Global Warming: The WNBA of American Politics

Neil McCabe / Townhall Columnist

 

While you have never met a fan of the WNBA, the women’s professional basketball league, leading sports media outlets continue to bombard us with scores, highlights and even live games.

So it is, too, with global warming, which after 10 to 15 years of not-so-much warming is now referred to as “climate change.” After nearly two decades of media consensus, it is impossible to find a regular American not part of the Global-Warming-Industrial-Political-Complex who is all spun up over the environmental calamities foretold.

More than any other reason, the WNBA falters because it's a winter sport played in the summer. In the summer we do not want to be cooped up in a sweaty sports arena, nor do we want to watch it on TV. We want outdoors and fresh air, and they keep trying to change the subject.

In the same way, as Americans living outside the Beltway demand action to free up the economy and break our dependence on Middle Eastern oil — and all that comes with it — President Barack Obama is trying to change the subject through his Obama for America organization, renamed Organizing for America. The subject changer will be “Action August,” a production of the OFA cadre manifesting Aug. 13 with rallies, full-court coverage in the media and in its volunteer-created “blizzards.”

As a son of central Massachusetts, I know that blizzards mean snow days out of school, hours of shoveling out the driveway, walks and stairs and missing paper boys.

According the OFA training manual, blizzarding is the strategic use of flyers and postcards, especially during "Action August" when lawmakers are home for the August recess. The manual advises: “You can blizzard by yourself, or with a group of friends or local supporters that you help recruit.”

Lost in the blizzard are the facts about the job-killing Obama environmental agenda.

The centerpiece of the agenda is Obama’s war on coal-fired electricity. Suppressing coal drives up fuel prices as demand slides to other sources. This is not only true for residential living, but most importantly, it increases the economic burden on whatever is left of our industrial base, at a time when our Asian competitors are enjoying cheap coal as we had for the last 150 years. The Keystone XL pipeline is too easy an answer, but somehow the President only wants jobs he creates with money borrowed from China, and the 20,000 jobs from KXL mean nothing to him.

Here Obama is playing the corrupt referee -- calling phantom penalties on coal and crude oil, while giving out to his natural gas and solar, wind and battery cronies free throws.

Just as the WNBA is a sport and league nobody asked for, the time, space and energy wasted on global warming remedies take us further from the adult conversation necessary for reviving our economy.

After five years of economic malaise, the President should reach out to conservatives to fashion policies that free up our markets. There is no government program to produce sustained job growth compared to the next Microsoft or Federal Express.

Instead, Obama has us bracing for OFA blizzards instead of jobs and a recovering economy.

Are We Serious About Education?

Thomas Sowell / Townhall Columnist

Two recent events -- one on the east coast and one on the west coast -- raise painful questions about whether we are really serious when we say that we want better education for minority children.

One of these events was an announcement by Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., that it plans on August 19th to begin "an entire week of activities to celebrate the grand opening of our new $160 million state-of-the-art school building."

The painful irony in all this is that the original Dunbar High School building, which opened in 1916, housed a school with a record of high academic achievements for generations of black students, despite the inadequacies of the building and the inadequacies of the financial support that the school received.

By contrast, today's Dunbar High School is just another ghetto school with abysmal standards, despite Washington's record of having some of the country's highest levels of money spent per pupil -- and some of the lowest test score results.

Housing an educational disaster in an expensive new building is all too typical of what political incentives produce.

We pay a lot of lip service to educational excellence. But too many institutions and individuals that have produced good educational results for minority students have not only failed to get support, but have even been undermined.

A recent example on the west coast is a charter school operation in Oakland called the American Indian Model Schools. The high school part of this operation has been ranked among the best high schools in the nation. Its students' test scores rank first in its district and fourth in the state of California.

But the California State Board of Education announced plans to shut down this charter school -- immediately. Its students would have had to attend inferior public schools this September, except that a challenge in court stopped this sudden shutdown.

Why such a hurry to take drastic action? Because of a claim of financial improprieties against the charter schools' founder and former head, Ben Chavis.

Ben Chavis has not been found guilty of anything in a court of law. Nor has he even been brought to trial, though that would seem to be the normal thing to do if the charges were serious.

More important, the children have not been accused of anything. Nor is there any reason for urgency in immediately depriving them of an excellent education they are not likely to get in their local public schools.

What Ben Chavis and the American Indian Model Schools are really guilty of is creating academic excellence that shows up the public school system, both by this school's achievements and by the methods used to create those achievements, which go against the educational dogmas prevailing in the failing public schools.

If it seems strange that there would be a vendetta against an educator who has defied the education establishment and thereby improved the education of minority students, the fact is that Ben Chavis is only the latest in a long line of educators who have done just that -- and aroused animosity, and even vindictiveness, as a result.

Washington's former public school head, Michelle Rhee, raised test scores in that city's school system and was demonized by the education establishment and politicians. She has left.

Years ago, high school math teacher Jaime Escalante, whose success in teaching Mexican American students was celebrated in the movie Stand and Deliver, was eventually hounded out of Garfield High School in Los Angeles. Yet, while he was there, about one-fourth of all Mexican American students -- in the entire country -- who passed Advanced Placement Calculus came from that one school.

Marva Collins, who established a very successful private school for black children in Chicago, doing so on a shoestring, was likewise the target of hostility when she was a dedicated teacher in the public schools.

Other examples could be cited of educators who produced outstanding results for minority students -- in New York, Houston and other places -- and faced the wrath of the education establishment, which sees schools as places to provide jobs for teachers, rather than education for students, and which will not tolerate challenges to its politically correct dogmas.

Norquist to Newsmax: GOP Should Seek 1-Year Delay of Obamacare 'Disaster'

By Jim Meyers and Kathleen Walter

 / Newsmax

 

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Low-tax crusader and Republican strategist Grover Norquist tells Newsmax that Republicans should seek a one-year delay in the implementation of the healthcare reform bill as a first step toward abolishing the "disaster" of Obamacare.

He also asserts that President Barack Obama's tax reform plan is a "Trojan horse" hiding a trillion-dollar tax increase.

Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform, whose Taxpayer Protection Pledge asks candidates to commit themselves in writing to oppose all tax increases.

In an exclusive interview with Newsmax TV on Monday, Norquist discusses efforts to delay Obamacare.

Story continues below video.  See video here:

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/norquist-obamacare-delay-obama/2013/08/12/id/519984?s=al&promo_code=147E6-1

"The good news is, we have dozens and dozens of conservative groups from the Repeal Coalition, the effort to repeal Obamacare, that sent a letter to the Republican leaders. And there are now 50 Republicans in the House who have co-sponsored Marsha Blackburn's legislation to delay the implementation of Obamacare for a year," he says.

"Our goal is to get rid of Obamacare and to replace it with a pro-consumer, pro-healthcare effort. But what can we do now as long as Obama is president and you have Harry Reid, left-wing Democrat, running the U.S. Senate? We could get a one-year delay, just as in 2011 we got an agreement that Obama signed to cut $2.5 trillion in spending out of the next decade's budget.

"If we delay it one year, we could go back and delay it again. Why might the president sign a bill that delays his signature effort? Because he could look you in the eye and say 'I delayed it, I didn't end it.'

"And he also has to worry that the plan is so flawed and so not ready for prime-time, that trying to get it pushed before 2014 might blow up in his face and cost him more Senate and House seats in 2014. We would like to spare the country that kind of disaster, of putting in a plan that's not ready and destructive when it is ready."

Sens. Mike Lee of Utah, Ted Cruz of Texas, and Marco Rubio of Florida are among the Republicans threatening to allow a government shutdown unless Obamacare is defunded.

Norquist comments: "Some people have said that we should ask the president to sign a bill to abolish Obamacare overnight, or we should let the government shut down. It's unlikely the president would sign a deal like that. This is the central piece of his presidency. He could allow a year's delay and maintain his dignity.

"We should ask for abolition. We should ask to defund it. We should pass it in the House. My sense is it's unlikely to pass in the Senate, and while we push for that, we should look at what's plan B if our first request isn't met. If we had the House, Senate, and the presidency, we could just do plan A. Obama's the president of the United States. He has the veto, unfortunately."

Asked if a government shutdown would hurt the GOP, Norquist responds: "Well, who would explain why the government is being shut down? CBS, ABC, NBC, Time magazine, and The Washington Post. So it's a toss-up.

"Could we convince the country that we were trying to reform things and the president wouldn't? Maybe. It's more likely that if we're announcing we're looking to close the government down that we'll get the blame for closing it down.

"The reason why doing a one-year delay is a powerful message is that the president has already conceded that his plan is not ready and he has a one-year delay for big businesses. So we have a populist message, which is that if it's good for the goose, it's good for the gander. If big business should get exempt, then so should small businesses and individuals.

"The president has admitted that much of his plan is not ready. We have a country ready to understand we should delay it a year. The country isn't quite there yet on abolition."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently said Obamacare is absolutely a step toward a single-payer system.

Norquist says Reid "spoke accurately and honestly, but I thought they were trying to keep that a secret.

"Obamacare was set up to fail, to fail into single-payer. They had hoped to have a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate so that every time something broke, it would get fixed in a way that drove us into single-payer. But a Republican House and a stronger Republican vote in the Senate has made it impossible. Every time there's been a failure, we've moved it in the opposite direction and that's why delay is something that Obama might do to try to save Obamacare. But it sets the stage for permanent delays in the future."

A Gallup poll over the weekend showed Obama with an approval rating of just 41 percent.

"One of the things that's interesting is you see some polls that say Congress has a 10 percent approval rating," Norquist tells Newsmax.

"So people are unhappy that Congress isn't able to accomplish more, but there's a reason why there's a stalemate in Washington. You have a left-wing Democrat [as president], a left-wing Senate, and a conservative Reagan-Republican House. Of course they're not going to agree. That's progress from when the Democrats had all three and were able to do what they wanted to.

"So I'm pleased that the Reagan Republicans run the House. The challenge for all of us is, how do we win a Senate committed to Reagan's Republican values and a president?"

Obama recently offered Republicans a so-called grand bargain which would lower the corporate tax rate from 35 to 28 percent and close some loopholes in return for supposed investments in jobs.

That "wouldn't help," Norquist maintains. "The president's plan is, he says tax reform but he views tax reform as a Trojan horse inside of which he has a trillion-dollar tax increase. So his plan is a tax hike over the next decade and massive stimulus spending.

"This is a man who's learned nothing in five years. He wants another stimulus package and another tax increase and thinks that you'll get a different answer. People have seen him fail, learn nothing, fail, learn nothing, and he's back with the same tired, failed, discredited tax-and-spend programs. He thinks Detroit is the way to run the country. The country doesn't agree."

Turning to another issue, Norquist declares: "I'm in favor of immigration reform. I'm not necessarily in favor of the Senate bill. The House is talking about greatly improving the direction that the Senate was going in. They're going to have more serious border security, a more serious guest-worker program so that agriculture can get people and we don't leave crops rotting in the fields. We need more guest workers for construction as well," he maintains.

"We also need high-tech immigration. When people come here and get skilled degrees in computers and science, I want them to stay. I don't want them going back to China or India and setting up companies to compete with the United States. ... Let's have more talent come here and stay here as well. And that's where this House bill is going to be an improvement over the Senate bill."

Norquist predicts there will be an immigration bill passed within the next seven or eight months.

"Perhaps this year, perhaps early spring," he says.

"A lot of these reforms Republicans have been trying to do for many, many years. It was the Democrats who stopped them. Remember, President Obama was president for two years in all of 2009, all of 2010. He had a Democratic House, a Democratic Senate, and he did nothing on immigration reform.

"He's not for immigration reform. When Bush put forward immigration reform in 2007, the guy who killed it was named Barack Obama. It was his vote which passed a poison pill amendment to kill the whole thing. So he tries to use this for political purposes. But Obama's not for immigration reform – not a pro-growth, pro-jobs, pro-secure border immigration reform, which is what the House, led by Republicans, will pass and will eventually be agreed to. The president is following on this. He's certainly not leading."

Norquist also comments on Obama's exorbitantly expensive trips while the White House remains closed to Americans due to budget cuts: "The president's being very hypocritical. He's like Louis the XVI and Marie Antoinette. They're living high on the hog.

"As long as Washington and the White House are fat and happy, they're fat and happy. They love going on vacations. The fact that other people are unemployed obviously doesn't bother them."

Pamela Geller: Truth begets hate

From Jihad Watch

In "Truth begets hate" at WND today, Pamela Geller exposes just how outlandish the mainstream media's denial of the jihad threat is getting:

We have now gotten to the irreconcilable point in the contemporary public discourse (or lack thereof) of irrefutable denial of the reality of the jihad threat. This denial persists no matter what. Newscasters (both local and national) spout a language of the absurd denying all connection of jihad with – jihad. 

The Fort Hood jihadi, Nidal Malik Hasan, describes himself as a mujahid (holy warrior) in the cause of Islam, but we are told that his act of war (and he uses that word – war) has nothing to do with Islam. The Boston Marathon jihad bombers repeatedly explain that their bombing was an attack designed to “defend Islam,” but we are told that it had more to do with a right-wing conspiracy or the desperation of two dejected youth, immigrants who had trouble making American friends.

This past weekend, Ave Maria Radio is hosted a conference at Eastern Michigan University called “Is Islam a Religion of Peace?” The featured debate was Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch, facing off against Shadid Lewis, regional director of the Muslim Debate Initiative in the U.S., on that very question: “Is Islam a Religion of Peace?”

Even the prospect of Spencer’s appearance had the usual suspects out for blood. Dawud Walid of the Michigan chapter of the Hamas-tied Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, shrieked: “That’s not what we should be embracing coming out of Ramadan,” and urged Muslims not to attend the debate. Too bad Hamas-CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood groups in the United States don’t address the spike in bombings and bloodshed that comes out of Ramadan.

In a Fox News Detroit segment addressing the resulting manufactured brouhaha over Spencer and the subject matter “Is Islam a Religion of Peace?,” Robert Muise, our attorney and co-founder of the American Freedom Law Center, appeared to defend the conference and Robert’s right to speak.

The Muslim that Muise debated, Victor Begg, lies through his teeth throughout the exchange. For him, it was an exercise in taqiyya, dodge and smear. He doesn’t respond to the questions asked of him. He says that Spencer must be bad, because he was banned from entering Britain, but his description of why Spencer and I were banned from Britain is a lie.

Begg claims that Spencer and I were banned from Britain because we “represented the worst form of bigotry.” The Home Secretary excluded us (and I quote) because our words might “justify terrorist violence,” which is essentially the British State’s recognition and sanction of Islamic violence. Begg trots out the uber-left Southern Poverty Law Center’s smear of our group, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, as a “hate group.” Yet it was the SPLC’s hate group listing that led one of its followers, Floyd Corkins, to try to assassinate Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council.

The Fox News talking head interviewing Muise and Begg, Murray Feldman, was just as bad, insisting that the name of the conference itself, “Is Islam a Religion of Peace?,” constituted hate speech. He went on to incredulously assert, in the face of Muise’s information to the contrary, that the Boston bombing and the Fort Hood jihad had nothing to do with Islam. It was stunning. “Are you saying that there is an argument that Muslims are responsible for the Boston bombing?” asks Feldman in profound shock.

And it continued, each statement more devoid of reality than the last. The money quote was from the Muslim rep Begg: “Islam doesn’t shy away from debate.” Yes, that’s why they attempt to shut us down everywhere we go. I don’t know how Muise didn’t throw up. These savages speak whenever and wherever they want, but challenge the big lies and the manufactured myths, and you are in for a world of pain.

Then, after the debate, even though Spencer won resoundingly, the coverage was just as vicious as it had been before the event. The Detroit Free Press led off its story with this “A man who was banned from speaking in Britain because of his views on Islam faced off Saturday against a defender of that faith in a debate about whether Islam is a religion of peace.” The Detroit News likewise had nothing to say about Spencer having trained the FBI or written bestselling books – it just mentioned the British ban and other staples of the leftist smear campaign.

But it’s not just this local coverage. This collective break with reality is systemic in the media and left-wing circles of influence. Aristotle said that A is A. And it’s true – except when it concerns Islam. And this is not just confined to the media and academia. The Obama administration, as well as Obama’s cabinet and military brass, has submitted to this madness. Anyone in the Department of Defense who signed off on the Fort Hood final report labeling that act of war as “workplace violence” should be fired. But by whom? This war on the truth comes from the top.

The fable of the “Emperor’s New Clothes” would be fitting. Only in today’s version the little boy who calls out the truth wouldn’t be heralded and applauded; he’d be smeared, libeled and drawn and quartered.

But we were right. We are right. And the more we are proven right, the darker it gets.

The great silence, the blacklist, the lies – all of it – will have the gravest of consequences.

Newest jihad threat: exploding clothes undetectable with current security devices
From Jihad Watch / Posted by Robert Spencer

The best thing that could come out of this would be the closing-down of the TSA, an extraordinarily wasteful and increasingly intrusive boondoggle that arose from the government's unwillingness and inability to face the reality of the jihad threat.

"Newest terror threat: Exploding clothes," by Rick Couri for KRMG.com, August 8:

The clothes are reported to become potentially devastating after being dipped in a special liquid. Once the clothes dry they become highly explosive. 

To make matters worse they are feared to be undetectable with current security devices.

American operatives looking into the claims say of the liquid "It's ingenious."

al-Qaeda explosives guru Ibrahim al-Asiri is thought to be the man behind the new threat.

Just last month TSA chief John Pistole pointed out the group had a newer, better underwear bomb and are close to perfecting explosives that are surgically implanted in the body cavities of “Frankenbombers.”...

It's BOWE TUESDAY...Our president has left Bowe behind (remember, he just released 6 from GITMO without exchanging Bowe for them)...Bowe needs our prayers more than ever...

...he needs to be brought home now!