IBD exclusive interview with MIT Professor of Meteorology, Dr. Richard Lindzen
We're all familiar with the politics of global warming. But what about the actual science? Is global warming real? Is man causing it? Will changing your light bulbs save the world?
Dr. Richard Lindzen, a dynamic meteorologist at MIT, joins IBD's Kerry Jackson to discuss the myths and misconceptions of climate change.
IBD Exclusive interview with Author & Columnist, Jonah Goldberg
"Fascist" is a term liberals often use to denounce Republicans and their policies. But which side really has the most in common with Fascist ideology?
Author and columnist Jonah Goldberg joins IBD's Monica Showalter to discuss the relationship between European Fascism and the politics of the American Left.
On the night of Thursday, February 21, 2008, a rabble attacked the U.S., German, British, and Croatian embassies in Belgrade, Serbia. Less than a mile away over 200,000 people, peacefully protesting against Kosovo’s declaration of independence, were praying in and around St. Sava Cathedral, completely oblivious to the violence being committed in their name. That protest was ignored; the riots commanded the world’s attention.
The embassy attacks were rightly greeted with condemnation, especially in Serbia itself. The following morning the air of Belgrade was blue with curses of ordinary Serbs damning those who had attacked the embassies and brought shame to Serbia.
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Dramatist David Mamet is a proud flip-flopper. In a Village Voice must-read, Mamet commits the bravest act known to a celebrity thinker: he changes his mind in public. No longer able to reconcile his 1960’s-born “everything is always wrong” worldview with the “rather wonderful and privileged circumstances” of American life, he has renounced his inner “brain-dead liberal.” Mamet on his moment of revelation: “We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the f__k up”.
In an aside, Mamet recalls how he once won a New Yorker contest:
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Google may eventually be displaced as the pre-eminent brand on the internet by a company that harnesses the power of next-generation web technology, the inventor of the World Wide Web has said.
The search giant had developed an extremely effective way of searching for pages on the internet, Tim Berners-Lee said, but that ability paled in comparison to what could be achieved on the "web of the future", which he said would allow any piece of information — such as a photo or a bank statement — to be linked to any other.
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"Unity is the great need of the hour. ... Not because it sounds pleasant or because it makes us feel good, but because it's the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exists in this country. I'm not talking about a budget deficit. ... I'm talking about a moral deficit. I'm talking about an empathy deficit. I'm taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother's keeper; we are our sister's keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny."
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By John W. Lillpop
Liberalism is truly a devastating mental disorder.
How else to explain the national furor that has driven liberal Democrats to devour one of their own over a benign remark made by Geraldine Ferraro?
A remark that just happens to be true?
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In all the ecstatic love-fest frenzy the left is having with Barak Obama, they have recently been invoking the mystique of «Camelot» - that storied infatuation with JFK and Jackie – and drawing a parallel.
Well, 'scuze me, but I remember JFK – and Barak… you're no Jack Kennedy! Let's look at JFK for a moment. I'll leave it to the reader to conclude whether Obama holds a candle to or resembles the late John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
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On March 12, the American Baking Association, representing 85% of the total baking industry, will lead a «Band of Bakers March on Washington.» Representatives from more than 50% of the nation's largest baking companies will call on Congress to correct the policies it has created over the years that have led to soaring food and oil prices. Not since the days of the Depression when World War I veterans marched on Washington to get their overdue benefits have we seen such an event. At stake is the ability of all Americans to afford to put food on the table.
Everyone knows that food prices have increased along with oil prices, but few people know that it is government policies that have brought the nation to a point where we are facing a wheat shortage.
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Because liberals reject the God of the Bible (as Alan Roebuck showed recently), and because they reject the idea of any inherent moral or teleological order in the universe (because if there's an inherent moral or teleological order then human beings are not free to believe and do whatever they want), for liberals the ultimate organizing principle of the universe is randomness. For liberals, randomness is the true source of apparent biological and spiritual progress, e.g., the progress from fish to frogs to reptiles to mammals to apes to primitive man to Aristotle to Jesus. And also for liberals, randomness is the true source of apparent "sin" and "crime." Thus the murders this past week of college students Eve Carson in North Carolina and Lauren Burk in Alabama have been repeatedly described by the liberal media as "seemingly random attacks," as ABC News twice described the two murders. To common sense, the usage is most strange, since "random" implies that there was no intent to commit the murders, they just happened. But of course to hold a human being up at gun point, to rob her, beat her, and shoot her dead, is not a random act in any way whatsoever. It is a most deliberate act.
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British politicians are now running away from “multiculturalism,” yet it refuses to die. It’s simply too entrenched in British life to be expunged. Conservatives might think that the Labour government has created a monster, but the truth of the matter is it has created a religion. Like Chinese State-endorsed Buddhism it is not a real religion, but a proxy that must pronounce government policy rather than spiritual understanding.
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A former librarian at Ohio State University-Mansfield who was publicly accused by the faculty of sexual harassment – just for recommending students read the best-selling book "The Marketing of Evil" by David Kupelian – has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the school and faculty members, alleging they violated his 1st and 14th Amendment rights.
The case was filed yesterday in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio by attorney Tom Condit, representing Scott Savage, a devout Quaker and former head of Reference and Instructional Services at Bromfield Library on Ohio State University's Mansfield campus.
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The Christian denomination that was so ostracized (or admired, depending on your perspective) for resisting liberal modern-day pleas to conform to contemporary culture has finally caved in on so-called "climate change."
Maybe it shouldn't surprise that the Southern Baptists have thrown in the towel on the environment. Having been beat up for so long on issues like homosexual marriage, evangelizing others' religions, and wifely submission to their husbands, they were overdue for a compromise. Sure enough some who claim to represent conservative Christians, like Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals, have baited the hook with the tempting rhetorical phrase "creation care," and apparently the Southern Baptist Convention's discernment has melted away.
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This past Saturday we celebrated. Twenty-four years ago today Edmund (Eddie) John Jeffers entered the world. One hundred and seventy-two days ago Sergeant Eddie Jeffers left his short earthly life to spend eternity with his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Eddie greatly impacted the lives of his wife, parents, siblings, and his friends throughout his life. Eddie also impacted America the last two hundred and thirty days of his life in ways that amazed him and still does those he left behind. My little boy truly became a man; a great man.
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Despite thousands of missiles being fired at Israeli cities, towns and villages, the European Union recently condemned Israel's "disproportionate use of force" and issued a communiqué urging Israel to "refrain from all activities that endanger civilians" in Gaza on the grounds that "such activities are contrary to international law.”
Earlier, Human Rights Watch issued a similar statement to the effect that civilians acting as human shields do not pose a direct threat to opposing forces and therefore retain their immunity from attack because they are not directly engaged in hostilities against an adversary. (Human Rights Watch, Backgrounder, International Humanitarian Law Issues in a Potential War in Iraq, accessed 20 February 2003).
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Right on the heels of Harvard’s capitulation to Sharia mores at its Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center, the Harvard “academic” community indulged an ideologue with much grander aspirations for implementing Sharia, UCLA Professor of Law, Khaled Abou el Fadl.
My dear friend and colleague Hillel Stavis had the morbidly fascinating experience of witnessing this pseudo-academic fraud peddle his paltry wares March 5, 2008 at Harvard’s Divinity School, during a lecture entitled, non-sequitur, “Conceptualizing Islamic Theology: Sharia and Human Rights Doctrine”
Here are Hillel Stavis’ cogent first hand observations, in his own words:
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Since the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was founded in June of 1994, the group has worked hard to conceal its true feelings about Hamas. That is, until now. Video footage taken at a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, rally against CAIR reveals its unabashed support for Hamas. If people had questions about CAIR's sympathies before, this should end all debate on the matter.
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Wafa Sultan shreds Islam and confirms what we always said: The Koran is but a terrorist teaching manual.
First we would like to highlight these excerpts, with our comments:
Wafa Sultan: Westerners who read the words of Muhammad “Allah has given me sustenance under the shadow of my sword” cannot imagine Muhammad's turban in the shape of a dove of peace rather than in the shape of a bomb.
Muslims must learn how to listen to the criticism of others, and maybe then they will reexamine their terrorist teachings (the Koran) in their hands.
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There's an old military aphorism that reminds us that "no military plan survives contact with the enemy." It can equally be said that no intellectual fad survives contact with reality. Such appeared to be the verdict rendered on one of the late 1990s silliest intellectual fads, "national greatness conservatism" as it collided with the ugly realities of policing Iraq.
Yet John McCain's ascendancy in the Republican primaries signals the idea's rebirth. Indeed, appreciating "national greatness," its impact on America's foreign policy, and McCain's affinity for it may help shed some light on what his prospective presidency could offer.
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In our journey through history, we have reached the culture war of the twentieth century that began in the 1920's and accelerated during the counter-cultural revolution of the late sixties and the sexual revolution of the seventies. The remaining installments of A Brief History of Conservatism will deal mainly with the postmodern era.
Ancient foundations of Western civilization are being destroyed by the contemporary culture. In order to understand the old foundations of civilization and culture that are now threatened by the multiculturalists, we are obliged to make one more brief visit to Ancient Greece and to the High Middle Ages.
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For more than two centuries, the political left has been preoccupied with the fate of criminals, often while ignoring or downplaying the fate of the victims of those criminals.
So it is hardly surprising that a recent New York Times editorial has returned to a familiar theme among those on the left, on both sides of the Atlantic, with its lament that "incarceration rates have continued to rise while crime rates have fallen."
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“Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.” –John Adams, in a Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, circa 1765
People have been predicting the demise of democracy, individual freedom and liberty, as well as resulting American supremacy, since the day American democracy was born. The most vastly distributed prediction has often been attributed to historian Alexander Tytler, dating back to the late 1700’s, and the prediction goes something like this:
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It is certain that the United States is in for an energy price and supply shock the likes of which we have never experienced or imagined. While high prices, to a reasonable extent can be tolerated, hell will break loose if massive supply disruptions emerge. We are much closer to them than people think. Those who think that we can conserve ourselves to energy independence need not read any further. They are vastly wrong and it is pointless to argue with them.
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It is widely reported that women suffer depression at twice the rate of men. Apparently, more women are clinically depressed than ever before.
On the assumption that these assessments are true, the question anyone interested in the subject -- which means anyone who cares about any woman -- is, why?
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Most politicians try to keep their financial backers un-indicted until after the election. But Obama’s biggest early sponsor, dual U.S.-Syrian citizen Antoin ‘Tony’ Rezko, is already indicted by a federal grand jury. Now he is going to trial in a Chicago federal court.
Rezko, along with co-defendants Ali Ata and Abdelhamid Chaib, face federal grand jury charges presented in October 2006 by the U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois, Patrick Fitzgerald. The case centers on allegations of fraud between 2000 and 2004 in the sale of 17 Papa Johns’ Pizza parlors in Detroit, Chicago and Milwaukee. The case may begin with pizza, but it leads to Europe, Syria, Iraq, and the UN Oil for Food program.
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Liberal Democrats from the North haven't had much success in recent presidential elections — not Hubert Humphrey, not George McGovern, not Walter Mondale, not Mike Dukakis and not John Kerry. Democratic Southerners — Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — have done quite a bit better.
Sen. Barack Obama, of Illinois, knows this history. So why does he think he can be the first Northern liberal Democratic president since John F. Kennedy edged out Richard Nixon almost a half-century ago?
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Is the American left religious? That depends on your definition of “religion,” and finding one that is universally agreed-upon is impossible. For our purposes here, the one by the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance (religioustolerance.org/rel_defn.htm) will suffice:
Religion is any specific system of belief about deity, often involving rituals, a code of ethics, a philosophy of life, and a worldview… Thus we would consider Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Native American Spirituality, Wicca, and other Neopagan traditions to be religions. We also include Agnosticism, Atheism, Humanism, Ethical Culture, etc. as religions, because they also contain a "belief about deity." Their belief is that they do not know whether a deity exists, or they have no knowledge of God, or they sincerely believe that God does not exist.
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Eight young men, unarmed and in the relative security of their Jerusalem yeshiva, are gunned down in cold blood. In Gaza, thousands take to the streets to celebrate. Their government encourages them to do so.
How toxic is a society when the governing party suggests celebrating a massacre of teenaged boys?
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Right on the heels of Harvard’s capitulation to Sharia mores at its Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center, the Harvard “academic” community indulged an ideologue with much grander aspirations for implementing Sharia, UCLA Professor of Law, Khaled Abou el Fadl.
My dear friend and colleague Hillel Stavis had the morbidly fascinating experience of witnessing this pseudo-academic fraud peddle his paltry wares March 5, 2008 at Harvard’s Divinity School, during a lecture entitled, non-sequitur, “Conceptualizing Islamic Theology: Sharia and Human Rights Doctrine”
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In 2005, I wrote the article 'Will Humans "PC" Themselves out of Existence?' Tragically - but predictably - today the answer appears to be an unambiguous and resounding "Yes!" The purveyors and proponents of "political correctness" have now reached the apex of their inherent goal: that of - once and for all - shutting down the truth. Note: Marx and Lenin achieved this goal faster but, it's doubtful that they could have accomplished it any better. In fact, step by step the 1963 Communist Goals for the USA have been and are continuing to be implemented daily - in the name of political correctness. The latest leftist attacks relate to telling the truth about candidates for the presidency of the United States - and one candidate in particular.
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Socialism, of which liberal-progressivism is the American sect, is more than control of the economy. Most importantly it is mind-control through the public education system.
The Washington Times reports the latest liberal-progressive-socialist curtailment of personal freedom.
"California courts have held that under provisions in the Education Code, parents do not have a constitutional right to educate their children in their own home," said the Feb. 28 ruling by the California Appellate Court for the second district.
When they wish to overrule long-standing political liberties, liberals look to precedents of so-called international law and other nations' customs. The socialist European Union, and Germany specifically, provide ammunition for abrogating educational liberties.
Why the animus of liberal courts and teachers' unions against home schooling?
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Educated people today seem to be embracing concepts that clearheaded philosophers of an earlier era would quickly recognize as lunacy. An interviewee of the San Francisco Chronicle (long known as a nationally ranked platform for less-than-brilliant comments) has recently trotted out one of the oldest, but most disturbing ideas: that the government has a more basic claim on children than parents do. In doing so, she made the following statement:
Sphere: Related Content[Leslie] Heimov [executive director of the Children's Law Center of Los Angeles] said her organization's chief concern was not the quality of the children's education, but their "being in a place daily where they would be observed by people who had a duty to ensure their ongoing safety."
"We bless the (Jerusalem) operation. It will not be the last," Hamas said in a statement following the terrorist attack at Mercaz HaRav, a Jewish yeshiva in Western Jerusalem, as candy was handed out in celebration in the Gaza Strip.
Just three days earlier, a Reuters headline on an article presenting Hamas terrorists as heroic warriors trumpeted, "Inspired by God, Hamas Fighters Battle On." Readers might have thought they were reading a PR press release by the terrorist organization meant to embolden its members and frighten the enemy.
The March 3, 2008 article by correspondent Nidal al Mughrabi conjured up images of a biblical David taking on a mighty Goliath, as it portrayed a Hamas gunman as a brave hero battling a mighty enemy. The lead paragraph began:
Sphere: Related ContentAbu Mohammed picked up his rifle, said farewell to his wife and six children and went out to face the Israeli tanks, helicopter gunships and missile-firing airborne drones.
Lisa Schiffren writing at National Review Online spells out the reality of Muslim polygamy among West African immigrants and illegal aliens in New York City. Departing from neoconservative orthodoxy, she recognizes that the people who follow such practices are not assimilable in our society; that they should be made to leave; and that if we fail to make them leave and if we fail to keep them out, then we will eventually have a population on our hands with the numbers and political power to institutionalize sharia. In Schiffren's words:
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If Washington wanted to develop a vibrant underworld of vicious criminal gangs, it couldn't do any better than the immigration system now in place. The permissiveness toward lawbreaking border-crossers combined with the pure numbers of immigrants who cannot possibly be assimilated in such bulk has created a witches' brew of crime-spawning social pathology. The worst creatures are the Hispanic gangsters who kill innocent Americans in order to illustrate aptitude for savagery.
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Reaction to my recent article disputing Barack Obama's claim that his views of abortion and infanticide don't make him "less Christian" ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous (and racist).
The pro-life Catholic mother of a deservedly famous son used a four-letter word after reading my article: "AMEN".
A New York father and grandfather shared these thoughts:
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The Washington Times reports the latest liberal-progressive-socialist curtailment of personal freedom.
"California courts have held that under provisions in the Education Code, parents do not have a constitutional right to educate their children in their own home," said the Feb. 28 ruling by the California Appellate Court for the second district.
When they wish to overrule long-standing political liberties, liberals look to precedents of so-called international law and other nations' customs. The socialist European Union, and Germany specifically, provide ammunition for abrogating educational liberties.
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Everywhere you turn, pundits and politicos are writing the obituary of the religious Right. We are told in ponderous articles that the movement is fracturing, splintering, losing momentum, losing heart, stumbling, fighting among themselves, and on the verge of falling into irrelevance. Is it true? Or is this wishful thinking on behalf of those who have always despised what the religious Right stands for? I’m not a betting man, but I am pretty sure it’s the latter.
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Enough is enough. Hillary Clinton has made history already; she has shown us that a woman can be a major presidential candidate. But as we are here living history, I'd like it to now be history.
Simply put, I don't want a woman president. Not if she's running to be a "woman president" and not the leader of the United States.
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Well, we will have Hillary Clinton to kick around some more, at least for another few weeks. The Mummy (as my radio pal Hugh Hewitt calls her) kicked open the sarcophagus door and, despite the rotting bandages dating back to Iowa, began staggering around, terrorizing folks all over again.
"She is a monster," Barack Obama adviser Samantha Power told a reporter from The Scotsman — and not a monster in a cute Loch Ness blurry, long-distance kind of way. "You just look at her and think, 'Ergh,'" continued Ms. Power, who subsequently resigned from the campaign.
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Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, does not think marching in a so-called "gay-pride parade" is a proper venue for the president of the United States.
However, one presidential candidate has made a pledge to do just that – Senator Hillary Clinton (D-New York). She says that Clinton made her pledge in the Washington Blade – a Washington newspaper serving the homosexual community. "...Really now! We've seen these gay pride parades in San Francisco and elsewhere," exclaims Donnelly. "Is this really an appropriate role for the President or the Commander in Chief of our armed forces? I don't think so..."
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Islam is one of the worlds most relentlessly polished turds.
That's along with Communism, Leftism and PC Liberalism ad nauseum. Every lame dhimmi, Leftard and PC Liberal boob seems to want to give millions of Muslims and the sliding scale of Islamist's worldwide, an eager and helping hand at giving the excremental truth of Islam, a nice spit and polish, so it comes up all shiny for presentation, like. Sadly, I find the effect is the same as rubbing Brasso on a pigs backside.
Dear sports, here's a little rundown of a cheery little book on the entirely real and stated goals of global Islam. Now, however dodgy and ineffective the FBI and CIA certainly are, and however clueless our PC authorities have turned out to be, the fact is, these really are the apocalyptic and ultimate plans of Islamists everywhere.
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If you ever wondered exactly how we get to a $3.1 trillion dollar annual federal budget. That means government stealing $3,100,000,000,0000 from you and me each year… here’s part of the answer.
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Al-Jazeera television on March 9 apologized to viewers after a talk-show guest, Syrian-American psychologist Dr Wafa Sultan, described as "barbaric" the response of Muslims to a Danish newspaper's cartoons about the Prophet Mohammed. "The Muslims' barbaric reaction added to the value of these cartoons. It simply proved their rightness," said Dr Sultan on the Qatari network. "The Muslim is an irrational creature, and the things he learned overpower his mind and inflame his feelings. That is why these remarks have turned him into an inferior creature, who cannot control himself and respond to events in a rational way."
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Throughout the night on 6th of March we have successfully continued our statue veiling campaign. With this reappearing action, we want to inspire the public to discussion concerning Islamisation and associated taboo subjects. By veiling statues in Berlin, Braunschweig, Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Helsinki, Moscow, Tampere, and Turku, we have expanded our activities to Germany, Finland and Russia within six months.
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Recent history may offer no purer example of August Bebel’s socialism of fools than Bobby Fischer. Arguably the best chess player ever, Fischer, who was born to a Jewish mother in Chicago, was an anti-Semite and anti-American whose passion for these hatreds was surpassed only by the straightforwardness with which he frequently expressed them.
On September 11, 2001, with bodies still smoldering in the rubble of the World Trade Center, Fischer called a radio station owned by Bombo Radyo, the largest radio network in the Philippines, to say:
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On the morning of Nov. 2, 2007, four Missouri Air National Guard F-15 Eagles -- the primary fighter aircraft for air defense over the continental United States -- roared out of Lambert Field, Missouri on a routine combat-training exercise.
A few minutes into the flight, the four pilots each made a couple of four-to-five “G” warm-up turns. Then at an altitude of 18,000 feet, one of the pilots, Major Stephen Stillwell, closed to within 9,000 feet of the flight leader’s jet. “Fight’s on,” Stillwell transmitted over the radio.
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Responding to the massacre of young boys studying Torah, someone wrote me that considering what horrors Israel had committed in Gaza "it's a shame he didn't kill every student in the school." This is what we are up against. I cannot begin to tell you how weary I am of hearing these lies and having to refute them. Are people stupid? Evil? Insane?
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By Alan Caruba
«The tripling of oil prices since the summer of 2003 has unleashed forces that within the next two or three years will bring oil prices tumbling back down to below $50 a barrel.» So said John Cassidy, writing about «The Coming Oil Crash» in the January issue of Conde Nast Portfolio. Yes, the price of oil will come down, though no one knows exactly when. It has topped $100 a barrel and there are indications it could go higher.
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How does one who claims to be a follower of Jesus Christ help to legislate killing the
unborn? It is a complete contradiction to the teachings of the Bible («You shall not murder»
[Exodus 20:13].
As an Illinois state senator, Barack Hussein Obama refused to support legislation to protect babies that survived late-term abortions, claiming «I did not want to concede.»
To what was Obama referring? His statement was in reference to babies that were fully
outside their mothers' wombs. Thus, Obama did not want to concede the fact that babies who survived a late term abortion were in fact «persons.» He was the only senator of the Democrat Party to speak against baby protection legislation. He was the only legislator from either side of the political isle that took his position.
Although the Barack Obama campaign has enough time on its hands to barrage reporters who don't spin their analyses of exit poll data in the Obama-approved manner—as Politico.com discovered when it posted a dull story pointing out that Obama has been lagging among Catholic voters and was promptly besieged by angry Obama staffers—it still can't seem to find the time to answer important questions about the candidate.
Obama, like John McCain, is running on his biography. Yet, there's much about his life that remains occluded or distorted.
For example, Obama disingenuously introduced himself to the country in his keynote address to the Democratic Convention in 2004 by starting out with 380 feel-good words about his racial background, focusing on his parents' "improbable love".
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Having little trust in titles or Germans, the French began to construct a massive series of fortifications 12 years after the end of "the war to end all wars." The Maginot Line consisted of 142 forts plus another 352 armored gun emplacements connected by tunnels and railways that stretched the full 87 miles of the Franco-German border. It worked, in a manner of speaking, as the German attacks on it were easily withstood, but it now stands as one of history's most famous examples of futility as the German commander Heinz Guderian simply sent von Kleist's two Panzer Corps through the Ardennes and around the line in the classic example of blitzkrieg.
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Venezuelan Dictator Hugo Chavez is rattling his sword, deploying troops, and hoping to distract his increasingly agitated populace from the domestic policies that are dragging Venezuela deeper into the poverty and dysfunction of socialism. It is inevitable that as the economy declines, shortages spread, food become scarce, and crime skyrockets, a foreign enemy will be found to blame for the woes Chavez' absurd policies cause.
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When True Believers begin to harbor doubts, they don't immediately give up the faith. It's too scary; too much pride and money has been invested; too many jobs and reputations are on the line; and they need to find a new reason to live. So they always try to add on new wrinkles and qualifications to their crumbling story.
Today that's happening with the global warming cult.
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Not every politician gets a week like the one John McCain got last week, and most of his good fortune was not of his making. Yes, he did clear the threshold of 1191 delegates to officially gain the nomination and, yes, that did lead to a helpful photo-op at the White House. But the real gifts were delivered by his potential Democratic rivals and by the Democratic Party itself.
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As the likelihood increases that Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee for president, it is high time Republicans start thinking about what type of campaign to run against him. The race is on.
Most strategists think, and we are inclined to agree, that the odds of a McCain victory against Barack Obama will be greater than they might have been against a Clinton nominee. But we also think a McCain/Obama campaign presents Republicans and conservatives with an opportunity to reassert conservative principles and redefine presidential politics in a way that a McCain/Clinton race never would have allowed. Rather than cowering behind throwaway lines lobbed at an uneasy base, it's time for an articulate, fearless discussion of conservative ideas.
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Late in the morning of Friday, February 29, Miami (Florida) Edison High School was besieged by dozens of police cars and vans. Officers in riot gear were seen rushing into the building and within minutes live TV film from a WFOR-TV helicopter showed dozens of students being led away in handcuffs. Police officials described the situation as a “large scale disturbance.”
This was not an uprising in a Baghdad market or an attack on a funeral procession in Islamabad. This was an insurrection in an American high school, led by teenage thugs with rap sheets longer than their arms. But what makes this sad event so meaningful is that Miami Edison is typical of thousands of failing secondary schools in cities across the nation.
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The failure of the Bush administration to reverse its predecessors’ drastic shrinkage of our armed services is notorious. Yet, because our fighters are the greatest in human history, the most pernicious fall-out of our parsimony remains unnoticed. The peerless but thinly stretched U.S. military, it turns out, has an Achilles’ heel: it cannot combat lawfare waged against the private partners on whom it is ever more dependent.
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Republicans sat helpless as Bill demolished 41 and then Bob Dole. The Clinton war room, Bubba’s charm and Hillary’s supposed genius were unbeatable. “Were” is the operative word.
The Clintons’ proven campaign tactics -- triangulation, personal attacks and open-ended promises to liberal pressure groups -- haven’t worked against Obama. His shimmering vacuity makes a poor target for the first two, and his ability to out-promise Hillary negates the third. But the Clintons aren’t quitting now, and they aren’t rehearsing her for role of second-fiddler, despite what Hill and Bill were hinting at last week.
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It might only be the shores of Lake Erie, but the Muslim Brotherhood has established an invasion beachhead in Toledo. The most recent landing by the international Islamic extremist organization was last weekend when the Muslim American Society (MAS) – the ideological arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in the US, identified as such by the Department of Justice in a court filing back in December – held a conference at the University of Toledo. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the Department of Homeland Security recently added Toledo to the list of high-risk terrorism areas.
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