The Obama administration’s crony green subsidy scandal is erupting like a solar flare in Washington. But do you know what your kids are learning in their environmental education classes about this red-hot taxpayer eco-scam? Chances are: not much.

Instead, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Democratic apparatchiks at the National Education Association are disseminating solar power propaganda masquerading as math and science curricula.

Titled “Solar Power and Me: The Inherent Advantages,” the lesson plan for middle-school and high-school students directs them to “take note of how solar energy is incorporated into the infrastructure of various cities nationwide and write a short essay about how they would encourage solar energy use in their own town.”

A worksheet labeled “All About Solar!” makes the blanket assertion that solar technologies are “a sound economical choice as they can reduce or eliminate exposure to rising electricity rates, or even eliminate one’s need to pay an electrical bill! In addition, solar panels can be a smart long-term investment, with many solar vendors offering 20-30 year warranties on their products.”

The only warranties worth anything from bankrupt, half-billion-dollar solar company Solyndra Inc. are the warranties on the Disney whistling robots and saunas that adorned its Taj Mahal headquarters. But I digress.

Another worksheet cheerleads the “financial savings” of “solar power and me” and coaches students to “imagine you live in amazing and sunny Anaheim, CA, where the combination of local and federal rebates covers 74 percent of your total cost of a solar panel system!” The exercise then entices the student to take out a 20-year loan on a new solar panel system to produce even greater illusory savings.

Yet another question-and-answer key reads: “How would switching to solar energy affect energy use at your home and school?” Answer: “In general, switching to solar energy would lower your home’s electrical costs and reduce your emissions, thus saving money and improving the environment.”

But as Brian McGraw of the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute points out: “There might be a small niche market, but solar energy is still largely incapable of producing reliable electricity at rates that are even in the ballpark of cost competitiveness compared to coal or natural gas.” Energy Secretary Steven Chu, the force behind billions of dollars’ worth of rushed green energy loans overseen by deep-pocketed Obama bundlers, himself acknowledged that solar tech will need to improve five-fold before it even begins to have a cost-competitive shot.

They say “all politics is local.” But economic decisions impact the whole economy and reverberate internationally. That is why politicians’ meddling with the economy creates so many disasters.

The time horizon of politics seldom reaches beyond the next election. But, in economics, when an oil company invests in oil explorations today, the oil they eventually find and process may not make its way to market and earn a profit until it is sold as gasoline a decade from now.

In short, the focus of politicians is extremely limited in both space and time — and all the repercussions that lie beyond those limits carry little, if any, weight in political decisions.

At one time, many state banking laws forbad a bank from having multiple branches. The goal was limited and local — namely, to prevent big, nationally known banks from setting up branches that many locally owned banks could not successfully compete against.

But, limited and local as such state banking laws were, their impact was both national and catastrophic, when thousands of American banks failed during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The vast majority of the banks that failed were in states that had laws against branch banking.

Why? Because, when there is a single bank in a single place, the fate of both its depositors and its borrowers depends on what happens there. If it is a wheat-growing region, a drop in the price of wheat means people deposit less money in the bank at the same time when more borrowers are unable to repay their loans.

Banks caught in that kind of crossfire went under on a scale that shrank the total amount of credit in the country and helped plunge the national economy into depression. In Canada, where banks were free to have branches all across the country, not one bank failed during the same years when thousands of American banks failed — and Canada did not yet have deposit insurance until 1967.

A Canadian bank with branches in all sorts of places across the country — with all sorts of different industry, commerce and agriculture — had their risks spread, instead of being concentrated, as in the United States.

Problems in a place where one branch was located would not collapse the whole bank.

President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s recent return to Yemen has been met by continued massive, violent protests calling for his immediate ouster. With separatists and al-Qaeda insurgents continuing to gain ground, the total collapse of Yemen’s government looks to be nearly at hand.

Saleh had spent the past three months in Saudi Arabia recuperating from burns he received in a June rocket attack on his presidential compound, an attack which killed 16 people and wounded more than 100. While waiting for Saleh to return, his sons and relatives were charged with maintaining control over Yemen’s government, its armed forces and the capital city of Sanaa.

However, their heavy handed attempts to maintain order have only served to expedite Yemen’s descent into a state of near anarchy. In the past two weeks alone, savage street fighting has claimed over 150 lives as Republic of Yemen Government (ROYG) forces have rained mortars and anti-aircraft fire onto crowds of anti-government protesters.

In the meantime, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and other Yemeni Islamic militants, such as the Partisans of Sharia, have overtaken several towns in southern Yemen, including the Abyan province capital of Zinjibar. Moreover, senior AQAP leaders have now admitted that fighters from Somalia’s al-Qaeda-linked al Shabab had crossed over into Yemen and were now joined in the insurgency.

Then, days before Saleh was to return home, anti-government tribesmen overran an army base north of Sanaa, home to the Republican Guard under the command of Saleh’s oldest son, Ahmed. That attack had been preceded a week earlier when another Republican Guard base in Sanaa had been taken over by a group of protesters and renegade ROYG soldiers.

Finally, serving as a backdrop to all this upheaval has been a Yemen economy, saddled with an unemployment rate of 40 percent, which has all but collapsed. So, it wasn’t too surprising that the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights recently wrote that the ROYG has “appeared to have lost effective control of parts of the country and within the major cities.”

So, it was into this quagmire to which Saleh returned, hoping to stave off further unrest and perhaps spare him a stint in prison or a date in front of a firing squad. To that end, Saleh, who has repeatedly rejected calls by opposition groups to vacate his 30-year presidency, offered in a televised national address to abide by a deal brokered by the Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).

Under that deal, Sahel would allow for parliamentary and presidential elections. In return, Saleh would cede power within a month of signing the accord in exchange for immunity from prosecution by a newly elected Yemen government.

Unfortunately for Saleh, the deal he offered had already been rejected three times by Yemen’s main opposition group, the Joint Meetings Parties. So, if Saleh had entertained thoughts that his televised peace offering would have a pacifying effect, ensuing events quickly disabused him of the notion.

Specifically, tens of thousands of protesters, quickly poured onto the streets of Sanaa demanding his immediate arrest, convinced Saleh was only stalling for time in an attempt to further consolidate his power. Perhaps their suspicions of Saleh being less than candid about voluntarily stepping aside was fueled by RYOG forces only one day after Saleh’s arrival having attacked an opposition camp in Sanaa, killing 17 people in the process.

It is not yet clear how the death of Osama bin Laden will impact President Obama’s promised draw down of American troops from Afghanistan set to begin in July. The Wall Street Journal reports that staff officers with Central Command in Kabul have written a report with the recommendation that only 5,000 troops be rotated home in July with another 5,000 withdrawn by year’s end.

But this report was written before bin Laden’s death. And the war’s opponents in the administration and on Capitol Hill are calling for a faster timetable in withdrawing American troops, making the argument that bin Laden’s demise has weakened al-Qaeda to the point that the president can bring our commitment in Afghanistan to an end on schedule in 2014.

Meanwhile, even as some in Congress are calling for a redefinition of the War on Terror, the facts on the ground in Afghanistan may prevent President Obama from satisfying war critics because of the slow pace of progress in training shown by the Afghan army and police and the inability of the Afghan government to entice the Taliban to negotiate.

When the president announced the 30,000 increase in troops for Afghanistan in December of 2009, it was with the understanding that the number of soldiers to be withdrawn beginning with the July, 2011 target date would depend on both the military success on the ground as well as the progress made by Afghan police and army units in their training. To date, the military is pleased with their counterterrorism strategy that has seen substantial progress in the south, especially in Kandahar province where the Taliban is strongest.

But the success in training the Afghan army and police has been uneven at best. For example, in February, we withdrew units from the Pech Valley in northeastern Afghanistan, turning over security to Afghan forces. Within weeks, the Taliban was back, setting up bases and taking over towns and villages that once had been cleared of them. In some villages, the newly trained police and army simply melted away. While there have been local successes with the new Afghan units, the military believes the training will go on for a decade or more before the Afghans will be able to take complete responsibility for their own security.

But there are some in the administration who believe that bin Laden’s death will change the psychology of the war and lead to a more measured draw down of troops. Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates calls bin Laden’s death a “gamechanger” and believes that besides delivering a blow to al-Qaeda, the terrorist’s death may make it easier for the Taliban to agree to a negotiated a settlement with President Harmid Karzai’s government. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also sounded optimistic about the salutary effect in Afghanistan as a result of the al-Qaeda leader’s death. “We must take this opportunity to renew our resolve and redouble our efforts,” she said.

Others, like Senator Lindsey Graham, believe now is not the time to pull back, but rather, to increase our efforts. Graham believes the killing of bin Laden has given the US effort in Afghanistan “momentum” and that what “we ought to do is pour it on now.”

But voices in Congress calling for a quick pullout from Afghanistan see bin Laden’s death in a different light. A leading Republican war critic in the House, Representative Jason Chaffetz, wrote that “it was not the 100,000 troops that took out bin Laden.” He believes we can still be effective fighting terrorism even if we bring most of the troops home.

Indeed, there is a strategy being crafted that anticipates the American withdrawal that would rely heavily on special forces to fight with the Afghan army as well as participate in the efforts to rebuild the civilian infrastructure. The Associated Press reports that the strategy is a “hybrid” between conventional counterterrorism strategies and a more Afghan-friendly policy that sees the role of special forces as trainers and facilitators rather than pure warriors. It has apparently led to some local successes that have encouraged General David Petreaus to expand the program.

Don’t be fooled by The Donald. Take it from one who knows: I’m a South Jersey gal who was raised on the outskirts of Atlantic City in the looming shadow of Trump’s towers. All through my childhood, casino developers and government bureaucrats joined hands, raised taxes and made dazzling promises of urban renewal. Then we wised up to the eminent-domain thievery championed by our hometown faux free-marketeers.

America, it’s time you wised up to Donald Trump’s property redistribution racket, too.

Trump has been wooing conservative activists for months and flirting with a GOP presidential run — first at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington and most recently at a tea party event in South Florida. He touts hisbusiness experience, “high aptitude” and “bragadocious” deal-making abilities. But he’s no more a standard-bearer of conservative values, limited government and constitutional principles than the cast of “Jersey Shore.”

Too many mega-developers like Trump have achieved success by using and abusing the government’s ability to commandeer private property for purported “public use.” Invoking the Fifth Amendment takings clause, real estate moguls, parking garage builders, mall developers and sports palace architects have colluded with elected officials to pull off legalized theft in the name of reducing “blight.” Under eminent domain, the definition of “public purpose” has been stretched like Silly Putty to cover everything from roads and bridges to high-end retail stores, baseball stadiums and casinos.

While casting himself as America’s new constitutional savior, Trump has shown reckless disregard for fundamental private property rights. In the 1990s, he waged a notorious war on elderly homeowner Vera Coking, who owned a little home in Atlantic City that stood in the way of Trump’s manifest land development. The real estate mogul was determined to expand his Trump Plaza and build a limo parking lot — Coking’s private property be damned. The nonprofit Institute for Justice, which successfully saved Coking’s home, explained the confiscatory scheme:

“Unlike most developers, Donald Trump doesn’t have to negotiate with a private owner when he wants to buy a piece of property, because a governmental agency — the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority or CRDA — will get it for him at a fraction of the market value, even if the current owner refuses to sell.

Here is how the process works.

“After a developer identifies the parcels of land he wants to acquire and a city planning board approves a casino project, CRDA attempts to confiscate these properties using a process called ‘eminent domain,’ which allows the government to condemn properties ‘for public use.’ Increasingly, though, CRDA and other government entities exercise the power of eminent domain to take property from one private person and give it to another. At the same time, governments give less and less consideration to the necessity of taking property and also ignore the personal loss to the individuals being evicted.”

Remember the big stories in the national media when George W. Bush waited four days to tour New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit? Here’s a pop quiz: How long did it take President Obama to visit the Gulf coast after the Deepwater Horizon oil leak began?

The answer is 13 days. Here is how The Washington Post described that visit:

“He flew in and out of New Orleans on May 2, drove two hours to a Coast Guard station and got a briefing before taking a quick helicopter tour. He did not even see the oil slick.”

Mark Knoller of CBS News reported last week that in the first 39 days after each respective catastrophe, Obama visited the Gulf coast twice; Bush visited New Orleans seven times. But remember, this is not Obama’s Katrina!

Now imagine if President Bush, five weeks into one of the largest oil leaks in U.S. history, and without ever having seen the slick, jetted across the country to headline a $17,600 per-person fund-raiser at the home of an oil-fortune heir. How do you think the national press would have treated that? Bush didn’t do that, which is why you didn’t hear about it. President Obama did — which is why you didn’t hear about it.

The media covered Obama’s trip to San Francisco to raise money for Barbara Boxer. Some news outlets even reported that Obama spoke at a private reception at the home of Democratic Party donor Gordon Getty. But few reported that Getty is the heir to the Getty Oil fortune. For instance, the New York Times reports on Obama’s trip never identified Getty as an oil heir. Do you think that would have been omitted had Bush been Getty’s guest?

What if, hours after the head of the U.S. Minerals Management Service left her job over Washington’s mishandling of that giant oil spill, President Bush held a press conference (his first in months) and, when asked about that agency head, could not say whether she had resigned or been fired? What if, hours later, the White House stated that the President knew all along that she had been dismissed, but that story was contradicted by the Cabinet secretary — the one who supposedly did the dismissing — having said that morning during a congressional hearing that she’d resigned voluntarily?

That happened in the Obama administration last week. Where are the outraged cries of incompetence and dishonesty?

Can you imagine the charges of buffoonery that would pour forth from New York, Washington, and Los Angeles, if the George W. Bush administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a state law that had been signed into law by one of Bush’s own cabinet secretaries?

Well, last week the Obama administration did exactly that. The Department of Justice asked the court to overturn a 2007 Arizona immigration law that punishes employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano signed the bill into law when she was Arizona governor.

All of these events were reported in the mainstream media. But they were not reported in the same way they would have been had a Republican been president. The point of this criticism is not to say that Bush was great and Obama stinks. Bush was not a great president. The point is to illustrate the double standard most of the media have.

Media bias exhibits itself in the subtle favoring of liberal politicians and ideas. The same rules don’t apply to the left and the right. The left is presumed to have good intentions, the right bad. So when Bush took four days to get to New Orleans after Katrina hit, it was evidence of racism, elitism, a general lack of concern for the little people. But when it took Obama three times as long to visit the Gulf Coast, there was silence.

When a left-wing administration makes mistakes or contradicts itself, that is simply human nature. When a right-of-center administration does, it is incompetence or duplicity. Or both.

At least some on the left are calling out Obama for his inattentiveness to the Gulf oil spill. That’s no substitute for the press setting the national narrative by holding him to the same standards to which it held Bush. But it’s a start.

Andrew Cline is editorial page editor of the New Hampshire Union Leader. Follow him on twitter @Drewhampshire.

United Nations Just Condemned “Acts” Which Caused Flotilla Deaths

Once, Jews were persecuted because they had no ancestral home — and no army, navy, or air force. Now, Jews, both in Israel and around the world, are persecuted precisely because they have an ancestral home which dares to defend its citizens from deadly harm. This Jew-hatred refuses to die. And, Jewish-American, Jewish-European, and Israeli leaders have refused to recognize that the contemporary war against the Jews is bigger, and the consequences graver, than ever before in history, and that this war is primarily being fought—and won or lost — through propaganda and the manipulation of ideas. Leftist progressives and journalists in the West have joined forces with Islamists, and with the United Nations and human rights groups in propagating Big Lies against the small Jewish state.

I first wrote about this in 2001-2002 and published a book on the subject in 2003:The New Anti-Semitism. It made no difference. Jewish-American leaders pooh-pooed the book, or paid no attention to it. Many insisted that “right wing Christians” were the most dangerous Jew-haters. I disagreed then and I disagree now. Since then, many Jewish-American intellectuals have insisted that such “alarmism” should not be encouraged, that things have been “worse in the past” and that matters are not “that bad” now.

Oh, speak for yourself — but dare not speak for Israel. And, do not think that Israel’s fate is not your fate too, as well as the fate of Western civilization. And, it gives me no pleasure that, seven years later, more and more American Jewish organization leaders are beginning to sound as I once did. The unfunded and poorly funded grassroots groups are way ahead of the Fat Cats.

Here’s what we are up against. Palestinian terrorists call themselves “freedom fighters;” Turkish terrorists call themselves “humanitarians.” When propagandists appropriate and misuse language, reality is blurred, confusion reigns. When the “good people” label (Israeli) “self defense” as “aggression” — and this includes feminists who should know more about the importance of self-defense — one despairs, or at least hopes that serious people, including leaders, will see through the deception and set matters right. Failing that, one experiences vertigo.

Some Jewish-Americans believe that Israel only has itself to blame. And so they blame Israel before anyone else can do so—as if the Islamist mobs would spare such Righteous Jewish Exceptions from the kind of collective lynch mob-like fury that is currently taking place world-wide against Israel and that specifically took place on the Turkish boat Mavi Marmara.

No matter what the intellectuals say, the Jews are on the move again. They are leaving Europe, where they were born and emigrating to Israel or to the United States and Canada.

Read the rest at Pajamas Media

The following is a “Best of” compilation of soldiers coming home and surprising their families:

Christopher Hayes, Washington editor for the far-left Nation magazine, offers a ringing endorsement of the thug tactics used by the Service Employees International Union and National People’s Action against Bank of America executive Gregory Baer.

You’ll recall that on his TV show Glenn Beck did a segment on the hundreds of angry, loud, purple-shirted SEIU members and National People’s Action activists who showed up at Baer’s house in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. They caused a ruckus, scared his family, frightened his neighbors, and used his home as a staging ground in their efforts to embarrass Bank of America and give so-called Wall Street reform legislation a boost.

After perfunctorily stating he was “dispositionally inclined to cringe at actions like this,” Hayes said he “got over that real quick when Trenda Kennedy of Springfield, Illinois, took the bullhorn on Baer’s steps.” He quoted Kennedy saying, “In America, every seven seconds one of our homes goes into foreclosure … My home is one of those!”

So somebody’s misfortune justifies urban terrorist tactics against a bank executive? Apparently that’s what Hayes believes. He might as well grab Al Sharpton’s bullhorn and start mindlessly chanting, “No justice! No peace!”

Hayes then praises the “Showdown in America,” an anti-capitalism campaign run by NPA, People Improving Communities through Organizing (PICO), and SEIU.” In his best MarxistSpeak, Hayes regurgitates the party line about America’s current economic problems: “The campaign aims to dismantle the entire Wall Street-Washington corporatist axis, which gave us the financial crisis, the bailouts and 7 million foreclosures since 2008, a million of which have ended in repossession.”

“It’s about damn time,” Hayes concludes, voicing his approval for the campaign.

Scaring the pants off suburbanites is absolutely necessary in order to generate the upheaval required to bring capitalism to its knees, argues Hayes.

Note that in his profoundly dishonest op-ed Hayes doesn’t assign any blame to government policy for America’s economic problems. There’s no discussion of the Community Reinvestment Act, home mortgage interest deduction, or the Fed’s crazy cheap money interest-rate policy.

To left-wingers like Hayes, the government can do no wrong.

Once I get home, I will be more happy to give you a firsthand account of what I have seen over here. For example, the US rebuilding effort had an Iraqi contractor who was hired to build a school. It was later found out that he blew the school up shortly after its completion and immediately submitted a bid for a rebuild contract. Al-Qaeda was blamed for the bombing.

There are several Iraqi contractors who have received advances for rebuilding contracts (in the millions!) and then vanished to Luxembourg or the US, never to be seen again! Might I add that at BIAP (Baghdad In'tl), non-locals are held on the tarmac while Arabs board the plane. They also charge "us" 15 dollars to leave the airport, but you can clearly see Iraqis going straight to security and bypassing the payment counter. Racism at its best!

At the cost of how many billions of U.S. taxpayer money?

Police knew about abuse by father

Svera was frank: "I'm afraid of my father. He beats me." But for the authorities it wasn't clear enough.

16 year old Svera R. from Zurich-Hongg: A strong person who wanted to live her life- without the bonds of the strict muslim faith which stood above everything for her father. On Monday he killed his fistborn child with an axe. Then he surrendered to the police.

Svera's friends are under shock. And they're in anger: "Svera was a poor girl. In the family there was a lot of confrontation.

Heated arguments", says Daniel A. (20) to BLICK. He lives in the community Rutihof next to family R. "Often the father was beating her so severely that we could see the bruises. She attended school in that condition." In 2007 the school filed a notion/alarm concerning the four kids who received Swiss citizenship. They got a social worker and an Egyptian counselor/mediator.  

"Nonetheless, police and ambulance showed up several times", says Daniel A. "Last time I noticed was two weeks ago, when the father had a heart attack."

That incident was confirmed by Marco Cortesi, spokesman of the police in Zurich. "Scheragha R. was brought into hospital by an ambulance." It was the second time the police got involved with family R. "Three weeks ago we were called for the first time" according to Cortesi. "Svera ran away. Very soon we located her at her boy-friend's home. On the phone she told an officer that things aren't all right at home any longer. That her father beats her and that she is afraid of him."

What does the police do with these information? "We offered her to visit the police station and provide a testimony- or move to a shelter. She didn't do either. That's why the charge of abuse wasn't investigated any further. This is standard procedure", says Cortesi.

The family counselor arranged a mediation between father and daughter. Svera spent a night at her parents' home but then ran away to her boy-friend.

"The third deployment in that case occurred on Monday when Svera and a friend of hers were caught stealing", says Cortesi. "We informed the parents." And Svera? "She said it was ok with her- but she would run away from home instantly."

But why were these cries for help not being paid attention to? Cortesi explains: "She didn't go to the police station in order to provide a testimony, nor did she contact a shelter. That way a case like this does not get on record."

At the Guardianship Authority (I guess: Guardian ad litem) of the city of Zurich father's R. beatings were never an issue.
Spokesman Martin Naef (39): "There were no indications of massive use of violence. It seems like it wasn't more than  skirmishes/fisticuffs and arguments/conflicts." Moreover, family R. had been in care/coached intensively. Naef: "We were under the impression that tension had been in decline since 2007." During the last weeks the family counselor increased visits to the family even more.

Tragic: A meeting with Svera, coaches and family counselor was scheduled for Tuesday morning. Naef: "It was planned to talk about the situation at home and assistance/care." Too late. Svera is dead.

Read it all.

People often say there is nothing worse than losing a child. Yes there is. Losing a child is only the beginning of the grief. How that child died is the other half. That knowledge will either bring a modicum of comfort, or intensify the pain.

While the Left uses their usual tactics to muster feelings of public outrage, pity, and defiance for their new class of victims—illegal immigrants in Arizona—the Shaw family is still mourning the death of their son, a real victim of illegal immigration.

Jamiel Shaw II was murdered two doors down from his home, just minutes after talking to his father. He was shot by an illegal alien who was a known gang member.

His mother, Army Sgt. Anita Shaw was looking forward to coming home from Iraq, that is, until the she got the news she would be going home to bury her son, along with his dreams.

Jamiel was a promising young football player. The very day he was murdered, he spent the morning in an invitation-only football training camp, designed for star players to prepare for college, and become NFL hopefuls.

The man accused of killing Jamiel had been released from jail just the day before on gun charges, he had been in and out of the system, and was on probation. He was here illegally.

Jamiel Shaw Sr. told NewsReal:

If the Arizona law would have been in effect in California, my son would be alive today.

The Shaw family and their supporters are trying to pass Jamiel’s Law. This law would take away “sanctuary city” status for gang members. Los Angeles currently grants “sanctuary” for illegal aliens by way of city policies that prohibit the LAPD from investigating violations of federal immigration laws.

The proposed law reads in part:

WHEREAS, the City of Los Angeles is unsafe for law-abiding citizens, legal aliens and illegal aliens due to the prevalence of gangs that routinely commit crimes including but not limited to murder, extortion, robbery, rape, theft, drug-trafficking, and vandalism;

WHEREAS, many, if not most, of the members of the gangs in Los Angeles are illegal aliens; and

WHEREAS, there is no legitimate public policy reason for the City to extend “sanctuary city” protection to illegal aliens in the gangs that are ravaging our city…

. . . .

No Sanctuary For Gang Members.  The policy of this City from this point forward is, and shall be, to deny any “sanctuary city” protection to illegal aliens in gangs.  Neither the Mayor, the Chief of the Police nor any other City employee shall prohibit or inhibit Los Angeles Police Department officers from lawfully investigating possible violations of federal immigration laws by gang members.

For this the Shaw family is fielding the typical tactics of the Left. They have been accused of racism, and endured death threats over the Internet. These grieving parents have been told that they should feel sorry for those that are here illegally; after all, they suffer separation.

To which Jamiel Shaw Sr. says:

We’ve been separated—we would love to cross a border to see my son.

“Immigration equality” organizations would have us believe that anyone living within our borders deserves the right to work and to organize, regardless of immigration status.

Mr. Shaw raised his son to obey the laws of the land, to work hard in school.

Everything that they say they’re fighting for—my son was stripped of.

Jamiel Shaw Sr. said he was trying to turn his grief into energy and right this wrong. To learn more about Jamiel’s Law, click here.

Michael Lerner’s home vandalized!

Lerner’s own organization’s website has the scare headline:  “A Right-Wing Zionist Threat: Vandals Strike Tikkun Editor’s Home.” Leftist bloggers have been even less restrained.  The Zionists are violent thugs and hoodlums, Judeofascists, vandalizing the home of Tikkun’s editor and and threatening him.  The “attack” on Lerner’s house in the upscale Berkeley Hills was a direct consequence of criticism from Alan Dershowitz–more proof that foolishly allowing non-leftists to exercise freedom of speech results in violence and hooliganism!

So just what exactly happened?

Lerner, a leading collaborator in leftists’ wars against the Jews, is anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian.  He calls himself “Rabbi,” although he never graduated from any rabbinic seminary and has no rabbinic ordination recognized by any branch of Judiasm. His Tikkun Magazine, publishes every Jewish anti-Israel crackpot and crank on the planet and many a non-Jewish anti-Semite.  In recent weeks, Lerner made the news for organizing a petition of anti-Israel leftists to support Judge Richard Goldstone and even offered to grant him an award.  Goldstone had headed the UN commission that smeared Israel for “war crimes” when it was forced to go to war against Hamas to stop its rocket attacks.  Since issuing his libelous report, Goldstone has been shunned by the Jewish communities all over the world, including in his own native South Africa, where some members of a synagogue where Goldstone’s grandson was having a Bar Mitzvah declared him persona non grata.

At that point, Prof. Alan Dershowitz, who considers Goldstone an anti Semite, denounced Lerner for his toadying to the jurist and denounced the petition circulated by Lerner as coming from “Rabbis for Hamas”:

“They have no shame and no credibility. They exploit their rabbinical status to support any conclusion that undercuts self defense Israeli actions without regard to the evidence and without regard to the truth.  Not surprisingly, the worst of these rabbis (and that’s saying a lot), Michael Lerner, after attempting to politicize the bar mitzvah by offering his anti-Israel synagogue for the event, has decided to honor Richard Goldstone with Tikkun Magazine‘s ‘Ethics Award.’ I guess all it takes to be honored by Tikkun is to pass Lerner’s litmus test of lying about Israel. That’s Lerner’s definition of ‘ethics.’”

A few days ago, some anonymous people, evidently Jewish students at the University of California at Berkeley, paid a visit to Lerner’s home up in Berkeley Hills.  (Just how Lerner came up with the cash to live with the capitalist class in one of the ritziest locations in the Bay Area is something about which his magazine readers might be wondering.)  The visitors taped up four stickers or leaflets around his home   Here is the Tikkun version of the story:

“They posted a printed bumper sticker saying ‘fight terror — support Israel’” next to a caricature of Judge Goldstone whose UN report on Israel’s human rights violations in its attack on Gaza last year has been denounced as anti-Semitic and pro-terror by right wingers in Israel and the U.S.  The caricature has Goldstone talking about his being kept from his grandson’s bar mitzvah, and the caricature of Rabbi Lerner responds by saying ‘any enemy of Israel is a friend of mine.’”

Lerner of course called in the cops.  You know – those civil servants whom he used to refer to as The Pigs when he was a leader of the Seattle Liberation Front (SLF), a 60s group which participated in numerous violent anti-war protests and riots along side the Black Student Union (BSU) and the ultra-violent  Weatherman terror group.  When the cops arrived they found a victimless non crime.  The leaflet hangers did not assault Lerner, and in fact never met or spoke with him.  They did  not so much as trample on the petunias in his yard.

But Lerner and his supporters are having trouble containing their rage.  The perps of the leaflet hangings are Zionist terrorists, thugs, vandals!  Some political observers in the Bay Area are expressing skepticism.  At least two local pro-Israel activists told me they suspect Lerner himself put up the leaflets in order to play martyr and get himself publicity.  Lerner has a track history of what might be called strategic misrepresentation when it comes to getting himself attention.  A few years back he got caught inventing pseudonymous imaginary letters to the editor printed in Tikkun Magazine agreeing with Lerner’s own writings there. (One wag claimed he should have signed them Ichael-May Erner-Lay.)

Lerner’s whining about being the victim of “Rightwing Zionist violence” is also a bit beyond hilarious.  Lerner himself has a long track record of organizing and participating in violence.  While he was in Seattle, Washington state attorney (and later Senator) Slade Gorton described the tactics of Lerner’s Liberation Front as “totally indistinguishable from fascism and Nazism.”   Lerner himself was one of the so-called “Seattle Seven,” charged in a federal trial with “conspiracy to incite a riot.”  He spent several months in prison.

In those days Lerner’s two passions, by his own admission, were LSD and Marxism.  Later he moved more into goofy pseudo-Jewish liberation theology and hatred of Israel.  He considers the rebirth of international anti-Semitism to be the fault of the Jews themselves for being so cussedly evil and racist.

He launched the bizarre magazine he called Tikkun in 1986 and has devoted it to radical politics, bashing Israel, and denouncing America, along with a monthly dollop of New Age touchy-feely recreational “compassion” and peace posturing.

Around the same time that he launched his magazine Lerner started telling people that he was an Orthodox Rabbi.  In fact he is neither a Rabbi nor Orthodox.   He says he was “ordained” when three hippy “rabbis,” one of whom claims in fact to be a Buddhist, put their hands on his head and proclaimed him rabbi.  A few years back I emailed him an inquiry as to whether he would submit to a small quiz of his knowledge of the Bible and the Talmud; he indignantly refused.  He claims his rabbinic status is recognized because he is a member of the California Board of Rabbis.  But membership in the Board does not mean anyone has acknowledged one’s rabbinic credentials as bona fide; it just means one pays annual dues.

While insisting that all he wants is peace and justice in the Middle East, Lerner’s prescription for achieving this is essentially the same as that of the Hamas.  He demands that Israel return to its 1949 borders, forego all forms of self-defense, and allow itself to be drowned by an influx of  Palestinian “refugees.”  Lerner has never seen an act of Arab terrorism that he does not rationalize, nor an act of Jewish self-defense he is willing to justify.  Lerner recently hosted Alice Walker on Yom Kippur, who devoted her talk to denouncing Israel for raping Arab women.

Besides Israel bashing, Lerner may be best known for sharing his “politics of meaning” (his nonsense term for disguising leftist politics under a thin veneer of theology) with a credulous Hillary Clinton when she was First Lady.  After 9-11 he demanded that Americans “feel the pain” of the al-Qaeda terrorists.  While claiming to be a rabbi he has also issued calls to “Smash the Synagogue.”   When Professor Edward Alexander from the University of Washington wrote an expose of Lerner, the latter sent threatening letters to numerous Jewish newspapers and magazines, warning they would be sued by him if they printed the piece.  Professor Alexander has described Lerner as “a kipah (skullcap)-wearing, rotund beard-plucker of vaguely ‘rabbinic’ appearance who could always be relied on to blame Israel and not the Arabs for the absence of peace, and to liken Israeli defense against Palestinian Arab violence to medieval Christian mobs . . . organizing pogroms against the whole Jewish community.”

A few years back Lerner demanded that all Jews devote their traditional Passover Seder to bemoaning the oppression of the Palestinians by the Zionist “Pharaoh.”  The same Palestinians used the occasion that year to murder 29 people at a Seder in Netanya, Israel.   He has long supported sanctions and boycotts against Israel to force it to capitulate to the Arabs.  He considers Arab terrorists to be the “New Maccabis,” and his writings are routinely carried by the publications and distribution lists of Islamic fundamentalists – the sorts of people who support car bombs in Times Square.

This is the man victimized by the merciless violent “terrorist vandalism attack” by Rightwing Zionist thugs against his home in Berkeley that spared even his petunias.

"Three Cases of Assault Upon Iranian Christian Leaders Reported in the Past Week," from AINA, April 23:

Washington -- International Christian Concern (ICC) has observed that within the past week there has been an unusually high number of forceful arrests of Iranian church leaders, a result of heightened and aggressive government tactics used to suppress the growing Christian church.

According to reports by Farsi Christian News Network (FCNN), the most recent incident occurred on April 14 when undercover security officers physically assaulted and arrested Pastor Bahnam Irani. The officers introduced themselves as agents of the Ministry of Information before invading Pastor Irani's house-church in Karaj and taking him to an undisclosed location.

Sources indicate that the ten believers attending the worship gathering were new to their faith in Christ. After the raid, the group was forced to complete prepared documents revealing the activities and whereabouts of church leaders. The attendees were also told that they would be summoned to further questioning at a later date.

In a similar occurrence, on April 11 the Ministry of Information arrested 19 year old Daniel Shahri in his home in Isfahan. When entering, the officers rendered an arrest warrant issued by the revolutionary court on charges of internet related activity and forming a house-church.

The third reported arrest occurred on February 28, when Hamid Shafiee and his wife, Reyhaneh Aghajary, were forcefully taken from their home in Isfahan. As of now, they remain in prison and are in poor health still awaiting charges to be brought against them.

As is often the case, arrests of Christians occur collectively and systematically. Once one Christian group is detained, security forces acquire additional information from interrogations, and from investigations of confiscated cell phones and computers which disclose the location of more Christians....

As usual, the mainstream media plays down the Tea Party protests except when it tries to paint them in a bad light.  For example, the Tax Day protests in Washington, D.C. were buried on p. 17 of The New York Times, right above an article reporting that the Obamas paid $1,792,414 in federal income taxes on earnings of $5,505,509 for 2009.  Is that juxtaposition supposed to be some sort of subtle message that President Obama shares our pain and, therefore, we have nothing to be upset about? 

In truth, Obama’s tax reporting raises some concerns of its own.  For example, I would like to know why the Obamas deducted $52,195 in home mortgage interest payments and $22,456 in real estate taxes when they have lived for free at taxpayer expense in the White House since January 20, 2009?  Even if there were a loophole that they were entitled to take advantage of, why didn’t the Taxer-in-Chief forego these deductions, as well as his $329,100 in charitable deductions, as an example to the rest of us?  After all, his Vice President Joe Biden said that paying higher taxes is the “patriotic” thing for the wealthy to do.

For his part, Obama told a fundraiser in Miami in mocking tones that Tea Party protestors should be thanking him for lower taxes:

You would think they’d be saying thank you

With that bit of prompting, his dutiful fans stood up and yelled, “Thank you!”

No doubt, the nearly half of American households who do not pay any federal income taxes today are thankful to Obama.  For the rest of us, the only reason to thank Obama would be if, by some miracle, he decides not to run again in 2012.  Since that is not likely to happen, we will have to vote him out along with his cronies in Congress.

As Representative Michele Bachmann told Tea Party protestors in Washington, D.C. yesterday,

I’d say it’s time for these little piggies to go home.

According to an analysis by the Heritage Foundation, President Obama’s 2011 budget calls for $2 trillion in higher taxes over 10 years—after accounting for the $154 billion in tax cuts called for in the budget.

But even if Obama were the tax-cutter he claims to be, which he is not , it is his big government socialism and the ballooning increase in the national debt that are upsetting so many Tea Party protestors and millions of other Americans.

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan - A gunman lying in wait shot and killed an 18-year-old woman as she left her job at a U.S.-based development company Tuesday, casting a spotlight on a stepped-up campaign of Taliban intimidation against women in this southern city where U.S. troops plan a major operation in the coming weeks.

Although there was no claim of responsibility and police said the motive for the attack was unclear, Taliban militants have been particularly harsh with women who work for foreign organizations or attend school. Bands of thugs are increasingly harassing women who want jobs, education and their own style of clothing, women and aid workers say.

In Tuesday's attack, the gunman emerged from a hiding place and shot the woman, whose first name was Hossai, after she stepped out of her office building, said deputy police chief Fazle Ahmed Shehzad. Hossai died at the hospital, and the assailant escaped.

Hossai worked for Development Alternatives, Inc., a Washington-based global consulting firm that "provides social and economic development solutions to business, government, and civil society in developing and transitioning countries," according to its Web site.

Eight years after the U.S.-led invasion ousted the Taliban from power, fear again dominates the lives of many young women and girls in the violent south, the stronghold of a revived Islamist insurgency that curbed women's rights when it ruled most of the country until the 2001 U.S.-led invasion.

"Every day the security situation gets worse and worse," said Ehsanullah Ehsan, a clean-shaven man who has devoted the last 16 years to educating girls, first in the remote border regions of Pakistan and since 2002 in Kandahar.

Ehsan is head of the Afghan Canadian Community Center, which provides vocational training and schooling to men and women. He says each day brings another story of threats against his female students. While many of the threats come from the Taliban, others are from criminals and even police.

Harassment of women comes against the backdrop of a general deterioration of law and order in Kandahar, a city of nearly a half million people.

The aim of the upcoming operation by NATO and Afghan troops is to clear Kandahar of Taliban fighters, who threaten and intimidate those who do not follow their strict interpretation of Islam, and to bolster the local police force, which appears incapable of stopping petty crime that is rampant in the city.

In the best of times, lives of women in conservative Afghanistan are far more restricted than in the West, especially in rural areas where a woman's place is in the home and beneath the all-encompassing burqa. Since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, however, women in urban areas like Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif and Jalalabad have more choices -- with some in parliament, government and business.

Even in Kandahar, the major city of the ultraconservative south, women say restrictions eased in the first years after the Taliban were gone. But as the Islamist movement began to rebound in 2003, pressure on women to adhere to strict Islamist and Afghan traditions increased -- with little protection from the ineffectual and corrupt Afghan police.

Ehsan told of one student whose family was warned by a shopkeeper to keep their daughters indoors and to let them leave only if they are wearing a burqa.

"The shopkeeper knocked on her parents' door and said: 'If you let her go out with her face showing and something happens to her, you have been warned and it will be her own fault,'" recalled Ehsan. "Why is it that every time it is the girls and the women who are targeted in our society?"

He said some threats come from uniformed men and young thugs who "tease the girls and make sexual demands." In the last six months, he believes more such threats have come from the Taliban, who warn women and girls not to go to school or work for foreign organizations....

Mideast. Teen feared dead returns home

A Palestinian teenager who went missing near the Gaza border last week and was believed to have been killed by Israeli troops has returned home safe after being detained in Egypt, he said on Sunday. Mohammed al-Faramawi, 15, said he had gone with some friends to Gaza's defunct airport near the borders with Israel and Egypt last Monday "for fun" when they found a smuggling tunnel to Egypt and crawled through it. They were promptly arrested by Egyptian security forces on the other side and held for several days. On Tuesday, the day after he disappeared, Palestinian medics and media reported he had been shot dead by Israeli forces near the border.

In a letter to the Citizen, "Imaginary crimes," published April 10, Joseph Alexander Norland explains the significance of this:

Re: Teen feared dead returns home, April 8.

I commend the Citizen for publishing this news item because it reflects the way the anti-Israel propaganda machine works. On the slightest pretext and the flimsiest of evidence, Israel stands accused for imaginary crimes big and small.

Readers who follow Middle East news will remember the story about Mohammed al Dura, a young boy who was supposedly shot dead by Israeli troops. The story was later exposed as a hoax but the damage to Israel's reputation was done.

On a larger and more ominous scale, the entire Goldstone Report is based on the same type of evidence as that described in the Citizen's story, complete with testimony by "Palestinian medics and media."

The next time one hears about "atrocities" committed by Israel, one should remember this Citizen story about the Palestinian teen.

Joseph Alexander Norland,

Ottawa

Mideast. Teen feared dead returns home

A Palestinian teenager who went missing near the Gaza border last week and was believed to have been killed by Israeli troops has returned home safe after being detained in Egypt, he said on Sunday. Mohammed al-Faramawi, 15, said he had gone with some friends to Gaza's defunct airport near the borders with Israel and Egypt last Monday "for fun" when they found a smuggling tunnel to Egypt and crawled through it. They were promptly arrested by Egyptian security forces on the other side and held for several days. On Tuesday, the day after he disappeared, Palestinian medics and media reported he had been shot dead by Israeli forces near the border.

In a letter to the Citizen, "Imaginary crimes," published April 10, Joseph Alexander Norland explains the significance of this:

Re: Teen feared dead returns home, April 8.

I commend the Citizen for publishing this news item because it reflects the way the anti-Israel propaganda machine works. On the slightest pretext and the flimsiest of evidence, Israel stands accused for imaginary crimes big and small.

Readers who follow Middle East news will remember the story about Mohammed al Dura, a young boy who was supposedly shot dead by Israeli troops. The story was later exposed as a hoax but the damage to Israel's reputation was done.

On a larger and more ominous scale, the entire Goldstone Report is based on the same type of evidence as that described in the Citizen's story, complete with testimony by "Palestinian medics and media."

The next time one hears about "atrocities" committed by Israel, one should remember this Citizen story about the Palestinian teen.

Joseph Alexander Norland,

Ottawa

The Long Way Home
By Andrew Klavan
Thomas Nelson, $14.99, 352 pp.

Enemies Among Us
By Bob Hamer
Fidelis, $14.99, 336 pp.

As an avid reader of contemporary fiction, I’m wary of two phrases that tend to raise a red flag with me: “Suitable for all ages” and “Christian fiction.”

The former generally means the book is either so benign that it’s devoid of reality, while the latter usually signals a warning that sermonizing and pat plot resolutions lie ahead.

But two terrific writers — an acclaimed veteran thriller writer and a legendary veteran federal agent whose life could be the basis for several thrillers — neatly avoid those pitfalls without sacrificing immediacy or suspense.

Edgar Award-winning mystery writer Andrew Klavan and first-time novelist Bob Hamer, a retired undercover FBI agent, each has produced an exciting thriller that is appropriate for teens and their elders.  Their new books would be equally at home on the mystery section shelf at Barnes and Noble and at Family Christian Stores; and best of all, neither insults the reader’s intelligence nor spends more time preaching than entertaining.

Klavan’s The Long Way Home, is the second entry in his “Homelanders” series, which is about a young man trying to clear his name on murder charges while fighting a group of homegrown Islamofascist terrorists.  That sounds like a tall order for a high school senior, but that’s only the half of it — Charlie West can’t remember any details of the past year that got him into this fine mess.

But Charlie’s partial amnesia isn’t the most unusual thing about him in the very girl-oriented world of “Young Adult Fiction.”   He’s a guy, but not a misunderstood bookworm or awkward geek—and he’s not about to be thrust into a world of magic. Charlie is a church-going, patriotic, athletic and popular kid.  And, fortunately for his current predicament, his sport is karate, not football.

As The Last Thing I Remember, the series’ first book, opened, Charlie was being tortured by terrorists without a clue about how he got there. He spent the rest of the book running for his life at a pace that would exhaust Richard Kimble.

Charlie’s still on the lam from both the police and the Homelander terrorist group, and there are still a satisfying amount of action set pieces (including a great escape from a killer in a library that turns into a flight from a whole police department), but The Long Way Home gives us time to take a breath as Charlie secretly returns to his home town.

As he enlists his loyal friends — and his dream girl, who he frustratingly finds out fell in love with him during the year of his life that he can’t remember — the tale allows for more character development and rounds out Charlie’s emotional life for the reader.  Stories of the hero who returns home to right past wrongs fill a niche in classic mystery lore, and Klavan does a fine job in adapting it for a younger audience.

Think Memento meets The Fugitive, spiced with the plot twists and relentless suspense of 24 and just a touch of the classic kid mysteries like The Hardy Boys, and you’ll have an idea of the treat in store when you pick up Klavan’s Homelanders novels.

Hamer, meanwhile,  is certainly following the old saw to “write what you know about.” His nonfiction debut, The Last Undercover, was about his five-year infiltration of the pro-pedophile group NAMBLA.  Among his other real-life adventures are posing as an arms dealer with the Russian mob and busting the world’s largest counterfeiting ring run by the North Koreans. But he chose a different yarn to launch his career in fiction.

Enemies Among Us is a crackerjack novel about undercover FBI agent Matt Hogan’s investigation of a charity that may be providing covert funding for terrorists. His superiors have become worried that Hogan is becoming overly aggressive and even reckless in the field, so they assign him the nice, quiet case of checking out a charitable clinic that may have ties to bad guys.  Of course, the assignment turns out to be as dangerous as any he’s ever taken.

Hamer brings a wealth of inside knowledge and telling detail to his story. The twist is that the suspicious charity is run by Christians, rather than the usual Muslim suspects, and we don’t know if the clinic’s staff is filled with allies or dupes of the terrorists.

The veteran FBI agent also paints a realistic portrait of the bureaucratic and legal hoops that agents must jump through in order to pursue the bad guys. Warrants aren’t issued on the spot while the agent is driving across town in hot pursuit, and getting instant lab results on forensic evidence.

Enemies Among Us is the first novel to be published under Ollie North’s Fidelis imprint, a new Christian publishing house that aims to be a little grittier and less overtly preachy than their brethren.  Enemies is the perfect start.

Unlike most books in the genre, Matt is struggling with his faith, while his wife is the steadfast one. The Hogans have a very healthy (off-scene) love life, and the book does not stop dead in its tracks to sermonize even when it would seem perfectly natural to do so. The characters’ ideological and spiritual struggles are seamlessly woven into the story in a way that is perfectly natural, which makes the characters come alive instead of killing the pace of the narrative.

The Long Way Home and Enemies Among Us are exemplary in the way the authors make their points without stacking the dramatic deck or overt sermonizing– and they can be enjoyed by all ages. In these cases, that’s a good thing.