Conservatively Speaking for July 19, 2010
Email This Post
- 
Print This Post
-
· Debating In Underwear Outlawed In Boulder
· Republican Ahead In PA Gov Race
· Hiring Quotas Buried In Last Week’s Financial Regulation Bill
· Million Dollar City Manager
· 4,500 Passports For Sex Offenders
· Obama Job Approval Hits New Low.
· Trillion Dollar Tax Increase Looms
· Obama A Socialist: 55% Say
· Chronic Drunks Cost San Franciscans $13 Million A Year
· Obama Versus Israel: Special Editorial
Rep. Sue Myrick (R) S. Carolina says it is “very frightening” that the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah has been sending agents to Mexico — and some have already entered the United States across the porous border.
The days when a citizen could address the Boulder City Council wearing only underwear may be over.
The council will vote on new decorum rules in September, seven months after a resident stepped up to a microphone in his boxer shorts.
The rules were already under review, but that incident led to a proposed ban on undressing during meetings.
It’s not the first time the university town has wrestled with how much clothing is enough. In April, the city barred teens and adults from showing their genitals in public. That could put the wraps on two annual traditions that involve running or cycling naked.
But the council declined to outlaw topless females, despite complaints about a woman who gardens in a thong and gloves.
The White House announced that the stimulus package saved 3 million jobs. But they said there are still jobs that need to be saved — President Obama’s, Joe Biden’s, Harry Reid’s, and Nancy Pelosi’s — Leno.
Republican State Attorney General Tom Corbett holds a 10-point lead again this month over Democrat Dan Onorato in Pennsylvania’s race for governor.
The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Voters in Pennsylvania shows Corbett picking up 48% of the vote. Onorato, the chief executive of Allegheny County, earns 38% support. Five percent (5%) prefer some other candidate in the race, and 10% remain undecided.
Last month, Corbett posted a near-identical 49% to 39% lead. It was the closest the contest had been to date.
The Palestinian Authority has requested that NATO send troops to secure any new Palestinian state in the West Bank.
Officials said PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has relayed a proposal for the stationing of NATO troops along the borders of any Palestinian state in the West Bank. They said the proposal was drafted in cooperation with U.S. envoy George Mitchell, assigned to accelerate efforts to win Israeli agreement for the establishment of a Palestinian state by 2012.
Buried deep in the bowels of the massive financial-regulation bill the Senate passed Thursday are massive race- and gender-employment provisions that will cost countless millions to enforce and appear to duplicate other civil-rights initiatives already in place.
What this mean is that all private financial institutions doing business with the federal government will be forced to hire specific quotas. Section 342 of the bill calls for an “Office of Minority and Women Inclusion” to be established in each of 29 federal bureaus and offices.
The regulations goes well beyond ensuring that discrimination in hiring decisions does not occur. Instead, they require assurance of “fair inclusion” – a ahirs breath away for formal hiring quotas.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who served as chief of staff for former President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, tells Newsmax that the rules represent a “dramatic change in employment legislation.”
The BBC is reporting that Venezuela may have massive oil reserves — even more than Saudi Arabia. We could have invaded closer to home and saved gas getting there.- Leno
The Los Angeles Times revealed in a front-page story that Bell City Manager Robert Rizzo is paid a salary of nearly $800,000 a year. His contract calls for annual increases of 12%. That means his one-year increase in salary next year will be over $94,000.
If he stays with the job - and why wouldn’t he - and the contract doesn’t change, the city manager will be making more than a million dollars a year in a couple of years.
Highly paid public administrators in Bell don’t stop with the city manager. Police Chief Randy Adams pulls down $457,000 a year. The Times article points out that salary is 50% more than the yearly salary of the Los Angeles police chief and L.A. County sheriff.
A community of 36,000, Bell is predominantly Latino, its ethnic roots evident in the markets and panaderias that line its main thoroughfares. Mom-and-pop auto businesses, coin laundries and beauty salons dot the city, located southeast of downtown, where the Los Angeles River cuts beneath the 710 Freeway. The average taxpayer salary there is $40,000 a year.
Bell is being investigated by the Los Angeles County district attorney over the compensation of its City Council members, who have voted themselves about $100,000 a year for their part-time positions. In a city the size of Bell, a council member is typically paid about $400 a month, according to state records.
The largely Latino immigrant citizens of Bell often are language challenged, and do not understand what’s going on in their city or simply don’t care they are being robbed blind.
Disneyland opened 55 years ago on July 17, 1955
4,500 U.S. passports of the more than 16 million issued in fiscal year 2008 were issued to registered sex offenders according to a Government Accountability Office report.
In part the report says, “Federal statutes authorize the Secretary of State to deny issuance of a passport in certain circumstances, such as while an individual is imprisoned or on parole or supervised release for a conviction for international drug trafficking or sex tourism or is in arrearages for child support,” the report states. “However, there is currently no comprehensive program to deny passports to applicants who are registered sex offenders.”
The GAO report said the Department of State cannot legally deny passports to registered sex offenders, except those specifically convicted of sex tourism. The Hillary Clinton run department called the embarrassing report “misleading.”
Folderol (FOL-duh-rol) noun:1. Nonsense; foolishness. 2. A trifle; gewgaw. Etymology- From a nonsense refrain in some old songs. The word is also spelled as falderal. Usage: “Canonisation is a slow business in the Catholic church: all that folderol about miracles and devil’s advocates.” John Sutherland; What’s Wrong With Teaching Rap in Schools?; The Guardian (London, UK); Jul 5, 2004.
A Fox News – Opinion Dynamics Poll released Thursday founds Obama with a 43% job approval rating – the worst yet.
The poll finds 76 percent of Democrats approve, which is the lowest positive rating he’s received among this group. Two weeks ago 84 percent of Democrats approved. Obama’s highest approval rating among Democrats was 93 percent a year ago May.
Among independents, 40 percent approve today, down from a high of 66 percent in June 2009.
Obama’s average approval rating among Democrats was 87 percent in 2009 and is 81 percent in 2010. For independents, the president’s average approval in 2009 was 53 percent, while for the current year it’s an average of 41 percent.
Some 13 percent of Republicans approve of Obama’s job performance. That’s about where it has been for the last year, though it is down from a high of 37 percent at the start of his term.
Overall, the president’s average rating for his term is 52 percent approval and 40 percent disapproval.
Republican incumbent Rick Perry holds a 50-41% lead over Democratic challenger Bill White again this month in his bid for an unprecedented third term as governor of Texas.
Low-tax crusader and Republican strategist Grover Norquist tells Newsmax that letting the Bush tax cuts expire in January 2011 would amount to a $1 trillion tax increase — the largest boost in American history.
Norquist — president of Americans for Tax Reform — also warns that President Barack Obama and the Democrats are intent on pursuing the “very bad idea” of imposing a European-style value-added tax.
And he says the tea party movement arose when millions of Americans became “scared straight” by huge increases in federal spending and debt.
Americans for Tax Reform is a coalition of taxpayer groups, individuals, and businesses opposed to higher taxes at the federal, state, and local levels.
In an exclusive Newsmax interview, Norquist — who is also on the board of the American Conservative Union and a regular Newsmax contributor — was asked if Obama had reneged on his promise not to raise taxes on couples earning less than $250,000 a year.
In Cincinnati, a woman gave birth to two 10-pound baby boys. The kids are named Stretch and Mark.– Leno
A poll from Democracy Corps finds that 55 percent of likely voters believe that the word “socialist” describes the president either “well” or “very well.” The revellation of the poll’s results by the likes of James “Cueball” Carville a longtime Clintonista has touched off something of a mini-political-wildfire.
First, leftists are insisting the poll is the result of months of Fox News and conservative “fear mongering”, and that in any case Obama’s policy’s do not meet the definition of “true socialism.”
Second, speculation that Carville’s involvement signals the beginnings of Hilary’s 2012 Presidential campaign.
In the former it is a metter of perspective in the definition of socialism officially defined as “an economic and political theory based on public or common ownership and cooperative management of the means of production and allocation of resources.
In a socialist economic system, production is carried out by a public association of producers to directly produce use-values (instead of exchange-values), through coordinated planning of investment decisions, distribution of surplus, and the use of the means of production. Socialism is a set of social and economic arrangements based on a post-monetary system of calculation, such as labour time, energy units or calculation-in-kind.
Socialists advocate a method of compensation based on individual merit or the amount of labour one contributes to society. They generally share the view that capitalism unfairly concentrates power and wealth among a small segment of society that controls capital and derives its wealth through a system of exploitation. They argue that this creates an unequal society that fails to provide equal opportunities for everyone to maximise their potential, and does not utilise technology and resources to their maximum potential in the interests of the public. Socialists characterise full socialism as a society no longer based on coercive wage-labour, organized on the basis of relatively equal power-relations and adhocracy rather than hierarchical, bureaucratic forms of organization in the productive sphere. Reformists and revolutionary socialists disagree on how a socialist economy should be established.”
You be the judge if the definition fits.
Second a resurgent Clinton campaign seems increasingly likely as larger and larger percentages of Americans shun Obama’s policies and he falls out of favor. Even the most optimistic and generally liberal polling outfits accept a worsening judgment of Obama. By 2012 at current rates of decline he would be below 40% approvals. Worse his core constituents are deserting him enmasse.
Geologists “have taken to Twitter” over a proposal to remove serpentine as California’s state rock because it can contain asbestos. A sarcastic New York Times says, “We’re on the geologists’ side, because asbestos-containing minerals seem like totally appropriate symbols of California.”]
Around 225 San Fransicans who are “chronic inebriants” - that are high ambulance users, and “fewer than 300 individuals account for 80 percent of the ambulance runs for alcohol treatment. One government run ambulance trip now cost taxpayers $1,438. One guy had 49 ambulance pickups in one month. The annual bill to San Francisco’s 806,000 residents is $13 million to retrieve and sober up chronic drunks who often pass out in doorways, parks and elsewhere.
In a classic example of government think the proposed solution is to levv $15 million in new taxes on businesses who sell or dispense alcohol pay “for the harm of alcohol consumption on the people of San Francisco and the city and county of San Francisco.”
Obviously the tax does nothing to resolve chronic drunkeness.
Two men were arrested for inexplicably attacking a Porky Pig mascot at a Six Flags Resort. The 24-year old woman complained of a headache but was not otherwise injured. My hunch is Daffy Duck is behind it. That’s All Folks!
Sarah Palin says she can see the White House from Alaska. A new poll released Friday show her tied with Obama 46-46% and trailing Huckabee, Romney and Gingrich. But, he has a real problem in huis own party from Hilary Clinton who, wlthough she denies interest more and more people beieve she will run.
Obama flailing and failing policies and programs are stinking up voters.
Democrats concede that anything short of a complete GOP sweep will be victory.
“I think I’ve discovered the secret of life – you just hang around until you get used to it.”
Charles M. Schulz, Peanuts cartoonist (1922-2000)
-SPECIAL EDITORIAL-
Obama is betraying the Jews. He is a cultural Muslim whose sympathies lie with the Islamic world in its life-death struggle against Israel. Unless American Jews wake up and speak out against Mr. Obama’s pro-Arab, anti-Israel policies, the Jewish state faces a possible nuclear war — and even annihilation, says Jeffrey T. Kuhner in a Wednesday World Tribune article.
Obama met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week. The goal: to repair the public rift in relations between Washington and Jerusalem.
But, Obama administration officials have assured the Saudi royal family that Obama is determined to pressure Mr. Netanyahu into accepting an independent Palestinian state encompassing the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital. Mr. Obama — like many in the Arab world — believes that the key to Middle East peace is resolving the Israeli-Palestinian issue.
An independent Palestine, says Kuhner will be an Islamic stake aimed at the heart of the Jewish state. Israel’s withdrawal to pre-1967 borders will leave Jerusalem vulnerable to an all-out military assault. The Arabs will have the strategic means to implement their overriding ambition since the creation of Israel in 1948: wiping out the Jews.
The democratically elected Hamas regime that runs the Gaza Strip openly calls for the destruction of the Jews.
The root cause of the violence in the Middle East has nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is a distraction, a convenient excuse consistently used by Arab tyrants to cover up the real disease afflicting the region: radical Islam. From its inception, Islamic civilization has been at war with its neighbors. The Muslim faith has spread throughout centuries by the sword and violent jihad. It is why Christians and Jews were slaughtered and expelled from Arab lands during the Middle Ages. It is why the Ottoman Turks invaded and conquered Spain, Portugal, the Balkans and parts of France and Italy, even reaching the gates of Vienna.
It is why the Saudis today continue to spend billions of dollars funding extremist madrassa all over the world. It is why Islamofascists, such as the Taliban and Al Qaida, seek a global caliphate based on Shariah law. It is why Iran’s revolutionary Shiite mullahs are marching toward a nuclear bomb.
Obama is virulently anti-Israel, championing appeasement toward radical Islam. The reason lies in Mr. Obama’s background and worldview — one that makes him uniquely unqualified to prosecute the war on terror.
During his youth, Mr. Obama was raised and educated as a Muslim. His father and stepfather were Muslims. When Mr. Obama attended a Catholic school in Indonesia, he was registered as an Indonesian citizen and “a Muslim.” In public school, he was also identified as practicing Islam. Under the name “Barry Soetoro,” he was compelled to take daily Islamic religious instruction, recite prayers, study the Koran and learn Arabic. His former classmates and teachers remember him as a devout Muslim.
For example, Rony Amir, a childhood pal of young Barry, described Mr. Obama as “previously quite religious in Islam.”
“We previously often asked him to the prayer room close to the house,” Mr. Amir said. “If he was wearing a sarong [waist garment worn for religious or casual occasions] he looked funny.”
Nor is Mr. Obama’s sympathy for Islamic culture limited to his youth. In an interview with the New York Times, Obama described the Muslim call to prayer as “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.”
The Times also noted that Mr. Obama recited, “with a first-class [Arabic] accent,” the opening lines of the Muslim call to prayer.
Here are the first few lines:
Allah is Supreme!
Allah is Supreme!
Allah is Supreme! Allah is Supreme!
I witness that there is no god but Allah
I witness that there is no god but Allah
I witness that Muhammad is his prophet …
Mr. Obama says he is a practicing Christian. Yet, there can be no denying that his Muslim heritage and Islamic background infuses his thought and actions.
Culturally, Obama is America’s first Muslim president says Kuhner. He refuses to admit there is a war against Islamist terrorism. His counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, even denies that jihad is a motive for Muslim extremists. He publicly excoriates Israel for building Jewish apartments in East Jerusalem, but calls for “engagement” and “dialogue” with Iran. He seeks a rapprochement with Syria, downplaying its ties to Tehran and support for Hezbollah. He is prematurely pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq. He has imposed crippling rules of engagement that make victory all but impossible in Afghanistan — for fear of killing civilians and “angering” the Muslim street. He demands Gitmo be closed. He calls for terrorists, like Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to be tried in civilian court. He has ordered that NASA’s “foremost” mission be “outreach” to the Islamic world — not space exploration. And he adamantly embraces Palestinian statehood, even at the mortal risk posed to Israel.
In short, Mr. Obama seeks to coddle the Islamic world. The result is that Iran is on the verge of acquiring the bomb. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — like all fanatics — is a serious man. He vows to slay the Jews of Israel once and for all. Mr. Obama is not some grand peacemaker. Rather, he is a naive, foolish leftist who — blinded by his ideological and cultural blinkers — is playing right into the blood-soaked hands of America’s enemies.
Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a radio talk show host (570 am WTNT, 5 to 7 pm daily) and a columnist at The Washington Times and WorldTribune.com.