Political Corruption Slows Growth, Kills Jobs

Peter Morici / Townhall Finance

 

This Friday the Labor Department is expected to report the economy added 230,000 jobs in August. The pace has picked up a bit but is still far less than needed to reemploy all the prime aged workers displaced in the wake of the financial crisis.

 

The jobless rate is down to 6.1 percent but that statistic is deceptive. For example, one in six adult males between the ages of 25 and 54 is not working. Many don't show up in the unemployment count, because they are not actively looking for a job.

They spend their days cluttering park benches or watching ESPN, because they are too discouraged to look for work or lack the incentive to make an effort.

Since 2000, Congress has enhanced the earned income tax credit, and expanded or enacted new programs that provide direct benefits to low and middle income workers, including ObamaCare and Medicaid, food stamps, and rent and mortgage assistance.

Generally, benefits phase down as family incomes rise, and this effectively taxes additional income as much as 50 percent. Consequently, government benefits penalize work and skills acquisition, and often encourage one partner in two adult households to be idle.

Many unemployed men combine assistance from wives, relatives and friends with government benefits to avoid work altogether or cling to part-time employment to avoid tripping income thresholds that would result in the loss of benefits.

Similarly, many women with good skills and education, who might enjoy the fulfillment and independence of working, are encouraged to avoid employment.

Kerry: “The real face of Islam is a peaceful religion based on the dignity of all human beings”

Robert Spencer / Jihad Watch

 

The dignity of all human beings? Kerry ignores the fact that the hadith he cites is restricted to Muslim treatment of other Muslims, per the command of the Qur’an itself: “Muhammad is the apostle of Allah. Those who follow him are merciful to one another, but harsh to the unbelievers” (48:29). The sharp dichotomy between Muslims and non-Muslims runs through all of Islamic theology and law.

Islamic law even mandates lesser penalties for those who kill a non-Muslim than for those who kill a Muslim. The Shafi’i Sharia manual ‘Umdat al-Salik dictates: “The indemnity for the death or injury of a woman is one-half the indemnity paid for a man. The indemnity paid for a Jew or Christian is one-third the indemnity paid for a Muslim. The indemnity paid for a Zoroastrian is one-fifteenth that of a Muslim.” (o4.9)

The dignity of all human beings? Maybe, but not the equal dignity.

“Kerry: ‘The Real Face Of Islam Is A Peaceful Religion’ [VIDEO],” by Brendan Bordelon, The Daily Caller, September 3, 2014:  See video here: http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/09/kerry-the-real-face-of-islam-is-a-peaceful-religion-based-on-the-dignity-of-all-human-beings?utm_source=Jihad+Watch+Daily+Digest&utm_campaign=917f3d7b5a-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_ffcbf57bbb-917f3d7b5a-123435571

Secretary of State John Kerry took pains to separate the brutal Islamic terror organization ISIS from its broader religious affiliation on Wednesday, taking time out from a statement on beheaded journalist Steven Sotloff to claim that “the real face of Islam is a peaceful religion.”

Kerry spoke to a largely-Islamic audience at the State Department Wednesday, which had assembled to recognize State’s new “special representative for Muslim communities,” Shaarik Zafar. But the planned event was overshadowed by the brutal beheading of Sotloff by ISIS fighters in Iraq, pushing the secretary to again publicly condemn the group.

“Those who have murdered James Foley and Steven Sotloff in Syria need to know that the United States will hold them accountable, no matter how long it takes,” he warned in his speech.

“But here today, what is really important — and I want to take advantage of this podium and of this moment, to underscore as powerfully as I know how — that the face of Islam is not the butchers who killed Steven Sotloff,” he continued, to immediate applause.

“That’s [ISIS].”

“The face of Islam is not the nihilists who know only how to destroy, not to build,” Kerry went on. “It’s not masked cowards whose actions are an ugly insult to the peaceful religion that they violate every single day with their barbarity, and whose fundamental principles they insult with their actions.”

“The real face of Islam is a peaceful religion based on the dignity of all human beings,” the secretary asserted. “It’s one where Muslim communities are leading the fight against poverty. It’s one where Muslim communities are providing basic health care and emergency assistance on the frontlines of some of our most devastating humanitarian crises.”

President George W. Bush often explained to the American people that Islam was a peaceful religion, claiming “Islam is peace” five days after the September 11, 2001 attacks. He still felt compelled to make that assertion at the end of his term, following nearly eight years of war against Islamic terrorism.

President Barack Obama has also felt it necessary to educate Americans on Islam’s peaceful nature. “The religion teaches peace, justice, fairness and tolerance,” he said in 2010. “All of us recognise that this great religion cannot justify violence.” And in July 2014 he declared that Islam shares “the values of peace” with other religions and cultures.

Obama: The Islamic State has “already failed”

Pamela Geller / Atlas Shrugs

The Islamic State has conquered whole swaths of the Middle East. The Islamic State has stolen close to 500 million dollars from the Mosul’s central bank. They have immense wealth and far more resources than any other Islamic terror group. They seized American state of the art military equipment in Iraq. They have enough uranium to build a radioactive dirty bomb. They have more money and more firepower than America’s arch foe, their mother organization Al Qaeda.

House Intelligence Committee chairman Rep. Mike Rogers today contrasted al Qaeda before Sept. 11, 2001 with ISIS by stating al Qaeda was “small cell, very surreptitious, operated in the remote lands of Afghanistan, at least at the end of it, before the 9/11 attack. And so they never really were connected to thousands and thousands of people in a very open way. Well, with ISIS, what you see now is a terrorist organization that has a functioning army. And it is a functioning army. They have command and control to a large extent, more than you would see in any terrorist organization. They have tanks. They have artillery pieces. They actually named a few weeks ago an oil minister to try to make sure that they were taking full advantage of the oil refineries that they had captured, and how to sell it and disburse it in a way that they could see a daily revenue stream.”

The Islamic State has threatened Obama and vowed that they are coming after him. They have promised to raise the black flag over the White...

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Father of SEAL Team 6 Hero: Obama Administration Lied to Us

By Courtney Coren and Bill Hoffmann

 / Newsmax

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The father of a SEAL Team 6 member who died in a helicopter crash says the Obama administration lied to him and the other families about the details surrounding the deaths of members of the squad that killed Taliban leader Osama bin Laden.

Billy Vaughn, father of Navy SEAL Aaron Vaughn, who was among 30 who died in 2011 when their Chinook helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan, told J.D. Hayworth on "America's Forum" on Newsmax TV Wednesday that what the families were initially told about why the helicopter was shot down later turned out to be a lie.

Story continues below video.
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsmax-Tv/SEAL-Team-6-Billy-Vaughn/2014/09/03/id/592390/?ns_mail_uid=32379927&ns_mail_job=1584457_09042014&s=al&dkt_nbr=doijwt7h

"When the chopper was shot down, we learned many disturbing things," Vaughn explained.

"We learned that when the shots were fired, when the chopper was down, we did not take out the men who fired the [Rocket Propelled Grenades] because of the rules of engagement," he said. "That's what we were told three times in that debriefing."

However, Rep. Thomas Rooney of Florida, who was Vaughn's congressman at the time, heard a different story when he attended "a classified, high-level military briefing."

"He was told in the debriefing that they did not take them out because of the rules of engagement," but because "they didn't know where the shots came from."

Billy Vaughn said he knew at that point that "what we'd been told" was a lie.

Vaughn said that the other disturbing factor about the death of his son and the other SEAL Team 6 members was that the helicopter they were in was "a 1960-some-odd helicopter, CH-47C retrofitted to D model in the 1980s," which was really "a transport chopper."

"We learned that they had begun to mix Navy SEALs, Army Rangers with general purpose forces, aviation, because we didn't have enough Special Operations to fly our Special Operators on their nighttime assaults," he added. "So we'd begun to mix them."

He said that once he and his wife, Karen, learned that they were lied to, they started "to look at many other things."

The Vaughns wrote an open letter to Obama that was published on WorldTribune.com, telling the president that he needs to resign in the face of the growing threat of the Islamic State, saying that he is "not up to this job."

He told Newsmax that what the media isn't talking about is the fact that "since President Obama became president, over 80 percent of the deaths in Afghanistan have occurred on his watch."

He said that he and his wife have called on Obama to resign because "the world stage has deteriorated under his watch, and he has stood idly by or drawn a red line in the sand and then not backed it up or armed the enemy.

"Now even it's come out with [James] Foley's beheading that the president . . . knew ahead of time but probably his inaction caused us not to be able to get that guy out," he said.

"Then again, he discloses the Special Operations attempt that was made, compromising our Special Operatives again," he added. "He's done that over and over again.

"It's just one thing after another, and every time he compromises our forces, he also compromises the security of American citizens, and when America is at risk, the world is at risk."

Vaughn contends that when the Vice President Joe Biden outed SEAL Team 6, he put the unit at greater danger by making it a target, something he says his son was aware of and warned them about before he was killed.

"This president has outed our special operators time and time again to tout himself as the national security president when nothing could be further from the truth," he said.

In an interview Wednesday on "The Steve Malzberg Show," Karen Vaughn urged the White House to stop waffling and launch quick and definitive action against ISIS.

 

Story continues below video.

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsmax-Tv/SEAL-Team-6-Billy-Vaughn/2014/09/03/id/592390/?ns_mail_uid=32379927&ns_mail_job=1584457_09042014&s=al&dkt_nbr=doijwt7h

"If you have cancer, you don’t manage cancer, you crush it," she said.

"I'm so sick and tired of these vague terms and this needing somebody else to do something first before this president acts."

Billy Vaughn told Steve Malzberg that Obama "just looks for an excuse not to act … It sounds like he has no soul, he has no passion.

"You can get him excited talking about the minimum wage or talking about the way that somebody's being treated at work, in other words about problems in America, but you cannot get him excited, you cannot get any passion out of this man about threats to our republic."

OBAMA goes around Congress, lifts ban on Libyans attending U.S. Flight Schools and studying nuclear science

Bare Naked Islam

Less than two years after four Americans got massacred in a terrorist attack on the U.S. Special Mission in Benghazi, Libya the Obama administration is disregarding congressional opposition to lift a decades-old ban on Libyans attending flight schools and training as nuclear scientists in the United States.

Judicial Watch  The ban was implemented in 1983 after a wave of terrorist incidents involving Libyans. The African nation continues to be a hotbed of terrorism and in fact, the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli was recently evacuated because violence between rival militias has created a deadly environment. Many other foreign governments have also shut down their embassies in Libya because the violence has spread throughout the entire country. 

Nevertheless, President Obama has discounted congressional opposition to let Libyans train as pilots, airplane mechanics and nuclear scientists in the United States. Perhaps the commander-in-chief has somehow forgotten that many of the 9/11 hijackers—mostly Saudi nationals—received their training in American flights schools because our government allowed it. Have we not learned that it’s a really bad idea to help our enemies obtain skills that could later be used to attack us?

Official word of this senseless change comes via a final regulation approved by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). It lifts the longtime prohibition on Libyans coming to the U.S. to attend flight school, work in aviation maintenance or flight operations or to study or train in nuclear science. The Obama administration claims that the ban is no longer necessary because the “United States Government and the Government of Libya have normalized their relationship and most of the restrictions and sanctions imposed by the United States and the United Nations toward Libya have been lifted.” 

Coming soon, to a flight school near you

The move comes just a few months after a congressional hearing addressed what was then the administration’s proposal to overturn the 30-year ban. Before actually reversing the longtime regulation, the administration was required to provide Congress with certain documents that were never provided, according to the heads of the House Judiciary Committee and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee considering the matter. In other words, the president has once again blown off Congress and this week the lawmakers involved in the process expressed outrage. 

“The Obama Administration is turning a blind eye to real terrorist threats that exist in Libya today by carelessly forging ahead with its plan to allow Libyan pilots and nuclear scientists to study in the United States,” said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte. “The House Judiciary Committee has repeatedly sought information about the Administration’s policy reversal but political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security have stonewalled the Committee’s requests and have not articulated why it is in Americans’ best interests to change policy.

 

Given the ongoing volatility in Libya, it is unconscionable and completely irresponsible that the Administration plans to lift a longstanding policy that protects Americans and our national security from threats in the region.”

 

At the congressional hearing earlier this year, a top Homeland Security official revealed that the Hillary Clinton State Department first requested the Libyan ban lift in 2010. Three years later, the official, Alan Bersin, told Congress, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano agreed to begin the process to amend the regulations relating to Libya. This illustrates that the administration started working to lift the ban long before the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. Special Mission Compound in Benghazi. Clearly, it was not enough to deter the administration from going forth with its dangerous plan.

Eric Holder: A More Dangerous Race-Card Hustler Than Al Sharpton

Larry Elder / Townhall Columnist

It's one thing to watch race hustlers like the Rev. Al Sharpton bellowing, "No justice, no peace." But when the attorney general of the United States makes false but racially incendiary claims about today's alleged "pernicious racism," we are in uncharted territory.

Holder complains about different prison rates, different school expulsion rates and longer prison sentences for black boys and men compared to white boys and men. He equates "equal rights" with "equal results."

In Ferguson, Missouri, after announcing federal investigation into the cop-shooting death of an unarmed black teen, Holder said: "I am the attorney general of the United States. But I am also a black man. I can remember being stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike on two occasions and accused of speeding. ... I remember how humiliating that was and how angry I was and the impact it had on me."

The New Jersey Turnpike? The long-believed claim of "racism" on that highway has been investigated -- and debunked. Twice.

Numerous complaints of DWB -- Driving While Black -- were filed by blacks driving on the New Jersey Turnpike. So the state entered into a consent decree, agreed to federal monitoring, and put their officers through, among other things, "sensitivity training." New Jersey commissioned a study, checking motorists' speed with laser guns and photographing drivers of vehicles going 15 mph or more over the speed limit.

The result? It turned out that more speeders were black than white, which explained why cops pulled over black motorists so often. The U.S. Justice Department, which requested the study, did not want the results released to the public. Instead, they accused the researchers of using a "flawed methodology." Why shelve a report that disproves racism? Isn't it good news that Jersey troopers do not pull blacks over willy-nilly? Would this not improve race relations in New Jersey? No -- the facts did not fit the script.

Poll: Majority of Americans "Concerned" Obama Has No Strategy to Deal With ISIS

Daniel Doherty / Townhall Tipsheet

As one television host recently noted, we’re all human beings and therefore we all make mistakes. That’s true enough. Even presidents, after all, aren’t exempt from the laws of nature. So when President Obama said a few days ago that his administration didn’t have “a strategy” to deal effectively with ISIS, most of his cheerleaders in the media, presumably, assumed it was a gaffe. But was it?

 

As of this writing, ISIS terrorists (some of whom are Westerners) have already beheaded one American journalist and reportedly decapitated another. At least one American has died fighting for the caliphate, and we don’t know if other American traitors, suspected of joining the group, will have their US passports rescinded, either.

Needless to say, these are all serious concerns. Hence why most Americans are troubled by what President Obama said last Thursday:

The president said last week at a press conference that the United States doesn’t have a strategy yet for dealing with the group which threatens to defeat democratic forces in Iraq and send the messy civil war in Syria further out of control. Seventy-three percent (73%) of voters are concerned that the United States does not have a strategy for dealing with this military group, with 47% who are Very Concerned. Twenty-five percent (25%) are not concerned by this lack of a strategy, but that includes only four percent (4%) who are Not At All Concerned. 

The president has authorized selective U.S. airstrikes to halt ISIS advances but has ruled out sending troops back to Iraq. Just 30% think the United States should send troops to defeat ISIS, but that’s up from 12% last December. Opposition to sending troops back to Iraq has fallen dramatically from 71% in December to 58% a month ago. Now just 41% feel that way. A sizable 29% are undecided.

In other words, nearly half of respondents say they are exceedingly nervous that the president has no plan whatsoever to confront this threat.

Perhaps, then, it's finally time he came up with one.

Good News: 'Blue State Diaspora' Is 'Overstated,' Not Turning Red States Blue

Matt Vespa / Townhall Tipsheet

 

Blue state residents are moving to red states, but maybe the results won’t resemble anything close to a conservative Armageddon. Over at FiveThirtyEight, Harry Enten and Nate Silver said, “It’s a fascinating hypothesis, but it’s overstated, in our view.” While they admit the process of their analysis isn’t perfect, Enten and Silver noted that the balance of power remains “reasonably equivocal,” especially over the long term. If anything, they argue that migration rates have only contributed to a more polarized electorate. 

 

So, here’s what these guys have to say about the Blue-State Diaspora premise:

The first problem is that the predominant political trend of the past two decades has not been consistently better performance by Democrats, but instead greater polarization across partisan and geographic lines. 

Remember, the GOP controls the House of Representatives, a plurality of state legislatures and a majority of governor’s mansions, and Republicans are slight favorites to take the Senate in November. 

Democrats have done well in recent presidential elections, but if Republicans take the Senate and hold the House, then by 2016 the GOP will have had control of the Senate for 12.5 of the past 24 years and the House for 18 of 24. …

People who leave an area don’t necessarily resemble the ones who stay. Instead, there’s evidence that migrants’ political beliefs mirror those of voters in their new destination. Many people moving from a liberal state to a conservative state may be conservative, or may at least end up that way before long. People moving from a conservative state to a liberal state may be liberal.
…
If anything, movers generally have more extreme political views than natives: Those people moving to the West Coast or New England, for example, are more liberal than people who grew up there. Thus, the process of intra-country migration could be contributing to political polarization rather than making states more purple.