Columnist.
When I was growing up in South-Central Los Angeles, "Paul" was one of my closest friends. In grade school and junior high, he and I spent countless hours together. He helped me become a slightly better athlete, and I helped him with math and biology. But when I returned home from college, Paul had become "Muhammad." But pre-Muhammad, Paul starred on the high school basketball, baseball and football teams. As the basketball team's starting point guard, he was a prolific scorer and a tenacious defender, a combination college recruiters drool over. Big basketball power schools -- UCLA, Notre Dame, Marquette and others -- scouted him. Paul talked incessantly about the destiny to which he felt entitled ... the NBA, the money and the glamour. But Paul had a problem -- temper and arrogance.
To: President Barack ObamaFrom: Former President George W. BushTopic: IraqMessage: "We're ba-a-a-ack!!!!!" I've been quiet these last six years. But your belated decision to "destroy" ISIS prompted me to write. You repeatedly scorched my presidency, said that I so botched up things, so destroyed American foreign policy that all you had to do was not be George W. Bush. "Don't do stupid stuff" was your West-Wing mantra. What a difference six years of Presidential Daily Briefings on national security threats can make.
When NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell handed down a mere a two-game suspension for domestic violence, he took his cue from some of the very same women's groups now calling for his head. Goodell first suspended Ray Rice, a star player, for two games four months after Rice's grand jury indictment for third-degree aggravated assault. A hotel video showing Rice dragging his then-fiancee's limp body out of an elevator "went viral." Rice reportedly admitted to Goodell that he punched her in the face, knocking her down. For this, Goodell suspended Rice just two games.
The NBA's Atlanta Hawks owner has discovered that he is, Lord help him, a "racist"! How do we know this? He tells us. Owner Bruce Levenson "outed" himself by producing an email he wrote back in 2012. Now, to the untrained eye, this email might read like a standard analysis of how to attract a larger and more diversified market share. But Levenson now realizes that he was practicing ... racism! So in the interest of purging the NBA of all "racist" owners, Levenson is reluctantly now offering to sell his team. What exactly did the "incendiary" memo say?
It's one thing to watch race hustlers like the Rev. Al Sharpton bellowing, "No justice, no peace." But when the attorney general of the United States makes false but racially incendiary claims about today's alleged "pernicious racism," we are in uncharted territory. Holder complains about different prison rates, different school expulsion rates and longer prison sentences for black boys and men compared to white boys and men. He equates "equal rights" with "equal results." In Ferguson, Missouri, after announcing federal investigation into the cop-shooting death of an unarmed black teen, Holder said: "I am the attorney general of the United States. But I am also a black man. I can remember being stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike on two occasions and accused of speeding. ... I remember how humiliating that was and how angry I was and the impact it had on me."
Why has there been no media interest in the police shooting of an apparently unarmed suspect in Salt Lake City? Just two days after the shooting death of Michael Brown, an officer with the Salt Lake City Police Department shot and killed an unarmed 20-year-old. The Salt Lake City Police Department equips some of its officers with cameras. The department confirmed the officer who shot had a camera and that footage of the confrontation and shooting was captured, but they would not elaborate further, and the video of the encounter has yet to be released publicly. As with the Michael Brown case, this "lack of transparency" has caused some family members of the deceased to raise questions.
Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson is neither Mark Fuhrman nor Barney Fife. Based on what has been presented so far in the media, not even an O.J. Simpson juror would find Wilson guilty of murder. Many simply have chosen to believe that teenager Michael Brown was "executed" or "shot several times in the back" -- the evidence can wait. Witnesses who definitively assert that officer Wilson "shot him in the back" have been contradicted by the Brown family's own medical expert, respected pathologist Dr. Michael Baden, who conceded the wounds could be consistent with Brown charging toward Wilson, not running away.
After our ill-advised complete withdraw from Iraq in 2011, President Barack Obama now sends hundreds of "advisors" and orders airstrikes. Let's re-visit. When, in 2002, then-Illinois State Sen. Obama gave his famous anti-Iraq War speech, he argued that America had no business in this "dumb" war. Period. Obama considered Iraq a blunder of epic proportions, a misadventure totally devoid of any national security interest. Obama never doubted the assumption given to then-President George W. Bush by all 16 of our intelligence agencies: that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of WMD, specifically chemical and biological weapons. CIA director George Tenet, who served under Obama's predecessors -- Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton -- called the intelligence behind this assumption a "slam dunk."
In 1964, Malcolm X chastised black people for their blind allegiance to the Democratic Party. He said: "You put them first, and they put you last -- 'cause you're a chump. A political chump! ... Anytime you throw your weight behind a political party that controls two-thirds of the government, and that Party can't keep the promise that it made to you during election time, and you are dumb enough to walk around continuing to identify yourself with that Party -- you're not only a chump but you're a traitor to your race."
Last week, by 2-1 vote, a Washington, D.C., appellate panel ruled that the Obama administration unlawfully changed Obamacare. Meanwhile, on the same day, on the same question, a panel from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the other way. This issue is headed for the Supreme Court. Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, is -- according to CNBC -- the "intellectual godfather" of what is perhaps Obamacare's most serious court challenge. Cannon says when Congress drafted Obamacare, they made it clear: Tax credits, grants and other subsidies would be available only to those enrollees who sign up via state-funded exchanges.
Attorney General Eric Holder, in a recent interview, reiterates the theme heard from the very beginning of President Barack Obama's administration: opposition to Obama's agenda equals racism. "There's a certain level of vehemence, it seems to me, that's directed at me (and) directed at the president." What is Holder's proof -- to the extent that any is required? After all, following his election, Obama's favorable ratings reached nearly 80 percent, higher than any president-elect since John F. Kennedy. Obama, in 2008, received a greater percentage of the "white vote" than did John Kerry.
The stock market reached a record high last week, closing over 17,000 for the first time. Good news, of course. As President John F. Kennedy famously said, "A rising tide lifts all boats." But it sure helps if you own a boat. In this case, the "boat" would be the dynamic American stock market. But investors in the stock market disproportionately come from the top 1 percent, and they hold about 35 percent of all stocks and mutual funds. The next-richest 9 percent control about 45 percent. The remaining 90 percent have less than 20 percent. While nearly half of Americans have either direct or indirect investments in the stock market, half of Americans do not. And even for those who do, their home equity is still, by far, their largest investment.
Obama's poll numbers dropped below those of former President George W. Bush. By the end of Bush's term, focus groups were telling pollsters they despised the very four-letter word B-U-S-H. When John McCain faced Obama in 2008, Democrats gleefully slammed McCain's quest as the "third Bush term." Given Obama's light resume and see-no-flaws cheerleading by an adoring media, Obama's fall was inevitable. If absolute power corrupts absolutely, absolute adoration comes close. In practically anointing Obama, our "watchdog" media ignored a thin resume full of red flags. So in four years, Obama shoots from unknown state lawmaker, with little private sector and no executive experience, to president -- all in a nanosecond by political standards.
1) In 2011, President Barack Obama pronounced Iraq "self-reliant and democratic," and "a country in which people from different religious sects and ethnicities can resolve their differences peacefully through the democratic process." In 2010, Vice President Joe Biden called Iraq "one of the great achievements of this administration." Obama ignored pleas by top generals who advised against pulling out without leaving a residual force. 2) Nearly everybody assumed Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Of the newspaper editorials that opposed the war, not one challenged the assumption that Iraq possessed stockpiles of WMD.
President Barack Obama, on Dec. 12, 2011, called Iraq "self-reliant and democratic." He praised that country, calling it a "new Iraq that's determining its own destiny -- a country in which people from different religious sects and ethnicities can resolve their differences peacefully through the democratic process." Obama said, "I have no doubt that Iraq can succeed." He campaigned to end the war in Iraq. He did -- at least he ended America's military involvement in the war. He pulled out all the troops, without leaving a residual force behind as we did, for example, in South Korea, where we have stationed troops for over 50 years.
How critical to the passage of Obamacare was the 2010 "score" given the legislation by the Congressional Budget Office? Recall the President's signature legislation barely passed, and squeaked by along party lines -- without a single Republican vote. Before the vote, congressional Democrats waited for the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office to "score" the legislation. How much, per the CBO, will Obamacare cost? Will Obamacare, as President Barack Obama promised, truly *reduce* the deficit, the gap between what the government takes in and what it spends
The Washington Times reports that the Pentagon pretty much knew the whereabouts of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in recent years. So why didn't they rescue him? Quoting a former intelligence official, the Times said: "Military commanders were loath to risk their people to save this guy. They were loath to pick him up and, because of that hesitancy, we wind up trading five Taliban guys for him. The mentality was, 'We're not going to lose more of our own guys on this.'" The Times also quoted an anonymous "high-level congressional aide": "Joint Special Operations Command always had the rescue mission on the table and it was entirely under their ownership, but the big question centered on whether Bergdahl was somebody you risk lives for when you still have time and space to maneuver diplomatically. ... The prisoner swap was being built up as the only option that was available. But there's been knowledge of the general vicinity of where Bergdahl was, down to how many guys were guarding him."
Elliot Rodger's story is not one of an untreated, mentally ill, white mass-killer who illegally acquired fully automatic "assault weapons." This mixed white and Asian 22-year-old bought his firearms legally, did not use a long-arm or "high-capacity" weapon and had been in therapy since the age of 8. Half his murder victims were killed by knife. Several of the injured were run over by Rodger's car. None of the mental health professionals apparently felt that Rodger was a danger to himself or others. The police had recently conducted a welfare check on him at the request of his family. Rodger persuaded the police that he was fine.
I'm old enough to remember when only black people called black people "Uncle Tom." Democrats, however, long expanded the category of who can play the race card and on whom. Call them equal opportunity race-card players. As with black race-card hustlers -- say the Revs. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton or any given host on MSNB-Hee-Haw -- white race-card players label others "racist" for the crime of disagreement. As with black race-card hustlers, white race-card hustlers need not name names when accusing someone of "racism." And, as with black race-card hustlers, the mainscream media will not bother to ask the white race-card hustler to *identify* said racists.
