The Front Page Cover
The Events of the Week -- Featuring:
Too Much Information
by Tom McLanughlin
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Top Headlines
liar-nObama's legacy update: 2016 ended with the slowest job creation since 2012. (Washington Examiner)
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Record 95,102,000 Americans not in labor force; Number grew 18% since liar-nObama took office in 2009. But he saved the economy! (CNS News)
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Republican Study Committee introduces plan to replace liar-nObamaCare. (The Washington Free Beacon)
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liar-Hillary Clinton might run for mayor of New York. (Red State)
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Sheriff proposes to build Trump's wall with inmates community service hours. (The Washington Times)
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liar-nObama seized and federalized land three times the size of Texas over last 8 years. (Media Research Center)
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"Non-partisan" IRS prioritized liar-nObamaCare over taxpayer customer service, IG report says. (The Washington Times)
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liar-nObama freed 75% of Gitmo terrorists — most are out killing again. (The Washington Free Beacon)
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Six alarming findings in House panel's Planned Parenthood probe. (The Daily Signal)
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Transgender woman sues Catholic hospital for refusing to make her a "man." (Associated Press)
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South Korea plans "decapitation unit" to take out Kim Jong Un. (New York Post)
"Why I married myself." Now so-called "self-marriage" is trending. (Good Housekeeping)
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Policy: Why the GOP must repeal and replace liar-nObamaCare, not repeal and delay. (Washington Examiner)
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Policy: The anti-pipeline anti-environmentalists. (Investor's Business Daily) ~The Patriot Post
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Hypocritical Coastal Elites Soak Middle Class
by Victor Davis Hanson
by Victor Davis Hanson
{nationalreview.com} ~ One reason for the emergence of outsider Donald Trump is the old outrage that elites seldom experience the consequences of their own ideologically driven agendas... Hypocrisy, when coupled with sanctimoniousness, grates people like few other human transgressions: Barack liar-nObama opposing charter schools for the inner city as he puts his own children in Washington’s toniest prep schools, or Bay Area greens suing to stop contracted irrigation water from Sierra reservoirs, even as they count on the Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy project to deliver crystal-clear mountain water to their San Francisco taps. The American progressive elite relies on its influence, education, money, and cultural privilege to exempt itself from the bad schools, unassimilated immigrant communities, dangerous neighborhoods, crime waves, and general impoverishment that are so often the logical consequences of its own policies — consequences for others, that is. Abstract idealism on behalf of the distant is a powerful psychological narcotic that allows caring progressives to dull the guilt they feel about their own privilege and riches... http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443466/
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liar-nObama Passing Out “Get Out Of Gitmo Free”...
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ Hussein liar-nObama is concerned about his legacy, but not with the infidel American people... It’s how he’s viewed in the Islamic world that counts to the pretend ‘president’ and he’s doing everything he can to be seen as a great liberator and jihadi. Toward that end liar-nObama is confirmed to be planning to transfer a minimum of 18 more terrorists out of Gitmo. He just announced on Thursday that another four, all Yeminis, will be heading for the country where liar-nObama bowed to their King, Saudi Arabia. It seems his days of bowing to Islamists and serving their cause aren’t anywhere near finished yet. Now another new batch of prisoners, who arrived at a mass, simultaneous epiphany on the evils of their terrorist ways, have decided to become “civilized.” They’ll return to a life of breeding goats, complemented by whatever form of employment they might choose when not engaged in their favorite pastime, taking liar-nObama up on his convincing offer of “this is your last chance, Trump is coming.”... http://rickwells.us/obama-passing-gitmo-free-cards-like-halloween-candy/
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Schumer And The Schumer Clowns Targeting Free, Sovereign America
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ Lou Dobbs has a few thought on “the man leading the Dem’s obstructionist charge on Capitol Hill. He is none other than Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York... The same Schumer, who back in November said he could work with President-elect Trump. Trump reciprocated at the time with this tweet: ‘ I have always had a good relationship with Chuck Schumer. He is far smarter than Harry dinky-R and has the ability to get things done. Good news!'” “But that was then and now is something all together different,” says Dobbs. “The President-elect today dubbed Schumer ‘head clown’ after the Senate Minority Leader accused Republicans of wanting to ‘make Americans sick again’ by repealing liar-nObamacare.” Dobbs says, “Too low even for a man of Schumer’s standards, and of course all the Dems following the head clown will be forever known as Schumer clowns. And suddenly Schumer doesn’t like name calling.” He plays a clip of Schumer proclaiming this as ‘not a time for calling names. It’s time for them to step up to the plate if they want to repeal and show us what they’d replace it with.” As always, the argument from one leftist closely mirrors the others. That’s the same lame and poorly grounded pitch liar-nObama made in a Vox interview...
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Jihadi Jeh Johnson Makes It Official –
Election Systems Now Under His “Protection”
by Rick Wells
{rickwells.us} ~ The mechanisms and propaganda for this declaration have been in the works since the closing months of the election but the upset victory by Donald Trump made implementation a little more delicate... Now that they’ve had a couple of months of selling the mantra that “the Russians hacked the election,” to provide themselves with a permission slip, the globalists at DHS are officially putting our state-run election systems under their control, “in the name of security.” Hiding behind the claims that “increasingly sophisticated cyber bad actors” and an election infrastructure that’s “vital to our national interests,” mandate that Jihadi Jeh Johnson and his band of jihadists and criminals at DHS take over the United States elections. They can’t let the American people get in their way again...This has always been a state control issue not government. http://rickwells.us/jihadi-jeh-johnson-makes-official-election-systems-now-protection/
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Tucker Carlson DESTROYS Far Left Crank
on Russian Hacking Scandal
by Rusty Weiss
{menrec.com} ~ Fox News host Tucker Carlson brought Paul Davies, editorial page editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer, onto his show for a discussion about the alleged Russian cyberhacking conspiracy involving the 2016 election... In an editorial earlier this week, the Inquirer blasted President-elect Donald Trump because he “does not seem to understand or care that the United States was attacked.” “Whose side is Trump on?” they asked. Carlson asked Davies why he felt any of the information gleaned from Wikileaks – which has consistently claimed none of their emails were hacked and handed over by Russian intelligence, but rather leaked from a disgruntled DNC worker – should have remained hidden from the American people. He had no answer...
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When "Peace" Means Capitulation to Islam
by Giulio Meotti
by Giulio Meotti
{gatestoneinstitute.org} ~ What inspired al-Qaeda to attack the United States, according to one of the terrorists, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who helped plan 9/11?... The American psychologist, James E. Mitchell, who crafted the interrogation program that helped stop terrorist attacks and saved countless lives after 9/11, just published a book, Enhanced Interrogation. In it, KSM is quoted as saying that al-Qaeda expected the United States to respond to 9/11 as it had to the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut -- the United States "turned tail and ran." In the end, KSM told Mitchell: "We will win because Americans don't realize... we do not need to defeat you militarily; we only need to fight long enough for you to defeat yourself by quitting. ... Eventually, America will expose her neck for us to slaughter."... https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/9726/peace-capitulation-islam
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Too Much Information
by Tom McLanughlin
{tommclaughlin.blogspot.com} ~ Every day I get emails from news aggregators, those individuals and organizations who scan the news day and night and select links to what they think I should know. I signed up for them but I cannot read them all. There’s not enough time in the day — and if there was, I don’t have the energy. I have to delete some each day without reading them and I feel guilty when I do that. I feel I’m missing something I should know.
There was a time I thought it was possible to get at least a cursory understanding of anything and everything. Long ago I learned that’s not possible, but sometimes I forget. As a boy, I read newspapers, magazines, and books of all types. My father subscribed to The Boston Globe, The Lowell Sun, Time, Newsweek, US News and World Report, National Geographic, and others. Occasionally, I’d see a Playboy left in the woods. The library was just over a mile away. I also purchased comic books and Superman was my favorite. Then there was a collection of Classics Illustrated — abridged, edited, comic-book formatted classic books like “Last of the Mohicans”; “Moby Dick”; “Silas Marner”; and many others. There was never a lack of things to read. It was a rich environment for a boy who wanted to learn about the world, past and present.
And I was sent to school — Catholic schools from second grade through high school. There I was taught many things, including the long history of the Catholic Church — the oldest, continually-functioning institution on earth. After that, I attended various colleges and earned degrees. All during that time, I took lessons from the school of hard knocks and I have the scars to prove it.
Understanding the present is difficult enough but then I was a history teacher. I had to help students make sense of the human past and relate it to the present. Courses were chunked into specific places and time spans but that didn't make it much easier really. There was the stuff we know happened, but what did it mean? It was humbling.
Since the late 20th century, I’ve used the internet to supplement my information gathering, but I have mixed feelings about it. My laptop has become the primary way I interact with the world beyond family, and sometimes with family as well through texts, email, and social media. I’m using it now to write this. Soon I’ll send it out for publication in various places, hard copy and digital.
In my pocket is another device with which I can tap the worldwide web, but I prefer my laptop because I don’t like typing with my thumbs, because the laptop is faster, and because its screen is bigger. I can’t remember the last time I looked online for information and didn’t find it. Can you? So, nearly all of us have something in our pockets that can reveal to us almost any kind of facts we may be looking for.
But is this access making us wiser? Better citizens? Better people? Not from my perspective it isn’t. For many of us, the information we’re looking for isn’t edifying. For some, it’s gossipy. For others, it’s prurient. Online, there’s always an option to go in a different direction. We may have originally been searching for edification, but were distracted and taken somewhere else.
That’s not possible when we’re reading a book. Turn the page and we go where the author wants to take us, and if we chose the book wisely, that’s a positive direction. We can put the book down and pick up some kind of pulp, but it has to be readily available. To read a Playboy growing up, I would have to close whatever I was reading, go out into the woods, look for it, and it probably wouldn’t be there. Online in the 21st century, hooks are everywhere. If someone nibbles, more is just a compulsive click away. We must choose not to bite. When laptops with wireless internet were issued to all my students during my last years teaching, use of social media or accessing pornography were forbidden, but it was difficult to monitor, especially because they could be taken home. Compared to Playboy of my youth, pornography available to children today is shockingly evil.
Even without distractions, it’s not possible to learn all we want to know. There’s simply too much information available at our fingertips now. We’re nearly always on overload. and we don’t take time to process, and our online experience tends to be solitary. Someone may put a phone under our eyes wanting us to watch something, but how often do we discuss it? How much time do we spend just thinking about it? Not nearly enough would be my guess. Instead, we're always looking for more.
All this is taking us all somewhere, but exactly where is anybody’s guess.
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