Is Islam Compatible with American Freedoms?
Watch this interview with Imam Rauf, the best known advocate for Islam in America, and you’ll come to the same conclusion all other freedom-loving Americans have reached. http://www.jihadwatch.org/2012/07/michael-coren-exposes-ground-zero-mosque-imam-rauf-robert-spencer-gives-postgame-analysis.html
One-Minute World-Wide Racism Round-Up
One-Minute World-Wide Racism Round-Up
July 12, 2012
By Josh First
www.joshfirst.com
Racism is a significant fault. Judging an individual or groups of individuals, or ascribing to them inherent flaws or evil character because of their skin color, ethnicity, or religion, is a most primitive human trait. It has no place in the civilized world. Well, let’s be accurate: According to the Left’s political correctness, judgmentalism, racism and discrimination are acceptable if the person doing them is a purported victim, or a member of certain classes of purported victims. Arch-racists Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright are two good examples of this double standard; they oppress people because of skin color, but get a free pass. However, in general, to accuse someone of racism is the highest form of criticism in free societies, because free societies are supposed to hold all citizens to an equal standard and equal treatment under the law. To be racist is to stand against everything that makes free societies great.
America is supposedly a terribly racist place, according to the Left. Certainly it was, 150 years ago, and even 50 years ago. Now? No. The greatness of America is that the ability to change, evolve, and improve is built into its political system. Reverse racism is the main source of racism today in America. For purposes of comparison, let’s do a quick trip around the world and sample some of the racism on display, and see how America stacks up.
Let’s start in the lovely, free, butterflies-and-bunny rabbits Iran, where freedom protestors were gunned down en masse in the streets just two years ago, allegedly gay men are slowly hung to death in public (go online and watch the videos), and famous women’s rights advocates are personally tortured to death over weeks by high-ranking political leaders. I was being sarcastic before. Iran is not a great place; Iran is a swamp of sadistic racists. But because it is a Muslim nation, and therefore a member of one of the purported victim classes, the Left hardly lifts a finger against them. This week, Iran’s annual “International Wall Street Downfall Cartoon Festival,” an officially-run cartoon competition, resulted in first prize being awarded to brutally anti-Jewish cartoon. That ranks a 10 on any racism index you care to use. Muslims who convert to Christianity are put on trial and killed. That ranks a 10 on any racism index you care to use. Iran: Racist place.
A few hundred miles to the West, the minority Muslim Alawite community, which controls Syria, is on a serial killer’s dream rampage across Syria, hacking, hanging, burning, drilling, kicking, sawing, beating, bombing, and shooting the population into submission. Again, go on YouTube and watch the videos. It is pure savagery. Syria is officially, by law, run by the Alawite Muslim population. But, Muslims can’t be racists, so…well, by now you know the Left’s story on dealing with Islamic discrimination. In any case, no one on the Left really says anything about it. But it is a racist place. Incidentally, all of Syria’s Jews were dispossessed and kicked out, despite living there far longer than anyone identified as Arab or Muslim. Syria: Racist place.
A few miles more to the west, the Palestine Authority has once again officially rejected the notion of any Jews ever living in a state of Palestine, even Jews whose families and communities have lived in Judea and Samaria for thousands of years. Adolf Hitler also said that there was no place for Jews in his country. Is Israel, or any other nation for that matter, allowed to say that no Muslims will ever live within its political boundaries? No. But then again, the Palestine Authority is mostly Muslim, and despite a nearly two-to-one Jewish refugee to Arab refugee disparity, Jews are considered the bad guys and Arab Muslims are the purported victims there. Thus, arch-racist PA leader Mahmoud Abbas is given a pass by the Left (Abbas wrote his PhD thesis on the ‘falseness’ of the European Holocaust, even as the Arab ethnic cleansing of nearly a million Jews from across the Middle East was in full swing. Talk about a double standard…), and racist ethnic cleansing is now official policy of the Palestine Authority. That ranks right up there with Exceptional Levels of Racism. By contrast, even appearing to ‘Redline’ a home in America can get a bank, an appraiser, and a realtor in hot water. Palestine Authority: Really racist place.
Over a thousand miles to the west, Bosnia’s constitution explicitly institutionalizes racism. Remember Bosnia, the place where Europeans were once again joyously killing each other in droves just 20 years ago? Well, the Bosnian constitution only allows “constituent peoples,” which are Bosniaks (Muslims), Croats, and Serbs, to serve in elected posts. Jews, Gypsies (“Roma”), and other minorities are classified as “others” in that constitution, and they may not serve in Parliament. Recall that these were the same Bosnians who were subjugated by the Serbs in the 1990s, and who, in a sane world, might have learned a thing or two about the evils of racism from their own recent experience. But recall that they are….Muslims, and therefore above criticism and way off the Left’s radar screen. On our radar screen here, constitutions that officially prevent minorities from serving in government ring the bell on “Most Racist Places,” and thus Bosnia ties Iran, Syria, and the Palestine Authority on its racism index. Bosnia: Racist place.
A few thousand miles more to the west, presidential candidate Mitt Romney is booed several times at the annual NAACP conference. Romney made the pledge to repeal “ObamaCare,” and immediately reaped the heaped scorn of most of the thousands of blacks in the audience. Now, if a mostly white audience booed a black speaker, would that be racist? Well, it would surely be represented by the Left to be racism. If that’s the case, then why isn’t it racist for the NAACP attendees to boo a white speaker?
Even more to the point, NAACP leader Charlotte Stoker-Manning (chair of Women in NAACP ) was quoted this week in BuzzFeed and The Daily Caller with the following golden nuggets: “I believe [Romney’s] vested interests are in white Americans”; and, “You cannot possibly talk about jobs for black people at the level [Romney is] coming from. He’s talking about entrepreneurship, savings accounts — black people can barely find a way to get back and forth from work.”
Charlotte doesn’t appreciate how racist she sounds. Ascribing racist intentions to Romney because of the color of his skin is…racist, pure and simple. Second, why does Charlotte have so little faith in the black community? In the years following Emancipation, blacks thrived. Some of America’s great inventors from the 1870s through the early 1900s were black. During that period, whites elected blacks to higher office across the country; blacks proved themselves to be the intellectual and entrepreneurial equals of their European neighbors. Today, Prince George’s County in Maryland is loaded with middle-income blacks. Entire communities there are black, safe, and thriving, populated by people who have entrepreneurial small businesses and savings accounts. They are breaking with Charlotte’s racist portrait of blacks as incapable dependents.
So, in our one-minute world-wide tour of racism, we see that there are whole nations whose constitutions give sole political power to select ethnic or religious groups. There are groups who abused, robbed, and ethnically cleansed religious minorities from their midst and yet now complain that that same minority found another place to live near them. But despite all this, according to the Left, America has a racism problem. I might agree, because the racism here in America may not be from the usual sources, but it’s racism nonetheless.
Do I think the self-appointed guardians of anti-discrimination are onto it?
Nope.
Neither do you.
Up Next: Why Conservatives Love African Americans…
What to do with Republican “Moderates”
By a 5-4 decision, the US Supreme Court has upheld Obamacare “as a tax.” Because Congress has the authority to levy taxes, Obamacare’s mandate is held not unconstitutional. It stands.
Obama sold Obamacare as “not a tax.” Obama lied. You are now even more greatly taxed by the Federal government.
Two takeaways:
1) Republican “moderates” are in fact liberals with a conscience, meaning that on big issues of vision and founding principles, moderate R’s are not on your side. SO: Actively support and vote for conservatives only. Moderates will sell you out on the key issues.
2) Republican senators have always allowed Marxists and other unqualified nominees to the Supreme Court to be confirmed for a hodgepodge of technical reasons. These R senators are always lauded by the press as being “high minded.” Democrats always argue that conservative nominees are “out of the mainstream,” and they fight them tooth and nail.
The result is that we get a Supreme Court stacked with justices who do not share the views of America’s founders, who think that the US would be better served with a Constitution like that of South Africa (Ginsberg), and that requiring US citizens to buy something is just fine and in keeping with the way America has always been run.
SO: Encourage US senators to fight liberal nominees to the US Supreme Court on the grounds that they are out of the mainstream and therefore unqualified.
Take back your country, folks!
Patriot News publishes op-ed by First
http://www.pennlive.com/editorials/index.ssf/2011/12/new_state_senate_map_is_a_bad.html
BY JOSH FIRST
With the creation of the new state Senate seat in Dauphin County, presently held by Jeff Piccola but soon to take on a new shape, citizens of Pennsylvania’s capital city and the Republican Party have just been handed a defeat.
Harrisburg might be the capital of Pennsylvania. The city might be a significant part of Dauphin County, with which the city shares many business, tax, cultural and infrastructure relationships. City residents’ personal lives will be strongly influenced by the new state Senate seat that lies just across Vaughn Street in uptown Harrisburg. Yet despite these multiple bonds of steel, Harrisburg citizens are now cut off from that new district and have no voice in an elected position next door that is otherwise going to be a huge part of their lives.
The boundaries of this new district might be a problem simply for the artificially bifurcated relationship between the county and the city alone. But what is really irksome is that uptown Harrisburg is a demographically rich, heavily Republican area. In other words, it’s safe for Republicans.
The 14th Ward, specifically, is the most Republican precinct in the city, and it is home to many gay Republicans, lesbian Republicans, black Republicans and the largest group of Jewish Republicans between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
I know this because as a conservative Republican activist, I routinely collect ballot signatures for Republican candidates in this ward and am on a first-name basis with many of these neat people. On evening walks with my wife through uptown, I quietly mutter “Republican. Democrat. She’s Republican, and he’s a Democrat, Republican. Republican,” as we pass by each house.
Had the new Senate district included this area, then any or all of these Republicans could have been compelling candidates for the Senate position. Sadly, every one of them is now eliminated from consideration for the new seat, a rare opening in a state where elected officials camp out in seats for what feels like a lifetime.
Including uptown Harrisburg in the new Senate district would have included enough of Harrisburg to give city citizens representation while easily protecting the Republican character of the new district and creating opportunity for greater diversity in the Republican Party. An opportunity has been missed, and who knows how many decades will pass before another one occurs. To those of us who toil in the trenches of the Republican Party, it’s a self-inflicted wound in the foot, easily avoided.
Josh First is a businessman living in Harrisburg.
First’s Official Comments on Redistricting
FIRST for SENATE
PO Box 5128
Harrisburg PA 17110
www.joshfirst.com
May 10, 2012
Hon. STEPHEN J. MCEWEN, Jr . P.J.E., Chairman
2011 Legislative Reapportionment Commission
North Office Building, Room 104
Harrisburg, PA 17120
Dear Chairman McEwen,
I am writing to request that redistricting be removed from the Pennsylvania legislature and placed in the hands of a non-partisan, computer-driven process. There are two reasons for my request. First, gerrymandering disenfranchises voters by diluting their vote’s effectiveness. Second, it leads to behavior by those running the partisan process that reinforces entrenched Party interests; those Party interests work harder to protect the Party than the citizens’ interests.
Pennsylvania’s redistricting has long been defined by unfair gerrymandering by both Democrats and Republicans, and you now have an opportunity to help end it. With the January 24th, 2012, Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision rejecting the heavily gerrymandered state redistricting map of 2011, and singling out the 15th Senate District for which I recently ran as especially egregious (calling it “the Iron Cross”), Pennsylvania’s citizens and leaders have the clear authority and opportunity to put in place a non-partisan, computer-generated process that gives neither party an artificial advantage and which honors voters’ full rights.
Gerrymandering protects career politician incumbents to keep their seats “safe” from voters wanting electoral change, and safe from independent-minded candidates. Deals are struck between the parties to protect or trade certain seats for others. While the political parties gain from this behavior, Pennsylvania’s voters lose: Their votes are artificially diluted, and strong, independent-minded candidates who buck party bosses are artificially eliminated or undermined by their parties from opportunities to run.
Gerrymandering has created a “Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe” culture, with each political party using minor, legalistic technicalities to achieve huge, undeserved results against the voters’ interests. The protected seats have become profit centers for the Party’s chosen government affairs firms and other selected private businesses. This weasely culture creates elected leaders who are less willing to take clear positions on important issues. They instead rely upon redistricting to eliminate potential challengers who are motivated by parties’ failures to resolve important societal issues. Gerrymandering reinforces an entrenched political establishment that is more interested in making deals and profits that benefit the parties than in leading and making hard choices that benefit citizens.
As a conservative Republican candidate in the contested April 24th, 2012, primary race for the 15th Senate District, I am eminently qualified to comment on this situation.
Long a politically active Republican voter in the 15th Senate District, and a known potential candidate for the 15th Senate District seat, the area I live in, Harrisburg City, was “mysteriously” eliminated at the last minute (late 2011) from the original senate district. No observers I knew could make sense of how Harrisburg City was removed from the senate district that had so long served it, especially considering that the city was being separated from its own county. It appeared to be a blatant and contrived decision effort to eliminate a strong candidate who was not hand-picked by the Republican Party leaders. Only the January 24th, 2012 Supreme Court rejection of the “Iron Cross” district allowed me to enter that race.
Separating the city of Harrisburg from most of Dauphin County makes no sense, because each of those political entities shares in a $300 million incinerator debt, common infrastructure, school districts, economies, and communities. Had the senate district been shaped with the citizens and their infrastructure in mind, then we would have had a more level playing field to compete on, more competition, more meaningful choices for the voters, better, more representative government.
To highlight just how negative this politicized redistricting can be, consider that only two weeks before the April 24th, 2012, primary election, your commission issued a proposed redistricting map for the 15th Senate District that looked exactly like the one that had been struck down by the court. Why your commission did not wait until after the April 24th election date is a poorly kept secret: Republican leaders used the proposed map to unfairly influence the primary election in the 15th Senate District. Because I live in Harrisburg City, which under the new proposal would once again be outside of the new 15th Senate District, releasing the proposed map was a strategic effort to persuade Republican voters not to vote for me. Voters received a strong message (reported in the press) not to vote for me, because I would not be able to represent them, unless I moved into the new district. Republican leaders from all over the state were actively and openly supporting candidate John McNally, who received at least $150,000 from the Republican Party of Pennsylvania. It was a shameless manipulation of the process by Party leaders trying to protect their “investment.”
This kind of weasely, manipulative, unethical behavior is a direct result of the Party’s participation in redistricting. If you take the Party out, and put in charge a disinterested computer, then these fool-the-voter games will cease.
Another poorly kept Harrisburg secret is that elected Republican leaders have subsequently worked out an agreement with Republican justices on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to avoid another rejection of the “Iron Cross.” This, despite the proposed 15th Senate District map’s facts remaining the same now as they were on January 23, 2012. That the court will have to now find differently on the same facts that caused rejection only a few months ago, will degrade the voters’ confidence in both the judiciary and legislature. Voter confidence in elected officials is core to the success of our Commonwealth and Republic’s representative form of government.
If you are happy with the current defunct arrangement, then the Commission can carry on. If you believe in professional government, with the best interests of the voters at heart, however, then please make a recommendation to end gerrymandering once and for all and place the process in the hands of a computer.
Thank you for considering my comments.
Sincerely,
Josh First,
Voting Citizen
York Dispatch Profiles First
First makes run for the 15th Senate District
by: ANDREW SHAW The York Dispatch
Updated: 03/08/2012 11:35:35 AM EST
If elected,15th Senate District candidate Josh First would not do the following things:
—Take a state pension,
—Take a state car,
—Take per diems,
—Take state health care,
—Serve for more than three terms.
Those are absolutes in First’s mind, as the Harrisburg resident said state government has for too long been behaving badly.
“We have to return the government to being a servant of the people,” First, 47, said.
First is a husband, father of three children and owner of Appalachian Land and Conservation Services.
The former 17th Congressional District candidate said he might be running as a conservative Republican, but he’s not afraid to stand his ground even when it rubs other Republicans the wrong way.
And he’s also made his stance on education clear, he said.
In a Pennsylvania State Education Association questionnaire for candidates, First was asked, “Would you oppose legislation that authorizes taxpayer-funded vouchers and diverts public money away from public schools to private or religious schools?”
First’s response?
“Hell no,” he checked off, adding the “hell” for emphasis. He added, “How on earth does any adult try to argue for continuing the current state of affairs?
“If I lose because the PSEA is scared of me, then so be it,” First said of his stance.
The self-described “hook and bullet” Republican who loves to fish and hunt said he’s a conservationist and would help support land preservation if elected.
First is running in a district occupied by Sen. Jeffrey Piccola, who is not seeking re-election. Republicans John McNally and William Seeds and Democrats Alvin Q. Taylor and Rob Teplitz are also running.
The district is mostly in Dauphin County, but also includes five York County municipalities — Conewago and Newberry townships and three boroughs, York Haven, Lewisberry and Goldsboro.
link to the article on http://www.yorkdispatch.com/localnews/ci_20129219/first-makes-run-15th-senate-district
First demands end to use of Republican Party funds in Senate Race
From: info@joshfirst.com
To: rgleason@pagop.org
Sent: 2/9/2012 1:38:13 P.M. Eastern Standard Time
Subj: 15th Senate District race
First for Senate
PO Box 5128
Harrisburg, PA 17110
February 8, 2012
Hon. Mr. Jeff Haste, Chairman
Dauphin County Republican Committee
2255 Paxton Church Road
Harrisburg, PA 17110
Dear Jeff,
It pains me to write this, but it must be said.
The December 2011 endorsement by the DCRC of a candidate for the recently redistricted senate district no longer stands. That endorsement is null and void as a result of two court decisions.
Both the Pennsylvania Supreme Court (two weeks ago) and a Federal Court (today) have rejected the mangled mess that was presented as redistricting, with the 15th Senate District specifically cited as an egregious example. Clearly those of us in the 2001 version of the 15th Pennsylvania Senate District will be in that district for some time to come, probably a year, or more. My candidacy for that senate seat is well known, and we have collected far more ballot petition signatures than are necessary to be certified to the primary ballot next week.
Thus, the endorsement of immediate DCRC past-chairman John McNally does not stand, and the expenditure of DCRC money on his campaign is both unethical and illegal. It is unethical because I have not been considered for the same endorsement in the actual district, and illegal because that district no longer exists.
I request that DCRC immediately cease the expenditure of party money on the McNally campaign. Additionally, I am sending a similar letter to the Pennsylvania Republican State Committee, which funded the robo-calls last week, inviting Republicans to McNally headquarters. State Republican Party money is also off limits.
If a lawsuit is necessary to enforce this, I will pursue it. I also expect to be invited to any new endorsement meeting, where I will speak against party endorsements in the primary race, and where I will ask John McNally to reject any endorsement.
Using Republican Party money to promote one Republican candidate over another in a primary race is destructive and wasteful. Actually, it is outrageous and corrupt. That money must be used to defeat President Obama in the fall. Republican donors and voters deserve better than this. The Republican Party must stay out of primary races. Let the people choose without the party machine coloring their choices.
I look forward to your response, to info@joshfirst.com or my cell, which you have. Thank you.
Respectfully,
Josh First
Candidate
Josh First begins campaign for State Senate
With Tuesday’s historic decision by the Supreme Court to overturn the recent redistricting, the former PA – 15th senate district remains intact. That means that I am now back in a district from which senator Jeff Piccola is retiring, and for which I can run.
The Pennsylvania 15th Senate District is a beautiful place, really the heartland of America. It also includes Harrisburg, the state capital and one of the major Underground Railroad thruways, with one of the nation’s most majestic public edifices, the capitol building.
It is an honor to declare my candidacy for the 15th Senate District.
Please let me know if you can volunteer to circulate petitions, which are due by February 15th.
Email: info@joshfirst.com, or call 717 232-8335.
Thank you!
–Josh
Josh First