Archives

Monday, October 8, 2012

400-408 – Brigitte Gabriel, is an international terrorism analyst and author of two New York Times Best Sellers, Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America (2006, Amazon), and her most recent, They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It (2008) (Amazon).  She is the President of ACT for America (actforamerica.org), the largest national security grassroots organization in America, giving a mobilized voice to Americans concerned about radical Islam, terrorism, stealth jihad, sharia law, and the political correctness that enables their advance.  She has addressed the highest levels of governments in the US, Britain, and Australia about Islamic terrorism.

ACT for America now with 704 chapters across the country, 37 here in California, and over 245,000 members – and with a full-time lobbyist on capitol hill.  Brigitte is fluent in Arabic, French, English and Hebrew, and during the 1980's was the host of the Arabic-language evening news program World News, broadcast throughout the Middle East.

Brigitte came to America in 1989, having survived the horrors of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) when radical Muslims seized power from the Christians.  Her father was a successful businessman, and was 60 and his wife 55, when their only child, Brigitte, was born on 10/21/1964.  When she was 10, the first attack came, destroying her house and wounding her with shrapnel.  She and her parents were forced to live in an underground bunker for 7 years – with no electricity, no running water, no sanitation system, and only one kerosene lantern – she crawled in a ditch everyday to fetch water and to avoid Muslim snipers.  

• Brigitte exposes how Islam is being taught in American public schools – even 911 is not portrayed as an Islamic terrorist attack against the United States!  The free 220-page report, entitled Education or Indoctrination? The Treatment of Islam in 6th through 12th Grade American Textbooks is available at actforamericaeducation.org, examining 38 textbooks, was mailed to over 70,000 elected school board members nationwide to expose what our children are being fed.

• LINER – Pastors, join us for our half-day annual pastors conference, Impact 2012, from 830-1230, on Thursday October 11th at APU!  Pastors, you're going to hear strategic keys on how to increase the impact of your ministry shared by gifted servants of God – Rick Warren, Ken Ulmer and Robert Jeffress. You'll get answers to your toughest questions from our Pastors Panel that I'll emcee – with pastors Jeff Vines, Steve Wilburn, Shawn Thornton and Scott Daniels.  And you'll hear encouraging testimonies from ministries working overseas – Gospel for Asia and Forever Found.  With inspiring worship by the Harvest Worship Band.  As well as resources for your church – including web designers, retreat hotels, building and financial services, health insurance and more!  Pre-register now for this "free lunch," at kkla.com, keyword "Impact."

413-423 – Brigitte Gabriel

428-438 – (6X) • Prager University (10/08/2012) Do You Have Free Will?

• Billy Hollowell (Breitbart, 10/08/2012) BASEBALL STAR-TURNED THEOLOGIAN EXPOSES ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT 'FREE WILL' (& CLAIMS IT PROVES GOD'S EXISTENCE).

443-452 – • Charles Cooke (NRO, 10/08/2012) Celebrating Columbus, Brave and Bright: Imposing modern morality on the past is a form of historical illiteracy.

Key Points – 

• THE FIRST? – First off, however you elect to parse "discovery," Columbus wasn't the first outsider to discover America. As early as 30,000 years ago, human beings started to move across a Siberia-Alaska land bridge named Beringia and then to fan out throughout the Americas. On the Western side of things, Leif Ericson and the Vikings made it to North America around 1000 a.d. but saw fit not to stick around. Strike one for the fable.

• FLAT EARTH? – As Stephen Jay Gould has observed, "there never was a period of 'flat earth darkness' among scholars." They had accepted the spherical theory from the time of Socrates, and it had reigned without interruption ever since. Insinuations to the contrary, still pervasive in the public imagination, derive first from 17th-century Protestant attempts to paint Catholics as backwards, and then from the 19th-century atheist movement, which picked up the falsehood and propagated it to demonstrate the supposed benightedness of the religious.

• SMALLPOX FOR SYPHILIS – Of the charge that he brought smallpox to the New World and is thus guilty of wiping out untold numbers of the native people, Columbus must be exonerated. The vast majority of the devastation inflicted upon the Indian tribes was inadvertent: As he did not propose that the world was round, he also did not propose germ theory — that would not be proffered until after the invention of the telephone — and it is simply preposterous to postulate that he should have known what would happen when two hitherto unfamiliar worlds collided. If one is to lay the blame at Columbus's feet for the collapse of the Indian population, one also must blame the Indians for unwittingly giving the visitors syphilis, which they took back with them and which subsequently wiped out upwards of 5 million Europeans. It was an unfortunate quid pro quo, to be sure, but not one for which either side should feel much guilt.

458-508 – Stanley Kurtz, a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center (eppc.org), contributing editor at National Review Online, and best-selling author of his latest book Spreading The Wealth: How Obama is Robbing The Suburbs to Pay for the Cities (2012) (Amazon).

• Stanley Kurtz (NRO, 10/08/2012) Obama's Plan for Ohio.

• Stanley Kurtz (NRO, 8/1/2012) Burn Down the Suburbs?  Just as wealthy states are expected to fund poor states, and those who pay federal taxes are expected to fund the unemployed, so too the suburbs are expected to fund our urban centers – in the mind of Progressives.  This socialist redistributive scheme goes by many names, among them "regional equity movement" or "regional tax-based sharing," "Building One America," and the "Sustainable Communities Initiative."  It's up and running in Minneapolis-St.Paul, and the suburbs hate it, but they can't end it because Progressives are the political majority.  The best words to describe it are tyranny and theft.  And it's on the ballot in California as Prop 31 ("redistribution without representation").  It's simply "blue America" stealing money from "red America."  

• LINER – Go to kkla.com, keyword "Jeremiah," for your chance to win David Jeremiah's latest book "God Loves You, He Always Has, and He Always Will."

512-523 – Stanley KurtzBut it's not just Obama, it's the progressives within the Democratic party who are advancing this agenda, right?  

528-539 – • University of Colorado, Boulder (10/04/2012) Updated election forecasting model still points to Romney win, University of Colorado study says.  Kenneth Bickers & Michael Berry still predict a Romney victory.  They've correctly predicted every election since 1980.  They have Romney getting 330 electoral votes, and Obama getting 208.

• John McCormack (Weekly Standard, 10/08/2012) Princeton Economist: Obama Campaign Is Misrepresenting My Study on Romney's Tax Plan.

Last night, the Obama campaign blasted out another email claiming that Mitt Romney's tax plan would either require raising taxes on the middle class or blowing a hole in the deficit. "Even the studies that Romney has cited to claim his plan adds up still show he would need to raise middle-class taxes," said the Obama campaign press release. "In fact, Harvard economist Martin Feldstein and Princeton economist Harvey Rosen both concede that paying for Romney's tax cuts would require large tax increases on families making between $100,000 and $200,000."

But that's not true. Princeton professor Harvey Rosen tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD in an email that the Obama campaign is misrepresenting his paper on Romney's tax plan:

I can't tell exactly how the Obama campaign reached that characterization of my work.  It might be that they assume that Governor Romney wants to keep the taxes from the Affordable Care Act in place, despite the fact that the Governor has called for its complete repeal.  The main conclusion of my study is that  under plausible assumptions, a proposal along the lines suggested by Governor Romney can both be revenue neutral and keep the net tax burden on taxpayers with incomes above $200,000 about the same.  That is, an increase in the tax burden on lower and middle income individuals is not required in order to make the overall plan revenue neutral. 

You can check the math that shows Romney's plan is mathematically possible here.

• Arthur Brooks (WSJ, 10/07/2012) A '47%' Solution for Romney. When he is attacked for his comments about Americans who don't pay taxes, the candidate can counter that the president's policies are stifling opportunity.  

• [E]liminating the Bush-era tax cuts for households making over $250,000 a year would reduce the deficit by a paltry 5% annually.

• California's education system consumes 52% of that state's Greek-style budget.

• My colleague Charles Murray's best-selling book "Coming Apart" shows clearly that the predictors of a happy, successful life are cultural, most notably family, community and work ethic.  The bottom 20% in America are not stuck because their welfare support is insufficient. It is because these cultural institutions are not helping them lead the lives they deserve

544-554 – Key Points – It is illegal to solicit or receive campaign donations from foreign nationals.  68% of the traffic to obama.com is foreign and it links directly to the barackobama.com donation website.  The Obama campaign owns over 400 Obama sites, but not obama.com – it's owned by an ex-American from Chicago and Obama bundler, Robert Roche, who now lives in Shanghai and who's made 19 visits to the White House since 2009.  Obama took in $181M in September from 1.8M donors, 500K of them brand new, but over 98% of the money is untraceable since the donations were less than $250.  Half the money came from 35K donating the maximum $2,600, but the other half came from 1.7M "anonymous" donors whose average gift was $53.  If a gift is $250 or more you have to keep track of the donor's name, if less than $50 a gift is considered "petty cash" and campaigns don't track anything about the gift.   43% of traffic to barackobama.com is from foreign sites.

In an explosive report set to send shockwaves through official Washington, the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President Peter Schweizer report on a new 108-page GAI investigation into the threat of foreign and fraudulent Internet campaign donations in U.S. federal elections

•• Mike Flynn (Breitbart, 10/06/2012) WINDFALL: OBAMA RAISES $181 MILLION, ONLY AROUND 2% OF DONATIONS REPORTABLE.

// The campaign said that just over 1.8 million people made donations to the campaign last month. According to the campaign, over 500k of these were brand-new donors, having neither given in 2008 nor 2012. 98% of contributions were under the reporting threshold of $250. Of these, the average contribution was $53. 

Its really a tale of two worlds. 35k people gave an average of $2,600, while just over 1.7 million people gave an average of $53. Half the campaign's haul came from people giving around the maximum amount and half from people who don't have to be disclosed. Seems a bit odd. 

The average of $53 from small donors is particularly noteworthy. Contributions under $250 don't have to be disclosed, but the campaign still has to keep track of the donor's name, in case subsequent donations push their contribution over the reporting threshold. 

For contributions under $50, however, the campaign doesn't even have to keep track of the donor's name. It is effectively considered a "petty cash" donation. A person could theoretically make 10 $49 donations and never be reported, even though their total contributions are above the FEC's reporting threshold. 

With an average donation of $53 from small donors, Obama has A LOT of donors who will never be disclosed and whose names aren't even known to the campaign. Tens of millions of dollars worth. 

• Paul Bedard (Washington Examiner, 10/08/2012) Report: Obama.com solicits foreign contributions for prez.

• Mytheos Holt (Blaze, 10/08/2012) EXPLOSIVE REPORT: OBAMA CAMPAIGN WEBSITE LACKS IMPORTANT TOOL TO PREVENT ILLEGAL DONATIONS.

• Tony Lee (Breitbart, 10/08/2012) REPORT: OBAMA.COM VULNERABLE TO ILLEGAL FOREIGN CAMPAIGN DONATIONS.

• Wynton Hall (Breitbart, 10/08/2012) BOMBSHELL: OBAMA.COM OWNED BY BUNDLER IN SHANGHAI WITH BUSINESS TIES TO CHINESE GOVERNMENT.

558-608 – •• Mike Flynn (Breitbart, 10/08/2012) HOW MUCH OF OBAMA'S $181 MILLION SEPTEMBER HAUL WAS ILLEGAL?

• Government Accountability Institute (GAI) found that Obama's donation page doesn't use any industry-standard credit card security measures. It doesn't even use the basic Card Verification Value (CVV), the security number on the back of a card, that most other campaigns use. Not using this basic security measure makes it much easier for phantom donations or even foreigners to contribute illegally to the Obama campaign.

• It isn't an oversight but a conscious decision to not use CVV security. In fact, credit card companies charge the campaign higher fees because it doesn't use this. So, the campaign is paying millions of dollars more in fees than it would not to have basic security. 

• Tellingly, the Obama campaign does use CVV security in its merchandise store. They utilize higher standards of security to purchase a coffee mug than making an on-line donation. Thus, the campaign has chosen to use two different payment systems on its site. Odd, eh?

• LINER – Pastors, join us for our half-day annual pastors conference, Impact 2012, from 830-1230, on Thursday October 11th at APU!  Pastors, you're going to hear strategic keys on how to increase the impact of your ministry shared by gifted servants of God – Rick Warren, Ken Ulmer and Robert Jeffress. You'll get answers to your toughest questions from our Pastors Panel that I'll emcee – with pastors Jeff Vines, Steve Wilburn, Shawn Thornton and Scott Daniels.  And you'll hear encouraging testimonies from ministries working overseas – Gospel for Asia and Forever Found.  With inspiring worship by the Harvest Worship Band.  As well as resources for your church – including web designers, retreat hotels, building and financial services, health insurance and more!  Pre-register now for this "free lunch," at kkla.com, keyword "Impact."

612-623 – (6X) • Prager University (10/08/2012) Do You Have Free Will?

628-639 – Gregg Frazer, Professor of History and Political Studies, at the Master's College, a classmate of mine in the PhD program at Claremont Graduate University, and author of the just-out The Religious Beliefs of America's Founders: Reason, Revelation, Revolution (Amazon), based upon his dissertation.  Gregg and his wife, Leanne, have three daughters, are members of Grace Community Church, and he enjoys listening to jazz.

(4X) David Barton quotes from my interview with him a few weeks ago.

• Today we talk about his new book and he responds to some of the things that Barton said on my show from his new book The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson (2012) (Amazon).  Gregg argues that both the political left and political right are wrong when it comes to America's founders – they were neither the deists of the left (Barry Lynn), nor the Christians of the right (David Barton & Peter Marshall).  They were what he calls "theistic rationalists," a hybrid belief system of natural religion, Protestantism, and reason – with reason the decisive element.  He bases this upon their private writings.

644-656 – Gregg Frazer,

• Jonathan Seidl (Blaze, 10/08/2012) FILMMAKER MAILS OVER 4 MILLION COPIES OF CONTROVERSIAL OBAMA DOCUMENTARY TO SWING STATE VOTERS.  Joel Gilbert is mailing out copies of his Dreams from My Real Father DVD, in which he claims Obama's real father is communist party member Frank Marshall Davis.

The description of the film puts it this way:

In "Dreams From My Real Father," Barack Obama is portrayed by a voiceover actor who chronicles Barack Obama's life journey in socialism, from birth through his election to the presidency. The film begins by presenting the case that Barack Obama's real father was Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party USA propagandist who likely shaped Obama's worldview during his formative years. Barack Obama sold himself to America as the multicultural ideal, a man who stood above politics. Was the goat-herding Kenyan father only a fairy tale to obscure a Marxist agenda, irreconcilable with American values?

• Eliana Johnson (NRO, 10/08/2012) Is the Obama Campaign Being Financed by Foreign Donations?

• Paul Bedard (Washington Examiner, 10/04/2012) Was Obama rattled by developing donor scandal story?

• Peter Wehner (10/07/2012) A DESPERATE PRESIDENT'S DESPERATE CLAIMS.

• The President's claim that Governor Romney has been going around the country for months calling for $5 trillion in tax cuts that favor the wealthy is pure fiction. Even President Obama's deputy campaign manager, Stephanie Cutter, admitted that the $5 trillion figure is inaccurate. What Governor Romney favors is a 20 percent cut in rates for everyone. But as Governor Romney explained to the President during the debate, he's committed to making his tax reform plan revenue-neutral by broadening the tax base and through the revenues generated from economic growth. So only if you intentionally ignore a key element of Mitt Romney's tax proposal do you get any revenue loss at all. // The truth is that Governor Romney is not just proposing a 20 percent tax rate cut. He's proposing a reform of the tax code that lowers the rate people pay on their income but increases the portion of their income subject to taxes. 

• What makes the false claim by President Obama doubly risible is that it came in the same debate in which Mr. Obama said, "I've put forward a specific $4 trillion deficit-reduction plan." But as any number of fact checkers (like Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post) have pointed out, the $4 trillion figures (a) counts $1 trillion in cuts reached a year ago in budget negotiations with Congress, meaning those savings are already in the bank; (b) counts $800 billion in savings in debt payments (from lower deficits) as a "spending cut," which is a dubious claim; and (c) Obama is counting nearly a $1 trillion in savings from war money that no one expected to be spent anyway, now that the Iraq war is over and the Afghanistan war is winding down. As Mr. Kessler put it, "By projecting war spending far in the future, the administration is able to claim credit for saving money it never intended to spend. (Imagine taking credit for saving money on buying a new car every year, even though you intended to keep your car for 10 years.) Rather than good arithmetic, independent budget analysts called the maneuver 'a major budget gimmick.'" (Shockingly, the press has applied very little attention and scrutiny to President Obama's invented claim that he's put forward a specific $4 trillion deficit-reduction plan.)

•  On the matter of accountability that the President professes devotion to: As I've pointed out before, this is a president who promised to cut the deficit in half, bring down health care premiums by $2,500 for a typical family, create five million new green energy jobs alone, lift two million Americans from poverty, and as president-elect, informed us that he had asked two of his top economic advisers, Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, to conduct a "rigorous analysis" of his economic recovery plan. The report that he released predicted unemployment would not rise above 8 percent if the stimulus plan was passed. None of those promises have been met. In fact, they have been utterly shattered.