Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
I say with some passion, as a longstanding former subscriber, death to Newsweek! And no one more deserves to see the magazine die a most ignominious death than current editor Jon Meacham. As indicated by the collection of Newsweek covers below, Meacham practically destroyed the magazine all by himself. Not even the recession could wreak as much havoc. Once a great American institution, Newsweek long ago lost any claim to the honorific of "professional journalism." A laughingstock and disgrace, having abandoned even the tiniest shred of integrity, the magazine sold its soul to the false zeitgeist of the Obama Zombie Interregnum. And as reportedtoday, Newsweek's demise couldn't come too soon (and actually, the end won't be long in coming, despite the whiff of hope at the announcement):
The Washington Post Co. announced Wednesday that it has retained Allen & Company to explore the possible sale of NEWSWEEK magazine. The newsweekly, which has struggled in recent years, was launched in 1933 and purchased by The Washington Post Co. in 1961.
Washington Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham came to New York to tell the magazine staff at a 10:30 a.m. ET meeting on Wednesday. "We have reported losses in the tens of millions for the last two years," he said. "Outstanding work by NEWSWEEK's people has significantly narrowed the losses in the last year and particularly in the last few months. But we do not see a path to continuing profitability under our management."
Graham said the company decided to go public with the news to invite as many potential buyers as possible, and said the sale could be completed within a few months. "Our aim will be--if we can do it--a rapid sale to a qualified buyer," he said. "We're a public company and we have to consider the price offered. But we'll have a second and third criteria: the future of NEWSWEEK and the future of those who work here."
In a later meeting, NEWSWEEK Editor Jon Meacham told the editorial staff that he continues to believe in the mission of the company. Meacham said he would do everything he could to ensure the continuation of the magazine, including personally pitching potential buyers. He also reminded the staff that NEWSWEEK wasn't closed today, but was put on the market.
The best analysis I've seen on this is at NYT (of all places):
Newsweek is your father’s magazine, and no amount of reinvention could fix that. The brand still has recognition, but beyond helping its editor, Jon Meacham, get on television and sell some books, it hard to tell what the brand is really worth at this point. The people at the magazine had been told that they had until the end of 2010 to figure it out, but with loses of more than $500,000 a week, the alarm clock rang on the early side.
America’s homeland security amnesia never ceases to amaze. In the aftermath of the botched Times Square terror attack over the weekend, Pakistani-born bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad’s U.S. citizenship status caused a bit of shock and awe. The Atlantic magazine writer Jeffrey Goldberg’s response was typical: “I am struck by the fact that he is a naturalized American citizen, not a recent or temporary visitor.” Well, wake up and smell the deadly deception.
Shahzad’s path to American citizenship — he reportedly married an American woman, Huma Mian, in 2008 after spending a decade in the country on foreign student and employment visas — is a tried-and-true terror formula. Jihadists have been gaming the sham marriage racket with impunity for years. And immigration benefit fraud has provided invaluable cover and aid for U.S.-based Islamic plotters, including many other operatives planning attacks on New York City. As I’ve reported previously ...
Monday night's arrest of suspected Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad is both disconcerting and reassuring—proof that the world's jihadists are still targeting the U.S. homeland, yet also evidence that our antiterror fighters are getting better.
From the street vendors who alerted police to the smoking car, to the mounted officer who moved crowds away from it, to the impressive forensic and detective work that led to Shahzad's dramatic arrest as his flight was preparing for takeoff at Kennedy airport, to the international cooperation that led to the capture in Pakistan of one of his radical associates, things rapidly came together after the botched car bombing in a way they too rarely do outside the movies.
Surely all this deserves a cheer—and no small amount of credit goes to the Bush Administration for mobilizing this antiterror capability and mindset, which its successors have been able to exploit.
The bombing attempt is also a timely reminder that all the talk about the war on terror being over is nonsense. Astute police work foiled last year's plot to bomb New York's subway, as it did similar planned attacks against a New York synagogue and a Dallas skyscraper. But it was only luck that saved the passengers aboard Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day, just as it was luck and terrorist incompetence that prevented an atrocity at the corner of 45th Street and 7th Avenue. The victims of November's Fort Hood massacre were not as fortunate.
But a cautious note on the left's "law enforcement" approach:
One regrettable part of this investigation so far is Shahzad's arraignment in a Manhattan court room yesterday on terrorism charges. This means he has been allowed to lawyer-up and told of his right to remain silent, rather than being subjected to more thorough interrogation as an enemy combatant. Attorney General Eric Holder said yesterday that Shahzad is cooperating, and we hope he is.
Hey, give it up for Bryan Ferry. He's not only a suave lady's man, but conservative as well! Roxy Music was my very first "gig." I'd been going to stadium concerts since I was in high school, but in 1979 my friend Potato Head (Skatemaster Tate) turned me on to new wave and punk, and the rest is history:
I haven't blogged much on same-sex marriage, although the holding pattern on Cal's Prop 8 trial will come to an end in June, when closing arguments are scheduled. And we'll see things pick up big time then, especially since hack Judge Vaughn Walker scheduled arguments to coincide with the LA PRIDE FESTIVAL, which celebrates the 40th anniversary of L.A.'s first gay pride demonstration. Not only that, I see folks like Lyndsay Beyerstein have kicked up with the extremist gay marriage agitation, which we find here is the not-so-original meme of defining conservative marriage traditionalists as bigots with no reason other than, well, they're supposed to be bigots. I know. Beyerstein's one Class A anti-intellectual. Still, she's apparently looking to break records with this entry, "If You Oppose Equal Marriage, You Are a Bigot":
By definition, bigots are people with unshakable baseless prejudices. There is absolutely no reason, besides blind prejudice, to deny same sex couples the right to civil marriage.
You can use religious language to express your belief that gays and lesbians are disgusting second class citizens unworthy of rights that heterosexuals take for granted, but it doesn't make your position any less bigoted. Logically, there is no reason to put same-sex relationships on a lesser legal footing than opposite sex unions, unless you think there's something wrong with them.
You can insist you don't wish gay people any harm. Perhaps not. But there were lots of pro-segregationists who didn't wish ill upon black people, but still didn't want to drink out of the same fountains. They too were bigots.
You can point out that discrimination against gays and lesbians is a longstanding tradition, but that doesn't excuse your bigotry. If anything, it makes it worse. It was one thing to fear what the expansion of gay rights might do when gays and lesbians had no rights. Today we're decades into gay liberation and none of the dire predictions have come true. For example, children raised by same-sex parents are at least as healthy and well-adjusted as those raised by opposite sex parents--and no more likely to identify self identify as gay.
So, if you're still clinging to those irrational fears in the face of evidence, guess what? That's bigoted. If, like the voters of California, you voted to break up families in the name of preserving family values, that makes you a hypocrite and a bigot.
As longtime readers know, I've debated this issue up and down to heaven and back. And I've yet to encounter anyone with a prevailing argument. The most folks can muster is that the much-esteemed youth demographic is supposed to carry the pro-gay marriage vote over the top any time soon. Well, the youth vote's petering out as Obama remorse hardens, and, frankly, the Stalinist actions of gay rights forces were so over the top as to alienate potential allies. That whole outing campaign, and the Google maps, etc. God, totally ridiculous, come to think of it, but desperation drives that kind of extremism, so understandable.
And now we've got this screed from Lindsay Beyerstein that's so bereft of anything substantial it's plain ludicrous. She holds herself up as a journalist, which is obviously hard to sustain when your MO is to completely ignore extant arguments against SSM while yammering "There is absolutely no reason, besides blind prejudice, to deny same sex couples the right to civil marriage." No, Lindsay, there are lots of reasons. You're simply too closed-minded, er, bigoted, to even entertain the idea that there might actually exist fundamental non-religious cultural norms, social folkways, and regenerative biological facts that easily repudiate the radical gay licentiousness and hedonism that's never far from the gay marriage program. I mean, sheesh. At least excitable Andrew "Milky Loads" Sullivan puts up some arguments when making the case, as whacked as he is. You're just proving yourself to be the more genuine bigot than anyone of those anti-SSMs you excoriate. It's all you've got (remember, dissent is the new racism).
The thought of out-of-wedlock pregnancy struck terror in women in midcentury America, said Claudia Goldin, a professor of economics at Harvard University who has studied the pill's effect on professional women. The proper course of courtship was to go steady, become lavaliered, pinned, then engaged.
"They were a set of steps that led almost irrevocably to marriage, and they were set down at an early age," she said. "The pill allowed us to get rid of all of those steps."
That first pill, Enovid, contained a mixture of the hormones estrogen and progestin that worked to prevent ovulation. Women took one active pill a day for 21 days, then a placebo pill for seven days to allow for menstruation, which the pill's inventors thought was necessary and would assure women they weren't pregnant.
In the post-pill era, the average age of first marriage began to creep up as women and couples no longer felt they needed to wait to become sexually active. The rate of women in professional schools rose from 18.4% of professionals in 1960 to 36.4% by 1998.
The pill also has been credited — or blamed — for overturning sexual mores, but there is less evidence that it caused or evenly greatly contributed to the sexual revolution, May said. The nation, she noted, experienced sharp changes in sexual behavior in the 1920s, during World War II, and during the 1960s and '70s.
Other predictions swirling around at the time of its debut did not come true, May said. The pill did not curb worldwide population growth, create happier sex lives for married couples or reduce rates of divorce.
Amazing to think that a scientific advance like this accelerated the collapse of traditional values and culture. Could've happened in any case, but the empowering effect of the pill certainly made options available for women outside of marriage, and that, along with the radical feminist interpretation of marriage as institutionalized rape pretty much sealed the deal.
Unlike Jonah Golberg, the notion that the Times Square bomb attempt was mounted by some domestic Timothy McVeigh type never remotely entered my mind. But Goldberg's dead on about about this:
A lot of liberals seem very keen to minimize or dismiss the reality of Islamic terrorism while working devilishly hard to create a false reality that the real threat is from American citizens American "rightwingers."
I mean the thing is is that and I get frustrated and there was part of me that was hoping this was not going to be anybody with ties to any kind of Islamic country because there are a lot of people who want to use this terrorist intent to justify writing off people who believe in a certain way or come from certain countries or whose skin color is a certain way. I mean they use it as justification for really outdated bigotry.
And so there was part of me was really hoping this would not be the case that here would be somebody who is not the defined. I mean he’s accused he’s arrested you know I don’t want to convict him before it’s time to do so. He’s the guy authorities say is involved. But that being said I mean we know even in recent history you have the Haitari militia from Michigan who have plans to let’s face it create terror.
That’s what they were planning to do and they were doing so from far different backgrounds then what this guy is coming from. So, the threat is not just coming from people who decide that America is the place to be and you know come here and want to become citizens. Obviously this guy did.
Great commentary at Dean's World as well ... and as I always say: Nothing compares to the leftists. Absolutely nothing.
Heard Fine Young Cannibals on the radio during drive time this morning. "She Drives Me Crazy" reminds me of a woman, way long ago, who picked me up cold at Fresno's Wild Blue Yonder, a happening Tower District nightclub, now defunct. I was just coming off a bad breakup. But who's to quibble when a hot blond falls in your lap. I don't see her on Google, so no need to mention her name. But come to find out later that she's friends with my wife's step-brother's wife. Long story short, when I saw the woman at their wedding it was a shock. I'm married with children by this time, which made it very weird, TSTL. She had a conveniently sketchy memory, which is I guess what happens with folks trying to live down their wild years. Anyway, she drove a Mustang and rode horses back then, in Fresno. Had Fine Young Cannibals on the brain all the time, in the summer of 1989. Weird memories the radio brings up. Interesting band, in any case. Glad I found my wife, that's for sure. We love each other and there's no deception:
The overwhelming majority of Americans think the country’s immigration policies need to be seriously overhauled. And despite protests against Arizona’s stringent new immigration enforcement law, a majority of Americans support it, even though they say it may lead to racial profiling.
These are the findings of the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
With the signing of the Arizona law on April 23 and reports of renewed efforts in Washington to rethink immigration, there has been an uptick in the number of Americans who describe illegal immigration as a serious problem.
But the poll — conducted April 28 through May 2 with 1,079 adults, and with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points — suggests that Americans remain deeply divided about what to do.
The public broadly agrees, across party lines, that the United States could be doing more along its border to keep illegal immigrants out. The view was shared by 78 percent of the respondents.
That unity, however, fractures on the question of what to do with illegal immigrants who are already here and the role of states in enforcing immigration law, normally a federal responsibility.
Well, shouldn't be too hard to figure out. Just say, "Sí, se puede!":
The FBI has arrested a 30-year-old Bridgeport, Conn., man in connection with the failed attempt to set off a car bomb in New York's Times Square, federal authorities told ABCNews.com late Monday night.
The man was identified as Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized American citizen, who had recently returned from a five-month trip to Pakistan and the city of Peshawar, a known jumping off point for al Qaeda and Taliban recruits.
Shahzad was arrested at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City where FBI agents said he was attempting to leave the country to go to Dubai.
At a press conference early Monday morning, Attorney General Eric Holder said, "It's clear that the intent behind this terrorist act was to kill Americans." He urged America to "remain vigilant."
How they equate Anarchists with Liberals/Progressives I don't know... but they do. Aren't they always whining about how we love "Mommy Government"? Yep, totally makes sense that we'd join up with a "movement" that wants no government, no authority. I detest how these little idjits reflect on us by default. But we will be hearing about this tomorrow.
Paddy's getting warm on the "anarchists," although anarcho-communists and Marxian socialists differ not so much on the repudiation of private property, but on the role of the state. Anarchists hope to smash the state on the road to utopia; Marxist want to build the state as the conveyor belt to the eradication of capitalism.
But anarchist quibbles aside, the real kicker is Paddy's link to those "Liberals/Progressives," which takes us to Wikipedia's entry for "Liberalism." Big mistake. Today's left-wing ideological cohorts of the Democratic Party call themselves progressives, not liberals. And there's a reason. True liberals are the "classical liberals" of enlightenment political philosophy, folks like John Locke, and later, Adam Smith. A top 20th century classical liberal would be Friedrich von Hayek, an aggressive advocate of free-market capitalism who most leftist today would demonize as "reactionary."
No, Paddy's thinking about the left-liberalism as it's practiced in the U.S., and thus she wanted to link to this Wikipedia entry:
The term liberalism, without a qualifier, in the United States for the last 70 years usually refers to modern liberalism, a political philosophy exemplified by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s, and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s. It is a form of social liberalism, whose accomplishments include the WPA and the Social Security Act in 1935, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Community Reinvestment Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
And of course, since 1965 we've seen this version of American liberalism coalesce into a working alliance with the neo-Marxists of the post-Vietnam era, and this alliance of "no enemies on the left goes all the way to the Obama White House. As David Horowitz noted this morning, in his essay, "Obama-Style Socialism":
Neo-socialists are fellow travelers of neo-Communists and vice-versa. The real division in the modern world is between totalitarians and libertarians, and pivot of this division is the inherent conflict between liberty and equality. Since people are born unequal (in talent, capability, brain power and physical beauty and prowess) and since they develop unequally through circumstance, the only way to make them equal is to take away everyone’s liberty. And of course this will not make them equal because those who get to decide who is made equal and at what pace constitute a new and oppressing ruling class.
And it's worth remembering that Obama-style neo-socialists have no qualms making tactical alliances with the anarchist "occupy everything" hordes, for example, earlier this year when the Democratic Party-allied California Teachers Association endorsed the anarchist March 4th 'Day of Action' to 'Occupy California!'"
And that explains why there's minimal MSM coverage of the violence and radicalism on the left over the weekend. As noted at Jawa Report:
Did you hear ANY OUTRAGE OR HAND-WRINGING FROM THE MOTHERF*CKING MAINSTREAM MEDIA OVER THIS LEFTWING VIOLENCE, VANDALISM AND HATE? Were there any MSNBC specials about the violence of the political left? Were there any "expert" panels on the history of leftwing political violence, or any discussion over how one-party dominated government could be fueling this kind of behavior, as the supporters of the Obama regime actually appear to think (with good reason, it would seem) that their beloved President condones or at the very least looks the other way when his supporters commit acts of violence and vandalism to further his party's agenda?
Nope. Because it's leftwing Democrat hate, violence and assault directed at the "correct" people for the "correct" reasons. And as we all know, that's just "political expression."
So, sorry Paddy. Looks like you're schooled on "liberalism." Love "The Pistols", in any case:
It's one of the greatest hypocrisies of today's postmodern left. They never live they way the tell everyone else to live. Just last week Al and Tipper Gore announced the purchase of a new luxury mansion in posh Montecito, California. As Doug Ross noted earlier:
The Los Angeles Times reported last week that Al and Tipper Gore greatly expanded their carbon footprint with the purchase of their fourth luxury home. The 'global warming' business has been very, very good to the Gores.
Former Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, have added a Montecito-area property to their real estate holdings, reports the Montecito Journal... The couple spent $8,875,000 on an ocean-view villa on 1.5 acres with a swimming pool, spa and fountains, a real estate source familiar with the deal confirms. The Italian-style house has six fireplaces, five bedrooms and nine bathrooms ....
Don't you love these hypocritical Climatards? (That's the term they prefer, I hear).
They want to control your lives: how big your car can be, how much water your toilet can hold, the kind of light bulbs you can use. They even think there are limits on how much money you should be able to make.
But they put no limits on what they can have. Kind of like the old Soviet Politburo. Which is the kind of society they intend for us.
Michael Moore believes that corporations are uniformly evil. He has said numerous times, he doesn’t think capitalism is right “on any level.” He has called capitalism “another evil empire,” in contrast to the evil empire, the Soviet Union, which is gone. We’ve still got one we need to defeat. He says that corporate managers are in fact “corporate terrorists.” People who work for Halliburton he calls “corporate thugs.” Halliburton—remember the name of that company.
He says oil companies “rape and destroy our environment,” and he says pharmaceutical companies are “greedy and kill people.” I guess this is their business model—to kill off their customer base. He’s said repeatedly, “I don’t own a single share of stock because it’s morally wrong.” Now this is something that he likes to trump out all the time on college campuses. He actually goes and tells young people, “You don’t want to work for the big man. You don’t want to work for the boss man. You don’t want to work for corporations. You don’t want to invest in the stock market because, by investing in the stock market, you are cooperating with the debasement of the world. You’re exploiting people in developing worlds. You’re exploiting American workers.”
This is what Michael Moore tells college campuses. What he tells the IRS is something very different. You see, Michael Moore and his wife set up a tax shelter about 15 years ago when they started making money on Roger and Me. This is a private foundation. They completely control it. It has no employees. There are only two members of the board and the two members of the board are Michael Moore and his wife. It’s registered at their home. This is an example of some of the capital gains that they’ve taken in recent years. This is the allegedly stock-less Michael Moore.
It makes very interesting reading because you find Pfizer, for example. He bought shares of Pfizer. He’s owned shares in Schlumberger, an oil well-drilling company. He’s owned shares in Noble Energy, which is an oil pipeline company. If you look about 60% down the right-hand column, you can see that, a few years ago he actually owned shares in Halliburton, of all things. Can you imagine a shareholder meeting with Michael Moore and Dick Cheney?
The point is that Michael Moore is very much involved in the stock market and it’s a good thing. He’s a wealthier man because of it. While he goes around telling people on college campuses, “Don’t be involved with the Big Man,” Michael Moore’s actually in bed with the Big Man. Michael Moore is an individual who has invested in the stock market and is very much the corporate investor that he professes to lament and dislike.
As the GOP candidate with unquestioned conservative credentials, DeVore is perhaps best positioned to tap into Republican voter anger at Washington. If he can somehow manage to squeak by Campbell and Fiorina in the primary, his best-case scenario would be something along the lines of what has unfolded in Florida this spring, where conservative Marco Rubio has stormed into serious contention for a Senate seat on the back of the tea party movement. If DeVore could show he had a legitimate shot at beating Boxer, that could boost his national fundraising efforts, which have yet to take off. DeVore also has a military background and worked in the Defense Department under President Ronald Reagan.
The label ‘neoconservative’ was first used in the early 1970s by friends and enemies of a group of New York intellectuals who were critical of the leftward turn that American liberalism had, in their view, taken in the previous decade. What these intellectuals reacted against was a mix of social movements – like student protests, counterculture, black nationalism, radical feminism and environmentalism – and government overreach through Lyndon Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’ programs. While in no way defenders of the free market or the nightwatchman state like the true National Review conservatives, they stressed the limits of social engineering through transfers of wealth or affirmative action programs) and pointed out the dangers that the boundless egalitarian dreams of the New Left had created for stability, meritocracy and democracy. Intellectuals such as Nathan Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, James Q. Wilson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan coalesced around The Public Interest, a magazine created by Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell in 1965, and a few years later around Commentary, whose editor was Norman Podhoretz.
These original neoconservative were New York-based intellectuals, primarily interested in domestic issues, and they still regarded themselves as liberals. That is why the disconnect could not seem more complete between them and the latterday neocons, who are Washington-based political operatives identified with the right, interested exclusively in foreign policy, and who have a solid, if not excessive, confidence in the ability of the American government to enact social change – at least in Iraq or Afghanistan. There exists, nonetheless, a tenuous link between the two groups, which explains why the label has travelled through time. This link is provided by a third, intermediate family of neoconservatives, the Scoop Jackson Democrats of the 1970s and 1980s – named after Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson (D-Washington)– and the real ideological ancestors of the contemporary neocons, the ones who literally invented neoconservative foreign policy.
The Scoop Jackson Democrats were also born of a reaction to the New Left, but this time, inside the Democratic Party, when Senator George McGovern won the nomination to be the Democratic candidate against Richard Nixon in 1972. McGovern was seen by traditional Democrats as way too far to the left, both in domestic policy (he supported massive social programs and affirmative action through quotas) and in foreign policy, where he advocated a hasty retreat from Vietnam, deep cuts in the defence budget, and a neoisolationist grand strategy. Coalescing around Commentary, Scoop Jackson's Senate office and a group called the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, Democratic operatives and intellectuals such as Richard Perle, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Eugene Rostow, Ben Wattenberg, Joshua Muravchik, Elliott Abrams, and others, tried to steer the Democratic Party back to the centre. They wanted to get back to the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John Kennedy: progressive policies at home, muscular anticommunism abroad, including the defence of human rights and fellow democracies. That is why they found themselves battling not only the left wing of the Democrats, but also Nixon and Kissinger's realist policy of détente, which included deemphasising ideological concerns and engaging Moscow, thereby legitimising the Soviet regime rather than trying to change it.
The violence was initiated from a group holding a rally at the town clock for May Day. Windows at Jamba Juice and Velvet Underground were left shattered and graffiti including anarchy signs were tagged onto buildings.
"Brick by brick we will bring it down"; 'Destruction is the New Pink"; “Destroy the Destroyers" and others.
Got that? This is exactly what these folks are looking for: anarchy and violence, property destruction and looting. Classic leftists. Lots of photos at thisradical blog.
RELATED: Bruce Hoffman, at National Interest, "American Jihad":
WHILE WE concentrate on the battle abroad, believing that al-Qaeda is focused on attacking the United States overseas and that radicalization and recruitment within the homeland will never occur, we are creating the largest, most devastating blind spot—America.
During 2009, at least ten jihadi terrorist plots or related events came to light within our borders—an average of nearly one a month. By any metric, this is an unprecedented development. While many of the incidents involved clueless incompetents engaged in half-baked conspiracies, some of the plans alarmingly evidenced the influence of an identifiable terrorist command-and-control apparatus.
In some cases, these terror networks merely inspired individuals: there was the plot by four prison parolees and Muslim converts to bomb two synagogues in New York City and an upstate Air National Guard base; the attempt by a Jordanian national who overstayed his visa to bomb a Dallas office building; or a similarly far-fetched plan by another Muslim convert to bomb a federal courthouse in Springfield, Illinois.
But in other instances, terrorist groups either actively recruited individuals in the United States, deliberately motivated others to carry out terrorist attacks on U.S. soil or directed trained operatives in the execution of coordinated strikes against American targets within our borders. These network-linked incidents should concern us even more. Think of Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan-born U.S. resident arrested in Colorado last September who pleaded guilty to charges of plotting a “Mumbai on the Hudson”–like suicide terrorist attack on, among other targets, the New York City subway; the shooting last June outside a military-recruiting station in Little Rock that killed one recruiter and wounded another; and the November 2009 massacre at Fort Hood that claimed the lives of thirteen people. Both shooters—Abdulhakim Muhammad, an African American convert to Islam who had spent time in Yemen, and Major Nidal Hasan—had some connection to AQAP, the same local franchise of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda movement that was responsible for the Christmas Day bomb plot. And Awlaki, the cleric who had a role in radicalizing Abdulmutallab, is also believed to have played an important part in the radicalization of Major Hasan.
It is hard to be complacent when al-Qaeda and its Pakistani, Somali and Yemeni allies arguably have been able to accomplish the unthinkable—establishing at least an embryonic terrorist recruitment, radicalization and operational infrastructure in the United States with effects both at home and abroad. Al-Qaeda’s grasp is deep and wide. And it has also allowed them to co-opt American citizens in the broader global al-Qaeda battlefield. These accomplishments include the radicalization and recruitment of nearly thirty young Somali Americans from Minnesota who were dispatched for training in their mother country and the case of five young Muslim Americans from Alexandria, Virginia, who sought to fight alongside the Taliban and al-Qaeda and were arrested in Pakistan. Additional incidents involved sleeper agents like the Pakistan-born U.S. citizen named David Headley (who changed his name from Daood Sayed Gilani) whose reconnaissance efforts on behalf of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a long-standing al-Qaeda ally, were pivotal to the success of the November 2008 suicide assault in India; and both Bryant Neal Vinas and Abu Yahya Mujahdeen al-Adam, two American citizens recently arrested in Pakistan for their links to al-Qaeda.
While it is easy to dismiss the threat posed by wannabes who are often effortlessly entrapped and snared by the authorities, or to discount as aberrations the homicides inflicted by lone individuals, these incidents evidenced the activities of trained terrorist operatives who are part of an identifiable organizational command-and-control structure and are acting on orders from terrorist leaders abroad.
From Looking at the Left, "AZTLAN ASTROTURF – MAY DAY MARCH in DENVER." Most of these are self-explantory. The revolution is without borders, as the progression of banners shows. And notice what demonstrators are wearing. The woman with the Opresor! banner fourth down: red star on her shirt. And the dude with the "Death to Empire" sign: Mao cap and Arafat-esque keffiyeh. And don't miss at the link COP KILLER ANARCHIST UNICORNS.
This new "education policy" in Arizona is right out of the history of Fascist Europe. Immigrants – in particular a specific category, Hispanics – are being scapegoated for the State’s problems, demonized, and purged.
I can do nothing to change what the people and government of Arizona have done, but I will never forget what I am seeing, and I will never forgive Arizona for it. They have taken in my perception the dubious Blue Ribbon County Fair Prize for being the most irredeemably racist, xenophobic people in the country gathered together in the most un-American state in the Union.
There are just no words strong enough to condemn these people or what they are doing.
Saw it last night, with my teenage son. Amazingly good flick. Don't think I've had as much fun at a slasher film since when I was in high school, or thereabouts. "The Shining" remains one of my favorite movies of all time, and I love Sissy Spacek in "Carrie." I saw the original "Halloween" in theaters back in the day. Frankly, though, sometimes I take my cinema viewing too seriously. Toward the end of this one, that pool of blood scene is the best. Quick snippets of it at the end of the trailer. Have a blast and see this one, especially if you've got teenagers to hang with:
From the most surprising of places, NYT, "The Spill vs. a Need to Drill." And you know, this stuff just kills the radical leftists who are openly rejoicing at the Gulf spill. Soon we'll be hearing calls for "a million Deepwater Horizons":
Emotions are running high as an oil slick washes over the Gulf Coast’s fragile ecosystem, threatening fisheries, shrimp farmers and perhaps even Florida’s tourism industry. Thousands could see their livelihoods ruined. A cleanup could take years ...
But whatever the magnitude of the spill at the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana, it is unlikely to seriously impede offshore drilling in the Gulf. The country needs the oil — and the jobs.
Much has changed since 1969. The nation’s demand for oil has surged, rising more than 35 percent over the past four decades, while domestic production has declined by a third. Oil imports have doubled, and the United States now buys more than 12 million barrels of oil a day from other countries, about two-thirds of its needs.
The politics have also changed. Republicans want to boost domestic oil production to reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil. High on the Democratic agenda is reducing carbon emissions that cause global warming. To bridge the gap, the White House has backed a compromise that would expand domestic offshore exploration in exchange for Republican support for its climate policy.
There is another reason why offshore drilling is likely to continue. Most of the big new discoveries lie deep beneath the world’s oceans, including in the Gulf of Mexico. For the oil companies, these reserves are worth hundreds of billions of dollars and represent the industry’s future.
Since the 1980s, the Gulf has turned into a vast laboratory for the industry to test and showcase its most sophisticated technology — rivaling, the industry says, anything used for space exploration. This is where oil companies found ways to drill in ever-deeper water, where they developed bigger platforms to pump even more oil, where they pioneered the use of unmanned submarines and elaborate underwater systems straight out of a science fiction novel.
Some of the newest floating rigs can drill in more than 10,000 feet of water. They can stay in the same position for weeks, even as they sustain 40-foot waves, thanks to satellite positioning systems and tiny propellers below the hull. Hundreds of miles away, engineers sitting in control rooms in Houston monitor the drilling in real time.
All this has helped to turn the Gulf of Mexico into the fastest growing source of oil in the United States. The Gulf accounts for a third of the nation’s domestic supplies, or 1.7 million barrels a day, mostly from the deepwater region.
And of course, where there's radicalism, the Obama administration can't be far behind. For example, Obama fundraiser Gloria Estefan kicked off events at L.A.'s migrant's march this morning.
Singer Gloria Estefan kicked off a massive march through the streets of downtown Los Angeles as demonstrators galvanized in opposition to Arizona's tough law against illegal immigration demanded an overhaul of immigration laws.
"We're good people," the Cuban-born singer said aboard flatbed truck. "We've given a lot to this country. This country has given a lot to us." Cardinal Roger Mahony stood on the truck and joined the crowd in chanting, "Si, se puede," or "Yes, we can," in Spanish. Streets and sidewalks were packed with tens of thousands of people as horns blared. Organizers handed out T-shirts that read, "Legalize Arizona" and "Boycott Arizona." Marchers waved American flags, along with many from other countries, including Mexico, the Philippines, Nicaragua and Guatemala.
The open-borders lobby can try and hide its radicalism with a carefully-orchestrated show of American flags, but the movement’s reconquista roots always expose themselves on May Day.
It's a tabloid rumor. But National Enquirer's the only news outlet that would even touch the John Edwards love-child shocker, and now they've got this: "OBAMA CHEATING SCANDAL: SHOCKING NEW REPORTS":
PRESIDENT OBAMA in a shocking cheating scandal after being caught in a Washington, DC Hotel with a former campaign aide.
A confidential investigation has learned that Obama first became close to gorgeous 35 year-old VERA BAKER in 2004 when she worked tirelessly to get him elected to the US Senate, raising millions in campaign contributions.
While Baker has insisted in the past that "nothing happened" between them, reports reveal that top anti-Obama operatives are offering more than $1 million to witnesses to reveal what they know about the alleged hush-hush affair.
Obama still scoffs at the suggestion that he is a socialist largely to delegitimize his opponents. During his address to House Republicans at their retreat in December 2009, Obama ridiculed Republicans for acting as if his health-care scheme were some “Bolshevik plot.” In responding to the “Tea Parties” organized to oppose the expansion of government, Obama has explicitly likened those who describe his policies as socialist to the “birther” conspiracy theorists who foolishly believe he was actually born outside the United States: “There’s some folks who just weren’t sure whether I was born in the United States, whether I was a socialist, right?”
He reserves for himself the mantle of technocrat, disinterested, pragmatic, pushed to use the powers of government by the failings of his predecessor and the madness of the free market. He is not interested in ideology; he is interested in doing “what works” for the greatest number of Americans (he has often said that his guiding insight to government’s role is the notion that we are all our brothers’ keepers). Indeed, Obama goes further and often insinuates that principled disagreement with his agenda is “ideological” and therefore illegitimate. In a speech on the eve of his inauguration, he proclaimed that “what is required is a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives—from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry.” In other words, to borrow a phrase from Lionel Trilling, ideology is an irritable mental gesture.
Denying that you are an ideologue is not the same thing as proving the point. And certainly Obama’s insistence that ideology is something only his critics suffer from is no defense when stacked against the evidence of his actions. The “pragmatic” Obama is only interested in “what works” as long as “what works” involves a significantly expanded role for government. In this sense, Obama is a practitioner of the Third Way, the governing approach most successfully trumpeted by Blair, who claimed to have found a “third way” that rejected the false premises of both Left and Right and therebylocated a “smarter” approach to expanding government. The powerful appeal of this idea lies in the fact that it sounds as if its adherents have rejected ideological dogmatism and gone beyond those “false choices.” Thus, a leader can both provide health care to 32 million people and save money, or, as Obama likes to say, “bend the cost curve down.” But in not choosing, Obama is choosing. He is choosing the path of government control, which is what the Third Way inevitably does and is intended to do.
Still, the question remains, What do we call Obama’s “social-ism”? John Judis’s formulation—“liberal socialism”—is perfectly serviceable, and so is “social democracy” or, for that matter, simply “progressivism.” My own, perhaps too playful, suggestion would be neosocialism.
The term neoconservative was assigned—and with hostile intent—to a group of diverse thinkers who had grown convinced that the open-ended ambitions of the Great Society were utopian and, ultimately, counterproductive, even harmful. At first, few neoconservatives embraced the label (as late as 1979, Irving Kristol claimed he was the only one to accept the term, “perhaps because, having been named Irving, I am relatively indifferent to baptismal caprice”). But as neoconservatism matured, it did become a distinct approach to domestic politics, one that sought to reign in government excess while pursuing conservative ends within the confines of the welfare state.
In many respects, Barack Obama’s neo-socialism is neoconservatism’s mirror image. Openly committed to ending the Reagan era, Obama is a firm believer in the power of government to extend its scope and grasp far deeper into society. In much the same way that neoconservatives accepted a realistic and limited role for the government, Obama tolerates a limited and realistic role for the market: its wealth is necessary for the continuation and expansion of the welfare state and social justice. While neoconservatism erred on the side of trusting the nongovernmental sphere—mediating institutions like markets, civil society, and the family—neosocialism gives the benefit of the doubt to government. Whereas neoconservatism was inherently skeptical of the ability of social planners to repeal the law of unintended consequences, Obama’s ideal is to leave social policy in their hands and to bemoan the interference of the merely political.
“I would have loved nothing better than to simply come up with some very elegant, academically approved approach to health care, and didn’t have any kinds of legislative fingerprints on it, and just go ahead and have that passed,” he told CBS’s Katie Couric. “But that’s not how it works in our democracy. Unfortunately, what we end up having to do is to do a lot of negotiations with a lot of different people.”
Whereas Ronald Reagan saw the answers to our problems in the private sphere (“in this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”), Obama seeks to expand confidence in, and reliance on, government wherever and whenever he can, albeit within the confines of a generally Center-Right nation and the “unfortunate” demands of democracy.
Authorities in Los Angeles are bracing for a massive illegal immigration rally today. As always, the hardline communist protest groups are leading the demonstrations. Here's the statement at L.A. Indy Media:
WORKERS RIGHTS ARE IMMIGRANT RIGHTS! Diverse immigrant rights groups all over the United States will come out in a united full force for an all-out drive to push genuine immigration reform in 2010. In almost all major cities of the United States, immigrant rights groups led the labor unions, immigrant rights advocates and anti-war and racism forces like the International ANSWER Coalition will hold march and rallies for full immigrant rights and to commemorate International Workers Day.
May Day was the biggest annual show in the world, a gigantic parade that climaxed before the Lenin mausoleum in Red Square as dignitaries smiled down on rows of tanks, cannon, missiles and soldiers paraded before them.
It was the chief ritual in the myth-laden cult of communism, a drama that seamlessly combined weaponry and peasant enthusiasm. May Day parades flourished till 1991, when protesters jeered General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and suddenly the jolliness was over. Today it exists mainly as a grotesque comedy, its carefully crafted remnants floating on the Internet.
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