Senator Rubio Introduces Bill to Destroy Operation Choke Point

About a year ago, the Second Amendment community was rocked by news that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) had teamed up with Attorney General Eric Holder to utterly destroy firearms manufacturers and dealers by cutting off all credit and banking relationships with them.

For its part, the FDIC categorized gun and ammunition sales as a “high-risk business,” lumping it in with drug dealers, pornographers, and Ponzi scheme operators — all of which it was working to completely destroy.

Holder, in turn, would provide the “muscle” — using a program called Operation Choke Point to make sure banks “got the message.”

Senator David Vitter (R-LA) and Congressman Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO) soon got appropriations language to defund Operation Choke Point.  But when Holder promised to be a “good boy” and the FDIC removed guns from its “high-risk list,” the appropriators relented and allowed the program to continue.

Not surprisingly, every evidence is that Holder was lying — and has every intention to continue using Operation Choke Point to go after gun dealers on a case-by-case basis. 

In Hawkins, Wisconsin, for instance, a bank was just recently pressured to deny credit to the local gun dealer for the purpose of shutting its doors.  (And, incidentally, AG candidate Loretta Lynch lied to Vitter and Mike Lee about knowing nothing substantial about Choke Point, even when warned she would be asked about it.)

So now, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) has introduced legislation to shut the doors of Operation Choke Point — and bar all of the possible escape routes.

Rubio’s bill, S. 477, would defund Operation Choke Point — permanently.  It would insure that the FDIC didn’t use “fees” to fund a program which could no longer go on with appropriated funds. And it would prohibit Holder and the FDIC from reestablishing “Choke Point” under another name.

Furthermore, Rubio is committed to not just allow his legislation to lie dormant.  He understands that he may have to add the proposal as an amendment to a must-pass bill.  This is exactly what we will need to overcome a potential presidential veto.

Rubio’s strategy can become a template for other pro-gun legislation, in addition to putting the Second Amendment community on the offense, rather than simply playing a defensive strategy.

EDITORS NOTE:  Readers may click here to Contact their Senators on S. 477, the Firearms Manufacturers and Dealers Protection Act of 2015.

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Islamic State: “Allah has revealed Islam to be the religion of the sword, and the evidence for this is…profuse”

Cognitive dissonance: Bush, Obama, David Cameron and a host of others insist that Islam is a religion of peace. The Islamic State, which they claim has nothing to do with Islam, quotes the Qur’an copiously to establish that Islam is actually a religion of the sword that calls for permanent war against Infidels. Would it be permissible to examine the Qur’an to try to determine which claim is more accurate? Or would that be “Islamophobic”?

“ISIS Upset with Obama, Kerry, ‘Heretics’ for ‘Slogan’ That Islam Is Religion of Peace,” by Bridget Johnson, PJ Media, February 12, 2015:

The new issue of ISIS’ magazine released today takes issue with Western leaders who assert that Islam is a religion of peace.

In the Dabiq magazine article, the writer said the wrongful “slogan” is also being used by “apologetic ‘du’āt’ [beggars] when flirting with the West.”

“They have repeated this slogan so much to the extent that some of them alleged that Islam calls to permanent peace with kufr and the kāfirīn. How far is their claim from the truth, for Allah has revealed Islam to be the religion of the sword, and the evidence for this is so profuse that only a zindīq (heretic) would argue otherwise,” the magazine states….

After a page worth of quotes from the Quran that “revealed the sword against the apostates,” the article asks, “So how can the zanādiqah (heretics) or even those who blindly follow them – Bush, Obama, and Kerry – obstinately claim that ‘Islam is a religion of peace,’ meaning pacifism?”…

It quotes more of the Quran, concluding “it is clear then that salām (peace) is not the basis of the word Islam, although it shares the same consonant root (s-l-m) and is one of the outcomes of the religion’s sword, as the sword will continue to be drawn, raised, and swung until ‘Īsā (Jesus – ‘alayhis-salām) kills the Dajjāl (the Antichrist) and abolishes the jizyah. Thereafter, kufr and its tyranny will be destroyed; Islam and its justice will prevail on the entire Earth.”

“…There will always be a party of Muslims fighting parties of kāfirīn until there is no more fitnah and the religion is completely for Allah alone.”

That’s from the Qur’an: “And fight them until there is no fitnah and the religion, all of it, is for Allah” (8:39).

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Common Core: Into the Bowels of the Beast

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Bob Root and Debbie from American Patriot News.

This week, Once again, several grassroots activists fighting to restore local control and to bring common sense not common core to education, headed off for the long drive to Tallahassee.  Bob Root, of American Patriot News hosted us from the outskirts of the city and we helped put his excellent papers together for distribution.

We started early the next morning, darting in to see this legislator and make an appointment with that one, chatting with staff and exploring the labyrinth of the oddly constructed capitol buildings armed with research papers, copies of our bill, agendas, directories and very high hopes.

Tuesday, 2/10/15 was the date of the Florida House Education Sub-Committee Chaired by Representative Janet Adkins.  We sat right in front so we could see and be seen.  Having attended several mind numbingly dull presentations, I admired the legislators’ ability to appear attentive and wondered what they were really thinking.

The presentation that day was about (taxpayers spending more money for) training Principals to do better.  They were lamenting the lack of good candidates and had done some research showing “61% of superintendents in Urban areas can’t find the leaders they need” from a paper, “Preparing School Leaders for a Changing World”, by Linda Darling-Hammond, who is ironically one of the architects of Common Core.

The first speaker mentioned time spent doing compliance VS Instructional time was a factor in the reason that 75% of potential candidates thought the job was too complex and 60% rated the job of Principal “unattractive.”

Their solution for all of this was…you guessed it… More Expensive Training.

My brain immediately reverted to my days of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley where we were taught in management to look at the whole process, and not just the individual or position.  Generally such discontent arises from a systemic problem.  As an example, let’s use bowling.

If you are a bowler trying to make a good score, and there is a large hole in the middle of your lane, would you think more lessons would help you get a higher score?  Or would you fix the hole first?  Just asking….

Those people in the study were all pointing to the hole in the alley as the reason the job of Principal is so hard.  The 800 pound gorilla in the room is Federal and State micromanagement which has created a bureaucratic nightmare of convoluted reporting schemes. Common Core and High Stakes Testing is the last and largest straw that has just broken the camel’s back.  When they are losing 40% of class time just for testing by many accounts, how can they be expected to perform miracles?

Well, Senator John Legg has proposed SB 616, a bill that has no Leggs.  This brilliant senator changes none of the bureaucratic testing mandates, but adds a new one, that schools can test no more than 5% of their class time.  If tests exceed that, they have to send letters to parents for permission for additional testing.  Wow!  That’s only 9 of 180 days.  But wait, who’s going to count?   Does that count the time students are in the gym while someone uses their class for testing?  Or their teacher is proctoring for retests or make up tests?  Where will they record the amount of testing?  Who will send out the letters to parents for permission?  What happens when they don’t approve?  My head is aching with complexities pulsating in my exploding brain.

I composed my thoughts and decided I should say something, stand up for taxpayers and point out the obvious to our illustrious leaders.  We worked hard to develop a solution that has something for everyone to love.  Surely they wanted to hear about the good news.  This being a public hearing, public testimony is mandated by law.  Having properly filled in the request to speak, we patiently waited our turn.

With nearly seven minutes left in the meeting, the Chair acknowledged the fact that two people had submitted a request to speak.  But she said “we will not be taking public input at this time.”  So after driving 7 hours each way to be there to let them know any of these thoughts, we were summarily dismissed.

Do you think it’s time we all come to Tallahassee?  Check to see if your representatives will “dismiss” your thoughts about your children and what they need.  This must end.

March for the Children is scheduled for March 5, 2015 in Tallahassee, FL.

RELATED VIDEO: http://thefloridachannel.org/videos/21015-house-k-12-subcommittee/

Did Alabama’s Chief Justice Moore Clean CNN Host’s Clock in Same-Sex Marriage Debate? (ONLINE POLL)

In what CNN billed as an epic “debate,” Alabama’s Chief Justice Roy Moore, gave CNN’s host of “New Day” Chris Cuomo a lesson in the law.

Obviously acting as a stalking horse for the same-sex marriage crowd, Cuomo attempted to embarrass Justice Moore with his questions, but, to his apparent chagrin Justice Moore continued to calmly correct him on the facts and the law.  Realizing he was losing the “debate,” Cuomo kept on changing the questions, and Justice Moore continued to school Cuomo in Constitutional law.

Richard Thompson, President and Chief Counsel of the Thomas More Law Center (TMLC), a public interest law firm based in Ann Arbor, MI, said, “As the law currently stands, Justice Moore is right.  And I applaud him for his courageous and dignified stand for both the Constitutions of the United States and the State of Alabama.”

Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore in Epic 25 Minute Interview on Gay Marriage from Thomas More Law Center on Vimeo.


POLL: How do you feel Justice Moore did in the “debate?”

Reply to this e-mail with your thoughts and comments on this video.


To get a full understanding of Justice Moore’s legal reasoning, read the legal memorandum he sent to Alabama Probate Judges, dated February 3, 2015.

This is the legal memo Justice Moore sent to the Probate Judges.

In a letter dated January 27, 2015 to Alabama Governor Robert Bentley, Justice Moore stated that, “As of this date, 44 federal courts have imposed by judicial fiat same-sex marriages in 21 states of the Union, overturning the express will of the people in those states. If we are to preserve that ‘reverent morality which is our source of all beneficent progress in social and political improvement,’ then we must act to oppose such tyranny!”

During the televised interview, Cuomo demanded to know whether Justice Moore would follow a federal court decision that legalized same-sex marriages. However, Cuomo himself refused to answer the question posed to him several times throughout the debate: whether or not he would follow the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision which held that people of African ancestry were not entitled to citizenship or constitutional protections.  Chief Justice Moore makes it clear that according to the US Constitution, the definition of marriage belongs to the states and should be left to the people of each state to decide.

Proving that Justice Moore’s analysis that the original preliminary injunction against the state attorney general was ineffective because he had no jurisdiction over marriages in Alabama, yesterday, the federal district judge allowed plaintiffs to amend their complaint and add probate judge Don Davis as a defendant so that the court’s injunction could temporarily allow gay marriages to take place.

The Thomas More Law Center has launched a national strategy for the protection of traditional marriage headed by TMLC senior trial counsel Erin Mersino. As a part of that strategy, TMLC has submitted numerous amicus briefs in key same-sex marriage cases on behalf of the National Coalition of Black Pastors and Christian Leaders. One of the purposes of these briefs is to negate the homosexual community’s fallacious argument that discrimination because of one’s sexual preference is the same as racial discrimination. To date, TMLC has filed four briefs with the Supreme Court, as well as with the 5th and 6th Circuit Courts in support of traditional marriage.

RELATED ARTICLE: Un-Manning Manning

Israel’s Republican Governor?

This morning I opened up a Ynet.com  Op ed, “Israel’s Republican Governor”,   by Tel Aviv University Professor Aviad Kleinberg, a member of the History Faculty and according to the information on him, a medievalist by specialization with interests in  religion and philosophy. Kleinberg conclusion was:

Despite his declarations, Netanyahu is thinking less about Iran and more about politics – both Israeli and American. While the Republicans are deriving pleasure from the slap in Obama’s face, the price will be paid by us.

Kleinberg starts off  trying to hoist PM Netanyahu with these comments:

“While there are those who are focusing on protocol or politics, a bad deal with Iran is being formed,” Benjamin Netanyahu has declared. The remedy for this bad agreement, it turns out, is a speech which the prime minister will deliver in Washington, D.C.

Netanyahu is suggesting the following equation: It’s true that this speech faces a strong opposition in the United States. It’s true that it is infuriating the administration and will create high tensions between Israel and US President Barack Obama. It’s true that there is a good chance that the administration will punish Netanyahu (i.e., the State of Israel) because delivering the speech is perceived as breaking the acceptable rules of the game between countries (a head of state does not make an official visit when the head of the state he is visiting makes it explicitly clear that he is not interested in the visit). It’s also true that to an innocent bystander, it seems like cynical attempt to grab the spotlight in order to advance the guest’s interests in the election campaign. But all that pales into insignificance in the face of the fundamental achievement – stopping the bad agreement with Iran.

You can read the rest here...

Times of Israel 2015 Election PollProfessor Kleinberg’s trust in President Obama’s effort via the P5+1 negotiations to prevent Iran from achieving a nuclear breakout and producing weapons is not reflected in the latest Times of Israel  (TOI) poll of Israeli views on the upcoming Knesset election issues and party list candidates released yesterday.  The TOI headline was, 3 in 4 Israelis don’t trust Obama to keep Iran from nukes.

The TOI poll findings were:

Asked whether they trust the U.S. president to ensure Iran not get the bomb, an overwhelming 72% do not, compared to 64% in our January 2014 survey.

Israeli voters give Obama a 33% favorable and 59% unfavorable rating, The Times of Israel’s survey also shows. Still, the president’s favorable and unfavorable ratings (33%/59%) aren’t much worse than those of several of Israel’s politicians such as Moshe Kahlon (45%/32%), Netanyahu (41%/54%), Isaac Herzog (38%/43%), or Naftali Bennett (38%/52%). Obama is on par with Yair Lapid’s current rating of 34% favorable and 59% unfavorable, and has a better perception than Tzipi Livni (29%/64%) and Avigdor Liberman (31%/61%).

Read more

Here is what I posted as a comment on the Ynet.com in response to Professor Kleinberg’s Ynet.com opinion:

Professor Aviad Kleinberg of Tel Aviv U’s history department betrays his expertise as a medievalist when it comes to opining on American politics. He of all people should recognize this less than Machiavellian ploy by the Obama West Wing seeking to dis Bibi for accepting Speaker Boehner’s invitation to speak before a Joint Session of Congress about Iran’s nuclear hegemony agenda and Radical Islamists on your borders.

One only need look at polls in the U.S. on the matter of the PM speaking before a Joint Session of Congress to realize that he has the backing of 50 % of Americans respondents.. Methinks the Professor protests too much in light of the agitprop by the Presidents’ media minders in the West Wing seeking to provide support for the so-called Zionist Union in the March 17 snap Knesset elections. Which has been revealed in both the liberal NY Times and Washington Post.

If Bibi ran as a Republican Governor here in the Sunshine State he’d win hands down. Can’t say that for ‘Democrats’ Tzipi and Bluji who can hardly match the PM’s Churchillian cadence nor his gravitas on mutual national security interests of concern to Israel and the West.

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EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review. The featured image is of U.S. House Speaker Boehner and Israeli PM Netanyahu taken on May 24, 2011 before his speech to a Joint Session of Congress. Source: NER.

World’s Largest Pro-Israel Group is ‘3 Million Strong’ with Mike Huckabee

JERUSALEMFebruary 12, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — United with Israel, the world’s largest grassroots pro-Israel movement, has reached a significant milestone with 3 million supporters and counting.

Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas who will likely run for the Republican nomination in the 2016 US presidential election, will officially become number 3,000,000, when he attends UWI’s “Three Million Strong” celebration in Jerusalem on February 18, 2015.

In 2012, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was “honored to be the one millionth United withIsrael fan!”

Founder Michael Gerbitz remarked, “It is truly amazing that, at a time when governments around the world are united in their condemnation of the State of Israel, we’ve been able to connect with millions of people – many in some of the most anti-Semitic countries – who are proud to stand united with Israel. We make sure that the truth about Israel reaches every corner of the globe.”

About United with Israel

United with Israel is a global, grassroots movement comprised of individuals who are deeply committed to the success and prosperity of Israel. Using social media and the latest web technology, UWI has built a massive network of pro-Israel activists in order to promote positive Israel news, unity with the People, Country and Land of Israel.

“There is a huge market of Israel supporters around the world that wasn’t being reached,” Gerbitz says. “The exponential impact of social-media powered outreach is dramatic when our direct reach of 3 million supporters gives us access to half a billion people. This is what’s needed to fight and win Israel’s battle of public opinion, from congregations to cafes to universities throughout the world.”

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Obama’s Fingers in the Cookie Jar?

In an October 21, 2008 column, titled “Obama is Bought, but Who Owns Him?” I quoted the Obama campaign’s last pre-election financial report which showed that their contributor base had grown from 1.5 million to 2.5 million, and that the total amount raised was approximately $600 million… 25% of it ($150 million) from those contributing from $2,000-2,300.  If that was to be believed, that segment of his contributor base had grown from 37,000 to 71,400 in just over three months, leaving the remaining $450 million to be contributed by some 2.43 million people, each giving $5, $10, $20… or, as Obama assured us, “whatever they could afford.”

Of course, no one but a product of our public education system would be unable to calculate that $450 million cannot be contributed by 2.43 million people in $5, $10, or $20 amounts.  To create a pool of that magnitude, each of those 2.43 million people would have to contribute, on average, just over $185.  That simply does not happen.  It has never happened before, and anyone who believed that actually happened will believe almost anything.  So how were they doing it?

In a July 25, 2008 column we pointed out that UBS Americas, headed by Robert Wolf… along with George Soros, one of Obama’s top two money men… had been accused of highly unethical and illegal banking practices in six months of hearings by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, headed by Senator Carl Levin (D-MI).  According to an article in The Nation magazine, UBS Americas, a subsidiary of UBS, of Zurich, Switzerland, “had advised wealthy Americans, including many of our worst villains, how to shelter funds from the IRS, as well as from prosecutors, creditors, disgruntled business associates, family members, etc.”

In a Statement of Facts in the criminal trial of former UBS executive Bradley Birkenfeld, it was alleged that UBS took extraordinary steps to help American clients manage their Swiss accounts without alerting federal authorities.   For example, UBS advised clients to avoid detection by using Swiss credit cards to withdraw funds, to destroy all existing off-shore banking records, and to misrepresent the receipt of funds from their Swiss accounts as loans from the Swiss bank.  According to The Nation, UBS established an elaborate training program which taught bank employees how to avoid surveillance by U.S. law enforcement, how to falsify visas, how to encrypt communications, and how to secretly move money into and out of the country…

It was the perfect instrument for funneling large sums of illegal campaign contributions into the coffers of an unscrupulous American politician.  Putting two and two together, I concluded that any number of foreign contributors, wishing to influence the outcome of the U.S. presidential elections, could transfer unlimited sums of money through this device, using the Swiss bank accounts of unsuspecting American depositors as vehicles.  The owners of the Swiss accounts would receive periodic statements indicating: a) debits of varying amounts, up to $2,300 each, and b) offsetting credits provided by the cartel, or by a wealthy “international financier.”

For most of the super wealthy, especially those attempting to hide income and assets from U.S. authorities, an unexplained debit of $2,300, followed by a credit of the same amount, would not even raise an eyebrow.  So who would ever know the source of such contributions?  No one.

On the receiving end of the transactions, a U.S. recipient, such as the Obama campaign, could receive thousands of individual contributions via Swiss credit card transfers, with unsuspecting fictitious contributors… their names, addresses, and occupations “borrowed” from Obama’s extensive list of $10 and $20 contributors… being entered by teams of staffers working in a “boiler room” setting, preparing falsified reports for the Federal Election Commission.

A subsequent report by Newsmax, having studied thousands of pages of Obama’s FEC filings, found some66,383 highly suspicious contributions, not rounded to even dollar amounts, from 37,265 donors.  For example, an insurance agent from Burr Ridge, Illinois, reportedly gave a total of $8,724.26, more than $4,400 over his legal limit.  He gave in odd amounts such as $188.67, $1,542.06, $876.09, $388.67, $282.20, $195.66, $118.15, and one of $2,300.

A self-employed caregiver in Los Angeles made 36 separate contributions totaling $7,051.12… more than $2,450 over her legal limit.  Thirteen of those contributions were later refunded.  However, in an odd coincidence, those 13 refunds, in amounts such as $233.88 and $201.44, came to an even $2,300, the maximum allowable in any one election.  Another contributor, a retired schoolteacher from Rockledge, Florida, is reported to have given $13,800… $9,200 over his limit.  However, when interviewed by Newsmax, that contributor could not remember giving that much money to Obama.

Lest anyone suggest that those 37,265 donors either emptied their piggy banks or emptied their pockets and purses periodically and just sent it all to Obama, pennies and all, allow me to suggest something a bit more sinister.  Those 66,383 contributions were the proceeds of foreign currency conversions, smuggled into the country in foreign credit card receipts, and deposited in Obama’s campaign coffers using the forged names of some of Obama’s $10 or $20 contributors.

But now it is alleged that Loretta Lynch, Obama’s choice to succeed Eric Holder, is up to her eyeballs in yet another Obama administration criminal enterprise in which the banking system was misused in much the same way as in the 2008 foreign currency smuggling operation.  According to a February 7, 2015 report in WorldNetDaily (WND), the Obama Department of Justice appears to be stonewalling the release of documents that could implicate Ms. Lynch in a massive cover-up of Obama administration involvement in the international money-laundering of Mexican drug cartel money.

WND reports that Lynch, while serving as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, “oversaw the investigation of drug-related international money-laundering allegations against London-based HSBC Holdings, LLC.”  WND had previously published a series of articles documenting charges that HSBC laundered billions of dollars that were traced back to Mexican drug cartels.  That investigation resulted in a $1.256 billion fine paid to the U.S. government, ending the investigation and avoiding the filing of criminal charges.

According to the WND report, the federal government’s unwillingness to prosecute HSBC was exposed by whistle blower John Cruz, a former HSBC vice president in New York, who called the bank a “criminal enterprise,” saying that the fine imposed by the Department of Justice was “a joke.”  After being forced out of HSBC, Cruz filed a $10 million lawsuit against HSBC, charging “retaliation and wrongful termination.”  At that point, whistle blowers in India and London joined Cruz in charging that the HSBC settlement amounted to a “massive cover-up.”

WND charged that, in retaliation for their reporting of Cruz’s evidence, “HSBC lodged a complaint that blocked Internet access to one of the WND stories, and WND senior reporter Jerome Corsi was fired by Gilford Securities, the New York City investment firm he had worked with for two years as a senior managing director.  However, the plot thickened when WND uncovered evidence suggesting that the Obama Justice Department failed to proceed with the investigation of money-laundering charges in deference to bank clients of the Washington-based law firm where Eric Holder served as a partner prior to becoming attorney general.

In a telephone interview on February 6th, Cruz told WND that the Obama administration “is continuing to cover up its role in the HSBC money laundering scandal.”  He went on to say that “the IRS has blocked every legal effort he has made to be credited as a whistleblower in the HSBC billion-dollar settlement.”  He said, “It is impossible that the Obama administration did not know HSBC was laundering drug money for the Mexican cartels, because the documentation I had showed the laundered money passed through the federal wire-transfer services.”

Cruz charged that the 1,000 pages of customer account information he provided show that HSBC’s money-laundering activities relied heavily on identity theft and purloined Social Security numbers that were “then used to create bogus retail and commercial bank accounts.”  Through those bogus accounts, HSBC employees systematically deposited and withdrew hundreds of millions of dollars on a daily basis, apparently without the knowledge of the identity-theft victims.  He explained that when a bogus bank loan was established under a stolen identity… causing much consternation among individuals who found they were the recipients of loans they knew nothing about… five percent of the loan proceeds went to the accounting firm that prepared the phony tax returns and the other 95 percent went to the HSBC managers.

Cruz explained that one manager was involved in the transaction, another manager was involved in notarizing the transaction, and senior management was involved when they approved the loans, even loans that had been rejected by underwriters.  In order to avoid prosecution for violation of the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and the Trading with the Enemy Act, HSBC agreed to pay the $1.256 billion fine in a deferred prosecution agreement with Obama’s Justice Department.

With Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch having major roles in the cover-up, Ms. Lynch will have a great deal of explaining to do as her confirmation hearings continue.

In the meantime, it would be most interesting to study FEC contribution reports to learn how much HSBC money found its way into the hands of Barack Obama, the Democratic Party, and numerous Democratic candidates.

Florida: Four generations of Jewish family sued by Bradenton Condominium Association

Some things are definitely stranger than fiction and beyond imagination … but try to imagine a nine-year-old girl, barely able to read, being sued by a condominium association for the debts of her great-grandfather, deceased five years ago. If you know the Heritage Village West Condominium Association (HVW) in sunny Bradenton, Florida, perhaps you might ask one of its proud Board members or their attorney, Scott Petersen of Becker & Poliakoff, for the reasoning behind their demands for little Kenna and her three siblings to pay HVW for the unpaid maintenance fees of their beloved “Big Papa,” Holocaust Survivor Al Katz.

In a case full of travesties, the foreclosure against Al Katz’s modest apartment-sized condominium is mind-numbing! First, it was HVW that helped, both in and out of court, to put and keep Al Katz into a frightful guardianship, in which he was forced to abandon his much-loved HVW condominium to live in a crowded room at Casa Mora nursing home behind layers of security in the dreaded lockdown unit, where screams resound day and night and delicate, precious elders are held in isolation from the rest of the normal world.

At Casa Mora, Al became septic and unresponsive after weeks of bleeding into his catheter bag and three days of escalating fever, despite repeated alerts to Casa Mora staff and to Al’s guardians by his daughter, who had no legal rights at the time to order proper care for him. Through Divine blessing, Al, the Holocaust Survivor, survived many months of deep-reaching bedsores and gradual recuperation from sepsis at age 89. When his daughter finally obtained legal rights from the Manatee County Probate Court to care for her Dad, Al returned to his condominium, without one visit or phone call from any of his neighbors at HVW, where he had lived for 26 years.

Al was HVW’s only Jew, and he was now a very lonely, ostracized Jew, who had served on the HVW Board in his prime and donated dozens and dozens of hours to helping his neighbors, one of whom had just recently testified in court that Al belonged in the nursing home, not with his family in his own condominium.

Through Al’s expensive guardianship, his liquid assets were speedily consumed to pay multiple attorneys and his professional guardian, who refused to file or pay Al’s income taxes. At the end of his lonely life, Al was bereft of funds and friends and thrust into dire debt through no fault of his own. In the Holocaust, Al had lost everything, and in guardianship, his history had repeated itself.

Al’s guardianship account held by professional guardian, Herbert Schimmel, had zero dollars in it for Al’s estate to receive. Al’s daughter, therefore, spent her own money by the scores of thousands to administer his estate, but HVW maintenance fees were unpaid. When HVW filed to foreclose on Al’s condominium, Al’s daughter defended against the legal action.

After years of legal defense against HVW, the Board and its attorney suddenly decided not only to sue Al, of Blessed Memory, but also his entire extended Jewish family – Al’s daughter, son-in-law, son, daughter-in-law, granddaughter, three great-granddaughters, and one great-grandson – and HVW then obtained a court order against them from Manatee County Judge Robert Farrance for Al Katz’s alleged debts, despite the fact that only two of these persons had ever been served with the foreclosure Complaint and notice of any court hearings in four years’ time. Simply put, HVW was able to successfully sue four generations of a family, including multiple minor children, to pay for the debts of their father, grandfather, and great-grandfather without ever serving most of them with court documents or allowing them any due process to defend themselves!

When this incidental matter was brought to the attention of HVW’s attorney, Scott Petersen simply served some of the family members, all located out of state, with the Complaint three years after the deadline for process service had elapsed, without blinking either of his eyes.

It was Mr. Petersen who also served Al’s daughter and son-in-law with foreclosure documents on Rosh HaShonah, the holy Jewish New Year, and immediately began pressuring their attorney to set his foreclosure motion for imminent hearing. In the same time frame, Al’s family, staying in his HVW condominium, received anti-Semitic hate mail from an HVW resident, who proudly used his email address to threaten the only Jews at HVW, warning them:

Be warned, I’ll be keeping an eye on you. The last thing you want to do is make an enemy of me….

He continued, saying:

… don’t give me any of this holocaust survivor stuff. I don’t want to hear it…. These men and women led their lives and now that it’s coming to an end you want to pretend that there is more for them? Let them be and let them greet their [M]aker..Not to be crass, but if anyone of these survivors, most in their 90’s has any hope of leading any sort of life beyond bedpans and feeding tubes, let them go so they can be one with the [L-]rd [A]lmighty.

By the way, you make yourselves look foolish with this survivor crap.

Although Al’s family sent excerpts of the anti-Semitic emails to dozens of HVW residents, agents, and Board members, not one of them ever spoke against the hate mail sent by their non-Jewish neighbor against their Jewish neighbors.

The hate mail was preceded and followed by repeated incidents of vandalism to Al Katz’s yard, destruction of plants, tossing litter on the property, and dumping garbage cans in the yard for weeks – all without objections raised by any of the 167+ HVW condominium owners and their condominium management company, DellCor.

Just as HVW’s stone entry sign has collapsed under its own weight, the burden of the sins and crimes committed by HVW’s Board, agents, and residents is toppling and crushing HVW’s future to the ground. The results of greed and hate are aptly symbolized by the crumbling stone marker that greets residents and guests alike with a frown and scowl as they enter and exit the nearly-Jew-free zone.

RELATED ARTICLE: Elder Fraud and Financial Abuse Now Estimated at $36 Billion

The Eugenics Plot Behind the Minimum Wage

There really was a white male scheme to exterminate African Americans by Jeffrey A. Tucker:

In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. identifies the government as the enemy of the rights and dignity of blacks. He was locked up for marching without a permit. King cites the injustices of the police and courts in particular. And he inspired a movement to raise public consciousness against state brutality, especially as it involved fire hoses, billy clubs, and jail cells.

Less obvious, however, had been the role of a more covert means of subjugation — forms of state coercion deeply embedded in the law and history of the United States. And they were offered as policies grounded in science and the scientific management of society.

Consider the minimum wage. How much does racism have to do with it? Far more than most people realize. A careful look at its history shows that the minimum wage was originally conceived as part of a eugenics strategy — an attempt to engineer a master race through public policy designed to cleanse the citizenry of undesirables. To that end, the state would have to bring about the isolation, sterilization, and extermination of nonprivileged populations.

The eugenics movement — almost universally supported by the scholarly and popular press in the first decades of the 20th century — came about as a reaction to the dramatic demographic changes of the latter part of the 19th century. Incomes rose and lifetimes had expanded like never before in history. Such gains applied to all races and classes. Infant mortality collapsed. All of this was due to a massive expansion of markets, technology, and trade, and it changed the world. It meant a dramatic expansion of population among all groups. The great unwashed masses were living longer and reproducing faster.

This trend worried the white ruling class in most European countries and in the United States. As John Carey documented in Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), all the founders of modern literary culture — from H.G. Wells to T.S. Elliot — loathed the new prosperity and variously spoke out on behalf of extermination and racial cleansing to put an end to newly emerging demographic trends. As Wells summed up, “The extravagant swarm of new births was the essential disaster of the nineteenth century.”

The eugenics movement, as an application of the principle of the “planned society,” was deeply hostile to free markets. As The New Republic summarized in a 1916 editorial:

Imbecility breeds imbecility as certainly as white hens breed white chickens; and under laissez-faire imbecility is given full chance to breed, and does so in fact at a rate far superior to that of able stocks.

To counter the trends unleashed by capitalism, states and the national government began to implement policies designed to support “superior” races and classes and discourage procreation of the “inferior” ones. As explained by Edwin Black’s 2003 book, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, the goal as regards women and children was exclusionist, but as regards nonwhites, it was essentially exterminationist. The chosen means were not firing squads and gas chambers but the more peaceful and subtle methods of sterilization, exclusion from jobs, and coercive segregation.

It was during this period and for this reason that we saw the first trial runs of the minimum wage in Massachusetts in 1912. The new law pertained only to women and children as a measure to disemploy them and other “social dependents” from the labor force. Even though the measure was small and not well enforced, it did indeed reduce employment among the targeted groups.

To understand why this wasn’t seen as a failure, take a look at the first modern discussions of the minimum wage appearing in the academic literature. Most of these writings would have been completely forgotten but for a seminal 2005 article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives by Thomas C. Leonard.

Leonard documents an alarming series of academic articles and books appearing between the 1890s and the 1920s that were remarkably explicit about a variety of legislative attempts to squeeze people out of the work force. These articles were not written by marginal figures or radicals but by the leaders of the profession, the authors of the great textbooks, and the opinion leaders who shaped public policy.

“Progressive economists, like their neoclassical critics,” Leonard explains, “believed that binding minimum wages would cause job losses. However, the progressive economists also believed that the job loss induced by minimum wages was a social benefit, as it performed the eugenic service ridding the labor force of the ‘unemployable.’”

At least the eugenicists, for all their pseudo-scientific blathering, were not naïve about the effects of wage floors. These days, you can count on media talking heads and countless politicians to proclaim how wonderful the minimum wage is for the poor. Wage floors will improve the standard of living, they say. But back in 1912, they knew better — minimum wages exclude workers — and they favored them preciselybecause such wage floors drive people out of the job market. People without jobs cannot prosper and are thereby discouraged from reproducing. Minimum wages were designed specifically to purify the demographic landscape of racial inferiors and to keep women at the margins of society.

The famed Fabian socialist Sidney Webb was as blunt as anyone in his 1912 article “The Economic Theory of the Minimum Wage”:

Legal Minimum Wage positively increases the productivity of the nation’s industry, by ensuring that the surplus of unemployed workmen shall be exclusively the least efficient workmen; or, to put it in another way, by ensuring that all the situations shall be filled by the most efficient operatives who are available.

The intellectual history shows that whole purpose of the minimum wage was to create unemployment among people who the elites did not believe were worthy of holding jobs.

And it gets worse. Webb wrote:

What would be the result of a Legal Minimum Wage on the employer’s persistent desire to use boy labor, girl labor, married women’s labor, the labor of old men, of the feeble-minded, of the decrepit and broken-down invalids and all the other alternatives to the engagement of competent male adult workers at a full Standard Rate? … To put it shortly, all such labor is parasitic on other classes of the community, and is at present employed in this way only because it is parasitic.

Further, Webb avers: “The unemployable, to put it bluntly, do not and cannot under any circumstances earn their keep. What we have to do with them is to see that as few as possible of them are produced.”

Though Webb was writing about the experience in the United Kingdom, and his focus was on keeping the lower classes from flourishing, his views were not unusual. The same thinking was alive in the US context, but race, not class, became the decisive factor.

Henry Rogers Seager of Columbia University, and later president of the American Economic Association, laid it all out in “The Theory of the Minimum Wage” as published in the American Labor Legislation Review in 1913: “The operation of the minimum wage requirement would merely extend the definition of defectives to embrace all individuals, who even after having received special training, remain incapable of adequate self-support.”

Further, he wrote, “If we are to maintain a race that is to be made of up of capable, efficient and independent individuals and family groups we must courageously cut off lines of heredity that have been proved to be undesirable by isolation or sterilization.”

Isolation and sterilization of less desirable population groups are a form of slow-motion extermination. The minimum wage was part of that agenda. That was its purpose and intent. The opinion makers of 100 years ago were not shy about saying so. The policy was an important piece of weaponry in their eugenic war against nonelite population groups.

Princeton University’s Royal Meeker was Woodrow Wilson’s commissioner of labor. “It is much better to enact a minimum-wage law even if it deprives these unfortunates of work,” Meeker argued in 1910. “Better that the state should support the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed than subsidize incompetence and unthrift, enabling them to bring forth more of their kind.”

Frank Taussig, who was otherwise a good economist, asked in his bestselling textbook Principles of Economics (1911): “How to deal with the unemployable?”

They “should simply be stamped out,” he stated.

We have not reached the stage where we can proceed to chloroform them once and for all; but at least they can be segregated, shut up in refuges and asylums, and prevented from propagating their kind.…

What are the possibilities of employing at the prescribed wages all the healthy able-bodied who apply? The persons affected by such legislation would be those in the lowest economic and social group. The wages at which they can find employment depend on the prices at which their product will sell in the market; or in the technical language of modern economics, on the marginal utility of their services. All those whose additional product would so depress prices that the minimum could no longer be paid by employers would have to go without employment. It might be practicable to prevent employers from paying any one less than the minimum; though the power of law must be very strong indeed, and very rigidly exercised, in order to prevent the making of bargains which are welcome to both bargainers.

These are but a small sample and pertain only to this one policy. Eugenics influenced other areas of American policy, too, especially racial segregation. Obviously you can’t have the races socializing and partying together if the goal is to gradually exterminate one and boost the population of the other. This goal was a driving force behind such policies as regulations on dance clubs, for example. It was also a motivation behind the proliferation of marriage licenses, designed to keep the unfit from marrying and reproducing.

But the minimum wage is in a special category because, these days, its effects are so little understood. One hundred years ago, legislating a price floor on wages was a policy deliberately conceived to impoverish the lower classes and the undesirables, and thereby to disincentivize their reproduction. A polite gulag.

As time went on, the blood lust of the eugenics movement died down, but the persistence of its minimum wage policies did not. A national minimum wage passed in 1931 with the Davis-Bacon Act. It required that firms receiving federal contracts pay prevailing wages, which meant union wages, a principle that later became a national minimum wage.

Speeches in support of the law were explicit about the fear that black workers were undercutting the demands of white-only unions. The minimum wage was a fix: it made it impossible to work for less. The sordid history of the minimum wage law is harrowing in its intent but, at least, realistic about what wage floors actually do. They stop upward mobility.

Eugenics as an idea eventually lost favor after World War II, when it came to be associated with the Third Reich. But the labor policies to which it gave rise did not go away. They came to be promoted not as a method of exclusion and extermination but rather, however implausibly, as a positive effort to benefit the poor.

Whatever the intentions, the effects are still the same. On that the eugenicists were right. The eugenics movement, however evil its motive, understood an economic truth: the minimum wage excludes people from the job market. It takes away from marginal populations their most important power in the job market: the power to work for less. It cartelizes the labor market by allowing higher-wage groups access while excluding lower-wage groups.

King wrote of the cruelty of government in his day. That cruelty extends far back in time, and is crystallized by a wage policy that effectively makes productivity and upward mobility illegal. If we want to reject eugenic policies and the racial malice behind them, we should also repudiate the minimum wage and embrace the universal right to bargain.

ABOUT JEFFREY A. TUCKER

Jeffrey Tucker is a distinguished fellow at FEE, CLO of the startup Liberty.me, and editor at Laissez Faire Books. Author of five books, he speaks at FEE summer seminars and other events.  His latest book is Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World.

Obama: Media overstates terror threat as opposed to “longer-term problem of climate change”

Obama’s timing couldn’t be worse. First there was this:

“The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever,” by Christopher Booker, the Telegraph, February 7, 2015:

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.

Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming….

But Obama is entirely oblivious. He readily agrees with Matthew Yglesias’ contention that “the media sometimes overstates the level of alarm people should have about terrorism and this kind of chaos, as opposed to a longer-term problem of climate change and epidemic disease.”

Also, it is not surprising that in an interview devoted entirely to foreign policy, Obama never once mentions Islam, or even “Islamist.” He does refer to “violent extremism,” which seems to be his euphemism of choice these days, as it is also the name of his Countering Violent Extremism summit, which should be renamed Countering the Threat We Dare Not Name.

Worst of all, he refers to “violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.” No one was randomly shot in that “deli in Paris.” It was a kosher supermarket, and the people who were murdered there were murdered because they were Jews. They were murdered by people who were animated by the Qur’an’s relentless Jew-hatred and labeling of the Jews as the worst enemies of the Muslims (5:82). But that, too, is a threat that Obama dares not name.

It’s also significant that he gave this massive, detailed, extensive interview to Vox, a far-Left publication that just last Saturday was claiming that those who took issue with Obama’s reprehensible moral equivalence regarding the Crusades were just looking for an excuse to hate Muslims. That is the milieu from which Obama comes, and in which he is most comfortable. That is, almost certainly, his world view as well: that those who believe that Islam uniquely teaches and justifies violence in a way that Christianity and other religions do not are motivated solely by hatred of Muslims. This is the line that Hamas-linked CAIR and its henchmen have promoted for years. In the White House today, they have their most powerful champion ever.

“Obama: The Vox Conversation,” Vox, February 9, 2015:

Matthew Yglesias

Do you think the media sometimes overstates the level of alarm people should have about terrorism and this kind of chaos, as opposed to a longer-term problem of climate change and epidemic disease?

Barack Obama

Absolutely. And I don’t blame the media for that. What’s the famous saying about local newscasts, right? If it bleeds, it leads, right? You show crime stories and you show fires, because that’s what folks watch, and it’s all about ratings. And, you know, the problems of terrorism and dysfunction and chaos, along with plane crashes and a few other things, that’s the equivalent when it comes to covering international affairs. There’s just not going to be a lot of interest in a headline story that we have cut infant mortality by really significant amounts over the last 20 years or that extreme poverty has been slashed or that there’s been enormous progress with a program we set up when I first came into office to help poor farmers increase productivity and yields. 7 It’s not a sexy story. And climate change is one that is happening at such a broad scale and at such a complex system, it’s a hard story for the media to tell on a day-to-day basis.

7 The little-noticed “Feed the Future” initiative has reached about 7 million people already, and introduces farmers in poor countries to more advanced technologies and management practices to boost crop production.

Look, the point is this: my first job is to protect the American people. It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris. We devote enormous resources to that, and it is right and appropriate for us to be vigilant and aggressive in trying to deal with that — the same way a big city mayor’s got to cut the crime rate down if he wants that city to thrive. But we also have to attend to a lot of other issues, and we’ve got to make sure we’re right-sizing our approach so that what we do isn’t counterproductive. I would argue that our invasion of Iraq was counterproductive to the goal of keeping our country safe.

And despite the incredible valor of our troops — and I’m in awe of them every single day when I work with them — you know, the strategy that was crafted in Washington didn’t always match up with the actual threats that were out there. And we need to make sure that we’re doing the right things and doing those well so that we can also deal with future threats like cybersecurity or climate change or different parts of the world where there are huge opportunities, but [that] before I came into office, we had neglected for quite some time, Asia Pacific being a perfect example. Or our own backyard, the Western Hemisphere, where there’s been real progress in Latin America and we’ve got the opportunity to strengthen our relationships. But there are also some big problems like Central America where, with a relatively modest investment, we could really be making a difference and making ourselves safer. 8

8 This is not necessarily directly relevant to “our safety,” but it’s worth noting the horrific conditions documented by NGOs that have looked at the lives of Central Americans sent back to their homes by US officials. Here’s what the administration is doing now in Central America.

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President Obama’s ‘War on Christianity’

Never in the history of the United States has there been a President who has aligned himself with so many anti-Christian elements in America. President Obama promised when elected in 2008 to heal the divides in the nation and fundamentally transform it. Many took these promises as a positive, time has shown these promises have had a negative impact on America and Americans, particularly those of the Christian faith.

Anti-Christian groups in America include: Communists, atheists, agnostics, shariah compliant Muslims, homosexuals, transgenders, lesbians and members of certain religious sects. The targets of these groups include: Christians, Jews, Evangelicals, blacks and Hispanics of faith, and those who share a love for the Holy Land (Israel).

President Obama, both domestically and internationally, has taken policy stands that are nothing less than anti-Christian.

Perhaps it is best to understand how, little by little, President Obama has come to embrace those who are most violently opposed to Christians (and Jews) domestically and globally.

Here are some of President Obama’s domestic policies that are anti-Christian:

  1. The Affordable Care Act – The Affordable Care Act has impacted religious liberty by requiring faith based institutions to provide services which are against their Christian beliefs. Religious News Service reporter Kathleen O’Brian notes that Afordable Care Act religious exemptions are hard to get. O’Brien notes, “Under the [ACA] bill, anyone claiming an exemption on the grounds of religious beliefs would have to include a sworn affidavit on their annual tax return. In addition, they would lose the exemption if they sought and received medical care during that tax year.” In 2014 the U.S. Supreme Court rules against Obama in the Hobby Lobby contraception case. This ruling, at least temporarily, held back the anti-Christian ACA onslaught.
  2. Repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell – President Obama is clearly in the homosexual camp when it comes to domestic policy. The repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is a prime example of an anti-Christian policy to transform our military from a Christian force for good into a secular petri dish for pro-homosexual social policies. In July 2011, DefendChristians.org reported, “Last year President Obama led the charge to repeal ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ that now allows open homosexuality in the military. Obama’s political payoff has altered the fabric of our military and now our military chaplains have become the victims. Christian chaplains have been ordered to go along with homosexual sin or face administrative discharge, even though they were promised that their sermons, counseling, prayers and worship could remain the same.” Commanders, soldiers and Chaplains are now subject to courts martial if they publicly profess their Christian faith.
  3. Medicare, Medicaid and “Gender Reassignment” Surgery – As recently as December of 2014, New York Governor Cuomo approved the use of Medicaid funds for low income sex change operations. In a December 17, 2014  New York Post article Carl Campanile reported, “Gov. Cuomo approved a new policy Tuesday night allowing impoverished transgender New Yorkers to bill taxpayers for sex-change surgery. The Cuomo administration issued new rules requiring New York’s highest-in-the-nation $55 billion Medicaid program — the government health-insurance program for the needy — to foot the bill for ‘gender reassignment’ operations.” Medicare also covers “gender reassignment” operations according to the National Center for Transgender Equality. The use of public funds to support sex change operations offends those of faith. The use of public funding to promote transgenderism is not a Constitutional role for the federal government.
  4. Presidential Executive Orders – President Obama has used the power of his pen to force Christian organizations and businesses to betray their religious beliefs or face stiff penalties and possible criminal prosecution. Todd Starnes from Fox News reported in July 2014, “President Obama signed an executive order Monday barring federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity – ignoring the pleas of Christian and other faith leaders to include an exemption for religious organizations… The executive order would prevent Christian and other religious organizations with federal contracts from requiring workers to adhere to the tenets of their religious beliefs. Christianity Today reports the order could impact religious non-profits such as World Vision, World Relief and Catholic Charities.”
  5. Department of Justice failure to defend in court the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) – The U.S. Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed into law the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 1996. In September 2014, CNSNew.com’s Terrance P. Jeffrey reported: President Barack Obama praised retiring Attorney General Eric Holder yesterday for advancing the cause of same-sex “marriage” in the United States by refusing to defend federal law. “And several years ago,” Obama said in a joint appearance with Holder at the White House, “he recommended that our government stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act–a decision that was vindicated by the Supreme Court, and opened the door to federal recognition of same-sex marriage, and federal benefits for same-sex couples. It’s a pretty good track record.” In his own statement at the event, Holder praised Obama for advancing the “visions” he said he and Obama had “always shared.” The vision always shared was and remains an anti-Christian one.

Here are some of President Obama’s foreign policies that are anti-Christian:

  1. Failure to support and defend the Holy Land – President Obama has instituted policies and made public statements attacking Israel and its Prime Minister. What many do not see is that Israel is in fact the protector of the Holy Land. The birth place of Judaism and Christianity.
  2. Obama Declares The Future Must Not Belong to Practicing Christians at the United Nations – In September 2012 Erick Erickson wrote: In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly today the President of the United States declared that the future does not belong to practicing Christians. Already, the media and the left are in full denial, probably based on their general lack of understanding of theology. This would have been a gaffe had Mitt Romney said it. But with Barack Obama, he’s just speaking bold truths. His bold truth declares that the future does not belong to practicing Christians.Pay careful attention to what he says.” Obama has repeatedly stated “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” Christians have failed to fully comprehend what President Obama stated in 2012 and on many occasions since.
  3. President Obama’s Absence at the Charlie Hebdo Rally in Paris – Reuters reported, “The absence of President Barack Obama or any top members of his administration from a huge march in Paris on Sunday to honour victims of Islamist militant attacks raised eyebrows among some in the US media. French President Francois Hollande and some 44 foreign dignitaries, including leaders from Germany, Italy, Britain, Turkey, Israel and the Palestinian territories, led up to two million people in what commentators said was the largest crowd in Paris since its liberation from Nazi Germany in 1944. Islamist militants killed 17 people, including journalists and police, in three days of attacks in the French capital last week. The United States was represented at Sunday’s march by its ambassador to France, Jane Hartley. But commentators on some US media outlets questioned why Obama did not attend or send a top administration official such as Vice President Joe Biden or Secretary of State John Kerry.”
  4. President Obama’s Quest to give Iran a Nuclear Weapon – Iran has repeatedly declared it will destroy the Holy Land (Israel) and occupy Jerusalem. In November 2014, Stuart Winer and Marissa Newman reported on Iran’s 9-point plan to destroy Isreal. Winer and Newman wrote: “A plan titled “9 key questions about the elimination of Israel” was posted on his Twitter account Saturday night, using the hashtag #handsoffalaqsa, in reference to the recent tensions on the Temple Mount. The sometimes grammatically awkward list explained the how and why of Khomeini’s vision for replacing Israel with a Palestinian state. The first point stated that “the fake Zionist regime has tried to realize its goals by means of infanticide, homicide, violence & iron fist while boasts about it blatantly.” Due to the above, Khomeini argued, “the only means of bringing Israeli crimes to an end is the elimination of this regime.” (See the chart below for the details of the 9-point Iranian plan) A nuclear armed Iran will be a precursor to implement this 9-point plan.

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RELATED VIDEO: Bill Warner, Ph.D. on Jihad vs Crusades:

IRAN’S 9-POINT PLAN TO DESTROY THE HOLY LAND (ISRAEL) – Chart courtesy of the Times of Israel.

iran 9 point plan to destory israel

For a larger view click on the chart.

Who is the Leader of the ‘Free World’ Obama or Netanyahu?

The question ‘Who is Leader of the Free World, Obama or Netanyahu’ may at first sound foolish. However ask yourself, which other leader of a western style democracy has a better grasp of the danger Iran and Radical Islam poses to the free world.

The leader of the free world must be able to identify the enemy and confront it.

Obama has distanced himself from the reality that Radical Islam and Iran account for most of the terrorism occurring around the world. Obama cannot even utter the words ‘Radical Islamic Terrorism’ and as a result he cannot  be considered the leader of the Free World.

Obama’s trashing Netanyahu for accepting an invitation to speak before Congress has nothing to do with protocol. It has everything to do with Netanyahu’s understanding the threat of an Iran with nuclear weapons and Radical Islam poses to America, Israel and the rest of the free world. As a result Netanyahu’s speech will stand in stark contrast to Obama’s approach to Iran and Radical Islam.

That is what is driving Obama up the wall.


Who is Leader of the Free World: Obama or Netanyahu?

By Joseph Gelman

It’s another day, so you can be pretty sure that another anonymous Obama administration “source” is trashing the Israeli Prime Minister in yet another planted story in a friendly media outlet somewhere.

This used to be news, now it’s just sad.

What is it about Benjamin Netanyahu that has the Obama administration so insecure and borderline hysterical?

Perhaps it has something to do with the way the pesky and smooth-talking Israeli Prime Minister has gradually supplanted Barack Obama as the moral leader of the free world, on the most important issue of our time.

Where there is a leadership void, someone will fill it.

Obama and his minions’ sense it, and the jealousy/resentment seem to know no bounds.

When Netanyahu, a gifted orator in the English language, speaks on the dangers of radical Islam and a nuclear Iran, he projects a confidence and persuasiveness that the administration can’t match.

In stark contrast, when Obama speaks to these matters in his painfully couched language, knowledgeable people smell politics. They can sense the hesitation and stumbling over usage of even the most basic and obvious terminology, like “radical Islam”. Not a confidence-builder when facing the mullahs of Tehran.

While the Israeli Prime Minister has no such inhibitions… the problem for Obama is, neither do most freedom-loving people in the West. They inherently know that radical Islam does in fact have something to do with Islam, no matter how desperately the President tries to convince them otherwise. And they understand that such Islamists, be them of the Shiite or Sunni variety should never be allowed the means to produce nuclear weapons.

This dynamic is not lost upon the administration, and it is, along with ego, at the very heart of the Obama administrations apoplectic reaction to Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to Netanyahu to speak before a Joint Session of Congress.

It has little to do with a “breach of protocol.” Had Boehner invited the Prime Minister of Luxemburg to speak on European monetary policy, the words “breach of protocol” would never have come up. It’s Netanyahu himself that they fear and loath.

They are beside themselves that their appeasement policies vis-à-vis Iran are to be so publicly challenged by someone they view as of inferior status and a lot of chutzpah. And yet Netanyahu is clearly of superior knowledge on the issue, of superior communications skills, and most of all, has a superior stake in the outcome of negotiations with Iran.

Netanyahu will be speaking from the world’s most prestigious platform without the administration’s permission, directly to the American people and over the administration’s head, with the full backing of a solid majority in congress and of a very large constituency in the United States, many of whom have been lifelong supporters of the president’s own party.

It’s enough to drive any anti-Semite stark-raving mad.

Unfortunately, it’s also enough to drive this administration to the brink of DEFCON 1 political hysteria. Count on an endless barrage of negativity directed towards Mr. Netanyahu between now and the speech, and until the Israeli elections on March 17th. This will be an all-out, scorched-earth campaign conducted by the administration to get Netanyahu to back down from the speech, and to ruin his reelection prospects.

The gloves are off.

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Where are the Arab Armies?

The ongoing Syrian conflict, the fall of the Yemeni government, the burning of the Jordanian pilot, and other events make one wonder why even those Arab nations with significant military capabilities tend not to use them against a common enemy.

The attacks on ISIS by the Jordanian air force have been a dramatic example of what could be done to eliminate this threat to the entire region if the other military forces would join in a united effort.

This raises the question of why the armies of various Middle Eastern nations do not seem to be engaged in destroying the Islamic State (ISIS).

The answer may be found in a casual look at recent history; these armies have not been successful on the field of battle. Most recently what passed for the Iraqi army fled when ISIS took over much of northern Iraq.

Since 1948 the Arab nations that attacked Israel were repeatedly defeated. The Iraq-Iran war conducted by Saddam Hussein finally stalemated after eight years. Later it took the leadership of the U.S. to drive Saddam’s Iraq out of Kuwait.

Israel Air Force

Israeli fighter jets.

In October 2014, the Business Insider published a useful ranking of Middle Eastern militaries put together by Armin Rosen, Jeremy Bender, and Amanda Macias. Ranked number one should surprise no one. It was Israel which has a $15 billion defense budget, 176,000 active frontline personnel, 680 aircraft, and 3,870 tanks.

Unlike previous administrations dating back to Truman, while the U.S. is technically still an ally of Israel, in reality the Obama administration has demonstrated animosity toward the only democratic nation in the region. Indeed, the U.S. has been engaged in lengthy negotiations with Iran that would ultimately permit it to become a nuclear power. There isn’t a single Middle Eastern nation that wants this to occur and it has greatly harmed U.S. relations with them.

Ranked second militarily is the Turkish Armed Forces with an $18.1 billion defense budget, 410,000 active frontline personnel, 3,675 tanks and 989 aircraft. This nation has shifted heavily toward being an Islamist state as opposed to the secular one it had been since the end of the Ottoman Empire in the last century. Its military hasn’t been involved in a conflict since the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974. It is a NATO-allied military but that doesn’t mean it will support NATO in a future conflict. It was used against the Kurdish separatist movement in the 1980s, but these days the Kurdish Peshmerga, between 80,000 and 100,000 strong is now ranked as “one of the most formidable fighting forces in the Middle East” and it is likely the Kurds will carve their own nation out of an Iraq which barely exists these days.

Number three among the Middle East militaries is Saudi Arabia with a $56.7 billion defense budget, 233,500 active frontline personnel, 1,095 tanks, and 652 aircraft. It has been closely allied with the U.S. for decades, but the Obama Iranian nuclear negotiations have negatively affected that relationship. One can assume the same from its other allies, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia has also provided “substantial assistance” to post-coup Egypt.

Map - MidEast

For a larger view click on the map.

The rankings put the United Arab Emirates at #4, Iran at #5, Egypt at #6, Syria at #7, Jordan at #8, Oman at #9, Kuwait at #10, Qatar at #11, Bahrain at #12, Iraq at #13, Lebanon at #14, and Yemen at #15. The Business Insider article noted that “The balance of power in the Middle East is in disarray” and that’s putting it mildly.

Debka File, an Israeli news agency, reported on February 5 that “The group of nations U.S. President Barack Obama assembled last September for an air offence against ISIS inroads in Iraq and Syria is fraying.”

It deemed the participation of the UAE, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Bahrain as “more symbolic than active” noting that Iraq has no air force to speak of and an army in name only while the Saudis “allotted a trifling number of planes to the effort” and Bahrain has no air force at all. The UAE has the biggest and most modern air force and it has reportedly joined with Jordan to attack ISIS strongholds.

Debka reported that the coalition is “adamantly opposed to Obama’s policy…and loath to lend their air strength for its support” and that is very good news for ISIS, but not for the rest of the Middle East.

In October, Commentary magazine published an analysis by Ofir Haivry, vice president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, about the“Shifting Alliances in the Middle East.” It began with the observation that “The old Middle Eastern order has collapsed” as “the ongoing Arab uprisings that begin in late 2010 have unseated or threaten to unseat every Muslim government in the region.”

Postulating ‘five broad, cross-regional, and loosely ideological confederations”, Haivry concluded that “Perhaps our biggest challenge is not a new Middle East, but a new United States in paralysis. Under the Obama administration, America’s historic aspiration to shape events in the region has given way to confusion and drift.”

It should not come as that much of a surprise that Israel has been developing intelligence and security relations with several Arab nations, including what the Middle East Monitor described as “growing secret cooperation between Israel and Saudi Arabia.” That sounds like very bad news for Iran and very good news for the rest of us.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

RELATED VIDEO: Senator Rand Paul (R-TN) on fighting the Islamic State in the Middle East.

Israel’s Offshore Gas Discoveries are in Jeopardy

On February 3rd, there was a  Conference  in Tel Aviv co-sponsored by the Israeli Ministry of Infrastructure, Energy and Water and Maala – a group concerned with Socially Responsible Business. Globes Israeli Business and Reuters covered it, “Energy minister: Foreign companies aren’t coming to Israel.”

 Silvan Shalom, Israeli Minister of Infrastructure,  the Israel Manager of  Houston –based Noble Energy, Inc. co-developer with Israel’s Delek Group and a representative of Australian  energy company Woodside, Pty.  appeared among other presenters. They were all  bemoaning the arbitrary, some would say capricious draft ruling of Dr. David Gilo, Director General of Israel’s Antitrust Authority (IAA) , basically stopping development of the offshore Leviathan  gas field and  forcing the possible sale of the existing Tamar gas field in Israel’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).  Gilo,as we have discussed  in prior posts, has confounded Israel’s energy independence and possible export opportunities with his draft consent order based on misguided consumerist  populism.  His understanding of the economics of pricing of gas as a commodity in the international markets is simplistic at best and simply panders to  misguided domestic  populist concerns over maintaining low energy prices.  His proposals to enhance competition  in the domestic  market come amidst the looming March Knesset elections.  Many  suspect that his actions were in support of the Labor-Hanuat coalition objective of unseating Prime Minister Netanyahu.  Not surprising as Israel’s founding generation, save for  Menachem Begin, were Socialist  Marxists. They created the country’s dual economy with Histadrut – the labor union dominated institution – owning  key sectors in the country’s economy that have  only been partially privatized. The exception being Israel’s much vaunted high tech sector.

Gilo’s  misguided logic is reflected in the comments of the Israeli National Infrastructure-Maala conference presenters. It was bolstered by an announcement that the Noble Energy –Delek Group partners  were on the verge of concluding a deal with Egypt to provide much needed gas from the Aphrodite field in the adjacent Republic of Cyprus EEZ.  Neither Noble or Delek accept the separate marketing proposals and sales of  both Tamar and smaller fields, originally part of an IAA deal agreed to by Gilo.

Note these comments from the Globes article:

“We don’t see foreign gas companies coming to Israel,” Minister of National Infrastructure, Energy, and Water Silvan Shalom admitted. “The foreign companies have interests in countries like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, and bringing them to Israel is no easy task. Israel is small country, with a small gas market. In a utopian and theoretical world, companies would come, but that’s not how it is in the real world.”

“Unfortunately, our business in Israel was unsuccessful, but our connections with Noble Energy have become stronger,” Woodside VP Corporate Affairs Roger Martin said at a conference organized by the Ministry of National Infrastructure, Energy, and Water and the Maala organization.

Woodside, which planned to acquire 25% of the rights in the Leviathan natural gas reservoir for $2.7 billion, backed out at the last minute, and left Israel. “We’re working together with Noble Energy in Africa, and we signed an additional agreement with them in October for oil and gas exploration off the Cameroon coast,” Martin said.

“Our pride in making our contribution to the community was met with cynicism. They tell us cynically, ‘This is very American’,”  [Nobel Energy Israel Manager]  Zomer said angrily. “What do you want from me? What’s very American? I don’t understand this. Since when is doing good considered American? Why should companies in Israel apologize for their success? Of course Noble Energy hoped to make a profit in Israel, but it also meant to do good for Israel.”

Gidon Tomer [CEO Delek Drilling  Partnership] noted , “That state could expect NIS 250 billion  ($65 Billion) in revenues from the first stage of developing Leviathan. He added, “This revenue doesn’t take into account the immediate saving from the consumption of cheap gas. You have to look at the enterprises saved by natural gas. These enterprises are boosting their competitiveness. It’s a reduction in the cost of living.”

Alexander Varshavsky of the National Gas Authority  asserted that Israel could expect to lose NIS 3 billion ($780 million)  annually starting in 2018 from the delay in developing Leviathan. “Beyond that, it’s a blow to Israel’s credibility,” he argued.

On the matter of Gilo’s express goal of enhancing competition and energy pricing, Globes noted comments of   a conference participant who said, ‘If you want to talk about responsibility, Israel’s responsibility is to bring gas to factories. There are factories in the outlying areas that closed down because of their energy costs. At enterprises like Phoenicia Flat Glass Industries and Shaniv Paper Industry Ltd. (TASE: SHAN), it was a do or die question. Today, they’re hooked up to natural gas and saving money. That’s the most important thing.”

Should PM Netnayahu win the March 17th election perhaps a priority will be to pass legislation amending the mandate of the IAA remodeling it in on 100 year precedent of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.  Otherwise , director General Gilo of the IAA, will thwart Israel’s economic future and energy independence.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review. The featured image of the Tamar deep oil platform is courtesy of Oil in Israel.

Ronald Reagan’s Free-Market Mentors by John Fund

Have you ever gone back and revisited or recalled the books or mentors who shaped your political or philosophical thinking? I got that chance this past weekend when I attended the annual summit meeting of the Foundation for Economic Education in Ft. Myers, Fla. A slim pamphlet reprinted by the Foundation for Economic Education was given to me by Dennis Miller, a school teacher, when I was 14 years old. It was “The Law,” by the 19th-century French economist FredericBastiat, and it set me on my current path of thinking.

I’m not the only one whom FEE has influenced. Milton Friedman described “I, Pencil,” FEE’s account of the hundreds of people and the raw materials that contribute to the making of that humble writing instrument, as “one of the clearest explanations of how markets work to benefit consumers” he had ever encountered. The Nobel Prize–winning economist F. A. Hayek said that FEE had helped inspire him to found the free-market Mont Pelerin Society. Ronald Reagan credited FEE materials he read in the 1950s with aiding his conversion to conservatism.

FEE says its mission is to “inspire, educate, and connect future leaders with the economic, ethical, and legal principles of a free society.” In the last five years, it has shifted its emphasis to reaching young people ages 14 to 24 through seminars, readings, and social media. Detroit’s public schools have made FEE’s Common Sense Economics its primary textbook for tenth-graders studying the economy. With a budget of only $3.6 million a year, FEE punches way above its weight in reaching future “influencers” who will populate academia, business, the media, and legal circles.Founded in the immediate aftermath of World War II by Leonard Read, a former head of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, the free-market outreach group has distributed millions of copies of classic texts such as Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, Hans Sennholz’s Up from Poverty, and Lawrence Reed’s Are We Rome?

Take Romina Boccia, a 30-year-old German immigrant of Italian ancestry. “When I was in state schools in Bavaria, I realized that there must be other perspectives on society I wasn’t getting,” she told me. “Then someone handed me a copy of Bastiat’s ‘The Law’ on a train, and I was hooked.” She now is a research fellow in economic policy at the Heritage Foundation.

Another person who got hooked on FEE’s materials was a middle-aged actor named Ronald Reagan. The story is fascinating, as detailed in the 2006 book The Education of Ronald Reagan, by Thomas Evans.

From 1954 to 1962, Reagan worked as the host of CBS’s top-rated General Electric Theater and served as General Electric’s official spokesman. For weeks at a time he would tour GE’s 139 plants, eventually meeting most of the 250,000 employees in them. Reagan himself estimated that he spent 4,000 hours before GE microphones giving talks that started out with Hollywood patter but ended up as full-throated warnings about Big Government. “GE tours became almost a post-graduate course in political science for me,” he later wrote. “By 1960, I had completed the process of self-conversion.”

Evans, a lawyer who served in the Reagan administration before turning amateur historian, identified Reagan’s mentor at GE as Lemuel Boulware, the man behind both the company’s PR efforts and its labor-negotiation policy. Boulware believed that at the start of contract talks, GE should make an offer it viewed as fair to stockholders, workers, and customers and then stick with it, allowing for almost no changes. This “take it or leave it” approach was so successful (strikes became almost unknown at GE) that it entered the lexicon of labor relations as “Boulwarism.”

But Boulware also believed that the policy would work only if executives went over the heads of union officials and educated the workers directly about why they had a stake in GE’s prosperity. Evans notes that “a worker who learned that GE’s profit margin was much smaller than he had been led to believe or that union officials had not been truthful with him” was unlikely to join a picket line or insist on over-the-top demands. Thanks to his outreach to workers, and his surveys of them, Boulware was “reputed to understand blue-collar workers better than anyone in the country.”

Boulware’s efforts included an elaborate campaign to educate GE’s workers as well as the public on the moral and economic benefits of free enterprise. He encouraged workers to form book clubs and read free-market texts published by FEE, especially Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson and Wilhelm Ropke’s Economics of the Free Society. He also encouraged his managers to read William F. Buckley Jr.’s brand-new National Review.

Boulware’s free-market message so penetrated GE’s work force that Reagan, his traveling ambassador, quickly saw how important it was for him to become familiar with what the workers were reading. Over time, his own reading and his conversations with GE workers had an effect. By the late 1950s, Reagan was lambasting those “who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without automatically concluding the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.” Historian Rick Perlstein has concluded that “Reagan was an integral component in the Boulwarite system.”

The lessons Reagan had learned during his GE barnstorming stuck with him. Several passages in his famous 1964 speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater came directly from his GE talks. (“There is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down: up to man’s age-old dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order; or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism.”)

The influence of those years lasted well into Reagan’s presidency. The Timemagazine journalist Hugh Sidey recalled admiring some of Reagan’s White House speeches so much that he asked a speechwriter who exactly had written them. “Reagan,” he was told. “They were actually pretty much the speeches he had given when he worked for General Electric.” And for the GE talks, Reagan was his own speechwriter.

Of course, few of the people that FEE has influenced turned out to be the gifted popularizer of liberty that Ronald Reagan was. But FEE marches on, adapting its outreach to the digital age and the fourth generation of young people to have come on the scene since its founding. Not a bad record at all for a group that shuns harsh rhetoric in favor of quiet persuasion.

This piece was first published here at National Review Online. Reprinted with permission.

ABOUT JOHN FUND

John Fund is currently the national-affairs columnist for National Review Online and a senior editor at the American Spectator.