The Right Lane 7.23.13

The pursuit of Constitutionally grounded governance, freedom and individual liberty

"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington

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Former military head says it was quickly clear terrorists behind Benghazi consulate attack  By Catherine Herridge

The former head of U.S. forces in Africa, General Carter Ham, told the Aspen Security Forum that it quickly became clear the assault on the American consulate in Benghazi last year was a terrorist attack and not a spontaneous demonstration."It became apparent to all of us quickly that this was not a demonstration, this was a violent attack," Ham said. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton initially had portrayed the embassy attack as a response to an inflammatory internet video.

Ham said he was in Washington D.C. for a routine meeting on September 11, 2012 with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Martin Dempsey, when an alert came in from commanders in Stuttgart, Germany that a violent assault was underway on the consulate in Benghazi and Ambassador Chris Stevens was missing. Asked if it was a terrorist attack, Ham said the intelligence left no doubt that it was.

“I don't know if that was my first reaction, but pretty quickly as we started to gain understanding within the hours after the initiation of the attack, yes." While Ham did not address reports he was pushed into retirement after Benghazi, he said a quick response to the attack was not possible -- and he defended the decision not to scramble fighter jets. "It was perfectly understandable to me why people would say you should have done that (but) in my military judgment, there was not a necessity and there was not a clear purpose in doing so." Ham's public assessment, believed to be his first since the attack that left four Americans dead, including Stevens, bears special weight since he was the regional commander for Africa. His comments last weekend are in line with those of his former boss, Panetta, who testified before the Senate Armed Services committee in February. "When I later found out that you had RPGs and mortars and there was an attack on that second facility, there was no question in my mind it was a terrorist attack," then Defense Secretary Panetta said.

Asked why Clinton initially blamed an internet video for the attack -- calling it a "response to inflammatory material posted on the internet" -- when senior military officials knew the day of the attack it was terrorism, the State Department Monday tried to portray the disconnect as old news. "I'm not going to litigate what's already been evaluated," said spokeswoman Jen Psaki.

"This Administration has always been clear that violent extremists were involved in this attack," Psaki said. "The question was who exactly they were and whether there was also a demonstration at the same time. It now appears that there wasn’t, despite the intelligence assessment at the time.  In a letter to Hagel and Secretary of State John Kerry, Republican Congressman Frank Wolf, is pressing the administration to explain why it has not used the military to detain five Benghazi suspects. Ham told the Aspen conference he believed the fragile government in Libya was to blame for the investigation's lack of progress.

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Student Suspended For Asking That Class Be Taught In English by Frank Camp

 “Absurdity exists so that we may see what lies outside the bounds of normal human behavior. For without absurdity, we may never understand normality.”

Obama is still lying, John McCain is still spineless, and the Left is still trying their best to incite racial outrage. The world does not change—at least in terms of basic human behavior. In that vein, another thing that doesn’t change is absurdity. In a story that pushes the boundaries of ridiculousness, an Arizona community college student has been suspended for filing a complaint about one of her classes. Terri Bennett complained that her class discussions were being dominated by Spanish language speaking. According to Town Hall:

“In early April, the student, Terri Bennett, formally requested a rule limiting classroom discussion to English. Nursing program director David Kutzler allegedly responded by called her a ‘bigot and a bitch’…Kutzler allegedly charged that Bennett was ‘discriminating against Mexican-Americans’ and threatened to report her complaint as a violation of the school’s policies against discriminatory behavior and harassment.”

Let’s break this down:

1. The Arizona Constitution mandates that classrooms be taught in English. That alone makes Bennett’s suspension illegitimate.

2. Requesting that classroom discussions be in English is not bigoted. This is, in fact, America. Being that English is the language of this country, classes should be taught in English. It is up to those who don’t understand English to learn the language of the country in which they live. It is not Bennett’s problem to deal with.

3. Finally, suspending a student for such a request is deplorable. This is yet another example of the American education system bowing down to the gods of political correctness. It’s a sickness.

This story is so absurd that it could have been a satire. Political correctness is laying waste to our country–especially our educational system. It is a disease that eats away at the heart and soul of what it means to truly educate. Political correctness is a cancer that—If not stopped—will empty out our minds, leaving nothing but a hollow shell. Terri Bennett’s community college scuffle is just the tip of the iceberg. Our PC culture has become a well organized machine. This is a stunning example of modern American absurdity. This is not normal—or at least it shouldn’t be. Unfortunately, issues like this are becoming routine. The American education system has failed. It’s time to start from scratch. We can begin by lifting up our heads, getting off our knees, and standing up in defiance of the politically correct state gods. We need to look them straight in the eyes, and declare war on the archaic American educational system. If we don’t take a stand right now, political correctness will destroy more than it remedies.

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Issue of race is full of contradictions  E.J. DIONNE

“ In the jewelry store, they lock the case when I walk in,” the young African-American man wrote. “In the shoe store, they help the white man who walks in after me. In the shopping mall they follow me.... Black male: Guilty until proven innocent.”  “I have lost control of my emotions,” he declared. “Rage, Frustration, Anguish, Despondency, Fatigue, Bitterness, Animosity, Exasperation, Sadness. Emotions once suppressed, emotions once channeled, now are let loose. Why?”

The words came not in response to the George Zimmerman verdict in the Trayvon Martin killing but to the acquittal of the police officers in the Rodney King case. The author of the May 6, 1992, column in the Stanford University student newspaper: Cory Booker, now the nationally celebrated mayor of Newark and the front-runner to be the next United States senator from New Jersey.  Booker pointed me toward his angry essay more than halfway through a late breakfast on a visit here last week. He spoke the day before President Obama went to the White House briefing room to issue his powerful reminder to Americans that “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago.” In words that resonated with what Booker had said, the president noted that “the African-American community is looking at this issue though a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.”

For his part, Booker didn’t start with the Zimmerman trial but instead spoke enthusiastically about a program he had established in cooperation with the libertarian-conservative Manhattan Institute to help men released from prison become better fathers. “The right intervention,” he said, “can create radically different outcomes.”  Booker knows about crime. He described his experience of holding a young man who had just been shot, trying and failing to keep him from dying in his arms. He returned home disconsolate and washed off the young man’s blood.  His account, and Obama’s later words, put the lie to outrageous claims by right-wing talk jocks that those upset over the outcome in the Zimmerman trial have no concern for what the conservative provocateurs, in one of their newly favored sound bites, are calling “black-on-black” crime.

African-American leaders, particularly mayors such as Booker, were struggling to stem violence in their own communities long before it became a convenient topic for those trying to sweep aside the profound problems raised by the Martin case.  Booker fully accepts that there is a right to self-defense. “One of the things I learned from the good cops is that there were some times when they were completely justified in pulling their weapons and killing somebody,” he said. But those good cops, he insisted, also understood that their first obligation was “to defuse a situation,” to try to prevent violence. Discussing Zimmerman, Booker added: “This so-called community watch guy, having been told by the police to back away, had so many opportunities to defuse the situation.”  Why, Booker wonders, do we have our famous conversations about race and fear only “when things go terribly wrong”? Why, he wants to know, was it impossible for Zimmerman to look upon Martin “as someone he could have a conversation with”?

This shrewd politician is under no illusions that his questions have simple answers. Yet as we neared the end of the interview, he offered a thought you might hear in a church or synagogue. “Fear is a toxic state of being,” Booker said. “You’ve got to lead with love.”  Talking to Booker was a reminder of the bundle of contradictions that is the story of race in America, precisely what Obama was underscoring when he spoke of our progress as well as our difficulties.  The young man who protested against the need to prove his innocence had earned a Rhodes scholarship and went on to become one of the country’s most prominent politicians. He has won friends across the political spectrum (which makes some liberals nervous). Most of what he had to say to me was about practical things government can do to reverse rising inequality and battle child poverty. One of the central problems of our time, he said, is “the decoupling between wage growth and economic growth,” a development that feeds so many other social challenges.  We cannot give up on trying to solve these problems any more than we can blind ourselves both to the persistence of racism and our triumphs in pushing it back. That, I think, is the message of his old column. We have come a long way, and have a long way to go.

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Mark Twain on the Entitlement Mentality  by David L. Goetsch

Mark Twain specified that his autobiography not be released until he had been dead for 100 years.  He wanted to make sure that everyone he insulted in his final work would also be dead, along with close relatives.  The autobiography is out now and there are plenty of the dead and buried insulted in it.  But one group he insults is not only still alive—it’s growing by leaps and bounds.  This group consists of people who look to nanny government for their sustenance, a group that has come to be known as the entitlement generation. 

In his autobiography Twain comments that “Any man who is satisfied to be fed by another man rather than by the honest sweat of his own brow should be shot.”  Twain cites numerous occasions in his life when he was taken advantage of while trying to do a good deed for another man.  Twain’s well-intentioned deeds typically consisted of providing for people who claimed to be down on their luck.  In variably, the person “helped” did not appreciate the help, did not pay back the money Twain loaned him, and did not change his profligate ways. This situation should sound familiar to anyone aware of what has happened to America.  In fact, if Mark Twain were still alive he would be aghast to learn that the phenomenon he decried has become an accepted and acceptable way of life in America.

Twain, never one to treat politicians gently, would have much to say about so-called progressive liberals who not only condone the entitlement mentality, but promulgate it as a political strategy for gaining and retaining power. I am sure he would also have a word or two to say about Americans who think the government—that is to say the American taxpayer—owes them a living.  If Mark Twain could come back from the grave he would find an America much changed from the one he knew.  Twain’s was a more self-reliant America in which those who were truly down on their luck looked to charity for help, not the government, and those who could work did.

Mark Twain and people of his era knew instinctively that to allow a man to live off the earnings of others was to rob that man of his dignity, ambition, and self-worth, not to mention robbing the giver of his hard-earned income.  They also knew that when dealing with people you get more of what you reward.  Reward sloth through government entitlements or any other means and you will get more sloth.  It is really that simple.  The entitlement mentality is more addictive than cocaine and it can spread faster than a virus.  Allow a man to get used to being idle and he will want to be idle forever.  Reward idleness with government entitlements and people will make a living from being idle.

Laziness, sloth, and idleness are concepts that even the most ignorant, uneducated, unskilled individual knows how to exploit others to his advantage.  People who will not exert even an ounce of initiative, drive, or energy to take care of themselves will exert enormous effort, motivation, and innovation when it comes to playing the system to get the most for doing the least.  These entitled individuals then sire large numbers of entitled youngsters—usually out of wedlock—who grow up with the entitlement mentality instilled at their mothers’ breasts.  Mark Twain might have over stated his solution to this problem somewhat, but he at least recognized the need for a solution.

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John Boehner: I Can’t Stand On The Issues Because It Will Make My Job Harder by Tim Brown

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) apparently doesn’t understand that his role as House Speaker is a leadership role, not a facilitator. Boehner appeared on CBS’ Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer on Sunday and told him “My job in this — in this process is to facilitate a discussion and to facilitate a process so the American people can see what we’re doing and so the members understand that we’re dealing with this in a deliberative way.” Boehner sidestepped the question over and over as to whether he was in favor of a pathway to citizenship for millions of illegal aliens in the United States. Instead of answering, he basically said that his job was not to take a stand, but to let the House “work its will.” “[P]eople have been trying to get me to do this since the day after the election,” Boehner said.

“Well, you’re the leader of the Republicans,” Schieffer responded.  While Boehner has said that he believes Congress needs to do something about immigration, he seems lost on how to lead them, probably because he is not a leader. This is exactly the kind of spineless, numb-skulled approach that has resulted in more advancement from the Socialist Democrats, including the implementation of Obamacare and the infamous “fiscal cliff” deal earlier this year. Why he was re-elected as Speaker of the House is anyone’s guess. “It’s not about me,” Boehner said. “It’s not about what I want. What I’m — what I’ve committed to when I became speaker was to a more open and fair process. And as difficult as this issue is, me taking a hard position for or against some of these issues will make it harder for us to get a bill.”

“If I come out and say I’m for this and I’m for that, all I’m doing is making my job harder,” Boehner told Schieffer. “My job is to — as the leader of the House, is to facilitate this conversation and this process that involves members on both sides of the aisle, involves the American people and where they can see us moving in a deliberative, step-by-step, commonsense way.”  What Boehner failed to state was that as a representative of the people of Ohio, he has a duty to determine where he stands on what he’s facilitating too. Though Boehner called the immigration system “broken,” he said the House wouldn’t take up the Senate’s amnesty bill because it fell short of border security. So wait. He’s willing to come right out and speak on that, why not the idea of citizenship for illegals? This seems a bit hypocritical to me.

“What we’re going to do in the House is, we’re dealing with this in a commonsense, step-by-step approach,” Boehner continued. “We want to deal with this in chunks, chunks that the members can deal with and grapple with and, frankly, chunks that the American people can get their arms around.” Schieffer said Boehner’s lack of a stance on the issue “is kind of an interesting take on leadership…In other words, you don’t see yourself as someone who has an agenda? You’re there to just sort of manage whatever your people want to do?”

“The House should be allowed to work its will,” Boehner said. He then added that he’s watched what other House speakers did before he got the job. “And, you know, I could talk about what happened just before I became speaker. All the bills were written in the speaker’s office. Those bills turned — all turned out to be very unpopular, whether it was the stimulus bill, the Dodd-Frank bill, Obamacare, shoved through the floor of the House, 430 members, Democrats and Republicans locked out in the process. This is not the way the House is intended to work.”  Boehner then made another attempt to try and save face concerning his lack of leadership and claims that he can’t control his caucus. “Bob, I talked about this the day I was sworn in as speaker, that I considered my job was to open up the process, to let members participate. Yeah, I’ve got certain things that I’d like to see accomplished. But this is not going to be about me. I said it the opening day, and it’s never going to be about me. It’s what’s in the best interests of the country.”  “If we’re listening to the American people and we’re following their will, our House will work just fine,” he concluded.

Well apparently you aren’t listening John Boehner. You’re playing with fire and you’re going to get burned. In fact, you’ve already been getting burned. Don’t you smell the smoke? You aren’t following the will of the people or you would have started up that independent House investigation into Benghazi, but you waved your hand on that. If you were listening to the people, you would never have made that stupid fiscal cliff deal. There are far too many things to point out that Boehner and House leadership are not leading, but are simply caving to their opposition. Finally, and this is just an observation, you can never trust a man who wears a pink tie.

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Bill O'Reilly BLASTS President Obama, the Black Caucus, and the rest of the left for the Race Relations issues in this country getting completely out of hand during his talking points memo. You may not like Bill O'Reilly, but you must stop and consider the harsh reality he points up!  Listen....

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Florida Poll: Majority Believe Race Relations Worse Since Obama Took Office

While angry crowds rallied in 100 cities this weekend to protest George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the high-profile Trayvon Martin case, Floridians quietly proved they are satisfied with the trial’s results. A recent poll reveals their approval of the jury’s decision and, perhaps more interesting, their disapproval of the president’s handling of race relations since his inauguration. Viewpoint Florida asked 900 people, most of whom were Democrats, for their opinions on Zimmerman’s not guilty verdict. A majority, 56 percent, believe the jury got it right and 63 percent felt Zimmerman should not have to face federal hate crime charges.

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Global Warming Stopped in 1998. It’s in Davy Jones’ Locker  by Gary North

The global warming crowd has a problem. Global warming has disappeared. It’s missing in action. The public is cooling toward the idea that we need intervention by governments to stop global warming.

A recent article explained that the theory’s defenders are doing their best to come up with a plausible explanation. It’s the ocean.  Huge amounts of heat – equivalent to the power of 150 billion electric kettles – are being continuously absorbed by the deep ocean, which could explain why global warming has “paused” over the past 10 to 15 years, scientists have concluded in a series of reports to explain why the Earth’s rate of warming has slowed down.  I see. The ocean is a new factor. It was never there before. But now, without warning, it is sopping up heat like a Bounty paper towel in a TV ad. What the GW proponents need is a theory of “what’s new.” But a British newspaper reporter dutifully reports this with a straight face. Here is the political problem facing the GW crowd.

Global average temperatures are higher now than they have ever been since modern records began. However, after a period of rapid temperature increases during the 1980s and 1990s there has been a significant slow-down since the turn of the century, leading some sceptics to claim that global warming has stopped. A scientific assessment of the planet’s heat balance has found that the most likely explanation for the recent hiatus in global warming is the continual absorption of thermal energy by the huge “heat sink” of the deep ocean many hundreds of metres below the sea surface, according to scientists from the Met Office.

If this is the most likely explanation, they have a problem. It’s called public skepticism. Senior climate scientists said that they had always expected periods when the rate of increase in temperatures would level off for a few years and emphasized that the last decade was still warmer than any previous decade, with 12 of the 14 hottest years on record occurring since 2000.  Who are these “senior climatic scientists”? Where and when did they go into print with this prediction, namely, that temperatures would level off for 15 years? Where, precisely, did they say that the ocean would start causing this, when it never had before? We need specifics here. We do not get any.

Professor Rowan Sutton, a climate scientist at Reading University, said the temperatures have leveled off in the past, the latest example being in the 1940s and 1950s when sulphate pollutants from the post-war boom in industrial production may have acted as a shield against incoming solar radiation. “Some people call it a slow-down, some call it a hiatus, some people call it a pause. The global average surface temperature has not increased substantially over the last 10 to 15 years,” Professor Sutton said. Some people call it “return to normal.”

“Climate scientists absolutely expect variations in the rate at which surface temperature will rise….but that is not to say we understand all the details of the last 10 to 15 years,” Professor Sutton said.

Is that what they expect? For how long have they expected this? How long do they expect it to last? For as long as the world’s oceans act as a heat sink? That could be a very long time.

What is the problem they face? This:

The problem for the Met Office is to explain why the rate of increase in global temperatures has declined in recent years while concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have continued to accelerate. Skeptics claim that this shows there is not a strong link between the two, whereas climate scientists insist that rising carbon dioxide concentrations are largely responsible for the rise in global temperatures.

Skeptics are winning the argument. That’s because the global warming crowd is clearly grabbing at straws. The ocean is not a good place to find straws.

The most likely explanation for the current pause is that excess heat trapped by carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is being transferred from the atmosphere to the oceans where it is being transported down to deeper layers that cannot be monitored by satellites, Professor Belcher said. “It looks like the Earth is continuing to accumulate energy but it looks like it is being re-arranged and hidden from view,” he said.

This energy is hiding in the ocean. Maybe Atlantis is tapping into it as a thermal energy source.

However, measurements from hundreds of ocean floats released over the last decade, which descend and drift to depths of up to 2,000 meters, show that huge amounts of heat from the sea surface is now being transferred to the deep ocean, with unknown consequences for the environment, the scientists said.  “In summary, observations of ocean heat content and of sea-level rise suggest that the Earth system has continued to absorb heat energy over the past 15 years, and that this additional heat has been absorbed in the ocean,” says the Met Office report.  Will this heat sink end? Of course it will end. As surely as global warming is true, this heat sink phenomenon will reverse. Then we’ll see that global warming is still a threat to the world.  The pause, however, is unlikely to change the predictions over the future course of global warming. Temperature increases expected by 2015 will only be delayed by a further five or ten years, the scientists said. Average surface temperatures are still on course to increase by 2C this century, with further rises expected by the end of the century if nothing is done to curb carbon dioxide emissions, they said. They will get back to us on this. Real Soon Now.

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Concealed Carry Maps: Gun Owners Have Won   by Gary North

Gun owners are not losing. They are winning.
Nowhere is this more visible than in this pair of maps. The first shows concealed carry states in 1981. The second shows them in 2011. In most states, any adult can carry a concealed pistol. Local governments may not prohibit this.

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"When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary."--Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

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