http://send.hadavars.com/index.php?action=message&l=2096&c=21630&m=20117&s=a317a26441993bdd8f740ee9a6c71bce President Obama re-introduced his New Middle East vision during his September 25, 2013 speech at the UN General Assembly: “Let me take this opportunity to outline what has been the US policy toward the Middle East and North Africa, and what will be my policy during the remainder of my presidency….” Obama clarified that […]
http://www.city-journal.org/2013/eon0927ss.html The early political careers of President Obama and Gotham’s likely next mayor, Bill de Blasio, have followed similar trajectories. Both Obama and de Blasio emerged from the radical activist wings of their respective big-city Democratic parties. Both achieved broad political success despite their leftist backgrounds, winning big electoral victories against the odds. Both have […]
I’m sorry, but we have to talk about the barbarism of modern Islamist terrorism http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100238080/im-sorry-but-we-have-to-talk-about-the-barbarism-of-modern-islamist-terrorism/ In Western news-making and opinion-forming circles, there’s a palpable reluctance to talk about the most noteworthy thing about modern Islamist violence: its barbarism, its graphic lack of moral restraint. This goes beyond the BBC’s yellow reluctance to deploy the T-word […]
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/26/Its-worse-than-a-conspiracy-it%20-s-consensus
Vladimir Bukovsky is one of the founders of the Soviet dissident movement. He spent twelve years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and psychiatric hospitals during his fight for freedom. In 2007, he was nominated for president of Russia by the democratic oppostion in moral protest of Putin’s powers. His many works include To Build a Castle and Judgement in Moscow.
Pavel Stroilov is a Russian exile in London and the editor and translator of Alexander Litvinenko’s book, Allegations. He is co-author with Bukovsky of EUSSR: The Soviet Roots of European Integration, and the author of Behind the Desert Storm: A Secret Archive Stolen From the Kremlin that Sheds New Light on the Arab Revolutions in the Middle East.
Groundbreaking books about the history of communism, such as Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago or Viktor Suvorov’s Ice-Breaker, are never written by “professional” historians. Indeed, historians typically meet those books with remarkable hostility.
Yet, non-academic history books certainly have their advantages. For one thing, they are readable. More often than not, they are better researched too. Above all, they are intellectually honest, free from the unspoken taboos of the academic world and from allegiances to theories and to colleagues that tie the hands of many an academic.
Where a professional historian pursues an academic career, the amateur seeks after the truth. Ignorant of taboos, the amateur can follow the trail of evidence to wherever it leads and discovers things which, according to the academic conventional wisdom, are best left untouched and unsaid.
That is what Diana West does in American Betrayal:The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character. By her own admission, she started that book with no intention of writing much about the Cold War. She started not as a historian, but a simple mortal puzzled and disturbed by the obvious question: how on earth could this great civilization of ours have degraded into such a hypocritical nonsense as political correctness? Having written her previous book about the death of the civilization of grown-ups, now Mrs. West, in her own words, attempts a post mortem–only to discover unmistakable signs of a murder.
She digs deeper, “tracing references and footnotes backward along a well-mapped historical route that has simply fallen into disuse”, as she puts it–and discovers the true history of the 20th century, the history of communist crimes against humanity, to which so many in the Western Establishment were accomplices and collaborators; and then a massive cover-up of those crimes, which infested our entire public life with a culture of hypocrisy and double standards.
It is this search for the causes of our moral crisis that brings her as far back in history as 1930s, when the Great Famine was artificially organized by the Soviets to force the peasants into collective farms, and the Western media consciously helped Stalin to cover up that mass murder. She cites a fascinating account by a repentant journalist who had been present at the meeting of Moscow press corps with the Soviet chief censor, Umansky, to work out a “formula of denial,” after one reckless correspondent reported the news of the famine in 1933.
After “much bargaining in the spirit of gentlemanly give-and-take”, the “formula” was agreed, wherefrom the Western journalists and the Soviet censor proceeded to party with vodka and luxurious snacks until early hours in the morning. The next day, it was infamous Walter Duranty who took the lead in attacking the famine report as an incompetent and biased “big scare story”, and then explaining: “There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation, but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition”.
“To understand this episode,” Mrs. West comments, “is to understand the extent to which Orwell’s ‘Newspeak’ had its birth in the pages of the free press as much as in the totalitarian censor’s office. […] Looking back over more than three-quarters of a century of Big Lies to follow, this initial instance, this first time, demands a level of scrutiny and reflection it doesn’t ordinarily receive, not having been recognized as the Original Sin that would ultimately corrupt us all. It was as if society suddenly became incapable of making the most elementary if vital connections between facts and conclusions, logic and judgment, ideas and implications, and truth and morality.”
“Why German — and to an extent, British — government-spending austerity programs are slowly succeeding, whereas the US is heading into a financial abyss with the profligate current “entitlement” (read socialist) policies fanned by our incompetent (in so many ways) Administration — Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security… Socialism bankrupts governments and wrecks economies, especially in the face of a demographic tsunami, the subject of the article below…DR. JOHN A….”
Stop all the dithering, D.C. The baby-boom budget bomb could destroy the economy within 25 years. The time to act is now.
As President Barack Obama and Congress continue to bicker over passing the federal budget and raising the government’s debt ceiling, a report published by one of the nation’s most credible agencies warns that the U.S. could face economic disaster within 25 years due to excessive government spending.
Obamacare is part of the problem, but so are Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. The cost of these programs will mushroom as tens of millions of baby boomers reach retirement age.
Scott Pollack for Barron’s
The report was published on Sept. 17 by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Its most optimistic forecast shows the federal debt growing to 100% of annual economic output by 2038, from an “already quite high 73%” today. That would make the U.S. like France, which in terms of fiscal strength is none too good.
But the CBO implicitly concedes that the outcome is likely to be a lot worse than that, and so it included its “alternative fiscal scenario,” which is far more realistic. It projects the federal debt will grow to 190% of the nation’s annual economic output by 2038. That would make us worse than Greece today, which has a 27% unemployment rate and periodic bloody riots over its dreadful economic conditions.
A Barron’s cover story on the federal debt compared the potential fiscal crisis in the U.S. to that of Greece (“Debt Crisis: Next Stop, Greece,” Feb. 18). Some critics of that shocking analogy failed to notice that it did not originate with Barron’s, but with the CBO itself. In its September 2013 report, the CBO stood by that analogy.
It is a truism of American democracy that politicians’ time horizons rarely extend beyond the next election. That’s why you have to go back nearly 15 years to find a president squarely addressing the baby-boom budget bomb. In his State of the Union address in January 1999, Bill Clinton urged Congress to seize “an unsurpassed opportunity to address a remarkable new challenge, the aging of America.” With the winds of a budget surplus at his back, Clinton declared that “now is the moment for this generation to meet our historic responsibility to the 21st century.”
http://pjmedia.com/blog/replacing-obamacare-the-strategies-and-options/ This is the fourth and final article in a series on the rollout of Obamacare, and how the law will change our health care system. Each of the past two weeks, we have published two articles: one on the changes in medicine and medical care and one on changes in the insurance industry. We […]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/27/john-mccain-elizabeth-obagy_n_4005380.html
John McCain Hires Elizabeth O’Bagy, Syria Analyst Recently Fired Over False Ph.D Claim
Less than a month after being fired for falsely claiming to hold a Ph.D, Syria researcher Elizabeth O’Bagy has a new job.
Foreign Policy’s The Cable reported Friday that O’Bagy has been hired by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to work as a legislative assistant. It was McCain who propelled her into the national conversation, reading part of an “important op-ed” she wrote for the Wall Street Journal at a Senate hearing on Syria earlier in September.
“Elizabeth is a talented researcher, and I have been very impressed by her knowledge and analysis in multiple briefings over the last year,” McCain told The Cable in a statement. “I look forward to her joining my office.”
O’Bagy was previously employed by the Institute for the Study Of War, who fired her on Sept. 11 after learning that her Dr. title was untrue. She had appeared on various TV networks under that guise, including CNN and Fox News.
“The Institute for the Study of War has learned and confirmed that, contrary to her representations, Ms. Elizabeth O’Bagy does not in fact have a Ph.D. degree from Georgetown University,” the institute said in a statement obtained by Politico. “ISW has accordingly terminated Ms. O’Bagy’s employment, effective immediately.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/359767/how-constitutionally-fund-government-andrew-c-mccarthy
It’s the House’s prerogative to supply funds, or not, for Obamacare.
— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy.
Republican leaders are right: There was a flaw in Ted Cruz’s plan to defund Obamacare: He took Republican leaders seriously.
Senator Cruz, along with Senator Mike Lee and House conservatives, devised a strategy to forestall the unpopular socialized-medicine scheme that Democrats unilaterally rammed through Congress in 2010. They would starve it of funds, not unlike the way Democrats and Republicans have slashed funds for fence construction along the Mexican border, even though the fence has been the law of the land for seven years. The Obamacare defunding strategy, though, depended on Republican fidelity to a ballyhooed campaign promise to reform Washington’s wayward legislative process by reimposing constitutional order — an order that gives the House of Representatives primacy over the spending of taxpayer dollars.
In the stretch run of what became the historic 2010 midterm elections, the Republican establishment issued its “Pledge to America.” If you flip past the many pin-up glossies of John Boehner, Eric Cantor, and Kevin McCarthy, you occasionally find some text in the Pledge. Text such as this: “We pledge to honor the Constitution as constructed by its framers and honor the original intent of those precepts that have been consistently ignored.”
Constitutional devotion was fashionable in 2010 — more fashion than substance, some of us suspected at the time. The GOP had been cast into the cold by angry voters in 2006 and 2008. The party had controlled the White House and both congressional chambers through most of the first six Bush years. As self-styled “compassionate conservatives,” Republicans bloated government, nearly doubling the debt the nation had previously taken over two centuries to accumulate. Fed up, conservatives stayed home in droves. The result was the Pelosi/Reid Congress and, later, the Obama administration.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/359778/worse-new-normal-mark-steyn A few years ago, after the publication of my book America Alone, an exasperated reader wrote to advise me to lighten up, on the grounds that “we’re rich enough to be stupid.” That’s to say, Western democracies and their citizens are the wealthiest societies ever known, and no matter how much of our energies […]
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/09/another_stealth_jihadi.html When a black 23-year old North Carolina man, Lakim Anthony Faust, shot four white people near a Wal-Mart last June, the story barely lasted 12 hours in the news cycle. Naturally, USA Today and various other sources covering the shooting left out key details like the races of the victims and the perpetrator. Greenville […]
