Kenyan terrorists look a lot like Syrian rebels

By now you’ve heard about the Kenyan mall massacre where innocent people were asked by the terrorists to tell them the name of Muhammad’s mother.  Those who could not were executed on the spot, including children as young as five years old.  These are the types of animals we’re at war with.  This is the unspeakable horror of daring not to conform to their radical vision of Islam.  The story, of course, gained international attention.

But what about the terrorists in Syria who were going house-to-house in Christian villages and slaughtering anyone who did not profess a belief in Islam?  Where was the outrage from the United States?  Where was the condemnation from our president?  There was none.  Why?  Because this president, through the CIA, is sending guns to these animals.  You see, these terrorists who have been indiscriminately killing innocent people all across Syria are the Syrian rebels.  These are the same Syrian rebels Obama wants to help and is helping.  These are the same barbaric bastards who Sen. John McCain sees as moderates.

I fear for our country.  I fear for our future.  We have so lost our way that we can no longer tell good from evil.  People like McCain and Lindsay Graham and Obama want so much to depose the Assad regime that they’re willing to literally make a pact with the devil.

Did you catch this headline?  “Syrian Rebels Attack Christian Village, Behead Priests.”  Or, how about this one: “Syrian Rebels Slit Throat of Christian Man Who Refused to Convert to Islam.”   Probably not.  These headlines were found throughout the international media and on conservative sites like Breitbart.com and Townhall.com but got very little play in the mainstream media.

Here’s what’s frightening about all of this, aside from the fact that we’re aiding this human debris.  What’s frightening is that the American people are being spoon-fed what the administration wants them to know.  The news media are no longer the watchdogs of the government.  They’re the lapdog of the government.  I’ve often said that media bias isn’t so much in what they tell you, it’s in what they don’t tell you.  We’re not being told nearly enough about who the Syrian rebels really are because if the American people knew the truth they would be outraged.

People like Sen. Ted Cruz have tried to tell the people.  John McCain despises Cruz because he dared speak the truth on the proposed Syrian air strikes when he said America should not become “al Qaeda’s air force.”  McCain has actually been meeting with Syrian rebel generals and whined that the terrorist rebels feel abandoned by Obama.  Hard to understand how when Obama is sending them weapons.

McCain was called on the carpet by Fox & Friends when they aired a video of Syrian rebel terrorists shooting at an airplane and yelling “allahu akbar,” the trademark scream of terrorist suicide bombers the world over.  McCain acted as though the host, Brian Kilmeade, was some kind of Islamophobe scolding him that yelling “allahu akbar” was no different than a Christian saying “thank God.”  The difference is Christians saying “thank God” don’t walk around sporting dynamite vests.  Of course, this is the same McCain who traveled all the way to Egypt to meet with the Muslim Brotherhood, another terrorist organization that has had meetings with Obama in the White House.  But understand this.  The Syrian rebels we are supporting right now are no different from the mall terrorists in Kenya who killed children with one exception.  McCain and Graham and Obama haven’t met with them yet.  But just give them time.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

It's your economy, stupid

Now that Syria has sort of blown up in President Obama’s face he’s once again turned to the economy.  In a speech marking the fifth anniversary of the demise of Lehman Brothers the president sought to take credit for anything he could find good in the economy and blame the rest on the Republicans.  Nice try, Mr. President, but the people are no longer buying it.

He bragged about 7.5 million private sector jobs he has created but the facts tell a completely different story.  The fact is there have only been a little over a million jobs created since Obama took office.  This is one of the slowest, if not the slowest, recoveries from a recession in the history of the country.  Why?

Well, for starters, George W. Bush and the Republicans have nothing to do with it.  Consider this.  Obamacare is turning the American work force into part-timers.  There are stories every day of companies that are cutting employee hours so they don’t have to bear the sticker shock of higher healthcare costs under Obamacare.  And the working poor are being hurt the most.  Here’s the reason.  Obamacare mandates that an employee pay no more than 9.5 percent of their income on health insurance.  Of course, health insurance is a fixed cost so, naturally, it’s a bigger percentage of someone’s salary making $30,000 than it is someone making $300,000.  So, if your employer is now paying 60 percent of your health insurance they don’t have to pay more money for the higher-salaried employee but they do for the lower-salaried employee.

Consider this example.  The Kaiser Family Foundation says the average family insurance plan is now just north of $16,000.  For that employee who’s making $300,000 by law they can’t pay more than $28,500 of their salary toward health insurance.  So even if they were footing the whole bill their employer wouldn’t be obligated to pay anything toward their health insurance.

Now let’s take the employee making $30,000.  By law they can’t pay more than $2,850 toward their health insurance.  If their employer is now paying 60 percent they’re paying $9,600 of that $16,000 health insurance tab.  Under Obamacare they’ll be required to pay $13,150 or 82 percent of that person’s health insurance.  Now do you understand why lower-paid employees are getting cut back to under 30 hours?  If you’re employed under 30 hours then your employer isn’t required to pay a dime of your health insurance.

We also have far more people trapped on welfare since Obama changed the standards during the recession.  More people on welfare means fewer people working.  Obama’s EPA has waged war against the oil and coal industries, killing tens of thousands of jobs in the process.  At a time when there’s an oil boom going on in North Dakota, primarily on private land.  Were the president to open up public land to oil development experts say we could be energy independent in five years, only having to import a little oil from Canada.  Imagine that.  No more entanglement in the Middle East over oil.

Between the president stubbornly standing in the way of getting at our energy resources and blocking the completion of the Keystone Pipeline millions of potential jobs go unfilled.  The way to economic recovery is through a booming economy and that comes from allowing the private sector to create jobs, not by killing them.  Unfortunately, the recession is still real for most Americans.

This is your economy, Mr. President.  After nearly five years at the helm there’s simply no one left to blame.  It’s time for you to own it.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Putin saves Obama from himself

Vladimir Putin may have saved Barack Obama from himself.  Hell bent on striking Syria over alleged chemical weapons attacks Mr. Obama found himself out in the cold, rejected by his allies and, in all likelihood, left to slowly twist in the wind by Congress.  In fact, the House had indicated it would not vote on the Syrian resolution so as not to embarrass the president on the world stage.

Then in stepped Russian President Vladimir Putin.  He came up with an idea of having Syria turn its chemical weapons over to international control and stepped back and allowed Secretary of State John Kerry to float the idea in a speech.  The idea was well-received and Kerry and Obama quickly took credit as a way out of this crisis.

Of course, this was another homemade crisis at the hands of President Obama, just like Obamacare and the sluggish economy.  Had Obama not offered up an ultimatum none of this would’ve happened.  That’s not to diminish the use of chemical weapons but more and more evidence is emerging that suggests the Assad regime had nothing to do with the chemical weapons attacks.

Can you imagine if Obama had attacked Syria and sparked World War III in the Middle East?  Iran had vowed to attack U.S. interests in Iraq along with attacking Israel.  Israel would have surely retaliated then it’s like breaking up a bar fight between two brothers.  You hit one and the whole family is going to jump you.  Then, to ultimately learn that it was the Saudi-backed, al Qaeda-run Syrian rebels who used the chemical weapons in the first place?  Wow.  What a mess that would’ve been.

Fortunately, Putin stepped in to keep Obama from doing something real stupid.  But look at what has ultimately happened.  Obama said the use of chemical weapons would be met with serious force from the United States.  If we truly believe Assad used chemical weapons there were absolutely no consequences.  All he had to do was agree to give them up after he used them.  It’s like the police allowing a mass killer to simply throw down his weapon and they let him walk free.

If Assad does comply with turning his chemical weapons over to international control it could prove to be akin to one of those lame gun buy-back programs.  You know the ones where Grandma turns in her late husband’s revolver he kept in the sock drawer.  The gun had absolutely no chance of ever being used in a crime yet the police can crow that they got another “dangerous weapon” off the streets.

What if it was the Syrian rebels who used the chemical weapons?  The UN says they’ve used them before and now they’re going through Christian villages killing Christians who don’t convert to Islam on the spot.  What about their chemical weapons?  Aren’t we going to demand they turn theirs in too?

Apparently not because this administration, along with other naïve accomplices like Senator John McCain, somehow has come to the conclusion that the same al Qaeda that hit us on 9/11 and now controls seven of the nine Syrian rebel groups is a moderate faction we can do business with.  So we get Grandma to turn in her weapon but the criminal thugs who are known to have terrorized and brutalized innocent people still have theirs.  At the end of the day I don’t see how this is a victory but for the LCDs (the Lowest Common Denominators) it may be all they need to convince them that Barack Obama is a brilliant strategist and master negotiator.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Climate change is real...but it's also natural

Each summer supply barges arrive in the remote area of the Amundsen Gulf in the Canadian Northwest Territories to bring supplies of fuel and other necessities.  This year the barges are being held up by ice.  Yes, ice in the Arctic in the summer.  Back in 2007 Professor Weislaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that by the summer of 2013 there would be no more sea ice in the Arctic.  He used so-called supercomputers to reach his conclusion.

Flash forward and here we are.  The global warming alarmists took Maslowski's prediction as gospel and worked the media up into a frenzy yet as summer comes to a close about 40 percent of the Arctic Ocean remains covered in ice.  Of course, Maslowski isn't the first to get it wrong.  There are about 73 climate models out there and all of them have been predicting higher temperatures due to more manmade CO2 in the atmosphere.  Now that we've had time to study these models and compare them to satellite temperature data from as far back as 1979 when we first starting tracking temperature with satellites we find that every single model has been wrong.  Every single one.

But that hasn't stopped the climate change hysterics.  The Center for Climate and Security is now claiming that the Syrian uprising is due, at least in part, to manmade climate change.  They argue that a five-year drought from 2006-2011 caused serious "food insecurity" which led to the uprising.  It couldn't have been the Arab Spring that was sweeping the region or al Qaeda's infiltration of the rebel movement.  It couldn't be that Saudi Arabia is funding the rebel cause in an effort to topple the Assad regime.  It must be due to manmade global warming.  Like droughts are something new to the Middle East or anywhere else.

As the evidence piles up against them the global warming alarmists just up their shrill rhetoric.  The melting ice in the Arctic was their last hope of scaring the producing nations out of their money.  (Of course, they never mention that ice has been growing in Antarctica so whatever's happening couldn't be global)  Now their predictions for the Arctic Ocean are shown to be overblown and made up.  Just like their predictions about polar bears, hurricanes and temperatures linked to CO2.

Facts, like the ice in the Arctic, are stubborn things.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

The 'gun culture' is not the problem

I continue to cheer on my birth state from the sidelines as the Republicans dismantle liberalism brick by brick.  North Carolina has a Republican governor and a Republican state legislature and state senate.  So far they have taken aim at the state income tax, implementing a flat tax rather than a tiered tax that punished people the more they earned.  They ended teacher tenure in public schools that had historically protected teachers just because they had been on the job longer.  They instituted voter ID which will make elections more honest, despite the insane contention from the left that it will keep minorities from voting.

But a little-noticed law goes into effect this week.  It prohibits law enforcement from destroying unclaimed firearms and guns acquired through one of those silly gun buy-back programs.  Now they’re required to either donate the guns, keep them or sell them to licensed firearms dealers unless the guns are damaged or missing serial numbers.  Heretofore, law enforcement agencies would destroy millions of dollars worth of guns under the guise of keeping the streets safer.  Of course, anyone who has studied the issue knows that it’s not the guns.

Even a new Harvard University study concluded that more guns do not mean more violence.  The study looked at gun ownership worldwide and found that America’s relatively high murder rate along with its relatively high gun ownership rate was an anomaly.  For example, Luxembourg bans handguns but their murder rate is nine times higher than Germany’s where gun ownership is 30,000 times higher.  The Soviet Union managed to strip its citizenry of their guns which continued after the Iron Curtain fell.  By the 1990s their murder rate was three times that of the United States despite their ban on guns.

In fact, the Harvard study found more guns equated to less crime.  Here’s the money quote from the study: “Where firearms are most dense violent crime rates are lowest, and where guns are least dense violent crime rates are highest.”

Of course, that’s common sense for those of us who understand why the founding fathers included the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights. 

What’s ironic is President Obama signed 23 Executive Actions in the wake of the Newtown, CT shooting and one was a study from the CDC to research the causes and prevention of gun violence.  In the process they blew out of the water many of the preconceived notions of the gun grabbers.

One thing the CDC study found was “unintentional firearm-related deaths have steadily declined during the past century.”  They concluded that less than one percent of all unintentional fatalities today are due to firearms.  So much for the old “having a gun in the house is dangerous” argument.

The president’s own commissioned study also found that guns are used far more for defensive purposes than for murder.  “Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence,” they concluded.   “Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.”  How much press did the study get?  Virtually none.

In North Carolina they understand that simply destroying guns does not solve anything.  Guns turned into a buy-back program are guns that would never have been used in a crime.  The so-called “gun culture” is not the problem.  It’s the “thug culture” that’s the problem.  Until we address that, senseless killings will continue.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.