A principal Middle East adviser to US presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama resigned on Friday after reports surfaced that he had been in repeated contact with members of Hamas.
Rob Malley interviewed Hamas officials, as well as Israeli, Palestinian, and other international officials, as research for reports he wrote for the International Crisis Group, a non-partisan conflict-resolution think tank.
Full Article ...
On a pleasant Thursday in December 1948, Emilio Traubner, a correspondent for The Palestine Post, found himself near Abu Kabir, not far from Jaffa. Trenches and expended cartridges were strewn about, reminders of the fighting between units of the Irgun and local Arab forces that had taken place there seven months previously. There was a large Arab villa from where Traubner recovered a diary. It turned out to be the daily record of Yusuf Begovic of Pale, a town near Sarajevo in modern-day Bosnia-Herzegovina. In it Begovic had described his activities as a cook for the "Arab Army of Liberation."
Full Article ...
Following 9/11, in order to try to discover for myself the true nature of this purported Religion of Peace, whose ardent followers had just been responsible for the worst attack ever to take place on American soil, I began to research Islam. I started by reading the Qur'an, at the painfully slow rate of 5 hate-filled pages a day. It soon became apparent that this revered Book of Peace had more in common with Mein Kampf than with the New Testament. In fact, there were many similarities between the two. Both were filled with violence and threats of violence, both shared an arrogant contempt for those who dared to disagree with their authors, both advocated for the complete and utter subjection of all unbelievers, and sought an eventual worldwide hegemony.
Full Article ...
This general election more than most will test the courage of voters to avoid lesser-evil strategic voting that has propped up our two-party plutocracy. People with intelligence and conscience must resist peer pressure and the temptation to vote against John McCain by voting for Barack Obama.
Of course, a McCain presidency that pursues much of the same policies and values of the totally inept and morally bankrupt Bush administration is something to loathe. But lesser-evil voting sustains our corrupt political system.
Full Article ...
Some scam artists target rich widows. Some target the elderly. Rick Senninger, former executive producer and founder of the Intel Radio Network and “Outside The Wire”, targeted veterans.
He played up the whole patriotism thing, repeating “Thank you for your service” a few times, and then hit up veterans and their organizations. He regularly interviewed people on his show like retired Lt. Col. Buzz Patterson, military wives, homeland security supporters, as well as soldiers presently serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a veteran myself, I probably gave him the added credibility to go after a segment of our society respected and admired.
Full Article ...
In its subtly mind-manipulating photographs conveying an alienated, leftist view of America, the New York Times is tops in the field, and its photo of the triumphant Barack Obama greeting people at the U.S. Capitol yesterday, by Doug Mills (I've reduced the size slighly to fit it on VFR's main page), is one of the Times' best.
Full Article ...
In today’s nanny culture, where individuals are deemed incapable of looking out for their own interests and government is supposedly looking our for everyone’s welfare, wage and hour legislation is an accepted commonplace. But this was not always so.
Back in 1903, the enlightened State of Oregon enacted a law regulating the working hours of women, a supposedly noble endeavor designed to protect the “weaker sex” from exploitation.
The statute provided that “...no female [shall] be employed in any mechanical establishment, or factory, or laundry in this state more than ten hours during any one day.”
Full Article ...
Last month was a difficult time for the South Florida Jewish community. On April 29, 2008, vandals defaced a Parkland, Florida synagogue with spray-painted swastikas and statements lauding Hitler. One week prior to that, another synagogue in nearby North Miami Beach was set on fire. Anti-Semitism is on the rise in South Florida, and it’s incumbent upon the community to understand what groups have created this atmosphere for the area.
Full Article ...
Now and then I like to share some of my e-mails from the weekly readers of my globally syndicated column. My column currently has millions of readers both on the Internet and a handful of magazines and newspapers in this region that pick up my columns, which I have been writing since 1959 (almost a half-century now).
The following e-mail I received came from got-a-life@comcast.net. Feel free to contact this Web. The headline on this commentary reads:
Full Article ...
The average temperature in April 2008 was 51.0 F. This was -1.0 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average, the 29th coolest April in 114 years. The temperature trend for the period of record (1895 to present) is 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit per decade.
Full Article ...
Tom Hayden, who cheered for a communist military victory in Vietnam, is calling attention to Senator Hillary Clinton’s old ties to communists. But Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, formerly of the Washington Post, wonders if Hillary’s comments on Senator Barack Obama’s ties to communist terrorist Bill Ayers constitute McCarthyism.
Bernstein, now an election analyst for CNN, has reason to be concerned about where all of this may lead. His parents were members of the Communist Party USA, and he says in his book about them, Loyalties, “I am proud of the choices they made.”
Full Article ...
Barack Obama's alleged socialist and communist connections will be the highlight of a planned news conference to be held in Washington in late May.
Veteran conservative journalist and media critic Cliff Kincaid says the news briefing scheduled for May 22 is not designed to support or oppose any one presidential candidate, but rather to shed light on parts of Senator Obama's (D-Illinois) past that the mainstream news media has chosen to ignore.
Full Article ...
Barack Obama is about to put the world on the American welfare rolls.
From World Net Daily.
Sen. Barack Obama, perhaps giving America a preview of priorities he would pursue if elected president, is rejoicing over the Senate committee passage of a plan that could end up costing taxpayers billions of dollars in an attempt to reduce poverty in other nations.
Those who are rooting for the economy to go into a tailspin cannot be pleased.
First, the government told us that the economy grew 0.6% in the first quarter.
I wasn’t happy, because I’d like to see the economy get back to at least the 3.2% average growth it experienced from the second quarter of 2003 through the third quarter of 2007. But many in the business press seemed displeased for the opposite reason — that the number wasn’t negative. Since the everyday working definition of a “recession” is “a decline in GDP for two or more consecutive quarters,” it meant that there is no solid evidence of a recession.
Full Article ...
I gave the top 10 reasons John McCain should repudiate the National Council of La Raza on Tuesday. Here are five more reasons he should stay the hell away from La Raza/The Race (but won’t):
5. La Raza/The Race joined the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in a failed lawsuit attempt to prevent the feds from entering immigration information into a key national crime database–and to prevent local police officers from accessing the data.
Full Article ...
All the Ottoman Sultans were descendants of Osman I (1258-1326). Around 1300, this ruler united certain of the disparate Turkish tribes (Seljuks) who had originally settled in Anatolia from the 11th Century. Osman emerged as a ruthless leader, uniting some of these tribes with force where necessary and establishing a center of power at Bursa near Constantinople.
Full Article ...
The Chicago Tribune, which once employed Barack Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod, is refusing to publish the truth about a Weather Underground terrorist bombing that killed a policeman. The paper apparently does not want to tarnish the image of Obama friends Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who were allegedly part of or had direct knowledge of the bombing plot that also injured several other police officers. The Tribune considers Ayers an education expert and has published various articles by him.
Please help Accuracy in Media expose the Tribune’s cover-up.
Full Article ...
The below is a comment posted by me in a VFR discussion in 2003. A more precise word than teleological in this context would be holistic, meaning that the whole is drawing the parts of which it is the whole toward itself. Thus a planet with a pressurized atmosphere brings forth organisms with wings. Thus God, the ultimate whole, brings forth beings who are made in his image and likeness and who can know him.
Full Article ...
What do you call a candidate who wins 90 percent of the African-American vote, between 30 percent and 50 percent of the Hispanic vote and 40 percent of the white vote in a tight Democratic primary race?
A general election loser.
Apply those percentages to the general election, and the candidate will bomb. In 2004, President Bush won 43 percent of the Hispanic vote, 58 percent of the white vote and 11 percent of the African-American vote. That means that John Kerry did better among Hispanics than Barack Obama has done in the Democratic primaries; better among whites than Obama has done in the Democratic primaries; and almost as well among African-Americans. Obama's coalition is Kerry's, but weaker.
Full Article ...
Too extreme" for North Carolina — that's how a recent GOP ad characterizes Barack Obama as it challenges Democratic gubernatorial candidates Beverly Perdue and Richard Moore for supporting the "most liberal person in the United States Senate."
Meanwhile, Obama has finally taken issue with the extreme and divisive racial rhetoric of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, an outspoken advocate of Black Liberation Theology who has categorically condemned the very government that the Illinois senator aspires to lead.
But the question remains, how many of Wright's views does Obama secretly share even as he shuns the man who was his mentor for more than two decades?
Full Article ...
"It's a recession," said former President Harry Truman, "when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose yours."
For people facing home foreclosure, job loss or the struggle of paying high gas prices, the definition a recession seems immaterial and insignificant. True.
Pedestrians are reflected on an electronic board displaying Japan's TOPIX index in Tokyo April 14, 2008. The Nikkei stock average fell 3.1 percent on Monday, with exporters such as Canon Inc hit by a stronger yen and further evidence the United States may be in recession. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon (JAPAN)
Full Article ...
In an election year such as this, the responsible voter must assess the "glorious" ends of the Left's various offers of a life without edges: an existence free of the normal dangers, struggles, and consequences of life.
Full Article ...
The most momentous political story of the hour is not what you might think...whatever you might think. It has to do with an American politician now living in London and his aspiration to become president of the United States. His name is Boris Johnson. He, an exemplary conservative, has just beaten one of the most rebarbative left-wing reactionaries in the United Kingdom, to become mayor of London. Johnson ran a very fine campaign, an amalgam of high intelligence, sound principle, rollicking good humor, and energy that could be branded New Tory. Mind you, New Toryism will arrive on these shores in due course.
Full Article ...
Barack Obama has finally distanced himself from Rev. Jeremiah Wright after a 20-year relationship, but the pastor who is replacing Wright at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ is likely to be just as controversial.
New Trinity pastor Otis Moss has called Biblical patriarch Abraham a “pimp” and made other statements many would consider offensive.
Full Article ...
Between a lower unemployment rate, continued GDP growth, continued growth in personal income, continued growth in industrial production, a clearly rebounding stock market (a leading economic indicator) and tremendous fiscal stimulus in the pipeline, it is becoming increasingly unlikely that we are currently in a recession of any sort, much less the catastrophic recession promoted by so-called “journalists”.
Or, as was more succinctly reiterated at Carpe Diem (after an even more insightful analysis of today’s employment data):
Full Article ...
Ever get a little tired of the partisan propagandists who make up their own truth based not upon the evidence but upon pure fiction in order to justify and promote their own point of view?
That includes agenda driven pundits as well as what used to be considered our major news media. People are no longer interested in accuracy but rather in painting the picture that matches their view, no truth required.
Full Article ...
Lest we forget, there are good reasons why some have been committed to training quartz halogen floodlamps on every bit of spume found beneath the rock that is Barack Obama's campaign for the Democratic nomination, why they shall continue to do so, and why they will focus (or re-focus) attention on whomever comes out as the nominee when circumstances warrant such action.
Full Article ...
She claims that her students violated her civil rights. She says student's "anti-intellectualism" made her life a living hell. So, this ex-Dartmouth professor is threatening to sue her students for the temerity to have doubted her harebrained theories on "eco-feminism" and the "French narrative theory."
Full Article ...
In any conflict, warfare happens on multiple fronts and includes military, economic, diplomatic and information actions. Too much attention is given to the military effort. Real action takes place in the Information campaign and we have to learn to recognize when we are being challenged in this area. Another shot just went across our bow when the meeting of Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) issued their report about "Islamophobia" and the growing threat against Muslims.
The OIC is comprised of 57 countries and one of their goals is improve the plight of the Muslim peoples and empower them.
Full Article ...
Well, it looks like it's the end of the road for Hillary. Time for her to pack up her pantsuits and go back to ... wherever it is she's pretending to be living these days. Now we just have to get rid of the other two. Perhaps if I endorse Obama ...
This week, Bill Clinton lost his second presidential election for a protege.
Ronald Reagan was so popular, he not only won a 49-state landslide re-election for himself, but he also won a symbolic third term for his boob of a vice president, George Herbert Walker Bush (who immediately blew it by breaking his own "no new taxes" pledge).
Full Article ...
A recent survey on the environment found that seventy percent of people worldwide think that the planet is running out oil. Only less than one quarter believe that there is enough of it to keep it as a primary source of energy. Petro pessimism runs especially high in the United States where a full two thirds think that the point of depletion is within sight.
Here are some hard facts.
Full Article ...
On a recent afternoon, the staffers of Chicago’s Third Ward district seemed stumped over a seemingly simple question: where was Dorothy Tillman? First elected in 1985, Tillman worked here for over twenty years, until her defeat last year at the hands of challenger Pat Dowell. Now no one at her former office could say how the ex-alderwoman could be reached.
Full Article ...
If you wonder why your professors cannot let go of their pet theories no matter how badly they work out when practiced in the real world, you will find part of the answer in A Conservative history of the American Left by my predecessor, Daniel J. Flynn.
“From persuasion to politics, politics to revolution, and revolution to a long march through the institutions, the Left’s methods for transforming society have evolved,” Flynn writes. “The ends, though, have remained more or less the same.”
Full Article ...
You’ve got to give it to the ACLU. It has run one of the most effective PR machines in America for nearly a century. Founded by a communist subversive, today’s ACLU has honored its founder’s vision by carrying the torch as the nation’s pro bono Fifth Column.
The ACLU is the most unpopular organization in America, but that hasn’t translated into its demise. The ACLU not only maintains a mega-million-dollar support base and an army of Useful Idiots, but, maddeningly, is still viewed as respectable in many elite circles. Even so, every time the ACLU acts according to its seditious nature, my hope is renewed that all Americans will shake themselves awake, recognizing that the image of the ACLU as a “defender of freedom” is a carefully cultivated deception. But I’m not sure what it’s going to take. The evidence against the ACLU is already decisive - given a chance, the ACLU never fails to take the side of the enemy, especially since September 11.
Full Article ...
Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced at the end of last month that the United States was preparing for “potential military courses of action” against Iranian forces. “It would be a mistake,” he noted, “to think that we are out of combat capability.”
Many, however, would say the real mistake is to think the Bush administration is really contemplating military action. “It is time to admit the truth,” Charles Krauthammer recently wrote. “The Bush administration’s attempt to halt Iran’s nuclear program has failed.” Dubya still has more than eight months left in the White House, but most everyone is ready to close the book on the obviously exhausted president.
Full Article ...
John Bolton, America’s ex-ambassador to the United Nations, has called for US air strikes on Iranian camps where insurgents are trained for war in Iraq.
Mr Bolton said that striking Iran would represent a major step towards victory in Iraq. While he acknowledged that the risk of a hostile Iranian response harming American’s overseas interests existed, he said the damage inflicted by Tehran would be “far higher” if Washington took no action.
Full Article ...
Phillip Bobbitt is the Herbert Wechsler Professor of Federal Jurisprudence and the Director of the Center for National Security at Columbia University. He has a long history of high-level government service.
Bobbitt is the author of Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century, a provocative attempt to re-conceptualize the war on terror. Bobbitt argues that many of the widely-held assumptions about this war are dubious at best. Among them are:
The view that because terrorism will always be with us, there can be no victory in a war against terror;
The view that the root causes of terrorism lie in conditions of poverty, economic exploitation, neglect of health and education, and religious indoctrination that must be reversed before a war against terrorism can be won;
The view that terrorism will not flourish in democracies;
Full Article ...
Despite the outward appearance of infirmity, Omar Abdel-Rahman, the "Blind Sheikh" is a central figure in the Islamic global jihad. He was convicted in 1995 of conspiring to bomb the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993, which killed 6 and injured over 1,000.
Rahman is now serving a life sentence for that crime.
A precocious child, he started studying the Qur’an at an early age, committing much of it to memory. After graduating with a PhD in Qur'anic studies from Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Rahman took leadership roles in a number of jihadist groups including Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya and Egyptian Islamic Jihad, both offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Full Article ...
So many academics want the arguments presented in Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) to be true. It encourages the reading of novels at an oblique angle in order to discover hidden colonialist subtexts. It promotes a hypercritical version of British and, more generally, of Western achievements. It discourages any kind of critical approach to Islam in Middle Eastern studies. Above all, Orientalism licenses those academics who are so minded to think of their research and teaching as political activities. The drudgery of teaching is thus transformed into something much more exciting, namely “speaking truth to power”.
Full Article ...
This is a lesson for the civics books. Five months ago, ethanol derived from corn was the new miracle green fuel. By using corn to power our cars, we could tell the sheiks to go pound their sand.
It all sounded so simple. It also ignored the basic laws and limitations of economics, geography, chemistry and electoral politics. If we learned anything from the 1970s, we apparently forgot it. Then it was synfuels. Now it's biofuels, equally expensive and impractical.
Full Article ..
It is a frustrating reality of today's media/Internet-driven politics that lies are often told so frequently that they take on a reality of their own. This has particularly been the case in the Iraq war, where it is impossible not to hear on a daily basis some variation of either "Bush lied" or "it has become a civil war" or "the surge has failed". These falsehoods are stated so routinely by the Left (and covered so dutifully by the media) that they have taken on a certain credibility.
Full Article ...
Everyone everywhere has by now heard about the “clash of civilizations.” This Samuel Huntington concept has become universal. In the 1950’s, the French economist, Alfred Sauvy had a comparable success with the expression “third world.” One reason these phrases gain wide acceptance is their lack of clear definition. The “clash of civilizations,” basically the West against the rest, is supposed to describe the world as it is. In reality, the West is vague enough to include a vast array of areas without describing their unifying characteristics.
Full Article ...
The United States is fighting the "global war on terrorism" in the wrong way. The key to defeating Al Qaeda doesn't lie in trying to undermine its extremist ideology but in defeating its strategy. And right now, Washington has a historic opportunity to do just that.
This isn't an exercise in foreign-policy hairsplitting. It's a vital distinction that helped the US win the cold war against Soviet communism.
Full Article ...
Ben Stein has a dangerous idea. His idea is that professors and teachers who express skepticism about Darwinism are likely to find themselves not granted tenure, castigated and ridiculed, and disqualified from the opportunity to have research papers published.
Full Article ...
The San Francisco Chronicle and the various demagog politicians of Berkeley and Oakland, California should really be ashamed of themselves for ginning up into sensational "raids" a few arrests by ICE agents and making of them actions designed to empty those community's schools of children. In reality a few routine U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in those cities occurred yesterday that had nothing to do with school children. Yet, these politicians shamelessly ran about the countryside waving their arms, serving grave warnings to ICE about their supposed targeting of school children, and ginning up parents with the false bravado of standing athwart ICE's "harassment and fear."
Full Article ...
Are people worse today than those who lived in previous generations?
It has always been my strong inclination to answer this in the positive --until I came across the following quote:
"If the West has now reached the point of internal disintegration, it is not because the people at large are, in essence, worse than in former times (human nature does not change); it is because they have been led to believe in errors (such as the belief that one has the right to do as one pleases) by a minority of "intellectuals who have been allowed to disseminate freely their pernicious ideas." Yves Dupont.
Full Article ...
Senator Obama's victory speech last night turned impressively to the general election campaign. He all but clinched the Democratic nomination last night. His speech sounded very much like a nomination acceptance speech. I expect that the themes he sounded in his speech last night will reappear in his speech this summer in Denver.
Tom Maguire caught this passage:
I trust the American people to understand that it is not weakness, but wisdom to talk not just to our friends, but to our enemies, like Roosevelt did, and Kennedy did, and Truman did.
Now that another Earth Day has come and gone, let's look at some environmentalist predictions they would prefer we forget.
At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, "The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind."
C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, "The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed."
Full Article ...
As I write this, Democrats in the states of Indiana and North Carolina are poised to express their preferences in the ongoing primary slugfest between U.S. Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama. Which of them wins is of little importance. What counts, as with all things liberal, is fairness.
Full Article ...
“What could possibly go wrong?” That’s what members of Congress probably thought when they started shoveling bigger subsidies at ethanol producers. Now, with food riots erupting in some parts of the world, we have our answer: a lot can go wrong.
Other factors--a weak dollar, high energy costs, low crop yields in places such as Australia--have played a role in this crisis. But diverting food to fuel is clearly a contributor, and it exacerbates the situation.
Full Article ...
Are you ready for hope and change? Barack Obama better hope his bitter half has a change of attitude if she expects to assume the title of first lady in November. She's been likened to John F. Kennedy's wife, what with her chic suits and pearls and perfectly coiffed helmet hair. But when she opens her mouth, Michelle O is less Jackie O and more Wendy W -- as in Wendy Whiner, the constantly kvetching "Saturday Night Live" character from the early 1980s.
Full Article ...
Barack Obama has a habit of hanging out with flamethrowers who espouse radical causes. There's Obama's long-time associate, former Weatherman William Ayers, who once boasted, "I don’t regret setting bombs...I feel we didn't do enough."
And Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s spiritual mentor, who has defended the notion that Zionism is racism, compared white kids to “rocks,” and propounded the theory that the government invented AIDS to kill off Black folks.
Full Article ...
The Barack Obama campaign responded to the pictures of Obama political and community associate William Ayers stomping on the American flag, first published in 2001 in Chicago Magazine. In a statement reported on Fox & Friends this morning, Team Obama deplores Ayers’ actions but rejects any connection between Ayers and Obama:
Full Article ...
How indicative of his character and beliefs is Senator Obama's having launched one of his political campaigns at the home of his friends Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers?
Who are Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers? And why would Senator Obama wish to associate his political beliefs with those of Dohrn and Ayers?
Might his friendship with these Weatherman terrorists of the 1960s and 70s be a clue to the voting record that led National Journal to rate Mr. Obama the most liberal member of the Senate?
The New York Times reported on September 11, 2001, ironically, the day the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were bombed:
Full Article ...
The race industry and its elite enablers take it as self-evident that high black incarceration rates result from discrimination. At a presidential primary debate this Martin Luther King Day, for instance, Senator Barack Obama charged that blacks and whites “are arrested at very different rates, are convicted at very different rates, [and] receive very different sentences . . . for the same crime.” Not to be outdone, Senator Hillary Clinton promptly denounced the “disgrace of a criminal-justice system that incarcerates so many more African-Americans proportionately than whites.”
Full Article ...
New York State Governor David Paterson yesterday signed the “Libel Terrorism Protection Act” (S.6687/A.9652), which on March 31 passed the state’s Assembly and Senate unanimously.
Also known as Rachel’s Law, the bill sponsored by Assemblyman Rory Lancman (D-Queens) and Senate Deputy Majority Leader Dean G. Skelos (R-Rockville Centre) will protect American journalists and authors from foreign lawsuits that infringe on First Amendment rights. The bill also received unprecedented support from Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.
Full Article ...
Frank Gaffney, the neoconservative movement's leading spokesman on "Islamism," has just discovered to his great shock and consternation that the people he variously calls "Islamists," "Islamo-fascists," and "jihadists"--but never, you know, "Muslims"--are ensconced in America and gaining a foothold in the corridors of power. Paraphrasing the title of Bat Ye'or's Eurabia, he calls this new regime "Amerabia."
May I ask where Gaffney has been? It is now May 2008. Steven Emerson's extremely alarming, mind-altering documentary Jihad in America, showing the profound inroads that jihadist and terror-supporting communities had made in heartland cities across this country, was broadcast on PBS in 1994. Just in case Mr. Gaffney misses the significance of that last sentence, I'll help him out:
It's been a known fact for at least 14 years that Mideast-based jihadist communities and organizations are widely established in America.
Full Article ...
Before December 2007, most Americans had no idea that bureaucrats in their neighbor to the north had been waging a war on free speech for over a decade.
Then well-known conservative columnist and author Mark Steyn announced that he and Macleans, Canada’s oldest weekly newsmagazine, were being charged by a British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal with "flagrant Islamophobia" for printing an excerpt from Steyn’s book America Alone
Full Article ...
On the inside back cover of books published by Gallup Press there is the following breathtaking statement:
Gallup Press exists to educate and inform the people who govern, manage, teach and lead the world's six billion citizens. Each book meets Gallup's requirements of integrity, trust and independence and is based on a Gallup-approved science and research.
Don't be distracted by the bad grammar. Focus instead on Gallup's "requirements of integrity, trust and independence." Thanks to a remarkable admission by a coauthor of Gallup's new bestseller Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think, we are now able to know precisely what Gallup's "requirements" really are.
Full Article ...
Thirty days after Steve McIntyre caught NASA cooking climate history again - this time in a feeble attempt to somehow conceal the alarmist-embarrassing downward trend since 1998 -- Al Gore shamelessly portrayed Saturday's Myanmar cyclone catastrophe as a ‘consequence' of global warming.
Full Article ...
In climate, as in politics, ther are natural cycles. We may be seeing some new ones starting these days in both spheres. For those of you worried about the start of solar Cycle 24, good news. A small sunspot recently appeared in the sun's southern hemisphere. So it looks like the next sunspot cycle has well and truly started.
Meanwhile scientist Don J Easterbrook reports that the northern Pacific Decadal Oscillation has flipped, threatening 30 years of colder weather, and the American Thinker's Marc Sheppard wonders what happens as the global warming community admits that there are factors other than anthropogenic warming that affect the planet's climate.
Full Article ...
It was 1943. We were in the middle of a global conflict that was caused by the predilection of evil men for power.
Predictions of doom and gloom abounded. How would the world survive? What could mankind do about it? Into all this angst and depression strode Bette Davis in a gorgeous beaded suit, to deliver her own personal lament about the lack of eligible men on the home-front called, "They're Either Too Young or Too Old."
Full Article ...
Unassisted this year by a media blitz, the May 1st amnesty marches for illegal aliens limped along American streets. In previous years, the media hype surrounding this issue commanded the nation’s attention. When I taught in Texas, my students found the demonstrations more urgent than their novel The Great Gatsby.
During my best class, several Hispanic students asked me for my opinion about the demonstrations. They told me they had friends skipping classes to participate. I answered their question by relating it to the novel and our discussion of the American Dream.
Full Article ...
It would be more amusing had I not been personally involved. Three years ago I was a lone voice outrageously predicting $100 oil, debated on many occasions on national TV by those predicting $50 or even less. The tapes are still available.
Now, $100 seems conservative, others have jumped on that number by the carload and the OPEC president said last week that oil may climb to $200. This, by the way, is the same organization that four years ago was insisting that the “official” price was between $24 and $28, while we were paying $50. Clearly they hoodwinked us.
Full Article ...
Although she promised to go “full speed ahead” last night, there was precious little to boast about. After weeks of campaigning against a scandal-plagued Barack Obama in a culturally conservative state where she enjoyed a late lead, Hillary Clinton could only eke out a 23,000-vote margin of victory, approximately one-tenth the number of votes he walloped her with in North Carolina the same night – and her margin was almost certainly produced by Rush Limbaugh.
Full Article ...
Barack Obama’s years as a community organizer in Chicago are at once the most well-known and the least well-understood facet of his biography. It is common knowledge that the Democratic candidate got his start in politics on the city’s predominantly black South Side. Yet the people who surrounded him in those days, and who ultimately would propel him to higher office, remain a mystery.
Full Article ...
Like many other critics of Joe McCarthy, Ronald Kessler would be more persuasive if he knew something of the subject.
Kessler's Wall Street Journal essay ("The Real Joe McCarthy," April 22), attacking the Wisconsin senator and taking a sidewise shot at my recent book about him, is an odd amalgam of unverifiable hearsay and a handful of items checkable from the record. It's noteworthy that, on the checkable matters, Kessler is repeatedly, and egregiously, in error.
Full Article ...
Corn ethanol has exploded recently in the headlines as the latest big fuel mistake and cause of public outrage. Its very production has been denounced by numerous world leaders as a “crime against humanity” because corn cultivation for ethanol diverts food acreage to fuel acreage creating the tectonic cause of the severe spike in food prices. This has in turn helped swell a rising tide of starvation for millions around the world.
Corn ethanol’s inherent energy inefficient character has been exposed by experts who have resisted the tobacco-style science corn lobbyists have proliferated. But all these headlines were shouted years ago by critics who foresaw the current predicament.
Full Article ...
In a few hours we will know the outcome of the Democratic primaries in two important states that could decide the political fates of Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
In Indiana, a primarily white state, we will know whether white voters, who are close to 75 percent of the population of the U.S., accept Senator Obama's explanation of why, after first stating, "I can no more disown him [Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can disown my white grandmother," he now rejects Wright after Wright's appearance before the NAACP and the National Press Club.
Full Article ...
Democrats once accused Republicans of wanting old people and children to starve to death because the Republicans wanted to end the welfare state’s food stamps program. So why are they silent on the government program that’s actually causing starvation and food shortages? Oh. Right. The ethanol boondoggle is their idea.
Bio fuel mandates have brought $5 a gallon milk here, tortilla riots to Mexico and even a shortage of bagels in Bethesda. Many other strong arguments against biofuel mandates, and especially against corn ethanol, have existed for years and continue to be highly relevant.
Full Article ...
Even Americans knowledgeable about Europe’s growing accommodation to the totalitarian ideology known alternatively as Islamism, jihadism or Islamofascism tend smugly to believe the same thing can’t happen here. Think again. Every day, new evidence appears of similar acts of submission – the Islamists call it “dhimmitude” – on the part of the U.S. government, judges, the press and leading corporations.
Full Article ...
Christians believe that God became human in Jesus Christ. If so, it follows that there is something called humanity. That is, humans have a nature, a shared or common nature. Human nature is not just a social construction. Human nature is real. And if it is real, then it is the same everywhere and at every time. It is, in a word, universal.
The idea that human nature is universal might seem simple to you, and it is. All true ideas are simple, because anyone can grasp them. Yet, believe it or not, you are about to enter a world that treats the idea of a universal human nature as simple-minded foolishness. The really sad thing is that your professors will not try to complicate this idea. To complicate an idea, you have to first take it seriously. Rather than argue about this idea, most of your professors will simply ignore it. You see, the idea of a universal human nature is contrary to everything most professors, at least in the humanities, believe. And that makes it one of the most radical ideas you can hold as a student.
Full Article ...
With little fanfare, the proponents of the SAVE Act are getting closer and closer to pulling off a herculean act of legislative imagination and ingenuity. The SAVE Act is an enforcement only bill that will create a system, if properly implemented, that will have a full proof identification and verfication mechanism for all employees so that employers can easily verify that each employee is in fact legal.
Full Article ...
For more than 200 years, America reigned as the worlds most productive, prosperous, powerful and generous nation on earth. Like all nations, America is nothing more or less than the sum of its people and their belief system.
In the case of America, they were once a people who had risked all to gain national independence and sovereignty, individual liberty and personal freedom for every man, woman and child. Generation after generation volunteered the blood of its best citizens to protect individual rights from all who would attack them in the name of some greater common good.
Full Article ...
NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer says missile-defense shields are a key element for trans-Atlantic security. De Hoop Scheffer made his comments in Prague as the keynote speaker at an international conference on missile defense, as the Czech and U.S. governments look forward to signing a deal soon to station a related U.S. radar base on Czech soil.
Participants at the conference discussed how a U.S.-proposed missile-defense shield based in the Czech Republic and Poland can meet what Washington calls a rising danger to the West from missile-armed “rogue” states.
Full Article ...
An indictment was unsealed today against international arms dealer Viktor Bout, a/k/a Boris, a/k/a Victor Anatoliyevich Bout, a/k/a Victor But, a/k/a Viktor Budd, a/k/a Viktor Butt, a/k/a Viktor Bulakin, a/k/a Vadim Markovich Aminov, for, among other things, conspiring to sell millions of dollars worth of weapons to the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (the FARC) — a designated foreign terrorist organization based in Colombia — to be used to kill Americans in Colombia.
Full Article ...
House Republicans are spreading the word about the La Raza earmark in the pork-laden housing bill that I’ve been reporting on (see here and here).
Fresh from the desk of House GOP leader John Boehner:
Democrats are prepared to bring to the House floor legislation purportedly written to assist Americans impacted by the recent housing slump. But in recent days, it has become increasingly clear who this legislation is really out to serve: scam artists, speculators, and trial lawyers.
This is a descriptive review of Black Theology & Black Power by James H. Cone, (New York: [Harper & Row, 1969]. It is not an attempt to politicize Cone’s arguments, but to simply explain what the book attempts to put forth. Keep in mind that according to Cone’s ideas in 1969, Black theology demands “blackness as the sole criterion for dialogue (p. 148)”. Additionally, as much as Cone would have liked his works to become the definitive explanation of Black Theology, many Black theologians dispute the fact and point out that Cone’s Black Theology is actually Black Liberation Theology.
Full Article ...
When one looks at Obama, it's shocking how radical and anti-American his closest associates are. Taken separately, the black liberation theology of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, or fundraiser William Ayers' unrepentant past as a 1960s terrorist or Obama's openly pro-Che Guevara volunteers in Houston might be dismissed.
Full Article ...
I invite the reader to a thought experiment. Imagine that it is the late 1930s, and "conservative" intellectuals in Western Europe and the United States formulate an ideology which says that their countries should be open without discrimination to all people of all political persuasions. Then imagine that large numbers of immigrants of all political persuasions begin entering and settling in those countries, including many Nazi immigrants from Germany and Austria. Then imagine that the Nazi immigrants, following the Nazi ideology as laid out in Hitler's Mein Kampf, begin promoting the spread and institutionalization Nazism in their new countries, while also using verbal intimidation, threats of violence, and actual violence to silence critics of Nazism.
Full Article ...
At the website ShrinkWrapped, where "A Psychoanalyst Attempts to Understand Our World," the anonymous author says about Israel exactly what I have been feeling and saying, though not writing, for some time, that there seem to be no fight left in the Israeli people. Yes, we know that Israel's government is led by despicable weaklings and fools who are surrendering their country, allowing it to be attacked, and planning further retreats. But how can the Israeli people be so passive about this situation? This is why I have not been writing about Israel's plight in recent months. It is difficult to care about people unless they care about themselves and show that they have some desire to live. But lately the Israelis have shown no such desire.
Full Article ...
Here are some excerpts from an excellent essay on May 68 by a writer named Cyril de Pins. Several French websites have mentioned the article:
We are the heirs of May 1968. It is indubitable. But we no longer see ourselves only in that light. Those, like myself, who were born after 1970, only inherited what was bequeathed to them by the preceding generation, the generation of those who were in their twenties during the springtime festivities regarded by so many as a revolution. And this heritage is indeed impoverished: it consists of a juvenile proclivity to publicly complain and denounce, of an unlimited and blind confidence in youth and in oneself, of a hatred of the principle of authority, and of a hateful rejection of the past.
Full Article ...
A desire to understand the universe seems to be hard-wired into our brains. However we need a worldview (from the German Weltanschauung which means, literally, "world view"). Continuing with the computer metaphor, a worldview corresponds to a disc operating system, a framework for receiving and processing data.
Full Article ...
White Guilt is the locomotive propelling the Obama campaign. Without it the Junior Senator from Illinois would be just a skinnier Bill Clinton. American kids are being guilt-tripped in all the public schools today, from grade school to graduate school. By the time they get to voting age, they feel so bad about the slave trade and Jim Crow that they are ready to pay up for forgiveness. That's Senator Obama's Youth Vote.
Full Article ...
In his book The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud said of religion and morality,
“It would be an undoubted advantage if we were to leave God out altogether and admit the purely human origins of all the precepts and regulations of civilization.”
In making this statement, Freud weighed in on one of life’s most important questions: What is the nature of right and wrong? Is it real, something existing apart from man, a reflection of Absolute Truth, of God’s will? Or is it, in accordance with the atheist model, merely a product of mortal minds and thus synonymous with consensus opinion? Freud made it clear he believed the latter.
Full Article ...
All day Wednesday, the FOX News Channel was repeating some poll in which around 45% of Americans believed we are in a recession. It’s not like the signs aren’t all around us.
While Neil Cavuto reminded fact-challenged, Clinton operative Lanny Davis that 95% of homeowners are indeed paying their mortgages on time, Davis continued his recitation that America is spiraling downward.
Full Article ...
Travis Childers (D-Miss.) came very close to winning the special election for the first congressional district in Mississippi. Winning with a half a percent more of the vote would have sealed the deal, but now Childers will face Republican Greg Davis in a runoff one week from today.
Davis has now resorted to tactics which have Childers crying foul. In this heavily Republican, conservative district, Davis dared to out Childers. Davis showed all the support Childers has gotten behind the scenes from the Obama campaign.
Full Article ...
In two months the Supreme Court will conclude its 2007-2008 Term, some 216 years after it rendered its first decision. During those years, the Court decided thousands of cases.
While Americans have been considerably affected by the Court’s interpretation of federal statutes, its constitutional decisions have had the greatest impact on the limited government and concern for individual rights bequeathed us by the Founders.
Full Article ...
It is a well-chronicled fact that modern academia is no friend of Israel. Even in this generally hostile environment, however, the University of California at Irvine stands in a class of its own.
Witness the school’s tradition of allowing the campus chapter of Muslim Student Union (MSU) to hold events whose sole aim is to denounce Israel and America, while supporting Islamic terrorist groups. Past events hosted in this mold have been titled “Hamas: the People’s Choice” and “Israel: The 4th Reich,” and have featured far-left demagogues like professors Norman Finkelstein and Ward Churchill, as well as Amir-Abdel Malik-Ali, a black imam notorious for his anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and his open championing of Hamas and Hezbollah.
Full Article ...
So numbed have I become by the endless replay of the fatuous clerical rantings of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that it has taken me this long to remember the significant antecedent. In 1995, there appeared a documentary titled Brother Minister about the assassination of Malcolm X. It contained a secretly filmed segment showing Louis Farrakhan shouting at the top of his lungs in the Nation of Islam's temple in Chicago on "Savior's Day" in 1993. Farrakhan, verging on hysteria, demanded to know of the murdered Malcolm X: "If we dealt with him like a nation deals with a traitor, what the hell business is it of yours?" His apparent admission of what had long been suspected—that it was the Black Muslim leadership that ordered Malcolm's slaying—is not understood or remembered (or viewed) as often as it might be.
Full Article ...
Tom Hayden, who cheered for a communist military victory in Vietnam, is calling attention to Senator Hillary Clinton’s old ties to communists. But Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, formerly of the Washington Post, wonders if Hillary’s comments on Senator Barack Obama’s ties to communist terrorist Bill Ayers constitute McCarthyism.
Full Article ...
"A madman is not someone who has lost his reason. A madman is someone who has lost everything but his reason," wrote English writer G K Chesterton, adding, "Poets do not go mad, but chess players do."
The Persians invented chess, but have been prone to madness since Xerxes flagellated the sea for obstructing his failed attempt to invade Greece in the 5th century BC. Today's Persians evince grandmasterly cunning in their maneuvers against America, but are madder than Xerxes. Iran's President Mahmud Ahmadinejad thinks that the Holocaust never happened, that there are no homosexuals in Iran, and that the American cartoon Tom and Jerry is an instrument of Zionist propaganda.
Full Article ...
Given the chance to clarify his views on a variety of subjects, Wright left no doubt that he was an Anti-American megalomaniac. A demagogue who infuses religion with a dangerous mix of politics and reverse racism; not to instill spiritual wealth in his flock, but to perpetually pick at social scabs that would otherwise heal - if only allowed to do so. When asked questions like "Can you explain what you meant in a sermon shortly after 9/11 when you said...Quote, 'America's chickens are coming home to roost.' ?", Wright responded "You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you. Those are biblical principles, not Jeremiah Wright bombastic, divisive principles."
Full Article ...
Anyone with only a passing interest in Islamic affairs will be aware of the term "Caliphate." The last Caliphate, that of the Ottomans, was officially abolished on March 3, 1924, on the orders of the secular government of Turkey. Islamists glamorize the Caliphate as something "good," but in its last years, the Ottoman Caliphate was bloated and corrupt. It gave rise to the Armenian genocide under Sultan Abdul-Hamid II. From the early 16th Century onwards, the Sultan of the Ottomans was also the Caliph. On November 1, 1922 the Sultanate was officially abolished and the deposed Abdul-Hamid lost his title of Caliph. 18 days later Abdul-Hamid’s cousin was inaugurated as Abdulmecid II the very last Caliph.
Full Article ...
Proving the advantage of actual observations, German researchers say Earth will stop warming for at least a decade. It seems ocean currents, not SUVs, help determine the temperature of Earth.
When the United Nations World Meteorological Organization recently reported that global temperatures had not risen since 1998, the explanation given by WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud was that the cool spell was the effect of the Pacific Ocean's La Nina current, "part of what we call 'variability.' "
Full Article ...
History dictates that protecting and maintaining a nation's industrial base is critical to its national security and to winning wars. This is why taking out an enemy's manufacturing infrastructure, as America did to Germany and Japan during World War II, is the first step in rendering it defenseless.
Yet today in America, despite the menace of terrorism and threats from assorted despots around the globe, we are neglecting — and in some cases damaging — our own military industrial base.
Full Article ...
There’s an old joke about astronomers discovering a giant meteor heading toward the Earth, and the Washington Post running the headline: “World To End; Minorities and Poor To Suffer Most.” Well, on Sunday the front page of the Post read: “The New Economics of Hunger.” In the subhead: “The world’s poor suffer most.”
First, it is not clear that the economics of hunger are any different now than they have been in the past. There is still supply and demand. And there still are no free lunches.
Second, if you happen to be a poor farmer, increasing prices for crops should not make you “suffer most” – they should make you suffer less. If you can grow even a little more than you consume, you will end up with additional cash in your pocket.
Full Article ...
National Public Radio announced in April that "Senator Barack Obama publicly denounced his former pastor Jeremiah Wright...for what he called 'destructive remarks' on race."
"Obviously whatever relationship I have had with the Reverend Wright has changed. I don't think he showed much concern for me or what we are trying to do with this campaign or for the American people," said the Senator from Illinois. Some who heard the Senator's words wondered if this is a change we can believe in.
Full Article ...
Ben Stein is known to many as an actor on Comedy Central. But the funniest part about his recent movie, "Expelled," is not any clever lines spoken by Stein but the hysterical way that liberals are trying to discourage people from seeing it.
Stein's critics fail to refute effectively anything in "Expelled"; they just use epithets to ridicule it and hope they can make it go away. However, it won't go away; even Scientific American, which labeled the movie "shameful," concedes that it cannot be ignored.
Full Article ...
The more effective campaigns being conducted by our enemy in this war are not necessarily those of bombs and bullets. They are being fought in the classrooms and courtrooms, through media manipulation, and the revision of policies and procedures within strategic domestic strongholds. Our enemy has gained more ground by victories in those venues than they could ever have gained on any battlefield.
Full Article ...
Today's Daily News cites a great column by Mary Anastasia O'Grady titled "Peru Takes the Other Path."
Inside the weekend edition of The Wall St. Journal, she has a fascinating article and interview with Peru President Alan García titled "Peru's Born-Again Free Marketeer." It is a stunning piece, a must read.
Excerpt:
Full Article ...
The Americanization movement greeted immigrants between 1895 and 1924. Few people nowadays know about the Americanization movement, but it swept the nation at a level comparable to that of abolition movement, prohibition, women's suffrage and the Great Awakenings. In 1918 two branches of the Federal government ran Americanization programs. One had over 100 employees, surveyed the activities of 50,000 local organizations working with foreign populations, and coordinated tactics with at least 15,000. Industries and Presidents participated in this effort. The Americanization movement provides a traditional culturist model we should all know about.
Full Article ...
It is interesting to note that CAIR director Nihad Awad will soon be sharing center stage in a major conference with Mohammad Akram al-Adlouni, the probable author of the most damning documents made public during the Holy Land Foundation trial.
The conference in Denmark, heavily populated with Muslim Brotherhood figures, is, according the program, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Nakbah or catastrophe, as they refer to the founding of the state of Israel.
Full Article ...
Four score and seven years ago … No, wait, my mistake. Two score and seven or eight days ago, Barack Obama gave the greatest speech since the Gettysburg Address, or FDR's First Inaugural, or JFK's religion speech, or (if, like Garry Wills in The New York Review of Books, you find those comparisons drearily obvious) Lincoln's Cooper Union speech of 1860.
Full Article ...
Notorious New Ager George Lucas’s wildly popular Star Wars movies abound with occult themes. In Return of the Jedi, dissident Jedi warrior Anakin Skywalker fell to the dark side of the Force and became the evil Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth Vader. Likewise, Oprah Winfrey has fully shifted to the dark side and is a full-fledged New Age spiritual leader and occultist. Make no mistake about it: as with Vader, Oprah is fully aware that she has made The Shift.
As I pointed out in my article, Emergent Church Spreading Spiritual Cancer:
Full Article ...
The latest Ipsos poll conducted over the weekend shows that on the eve of the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has taken over the lead in popular support from Democrats nationally. Among Democratic supporters across the country, 47% say that if the 2008 Democratic presidential primary or caucus was being held in their state today, they would choose Clinton, while 40% would vote for Barack Obama.
Full Article ...
Until now, Israel’s state-owned media have generally never done any investigative reporting on Israel’s Far left and Academic Fifth Column. The TV and radio stations are owned by the Israel Broadcasting Authority, and the IBA has always been a poorly-disguised bastion of the Left. Its heads have never hidden the fact that think their mission in life is to advance the Left’s agenda.
That is why the decision to run a series of radio shows viciously attacking the academic far Left and the “Post-Zionists” is so significant, and why it has the far leftists in Israel soiling themselves in anguish.
Full Article ...
In his interview last week with Rush Limbaugh, excerpted by Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch, Andrew McCarthy explains how, as the lead federal prosecutor in the Blind Sheikh terrorism case in the 1990s, he started off thinking that the defendant had perverted Islam, then came to realize that the truth was otherwise:
In fact, the whole experience in watching the dynamic of him and other people in the Muslim community throughout the trial was a real eye-opener for me. I wanted to believe in 1993 the stuff that we were putting out, you know, that he basically perverted what was otherwise a peaceful doctrine. But what I found going through all of his thousands of pages of transcripts and statements, was that when he cited scripture to justify acts of terrorism, to the extent he was quoting scripture or referring to it, he did it accurately, which shouldn't be a surprise...
Why doesn't America ever get better at educating children?
During my lifetime, Americans have made progress in many fields—for example, retailing, where Wal-Mart and Costco operate profitably selling at inflation-adjusted prices that would be unimaginably low to past generations.
Yet, our schools keep bumping along, with one fad replacing another, but little if any improvement in results.
In the early 1990s, I frequently visited Bentonville, Arkansas, making sales calls on Wal-Mart. What distinguished Wal-Mart from every other major corporation I'd met with was the ruthlessness of its rationality. Its employees would tear apart the slightest weakness in my sales pitch.
Full Article ...
Otis Moss, the man slated to become the new chief pastor at the Trinity United Church of Christ, referenced a rap song during one of his recent sermons that includes among its lyrics "F--- America" and states the U.S. is "still with triple K" – referring to the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan.
Moss was lauded last week by Sen. Barack Obama as a "wonderful young pastor," and an acceptable choice to replace retiring pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose controversial remarks landed the presidential candidate in hot water.
Full Article ...
Mounting evidence of lower temperature trends despite rising atmospheric CO2 levels is becoming a real problem for the greenhouse gas crowd. And reports that the cooling appears to follow a period of dormant solar activity aren't likely to ease their anxieties.
Indeed, without an immediate alarmist course correction, years of "the science is settled" campaigning could prove for naught, as prolonged temperature dips decimate the primary anthropogenic argument. After all, Lord Gore has shouted the IPCC's proclamation of a 0.3°C warming over the next decade from virtually every rooftop. Given new data projecting the contrary, he and his green hordes will need to find a way to not only explain the error, but keep the AGW dream alive.
Full Article ...
Israel is Western civilization's canary in the coal mine. If Israel cannot survive, perhaps Western civilization -- pluralistic, democratic, individualistic, secular, free-trading and devoted to the rule of law -- will be unable to last, either.
On the eve of Israel's 60th anniversary, those of us who cherish our own fundamental freedoms had better hope the Jewish state makes it through its second 60 years; or else our own right to think, say or worship as we please (unless, of course, we come under the scrutiny of a so-called human rights commission) is in jeopardy.
To many Canadians, that may seem a farfetched warning.
Full Article ...
Operating outside public view, the House Democratic majority is taking extraordinary steps to maintain spending as usual while awaiting a Democrat as president. Remarkably, the supine House Republican minority hardly resists and even collaborates with its supposed adversaries.
Full Article ...
Dick Polman is a long time Philly columnist and extreme left-winger that rarely makes any attempt to seem "fair and balanced," so it isn't surprising that his latest attempt at prescient punditry is a plaintive plea for the Democrats to chill out and just get along so that they can beat the "septuagenarian" McCain. But, his piece is so filled with horribly misconstrued historical analysis that it is hard to let him slide and mark it up solely as another forgettable example of the kind of partisan claptrap most of his work turns out to be. With the sort of half informed historical analysis he indulges in to cajole people to vote for the Democrats, this latest piece is too dishonest to just let it slide by. If anything calls for a fisking, this one does.
Full Article ...
As David Berlinski recently noted, “the thesis that there is a connection between Darwin and Hitler is widely considered a profanation.” But striking an indignant pose -- feathers in full ruffle -- is not an answer to such a serious charge, especially when the words of both Darwin and Hitler speak otherwise.
Those defending Darwin cannot have read his Descent of Man, wherein he applies the principles of natural selection to human beings -- a thing he prudently avoided in his earlier Origin of Species. In the Descent, the eugenic and racial inferences are clearly and startlingly drawn by Darwin himself.
Full Article ...
Democrats once accused Republicans of wanting old people and children to starve to death because the Republicans wanted to end the welfare state’s food stamps program. So why are they silent on the government program that’s actually causing starvation and food shortages? Oh. Right. The ethanol boondoggle is their idea.
Full Article ...
The ballots were still being counted on Friday May 2 -- and it was far from a landslide - (53 to 46 %) albeit a record turnout of voters. But by noon, the bookies had already declared Boris Johnson the new Mayor of London. Appropriately enough, May 2 is the day on the Orthodox Church calendar that honors Saint Boris of Bulgaria. Post-election comments -- penned in the daily newspapers from assorted left leaning grumblers, snidely suggested that it would take at least one saint (or a collection of them, plus a bevy of guardian angels) to keep Boris from dragging London down to a new level of hell.
Full Article ...
As Ranking Member of the Committee on Homeland Security, I am acutely aware of the threats our nation faces from international terrorism. But even I was taken aback a few months ago when New York State Law Enforcement officials approached me about a possible terrorist nexus as close as the neighborhood convenience store.
Recent investigations suggested a disturbing trend: that well-organized cigarette smuggling operations are sending millions of dollars in profits annually to the Middle East, possibly to our enemies. I immediately ordered my staff on the Committee to investigate the matter further, and what they found is disturbing.
Full Article ...
We’ve seen a lot in this campaign cycle, but the media hit a new low with the ABC Sunday love-fest between Hillary Clinton and George Stephanopoulous. For an entire hour, we were treated to an infomercial for the Clinton campaign. It’s a perfect example of how the political activists who pose as journalists have seized control of the media battlefield.
Full Article ...
As Israel celebrates its sixtieth birthday, the extreme left Center for Constitutional Rights (“CCR”) continues its attempt to use our federal courts to punish Israelis who have helped keep Israel free against terrorists determined to destroy it.
CCR’s calculus is purely ideological. Israel is defined as the enemy because it is one of the closest allies of the United States and is in the foreground of the war against the kind of terrorists whom CCR loves to represent.
Full Article ...
Americans are well acquainted with presidential candidate Barack Obama’s legendary pledges to bring “change” to America’s political and social landscape. (For example, see here and here and here.) Indeed, “Change We Can Believe In” is the slogan that adorns the homepage of his campaign website and so many of the placards displayed by the supporters who attend his speaking engagements. His Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, is also well practiced at issuing calls for change. Her “Change and Experience” ad campaign was but an outgrowth of her 1993 declaration, as First Lady, that “remolding society is one of the great challenges facing all of us in the West.” Most Americans are unaware, however, that when Obama and Clinton speak of “change,” they mean change in the sense that a profoundly significant, though not widely known, individual -- Saul Alinsky -- outlined in his writings two generations ago.
Full Article ...
Patrick Moore Wisely Questions Global Warming Alarmism and Advocates Nuclear Energy
Speaking before an audience in Boise, Idaho last week, Greenpeace Founder Dr. Patrick Moore confirmed that there is no proof that humans are causing global warming, and he wisely advocated a dramatic shift toward reliance upon nuclear power.
In light of the fact that Greenpeace was originally established for the very purpose of opposing underground nuclear testing, it is refreshing that someone in our current “gotcha” political culture acknowledges the facts when they contradict his previous policy agenda. In other words, perhaps even Al Gore will ultimately see the light and disown his silly and self-serving global warming crusade.
Full Article ...
The Right Conquers Rome. Is Italy about to Break the Mold?
Cross posted fromBrussels Journal.com
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/3221
Hat tip to Hans at USA Partisan:
http://usapartisan.blogspot.com/
From the desk of John Laughland on Thu, 2008-05-01 15:27
Different languages have different words for a major defeat or rout. They are often borrowed from the most inglorious episodes in respective national histories. Thus the French word for a terrible defeat is «bérézina», a reference to the disastrous Battle of Berezina in present-day Belarus in 1812 when Napoleon's already retreating troops were decimated by Marshal Kutuzov. The Germans often use the term «Stunde Null» («Zero Hour») for the same purpose: this was the term used to denote Germany's state of total devastation after the unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945. The British, rather eccentrically, use the word «Waterloo» to mean «defeat», even though they were the victors in that Belgian village in 1815. In Italian, the expression is «Caporetto»,in memory of the Battle of Caporetto fought at what is now Kobarid in Slovenia in 1917, the subject of Hemingway's Farewell to Arms. The expression has been much used in the newspapers in recent days to denote what happened to the Italian Left at the recent parliamentary and local elections.
Full Article ...
In late April, AccuWeather.com, led by Joe Bastardi, its chief meteorologist, issued a news release that was, to be kind, pure mush. The early warning forecast for 2008's June to November hurricane season said that conditions like La Nina and a «continued warm water cycle in the Atlantic Basin» held forth the «chance for U.S. landfalling storms.»
The operative word here is «chance» when predicting hurricanes because it is largely a question of gaming odds on how many. What no self-respecting meteorologist, whether in private forecasting or working for the U.S. government's weather service, wants you to know is that their highly sophisticated computer weather models quite simply cannot factor in a whole range of factors, not the least of which is clouds. Yes, clouds.
Full Article ...
Barack Obama first appeared on the national political scene as a uniter with hope and promise in his words. In 2004 when he gave his now-famous keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention, Americans saw Obama emerge as someone special and unique. He was young and oozed poise and charisma. Without a doubt, the Democrat Party had their future presidential candidate in its sights.
Today, the Democrat National Party is stuck with nothing more than a leftist ideologue politician who uses empty words to astound those who sought after him.
Full Article ...
Gordon Brown's first electoral test turned into a nightmare last night as Labour lost an astonishing 331 council seats and Boris Johnson won the London mayoral election.
Boris Johnson ended the eight-year reign of Ken Livingstone, delivering another body blow to the Prime Minister as Labour lost a quarter of the councillors who stood for the party on Thursday.
Full Article ...
Contrary to the perception of editorial writers at great newspapers like the New York Tiimes, defending American sovereignty is not a expression of racist hatred. In fact, it (defending America) is essential if this republic is to survive.
Acting in the best interests of America means, among other things, preventing further invasions from third world illegal aliens. It also means deporting those already here.
Full Article ...
During his interview with Tim Russert on Meet the Press Sunday May 4th, Obama stated three different times that (1) “It’s a wonderful church . . .”, and later (2) “I feel a great loyalty to that church . . .”, and even later, (3)“I am proud of my church and am committed to the values of that church.” Yet Russert never brought up questions about Obama’s new pastor, the good “Rev”. Otis Moss, nor did he question the long-time Black racist values of Obama’s beloved church.
Full Article ...
Isn’t a public thoroughfare a stated place of safety upon which a private citizen can expect to move from one destination to another without molestation? Isn’t it against the law for a private citizen or a group of private citizens to dragoon other private citizens off a stated public thoroughfare, to drag them into a building, say into a mosque, to interrogate them about their reasons for being on said public thoroughfare?
Full Article ...
The fearless and insightful Andrew McCarthy tells the truth, truths we have been repeating here for years, on the bully pulpit of the Rush Limbaugh Show. Don't miss Andy's important new book about the Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman case and the jihad threat in general (along with our supine and fantasy-based response to it): Willful Blindness.
Full Article ...
The Obama campaign must really be in worse trouble than we thought. What else to conclude from the campaign's decision to file a 64-page complaint with the Federal Election Commission, trying to prevent Edgar Bronfman and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees from spending $700,000 on television commercials to be aired at Indiana for Senator Clinton?
Full Article ...
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is refusing to identify the "influential Muslim Americans" and "leading U.S.-based scholars and commentators on Islam" who met with Secretary Michael Chertoff in helping shape a softer approach to government lexicon about terrorists and their ideological motivations.
"Our policy is we don't comment on the Secretary's private schedule," spokeswoman Amy Kudwa told the IPT. Nor would she identify any of the participants' organizational affiliation.
Full Article ...
April is the cruelest month, as T.S. Eliot wrote — and this year it has bred twin scandals out of the dead land of American academia. First there was the sanguinary spectacle of Yale senior and aspiring menses genius Aliza Shvarts’s culminating art project, which consisted of “video recordings of [her] forced miscarriages as well as prepared collections of the blood from the process.” It was a valuable look at what passes for art instruction in even the best American universities — as Michael J. Lewis pointed out in the Wall Street Journal — and a reminder that there are cheaper ways to earn your beret. The affair calls to mind a few lines of another poet:
Full Article ...
As Reverend Wrong weaved his beguiling case of woes why blacks in America have no chance of success, I could just picture black men and women believers saying to themselves, "Why try? If a Minister of G-d says this country is evil and is inventing viruses to kill us, we may as well get whatever joy we can off the streets instead of pounding them for jobs, sales, educations, business opportunities," etc., etc., etc.
Full Article ...
As I watched, it, I kept hearing that old, 80’s Cyndi Lauper song in my head: “…I see your true colors, shinin’ through…”
The “it” that I’m referencing is Bill O’Reilly’s recent interview with Hillary Rodham Clinton on the Fox Newschannel. If you didn’t see it on cable tv, by all means log-on to Fox News Dot Com and view it there. For those of us who care about our nation, its politics, and the selection of our next President, this discussion is “must see” material.
Full Article ...
Jeremiah Wright is now disowned, and Barack Obama is forever discredited.
“I can no more disown him (Jeremiah Wright) than I can disown my white grandmother.”
— Barack Obama, Philadelphia, March 18
Guess it’s time to disown Granny, if Obama’s famous Philadelphia “race” speech is to be believed. Of course, the speech was not just believed. It was hailed, celebrated, canonized as the greatest pronouncement on race in America since Lincoln at Cooper Union. A New York Times columnist said it “should be required reading in classrooms across the country.” College seniors and first-graders, suggested the excitable Chris Matthews.
Full Article ...
A new peer-reviewed study in the scientific journal Nature may be hard for Al Gore and other global warming activists to swallow.
The study predicts that global warming will stop until at least 2015, a prediction that contradicts the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former Vice President Gore, who have issued dire warnings about rising global temperatures. The document notes that global surface temperature will not increase until 2015, "as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic [manmade] warming."
Full Article ...
We will be, or at least we should be, pondering the visit of Pope Benedict for a long time to come. I do not agree with the widely expressed view that this will be his only pastoral visit to America. To judge by the vitality exhibited, which seemed to grow with his every day here, this may be a pontificate as long as that of Leo XIII, who died at age ninety-three. Benedict just turned eighty-one. He may return in five years or so to see how we have responded to his proposal this time around.
Full Article ...
POLITICAL campaigning necessarily produces a wide gap between words and deeds. This is the price of bringing together a broad coalition with disparate interests. All effective politicians are at times authentically insincere or sincerely inauthentic. Exaggeration, embellishment, overstatement, doubletalk, deception and lies presented as metaphorical truths are the order of the day.
So, of course, Barack Obama is no different. He exaggerates the credit he deserves for a limited piece of ethics-reform legislation. He embellishes when he presents himself as having had a consistent record on the Iraq war when in fact he's done a fair amount of zigzagging.
Full Article ...
Once again this week, there was a black man in the national spotlight using his celebrity status to lecture America about the black experience, black culture and black “victimhood.”
Now, you probably think I’m referring to that most notable of radical Afrocentric holy men, Jeremiah Wright, or his slick protégé, Barack Hussein Obama.
Fair enough.
Full Article ...
Research scientist Dr. Roy Spencer has authored a new book designed to clear up so-called "climate confusion."
Spencer was a senior scientist for climate studies at NASA but now works as a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He also helped develop satellite technology that is used for measuring global temperatures.
Spencer's latest project is a book called Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor. "A lot of the public are confused about the issue of global warming. They don't know what to believe anymore. They hear anything from, you know, global warming is a hoax to global warming is going to kill us all in ten years," Spencer says.
Full Article ...
When Sylvain Gouguenheim looks at today's historical vision of the history of the West and Islam, he sees a notion, accepted as fact, that the Muslim world was at the source of the Christian Europe's reawakening from the Middle Ages.
He sees a portrayal of an enlightened Islam, transmitting westward the knowledge of the ancient Greeks through Arab translators and opening the path in Europe to mathematics, medicine, astronomy and philosophy - a gift the West regards with insufficient esteem.
Full Article ...
In the past four months, six Muslim women living in Berlin have been brutally murdered by family members. Their crime? Trying to break free and live Western lifestyles.
Within their communities, the killers are revered as heroes for preserving their family dignity. How can such a horrific and shockingly archaic practice be flourishing in the heart of Europe?
Full Article ...
The American public, and Christians in particular, are being deluged once again with talk of the thoroughly ambiguous concept of "social justice." It is, after all, election time. Thus the pseudo religious among us must make their pitch for the Christian vote, on whatever spurious terms they can concoct.
Full Article ...
The president's nomination of generals David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno to take command of U.S. Central Command and Multinational Force-Iraq, respectively, was obviously the right decision. By experience and temperament and demonstrated success, both men are perfectly suited to these jobs. Given the political climate in Washington, however, their nominations are likely to be attacked with the same tired arguments war critics used to try to drown out reports of progress in Iraq during the recent Petraeus-Crocker hearings. So before the shouting begins again, let us consider in detail one of the most important of these arguments: that no one has offered any clear definition of success in Iraq.
Full Article ...
Post-May Day depression is a growing malady that affects many progressives and pro-Communists each year, usually beginning late in the afternoon on May 1 and continuing until the morning of the next May Day. For some, it is a result of too much sign-making and short-range marching with very few people giving a crap. Many left-wing agitators in the United States and other free nations have mild symptoms, but others are subjected to an almost paralyzing agony.
This article shows how dejected collectivists around the world can combat May Day depression by just taking a few simple precautions.
Full Article ...
Newsweek, via anonymous sources, explains why Oprah left Obama's church in this article, Something Wasn't Wright:
According to two sources, Winfrey was never comfortable with the tone of Wright's more incendiary sermons, which she knew had the power to damage her standing as America's favorite daytime talk-show host. "Oprah is a businesswoman, first and foremost," said one longtime friend, who requested anonymity when discussing Winfrey's personal sentiments. "She's always been aware that her audience is very mainstream, and doing anything to offend them just wouldn't be smart. She's been around black churches all her life, so Reverend Wright's anger-filled message didn't surprise her. But it just wasn't what she was looking for in a church." Oprah's decision to distance herself came as a surprise to Wright, who told Christianity Today in 2002 that when he would "run into her socially … she would say, 'Here's my pastor!' " (Winfrey declined to comment. A Harpo Productions spokesperson would not confirm her reasons for leaving the church.)
