Written by Michelle Malkin

The wheels on the bus go ’round and ’round, just like the endless cycles of big, bad government programs to federalize preschool and daycare.

On Wednesday, the White House Summit on Early Education will unveil nearly $1 billion in new “investments” to “expand access to high-quality early childhood education to every child in America” from “birth and continuing to age 5.” It’s a retread of President Obama’s 2013 State of the Union school-spending plan, which was a repackaging of his 2011 Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge program.

Those Obama initiatives are knockoffs of moldy-old Democratic policy chestnuts, such as former Vice President Al Gore’s push to fund preschool for all 3-year-olds at a cost to taxpayers of at least $50 billion over 10 years, left-wing actor/director Rob Reiner’s “I Am Your Child” campaign for universal preschool and child care, and Hillary Clinton’s various “It Takes a Village” schemes to expand Head Start from womb to work. With age comes fiefdom.

How could anybody be against tax-subsidized Pre-K for all, you say? Let me count the ways.

Every one of these Big Babysitter boondoggles rests on “progressive” junk science. The Obama White House asserts that “studies show that for every dollar we invest in early childhood education, we see a rate of return of $7 or more.” Balderdash. This discredited claim rests on results of the tiny Perry Preschool Project in Michigan, run at a cost of $19,000 per child more than a half-century ago, and a similar program in North Carolina called the Abecedarian Early Intervention Project.

As David Armor of the libertarian Cato Institute noted in a thorough review of the scientific literature this fall, the “groups studied were very small, they came from single communities several decades ago, and both programs were far more intensive than the programs being contemplated today.”

More recent research by the Brookings Institution’s Russ Whitehurst found that the vaunted academic benefits of full-time Pre-K in Georgia and Oklahoma “have had, at best, only small impacts on later academic achievement.” In fact, Georgia elementary school students’ test scores are mediocre, and Oklahoma test scores have been on the decline for the past decade. A 2010 Department of Health and Human Services report, which assessed approximately 5,000 3- and 4-year-olds who were randomly assigned to either a control group or a group that had access to the federal Head Start program, concluded that “at the end of kindergarten and first grade … the Head Start children and the control group children were at the same level on many of the measures studied.”

In 2012, government researchers reported “little evidence of systematic differences in children’s elementary school experiences through 3rd grade, between children provided access to Head Start and their counterparts in the control group.” The federal investments in early childhood programs keep ballooning, yet the educational impacts are dubious at best.

Then there’s the alarming encroachment of data miners into the lives of parents and their young children. As I’ve reported previously, Common Core-aligned assessment systems such as Teaching Strategies Gold in Colorado and California’s “Desired Results Developmental Profile” are stockpiling massive amounts of information on preschoolers’ social, emotional, physical, language and cognitive development. The collection of data and accompanying assessment inevitably dictate the content in the classroom. TS Gold, which integrates its results into the vast network of statewide longitudinal data systems, raked in $30 million in federal Race to the Top subsidies in 2012. The latest round of Obama’s “Preschool Development Grants” and “Early Head Start-Child Care Partnership Awards” require applicants to plug into this insatiable data machine, as well as “linking” and “partnering” with a plethora of other government programs.

After attending TS Gold training sessions last year, Cindee Will, principal of the James Irwin Charter Academy in Colorado Springs, calculated that compliance, not including taking and uploading photos of students as required, would soak up at least 16.5 hours of kindergarten class time per week or 640 hours a year of instruction in class. Test administration four times a year for an average of 25 students, she told me, would mean “150 hours per year or 2.5 months: one quarter of our time. And this equation is done with the knowledge that our K program is a half-day program!”

As you might imagine, the administrative and financial burdens on small, privately run part-time preschool programs would be even more onerous. Fatal. And exactly as planned.

Think ObamaCare is bad? Well, welcome to TotCare. The goal of the educational central planners, you see, is the elimination of competition. The fact is that the vast majority of Pre-K kids are already happily enrolled in early childhood programs outside of Fed Ed’s clutches. The “problem” isn’t most families’ lack of access to preschool. It’s Washington’s lack of access to your kids for their institutionalized warehousing, data mining and pedagogical propaganda schemes. The Nanny State’s ceaseless quest for control keeps creepily rolling along.

Originally posted at OneNewsNow.com

Now that the heady rush of jubilation has faded from the election, it’s time to take stock of what we actually achieved. The numbers couldn’t be more forthright. It’s as if the American people interrupted the President to interject, “Now, let me be clear…” The 2014 election was an epic political repudiation of President Barack Obama, U.S. Senator Harry Reid, and the Progressive agenda in Washington.

It was a demonstration that all but the most white-eyed leftist loons in America are tired of Obama’s ineptitude, deliberate or otherwise. How amusing now to think about those talking heads on cable who tried to suggest that the Democrats might not lose the Senate, the day before America catapulted the Senate back to the Republicans in a resounding fashion.

But what has been achieved? What has our political support purchased? In a strange way, American voters are like folks on that Storage Wars show. Turn on any episode and you’ll see people bidding crazy amounts of money on a garage-worth of stuff they’ve only glimpsed from a distance. Could be treasure, could be rubbish. And just like those storage-capitalists, we don’t yet know what we just purchased.

In the majority of races, it would be very difficult to elucidate just what the Republican candidate ran on, since the only discernable plank in the 2014 GOP campaign strategy was “We’re not Obama”. It could be that we’ve only traded progressive Democrats for progressive Republicans. The reality is that the GOP has controlled arguably the most powerful organ in the Federal government for the past four years.

The power of the House of Representatives lies in the purse. It is through the House that all the rest of the government is funded, since all bills for raising revenue originate in the House (ala Article I, Section VII). Of course this is by design, providing one more check and balance to offset the potential overreach of a Federal leviathan. Whoever controls the House, controls the funding of the entire US Government.

And yet, this power was deliberately set aside by GOP leadership during one of the most egregious, tyrannical growths of Presidential power in American history. One could argue that there has never been a greater need for the House to check a runaway Executive branch and yet the Speaker of the House sat on his hands for four years. No, even worse, the Speaker told his enemies about his plans to sit on his hands before he did so. When U.S. House Speaker John Boehner communicated time and again that the power of the purse was off the table, he surrendered before the enemy even took the field.

Since Boehner took the Speaker’s gavel in 2010, Obama has:

• Implemented (and funded) Obamacare
• Directed his DOJ to blatantly flout federal law in cases involving DOMA
• Prevented the Congressional inquiry into the deliberate harassment of conservative organizations by the Internal Revenue Service
• Violated religious liberty of Americans via the contraception mandate
• Stonewalled Congressional investigators attempting to get to the bottom of the murder of American diplomats in Libya

And this is just the low-hanging fruit!

Obama’s abuse of presidential power has been beyond the wildest dreams of progressive radicals, yet Boehner’s House has achieved only one minor victory: Sequestration via a half-hearted government shutdown. Yet even Boehner himself admits that he had to be talked into it and was against the idea from the beginning.

New Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is at least as spineless as Boehner and coupled with the fact that these two men now control the entire Federal legislative machinery yet haven’t advanced the slightest hint of a conservative agenda over the past 4 years, can Americans have any hope in the success of a newly-elected conservative majority?

It is a question which is impossible to accurately answer at this juncture. Conservative politicians are not immune to legislating much differently than they campaigned. Given the number of Establishment-endorsed GOP candidates who won, I think there will be more than a fair number of newly-minted RINOs in D.C. come next year.

It remains to be seen how much of a seat at the table Boehner and McConnell will give any true conservative who shows up. Based solely on their actions over the past 4 years, chances are that McBoehnell will work behind the scenes to erode support for any kind of conservative resistance which forms in either house.

The encouraging thing is that there are several strong conservative voices headed to Washington next year. Folks like Ben Sasse in Nebraska, Joni Ernst in Iowa, and Tom Cotton in Arkansas should revitalize the efforts of U.S. Senators Mike Lee and Ted Cruz, men who have been holding the conservative line in the U.S. Senate. Similarly Dave Brat, Barry Loudermilk, Mia Love, John Ratcliffe, and Andy Mooney are headed to the an U.S. House in desperate need of articulate, impassioned, principled conservatives.

These Congressional rookies probably think they’ve finally emerged from the political fight of their lives, but they haven’t seen anything yet. If there’s one thing the heartless Republican establishment will attack, it’s an unapologetic conservative. They’ll keep their powder dry until they spot the opportunity to turn on a Tea Partier and then it’ll be open season. If these freshmen are smart, they’ll realize that power lies in numbers and the tighter formation they can maintain, the better.

There’s a reason why the Greek phalanx and the Roman testudo were such effective fighting formations. With any luck, organizations like the Tea Party Caucuses in both houses can form rank around these fledgling representatives until they get their sea legs and prepare to carry the fight to the enemies of Liberty, foreign or domestic.

Please support the work of Illinois Family Institute.

On Black Friday your government was shopping with credit cards too it would seem.  The total outstanding U.S. public debt just hit a new historic level, which probably would be better associated with a red Friday rather than a black one. As of the last workday in November, total U.S. public debt just surpassed $18 trillion for the first time, or $18,005,549,328,561.45 to be precise.

Our nation’s debt now exceeds, at 103 percent, total Gross Domestic Product which some say was artificially inflated by half a trillion when the government decided to add the “benefit” of R&D intangibles into the GDP earlier this year.

This unprecedented total US debt has increased by 70 percent under just one President, Barack H. Obama. It has gone from $10.625 trillion on January 21, 2009, to $18.005 trillion now.

Yet, the President’s term and his reckless spending are far from over.  If he succeeds with his executive order for amnesty for illegals, a new report finds that if that act involves 4 million illegals, the net cost (benefits paid in minus benefits paid out) to taxpayers for his action will be another $2 trillion in taxpayer-funded services like Medicaid and Social Security.

In other words, this president has taken the debt that it took 43 other presidents to rack up, doubled it in just six years, and saddled future generations with $20 trillion in IOU’s.

Written by Napp Nazworth

Implementation of the Common Core State Standards Initiative has not gone well, supporters and critics alike now agree. Understanding why the education reform has been so rocky could aid future policy initiatives.

Here are five of the main reasons Common Core has been a disaster.

1) No Deliberative Democracy

Common Core was put into effect sneakily, rather than through the usual deliberative and democratic processes.

The Common Core is a set of math and English standards for K-12 education developed by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, both of which are non-governmental organizations. Neither Congress nor state legislatures were involved in developing the standards.

For comparison, look at how President George W. Bush’s education reform, No Child Left Behind, was implemented. That legislation was debated in subcommittee hearings, committee hearings, and on the floors of the U.S. House and Senate before being passed on a bipartisan vote. While the debate was taking place in Congress, there was a public debate, with newspaper reports and pro and con arguments presented in editorials, news programs and water cooler talk across the nation. None of that happened when states adopted the Common Core.

The Common Core was developed in a private meeting by a non-governmental body. States were then encouraged to adopt the standards in an Department of Education grant competition that was part of the 2009 stimulus bill.

Even some Common Core supporters now admit that the way it was implemented was a mistake. At an American Enterprise Institute panel in October, Chris Minnich, current executive director of CCSSO and the council’s strategic initiatives director of standards assessment and accountability in 2009, said that Common Core would be better off today if the federal government had not been involved by creating incentives and funding the testing consortia.

By the time the standards had made its way to teachers, students and families, most were taken by surprise. And due to the lack of deliberative democracy, proponents had not gone through the difficult task of building public support before the policy was thrust onto the public.

2) Supporters Demonized Critics

Common Core supporters also made the mistake of characterizing critics as a bunch of crazies. A May Christian Post analysis pointed out many examples of this.

Common Core critics have been derided as “fringe voices,” people who are “comfortable with mediocrity,” an “ideological circus” with “hysterical claims and fevered accusations” from “the market-share-obsessed talk-radio crowd,” “far-right,” a “mediocrity caucus,” and “white suburban moms” opposed to educational progress.

Demonizing critics created additional problems for the Common Core. First, supporters lost legitimacy when these claims were easily demonstrated as false. Some of the harshest critics have been liberals, academics and teachers.

And second, by demonstrating an unwillingness to listen to the critics, Common Core supporters reinforced the critic’s view that Common Core is top-down and elite-driven. The arrogance of these Common Core supporters is similar to that of “Obamacare” architect Jonathan Gruber, who said that implementation of President Obama’s signature healthcare reform law had a “huge political advantage” in its “lack of transparency” due to the “stupidity of the American voter.”

3) No Trial and Error

Rather than pushing Common Core on an unsuspecting public using backdoor methods, supporters should have started small.

In the United States federalist system, states are often described as “laboratories of democracy.” Policies can be tried by early adopter states while other states wait to see the results. If the results are positive, other states will adopt them.

At the AEI October panel, Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at AEI, said that 10 to 15 states likely would have adopted the Common Core on their own, even without the federal incentives. Hess is neither for nor against the Common Core standards, but has been critical of how they have been implemented.

If Common Core had started that way, Hess noted, it would have been “a truly and genuinely kind of state-led effort, which if it was working and being implemented well, others would have wanted in.”

4) No Process to Improve Them

The developers of the Common Core did not leave in place a process to improve the standards.

In a perfect illustration of how the Common Core was put together haphazardly and without much forethought, the standards were created by a panel formed exclusively for the purpose of writing the standards. The panel was disbanded, and then the standards were copyrighted.

So, as education historian Diane Ravitch has pointed out, if a state wanted to change the standards, how would they do so? The answer is not entirely clear.

What if a state wanted to keep part of the standards but throw out other parts? Over 500 early childhood experts, for instance, signed a letter saying that the standards would be harmful for children in the early grade levels. (No early childhood experts were part of the panel that developed the standards.) So some states may want to dispose of at least that part of the standards. Whether they are legally allowed to do that is, however, murky.

Legally, a state should not be able to change a copyrighted product it does not own. But, who would a state go to for permission? And, if a state violated the copyright, who would sue them anyway? Others have even argued that the Common Core is not something that should have been able to obtain a copyright in the first place, because, according to copyright law, “ideas, methods, or systems” cannot be copyrighted.

Some states, like Florida, have made changes to the Common Core. Those changes appear to be mostly additions to the standards, which is legal, rather than changing the existing standards.

Suppose, however, that each state does ignore the potential copyright issues and changes the Common Core to its liking. That would undermine one of the main purposes of the Common Core to begin with. One of the primary impetuses for having a Common Core was that it would be, well, common. Having all, or many, states on the same set of standards, comparisons could be made across states and resources could be pooled for texts and testing materials. So, without a national process for improving the standards, the reason for having common standards in the first place has already been undermined.

5) Cronyism

Now that the secretive, top-down, elite-driven education reform was thrust onto unsuspecting students, parents and teachers, American taxpayers will wonder why they are being asked to pay for what is turning out to be an extremely expensive project with most of the benefits going to a few large companies.

A significant portion of the taxpayer dollars for Common Core implementation will go to testing companies. And these testing companies were also involved in developing Common Core.

As Julian Vasquez Heilig, professor of educational leadership and policy studies and the director of the doctorate in educational leadership program at California State University, points out on his blog, the work groups who designed the Common Core were comprised of five employees of ACT, two employees from a Pearson affiliate, six employees from Achieve, seven employees from The College Board and two employees and co-founders of Student Achievement Partners. Teachers and administrators were part of the group that reviewed the standards but not the group that wrote the standards.

Parents and teachers may look at that situation and wonder if those who wrote the standards did so in the interests of their children or in their self-interest. There is, however, a more important question raised by Common Core cronyism.

In all likelihood, those who wrote the standards see no conflict between their self-interest and what is best for American students. They are, after all, involved in those companies (many of which are non-profit) because they believe the work of those companies is to the benefit of students.

The larger question that should be asked, then, is — why should they get to decide education policy for the nation? As Vasquez Heilig pointed out, those involved in writing the Common Core have a particular view of education (which he wrote more about here and here). It is a legitimate view of how children should educated, but it is not a view shared by all educators, parents and education professors. There are equally legitimate alternatives that should also be part of the national dialogue on education reform.

Americans hold certain expectations of how education should be reformed — with parent and teacher input; through deliberation (both talking and listening) and democratic processes; and through trial, error and re-reforms at the local and state level. Common Core did none of those things and that is why it has been a disaster.

This article was originally posted at the ChristianPost.com website.

Note: now that rogue and renegade federal judges have struck down amendments that protect natural marriage in Mississippi and Arkansas, passed with 86 percent and 75 percent of the vote respectively, it’s time once again to review the solution: courageous governors.

There is one and only one short range solution to a runaway judiciary on the issue of sodomy-based marriage: a governor with the testosterone to stand up and just say no.

Governors take an oath of office to uphold the federal constitution and the constitution of their own state. Any governor in any state with a marriage amendment as a part of his constitution has the right, nay, the duty, to refuse to comply with any judicial order to recognize same-sex marriage.

The Constitution is utterly silent on the topic of homosexuality and marriage, which means, according to the Constitution the Founders gave us, this is an issue reserved exclusively to the states.

Any ruling from any federal court that imposes domestic policy on a state is by its very nature unconstitutional, and no governor has any obligation to obey it. In fact, quite the opposite. He must refuse to comply with it, for to comply would mean he must violate his own sacred oath of office.

A governor’s oath is to defend the Constitution of both the federal government and his own state. Defending something by definition means protecting it when it is under attack, regardless of where that attack comes from — even if the attack comes from a federal judge, a federal court, or the Supreme Court itself.

Governors have been meekly capitulating to judicial tyranny, one after the other, and timidly abandoning their posts.

Americans have no understanding of how little power the federal judiciary actually holds. It was designed by the Founders to be the least powerful branch of the federal government, with its jurisdiction limited to settling matters of dispute between individual states and matters of international controversy. The Supreme Court met in a closet for the first several decades of its existence, a sign of the lowly stature it occupied under the Constitution as written.

But the federal judiciary has mutated into a gargantuan beast, looming over liberty, freedom and the Constitution itself, and imposing its own benighted and twisted version of morality on the entire country with no legal, statutory, constitutional or moral authority.

But it has no police force it can order to arrest or detain anyone. If its unconstitutional rulings are ignored, what will the Supreme Court do? It can issue an arrest order, I suppose, but if a governor will not allow it to be executed, what can the Court do? The answer is nothing.

President Andrew Jackson once said, of a decision handed down by the chief justice of his day, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”  What happened in the face of this defiance from a co-equal branch of government? Precisely nothing.

The truth is the federal judiciary is impotent apart from the good will of the American people. Once the American people realize that the Supreme Court is a co-equal branch of government, not the superior branch of government, they can get back to governing themselves rather than deferring to black-robed oligarchs to make all the important decisions for them.

For a governor to stand up and refuse to cower to a federal court would not be civil disobedience at all. It would be constitutional obedience — obedience to the Constitution and its provisions in the ninth and 10th amendments, obedience to his own state constitution, and obedience to the oath he took before Almighty God.

Governors do not take an oath of allegiance to the Supreme Court. They take an oath of allegiance to the Constitution. It’s time they started acting like it.

Many people and organizations are concerned about so-called net neutrality and its possible effects on free speech, but OneNewsNow talked to one person who is concerned for another reason: the free market.

If this is a free speech issue, says the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Ryan Radia, “it’s not about speech being regulated by the government.”

“It’s about speech being regulated by private companies,” Radia suggests. “If you build a network, you own it, you operate it and you decide that your policy will be just to allow certain types of messages. You should be free to do that. Of course your subscribers are free to choose who their provider is.”

Conservative activist and attorney Matt Barber, meanwhile, says he’s concerned that President Barack Obama not only hates the free market and wants a socialistic United States, but he can control the Internet through net neutrality via the FCC. “We know that any speech that the progressive left disagrees with they want to classify as ‘hate speech,'” Barber says. “I’m concerned about the free speech aspects of this on the Internet as well.”

Radia, who is associate director of Technology Studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, says he opposes net neutrality for free market reasons.

“We’re not going to see Comcast blocking Fox. We won’t see AT&T blocking a union website,” he says, because subscribers would “revolt” and business partners would be unhappy if that happened.

This article was originally posted at the OneNewsNow.com website.

As the American people prepare to vote on marijuana ballot measures in three states and the District of Columbia, measures which would make the mind-altering substance more freely available, more bad news keeps coming for the well-funded pothead lobby.

In a major terrorism-related case, a participant in the cover-up of the Boston Marathon bombing conspiracy, Robel Phillipos, claimed the drug had so many bad effects on his brain that he lied to federal agents.

The key question, however, is whether the major media will ever start reporting on the substantial evidence linking “cannabis” and mental illness, violence and terrorism.

The “reefer madness” defense for Phillipos, a close friend and associate of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev, would be laughable were it not for the fact that the Boston bombings killed three people and injured hundreds. Martin Richard, the eight-year-old boy killed in the bombing, had been photographed holding a sign that said, “No more hurting people. Peace.”

The pothead defense clearly didn’t work out the way his radical left lawyers had planned; Phillipos has now been found guilty by a jury of lying to the FBI, “despite his claim that he was too high to remember what he had done,” as The Atlantic magazine described the unusual defense.

The son of an Ethiopian immigrant, Phillipos knew that two other Tsarnaev friends removed a backpack containing evidence of the terrorist crime from his college dorm room at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. But he lied about it to federal agents.

His attorney, Susan Church, and her co-counsel, Derege Demissie, had argued that “he smoked marijuana about a half-dozen times that day, and was simply unable to reconstruct his actions during a series of high-pressure interviews with federal agents,” The Boston Globe reported. The Globe said legal analysts were divided over whether the “I forget because of marijuana” defense would work.

Well, it didn’t.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s office, between April 19, 2013 and April 26, 2013, federal investigators interviewed Phillipos five times about the bombing and during each of those interviews Phillipos lied. He blamed marijuana for all of these memory “lapses.”

U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said, “In the wake of one of the most significant events in this city’s modern history—an event which left two young women and a child dead, and many more injured —thousands of ordinary citizens assisted law enforcement in identifying and locating the perpetrators.” However, she said that Phillipos did just the opposite. “He lied to agents when he could have helped. He concealed when he could have assisted,” she said.

He faces eight years in prison for each of the two counts of lying, three years of supervised release, and a fine of $250,000 for each charge.

Incredibly, former governor of Massachusetts and 1988 Democratic nominee for president Michael Dukakis testified on his behalf and said he and his wife had taken him to the 2004 Democratic National Convention as a “special guest.” Dukakis said, “We watched him grow up.”

Based on the defense of his crimes offered by his lawyers, it appears that he grew up into a zombie willing to lie about his knowledge of the worst terrorist incident in Boston history because marijuana clouded his memory.

This provocative legal theory came, not surprisingly, from the far-left. His attorney Susan Church previously served as co-chair of the Massachusetts Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, and regularly conducts “know your rights” seminars at community centers and various immigrant advocacy groups.

Her bio neglects to point out that the National Lawyers Guild was once identified as a Communist Party front. Her co-counsel, Derege Demissie, is a member of the board of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.

Church focuses on “immigration law and criminal defense,” and “advocates for immigrants with criminal convictions facing deportation and immigrants seeking immigration benefits in the United States.” She received the “Detention Panel Attorney of the Year” award from the Political Asylum Immigrant Representation project.

Leave it to the ACLU and the far-left National Lawyers Guild to offer marijuana as a defense for lying about terrorism.

The “high out of his mind” defense, though ultimately unsuccessful, does add to the questions about marijuana’s role in the crime, since Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev was a heavy marijuana user and dealer. His older brother, killed in a shoot-out, was implicated in a triple murder involving marijuana being thrown on three dead bodies whose throats were slit.

To add to the intrigue, a sister of the Boston Marathon bombers who goes by the name of Bella Tsarnaeva is also facing a marijuana charge.

The Bergen County, New Jersey, Record reported that Tsarnaeva was arrested after police responded to her home on a domestic violence report and found marijuana. The paper said both Tsarnaeva and her boyfriend, Ahmad Khalil, were indicted on April 10 for possession of marijuana with intent to distribute.

The number of people associated with the bombers and/or the conspiracy has led to speculation that it grew out of a marijuana smuggling operation, possibly with foreign ties. The Tsarnaev brothers were born in the former Soviet Union.

It has long been known that terrorist groups operating in drug-producing regions of the world such as Afghanistan, Colombia and Peru, have been heavily involved in the drug trade.

Despite Phillipos’ failure to blame pot for his lies, Reuters news agency noted that his lawyers called one expert, Dr. Alan Wartenberg, who said that marijuana can “impair memory” and “impair executive functions,” as well as judgment and other brain functions. Wartenberg said younger men’s brains are “more prone to cognitive impairment from marijuana” than those in older men.

Many studies back up the testimony. One study from Northwestern University found that teenagers who were heavy marijuana users had “abnormal changes in their brain structures related to working memory and performed poorly on memory tasks.”

But while the drug can have an extremely negative effect on the brain, the idea that smoking marijuana on a constant basis gets you off the hook for lying about crimes of terrorism has now been rejected by a jury.

Still, how many more “stoners” will be produced if the marijuana ballot measures pass on November 4? The stakes are so high that the Brookings Institution is calling them the “Marijuana Midterms.”

The dope lobby is heavily funded, with much of the money coming from groups associated with billionaires George Soros and Peter Lewis. Other funds are supplied by the marijuana business, which generates repeat customers dependent on the weed.

One analysis shows that in Oregon, the marijuana lobby is spending $2 million on a prime-time TV ad campaign, while opponents have raised a mere $168,000. In Alaska, dopers have raised $867,000 while opponents have only raised $97,000.

In states like California, Washington and Colorado, where marijuana has been legalized, experts are now warning about edible marijuana products disguised as candies, cookies and brownies falling into the hands of kids. The Washington Poison Center warns that, of the reported cases of pediatric marijuana exposures in Washington State, 27 percent were cases involving children from one to three years old.

While drugging kids with marijuana appears to be on the rise, the media seem to be treating these cases as harmless pranks.

The dope lobby, meanwhile, is extremely upset over my previous column examining a connection between high-profile cases of Islamic terrorism and violence and marijuana addiction. One critic called my column “offensive,” saying, “I hope that all TWB readers contact him and let them know what they think of his reefer madness.”

TWB stands for “The Weed Blog,” devoted to all things marijuana-related. It features “marijuana books,” cannabis recipes, and even “grower tips.” It is typical of the consuming passion for the drug that characterizes heavy users.

The editors and administrators are identified by the names “Johnny Green” and “Jay Smoker,” which are obviously pseudonyms for marijuana users and activists. They are determined to portray marijuana addiction in the best possible light.

This is typical of the marijuana mentality that gripped the Boston bombers and their collaborators, until one of them, Phillipos, got caught by the feds and lied. Then he decided he had to blame pot for his mental problems in order to avoid prison.

This article was originally posted at the Accuracy in Media website.

The heavy hand of misused government power is getting heavier by the day.

Given the Obama Administration’s vast abuses of executive power, it’s not surprising that lesser lights are following the Chief Executive’s example and waging “lawfare” on their opponents.

In Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, a pastoral couple who own a wedding chapel are facing a 180-day jail term and a $1,000-per-day fine if they continue to refuse to “marry” homosexual couples. The city says the couple are violating the local anti-discrimination law, which includes “sexual orientation.” Religious freedom? Not so much.

In Houston, it probably seemed like a good idea to Mayor Annise D. Parker, an activist lesbian, for city attorneys to serve five pastors with subpoenas ordering them to turn over all sermons, e-mails, and other communications involving a petition drive against a transgender statute that she had championed.

After all, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, Cuba’s Raul Castro, and Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner routinely misuse the law to crack down on opponents.

Wait. This is America. This is Texas, land of the Alamo, where the U.S. Constitution is supposed to restrain would-be tyrants.

Faced with a hurricane of a backlash, the mayor backed off, sort of, reducing the demand to the content of sermons. Let me translate: “Here’s a gun to your head, pastor. Turn your remarks over – or else. By the way, God bless America.”

What should happen swiftly is her removal from office and civil damage lawsuits filed by the targeted pastors. Jesus said to turn the other cheek when faced with insult, but that does not mean stepping aside and allowing bullies to go on to their next victims. By standing up to anti-religious bigotry and unlawful lawfare, the pastors fight for all of us.

As Texas U.S. Senator Ted Cruz said recently, “Caesar has no jurisdiction over the pulpit, and when you subpoena one pastor, you subpoena every pastor.”

The mayor, who misused her power to block a referendum a few years ago that would have curbed the city’s lucrative use of red-light revenue cameras, is not exactly an outlier. Liberals across the land reflexively reach for the big gun or gavel when someone disagrees with their agendas. They live to use government power to force their morals, or lack thereof, on everyone else.

The targets include anyone standing in the way of their imagined utopia of pansexuaity, windmills, bureaucratic supremacy, political correctness and a cowed populace dependent on government handouts.

When judges overturn voter-approved state constitutional amendments protecting natural marriage in the law, they know full well that they’re unleashing the legal equivalent of the hounds of hell on millions of Americans who are punch-drunk from repeated outrages committed by judicial tyrants. Increasingly, people are asking what has happened to our self-governing republic and how do we get it back?

In Wisconsin, a vindictive, partisan state district attorney, John Chisholm, has engaged in lawfare to harass conservative groups working with Republican Gov. Scott Walker. Agents have raided people’s homes and offices, looking for evidence that groups violated campaign finance laws by advocating for policies favored by the governor. A court has since ruled against Mr. Chisholm and halted the witch hunt, but not before it had the intended effect: frightening away contributors to Mr. Walker and conservative groups while Mr. Walker faces a tough re-election against a public-union-backed Democrat.

The tactic is similar to the Internal Revenue Service’s well-documented harassment of Tea Party groups, such as multiple. punitive audits of True the Vote, its founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, and her family’s business, and piling on by other Obama-run federal agencies like OSHA.

Back in Texas, the Travis County prosecutor’s office got a grand jury to indict Republican Gov. Rick Perry on two felony counts in September because he vetoed funding for a statewide public integrity unit run by Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg. She had refused to step down after being convicted of drunk driving. The governor thought, not unreasonably, that this disqualified her as an “ethics” officer. The ludicrous charges against the governor will at some point be dismissed, but that doesn’t matter. The idea is to get the media to portray Mr. Perry, a possible Republican presidential candidate, as damaged goods.

The Travis County office is good at this. It’s the same unit that took out Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (TX) when hyper-partisan Democrat Ronnie Earle filed bogus money-laundering charges in 2005. Although Mr. DeLay finally was exonerated in September 2013, Earle’s use of lawfare removed one of the most effective Republican leaders and fundraisers for several years.

In Alaska, two partisan federal prosecutors withheld exonerating evidence and managed to get Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens convicted of making false statements about a home renovation just days before the 2008 election. This cost Mr. Stevens, who died in a plane crash in 2010, his long-held seat and elevated Mark Begich, who gave Democrats a filibuster-proof Senate through which Majority Leader Harry Reid rammed Obamacare.

This year, Mr. Begich’s re-election campaign, unaided by lawfare, is counting on the power of his main message: “Obama Who?”

Elections have consequences, and so should misuse of the legal system by unscrupulous politicians who wage lawfare.

This article was originally posted at the TownHall.com website.

A Sad Milestone for Marriage and Morality

A giant milestone in the moral revolution passed this week when the U.S. Supreme Court turned down every single appeal from several states on the issue of same-sex marriage. This decision not to take at least one case under consideration stunned both sides in the same-sex marriage battle. Last weekend’s edition of USA Today featured a front-page story that declared the virtual certainty that the Court would take at least one of the cases and declared same-sex marriage to be “a cause whose time has come.”

Well, same-sex marriage may well be an issue whose time has come in the culture, due to the massive moral shift that has taken place over the last few decades, but the nation’s highest court has decided that now is not the time for it to take up such a case. Faced with the opportunity either to stop same-sex marriage in its tracks or to hand down a sweeping decision tantamount to a new Roe v. Wade, the Court took a pass.

Some will argue that the Court’s decision was a strategic choice intended to preserve its dignity and stature. Already, many defenders of natural marriage are doing their best to argue that the Court’s refusal to take a case is better for the cause of marriage than a sweeping decision in favor of same-sex marriage. The proponents of same-sex marriage had hoped for just such a decision, and attorneys were jockeying for position, wanting to be the lead counsel for the “gay marriage Roe decision.” But make no mistake, the proponents of same-sex marriage won this round, and they won big. They did not get the sweeping coast to coast ruling they wanted, but what they got was an even faster track to the same result.

Had the Court taken one of the cases, the oral arguments would not have taken place until early 2015, and the decision would not have been likely until the end of next June. Until then, same-sex marriage would be on hold to some degree. Now, the Court’s decision to allow lower court rulings to stand sends an immediate signal — it is full steam ahead for same-sex marriage coast to coast.

As of last week, 19 states and the District of Columbia had legalized same-sex marriage by one means or another. The Court’s decision not to take one of the cases from the lower Federal courts means that every one of them stands. Therefore, not only will same-sex marriage be legal in the states that made a direct appeal, but in every state included within the same U.S. Circuit.

That result is that the decision made clear by the Court will lead, automatically, to the fact that 30 states will have legal same-sex marriage within weeks, if not days. The news from the Court means that the vast majority of Americans will live where same-sex marriage is legal, and three fifths of the states will have legalized same-sex marriage.

But the Court’s decision also sent another even more powerful message. The remaining federal courts were put on notice that same-sex marriage is now the expectation of the Supreme Court and that no appeal on the question is likely to be successful, or even heard. You can expect the lower courts to hear that message loudly and clearly — and fast.

This day in U.S. legal history will be remembered for many years to come as a landmark day toward same-sex marriage. It was the day the nation’s highest court took one of the lowest paths of least resistance. It now seeks to maintain its prestige by avoiding the backlash the Court experienced in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade in 1973. It wants to have its victory without taking further risks to its reputation.

Given the recent remarks made by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, even some of the Court’s most liberal justices wanted to avoid a backlash while achieving the same eventual result. This week’s announcement means that their hopes were achieved.

But the decision also indicates something further — it points to the vindication of Justice Antonin Scalia. When the Court handed down the decision striking down all state sodomy statutes in 2003 in Lawrence v Texas, Justice Scalia declared that it meant the end of all morals legislation. The majority opinion in that decision was written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, whose legal reasoning was ridiculed by Scalia in one of his most scathing dissents.

Kennedy, said Scalia, had created “a massive disruption of the current social order,” that could not be stopped. Further: “Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.”

Eleven years earlier, Scalia had dissented from another Kennedy majority opinion, that time on abortion. Justice Kennedy had sustained a right to abortion, maintaining the central impact of Roe and pushing further toward a mysterious existential argument. Kennedy had written, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

Scalia famously rejected that language as Kennedy’s “sweet-mystery-of-life passage,” and he saw that same reasoning behind the Lawrencedecision.

But Scalia also said this about the 2003 decision: “This reasoning leaves on pretty shaky grounds state laws limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples.” Further: “Today’s opinion dismantles the structure of constitutional law that has permitted a distinction to be made between heterosexual and homosexual unions, insofar as a formal recognition in marriage is concerned. If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is ‘no legitimate state interest’ for purposes of proscribing that conduct … what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples?”

Indeed, the Lawrence decision did put all laws limiting marriage to opposite sex couples on shaky ground. Very shaky ground. Justice Scalia saw what now appears obvious. The Court’s decision in Lawrence in 2003 set the stage for this week’s news.

Even more recently, Justice Kennedy was the author of the Court’s majority opinion in the Windsor decision striking down the federal government’s Defense of Marriage Act. That decision, handed down in June of 2013, set the stage for this week’s development in a big way.

Once again, Justice Scalia saw it coming. He called the Court’s decision to strike down DOMA “jaw-dropping” in both its audacity and its reasoning. Then he offered these memorable words: “As far as this Court is concerned, no one should be fooled; it is just a matter of listening and waiting for the other shoe.”

That “other shoe” was the inevitability of same-sex marriage as a national reality.

What happened this week at the Court — or perhaps what didn’t happen — is a direct vindication of Scalia’s warnings. He saw it coming and he warned us.

What the Court’s majority has now decided, evidently, is to allow shoes to fall at the hands of lower courts that will follow its reasoning and obey its signals.

The news from the Court means a sad vindication for Justice Antonin Scalia. It means an even sadder day for marriage in America.

And it means, no matter what you think you heard or didn’t hear from Washington, that the other shoe has dropped.

This article was originally posted at the AlbertMohler.com blog.

Written by Katrina Trinko

This isn’t OK.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision not to hear any of the cases on same-sex marriage means, as my colleague Ryan T. Anderson writes, that “lower court rulings that struck down state marriage laws now will go into effect, forcing the redefinition of marriage in [Indiana, Wisconsin, Virginia, Oklahoma and Utah] and potentially in other states in the 4th, 7th, and 10th circuits.”

That shouldn’t be acceptable—regardless of your position on same-sex marriage.

Voters in 31 states voted to define marriage as being between a man and a woman.

Liberal California voted for that in 2008, and so did red Texas in 2005. From 1998 to 2012—not say, from 1870 to 1890, or some other long-gone time period—34 states voted on defining marriage as being between a man and a woman—and only three voted against it.

And now the will of the people is being struck down by judge after judge.

If you think same-sex marriage should be legal, put it on the ballot. Ask the people of your state to decide in a vote.

Pundits have been pointing out that polls show Americans’ views on same-sex marriage have changed in recent years. “The Supreme Court confirms what we already knew: The fight over gay marriage is over,” tweeted the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, including a chart that shows higher support for than opposition to same-sex marriage.

But those polls are irrelevant. If people want to change a law they now consider to be wrong, they should do it at the ballot box, not at the courthouse. Unless, of course, the law is in clear violation of the text of the U.S. Constitution. But no one seriously thinks that when we ratified the 14th Amendment, we were voting to redefine marriage.

Americans deserve the right to choose the laws governing marriage. Everyone who values the will of the people, no matter what they think on the issue of same-sex marriage, should be decrying how it’s judges, not Americans, getting to decide this important issue.

This article was originally posted at The Daily Signal blog.

Earlier today, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) decided that it would not hear any of the marriage redefinition cases currently before it, including cases from Indiana, Utah, Oklahoma, Virginia and Wisconsin. Family Research Council President Tony Perkins released the following statement in response to the Supreme Court’s refusal to accept appeals to this judicial activism:

“The Supreme Court decision to not take up these lower court rulings, which undermine natural marriage and the rule of law, for now, puts the issue of marriage back before the US Congress. This decision, in part, is an indication that those on the Court who desire to redefine natural marriage recognize the country will not accept a Roe v. Wade type decision on marriage.

Unfortunately, by failing to take up these marriage cases, the High Court will allow rogue lower court judges who have ignored history and true legal precedent to silence the elected representatives of the people and the voice of the people themselves by overturning state provisions on marriage. Even more alarming, lower court judges are undermining our form of government and the rights and freedoms of citizens to govern themselves. This judicially led effort to force same sex ‘marriage’ on people will have negative consequences for our Republic, not only as it relates to natural marriage but also undermining the rule of and respect for law.

The Court decision ensures that the debate over natural marriage will continue and the good news is that time is not on the side of those who want to redefine marriage. As more states are forced to redefine marriage, contrary to nature and directly in conflict with the will of millions, more Americans will see and experience attacks on their religious freedom. Parents will find a wedge being driven between them and their children as school curriculum is changed to contradict the morals parents are teaching their children. As more and more people lose their livelihoods because they refuse to not just tolerate but celebrate same-sex marriage, Americans will see the true goal, which is for activists to use the Court to impose a redefinition of natural marriage on the entire nation.

Congress should respond to today’s announcement by moving forward with the State Marriage Defense Act, which is consistent with last year’s Windsor ruling and ensures that the federal government in its definition of marriage respects the duly enacted marriage laws of the states.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently issued a report revealing that 1,036 plans in Obamacare (also known as the Affordable Care Act) health insurance exchanges are paying for elective abortions.  In other words, U.S. taxpayers are paying for surgical and chemical abortions under Obamacare.

The audit found that in five states all health insurance exchange plans included elective abortion coverage.  In another eight states, 95 to 100 percent of the plans paid for elective abortions.

President Barack Obama had  promised that no federal dollars would be used to underwrite abortion coverage.  He even issued an executive order to that effect to mollify opposition from within his own political party.

Yet the GAO report verifies what knowledgeable observers knew at the time.  The President’s executive order had no legal effect, because it conflicted with the law’s own provisions, which clearly authorized federal subsidies (called “affordability credits”) for abortion coverage.

The GAO audit also revealed that insurers are uniformly failing to collect an abortion surcharge that was required in every health insurance plan that included abortion coverage.  Under that provision, individuals were to be assessed a separate fee of $1 per month for abortion “services,” regardless of the age, gender, or ability to conceive of the insured.

U.S. Representative Randy Hultgren, a pro-life Republican from Illinois, reacted to this report by urging full transparency from the President and for the U.S. Senate to pass the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act (H.R. 7) which ensures the Hyde Amendment, which prevents federal tax dollars from paying for abortions, is implemented across the federal government.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed this legislation, which was introduced by U.S. Representative Christopher Smith (R-NJ).

H.R. 7 is co-sponsored by Illinois U.S. Representatives Rodney Davis (R-Champaign), Randy Hultgren (R-Geneva), Daniel Lipinski (D-Chicago), John Shimkus (R-Danville), Aaron Schock (R-Peoria), Peter Roskam (R-Wheaton), and Adam Kinzinger (R-Rockford).

This bill is currently before the U.S. Senate, where U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is unlikely to take it up for debate.

U.S. Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA) says that Americans should be outraged.  “Many of us argued at the time Obamacare passed that it would funnel taxpayer dollars to elective abortions.  This independent report validates our claims and proves that yet another Obamacare promise has been broken.”

Casey Mattox, Senior Counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), charges that the architects of Obamacare built a “purposely deceptive accounting scheme” into the Affordable Care Act.

“We were told we had to pass the bill to find out what was in it.  Now we know what exactly is in it:  corporate welfare for the Administration’s abortion industry cronies.”

Read more:  GAO Report Confirms Obamacare Subsidizes Abortion

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Let’s give President Barack Obama his due. Last week he announced his “It’s On Us” campaign to end sexual assault of women on college campuses. All decent people agree that the sexual assault of women is a cultural evil that we must continually work to expose and end.

While the cause of raising awareness in the hope of ending violence against women on campus is noble and critically important, Obama’s motives may be less noble and more self-serving. Cynical minds suspect this may be part of his get-out-the women-to-polling places campaign.

If that isn’t his motive, then why the deafening silence on the sexual assault of men in the military. GQ Magazine has a September article that is excruciatingly painful to read. Men tell their stories of brutal sexual assaults during their military service and the devastating life-altering aftermath.

They also share their frustration with the worse than inadequate response by the military bureaucracy, which is set-up to address sexual assaults on women but not men. The military is not adequately addressing this problem. Congress is not adequately addressing it. And President Obama certainly is not adequately addressing it, even as he addresses the sexual assault of women on campus.

Here are some stories of the stories profiled in the GQ article on an issue to which Obama could and should increase awareness (WARNING: graphic details):

• Kole Welsh, Army, 2002-07: I had actually let the assault go, because I didn’t want it to interfere with my career. I wanted to be an officer, and I just said, ‘Bad experience, won’t let that happen again.’ But there was some residual damage. A month and a half later, I was brought into a room with about nine officers and told, “You’ve tested positive [for HIV].” I was removed from the military and signed out within a day. It was a complete shock.

• Heath Phillips,Navy, 1988-89: The two main guys—their nickname was the Twin Towers. They held themselves like they were God and untouchable. They were both six feet five or above, 250 pounds. I weighed maybe 120 pounds soaking wet. As soon as the Twin Towers came near you, you instantly wanted to pee yourself.  The main attacks were at night. When you’re being dragged out of your bunk literally by your ear, you can’t fight, because they’re doing these funky things with your fingers, twisting them, and they’re ripping your mouth open, and then they got another guy that has his fingers in your nose or in your eyes to make you open your mouth. That’s what always used to bother me: I’m screaming, yelling, fighting, and nobody is even moving their curtains to look.  I went AWOL; I couldn’t take it no more. I tried hanging myself. I was living in the streets, and I got arrested shoplifting, and they sent me to the brig. Then I got sent back to the same berthing area, where they started terrorizing me again. The final straw was, I was taking a shower and these guys beat me up and raped me with a toilet brush. Medical told me I probably had a hemorrhoid. I went AWOL again, then turned myself in a couple of days later. Finally my executive officer came back [proposing] I take an other-than-honorable discharge.

• Steve Stovey: As a man, I can’t perform the way I used to. I just feel damaged. All I remember, along with the pain, is the slapping sound of being raped. I try to make love to my wife, but I can’t—I’m triggered. I’m traumatized by that sound.

• Matthew Owen, Army, 1976-80: One night I was getting ready to go into my room in the barracks when a blanket was put over my head. I heard five different male voices, which I recognized, because I had heard these voices when they harassed me every day. They beat me down onto the floor and forced my legs open. Then they took the end of a broomstick and forced it into me again and again. Each time it felt like my insides were coming out. The blood was a blessing, because it seemed to lubricate the broomstick.

And here are some deeply troubling facts from the GQ article:

• More than half of the victims of sexual assault in the military are men.
• Every day 38 men are sexually assaulted in the military.
• When a man enlists in the military, his risk of being sexually assaulted increases ten-fold.
• In sheer numbers, more men experience Military Sexual Trauma (MST) than women. Almost 14,000 men were sexually assaulted in 2012 alone.
• Sexual assault on men results in a particularly toxic form of PTSD

Men are even less likely to report sexual assault than women (which points to the inherent differences between men and women). The reasons range include shame, fear of physical retaliation, professional ruin, and social stigma.”

Here are some excerpts from Obama’s speech that launched his campaign to raise awareness of campus sexual assault:

When they finally make it onto campus, only to be assaulted, that’s not just a nightmare for them and their families; it’s not just an affront to everything they’ve worked so hard to achieve—it is an affront to our basic humanity.  It insults our most basic values as individuals and families, and as a nation.  We are a nation that values liberty and equality and justice.

…

For anybody whose once-normal, everyday life was suddenly shattered by an act of sexual violence, the trauma, the terror can shadow you long after one horrible attack.  It lingers when you don’t know where to go or who to turn to….It’s a haunting presence when the very people entrusted with your welfare fail to protect you.

…

We still don’t condemn sexual assault as loudly as we should.  We make excuses.  We look the other way.

…

It is on all of us to reject the quiet tolerance of sexual assault and to refuse to accept what’s unacceptable.”

Perhaps Obama could speak these words to and about the young men who volunteer to serve America at great personal risk and sacrifice and who, like college co-eds, deserve to be protected from the shattering violence of sexual assaults.

While the government is cleaning up the Veterans Affairs mess, they should be cleaning up this mess, and Obama should be leading the effort even if it doesn’t garner Democrats a single vote.

Written by Dennis Prager

President Barack Obama declared in his recent address to the nation that “ISIL is not Islamic.”

But how does he know? On what basis did the president of the United States declare that a group of Muslims that calls itself the “Islamic State” is “not Islamic?”

Has he studied Islam and Islamic history and concluded that ISIL, Boko Haram, al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, Jamaat-e-Islami, Lashkar-e-Taiba (the group that slaughtered 166 people in Mumbai, most especially guests at the Taj Hotel, and that tortured to death a rabbi and his wife), the various Palestinian terrorist groups (all of which have been Muslim, even though there are many Christian Palestinians), and the Muslim terror groups in Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere are also all “not Islamic?”

Has he concluded that the Muslim Brotherhood, which won Egypt’s most open election ever, is “not Islamic?”

And what about Saudi Arabia? Is that country “not Islamic” too?

Oh, and what about Iran? Also “not Islamic?”

Isn’t that a lot of Muslims, Muslim groups, and even nations — all of whom claim Islam as their religion — to dismiss as “not Islamic?”

To be fair: These baseless generalizations about what is and what is not Islamic started with Obama’s predecessor, President George W. Bush, who regularly announced that “Islam is a religion of peace.” And it is equally unlikely that his assertion came from a study of Islam and Islamic history.

The fact is that a study of Islamic history could not lead any fair-minded individual to conclude that all these Muslims and Islamic groups are “not Islamic.” Neither Islamic history, which, from its origins, offered vast numbers of people a choice between Islam and death, nor Islam as reflected in its greatest works would lead one to draw that conclusion.

Killing “unbelievers” has been part of — of course, not all of — Islam since its inception. Within ten years of Muhammad’s death, Muslims had conquered and violently converted whole peoples from Iran to Egypt and from Yemen to Syria. Muslims have offered conquered people death or conversion since that time.

The Hindu Kush, the vast, 500-mile-long, 150-mile-wide mountain range stretching from Afghanistan to Pakistan, was populated by Hindus until the Muslim invasions beginning around the year 1000. The Persian name Hindu Kush was proudly given by Muslims. It means “Hindu-killer.” At least 60 million Hindus were killed by Muslims during the thousand years of Muslim rule. Though virtually unknown, it may be the greatest mass murder in history next to Mao’s.

The groups named above are following some dictates of the Koran.

A few of many such examples:

“I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them” (8:12).

“When the sacred months are over slay the idolaters wherever you find them. Arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them. If they repent and take to prayer and render the alms levy, allow them to go their way. God is forgiving and merciful” (9:5).

“Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth” (9:29).

There is also a different admonition in the Koran: “In matters of faith there shall be no compulsion” (2:256).

So a Muslim can also cite the Koran if he wishes to allow non-Muslims to live in peace.

The problem is that Muslim theological tradition, affirmed by many scholars, holds that later revelation to Muhammad supersedes prior revelation (a doctrine known as “abrogation”). And the Koranic verses ordering Muslims to fight and slay non-believers came after those admonishing Muslims to live with non-believers in peace and without religious compulsion.

The problem is that Muslim history, in keeping with the doctrine of abrogation, has far more often practiced the violent admonitions.

The problem is that more than 600 years after Muhammad, Ibn Khaldun, the greatest Muslim writer who ever lived, explained why Islam is the superior religion in the most highly regarded Muslim work ever written, Muqaddimah, orIntroduction to History: “In the Muslim community, the holy war is religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.”

In other words, Ibn Khaldun boasts, whereas no other religion commands converting the world through force, Islam does. Was Ibn Khaldun also “not Islamic?” And so much for the president’s other claim that “no religion condones the killing of innocents.”

None of this justifies bigotry against Muslims. There are hundreds of millions of non-Islamist Muslims (an Islamist is a Muslim who seeks to impose sharia on others), including many “cultural” or secular Muslims. And individual Muslims are risking their lives every day to provide the intelligence needed to forestall terror attacks in America and elsewhere.

It is only a call to clarity amid the falsehoods coming from the president, the secretary of state, and especially the universities.

As the courageous Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born woman who leads a worldwide effort on behalf of Muslim women and for reforming Islam, asked in a speech at Yale University this month: If Islam is a religion of peace, why is there a sword on the Saudi flag?

If the president feels he has to obfuscate for the sake of gaining Muslim allies, so be it. But the rest of us don’t have to make believe what he said is true.

Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His most recent book is Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

This article was originally posted at the NationalReview.com website.

Boy, turn your head for one minute and suddenly everybody is a war hawk! Wasn’t our government in the full-time occupation of blaming Bush for his bloodthirsty colonialism..? All of a sudden, Senator Dianne Feinstein (Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee) has gone on record that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is a threat which “cannot be overstated”. The Department of Homeland Security circulated a memo to law enforcement agencies, suggesting that attacks by ISIS could happen with “little to no warning”. Secretaries Hagel and Kerry, along with the President, are working overtime to cobble together an international coalition, intent on engaging in a military campaign against ISIS.

At the same time, the Federal government is actively working to keep our southern border WIDE OPEN. The President, DHS, Secretary Hagel; these are some of the people directly responsible for the fact that anyone and everyone can do the watusi across our southern border without ever being seen, questioned, or identified, and yet they are acting on a credible, dangerous threat to our safety.

• We have a credible threat from a terrorist organization which “cannot be overstated’.
• We have a de facto open borders policy on our Southern border.

These two facts seem to be irreconcilable. ISIS has posted information which seeks to prove that they have active cells here in this country as we speak. Last month, a Twitter profile supposedly affiliated with ISIS posted a picture of a Chicago landmark, boasting about their supposed infiltration of the United States. Given the corroboration of the memo from DHS, it seems clear that our government acknowledges the rapid-strike capability of this group, along with the viability of their threats, and simultaneously retains their position of open immigration.

President Obama has described his willingness to engage this enemy overseas in an open-ended campaign, spanning multiple years. But why would we expend effort, money, and manpower to fight an enemy overseas who has already infiltrated our ranks here at home, going so far as to leave the back-door open for anyone and everyone to visit? Could this cognitive dissonance be deliberate on the part of the Obama Administration? There’s a threat to which we are preparing to offer a long-term militaristic response. The top-ranking Senator on the Intelligence Committee has spoken about the threat in the most dire of terms. This enemy has sworn vengeance on us and provided proof which suggests they are capable and nearby. And yet our southern border remains open, day and night.

Either the threat is dire or it is not. Either it’s safe to allow all-comers to cross our borders and remain in our country or it isn’t. If this cognitive dissonance isn’t deliberate, then what is it? Accidental? Can’t be. The Border Patrol, INS, and DHS are operating under the orders of the President himself. If he wanted the border closed and scrutinized, it would be. Unknowing? Hardly, given the hubbub which was caused by the Feds dumping illegals in cities without informing local authorities or vetting the immigrants.

The only logical explanation is that this is deliberate. But why? A number of explanations come to mind. Start with the most charitable: arrogance. This is the Administration who oversaw Operation Fast and Furious, where guns were deliberately given to drug cartel members because the DOJ felt capable of managing and tracking the problem. They lost control of the situation and as a result, one Border Patrol agent lost his life and countless others have become victims as a result of those lost weapons. The Obama administration consistently overestimates its abilities. Their refusal to secure the border could be a dangerous game of chicken, designed to bait our enemies into revealing some compromising information about themselves, using the safety of the American people as bait.

Or it could be completely political. Perhaps the Obama Administration isn’t willing to close the border, even with a risk of attack, because of the terribly steep price which would be paid by his legacy and the Democratic Party amongst the rabid amnesty lobby; the reverberations of which would be felt for several elections cycles to come. Perhaps he’s gambling that he can dodge a bullet until just after the November elections when he can nationalize the illegals in this country, with the intention to shut the door once he has his 5-10 million Democrat voters in house.

But it could also be ideologically motivated, and this is where it gets unsettling. Let’s not forget that this President is an acolyte of Saul Alinski, who himself counseled the communities he organized to make the “Haves” as uncomfortable as possible, by whatever means necessary. Obama’s very own chief-of-staff, currently presiding over a bloodbath in the city of Chicago, once said that one should “never let a crisis go to waste”. Surely the Rahmfather wouldn’t advise letting an ISIS go to waste either. Is it possible that the President sees an opportunity to procure millions of votes while gaining even more authoritarian power, due to an increased level of danger or (God forbid) another attack on American soil? He’s already asking Congress for a $5b slush fund which he claims would be used to support operations against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

He’s just spreading the slush around, right?? The President is fund-raising on dire threats to the safety of this nation, so is it really such a logical leap to think that the cognitive dissonance displayed by our national security policy is by design? This is entirely plausibl, given the track record of this President, bent on dismantling the Constitution he swore to uphold. The answer probably lies somewhere in the middle of all these explanations, borrowing some motivation from each. However, it is a clear dereliction of duty to deliberately compromise the safety of the American people and an inexcusable abuse of Presidential power, regardless of motivation.