David Axelrod is the man who, more than any other, could be called Barack Obama’s brain (though Axelrod would be publicly horrified by the honorific, and would hasten to assure Valerie Jarrett that he has never been in communication with the editors of this magazine). In his new book, Axelrod describes a moment late in Obama’s first term where Obama acknowledges having a “Bulworth” list of “issues on which he felt he had been insufficiently forthright,” but about which he would be more candid in his second term. (The reference is to the Warren Beatty movie in which a candidate finally decides to tell the truth.) About what issues was Obama now going to be honest? One of them was Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, with regard to whom Obama “felt he had pulled his punches . . . to avoid antagonizing elements of the American Jewish community.”
http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4527881/senator-marco-rubio-us-foreign-policy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODjcm7U4lo0
For most of the past forty years, red represented Democrats and blue, Republicans. The reasons stem back to the soldiers of the north in our Civil War who were predominantly Republican and to the royal blue of Europe. The color red was associated with passion and socialism, characteristics more common to the Left. In the U.S., blue denoted those who put reason before empathy, an attribute more generally assigned to cold, blue-blooded Republicans, allegedly of the country club set.
While its ubiquity is relatively recent, the use of colors to depict states during Presidential elections dates back to the universal adoption of color televisions, around the mid 1970s. In October 1976, using one of the first color-coded maps, NBC’s John Chancellor depicted a white map, which then changed as states were seen as favoring one party over the other – at that time, blue for Republicans and red for Democrats. Reagan’s 1980 Republican landslide was shown in blue on NBC and CBS, but red on ABC.
RON CAPSHAW IS QUITE THE CUR….MUCH MORE INFORMATION ON McCARTHY IS AVAILABLE IN DIANA WEST’S BOOK “American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character”
WHICH HE TRASHED EVEN THOUGH HE CONFESSED THAT HE HAD NOT READ IT!!!!
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/08/the_beginning_of_wisdom.html
“I haven’t read West (I do intend to), but from the scuttlebutt and reviews circulating the internet, it is fairly apparent that she is a reckless historian of the McCarthy school of history. This, Ron Radosh is not. Unlike the conspiratorial school, populated on the left by Oliver Stone, and onthe right by West, Radosh dares to take a complex view of history. He is grown up enough to realize that both Hiss was guilty and McCarthy was a reckless demagogue; that the blacklist was wrong and that the Hollywood Ten were selective civil libertarians.”
With Alger Hiss, the Democrats had proven they were unwilling to investigate their own.
The act of waving lists to decry an injustice is as old as the Republic. But when Senator Joseph McCarthy waved his list, almost exactly 65 years ago, it became much more than the usual political gesture. On February 9, 1950, during a speech he gave in West Virginia, McCarthy waved a list of 205 names of men he alleged were “known Communists” — known as such by Secretary of State Dean Acheson. With this gesture, he worsened an already panicky situation, gave the angry public a ready-made explanation for why the country was losing the Cold War, helped foster class divisions in the country, and dealt anti-Communism a blow from which it did not recover for decades.
At the time McCarthy spoke to the Ohio County Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, W. Va., many Americans feared that the U.S. was losing the Cold War. By 1950, Stalin had invaded Czechoslovakia, controlled Eastern Europe, and, most chilling of all, had obtained the A-bomb. Citizens were at a loss as to how the most powerful country in the world could be losing the conflict.
Nearly 12 years ago I found myself sitting with Bob Simon at Gabriel’s restaurant, a60 Minutes haunt, discussing a possible profile of the Russian maestro Valery Gergiev. Smeeta Sharon, a friend of Bob’s from the Metropolitan Opera had a feeling the brilliant, globe-trotting maestro would make a great profile and Simon acted on it. That lunch was like reaching the peak of Mt. Everest for me: Several months later we were in St. Petersburg attending countless performances at the Mariinsky Theatre and celebrating the 300th anniversary of the city’s founding, as Bob interviewed Gergiev, who was orchestrating the events, and the 60 Minutes crew shot hours upon hours of footage.
34th Annual News & Documentary Emmy AwardsBob Simon was a consummate war reporter and foreign correspondent, to be sure, but he was like a kid in a candy shop when it came to classical music, especially opera. He might not have been intimidated by world leaders, but when it came to meeting one of his favorite singers, you sensed he was in awe. We developed an enduring friendship after that, in part because of his devotion to classical music. In an era when it has become nearly impossible for classical music to carve out even a few minutes on network or cable television, Bob went out of his way to get stories from that world on the air. It’s fitting that the last of his 27 Emmy Awards was for a story about a Congolese children’s orchestra with makeshift instruments.
Bernard Goah came to the United States to escape the violent civil wars that turned Liberia into hell on earth. In the 1990s and early 2000s, approximately 250,000 people died at the hands of Liberian rebel fighters, some of them child soldiers. Acts of rape, torture, and cannibalism were committed with impunity. Goah fled Liberia to escape the perpetrators of those acts, but he says several of them live freely and comfortably in the United States.
The federal government celebrated the high-profile deportation of Liberian warlord George Boley Sr. from New York in 2012 and the 2014 arrest of Jucontee Thomas Woewiyu, a former Liberian defense minister found living quietly in Pennsylvania. Those cases may have been the tip of the iceberg: According to a former special agent for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency and several Liberian men — including Goah — who helped to bring Boley down, many more Liberian warlords, foot soldiers, and human-rights violators now live in the U.S. These war criminals appear to have hidden themselves in plain sight, using nonprofit organizations to help conceal their identities.
The president is not on the right side of the battle in his attempts to punish Israel, partner with Iran, and trim America’s role.
At the risk of being melodramatic, it must nonetheless be said: We are in a war for civilization itself, and Barack Obama is not on the right side.
We are in a battle for civilization because the Islamic State, which is darkness and evil personified, has declared war against us — and we in the West and the modernized Orient (Japan, India, Taiwan, and the like) are, despite our flaws, the very repository of civilization. They are backwards; we are enlightened. They are warped; we are well-intentioned. They are inhuman; we are humane. They are soul-less; we are desirous, however imperfectly, of a grace beyond our ken.
The Islamic State, meanwhile, is aided in its anti-civilizational enterprise even by some of its nominal enemies. The Iran of the ayatollahs is a cancer on humanity, while Hamas and Hezbollah are its murderous allies, serving a “prophet” they make into a thug. Al-Qaeda and its affiliates still poison vast swaths of the Middle East and Africa. The Muslim Brotherhood bizarrely enjoys something approaching respectability in left-wing circles, although in reality it’s a vicious virus working toward death. North Korea is, of course, a black hole; Russia is led by a black-hearted villain. And in other places in the world, Marxists still peddle their poison.
Let us start our grand tour of an increasingly out-of-control world in Russia. Putin plays a two-bit Hitler in trying to gobble up his neighbors. The West responds with a one-bit imitation of 1930s Britain and France. ISIS reminds us that beheading and human incineration are contemporary, not premodern, practices. The only difference is that we video them on iPhones now [1] rather hear rumors about them by word of mouth a year later.
Jews are wise to leave Europe [2] in the manner that some of the lucky got out in the 1930s. The danger is not that we are facing a sudden war on any one front, but that all these fronts — the former Soviet republics, the Islamic caliphate in Iraq and Syria, the roaming Islamic terrorist gangsters inside the West, and the Iranian soon-to-be-nuclear co-prosperity sphere from Yemen to Lebanon — are combining to create chaos as the new normal.
Whole swaths of the globe are becoming badlands that sane people avoid — the former Soviet republics, Russia, the Middle East, North Africa, Persia, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, Cuba, and perhaps soon Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus — as if they were the national no-go-zone versions of our own New Orleans or Detroit.
Ceding prior U.S. influence to regional hegemons — China in Asia, Russia in the former Soviet Union, ISIS and Iran in the Middle East — is turning the world into a pre-globalized Wild West. Think of travel plans. See the Parthenon? But will Greece be bankrupt and on strike from the airport to the Acropolis? See the Dead Sea? Will the rockets come in from Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, or Iran? See South America? Tiptoe around the mess in Argentina, Nicaragua, Peru, or Venezuela. See Paris or Copenhagen? Just don’t walk near a synagogue or kosher market. See St. Petersburg? Make sure there is not the next war nearby in Tallinn. See Turkey? The Hagia Sophia will probably be a mosque again soon.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest issued a statement tonight on the ISIS mass beheading video in which 21 Coptic Christians were murdered on the Libyan coast:
The United States condemns the despicable and cowardly murder of twenty-one Egyptian citizens in Libya by ISIL-affiliated terrorists. We offer our condolences to the families of the victims and our support to the Egyptian government and people as they grieve for their fellow citizens. ISIL’s barbarity knows no bounds. It is unconstrained by faith, sect, or ethnicity. This wanton killing of innocents is just the most recent of the many vicious acts perpetrated by ISIL-affiliated terrorists against the people of the region, including the murders of dozens of Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai, which only further galvanizes the international community to unite against ISIL.
Richard L. Cravatts, PhD, the author of Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel & Jews, is president of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.
In the campus war against Israel, the all too familiar refrain from anti-Israel activists, many of whom form the loose coalition of groups and individuals spearheading the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, is that their quarrel is only with Israelis and their government’s policies, not with Jews themselves. But that specious defense has fallen away of late, revealing some caustic and base anti-Semitism, representing a seismic shift in the way that Jews now are being indicted not just for supporting Israel, but merely for being Jewish.
It was not without some historical irony, then, when student council leaders at Durban University of Technology (DUT) in South Africa in early February floated a proposal that suggested, apparently without shame, that Jewish students should be expelled from the institution, that, as the student body’s secretary, Mqondisi Duma, put it, “We took the decision that Jewish students, especially those who do not support the Palestinian struggle, should deregister.” This is, one would think, a rather shocking sentiment from students who themselves benefited from a world-wide campaign in the 1970s and 1980s to end South Africa’s racist apartheid system.
