At Christmastime, George W. Bush was Santa, Obama is Scrooge

Every year, in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, I think about George W. Bush.  It was in that week each year for the eight years I covered him as a reporter that he gave me a spectacular gift — and he knew it.

Read more at the Washington Times
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Democrats the real party of the rich

One of the great misconceptions in American politics is that Republicans are the party of the rich.  That title belongs to the Democrats, who regularly garner the big bucks of America’s moneyed elite.  David Elliott of the AP reports: For as often as Democrats attack the conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch for their heavy spending on politics, it's actually the liberal-minded who shelled out the most cash in the just completed midterm elections. At least, that is, among those groups that must disclose what they raise and spend. Read more at American Thinker
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

German Journalist Reports ISIS Planning the "Largest Religious Cleansing Strategy in History"

"It is not a question of if we will conquer Europe, just a matter of when that will happen. But it is certain ... For us, there is no such thing as borders. There are only front lines.” These were the chilling words German journalist Jürgen Todenhöfer heard from an Islamic State militant during his recent, stunning visit behind those “front lines,” in Iraq and Syria.  The militant was himself a German, one of hundreds of sympathizers joining the Islamic State’s ranks from Europe and the United States.

Read more at Aleteia
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Castro Encourages Obama To Rule By Executive Orders — And To Throw One His Way

It's a little known fact that President Reagan's 1981 firing of the air traffic controllers for an illegal strike was watched closely by ... the Kremlin. It concluded that President Reagan was a man of his word — and not to be messed with.  Well, it seems the tyrants in Havana have been watching U.S. domestic dramas closely, too. In Cuban dictator Raul Castro's weekend speech on President Obama's move toward normalizing relations, he noted that President Obama issued a lot of executive orders, something that corresponds to how the Castro brothers rule, the better to get around a dissenting Congress on issues such as ObamaCare and amnesty for illegal immigrants.

Read more at Investor's Business Daily
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

New Harmony, a utopian experiment in the American wilderness

In 1825 Welsh industrialist, Robert Owen, purchased a religious community on the frontier in Indiana, named Harmony. He renamed the village, New Harmony, and implemented a wide range of social experiments that seemed to hark of John Lennon’s 1971 song, “Imagine.” Things did not go as planned.  The popular understanding of communism among North Americans is that its concept began with the writings of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx then appeared in an extreme form with the advent of 1918 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. In fact, while living in England, Engels attended a Socialist “church” founded by Robert Owen. and wrote for a journal that Owen published, The New Moral World. The wealth of both Owen and Engels was derived from the partial ownership of textile mills. While espousing the ideal that workers should own the means of the production, in their lifetimes, they both continued to maintain affluent lifestyles by owning the means of production themselves.  All of the basic beliefs and economic principals of Marxism can be found in the writings of Robert Owen.

Read more at the Examiner Read More......

Hate Speech Leads to Hate Crimes

America and the West are subjected nonstop to a barrage of hate speech from the intelligentsia. Hate speech leads to hate crimes, here as everywhere. Few people have faced up to the extent of the hate crimes and hate speech against the West. The murder of the two New York City policemen Saturday is only the tip of the iceberg.  Literally thousands of inciters have propagated a dishonest storyline of widespread police violence against blacks. And what we’ve seen in recent months is only the current instance in a long history of incitement against the West. A view of the West as enemy is cultivated in universities across the country as the cutting edge of moral thinking, with full rein given to a very un-academic manner of speech, replete with the colorful language of vilification. From these heights, the same attitudes inevitably seep into other venues, including textbooks for much younger students.

Read more at National Review
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

In Vermont, single-payer healthcare quietly disappears

If you’re looking for a state with a reliable Leftward tilt, you’d be hard pressed to do better than Vermont. After all, this is the place which has repeatedly elected Bernie Sanders – a man who considers the Democrat Party too conservative for his tastes – to statewide office since 1991. So in terms of socialist experimental laboratories, this is the spot where you’d want to launch progressive initiatives and take them for a test spin. That was the plan for Governor Peter Shumlin, who had promised his constituents that they would soon be enjoying the first in the nation single payer healthcare plan. But faced with the cold, harsh light of reality, that plan is now history.

Read more at Hotair.com
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

The Left’s Love Affair With the 4-letter N Word

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.” - Aldous Huxley

I like quotes.  Quotes are wisdom for those with short attention spans.  They are disregarded by many as irrelevant platitudes or obsolete; however, they are knowledge, often hard-earned and considered by their authors to be important enough to be passed on.  I’ve chosen the above quote for today, not only because it is always relevant, but because we bear witness to a time where the political left of this country is trying to realize Aldous’ dystopic “Brave New World” (which I’m reasonably sure he meant as a warning, not a blueprint).

To this end, the left has slandered any group that has opposed their fundamental (Socialist) transformation of America, and they love one name more than any other: Nazi (the 4-letter N word).  But how accurate is this?  What traits do the political left and right really share with this infamous party of villains?

Read more at Gun News
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

More 'Tolerance' From Stalinist Universities

Honestly, sometimes leftist thought police surprise even me, not so much with their unreasonableness, extremism and tyrannical tactics but with their brazenness in openly showing who they are. Each new day's headlines trump yesterday's.  A few weeks ago, Fox News' Todd Starnes reported on a Marquette University student's encounter with his ethics instructor. The professor, Cheryl Abbate, was leading her "Theory of Ethics" class in a discussion about the application of philosophical theories to controversial political issues.  Among the issues listed on the blackboard were gay rights, gun rights and the death penalty. Professor Abbate removed gay rights from the list before the discussion began, with the summary explanation, "We all agree on this."

Read more at Townhall.com Read More......

Oregon Dems’ tax tsunami has started

The Democrat “Super Majority” is doing little to hide their plans for the 2015 Legislative Session. On Monday, the House Revenue Committee introduced more than 40 bills that would increase taxes on working Oregon families and small businesses.

“The Democrat regime has a spending fever, and their only prescription is more taxes,” said Senate Republican Leader Ted Ferrioli (R-John Day).

“Thousands of Oregon families are hurting, struggling to buy food, pay rent and keep the heater on, especially in rural parts of the state and among minority communities. The proposed tax increases would put the American dream that much further from reach, and show a disconnect between legislative leaders and working Oregonians.”

Among the tax increases introduced:

Read more at the Oregon Catalyst Read More......

Shaking Hands with the Devil, from Ninety Miles Away

A long time ago, on an island not too far away, a pair of brothers was ejected from a good Jesuit school. The one was reportedly a better student, the other less impressive, but together, they preferred other things – politics, rabble-rousing, war.  When the brothers grew up, they fell in with a bad crowd – the worst of crowds, in fact. Far across the oceans, Chinese communists were consolidating their power, Soviet communists were drawing an iron curtain down the center of Europe, Korean communists were settling in for the long haul in Pyongyang, Vietnamese communists were revolting against the French in Hanoi.

Read more at the Illinois Review
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

U Michigan Department Chair: We Should ‘Hate Republicans’

A University of Michigan department chairwoman has published an article titled, “It’s Okay To Hate Republicans,” which will probably make all of her conservative students feel really comfortable and totally certain that they’re being graded fairly.

“I hate Republicans,” communications department chairwoman and professor Susan J. Douglas boldly declares in the opening of the piece. “I can’t stand the thought of having to spend the next two years watching Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Ted Cruz, Darrell Issa or any of the legions of other blowhards denying climate change, thwarting immigration reform or championing fetal ‘personhood.’”

Read more at National Review
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Here's how Senate Republicans plan to reform the tax code

On Thursday, the Republican staff of the Senate Finance Committee released a report on the prospects of tax reform in the next session of Congress. The report gives insight into what policy reforms Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, might push as he takes over the committee when Republicans assume control of the Senate next month.

Committee staff listed seven principles to guide tax reform. “The first three principles are adopted from President Reagan’s tax reform in the mid-1980s, with four additional principles that are critical in today’s world: (1) efficiency and economic growth, (2) fairness, (3) simplicity, (4) revenue neutrality, (5) permanence, (6) competitiveness, and (7) incentives for savings and investment.”

Read more at the Washington Examiner Read More......

Feds Plan for 35 Agencies to Help Collect, Share, Use Electronic Health Info

Along with the primary goal of expanding the availability of health insurance, the Affordable Care Act aims to make the use of Electronic Health Records (EHR) universal. This plan actually began with the 2009 stimulus (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act), which included the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act. Doctors and other health providers have been offered incentives to convert patient information and health histories to a compatible and transferable electronic format, and as of June 2014, 75 percent of eligible doctors and 92 percent of eligible hospitals had received payments under the program.

Read more at the Weekly Standard Read More......

Obamacare Premiums Increase Again

Many Americans purchasing Obamacare-compliant health insurance plans will pay significantly higher premiums next year for coverage that generally carries large deductibles and has narrow provider networks. The high premium and high deductible combination likely contributed to the administration’s decision to wait until just before open enrollment, and after election day, to publicize the rates. These premium increases are on top of last year’s average increase of nearly 50 percent for individual market coverage.

Read more at the Senate Republican Policy Committee website Read More......

Unexpectedly: The New York Times discovers that many don’t have to work in the age of Obama

You already knew that Mitt Romney was right about just about everything.

He was right when he called Russia America’s “number one geopolitical foe.” With Moscow occupying sovereign foreign territory in Europe for the first time since 1989, and as American tanks and possibly even nuclear weapons are headed back to the European front, the 1980s called and they clearly got their foreign policy back.

He was right to warn about the expansion of Islamic extremists into formerly obscure places like Northern Mali. Despite being mocked by the unduly self-assured for his insistence that Islamic radicalism in North Africa was a threat to global security, France introduced troops into that country in 2013 at the behest of Mali’s president in order to quell the raging conflict between Islamist insurgents and government forces.  He was right about Detroit.

Read more at Hot Air Read More......

“I Hate America”: The Harm of Mental Masochism

By Nikita Chirkov
It would be a miracle if, during an ordinary stroll through a modern academic institution, you came across a jubilant group of students celebrating America’s role in the world (unless, of course, we are talking about the barely noticeable enclaves of college republicans and conservatives). For most students, the American global influence inspires shame and regret, signaled by a shaking hand that slowly drops from the heart at the first sounds of the Star Spangled Banner. A recent video survey of Harvard students demonstrated that most actually believed America is a greater threat to world peace than ISIS. Seems like a lot of people love to hate America. I’ll risk accusations of unnecessary bluntness, and label the disorder of logical reasoning as mental masochism – the type that slowly withers away rationality by a mechanism of self-destruction. This is probably the worst fate that can ever face any society, because once the masochism starts it becomes incurable. Of course, I can’t possibly vindicate all charges of American imperialism in one article, so what I will do instead, however, is write a series of articles addressing the most infamous of American crimes. The first charge against American imperialism that I will examine is that of the U.S. arming of Afghanistan forces against the Soviet invasion of 1979.

Read more at Intercollegiate Review Read More......

America Is Among Least Racist Countries In The World

From 2010 to 2014, the World Values Survey asked residents in over 50 countries who they would not want as neighbors. Just over five percent of respondents in the United States said “people of a difference race.” That’s far more tolerant a response than citizens of most European, African and Asian countries gave. As a comparison, 15 percent of Germans, 41 percent of Indians and 22 percent of Japanese said they wouldn’t want to live next to “people of a different race.” The Washington Post depicted the results in a useful chart.

Read more at Daily Caller Read More......

NYT: Poll Finds That More Americans Back Gun Rights Than Stronger Controls

Two years after the mass school shooting in Newtown, Conn., a majority of Americans say it is more important to protect the right of Americans to own guns than for the government to limit access to firearms, a Pew Research Center survey conducted this month found. The center said that it was the first time in two decades of its surveys on attitudes about firearms that a majority of Americans had expressed more support for gun ownership rights than for gun control.

Read more at the New York Times Read More......