Obama's Bizarre Iranian Love Affair Continues

Obama's Bizarre Iranian Love Affair Continues

 

BY ROGER L SIMON APRIL 3, 2016

CHAT 594 COMMENTS

It's a shame the Republican candidates continue to waste time hectoring each other over the most trivial matters when over the last few days it has become increasingly clear how completely the president of the United States sold out the interests of our country and the West to the Islamic Republic of Iran -- by far (it isn't even close) the biggest state sponsor of terrorism. The candidates are missing an extraordinary teaching moment about something of monumental significance, assuming they are paying attention to it themselves.

The media -- only a very few of whom (like Bloomberg's Eli Lake and our ownMichael Ledeen) seem even faintly interested in what is going on with Iran -- is equally complicit and even more culpable in this fascination with the tangential.

What the supposed journalists are missing is a chance to solve the greatest mystery of our times -- why Barack Obama decided to sell out those Western interests to Iran; and why, at least for the moment, he has taken the Shiite side in the thirteen hundred year plus Sunni-Shiite civil war and in so doing placed humanity in jeopardy, making the mullahs stronger and virtually assuring they will eventually have atomic weapons.

Why does this peculiar man who somehow ended up president of the United States make the often inexplicable decisions he does? Does he have real reasons (nefarious or otherwise) or is it, to be blunt, emotional disturbance?

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But to those recent events: It now appears clear that Obama, for all his protestations in 2011, was never serious about overthrowing Assad. (We already know he didn't turn out to be serious about his redline for the despot's use of chemical weapons on his people.) When presented with a military plan to overthrow Assad in 2012 by supporting more moderate rebels who then still existed, we now learn Obama demurred.

Why? I doubt the mullahs would have approved of the overthrow of their Syrian ally, and Obama, from the outset, was above all things bent on making a deal with Iran. He still is, even though he doesn't really have one, not one that anyone understands anyway or has seen.  The little bit of a deal he has is a moving target manipulated entirely by Ayatollah Khamenei who, unless Obama is actually an Iranian agent (I doubt that, but anything's possible), has played our president like the proverbial violin and doesn't seem as if he's ready to stop.

In the last week or so Obama has decided to ignore the putatively sanctioned Iranian missile tests -- the ones with "charming" admonitions for Israel to be wiped off the surface of the Earth emblazoned on the fuselage in Hebrew and Farsi -- and seemingly agreed to the ayatollah's demand that Iran should be allowed into our dollar system. A hundred and fifty billion evidently wasn't enough.

Irony of irony, this latest financial sellout to Iran will be administered by Secretary of the Treasury Jacob Lew -- an orthodox Jew. (How does that man sleep?) Lew assured the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last July that “Iranian banks will not be able to clear U.S. dollars through New York or hold correspondent account relationships with U.S. financial institutions, or enter into financing arrangements with U.S. banks.” That was then. This is now.

Glenn Beck: Milton Friedman Econ 101

Glenn Beck: Milton Friedman Econ 101


Milton Friedman ECON 101


Bloomberg Money recently printed an article extolling the “helicopter money” theory from a man many consider to be the greatest economist in the 20th century — Milton Friedman. Friedman was a brilliant defender of the free market — or capitalism. Milton Friedman was the son of poor, immigrant parents. His father died when he was 15, forcing him to creatively supplement a scholarship to Rutgers University. 

Capitalizing on the tradition that all freshmen must wear green ties, he and a friend went door to door, selling them in the dormitory. There he learned early the benefits of a free market — offering products at a lower, competitive price while making a profit. After graduating from Rutgers, Friedman earned his Master’s Degree from the University of Chicago and later his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He married his college sweetheart and went on to teach at Columbia, Cambridge, the University of Chicago and the Hoover Institution. Before Friedman rose to prominence, the preeminent economist of the 20th century was Englishman John Maynard Keynes, who advocated for more government intervention in the economy. 

Friedman however, was a rare breed and didn’t think inside the box. He was thrilled in 1947 to receive an invitation from the Nobel Prize winner Friedrich von Hayek to meet in Sweden with some of the brightest minds in the world. Decades later, in 1976, Friedman himself was awarded the Nobel Prize in economic sciences. Friedman was unafraid and unashamed in the goodness and rightness of capitalism. He often engaged detractors on college campuses, stating that “a society that aims for equality before liberty will end up with neither equality nor liberty.” I

n 1979, he sat down for an epic interview with Phil Donahue, addressing the talk show host’s concerns about capitalism. Today, Friedman would no doubt be labeled an uncaring, hateful racist for his straightforward thinking. For example, when asked at a college forum what role the government plays in helping the poor, he spoke decisively on the matter: “First of all, the government doesn’t have any responsibility. People have responsibility. This building doesn’t have responsibility. You and I have responsibility. People have responsibility,” Friedman said. “How can we as people exercise our responsibility to our fellow man most effectively? That’s the problem. So far as poverty is concerned, there has never in history been a more effective machine for eliminating poverty than the free enterprise system and the free market.” 

Friedman’s ideas would eventually become hugely influential in the thinking of Chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, President Ronald Reagan, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and later, Ron and Rand Paul. Milton Friedman died in 2006, at the age of 94, silencing a voice that strongly defended the virtues of capitalism and a free market system that has richly blessed as the United States.

Source: http://www.glennbeck.com/2016/04/04/milton-friedman-part-i-economics-101/?utm_source=glennbeck&utm_medium=contentcopy_link

The Left Lets the Veil Drop

NOAH ROTHMAN / APR. 1, 2016

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You’ve got to hand it to progressives. So assured are they that their policy prescriptions are ultimately for the best that they routinely demonstrate utter disregard for consistency or the consequences of disseminating untruths. Everything is fair game, so long as it advances their preferred agenda. Such was the brazen course taken by liberals in their pursuit of a “living wage,” e.g. a dramatic increase in state and federal minimum wages.

In the effort to create an issue on which the party could campaign in 2014, Democrats settled on hiking the minimum wage. For many of its advocates, this policy preference was the result of a noble desire to provide support for the less fortunate amid the lingering effects of the 2008 financial downturn. Good intentions have always inoculated the left against criticisms of the consequences of their policy preferences.

There was a cynical motive to this crusade on the part of liberals, too. The political imperative to blunt the GOP’s anticipated momentum heading into the midterm elections always trumped the negative economic effects of a minimum wage hike. Democrats professed to want to give the little guy a leg-up, and research that suggested a minimum wage hike would have the precise opposite effect for hundreds of thousands of little guys was dismissed.

In February of 2014, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office released a study that found raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour by 2016 would hike earnings marginally for up to 16.5 million workers, but that would come at a cost. Approximately 500,000 lower-skilled workers would lose their jobs, and “the income of most workers who became jobless would fall substantially.” In early 2014, with the official unemployment rate stable at 6.7 percent, that did not seem to many like a tradeoff worth making.

Nonsense, the left declared. Not only was the tradeoff worth it, but there was also no tradeoff at all. That’s right; follow this logic. Think Progress’s Bryce Covertassured a nervous nation that, even if the CBO study was accurate, other research suggested that the increase in income for millions of lower-skilled workers would result in more spending, which in turn creates jobs. “There is also real world evidence that minimum wage increases don’t hurt jobs,” she wrote, citing the Center for American Progress. “After looking at the increases during times [of] 7 percent unemployment or more, the rate actually declined 52 percent of the time and in a few cases remained unchanged.”

Covert was hardly alone. The CBO’s assessment of the negative impact on employment was “fuzzy and unreliable,” while it probably underestimated the positive impacts of the minimum wage, declared National Memo’s Joe Conason. Even the president and the government he leads got in on the act. “There’s no solid evidence that a higher minimum wage costs jobs,” Barack Obama declared. Over at the Department of Labor, a web page dedicated to serving as a minimum wage “myth buster” soon appeared, which echoed the president’s sentiments. “Myth: Increasing the minimum wage will cause people to lose their jobs,” the Labor Department truth-seekers averred. “Not true.” They cited a letter to the president signed by 600 economists who insisted that a minimum wage hike had “little or no negative effect on the employment of minimum-wage workers.”

It was perhaps with these appeals to authority in mind that the nation’s most liberally governed states embarked on a brave journey into the unknown. This week, New York and California’s legislatures both approved minimum wage increases, not to the $10.10 per hour, for which President Barack Obama advocated and approved for federal contractors, but to $15 per hour. Despite both states having higher unemployment rates than the national average, their respective governors are expected to sign those measures. Their advocacy campaign successful and complete, the left is now shifting from denying that there will be any adverse effects on employment as a result of the minimum wage hike to admitting that those effects will materialize and lead to a kind of desirable economic Darwinism.

“The $15 minimum wage sweeping the nation might kill jobs — and that’s okay,” read the headline gracing Washington Post WonkBlog journalist’s Lydia DePillis’ report on the unsatisfactory outcomes of a massive increase in the state-level minimum wage. She quotes a variety of liberal economic policy activists who are now hedging their bets. “For its advocates, the question isn’t whether minimum wage hikes will kill jobs, but rather how to help people who end up unemployed when they do,” DePillis reported. That is, “when” they become financially dependent on the federal safety net; not “if.”

Even California Governor Jerry Brown admits that there will be pain associated with such a substantial minimum wage hike, but that he is obliged to accommodate the “principle” of mandatory wage growth commensurate with income levels that can support a family. This contention might be the most frustrating misconception about the minimum wage — it was never designed to be a single-source income sufficient to sustain a household. If that’s the most frustrating claim made by minimum wage activists, the most galling is the contention from some academics that the law’s losers deserve their lot.

“Why shouldn’t we in fact accept job loss?” asks New School economics and urban policy professor David Howell, who’s about to publish a white paper on the subject. “What’s so bad about getting rid of crappy jobs, forcing employers to upgrade, and having a serious program to compensate anyone who is in the slightest way harmed by that?” [emphasis added]

And you thought conservatives were heartless. At least the right demonstrates some regard for an individual’s own labor and values the stable neighborhoods that develop around a culture of productivity and industriousness.

DePillis’ report closes with a note of uncertainty. We’re in “uncharted waters” here; anything could happen. But the effects of dramatic minimum wage hikes on low margin businesses are almost always the same; fewer hours and less work for employees, reduced product or service quality, and, when all else fails, higher prices for consumers. “The thought process is that you’re going to put more money in people’s pockets,” said Albuquerque café owner Myra Ghattas in a recent L.A. Times report who is struggling to accommodate just a $1 hike in his state’s minimum wage. “In theory, that makes sense. But people end up getting hours cut, and they don’t actually make any more money.”

For larger firms that can afford to simply eliminate minimum wage positions by replacing them with a touch-screen self-service station, for example, the choice becomes a no-brainer. The self-styled most compassionate among us believe that the priority should be providing those who have their position eliminated as a result of this law with government benefits as soon as possible. While their solution to the problem they created mitigates some immediate suffering, it also robs the newly jobless of their sense of agency and pride. Families deteriorate, neighborhoods follow, and social cohesion worsens.

If there is one particular social benefit to these minimum wage laws, it would be that they have led liberals to let their veil slip. For too many on the left, the ends always justify the means, even if those means are willfully deceptive. The progressive project demands compromises from us all.

More Chaos at Chicago Public Schools.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: More Chaos at Chicago Public Schools.

This last comment is telling, because it points to a structural problem that is contributing to this dysfunction (Chicago teachers have been threatening strikes regularly for the last several years): namely, that people who live outside of Chicago, and have no voice in how the Chicago schools are run, must be taxed in order to provide the money to run Chicago schools the way the Chicago city government—or, more accurately, the Chicago Teachers Union—thinks they should be run.
A big part of blue state politics is the effort to equalize school spending across districts; rich Illinois suburbs can afford better schools than poor towns and cities, so they are asked to send extra money to Springfield to subsidize underfunded schools in Chicago. And it’s not just Illinois—state Democratic parties across the country are eager to subsidize schools in poor places with money raised in rich ones. (Incidentally, this may be one reason Democrats are struggling at the state level).
There is nothing wrong with this arrangement in and of itself—money should be redirected to children from poor families. The problem is that there is no countervailing understanding that if Illinoisans at large are going to pay for Chicago’s schools, sooner or later taxpayers will want some say in how the schools are managed. (The available evidence suggests that they are not being managed well, to say the least). But when Springfield tries to impose cuts or reforms, as it is now, political interests in Chicago fight them tooth and nail.

Remember, it has nothing to do with educating kids. It’s about graft and vote-buying.

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Posted at 10:30 am by Glenn Reynol

Comm - Glenn Beckunism Part IV

Glenn Beck - Communism Part IV


http://www.glennbeck.com/2016/03/31/communism-part-iv-american-radicals/



Communism Part IV: American Radicals Income equality, thriving economies parody throughout society. Perpetual peace. Utopia. These were the lofty goals and idealistic promises of communism. One hundred million dead during peacetime, continual war and/or the threat of it, economic disaster, state-controlled media, governmental lies, labor camps, concentration camps, starvation, police states, lack of freedom, and state-sponsored atheism. This is the reality of communism.

Source: http://www.glennbeck.com/2016/03/31/communism-part-iv-american-radicals/?utm_source=glennbeck&utm_medium=contentcopy_link

Communism Part III: The Rise in America

Communism Part III: The Rise in America 

By The Glenn Beck Program Updated 03/30/2016 


A generation has passed since the Cold War ended — and along with it, a true understanding of communism. Young voters today grew up in school systems where capitalism was often a dirty word. They heard the siren call of socialism and its promise of being the great equalizer. They’re in for a rude awakening. In this series, Glenn discusses the origins of communism, what it really means and what lurks behind the pleasant label of “democratic socialism.” 

Source: http://www.glennbeck.com/2016/03/30/communism-part-iii-the-ride-in-america/?utm_source=glennbeck&utm_medium=contentcopy_link



http://www.glennbeck.com/2016/03/30/communism-part-iii-the-ride-in-america/


Communism III - Glenn Beck

King Barack Won't let Us Say "Islamic Terrorism", and that goes for the Pres., of France, too!!!

Pathetic: White House silences translation audio when French president mentions “Islamist terrorism”

POSTED AT 1:21 PM ON APRIL 1, 2016 BY ALLAHPUNDIT

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I owe the MRC an apology for doubting them. I read this piece assuming all the way through that they had misconstrued what must be a perfectly innocent glitch by the White House in translating Hollande. Nope. Watch the official WH video below (starting at 3:20) and follow along with the official WH translation and you’ll see how hard it is to come up with an explanation different from theirs. The audio on the clip perfectly tracks the transcript — except when it cuts out for exactly two sentences and then resumes:

But we’re also well aware that the roots of terrorism, Islamist terrorism, is in Syria and in Iraq. We therefore have to act both in Syria and in Iraq, and this is what we’re doing within the framework of the coalition.

I’d chalk that up to a glitch if not for the fact that it jibes with Obama’s own notorious policy ofnot mentioning Islam in connection with jihadism. If that’s his rhetorical preference, okay; it reeks of embarrassing political correctness but it’s his prerogative to choose his own words. It’s not his prerogative to choose someone else’s words, particularly when that someone is a foreign head of state whose country is dealing with a more severe jihadist threat right now than the United States is. They’ve actually reached the point now where they’re blacking out references to Islam for English speakers in official state video of talks over terrorism. (At least they’re not censoring transcripts. Yet.)

You know what the worst part is? Hollande didn’t say “Islamic terrorism,” which is the supposedly objectionable term. He said “Islamist terrorism.” “Islamist” was, I thought, a term that came into use precisely because it gave the speaker an efficient way to distinguish between “moderate Muslims” and the more jihad-minded. “Islamic” describes all things Muslim; “Islamist” describes a supremacist view in which Islam is the highest authority of the state. Many critics of Islam would dispute that there’s a meaningful distinction between those two, but Obama and Hollande certainly wouldn’t. ISIS may not be Islamic to Obama but it’s certainly Islamist. Point being, Hollande chose his words carefully here according to the White House transcript so as not to conflate the average Muslim with the jihadis he’s discussing — and the White House still censored him. That’s the point we’re at.