The End of Reason :: Breath of the Beast

I have been working on the next installment of my Cultural Insanity series and it is on the way, but since posting the first part I have seen something related to it that I would like to report as a separate post. Frankly, I have been a little distracted by monitoring the response to my first Cultural Insanity post; after all although I was trained as an anthropologist and not unfamiliar with psychological theory, in making the analogy between a personality disorder and two very different cultural sub-groups, I was treading on somewhat unfamiliar ground.
I was elated when ShrinkWrapped, a psych-blogger whom I respect enormously picked up on my ideas and posted a not unsupportive discussion of it mixing in material fro Dr. Sanity and Victor Davis Hansen. of it.

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Big Media Whitewash- AP Praises Anti-Semitic Kossites Gateway Pundit

Could you even imagine Republicans going to an event sponsored by anti-Semitic haters and getting away with it?
Yet... Big Media is coddling the dems by whitewashing their report on Daily Kos from any of the frequent hate speech in their review of the Yearly Kos event.

This hate-filled rant at Daily Kos is sadly not the only anti-Semitic posting on the website.

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WorldNetDaily: Saudi billionaire's lawsuit leads to book's destruction

WorldNetDaily: Saudi billionaire's lawsuit leads to book's destruction: "Cambridge University Press has defaulted on a libel suit filed against it by a Saudi billionaire, issuing an apology, agreeing to pay court fees and damages and agreeing to destroy all unsold copies of a 2006 book by two American authors, as well as asking libraries to remove the book from their shelves.

In an apology published on its website, the academic publisher wrote:

'In 2006 Cambridge University Press published 'Alms for Jihad' written by J. Millard Burr and Robert O. Collins which made certain defamatory allegations about Sheikh Khalid Bin Mahfouz and his family in connection with the funding of terrorism. "

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Hot Air » Army spokesman: Investigation shows Beauchamp’s allegations are false; Update: No specific statement forthcoming?

"A nice “get” by Bob Owens. There were rumors all day long that the Army is preparing to formally pronounce Beauchamp a liar, first from Matt Sanchez and then from Michael Goldfarb, who was told by a source to “stand by for a statement about to come from the Army saying their review of Beauchamp’s story shows it to be a combination of complete fabrication and wild exaggeration.” That last bit hints at something much more specific than what Bob got but the gist is the same."

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How Best to Attack America? By William Hawkins

"There has been no major terrorist attack in the United States since September 11, 2001. This is amazing, given how large and open America continues to be. Though the recent National Intelligence Estimate noted that it is harder now to attack the United States, “al-Qaeda is showing greater and greater ability to plan attacks in Europe and the United States.” It is the old offensive-defensive dynamic seen in every war. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff says his “gut” tells him a new attack may be on the way. But would such an attack be the result of al-Qaeda rebuilding its capability, or of it rethinking its strategy? The debate in enemy circles over how to strike the United States goes back deep into the last century."

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Ignorance is Strength by Dave Nalle

"Few editorials have generated as much heated debate as rapidly as the recent article from Brookings Institution scholars Mike O'Hanlon and Ken Pollock in the New York Times titled 'A War We Just Might Win.' The piece is the result of their extended visit to Iraq and discussions with military and political leaders there, which have led them to conclude that the Bush surge and some of the associated strategy changes are actually advancing our objectives in Iraq more than many expected or are aware of here in the US, especially in the media. "

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Global Deceit - Bethany Stotts

"Last month Washington Post writer Marc Kaufman championed a two-year Global Warming study by the Union of Concerned Scientists in his article, 'Study: Inaction on Warming Will Be Disruptive, Costly.' The study, which the author obviously supports, makes sweeping pronouncements about the global Armageddon to come. According to the study, global warming will bring regular and disastrous flooding to the Northeast coast, causing unprecedented damage to roads, housing, and other structures. Also, the Midwest will be afflicted with perennial droughts and American agricultural industries will collapse due to the climate changes. "

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Vox Popoli: The socially autistic atheist

"It's not just a figment of my imagination, it seems atheists truly are socially autistic by their own report. Asperger's Syndrome is a disorder described as 'autistic psychopathy' by its discoverer, Dr. Hans Asperger. Those with the disorder tend to be intelligent, socially awkward and difficult to converse with. They are also likely to be male."

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Robot/SWORDS

Here comes the gamers of the future no wonder they hit the gaming market so big

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The Future Face of Geopolitics By Marc Huybrechts

In an earlier essay I noted that the preponderant nature of war had been changing over the past half century or so, from international wars between states to civil wars within states. History does not suggest that this state of affairs will continue forever.   Indeed, liberal democracy faces currently two major challenges: (A) the terrorism emanating from radical Islam and (B) the renewed rise of non-democratic great powers. The first threat is the more immediate one. But, it is the lesser of the two, because it originates in stagnant and backward societies that are largely living on the economic rent from natural resources and that pose no military threat to developed societies.  However, their potential use of acquired weapons of mass destruction does present a serious and growing menace.  Nevertheless, it is the second threat in the form of the return of authoritarian great powers (specifically China and Russia), that is likely to be the major threat to liberal democracy’s survival in the foreseeable future.      

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Taking Issue with Private Scott Beauchamp By MATT SANCHEZ

Baghdad - Both sides of the ideological split have drawn a line in the sand over what a soldier's story really means - that is if the tales of Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp are just a story or a state of mind.

On the left, the dramatic details Beauchamp described were a confirmation of the argument that an unjust war will numb a man into a callous monster.

On the other side, critics accuse Private Beauchamp of disparaging his fellow soldiers and distorting reality.

One side stands opposed to the other and like watching a dog chase its tail, everyone will spin in circles convinced one good bite will eventually be worth all the fuss.

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Whose Limits? Brian C. Ledbetter

Sterling, Virginia

I highly recommend heading over this way to find out where a considerable chunk of our education tax dollars are going here in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

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Refreshing reign of conservatism By Frank Devine

RUPERT Murdoch's successful bid for ownership of The Wall Street Journal is good news in several respects.

It is cheering to see the gigantic Aussie battler achieve another ambition. He is our first compleat tycoon. Despite his American citizenship, his native accent lingers and, we might flatter ourselves, so do strong remnants of the Australian style for getting things done.

It's also good to have somebody who knows newspapers showing interest - a $US5 billion interest - in one, as investors and long-term newspaper owners flee an industry under financial stress as readers and advertisers migrate to the internet.

The newspaper format remains the best collective method of gathering and analysing news. Newspaper content electronically delivered is our strongest defence against

the online babble of bloggers, propagandists and hucksters.

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A TRIBUTE TO GEORGE W THE GREAT :: PersianWarriors

A TRUE HUMANBEING THAT IS ON THE SIDE... more info A TRUE HUMANBEING THAT IS ON THE SIDE OF THE INNOCENT PEOPLE OF THE WORLD AGAINST THEIR TYRANTS & OPPRESSORS. WE RESPECT YOU GEORGE W BUSH !!! WE ADMIRE YOUR BRAVENESS !!! YOU ARE TRULY A GREAT !!!

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Nutroots’ Success Doesn’t Run Deep By Lisa De Pasquale

This week hundreds of liberal bloggers and online activists will gather for the YearlyKos Convention in Chicago, IL. YearlyKos is inspired by Markos Moulitsas Zúniga’s blog, DailyKos.com. He has been the darling of both the online and mainstream media outlets since he began blogging in 2002. The second YearlyKos is a chance for the “netroots community” to share strategies on “expressing viewpoints” and “building consensus.” By those standards, it seems like it should be a short conference. I imagine it goes something like this: So, are we going to continue to compare Bush to Hitler and call conservatives stupid, homophobic racists? Great, meeting adjourned, see ya next year!

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The Legacy Of The Daily Kos By John Hawkins

"I wouldn't want to be a senator or congressman. I'm able to influence politics much more effectively doing what I do. Now I can shape the national political debate. The only way I could exert more influence would be if I were president. But I'd never want that guy's job. Never." -- Markos Moulitsas Zuniga

Is Markos Moulitsas Zuniga AKA Kos really that powerful? No. But, does he have enormous sway on the Left? You bet he does.

His blog, the Daily Kos, is an enormous website that is slavishly catered to by Democratic Congressmen and senators. Among the prominent Democrats that have posted on his blog are Jimmy Carter, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi. Moreover, all three Democratic front runners for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards, are scheduled to attend the Yearly Kos convention.

 

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August 5th- Support imprisoned Iranian student activists and bloggers :: Incognito

Arash Kamangir is asking all bloggers to join in a movement, generated by a group of Iranian bloggers, to publicize the plight of jailed student activists in the land of Ahmadinejad and the oppressed.

August 5th 2007 is the 101-st anniversary of the Iranian constitutional revolution. BUT Iranian people still struggle for democracy and student activists are still sent to jails. Several student activists spend this year’s anniversary in jails. They include Mohammad Hashemi, Ali Nikoones bati, Ali Vefghi, Bahareh Hedayat, Mehdi Arabshahi, Hanif Yazdani, Abodllah Momeni, Bahram Fayyazi, Habib Hajiheydari, Morteza Eslahchi, Mojtaba Bayat,, Arash Khandel, Ashkan Ghiasvand, Ahmad Ghassaban, Majid Tavakoli, Ehsan Mansouri, and Amir Yaghoub-ali.

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The EU and the Globalist Alliance :: Gates of Vienna

Here is an interesting comment about Multiculturalism posted at a website in, of all places, Bangladesh: “Multiculturalism is an unnatural and unhealthy condition that can only afflict countries in national decline. (…) Greed and corruption will characterise the government coupled with oppressive measures directed against its citizens. Lies and deceit will be the stock and trade of media, politicians, and educational institutions.” Multiculturalism “is used to prevent a national consensus among the electorate. It erodes values, cultures, beliefs, religions, ethnic habits, etc. ensuring a swirling river of discontent upon which the multiculturalists rides. It is a perfect method of ensuring that there can never be accord, unity, or a commonly shared destiny among those ruled.”

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Protected Victims vs. the Right to Desecrate :: Gates of Vienna

Concerning the performance art of young Stanislav Shmulevich at Pace University, Robert Spencer says it the best:

For all the examples of the double standard that [Christopher Hitchens], Malkin and others have brought forth — from Piss Christ to Chris Ofili’s Turner-Prize-winning, elephant-dung and pornography-bedecked Virgin Mary and the rest — emphasize the fact that the real agenda of today’s dominant politically correct culture is certainly not tolerance, or even anything-goes moral relativism. Some things most emphatically don’t go, as Stanislav Shmulevich’s two felony charges indicate. As a cultural movement, political correctness and multiculturalism are emphatically anti-Western and anti-Christian. And they are also suicidal.

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An Open Letter to Hillary Rodham :: Gates of Vienna

Dear Hillary,
So they finally dug out your super secret honors thesis from Wellesley College. No wonder you wanted to post a guard on it! “THERE IS ONLY THE FIGHT: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model“ is sure to cause a huge conflagration. And the pages of your thesis will be used to start the fire.
The funny thing is many people our age were fans of Saul Alinsky back then. He wanted people to free themselves, even if they had to do so in somewhat unorthodox ways. I remember him describing what he considered the stranglehold Eastman Kodak had on the company town of Rochester, New York. In order for poor people to put pressure on Eastman Kodak he suggested that they show up at the haunts of the wealthy and make things uncomfortable enough that they would give in to the demands for better pay, etc.

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'A victory for all Americans' By Joseph Farah

That's what Barack Obama called it.

"A victory for all Americans."

A small town in Pennsylvania votes overwhelmingly to elect a mayor on a platform of cracking down on the damage illegal aliens are inflicting on the community.

The heroic mayor, Louis J. Barletta, fulfills his promise to his constituents by enacting an ordinance last summer prohibiting renting to those in the U.S. illegally.

A group of "activists" challenge the law in court.

And U.S. District Judge James Munley, an appointee of Bill Clinton, overturns the popular measure with a stroke of the pen.

That is what Barack Obama characterizes as "a victory of all Americans."

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We Must Overcome Our Fear of Islam by Gary Bauer

What do you call a photograph of a small plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of urine?

If you’re part of the liberal establishment, you might call it “modern art” worthy of a generous taxpayer-funded grant.

Or how about the burning of an American flag in a protest? Our courts say that act is protected as freedom of speech.

Now, what do you call a Koran submerged in a toilet? If you were part of the liberal elite, you’d call it a “hate-crime” and a felony punishable by up to two years in prison.

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Losing Conservatism Will Lose America By Chris Adamo

Real America’s dread of a "President Hillary," though understandable, is not sufficient to get any Republican elected on that basis alone. Yet time and again, the standard reaction of GOP insiders to Hillary’s candidacy is to attempt to form and mold their field of candidates in direct response to her.

First we were told that Condoleezza Rice was the only viable candidate, since only a woman could possibly compete against another woman. In the aftermath of Rice’s flat refusal to consider running, the new mantra within Republican circles has been the "only a moderate can win."

Ironically, this very response, itself a reflection of neither leadership nor boldness but of fear and capitulation, holds the greatest potential to torpedo Republican hopes for ’08.

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Casualties of Anti-War By Marc Sheppard

The left's anti-war forces sustained heavy casualties earlier this week. And, judging from both strategy shifts and painful screams heard throughout the liberal blogosphere, many of the fallen were high value propaganda targets.


It's no secret that Democratic strategists see failure in Iraq as a blood-soaked red carpet leading them to the White House next year. So much so that even before the president officially announced the initial 20,000 troop surge in January, opposition party leaders were scrambling to denounce it as a doomed and desperate last-gasp effort to save a failing policy.

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Global Warming Propaganda Factory By Christopher J. Alleva

I have often wondered how the media are in such lock step on Global Warming. Well, I wonder no more. Recently, I came across a website for the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ). http://www.sej.org/ This website is veritable tool box for any budding reporter assigned to the global warming beat. If you're an editor at the Palookaville Post, all you have to do is send your cub reporters to this site and they'll have everything they need to write an article that fits the template and action line perfectly.

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Liberalism on a Ledge By Shawn Macomber

CHICAGO -- "What did your psychologist tell you?"

Such was the penultimate query of one of the first YearlyKos 2007 panels, "Holding Congress Accountable for a Progressive Agenda." The question was presented to Firedoglake celebrity blogger Jane Hamsher by a middle-aged woman who explained she was trying to convince disillusioned "progressive activists who are ready to give up" to continue to partner with her local Democratic Party chapter.

Despite the Republicans' recent midterm election reversal of fortune, forlorn talk of Democratic victors stabbing "the netroots" in the back has paradoxically replaced the We're going to kick ass from one end of this country to the other! vibe of the 2006 convention. Betrayal? Participants were only all too happy to count the ways: No immediate Iraq pullout, defections on the hate crimes bill, Congressional staffers building walls between representatives and bloggers who grew accustomed to easy access during the campaign.

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In Defense of Drunken Astronauts By Charles Krauthammer

"Someone's gotta do it. No one's gonna do it. So I'll do it. Your Honor, I rise in defense of drunken astronauts.

You've all heard the reports, delivered in scandalized tones on the evening news or as guaranteed punch lines for the late-night comics, that at least two astronauts had alcohol in their systems before flights. A stern and sober NASA has assured an anxious nation that this matter, uncovered by a NASA-commissioned study, will be thoroughly looked into and appropriately dealt with.

To which I say: Come off it. I know NASA has to get grim and do the responsible thing, but as counsel for the defense -- the only counsel for the defense, as far as I can tell -- I place before the jury the following considerations:"

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A free-market cure for US healthcare system - The Boston Globe By Rudolph W. Giuliani

"All Americans want to increase the quality, affordability, and portability of healthcare. The 2008 election presents a decisive debate on how to reach this goal.

The Democratic candidates for president believe in a government-mandated model that looks for inspiration to the socialized medical systems of Europe, Canada, and Cuba."

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The reckless New Republic. by Michael Goldfarb

In an interview with the New York Observer earlier today, New Republic editor Frank Foer singles out THE WEEKLY STANDARD for recklessness in raising questions about a pseudonymous column by a soldier in Iraq, Scott Thomas Beauchamp, published two weeks ago in the New Republic. Foer's accusation is misleading and unwarranted.

The article in question, "Shock Troops," was a collection of first-person "vignettes" (TNR's term) that described the author's cruelty and that of his fellow soldiers. The point, according to the New Republic, was to depict "the morally and emotionally distorting effects of war."

The Observer's Michael Calderone writes: "Of the Weekly Standard in particular, Mr. Foer said he did not assist in their reporting when contacted because of 'the reckless way they handled their investigation.'"

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Liberal intolerance, revisited by Lawrence Auster

At a blog called Paloustics (I have no idea what that means) the entire text of my 2004 article at FrontPage Magazine, "How to Oppose Liberal Intolerance" has been reproduced. Because many key passages of the text have been bolded, this version of the article may help bring out its meanings in a new way and make it worth a re-read, especially as several entries at VFR today are on the subject of liberalism.

The main theme of the article is that when mainstream conservatives complain endlessly about the double standards imposed by liberalism, they are fundamentally mistaking what liberalism is. The double standard is not some excess or defect of liberalism, which liberals can be persuaded or shamed to fix; the double standard is inherent in liberalism, proceeding from the leftist project of treating unequals as though they were equal. Mainstream conservatives don't want to focus on this aspect of liberalism, because they themselves share a modified version of the same egalitarian agenda..

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Clinton and Pelosi: Most Dangerous Women in America by Susan Heathfield

For conservative values, the voting records of the, arguably, two most politically powerful women in the United States of America, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Presidential candidate, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY), make me view the future with dread and unease for the conservative agenda. And, nothing they've done in 2007 has done anything to ease my mind.

House Speaker Pelosi operates on the far left side of liberal.

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Romney: Hezbollah role model for U.S. By Aaron Klein

JERUSALEM – Republican presidential candidate Gov. Mitt Romney has cited the social welfare network of the Lebanese Hezbollah terror group as a role model the U.S. should copy to help promote "goodness" and "freedom" around the world.

Sections of Hezbollah's social welfare network, including schools and camps, are routinely used by the terror group to indoctrinate students in anti-Israel propaganda, instruct in military tactics and promote Shiite Islamic beliefs, including the waging of a final, apocalyptic world battle against "evil."

The former Massachusetts governor this weekend was asked during a campaign stop in Iowa whether he would renew President Bush's $50 million campaign to combat AIDS in Africa.

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When Tolerance Becomes Criminal By George Handlery

A stunning piece appeared in Der Spiegel (July, 23), a German weekly. It shocked this writer, so it might impress the reader, too. Inevitably, the account carries one from the report’s specifics to implications that are more significant than the original details.

The two-page piece responds to a suit brought against the UN and Dutch soldiers under its command. The plaintiff alleges their responsibility for the Srebrenica massacres.

On June 12 1995, Bosnian Serbs acting for Belgrade captured the Muslim town Srebrenica and massacred seven thousand male captives. “Blue Helmets” protected the town and a safe-zone close to it sheltering the claimants

Now Numira Subasic having lost 22 family members wants justice for herself and other abused women. That government has already been investigated the case and the conclusions cost a Minister his job.

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TABOO: Why Do Blacks Underperform on Standardized Tests? By La Shawn Barber

After I became a Christian eight or so years ago, I developed a hunger for good, sound biblical teaching. I wanted more than the emotional style of preaching I was used to hearing at black churches.

My youngest sister, who’d been a Christian years before I had, recommended a denomination that was Bible-focused, conservative, and emphasized expository preaching from men who’d gone to seminary and studied Greek and Hebrew, early church fathers, systematic theology, etc. Their style of preaching was organized in such a way that one could listen, take notes as they analyzed the text, and leave the church filled with a burning curiosity about the faith and a hunger to read, study, and learn more.

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A Tripartisan Solution? :: New York Sun Editorial

Senator Lieberman is someone we watch closely. Not only is he a former vice presidential nominee of the Democrats who is one of the few senators to be elected as an independent, but he also has been a stalwart in the war on Islamic extremist terrorism. So when the junior senator from Connecticut joined yesterday with a former Republican presidential candidate, Senator Alexander of Tennessee, and a Democrat of Minnesota, Senator Klobuchar, to propose what they billed as a "tripartisan solution" to the presidential nominee selection process, it got our attention.

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Finsbury Park: Inside the British Jihad By Pratik Chougule

Stepping off the subway at Finsbury Park, the change in scenery could not have been more acute. Just an hour earlier, I had been awed by the grandeur of Big Ben, towering over the British Houses of Parliament. It is the symbol of the England in our history books: a beacon of liberty, tolerance, and stability.

Finsbury Park is different. Small shops and ragged apartments line the streets of this working class area of North London. More pronounced than the socioeconomic inequality is the cultural discrepancy. Grocery stores feature Middle Eastern foods and advertisements for cheap phone calls to the East while women clad in veils and burkas stroll with their young children wearing kufis. As Christopher Hitchens remarks of Finsbury Park in the June 2007 issue of Vanity Fair, “Returning to the old place after a long absence, I found that it was the scent of Algeria that now predominated.”1

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Man Made Global Warming: The Most Dangerous Lie of Our Times :: Pundit Review

If you have an hour to watch this video on “man made global warming” I would highly suggest doing so. Man made global warming is a lie-pure and simple. It is not based on sound science but is instead an active and vibrant global political movement that presents itself under the guise of science. As one of the scientists on the video says, “when the Berlin Wall came down, the Communists of the world had to find a new home which they did in the modern day envinronmental movement.” As Chris Horner, author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming” and world renowned atmospheric scientist Dr. Dick Lindzen of MIT (who makes many appearences in the video0 have both said on our show, this political movement is essentially anti-capitalist and anti-human.

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Garbage In, Garbage Out By The Stiletto

Are some people simply too stupid, uninformed or mentally incompetent (second item) to vote? Though the very idea seems “un-American,” Jonah Goldberg, suggests that ”[m]aybe the people who don’t know the first thing about how our system works aren’t the folks who should be driving our politics, just as people who don’t know how to drive shouldn’t have a driver’s license.” Goldberg notes:

A very high percentage of the U.S. electorate isn’t very well qualified to vote, if by “qualified” you mean having a basic understanding of our government, its functions and its challenges. Almost half of the American public doesn’t know that each state gets two senators. More than two-thirds can’t explain the gist of what the Food and Drug Administration does.

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My View of Islam by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

On holy war, apostasy and the rights of women in Islam.

The undisputed definition of Islam by all her adherents is “submission to the will of Allah.” This divine will is outlined in the Koran and in the teachings and deeds of Muhammad, as recorded in the Hadith or Sunna.

While the Koran is considered to be the true, undiluted word of God revealed to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel, the Sunna carry less weight and have always been a cause for disagreement amongst Muslim scholars. Theologians of Islam have, however, reached consensus on the authority of a set of six volumes from the Sunna called the Sahih Sita, or authentic six.

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All About the Proposed FairTax Plan By Bonnie Alba |

Imagine receiving a full paycheck, all your last pay period wages.  No income tax except possibly state.  Think FairTax.  It is the proposed replacement plan to the dreaded IRS and the complicated tax code system which the majority of citizens, including the experts, do not understand.
        How will the government collect revenues then?  It’s simple.  Citizens would pay federal government taxes on what they buy in new purchases and services.  The proposed 23 percent tax on every dollar would be included in all displayed prices.  No added tax at the register.

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Jimmy Carter, the Muslims, and Other Catastrophes :: ChronWatch

Can’t anybody shut up Jimmy Carter once and for all? In his latest statement, he blamed America for fomenting trouble in Gaza by siding with the Fatah against Hamas. Now, quite frankly, I don’t see a world of difference between the two groups, but at least Fatah appears to be the lesser of the two evils. Few would deny that Hamas, along with Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, represents Islamic terrorism at its very worst.

Yet, just a few days after the murderous rampage in Gaza that saw Hamas thugs butchering the opposition in the streets and tossing victims off tall buildings, there’s Carter leaping to their defense. I would have hoped that long before this, Rosalynn would have found a nice little rest home for this senior, senile, citizen.

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Al Qaeda threats, big surprises, Massive Terror Attack By Judi McLeod & Sean Osborne

“Ninety days at the most” as of July 30, 2007 is the timeline predicted by counterterrorism expert Juval Aviv for an “imminent al Qaeda attack on five to seven American cities simultaneously.”

“I predict, based primarily on information that is floating in Europe and the Middle East, that an event is imminent and around the corner here in the United States. It could happen as soon as tomorrow, or it could happen in the next few months. Ninety days at the most,” said Mr. Aviv. (The Family Security Foundation, Inc., July 30, 2007).

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Ban the Burqa - and the Niqab Too By Daniel Pipes

Once-exotic forms of Muslim women's head and body garments have now become both familiar in the West and the source of fractious political and legal disputes.
The hijab (a hair-covering) is ever-more popular in Detroit but has been banned from French public schools, discouraged by the International Football Association Board, and excluded from a court in the U.S. state of Georgia.
The jilbab (a garment that leaves only the face and hands exposed) was, in a case partly argued by Tony Blair's wife, first allowed, then forbidden in an English school.

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Just say "No!" to YouTube Debates By Paul Shlichta

I breathed a sigh of relief when most of the Republican presidential hopefuls declined to participate in the next YouTube debate. I think they displayed good judgment and common sense in refusing to be inveigled into what is at best a CNN publicity scheme and at worst a ruse to force Republican candidates to display themselves in an unfavorably biased environment.

Relevance

The only valid reason for a YouTube debate, or any kind of debate, is to permit the voting public to assess the relevant qualifications of a candidate. As I wrote in a newspaper op-ed in 2000:

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House Headed Toward 'Socialized Medicine' by John Gizzi

“By the time your story appears, the U.S. House of Representatives may have taken a big step toward socialized medicine!”

So said a breathless Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) at 5:30 p.m. on August 1.  The congressman was just back from the House floor, where she called me after a day-long battle against what appeared to be inevitable enactment of SCHIP -- that is, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program -- as a permanent entitlement. 

Recalling how the program to provide health care for lower-income children was enacted in 1997 by a Republican-run Congress and run as a bloc grant to the states, Blackburn pointed out that the newly-minted SCHIP that Democrats are trying to shoehorn through the House would “make drastic changes” and make the program “a permanent entitlement costing $159.9 billion over the next ten years.”

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Stifling Spencer By Joel Mowbray

Just over 24 hours before a scheduled speech it is hosting by commentator and FPM columnist Robert Spencer, Young America's Foundation found something unexpected sitting in the FAX machine: a thinly veiled threat of a lawsuit if the group allowed the talk to happen as planned.

Near the end of the one-page missive is the rather unsubtle sentence: “Our clients have instructed us to pursue every available and appropriate legal remedy to redress any false and defamatory statements that are made at the session.”

Although YAF, which is the nation's largest conservative group catering to high school and college students, is used to campus leftists attempting to silence the right-wing speakers it helps sponsor, the apparent lawsuit threat likely came as a shock.

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The Senate's Churchill? By Kenneth R. Timmerman

Arizona Republican Senator Jon Kyl has taken a lot of knocks recently from conservatives for having teamed up with Teddy Kennedy to front for the administration’s failed immigration scheme.

But when it comes to the threat from the Islamic Republic of Iran, few members of the U.S. Senate – or of any branch of the U.S. government, for that matter – have understood or articulated the stakes so well.

Kyl believes that the United States faces no greater challenge from any single country today than from Iran. And yet, he noted in a presentation last week to the American Enterprise Institute, “Western nations react as if a nuclear armed Iran is no big deal.”

History provides a stark choice for how we can choose to deal with the Iranian threat, Kyl said. It’s either the 1930s, or the 1980s.

“During the run up to World War II, Europe failed to heed the warnings” coming from Germany and from Western leaders such as Winston Churchill, Kyl reminded AEI.

Hitler was explicit about his intentions. So are Iran’s current leaders.

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Asia's brown clouds 'warm planet' :: BBC News

Clouds of pollution over the Indian Ocean appear to cause as much warming as greenhouse gases released by human activity, a study has suggested.

US researchers used unmanned aircraft to measure the effects of the "brown clouds" on the surrounding area.

Writing in Nature, they said the tiny particles increased the solar heating of the lower atmosphere by about 50%.

The warming could be enough to explain the retreat of glaciers in the Himalayas, the scientists proposed.

The clouds contain a mixture of light absorbing aerosols and light scattering aerosols, which cause the atmosphere to warm and the surface of the Earth to cool.

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The Talk-O-Sphere: Why the Empire is Striking Back with the Fairness Doctrine By Richard Miniter

With all the fuss about the power of the blogosphere, influential talk radio hosts and their loyal audiences remain a thorn in the side of the political and media establishment. PJM Washington editor Richard Miniter takes the pulse of talk radio and finds it going strong - too strong for some.

It’s pushing 1 a.m. at an East Side smoke-easy called Merchants NY, when Steve Gill tells me why he is delighted that he lost his race for Congress in 1994.
With another 800 votes he would have won, but, he says, Tennessee would have lost. “If I was sitting in Congress right now, Tennessee would have an income tax,” he said.

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Washington Post, Newsweek Misrepresent Islamists as ‘Moderates’ By Steven Emerson

Continuing in its efforts to help sanitize radical Muslims and present them as mainstream voices, the Washington Post and Newsweek, in their “On Faith” blog, published a piece from long-time Imam of the Islamic Society of Orange County, Muzammil Siddiqi.

“On Faith” describes Siddiqi as involved in “inter-faith initiatives, including participation in an inter-faith prayer service with President George W. Bush” and as the “Chairman of the Fiqh Council of North America, a body tasked with interpreting religious law throughout the continent.” (For more information on the pro-terrorism background of the Fiqh Council, read, “The American Islamic Leaders' 'Fatwa' is Bogus").

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CAIR threatens Young America’s Foundation, seeks to stifle Robert Spencer by Bryan :: Hot Air

Noted author, Hot Air contributor/host and jihad watcher Robert Spencer is scheduled to speak before a gathering of the Young America’s Foundation in Washington on Thursday. CAIR, whose spokesman Ibrahim Hooper defamed Spencer on CNN Tuesday night, has issued a demand via its lawyers that YAF cancel the speech or “ensure that false and defamatory statements are not disseminated at that session.” Here’s the letter from CAIR’s lawyers to YAF.

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Mexico's Role in Border Agents Case Still in Question By Fred Lucas

A House panel Tuesday tried to determine whether the Mexican government had played any role in the politically explosive prosecution to two U.S. Border Patrol agents but was not able to reach any conclusions due to the absence of Justice Department and Homeland Security officials from the hearing.
Only State Department officials responded to invitations from a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee probing the prosecution of Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, who were sentenced to 11 and 12 years in prison respectively for shooting a Mexican drug smuggler near the international border and covering it up.
The case has sparked a national outrage, largely because federal prosecutors sought out the wounded man, Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, in Mexico, then offered him immunity in exchange for his testimony in court against the agents.

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Pro-Ayatollah Disinformation and Manipulation Campaign by Washington Think Tankers By Hassan Daoleslam

The policy of United States on Iran over the past decade has been amalgamated with confusion and shortsightedness. This is not accidental. A key factor in shaping this policy has been a disinformation campaign by the pro-Iranian circles. A leading champion of this propaganda crusade is the Council for Foreign Relations (CFR) and Dr. Ray Takeyh. Dr. Takeyh is a senior fellow at CFR and has testified frequently at various congressional committees and has appeared in numerous media venues. Takeyh until early 2000s was an ardent opponent of engagement with Iran but surprisingly became a strong advocate of rapprochement policy. As a leading figure of the pro-Iranian regime circles in the US, Dr. Takeyh has systematically and with no accountability distorted the reality of the Iranian political situation. He has selectively changed the facts and fabricated new ones. Along with acquaintances and peers such as his wife Susan Maloney (who until a short while ago held the important position of Iran policy planner staff in the State Department[1, 2]) and Richard Haas the president of the CFR, has influenced the United States policy on Iran.

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Go Joe !!

Joseph2008

[H/T Theo Spark]

Link to site

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Hillary Clinton’s Wellesley Thesis :: GOPublius

GOPublius has obtained a copy of Hillary Rodham’s senior thesis at Wellesley College. It is entitled:

“There is only one fight …” an analysis of the Alinsky Model

Although I have no ‘loving wife’ to thank for keeping the children away while I wrote, I do have many friends and teachers who have contributed to the process of thesis-writing.

We have not had a chance to review the thesis and will do so today. Regardless, we wanted to post this as soon as possible to share with our readers.  Hillary is running for President and it is important to be familiar with her beliefs.  This document was hidden from public view during her husband’s presidency - an apparent favor to the Clintons from contacts at Wellesley College - and interest in the thesis fell when Bill Clinton left office.  Now with Hillary a top Democratic candidate for President, this document is once again generating considerable interest.

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Satire: Bridge Collapses - Women and Minorities Hardest Hit by John Bambenek

The I-35 westbound bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed, sending rush hour traffic tumbling into the river below. Rescue crews rapidly descended on the location only to be blocked by the media and onlookers stumbling over one another to get the best pictures of the carnage to upload to YouTube.

Back in Washington, DC the rush to find someone to blame has already begun. Taking to the floor of the Senate, Senator Dick Durbin said, "You would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings." Senator Kerry blamed Republican politics saying, "What you see here is a harvest of four years of complete avoidance of real problem-solving and real governance in favor of spin and ideology."

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GOP resolution rejects amnesty for illegals By Ralph Z. Hallow

State Republican officials from across the country on Thursday will formally break with the desire of President Bush and other top Republican leaders to include amnesty and other benefits for illegal aliens in immigration-reform legislation.

So far, 47 members of the 168-member Republican National Committee have signed a resolution that unequivocally opposes the Bush-backed policy that would grant legal residency to millions of illegal aliens.

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Our transhumanist future By Maggie Gallagher

The legendary Swedish filmmaker, who wrestled all of his artistic life with the core realities of sex and death, finally succumbed to the latter on the Isle of Faro at the ripe old age of 89.

Like many great artists, Bergman was an avatar of his age -- the period when the Enlightenment Project penetrated deep into the upper middle class mainstream mind, the heyday of Freud and Marx, when Nietzsche's signature phrase "God is dead" hit the cover of Time magazine. In the movies made by this son of a Lutheran pastor, writes Mervyn Rothstein in The New York Times, "God is either silent or malevolent; men and women are creatures and prisoners of their desires."

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Did I Miss The ‘Hip’ Part? By Ann Coulter

CNN commentators keep telling us how young and hip the audience was for last week's YouTube Democratic debate, apparently unaware that the camera occasionally panned across the audience, which was the same oddball collection of teachers' union shills and welfare recipients you see at all Democratic gatherings.

Noticeably, Gov. Bill Richardson got the first "woo" of the debate -- the mating call of rotund liberal women -- for demanding a federal mandate that would guarantee public schoolteachers a minimum salary of $40,000.

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"Hate crimes" are simply the symptom of unassimilable diversity By Lawrence Auster

Regarding the indictment of 23-year-old Pace University student Stanislav Shmulevich for two felony counts of "Criminal Mischief in the Fourth Degree as a Hate Crime" for having placed two copies of the Koran in public toilets and attempting to flush them, leaving one of them covered in feces, the establi-cons--Robert Spencer, Mark Steyn, et al--are attacking the double standard they see at work here. They say that if the same were done to a Torah, it would not be seen as a hate crime.

I don't agree with that. If you were a Jewish student at Pace University and entered the men's room and found a Torah in a toilet covered in feces, you would feel attacked and intimidated as a Jew. The person who did it might very well be charged with a hate crime.

But hate crimes are not the issue here. They are just the surface of the problem.

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ILLEGAL ALIEN "CONTRIBUTIONS" TO THE U.S.

2006 (First Quarter) INS/FBI Statistical Report on Undocumented Immigrants

CRIME

     95 %  of Warrants in LOS ANGELES are for ILLEGAL ALIENS

     83 %  of Warrants for MURDER in Phoenix Arizona are FOR ILLEGAL ALIENS

     86 %  of Warrants for MURDER in Albuquerque New Mexico are for ILLEGAL ALIENS

     75 %  of those on the most wanted list in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Albuquerque are ILLEGAL ALIENS

     24.9 % OF ALL INMATES  in California detention centers are Mexican Nationals here ILLEGALLY

     40.1 % of all inmates in Arizona detention centers are Mexican Nationals here ILLEGALLY

     29 % (630,000) Convicted ILLEGAL ALIENS felons fill our state and federal prisons at the cost of $1.5 Billion Annually

     53 % Plus of all investigated burglaries reported in California, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and Texas are perpertrated by ILLEGAL ALIENS

     50 % Plus of all gang members in Los Angeles are ILLEGAL ALIENS

     71 % Plus of all apprehended Cars stolden in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California were stolden by ILLEGAL ALIENS  or "Transport Coyotes "

     47 % of cited / stopped Drivers in California have NO License, NO Insurance, and NO Registration for the vehicle of that 47 %,  over  92 % were ILLEGAL ALIENS

     63 % of cited / stopped Drivers in Arizona have NO License, NO Insurance, and NO Registration for the vehicle of that 63 %, over 97 % are ILLEGAL ALIENS

     66 % of cited / stopped Drivers in New Mexico have NO License, NO Insurance, and NO Registration  for the vehicle Of that 66 %, over  98 % were ILLEGAL ALIENS

BIRTHS

380,000 Plus "ANCHOR BABIES" were born in the U.S. in 2005 to ILLEGAL ALIEN PARENTS, making 380,000 babies automatically U.S. Citizens  97.2% of all costs incurred from those births were paid for by American taxpayers. 

66 % OF all births in California are to illegal alien Mexicans on Medi-Cal whose births were paid by taxpayers

HOUSING

    300,000 plus illegal aliens in Los Angeles Country are living in garages

     Nearly 60 % of all occupants of HUD properties in the United States  are illegal aliens.

TV & RADIO STATIONS

14 out of 31 TV stations in L.C. are Spanish only16 out of 28 TV stations in Phoenix are Spanish only

15 out of 24 TV stations in Albuquerque are Spanish only 

21 radio stations in Los Angeles are Spanish only

17 radio stations in Los Angeles are Spanish only 

17 radio stations in Albuquerque are Spanish only

SCHOOLS

34% plus of Arizona students in grades 1-12 are illegal aliens and 24% plus are non-English speaking

39% plus of California students in grades 1-12 are illegal aliens and 42% plus are non-English speaking

In Los Angeles County, 5.1 million people speak English - 3.9 million speak Spanish

SOCIAL SERVICES

      43 % of all Food Stamps issued are to illegal aliens

      41 % of all Unemployment Checks in the United States  are to illegal aliens

      58 % of all Welfare payments in the United States are issued to illegal aliens

      Less than 2 % of illegal aliens  are picking crops but 41 % are on welfare

POPULATION

     Over 70% of the U.S. annual population growth (and over 90% of CA, FL, and NY) results from immigration

EMPLOYER PROFITS

     The estimated profit to U.S. corporations and businesses employing illegal aliens in 2005 was more than 2.36 trillion

TAXES

62 % of all "undocumented immigrants" in the U.S. are working for cash and not paying taxes, predominantly illegal aliens are working without a green card

The cost of immigration to the American taxpayer in 1997 (last known calculation by Professor Donald Huddle, Rice University) was a NET (after subtracting taxes immigrants pay), $70 Billion per year.  [What are the 2006 costs?]

The lifetime fiscal impact (taxes paid minus services used) for the average illegal alien is $55,000 cost to the American taxpayer in a 5-year span.  You personally pay $11,000 every year to illegal aliens.

JOBS (per Center for Immigration Studies - September 2006): Between 2000 and 2005, 4.1 million immigrant workers arrived in the U.S., accounting for 86% of the net inrease in the total number of employed persons (16 & older), the highest share ever recorded in the U.S. Of the 4.1 million, between 1.4 and 2.7 million are estimated to be illegal aliens.  Also, between 2000 and 2005, the number of young (16 to 34) native-born men employed declined by 1.7 million - at the same time, the number of new male immigrant workers increased by 1.9 million. [Do you still believe the gov't employment rate stats?]

ACTION: Please share this data with elected officials, particularly those who spew the PCBS about all the "contributions of illegal aliens to our society" AND "our economy would collapse without them"!  However, NONE of this will matter IF our borders are not secured OR Pres. Bush succeeds in abolishing them (via his SPP, NAU, NAFTA Hwy), and illegal alien murders, drug smugglers and terrorists continue to be welcomed into our country

[H/T Michael Savage]

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CAIRing School Districts by: Matt Hadro

When the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals declared unconstitutional the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, some Americans bemoaned the fact that their country founded upon religious freedom was fast becoming atheistic.

The same court could now be touted as an Islamic force. Atheists are no longer getting the special treatment, in certain schools anyway. Allah is “what’s up” now.

If the increasing slant by the media and special interest groups towards militant Islam today is not enough proof, several public schools throughout the nation have exposed their own thoughts on the problem. In legal war of attrition, parents of students in a California school district eventually lost authority over the education of their own children to the 9th Circuit Court.

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The Finger-Pointing Game of the MSM: Islamic Terror Not So Bad If We Do Nothing :: Foehammer's Anvil

This story disgusts me. MSM reporters are fanning the flames of doubt around the horrific events that lead to the Beslan Massacre, conveniently forgetting that if it wasn’t for the Islamic terrorists taking all those children hostage in the first place, more than 200 of them would be alive today!

From the AP, Video reopens debate over Beslan attack:

A video that remained secret for nearly three years after the horrific Beslan hostage crisis has cast new doubt on official conclusions about what led to the deaths of 334 people, more than half of them children, during one of Russia’s worst terrorist attacks.

The footage is far from definitive, but appears to lend credence to the theory that security forces bear at least some of the blame for the high death toll.

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The Putin Jugend by Reuben F. Johnson

MOST OF US REMEMBER the joke from the famous Robin Williams film Good Morning, Vietnam.

"Here's Airman Adrian Cronauer with a little riddle for you. What's the difference between the army and the cub scouts? Ahhhnnn. Cub scouts don't have heavy artillery."

Su-27s fly in formation above the Nashi campgrounds.

The latest incarnation of the scouts in Russia does not have its own artillery--not yet, anyway--but they did have several Russian Air Force (VVS) jets at their disposal this past week. A flight of six Sukhoi Su-27 fighters--part of the VVS's demonstration team--performed Tuesday for thousands of members of the youth group Nashi. The occasion was the group's annual summer outdoor camp at Lake Seliger, a site some 350 kilometers from Moscow.

The Nashi summer camp has now been turned into campaign stop and political pulpit for major figures in the Russian government--hence the willingness of the powers-that-be in the Kremlin to spend the hundreds of thousands of dollars it cost to put on the Su-27 aerial display for the event.

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Confucius, Sun Tzu, and 'The People’s Liberation Army' By Lev Navrozov

Western university professors were so sure that every sage must have a Latin name that they transformed the name of the Chinese thinker Kung Fu Tzu (551-479 B.C.) into “Confucius.”

My Britannica says that he was a loner, and his teaching reminds me of Christ five centuries later. He devoted his life to relieving human beings of their sufferings and in particular, to avoiding war. As he said, “Virtue is to love human beings, and wisdom is to understand them.”

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Legal Immigration—The Bigger Problem By Edwin S. Rubenstein

Everyone is against illegal immigration (they say). Problem: legal immigration is actually the bigger problem.

How many legal immigrants enter the U.S. each year? Let me count the ways they come in! (With apologies to the poet.)

The 1990 immigration law "capped" legal immigration at 700,000 persons a year. Yet since 1990, there’ve been only two years in which legal immigration has been below that level.

In 2006, 1,266,264 people were granted legal permanent resident status. That’s a record if you exclude the post-IRCA amnesty spike of the early 1990s—which reflected the 1986 amnestying of illegal aliens already here.

In contrast, the stock of illegals in the US is growing by an estimated 500,000/year. [The Size and Characteristics of the Unauthorized Migrant Population in the U.S., by Jeffrey S. Passel, Pew Hispanic Center, 2006. PDF]

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Gentrification is Good for the Poor and Everyone Else By Richard L. Cravatts

Contrary to received wisdom among so-called progressives and community advocates, gentrification is good for poor people. A classic example of needless conflict is currently playing out in New York City.

The recent certification by New York's Department of City Planning of Columbia University's rezoning application for its plan to build a new section of its campus in West Harlem initiates a public review process that no doubt promises to be a contentious, rhetoric-filled negotiation. In fact, no sooner had Columbia University made its first public announcement then activists, both from the Harlem community and within Columbia itself, started their not unpredictable protests against expansionism, displacement, and, worst of all, the dreaded ‘gentrification' that might define Harlem's future.

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Only Christians Subject to Separation of Church and State By Sher Zieve

Who would have thought that, after the 9/11/2001 attacks on our country, all too many US citizens would run to both accept and embrace the religion of our enemy attackers? But, that is precisely what has happened. Since 9/11, Muslims throughout the US have demanded - and received - all manner of special privileges; from intimidating businesses into accommodating Muslim prayer rooms to said businesses setting aside portions of the workday for them to engage in prayer. Note: Suffice it to say, Christian prayer has been banned in the workplace and schools - for decades. The ACLU saw to that. But, the same ACLU that bans Christian practices hypocritically - perhaps illegally - either ignores or embraces special accommodations for Islam. Christian prayers - even non-denominational - have been forbidden in school classrooms and the workplace. But, everything Islam is being increasingly accommodated and adopted. Christmas has been branded "taboo" by public school administrators. But, the Islamic celebration of Ramadan is not only being instilled in an increasing number of public schools but, has even been celebrated at the White House.

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Small Talk By Lisa Fabrizio

The big news this week is that leading GOP presidential candidates are prepared to just say no to CNN's September edition of its YouTube debate series. In the aftermath of last week's unutterably awful display of what passes for modern political debate in our country, this is a most welcome and commonsensical development. In addition to the most obviously embarrassing aspects of the Democrat debate -- animated snowmen, phony rednecks, and a host of other wannabes eager for their 15 minutes of fame -- was the inordinate amount of video-questions posed by young, MTV-types.

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Democrats Gut Earmark Reform by Phil Kerpen

Earmark reform was supposed to be one of the top priorities for the new Democratic majorities.  Unfortunately the story of earmark reform has been apparent public victories for transparency and accountability, followed by behind-the-scenes retrenchment to allow business-as-usual to continue.  In the House we saw the spectacle of Democrats trying to circumvent their earmark rules by moving all earmarks into conference, an effort that House conservatives defeated.  In the Senate, however, earmark reform rules, although passed unanimously, have failed to take effect at all.  Yesterday the House voted overwhelmingly to pass a lobbying bill that included Senate earmark reforms, but this apparent victory is actually a major setback for earmark reformers.

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Human Events editor Jed Babbin talks about his book, "In the Words of Our Enemy."

 

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Ulrich Mühe, RIP By Jacob Laksin

If the name Ulrich Mühe means little to you, you’re not the only one. The German actor, who died last week at the tragically young age of 54, was little known outside of his native country. And while that began to change with the release of Lives of Others, a deeply poignant film about life in Communist East Germany in which Mühe played the starring role, he never acquired a fame commensurate with his outsized talents. Even so, Mühe deserves to be remembered, both for his contributions to film and, perhaps more important, to the historical memory of the Communist era that the Lives of Others will do much to mold.

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Illegal Aliens Declare War on the United States By Douglas MacKinnon

While the current administration, as well as Democrats and Republicans in Congress, focus on the war on terror and the war in Iraq, a greater real-time threat to our way of life and the rule of law in the United States, is manifesting itself just down the road a bit from the White House and the Capitol building . In Prince William Country, Virginia, illegal aliens have just basically declared war on the county, law and order, and the very livelihood of innocent Americans. They have done so, and no one in Washington really seems to care.

In the upside down world that is now our nation, these illegal aliens are outraged that the county is now trying to stem their overwhelming influx and the crushing burden their mass migration imposes on already strained county services. As hard as it may be to believe, these illegal aliens and their supporters, have become so enraged that the county is trying to uphold the law, that they have decided to attack the county on a number of levels.

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Unwelcome Internet Guests by Jonathan V. Last

"An ambitious private initiative to help American Internet service providers (ISPs) identify jihadist websites they are unwittingly hosting was unveiled the other day in Washington. The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) will lend its translation capabilities and the expertise of its Islamist Website Monitor Project to any ISP that wants to investigate the content of a suspicious foreign-language site. MEMRI president Yigal Carmon expects that ISPs will voluntarily shut down extremist sites once the providers realize what inflammatory material the sites contain.

The goal is to significantly disrupt the jihadists' use of the Internet to spread their ideology, their explosives know-how, and their recruitment propaganda worldwide. It's a daunting task: The Economist reports that the number of terrorist websites has gone from 'a handful in 2000 to several thousand today.' What makes it doable, Carmon says, is the fact that the majority of extremist websites are hosted by ISPs in the United States."

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Our Country Our Borders! :: Ironic Surrealism II

Sheriff Joe Arpaio is once again taking the illegal alien matter into his own hands.

Sheriff Joe, I salute you!

Sheriff Won’t End Hot Line on Migrants

PHOENIX — The county sheriff said he won’t disconnect a hot line he created for people to report information about illegal immigrants that has been decried as promoting ethnic profiling.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio stressed Wednesday that deputies would investigate people only if authorities had probable cause.

The hot line began last Friday and has received about 300 messages, which include tips about family and friends, employment, day laborers, houses where smugglers drop illegal immigrants, and crank calls.

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Help me Rwanda! By Joseph Farah

"Rwanda abolishes death penalty."

The headline caught my eye.

Some 13 years after the government of Rwanda sparked the genocide of some 800,000 mostly Christian ethnic Tutsis, a new government had, in a remarkable act of "compassion," prohibited the execution of any of those found legally responsible for those deaths.

It is as if the madness in Rwanda has never stopped – not completely.

But this particular strain of madness is not native to Rwanda. Those promoting the abolition of the death penalty in Rwanda belong to the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it the U.N. that sat on its hands while 800,000 people were butchered over a period of weeks, most with machetes?

Am I the only one who finds irony in the U.N.'s latest "resolution" of Rwanda's problems – the blocking of justice for the killers?

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The founders of modern conservatism Part 5 Fred Hutchison

 Prior to 1600 A.D., much of what we now regard as conservative ideas was taken for granted by most people of the West. Although some counter-cultural ideas emerged during the late Medieval and Renaissance eras, they had no long-term historical traction. In the last essay (part 4), we considered how leading Western philosophers during the period 1600–1800 A.D. undercut rational metaphysics and faith and promoted a destructive skepticism — thereby setting the stage for a rising liberal tide and a long-term cultural decline after 1800 A.D.
During the same period, a series of great men laid the foundations of modern conservatism. Although Western conservative principles and ideals are ancient, as outlined in parts 1–3 of this series, new foundations were needed to ensure a tough and resilient conservatism that could weather the intellectual, moral, and spiritual storms of modernity, and which could be a robust competitor of liberalism. This essay (part 5) is about a few of the founders of modern conservatism who lived from 1600–1800.

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ACLU sides with gangs :: ONUB

Fed up with deadly drive-by shootings, incessant drug dealing and graffiti, cities nationwide are trying a different tactic to combat gangs: They’re suing them. Fort Worth and San Francisco are among the latest to file lawsuits against gang members, asking courts for injunctions barring them from hanging out together on street corners, in cars or anywhere else in certain areas.

The injunctions are aimed at disrupting gang activity before it can escalate. They also give police legal reasons to stop and question gang members, who often are found with drugs or weapons, authorities said. In some cases, they don’t allow gang members to even talk to people passing in cars or to carry spray paint. “It is another tool,” said Kevin Rousseau, a Tarrant County assistant prosecutor in Fort Worth, which recently filed its first civil injunction against a gang. “This is more of a proactive approach.”

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The Martyrs No One Cares About By Michelle Malkin

The blood of innocent Christian missionaries spills on Afghan sands. The world watches and yawns. The United Nations offers nothing more than a formal expression of "concern." Where is the global uproar over the human rights abuses unfolding before our eyes?

For two weeks, a group of South Korean Christians has been held hostage by Taliban thugs in Afghanistan. This is the largest group of foreign hostages taken in Afghanistan since Operation Enduring Freedom began in 2001. What was their offense? Were they smuggling arms into the country? No. Inciting violence? No. They were peaceful believers in Christ on short-term medical and humanitarian missions. Seventeen of the 23 hostages are females. Most of them are nurses who provide social services and relief.

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The Hinge of Fate in Iraq By Tony Blankley

On June 25, the following resolution was tabled in the House:

"That this House, while paying tribute to the heroism and endurance of the Armed Forces, in circumstances of exceptional difficulty, has no confidence in the central direction of the war."

That would be June 25, 1942. The House would be the House of Commons in London, England. And the government in which no confidence was expressed was that of Winston Churchill.

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Rush Limbaugh Hails the People Cube's Editorial Cartoon By Red Square

Attention workers, peasants, and toiling unwashed intelligentsia! On Monday, July 30, 2007 our Party Organ was spotted by Rush Limbaugh, the biggest neo-imperialist criminal capitalist running dog of them all. The notorious author of See I Told You So described our "Founding Fathers" illustration by saying "It's a great, great, great cartoon because this is how libs see America today." See it here: Story #7: Great Editorial Cartoon on the Founding Fathers. He thought it was a parody!

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Kos And Effect For Democrats :: IBD

They won't debate on Fox News. They won't appear at the meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council. But they will grovel at the convention of a hate-filled Web site. This should tell voters all they need to know.

Sen. Hillary Clinton didn't show up at the DLC's meeting in Tennessee over the weekend. Neither did the rest of the Democratic field, including John Edwards, Barack Obama, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden and the legendary Dennis Kucinich.

But with the courageous exception of Biden, they all will be at this week's Yearly Kos convention in Chicago, mum about their tacit endorsement of a blog site that raises hate speech to an art form.

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Hitch vs. CAIR, Part 1 : Dennis Prager, Part 2

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Secular Turkey Is Becoming a Thing of the Past By Ron Coody

For those who follow Middle Eastern affairs, the recent election in Turkey probably got their attention. It certainly got the attention of lots of Turks, with nearly 80% of the electorate turning out for the specially called vote. The election saga started in the spring when the ruling secular elite threw out the AK party’s candidate for president on the grounds that the parliament lacked a quorum. A new election was called to reelect the parliament, with the secularists hoping to gain some seats and weaken the pro-Islamic AK party. The secularists failed…miserably.

The AK party won 46% of the vote, the largest majority any party has one since the late ‘60’s. Because of the way Turkey ’s democracy is set up, the AK party though winning a larger share of the popular vote did however lose a few seats in parliament. It matters little. With such a huge show of popular support for them and a shrinking show of support for the secular party of Turkey ’s founder Ataturk, the AK party has a green light to proceed basically in any direction it likes.

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Why the News Media Is Not Telling Us the Truth About Islamofascism By Peter Feaman

The Unspoken Alliance Between Islamofascists and the American Left

The misreporting and unwillingness of the mainstream media to tell us the truth about the war against Islamofascism begins with the premise that the mainstream media are leftist and overwhelmingly Democrat. As a result, the press and broadcast media are dually incentivized to misreport or negatively report the truth about the war on Islamofascism.

The Premise: The mainstream media are very left, very Democrat and very out of touch with mainstream America.

Who are the mainstream media?

(a) The print media.

For the purposes of this discussion, the mainstream print media include such newspapers as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlanta Constitution, the editorial boards of just about every American newspaper in the United States and weekly journals such as Time and Newsweek.

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Ethanol Scam: Ethanol Hurts the Environment And Is One of America's Biggest Political Boondoggles By JEFF GOODELL

The great danger of confronting peak oil and global warming isn't that we will sit on our collective asses and do nothing while civilization collapses, but that we will plunge after "solutions" that will make our problems even worse. Like believing we can replace gasoline with ethanol, the much-hyped biofuel that we make from corn.

Ethanol, of course, is nothing new. American refiners will produce nearly 6 billion gallons of corn ethanol this year, mostly for use as a gasoline additive to make engines burn cleaner. But in June, the Senate all but announced that America's future is going to be powered by biofuels, mandating the production of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022. According to ethanol boosters, this is the beginning of a much larger revolution that could entirely replace our 21-million-barrel-a-day oil addiction. Midwest farmers will get rich, the air will be cleaner, the planet will be cooler, and, best of all, we can tell those greedy sheiks to fuck off. As the king of ethanol hype, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, put it recently, "Everything about ethanol is good, good, good."

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Good news, bad news :: Center For Security Policy

There was some good news and some bad news last week in the struggle to preserve Western civilization from the insidious efforts of Islamofascists to penetrate, adulterate, and ultimately destroy it.  

First, some of the positive developments:

• Over the strenuous objections of Democratic leaders in both the House and Senate, the U.S. Congress approved legislation championed by Rep. Peter King and Senators Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins to protect actual and potential "John Does" – people who do their civic duty by warning law enforcement authorities about suspicious activity that might involve terrorism.

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Lieberman escalates attack on Iraq critics By Manu Raju

Ever since Connecticut Democrats refused to back him for a fourth term in Congress, Joe Lieberman has been burnishing his independent credentials in the narrowly divided Senate while becoming increasingly critical of the Democratic Party on the war in Iraq.

Lieberman, the Democrats’ 2000 vice presidential nominee, insists he is not actively considering joining the Republican Party. But he is keeping that possibility wide open as his disenchantment grows with Democratic leaders. The main sticking points are their attempts to end the war in Iraq and their hesitation to take a harder line against Iran.

“I think either [Democrats] are, in my opinion, respectfully, naïve in thinking we can somehow defeat this enemy with talk, or they’re simply hesitant to use American power, including military power,” Lieberman said in a wide-ranging interview with The Hill.

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Spectacular Video from Croatian Meteorite in July 2007

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FairTax Issue Gains Strength With Presidential Candidates :: Breitbart

WASHINGTON, July 31 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The FairTax, a proposal to replace the federal income tax system with a progressive national sales tax, is gaining strength with presidential candidates with five of eight GOP candidates and one Democratic candidate promising to "sign it into law" if passed by Congress.

"At campaign stops in the early primary states of South Carolina, Iowa, and Florida as well as elsewhere in the nation, FairTax supporters are visible, vocal, and insistent," said FairTax spokesman Ken Hoagland. "We are halfway through a 25-city bus tour in Iowa, have held 10,000-person rallies in South Carolina and Florida, and saw 5,000 people turned away by the fire marshal in Atlanta last year," said Hoagland.

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Liberals Ratchet Up the Violence Meter By Tom Brewton

Christopher Hitchins and Richard Dawkins, in their violent attacks on spiritual religion, sound very much like Adolph Hitler and Joseph Goebbels.
Herr Hitler and his propaganda minister needed a scape goat to explain the collapse of German militarism in World War I and the German Empire's wallowing into fecklessness under the socialist Weimar Republic. As the world knows to its sorrow, they found the scape goat.
Messrs. Hitchins and Dawkins see a terribly disordered world that they blame upon religion. Mr. Hitchins, in god is not Great, repeats every few pages: "Religion poisons everything." Mr. Dawkins, in The Blind Watchmaker, wrote:
It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet someone who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).

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A failed study of academic ideology :: A Western Heart

A study published late last year by sociologists John F. Zipp and Rudy Fenwick under the heading "Is the Academy a Liberal Hegemony? The Political Orientations and Educational Values of Professors" has got a fair bit of attention. It is a rather desperate attempt to deny the obvious -- that American university and college teachers are overwhelmingly Leftist.

They concede that party identification runs 7 to 1 in favour of Democrats among professors but argue that this does not adequately reflect ideology. Conservatives would certainly agree with that -- seeing professors as much more extreme Leftists than most Democrat voters are. That is the WRONG conclusion, however, according to the zippy one. He and his friend in fact argue that a lot of those academic Democrats are really centrists!

The study has been thoroughly shot down on a number of grounds by others (e.g. here and here) but I thought I should have a look at it nonetheless. I spent 20 years or so trying to measure people's political attitudes as precisely as possible and have over 100 academic journal articles in print reporting on the results of that. So the research concerned really is in my line of country. I thought I might be able to see defects that others have missed.

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Barbara Walters Funds U.N. Lobby Group By Cliff Kincaid

It is fascinating to watch how our liberal media treat the Bush Administration on foreign policy matters. The bias against its Iraq War policy has been phenomenal. But when the administration moves in the direction of abandoning an assertive U.S. foreign policy and relying more heavily on international institutions and other nations to solve problems, the coverage turns cordial and extremely supportive. Such is the case with the administration's push for ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

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Liberty, not Equality, for All :: GOPublius

The concept of liberty manifests itself in the exercise of our free-will. Our country was founded to protect, enhance and preserve the free-will of its citizenry. Since the depression, however, the Democrats and leftists in this country have been killing liberty with every social programs conceived to expand “equality”.  Liberty and equality, with the notable exception of the moment of creation, are often mutually exclusive, and the acceptance of ”equality-based” policies is slowly killing liberty.

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An Administration LOST at Sea By Doug Bandow

Once the scourge of goo-goo internationalism, the Bush administration is now desperate to appease the United Nations crowd, Europeans, and "transies," as the transnational progressives, or NGO gaggle, is called. The president's latest concession is pushing the Law of the Sea Treaty, appropriately known as LOST.

Needless to say, all of the wrong people are excited at the prospect of American ratification of LOST, after a more than three decade long struggle. Those who oppose the inevitable LOST victory will show themselves to be "part of an extreme out-of-touch minority," said one happy treaty advocate.

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The Death of Sweden By Fjordman

I still get questions as to why I, being Norwegian, write more about Sweden than I do about my own country. First of all: I do write about Norway sometimes. And second of all: If you look at capital cities alone, Oslo could quite possibly be the worst city in Scandinavia. However, in virtually all other respects, Sweden is worse. And yes, it is every bit as bad as I say it is.

The primary reason why I write so much about Sweden is because it is the most totalitarian country in the Western world, and should thus serve as a warning to others. The second reason is that Sweden, like my own country, now needs some "tough love." Too many Swedes still cling on to the myth of the "Swedish model" while their country is disintegrating underneath their feet. If Sweden the nation is to be saved – if it still can be saved, I'm not so sure – then Sweden the ideological beacon for mankind must be smashed, because vanity now blocks sanity.

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Clarity for America: The "Waves of Hate" Lie By Erik Rush

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is that as many Americans as possible become familiar with the following modus operandi, its fallacy and the truth behind why it exists in the first place.

In an article published on July 22, 2007 by the Washington Times entitled “Hispanic group aims to stop ‘wave of hate’ ”, writer Stephen Dinan illustrated, whether by design or not, an insidious but fairly common practice by ethnic advocacy groups.

“The nation's largest Hispanic advocacy group says it must come up with a strategy to combat ‘a wave of hate’ its leaders say came from talk radio's efforts to sink the Senate's immigration bill.

“’That had an extraordinary impact in the Senate, and as a nation, I don't think we should be comfortable with the fact that the United States Senate responded to what was largely a wave of hate,’ Cecilia Munoz, the National Council of La Raza's senior vice president for research, advocacy and legislation…

“… ‘what is motivating the actions of the United States Congress is not really about the public-policy debate, but is about their discomfort with Latinos.’” – Washington Times article

Intellectually dishonest? At the very least. But most propaganda usually is blatantly so.

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Is Immigration Really an "All American" Idea? By Warner Todd Huston

The plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty sums up the general assumption most people have about where immigration fits into American principles. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore," the famously inscribed tablet goes. "Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

For most people that about settles it. We are a "nation of immigrants." It's as American as baseball and apple pie. Not very long ago, I made this very claim in a discussion about the anchor baby issue. It seemed to me that since this was a nation of immigrants, we couldn't be intellectually honest and exclude people of foreign birth from having their children born on US soil being given automatic citizenship as set forth under the 14th Amendment. It was a natural assumption to make, but not one entirely informed. It was a matter that several letter writers quickly took me to school for seeking to disabuse me of my naive notions.

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The Cult of Global Warming By Don Feder

Global warming has become the apocalyptic cult of the new millennium. None of the other jeremiahs, throughout the ages, can hold an end-of-the-world candle to ozone-layer mystics prophesying climate Armageddon.

I just came across the ultimate Al Gore coffee table book, "The World Tomorrow: Scenarios of Global Catastrophe" by Yannick Monget.

On the jacket, the author is described as "the founder and chief representative of the Ankaa Group, an organization dedicated to conceiving and developing ambitious projects for the environmental protection of Europe."

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Orwellian Logic at the U.N. By Herb London

In George Orwell’s novel 1984, the protagonists in the totalitarian society employed “newspeak,” the inversion of words to create false meaning. “War is peace,” “good is bad,” “moral is immoral” are merely a few of the possible inversions.

While Orwell passed this mortal coil years ago, his notion of false meaning is alive and well and residing in the United Nations.

In fact, there is scarcely a sentence uttered at this institution that isn’t Orwellian. Human rights, for example, the hallmark of U.N. efforts does nothing to promote these rights. The commission organized to promote this goal is composed of the most serious violators of freedom.

 

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Why "Islamophobia" Is a Brilliant Term By Dennis Prager

What do anti-Semitism, racism and Islamophobia have in common?

In fact, nothing.

But according to Islamist groups, Western media and the United Nations, they have everything in common. Anti-Semites hate all Jews, racists hate all members of another race, and Islamophobes hates all Muslims.

Whoever coined the term "Islamophobia" was quite shrewd. Notice the intellectual sleight of hand here. The term is not "Muslim-phobia" or "anti-Muslimist," it is Islam-ophobia -- fear of Islam -- yet fear of Islam is in no way the same as hatred of all Muslims. One can rightly or wrongly fear Islam, or more usually, aspects of Islam, and have absolutely no bias against all Muslims, let alone be a racist.

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The Upcoming Presidential Election Should Be All About The Supreme Court for Social Conservatives By John Stemberger

We are in big trouble. Whether you consider the historical cycle of presidential elections; the results of the 2006 election; the mood of the country; or the unfavorable ratings of the President, the odds are that conservatives will have our heads handed to us on a silver platter in 2008. Unless our movement gets its act together quickly and gets on the same page, one thing is for sure-- we are in big trouble.

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Haditha Marine father Darryl Sharratt describes his phone call with Congressmen Murtha :: Pundit Review

Congressman John Murtha finally got around to taking a call from the father of one of the accused Marines in the so-called Haditha Massacre. The Marine is Lance Cpl. Justin Sharratt and his father, Darryl Sharatt, made 53 phone calls over 18 months, before getting a return call. Mr. Sharrat is a resident of Congressman Murtha’s district. That’s right. Murtha is his congressional representative.

Darryl got emotional talking about how his son’s desire to be a career Marine had been ruined. He wants Murtha to be held accountable but he’s realistic about the chances of an official reprimand from Congress (ed. note: that he so richly deserves). His frustration is understandable,

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Hugh Hewitt :: New York Times Pulitzer Prize winner John Burns on Iraq

HH: Pleased to welcome back to the Hugh Hewitt Show John Burns of the New York Times. Mr. Burns, welcome, it’s been about six months since we spoke, and I gather you’re in Baghdad today?

JB: I am indeed.

HH: How long have you been back in Baghdad?

JB: About three months. We take long rotations here, and then we reward ourselves with nice long breaks back home in the United States, or in my case, in the United Kingdom.

HH: Well, there are three things I want to cover with you today, Mr. Burns. Where are we now in Iraq, in your view? Secondly, where Iraq might be in a couple of years, depending on a couple of developments that the United States might enact? And then finally, in hindsight, what we did right and what we did wrong over the last four years. But let’s start with what you see in Baghdad today. Is the surge working?

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