http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/ It’s that time of year again. Like millions of Americans — some 50 percent of tax filers, in fact — I am spending many hours assembling various forms and bits of paper that I will turn over to my accountant, who will then go away to add, subtract, depreciate, amortize, deduct, allow, and expense, […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/jamie-glazov/through-these-blues-2/ FP: D.C. Watson, welcome to Frontpage Interview. Watson: Thanks very much. FP: let’s begin with you telling us what the book is about and its main argument. Watson: For a long time, I’ve paid close attention to who has been saying and doing what. Why so many of our politicians and journalists are as […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ryan-mauro/obama-meets-with-pro-hezbollah-groups-ahead-of-mideast-trip/ On Monday, President Obama prepared for his trip to the Middle East by meeting with around 10 Muslim and Arab officials that provided him with “recommendations.” The attendees included representatives from the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, two anti-Israel groups with a record of pro-Hezbollah advocacy. The meeting came four […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/why-obama-needs-another-dictator-to-replace-chavez-on-the-glazov-gang/
This week’s Glazov Gang had the honor of being joined by Bob Zeidman, award-winning novelist, Larry Greenfield, Senior Fellow at the American Freedom Alliance and Howard Hyde, author of the new pamphlet, Pull the Plug on Obamacare. The Gang members discussed Obama’s Billion-Dollar Giveaway to the Muslim Brotherhood. The dialogue occurred in Part II and shed light on the administration’s use of American taxpayers’ money to fund Islamists. The segment also highlighted Resisting ObamaCare. Part I, meanwhile, focused on Why Hollywood Cried When Hugo Died and highlighted the Left’s love affair with enemy tyrants. To watch both parts of the two part series, see below:
Part I:
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/not-if-but-when-2?f=puball
Remember the “Current Threat Level?” You know, the red, orange, yellow, blue and green color bar that the Department of Homeland Security uses to keep the public up to date on the U.S. terror threat? Bet you have no idea what color it is today.
The government website Terror-Alert explains the system,
The Homeland Security Advisory System is a means to disseminate information regarding the risk of terrorist acts to federal, state, and local authorities and to the American people.
In case you’re interested, we are currently at ‘yellow’ and incidentally we have been at “yellow” since September 10, 2007. The last time the color or level changed was back on June 30, 2007.
The system was created by a Homeland Security Presidential Directive 3 on March 11, 2002 and was unveiled on March 12, 2002. The original system was phased out on April 27, 2011, and replaced with a new system called the National Terrorism Advisory System.
I’m happy to say that it serves its purpose today about as well as it did when I wrote my article “Why is Our Government Hiding the Truth About Our Safety?” back on February 21, 2010 three years ago.
Interestingly enough I had written about the TSA in that article,
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/in-capitol-rotunda-barack-obama-draws-disconsolate-mourners Special New York Times report. March 9, 2014 Washington. D.C. – The body President Barack Obama, who on Tuesday succumbed to an injury from a golfing mishap on Martha’s Vineyard, was put on display in the Capitol Rotunda, and viewed by thousands of solemn, often weeping mourners in a line that stretched for over […]
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-02-120313.html
The influential bi-monthly The American Interest devotes the front section of its March/April issue to the end of American Exceptionalism. As Mark Twain said about rumors of his own death, it’s exaggerated. All depends on demographics: what has made the United States radically different from all other big industrial nations during the past generation is a fertility rate above replacement.
After the 2008 crisis, the United States’ fertility dipped below the replacement line. Whether that continues or reverses depends, in turn, on America’s religious character, and that is the least predictable facet of American life.
There are many good arguments against the idea of American Exceptionalism, but there has been – until very recently- one outstanding argument in favor. The United States is the last remaining Christian nation in the industrial world, and was until 2010 the only industrial nation with fertility above replacement.
That is an issue of fact; the American Interest addresses ideology. Prof Walter McDougall’s entry claims that ”Exceptionalism” itself was an invention of Cold War propaganda that the Pilgrim Fathers never had in mind. Another piece by Nils Gilman states that all nations have a ”master narrative” of their uniqueness to which the United States is, well, no exception. And UCLA’s Peter Berger argues that the United States used to be exceptional but isn’t any more. Two of the three pieces start by quoting President Barack Obama’s 2009 comment that the US is exceptional the same way that Greece or any other country is exceptional.
There is a good deal of truth in all three accounts. During most of US history, Americans had no vision of a City on a Hill, as 17th-century Massachusetts governor John Winthrop paraphrased the New Testament words. Prof McDougall correctly points out that the image came into rhetorical focus during World War II and the Cold War. That does not prove it false, however.
http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/novelists-view-world/2013/mar/11/amen-history-channels-bible/
NEW YORK, March 11, 2013 — Well, it could have been much worse, and in some ways it was better than expected.I missed the first part of the History Channel’s series on the Bible, that begins at, well, “The Beginning,” as in Genesis, but I caught up to it last night by the time Moses, not Yasser Arafat, reaches the Promised Land, yes, Israel.
Those of us who study the Hebrew Bible daily and religiously but are not necessarily religious, indulging in the forbidden cheeseburger after study and prayer or the ballgame we may watch after Sabbath services, were afraid that the series may take too many liberties in this, the age of political correctness.
ABC-TV, for example, once tried to re-do Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 “The Ten Commandments,” but forgot to mention that the people Moses was leading were Hebrews. They could have been anybody in that pasteurized version.
In this “Bible,” at least the script was clear enough.
But I must admit that even in this telling it was difficult to imagine anybody as Moses except Charlton Heston or Pharaoh as anyone except Yul Brynner.
Was this version accurate? I’ll let our doctors of divinity get into that, but as for me, not bad, and showing Samson as a black man was a good touch. Jews have become distilled and we do trace our lineage back to Abraham (some would say his grandson Jacob and the 12 Tribes, specifically Judah, hence Judaism), but we come from a mixture. We never were “the white man.”
The best part, for me as a casual observer, was that there was no hiding the fact that God promised the land of Israel to the Jewish people. Period. End of story. But as we know, this story is without end. Read he headlines and the Hebrew Bible itself foreshadows everything we read in the papers today.
But whoa! Where’s this been all these years? Even Israeli politicians are afraid to mention Israel’s indelible Biblical connection for fear of rocking the boat.
Frankly, I had expected “the other side of the story,” namely that the Arabs enjoy an equal claim to the Land, and if they do, it’s political, and not Biblical. The History Channel stuck to the Bible, the Hebrew Bible…told, of course, in King’s English, and there is even more to this to prove King Solomon’s maxim that there is nothing new under the sun:
http://news.yahoo.com/saudi-dissidents-jailed-post-arab-spring-crackdown-184143623.html
CHRISTA CASE BRYANT
Saudi dissidents jailed – a post Arab Spring crackdown?
A judge recently sentenced two activists to a decade in prison and ordered their civil rights organization, which lobbied against government corruption, to be shut down.
Saudi Arabia’s decision this weekend to sentence two of the country’s most prominent human rights activists to 10 and 11 years in prison, respectively, has sparked a surge of discontent among the kingdom’s reformers. In just one indication, an economist-blogger’s poll on Twitter drew 10,000 responses, 85 percent of them opposed to the decision.
While many activists appear undeterred, the sentencing of Mohammad al-Qahtani, together with that of Abdullah al-Hamid, cofounders of the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association (ACPRA), represents a significant step backward in reform efforts.
The small opening for reform created by King Abdullah when he took over in 2005 has been gradually closing since the Arab Spring, says Prof. Gregory Gause, a scholar of Saudi Arabia at the University of Vermont.
“The last two years have seen a closing of what had been a very small opening of what had been acceptable discourse in Saudi Arabia,” says Professor Gause, who chairs UVM’s political science department. “I do think it’s a signal … it’s part of the post-Arab Spring Saudi crackdown.”
http://www.steynonline.com/5465/the-racist-and-the-unknown-man My friend Lars Hedegaard is a dapper, courtly publisher and editor just turned 70. Like many Scandinavians, he speaks very evenly modulated English, but, insofar as I can tell, his Danish is no more excitable. A cultured, civilized fellow, he was for most of his life a man of the left, as are the […]
