Check the website, here.
The statement of purpose is here:
The Fox Nation is for those committed to the core principles of tolerance, open debate, civil discourse - and fair and balanced coverage of the news. It is for those opposed to intolerance, excessive government control of our lives, and attempts to monopolize opinion or suppress freedom of thought, expression, and worship.
Related: I wrote on abortion politics last night. See, "Late-Term Abortions Get New Scrutiny."
Near the end of a long and heated appeals court argument over whether New Haven was entitled to throw out a promotional exam because black firefighters had performed poorly on it, a lawyer for white firefighters challenging that decision made a point that bothered Judge Sonia Sotomayor.Read the full article here. Memeorandum links to addtional opinions, here. Robert Stacy McCain offers a long discursion on the hypocrisy of leftist identity politics, here.
“Firefighters die every week in this country,” the lawyer, Karen Lee Torre said. Using the test, she said, could save lives.
“Counsel,” Judge Sotomayor responded, “we’re not suggesting that unqualified people be hired. The city’s not suggesting that. All right?”
The exchange was unusually charged. Almost everything about the case of Ricci v. DeStefano — from the number and length of the briefs to the size of the appellate record to the exceptionally long oral argument — suggested that it would produce an important appeals court decision about how the government may use race in decisions concerning hiring and promotion.
But in the end the decision from Judge Sotomayor and two other judges was an unsigned summary order that contained a single paragraph of reasoning that simply affirmed a lower court’s decision dismissing the race discrimination claim brought by Frank Ricci and 17 other white firefighters, one of them Hispanic, who had done well on the test.
The Ricci case, bristling with important issues, has emerged as the most controversial and puzzling of the thousands of rulings in which Judge Sotomayor participated, and it is likely to attract more questions at her Supreme Court confirmations hearings than any other.
Before the rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, before the attacks on 9/11, there existed operationally decentralized but ideologically coherent gangs of pro-life, pro-gun, anti-black, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant crazies who represented the clearest and most present danger to the nation. Their crowning achievement: the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 and wounded hundreds more.Shorter Boston Phoenix: "Conservatives are Nazis."
Drawn from the ranks of fundamentalist Christians, neo-Nazis, survivalists, Ku Klux Klansmen, and radical pro-lifers, these nativist cadres have proven to be far more resilient than any of the putrid spawn of the so-called New Left, such as the Weather Underground.
Tiller's alleged assassin, Scott Roeder — an opponent of all but local government, a sometime tax resister who was once found by police with bomb-making materials in his car — appears to be a member of similar factions, including the "sovereign citizen" movement.
Like the New Left, the New Right advocates "power to the people" —its "people" being largely white, male, and Christian.
The mainstream political figure who most eloquently articulated the philosophy of the contemporary right was Senator Barry Goldwater. In his 1964 speech accepting the Republican nomination for president, Goldwater preached, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." Roeder would no doubt agree.
Ever since Goldwater, Republicans have successfully played footsie with the most repulsive elements on the right. It was part of President Richard Nixon's malevolent genius that he was able to defang the 1968 candidacy of segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace, capturing enough angry, racist votes to win the White House.
Ronald Reagan proved just as slick, kicking off his 1980 campaign at an all-white Southern church and pledging himself to "state rights," which is rightspeak for keeping the black man in his place. It was during the Reagan era that the many and varied apostles of hate and other assorted political misfits found common cause.
Of course, this editorial could have been written by Daily Kos. I just checked the Daily Kos tag for "George Tiller." What do I see? An advertisement for C-Span's book series, with the link to "In Depth: Bill Ayers."
Just keep the left's hypocrisy in mind when you read bullshit editorials like this. All mainstream conservatives denounced the Tiller murder in unequival terms. We've yet to see an equal response to the death of American troops at home.
It just keeps getting worse on the left.
Hat Tip: Gateway Pundit.
Read the whole post at Open Left.Subsidizing the continuating of the privatized welfare state is just about the worst thing we can do, on health care, or things like pensions, etc.
Your logical frame for discussion of health care benefits is misleading, and incorrect I think. We exempt health care benefits from taxation, a relic of the WWII era labor unrest of wage-price problems, where companies could deal with wage restraints by creating these fringe benefits, as they came to be called. They're still compensation, no matter what way you slice it. There is a cash value to it that is essentially deferred or foregone income. We are not looking at potential taxation of health care benefits as a new tax, but instead the ending of an exemption.
Want to make health care work? Tax whatever companies are paying in health care benefits and watch them clamor for a publicly-funded program real quick.
Cost of Health Care X Rising Cost of Health Care +Taxation of Health Care = Companies Loving Universal, Single Payer Health Care Program.
The economic recession should have meant easy votes for Europe's left-wing movements, longtime critics of unchecked capitalism.Read the whole thing, here. More commentary at Memeorandum.
Yet as Europe goes to the polls, left-leaning parties across the continent are looking likely to falter. That's true both for those in government, such as in the U.K. and Spain, and in the opposition -- such as France, Germany and Italy.
France's Socialist Party is trying hard to rally voters ahead of Sunday's European parliamentary elections. "Let's unite with all the French who contest free market, unfair policies that aim at deregulating everything," party leader Martine Aubry urged at a pre-election rally.
Yet less than 20% of voters say they plan to cast their ballot for the Socialist Party, according to recent surveys. That would be a weak performance considering France's main opposition party got 29% of the votes in the last European parliamentary elections.
In Germany, the Social Democrats are expected to get only around 26% on Sunday, consistent with their low opinion-poll ratings ahead of Germany's national elections in September. Italy's center-left Partito Democratico is expected to get a similar percentage.
One reason is that as Europe tipped into recession, the right moved left -- appropriating some of the left's long-standing economic policies, including nationalizations and bailouts.
French conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy, for example, helped recapitalize French banks, earmarked six billion euros for the auto sector and lashed out at "rascal bosses" with huge pay packages.
In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel has planted her conservative camp firmly in the political center. Ms. Merkel has largely given up her former program of market-oriented reforms, and has gradually approved various kinds of state intervention to protect workers during the current recession, from bailing out carmaker Opel to subsidizing payrolls at companies whose export orders have collapsed.
Even before that, right-wing parties across the continent began offering more pragmatic approaches to policy than they had traditionally done. In the past decade, conservative parties introduced competition or privatized some public services in France, Germany and Italy -- but they refrained from dismantling the health-care and public transport services cherished by voters.
In the past, there was a clear fault line between Europe's left-wing and right-wing parties. The left called for more social welfare programs and public spending. The right wanted the state not to interfere in market forces.
The Washington Post has an article on late-term abortions which basically allows Warren Hern, Leroy Carhart and the National Abortion Federation's Vicky Saporta to make a number of unsubstantiated claims about the women who come to them for post-viability abortions and the only response is a couple of short quotes from Operation Rescue.Well, they don't want to, naturally.
Why couldn't the Post find a pro-life doctor who specializes in helping women who want to carry their children with fetal anomalies to term?
I have little to say on the murder of Dr. Tiller than hasn’t been covered adequately elsewhere (e.g.). But two persistent points have been getting on my nerves regarding late-term abortion in which Dr. Tiller had specialized. So let’s have some data.Here's the link. If you're up to it, keep reading Dana's (morally bankrupt) justification for baby killing.
1) The focus on late-term abortion, especially the straw-fetus of frivolous late-term abortion. The typical discussion runs as follows: a very serious person argues that while he’s personally comfortable with first trimester abortion, the thought of a woman wandering in and deciding that she doesn’t want her baby in week 35 of a pregnancy is horrifying. (e.g., makes him want to puke.) And let’s accept for the sake of argument that it is horrifying.* What can the pro-choice advocate say?
First, that late-term abortions are really, really rare. Here’s a chart from the Guttmacher Institute ....
The full document is here. The chart shows percentage of abortions by week of gestation. Note that the vast majority are in the first trimester, and over half are before 9 weeks. (The answer to “Abortion stops a beating heart” should be “Well, about that…”; the heart isn’t beating before five weeks.)
But let’s look at the late-term abortions. Only 1.1% are after more than 21 weeks. 21 weeks is about two weeks shy of the lower-end of viability. 21 weeks is still in the second trimester. We can safely assume that the number of abortions in the third trimester is even smaller, especially because abortion after 24 weeks is generally not permitted by law except in cases of danger to the health of the mother and the fetus.
Related: Michelle Malkin, "Playboy “hatef**k” list fallout: AOL did what?"
So, let's take a look around the leftosphere and the liberal media for some of the postmodern commentary.
With the Bush Administration, everything always was about them. I dimly remember a news story (if you can find this and link to it, I’d be grateful) in which Condi Rice was in the Mideast, meeting with representatives of several Mideastern countries. She dictated to them what the United States expected from them, adding something to the effect of “this is what we want for you.” Someone spoke up and countered, “What about what we want for ourselves?”Well, there you have it: The U.S. can't be expected to have its own preconditions for peace in the Middle East. And of course, it's "the Bush administration" who's the bad guy!
Bush took dishonesty in the Middle East to hallucinatory extremes, we had not been honest brokers, or willing to speak the truth, for some time before he came on the scene.But wait! Here comes Lorelei Kelly at Huffington Post, "Our President in Cairo: Muslims Listened. Did America?":
For the past 8 years, our bad attitude made us really unpopular. Unappeasable, we became like the schoolyard bully -- you give him your lunch money and he still beat you up. President Obama is out to change this reputation.
But let's check around further:
* Carl at The Reaction is blinded by "Obama's Defining Moment": "Wow. I mean, wow. He invokes among the most holy of passages written in the Koran and challenges the Muslim world to live up to it."
* Faiz Shakir at Think Progress? How dare Republicans take issue with the speech?, "Inhofe Rips Obama As ‘Un-American,’ Suggests He’s On The Side Of Terrorists."
* John Amato at Crooks and Liars? Jewish neocons don't count, "A Memo to Krauthammer: President Obama's Speech Was Not Meant for You!
* Brian at Incertus demonstrates a pathetic ignorance President Obama's moral equivalence (and the implications thereof).
* Gershom Gorenberg, focusing on "the settlements myth," says its all "Benjamin Netanyahu's fault."
* Matthew Yglesias just attacks purveyors of "the settlements myth" as liars: "... it’s too bad that The Washington Post thinks its readers need to get commentary on this issue from the slipshod and dishonest Charles Krauthammer.
* And for the academic perspective on "going Palestinian," see Marc Lynch, "My First Take On The Speech."
Interestingly, Code Pink actually protested Obama's visit. At least Medea Benjamin's not ashamed to admit her allegiances lie with Hamas, pictured below:
When Hamas kingpin Khaled Meshal was asked about Obama's address, he refused to renounce the violent destruction of Israel.
Gee, what a great president we have!
See also, "Obama Overture to Hamas Suggests Inevitability of Terror Group's Dominance Among Palestinians."It’s crowded out there in the political blogosphere -- and there are as many ways to judge influence as there bloggers who stand ready to judge politicians.
But here’s an interesting tool I recently came across: From Wikio.com, it’s a ranking of political blogs -- emanating from everywhere from living rooms, mainstream media organizations, and the White House.
The rankings are compiled based on links from other blogs -- with extra weight given to blogs that rank higher via Wikio’s formulas, and based on how recently an item is published. Blog rolls aren’t taken into account, so only fresh postings impact the rankings. Wikio: About Us
One of the intriguing aspects of this list is that it puts everyone in the same pot. The list has mainstream media blogs -- from ABC News, CNN, The New York Times, and others -- alongside well-known partisan bloggers -- Michelle Malkin, FireDogLake -- and even government-run bloggers, like WhiteHouse.gov’s.
We got a sneak peek at the latest rankings -- due to be published Friday -- below. It’s a fun list to analyze: Huffington Post has the top spot, with the liberal Center for American Progress’ Think Progress and the conservative National Review’s The Corner right behind ...Here’s the Top 100:
President Obama on Friday toured a former Nazi concentration camp that his great-uncle helped liberate, accompanied by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, perhaps the camp's most famous prisoner.
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U.S. President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Buchenwald concentration camp survivor Elie Wiesel and International Buchenwald Committee President Bertrand Herz walk through the former Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany. Obama is visiting the site after his stop in Cairo, where in his speech to the Muslim world he made an appeal against Holocaust denial.
Worried by their prospects in the House, Democrats postponed final action on a nearly $100 billion wartime spending bill until next week so as to buy more time for talks among lawmakers and the return of President Barack Obama from overseas.Hat Tip: Memeorandum.
The administration remains confident it can navigate between the conflicting pressures from the right and left. But for this confident young White House, which so prides itself on juggling many balls at once, the delay is a humbling reminder of just how complex the low-profile appropriations process can be.
Obama himself faces growing criticism for piling on new requests and not doing more to support his demands. Privately, officials now concede that the budget calendar put them at a disadvantage, forcing the new administration to submit its funding requests in April, even before its policies could be fully formed.
This was most embarrassingly true in the case of Obama’s plan to close the Guantanamo detention center. But in a single stroke, the same appropriations bill affects wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a new alliance with Pakistan, the threat of pandemic flu, and complex civil liberties issues, such as whether the public should have access to damaging photos of post-Sept. 11 detainees held by the U.S. military.
As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama left some fuzzy edges to his biography. He affirmed strong support for Israel but implied a strong empathy for Palestinians. His personal story played up his introduction to the black church, leaving his father's Islamic roots in the shadows.Actually, the Times is being way too objective here.
It was a narrative designed to ease any voter concern about Obama's background and counter false Internet rumors that he was a Muslim.
But now, with Thursday's speech in Cairo, Obama is laying bare more of his sympathies and inclinations in the volatile area of Middle East politics.
Obama spoke, for example, of Palestinian "resistance" -- a word that can cast Israel as an illegitimate occupier. He drew parallels between Palestinians and the struggles of black Americans in slavery and of black South Africans during apartheid. Both references made some allies of Israel uneasy.
Moreover, in his defense of Israel's legitimacy, Obama cited the Holocaust and centuries of anti-Semitism, but not the belief of some Jews that their claim to the land is rooted in the Bible and reaches back thousands of years.
A close examination of the speech underscored how Obama, four months into his presidency and five years after stepping onto the national stage, is still introducing himself - and what he stands for - to Americans and the world.
From an Israeli perspective, Pres. Barack Obama’s speech today in Cairo was deeply disturbing. Both rhetorically and programmatically, Obama’s speech was a renunciation of America’s strategic alliance with Israel ....Read Glick's entire piece, here. More analysis at Memeorandum.
The only silver lining for Israelis from the president’s speech in Cairo and his general positions on the Middle East is that Obama has overplayed his hand. Far from bending to his will, a large majority of Israelis perceives Obama as a hostile force and has rallied in support of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu against the administration. This public support gives Netanyahu the maneuver room he needs to take the actions that Israel needs to take to defend against the prospect of a nuclear armed Iran and to assert its national rights and to defend itself against Palestinian terrorists and other Arab and non-Arab anti-Semites who wish it ill.
The Weather Underground, a leftist terrorist group from the 1970s, played a bit role in last fall’s presidential election through the association of unrepentant former Weatherman Bill Ayers with his fellow Chicagoan, Barack Obama. That kind of connection would have come as no surprise in Germany, where the Weather Underground’s far more deadly counterpart, the Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, continues to cast a shadow over the country’s politics.The full review is here.
In 1985, German journalist Stefan Aust published the definitive book on the RAF, The Baader-Meinhof Complex. His book has since been turned into a successful feature film of the same name, which was nominated last year for a foreign-language Oscar and is slated for U.S. release this summer. Aust, a former editor of Der Spiegel, has now reissued his earlier work, changing the title to Baader-Meinhof and updating it with information that has come to light since the end of the RAF’s reign of terror in West Germany 30 years ago. The new edition deserves attention, and not just because Anthea Bell’s deft translation preserves the dynamic, detail-rich prose that made Aust’s original read like a real-life thriller. Dense with insights into the psychology of terrorism, this history of West Germany’s struggle against RAF radicals also serves as a cautionary tale for the West in its war against the modern threat of jihadist terror.
I spent this rainy afternoon at Princeton’s Mudd archives ... reading Sonia Sotomayor’s 1976 senior thesis, La Historia CÃclica de Puerto Rico: The Impact of the Life of Luis Muñoz MarÃn on the Political and Economic History of Puerto Rico, 1930-1975.Read the whole thing, here. More at Memeorandum.
Since I was born and raised in Puerto Rico and I am very familiar with the island’s politics in the 1970s, I thought it would be interesting to read what she had to say.
Larry Moore wears a tie as he shines shoes at the corner of New Montgomery and Market.
He sleeps under a bridge, washes in a public bathroom and was panhandling for booze money 11 months ago, but now Larry Moore is the best-dressed shoeshine man in the city. When he gets up from his cardboard mattress, he puts on a coat and tie. It's a reminder of how he has turned things around.More at the link.
In fact, until last week it looked like Moore was going to have saved enough money to rent a room and get off the street for the first time in six years. But then, in a breathtakingly clueless move, an official for the Department of Public Works told Moore that he has to fork over the money he saved for his first month's rent to purchase a $491 sidewalk vendor permit.
"I had $573 ready to go," Moore said, who needs $600 for the rent. "This tore that up. But I've been homeless for six years. Another six weeks isn't going to kill me."
The bureaucrat told Moore that she found out about his business after reading about his success in this paper.
Along Market Street, Moore's supporters are indignant. Nothing happens when mentally ill men wander the street talking to themselves and drunkards pee in the alleys. Yet Moore creates a little business out of thin air, builds up a client base, and the city takes nearly every penny he's earned.
Christine Falvey, spokeswoman for Public Works, said the department's contact with Moore was meant to be "educational."
"We certainly don't want to hamper anyone's ability to make a living," Falvey said. "Our education efforts are actually meant to support that effort by making our streets an enjoyable place for people to visit."
That is unlikely to mollify Moore's clients.
"Nothing like kicking someone when they are down," ranted attorney Loren Lopin, one of Moore's clients who donated $100 to help him get housing. "I am pissed."
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But check some other (generally) neoconservative voices as well:I want to give a special shout out to Melanie Phillips, one of my favorite neocons, and her post, "Obama in Cairo":* Abe Greenwald at Commentary, "Obama Obliges Ahmadinejad."
* Atlas Shrugs, "Obama to Ummah: "America is not – and never will be – at war with Islam" Usama: Called for "Long War Against Infidels."
* Rachel Abrams at Weekly Standard, "More Speech, In Brief."* Dan Riehl, "Obama's Ich Bin Ein Muslim Speech."
* Max Boot at Commentary, "Obama in Cairo."
* Flopping Aces, "Obama’s Cairo Speech: So Many Apologies So Little Time."
* Peter Feaver, "Obama in Cairo - A Modest Step Forward."* Michael Goldfarb at Weekly Standard, "A History of Violence."
* Ira Stoll at Commentary, "Awful."
* Israel Matzav, "Obama: Hamas and Hezbullah Are No Longer Terrorists," and "Obama's Moral Equivalence of the Day."
* Jennifer Rubin at Commentary, "Re: Obama in Cairo."
* Michelle Malkin, "Rainbows and Unicorns and a World Without the J-Word."* Peter Wehner at Commentary, "The Not So Golden Mean."
* Power Line, "Obama's Cairo Speech, A First Take."
* Stephen Hayes at Weekly Standard, "The Speech."* Debbie Schlussel, "The Obama Apologist Speech to Islam & Al-Azhar; CAIR and Faux-Conservative Ignoramus Loved the Speech."
* Yid With Lid, "How Obama's Cairo Speech Threw Israel Under the Bus."
I don't see anything yet from Jules Crittenden, Charles Krauthammer, or William Kristol.So in conclusion, yes, there was some positive stuff in this speech – but it was outweighed by the United States President's shocking historical misrepresentations, gross ignorance, disgusting moral equivalence between aggressors and their victims, and disturbing sanitising of Islamist supremacism.
In short, deeply troubling.
Obama says he came to Cairo to tell the truth. But he uttered not a word of that. Instead, among all the bromides and lofty sentiments, he issued but one concrete declaration of new American policy: "The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements," thus reinforcing the myth that Palestinian misery and statelessness are the fault of Israel and the settlements.**********
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According to a well-informed source, Carlos Leon “Corey” Bledsoe, who changed his name to Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad after he converted to Islam, is from Memphis, Tennessee. He was a student at Tennessee State University, where he majored in business. After becoming a Muslim in 2004 at the age of 19, he quit college and embarked upon a path that ultimately led him to Yemen, where another American convert to Islam, John Walker Lindh, learned Arabic and Islam before moving on to Afghanistan, where he fought alongside the Taliban and Al-Qaeda against American troops before his capture in 2002.The full essay is available here.
Muhammad went to Yemen hoping to study with a jihadist imam, Yahya Hajoori. It is not clear at this point whether he actually studied directly with Hajoori, or with one of his students. Interestingly enough, he apparently traveled to Yemen on a Somali passport, and was jailed for a time in Yemen for doing so. In light of the recent involvement of Somali immigrants to the United States in the jihad in Somalia, it is significant that Muhammad would have this passport. Apparently this and more about Muhammad did not escape the notice of American law enforcement officials: when he returned to the U.S. from Yemen, the Joint Terrorism Task Force began to investigate him. Unfortunately, he appears to have been able to stay at least one step ahead of investigators.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media and the U.S. government have given this murder very little attention. After the murder of abortionist George Tiller last week, Barack Obama expressed his sorrow and indignation, and Attorney General Eric Holder ordered U.S. Marshals to protect abortion clinic. But so far Obama has said nothing about the murder of Private William Long, and no one has made any move to protect military recruitment centers. And NBC was sadly typical in breezing past Muhammad’s motive for committing this murder, and failing to mention his religion at all. During coverage of the murder on the Today show last Tuesday, NBC’s Ann Curry said nothing about the jihad doctrine or about Muhammad’s religion at all, failed to mention his trip to Yemen, and explained the murders by saying only that Muhammad was “upset with the military.” She acknowledged that he had “political and religious motives,” but didn’t mention what his religion was – nor did she give his name. By contrast, according to Newsbusters, “both ABC and CBS mentioned the conversion and the Yemen trip.”
Some analysts have opined that Muhammad was committing what has been described as “sudden jihad syndrome” – that is, something made him snap, and his murder was unpremeditated. However, Fox News reported Tuesday night that Muhammad was not acting alone. His act was part of a larger jihad plot to attack military personnel.
This was certainly not be the first act of jihad violence on American soil, or anything approaching the most deadly. But given the inadequacies of the response of the government and the mainstream media, it will almost certainly not be the last.
See also, the New York Times, and Memeorandum. Also blogging: Dan Collins and Moe Lane.
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