http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=1691 It was a few months into the First Intifada – on the eve of the Passover Seder – when my 5-year-old asked me to remind him whether “Pharaoh was the Hitler of Pesach or Purim.” His question was as apt as it was precocious. It made me laugh to hear it, though it should […]
http://reason.com/archives/2007/11/26/communisms-comeback
On November 2007 Steve Chapman wrote a column on Venezuela’s dictator Hugo Chavez. He ended with the following:
“A phony revolution may nonetheless be a durable one. If the Venezuelans who go to the polls next month give Chavez what he wants, they are likely to discover a paradox: They can bring about dictatorship through democracy, but not the reverse.
Makes you think huh? Mugabe the monster of Zimbabwe was also elected through democracy.
Book Review: Fast and Furious, Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Cover-Up Posted By J. Christian Adams URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012/04/05/book-review-fast-and-furious/ Fast and Furious is the story of Justice Department deception, ideological recklessness, and, above all, murderous indifference toward good government. Katie Pavlich’s new book, aptly titled Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal […]
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/04/05/a-constitutional-scholar-who-doesnt-understand-the-constitution
In a stunningly arrogant move, President Obama, the leader of one of the co-equal branches of the United States Government, intimated that should the United States Supreme Court rule the individual mandate included in the Patient Protection and Affordability Care Act is unconstitutional, they would be executing an act of “judicial activism. A more inappropriate and coercive comment has not been uttered in recent history by the President of the United States. Mr. Obama’s politically and ideologically motivated comments stand as testimony to not only his lack of constitutional literacy, it stands as a demented tribute to his audacity.
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/04/06/the-new-york-times%e2%80%99-charlie-brown/print/
For decades now too many Western politicians, diplomats, and pundits have played Charlie Brown to the Palestinians’ Lucy. No matter how many times the Arabs have invited Westerners to kick the football of “land for peace,” only to jerk the ball away at the last minute, there remains no end of Westerners eager to line up and take another try no matter how many times they land flat on their backs.
Thomas Friedman might hold the record for falling for this trick. Just recently he endorsed a call by jailed terrorist murderer Marwan Barghouti for a “non-violent” uprising against Israel “with civil disobedience or boycotts of Israel, Israeli settlements or Israeli products.” Friedman does have one condition for his support: that the Palestinians present “a detailed map of the final two-state settlement they are seeking.” In the same column, Friedman also endorsed the view that creating a Palestinian state can create peace and stability by providing an alternative “model” to the Islamist states coming into being as a result of the “Arab Spring” uprisings: “the rise of Islamists in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Syria, Israelis and Palestinians” create “a greater incentive than ever to create an alternative model in the West Bank — a Singapore — to show that they [Israelis and Arabs], together, can give birth to a Palestinian state where Arab Muslims and Christians, men and women, can thrive in a secular, but religiously respectful, free-market, democratic context, next to a Jewish state.”
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11744/pub_detail.asp
Generations of Americans have been raised to venerate science and those who have enhanced and extended our lives through its application. The rise of environmentalism, however, has generated a war on science, first by distorting it, and then by propagandizing the “findings”, “studies” and resulting claims based on them.
Science hoaxes have been around a long time, most famously, the “Piltdown Man”, a paleontological fraud that began in 1912, claiming to be the “missing link” between man and ape when a fake skill was discovered in a gravel pit in England. In 1869, a fake “giant petrified human body” of a ten foot tall man. Carved out of gypsum, it was quickly debunked, but the public loved the story.
In more recent times, in the 1970s, there was the claim of a discovery of a Stone Age tribe in the Philippines. This was followed by “crop circles” and, in 1999, the Archaeorapter, an archaeological fake claimed to be the link between birds and dinosaurs, debunked by 2002.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11738/pub_detail.asp
Call for Investigation over Israeli-Azerbaijan Leak
Off-the-record conversations, stories attributed to agenda-driven anonymous sources and leaks are nothing new. But something exceptionally outrageous happened last week when an article by Mark Perry was published in Foreign Policy, disclosing an alleged secret deal between Israel and Azerbaijan to enable potential airstrikes on Iran.
“The Israelis have bought an airfield and that airfield is called Azerbaijan,” Perry recounts a “senior administration official” as telling him in early February. A total of “four senior diplomats and military officials” confirmed the story to Perry.
One of the major problems facing Israel is that its aircraft would have to fly a long distance to Iran and back. That requires complicated and risky mid-air refueling. If the aircraft can land in Azerbaijan after striking their targets, then this makes an aerial campaign much more feasible.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11745/pub_detail.asp The furor surrounding President Obama’s recent comments about the authority of the United States Supreme Court to overturn enacted legislation brought consternation from many a constitutional scholar as well as at least three federal appeals court judges from the Fifth Circuit, who demanded a clarification from Attorney General Eric Holder. To his credit, Mr. […]
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=265058
As time goes by and events consistently refute their dogmatic doctrine, “two-staters” are looking more and more like “flat-earthers.”
If a Palestinian state is established, it will be armed to the teeth. Within it there will be bases of the most extreme terrorist forces, who will be equipped with anti-tank and anti-aircraft shoulder-launched rockets, which will endanger not only random passers-by, but also every airplane and helicopter taking off in the skies of Israel and every vehicle traveling along the major traffic routes in the coastal plain. Even if the Palestinians agree that their state have no army or weapons, who can guarantee that a Palestinian army would not be mustered later to encamp at the gates of Jerusalem and the approaches to the [coastal] lowlands.
– Shimon Peres
My column last week was largely a historical account of the monumental failure of the endeavor to implement a two-state approach following the 1993 Oslo Agreements. This column will focus more on some of the conceptual defects and inconsistencies that made past failure – and will make future failure –inevitable.
Two kinds of ‘two-staters’
In principle there are two categories of “two-staters:” (a) Those who insist that in their version of a two-state solution, “secure/defensible” borders for Israel are an indispensable imperative; and (b) Those for whom “secure/defensible” borders appear to be consideration of minor–if any–significance in their vision of the two-state arrangement.
Arguably one of the most eminent spokesmen for the first category is Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz; while the second category includes figures such as Peter Beinart, and groups such as J-Street and the Geneva initiative, endorsing the Obama-prescription that the frontiers of the Palestinian state be based on the indefensible 1967-lines with “agreed” (read “minor/cosmetic”) land swaps.
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/2995/oil-supply-prices
“Right now the key thing that is driving higher gas prices is actually the world’s oil markets and uncertainty about what’s going on in Iran and the Middle East, and that’s adding a $20 or $30 premium to oil prices,” President Obama said March 23. It’s complete and utter nonsense. Oil is trading in lockstep with expectations for economic growth, as reflected in stock prices. There’s not a shred of evidence that geopolitical uncertainty has added a penny to the oil price. Obama’s $20 to $30 per barrel risk premium is a number pulled out of a hat, without a shred of empirical support. In effect, the President is blaming Israel for high oil prices.
On April, 3, Vice-President Biden blamed higher oil prices on “talk about war with Iran”; fear that Iran might “take out the Saudi oil fields and Bahraini oil fields”; the Arab Spring movement; “war in Libya”; the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood; and a potential for unforeseen political unrest, such as “chaos in Russia.” It’s all complete and utter nonsense. Oil prices are going up because the world economy is consuming more oil and supply has not increased to meet the demand – in part because the Obama administration discourages North American energy development, most recently by stopping the proposed Keystone pipeline from Canada. It’s easier to blame foreign phantoms for high gas prices at the pump than the administration’s business-killing politics
One might argue that the market should price strategic risk into the oil price, but the fact is that markets are not especially good at assigning prices to possible events whose probability can’t be measured.
