Weekend Reading

Some selected articles and random images for your weekend:

Erik Ericson: Communists Win the Day. Frank Marshall Davis Would Be Proud Of Obama

To reiterate my conclusion on Barack Obama’s world view and policy objectives: to make the world safer, the United States must be less safe. To make the world more stable, the United States must be less stable. To make the world more prosperous, the United States must be less prosperous.

Sara Noble:  Why Obama Loves His Dictators 

In the end, Mr. Obama has more in common with dictators than freedom-loving peoples which is why he keeps befriending them. He believes the ‘stupid Americans’ need to be better controlled.

Mr. Obama likes the dictatorial approach when it comes to implementing his policies because he’s comfortable with it and the end justifies the means.

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[On Cuba]  Normalized relations is a financial bailout for a nation suffering under more than 50 years of a repressive communist regime.

Richard Fernandez: You Are The 'World'

In the United States failure appears to be a profit opportunity. Several  American friends have unaccountably offered me exactly  the same piece of sage advice.  ”Richard, never trust anyone who hasn’t failed.”  In their view anyone who hasn’t been flat broke at least once in his life has some kind of character defect. One acquaintance  wistfully recalled the time he lost his fortune and had to live out of his car, and how that motivated him to even greater wealth. 

Stephen Moore: The Pension Crisis Next Door: Scranton, Pa.

Scranton, Pa., is a middle-class, blue-collar city of 76,000 with severe financial problems.

It recently raised property taxes for 2014 by more than 50%, and those taxes are expected to rise another 20% in 2015.

The city also increased various fees, such as for garbage collection, by two-thirds. It's becoming a tax hell.

These taxpayer costs are skyrocketing because the city's auditors calculate that the police and fire pension funds will be completely depleted in three to five years.

Walter Williams: Liberals' use of black people

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there are about 200 police arrest-related deaths of blacks each year (between 300 and 400 for whites). That number pales in comparison with the roughly 7,000 annual murders of blacks, 94 percent of which are committed by blacks. The number of blacks being murdered by other blacks is of little concern to liberals. Their agenda is to use arrest-related deaths of blacks to undermine established authority.

Moe Lane: On trying to shoehorn populism into the modern Left. Somehow. Somewhere.

. . . the only avenue for a bottom-up movement in American politics is via the Right. 

IBD: Gun Grab U.N. Arms Treaty To Take Effect Dec. 24 

The Orwellian-named United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, which has disarmed none of the world's tyrants or terrorists, has announced on its website that the ATT will take effect on Christmas Eve, a lump of coal in the stockings of anyone who believes, as our Founding Fathers did when they wrote the Second Amendment, that guns in the hands of private citizens are the best defense against predators, terrorists and, yes, tyrannical governments.

Lee Stranahan: The Race War Dreams of Neo-Liberalism: From The 60s To Ferguson

The radical tactics and rhetoric aren’t being spouted directly by Pres. Obama and AG Holder. They are the authority figures now. The radicals are on the streets, led by Obama ally Al Sharpton, trained by people like radical leftist leader Lisa Fithian. These are the children of the revolution and they’re in charge now.

Heather Mac Donald: The Big Lie of the Anti-Cop Left Turns Lethal

. . . it is naïve not to recognize that criminal members of the black underclass despise the police because law enforcement interferes with their way of life. The elites are oblivious both to the extent of lawlessness in the black inner city and to its effect on attitudes toward the cops. Any expression of contempt for the police, in their view, must be a sincere expression of a wrong.

Selwyn Duke: Liberal Lies Killed the Two NYC Cops

The problem with symbolism in real life, just as in film, is that many people take it literally. This, not to mention that “hands up” was long portrayed as literally true, until facts made the lie so untenable that liberals — the ultimate men without chests, never man enough to admit error — had to conjure up the metaphor cover. But leftists couldn’t care less about right and wrong; all that matters is winning, as they define it.

J.R. Dunn: Gangbangers Unbound

That there is an agenda is not in question. Presidents, attorneys general, sports and entertainment celebrities, and the media sphere as a whole do not get involved in small local disturbances for no reason. Stepping back, we can see a consistent thread of deliberately aggravated racial incidents throughout the Obama presidency, from the Gates incident through the Trayvon Martin controversy on to Ferguson. All featured intervention from Obama, and most from Eric Holder as well. You can search all you like among previous presidencies for comparable actions, but you will do so in vain.

To understand what’s happening here, we need to go back to the collapse of the civil rights movement in the late 60s. In exchange for control of the newly-ratified black vote, Democrats dramatically expanded government welfare both through ADC and Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” programs. As has often been pointed out, this led to the deterioration of the urban black family, with young single black women with children “marrying” Uncle Sam in preference to their hapless male opposite numbers, unwilling to complete their educations and unable to obtain decent employment. The result was generations of young black men deprived of any sexual or social purpose. These lost generations comprised a kind of bonus to the left, with black male drifters viewed as an urban proletariat that could be exploited for revolutionary purposes.

Paul Kengor: What was Obama taught about Cuba?

Did Barack Obama ever support the embargo to begin with? Did he ever think it had a time and purpose?

I don’t have a complete, extended track record of Obama’s position over the decades, but I can say this: Obama was raised by people who were pro-communist. I’ve argued that Barack Obama is our first Red-Diaper Baby President. That sounds comical, but it really is true.

Tyler Durden: The Destruction Of The Middle Class Is Nearing The Final Stages

New legislation now gives pension plans the ability to cut benefits to pensioners in the future making the future welfare of these people uncertain.

Ivy Mike: If I was a Psychopath. . .

…and I was firmly ensconced in the halls of power within a massive enforcement regime; and if I hated the exercise of an inviolable right by the mundanes I rule over to the point where I thought the state should “brainwash” people against it; and if I knew I would be able to get away with treason to undermine that right by smuggling contraband into a foreign country to foment a crisis in order to pass laws that chip away at that right . . .