Monday, November 3, 2014
From: Gary L. Bauer
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Vote Tomorrow!
Tomorrow is YOUR day. It is the day that you — as one of the millions of Americans frustrated by Obama’s hostility to family, faith and freedom — can make your voice heard.
Don’t just complain about politics. VOTE!
My friends, I’m sure you have noticed that today’s message is coming from my political action committee, Campaign for Working Families. I am sending today’s message from CWF so that I can urge you to vote without any ambiguity.
There are critical Senate races in Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Dakota, Virginia and West Virginia.
I urge you to vote for the Republican candidate in each of these races.
The GOP candidate may not be with us 100% of the time. But they are preferable to the Democrat if for no other reason than their election prevents Harry Reid and Barack Obama from controlling the Senate. The pro-family, pro-life cause will be far better off if conservative senators are controlling key Senate committees.
So, please, go vote tomorrow — and take other eligible voters with you.
Ebola And Solidarity
We’ve been hearing a lot about the defiant nurse in Maine who’s refusing to be quarantined after returning from treating Ebola patients in West Africa. A court recently ruled that Maine can’t force the nurse into quarantine — yet another example of unelected judges overruling the will of Americans, who overwhelmingly support quarantines.
The nurse feels that the Ebola scare has been politicized and that 21 days in isolation is just too long. So she’s going about her life pretty much as usual — aside, she says, from avoiding large public gatherings (except for the throngs of reporters outside her home to whom she’s been giving almost nonstop interviews).
With this case in mind, I segue to an insightful piece by Peggy Noonan. In her Wall Street Journal column over the weekend, Noonan tells the story of her great aunt, who emigrated to the U.S. from Ireland a century ago.
When she embarked on the ship that would take her to the United States, Noonan’s aunt and her fellow travelers were given a health card — a cardboard document no bigger than a flashcard that they wore on their coats during their nine-day journey.
Every day on the ship, a surgeon would examine all the passengers for signs of illness and disease. The card indicated whether the patient was thought to be healthy or sick. The back of the card read: “Keep this card to avoid detention at Quarantine and in Railroads in the United States.”
Once they got to Ellis Island, the new immigrants were required to turn the card in to immigration authorities. If there was any indication that they had been sick — or if they had lost their card — they were placed in quarantine or sent back to Europe. There was no discussion about it.
So what did Noonan’s aunt do? As Noonan recounts:
“She disembarked at Ellis Island where, so enraged at this crude, assaultive violation of her civil liberties — being subjected to intimate questioning by a stranger, feeling harassed by the daily threat of rejection and expulsion, being, in effect, immigrant-shamed — she got a lawyer, sued the U.S. government, and, with Emma Goldman and Floyd Dell, started a civil-liberties movement that upended American immigration law.”
Actually, no she didn’t. Noonan’s aunt — and presumably everyone else on the ship — accepted the health regulations, including possible quarantine, as a small price to pay for being allowed to enter the country.
She would later pass on her health card to Noonan — not as proof of the shabby treatment she’d received, but as a souvenir and source of pride.
Noonan selects the right word to describe her aunt’s actions, especially when compared to actions of the Maine nurse: humility. The passengers displayed a humility that’s too often been absent in the Ebola crisis. The new immigrants understood that subordinating their own desires and comforts to the interests of society was good and right.
There’s another word that comes to mind: solidarity, the union or fellowship arising from common responsibilities and interests among and between groups of people.
How, in the course of a century, did we go from immigrants embracing a keen sense of solidarity with countrymen they had not yet even met to native-born Americans threatening to sue over being required to err on the side of protecting one’s fellow citizens?
In related news, a group of scientists is predicting that more Ebola cases will emerge in the U.S. this year. How many? The numbers vary from one or two to as many as 130. Bottom line: You may not want to strike those Ebola protection masks and gloves from your Christmas list quite yet.
Major Setback In Syria
President Obama has failed in his duties as commander-in-chief. He underestimated the power of the Islamic State and then, when it took over large swaths of northern Iraq and Syria, blamed counterterrorism officials.
Then it came out that Obama had received detailed and specific daily briefings about the terrorist group for a year before it began its deadly rampage. More recently, it has become clear that the bombing campaign Obama authorized to slow down the Islamic State has been largely ineffective.
Over the weekend, Obama’s Syria strategy suffered what the Washington Post described as “a major setback.” Jabhat al-Nusra, a radical Islamist group affiliated with al Qaeda, “routed” rebel fighters backed by the United States in northern Syria.
The Islamists also appear to have captured American-supplied weapons and persuaded many of the American-trained rebels from the Free Syrian Army to defect. This effectively puts an end to any hope of moderates gaining control of northern Syria.
Ironically, it was American bomb strikes against al-Nusra that helped garner support for the terrorist group among some Syrians. One activist told the Post: “When American airstrikes targeted al-Nusra, people felt solidarity with them because Nusra are fighting the regime, and the strikes are helping the regime. Now people think that whoever in the Free Syrian Army gets support the U.S.A is an agent of the regime.”
Obama’s policies have ensured that whether it’s the Assad regime or the Islamic State, whoever ultimately wins control of Syria, it won’t be the dwindling number of moderates.
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