The GOP Needs a General Grant

Via-American Thinker

By Tom Thurlow
Lately there have been a number of analogies made between various liberal political positions and the abolitionist Union side in the Civil War. No doubt this is a result of the 2012 Steven Spielberg movie Lincoln, and its notoriety, and the universal need to identify with the virtuous side of any historical struggle.

A few days ago, on CNN's Piers Morgan's show, columnist Frank Rich likened opposition to gun control to slave-owners in the pre-war South who did not want to give up their slaves. According to Rich, "I think that in some ways the gun culture is as entrenched in the American psyche as [was] slavery."

As a gun owner, I resent the comparison. But if there are any credible analogies to be made with today's political movements and Abraham Lincoln, it is between the Union side of the Civil War and today's Republican Party. Hear me out on this.

I don't mean to simply point out that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, which he was. Recall from history that during the Civil War, President Lincoln had a problem getting generals who would actively engage the Confederate army. "Some of my generals are so slow," Lincoln once remarked, "that molasses in the coldest days of winter is a race-horse compared to them."

We conservatives have a similar problem with our leaders, who hesitate to engage with President Obama and other high-ranking liberals.

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The Age Of Lies-Alaska is melting

I once wrote that I ceased to be liberal when I realized that in order to maintain that ideology I had to continuously deny what I knew to be the truth. What we are witnessing now is not just the denial of truths, it is the redefinition of truth.

Evil is being recognized as good and good is being condemned as evil.

And it is everywhere and it is seeping into everything. 

From The Age Of Lies

Alaska is Melting

At the beginning of the year it was publicized and widely reported that the Alaska Climate Research Center using data from NOAA weather stations throughout Alaska had determined that temperatures in Alaska had dropped significantly over the past decade.

A new report from the research center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks reveals that the 49th state of the union has cooled by 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 2000. 

The drop is described as a 'large value for a decade,' in the academic paper 'The First Decade of the New Century: A Cooling Trend for Most of Alaska.'

This was not some idle speculation but as I said a widely reported throughout the scientific community and in the popular press worldwide.

As the story from the UK Daily Mail points out, a drop in temperatures of 2.4 degrees over a decade is significant and a decade worth of data is more than just a simple anomaly. The report's  own title calls the past decade a "cooling trend". The current climate science community will often use yearly or even seasonal anomalies to alarm the public and here we have an entire decade long trend of cooling.

 Furthermore we are not talking about some random decade but rather the last decade when global temperatures especially in the northern latitudes were prophesied to rise. But rather than rising it has been been proven using the "warmist' communities own records that temperatures in Alaska actually dropped significantly over the past decade. These findings have not been disputed.

 What may have happened in previous decades although possibly significant as well does not change the fact that the current climate in Alaska is experiencing a cooling trend. This is fact based on actual data and research, plain and simple. All of this was brought to the worlds attention in the first week of January 2013.

So why is it that the National Wildlife Federation at the end of January can issue a report which states the following ?(emphasis in original)

Alaska has warmed about twice as much as the continental United States and warming is severely altering the Arctic landscape including melting permafrost. In the face of this unprecedented warming, many uniquely polar habitats—like the sea ice that polar bears, seals, and walrus require to hunt—are shrinking fast.

In what time frame is this purported warming supposed to have occurred? Obviously they can not be referring to the most recent available data since again as has been widely reported, Alaska temperatures are decreasing. The NWF must simply be ignoring recent long term changes in Alaska's climate in order to make such a statement.

 The report from the Alaska Climate Research Center tells us that previous studies found that:

In general, the temperature has increased in Alaska since instrumental records are available. Stafford et al. [2] analyzed 25 Alaskan stations for the time period from 1949-1998 and found a mean annual temperature increase for all stations in the range of 1.0°-2.2°C,

So previous studies, using basically the same stations that this new study used, concluded that Alaskan temperatures had increased, at most, 2.2 degrees, at the end of the twentieth century since 1949. Why is the increase of temperatures over a 50 year period of 2.2 degrees somehow" unprecedented" while the decrease in temperatures of 2.4 degrees over 10 years seems not to be even acknowledged?

I would also point out that if both studies are correct, then the past ten years of cooling have wiped out the previous 50 years of warming.

I would suggest that the decade long "cooling trend" in Alaska is an inconvenient truth that does not fit into the "warmist" narrative. Therefore the National Wildlife Federation just ignore the most recent scientific data in order to promote their progressive agenda.

The Age of Lies.

Amnesty Versus Bigotry

American Spectator

By ROSS KAMINSKY

Why Marco Rubio and his gang are correct — and it has nothing to do with amnesty.

It has recently become fashionable in conservative circles to attack Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” for putting forward a framework of principles for reform of America’s broken immigration system. The critiques from serious thinkers such as Utah Senator Mike Lee (perhaps my single favorite member of the U.S. Senate) and my American Spectator colleague Larry Thornberry, usually revolve around the word “amnesty” and suggest that Sen. Rubio is somehow caving in to leftist ideas in the way we normally expect from RINO and “establishment” Republicans, not from Tea Party champions.

These criticisms, both of the framework and of Senator Rubio, are misguided. They represent — but not for the reasons most people think — a primary cause of President Obama’s winning a second term and the primary reason that the GOP will have little chance at better future results unless the party — and the perception of the party — change dramatically.
The importance of the immigration debate is not mostly about its impact on several million Spanish-speaking illegal aliens (a term I don’t shy away from using). It is not even mostly about the economic impacts of immigration (a debate for another day). Instead, it is about how an ever-increasing number of voters view the Republican Party even if they have little interest in the details of immigration policy.

It is understandable that many on both sides of the political aisle argue over whether Hispanic voters are a naturally “conservative” constituency which has been turned off by the Republican position on immigration and related issues (such as in-state tuition for illegal aliens who were brought here at a young age by their parents) or whether they are a low-education, low-skill group whose desire or need for welfare and other public benefits makes them a target-rich environment for big-government Democrats.

Those who argue for the latter often point out that polls show Hispanics are no more interested in the immigration issue than the American electorate as a whole, concluding that Republicans are fooling themselves by thinking that caving into liberal immigration reform will increase the GOP share of the Hispanic vote.
Whether correct or not, this argument, like the current criticisms of the Gang of Eight framework, misses the point.

Republicans are not losing Hispanics because the party is perceived as anti-Hispanic or even hawkish on border enforcement. After all, that would not adequately explain the fact that according to exit polls Asian-Americans (who are not Hispanic and who tend to immigrate here legally) voted for Barack Obama by one percentage point more than Hispanics did.
The political impact of the immigration issue should not be seen principally as about immigrants. Rather, combined with Republican opposition to civil unions or gay marriage, it is part of a picture easily painted by Democrats and liberal media of the GOP as intolerant and bigoted.

The results among Hispanics and Asians reflect not that they have strong opinions about immigration, but that they see the Republican Party as bigots. They may not care very much about immigration as an issue, but that does not mean they do not view the political landscape through a lens of (in)tolerance and (un)openness for which a party’s immigration position is the most visible proxy.

It is the difference between a mat at your front door that says “Welcome” and one that says “Go Away.”

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War Is Like Rust

Via-Town Hall

Victor Davis Hanson

War seems to come out of nowhere, like rust that suddenly pops up on iron after a storm.

Throughout history, we have seen that war can sometimes be avoided or postponed, or its effects mitigated -- usually through a balance of power, alliances and deterrence rather than supranational collective agencies. But it never seems to go away entirely.

Just as otherwise lawful suburbanites might slug it out over silly driveway boundaries, or trivial road rage can escalate into shooting violence, so nations and factions can whip themselves up to go to war -- consider 1861, 1914 or 1939. Often, the pretexts for starting a war are not real shortages of land, food or fuel, but rather perceptions -- like fear, honor and perceived self-interest.

To the ancient Greek philosophers Heraclitus and Plato, war was the father of us all, while peace was a brief parenthesis in the human experience. In the past, Americans of both parties seemed to accept that tragic fact.

After the Second World War, the United States, at great expense in blood and treasure, and often at existential danger, took on the role of protecting the free world from global communism. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, both Democratic and Republican administrations ensured the free commerce, travel and communications essential for the globalization boom.

Such peacekeeping assumed that there would always pop up a Manuel Noriega, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden who would threaten the regional or international order. In response, the United States -- often clumsily, with mixed results, and to international criticism -- would either contain or eliminate the threat. Names changed, but the evil of the each age remained -- and as a result of U.S. vigilance the world largely prospered.

Jeff Session tell it like it is-too

How the Left Thinks

Via-Front Page Magazine

By Dennis Prager

To understand leftism, the most dynamic religion of the last hundred years, you have to understand how the left thinks. The 2013 inaugural address of President Barack Obama provides one such opportunity.

–”What makes us exceptional — what makes us American — is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’”

What American does not resonate to a president reaffirming this magnificent statement from our Declaration of Independence?

But here’s the intellectual sleight of hand: “What makes us exceptional — what makes us American” is indeed the belief that rights come from God.

But this seminal idea is not mentioned again in the entire inaugural address. This was most unfortunate. An inaugural address that would concentrate on the decreasing significance of God in American life — one of the left’s proudest accomplishments — would address what may well be the single most important development in the last half-century of American life.

–”We learned that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half-slave and half-free. We made ourselves anew, and vowed to move forward together.”

If there is one word that most excites progressives, it is “new.” (“Old” turns the left off: Judeo-Christian religions and the Constitution are two such examples.) The fact is that Americans did not make “themselves anew” after the Civil War. What they did was finally affirm what was old — the Founders’ belief that “all men are created equal.”Read entire article

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Enough of This Glumness

Via-American Spectator</strong>

By Peter Ferrara

There’s light at the end of the Obama tunnel.

Conservatives are still glum about the election, and the upper hand President Obama seems to have over Republicans. But the political stage has been framed far worse for conservatives and Republicans in the past.

In 1964, conservatives and Republicans were annihilated, when the conservative leader Barry Goldwater was crushed in the election by more than 20 points. Democrats held 295 House seats to 140 for the Republicans, and in the Senate, Democrats held a filibuster proof 67 seats, to 33 for the Republicans. This just 19 years after FDR had dominated American politics for a generation. The Republicans seemed dead, and conservatives were a disfavored minority within the Republican Party, distrusted as sure losers.

But in 1966, Republicans gained 47 House seats, and 3 in the Senate. Two years later, Richard Nixon won the White House, and was reelected in 1972 in an historic landslide, winning all but one state (Massachusetts).

By 1974, the Republicans seemed routed again. Watergate had forced Nixon to resign in disgrace, and the Republicans were annihilated again in the 1974 midterm elections. The Democrats gained 49 House seats, leading the Republicans 291 to 144, almost all the way back to 1964. Democrats gained 3 seats in the Senate, to lead the Republicans 60 to 38, with one Conservative Party Senator from New York, and one independent. In 1976, Democrat Jimmy Carter won back the White House from 8 years of Republican control.

But that was just a prelude to the Reagan domination of American politics for a generation, 24 years, after that. And during this time up until Reagan’s election, there was no Fox News, no conservative talk radio, no Internet and conservative blogosphere, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page did not blossom until the late 1970s.

Moreover, Republicans and conservatives only lost the 2012 election because millions of conservative voters stayed home, uninspired by the Northeast liberal Romney. This column tried to alert the public about that problem, in an offering entitled “RINO Romney Is the Least Electable.” But the Republicans still held the House majority, and hold complete control in 25 states with both the Governor and majorities in the legislature to only 14 for the Democrats.

Now Republicans and conservatives are on the comeback trail again. Suddenly, the upcoming issues do not favor Obama. And believe it or not, congressional Republicans are playing these issues right.

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Notable Quotes

"The problem with the GOP is that they still think it is about solving problems when it really is about saving the Republic"-

Jer

Egyptians Erupt Against Obama’s Favorite Islamist Regime

Via-Front Page Magazine

By Joseph Klein

During last Sunday’s “Sixty Minutes” joint interview with President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Obama boasted that “You know, when it comes to Egypt, I think, had it not been for the leadership we showed, you might have seen a different outcome there.”

It’s hard to disagree with the president. His administration contributed to the turmoil now gripping Egypt and leading to what some observers on the ground there have characterized as “a complete state of collapse,” to quote Al Jazeera.

Under Obama’s self-described “leadership,” his administration promulgated the false image of the Muslim Brotherhood as “moderate Islamists” (an oxymoron if there ever was one). Just last September, for example, an administration official, defending the White House’s plan to forgive $1 billion in Egyptian debt, said of the Muslim Brotherhood’s supposed commitment to economic reform: “They sound like Republicans half the time.” And let’s not forget Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s memorable description of the Muslim Brotherhood in February 2011 as “largely secular.”

As a consequence of his delusions about the good intentions of the Muslim Brotherhood, Obama tilted U.S. policy in their favor to lead the post-Mubarak regime at the expense of the more pro-democracy secularists who sparked the revolution in Tahrir Square in the first place two years ago.

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Notable Quotes

“I have deep concerns with the proposed path to citizenship. To allow those who came here illegally to be placed on such a path is both inconsistent with [the] rule of law and profoundly unfair to the millions of legal immigrants who waited years, if not decades, to come to America legally.”

Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX)

Notable Quotes

"Mr. Obama isn't a leftist lightweight or an incompetent; nor is he a little engaged chief executive who cares more about golfing, surfing, and taxpayer-funded multimillion dollar dates with Michelle than remaking the nation -- radically so. Mr. Obama is truly a rock-solid left-wing ideologue, with a strong strategic grasp, and a man who has Alinsky's tactics down cold."

J. Robert Smith

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ObamaCare ‘benefits’: The lie is exposed

Via-Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Editorial

ObamaCare’s negative consequences — sharply higher premiums, lower payments to treatment providers, reduced access — are looming so predictably that they can’t be called “unintended.”

Physician Scott Gottlieb, an American Enterprise Institute resident fellow, writes for Forbes about a California insurance broker who sells health plans to individuals and small businesses. She’s “prepping her clients for a sticker shock” this fall when insurers will unveil how they’ll cope with ObamaCare’s full brunt.

He says they’re “hinting to her that premiums may triple” — and that double-digit hikes are likely nationwide.

Dr. Gottlieb notes that ObamaCare empowers state regulators to block such premium increases and created a federal agency to oversee rates. But the regulators are mum on what’s looming. He says that’s because it’s all part of ObamaCare’s design, which doesn’t increase efficiency or competition.

If regulators force insurers to price coverage below what it costs under ObamaCare, insurers will lose money and leave markets — hence the coming hikes. Washington’s notion of controlling costs will be cutting payments to providers until they “fall below the rates where things will be readily supplied,” he says.

That’s similar to what happened under Massachusetts’ health care “reform,” the model for ObamaCare’s architects. They’ve known of its inevitable, anything-but-unintended consequences all along. And, soon, we’ll all pay a stiff price indeed for the latest government overreach, courtesy of the Nanny State.

Apes, Pigs, and F-16s

Via-NRO

When you arm Islamists, you become a willing participant in your own undoing.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

When Mohamed Morsi dehumanizes Jews as “the descendants of apes and pigs,” there’s an elephant in the room. We find it here:

Those who incurred the curse of Allah and His wrath, those of whom some He transformed into apes and swine, those who worshipped evil — these are many times worse in rank, and far more astray from the even Path!

You see, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood mahoff–turned–president did not conjure up the apes-and-pigs riff on his own. When Morsi fulminates that Muslims “must not forget to nurse our children and grandchildren on hatred towards those Zionists and Jews, and all those who support them,” he is taking his cues straight from the Koran. Or rather, from the Holy Koran, as “progressive” American politicians take pains to call it in the off hours from their campaign to drive every last vestige of Judeo-Christian culture from the public square.

The excerpt above is not from the Life and Times of Mohamed Morsi. It originates with that other Mohammed. Specifically, it is Sura 5:60 of the Koran, the tome Muslims take to be the immutable, verbatim commands of Allah, as revealed to the prophet. And as Andrew Bostom illustrates (with a disquieting amplitude of examples), the verse is not an outlier. It states an Islamic leitmotif.

Contrary to the fairy tale weaved by apologists for Islamists on both sides of America’s political aisle, Jew hatred is not a pathogen insidiously injected into Islam by the Nazis (with whom Middle Eastern Muslims enthusiastically aligned). Nor did the ummah come by it through exposure to other strains of anti-Semitism that blight the history of Christendom. Jew hatred is ingrained in Islamic doctrine. Consequently, despite the efforts of enlightened Muslim reformers, Jew hatred is — and will remain — a pillar of Islamist ideology.

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