Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Obama Replenishes the Taliban ... Or ‘How Wars End in the 21st Century’

Obama Replenishes the Taliban ... Or ‘How Wars End in the 21st Century’

By Andrew C. McCarthy

President Obama finally completed the prisoner swap he has been pleading with the Taliban for years to accept. While the president draws down American forces in Afghanistan and hamstrings our remaining troops with unconscionable combat rules of engagement that make both offensive operations and self-defense extremely difficult, the Taliban get back five of their most experienced, most virulently anti-American commanders.

In return, thanks to the president’s negotiations with the terrorists, we receive U.S. Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl—who, according to several of his fellow soldiers, walked off his post in 2009 before being captured by the Taliban. (For more on this, see Greg Pollowitz’s post at The Feed.) This was shortly after Sgt. Bergdahl reportedly emailed his parents that “The US army is the biggest joke the world has to laugh at”; that he was “ashamed to even be an American”; and that “The horror that is America is disgusting.”
Sgt. Bergdahl’s father, Robert, was by Mr. Obama’s side during Saturday’s Rose Garden press conference, at which the president announced Sgt. Bergdahl’s return but carefully avoiding mention of the jihadi-windfall the Taliban received in exchange. Mr. Bergdahl is an antiwar activist campaigning for the release of all jihadists detained at Guantanamo Bay. His Twitter account, @bobbergdahl, has apparently now deleted a tweet from four days ago, in which he said, in echoes of Islamic supremacist rhetoric, “@ABalkhi I am still working to free all Guantanamo prisoners. God will repay for the death of every Afghan child, ameen!”
We have been warning for years here that Obama was negotiating with the Taliban—even as he duplicitously bragged that the U.S. had “removed the Taliban government.” The president and his minions reportedly even turned for mediation help to Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi—the top Muslim Brotherhood sharia jurist who issued a fatwa in 2003 calling for violent jihad against American troops and support personnel in Iraq. (Indeed, the administration has hosted Qaradawi’s sidekick, Sheikh Abdullah bin Bayyah—who also signed the fatwa—at the White House for consultations … and the State Department was embarrassed to be caught touting bin Bayyah just a week ago.)
Nearly two years ago, I noted that Obama had just sweetened the pot on a longstanding offer to release the five Taliban leaders—beseeching the Taliban just to agree to participate in Afghan peace talks, not to make any actual concessions (other than freeing Sgt. Bergdahl). As Reuters reported at the time:

The revised proposal, a concession from an earlier U.S. offer, would alter the sequence of the move of five senior Taliban figures held for years at the U.S. military prison to the Gulf state of Qatar, sources familiar with the issue said. U.S. officials have hoped the prisoner exchange, proposed as a good-faith move in initial discussions between U.S. negotiators and Taliban officials, would open the door to peace talks between militants and the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
The revised proposal would send all five Taliban prisoners to Qatar first, said sources who spoke on condition of anonymity. Only then would the Taliban be required to release Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, the only U.S. prisoner of war. Previously, U.S. officials had proposed dividing the Taliban prisoners into two groups, and requiring Bergdahl’s release as a good-faith gesture to come before the second group of prisoners would be moved out of Guantanamo.

The Obama administration has never designated the Afghan Taliban as a terrorist organization. (The Bush State Department similarly failed to designate the Taliban, although President Bush did designate the group as a terrorist organization in an executive order that, pursuant to a congressional statute, criminalized the conducting of various financial transactions with it.) In 2012, the Obama White House made much of the fact that it finally designated a close Taliban confederate, the Haqqani network, as a terrorist organization. But as Eli Lake reported earlier this year, the administration refrained from using the designation to seize assets—which is the whole point.
Plain and simple, President Obama has never had any intention to confront and defeat the Taliban. As I observed back in 2009, General Stanley McChrystal, then the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, pronounced in a memo explaining U.S. strategy that the war in that country was the Afghans’ war, not ours. In his estimation, our troops’ primary reason for being there was not to defeat America’s enemies but to enable the Afghans to build a better life, and therefore “our strategy cannot be focused on seizing terrain or destroying insurgent forces; our objective must be the population”—meaning, to protect Afghans.
Obama’s overriding goal has been to end the war, not to win it—as if it were possible, by walking away, to end a war that the enemy started and continues to fight. The president has thus announced that our forces—which aren’t being permitted to prosecute a war anyway—are being pulled out. Less than 10,000 will remain as sitting ducks from an abandoned mission by the end of this year, and all of them will be withdrawn by the end of 2016. The president knows the Taliban are ascendant, aggressive, and biding their time until they can seize control again. He knows that the Taliban’s official return will be a boon to al Qaeda, which Taliban leadership continues to support. So Obama is trying to portray a humiliating American defeat as an Obama foreign-affairs triumph: the Taliban’s return will be made to look like a negotiated peace settlement instead of a surrender. The prisoner swap is just the latest accommodation of the Taliban on the road to this sorry outcome.
At the Weekly Standard, Tom Joscelyn profiles the five Taliban commanders Obama has released. They include Mullah Mohammed Fazi, perhaps the Taliban’s senior warrior (its “army chief of staff”) and longtime al Qaeda ally; Mullah Norullah Noori, a senior military commander who fought side-by-side with al Qaeda; Abdul Haq Wasiq, a senior Taliban intelligence official who helped train al Qaeda and fought with it against U.S. forces after 9/11; Khairullah Khairkhwa, a Taliban governor and al Qaeda trainer who brokered an alliance with Iran to collaborate against American-led forces; and Mohammed Nabi, who worked with the Haqqani network and al Qaeda to coordinate attacks against American and Coalition forces.
Meet the new Afghanistan, same as the old Afghanistan. In Obama’s America, “This is how wars end in the 21^st century.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/379265/obama-replenishes-taliban-or-how-wars-end-21st-century-andrew-c-mccarthy

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Down Memory Lane: Remember When Liberals Said the VA Was Proof that Socialism Works?

by John Hinderaker in Health Care, Liberals

At the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto pulls together liberals’ endorsements of Veterans Administration health care. It goes beyond just claiming that VA medicine was top notch; liberals often claimed that the supposed success of the VA is proof that government is superior to the private sector. Taranto titles his post “Socialist Supermodel.” You should read it all, but here are a few highlights:

[I]n January 2006, … former Enron adviser Paul Krugman wrote this:

I know about a health care system that has been highly successful in containing costs, yet provides excellent care. And the story of this system’s success provides a helpful corrective to anti-government ideology. For the government doesn’t just pay the bills in this system–it runs the hospitals and clinics.
No, I’m not talking about some faraway country. The system in question is our very own Veterans Health Administration, whose success story is one of the best-kept secrets in the American policy debate.
The “secret” of the VA’s “success,” Krugman argued, “is the fact that it’s a universal, integrated system.”
***
Timothy Noah, then with Slate.com, proclaimed in 2005: “Socialized medicine has been tried in the United States, and it has proven superior to health care supplied by the private sector. . . . The socialized medicine to which I refer is the complex of hospitals managed by the Veterans Administration.” His post, “The Triumph of Socialized Medicine,” was based on a Washington Monthly article by Phillip Longman, which carried the slightly more modest headline “The Best Care Anywhere.” And in 2009, Ezra Klein revealed that “one of my favorite ideas” is “expanding the Veterans Health Administration to non-veterans.”

Do you suppose these liberals, and others, will acknowledge how wrong they were about the VA, and consider what the implications might be for their government-knows-best philosophy?
Just kidding.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/05/down-memory-lane-remember-when-liberals-said-the-va-was-proof-that-socialism-works.php

Making Hay While the Sun Shines: The Left Politicizes Elliot Rodger

by John Hinderaker in Crime, Liberals

You have to hand it to the liberals: they never miss an opportunity to convert tragedy into political gain. In the wake of Elliot Rodger’s six murders–three with a knife and three with a gun, plus injuries inflicted with an automobile–they are calling, once again, for gun confiscation. I guess they are, anyway. As usual, they denounce conservatives and say things like “end the madness,” but confiscation seems to be the point of it all.
Once again, though, liberals are denied the holy grail of mass murderers–a conservative perpetrator, preferably a follower of the Tea Party. Rodger, like most of the others, was a devoted liberal. He followed the Young Turks on YouTube, a far-left group led by a goof named Cenk Uygur who once was an MSNBC host. So, foiled once again, liberals can make only their broader propaganda points.
Michael Moore deserves to be singled out for special condemnation. On Facebook, he purported to respond to requests for comment:

We are a people easily manipulated by fear which causes us to arm ourselves with a quarter BILLION guns in our homes that are often easily accessible to young people, burglars, the mentally ill and anyone who momentarily snaps.

So was Rodger was manipulated by a fear of conservative ascendancy propagated by the Young Turks? Apparently so.

While other countries have more violent pasts (Germany, Japan), more guns per capita in their homes (Canada [mostly hunting guns]), and the kids in most other countries watch the same violent movies and play the same violent video games that our kids play, no one even comes close to killing as many of its own citizens on a daily basis as we do — and yet we don’t seem to want to ask ourselves this simple question: “Why us? What is it about US?”

Heh. Moore hasn’t checked the numbers. There are many places with murder rates higher than ours. Pretty much all of sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, Russia, and others. Actually, the white murder rate in the U.S. is comparable to other Western countries.

Nearly all of our mass shootings are by angry or disturbed white males. None of them are committed by the majority gender, women. Hmmm, why is that?

I think testosterone has something to do with it. But wait! Elliot Rodger’s mother is Indonesian. Doesn’t that count for something? Apparently not, when liberal memes are at stake.
Actually, mass shootings are pretty equally distributed among ethnic groups. The worst mass shooter in American history was an Asian-American, Seung-Hui Cho, and an African-American, John Muhammad, murdered at least ten people in the D.C. area. And, of course, the overall homicide rate among African-Americans is something like eight times the white rate.

When the NRA says, “Guns don’t kill people — people kill people,” they’ve got it half-right. Except I would amend it to this: “Guns don’t kill people — Americans kill people.”

Murder occurs in every society, but at widely varying rates. Switzerland and Canada have high rates of gun ownership, but low homicide rates. White Americans own lots of guns but commit murders at a similarly low rate. While it is true that “Americans kill people,” some categories of Americans kill a lot more people than others–a fact which liberals understandably try to obscure.
This, however, has little to do with mass murders or serial killers. Mass murderers, while very rare, are found everywhere; to cite just one recent example, the train station attack in China in which 29 people were murdered. With knives. And one of the worst school massacres ever took place in Scotland.
As usual, the Left’s effort to gain political advantage from a murderous rampage by one of its own goes nowhere.
Beyond that, some might argue that Rodger was a prototypical liberal male, only carried to a pathological extreme. Consider the profile: socially awkward, convinced of his own brilliance but not notably successful in life, hungry for revenge against those who have done better despite their obvious inferiority, eager to gain power over others, but through political influence rather than firearms–is this not a typical liberal on Twitter, or elsewhere on the internet? Or, for that matter, in the Obama administration? Isn’t state power the legal path to the long-awaited revenge of the liberal nerds? This strikes me as a plausible suggestion.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/05/making-hay-while-the-sun-shines-the-left-politicizes-elliot-rodger.php

Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT by Don Polson Red Bluff Daily News 6/03/2014

Measure A—Yes to State of Jefferson; Show Dems our will!

My headline says it all.

Off the top of my head, I’d have to say that, in my decades of providing and evaluating employment resumes, I’ve rarely personally known of applicants “padding” their records in the sense of claiming things that weren’t true. Many times I, or another manager, would confirm an applicant’s dates of employment, but previous employers eventually provided nothing beyond mere dates, lest they place their company in legal or employment commission jeopardy. Most managers or owners have encountered curious “gaps” in someone’s history; upon inquiring, some are frank about having been housed and fed by, shall we say, the taxpayers in a secured facility. You could often sense a previous employer’s tone of voice: drab, as in “Yeah, they worked those dates,” or positively cheery, as in “Wow, did we hate to lose (so-and-so).”

I never placed one word on a resume that was not the literal truth; however, I share with many the routine and noncontroversial practice of emphasizing the duties and accomplishments that were most relevant to the position being applied for. Throughout one’s employment history, it is actually advisable to keep your resume current and flexible, no matter your job security (companies do go out of business), and to tailor your history so that someone with 25 seconds to scan what you’ve written quickly sees what they are looking for in a new hire. Over one’s work history, it’s just reality to have not only numerous employers but also more than one field.

I feel safe to say that if someone stated an inaccuracy that erred on the “inflated” side, and when such an inaccuracy (falsehood in a literal sense) accrued to their financial benefit, let alone provided minimal qualification for a position, that person, no matter his or her otherwise commendable and appealing performance—that person would/should be terminated and asked to reimburse said employer for fraudulently obtained compensation. That’s not me being excessively harsh; it’s standard procedure in the business world. Most employers will skip pursuing back pay; they’re just happy to let the desk or office get cleared out.

No one is above being truthful about their employment history, whether it’s using phony dates to hide one’s job-hopping, 3 to 6 month stints, or claiming to have training not actually achieved, or mentioning an impressive learning or business contact never really contacted—or, in the case of a local candidate, claiming a degree never actually awarded. My tolerance is strained to the breaking point when I consider the relative ease of earning an actual Masters degree in an education field from one of many reputable correspondence or online, study-at-your-own-pace, institutions, when compared to an actual brick-and-mortar campus requiring fulltime attendance. Readers can hopefully read into this who will get my vote for Superintendent of Education.

Back to last week’s unfinished topic, “Ten Obamacare Promises Broken” (Cathy Burke, 12/29/2013, Newsmax).

5. “Obamacare won’t add ‘one dime to our deficits.’” On Feb. 26, 2013, the Government Accountability Office issued a report projecting that Obamacare will add to the long-term federal deficit by $6.2 trillion.

6. “The ACA will cost around $900 billion over 10 years.” That’s not even in the ballpark. Each round of cost projections have been higher than the previous one, noted blogger Cam Harris; the then-current Congressional Budget Office’s report of May 2013 pegged the real 10-year price tag at around $1.8 trillion.

7. “Families making less than $250,000 won’t see ‘any form’ of tax increase.” The Heritage Foundation found at least $770 billion in 18 separate tax hikes, fees, and penalties, many of which heavily impact the middle class. Among those are the individual mandate tax, the medical device tax, and new penalties and limits on health savings and flexible spending accounts.

8. “The ACA will keep healthcare costs down.” While the president’s Council of Economic Advisors peddled this line endlessly, the closest they can come to any quantifiable support is a so-called “reduction in the rate of growth,” which even they admit is unrelated to Obamacare. James Capretta, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and American Enterprise Institute, wrote “Another Broken Promise: Obamacare is Driving Costs Up, Not Down” (Weekly Standard, 11/26/2013). The National Health Expenditure projections showed a slowdown in health spending that began long before the law was passed. HHS actuaries conceded that the reasons for declining rates of health care spending growth are a result of the economy, fiscal policy, Medicare cuts and slower growth in Medicaid, Medicare and other government programs—all unrelated to Obamacare.

9. “You have a deadline and a mandate.” The parade of squishy, malleable deadlines for individuals and businesses makes this promise nothing short of laughable.

10. “The state sites are working great.” Hello, Cover Oregon! Numerous state exchanges have produced epic failures and collapse, costing hundreds of millions of wasted tax dollars.

Experience and results since January 1 have only provided ever-mounting evidence that Obamacare is the fraudulent, deceptive and unsustainable boondoggle conservatives said it would be.

Worried About Floods Due to Rising Sea Level? Forget It: Not Happening (DP: worth it if only skimming through the math--the point is PROVEN)

Worried About Floods Due to Rising Sea Level? Forget It: Not Happening

by John Hinderaker in Climate

The global warming hysterics’ favorite fantasy these days is that Antarctic ice will melt due to hypothetical warming, leading to catastrophic flooding as the level of the oceans rises. It is commonly asserted that sea level will rise at least three feet by the end of the century. Put aside whether the Earth actually will warm and whether a three-foot rise would really be catastrophic. Put aside, too, any doubts about how much melting will occur even if the Earth warms by a few degrees, given that the average annual high temperature in Antarctica is -49 F. Does the reality of melting ice bear any mathematical relation to the oft-predicted flood scenario?
A reader who is familiar with geometry and arithmetic–which means he is not a reporter–decided to test the hysterical claim. I will reproduce his email in full:

The most recent climate alarmism is the report claiming increased ice melt in the West Antarctic glaciers, supposedly a leading indicator of a catastrophic, exponential, unstoppable rise in sea levels with devastating consequences for low lying areas and coastal cities. Irrespective of the validity and accuracy of the reported measurements of ice melt, the projection of future catastrophe is laughably implausible — and a simple analysis of the spherical geometry of the planet shows why the alarmism is entirely unwarranted.
Let’s start with the often repeated claim that we can project a sea level rise of at least 3 feet by the end of the century — 86 years from now. It is easy to calculate the volume of ice that would have to melt to produce that increased level and then compare it to the allegedly observed melt to determine how plausible the alarmism is.
To say that sea level will rise by 3 feet is to say that the nominal radius of the Earth would increase. But because of the “piling up” of water against the 30% of the Earth’s surface that is land, the average increase in radius (if there were no land against which the sea water would “pile up”) would be less than 3 feet, to a first approximation 3 * .7 = 2.1 feet. How much volume would the sphere of the Earth increase if its radius increased by 2.1 feet from ice melt? The volume of a sphere is 4/3*pi*radius(3). If we take the pre-melt radius as 4000 miles and the post melt radius as 4000 miles plus 2.1 feet, the volume increase is approximately 80,000 cubic miles. All of this, by assumption, is in the 70% of the Earth’s surface which is water to effect a three foot rise in the sea level.
So over a period of 86 years remaining until the end of the century, 80,000 cubic miles of water from ice melt would be required for a three foot rise in sea level, or about 930 cubic miles per year. Is this a lot? Or a little? Well, compared to the amounts of ice melt actually being observed from Antarctica and Greenland — and now being hyped by alarmists — it is huge.
Today’s report in the New York Times, “The Big Melt Accelerates,” [Ed.: This is the story that Steve commented on earlier today.] is revealing — if you do the math, which, of course, they don’t. The Times report claims that 310 billion tons of water melted into the oceans from Antarctic and Greenland glaciers and another 260 billion tons, amazingly, from the 1% of the Earth’s land-based ice that is in mountain glaciers. Is the total of 570 billion tons of water from ice melt a little or a lot?
Since they are measuring metric tons, that amounts to 1.25 x 10(15) pounds of water, which at 8.35 pounds per gallon is 1.5 x 10(14) gallons which, in turn, at 7.5 gallons per cubic foot is 2 x 10(13) cubic feet. At 5,280(3) cubic feet to a cubic mile we have 136 cubic miles of water or about 148 cubic miles of ice when adjusted for the expansion of water as it freezes. That’s about 12 miles square of glacier assuming on average the glaciation is 1 mile thick.
This compares to the required 930 cubic miles of water per year for 86 years to get to a sea level rise of 3 feet at the end of the century — a factor of almost 7 times what is said to be observed. Stated differently, at the new alarmingly increased level of ice melt it would take about 600 years for the purported 3 foot rise in sea level to obtain; the implied rise is 6 one-hundreds of an inch per year, or about 5.25 inches by the year 2100.
There is nothing complicated in this analysis — it’s just simple geometry and arithmetic. And it takes as given the reported observations of allegedly increased ice melt. It is patently obvious that for the catastrophic flooding massively hyped by the MSM and climate change alarmists to happen there must be a HUGE increase in glacier melt in West Antarctica and Greenland starting now and continuing. Every year that the observed ice melt does NOT increase by a factor of 7 from today’s rate of melt just requires an even greater increase in subsequent years for the alarmists’ predictions to happen. Exponential, indeed.
It seems exceedingly implausible that the rate of ice melt can accelerate over the next 86 years to produce a 3 foot rise in ocean surface levels and consequent land inundation. It would require an enormous and sustained discontinuity in the observed rate of ice melt starting immediately for this result to obtain — or else a huge future explosive and exponential rate of ice melt. If the IPCC is in fact predicting such a pattern it is extremely convenient since no dramatic presently observed ice melt is required for this prediction to be treated as “true!”
As to why the MSM and their fellow alarmists would fail to check the plausibility of these projections by offering the simple math, that is left as an exercise for the reader.

Meanwhile, at Watts Up With That?, a “sanity check” on the significance of the hysterics’ claim that “Three years of observations show that the Antarctic ice sheet is now losing 159 billion tonnes of ice each year – twice as much as when it was last surveyed.” Using a different approach, the author reaches a similar conclusion:

If one cubic kilometer of water (i.e., one gigatonne of water) is spread evenly over the entire 361 million square kilomters, the thickness of the new layer of water will be given by:
1 km³ / 361 x 106 km² = 2.78 x 10-6 meters = 2.78 microns.
Or, in terms of gigatonnes:
1 Gt x (1 km³/Gt) / 361 x 106 km² = 2.78 x 10-6 meters = 2.78 microns / Gt
That is, one cubic kilometer of water (i.e., one gigatonne of water) will add less than 3 millionths of a meter to the oceans!
From the press release, we are seeing about 159 billion tons/year of ice converted to meltwater (unless it sublimates), so the effect on sea level would be 159 x 3 millionths of a meter, or 477 millionths of meter of sea level rise per year from this. (or in other words 0.47 mm which works out to 47mm/century or ~1.85 inches/century)
For another perspective, a gigatonne of water is approximately one cubic kilometer. Frozen as ice, it would be expanded slightly, but for the purposes of perspective lets just say that is negligible. So, the ice loss per year would be 0.159 cubic kilometers.
According to the British Antarctic Survey BEDMAP2 project:
The derived statistics for Bedmap2 show that the volume of ice contained in the Antarctic ice sheet [is] 27 million km(3).
…
And so, the loss of 159 cubic kilometers of ice per year is apparently headline worthy, because at that rate of loss, it would take 169,811 years to lose all the 27 million cubic kilometers of Antarctic ice.
I’m pretty sure we’ll have gone through a few ice ages by then.

Apparently many people (including “science” writers for major newspapers) don’t understand that ice has been melting and sea level has been rising for thousands of years, since the end of the last Ice Age:
clip_image044

Since the end of the Little Ice Age, sea level has been rising at a rate of about 7 inches per century:

No doubt the rise in sea level will continue for the foreseeable future; that is, until the onset of the next Ice Age. Which, if we are lucky, won’t be for quite a few years yet, although geologic history suggests that we may be most of the way through the current inter-glacial period, perhaps nearing its end.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/05/worried-about-floods-due-to-rising-sea-level-forget-it-not-happening.php

Monday, June 2, 2014

Media Slowly Turn Against Obamacare

Media Slowly Turn Against Obamacare
By Michael Reagan

You may notice I have an extra spring in my step today. And why wouldn’t I? The Associated Press, of all people, has ruled that my warnings regarding Obamacare are credible.

It would have been nice if AP had joined the real world before the 2012 election, but better late than never.

You may recall that — aside from the basic unconstitutionality of forcing people to buy health insurance and determining what the insurance would cover — warnings regarding Obamacare contained three major elements. They are: government interference on a scale this massive means that relationships between doctors and patients will be affected; countless people will lose their existing insurance and finally, there is no way to keep healthcare cost down that does not involve rationing. The mainstream media, with AP "fact checkers" leading the charge, uniformly called these warnings exaggerated and false. The basis for this negative judgment was in many cases simply recycling the Obama administration’s Obamacare propaganda. Now the slow drip, drip, drip of reality has worn away at the boulder of MSM denial. Now the AP ruefully admits, “Before the law took effect, experts warned that narrow networks could impact patient's access to care, especially in cheaper plans. But with insurance cards now in hand, consumers are finding their access limited across all price ranges.

“The dilemma undercuts President Obama's 2009 pledge that: "If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period." Consumer frustration over losing doctors comes as the Obama administration is still celebrating a victory with more than 8 million enrollees in its first year.”

There are a couple of noteworthy items in that grudging acknowledgment of the truth. First it didn’t “undercut” Obama’s “If you like your doctor you can keep him” promise. It showed the promise to be the outright lie it always was. Second, “limited access” means you can’t keep the insurance policy you liked either, because in many cases it disappeared.

But the most telling fudge, and proof if you needed it that the media is still in the tank for Obama, is when AP explains, “Narrow networks are part of the economic trade-off for keeping premiums under control and preventing insurers from turning away those with pre-existing conditions.”

Narrow networks is public relations spin for the more accurate word: rationing. Which means everything conservatives warned about has come true.

Americans are competent enough to choose their own life insurance, car insurance, and homeowner’s insurance, why should health insurance be any different?

Dan Calabrese sums up what a conservative alternative to the Obamacare monster would look like.

“In a broad sense, this entirely predictable result demonstrates that one of the biggest flaws in Obamacare was that it doubled down on what was wrong with healthcare finance in the first place. People didn't need to be made more reliant on third parties to pay for their healthcare. They were already too reliant on third parties to begin with.

"Effective reform would have lessened the influence of health insurers and changed tax incentives to put more money in the hands of people to pay for their own basic care — limiting the use of insurance coverage to truly catastrophic needs.”

http://news.reaganreports.com/t/3968277/97659511/712058/8/

Deceptions of the Climatistas

by Steven Hayward in Climate

The New York Times is doing its job as an echo chamber for the Climatistas with a piece earlier this week on arctic and Antarctic ice melt, featuring this pairing of photographs of the Muir glacier in southwestern Alaska in 1941 and 2004. I’ve used these same two photos myself in presentations about the observable climate changes in the world. But is this proof that it is human-caused, in whole or in part?

Turns out the Times and others who use this photo pairing leave something out. Paul Homewood of NotALotofPeopleKnowThat blog points us to this next photo, from 1951, showing that much of the retreat of the Muir glacier occurred between 1941 and 1951—largely before the modern warming spurt that has Al Gore soiling his BVDs.

Actually it turns out the Muir glacier has been retreating for more than 200 years. Homewood notes this report from the U.S. Geological Survey, which provides this map of the extent of glaciation in Glacier Bay since the late 18^th century.

Gee—I wonder why the Climatistas and their media toadies would leave this out?
JOHN adds: In general, haven’t the world’s glaciers been retreating since the end of the last Ice Age, 10,000 or more years ago? I believe so. Certainly since the end of the Little Ice Age. Do people really not understand this? Perhaps not. More to come on this topic later in the day.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/05/deceptions-of-the-climatistas.php

Efforts Mount to Gloss Over Islamist Ideology of Boko Haram

U.S. Islamists are working hard to cleanse the semantics of the media so the Islamist ideology of Boko Haram isn't a topic of scrutiny.

By Ryan Mauro

The press conference organized by Muslim advocacy groups to distance Islam from Boko Haram.

The reason that Boko Haram believes its kidnapping of over 200 Nigerian girls is justified is because of Islamist teachings that the taking of female slaves is justified during jihad
. And this jihad is not limited Nigeria. In a recent video, its leader said it is at war with Christianity and democracy.
There are efforts to gloss over the fact that Boko Haram is inspired by Islamist doctrine. Comedian Dean Obeidallah writes that Boko Haram is not “Islamic” and the media shouldn’t describe it as “Islamist,” “Islamic terrorists” or anything of the sort.
Ahmed Bedier, former executive director of the Tampa chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and current leader of United Voices for America, speaking at a press conference organized by Muslim advocacy groups to distance Islam from Boko Haram, said he was “tired of people coming on television asking, ‘Where does this ideology come from?’ ” His answer was that it “comes from nowhere.”
Yet, the leader of the same press conference, Imam
Johari Abdul-Malik, the spokesman for the Dar Al Hijra mosque in Falls Church Va., said in reference to formally excommunicating Boko Haram’s leader Abubakar Shekau, “There is a great reluctance to excommunicate someone by extension. … It would be like convicting someone in absentia.”
Two days later, in a telephone interview, when asked to give sources from Islamic texts that contradict Boko Haram’s Islamist ideology, the interviewer reported that Abdul-Malik “quickly ended the call.”
CAIR and its allies work hard to cleanse the semantics of the media so the Islamist ideology isn't a topic of scrutiny, but Boko Haram leader Abubaker Shekau wants the world to know that he is motivated by Islamic sources. For example, he said:
“If we meet infidels, if we meet those that become infidels, according to Allah
, there is not any talk except hitting of the neck. I hope you, chosen people of Allah, are hearing. This is an instruction from Allah. It is not a distorted interpretation. It is from Allah himself.”
He also cites Islamic sources when justifying Boko Haram’s kidnapping of the Nigerian girls. Slavery of one’s adversaries, he says, is permissible during a jihad. The captives are the booty of war. Shekau explains, “There are slaves in Islam, you should know this, Prophet Muhammed took slaves himself during [the] Badr war.”
Shekau isn’t saying that it is permissible to take just anyone as a slave, but only those that belonged to the enemy. So how do these innocent girls qualify as seized enemy property? Because Shekau believes the jihad is not against an army, government or ethnic group but against Christianity, Western influence, democracy and Muslims that Boko Haram sees as impure.
Shekau declared, “To the people of the world, everybody should know his status, it is either you are with us mujahideen
or you are with the Christians.”
He continues:
“We know what is happening in this world, it is a jihad war against Christians and Christianity. It is a war against Western education, democracy and constitution… This is what I know in Quran
. This is a war against Christians and democracy and their constitution, Allah says we should finish them when we get them.”
Contrary to Bedier’s assertion that Boko Haram’s ideology “comes from nowhere,” it does come from well-established Islamic interpretations, even if most Muslims disagree with those interpretations (a mere 2% of Nigerian Muslims view Boko Haram favorably).
Shekau’s view is substantiated by IslamWeb, a popular website that endorses Sheikh
Yousef al-Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood
. In a 2002 fatwa

FatwaGlossary Item

A legal ruling made according to Sharia (Islamic law)

(authoritative Islamic ruling), IslamWeb concludes:
“Islam left only one source for slavery that is enslavement in war and only legal war (i.e. against the non-Muslims). Indeed, the enslavement of prisoners of war was a part of warfare. So, Islam did not free the slaves of its enemies while its own followers are enslaved by those enemies and given the worst possible treatment.”
In another 2002 fatwa, IslamWeb specifies that females from the enemy camp can be taken as booty. It says:
“’the slaves that your right hand possesses’…includes the slave girls and slaves in general those who are under the control of a free Muslim. As a rule, the only channel of producing this segment of society is Jihad in the cause of Allah.”
It continues:
“At last, a Muslim has the right to have sex with a slave girl since she is "in the possession of his right hand.”
Islam Q & A is a website by Sheikh Muhammad Salih al-Munajjid. He is an Islamic scholar that preaches in Riyadh and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and has two television shows.
In fatwa 10382, Islam Q & A states, “It is permissible for you to take concubines from among those whom you seized as war booty,” regardless of if one has a spouse. It says, “Islam allows a man to have intercourse with his slave woman, whether he has a wife or wives or he is not married.”
“The scholars are unanimously agreed on that and it is not permissible for anyone to regard it as haraam [prohibited] or to forbid it. Whoever regards that as haraam is a sinner who is going against the consensus of the scholars,” it rules.
Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi is another supporting source. He is the Islamist scholar that founded the Jamaat-e-Islami group in Pakistan and is continues to be referenced by Islamists around the world. The New York-based Islamic Circle of North America, one of the largest Muslim-American groups, continually cites him as a top authority on Sharia
.
Maududi wrote, “And forbidden to you are the wedded wives of other people, except those who have fallen in your hands (as prisoners of war): This is the Law of Allah.”
Then there’s the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America, based in California. In 2006, it issued a fatwa written by Dr. Hatem al-Haj, a member of its Fatwa Committee.
“God miraculously laid down a system by which all the tributaries feeding into the river of slavery would be cut off except for the captives of war,” AMJA’s fatwa rules (emphasis mine).
The fatwa’s author, Al-Haj, is also the Dean of the College of Islamic Studies of the Mishkah Islamic University of North America that is headquartered in Minnesota. Mishkau University also has branches in Detroit, Houston and Montreal and on-site activities in Tampa and Rutgers University in New Jersey.
All of these Islamic sources are in agreement. That doesn’t just “come out of nowhere,” as former CAIR official Ahmed Bedier insists.

http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/efforts-mount-gloss-over-islamist-ideology-boko-haram

Sunday, June 1, 2014

Gallup: Skepticism About Global Warming Grows

Gallup: Skepticism About Global Warming Grows

By Adam O'Neal

Americans are deeply divided over the cause and seriousness of global warming, according to a new Gallup survey. While opinions about the urgency of climate change have fluctuated throughout the past 15 years, the number of Americans who have serious doubts has more than doubled since 2001.

Roughly one-quarter of Americans are not worried about global warming “much or at all”; 36 percent have mixed feelings; and 39 percent “attribute global warming to human actions and are worried about it.” (According to Gallup, the “groupings stem from a special ‘cluster’ analysis of four questions that measure Americans' belief and concerns about human-induced global warming.”)

Women are significantly more likely than men to be concerned about global warming. Sixty percent of “concerned believers” are women, and two-thirds of skeptics are men.
The divide in belief varies even more wildly along partisan lines: Republicans (or those who lean Republican) make up 80 percent of skeptics, while Democrats (or those who lean Democratic) constitute more than 76 percent of believers.
“As with many issues in the past decade, Americans' views have grown more polarized,” concluded Gallup’s Lydia Saad.
The nationwide survey of 1,048 adults was conducted March 6-9 and has a margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/04/22/gallup_skepticism_about_global_warming_grows_122371.html#.U1aembBKCGw.twitter

Latest Front In War on Guns: Sue the Gun Store

by John Hinderaker in gun control, Second Amendment
In 2012, a man named William Spengler set his upstate New York house on fire, and lay in wait for firemen to respond to the blaze. When they did, he shot four of them with a rifle, killing two. Now some of the firefighters, or their heirs, are suing Gander Mountain, one of the country’s largest outdoor retailers:

The families of four New York state firefighters are suing St. Paul-based Gander Mountain, alleging that the retailer’s Rochester, N.Y.-area outlet could have prevented a “straw buyer” from purchasing the rifle that was turned over to a convicted killer and used on Christmas Eve 2012 to kill two firefighters and wound two others.
The lawsuit, which has the legal heft of prominent gun control advocates behind it, said the rifle used in the bloody ambush should never have been sold to 22-year-old Dawn Nguyen in 2010 with the eventual shooter at her side.

The suit alleges that Gander shouldn’t have sold Nguyen the rifle, even though she was a perfectly legal purchaser, because 1) Spengler was with her at the time; 2) she bought two firearms at once, a rifle and a shotgun; and 3) she allegedly paid cash. These grounds are weak: if plaintiffs had their way, stores could only sell one firearm at a time, and only to people who enter the store alone. And, while cash (i.e., a Federal Reserve note) is “legal tender for all debts, public and private,” guns are apparently the one product you should be required to pay for with a credit card.
Straw purchasers are notoriously difficult to catch. It would help if they were prosecuted more vigorously; firearms-related prosecutions have dropped sharply during the Obama administration, because Eric Holder has other priorities. Nevertheless, the plaintiffs’ anti-gun lawyer puts the burden squarely on Gander Mountain:

“Gun dealers have a responsibility to ensure they are selling guns to people legally entitled to purchase them,” said Jonathan Lowy, director of the Brady Center’s Legal Action Project and co-counsel for the families and surviving firefighters. “Just like a bar has a responsibility not to sell alcohol to minors, Gander Mountain has a responsibility not to sell firearms to convicted criminals.”

Of course, Ms. Nguyen was not a convicted criminal, and she was legally entitled to buy firearms. But you may wonder: why did William Spengler need someone else to buy the rifle for him? If you read far enough, you learn this:

The suit spells out that Nguyen entered Gander Mountain with Spengler, who was prohibited from owning firearms after his conviction for killing his 92-year-old grandmother with a hammer.

Prohibited from owning guns? More to the point, he should be prohibited from owning hammers. But the more relevant question is, what the heck is he doing out on the streets? A few moments’ research discloses that Spengler beat his grandmother to death with a hammer in 1980. He was convicted of murder, and soon became eligible for parole. His first parole hearing, in 1989, didn’t go well. He argued with the board over how many times he had struck his grandmother with the hammer, and mused aloud about the possibility that if he were freed, he may kill again: “If you were capable of it once, are you capable of it again?” Nevertheless, the parole board freed him in 1998, following another parole hearing in 1997.
This case illustrates the futility of the standard approaches to gun control. It was illegal for Spengler to own guns–as well it should be–but he had no trouble obtaining them. (On the same day he ambushed the firefighters, he also murdered his sister with a handgun.) Currently, liberals are pushing for “universal background checks.” Background checks already are universally run by stores that sell firearms, like Gander Mountain. That is why criminals often use straw purchasers. Here, Gander ran a background check on Dawn Nguyen, and she passed. What went on in this case is already illegal, and, while existing laws could be better enforced, especially as to straw purchasers, adding new laws for maniacs like Spengler to violate–the list begins with first degree murder, of course–will do no good.
What would help? How about not letting known murderers like Spengler out of prison in the first place? Law enforcement couldn’t save his grandmother, but once Spengler was convicted and imprisoned for that crime, why let him go? What earthly reason can there be to free a man who beat his own grandmother to death with a hammer?
I suppose the parole board enjoys sovereign immunity and can’t be sued, so that leaves Gander Mountain. Needless to say, Gander broke no laws and, even if the allegations of the complaint are assumed to be true, did nothing blameworthy. But Gander is in the lawyers’ sights because they are part of a political campaign to suppress gun ownership:

The families’ legal team in this action includes the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which was founded in 1974 as the National Council to Control Handguns and has for decades been lobbying for stricter gun laws.

The case is already being politicized by the Democrats:

On Monday, Nguyen’s gun purchase was held up by a member of Congress from Rochester while she criticized an amendment to block funding for efforts to require gun dealers in southwestern border states to notify authorities when they sell two or more of certain long guns to the same person within five days.
“We’re particularly sad in our district,” said Democratic Rep. Louise Slaughter said during a committee hearing, “and I don’t think they’re going to be very happy to find out there’s something that could have kept that young woman from doing that [but] was turned down by this committee.”

This is classic liberal logic: if you make it illegal to buy two long guns within five days, or require reporting of such purchases to the local police department, a criminal like Spengler will only have his straw purchaser buy one gun. And then, if he wants another, he will send the straw purchaser back to the store six days later. Or–here’s an idea!–he can send the purchaser to a different store on the same day. How dumb do liberals think criminals are?
Gander Mountain stores are a terrific resource. Among other things, they do a lot of firearms training. No doubt that training has saved lives–a more constructive contribution to public safety than is made by the gun grabbers. And some Gander stores, like the one near my house, have high-quality ranges where you can shoot in a safe, family-oriented environment:

So if you are in the market for outdoor products–and who isn’t, in May?–it wouldn’t hurt to swing by your local Gander Mountain store. Your purchases will help to defray the needless costs that well-funded ideologues are imposing, in an effort to advance their political agenda.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/05/latest-front-in-war-on-guns-sue-the-gun-store.php

Barack Obama: An Epic Incompetent

by John Hinderaker in Barack Obama

At Commentary, Pete Wehner sums up the emerging consensus on President Obama. Wehner’s indictment is all the more searing for being delivered in his characteristically measured tone:

The last eight months have battered the Obama administration. From the botched rollout of the health-care website to the VA scandal, events are now cementing certain impressions about Mr. Obama. Among the most damaging is this: He is unusually, even epically, incompetent. …
The emerging narrative of Barack Obama, the one that actually comports to reality, is that he is a rare political talent but a disaster when it comes to actually governing. The list of his failures is nothing short of staggering, from shovel-ready jobs that weren’t so shovel ready to the failures of healthcare.gov to the VA debacle. But it also includes the president’s failure to tame the debt, lower poverty, decrease income inequality, and increase job creation. He promised to close Guantanamo Bay and didn’t. His administration promised to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed before a civilian jury in New York but they were forced to retreat because of outrage in his own party. Early on in his administration Mr. Obama put his prestige on the line to secure the Olympics for Chicago in 2016 and he failed.
Overseas the range of Obama’s failures include the Russian “reset” and Syrian “red lines” to Iran’s Green Revolution, the Egyptian overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, and Libya post-Gaddafi. The first American ambassador since the 1970s was murdered after requests for greater security for the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi were denied. …
But that’s not all. The White House response to everything from the VA and IRS scandals to the seizure of AP phone records by the Department of Justice is that it learned about them from press reports. More and more Mr. Obama speaks as if he’s a passive actor, a bystander in his own administration, an MSNBC commentator speaking about events he has no real control over. We saw that earlier today, when the president, in trying to address the public’s growing outrage at what’s happening at the VA, insisted he “will not stand for it” and “will not tolerate” what he has stood for and tolerated for almost six years. His anger at what’s happening to our veterans seems to have coincided with the political damage it is now causing him.

Has Barack Obama ever actually been president? He doesn’t seem to think so. Obama takes it as an affront when anyone suggests that one of his administration’s almost countless failures might have something to do with him. It is as though he really believed that fundraising, golfing and occasional ceremonial appearances are a president’s only job duties. After 5 1/2 years, his “Who, me?” routine has worn very thin.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/05/barack-obama-an-epic-incompetent.php

From Sin City to Sim City

by Scott Johnson in Administrative state, Minnesota

Stanley Kurtz drew the outlines of Obama’s second-term plans to redesign the urban areas of the United States in Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs To Pay For the Cities. Our friend Katherine Kersten took note of the Minnesota angle and has conducted her own investigation.
Kurtz wrote about Kathy’s work in the NRO column “Meet TOD: The way Obama wants you to live.” As Paul Mirengoff has observed here regarding her work on this subject, Kathy has not liked what she found. Not one bit. Now she is on a midnight ride to let our fellow Minnesotans know that the Obamatons are coming.
The Democrats continue their obsession with the redistribution of wealth and income, but now they seek to add the redistribution of “the poor” themselves to their portfolio. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Kathy tells the story in “Turning the Twin Cities into Sim City” (behind the Journal’s dreaded subscription paywall). Here is the opening of Kathy’s column:

Here in the Twin Cities, a handful of unelected bureaucrats are gearing up to impose their vision of the ideal society on the nearly three million residents of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro region. According to the urban planners on the city’s Metropolitan Council, far too many people live in single family homes, have neighbors with similar incomes and skin color, and contribute to climate change by driving to work. They intend to change all that with a 30-year master plan called “Thrive MSP 2040.”
The Met Council, as it’s known here, was founded in the 1960s to coordinate regional infrastructure—in essence, to make sure that sewers and roads meet up. Over the years, its power to allocate funds and control planning has expanded. Now, under Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton—who appointed all 17 current members—the council intends to play Sim City with residents’ lives…

Consider this:

While minority residents have been streaming into the Twin Cities’ suburbs for the past 15 years, the Met Council wants to make sure there is a proper race-and-income mix in each. Thus it recently mapped every census tract in the 2,800 square-mile, seven-county region by race, ethnicity and income. The purpose was to identify “racially concentrated areas of poverty” and “high opportunity clusters.” The next step is for the council to lay out what the region’s 186 municipalities must do to disperse poverty throughout the metro area.

The project underway in Minnesota represents social engineering at its worst, yet it is only a preview of what Obama and his friends deep within the bureaucratic infrastructure have in store for the rest of the country, perhaps in a town near you. Kathy concludes with a wakeup call that applies to us, but also to others similarly situated:

Once implementation begins…Twin Cities residents will likely realize that Thrive MSP 2040′s centralized decision-making and Orwellian appeals to “equity” and “sustainability” are a serious threat to their democratic traditions of individual liberty and self-government. Let’s hope that realization comes sooner rather than later.

One thing Kathy’s depiction of the Democrats’ Sim City has in common with the Gram Parsons/Chris Hillman depiction of Sin City: “It seems like this whole town’s insane.”

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/05/from-sin-city-to-sim-city.php