Disrupting the Narrative of the New Left, its allies in Academia, Hollywood and the Establishment Media, and examining with honesty the goals of cultural Marxism and the dangers of reactionary and abusive political correctness.
THE NARRATIVE AND POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
“Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.”-George Orwell
It "can make some people uncomfortable," but City Council Speaker Christine Quinn says she's open to allowing middle-school girls as young as 11 to receive the morning-after contraceptive pill.
"This is a really important option we need to make accessible," Quinn said yesterday after receiving a mayoral endorsement from the Planned Parenthoodof New York City Political Committee.
"I understand it can make some people uncomfortable. We need to recognize the reality of what’s happening in children's lives and give them what they need to make the right choices and protect themselves," Quinn added.
Quinn had previously supported dispensing Plan B pills to high-school girls in a first-of-its-kind pilot program started by the Bloomberg administration last year.
Both regular birth-control pills and emergency contraception became available to students as young as 14 without parental notification.
Parents were given the option of opting out — but only 3 percent did, according to the Health Department.
Quinn said an expansion to middle schools might be necessary down the road.
The news coming out of Egypt is staggering. USA Today reports that "forty churches have been looted and torched, while 23 others have been attacked and heavily damaged" in one week. According to the Coptic Orthodox and Catholic churches in Egypt, 160 Christian-owned buildings have also been attacked.
In one town, Islamists paraded three nuns on the streets like prisoners of war after burning their Franciscan school. The attackers tore a cross off the gate of the school and replaced it with an Islamist flag. The New York Times described hundreds of Islamists in one attack, "lashing out so ferociously that marble altars were left in broken heaps on the floor."
Two security guards working on a tour boat owned by Christians were burned alive. An orphanage was burned down. The Catholic Bishop of Luxor told the Vatican news agency Tuesday that he has been trapped in his home for 20 days by Islamist mobs chanting "Death to the Christians!" "People who reside in the villages of the area that have nothing because food supplies are running out and people are afraid to leave the house," he said.
For the first time in 1600 years, prayers were not held in the Virgin Mary and Priest Ibram Monastery, which includes three churches, one of which is an archaeological site. According to the local priest, they were destroyed by supporters of former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi. On one village street, Islamists painted a red X on Muslim stores and a black X on Christian stores, so attackers knew where to focus their rage. On Tuesday, there were reports that the Brotherhood declared Friday prayers to be held in an evangelical church in the town of Minya that has been converted to a mosque.
A Brotherhood spokesman dismissed the wave of attacks as being perpetrated by "foolish boys" and alleged a conspiracy against his organization. But the Facebook page of the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party is rife with false accusations meant to foment hatred against Copts, including the absurd claim that the Church has declared "war against Islam and Muslims" and justified the attacks by saying: "After all this, people ask why they burn the churches." Then came a threat: "For every action there is a reaction."
Please be sure to read the whole article. It is well worth it. And so is the article below, written from the perspective of a Muslim who laments the damage done to his beloved Egypt by the hate-filled Muslim Brotherhood.
Mohamed Elhariry, a young businessman in Cairo, reveals the on-the-ground reality of life in recent months in Egypt. The young man says the Muslim Brotherhood "have lied to everyone, they never wanted a democratic state. The real Egypt is multi-denominational."
All of us Muslims were impressed by the attitude of Catholics, Coptic Orthodox and Protestant victims of the violence of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Christians did not ask for help from other countries of the same religion, instead they believed in themselves and in the Egyptian people. Everything that is happening in Egypt remains in Egypt. In contrast, the Muslim Brotherhood has made the rounds of the various Departments of State and put pressure on the interim government chosen by the various components of the Egyptian society.
We Muslims offered to protect churches and religious buildings, but our Christian brothers and sisters said: "Do not waste your souls, they are so precious to us. We have closed these buildings for now. Together we will rebuild our churches once we have eradicated terrorism." I am convinced that what is sacred to one of my neighbors is also sacred for me. I have respect for him and his free will.
The Obama administration has awarded Planned Parenthood more than $655,000 of taxpayer funds to hire "navigators" for the president's health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act (ACA). State affiliates in Iowa, Montana and New Hampshire were among the 105 organizations receiving $67 million in federal grants.
HHS will not require background checks or fingerprinting of employees, and a previous criminal conviction – including one for identity theft – does not necessarily disqualify an employee from becoming a navigator.
Navigators and their assistants will have access to the federal data hub, an online nexus containing information from the Department of Health and Human Services and seven federal departments: the IRS, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Defense Department, the Office of Personnel Management, the Veterans Health Administration, and the Peace Corps.
To expedite hiring before the exchanges go live on October 1, the administration has scaled back screening and cut new employees' training from 30 hours to 20.
This has raised concerns nationwide. Thirteen state attorneys general sent a letter to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on August 14 saying the administration had "failed to adequately protect the privacy" of American citizens.
"As it now stands, it is inevitable that HHS's vague 'standards' will result in improperly screened or inadequately trained personnel," they write.
They say the department has not defined what would qualify as a "breach" of privacy, nor defined who is accountable in the event of fraud: the person, his employer, or the exchange.
State regulations to tighten privacy could be said to violate federal regulations, which they call "woefully substandard."
"Unscrupulous counselors" – whom they warn will be "minimally screened and virtually unaccountable" – will have “easy means to commit identity theft on consumers seeking enrollment assistance.”
They have asked Sebelius to address their letter by August 28.
State AGs have also objected that HHS diverted 20 percent of funds intended for disease prevention to hire navigators.
Others are concerned Planned Parenthood employees could abuse their access to sensitive information to harass their ideological enemies. The National Organization for Marriage saw its tax forms leaked to a gay rights organization and later printed on The Huffington Post by a full-fledged IRS employee.
Although religious freedom is a pivotal human right, critical to national security and global stability, key provisions of the landmark International Religious Freedom Act are being neglected years after its passage. A number of studies demonstrates the link between freedom of religion and societal well-being, while its absence correlates closely with instability and violent religious extremism, including terrorism. Many governments, including those topping the U.S. foreign policy and security agendas, perpetrate or tolerate acts of religious repression, such as arbitrary detention, torture and murder.
The International Religious Freedom Act provides vital tools, including identifying and sanctioning the world's worst violators. But over many years and different administrations, the executive branch has not employed them fully or in a timely manner. With a key deadline for action arriving this month, it is time to confront this unwise failure to act.
The revelation comes from three Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinions declassified today by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
The NSA told the court in 2011 that it had accidentally collected an estimated 56,000 Internet communications by Americans or people in the U.S. that were unconnected to terrorism, a byproduct of collecting communications that are in bundled data packets from fiber-optic cables or other channels that travel through the U.S. telecommunications system. The court ordered the NSA to limit the material it collects and how long it keeps it, and the NSA agreed to limit storage of such bundled communications to two years. The court also ordered the NSA to destroy all bundled communications collected under the program between 2008 and 2011.
The news comes several hours after the Wall Street Journal reported that the NSA has the capability to spy on 75 percent of all U.S. Internet traffic. The Journal maintains that the NSA is capable of observing much more of Americans' online communications than officials have acknowledged.
In a statement to Fox News, the NSA defended the program, saying that it was charged with defending the country from foreign foes and protecting the rights of U.S. persons.
"It's not either/or," the statement said. "It's both."
Precisely the right takeaway from this morning's news about the reinstatement of four suspended State Department bureaucrats, and for precisely the right reason. There were so many strands of possible wrongdoing related to the Benghazi attack -- manipulation of the CIA talking points, scapegoating of the Mohammed moviemaker, lost opportunities for military action, alleged CIA intimidation of agents, and DOJ paralysis in pursuing the culprits -- that the most fundamental wrongdoing, the catastrophic lapse in security for the consulate, was often overlooked. Maybe that's a function of its comparative lack of sex appeal; the other elements all suggest intentional ass-covering government malfeasance while the security lapse was more likely due to egregious negligence.
And yet that egregious negligence has never been fully explained, despite testimony from whistleblowers that people as high up as Hillary's right-hand woman, Cheryl Mills, intervened personally to make sure people involved weren't speaking too freely. An ambassador got killed, as did three other Americans, and as of today the White House hasn't seen fit to sacrifice even a low-level staffer over it. Either there was something so sensitive happening at the consulate or at the CIA annex that the feds didn't want to call attention to it by installing a showier security presence or this really was a mind-boggling security vacuum in the heart of Libyan jihadistan despite repeated pleas from Chris Stevens himself to provide more muscle to protect U.S. diplomats. No one's been fired, no one's been suspended, no one's been fined. Mistakes happen. Next.
Tapper usually plays things straight enough as a reporter that it's hard to detect his feelings about a subject. Not here. Pure incredulity, start to finish. That’s where we're at with the most transparent administration ever.
So why won't even these four individuals be held responsible for their failures? Obviously: "These people have real lives, real careers." Unlike Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, of course...
"Who can you trust?" That's the title of a pretty good album, but it's also the question for our age. One of the underpinnings of successful representative government is that voters feel they can trust their representatives, and those in the bureaucracy to whom power is delegated, to follow the law. That trust in government officials' willingness to follow the law is the foundation for a sense that the law is legitimate, so that citizens feel a duty to follow the law as well.
But that trust has taken a big hit lately. Over the weekend, the IRS scandal hit the 100th day since the IRS admitted targeting conservative groups during the 2012 election year. Yet the IRS is still being charged with stonewalling Congressional investigators. IRS official Lois Lerner, of course, has already taken the Fifth rather than testify about what went on.
Meanwhile, new revelations of NSA lawbreaking have come out. As the Washington Post reported, the NSA violated privacy rules thousands of times per year. It appears that despite assurances that there was no domestic spying program, the NSA was, in fact, hoovering up vast numbers of phone calls, emails, etc. in order to spy on Americans. (New White House talking point: Hey, it's not a domestic spying program, it's just a program that does a lot of domestic spying!)
Do young Americans know the difference between the Nixon and Obama Administrations? Next Generation TV's Michelle Fields goes to the National Mall in Washington DC to find out.
It's Sunny at the White House! But not in Egypt, if you are a Christian or a Franciscan nun. All over the country, Christian churches are being burned, Christians murdered, and nuns paraded in the streets as "prisoners of war."
The "war": this can only mean a war of Islam vs. Christianity, right? What other "war" could they be prisoners of? (Their words, not mine.) The Muslim Brotherhood and their thug adherents are conducting a war of genocide against Christians, trying to erase the Copts - one of the oldest Christian groups in the world - from the land.
Once upon a time in America, the American president would have stood before the world, over and over again, and provided a moral counterweight to this evil. The great figures of the 20th century became great by denouncing evil and condemning genocidal and religious persecution: Reagan, Churchill, Wojtyla.
But Obama is no Wojtyla. He has remained nearly silent on the Muslim Brotherhood's bloody war on Egypt’s Christians. The martyrs pile up; he plays golf.
The thugs rampaging through Egyptian churches, you see, are Obama's thugs. He destabilized Egypt by giving the green light to Hosni Mubarak's fall. After all, Mubarak was an American stooge, a puppet, a toy of imperial America and all that left-wing drool Obama has subscribed to since he was writing articles in college denouncing the deployment of Pershing missiles in Europe. Now his thugs rampage through holy places, destroying.
Any news article you read concerning the violence in Egypt that fails to even mention the targeting of Christians and the burning of their churches should be read with a great deal of skepticism. The Establishment Media wants to portray the Islamofascists of the Muslim Brotherhood as peaceful protesters who are only motivated by disappointment that "Democratically-elected" Mohamed Morsi was overthrown. I suspect that if Adolf Hitler had been overthrown in 1934, members of the Nazi Party would have protested it in a similar manner.
It's time for the media lackeys of the West to start reporting the situation in Egypt honestly. Likewise, it's well past time for clueless RINO elitists like John McCain to stop misrepresenting Egypt's reality.
The Egyptian government under Hosni Mubarak also maintained that el-Zayat belonged to the Brotherhood. In 2008, it convicted him in absentia and sentenced him to ten years in prison on charges of funding the MB in Egypt (the Brotherhood was banned under Mubarak). As you might have suspected, el-Zayat's conviction was thrown out after the Mubarak regime was toppled, and he received an official pardon from Morsi in July 2012.
Member or not, el-Zayat plays a unique role in the Muslim Brotherhood's ideological universe. He's forged close connections with top global Brotherhood leaders and clearly shares and promotes the movement's worldview. Still, he, like other MB-connected individuals in the West that I've interviewed - some of whom you’ll meet in this book - disavows any sort of formal relationship with the Brotherhood.
Doing so has helped these "New Western Brothers" - as Italian terrorism expert Lorenzo Vidino calls them - largely avoid the stigma that the Muslim Brotherhood carries. Or used to carry. Indeed, the MB's much-deserved reputation for violence, radicalism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism is rapidly disappearing in the Age of Obama. The concept of engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood is no longer only whispered about at D.C. cocktail parties - it has become the official policy of the United States government.
We're nearing a point where el-Zayat and his Western cohorts may not even have to bother playing a double game anymore. The Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates are coming to power throughout the Middle East and North Africa, with the full support of Western governments - the Obama administration chief among them. In essence, the Brotherhood, which had moved in the shadows for most of its existence, has suddenly gone mainstream.
When an organization's members (and "non-members") become frequent guests at the White House and European Parliament and lead governments that receive billions in Western funding and weaponry, it's safe to say that any stigma that once existed is out the window. As a result, the day is fast approaching in Europe and the United States when allegations of membership in the Muslim Brotherhood will be greeted with a collective shrug of the shoulders by Islamists and Western officials alike.
No, it's not totalitarian, but it is shockingly arrogant and anti-scientific. The idea that science is closed, that science is settled and that anybody who brings evidence or questions is somehow a flat-earther is appalling.
Freeman Dyson, who is one of the great physicists of our time, he's a climate skeptic, he has more IQ in his pinky than the entire political echelon of the EPA put together, and they are saying this man is a scientific illiterate? The entire idea of science is that you are open to contrary evidence, it is the definition of a scientific theory. And particularly, climate science which is young, it's new, built on all kinds of assumptions, and data which contradicts each other -- the idea that it is a closed issue is incredibly unscientific and arrogant and that these bureaucrats and political hacks are decreeing this, I think is scandalous.
In a few short weeks, New Yorkers will choose between two candidates for city comptroller in the Democratic primary. One is Scott Stringer, a conventional Manhattan liberal. The other is a completely unhinged Manhattan liberal.
His name is Eliot Spitzer, and for a man who styles himself the "Sheriff of Wall Street," his real expertise is operating outside the law. As attorney general, he acted like some hick-town bully with a badge and a speed trap. But where it counted - in the courtroom - this sheriff seldom got his man.
Then again, Spitzer's goals in office have always been less about serving the people's interest and more about feeding his insatiable ego, his giant ambitions and his basest appetites. This fundamental character flaw, and the dysfunction it bred, brought down his governorship. And these failures, notably his meltdown in office, started long before the public learned of Ashley Dupre or the Emperors Club escort agency.
"The Post declines to accept the substitute language as quotations from DeLong." http://t.co/xPwYSeXtzW Story behind story is revealing too.
— Steve Krakauer (@SteveKrak) August 16, 2013
The National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, according to an internal audit and other top-secret documents.
Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States, both of which are restricted by statute and executive order. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that resulted in unintended interception of U.S. e-mails and telephone calls.
The documents, provided earlier this summer to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, include a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance. In one of the documents, agency personnel are instructed to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
