http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/oct/8/the-post-constitutional-president/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&utm_medium=RSS Team Obama insists that next month’s presidential election is “a choice, not a referendum.” It sure seems to be the latter with respect to the two candidates’ very different views on the Constitution. Mitt Romney makes plain at every turn his commitment to that document, while Barack Obama’s conduct in office has marked him […]
http://times247.com/
Times News
Obama loses
lead on key
voter issues
Stephen Dinan
Voters now give Mitt Romney the nod when it comes to handling national security, and he has recaptured a lead over President Obama when voters are asked who will do a better job on the economy — findings that spell bad news for the incumbent. Read more…
Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz28nYbQ4o4
Out of touch: Obama lives in left-wing bubble
Real Clear Politics
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Commentary
Understanding why Mitt Romney so decisively won the first presidential debate is as important as the fact that he did. Obama lost because he, like virtually the entire left, lives in a left-wing bubble. Read more…
Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz28nYtZrWC
North Korea boast: Missiles can hit U.S. mainland
Reuters
Monday, October 8, 2012
News
North Korea has rockets that can hit the U.S. mainland, it said on Tuesday. North Korea is believed to have been developing a long-range missile with a range of 4,160 miles, raising fears that it perfecting technology to build a missile capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to the United States. Read more…
Read more: http://times247.com/#ixzz28nZIGljS
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/mark-tapson/radicals-portraits-of-a-destructive-generation/
David Horowitz has established himself as the radical left’s foremost intellectual nemesis, certainly in part because he used to be one of them and understands their mindset and strategies so intimately. He has attacked progressive ideology in book after book, including Radical Son, Destructive Generation, Left Illusions, The Party of Defeat, The Art of Political War, and Unholy Alliance, to name a few. His new book Radicals: Portraits of a Destructive Generation, however, is less of an analysis of their ideology than personal reflections on a handful of people who have embraced that ideology.
The book’s six chapters each profile a different radical figure or figures: enfant terrible Christopher Hitchens, Marxist feminist Bettina Aptheker, black celebrity academic Cornel West, domestic terrorists like Linda Evans and Susan Rosenberg, feminist essayist Susan Lydon, and last but certainly not least, the radical left’s favorite mentor, Saul Alinsky.
The “destructive passion” of the title is the left’s utopian fantasy of human perfection, which “becomes a desire to annihilate whatever stands in the way of [that] beautiful idea.” This “fantasy of a redeemed future has repeatedly led to catastrophic results as progressive radicals pursue their impossible schemes.” And thus Horowitz begins the book reiterating a theme common to all his dissections of the left, and common to the radicals profiled here: “It is an enduring irony of the human condition that the urgency to make the world ‘a better place’ is also the chief source of the suffering that human beings have inflicted on each other from the beginning of time.”
In “The Two Christophers,” Horowitz eloquently examines the life and “unruly contradictions” of the iconoclastic Hitchens, who ultimately had second thoughts about some of his radical positions but never made the same leap out of the progressive faith that Horowitz did. To Horowitz, Hitchens was burdened by a “moral and intellectual incoherence” that overtook an otherwise brilliant mind. The chapter occupies nearly a quarter of the book, which gives some indication of the depth of personal respect and even affection that Horowitz held for the late Hitchens.
Bettina Aptheker, a professor at University of California at Santa Cruz, is an icon of radical feminism and the daughter of a prominent Communist Party intellectual who indoctrinated her into the movement. A Berkeley radical in the ‘60s, in the ‘70s Aptheker worked for the defense of fellow Communist Party member Angela Davis in the latter’s high-profile trial for her involvement in the murder of a judge in a failed attempt to free her imprisoned lover, murderer George Jackson. Aptheker went on to pursue her revolutionary work in the field of feminist studies, and even then, Horowitz notes, she “remained ideologically straight-jacketed, unable to free herself from the terrible legacy of the cause she and her family had served.”
Academic icon Cornel West, “a remarkably shallow intellect” who tirelessly promotes himself as a sort of modern-day Biblical prophet, is Horowitz’s next case history. The chapter on West is titled “Cultural Decline,” reflecting that his rise to cultural eminence is a reflection of general cultural decline, and was made possible only by his personification of progressive clichés:
While his audiences nod agreeably, treating his mumbo-jumbo as a discourse that somehow makes sense, what they really came to hear are the progressive insults to their country and their countrymen, which West serves up at every venue and every turn.
Those progressive insults are predictable accusations of racism, sexism, imperialism, Islamophobia, and homophobia against “a society that has bestowed on him so many undeserved privileges and honors.” For Horowitz, he is “the archetype of an American radicalism that has set out to destroy the American experiment, whose strength can be measured in his unmerited triumphs and ridiculous career.”
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/jamie-glazov/the-collapse-of-communism-the-untold-story/print/
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Robert Buchar, an associate professor and author of the Cinematography Program at Columbia College in Chicago. A political refugee from former Czechoslovakia, he is the producer of the documentary, Velvet Hangover, which is about Czech New Wave filmmakers, how they survived the period of “normalization” and their reflections on the so-called Velvet Revolution of 1989. He is also the author of Czech New Wave Filmmakers in Interviews and And Reality be Damned… Undoing America: What The Media Didn’t Tell You About the End of the Cold War and Fall of Communism in Europe. He just currently finished the new feature length documentary film, The Collapse of Communism: The Untold Story.
FP: Robert Buchar, welcome to Frontpage Interview. Congratulations on your new documentary film.
Buchar: Thank you Jamie for the opportunity to talk about it. It took eight years to finish but it’s finally done.
FP: Let us begin with this question: Why should we talk about the fall of communism? Why does it matter?
Buchar: Right, why talk about something that happened some 23 years ago? The word communism is even in our vocabulary anymore and the new generation has no idea what it even means.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/rael-jean-isaac/global-malarkey/
In an interview with the New Yorker, President Obama said that in his second term the most important policy he could address was climate change. Given the damage he has done to fossil fuels in his first term (and the vast sums he has squandered on the will o the wisps of sun and wind), one shudders to think what is in store for our energy supply if he turns full attention to the subject. Senator John McCain, his defeated Republican rival, was also a true believer in the global warming apocalypse, the notion that man-made global warming, if unchecked, will destroy the planet. In fact, now that so many governments have clambered on board, global warming theory, if unchecked, is going to destroy the economies of the Western world. Which underscores the importance of books like this one, compact, brief, easy to read, by a layman for a lay audience, that serve as antidotes to the prevalent hysteria.
In his new book, Global Warming: Trials of an Unsettled Science, author David Solway begins with a succinct review of the large body of scientific evidence throwing doubt on the claims of those who insist that global warming, as he puts it, is leading “to a latter day man-made global holocaust.” He makes the effort while acknowledging that evidence is a hard sell for believers invested in this apocalyptic faith. He quotes Jonathan Swift, “What a man has not been reasoned into, he cannot be reasoned out of.”
Indeed reasoned discussion is the last thing global warming zealots have in mind. They are every bit as impassioned and out of control as the rabid Moslem defenders of Mohammed from every conceivable slight. Solway cites (among others) Canadian global-warmer-in-chief David Suzuki telling a conference on sustainability at McGill “to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there’s a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail” for their failure to act and British lawyer Polly Higgins who petitions the UN to prosecute “climate deniers” for “crimes against peace.” My personal favorite is the obsessively anti-Israel English Labor party activist Clare Short who declares Israel, by distracting politicians from the weather, may cause the “end of the human race.”
Solway shows what we have here is an offshoot of liberal environmentalism that has become “the cutting edge of the movement for bureaucratized state control of both private life and free market economics.” Environmentalism has also become an anti-human religion. Solway has some telling quotes here. A couple of samples: Paul Taylor in Respect for Nature, A Theory of Environmental Ethics postulates “Given the total, absolute disappearance of Homo sapiens, then not only would the Earth’s community of Life continue to exist, but in all probability, its well-being enhanced.” Or John Davis, editor of Earth First: “Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.” Or Paul Watson, Greenpeace co-founder, who described human beings as the “AIDS of the Earth.”
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-obama-doctrine-exposed/ On Monday, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney took President Obama to task for his administration’s disastrous handling of American foreign policy, which has had catastrophic consequences — most recently in the form of the heinous attacks against our embassies in Libya and Egypt. To understand what happened in Benghazi or in Cairo requires more […]
http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-rebuke-of-sam-slick/?print=1
In an acutely reasoned article [1] for American Thinker, economist and member of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute Monty Pelerin warns that the United States is “one election away from tragedy.” Pelerin is not alone in mounting this argument; many commentators and political analysts are in agreement that November 6, 2012, may be one of the most fateful dates in the entire pageant of American history, no less crucial than another resonant date, April 12, 1861, when Abraham Lincoln responded to the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter. For there is a growing—though perhaps insufficient—consensus on the part of a notable segment of the American public, Republican candidates for office, and a number of disaffected Democrats that the coming election is essentially a plebiscite and that the future security, coherence, and prosperity of the nation will be decided on the first Tuesday of November of this year. “There are but a few weeks left,” writes Andrew McCarthy in a review [2] of David Limbaugh’s The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama’s War on the Republic [3], “before the nation either dramatically alters course or cruises on to the abyss, perhaps irreversibly.”
A victory for Mitt Romney would allow the nation to return, if only partially, to its historical roots as a constitutional republic and free market economy. But if Barack Obama should win re-election, America will inexorably go the way of the crushingly indebted, under-employed, imploding European Union, as well as gradually surrendering much of its autonomy to an advancing Islamic presence and the inroads of Shari’a law. It would continue to rely on the dubious expedient of soft power and international diplomacy (aka, accommodation and concession) to defend its interests, thus subsiding into political desuetude. A second term for this president will yield a nation drowning in debt, undergoing a rapidly declining material equity, and increasingly vulnerable to Islamic subversion.
To cite Roger Kimball’s objective recapitulation [4], this is the president who is defined by “the $16 trillion federal debt, the 8.3 percent unemployment when he promised to have it down to 5.6 percent, the annual deficit, which he promised to halve, hovering around $1.5 trillion,” as well as “the disaster that is Obama’s Islamophilic Mideast policy—our consulate overrun in Benghazi, our ambassador murdered, Obama is told 90 minutes into the assault, he goes to bed….” One might also mention Obama’s empowering of the anti-American Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the hospitality extended to Islamic organizations and individuals at home.
http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/ Retired Saudi commodore Abdulateef Al-Mulhim is evidently a thoughtful and courageous realist. Last year he wrote the very well-received article I referred to here, and now (hat tip: reader Jean) he reprises his wise counsels. Inter alia, he writes: ‘…. I decided to write this article after I saw photos and reports about a […]
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/10/08/csi-benghazi Three weeks after the terrorist attack that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, the FBI finally was permitted to bring its formidable forensic investigative capabilities to the burned-out husk of a building. The FBI’s efforts won’t be entirely futile. Their expertise and methodical approach will certainly yield some evidence of what […]
http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001310.html
www.arabnews.com/arab-spring-and-israeli-enemy
* Abdulateef Al-Mulhim, columnist for ‘Arab News’: “On the anniversary of the 1973 War between the Arab and the Israelis, many people in the Arab world are beginning to ask many questions about the past, present and the future with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The questions now are: What was the real cost of these wars to the Arab world and its people. And the harder question that no Arab national wants to ask is: What was the real cost for not recognizing Israel in 1948 and why didn’t the Arab states spend their assets on education, health care and the infrastructures instead of wars? But, the hardest question that no Arab national wants to hear is whether Israel is the real enemy of the Arab world and the Arab people.”
* Al-Mulhim: “I decided to write this article after I saw photos and reports about a starving child in Yemen, a burned ancient Aleppo souk in Syria, the under developed Sinai in Egypt, car bombs in Iraq and the destroyed buildings in Libya.”
* Al-Mulhim: “If many of the Arab states are in such disarray, then what happened to the Arabs’ sworn enemy Israel? Israel now has the most advanced research facilities, top universities and advanced infrastructure. Many Arabs don’t know that the life expectancy of the Palestinians living in Israel is far longer than many Arab states and they enjoy far better political and social freedom than many of their Arab brothers. Even the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip enjoy more political and social rights than some places in the Arab World. Wasn’t one of the judges who sent a former Israeli president to jail an Israeli-Palestinian?”
* Fred Hiatt: “Obama likes to say that ‘the tide of war is receding,’ but saying so doesn’t make it so, and withdrawing America from the field of battle doesn’t necessarily end a war… The longer a president holds America back from its expected role as leader and shaper of events, the messier the dilemmas will be.”
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fred-hiatt-no-escape-from-the-middle-east/2012/10/07/35fc9204-0f1c-11e2-bb5e-492c0d30bff6_story.html
