It's times like this that I really miss Yitzhak Rabin ...

... aw, who am I kididng? I miss him all the time.

RIP, greatest ever Prime Minister of Israel.

Anyone know what happened to the Magistrate? No posts since October?

xPost from V&M: Me on the Kennedy show discussing terrorism and banning 5.56 mm rounds

Here is the video of me with Will Rahn of the Daily Beast and Jillian Melchior of National Review on the Kennedy show on Fox Business to debate the extent of the terror threat in the US and globally and a potential ban on 5.56 mm ammunition.

Me on the new FBN show Kennedy discussing banning 5.56 mm rounds and discussing terrorism

Here is the video of me with Will Rahn of the Daily Beast and Jillian Melchior of National Review on the Kennedy show on Fox Business to debate the extent of the terror threat in the US and globally and a potential ban on 5.56 mm ammunition.

Summit on gender wage gap at NYU

Summit on gender wage gap at NYU

The manufactured outrage that purports to be legitimate criticism of Hillary is pathetic

Speaking fees? Her charity received donations from folks whose checks were drawn froma massive bank that had issues in a totally different area. This is supposed to be why we ought to be "concerned" about Hillary's impending candidacy?!

If that's all her detractors have got, I'm more confident than ever that she is the right candidate.

Laser Focus 2-3-15 - ISIS, Some Fellow Liberals and War

( Hear this as delivered on my radio show Making Sense with Steve Leser and the Rude Pundit on Feb 3 2015 by clicking http://podcasts.kcaastreaming.com/podcast-bin/stream.cgi?show=leser&datecode=20150203 )

Some of the things that help human beings and other intelligent organisms to understand the world and survive are the ability we have to categorize individual events and correlate multiple events to ascertain causality.

Why am I talking about this? Bear with me and it will become clear. From the moment we are born, we humans build our knowledge of the world. We have the ability to go to school and to read and learn without having to experience something, but we also learn from our own experiences about events and what they mean and what other events they cause.

We also learned eventually that our ability to observe and determine causality and relationships are potentially flawed. The scientific method was developed to go beyond casual observation and ensure that proper experimentation and analysis providing repeatable results was what governed human understanding of the world around us. These kinds of experiments and rigorous analysis led us to understand things like, the sun does not revolve around the earth like casual observation might lead one to believe.

There is a segment of fellow folks on the left that do not seem to understand the idea of rigorous analysis when it comes to analyzing whether intervention in a situation overseas is warranted.

I think about this a lot and started thinking about this when ISIS executed the Japanese prisoners they had been holding over the weekend. You see, since the Iraq war, and Rude one you and I have talked about this, many fellow Liberals and Progressives have been superficially analyzing events where the US was considering intervening.

The prevailing opinion among this small group of fellow Liberals and progressives, and its far from all of us, just this group, is that every potential military use is like Iraq and illegitimate automatically.

Let me respond directly to this group of fellow Liberals and Progressives. No everything is not like Iraq.

In Iraq, the Bush administration made a big deal about WMD, made a big show for a year about Iraq not allowing the UN weapons inspectors back into the country, then when they got them in they ignored their results. In hindsight (and actually I called it before the Iraq war in several articles) it was clearly a lie from the getgo. Iraq was not threatening anyone. Their troops were not massing on the border of any of their neighbors. Nothing was going on there.

This is a completely different situation from ISIS who are attempting to take over two countries and have explicitly stated their intent to take over many more. I want to go back to the Japanese Nationals. Their execution is a watershed event. The Japanese have it in their constitution that their military cannot be used overseas. So the idea of executing one of their journalists who you capture is completely despicable. Japan represented no threat at all to ISIS and they killed two of their citizens anyway. This is extremely important for everyone to think about. Because there is an opinion among this group on the left that I’ve been talking about that if the US simply leaves people alone, stops being involved in other countries that everyone will leave us alone too. In some cases that is true, but it is not true of ISIS.

This subgroup of fellow Liberals and Progressives believes that if we will leave ISIS alone, they will leave us alone. Well, by default, and by their Constitution, the Japanese leave everyone alone. But ISIS did not leave THEM alone. So there is your answer. With certain groups and certain countries, leaving them alone is not the right answer. How can you tell which is which? Well, ISIS doesn’t exactly make it hard to figure out to which group they belong.

Today, ISIS executed a Jordanian prisoner by putting them in a cage and burning them alive.

ISIS has demonstrated that they are one of the most ruthlessly violent and cruel groups in human history.

This nonsense with ISIS has gone far enough. Here’s what we need. We haven’t seen it in 60 years since the Korean War, but we need a fully global effort led by the UN to fight ISIS. If the UN won’t do it, anyone willing to do it should. The UN Security Council has already passed resolutions denouncing ISIS and target funding for ISIS and similar measures. It’s time for a resolution for the use of force against ISIS and all countries responding should be reflagged under the UN banner. ISIS should be degraded at least to the point where they cannot hold territory. And all fellow Liberals and Progressives should be supportive of that effort.

From KOs: Dems Voting for Stupak amendment predicted no longer being in the House

95 percent of anti-abortion Democratic House votes disappeared in just five years

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Last week, we noticed that of the 64 House Democrats who voted for the anti-abortion Stupak Amendment, only 12 remain. And of those 12, only three (Cuellar, Lipinski, and Peterson) voted for a similar anti-abortion measure last month (both measures effectively excluded abortion coverage from ACA insurance plans). That's a 95 percent reduction in anti-abortion votes from House Democrats in five years.

What happened? Take a look at the chart above. Fully half of the Democrats who voted for the Stupak Amendment lost a subsequent election. In the typical case, where they lost to a Republican, their conservative votes in the House were insufficent to protect them in their conservative districts. A handful lost to a Democrat, in either the primary or general election. Eighteen more Democrats retired (some to run for higher office), one resigned, and one died in office.

So the major reason why there's been such a rapid reduction in the number of anti-abortion votes from House Democrats is they've been replaced by Republicans.

But even if we just look at the twelve Democrats who were there in both 2009 and 2015, 75 percent of them changed how they voted. These nine Democrats are shown in blue above, and deserve some credit for their votes last month. All of them are from districts that President Obama won with more than 55 percent of the vote in 2012.
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(More at above link)

Tonight's Making Sense with Steve Leser and the Rude Pundit - GOP Anti-Vax? And More

First, is the Republican party going anti vax? Statements from some prominent Republicans might lead one to think so. Then, the President takes on companies sheltering trillions of dollars overseas. We will talk about what he is doing about it, then some really ugly death penalty executions happened in the last week. You won’t believe the circumstances.

All that plus special statements by me and the Rude one and also should restaurants be required to have their staff wash their hands after using the restroom? You would be surprised to hear who doesnt think so.

listen in on KCAA 1050am in the Los Angeles basin or at http://tunein.com/radio/KCAA-1050-s31934/

And also CALL IN between 9:45pm and 10pm eastern time, 6:45pm and 7:00pm Pacific time at 888-909-1050 to talk to Lee and I about any topic!