Social Security Reform Gets Pinochet’d

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Herman Cain proposed privatizing U.S. Social Security and cited Chile’s success. But like cuckoos popping out of clocks, the media smeared Chile as a “dictatorship.”

Cain, speaking Monday at CNN’s Republican presidential candidates’ debate in New Hampshire, boldly laid out the one solution known to work in resolving much of America’s $100 trillion in unfunded mandates by saying:

“I support a personal retirement system option in order to phase (out) the current system. We know that this works. It worked in the small country of Chile when they did it 30 years ago. I believe we can do the same thing.”

That system, initiated in 1981 by Chile’s Labor Secretary Jose Pinera, a U.S.-trained economist, formed the backbone of what’s known as Chile’s Economic Miracle. The privatization has provided Chile’s workers with an average 9.23% compound rate of return on their retirement contributions over 30 years compared with the 1% or less that U.S. workers can expect before the U.S. system goes bust in 2038.

Instead of challenging the proposal on its merits, the media were quick to leap on the only thing that excites them: The system, approved by Chile’s legislature and freely chosen by 97% of its workers over a state system, came about under the military government of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Read More at Investors.com

 

‘Demonic’ Is Angelic

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Ann Coulter’s chilling two-chapter recapitulation of the French Revolution is worth well more than the price of her new book,  Demonic, but that’s just a bonus.

Also priceless are Coulter’s plethora of one-liner skewerings of the liberal mob, but I digress. What make this her best book are her incisive demonstration that the revolution was the mother of the many totalitarian “revolutions” it spawned in the name of the people, her dissection of the mob mentality that drove it, and her case against today’s American liberals as exemplars of this mob mentality.

She first establishes her base line, defining the mob as “an irrational, childlike, often violent organism that derives its energy from the group. Intoxicated by messianic goals, the promise of instant gratification, and adrenaline-pumping exhortations, mobs create mayhem, chaos, and destruction, leaving a smoldering heap of wreckage for their leaders to climb to power.” Sound familiar? It should, because “the Democratic Party is the party of the mob. … Indeed, the very idea of a ‘community organizer’ is to stir up a mob for some political purpose.” No truer words.

She then systematically identifies the Democratic Party’s mob characteristics and how its leaders’ appeal to them — through distortions, inflaming passions, demonizing opponents and substituting propagandist images and sound bites in place of facts, ideas and persuasive argument. The Democratic Party is nothing if not a repository of hackneyed slogans (“the laws of logic have no action on crowds”), repeated mindlessly and incessantly and designed to thwart the rational consideration of ideas with appeals to incendiary, false rhetoric: “Bush lied, people died.” “No blood for oil.” “Tax cuts for the rich.”

Next, Coulter takes us on a gripping tour of the murderously barbaric and ghoulishly bloody years of the French Revolution and its philosophical underpinnings, which were inspired in part by Jean Jacques Rousseau.

Read More at Human Events by David Limbaugh, Human Events

Barack Obama, George Soros and the Religious Left

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Periodically, the professional left and their comrades in the traditional news media highlight religious leaders cheering for President Obama’s compassionate statism or denouncing  Republicans as sons of the devil.  I’m sure we can expect this pattern to become more frequent and more frantic as we approach the 2012 elections.

As Obama’s allies on the Religious Left step forward to promote Obama’s agenda and build momentum for his 2012 campaign, we should be prepared to expose them for who they really are.  In many cases we will discover that these religious leaders are well-compensated hyperpartisan mercenaries whose religious rhetoric is merely a threadbare cloak for their core values — values that have no basis in traditional religion or biblically-based teachings.

Over the weekend, Think Progress provided a megaphone for their brothers and sisters of the Church of George Soros:

Four members affiliated with the religious group Faith In Public Life held a brief press conference during FFC’s afternoon intermission to denounce the GOP’s adherence to the philosophies of anti-government, anti-religion author Ayn Rand. The leaders — Rev. Jennifer Butler, Jim Wallis, Rev. Derrick Harkins, and Father Clete Kiley — asserted that the GOP efforts to cut funding from many anti-poverty programs while balancing the budget on the backs of the poorest Americans were not in line with Christian values…

So who are these “religious” leaders, and what is this organization, Faith in Public Life?

Let’s break it down. First, we’ll look at the four leaders listed above, then we’ll look at the board members at Faith in Public Life (FPL)…

Read More at American Thinker By Jason Lee, American Thinker

Issa Investigates Project Gunrunner

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Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) is set to issue a number of subpoenas to federal officials who have ties to “Fast and Furious,” a secret program run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) that put thousands of semi-automatic firearms into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

Fast and Furious was a new addition to the ATF’s now-defunct “Project Gunrunner” program. It authorized (“pressed” is probably a more accurate word) U.S. gun stores located near the Mexican border to sell thousands of semi-automatic firearms to suspected and known straw-purchasers (those who buy guns for someone who can’t do so legally). The idea, apparently, was that the guns would lead the ATF to the heads of the cartels.

This program didn’t make headlines until Dec. 14, 2010. That day, during a late-night shootout between the U.S. Border Patrol and armed Mexican illegals in a remote canyon near Nogales, Ariz., 41-year-old federal agent Brian Terry was shot and killed. The U.S. Border Patrol agents had initially used beanbag rounds against the illegals. This loss of a federal agent in a beanbag-versus-rifle shootout should have been controversial enough — but the fact that agent Terry was killed by a firearm the ATF had “walked” across the border should have put this ill-considered program on every cable news network. Ditto for the fact that, as the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, a cartel arsenal recently captured in Mexico also contains guns from the sting.

But aside from CBS News, the mainstream media hasn’t been all that interested in investigating, and the Obama administration has been stonewalling. Two ATF agents — John Dodson, who is stationed in Phoenix, and Darren Gil, who was forced to retire as the agency’s attaché in Mexico City — became whistleblowers. Both Dodson and Gil have made the scandal public by speaking to CBS and other news outlets. Both agents say the orders for the program to send guns quietly into Mexico came from way over their heads, but neither knows how high up. Just where the idea began is what Representative Issa is hoping to discover.

Representative Issa’s investigation has been so stymied by the Obama administration that on June 3, some 31 congressional Democrats wrote to the president to urge him to end the administration’s stonewalling on the Fast and Furious program. In the letter, spearheaded by Rep. Jason Altmire (D., Pa.), the lawmakers called the uncooperative tactics “extremely troubling” and found the Justice Department’s failure to provide information to congressional investigators “equally troubling.” They say Americans deserve “prompt and complete answers.”

Read More at National Review By Frank Miniter, National Review

JUSTICE SCALIA RIPS LAWMAKERS AS BEING SLEEPY AND LAZY

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Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is not the sort who leaves readers wondering what he really thinks, especially when it comes to members of Congress. In two opinions Thursday, Scalia disparaged lawmakers, not for the first time, as sleepy and lazy.

To be sure, the 75-year-old justice will just as eagerly take a shot — or two or three — at colleagues on the court who come out on the other side of cases.

Scalia has laid out an approach to the law over his quarter-century on the court that rests on the meaning of the Constitution as it was understood by the people who wrote it and on the plain language of laws, not the legislative record that accompanies many bills. He also embraces the view that people should turn to their elected officials, not the courts, to solve many problems.

Commenting in a case involving cocaine sentences, Scalia wrote briefly to criticize one part of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s majority opinion that delved into legislative history. In particular, Scalia did not like that Sotomayor made reference to congressional testimony by a Yale medical school professor.

Scalia said the outcome of the case would be the same even if the professor “had not lectured an undetermined number of likely somnolent congressmen on the ‘damaging effects of cocaine smoking on people in Peru.’”

Read More at the Blaze By scott Baker, the Blaze

Commerce secretary pick: Globalist, CO2 activist

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President Obama’s nominee for commerce secretary, John Bryson, co-founded an environmental activist group that is a member and funder of the controversial Apollo Alliance.

Apollo is run by a slew of socialists and radicals, including Jeff Jones, a founder of the Weather Underground domestic terrorist organization. Jones himself boasts of doing work for the environmental group founded by Bryson, the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Bryson, meanwhile, currently is co-chair of the Pacific Council on International Policy, a globalist organization whose members can be found throughout the Obama administration.

Two weeks ago, Obama nominated Bryson for commerce secretary pending confirmation by the Senate.

Bryson is the former chairman, chief executive officer, and president of Edison International, the parent company of Southern California Edison.

Read More at WND By Aaron Klein, WorldNetDaily

 

Did Weiner Secretly Convert to Islam to Marry a Muslim?

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Omar Abu-Namous is the imam of the Islamic Cultural Center in New York and he is encouraging Huma Abedin – a practicing Muslim – to stand by her husband, New York congressman Anthony Weiner. Why would this imam support Anthony Weiner, who was raised Jewish, in a marriage with a practicing Muslim woman?

Every Islamic scholar agrees that it is forbidden for a Muslim woman to marry a non-Muslim. Former Muslim Walid Shoebat has translated the Arabic declarations relative to the validity of the marriage between Weiner and Abedin last year. One such publication Shoebat translated was the Al-Marsid newspaper, which reported on the Weiner/Abedin marriage specifically:

Dr. Anwar Shoeb of the faculty of Islamic law in Kuwait declared that the marriage between Anthony Weiner and Huma Abedin is null and void, considering it adultery as confirmed in the Sharia position, prohibiting the marriage of a Muslim woman to a non-Muslim, regardless of whether he is a Jew or a Christian. In this case, he assured the invalidity of the marriage certificate between them.

Abu-Namous is in direct opposition to his Islamic superiors? Why?

Abedin was raised in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In 2007, the New York Observer wrote (in an article no longer available but cross-posted at FreeRepublic.com) that her mother is a professor in Saudi Arabia and that her father was an Islamic scholar before his death.

Weiner was raised Jewish but admitted to growing up in a non-religious household. If Abedin remains a practicing Muslim and her religion forbids her from marrying a non-Muslim, isn’t she failing to practice Islam? Wouldn’t that be the case unless Weiner converted to Islam? The New York Times reported that Weiner “sometimes fasts with her (Abedin) during Ramadan.” This would indicate that the congressman is more amenable to practicing Islam than Abedin is to practicing Judaism.

Read More at Floyd Reports By Ben Barrack, Floyd Reports

Palin adviser slams Bachmann strategist Ed Rollins for dissing the ex-governor

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It looks like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann might genuinely be frenemies now.

A day after Ed Rollins, Bachmann’s top political adviser, trashed Palin in a radio interview, a top adviser to the former Alaska governor slammed the longtime GOP strategist and called on the Bachmann camp to retract his statements.

“Beltway political strategist Ed Rollins has a long, long track record of taking high profile jobs and promptly sticking his foot in his mouth,” Michael Glassner, Palin’s chief of staff, said in a statement to Politico’s Ben Smith. “To no one’s surprise he has done it again, while also fueling a contrived narrative about the presidential race by the mainstream media. One would expect that his woodshed moment is coming and that a retraction will be issued soon.”

As The Ticket previously reported, Rollins criticized Palin Tuesday, insisting she’s not as qualified to be president as Bachmann and is a joke candidate.

“Sarah has not been serious over the last couple of years,” Rollins said. “She got the vice presidential thing handed to her. She didn’t go to work in the sense of trying to gain more substance. She gave up her governorship.”

Read More at the Ticket By Holly Bailey, The Ticket

Joe Miller focused on defeating Mitt Romney in 2012

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Tea Party hero Joe Miller says he’s focused on making sure Mitt Romney doesn’t become president.

In an interview with The Daily Caller, Miller, who unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate in Alaska in 2010, said his Western Representation PAC hopes to spend at least $500,000 campaigning against Romney, a Republican candidate, in early primary states like New Hampshire.

“It’s about getting the government back to its fundamentals, limiting government and showing that Romney is not embracing that approach,” Miller said of his PAC’s “Stop Romney” campaign.

Miller, who chairs the Western Representation PAC, said he’s not supporting any other GOP candidate.

Miller said Romney has a “big government approach.” The PAC will publicize the former Massachusetts governor’s history of flip-flopping, or as Miller said, “where Romney use to be and where he claims to be today.”

Read More at the Daily Caller by Alex Pappas, The Daily Caller

Boehner Wimps Out on Libya

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The moment would be surreal were it not so reminiscent: An arrogant Democratic president had committed an impeachable offense, lied to the American people, and dared Congress to do anything about it. Incensed congressmen of both parties asked, negotiated, and threatened until they realized they had no alternative but to take action. Then, the Republican leadership stepped in to save their party’s, and their country’s, worst enemy.

This is not a Clinton-era flashback but a rehearsal of this week’s actions in Congress.

Barack Obama’s indiscretion is more serious than a stained dress and a lie under oath during a civil trial. Obama sent an already overstretched American military to take sides in the Libyan civil war, as part of the NATO operation known as Operation Odyssey Dawn. Now, well over 60 days into the fight, the war proceeds with no sign of Congressional approval and a promise of “no let-up.”

By the most liberal reading of the War Powers Resolution, this is illegal. Yet when Congress decided to act, the Republican leadership came to the rescue.

Boehner Saves Barry’s Bacon

A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers opposed the war from the beginning. Congressmen Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul suggested the war called for impeachment. Late last month Kucinich introduced House Concurrent Resolution 51, which would require Obama to remove all U.S. troops from combat in Libya within 15 days of passage.

Read More at Floyd Reports by Ben Johnson , The White House Watch