At the 2014 Value Voters Summit, Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann (R) claimed that there is no such thing as “moderate” Islam, and that President Barack Obama failed the American people by deciding not to declare war on it.

“Unbelievably, we have the first anti-Israel president in American history,” Bachmann said, continuing to address the absent Obama. “That’s your legacy!”

“It’s no wonder Hillary Clinton couldn’t think of an answer when asked on her book tour to name her greatest accomplishment as Secretary of State,” she continued. “Well I have one — permanent retirement!”
She claimed that Muslims are engaged in “spiritual warfare, and that what we must do is defeat Islamic jihad. Sadly, our president has the wrong prescription. He even fails to acknowledge their motivations for bringing out jihad.”

“Yes, Mr. President, it is about Islam!” she said as the audience applauded wildly.

“And I believe if you have an evil of an order of this magnitude, you take it seriously. You declare war on it, you don’t dance around it. Just like the Islamic State has declared war on the United States of America.”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/09/michele-bachmann-to-obama-islam-is-the-problem-and-you-need-to-declare-war-on-it/

From the Scientific American

The Hidden Potential of Autistic Kids

What intelligence tests might be overlooking when it comes to autism

Nov 30, 2011 |By Rose Eveleth

The average child will score around the same percentile for all these tests, both verbal and nonverbal. But an autistic child will not. Isabelle Soulieres, a researcher at Harvard University, gave a group of autistics both WISC and the Raven test to measure the difference between the two groups. Although she expected a difference, she was surprised at just how big the gap was. On average, autistic students performed 30 percentile points better on the Raven test than on WISC. Some kids jumped 70 percentile points. "Depending on which test you use, you get a very different picture of the potential of the kids," she says. Other studies have confirmed this gap, although they found a smaller jump between tests.

The “high functioning” autistic children, with the least severe version of the disability, were not the only ones to score higher. Soulieres conducted a study recently at a school for autistic children considered intellectually disabled. Using the Raven test, she found that about half of them scored in the average range for the general population. "Many of those who are considered low-functioning—if you give them other intelligence tests, you will find hidden potential," she says. "They can solve really complex problems if you give them material that they can optimally process."

What this means, she says, is that schools are underestimating the abilities of autistic children all across the spectrum. The widespread use of the WISC in schools has helped set expectations of autistic kids too low—assuming that they will not be able to learn the same things that the average child can. Based on the test results, people come to the conclusion that autistic children cannot learn, when perhaps they do not learn the same way other people do.

This hidden potential was recently acknowledged by Laurent Mottron, a psychiatrist at the University of Montreal. In an article in the November 3 issue of Nature, he recounts his own experience working with high-functioning autistic people in his lab, which showed him the power of the autistic brain rather than its limitations. Mottron concludes that perhaps autism is not really a disease at all—that it is perhaps just a different way of looking at the world that should be celebrated rather than viewed as pathology.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-hidden-potential-of-autistic-kids/

John Bennett (Tulsa World)

Oklahoma state Senator John Bennett (R) came under fire last week for comments he made about Muslims in America.

The Tulsa World reports that yesterday he doubled down on those comments, refusing to apologize “because I’m right, and they know I’m right.”

Bennett claims that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) “used political pressure to make me back down, but I didn’t and I’m not going to.”

“Is there a difference between moderate and radical Islam?” he asked, before answering, “I say, ‘No.’”

He then said that the goal of all Muslims is “the destruction of Western civilization from within. This is a cancer in our nation that needs to be cut out,” he added, but “the media is playing right into their hands.”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/09/oklahoma-state-sen-bennett-american-muslims-are-a-cancer-in-our-nation-that-needs-cutting-out/