimedia informational displays in the visitor center. Having been subjected to intensifying winds throughout the day, we found 50+ mile-an-hour gusts pushing our car doors shut, and forcing us to lean hard to cross the lot. It contributed to the eerie sense of natural vulnerability those survivors must have felt.
I found some news gems while wading through archived stories at Instapundit.com (pjmedia.com/instapundit). One item, sourced to pjmedia.com/tattler, by Debra Heine on July 7, was titled, “New Docs Reveal DOJ, IRS, and FBI Colluding to Prosecute Obama Opponents.” Look up the title or go to DonPolson.blogspot.com, where it posted last Thursday, the 24th. Obama’s Department of Justice “wanted IRS employees who were going to testify to Congress to turn over documents to the DOJ before giving them to Congress.
“Records also detail how the Obama IRS gave the FBI 21 computer disks containing 1.25 million pages of confidential IRS returns from 113,000 nonprofit social 501(c)(4) welfare groups (nearly every one in the United States) as part of its prosecution effort.” This is such a legal, political and constitutional abomination that, until someone is made to pay with fines and jail, Americans of all ideological leanings are not safe from state-sponsored persecution.
Emperor Obama, never passing up a chance to flout the law and the constitutional separation of powers, grabbed 20 million acres of Alaska. He proclaimed yet another unilaterally-designated wilderness that virtually no one will ever recreate in, but will assure the environmental wackos that he’s on the side of locking up America’s natural resources and against letting America benefit from our own God-given energy reserves.
Reported at Thehill.com on July 7, “GOP lawmaker: Obama saying ‘up yours’ to Congress,” Alaska Republican Don Young condemned Obama’s executive order designating nearly all 20 million acres in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as wilderness to prevent oil and gas drilling, saying “We have a president that says ‘up yours’ to the Congress.”
I find in the entirety of Ben Carson’s comments, on the incompatibility of Islam’s adherents and the Constitution’s oath for higher office, that he was right in every respect—and he did not negate the Article VI “no religious test” rule. “Footnote on Carson and Islam—CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) helps prove Ben Carson’s Point” posted under the “Islam” tab on Wednesday, Sept. 23 at DonPolson.blogspot.com. Read it before criticizing me.
Congrats to the Tehama County Tea Party Patriots on their 6th anniversary. Bring a salad or desert to complement pizza provided by the Tea Party Patriots tonight at the Westside Grange.

The results of the informal dollar-a-vote Republican primary poll: Bush=4, Carson=31, Christie=3, Cruz=11, Fiorina=17, Huckabee=2, Paul=3, Rubio=10, Trump=59. 21 voted to send Hillary to jail.

Monday, September 28, 2015

CARSON AND THE CONSTITUTION — ANDY MCCARTHY’S TAKE

CARSON AND THE CONSTITUTION — ANDY MCCARTHY’S TAKE

Andy McCarthy has weighed in on Ben Carson statement that Islam is inconsistent with the U.S. Constitution and that therefore he “would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation.” Like me, McCarthy disagrees with Charles Krauthammer’s view that Dr. Carson’s statement is inconsistent with the Constitution.
Krauthammer’s position is based on the idea that the Constitution isn’t just a legal document, it is a “didactic one” that “expresses a national ethos.” McCarthy points out, as I did, that this view of the Constitution is a tenet of progressive jurisprudence. As such, it is a recipe for serious mischief.
McCarthy argues:
The Constitution is not a pedagogical tool, teaching us values. It is a legal and political limitation on government’s intrusion into the realm of free thought and action.
It is in that realm that we acquire values, knowledge, and common sense. Thus armed, Americans have been taking the belief systems of candidates for public office into account since the Constitution took effect in 1789.
There is, moreover, a cottage industry of scholarship on how the religious beliefs of the framers and of presidents have shaped the course of American history. It would defy logic to ignore the patent connection between a candidate’s convictions and how he is likely to govern.
McCarthy goes beyond the constitutional question to defend the merits of advocating against electing any Muslim to be U.S. president:
Given that a mainstream interpretation of Islam requires Muslims to follow sharia, and that classical sharia is antithetical to our Constitution, there is no moral outrage in recognizing the dilemma the [president’s] oath [to uphold the Constitution] could pose for a devout Muslim. There is wisdom, not shame, in concluding that we’d rather not have to worry about the potentially divided loyalties of a Muslim president, just as the Constitution relieves us of worry over the potentially divided loyalties of a foreign-born president.
Like naturalized citizens, Muslims can be extraordinary Americans. But until Islam is reformed in such a way that a pluralistic, pro-liberty Islam is the world’s dominant Islam — and Islamic supremacism is the marginal exception, not the all-too-familiar rule — it is perfectly reasonable for Ben Carson, and any other American, to oppose the idea of a Muslim president of the United States.
It is more than reasonable to base one’s decision in a presidential election on the ideology of candidates. In my view, however, it is better to assess ideology based on a candidates’ record than to use Muslim status as a surrogate for ideology and end the inquiry there.
From a constitutional point of view, however, there is nothing objectionable about a citizen advocating the latter approach, as Dr. Carson seemed to do before rethinking his position.