http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.1769/pub_detail.asp 1. MUST WATCH VIDEO: Daniel Hannan – A brilliant and inspiring ode to American conservatism by Britain’s shining parliamentary star! A MUST LISTEN! 2. Which U.S. City is Paying Students to Come to School each Day? 3. VIDEO: Report: Is the White House Coordinating with “PROGRESSIVE” Media Matters? 4. VIDEO: Navy Commander On Iran: […]
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11418/pub_detail.asp
The Sneers and Smears of the Institute for Policy Studies
The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) bills itself as the nation’s oldest progressive organization. Progressive meaning collectivist.
IPS is a community of public scholars and organizers linking peace, justice, and the environment in the U.S. and globally. We work with social movements to promote true democracy and challenge concentrated wealth, corporate influence, and military power.
Actually, the oldest progressive organization is the Democratic Party, if we are to judge an organization by the policies it pursues, advocates, and advances. The Democratic Party, too, is a community of public servants and allies who link peace, social justice, and the environment. It, too, works with social movements to promote true democracy (populist mob rule) and challenges concentrated wealth (not any owned by members of the community, of course), corporate influence (not their crony capitalist friends and junket-generous lobbyists), and military power, for the Party’s ideal military policy would abolish all the services and rely on the National Guard to keep the populace honest and in line.
IPS, however, as a 501(c)3 organization that relies on public donations, can only inform and advise politicians and the public and has no legislative powers. It can’t force citizens to obey its whims and wishes or to conform to its agenda. That’s what its principals believe Congress is for.
IPS studies policies, and doesn’t like them or their authors or their supporters. It so dislikes the policies its minions study, that only the width and breadth of its scholars’ desks and all the junk on them prevent them from just penning placards with Magic Markers and stencils to make protest signs, instead of laboring over long, tongue-in-cheek anti-American screeds. IPS so dislikes the authors of these policies that it would just rather produce National Enquirer-level exposés on these individuals.
After all, to IPS, anyone who argues for self-defense, individualism and the rule of law, private property, and using nature to enhance man’s existence, is tainted by bourgeoisie ideology and is a reactionary varmint undeserving of an iota of politeness or courtesy. IPS profiles of such persons are frankly and admittedly unflattering, stereotyping caricatures, not disinterested proxy resumes or curricula vitae. IPS has never tried to disguise its invective and malice for any person, group or idea it deems an obstruction to the progress of Progressivism.
Reflecting the fresh and blossoming alliance between the Left and Islam, “Islamophobia” is the new sin IPS scholars and interns can excoriate, and anyone found guilty of expressing a fear of Islam, its depredations, and its jihad gets the same a priori derogatory treatment as have individuals such as John Bolton and David Horowitz (characterized in his profile as an “ex-lefty”—the traitor!).
IPS, in short, is a kind of “academic” auxiliary of Saul Alinsky-style community organizers and activists, a resource to turn to should a community organizer or activist be unable to coin an original slogan or who otherwise lacks the gray matter to effectively demonize his targeted, isolated, and polarized prey. Should a politician seek precooked mantras and party lines and buzz phrases with which to assault the House and Senate from the floor, and the public from the approving pulpits of The New York Times and Washington Post, IPS’s numerous papers and books are a rich trove of treasured bromides.
IPS enthusiastically endorsed Occupy Wall Street. Here it names two luminaries, the witch doctor and his cultural son and heir, a thug, as champions of OWS:
Occupy Wall Street is also garnering more attention from both local and global media, thanks to the growing outrage and support from well-known figures including MIT professor Noam Chomsky and rapper Immortal Technique.
Doubtless not a few of OWS’s behind-the-scenes planners and managers have intimate connections with IPS. The only “how-to” manuals that can instruct “revolutionaries” on methods to incite violence, “occupy” anything, disrupt commerce, trash public parks, and cry for vengeance (i.e., “social justice”) are to be found in IPS’s backlist of publications. IPS waxed poetic as OWS settled into its appropriated venues like Turks occupying Cypress, or Muslim hordes occupying European cities, and presumed to instruct us in the Howard Zinn kind of American history:
But we do know that three of the four top presidential candidates in 1912¬the “Bull Moose” Theodore Roosevelt, the Socialist Eugene Debs and the Democrat Woodrow Wilson -anchored their campaigns in the struggle against wealth’s maldistribution.
Our democracy faced “ruin,” Roosevelt warned, “if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few.” The 1912 incumbent, Republican William Howard Taft, blasted Teddy for “appealing to class hatred.” Taft ended up appealing to virtually no one. Wilson, Roosevelt and Debs together captured 75 percent of the final vote.
American politics a century ago revolved around wealth’s deeply dangerous concentration. Wealth meant to nations, activists preached, what manure meant to farms. Spread evenly, manure enriches the land. With manure concentrated in heaps, the land sours.
The young men and women these activists inspired would two decades later usher in a “New Deal” for America. Unions would “level up” average incomes. Steeply progressive taxes would “level down” incomes at America’s top. By the 1950s our plutocracy had melted away. The fortunes of our remaining rich no longer towered high enough to dominate us.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11416/pub_detail.asp The Iranian government, through a website proxy, has laid out what it considers the legal and religious justification for the destruction of Israel and the slaughter of Jews worldwide. Calling Israel a danger to Islam, the website Alef, with ties to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamani, said the opportunity must not be lost […]
http://www.stonegateinstitute.org/2848/islam-french-elections “We have been too busy with the identity of those who arrived and not enough with the identity of the country that accepted them.” – Nicolas Sarkozy With just ten weeks to go until the first round of presidential elections in France, Islam and the question of Muslim immigration has become a central issue […]
http://townhall.com/columnists/calthomas/2012/02/14/losing_liberty/print
“Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?” — Thomas Jefferson
“The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government — lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.” — Patrick Henry
Liberty is always tenuous. Those who enjoy it seem to be a minority in the world. That’s why liberty must not only be preserved by those who currently benefit from it; it must also be fought for and constantly renewed for future generations, because there are always those who wish to restrict or eliminate our freedoms.
The Obama administration’s ham-fisted attempt to require that contraceptives and abortifacients be offered to employees of Catholic and other religious institutions is a serious threat to our civil liberties. Yes, federal (through EEOC oversight) and state governments already play this role and have for a time. According to the Guttmacher Institute, “Some 28 states have mandated coverage of birth control and 20 of those have some sort of exemption for religious employers.” New York and California are among the 28. But do we really want government to continue to take the place of individual conscience? Should government continue to dictate to its citizens how to order and conduct their lives?
http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2012/02/14/the_progressive_legacy/print
http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2012/02/14/the_progressive_legacy_part_ii
http://townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/2012/02/14/the_progressive_legacy_part_iii/print
Although Barack Obama is the first black President of the United States, he is by no means unique, except for his complexion. He follows in the footsteps of other presidents with a similar vision, the vision at the heart of the Progressive movement that flourished a hundred years ago.
Many of the trends, problems and disasters of our time are a legacy of that era. We can only imagine how many future generations will be paying the price — and not just in money — for the bright ideas and clever rhetoric of our current administration.
The two giants of the Progressive era — Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson — clashed a century ago, in the three-way election of 1912. With the Republican vote split between William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt’s newly created Progressive Party, Woodrow Wilson was elected president, so that the Democrats’ version of Progressivism became dominant for eight years.
What Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had in common, and what attracts some of today’s Republicans and
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=257672 Israel’s position on Kosovo is a matter of vital national interest on which no government should ever compromise. February 17 marks the fourth anniversary of Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia. The UDI has been recognized since by the United States and its key NATO partners, as well as 80-odd other countries. The […]
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/02/14/a-muslim-love-story/ William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet concludes with the words, “For never was a story of more woe, Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.” Fortunately for him, Shakespeare had never paid a visit to Pakistan where all love stories end in woe and young lovers tend to die not in overwrought murder-suicide pacts, but […]
What Obama Needs to Say to China’s Next Supremo Posted By Gordon G. Chang
http://pjmedia.com/blog/what-obama-needs-to-say-to-chinas-next-supremo/?print=1
Vice President Xi Jinping, slated to become China’s next supremo, arrives at the White House tomorrow. We have been told [1] that the Obama administration will not “sacrifice the important issues for the sake of having a comfortable visit,” yet there is a sense of pessimism in Washington about America’s ability to persuade China to move in the right direction. It seems that everyone here believes that Beijing owns the century and controls our destiny.
The truth, however, is that we have the ability to get China to do what we want. Why? Because at the moment the Chinese economy is faltering — most indicators are pointing to low single-digit growth and “hot money” is gushing out of the country — and Washington holds the key to rescuing it.
China at the moment is in trouble because, among other things, export growth, once the engine of its economic “miracle,” has been on a long downward trend. Last month, exports fell 0.5% on a year-to-year basis and 14.2% month-on-month, a performance well below consensus estimates. That’s a problem for Beijing because it is dependent on sales abroad to keep Chinese factories humming and workers employed, and the American market is extraordinarily important to them.
The general narrative is that, when the global downturn hit in 2008, Chinese exporters started selling more to other markets and became less reliant on tapped-out American consumers. The facts tell the opposite story, however. In 2008, 90.1% of China’s overall trade surplus related to sales to the United States. That already staggering figure increased to 115.7% in 2009, and 149.2% in 2010.
And last year? Last year, the figure was a simply unbelievable 190.5%. In 2011, China’s trade surplus against the United States hit $295.5 billion, easily surpassing the 2010 record of $273.1 billion.
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2029/-Prince-Talals-Fox-News-AWOL-on-Prince-Talals-Twitter-Story.aspx
Have you heard about Hazma Kashgari, the Saudi blogger who tweeted an imaginary conversation with Mohammed, drew so many (tens of thousands) angry comments from his co-religionists and co-kingdomists that he deleted his tweets, fled the country and made for New Zealand to seek asylum but was arrested in Malaysia and extradited back to Saudi A where he now faces charges on the capital crime of “blasphemy”?
Not if you watch fair and balanced Fox News, you haven’t. I have searched the site but cannot find any stories about Kashgari. (You try.)
You don’t suppose the fact that Saudi dictatorship-family-member Talal bin Alwaleed owns the largest non-Murdoch stake in Fox News (7 percent) and a new stake in Twitter (almost 4 percent) has anything to do with that, do you?
