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Heather MacDonald, NRO.com

 

I would guess that Sergeant Crowley simply snapped under Gates’s taunts and chose to teach him a lesson for the informal offense of contempt of cop — an understandable, if less than ideal, reaction, but not a racist one. Crowley, even by Gates’s account, acted politely throughout the interaction.

 

National crime patterns are the same. Black males between the ages of 18 and 24 commit homicide at ten times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. Such vastly disproportionate crime rates must lead, if the police are going after crime in a color-blind fashion, to disproportionate stop and arrest rates. To criticize the police for crime-determined enforcement activity is to blame the messenger.

 

Obama has no one around him who could disabuse him of his ignorance about the police. Attorney General Eric Holder enthusiastically participated in the reign of unjustified federal consent decrees that the Justice Department slapped on police departments during the Clinton administration. Worrisomely, Obama gestures towards those days when he says that “we’re working with local law enforcement to improve policing techniques so that we’re eliminating potential bias,” as if Justice Department lawyers know a thing about “policing techniques.”

 

Obama’s prime-time recycling of advocate-generated myths about policing will only make inner-city neighborhoods more dangerous for their many law-abiding residents. No one benefits more from proactive policing than the poor, who have as much of a right to public safety as Cambridge residents. Officer Crowley was only doing his job, without any manifestation of racial bias. Now, if an officer investigates a 911 call in good faith, who knows if the president will say he acted “stupidly?” Why bother putting your reputation on the line? The blow to police morale from Obama’s gratuitous remarks is enormous.

 

Worse, Obama has only increased the racial paranoia that Gates put so vividly on display. Officers of all races say that the first thing out of a black driver’s mouth during a traffic stop for speeding or running a red light is often: “You only stopped me because I’m black,” a reaction ginned up by decades of anti-cop agitating and now bolstered by Obama’s recycled fictions. The advocate-fueled resentment of the police in inner-city neighborhoods makes crime fighting more difficult and more dangerous. Obama’s hope for reviving urban economies rests on a crucial precondition: that cities stay safe. He has just put that precondition in jeopardy. Read article.

Thomas Sowell, Townhall.com

 

Distracting the audience's attention is one of the ways magicians pull off some of their tricks. President Barack Obama's televised news conference on medical care shows that he is something of a magician when it comes to politics.

 

The big trick for the president is to convince the public that he can add tens of millions of people to his government medical care plan without raising the costs. But an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office showed that Obamacare would in fact raise the costs and increase the deficit by billions of dollars.

 

With both common sense and economic analysis saying that Obama cannot expand government medical care without expanding the already runaway federal deficit, it is quite a trick to get the public to believe otherwise-- a big challenge requiring big distractions.

 

One of those distractions has been to blame current high costs on scapegoats whom the president can rein in. Talking about the high pay of the CEOs of pharmaceutical companies is one of those distractions.

 

In an industry where developing just one new pharmaceutical drug can cost a billion dollars, whether the head of a mega-billion-dollar pharmaceutical company is paid a million dollars a year, 20 million dollars or works free of charge is not likely to raise or lower the cost of the medicine you buy by one dollar. Read article.

 

Mark Tapscott, Washington Examiner.com

 

President Obama’s desperate pleas this week for Congress to pass his massive health care reform before leaving town for its August recess ran head-on into constitutional roadblocks erected by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and the other Founders in 1787.

 

Put another way, the smart guys in the powdered wigs who met in Philadelphia saw the demagogic politicians coming, with their grandiose plans to remake America, so they built into our constitutional system a series of speed bumps designed to leave Obama and his ilk sputtering in frustration.

 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi may yet find a way to steamroller Obama’s radical reform through the lower chamber before the recess, but even there House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer prepared the way Tuesday for the more likely outcome of representatives heading home without taking such a vote.

 

On the Senate side, there is virtually no prospect of a vote. What is ahead for members of the world’s most exclusive debating society is a month of increasingly hostile questions from constituents as they read, think and talk about the Obama plan in detail. Odds are the outlook for the Obama plan will be even worse when Congress returns after Labor Day.

 

Obama knows this and he also sees his popularity dropping by the day, along with public support for his policies. So he launches a final push to get Congress to hurry up, aware that every day brings him 24 hours closer to defeat on one of his signature issues. Read article.

Eric Novack, Human Events.com

 

How many television hucksters rush you to buy something because the opportunity will not last? How many used car salesmen have told you that you that you need to ‘sign on the dotted line’ without fully reading the contract because the details are simply ‘boilerplate’? When was the last time some stock broker showed you the numbers for just the first few years of a loan repayment because ‘the investment will pay for itself’despite a huge balloon payment coming up? Welcome to health care reform, President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid-style.

 

Speaking at a town hall event earlier this month, Obama said, “For those who say, 'Well, you know what, this is something that is very complicated, so we shouldn't rush into it,' that's what happens in Congress all the time.” The President believes health care reform is something we should “rush,” even though it is very complicated. More recently, he said, “I just want to put everybody on notice, because there was a lot of chatter during the week that I was gone: We are going to get this done.” Why is the President is using the same tactics as the predatory lenders and television hucksters?

 

Steny Hoyer (D-Md), the House Majority Leader, recently responded to a question about members of Congress actually reading the health care reform bill before voting in favor of it. “If every member pledged to not vote for it if they hadn’t read it in its entirety, I think we would have very few votes.” In other words, do not bother to read the contract you are about to sign. Do not worry about what is actually in the bill, or what it means. Trust us -- it does not ration care to seniors, it does not raise taxes on small businesses and millions of the uninsured, it will not force you to give up your doctor or the health plan you currently have. [Really?] Read article.

 

Morris & McGann, Vote.com

 

President Obama's rhetoric last night summoned the memory of "1984," George Orwell's novel of a nightmarish future -- where the slogan of the rulers is "War is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength."

 

The president assures us that he will cut health-care spending. . .by adding $1 trillion to health-care spending.

 

He says that "health-care decisions will not be made by government". . .while he sets up a new Federal Health Board to tell doctors what treatments they can offer and to whom and under what circumstances.

 

Obama told the media, "I will free doctors to make good health-care decisions". . .by telling the physicians what to do.

 

When the president says he guarantees the "same coverage" to people who like their current health-insurance policies, he means that their current HMOs, insurers and doctors will be the ones to implement the protocols and instructions the government hands down to them -- not that we'll have our current freedom of decision-making.

 

When he blandly assures us that we will "stop paying for things that don't make us healthier," he really means that his Federal Health Board will overrule your doctor and stop him from using his own best judgment in your treatment.

 

The president will "get the politics out of health care" by putting it under government control. Read article.

Kelcy Allen, American Thinker.com

 

How in God's name, and I mean that literally, can liberals lay claim to Martin Luther King? Isn't it the Liberal Left and their ACLU who want to ban the Ten Commandments? Isn't it liberal Democrats who want to take "God" out of the Pledge of Allegiance and off U.S. coinage? Isn't it the modern American Left who vehemently calls for the separation of Church and State? Isn't it only Democrats who want God taken out of public discourse?

 

Where did Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stand on these issues? Wasn't he an ordained minister, like 24 of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, who themselves had seminary or Bible school degrees? Didn't he hold prayer vigils and constantly invoke the name of Almighty God, and wasn't he often pictured in public while embracing his Bible? Where in Hell, and I mean that literally, did the new liberal Left Democrats come up with such stupefying duplicitous hypocrisy? 

 

An African-American (emphasis on "American") conservative political group called RagingElephants.org, placed an ad over the last 4th of July holiday weekend beside a freeway exit in Houston, Texas. The large roadside billboard stated, "Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican!" I believe they were trying to point out that MLK was originally a member of Abraham Lincoln's emancipating Republican Party. While King may not have been a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, we can say with certainty that the American political Right has now moved so far left that President John F. Kennedy would be a mainstream Republican and Martin Luther King would fall smack dab in the middle of the right-minded conservative Christian camp! Read article.

 

Firestorm in Spokane

Tom DeWeese, NWV.com

 

In March, 2009, I traveled to Spokane, Washington to address the annual Republican Lincoln Day Dinner. I reprinted my speech (Part 1, Part 2) in the April issue of The DeWeese Report (Vol. 15, Issue 4), under the tile, “The Wrenching Transformation of America.” That speech caused a firestorm in Spokane as I detailed exactly how an organization called the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) is operating in more than 600 American communities (including Spokane). That group is guiding the local officials to impose Sustainable Development, the UN monster that transforms their community into a little soviet, with top-down control, robbing people of their private property, as it operates through non-elected boards and councils.

 

I explained in detail how ICLEI used the excuse of Climate Change to enforce these polices. Several people from my audience attended the Spokane City Council just two nights after my speech and confronted their local officials about what I had said. To their amazement, they found that every word I said was true. In fact, that very night, the city council was having the first reading of a sustainability plan for the community that ICLEI had helped prepare. It had been a year in the making and was now ready to be rammed through city council – unopposed.

 

That’s when the firestorm ignited. Warned by me, the local residents did everything they could to warn the community and block the plan. In the end, they lost in a vote of 5 – 2, but they were heard loud and clear and the battle is far from over.

 

One effort to stop the ICLEI plan was made by a physicist, Dr. Edwin Berry, from Bigfork, Montana. Dr. Berry attended my identical speech in Kalispell, Montana, just one week prior to the Spokane speech. We met and had a wonderful talk. After the firestorm hit Spokane, he volunteered to go there and make several speeches, adding his scientific expertise to follow up my talk.

 

He also sent a letter to the Spokane city council, strongly urging them to vote no on the ICLEI proposal. I reprint his letter here in the hopes it will help other communities to understand the monster they face in implementing sustainable policy. I will also tell you what I told the audiences in Spokane and Kalispell – If ICLEI is in your town – run them out of town on a rail with some high quality tar and feathers. Read article.

 

Walid Phares, NewsMax.com

 

If we accept the principle that a half truth is not the truth, we then need to consider that the Africa policy of the U.S. administration is dramatically incomplete in its essence.

 

Obama's fundamental philosophy is that the main threat to Africa is underdevelopment, and that priority should be to develop its economies and civil societies. He argues forcefully that "Development depends on good governance," and thus all it would take is for "judges, politicians, and decision-makers" to come to realize that it would be in the interest of their countries to act better and in a transparent way. The social science doctrine behind Obama's reasoning posits that an intellectual epiphany would lead to good citizenship and the latter would lead to jobs, equal opportunity, and all that moves societies to real democracy, and ruling by consent.

 

In abstract, and outside historical context, the logic of social evolution adds up. But as Obama's intellectuals and historians should know, human history is not happening outside specific realities, sui generic to the identity formation of each nation and region of the world. America had to resolve its painful and cataclysmic past before its 20th-century society completes the last steps of social justice.

 

From European settlements, to independence war, to wars with native Indians, border wars, slavery, civil war, and to more land acquisition before its democracy was able to mutate itself into its present stage. Africa isn't as lucky. Its native population is still pushed back in several areas of the continent, slavery is still plaguing millions, its borders aren't solid, and terrorism is abundant. In short, while living well is and should be the ultimate goal of all societies, living free is the only guarantee for that wellness.

 

Western enslavement of Africans is only one face of the coin but Arab and Ottoman enslavement of Africans is still dodging historical justice. The eastern dungeons of slavery were much older and never exposed by humanity.

 

Even in contemporary times, slaves have been taken from southern Sudan by the northern jihadists; slaves are in existence in Mauritania. Both governments are members of the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. As the president was visiting a remnant of a past evil, African blacks are serving "masters" in Khartoum and Nouakshot.

 

"Evil" is not dead in Africa. Read article.

 

Mychal Massie, WND.com

 

I'd like to elaborate a bit more on President Obama's NAACP speech and the thoughts I expressed pursuant to same on Bill O'Reilly's "The Factor" July 17.

 

The setting was New York – birthplace of the NAACP. The occasion was the celebration of the NAACP's centennial anniversary. And Obama, complete with his best Southern black preacher voice, addressed an organization that has failed to evolve in meeting the real challenges of today – but has instead transmogrified into the very thing it was created to combat.

 

Today, thanks in no small part to its chairman, Julian Bond, the NAACP promotes inequality and foments prejudice among citizens of the U.S., in part by insisting upon race-based solutions for every ill, real or imagined, the anecdotal notwithstanding.

 

Contrary to the view of Obama and the NAACP, I submit that America has long been in a post racialist period, and it didn't take a Kenyan-American being elected president – who belongs to the very party that was created and founded to support and promote slavery, the party of Nathan Bedford Forest (first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan) and Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., the party that for 80 years prevented and contested every civil rights initiative up to and including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, including having a black minister offer opening Congressional prayers – to prove it. Read article.

 

IBD Editorials.com

 

Our new science czar, John Holdren, once backed compulsory sterilization and forced abortion as part of a government population-control program. The only thing missing was a Soylent Green recipe.

 

In April, President Obama declared that "the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over." In everything from stem cell research to climate change and energy policy, reason and science would triumph. The problem is that what the Obama administration considers science, as exemplified by the choice of Holdren, is troubling.

 

In a recently rediscovered 1977 book, "Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment," co-authored with doomsters Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Holdren, who holds the post of presidential assistant for science technology, revealed his pessimistic and apocalyptic views on all three topics. They are disturbing.

 

He hates people and views them as the root of all planetary evils. Large families are a target of Holdren and the Ehrlichs, who write that they "contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children" and "can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility."

 

On page 837, Holdren writes "it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society." Read article.

 

Barry Rubin, Gloria-Center.org

 

Theme One: The Obama Revolution

 

To get a sense of Obama administration thinking, let’s examine the speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the Council on Foreign Relations, July 15. Remember that the wording of such speeches is not random and that phrases and formulations are carefully chosen to convey messages.

 

The most chilling and perhaps symbolic of all that was said in defining this administration is the speech's ending. In conclusion, Clinton quotes the American revolutionary Thomas Paine as saying, “We have it within our power to start the world over again.”

 

Many will recognize this as something quintessentially American: history doesn’t matter too much; human beings are malleable; all obstacles can be swept away. It is also a basic aspect of revolutionary creeds, including those of the French, Nazi, and Russian revolutions. Such thinking is, on one hand, awe-inspiring; on the other, terrifying. Read article.

 

Wesley Pruden, Washington Times.com

 

The bigger the talk, the harder the fall. Obama could ask Jimmy Carter.

 

The administration is sitting on an exceedingly bleak midsummer assessment of its budget - and by extension, the economy - that reveals ballooning deficits, slower growth and all manner of really bad news. Nobody in Washington talks in billions any longer. Trillions are the coins of the realm now. The latest budget figures were promised by mid-July and are promised now by mid-August. Or maybe by Labor Day. Surely by Thanksgiving.

 

The president wants to put off releasing the bad news until after Congress leaves town Aug. 7 for the summer recess. Who can blame him? Democratic congressmen actually prefer something closer to Christmas because they don't relish the close questioning they'll get once they're back home making speeches to Kiwanis and Rotary and taking questions from the skeptic in the street. Mr. Obama expected to have his health care "reform" in place by the recess, to be popping champagne corks with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, but the more everyone learns about his "reform" the more it looks like all that Obamacare would accomplish is to make everyone ill. Very ill, with lots of headaches, muscle pain, backaches, diarrhea, dizziness and throwing up, just like the side-effects promised in those pharmaceutical commercials on late-night TV.

 

You don't have to be Joe Biden to say impolitic things about Mr. Obama's prescriptions for curing what ails us. (Good old Joe told a Washington audience the other day that we're headed for national bankruptcy, and the only way we can avoid it is to run out and spend whatever we've got left.) Read article.