The Moderate U.S. Establishment Position? That the Muslim Brotherhood Might Be Moderate URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2012/04/09/the-moderate-u-s-establishment-muslim-brotherhood-moderate/ The Washington Post continues to talk relatively sensibly about Middle East developments. And yet its latest editorial also shows the type of contortions necessary to avoid facing the awful truth of the situation in the region. The editorial concludes: […]
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/295600/largesse-losers-thomas-sowell
How long do politicians have to keep on promising heaven and delivering hell before people catch on and stop getting swept away by rhetoric?
Why should being in a professional sport exempt anyone from prosecution for advocating deliberate violence? Recent revelations of such advocacy of violence by an NFL coach should lead to his banishment for life by the NFL, and criminal prosecution by the authorities. If you are serious about reducing violence, you have to be serious about punishing those who advocate it.
Have you noticed that what modest economic improvements we have seen occurred during the much-lamented “gridlock” in Washington? Nor is this unusual. If you check back through history, doing nothing has a far better track record than politicians’ intervening in the economy.
With all the talk about people paying their “fair share” of income taxes, why do nearly half the people in this country pay no income taxes at all? Is that their “fair share”? Or is creating more recipients of government handouts, at no cost to themselves, simply a strategy to gain more votes?
John Derbyshire Learns What We Cannot Talk About Posted By Bruce Thornton
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/04/10/john-derbyshire-learns-what-we-cannot-talk-about/
Wittgenstein once wrote, “What we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.” Ex-National Review writer John Derbyshire has just learned the modern American version of this truth. What we Americans cannot talk about is race (except, of course, in the anodyne terms established by political correctness), and woe betide anyone who refuses to pass over this topic in silence.
Derbyshire got in trouble over a piece he posted on the webzine Taki’s Magazine called “The Talk: Nonblack Version. “The talk” is what many professional blacks call the coming-of-age conversation they have with their kids, the main theme of which seems to be the persistence of racism in American society. Derbyshire’s version focuses on some matters of fact, such as the disproportionate numbers of black criminals, and others of speculation, such as black intelligence inferiority. It was the latter, of course, that got Derbyshire fired by National Review, which called such ideas “nasty and indefensible.”
The Lies of Günter Grass Posted By David Solway
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/04/10/exposing-the-lies-of-gunter-grass/
It’s a curious fact that the reputation of many contemporary novelists of popular distinction rests on a single book. Think, for example, of Umberto Eco. Had he not written The Name of the Rose, he would be better known today as an essayist and semiotician who had also published some interesting if not particularly memorable fiction. (The one exception to the rule might be Foucault’s Pendulum.) This is even truer of Norwegian antisemite, Jostein Gaarder, whose Sophie’s World catapulted him to international acclaim. The works that followed might best be portrayed as competent-to-forgettable. Ditto the anti-Zionist Louis De Bernière whose Captain Corelli’s Mandolin was his one resonant success, and Portuguese antisemite and Nobel Laureate José Saramago, whose only readable book was The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis.
As for Germany’s most famous living novelist, Günter Grass pretty well consorts with the paradigm, The Tin Drum having established him as a major literary and political voice of the twentieth century. Admittedly, subsequent books like Dog Years and The Flounder were notable achievements. But absent the beating of The Tin Drum, the callithumpian parade of Grass’ works in the public arena would have been far less spectacular. He cannot be dismissed as a one-shot Johnny, but his oeuvre arguably does not justify his inflated réclame. Indeed, for some time now, he has been living off the interest from the capital he invested in his heyday. Sadly, Grass lost it long ago.
The Center for American Progress’ War on Veteran Posted By Daniel Greenfield
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/04/10/the-center-for-american-progress%e2%80%99-war-on-veterans/
The shameful treatment of Vietnam veterans is one of the ugliest chapters in our history and it is a chapter that the Obama Administration appears eager to revisit under the guiding inspiration of the Center for American Progress.
While spending under Obama has dramatically increased, the only part of the budget that the radical administration appears to be willing to cut is military spending. But cuts to military spending don’t just involve hardware, but also target human beings. The most shameful cuts involve dramatic increases to health care costs for veterans.
Tricare provides medical benefits to active duty personnel and their families, as well as veterans. With military salaries that are below average for Federal workers, those who serve and have served their country depend on it. After ten years of war and fifteen thousand wounded men and women, Tricare is a small payment on the debt that can never be repaid.
Unfortunately the Party of Treason, not satisfied with stabbing soldiers in the back while they were fighting, has refused to cease its campaign against them even after they have come home. The Center for American Progress, the leftist think-tank that has been described as the brains of the Democratic Party, has made Tricare into a target.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ Feral children deprived of language develop their own forms of communication and it may be that societies deprived of religion develop their own belief systems. Religion is at its core a means of explaining the world and it becomes absurdly easy for science to slip into the habits of religion. To break down religion […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11756/pub_detail.asp
While the Road to Serfdom is paved with good intentions gone awry; the road to self fulfillment—the dream of the modern person—is constructed with freedom stones resembling personal license. What is emerging in the United States, based in part on the empirical data in Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, is a selective version of morality. If it feels good, do it. The constraints inspired by the Judeo-Christian tradition, our genetic inheritance, even our sex, are mere trifles compared to personal choice and desire. To my astonishment, even murder is justified as an act of personal morality.
Francesca Minerva argues that since babies have not formed desires and plans, they may be killed (she calls it “after birth abortion”) if they interfere with the desires and plans of other people who have formed desires and plans, namely their parents and other immediate relatives and also society as a whole. She writes:
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11758/pub_detail.asp
Exploding the Myth Eco-Puritanism Is Harmless Rich Trzupek
“All and all, this is a thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening read. The chapter entitled “A Climate Rooster Becomes President” should be required reading for every voter. Isaac outlines President Obama’s multi-pronged, all-out war on fossil fuels, which is sure to continue to have serious economic repercussions far into the future. Still, she remains hopeful that the wave of this particular apocalyptic movement has already crested. Indeed, fewer and fewer Americans profess to worried about man-made climate change every year. “Roosters of the Apocalypse” explains why.”
Roosters of the Apocalypse: How the Junk Science of Global Warming Nearly Bankrupted the Western World, is available from the Heartland Institute.
One of the difficulties inherent to combatting the excesses of environmental activists is that their message sounds so innocuous on the surface. Who can be against a cleaner world? How can anyone not want to protect the wonders of nature? And, if the green crowd may take things a tad too far at times, what’s the harm? After all, better safe than sorry, right?
Author Rael Jean Isaac explodes the myth that eco-puritanism is harmless in her new book Roosters of the Apocalypse: How the Junk Science of Global Warming Nearly Bankrupted the Western World, published by the Heartland Institute. It’s a devastating take-down of the excesses of the environmental movement past and present, in the form of a well-reasoned, easy to digest analysis that packs equal parts reason and entertainment into a surprisingly compact package.
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3000/obama-russia-space For the men in the Kremlin, nuclear weapons are the last shred of superpower status they have left, and anything that even slightly reduces the threat of their missile force is a menace to be fought with every tool available. The Undersecretary of State for Arms Control recently offered to provide Russia with classified […]
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/04/09/gsa-rocks-vegas
The federal civil service — Obama’s scandalous governing class — shows its true colors.
“Obama will protect the bureaucracy that is his willing instrument of governance, and those who infest the federal agencies as permanent employees will be carrying out his will even if a Republican replaces Obama in November.”
One of the few reasons to not mourn the death of Elvis Presley is that the General Services Administration’s event planners would probably have hired him to sing at their October 2010 “conference” at the ritzy-glitzy M Resort Spa Casino in Las Vegas. Instead, they had to settle for asongcelebrating government waste by one of their own.
According to the April 2 report by the GSA’s Inspector General, the “conference” cost $822,751. So, for a mere $2,742 per person in taxpayers’ money, the GSA event featured essential government functions such as a $75,000 team-building session in which attendees were challenged to build a bicycle, a session with an entertainer-mind reader ($3,200), almost $150,000 in food expenses as well as paying for clothing and tuxedo rentals for GSA employees,
