Fascinating article by F.W. Burleigh at @amthinker - What does this hand sign mean?http://t.co/ppqzL043b0 pic.twitter.com/CtuiS0xC60
— Doug Ross (@directorblue) February 19, 2015As Burleigh explains:
Fascinating article by F.W. Burleigh at @amthinker - What does this hand sign mean?http://t.co/ppqzL043b0 pic.twitter.com/CtuiS0xC60
— Doug Ross (@directorblue) February 19, 2015By Alan Caruba
Several members of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) recently reported on their social media accounts that a delegation of MB members had visited the U.S. State Department on January 27, 2015 and met with officials from the State Department and White House... According to the MB reports, the purpose of the meeting was to recruit support for their opposition to the 'Abd Al-Fattah Al-Sisi regime in Egypt.
On its part, the American administration was embarrassed by the publication of the visit, but openly acknowledged it a few days later. State Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki said that the MB members were part of a larger delegation that included former Egyptian MPs, among others, and that they are not currently active in the movement. She added that State Department meetings with various political elements were routine. The Egyptian regime, outraged by the visit, accused the U.S. administration of not respecting the Egyptian law that defines the MB as a terrorist organization, and of discounting the will of the Egyptian people. It also claimed that this conduct flies in the face of U.S. policy, which champions the struggle against global terrorism. Criticism of the U.S. was also voiced in the official Egyptian press and in the Saudi press.The fact that the reports on the visit coincided with the January 31 large-scale terrorist attack in Al-'Arish, in which 31 people were killed and which the Egyptian regime and media attributed to the MB, only increased the rage towards the U.S...
QOTD: "It is quite possible that, by the time Obama leaves office, no other country on Earth will have gained quite so much as Iran. . . . The United States is changing the terms of its relations with Iran and triggering a strengthening of that country economically and politically." --David Rothkopf
Though there are many trouble spots around the world, as a general rule it's easy to make an educated guess at one of the participants: Muslims vs Jews in "Palestine", Muslims vs Hindus in Kashmir, Muslims vs Christians in Africa, Muslims vs Buddhists in Thailand, Muslims vs Russians in the Caucasus, Muslims vs backpacking tourists in Bali, Muslims vs Danish cartoonists in Scandinavia. The environmentalists may claim to think globally but act locally, but these guys live it.
The United States has "a long tradition of welcoming refugees," and it expects to welcome thousands more of them from Syria in 2015 and 2016, despite concerns about foreign fighters, the State Department said.
"The United States has admitted 524 Syrians since 2011. We’re likely to admit 1,000 to 2,000 Syrian refugees for permanent resettlement in Fiscal Year 2015 and a somewhat higher number, though still in the low thousands, in Fiscal Year 2016," spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters on Friday.
...Psaki repeated that "one of our values is bringing in and welcoming refugees who have fled horrors around the world, and that continues to be central to what we believe in."
In response to a question, Psaki said she's aware of only "two incidents" involving "two Iraqis" who were admitted to Kentucky and were later accused of trying to send weapons and money to al Qaida in Iraq.
QOTD: "Rumors are [that] the [NBC] network may be looking to hire a new anchorman. Job description:
• Ability to read teleprompter;
• Can lie with air of contemplative concern;
• Harvard degree preferred.
Hey, I’ve got the perfect guy!" --Matt Barber
The official sign-up season for President Barack Obama's health care law may be over, but leading congressional Democrats say millions of Americans facing new tax penalties deserve a second chance.
Three senior House members strongly urged the administration Monday to grant a special sign-up opportunity for uninsured taxpayers who will be facing fines under the law for the first time this year.
The three are Michigan's Sander Levin, the ranking Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, and Democratic Reps. Jim McDermott of Washington, and Lloyd Doggett of Texas. All worked to help steer Obama's law through rancorous congressional debates from 2009-2010.
I previously reported that on May 30, 2014, Sonic asked law-abiding citizens to come to the restaurant unarmed. We also reported that a Sonic in Topeka, Kansas, was robbed the very day that customers were asked to come and eat while defenseless.
But on February 8 2015, the tables were turned. Atlanta’s NBC 11 reports that 23-year-old Joseph Toombs “was waiting in line at the drive-thru [in DeKalb County, Georgia,] when he saw three suspects approach him on foot.” Toombs alleges that “at least one of the suspects” had a gun.
The United States is under direct and sustained attack by the combined forces of the tyrannical far left and radical Islam, punctuated by humiliation abroad and despair at home.
We are losing because unlike Walter Mitty, whose delusions were confined to his own head, Barack Obama has been permitted to play out his most destructive leftist and pro-Islamic fantasies in real-time from the most powerful office on the planet.Obama behaves like a dictator not just because he is a narcissist, but because his political beliefs are, at their core, authoritarian. He represents a perfect anti-American storm, the amalgamation of twin totalitarian ideologies, Marxist-Leninism and Islamic extremism, both dedicated to the destruction of Judeo-Christian civilization.
Obama cannot counter threats from abroad because he is sympathetic to them, while simultaneously pursuing domestic policies that generate economic malaise, fiscal bankruptcy, and social chaos; conditions that undermine American democracy and are the foundation of his fundamental transformation of the country.
Obama would not be a problem, nor would he even be President, if we did not have a hopelessly corrupt political-media culture.
QOTD: "Don’t do this to a people that are in the crosshairs of multiple terrorist groups with the capability of attacking them. Don’t do this to a nation whose civilians are terrorized by thousands of rockets launched against them at a moment’s notice. Don’t do this to a country that’s facing down the threat of a nuclear weapon annihilating them off the face of the Earth. Don’t do this to a people that are being stigmatized all over the world, even as we speak, who are being oppressed. Don’t do this to a country that in forum after forum has become the subject of de-legitimatization as people argue that somehow Israel’s right to exist is not real." --Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)
هل سيصل صوت أطفال الغوطة الآن لهذا العالم الصامت ؟! pic.twitter.com/gj6NRdw5zS
— الدمشقي #خلافة (@Dimashki4) February 15, 2015Fat tails in nature, Boston snow edition pic.twitter.com/q62LueANK8 cc @nntaleb
— Felix Salmon (@felixsalmon) February 15, 2015You know global warming is getting bad when towns in New Hampshire cancel their annual Ice Carnival - http://t.co/vGdxX7S89Y @algore
— Doug Ross (@directorblue) February 15, 2015QOTD: "Note the backdrop of [Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's] speech: ISIS burns a Jordanian pilot alive, and the president declares that American Christians have to get off their “high horse”; the president declares an attack on a kosher deli in Paris to be “random,” and ISIS executes an American hostage. Now the Democrats and the White House are declaring that this is what they really deem intolerable and unacceptable." --Jim Geraghty
Was the brutal murder of three Muslims in North Carolina this week a case of “random violence,” or were the three targeted because of their Muslim faith? And why, of all the murders committed across the country this week, did these three grab so much national media attention? The FBI has now joined the investigation.
Perhaps the lessons learned from Jared Lee Loughner’s shooting of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona in January of 2011 could inform the answers to these questions, and serve as a reminder of the dangers of biased reporting on murder cases. But, unfortunately, the mainstream media continue to perpetuate a confusing double standard when it comes to reporting on the deaths of innocents.
Why, for example, did the deaths of three Muslims in Chapel Hill, North Carolina gain traction at The Washington Post, Reuters, and many other media outlets which speculated that it was a possible hate crime, while this black teen murdering a white classmate and taking a selfie with the corpse didn’t receive anywhere near the same treatment? And what about the murders occurring in Chicago every day? Don’t those deserve headlines, and candlelight vigils too?
“However, I do think it’s fair to say that attributing political motives to individual killings is much more of a phenomenon on the left than on the right,” argues Mark Hemingway for The Weekly Standard in a column regarding the recent execution-style shootings of Deah Barakat, Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, and her sister Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha.
The alleged shooter, Craig Stephen Hicks, liked the “Huffington Post, Rachel Maddow, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), Freedom from Religion Foundation, Bill Nye ‘The Science Guy,’ Neil deGrasse Tyson, Gay Marriage groups and similar progressive pages” on Facebook, notes Hemingway. Maddow didn’t mention any of that on her show when talking about the incident.
Hicks displayed a habit of posting snarky pictures with slogans like, “Democrats aren’t perfect but at least they haven’t been shoving poor Jesus up my c—ch and Ronald Reagan down my throat.” Another picture he promoted reads, “So Rick Santorum thinks that when people get educated they stop believing in God? Best advertisement for Atheism I’ve ever heard.”
The Davos World Economic Summit has long been a parade for the insider agenda, putting the power players’ plans for the world’s economies on display as a preview to their playing out for the rest of the year.
But so far, the 2015 elite retreat in the Swiss Alps has proven to be full of apprehension, and even horror… with many of its own members expressing regret at the world they have built.
The Guardian reported:
The billionaires and corporate oligarchs meeting in Davos this week are getting worried about inequality… even the architects of the crisis-ridden international economic order are starting to see the dangers. It’s not just the maverick hedge-funder George Soros, who likes to describe himself as a class traitor. Paul Polman, Unilever chief executive, frets about the “capitalist threat to capitalism”. Christine Lagarde, the IMF managing director, fears capitalism might indeed carry Marx’s “seeds of its own destruction” and warns that something needs to be done.
The scale of the crisis has been laid out for them by the charity Oxfam. Just 80 individuals now have the same net wealth as 3.5 billion people – half the entire global population. Last year, the best-off 1% owned 48% of the world’s wealth, up from 44% five years ago. On current trends, the richest 1% will have pocketed more than the other 99% put together next year. The 0.1% have been doing even better, quadrupling their share of US income since the 1980s.
These billionaires are not concerned with a fair or truly equitable world, of course. But they may well be concerned about having pushed the system beyond the brink, and triggering global collapse or unrest as a result of things gone way too far.
On top of a bloated super-surveillance police state that is still expanding in the age of Big Data and continuing terrorism, it is a “wealth grab on a grotesque scale” that has stood out the most in 2015.
In 2015, it has become obvious that inequality has become just plain cynical, unsettling and, perhaps, downright revolutionary… and even the insulated, egocentric billionaires have taken notice.
Senator Jeff Sessions‘ statement on new USCIS “guidelines” allowing amnestied illegal immigrants to bring in relatives:
“One of the President’s most shocking unilateral actions is his chain migration program for the relatives of illegal immigrants. Guidance issued yesterday from USCIS declares that many illegal immigrants’ foreign relatives may legally join them in the U.S. Under this decree, the Administration is allowing the Central American relatives of those covered by the President’s amnesty order to come to the U.S. as ‘refugees’ or ‘parolees.’
In effect, the President’s answer to the ongoing run on the border is to order government officials to transport many of those same individuals from Central America into the U.S. with lawful paperwork and guaranteed access to federal benefits.
This government-ordered amnesty chain migration will impose enormous costs on federal taxpayers and jobseekers, as those who arrive as refugees will be able to receive automatic federal benefits. We must be taking action to reduce the incentive to enter the country illegally. Helping illegal immigrants bring their relatives here as refugees only provides further incentive for illegal immigration. More broadly, we must be taking steps to curb the flow of unskilled labor and help families already living here—whether past immigrants or U.S.-born—find good jobs, good schools, and thriving communities.”
[NOTE: The U.S. currently admits 1 million permanent immigrants each year along with 70,000 refugees and asylees. According to Gallup, Americans want to see record immigration reduced, not increased, by a 2-1 margin.]
Emphases added. As far as I can see, this story has been picked up nowhere in the MSM.
QOTD: "If you remember the timing, Barack Obama was on vacation in Martha's Vinyard at this time. He was on vacation forever. They beheaded the American James Foley, and he took five minutes off from golfing to halfheartedly pretend to be upset by that. Then he went back golfing.
Ferguson was burning during this time. And still he golfed...
...Days after an American was beheaded by a terrorist, Obama partied with his old terrorist pals, who were involved in a plan to plant bombs at an American Army dance in Fort Dix, NJ." --Ace
Costs for schooling a surging number of limited English proficiency students are soaring — $2.5 billion in the Washington, D.C., region alone. But the federal government, responsible for the influx of immigrants, is ducking the bill.
A new study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform found that taxpayers in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia are incurring budget-busting costs to accommodate a rising tide of English-deficient pupils, most of them first-generation immigrants.Alexandria, Va., for example, is spending $25,538 per LEP student. With 4,183 such students enrolled this year, the city’s school district is paying out $107,719,214 for those LEP pupils — a whopping 45.8 percent of the district’s annual instructional budget.
The ranks of LEP students, many of whom come from households where no English is spoken, have jumped 125 percent in the Northern Virginia city since the 2005-2006 school year.
Similar increases are found in neighboring Fairfax and Arlington counties, as well as in D.C. and its Maryland suburbs.
Because LEP students require more intensive and specialized services, district outlays for them run 40 to 50 percent higher than for non-LEP students. And because the federal government is not reimbursing for the rising costs, local school districts and their counties are diverting funds from other programs, says Eric Ruark, director of research for FAIR.