What’s interesting in the news today?
Open Thread
1. An excellent read about how the issue isn’t really the issue.
Gay Marriage; A Trojan Horse Movement
From AmericanThinker “The Left doesn’t care about gay rights, any more than they care about civil rights, welfare rights, minority rights, animal rights or any other “rights.” According to the Left, “the issue is never the issue; the issue is always the revolution.” The various “rights” the Left has aggressively promoted over the years are merely vehicles to advance the Left’s power.
Consider: the welfare “rights” movement, founded by the notorious socialists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, was not established to guarantee welfare to the poor. As they said, their purpose was to pack the welfare rolls with so many beneficiaries that the government would collapse of its own weight. In the ensuing riots, they hoped policy makers would be driven to accept their socialist solution. In short, they sought anarchy, using a militant poor as their foot soldiers. They couldn’t care less what happened to the poor in prosecuting this agenda, and they said so. Doubt me? Just look at the status of the poor today. There are more people on welfare than at any time in history. And the crime and degeneracy that accompany it are epidemic.
Look at our country today. With manufactured crisis Strategist-in-Chief Obama, we are almost there, and Cloward and Piven’s intellectual descendants were out in force in Ferguson. The communist agitators seeking “social justice” for Michael Brown burned down much of the neighborhood. Do black lives matter to them? Apparently not. And they have even said so. The issue is not the issue.
Occupy Wall Street’s black anarchist organizer Nelini Stamp’s new group, Dream Defenders, popularized the slogan “Hands Up Don’t Shoot!” But prior to Ferguson there was Trayvon Martin. Working with Eric Holder’s DOJ, Stamp’s group was responsible for getting Sanford, Florida police chief Bill Lee fired. This despite the fact the FBI agreed with Lee’s assessment that there was no case against Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman. Did Stamp care about “Justice for Trayvon?” Not according to Stamp. “We are actually trying to change the capitalist system we have today, because it’s not working for any of us,” she said.
The Left uses “rights” agendas to wrap itself in the mantle of righteousness and seize the moral high ground, tactically putting us on the defense in the process. But they couldn’t care less about the actual issue except in its ability to facilitate their path to power.”
Click the link to read it all. All these professional agitators have one of two things in common. They started with ACORN or their front group, the Working Families Party. They’re all Obama type community organizers.
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2. Here’s yet another example of the dishonest left at work. First they mock the right for not being diverse enough, now they mock the diversity of the right. Some people are just never happy. So they want everyone else to wallow in their misery with them. No thanks.
From HotAir “It’s almost like the left’s commitment to diversity is a dishonest political vehicle aimed only at delegitimizing their opponents. Almost.
In 2012, the GOP presidential field’s lack of diversity — perhaps the least interesting form of diversity, but one which nevertheless enjoys near religious devotion from the left — did not go unmentioned by partisan Democrats.
As early as 2009, the left was salivating at the opportunity to see Barack Obama challenge what looked likely to be a field of predominantly white, aging, and nearly exclusively male candidates. While the smug, self-satisfied liberal elite was robbed of a cherished opportunity for self-congratulations by the lack of a purely monochromatic GOP field in 2012, the Republican Party’s defeats in that election year nevertheless buoyed the left’s hopes for the future.
Today, however, the GOP has remarkably self-corrected. To borrow a ubiquitous phrase that Democrats deployed with abandon in 2012, the GOP presidential field looks a lot more like the America they are hoping to represent.”
“And, with that, the goalposts that were once here are now over there… somewhere. Whereas the slate of Republican candidates were once so unrepresentative of America that they couldn’t be taken seriously, now it is the fact that the white majority is generally more supportive of Republicans than Democrats that is the GOP’s true political obstacle. Do you sense a common thread here yet?”
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3. Anybody shocked?
Me neither…..
From CBSNews “Sixty-one percent of Americans now say race relations in the United States are bad, the highest percentage since 1992, according to a new CBS News/New York Times poll, which finds that majorities of both whites and blacks now view race relations negatively.
Meanwhile, 79 percent of African Americans think police are more likely to use deadly force against a black person than a white person, but 53 percent of whites say race does not play a role in such instances.
The survey found that blacks are more likely than whites to report that their local police make them feel anxious rather than safe.
In the wake of the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and the unrest that followed, Americans’ views on race relations in the U.S. have grown significantly more pessimistic. Sixty-one percent now say race relations are generally bad, up 23 points from earlier this year. It is the first time a majority has held this view since the 1990s. Just a third of Americans now say race relations are good. These opinions are the most negative this poll has found since 1992, when riots broke out in Los Angeles following the acquittal of police officers in the beating of Rodney King.”
So the whole “post-racial president” thing has been a complete failure. Kinda sums up his presidency.
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4. And speaking of failures……
Here’s a costly one.
From TheWashingtonTimes “The IRS doled out more than $5 billion in potentially bogus college aid payments in 2012 under an Obama stimulus tax credit, according to a report Tuesday from the agency’s inspector general that said the administration still doesn’t have a good handle on how to root out erroneous claims.
Nearly 4 million students had questionable claims, totaling more than $5.6 billion in that one year alone, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration said. At least half of the students never provided tuition statements showing what they paid, while others attended schools that didn’t qualify them for the tax credit.
Other students claimed the credit for more than four years, which should have automatically earned a rejection, the investigators said.
“The IRS still does not have effective processes to identify erroneous claims for education credits,” said Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George, who said he has warned the IRS repeatedly about the problem, but “many of the deficiencies TIGTA previously identified still exist.””
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Wandering Views 