Oklahoma OK... Kol Hakavod!

I'm a fan of Oklahoma, as readers and friends who live there will attest to. I've been there a few times and the place, generally speaking is full of G-d fearing decent folks who tend to exhibit common sense, love freedom and treat strangers with courtesy. And they also tend to elect no nonsense, honest conservatives to public office, unlike my home state.

Not only that, but I've noticed that again,generally speaking, a solid sense of justice seems to exist among most of the denizens of Okie Land,even when there's no money or benefit involved.To wit, this item.

The picture above is called "Shepherdess Bringing in Sheep" by French Impressionist Camille Pissaro, and it's worth 8 figures easy on the open market. It currently sits in the University of Oklahoma's Fred Jones Jr. Art Museum, where it was donated along with a number of other paintings.

The problem is, there's a good chance it's stolen art. It belonged originally to French department store owner Raoul Meyer, and was part of his art collection that was seized by the Nazis when they invaded France during World War II.

The Nazis loved art, and plundered the best museums and private collections in Europe. Many of the museums were able to hide some of their treasures, but private collections were looted, especially the ones owned by Jews. After all, it's not like they were in any position to complain. And since a lot of them died in the camps or were left destitute, many of them weren't in any position to try and get their valuable paintings back, so they were sold to private collectors and museums, often by officers and bureaucrats connected to the post-war occupation.

"Shepherdess Bringing in Sheep” changed hands several times after the war,and when Meyer tried to get back his lawful property, a Swiss court ruled in ruled in 1953 that he'd missed his five-year window to recover the painting. Too bad, Jew!

So after it changed hands a few more times, it ended up being donated to O.U, where Meyer's daughter tracked it down and filed a lawsuit against the University of Oklahoma in January 2014.

And here's where it gets good.Twenty-six members of the Oklahoma House of Representatives introduced a resolution today that wants O.U. and its Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art to determine to the legislature's satisfaction that none of paintings were “unlawfully appropriated during the Nazi era.”

"If it is determined from provenance research that an object in its collection was unlawfully appropriated during the Nazi era without subsequent restitution, the House of Representatives hereby directs the University of Oklahoma and the Fred Jones. Jr. Museum of Art to resolve the matter in an equitable, appropriate, and mutually agreeable manner, including restitution," the resolution states.

It's expected to pass. The idea, of course, is to shame OU into doing the right thing.

Oklahoma has a population of 3.878 million folks, of whom only 4,500 or so are Jews. So there wasn't any political benefit for the Oklahoma Legislature in doing this. They acted in response to a letter last month from the small Holocaust Remembrance and Restitution Society at the University of Oklahoma asking for them to support their efforts.

Those legislators did it because it was the right thing to do.

That, and a sense of sheer decency and fairness, which as I noted, is fairly common in Oklahoma.

No Honor Among Thieves - Fatah Accuses Hamas of Stealing Millions in Gaza Aid

In a further sign that the Hamas/Fatah entity are having their problems getting along, Fatah today accused Hamas of stealing over $700 million in aid money '“over the blood of the children of Palestine,” Israel’s NRG News reported.

Fatah spokesmouth Ahmed Assaf claimed that, during Operation Protective Edge, the Hamas’ leadership in Gaza took the money and stashed it away. And this time the money didn't come from western taxpayers for once:

“They raised funds from the Arab world in the name of the martyrs in Gaza, and on behalf of women, children and elders, and they talked about rebuilding the Gaza Strip and Israel destroyed mosques,” Assaf said in an interview with Arab media.

The Fatah spokesman insisted that Hamas’ leadership must “return the money they stole from the families of the dead and wounded refugee families whose homes were destroyed by the war,” and warned against the Islamist group “taking advantage of the circumstances of the war of destruction…”

The Arab states are notorious for making huge financial pledges to 'Palestine' and then not following through, so the fact that Hamas actually got cash in hand surprises me. But the accusation doesn't, because while Hamas is popular in the Arab occupied areas of Judea and Samaria under Abbas, they're not so popular right now with the home town crowd in Gaza, some of whom have taken some pretty horrendous risks to leave Hamas's little Islamo-reichlet.

Fatah, who has stolen far more than Hamas are merely playing politics here and posing as the 'good mafiosos' to gain some political capital. They know Hamas isn't going to return the moolah, at least not all of it.

 

As ousted Fatah official Muhammad Dahlan admitted, Abbas personally stole at least $1.3 billion from the Palestine Investment Fund, money Yasser Arafat skimmed off humanitarian aid and 'taxes' paid to Fatah from 'Palestinian' businessmen as a price for being allowed to operate. Abbas' sons Yasser and Tareq have similarly benefited, as have a number of other well connected Fatah cronies. Sufa Arafat still lives in her chic apartment in the best part of Paris on her 'allowance' from the PA of $100,000 per month.

 Arafat's own accountant, Fuad Shubaki sung like a bird and revealed the details behind how Arafat and his fellow thugs in Fatah skimmed aid money and stole millions.One method was the old mafia trick of no-show jobs. Gullible western donors paid the salaries of PLO government employees for years who simply didn't exist.One audit revealed over 30,000 of them on the PLO payroll.

The 'Palestinian' leadership even had its greasy fingers on things like valuable medicines donated to the Palestinians by groups like OxFam, the International Red Cross, the EU and the UN (and of course, the American taxpayer).




For years, senior Fatah officials controlling the aid distribution made a bundle by systematically stealing the medicines and replacing them with worthless placebo pills, and then taking the real medicines to warehouses in Ramallah and Shechem(Nablus) for sale at premium prices on the black market.

'Palestine', you see, is the most successful con game in history.

The $700 million Hamas sticky fingered will be used as one of the bargaining chips in the next mob style sit down between Hamas and Fatah, with Fatah working on negotiating a cut for themselves.

Obama Administration To Return Stolen Jewish Artifacts To The Iraqis Who Stole Them

This is truly despicable.

Harold Rhode over at Pajamas Media has a piece ( h/t, Liberty's Spirit)  that outlines how Jewish historical artifacts, Torah scrolls and holy books stolen from the Iraqi Jewish community before they were forcibly expelled from Iraq were recovered and preserved...and are scheduled to be returned not to the Jews that they belong to but to the anti-semitic country of Iraq that stole them:

The National Archives is readying an exhibit of Iraqi Jewish artifacts due to open on October 11. Appallingly, the U.S. government has agreed to then return the Iraqi Jewish archives — including holy books — to Iraq, which systematically expelled its Jewish community, by June of 2014.

How did the Jewish Iraqi community — which dates to 721 B.C.E. when the Assyrians conquered Samaria and eventually deported the population to central Mesopotamia, and which was one of the two main sources of Mishnaic and Talmudic learning — lose, find, and lose again its patrimony?

The incredible story of how this unlikely turn of events came to pass has never been told in its entirety until now; I am one of the few who can tell it.

After American forces entered Baghdad in May 2003, the head of the Jewish and Israel section of Saddam Hussein’s Mukhabarat (intelligence agency) came to the Iraqi National Congress (INC), offering information about Saddam’s intelligence operations against Israel and Jews. He did this in order to curry favor. Former Iraqi officials frequently came to opposition groups to tell their stories, in return for which they would get “safe passage” documents stating that since they were cooperating with post-Saddam authorities, they should not be harmed.

The tipster visited the INC to talk about the rumored Jewish archives hidden in the basement of the Mukhabarat headquarters. After his visit, INC chairman Ahmed Chalabi called Judy Miller, the former New York Times reporter then embedded with a mobile unit looking for WMD, and me. I was an Arabic/Hebrew speaking policy analyst with the Office of Net Assessments in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, then assigned to the Coalition Provisional Authority, at the time.

We rushed over to talk with Chalabi, who told us that a former Mukhabarat employee reported that a huge treasure trove of Iraqi Jewish and Israeli material was amassed in the Mukhabarat building, and that he was prepared to show us where it was located. He also said there was an ancient copy of the Talmud written on leather or parchment.

Miller and I then went off to the Mukhabarat building with the former Saddam officer and an INC contingent.

The tipster indicated from outside the building where in the basement the Jewish and Israel sections were located. Then — he promptly disappeared. Despite the bombed-out structure’s instability, looters were overrunning the building. Danger was everywhere.

We were, in fact, standing beside a large metal device which had lodged itself halfway into the ground. We later learned that this live, undetonated bomb had penetrated through three or four stories of the building and destroyed the building’s water system. It had pierced the wall almost at ground level. We saw, through the hole it made, that the Jewish and Israel sections were flooded.

Rhode goes on to relate the amazing story of how the artifacts were rescued, restored and shipped to America, with the aid of Ricard Perle and Dick Cheney, among others. And then
tells how they were stolen in the first place:

After Israel became a state in 1948, martial law was declared in Iraq and many Jews left in the mass exodus in 1950-51. Almost all of those who remained behind left by the 1970s. They were not allowed to take much with them.

In 1950-51, they were allowed one suitcase with clothing — sometimes not even their personal documents — and nothing more. They were forced to leave everything else behind, including their communal property. For many years, Jews were not permitted to leave Iraq at all and were persecuted. With time, the few Jews who remained in Baghdad transferred what communal holy books and religious articles they had to the one remaining synagogue which functioned. This was in Batawin, a section of Baghdad which in the late 1940s was the neighborhood to which upwardly mobile Jews moved. The remaining Jews stored this property in the synagogue’s balcony, where the women sat during prayer.

The Jews did not freely relinquish this material. They did it under duress, having no other option.

In 1984, Saddam sent henchmen with trucks to that synagogue. Those scrolls, records, and books were carted off to a place unknown. Local Jews who were at the synagogue at that time witnessed this thievery, and described to me personally how the material was carted off against their will.

The post-Saddam Iraqi authorities agreed to the Jewish artifacts being taken to America to be restored, but guess what? These thieves now want 'their' stolen property returned. This is the equivalent of heirs of Nazis demanding that artwork stolen by Hitler's henchmen from all over Europe be returned to them as rightful owners.

Moreover, considering how Iraq feels about Jews, there's no guarantee the artifacts will be given the care and reverence they deserve.

They belong to the Iraqi Jewish community, almost all of whom now live in Israel. And their proper home is the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center outside of Tel Aviv, the only museum in the world dedicated to the history of Iraqi Jewry.

There's a petition you can sign here to stop the transfer and return these historic and holy artifacts to their rightful owners.

These holy artifacts must not go back to the people that stole them.

Yet Another Taxpayer Paid Luxury Vacation For The Obamas, Including a Private Jet For The First Dog

You can't make this stuff up.

Our president and the First lady are enjoying the president's fourth luxury vacation this year, at the ultra-pricey Martha's Vineyard.

Like many of us, the Obamas will unfortunately be downsizing their vacation this time. Their normal rental, the 28-acre Blue Heron Farm has been sold, so they will be reduced to making do at a $7.6 million, 5,000-square foot retreat on nine acres located in Chilmark on the western tip of the island that includes its own basketball court. They'll be there eight days, so the American taxpayer will probably be picking up the tab for a full two weeks. Martha's Vineyard in season is extremely pricey.

Now, no details of what that's costing us, but we do know that over 70 rooms have been booked for the Secret Service and the rest of the entourage not deemed worthy to spend the night on call at the estate. Each room costs $345 per night. mere hovels by Martha's Vineyard standards. The Secret Service normally gets there a few days before the First Family, so let's figure ten days. That works out to well over $240,000, just for lodging for the help. With food and incidentals, we're probably talking around $300,000 plus on the conservative side, not counting transportation and fuel.

And speaking of transportation, President Obama decided to commandeer two MV-22 Ospreys, military aircraft that carry 24 passengers each and cost $11,000 per hour to fly. One of them held the first family, its luggage and some of their more favored servants. The other one was - wait for it - a dog taxi used to fly in the First Dog, Bo.

Round trip cost for two MV-22 Ospreys, about $88,000, not including maintenance.

This also doesn't include the cost of transporting the president and his wife's entourage who didn't manage to hitch a ride in the ospreys. Or any additional Cadillac Escalades or other vehicles they required.

Another little item we have to account for is construction costs for each one of the president's little idylls. Whenever the president travels, extensive renovations have to be performed for the length of his stay to deal with things like security, advanced communication networks and the like. And then these renovations have to be removed and the house returned to its original condition when he leaves. This can cost anywhere up to several hundred thousand dollars.

I've never had much good to say about President George W. Bush, but because he made a point of vacationing at his ranch in Crawford, the American taxpayer only had to do this once. We've already had to do it four times this year alone for President Obama.

Our final tab for President Obama and his family's little taste of the sweet life? Probably around a million dollars, give or take a few greens fees or the odd less than four star meal. That comes out to about $125,000 per day...a lot more than the majority of families in America live on for a full year.

President Obama 'gets' the middle class, all right. Good and hard, and without any lubrication.

The Real Reason The Chicago Teacher's Strike Is Bad News For Obama

Chris Cillizza in his WaPo politics column the Fix looks at the Chicago teachers strike and writers that the primary reason it's bad for President Obama's campaign is the associations with the president's adopted hometown and his ex-chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, and Emanuel being distracted from fundraising for the chief pro-Obama PAC, Priorities USA.

He misses the main reason entirely.

What's going on with the Chicago teacher's union is a story that's occurred nation-wide for years. What people see is a greedy and unprincipled public employee union holding up the tax payers once again with the help of the Democrat they elected to office. And this is happening right after they saw a convention that featured a number of public employee functionaries speaking loudly and in some cases arrogantly about their 'rights' , with those sentiments being echoed by a number of Democrat politicians, including the president.

They see an entitled class of whom teacher's union president Karen Lewis is almost a caricature of, a far left harridan holding children and their education hostage. Note color of those tee shirts. It's not accidental.





In Los Angeles, for instance, the teacher's unions have the same kind of hold over th ecity's Democrat politicians they do in Chicago. In spite of the fact that the LA Unified School District's drop out rate is almost 40% and test scores are in the cellar while California is number 3 in the country in the amount spent per pupil, the union has successfully fought any attempts to institute teacher evaluation based on test scores while continuing to rack up raises and increased benefits. In fact, the teacher's unions have contributed millions and are the main financial backers of Governor Jerry Brown's Proposition 30, which would raise the already high state taxes on incomes over $250,000 while increasing the state sales tax to 7.75%, which in Los Angeles because of local city sales taxes translates to an increase from 9.75% to 10%. The increase on Los Angeles' already highly taxed gas prices, currently averaging about $4.15 per gallon on food and manufactured goods for people at all economic levels can only be imagined.

And one of the primary reason for the hikes is to allow the teachers and the other public employee unions to preserve the raises and benefits they've already been granted by the Democrats they paid to put into office.

The fact that this time it's Chicago and Rahm Emanuel is entirely secondary.

By this time, anyone who's paying attention identifies this president and his party with the greed of the public employee unions, and this strike, which even Rahm Emanuel called unnecessary and a strike of choice may make a lot of them start putting 2 and 2 together and thinking about whether they want to reward the enablers of this kind of behavior come November.

Were Mitt Romney's Tax Returns Stolen?

There's a story circulating the outskirts of the internet that an anonymous group says that it stole copies of GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney's tax records and is threatening to release them publicly unless they're paid $1 million in a Bitcoin (Internet currency) account.

The local Democratic and Republican parties in Williamson County, Tennessee where the PricewaterhouseCoopers office is located both received packages from the hackers containing a thumb drive and a letter outlining a competitive-bidding ransom scheme to start a bidding war against each other over the release of Romney’s taxes.

"Using your office" in Franklin, Tennessee, the group tells PricewaterhouseCoopers in an online posting, "we were able to gain access to your network file servers and copy over the tax documents for one Willard M Romney and Ann D Romney."

It threatens to send encrypted copies to "all major news outlets" and warns, "If the parties interested do not want the encrypted key released to the public to unlock these documents on September 28 of this year then payment will be necessary."

If the money is not received, "the entire world will be allowed to view the documents with a publicly released key to unlock everything," the group warns.

The website Pastebin has a piece up that allegedly describes the supposed caper:

Romney’s 1040 tax returns were taken from the PWC office 8/25/2012 by gaining access to the third floor via a gentleman working on the 3rd floor of the building. Once on the 3rd floor, the team moved down the stairs to the 2nd floor and setup shop in an empty office room. During the night, suite 260 was entered, and all available 1040 tax forms for Romney were copied. A package was sent to the PWC on suite 260 with a flash drive containing a copy of the 1040 files, plus copies were sent to the Democratic office in the county and copies were sent to the GOP office in the county at the beginning of the week also containing flash drives with copies of Romney’s tax returns before 2010. A scanned signature image for Mitt Romney from the 1040 forms were scanned and included with the packages, taken from earlier 1040 tax forms gathered and stored on the flash drives.

According to Williamson County Democratic Party Chairman Peter Burr, who received one of the packages, the letter states the Democrats have the option of outbidding PricewaterhouseCoopers or the GOP in order to ensure publication.

For its part, PricewaterhouseCoopers has said that they are working with the U.S. Secret Service and that there is no evidence that any of their data was compromised or that there was any unauthorized access.In fact, it would be very difficult to do this electronically without leaving footprints.And a 'scanned copy' of Mitt Romney's signature can be found on the net in maybe 2 minutes, tops.

But of course, this all might be nothing more than an elaborate story cooked up by the Obama Administration to cover the real crime.

Remember that the IRS is a federal agency under President Obama's direct control, and if he and his campaign wants copies of Mitt and Ann Romney's tax returns, all he has to do is shoot a memo over to Tim Geithner to get their hands on them.I would almost guarantee they already have, and that the misleading attack ads are ready to roll.

And what better way to cover the sudden onslaught than to come up with the story of an anonymous hacker group?

But of course, the president would never be a part of such a dishonorable, illegal and dishonest scheme just to win an election, right?

Would he ever. Just ask former Illinois Republican Senate candidate Jack Ryan, who was beating a certain Democrat named Barack Obama back in 2004 until somebody went judge shopping and got a Democrat appointed judge in Los Angeles to issue a court order making Ryan's sealed records from an acrimonious divorce and custody battle public. Ryan subsequently left the race.

If I'm right (and obviously, I hope I'm not), I still don't think this is going to be a game changer,with everything else that's going on.If nothing else, Governor Romney, who's not stupid, has to have considered the possibility that his tax records would be illegally leaked and prepared certain counter measures.

We'll see...

France's Wealthy Flee The Country And Go Galt

Here's the thing about the 'Evil Rich'. They know how to make money,they didn't get rich by being stupid and they certainly haven't stayed rich by being stupid either.

Which is exactly why they're fleeing the new French Socialist government and it's confiscatory tax rates in droves:

The latest estate agency figures have shown large numbers of France's most well-heeled families selling up and moving to neighbouring countries.

Many are fleeing a proposed new higher tax rate of 75 per cent on all earnings over one million euros. (£780,000)

The previous top tax bracket of 41 per cent on earnings over 72,000 euros is also set to increase to 45 per cent.

Sotheby's Realty, the estate agent arm of the British auction house, said its French offices sold more than 100 properties over 1.7 million euros between April and June this year - a marked increase on the same period in 2011.

Alexander Kraft, head of Sotheby's Realty, France, said: "The result of the presidential election has had a real impact on our sales.

"Now a large number of wealthy French families are leaving the country as a direct result of the proposals of the new government.{...}

Gilles Martin, a Swiss tax consultant, reported the same trend. "Since the socialists came to power in France, I have been deluged with inquiries from rich French people who would rather pay their tax in Switzerland," he told Switzerland's 20 Minutes newspaper.

A report earlier this year by London estate agents also showed France's richest people were heading to Britain to escape new higher taxes.

Yes, when the Socialist robber barons start salivating about stealing other people's money, there's usually someone else nearby more than willing to take in wealthy business people and take advantage of the availability of wealth creators and economic engines for a smaller slice of the pie.

As British PM David Cameron said, "If the French go ahead with a 75 per cent top rate of tax we will roll out the red carpet and welcome more French businesses to Britain and they can pay tax in Britain and pay for our health service and schools and everything else."

Don't think this phenomenon is limited to France.