National Review Podcasts - Read by OutloudOpinion
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Podcasts of your favorite National Review Authors - Victor Davis Hanson, Clifford May, Katherine Jean-Lopez, Daniel Foster & Stephen Spruiell, Jim Geraghty, Ramesh Ponnuru, John Derbyshire, Conrad Black and many more.
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Coexisting with Sharia A trial involving child sex abuse in England sends a warning. 5.25.12 | You have probably seen the “coexist” bumper sticker. It implies that we should all just try harder to get along. Wherever we turn, it seems, we are assured that efforts to embrace differences will result only in harmony, although the bargain often entails that we abandon our core cultural principles and our Western soul. For too long we have failed to comprehend that the cost of coexistence can be high. Finally, though, the pursuit of tolerance at any price is being assessed realistically. The British have now been forced to confront — and finally judge — the actions of some minority Muslims who have embedded themselves in a counterculture hostile to British society. Forty-nine men, predominantly from Pakistan, were convicted (or are still wanted) for luring 47 underage British girls to lairs for serial rape. At least one victim was forced to have sex with 20 men in one night, according to the police. Two girls became pregnant and a 13-year-old reported aborting a baby conceived by rape. Nine of the Muslim men were found guilty last week. Authorities expect to charge four more, and up to 40 additional suspects remain at large. Judge Gerald Clinton accused the predators of targeting white girls because they were not part of the Islamist “community or religion.” The ringleader was removed from the courtroom for being disrespectful of the judge and the legal process. | 5/25/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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‘Clean Coal’ Means No Coal: Obama the candidate tries to appear friendly to all energy sources. 5.25.12 | Two weeks ago, the Obama campaign quietly edited its website to highlight the president’s support for “clean coal.” In place of a section for “energy efficiency” with no mention of coal, BarackObama.com now boasts that the stimulus package “invested substantially in carbon capture and sequestration research.” The administration’s position on coal has, shall we say, evolved. In 2001, the EPA released an endangerment finding stating that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide threaten public health and the environment by contributing to climate change and that therefore they could be regulated under the Clean Air Act. Since then, as Bryan Walsh noted in Time magazine, the EPA has “embark[ed] on what could be the most far-reaching environmental regulatory scheme in American history.” Already, 57 coal-fired plants have closed owing to the EPA’s regulations, according to the National Mining Association. Supporters insist that policies favoring renewable energy sources will lead to lower costs. However, the burden of these coal regulations has contributed to a $300 increase in the average household’s electricity bill over the last five years, despite the substantial stimulus investment “in carbon capture and sequestration research.” Some of this increased cost can be attributed to more demand for electricity. But USA Today reports that the rise in cost is due in part to “the expense of replacing old power plants, including heavily polluting — but cheap to operate — coal plants that don’t meet federal clean air requirements.” | 5/25/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Is the Constitution a Republican Plot? Harry Reid’s Senate seems to think so. 5.25.12 | It’s one of the clearest, easiest-to-understand provisions in the Constitution. And Harry Reid’s Senate flouts it routinely. The Origination Clause in Article I, Section 7 states: “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.” In addition to clarity, this provision has an even greater virtue: It serves a very good purpose. The Founding Fathers required revenue measures to originate in the House because they wanted this authority to belong to the legislative body closest to the people. Plus, the Framers wanted the larger states to enjoy the most influence on matters of taxing and spending, which is the case in the House (whose seats are allocated according to population) but not the Senate (where each state gets two seats regardless of population and smaller states have outsized influence). “This power over the purse,” James Madison explained in Federalist No. 58, “may, in fact be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people.” | 5/25/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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What Iran’s Rulers Want War, genocide, and nuclear weapons. 5.24.12 | It’s no longer possible to pretend we don’t know the intentions of Iran’s rulers. They are telling us — candidly, clearly, and repeatedly. Most recently last Sunday: Addressing a gathering in Tehran, Major General Hassan Firouzabadi, chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces, vowed the “full annihilation of the Zionist regime of Israel to the end.” A few days earlier, José Maria Aznar, former prime minister of Spain, during a presentation at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a respected Israeli think tank, recalled a “private discussion” in Tehran in October of 2000 with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who told him: “Israel must be burned to the ground and made to disappear from the face of the Earth.” Dore Gold, the former Israeli ambassador to the U.N. who now heads the JCPA, wanted to be certain there was no misunderstanding. He asked Aznar: Was Khamenei suggesting “a gradual historical process involving the collapse of the Zionist state, or rather its physical-military termination?” “He meant physical termination through military force,” Aznar replied. Khamenei called Israel “an historical cancer” — an echo of Nazi rhetoric he has employed on numerous occasions, the last time in public on February 3. | 5/24/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Climategate Continues Will a penalty be called for Keith Briffa’s excessively curved hockey stick? 5.24.12 | Climategate, the 2009 exposure of misconduct at the University of East Anglia, was a terrible blow to the reputation of climatology, and indeed to that of British and American science. Although that story hasn’t been in the news in recent months, new evidence of similar scientific wrongdoing continues to emerge, with a new scandal hitting the climate blogosphere just a few days ago. And central to the newest story is one of the Climategate scientists: Keith Briffa, an expert in reconstructing historical temperature records from tree rings. More particularly, the recent scandal involves a tree-ring record Briffa prepared for a remote area of northern Russia called Yamal. For many years, scientists have used tree-ring data to try to measure temperatures from the distant past, but the idea is problematic in and of itself. Why? Because tree-ring data reflect many variables besides temperature. Russian tree growth, like that of trees around the world, also reflects changes in humidity, precipitation, soil nutrients, competition for resources from other trees and plants, animal behavior, erosion, cloudiness, and on and on. But let’s pretend, if only for the sake of argument, that we can reliably determine the mean temperature 1,000 years ago or more using tree cores from a remote part of Russia. The central issue that emerges is: How do you choose the trees? | 5/24/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Pressuring the Chief 5.24.12 | We have argued before that the Supreme Court should strike down Obamacare. While the Constitution grants Congress the power to regulate commerce among the states, and to make all laws necessary and proper to execute that power, Obamacare’s command that all Americans purchase health insurance cannot be justified under either grant. Perhaps we are wrong. Perhaps there are better arguments for the law’s constitutionality than those we have so far seen from its defenders. But some of those defenders now seem to be dispensing with such arguments altogether. Instead they are threatening dire consequences for the reputation of the Supreme Court and especially for Chief Justice John Roberts if he joins a majority of the justices to strike down the individual mandate. | 5/24/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Baby Budget Hawks of the GOP: Being better than Dems is not good enough. 5.23.12 | The conventional wisdom, pushed for very different reasons by both Republicans and Democrats, is that Republicans in Congress, controlled by radical tea-partiers, have been slashing government spending. Thus it becomes a little hard to understand how, in the few short months since last year’s debt-ceiling deal, the federal debt has increased by more than $1.5 trillion, roughly $13,000 per household. If Republicans are such great budget cutters, how come we continue to spend more, run more deficits, and accumulate more debt? The latest evidence suggests that it is because, contrary to conventional wisdom, Republicans still aren’t such radical budget hawks after all. For example, the latest Club for Growth scorecard suggests that, on the whole, Republicans in this congress have actually been less fiscally responsible than those in past congresses. For 2011, the average Republican received a weighted score of 69.5 out of 100. That’s far short of the 86.3 average score in 2010, and it hardly suggests a tea-party-led wave of austerity. | 5/23/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Christie Is One of Us 5.23.12 | New Jersey governor Chris Christie has certainly earned his fair share of enemies over the years — corrupt politicians whom he indicted as U.S. attorney, Democrats in the state legislature, teachers unions, and liberal activists across the country. Among conservatives, though, Christie has become a rock star. Well, among some conservatives. He’s taken a beating on NRO lately. Andrew McCarthy argues on the Corner that Mitt Romney should not choose Chris Christie as his vice-presidential candidate. He is probably correct that Romney would be best served by selecting someone other than Christie, but his characterization of Christie as a “tough-talking moderate” is unfair to the governor. Christie has proved himself a tough-talking conservative. | 5/23/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Who Is Barack Obama? 5.22.12 | Who is Barack Obama? Obama the presidential candidate presents himself as a man who has loved America from his earliest childhood, a man proud of his mixed-race roots who comfortably transcends polarized racial politics, a man who eschews the ideologies of Left and Right, an optimistic healer. But in his critically acclaimed autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, Obama is something else entirely. Obama published his autobiography in 1995, when he was in his mid-thirties. Unlike most books by politicians, which are concoctions of clichés penned by ghostwriters, Dreams was clearly written by Obama himself. Unlike most politicians, Obama can write and loves language. (He was contemplating a career as a novelist at the time he wrote Dreams.) Most important, Obama wrote his autobiography after he had become a political activist but before he was a politician; the book is therefore candid in a way a conventional politician’s memoir would never be. Dreams is a complex, introspective book. Its theme is how Obama, born in Hawaii to a white student mother and Kenyan student father, grows to view himself and the white society around him. The Obama of Dreams abandons his multiracial roots to forge an alienated black identity — that of a man steeped in radical ideology who views history in terms of a huge chasm separating oppressor from oppressed, white from black, and rich from poor; a man who is never more emotionally at home than when sitting in the church pew listening to Rev. Jeremiah Wright rant about white racism. | 5/22/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Democrats’ Budget Blame Game: Higher taxes is not fiscal conservatism. 5.22.12 | Over many decades, the Democratic party earned a reputation among voters for backing higher government spending and government programs over private-sector initiatives. Americans thus came to see the party as largely uninterested in fiscal restraint, especially the kind of restraint that would help keep taxes from rising. In contrast, Republicans have built their brand around fiscal conservatism — holding the line on taxes, spending, deficits, and debt. But in recent years, Democratic politicians and their apologists have tried to peddle the notion that historical perceptions about the parties regarding fiscal matters are erroneous. According to the narrative now promoted by most party activists and often repeated in the mainstream press, despite perceptions, it’s actually the Democrats who are now the party of fiscal conservatism, because they’re willing to raise taxes. Republicans, it is contended, are now fiscally reckless on account of their taxophobia. All of this depends on a definition of fiscal conservatism not shared by voters. To Democratic apologists, it is fiscally conservative to expand government, so long it’s paid for by tax increases. Unfortunately for them, the electorate does not see it that way. They want their elected leaders to be conservative in using their tax dollars, and conservative in asking for them too. | 5/22/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Call for a Global Tax: The U.N. promotes leftist economics under the banner of “human rights.” 5.22.12 | Targeting the G-8, United Nations human-rights officials (“independent experts”) have issued a call for a global financial-transaction tax “to offset the costs of the enduring economic, financial, fuel, climate and food crises, and to protect basic human rights.” The May 14, 2012, statement is among the most blatant examples of how far the international human-rights community has strayed from human-rights principles by blundering into complex and highly partisan political debates on economics. Olivier De Schutter, U.N. special human-rights rapporteur on the right to food, proclaimed: “Where the world financial crisis has brought about the loss of millions of jobs, socialized private debt burdens, and now risks causing significant human rights regressions through wide-ranging austerity packages, a financial transaction tax (FTT) is a pragmatic tool for providing the means for governments to protect and fulfill the human rights of their people.” Magdalena Sepúlveda, another U.N. special rapporteur (her bailiwick is poverty and human rights), expressed confidence that the presumably massive revenue stream from such a tax “would fill government deficit holes, but should be channelled to fighting poverty, reversing growing inequality and compensating those whose lives have been devastated by the enduring global economic crisis.” Neither expert made any mention of possible social, economic, or political costs. | 5/22/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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G, What a Waste Leaders of ailing nations meet at Camp David. 5.22.12 | The spectacle of the G-8 leaders in the bucolic verdure of Camp David, as they were strutting in their leisure attire capped by prudent sweaters against any non-fiscal Catoctin chill for photo-ops for those at home, could momentarily disguise what an appalling mess all the G-8 countries except Germany and Canada have made of the art of government. Not all the leaders who attended are equally blameworthy, of course. The French and Japanese leaders are new. Some — Mario Monti (of Italy) and David Cameron (of the U.K.) — have lightly ameliorated the desperate conditions they inherited; and some — Angela Merkel (of Germany), and Stephen Harper (of Canada) — inherited advantageous conditions and have steadfastly reinforced them, have been reelected and probably will be again. As a group, they are an interesting kaleidoscope of leaders of great nations toiling for their own political well-being and for the welfare of their 900 million people, in eight of the twelve largest national economies (Brazil, China, India, and Spain are missing, and would bring the population represented to over 3.5 billion — a majority of the world). They are like a cutaway drawing of Santa’s workshop, with each elf banging away in some purposeful task, yet conveying a slightly comical, portentous busyness. At least this confected casualness is preferable to the former, ostentatious fun of the summiteer: speeding limousines hurtling to a stop as if conveying bank robbers transferring to escape helicopters, as well-upholstered and accoutered men debouch from their cars and bustlingly wrestle bulging briefcases up the conference-building steps for the evident benefit of all mankind. For all history up to the end of the Cold War, summit meetings were historic and dramatic occasions, when leaders who controlled the destiny of much of the world met to change the world. Thus it was with Pope (Saint) Leo and Attila the Hun in 452; Henry VIII and François I at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520; Napoleon and Alexander on the raft at Tilsit in 1807; Metternich and the heads of the Great Powers at Vienna in 1814–15; Bismarck and the Powers at Berlin in 1878; Clemenceau, Wilson, and Lloyd George at Versailles in 1918–19; Hitler, Chamberlain, and the others at Munich in 1938; Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at Tehran in 1943 and Yalta in 1945; and the post-war summit meetings from Potsdam through to the dramatic Reagan-Gorbachev meetings in Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington, and Moscow. Hugely important decisions, many of them disastrous and some dishonorable, were made at those earlier meetings. The previous meetings at Camp David, between Churchill and Roosevelt in 1943, and between Eisenhower and Khrushchev in 1959, were necessary and at least discussed serious subjects. | 5/22/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Chronicle of Double Standards: In higher ed, civility is for liberals only. 5.22.12 | You may recall the kerfuffle a couple of weeks back involving The Chronicle of Higher Education’s decision to fire blogger Naomi Schaefer Riley for her criticism of black-studies programs. Many critics insisted it wasn’t about her point of view but her harsh language. Indeed, Chronicle editor Liz McMillen felt compelled to apologize for Riley, writing, “Several thousand of you spoke out in outrage and disappointment that The Chronicle had published an article that did not conform to the journalistic standards and civil tone that you expect from us.” Well, what does the record suggest? Was Riley targeted for her views, or was her tone really out of bounds? My research assistant Taryn Hochleitner and I went to the record, checking out all Chronicle articles and blog posts that mentioned “gender studies,” “ethnic studies,” or “black studies” between April 1, 2011, and May 1, 2012 (thus not including the Riley-related back-and-forth). Of the 34 articles and blog posts in question, half used these phrases only incidentally. Of the remaining 17, eight were enthusiastic, four critical, and five balanced. When we narrowed the criteria to examine only the Chronicle articles tagged as “reporting” (and not blogs), the results were even more one-sided. There were 24 relevant articles. Of the twelve that focused on these topics, seven were generally positive and none were critical. So, not much evidence of that “journalistic standard” called even-handedness. | 5/22/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Party of Civil Rights 5.21.12 | This magazine has long specialized in debunking pernicious political myths, and Jonah Goldberg has now provided an illuminating catalogue of tyrannical clichés, but worse than the myth and the cliché is the outright lie, the utter fabrication with malice aforethought, and my nominee for the worst of them is the popular but indefensible belief that the two major U.S. political parties somehow “switched places” vis-à-vis protecting the rights of black Americans, a development believed to be roughly concurrent with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the rise of Richard Nixon. That Republicans have let Democrats get away with this mountebankery is a symptom of their political fecklessness, and in letting them get away with it the GOP has allowed itself to be cut off rhetorically from a pantheon of Republican political heroes, from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to Susan B. Anthony, who represent an expression of conservative ideals as true and relevant today as it was in the 19th century. Perhaps even worse, the Democrats have been allowed to rhetorically bury their Bull Connors, their longstanding affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, and their pitiless opposition to practically every major piece of civil-rights legislation for a century. Republicans may not be able to make significant inroads among black voters in the coming elections, but they would do well to demolish this myth nonetheless. Even if the Republicans’ rise in the South had happened suddenly in the 1960s (it didn’t) and even if there were no competing explanation (there is), racism — or, more precisely, white southern resentment over the political successes of the civil-rights movement — would be an implausible explanation for the dissolution of the Democratic bloc in the old Confederacy and the emergence of a Republican stronghold there. That is because those southerners who defected from the Democratic party in the 1960s and thereafter did so to join a Republican party that was far more enlightened on racial issues than were the Democrats of the era, and had been for a century. There is no radical break in the Republicans’ civil-rights history: From abolition to Reconstruction to the anti-lynching laws, from the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964, there exists a line that is by no means perfectly straight or unwavering but that nonetheless connects the politics of Lincoln with those of Dwight D. Eisenhower. And from slavery and secession to remorseless opposition to everything from Reconstruction to the anti-lynching laws, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, there exists a similarly identifiable line connecting John Calhoun and Lyndon Baines Johnson. Supporting civil-rights reform was not a radical turnaround for congressional Republicans in 1964, but it was a radical turnaround for Johnson and the Democrats. | 5/21/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Paleface 5.21.12 | Set aside, for a moment, the mere fact of Elizabeth Warren’s undocumented claims of Cherokee heritage, such sentences as “My pawpaw had high cheekbones, like all the Indians do,” the hokey Pow Wow Chow cookbook with recipes from Le Pavillon (which was located in the famous Cherokee territory of Fifth Avenue, across from the St. Regis Hotel — happy hunting grounds, indeed), and listing herself as a member of a minority group in the Harvard directory. Forget all of that for a moment and consider that Harvard Law School advertised Elizabeth Warren — blond-haired, blue-eyed, pale to the point of translucence — as its “first woman of color” enjoying tenure. It would later cite her presence on the faculty as evidence of its commitment to “diversity.” And she allowed it. One would think that Harvard’s law school and one of its most prominent professors might have some interest in the question of evidence. (They still teach the rules of evidence at Harvard Law.) Like most Indian tribes, the Cherokee are fairly picky about who gets to call himself a Cherokee, and, unlike Harvard, they demand documentation. Indeed, it is a commentary on our times that “Cherokee genealogist” describes an occupational specialization, and a prominent Cherokee genealogist has reiterated that Ms. Warren has no documentable claim to Cherokee ancestry. This is not unusual: So common are false claims of Cherokee ancestry that among genealogists “My grandmother was a Cherokee princess” is a punch line. But the typical third-grader uttering this sentence is not running for the U.S. Senate nor contributing to the alleged “diversity” of Harvard Law. | 5/21/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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How to Combat Bias at the BBC? Simply stop paying the licensing fee, Beeb refuseniks say. 5.21.12 | London – At last someone has said it. Boris Johnson, the Conservative mayor of London who just won reelection over his left-wing nemesis, “Red Ken” Livingstone, thinks the BBC — the nation’s biggest news outlet — is biased and must change in fundamental ways. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Johnson makes plain just how pernicious he thinks the British Broadcasting Corporation has become. He notes that it is “unlike any other media organisation in the free world, in that it levies billions from British households whether they want to watch it or not.” The annual $230 license fee is required of every British television owner and provides some 75 percent of the BBC’s $7 billion budget. And Big Beeb claims it vigorously prosecutes people for not ponying up. Given the slush fund it has access to, it’s no surprise the BBC is big, bloated, and hopelessly biased. Even the network’s own internal studies have exposed the bias. In 2007 an official BBC report found that the network was institutionally biased, especially in its treatment of climate change, poverty, race, and religion. In 2003, a BBC reporter falsely accused the Tony Blair government of “sexing up” an intelligence report before the Iraq War. | 5/21/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Time-Wasting Network 5.18.12 | ‘If time be of all things the most precious,” Benjamin Franklin said, “wasting time must be the greatest prodigality.” But he had never heard of a status update. Facebook is the world’s foremost purveyor of information you shouldn’t care about. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is to uselessness what Henry Ford was to the automobile. He has mastered it on an industrial scale and is riding it to a vast fortune. At more than $100 billion, the valuation of Facebook equals the annual GDP of Morocco or Vietnam, countries that don’t top anyone’s list of economic powerhouses, but do actually produce some things of value. | 5/18/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obama’s Oprah Problem 5.18.12 | She didn’t see it coming. One day, Oprah Winfrey turned around, and her nationally syndicated show was sliding in the ratings, and her audience was fleeing en masse. And it happened soon after a day she thought was one of the best in her life. Isn’t that how all the giants fall? When they least expect it? Appelbaum and Gebeloff interviewed several other people who “continue to take as much help from the government as they can get,” despite being skeptical about government programs. “When pressed to choose between paying more and taking less, many people interviewed here hemmed and hawed and said they could not decide. Some were reduced to tears.” | 5/18/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Health Care, Chicago Style A questionable grant to a questionable Obama associate’s group. 5.17.12 | This week the Department of Health and Human Services allocated a $5.9 million grant to Chicago’s Urban Health Initiative. This is the not-for-profit program, run by the University of Chicago Medical Center, at which Michelle Obama was once an executive, and which is now run by one of President Obama’s closest confidants, Eric Whitaker. The grant comes from money allocated by the president’s health-care-reform initiative to fund innovative and cost-cutting solutions, part of the “We Can’t Wait” executive-branch stimulus initiative. Whitaker has a checkered past, with a variety of controversies surrounding his work at the University of Chicago’s hospitals and Illinois’s health department, and it’s only gotten worse recently: Edward Klein, author of The Amateur, claims that Reverend Jeremiah Wright fingered Whitaker as an Obama surrogate who offered $150,000 for the pastor to lie low during the 2008 campaign. If we’re to believe Klein’s claims that he has tapes of Reverend Wright saying that Whitaker offered him hush money, then the only question is whether Wright’s account can be trusted. He might appear unreliable, except that he seems to have little reason otherwise to slander Whitaker, another prominent member of Chicago’s black community. (Wright has invited Whitaker to speak at his church’s events.) Klein’s book explains that Obama chose Whitaker as his fixer for the Wright problem; he was tasked with trying to restrain Wright and on one occasion with finding a replacement preacher for an Obama campaign event. | 5/17/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Ambivalent Theocrat Obama uses the Bible to “exploit what divides us.” 5.17.12 | There are legitimate theological arguments on both sides of our political divide, but they are not equally well received. In America, it seems, one man’s moral teacher is another’s Torquemada — the difference is usually determined by party registration — and the returns on overt religiosity are mixed at best. As president, George W. Bush was repeatedly and pejoratively labeled “theocrat” for acknowledging his faith, and even the slightest intimation that his religious belief informed his political vantage point was perceived by the Left as symptomatic of an almost treasonous disrespect for the separation of church and state. Throughout his political career, Barack Obama, too, has marshaled religious argument and imagery to his cause when politically expedient, but nary a whisper has followed his proclamations — even when his pastor of 20 years was exposed as an unreconstructed bigot. Obama’s appeals to religion and his claim to be “doing the Lord’s work” are cynical and mercurial enough to have pushed Michael Gerson amusingly to quip that, “even when Obama changes his views, Jesus somehow comes around to agreeing with him.” His varying use of Scripture has been nowhere more striking than with his gay-marriage “evolution.” Announcing his changed position on the issue to ABC News in May, Obama confirmed that he and Michelle are. | 5/17/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obama’s Gay-Marriage Gift to Romney? 5.16.12 | No doubt Barack Obama did not intend to do Mitt Romney a favor when he announced his support for same-sex marriage last week. But for Romney, the announcement provided a critical opportunity, both to energize the social conservatives in his base and to drive a wedge between Obama and certain key demographics. “There is a greater opening now [for Romney] with Hispanic voters and African Americans,” a GOP strategist says. | 5/16/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obama and GM Cook the Books 5.16.12 | Would you hire President Obama as your financial adviser? Three years ago his administration invested more than $100 billion in taxpayer money to bail out General Motors. On Tuesday, the entire company, not just what the government owns, was worth less than $34 billion. By anyone’s definition, that investment is a glaring failure. Yet over the last few days the Obama campaign, in a $25 million marketing blitz, has flooded the airwaves with ads in battleground states, claiming the bailout should be counted a rousing success. Unfortunately, assertions that “all loans have been repaid to the federal government,” that the bailout “saved more than one million American jobs,” that “U.S. automakers are hiring hundreds of thousands of new workers,” that GM is again the “number-one automaker” — all are based on creative accounting. | 5/16/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Where’s the Accountability? 5.16.12 | Late last week JPMorgan Chase announced that it had lost some $2.3 billion, and possibly more, as a result of bad investment decisions made by its risk-hedging operation. Predictably, some have seized on this misstep to call for greater regulation of the banking industry. White House spokesman Jay Carney said: “The president fought very hard against Republicans and Wall Street lobbyists to get Wall Street reform passed . . . I think that this event merely reinforces why the President was right to take on this fight and why we still need to make sure it’s implemented.” Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren released a new radio ad warning, “Wall Street isn’t going to change its ways until Washington gets serious about strong oversight and real accountability.” Paul Krugman called JPMorgan Chase “an object demonstration of why Wall Street does, in fact, need to be regulated.” | 5/16/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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What Happened in Greece? 5.16.12 | In Jonah Goldberg’s The Tyranny of Clichés, liberals in the United States try to conceal their ideological bias by pretending to be objective, pragmatic, and moderate. The Greek Left, on the other hand, operating in a center-left country, has no such preoccupations. In the May 6 parliamentary elections, for the first time in recent history, a party of the far Left came in second. It is composed of various subgroups such as the eco-socialists, the Anti-Capitalist Group, the Communist Organization of Greece, and the Trotskyist Communists of the group known as Red. Just in case you found all those names too pragmatic or moderate, the party itself is called the Coalition of the Radical Left. | 5/16/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Gay Divorcees 5.15.12 | Announcing the results of his long-term “evolution” on the subject last week, President Obama revived the debate over gay marriage. In the widespread discussion, however, there is one question that’s rarely asked: How interested are gay couples in getting married? Heretofore at least, the answer seems to be “not really.” Since 1997, when Hawaii became the first state in the union to allow reciprocal-beneficiary registration for same-sex couples, 19 states and the District of Columbia have granted some form of legal recognition to the relationships of same-sex couples. These variants include marriage, civil unions, domestic partnerships, and reciprocal-beneficiary relationships; and the most recent U.S. Census data reveal that, in the last 15 years, only 150,000 same-sex couples have elected to take advantage of them — equivalent to around one in five of the self-identified same-sex couples in the United States. This number does not appear to be low because of the fact that only a few states have allowed full “marriage”; indeed, in the first four years when gay marriage was an option in trailblazing Massachusetts, there were an average of only about 3,000 per year, and that number included many who came from out of state. | 5/16/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Sink with California 5.15.12 | California is in desperate fiscal straits, facing a nearly unbridgeable deficit of $16 billion, the result of spending that continues to exceed estimates and tax revenue that fails to meet them. Those in better-governed states who are tempted to sniff at the Golden State’s comeuppance, however, should bear in mind that California’s position as a national trendsetter is still quite secure: What is happening in California is very likely to happen in other states — and possibly at the federal level — if action is not taken. There are lessons here for both the Left and the Right, and those who would not sink with California as it falls into a sea of red ink would do well to study them. California’s present condition is the direct result of welfare-state governance in its full maturity. Intransigent public-employee unions use the collective-bargaining process to maintain their inflated compensation packages, while poorly administered programs for the elderly and indigent have produced a permanent dependent class with attendant expenses that are difficult or impossible to reduce: When Governor Jerry Brown attempted to impose co-pays on some recipients of medical benefits, the Obama administration blocked him. Governor Brown’s attempts to cut spending on health care by lowering some physicians’ reimbursements and subsidies for low-income Californians were blocked by the federal courts. Governor Brown has demonstrated very little that might be called fiscal responsibility, but such attempts as he has made at spending discipline have been blocked by federal authorities when they have not been blocked by Democrats in the state legislature. Those who suspect that Obamacare may turn out to be more expensive and less effective at controlling costs than its admirers have claimed should take a good long look at California to appreciate the difficulty of rationalizing out-of-control health-care spending in a single state. (And multiply by 50.) | 5/16/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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GASBombed: The accounting-standards board is about to nuke state and local budgets — and it’s about time. 5.15.12 | It would be tempting to write that the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) is poised to blow a $3 trillion hole in the budgets of state and local governments. But in fact, if you want to be precise, GASB is getting ready to blow the lid off of the $3 trillion hole that is already there. The problem is this: State and local governments have, for the most part, woefully underfunded their employee-pension systems. As a result, they have massive unfunded liabilities for future pension payments — liabilities that total as high as $3 trillion, by some estimates. They can’t forgo writing those pension checks, they don’t have money set aside to cover those pension checks, and they are promising ever more generous pension checks in the future. What does that mean, exactly? GASB, which has a refreshingly reliable habit of producing English-major-approved prose, explains: | 5/16/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Once Again, Break Up the Banks: J. P. Morgan’s loss reminds us that we shouldn’t have to worry about such a big bank. 5. | Et tu, Jamie Dimon? The embarrassing announcement of a large trading loss at J. P. Morgan has brought the issue of bank regulation back to the fore. J. P. Morgan’s announcement was particularly shocking because Morgan was one of the few banks to emerge from the financial crisis with its reputation intact, or even enhanced. In Fool’s Gold, Gillian Tett’s narrative of the financial crisis, she singled out J. P. Morgan and its CEO for praise. Supposedly, although Morgan traders had invented some of the synthetic credit instruments that were at the center of the financial crisis, the bank had behaved more conservatively than its competitors, and Dimon appreciated risk better. Last Thursday, however, it was Dimon who had to announce one of Wall Street’s biggest losses in years, a $2 billion trading write-down. Based on the public record, I can’t exactly piece together how the loss took place. The losses reportedly were incurred on credit-default swaps owned by J. P. Morgan’s chief investment office, which undertakes hedging. I remember in 1986 Freddie Mac suffered an embarrassing loss incurred by the unit that was hedging its multifamily-mortgage commitments. It turned out that the trader was using his judgment about when to hedge: When he thought interest rates were going up, he hedged; and when he didn’t, he didn’t. What this strategy amounted to was speculation, that is, making bets on positions to which the bank didn’t already have exposure — the opposite of hedging. I assume that something similar took place at Morgan: If they were truly hedging, then the loss on their trades would have been offset by a gain somewhere else in their portfolio. | 5/16/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obama’s Sunny Predictions. 5.14.12 | Most of my economics professors opened class with some variation of the old in-house joke: “Economists have correctly predicted nine out of the last five recessions.” Their scholarly modesty apparently exhausted, however, they proceeded to spend the next four months teaching precisely how to model and forecast the national economy. In a world where describing the current state of the economy proves difficult — the Bureau of Labor Statistics always has to revise its estimates of current unemployment — it’s understandable that predictions are unreliable. Even so, the manner and degree to which economists are wrong in their forecasts is illuminating. For example, the Obama White House’s predictions often stem from methodological overconfidence. | 5/14/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Union Bosses’ Hypocrisy. 5.14.12 | The leaders of America’s unions have been very vocal lately in their criticism of Republicans and of business. According to them, Republicans care only about the wealthy and are unfairly targeting the workers of America with their reforms. These union leaders insist that only they can speak for regular Americans. In fact, their own salaries suggest that they have nothing in common with the average citizen. Here is a short list of some of the highest-earning, and most hypocritical, union presidents. | 5/14/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Preventing a Nuclear Iran. 5.14.12 | It was reported last week that, in anticipation of the May 23 multilateral nuclear talks with Iran in Baghdad, President Obama had already conceded that Iran can continue to enrich uranium so long as it does so at levels no higher than 5 percent — i.e., not weapons grade. This concession, leaked to the major news outlets but analyzed by none, gives self-defeating a bad name. It would not only make it easier for Tehran to break out and make nuclear weapons whenever it wants, but it would give Iran’s neighbors every reason to demand similar nuclear-fuel-making “rights.” With any luck, Iran will reject this offer. Meanwhile, Congress, which is already toying with legislation to tighten our nuclear-nonproliferation policies, should get busy. | 5/14/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Astronauts: Cool It on Warming. 5.11.12 | To the long list of right-wing, knuckle-dragging know-nothings who dare question so-called “global warming,” environmentalists now can add six Apollo astronauts, two rocket men who flew aboard Skylab, and a pair of former directors of the Johnson Space Center (JSC). These veterans of America’s space program are among the 49 retired NASA employees who recently asked the agency to halt what they consider its unscientific advocacy of climate alarmism. | 5/11/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Gay Marriage: Not Inevitable. 5.11.12 | President Barack Obama insists that he didn’t announce his support for gay marriage out of political considerations. He’s right. He did it out of self-regard. How it must have eaten away at him to be the first African-American president, yet not associate himself with what has been deemed the foremost civil-rights issue of the age. To be a progressive in favor of all things “forward,” but retrograde on marriage. To know that his stance was a transparent charade and see it treated as such by the lefty opinion makers he respects most. To watch his sloppy, unserious second-in-command get all the credit for moral courage by forthrightly endorsing gay marriage on Meet the Press while he clung to his artful dodge. | 5/11/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obama, Carter, and the Missing Words on Iran. 5.11.12 | American interests and allies in the Persian Gulf are threatened. What’s needed is a clear and tough statement right from the top, so the president starts making speeches. What does he say? That depends on whether it’s Jimmy Carter in 1980 or Barack Obama in 2012. Jimmy Carter in 1980 was a lot tougher. | 5/11/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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‘Young Guns’ Under Fire. 5.10.12 | A non-profit political organization using the moniker of House leaders Eric Cantor, Kevin McCarthy, and Paul Ryan is coming under fire for its support of defeated Indiana senator Dick Lugar. The Young Guns Network, often referred to as the YG Network, spent over $100,000 trying to prop up Lugar in his bid to fend off conservative upstart Richard Mourdock. | 5/10/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obama’s College Promises. 5.10.12 | The Obama campaign has a message for young-adult voters: When it comes to higher education, the president will dole out taxpayer dollars and “free stuff” at the rate Joe Biden makes gaffes. When Mitt Romney was campaigning in Ohio on Monday, he offered a different approach. | 5/10/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Devolution of Marriage. 5.10.12 | President Obama is getting credit, even from some critics, for finally being honest and consistent in his position on same-sex marriage now that he has announced his support for it. But he is still being neither honest nor consistent. And his dishonesty is not merely a matter of pretending that he has truly changed his mind about marriage, rather than about the politics of marriage. His claim that he believes that states should decide marriage policy is also impossible to credit. One of the purposes of the federal Defense of Marriage Act was to block this scenario: A same-sex couple that resides in a state that does not recognize same-sex unions as marriages goes to a state that does so recognize them, gets married there, returns home, sues in federal court to make the home state recognize the “marriage,” and prevails. Obama has long favored the repeal of the act. He does not truly want states to be able to continue to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. | 5/10/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Too Much Wavering on Budgets. It undermines market confidence. 5.9.12 | Notwithstanding the recently enacted EU fiscal pact, Europe is again facing a sovereign-debt crisis. Standard & Poor’s has downgraded a number of Spanish banks and Spain’s sovereign debt. For two years, Spain and other European countries, including those not facing an immediate crisis, such as France and Italy, have struggled to establish appropriate austerity policies to reduce fiscal deficits. Besides being unpopular, such measures produce an immediate negative result — a reduction in economic output. Will that effect continue to overshadow the expected positive result from improved market confidence among households and investors? It depends on how plans for reducing budget deficits are implemented. The fortitude of Europe’s political leaders in the face of setbacks will be critical. Indications are that, although the thrust of budget consolidations that have been initiated by European governments is appropriate, policymakers lack the necessary conviction to stay the course. | 5/9/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Guilt by Association. 5.9.12 | My friends on the left make much of the apparent correlation between creationism and skepticism about assured climate disaster. It is the “some–all fallacy” writ large. “Some” climate scientists who happen to believe in intelligent design, a variant of creationism, also question the high-sensitivity climate model. Therefore “all” who hypothesize that warming has been overblown must also question evolution; i.e., they are ignorant dolts. Note to the Left on this one: No one — scientist or otherwise — has yet come up with the definitive explanation of the first life forms on earth. There is no conclusive bridge between self-replicating molecules capable of mutation (a definition of life) and the primordial, lifeless, dimly-lit planet Earth of some 3 billion years ago. So even the most erudite thinkers must resort to aliens, life-bearing comets, God — or, in my case, beats-the-heck-out-of-me. | 5/9/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Rigorously Modest. Remember the social sciences’ limitations. 5.9.12 | Imagine that a U.S. president is considering his options vis-à-vis a rapidly developing Iranian nuclear-weapons program. First, a science adviser comes into the room and predicts that if the Iranians take the following quantity of fissile material and compress it into a sphere of the following size under the following conditions, then it will cause an explosion large enough to destroy a major city. Next, a historian comes into the room and predicts that if external attempts are made to thwart Iranian nuclear ambitions, then a popular uprising will sooner or later ensue and force changes in government until Iran has achieved nuclear capability. The president would be unwise to begin debating the findings of nuclear physics with his science adviser. Conversely, the president would be unwise not to begin a debate with the historian. This would likely include having several historians present different perspectives, querying them on their logic and evidence, consulting with non-historians who might have useful perspectives, engaging in introspection about human motivations, considering prior life experience, and so on. | 5/9/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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A Stealth Expansion of the Welfare State. The Obama administration encourages states to spend more federal money. 5.8.12 | Our national-security capabilities are set to implode next January. That’s when tens of billions of dollars in across-the-board cuts will take effect, hitting every Pentagon account with an immediate 10 percent cut. In the words of the Obama White House, these cuts will be “devastating” and “undermine our national security.” The nation’s top military leaders agree. They have told Congress that over the course of the next decade, military spending would fall $1 trillion below what’s needed to keep us safe. The resultant reductions in operations, maintenance, and training would produce an “unacceptable level of strategic and operational risk.” The Navy will suffer a “severe and irreversible impact” (emphasis added). The Marine Corps will struggle to carry out even one major contingency operation. America will, once again, have a “hollow” military force, just as it did during the Carter era. | 5/8/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Beyond Boston. The Romney campaign reaches out. 5.8.12 | Among politicos, Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign is frequently referenced as “Boston.” Romney’s headquarters is housed there, and for much of the campaign season, the phrase has been used to describe the former governor’s tight-knit group of senior advisers, such as Stuart Stevens and Matt Rhoades, who have long helmed the ship. These days, that cadre of Romney loyalists and strategists continues to run the operation, but the campaign recently bulked up its management team for the general election. Ed Gillespie, a former GOP chairman, was tapped to serve as a senior adviser; Mike Biundo, Rick Santorum’s former campaign manager, was asked to be a coalitions director. | 5/8/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Our Extractive Elites 5.7.12 | Why do nations fail? In their new book, economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson argue that countries collapse when the reigning political coalition extracts wealth rather than promotes innovation and growth. Sounds like a union, doesn’t it? The book, Why Nations Fail, sums up Acemoglu and Robinson’s laudable academic oeuvre, focusing on the pre-industrial and developing world. They trace how nations grow rich thanks to inclusive institutions that provide economic incentives and protect property rights, and how nations suffer when “extractive elites” gather political and economic power for the purpose of rent-seeking. In a review of the book, Buttonwood, a columnist for The Economist, argues that, given the anemic growth across the industrialized world, perhaps the West and the United States face similar problems. He fingers two possible culprits — the extractive elites of the rich world: too-big-to-fail banks, and the public sector, particularly its unionized employees. | 5/8/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Dohrn Connection: Eric Holder’s DOJ funds Dohrn-connected organization. 5.7.12 | Bernardine Dohrn has a history with the Justice Department. More specifically, in the early 1970s, she was one of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives because of her actions with the Weather Underground, a violent radical organization. Times have changed. In 2010 and 2011, the Justice Department saw fit to give $400,000 in grants to an organization that lists Dohrn as a member of its board of directors: a $150,000 grant in September of 2010 and a $250,000 grant a year later. The organization that received the grants is the W. Haywood Burns Institute, and the project that brought in the money is the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative. JDAI aims to keep juvenile criminals out of “secure confinement” and to reduce racial disparities in the juvenile justice system. | 5/8/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Occupying Wells Fargo The Left’s obsession with a bank. 5.3.12 | They call it “Western Wall Street” when they’re being polite, and quite the variety of unpleasant names when they are not, and they seem intent on singling it out for special treatment. Its real name is Wells Fargo, and the Occupy movement and its acolytes hurl such vitriol its way that, in 2011, the bank went as far as recording in its annual report that the group had the potential to damage its profits. The charges against Wells Fargo range from the quotidian to the ridiculous: Along with almost all other large corporations in America, it is accused of paying too little in taxes; along with almost all the other big banks in America, it is denounced for offering the subprime loans that contributed to the financial meltdown of 2008. Wells Fargo is also held to be a particular offender when it comes to foreclosures — a trend that was made worse, protesters allege, by its acquisition of Wachovia in October 2008 — and it seems that it rather likes outsourcing too, with a higher than usual number of call centers in India and other foreign countries. But while the details might vary a little, these are pretty standard progressive charges — common to all big banks — and what really appears to vex the Left is the pervasive and effective fiction that Wells Fargo is involved in a vast conspiracy to lock up illegal immigrants and to expand dramatically the prison population for its own pecuniary gain. In and of itself, the United States’ incarceration rate is a popular issue for Occupy Wall Street types: As well as objecting to the privatization of prisons, they consider the number of Americans behind bars and the racial makeup of the prison population to be symptomatic of institutional racism. They see the fact that Wells Fargo–backed mutual funds are used to build detention centers that hold illegal immigrants as, at best, complicity in the “prison-industrial complex,” and, at worst, as profiteering from crime. | 5/3/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Foggiest War We don’t know the enemy. What’s worse: We don’t want to. 5.3.12 | The “fog of war” is a concept derived from the writings of Carl von Clausewitz, the great 19th-century Prussian military theorist who recognized that those leading troops into battle often lack data, perspective, and situational awareness. Enveloped within this “fog of uncertainty,” they may not know whether they are winning or losing, and they may take actions that weaken their position and strengthen their enemies. Would Clausewitz not be fascinated by the war dominating the 21st century, a conflict so murky we can’t even agree on its name? Is it the “War on Terrorism” or the “Long War” or the “War Against al-Qaeda” or just “Overseas Contingency Operations”? Over at Foggy Bottom — an apt nickname if ever there was one — an unnamed “senior State Department official” told National Journal’s Michael Hirsh that “the War on Terror is over.” He (or she?) elaborated: “Now that we have killed most of al-Qaeda, . . . people who once might have gone into al-Qaeda see an opportunity for a legitimate Islamism.” A White House spokesman later issued a “clarification”: “We absolutely have never said our war against al-Qaeda is over. We are prosecuting that war at an unprecedented pace.” | 5/3/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Rubio’s Vet-aches Could Charlie Crist’s old team end up vetting Rubio for Romney? 5.3.12 | Have some sympathy for the men and women who will receive serious consideration as a potential running mate and vice president to Mitt Romney. In the coming weeks and months, they will be asked to turn over every detail of their political, financial, and personal lives to a group of strangers. And — in the case of one potential running mate — some of those strangers spent the 2010 cycle attempting to beat him in a tense primary and general election. From all appearances, Florida senator Marco Rubio and Romney hit it off well. Rubio’s endorsement of Romney effectively ended the Republican primary campaign; the senator is often deployed as a Romney surrogate on television and radio and Rubio appeared with Romney at a rally in Philadelphia on April 23. (The Romney campaign refused to say whether their staff has yet contacted any possible running mates about the selection process.) | 5/3/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Reality of Voter Fraud 5.2.12 | The 2012 elections will feature many close races, likely including the presidential contest. That makes concern about voter fraud and ballot integrity all the more meaningful, and a conference held here last weekend by the watchdog group True the Vote made clear just how high the stakes are. “Unfortunately, the United States has a long history of voter fraud that has been documented by historians and journalists,” Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in 2008, upholding a strict Indiana voter-ID law designed to combat fraud. Justice Stevens, who personally encountered voter fraud while serving on various reform commissions in his native Chicago, spoke for a six-member majority. In a decision two years earlier clearing the way for an Arizona ID law, the Court had declared in a unanimous opinion that “confidence in the integrity of our electoral processes is essential to the functioning of our participatory democracy. Voter fraud drives honest citizens out of the democratic process and breeds distrust of our government. Voters who fear their legitimate votes will be outweighed by fraudulent ones will feel disenfranchised.” Indeed, a brand-new Rasmussen Reports poll finds that 64 percent of Americans believe voter fraud is a serious problem, with whites registering 63 percent agreement and African-Americans 64 percent. A Fox News poll taken last month found that 70 percent of Americans support requiring voters to show “state or federally issued photo identification” to prove their identity and citizenship before casting a ballot. Majorities of all demographic groups agreed on the need for photo ID, including 58 percent of non-white voters, 52 percent of liberals, and 52 percent of Democrats. | 5/2/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Occupy’s Totalitarian Temptation 5.2.12 | Yesterday morning, I sauntered into Madison Square Park before many others had arrived. The “Free University” was still setting itself up, and it was a forlorn sight. Lonely red balloons flew at various points around the fountains, and bored policemen sat on benches looking bemused and coordinating their patrols with the Park Service. Dotted around the place were “professors” without students, waiting expectantly under signs that read “Open-Access Teach-In” and “Free Yoga,” and trying to catch the eyes of unimpressed commuters in the hope that they might stop and engage. (Students, it appears, will be no earlier to the revolution than they are to their classes.) One man with some sports equipment — presumably the “(Meta-)Physical Education” teacher — stood in the rain waiting in vain for takers. But on the north side of the park, next to the statue of David Glasgow Farragut, a circle had formed — what seemed to be a roundtable on climate change. I wandered over and stood quietly on its edge. | 5/2/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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China’s War on Baby Girls 5.2.12 | The blind Chinese human-rights activist Chen Guangcheng, who escaped from house arrest on April 22 and may be under the protection of the U.S. Embassy, was initially detained for exposing the massive abuse of Chinese women under China’s one-child policy. His documentation of forced sterilizations and abortions landed him in jail for four years, followed by a year and a half of house arrest. His daring escape has now triggered renewed attacks on organizations engaged in helping Chinese women keep and feed their infants. Since April 28, the Family Planning Commission of Susong County in China’s Anhui province has been harassing families of pregnant women and infants who have received aid from a charity that helps rural families raise infant girls. Often the girl is a second child, in violation of China’s one-child policy. PRC government agents have issued heavy fines to families for over-quota births and have threatened forced abortion for mothers with “illegal” pregnancies. Li Bin, the former governor of Anhui province, is the current chairman of the National Population and Family Planning Commission. | 5/2/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Chris Christie’s Islam Problem 5.1.12 | A Quinnipiac poll in April showed Chris Christie as the most popular potential Republican vice-presidential candidate, thanks to his budget cuts and standing up to government employees’ unions. But the governor of New Jersey has a problem, specifically an Islam problem, that can and should get in the way of his possible ascent to higher office. Time and again he has sided with Islamist forces against those who worry about safeguarding American security and civilization. Some examples: 2008: When serving as U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Christie embraced and kissed Mohammed Qatanani, imam of the Islamic Center of Passaic County, and praised him as “a man of great goodwill.” He did this after Qatanani had publicly ranted against Jews and in support of funding Hamas, a U.S. government–designated terror organization, and on the eve of his deportation hearing for not hiding an Israeli conviction for membership in Hamas. In addition, Christie designated a top aide, Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles McKenna, to testify as a character witness for Qatanani. 2010: After Derek Fenton burned three pages of a Koran at a 9/11 memorial ceremony, his employer, New Jersey Transit, got Christie’s approval to fire him. Protecting Islam at the expense of the constitutional right to free speech, Christie endorsed Fenton’s termination: “That kind of intolerance is something I think is unacceptable. So I don’t have any problem with him being fired.” The American Civil Liberties Union successfully represented Fenton to get his job back. | 5/1/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Founders Loved Mandates? 5.1.12 | As a legal argument against an act of Congress, “it’s unprecedented” does not carry all that much weight. After all, every first use of a legitimate congressional power was obviously without precedent. And there is, in the nature of things, no reason that such a first instance could not occur many years after the power itself was called into being by the Constitution. So when the individual mandate to purchase health insurance, now at issue in the Obamacare case before the Supreme Court, is denounced as unprecedented, that’s hardly a slam-dunk argument. It’s just the beginning of one. What one must show is that the unprecedented mandate is also improper — an illegitimate claim of authority under the Constitution. “It’s unprecedented” can add some rhetorical oomph to the more important claim of illegitimacy, since a plausible reason why no earlier Congress attempted such a mandate is that it would have been understood to reach too far. By the same token, the ability to say “but there is a precedent!” is a kind of Holy Grail for Obamacare’s defenders. Historic enactments that can be analogized to the individual mandate are valuable currency in a legal system that is based on precedent. Better still if these historic acts went unchallenged in their day. And best of all if they date from the generation of the Founders themselves — when the earliest Congresses and presidencies were filled by men who had participated in writing, ratifying, or otherwise arguing about the creation and meaning of the brand-new Constitution. | 5/1/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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In Syria, America Allies with the Muslim Brotherhood 5.1.12 | While the Obama administration’s burgeoning contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt continue to cause controversy, the administration’s policy of growing cooperation with the Syrian opposition continues to enjoy almost unanimous support. This is remarkable, since by virtue of that policy the administration is openly allied with none other than the Muslim Brotherhood: that is, openly, but with perhaps just enough misdirection for the alliance to escape the notice of the broader public. The Syrian opposition organization that the United States and other Western powers have been officially supporting is, of course, the Syrian National Council (SNC). At a meeting in Istanbul on April 1, the so-called Friends of Syria, including the United States, recognized the SNC as “a legitimate representative of all Syrians.” Although the use of the indefinite article suggests there were reservations on the part of some participants, U.S. State Department statements both before and after the Istanbul meeting leave no doubt that the Obama administration treats the SNC as its principal Syrian interlocutor. The SNC is also the presumptive recipient or at least conduit of the aid that the Obama administration has pledged to the Syrian opposition. While in Istanbul, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with representatives of the SNC, and she afterwards promised that “there will be more assistance of all kinds for the Syrian National Council.” | 5/1/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Lessons from Byzantium 4.30.12 | The Byzantine Empire’s long run — 1,100 years — may seem remote from the 21st century, but a reading of its history offers at least three timeless lessons. Understanding some of the fatal weaknesses in the Eastern Roman Empire may help clarify the political and economic problems that America faces today and the choices we have in responding to them. Founded in 330 by the emperor Constantine, the eastern half of the Roman Empire was centered in Constantinople, the New Rome. By the fourth century, the empire had endured more than a century of instability, internecine warfare, and economic decline. In that context Rome’s eastern lands, arcing around Asia Minor, the Levant, and northern Africa, were especially attractive, being richer and more settled than the comparatively backward parts of western Europe. It was in part to assure continued access to these sources of wealth that Constantine relocated his capital. By ad 476, Rome had been overrun by barbarian tribes, and before long only Constantinople in the East had a seat for the emperors. | 4/30/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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A Child of the North Korean Gulag 4.30.12 | ‘Because I am surrounded by good people, I try to do what good people do. But it is very difficult. It does not flow from me naturally. . . . I am evolving from being an animal. But it is going very, very slowly.” Shin Dong-hyuk was speaking to Blaine Harden, a reporter for Frontline and a contributor to The Economist who has served as the Washington Post’s bureau chief in East Asia. Harden has recently authored the gripping memoir Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West. As Harden recounts, Shin was born in 1982 in Camp 14 in North Korea, a “no exit” political camp largely populated by entire families. It is one of six camps that may hold a total of 200,000 prisoners, the biggest of which occupies an area larger than Los Angeles. These camps are clearly visible in satellite reconnaissance photos, but North Korea denies that they exist. Shin is believed to be the first person born in such a camp ever to escape. His family was there because his father’s two brothers fled south during the Korean War. Until his escape, Shin was always infested with lice. There was never any water for bathing or even a way to brush one’s teeth. Everyone smelled like a farm animal, so no one else was bothered by the odor. The camp diet was corn, cabbage, and salt. Pellagra was a common cause of death. To this day, the only fertilizer generally available in the camps and in the country as a whole is human excrement. In 2008, South Korea halted donations of chemical fertilizer in response to provocations from the North. | 4/30/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Death of Free Speech, Continued: An alarming trial in Denmark 4.30.12 | When an opinion on sociological trends or a critique of a group ideology results in criminal charges of hate speech, liberal democracy is in danger. The Danish supreme court has just highlighted that danger. While deciding to acquit Lars Hedegaard, president of the Danish Free Press Society, of intending to speak hatefully for public dissemination, the court emphatically affirmed a statute according to which anyone who “publicly or with the intent of public dissemination issues a pronouncement or other communication by which a group of persons are threatened, insulted or denigrated due to their race, skin colour, national or ethnic origin, religion or sexual orientation is liable to a fine or incarceration for up to two years.” The prosecution of Hedegaard resulted from remarks that he made during an interview and contends were electronically distributed without his permission. Although Hedegaard explained that he did not intend to accuse the majority of Muslim men of abusive behavior, Denmark’s Office of Public Prosecutions deemed his reflections on the incidence of family rape and the commonness of misogyny in Muslim-dominated areas to be criminally insulting. | 4/30/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Sorry Stafford Panderfest A shameless cave-in by House Republicans 4.30.12 | Inspired by President Obama’s cheap election-year politicking, Congress has launched into a frenzied, bipartisan panderfest over the Stafford loan program. Late last week, an emotional House speaker John Boehner led House Republicans to vote for an Obama-proposed giveaway he’d denounced just a few days previously. For those who don’t eagerly track the ins and outs of federally subsidized student loans, here’s the deal: Five years ago, in a piece of cheap political theater, Democrats in Congress wrote an additional sweetener for federally subsidized Stafford loans into the College Cost Reduction and Access Act. Beyond offering college loans at a guaranteed rate of 6.8 percent, Congress temporarily dropped the undergraduate rate as low as 3.4 percent. The fixed rate was demanded by student-loan advocates who disliked the fact that interest rates fluctuate and wanted the feds to offer certainty (and understood that the rates would have to be high enough that they wouldn’t drain the U.S. Treasury). The Bush administration, which never worried about spending a couple billion more, cheerfully went along for the ride. Now, the temporary 3.4 percent is set to naturally expire, with undergraduate Stafford loans reverting to the standard 6.8 percent rate. The impact? Not so much. U.S. PIRG, the big “student advocacy” lobbying outfit, calculates that the change would cost the average new borrower $2,800 over a ten-year repayment term. That’s about $25 a month. Former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin has pegged the impact at $7 a month. | 4/30/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obama’s No FDR: FDR’s policies revitalized America. 4.26.12 | Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal is a brilliant columnist, I almost always agree with him, and regret that I could not have written the same opinions as well as he. But I am stirred to respectful dissent by his column of April 19, which effectively announced his adherence to the heresy that Franklin D. Roosevelt did not really alleviate the Great Depression in his first presidential term, but used his vast public charm and buoyant optimism to put it over on the voters that he had. The unspeakable rubbish that Roosevelt had given Eastern Europe to Stalin at the Tehran and Yalta Conferences had just been laid to rest when a new hobgoblin arose and was introduced about in respectable company by my esteemed friend Amity Shlaes and others: that Roosevelt didn’t really make much progress against the Depression until the onset of World War II. Mr. Henninger wrote that FDR’s 1936 reelection campaign took place as the country “was mired in the Great Depression,” and that he “kicked off” his campaign on October 30 of that year at Madison Square Garden in New York with a speech that presaged President Obama’s address on April 3 to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, in which he reviled “social Darwinism.” The columnist concluded that “the Obama campaign can borrow Roosevelt’s content,” but “can’t teach Obama . . . a pretty grim guy . . . how to be FDR.” | 4/26/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Real War on Women: Honor killing, forced marriage, genital mutilation — that is a war on women. 4.26.12 | Her name was Derya. She lived in Batman, Turkey, she was 17 years old, and she had a problem that few American women know about, let alone have ever experienced: The men in her family were doing everything they could to get her to kill herself. It started with text messages like this one from her uncle: “You have blackened our name. Kill yourself and clean our shame, or we will kill you first.” What was Derya’s crime? What had she done to deserve a message like that from a relative? She had fallen in love with a boy she had met in school the previous spring. When news of this outrage reached Derya’s family, her mother warned her that her father — her own father — might kill her. She didn’t listen. And then the orchestrated campaign of terror began. Threatening text message after threatening text message, sent by her brothers and uncles, sometimes as many as 15 a day. | 4/26/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Medicare’s Dirty Little Secret 4.25.12 | It’s something everyone knows, but no one wants to talk about: Medicare’s cash position makes Enron’s business model look downright reputable. Medicare is bleeding cash — a fact disguised by creative accounting. According to Monday’s release of the 2012 Trustees Report, in 2011 Medicare took in $260.8 billion in payroll taxes and beneficiary premiums, but spent $549.1 billion in medical services. That means last year Medicare ran a $288.3 billion cash shortfall. And 2011 wasn’t the exception; it was the norm. Since President Lyndon Baines Johnson secured passage of Medicare legislation in 1965, the program has run cash deficits every year except 1966 and 1974. Advocates of the status quo argue that Medicare receives “general revenue transfers,” but that’s government-speak for raiding the Treasury to spend other tax revenues. It’s the dramatic use of general-revenue transfers that has hidden Medicare’s true insolvency from the public and masked Medicare’s contribution to the national debt. | 4/25/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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So, Is Mexican Immigration Over? 4.25.12 | A new report finds that the number of Mexican immigrants in the United States has declined for the first time since the Great Depression. As the Supreme Court hears oral arguments today in Eric Holder’s lawsuit against Arizona, it’s worth considering what these findings might mean for immigration policy. The report, from the Pew Hispanic Center, found that the total number of Mexican-born people living in the United States has dropped somewhat, from 12.6 million in 2007 to 12 million last year. This comes after 40 years of very rapid growth, rising from just 750,000 in 1970. More important than the slight decline is the dynamic behind it: The number of Mexicans moving back doubled in the period from 2005 to 2010 compared with ten years earlier, while the number of new arrivals fell by more than half. (My colleague Steve Camarota noted both these developments several years ago; Pew had disputed the increase in return migration but seems to have come around.) | 4/25/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Rapid-Response Romney: The 2012 Romney campaign hits back much quicker than the 2008 McCain campaign. 4.23.12 | Veterans of John McCain’s presidential campaign of 2008 lamented a maddening process that only worsened as that election season progressed. A liberal blog would make a stunning allegation about McCain or, later, Sarah Palin that was not easily verified or disproved. Within an hour or two, a major newspaper reporter or television news producer would call the campaign and demand a comment or denial; the clock was ticking to avoid the dreaded “the McCain campaign had no comment,” which suggested evasiveness or a de facto confirmation of the often bogus or wildly exaggerated claim. Patrick Hynes, who was an online-communications consultant for McCain, recalls Sam Stein of the Huffington Post calling about a rumor that McCain had been involved in a car accident that killed someone shortly after returning from Vietnam, and that military authorities had somehow covered up the entire incident. | 4/24/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Courting Marco: The junior senator from Florida stays mum on his VP prospects. 4.23.12 | Over the weekend, Marco Rubio went mum. To the disappointment of political junkies, the freshman Florida senator once again declined a chance to play Washington’s favorite parlor game: speculating on the vice-presidential sweepstakes. “The last thing [Mitt Romney] needs is those of us in the peanut gallery to be saying what we would or would not do,” Rubio said on CNN’s State of the Union. “I’m not going to even discuss the process anymore.” Rubio’s comments are hardly a surprise. He has been swatting away the chatter about his likely contention for the GOP’s number-two slot since his ascension to the upper chamber. During nearly every editorial-board meeting, radio interview, and television appearance, he has been asked the same question. And every answer he gives, like the one he gave Sunday, has been the same: He’s flattered but not interested. | 4/24/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Hatch Heading for a Fall? 4.23.12 | All the senator’s horses and all the senator’s men couldn’t quite wrap up the Utah Republican nomination for Orrin Hatch on Saturday. At the GOP convention, the seven-term senator narrowly missed winning the 60 percent of delegates he needed to avoid a primary against former state senator Dan Liljenquist. Polls still show him favored in the June 26 primary, but Hatch now faces his first serious challenger since he won his seat in 1976. And, as Richard Lugar can testify — the 80-year-old Indiana colleague of Hatch’s is now suddenly neck and neck with a challenger in his own May 8 primary — a lot can happen in the few weeks of an intense campaign. Hatch knew he would face opposition this year after Tea-party delegates, who dominated the Republican party’s 2010 state convention, unceremoniously dumped his Senate colleague Robert Bennett in favor of Mike Lee, the constitutional scholar who is now Utah’s junior senator. Bennett didn’t even receive enough delegate votes to force a primary. | 4/23/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Keep the First Amendment 4.23.12 | The phrase “stunning development” is used far too often in our politics, but here is an item that can be described in no other way: Nancy Pelosi and congressional Democrats, frustrated by the fact that the Bill of Rights interferes with their desire to muzzle their political opponents, have proposed to repeal the First Amendment. That is precisely what the so-called People’s Rights Amendment would do. If this amendment were to be enacted, the cardinal rights protected by the First Amendment — free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom to petition the government for redress of grievances — would be redefined and reduced to the point of unrecognizability. The amendment would hold that the rights protected by the Constitution are enjoyed only by individuals acting individually; individuals acting in collaboration with others would be stripped of those rights. | 4/23/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The President’s Incoherent Economic ‘Philosophy’ 4.23.12 | Once upon a time, President Obama was a traditional Keynesian. When he came into office, he favored a massive injection of new government spending into the economy in the name of “stimulus” — counter-cyclical federal activity aimed at offsetting depressed consumer demand emanating from a recession-battered private sector. Unfortunately for the president, that approach to economic revival has now been thoroughly discredited in the public’s mind. The problem with Keynesianism isn’t the theory; it’s the practice. What happens in the real world — that is, the world in which Congress drafts and passes legislation — isn’t a series of tidy, one-time, highly valuable public investments that would not have occurred were it not for the legislation. No, when Congress writes stimulus spending bills, what we get are narrow-purpose pet projects, large federal bureaucracies, ideological hobbyhorses, and spending that simply displaces what otherwise would have occurred anyway, especially at the state level. The net result provides little if any boost to aggregate demand because the states — and to some extent private citizens — simply pocket the federal money and reduce their deficits and debts. Meanwhile, what federal taxpayers get is a permanent increase in the size of government — because almost nothing in politics is ever “one-time” — as well as a massive increase in the national debt. | 4/23/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Wonders of Deregulation: It has benefited many Americans and harmed very few. 4.23.12 | Decades of deregulation and economic liberty, President Obama argues, have endangered and impoverished Americans. He has told voters in recent weeks that “we tried [the] theory” of deregulation, and it “hasn’t worked.” Further, today conservatives “keep telling us that if we’d just strip away more regulations, and let businesses pollute more and treat workers and consumers with impunity, that somehow we’d all be better off.” | 4/23/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obama’s Funny Money: In 2008, the president’s campaign-finance operation was highly suspect. 4.20.12 | The media lionized Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign for running as smoothly (and stylishly) as a Swiss watch. “We love things that are smart,” explained Time’s Mark Halperin, later the co-author of a best-selling book about the 2008 race, Game Change. At least Halperin had the courage also to deplore the pro-Obama tilt of the media during the campaign. At a post-election Politico/University of Southern California conference in 2008, he called it “the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq War. It was extreme bias, extreme pro-Obama bias.” Well, only now are we learning that things weren’t quite as “smart” as we were led to believe. Yesterday, it was reported the Federal Election Commission unanimously found that the 2008 Obama campaign had failed to properly report some $2 million in last-minute contributions. The campaign could still have to pay fines or face other penalties. (The audit for the 2008 John McCain campaign hasn’t yet been completed.) | 4/23/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Flushing Out the Extremes on Immigration: The DREAM Act was supposed to, but didn’t. Secure Communities can. 4.20.12 | Congress passed the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act ten years ago this summer, making it illegal to kill a baby who had been born despite an abortion attempt. The bill had very little practical purpose, as few babies survive attempted abortions. Rather, the goal was to expose and isolate the radicals on the pro-choice side who would oppose such a measure, thus helping move public opinion in a more pro-life direction. As Hadley Arkes wrote on NRO at the time, “no one except a crazed zealot would profess any doubt about the ‘human’ standing of the child at the point of birth.” Each side on the immigration-control debate thinks it has a similar issue. For the pro-amnesty crowd, it’s the DREAM Act; for immigration hawks, it’s the Secure Communities program. The problem for the open-borders folks is that they’re the only ones who think the DREAM Act is an unopposable bill — in fact, it’s been voted down in Congress more than once and no one’s suffered any consequences. The problem for the immigration hawks is that too much of the ostensibly pro-enforcement Republican leadership is too timid to see the power of Secure Communities as a political tool. | 4/23/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Paul Ryan’s Grand Compromise 4.20.12 | Paul Krugman has called Representative Paul Ryan’s (R., Wis.) budget “the most fraudulent in American history.” He and fellow critics take issue with the fact that Ryan promotes balancing tax cuts with the elimination of tax credits and deductions, but doesn’t specify which he would remove. Ryan and his staff contend that since a budget is an appropriations request — not a revenue plan — he can only suggest reforms to the Ways and Means Committee, which deals with tax policy. Unfortunately, this back-and-forth has overshadowed the fact that getting rid of tax preferences is sound policy. Indeed, both the Bowles-Simpson Commission and the Domenici-Rivlin Task Force supported eliminating tax preferences in order to “broaden the base” of taxable income. Tax deductions are regressive, because you have to have money to hide money. A Tax Policy Center study found that the top 0.1 percent of earners — those who make about $9.5 million and above annually — would lose 23 percent of their income if all tax deductions, credits, and exclusions were suddenly removed. As Alice Rivlin, a former CBO, OMB, and Fed official, told James B. Stewart of the New York Times: “There’s no question that” tax deductions “heavily favor the upper 1 percent, and certainly the upper 2 or 3 percent. If you’re going to have tax reform, then you’re going to have to increase the effective tax rate on the ultra wealthy.” | 4/23/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Buffett Rule’s Chump Change 4.19.12 | President Obama has admitted that his so-called Buffett Rule isn’t really about reducing the deficit, but about tax fairness. Yet he and his supporters have still clung to the idea that the proceeds, about $4.5 billion per year, while they wouldn’t close the deficit, are nothing to sneeze at. As I pointed out the other day, though, while liberals have derided Romney’s plan to eliminate high-income taxpayers’ deduction for mortgage interest on second homes as meaningless, it would actually raise a non-negligible amount of revenue, and quite possibly more than the president’s proposal. In fact, there are a variety of measures — including spending cuts and simplifications of the tax code — that could easily reduce the federal deficit by about $4.5 billion: | 4/19/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Afghan and Iraqi Woes U.S. foreign policy mustn’t waste another decade.. 4.19.12 | It must be said that the War on Terror has substantially been a success. After the 9/11 atrocities, the conventional wisdom — which was reflected in the claims of bin Laden and others in their bloodcurdling videos — was that terrorism would be routine and devastating against any countries that displeased militant Islam. There was the fear and the promise of unlimited numbers of suicide attackers. But despite close calls over Detroit (the panty-bomber) and in Times Square, and doubtless many quietly foiled efforts, there has been no return to terrorism in North America, and very little in Latin America. Even in Europe and Australasia, prime targets, there has not been much beyond the London buses, Madrid commuter trains, and the Australian-frequented bar in Bali. The Israelis stopped the suicide bombing in their country by killing the outstanding surviving Hamas leader after each outrage; lo and behold, the eagerness for heroic violent death did not extend to those commissioning the suicide attacks, as bin Laden and the rest cowered and skulked in caves or anonymously behind high walls. Thus, the principal raison d’être of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars has been achieved, though it is not clear that the nearly $2 trillion and about 7,000 American and Western Allied lives expended in those wars were essential to the accomplishment of that objective. | 4/19/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Liberate ‘Zones of Electronic Repression’! Islamists shouldn’t be allowed to use Western technology to crush dissent. 4 | ‘The fax shall make you free.” Albert Wohlstetter, the great Cold War strategist, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, said that back in 1990. He was right: The advent of fax machines, photocopiers, and other then-cutting-edge communications technologies was an enormous boon to the free flow of information. In Communist countries, the Samizdat was transformed: Dissident self-publishers, who previously would sit at typewriters copying banned books page by page, could now, with the push of a button, create dozens of copies and transmit them almost anywhere. Ever since, there has been not just the hope but the expectation that advancing communications technologies — personal commuters, the Internet, e-mail, smart phones, satellites, and the like — would inevitably spread freedom while constraining the power of the despots. This just in: It’s not turning out that way. | 4/19/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Egypt: Pity the Winner A frightful mess of an election. 4.19.12 | Egypt’s presidential race is now down from 23 declared candidates to just a handful of real competitors. On April 14, the Supreme Presidential Electoral Commission disqualified ten candidates, including Omar Suleiman, who had been President Hosni Mubarak’s intelligence-service chief; Khairat El-Shater, the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate; Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, the Salafi leader; and Ayman Nour, the man who had run against Mubarak in 2005. This leaves Amre Moussa, the former Mubarak foreign minister and head of the Arab League; the Brotherhood’s substitute candidate, Mohammed Mursi; and Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, the former Brotherhood leader now running as a sort of “centrist Islamist.” The field may change again, for a newly adopted statute would also bar Ahmed Shafik, former head of the air force and briefly prime minister as Mubarak was collapsing, but the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces has yet to approve this new statute. The election will be held on April 23 and 24, with a run-off in June if no one gets 50 percent. The rules governing this contest might strike a foreigner as bizarre. Shafik, for example, left the Air Force in 2002 and served as prime minister for only four weeks. He was Mubarak’s minister of civil aviation for nine years — but Amre Moussa served as Mubarak’s foreign minister for ten years (not to mention that, as head of the Arab League for ten years, selected by Egypt, he was not exactly in rebellion against Mubarak). A law that says Shafik is irreparably tarred by association with Mubarak while Moussa is a model of democratic probity is ridiculous. | 4/19/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Christie the Prophet: The New Jersey governor sees how the welfare state rots society. 4.18.12 | New Jersey governor Chris Christie recently warned that America is in danger of becoming a country of “people sitting on the couch waiting for their next government check.” Predictably, the Left was outraged, but Governor Christie wasn’t far off the mark. During the 2011 debate over raising the debt ceiling, President Obama reminded Americans that the federal government sends out 70 million checks every month. That is probably an underestimate. According to the Washington Post, the president’s number included Social Security, veterans’ benefits, and spending on non-defense contractors and vendors, but not reimbursements to Medicare providers and vendors or electronic transfers to the 21 million households receiving food stamps. (Nor did he include most spending by the Defense Department, which has a payroll of 6.4 million active and retired employees and, on average, cuts checks for nearly 1 million invoices and 660,000 travel-expense claims per month.) The actual number might be closer to 200 million checks every month. | 4/18/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Assad: An Arab Problem: The U.S. doesn’t have a big role to play in Syria. 4.18.12 | As Bashar Assad toys with the ill-fated United Nations peace plan for Syria, some have called for a U.S.-led intervention in yet another Arab conflict. Some support American action as a strategic opportunity to deal a deathblow to Iran’s favorite proxy; others push on purely humanitarian grounds. But all of them ignore a fundamental reality: Assad is an Arab problem. This is their fight, not ours. While the hawks here in the U.S. may respond that no country in the region could match the hard-power options at America’s disposal, that doesn’t mean the intervention should fall upon our shoulders. And those who believe America has a moral obligation to act largely assume that an effort intended to be a replay of NATO in Kosovo, 1999, won’t turn into America in Beirut, 1982. By getting too involved, we could very make well make things worse — in a country with chemical weapons, no less. | 4/18/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Hot Tea: Mere days after the primary’s fizzle, Mitt Romney is embraced by conservative activists. 4.18.12 | On Monday night, standing beside a 20-foot white marble statue of Benjamin Franklin, Mitt Romney met the Tea Party. Or, rather, the Tea Party met Mitt Romney, embraced him, and made him an honorary member. Even in the City of Brotherly Love, the hearty reception was a tad surprising. Romney, for his part, seemed pleasantly startled by the fist-pumping standing ovation and raucous cheers that greeted his entry, to the strains of Kid Rock’s anthem, “Born Free.” “What a welcome from the Tea Party,” Romney said, grinning, at the top of his remarks. | 4/18/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Islam’s Cartoon Missionaries 4.17.12 | Comic books as a method of missionizing for Islam (da’wa)? Yes. One year ago, Harvard University hosted a workshop to teach comic-book artists how to address Americans’ “unease with Islam and the Middle East.” And later this week, Georgetown University will air a PBS documentary, Wham! Bam! Islam!, celebrating a comic book called The 99. | 4/17/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Romney, Unplugged 4.17.12 | The good news for wary conservatives is that Mitt Romney has finally gotten specific about his plans for reforming the tax code and shrinking the federal government. The bad news is that he did so at a private gathering of donors, and for purposes of analysis we have only what reporters lurking outside the event overheard. But with that caveat, we can report that much of what Romney proposes is constructive. Romney has long promised a revenue-neutral simplification of the tax code that would couple a 20 percent across-the-board rate cut with the elimination of certain deductions. In his off-mic comments he named names, singling out federal deductions for state and local taxes, and for mortgage interest on second homes, as potential offsets. Both changes would be welcome. | 4/17/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Jindal’s Tough Education Reforms 4.17.12 | Earlier this month, after a bipartisan majority passed two new education bills in the Louisiana state house, teachers took the day off from work to protest in concert with activists, including the rather obscure Occupy Baton Rouge. In Cajun tradition, they held a raucous “funeral for education reform.” But on the contrary, Louisiana’s school reforms represent a new national birth of freedom for education. This is a huge step forward for conservative policy, especially with the establishment of unprecedented access to school choice. As Jim Geraghty wrote in National Review last fall, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal has enjoyed a spectacular run of success at governing his state, overhauling Louisiana, once derided as America’s “banana republic,” by cutting down corruption, improving business-friendliness, and reforming the health-care system. In fact, Jindal’s efforts were so successful that the Democratic party essentially didn’t bother putting forth a challenger in 2010; Louisiana had gotten so bad that dramatically reducing spending and cracking down on ethics violations didn’t anger the body politic at all. But then, of course, there were still public schools: With sacrosanct spending levels, lifetime tenure, and no accountability measures, they are the Louisiana-like rump in every state, holding back student achievement. | 4/17/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obama v. the Court 4.16.12 | President Obama was once a lecturer on constitutional law, but he appears to be a little rusty. Most of what he has said recently about the Supreme Court case challenging the constitutionality of the health-care law he signed has been ill-informed. Asked about the matter at a press conference on April 2, he responded that he was confident the Court would uphold the law: “And the reason is because, in accordance with precedent out there, it’s constitutional.” Actually, there isn’t any precedent for the Court to examine on the question of whether the federal government can order Americans to buy health insurance. There are plenty of cases, from the New Deal onward, in which the Court has said the federal government has broad leeway in regulating commerce among the states. Wickard v. Filburn, for example, is a canonical 1942 case in which the Court held that Congress may regulate even intrastate economic activity because of its interstate effects. But the oral argument did not dwell much on such cases, because they do not offer much guidance for the Court in the Obamacare case. | 4/16/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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How Obama Got the Individual Mandate So Wrong 4.16.12 | President Obama insists that the public would rise up in anger should the Supreme Court strike down all or part of his health-care law. James Carville, a former strategist for Bill and Hillary Clinton, claims a death sentence for Obamacare would benefit Democrats. Such arguments border on fantasy. The reaction to the closely watched Supreme Court oral arguments on Obamacare shows that the law lost ground with the public the more the public followed the issue. A new Washington Post/ABC News poll pegs support for the overall law at 39 percent, the lowest level of backing since this poll first began tracking the issue in 2009. Only about half of Democrats want the entire law upheld. In contrast, approval of the Supreme Court has increased following the roughing up it gave Obamacare. A new Rasmussen Reports survey found that the percentage of likely voters who rate the court as good or excellent went up 13 points in a month, to 41 percent. A full 42 percent of independents and unaffiliated voters rank the court highly, up from 26 percent only a month ago. Even some liberals acknowledge that when it comes to public opinion, the law resembles the dead parrot in that old Monty Python skit. When the Daily Beast asked media and policy experts how the law could be better marketed, the general sense was that it was too late. “Medicare was marketable because it was understandable,” says Lawrence O’Donnell, the liberal MSNBC host who was staff director of the Senate Finance Committee when it debated Hillarycare in the 1990s. “I have never met anyone, outside of the government, who can describe what the new health-care law is. You cannot market something that is indescribable.” | 4/16/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Framing the Religious-Liberty Issue 4.16.12 | ‘Our First, Most Cherished Liberty,” the Easter Week statement by the Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, is the most developed statement on current religious-freedom controversies to emerge from the bishops’ deliberations. It also, and just as urgently, defines with considerable precision a major issue in American public life: Will the robust networks of free and voluntary associations that Alexis de Tocqueville admired as the sinews and musculature of American democracy continue to flourish? Or will the United States increasingly resemble Western Europe, where the associational instinct (and, with it, civil society) has atrophied under the heavy weight of the European nanny state? The bishops, in other words, helpfully frame the religious-freedom issue in its broader context. To be sure, the bishops are very, very concerned about increasing governmental encroachments on religious freedom of recent years. Those encroachments include the HHS “contraceptive mandate” in the implementation of Obamacare, which brought the entire issue to the surface of public life; they also involve state laws that impede the Church’s service to immigrants, attempts by state legislatures to turn religious communities into bureaus of state government, discrimination against Christian students on university campuses, and restrictions on the Church’s capacity to draw on public funds in its service to orphans and victims of human trafficking. This shrinkage in the sphere of religious freedom is bad enough in itself, and deserves to be fought. But as the Ad Hoc Committee points out (in explaining that religious freedom “is not only about our ability to go to Mass on Sunday or pray the Rosary at home”), the issue beneath these issues is the advance of Leviathan, often in the name of imposing a beneficent relativism — that turns dictatorial: | 4/16/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The New Black Panthers’ Unpunished Threats: The Department of Justice appears uninterested in pursuing the group. 4.13.12 | George Zimmerman is facing charges of second-degree murder. A jury will decide his guilt or innocence. Here’s hoping the criminal-justice system cools rather than exacerbates the passions the killing of Trayvon Martin has raised. But Attorney General Eric Holder isn’t helping. Wednesday, he appeared before the Reverend Al Sharpton’s National Action Network to praise Sharpton “for your partnership, your friendship, and your tireless efforts to speak out for the voiceless, to stand up for the powerless, and to shine a light on the problems we must solve, and the promises we must fulfill.” This is the same Al Sharpton who has led several rallies against Zimmerman, in which he called for civil disobedience and an “occupation” of Sanford, Fla., where the shooting occurred, if an arrest wasn’t made. | 4/13/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Nanny Tax You shouldn’t have to be an accountant and a lawyer to hire a nanny. 4.13.12 | There are certain laws everybody breaks. Everybody jaywalks, nobody respects the speed limit, and nobody pays taxes for the children’s nanny. But would more parents follow nanny-related laws if the system were more straightforward? As a new mother, I wonder. I had spent several years as a full-time speechwriter. Last spring, I became a full-time mother and part-time writer. I scribbled freelance pieces in the snippets of time I could snatch; and there weren’t many. In the fall, my husband and I decided to hire part-time help, liberating me to write more regularly. That decision was fairly easy. Finding someone we liked and trusted to watch our baby was harder. But the most head-breaking of all has been the legal and accounting nonsense associated with our new position. | 4/13/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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It’s Not the Arab Spring, It’s the Nahda 4.12.12 | The term “Arab Spring” was born of optimism, not analysis. When a downtrodden fruit monger in Tunisia self-immolated, setting off a series of regional upheavals, many journalists, diplomats, and academics thought they heard an echo of the Prague Spring of 1968. That was when Czechoslovakia boldly initiated democratic reforms — an experiment quickly extinguished by a Soviet invasion. Americans do not like to see people living under the jackboots of dictators. We instinctively root for the revolutionaries hoping there are George Washingtons and Thomas Jeffersons among them. But the American Revolution was an historical anomaly. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Iranian Revolution — in these and other instances, one form of despotism simply replaced another. | 4/12/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Threats to Life: New challenges to ethics, and to civilization 4.12.12 | Last week, I broached the question of an attempted shift in the long-standing cultural balance in America between the paramountcy of the Judeo-Christian values of the sanctity of life and primacy of the individual will in pursuit of conventional moral standards, and the moral relativism of an evolving rationalist Enlightenment. It is, very broadly, the abrasion between positive faith and humanist reason, and although I saw no evidence that Senator Santorum saw the issues in exactly this historic context, I think he deserves credit for raising these different perspectives in what has otherwise seemed to me the most intellectually vapid U.S. presidential campaign I have observed. (And I have observed all of them starting with the relatively distinguished rematch in 1956 between Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai E. Stevenson, very different men but both of undoubted stature.) These questions are regularly played out as what are called the life issues, and are not usually argued along partisan lines. The great majority of people of all political shadings will agree that personal and national self-defense justify recourse to force in the absence of other effective measures. The death penalty for heinous crimes is more hotly contested, especially as there are now constant revelations of deliberate prosecution suppression of exculpatory evidence all over the country, and all execution techniques, including lethal injection, have been shown to be potentially cruelly painful. Abortion is a proverbially divisive subject, and the depredations of the pro-abortionists are becoming steadily more aggressive: now partial-birth abortions, and even the first stirrings of the scandalous enormity of post-birth abortion. Assisted suicide and euthanasia are heating up, fueled by the burgeoning organ-transplant industry. | 4/12/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Working-Class Wonk 4.12.12 | Mitt Romney has left the building and the town-hall meeting has ended, but Rob Portman, Ohio’s rail-thin freshman senator, paces across the factory floor to shake hands with the lingering crowd. He spends 20 minutes with the metalworkers, listening to their stories. He lightly grips his hands at his waist; his salt-and-pepper hair is slightly mussed. His responses are crisp, calm, and full of numbers. In that respect, he echoes Romney, the potential Republican presidential nominee. But behind the mannerly persona, Portman, like Romney, is a shrewd operator. Unlike Romney, he is a seasoned Washington player — and an influential lawmaker who has worked for two presidents. The pair’s stylistic similarities, midwestern roots, and contrasting career paths have spurred Republican strategists to tout Portman as a leading vice-presidential contender. | 4/12/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Cheney’s Energy Success 4.12.12 | It’s hard to remember — after Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Blackwater, etc., took turns dominating our collective consciousness — but the Cheney Energy Task Force was once among the gravest of the Bush administration’s sins. Created in the second week of Bush’s first term, it was seen as the birth of the Bush-Cheney hyper-secretive neo-conservative crypto-fascist military-industrial crime syndicate. Now, Obama frequently brags that under his administration, domestic oil production has hit an eight-year high. As he also points out, however, the president can’t have a significant, instantaneous effect on the energy supply. Indeed, we are currently enjoying this surge of oil production largely because of improvements to hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” which has increased the oil produced on state and private land. Much of the credit should go to technological innovators and the oilmen who’ve adopted their techniques. But some credit should be reserved for the Cheney Energy Task Force, which established the guidelines for the Bush administration’s response to these developments. | 4/12/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Buffetted by Tax Hikes 4.11.12 | Speaking in Florida (unemployment rate 9.6 percent, No. 1 in the nation for foreclosures), President Barack Obama reiterated his demand for a tax increase based on the so-called Buffett Rule, a non-solution to a non-problem intended mainly to distract from the administration’s non-solutions to real problems. The Buffett Rule would function as a secondary alternative-minimum tax, putatively to accomplish what the primary alternative-minimum tax has failed to do: sock it to billionaires (“billionaires” here being defined in some instances as “individuals making $250,000 a year,” which is mathematically suspect). The case for the Buffett Rule is built upon a myth cultivated by President Obama, by Warren Buffett, and by many of their supporters and admirers: that high-income Americans pay lower tax rates than middle-class Americans. This is a falsehood, one that has been amply documented with data from the tax experts at the IRS and by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. | 4/12/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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President of the Twilight Zone 4.11.12 | Deconstructing one of President Obama’s speeches can be a bit like taking a trip to an alternate universe. Take his remarks last week to the Associated Press, contrasting his budget vision with that of Paul Ryan and Republicans. All that was missing was a Rod Serling voice-over announcing, “You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind; a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination.” For instance, the president denounces the Ryan budget as “thinly veiled Social Darwinism.” One would think that Social Darwinism would mean actually cutting the budget. But in reality, Ryan’s budget increases federal spending by more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years. | 4/12/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Millennials Turn Rightward? 4.10.12 | The “luster of Obama’s promises has worn off” and “hope” and “change” no longer drive young voters. In 2008, the “millennial” generation, comprising those between the ages of 18 to 29, voted for President Obama by a margin of 2–1. In 2004, President Bush lost this demographic by nine points to John Kerry. But, for the first time in over a decade, it appears the trend has reversed — young Americans are now reconsidering their allegiances to the Democratic party. Why have the millennials, the group that Obama has described as “the foundation of [his] campaign,” abandoned him? To quote another Democratic campaign, “it’s the economy, stupid.” According to research conducted for Resurgent Republic, a conservative policy organization, young voters are no longer enamored with the president because of the current state of the economy. The millennials chosen for the focus groups were all self-identified independents who had voted for Obama in 2008 but were now undecided on the generic ballot. The dramatic effects of the “Great Recession” had shifted the mindsets of these younger Americans — unemployment amongst this crucial Obama demographic is currently at its highest point since the end of World War II. | 4/10/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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There Is No War on Women in Wisconsin 4.10.12 | In 2009, Wisconsin enacted a law that would help victims of sex discrimination win bigger awards. Such victims already could file their cases with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in federal court, or with the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development. But lawmakers thought that once an accuser had won before an administrative-law judge — the final step of the process that starts with the Department of Workforce Development — she should then be allowed to file her case in a Wisconsin circuit court. Circuit courts were directed to award compensatory and punitive damages of up to $300,000 for large employers, whereas administrative-law judges may only make the accuser “whole” by awarding back pay, attorney’s fees, etc. | 4/10/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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An American Gospel 4.9.12 | Americans are an enterprising people, and we start churches like we start businesses. (It is not always possible to tell the two apart.) There are more than twice as many distinct religious communities as McDonald’s restaurants in the United States, and eight times as many religious congregations as ZIP codes. The diversity of American creeds and the comity among their adherents is remarkable: The West Texas city in which I was raised was dominated by white Baptists and brown Catholics, but we had everything from staid Methodist congregations to foot-washing Primitive Baptists, holy-rolling Foursquare and Full Gospel churches, a tiny congregation of Latin-loving sedevacantists led by a discalced Franciscan (try that on a sidewalk in Texas in July), neo-Marcionite churches full of people who did not know what a Marcionite is, various expressions of the Seventh-Day Adventist tendency, even a few Mennonites out in the countryside. Everybody thought everybody else was going to perdition, though to the best of my recollection Janet Reno was the only one willing to dispatch anybody to hell from Texas over religious peculiarities. But the Mormons are a tribe apart. | 4/9/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Why We Need Voter-ID Laws Now: Voter fraud is a scandal, and the attorney general can’t look away anymore. 4.9.12 | Attorney General Eric Holder is a staunch opponent of laws requiring voters to show photo ID at the polls to improve ballot security. He calls them “unnecessary” and has blocked their implementation in Texas and South Carolina, citing the fear they would discriminate against minorities. I wonder what Holder will think when he learns just how easy it was for someone to be offered his ballot just by mentioning his name in a Washington, D.C., polling place in Tuesday’s primaries. | 4/9/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Waiting to Lose in Afghanistan 4.9.12 | After a decade of fighting in Afghanistan, at tremendous cost in American blood and treasure, many Americans are now asking: Why are we there? What do we have to show for our efforts? The answers are troubling: A government, under President Hamid Karzai, that is corrupt, largely incompetent, and of questionable loyalty; inept Afghan security forces that regularly turn their weapons on their American and NATO advisers; and a resurgent Taliban poised to regain control of the country after U.S. forces withdraw. Many look at these facts and conclude that the U.S. can’t win in Afghanistan and should therefore get out. But few have examined the dire consequences of losing. What would it mean to lose in Afghanistan? The U.S. invaded the country in 2001 with the stated objective of vanquishing al-Qaeda and the Taliban regime that harbored it. When we finally withdraw all forces in 2014, the Taliban influence in Afghanistan is likely to be substantial, if not paramount. Should the Taliban retake much of Afghanistan, whether we label our withdrawal a defeat or call it something more appetizing (a draw, for example) is immaterial: Our enemies will view this as an American defeat, and learn lessons that will bode ill for our future. | 4/9/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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It’s Not ‘All of the Above’ After All: Obama’s pointless war on coal 4.5.12 | So now we know that when President Obama says he wants an “all of the above” strategy for energy, “the above” doesn’t include the energy source in which America has the biggest advantage over the rest of the world: coal. Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a new regulation that, if enacted, will effectively outlaw the building of new coal-fired electricity-generation plants. In its proposed rule — which, by the way, is 257 pages long – the agency says it is using a “common-sense approach to reducing CO2 and other [greenhouse-gas] emissions, which by causing climate change, pose a serious threat to public health and welfare.” The EPA’s proposal defies common sense in several ways. I will focus on two of them: the essentiality of coal both here in the U.S. and around the world, and the negligible effect that this move will have on global carbon-dioxide emissions. | 4/5/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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A Breather from Regulations 4.5.12 | ‘It’s so meager,” proclaimed House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on March 9, the day after the House passage of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, a bill to reduce regulations on businesses that raise capital. Though Pelosi had voted for the bill, as had 157 other Democrats and all the Republicans who were present, she belittled the accomplishment as a “little king” and at most a “jobs bill lite.” A few days later, the bill — which also garnered the support of such staunch liberals as Barney Frank (D., Mass.) and Maxine Waters (D., Calif.), and was supported by the Obama administration — suddenly became “radical.” “Democrats have belatedly woken up to the act’s radicalism,” stated The Economist. The usual suspects who treat regulation as religion — the AFL-CIO, the New York Times editorial page, etc. — came out in full force against the bill. When the bill came before the Senate, Jack Reed (D., R.I.), Carl Levin (D., Mich.), and Mary Landrieu (D., La.) spearheaded an amendment that would have weakened or gutted every measure of regulatory relief in the House bill. The amendment got the vote of every Senate Democrat and Senator Scott Brown (R., Mass.), but fell short of the 60 votes it needed to move forward. Eventually, 25 Democrats — nearly half of the party’s Senate caucus — joined the unanimous Republicans to pass a bill that contained almost all the provisions of the House version. | 4/5/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Messages of Toulouse: Lone-wolf terrorists are a growing threat moderate Muslims shouldn’t ignore. 4.5.12 | To those who proclaim themselves jihadis, Mohamed Merah is a hero and a martyr. He became a hero last month when he attacked a Jewish school in Toulouse, murdering Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his two young sons, Gabriel and Arieh, and a seven-year-old girl, Myriam Monsonego, whom he pulled by the hair and then shot in the head. He became a martyr when, after a 33-hour standoff, he was killed by French commandos. This part of the story has received too little attention: Merah, the 23-year-old son of Algerian immigrants, began his killing spree by gunning down French paratrooper Sergeant Imad Ibn Ziaten and, four days later, two more uniformed paratroopers, Corporal Abel Chennouf and Private Mohamed Legouad. All three were Muslims. | 4/5/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The EPA Abuses First, Apologizes Later 4.4.12 | Last summer, I wrote about the Environmental Protection Agency’s shameful persecution of a Texas natural-gas company, Range Resources Corp. The year before, EPA had slapped the company with an “emergency order” under the Safe Drinking Water Act, alleging that it “caused or contributed to” the contamination of two water wells west of Fort Worth. Almost immediately, however, EPA was forced to admit that Range had no connection whatsoever to the contamination in question. It nonetheless insisted on the company’s obedience to the original order. I argued then that this was all a shameful abuse of power. Well, just last week, after a nearly two-year odyssey in which the company has spent $4.2 million defending itself, EPA agreed to drop the whole thing. The withdrawal of the emergency order was officially announced at the end of last week, where the government usually tries to bury its embarrassments. But the question remains: Why now? | 4/4/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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President Petulant 4.4.12 | I spoke last night at a symposium on “The Obama Presidency” at the University of California at Berkeley. In a radical city known sometimes for its liberal anger, it won’t surprise you, many of those in the audience were upset at the prospect of the Supreme Court’s overturning part or all of Obamacare. After all, Berkeley voted 88 percent for Obama in 2008. But almost no one present at the symposium was as petulant as President Obama was yesterday, when he incorrectly claimed that if the Court rules against his landmark legislation it would be taking “an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” The implication of his statement was that he hasn’t heard of Marbury v. Madison, in which the Supreme Court laid down the doctrine of judicial review in 1803, and by which the Court can strike down unconstitutional laws. Indeed, since 1981, the Court has struck down 57 specific legislative acts of Congress, an average of two per year. | 4/4/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Conservatives and the Courts 4.4.12 | Who says bipartisanship is dead? Left and Right have finally found something that they agree on. They are both unalterably opposed to judicial activism — except, of course, when they aren’t. The latest meme from the Obama administration, congressional Democrats, and much of the media is that if the Supreme Court were to strike down all or part of Obamacare, it would place the Court’s legitimacy itself at risk. After all, since only 28 state attorneys general, at least two District Court Judges and five Circuit Court Judges (including a Clinton appointee), numerous law professors, the 52 organizations and hundreds of state legislators who filed briefs in support of the plaintiffs, and 72 percent of the American public believe that Obamacare’s attempt to force every American to buy a specific commercial product is unconstitutional, it would obviously be an unprecedented act of judicial activism for the Court to agree. | 4/4/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Impropriety of Obamacare 4.4.12 | Liberals claim that to strike down Obamacare would run counter to decades of Supreme Court precedent about the scope of the congressional power to regulate commerce among the states. Conservatives, while unenthusiastic at best about the precedents, argue that to affirm Obamacare would go beyond them. So how should this case be distinguished from those precedents? Michael Greve’s new book The Upside-Down Constitution, which I recently reviewed for NR, provides a compelling answer: Unlike the governmental actions at issue in those previous cases, this one involves a commandeering of individuals that cannot be considered “proper” under the Constitution. His argument is that most of the cases we file under the heading of the “commerce clause” would better be analyzed as “necessary and proper clause” cases. He begins with Gonzales v. Raich, a 2005 case affirming the power of Congress to prohibit the cultivation and possession of marijuana even for non-commercial distribution within a state. | 4/4/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Saving Sovereignty 4.3.12 | American progressives from Woodrow Wilson and John Dewey to Barack Obama and Ruth Bader Ginsburg have long expressed dissatisfaction with what they see as the constraints of an outmoded 18th-century Constitution. For more than a hundred years, progressives have sought to “transform” America, to make the political, economic, cultural, and legal foundation of our constitutional republic (our “regime,” in the Aristotelian-Tocquevillian sense) more statist, more centralized, more regulatory, more “European,” more secular, and less capitalist, less entrepreneurial, less “provincial,” less religious, less “exceptional.” In the past, progressives lauded the American “common man” and presented their agenda within the framework of the American story. Progressive politicians were dissatisfied with the American Constitution because, in their view, it limited popular sovereignty and thus the will of the American people. They called for more direct democracy, with popular referendums and recalls. Meanwhile, historians of the Progressives put forward populist patriotic narratives. States’-rights and limited-government advocates such as Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were magically transformed by such academics as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. into proto– New Dealers and proto-Progressives battling “aristocratic” moneyed interests. | 4/3/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Too Young to Die: Why do we ignore murders of blacks by other blacks? 4.3.12 | His name was Albert Vaughn. He was by all accounts a very good kid living in a very tough neighborhood. He was attending a party at a home that was supposed to be a haven for young inner-city Chicago teens back in April of 2008. The kids were there to enjoy some fun, drink some Kool-Aid, and listen to their favorite music, free from the fear of violence that too often inhabited the streets outside. But violence found a way in. At about 10:30 p.m., a scuffle broke out in the basement between two of the guests, and the fight ignited a chain of events that led to the death of the innocent young man. He was fatally struck in the head with a baseball bat as he tried to help the party chaperones usher the kids home. | 4/3/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Carbon Emissions Are Good 4.3.12 | Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced its intention to enforce regulations that would effectively ban new coal-fired power plants in the United States. As coal is by far America’s cheapest and most plentiful fossil fuel, and coal-fired power stations account for 45 percent of all electricity generated in the U.S., the destructive economic effects of this edict can hardly be overstated. It is therefore imperative to subject the EPA’s logic to a searching examination. According to the EPA, despite their disastrous economic effects, regulations to prevent the U.S. from making use of its coal resources are necessary, because coal combustion produces carbon dioxide, which allegedly will cause global warming, which would allegedly be harmful to the Earth’s biosphere and human society. Others, wishing to avoid an environmentalist-created economic catastrophe, have challenged this argument’s first premise, to wit, that global warming is really occurring. Since there is no actual global temperature, but only an average of many different constantly changing local temperatures, this approach has led to convoluted debates revolving around data sets that can easily be based upon an unrepresentative mix of measurements. | 4/3/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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It’s Not Road Rage, It’s Terrorism 4.3.12 | On February 25, 1994, Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli doctor of American origins, went to the mosque at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, and murdered 29 Muslims with an automatic weapon before being overwhelmed and himself killed. This massacre prompted conspiracy theories and riots in Muslim circles, including accusations that the government of Israel stood behind Goldstein, an allegation that strenuous denunciations of his attack by the Israeli government did not fully deflect. On March 1, four days later, Rashid Baz, a New York livery driver of Lebanese origins, fired two guns at a van carrying Hasidic Jewish boys on a ramp leading to the Brooklyn Bridge, killing Ari Halberstam, 16, a yeshiva student. Baz was quickly apprehended, convicted, and sentenced to 141 years in prison. Circumstantial evidence pointed to a link between the two events, for Baz was immersed in the Arabic-language media coverage of Goldstein’s attack, he attended the incendiary Islamic Center of Bay Ridge, and he was surrounded by Muslims who condoned terrorism against Jews. More than that, friends indicated that Baz was obsessively angered by the attack in Hebron and the psychiatrist for his legal defense, Douglas Anderson, testified that Baz “was enraged” by it. “He was absolutely furious. . . . Were it not for Hebron this whole tragedy [in New York] wouldn’t have occurred.” | 4/3/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Dastardly Supreme Court 3.30.12 | After telling themselves that Obamacare’s individual mandate was patently constitutional, liberals are now aghast at the possibility — seemingly more likely after this week’s oral arguments — that it will be overturned. In a panic, the Left has leveled all sorts of ridiculous charges against the Supreme Court. Here are the three worst offenses. 1. The justices are hypocrites. New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait growls that Justice Antonin Scalia — before he has even cast a vote, mind you — “is gleefully reversing his previous interpretation of the Commerce Clause.” For evidence, Chait links to a post by blogger NYCSouthPaw, who contends that one of Scalia’s comments during oral arguments “completely contradicts something [he] wrote in one of his most famous opinions.” | 3/30/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Alabama’s Stand for Religious Liberty 3.30.12 | Thomas Jefferson predicted that future generations would be happy as long as they could “prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them.” Earlier this week, I attended arguments at the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of Obamacare, and I am hopeful that the Court will save us from such wasted labors by striking the Affordable Care Act down in its entirety. For now, though, we are stuck with the myriad regulations and mandates that the Affordable Care Act has spawned. That is why, on March 22, the State of Alabama joined a lawsuit against the recent mandate requiring the insurance plans of all employers, with the exception of some houses of worship, to cover contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilization procedures. The lawsuit was originally filed by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, on behalf of the world’s largest Catholic media network, Eternal World Television Network, Inc. (EWTN), which happens to be headquartered near Birmingham. EWTN has taken great pains to provide insurance to its employees without also subsidizing services that violate its religious mission and contravene the teachings of the Catholic Church. But now, the contraception mandate would require EWTN and other religious employers and individuals to choose between paying fines and subsidizing practices that contradict their beliefs. | 3/30/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Rubio on the Race: He backs Romney, but seeks to quell veep rumors. 3.30.12 | Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) spoke with NRO this morning about his endorsement of Mitt Romney, the signal he’s sending on the oral arguments at the Supreme Court about Obamacare, and his idea for a revised version of the DREAM Act. | 3/30/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Vigilantes for Trayvon? 3.29.12 | The angry public reaction to the shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin had a solid basis in fact. The teen was found dead and unarmed. A call placed to police by the shooter, George Zimmerman, proves beyond any doubt that — at least in the early stages of the encounter — Zimmerman was the aggressor. Further, Zimmerman’s story — that after running away in apparent fear, Martin suddenly attacked when Zimmerman gave up on the pursuit — sounds implausible. There should be a trial to determine whether Zimmerman can be proven guilty of a crime, and at first it appeared there would not be. But that has changed. Despite the police’s reluctance to arrest Zimmerman, a special prosecutor is looking at the incident and may bring charges. The race-obsessed Obama Justice Department is also on the case. Even assuming Zimmerman acted illegally, a fair trial does not guarantee justice for Martin — there may not be enough evidence to prove the shooter guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. But to the extent it is possible and consistent with the rule of law, the justice system will address this case. | 3/29/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obamacare Arguments Lean Against Severability 3.29.12 | After yesterday’s heartening arguments, today’s arguments carry even more importance, because it seems likely the Court will actually reach the severability question. If there are political consequences for the Court’s decision on the mandate argued yesterday, there could be even more consequences to today’s arguments. If the law is struck down in its entirety, expect the president to dust off his 2010 State of the Union talking points, which charge the Court with what he calls “judicial activism,” but in reality seem to criticize any court decision that finds a law of his unconstitutional. The justices on both sides seemed skeptical of Paul Clement’s opening arguments for the plaintiffs, asking them to strike down the entire law along with the mandate. When he was prompted by Justice Alito to start arguing his fallback position, he made a solid case that far more than the administration’s set of central provisions actually are tied inextricably to the mandate. Not just community-rating and guaranteed-issue, but also Medicaid, employer mandates, and tax credits, among many other provisions, will be undetermined if left to stand without the mandate. The justices at first seemed unreceptive to his argument that the “shell of the law” left after removing these provisions should fall, with Justices Kennedy and Scalia particularly concerned about how to articulate such a rule. | 3/29/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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‘Can We Come In Now?’ Good news and bad news from the Arizona border. 3.29.12 | Perceptions matter in politics. This is a banal observation, to be sure, but one that hit home for me on a recent tour of the Arizona border. Last month, I went along on a safari for friends and supporters of the Center for Immigration Studies, starting in Yuma and heading east almost to Nogales. A straight line between the two points would measure about 300 miles, though we covered close to 1,000 miles in our various wanderings. A Border Patrol agent related that, the day after Obama won the presidential election in 2008, two Mexicans came up to the fence and asked the agent, “Can we come in now?” They couldn’t, of course, despite all they’d heard about Obama’s views on immigration, and his subsequent lack of interest in pushing for amnesty changed his fans’ perception of him. | 3/29/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Injustice System Too many prisoners, too little justice. 3.29.12 | Every resident of or frequent visitor to the United States should rejoice at the Supreme Court’s decision last week expanding the rights of defendants to effective counsel in plea-bargain negotiations. As Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion, the country no longer has a “trial system,” but rather a system in which “the negotiation of a plea bargain, [instead of] the unfolding of a trial, is almost always the critical point for a defendant.” In federal cases, 97 percent of convictions — and in state cases, 94 percent of convictions — are the result of plea bargains. Justice Kennedy, perhaps without realizing it, turned over the rock that hides the ghastly infirmity of the whole American criminal-justice system when he emphasized that the plea bargain is “the critical point for a defendant.” He didn’t say, “for a convicted defendant,” or “for a guilty defendant” — and thus implicitly recognized that over 90 percent of those charged are convicted. The sluggishness of the Supreme Court to grasp the implications of this makes the gently downward movement of molasses and even that of fresh cement seem like the rush of the Niagara River toward the falls, but at some point the high court is going to have to come to grips with this degeneration of American justice into virtual Star Chambers. | 3/29/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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It’s Not About Stand Your Ground: We should reserve judgment, but it seems that Zimmerman acted lawfully. 3.28.12 | President Obama, Jesse Jackson, and others have chosen to personalize the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla., highlighting the racial issues by expressing concern for people who look like they do or live where “blacks are under attack.” Many conservatives and liberals have also already concluded that the shooter committed a crime. All of these reactions are premature. In response to the shooting, Florida governor Rick Scott has set up a commission to review the state’s “Stand Your Ground” law. Gun-control organizations, including the Brady Campaign, have gone beyond this and even more drastically called for the end of right-to-carry laws. | 3/28/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obama’s Open Microphone: The president shouldn’t be offering concessions to Russia, in private or in public. 3.28.12 | The remarks of President Obama to Dmitry Medvedev over an open microphone, in which he promised that in a second term, he will have flexibility on the issue of global missile defense, shows that when it comes to U.S.–Russian relations, Obama is a stunningly slow learner. The relations between a U.S. president and a Russian leader often follow a depressing pattern. The American leader charms (or thinks he charms) his Russian counterpart. The Russian leader begins to engage in criminal behavior, which gets steadily worse. Finally, something big happens — the invasion of Afghanistan, the nuclear poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London, the invasion of Georgia — and the realization dawns that the Russian is neither a Christian nor a friend and he has to be approached with realism. | 3/28/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Yes, We Can Wait We can always wait for the Constitution. 3.28.12 | In pushing through parts of the New Deal, President Franklin Roosevelt reportedly told one wavering congressman, “I hope you will not permit doubts as to constitutionality, however reasonable, to block the suggested legislation.” As one listens to the Obama administration and others defend the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (a.k.a Obamacare), one gets the impression that Roosevelt’s nostrum has been adopted as the official motto of this administration. Their attitude seems to be that, of course Obamacare is constitutional because, well, because it’s important. The idea that federal government’s power should be limited is dismissed as a quaint relic of a bygone age. There are important national problems to be solved, and we should not be held back by a document from the past. As Representative Kathy Hochul (D., N.Y.) puts it, “Basically we are not looking at the Constitution. . . . The decision has been made by this Congress that American citizens are entitled to health care.” | 3/28/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Still the Alinsky Playbook 3.27.12 | Forty years after his death, Saul Alinsky — the father of the community-organizing model that inspired both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — is more politically relevant than ever. Leading conservatives attempt to tie the Obama administration to Alinsky’s radicalism, with Newt Gingrich declaring that Obama draws his “understanding of America” from “Saul Alinsky, radical left-wingers, and people who don’t like the classical America.” For their part, liberals have scrambled to minimize Obama’s affinity for Alinsky and to sand over Alinsky’s sharp edges. A blogger at Britain’s Guardian newspaper claims that Alinsky was merely “what passes for a left-wing radical in American politics, agitating for better living conditions for the poor.” (Liberals have also largely ignored the fact that the subtitle of Hillary Clinton’s honors thesis at Wellesley was “An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.”) | 3/27/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obama’s Lawyer Confuses Himself: Is the Mandate a Penalty or a Tax? 3.27.12 | Is the individual mandate a penalty or a tax? That was today’s question at the Supreme Court. Unfortunately for the Court, both the respondents — the states — and the petitioners — the Obama administration — agreed that the mandate was a penalty. So the Court had to hire an outside lawyer, Robert Long, to argue that the mandate was a tax. He didn’t get very far. “I would not argue that this statute is a perfect model of clarity,” Long conceded. The headline you’ll read in tomorrow’s paper is that the justices seemed nearly unanimous in objecting to the idea that the mandate was a tax. After all, the text of the law itself is clear in describing the mandate as a penalty. And this matters because the Anti-Injunction Act of 1867 prohibits people from suing the government for a tax that hasn’t yet gone into effect. (The individual mandate goes into effect in 2014.) People can sue, however, over a penalty. Robert Long tried to argue that it doesn’t matter what the text of the law actually says; what matters is what the mandate is meant to achieve, and that the mandate is meant to garner revenue for the government. But Justice Ginsburg shot down that argument: “This is not a revenue-raising measure,” she pointed out, “because, if it’s successful, nobody will pay the penalty, and there will be no revenue to raise.” | 3/27/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Next Step for the Sacketts An Idaho couple continues to fight the EPA. 3.27.12 | In 2005, Mike and Chantell Sackett bought a piece of land from a friend. They planned to build a house on it. While the lot was near Idaho’s beautiful Priest Lake, it was part of an existing subdivision, and it already had a sewer hookup. There were other houses nearby — including a row of them between the Sacketts’ lot and the lake. “We went to the county and paid our fees, got a building permit, and went through the checklist,” Mike remembers. “Then the EPA shows up.” | 3/27/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Constitution vs. Obamacare 3.26.12 | The Supreme Court this week is hearing arguments about some specific, grave constitutional concerns about Obamacare: most prominently, whether the federal government has the power to order all Americans to purchase health insurance that meets the federal government’s standards. But it is worth taking a few steps back to remind ourselves that while this requirement is an unprecedented infringement on Americans’ liberty, the legislation as a whole — in its conception, not just its details — is an offense against constitutional government. As is much of modern government, and conservatives should not shrink from saying so. | 3/26/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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An Inverted System 3.26.12 | The Founders of this country, according to lore, created a system in which federal and state power balanced each other. During the New Deal, however, the Supreme Court stopped maintaining that balance. In Wickard v. Filburn (1942), the Court allowed the federal government to shove the states aside to regulate purely intrastate activity (specifically, to tell a farmer to stop growing wheat to feed his cattle). Since that time, the federal government has seized more and more power at the expense of the states. In recent years, however, the Court has tried to move back toward the Founders’ view of the rights and dignity of the states. Michael S. Greve, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has written The Upside-Down Constitution to tell you that all of the above is wrong. “Balance” is precisely the wrong way to look at the constitutional allocation of responsibilities, implying as it does that the state usurpation of a federal power could somehow compensate for the federal usurpation of a state power. The Constitution established a division rather than a balance of powers, and it did so not to protect the interests of the states but to safeguard accountability and competition (although the Founders did not use those exact words). | 3/26/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Don’t Erect a Monument to Che 3.26.12 | As a victim of Che Guevara’s atrocities, as a historian, and as a Cuban of Irish descent, I am deeply disturbed by the fact that the city of Galway is planning to erect a monument to Ernesto “Che” Guevara. I don’t mind one bit if those behind this monstrous project want to believe lies — that’s their right in a truly free society — but it would be wrong to allow their abysmal ignorance or willful blindness to stand unchallenged. Those who think highly of Che may be surprised to hear it, but they have way too much in common with Holocaust deniers. Che was my neighbor in Havana, and I actually saw him in the flesh several times. He lived in an opulent mansion just a few blocks from my very small house, and also ran the prison of La Cabaña, where some of my relatives ended up being tortured and murdered. Their crime? Voicing an opinion different from Che’s. Or, in the case of my uncle, simply having a son who voiced an opinion contrary to Che’s. The awful truth about Ernesto “Che” Guevara is that he was a violent thug with despotic tendencies. Che’s admirers prefer to think of him as a righteous warrior, and often cite certain books that portray him as a saint. I hate to break the news to them: Some books are full of lies. Fortunately, others are not, like the memoir Cuba 1959, La Galera de la Muerte, written by Javier Arzuaga, the priest who accompanied all of Che’s victims to the firing squad during the first nine months of the so-called Revolution. Read it and weep, please, all of you who love Che. We Cubans are the only people on earth who knew the real Che — as opposed to the icon stamped on all sorts of merchandise — but there are many in the world who tune us out, discredit our testimony, and would love to gag us. Somehow, the lie is preferable. | 3/26/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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‘No Wi-Fi’: The Real Sign of Our Times 3.23.12 | I popped into a coffeeshop the other day to get my brain jump-started, and I saw a sign that stopped me cold: “No Wi-Fi.” That’s the history of the millennial era in two words: The day before yesterday there was no such thing as wireless Internet access. Then it became available, usually for a pretty stiff usage fee. (Remember the dark ages of having to rely on Boingo at the airport? Oh, wait . . . if you fly out of LaGuardia, you’re still in the dark ages. More about that in a minute.) Then wireless got so cheap that it became available as a courtesy in public spaces, and coffeeshops and the like began to offer it as a basic amenity, like restrooms or comfortable chairs. Up went the signs: “Free Wi-Fi.” Pretty soon, you could log on for free at McDonald’s while sucking down all 1,160 calories in your supersized shake. And then a funny thing happened: The “Free Wi-Fi” signs went away. The new sign was the invisible sign: “Of course we have wireless — what do you think this is, Waziristan?” | 3/23/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obama Flunks Math With CAFE, you’ll save more than you ever spent. 3.22.12 | During a speech two weeks ago at the Daimler Truck manufacturing plant in Mount Holly, N.C., President Obama bantered with an audience member over his administration’s proposed Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards: | 3/23/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obama’s Oil Bottleneck: The president could encourage oil production if he tried hard enough. 3.22.12 | ‘When it comes to American energy production, President Obama is like a rooster who crows at the sunrise, then imagines that he conjured up the morning,” jokes Ben Cole of the Institute for Energy Research. The White House has been taking credit for increased oil production, when it actually was taking place on state and private lands while output on federal lands was dropping. Now, the administration is touting the construction of the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline, though so far the process has been entirely outside federal jurisdiction. This southern pipeline constitutes about one third of the original proposed Keystone XL route, from Cushing, Okla., to refineries in the Gulf Coast. Cushing, at the junction of several major pipelines from around the country, serves as a sort of switching station for oil on its way to the coast. Currently there’s a glut of oil in Cushing because the pipelines to the coast are too small to carry all of the oil from Oklahoma. On top of fixing a problem with our nation’s oil infrastructure, this route will cost $2.3 billion and is estimated to create 4,000 jobs starting in 2013. | 3/22/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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HHS Messes with Texas Obama’s real agenda is clear: abortion. 3.22.12 | While opposition to the HHS mandate has caused many liberals to accuse Republicans of a “war on women,” the Obama administration itself has just declared the first front in its own war on women’s health care. Its casus belli? The Texas government’s restriction on funding for abortion providers. As of last week, President Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services has withdrawn $30 million worth of funding from a Texas Medicaid program that provides health-care services for low-income women. This HHS policy begins to confirm what conservatives have suspected all along: While the Obama administration has made it clearer than it would like to claim the mantle of “protecting women’s health,” its real aim is unfettered access to abortion and ubiquitous, free contraception. | 3/22/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Economic Sanity for 2012 Obama and Romney should get serious about the debt. 3.22.12 | There are some obvious steps available to the administration to incite more credible inferences of economic progress that don’t require legislation, and should not be complicated, even in this very odd election campaign. Longer-term interest rates have just finally started to inch up, and there has been slight progress in the last couple of years to term out federal debt a little. It is a truism, often hammered like a piñata throughout the Obama years, that $1.3 to $1.6 trillion annual federal deficits, in a country that had a conventional money supply of $900 billion when this regime was inaugurated, could not continue indefinitely without disastrous consequences. There is not the least indication of any national or official will to repay the new debt. And there is little likelihood of any timely growth out of the debt back to manageable debt/GDP ratios, as consumer spending won’t revive quickly until family and personal debt have receded further. More acquisitive consumers largely benefit foreign luxury-goods and engineered-products industries anyway. | 3/22/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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‘Destroy All the Churches’ Is it not news when the leading Saudi religious authority says that to terrorists? 3.22.12 | Imagine if Pat Robertson called for the demolition of all the mosques in America. It would be front-page news. It would be on every network and cable-news program. There would be a demand for Christians to denounce him, and denounce him they would — in the harshest terms. The president of the United States and other world leaders would weigh in, too. Rightly so. So why is it that when Abdulaziz ibn Abdullah Al al-Sheikh, the grand mufti of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, declares that it is “necessary to destroy all the churches in the Arabian Peninsula,” the major media do not see this as even worth reporting? And no one, to the best of my knowledge, has noted that he said this to the members of a terrorist group. Here are the facts: Some members of the Kuwaiti parliament have been seeking to demolish churches or at least prohibit the construction of new ones within that country’s borders. So the question arose: What does sharia, Islamic law, have to say about this issue? | 3/22/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obamacare, Two Years Later 3.21.12 | This week marks two years since of the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and if the Obama administration has chosen to all but ignore the second anniversary of Obamacare, the rest of us should pause and reflect on just what a monumental failure of policy the health-care-reform law has been. What’s more, it has been a failure on its own terms. After all, when health-care reform was passed, we were promised that it would do three things: 1) provide health-insurance coverage for all Americans; 2) reduce insurance costs for individuals, businesses, and government; and 3) increase the quality of health care and the value received for each dollar of health-care spending. At the same time, the president and the law’s supporters in Congress promised that the legislation would not increase the federal-budget deficit or unduly burden the economy. And it would do all these things while letting those of us who were happy with our current health insurance keep it unchanged. Two years in, we can see that none of these things is true. | 3/21/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Doctorcare Learning the lessons of health-care reform 3.21.12 | I have finally figured out how to apply the lessons of Obamacare to save my own sinking medical office from bankruptcy. Under the president’s health-care law, the stated goal of which is to provide easy-to-use health insurance for everyone, you — the struggling-to-make-ends-meet patient — will see your skyrocketing mandated premiums used to pay not only for contraception, but also for the medical sequelae of a rude and obese McDonald’s customer who chooses to eat one bacon cheeseburger with fries after another. As your physician, I will be paid less and less for treating you even as insurance companies charge you more and more to cover the self-destructive among us. At the same time, Obamacare mandates will shrink your co-pays to the point where I will no longer be able to afford coffee for my nurses. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to appear selfish or unappreciative of your choosing my services; in fact, I am committed to taking care of you regardless of whether doing so still pays my bills. I will keep my office door open as long as I can afford to keep the lights on. As a private practitioner, I am a dying breed, and even as most of my contemporaries join the ranks of hospitals and clinics, I am pledged to continue to provide you with the kind of care you are used to receiving. | 3/21/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Despair and Necessity in Afghanistan 3.20.12 | If recent events on the ground in Afghanistan aren’t enough to sour the American public on the war there, there’s always Hamid Karzai. The Afghan leader, who certainly wouldn’t be in power and probably wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for U.S. forces fighting in his country, says he wants our soldiers out of Afghan villages. If he were to get his way, it would collapse our war effort and, soon enough, his government. | 3/20/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Turbulent Priest Good riddance to Rowan Williams. 3.20.12 | Once described as the “Conservative party at prayer,” the Church of England has taken a decidedly leftward turn in the last century, prompting the Earl of Onslow’s immortal observation that “one hundred years ago, the Church was in favor of fox hunting and against buggery. Now it is in favor of buggery and against fox hunting.” In the vanguard of its continuing drift was Rowan Williams, a self-described “bearded lefty” and terminal casuist who has also happened to be the Archbishop of Canterbury for the last nine years, and thus effectively second only to Queen Elizabeth II in the spiritual hierarchy. Among other things, Williams became infamous for a steadfast refusal to acknowledge the virtues of his own country — and his own church, for that matter. It is thus no loss to either Britain or the Anglican Church that Williams announced on Friday that he will be resigning his office, effective December 2012, and I must respectfully disagree with John O’Sullivan’s more flattering portrayal of Williams, and set the ball rolling on “great many less flattering things” that O’Sullivan correctly predicted “will be said about him in the next few months.” | 3/20/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Cato and the Power of Ideas 3.19.12 | Reading Richard Cohen’s squalid column last week about Andrew Breitbart (“A Bombthrower Without Ideas”) somehow put me in the frame of mind to think about the . . . Koch-Cato feud. You’ll need to bear with my circuitous route for a moment to work this out. Cohen, who is sometimes worth reading for his occasional departures from the liberal reservation, joined the Left in braying about Breitbart’s supposed shortcomings. Cohen writes that “a good deal of [Breitbart’s career was] revolting and some of it unethical or sloppy,” though the main example he cites of Breitbart’s sloppiness is inaccurate. But more egregious was Cohen’s precious comparison of Breitbart with James Q. Wilson, who died the day after Andrew. | 3/19/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Dr. Science vs. the Market: Steven Chu is a brilliant physicist but a lousy investor of your money. 3.15.12 | It’s hard to imagine a better candidate for the role of scientific technocrat than Steven Chu. After earning undergraduate degrees in math and physics from Rochester, he got his Ph.D. from Berkeley in 1976 and then joined Bell Labs, where he did the work on atomic physics that would earn him a share of the 1997 Nobel Prize. Chu holds ten patents, has published nearly 250 scientific and technical papers, and has taught at Stanford and Berkeley. While on the faculty at Berkeley, Chu became director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a Department of Energy–funded research facility that has increasingly focused on renewable energy (especially during Chu’s tenure). Chu is perhaps the best example of Barack Obama’s stated goal of relying on smart, proven experts to run his cabinet departments. And yet the Department of Energy has floundered under Chu’s administration. | 3/16/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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No Mandate Left Behind: House Democrats want to double down on a flawed education law. 3.15.12 | Two weeks ago, when the House Education and the Workforce Committee marked up two bills to update the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), Democrats and their allies screamed bloody murder. Ranking Democratic member (and former chairman) George Miller called the bills “radical” and “highly partisan” and said they would “turn the clock back decades on equity and accountability.” A coalition of civil-rights, education-reform, and business groups said they amounted to a “rollback” of NCLB. Miller put forward his own bills, which most of the same groups quickly endorsed, and which, Miller argues, “eliminat[e] inflexible and outdated provisions of No Child Left Behind and requir[e] states and [school districts] to adopt strong but flexible and achievable standards, assessments, and accountability reforms.” | 3/16/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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No Compromise 3.15.12 | In May 1953, the Polish government ordered the implementation of a decree giving the state the authority to appoint and remove Catholic priests and bishops throughout the country: The Catholic Church was to become a subsidiary of the Polish state; its clergy would act as agents of state power; and its educational and charitable activities would be approved (or rejected) by a state intent on bringing the most important institution in Polish civil society to heel. The bishops of Poland, who had tried for years to find a modus vivendi with the Communist regime, now drew the line. Meeting in Kraków under the leadership of the country’s primate, Stefan Cardinal Wyszyński, the Polish episcopate issued a memorandum deploring the government’s attempt to turn the Church “into an instrument of the state” as a violation of the natures of both church and state. The memorandum concluded memorably: “We are not allowed to place the things of God on the altar of Caesar, Non possumus! [We cannot!].” Americans accustomed to religious freedom may, at first blush, find it hard to imagine any possible analogy between our situation today, in the midst of the debate over the HHS “contraceptive mandate,” and that of Poland’s Christians in 1953; of course those brave men and women faced challenges far beyond those facing American believers today. Yet the structure of the moral and political argument, then and now, is eerily similar. In both cases, an overweening and arrogant government tries, through the use of coercive power, to make the Church a subsidiary of the state. In both cases, the state claims the authority to define religious ministries and services on its own narrow and secularist terms. In both cases, the state is attempting to co-opt as much of society as it can, while the Church is defending the prerogatives of civil society. | 3/15/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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An EPA Power Grab 3.15.12 | The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) claim that the Obama administration’s model year (MY) 2017 and later fuel-economy standards — which rise to 54.5 mpg in 2025 — will produce net benefits ranging from $262 billion to $358 billion. Skepticism is justified. If the standards are as beneficial as the agencies contend, why wouldn’t consumers demand, and profit-seeking manufacturers produce, vehicles built to the same or similar standards without regulatory compulsion? Fuel-economy regulation assumes that motorists do not want to avoid pain at the pump and automakers don’t want to get rich. | 3/15/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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A Guide for the Perplexed Fareed Zakaria. 3.15.12 | Fareed Zakaria is wearing his “I’m perplexed” face. On his weekly CNN program, he notes that Saudi Arabia did not go nuclear in response to “Israel’s buildup of a large arsenal of nuclear weapons.” So why, he asks the camera, would the Saudis do so in response to Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons? The camera did not answer, so I will: The Saudis are not fools. They know Israel poses no threat to them. They know, too, that those who rule the Islamic Republic of Iran seek to establish hegemony over the Middle East and lead a global Islamist ascendancy. A nuclear-armed Iran would challenge the Saudi clan’s claim to be the rightful guardian of Mecca and Medina and embolden Arabia’s Shia minority. It would threaten the small states in the region, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Bahrain among them. It would dominate Iraq (where its influence has been growing as American forces hav | 3/15/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Texas vs. California: Why so many people are moving from the Golden State to the Lone Star State. 3.14.12 | One in five Americans calls California or Texas home. The two most populous states have a lot in common: a long coast, a sunny climate, a diverse population, plenty of oil in the ground, and Mexico to the south. Where they diverge is in their governance. For six years ending in 2010, I represented almost 500,000 people in California’s legislature. I was vice chairman of the Assembly Committee on Revenue and Taxation and served on the Budget Committee. I was even a lieutenant colonel in the state’s National Guard. Before serving in Sacramento, I worked as an executive in California’s aerospace industry. I moved to Texas late last year, joining the 2 million Californians who have packed up for greener pastures in the past ten years, with Texas the most common destination. In his State-of-the-State address this January, California governor Jerry Brown said, “Contrary to those declinists who sing of Texas and bemoan our woes, California is still the land of dreams. . . . It’s the place where Apple . . . and countless other creative companies all began.” | 3/14/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Don’t Retreat, Re-aim: The GOP must refocus on economic issues. 3.14.12 | Do you remember in the days leading up to the Republican electoral victory in 2010, how the Tea Party marched on Washington with signs saying “Birth Control Is Bad”? Neither do I. Less than a year and a half after Republicans swept to the biggest midterm congressional landslide since Grover Cleveland’s second term, they are struggling against a president presiding over a struggling economy, rising gas prices, and an approval rating in the low 40s. Prospects for a Senate takeover, once a foregone conclusion, are now are tenuous. Even the newly won House majority is in jeopardy. What has changed? Some may blame this on a nasty primary between three of the least inspiring presidential candidates since Bob Dole. But the current GOP seems to have lost any semblance of a coherent message. | 3/14/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Costly United Nations: The U.N. headquarters is getting a facelift — at our expense. 3.13.12 | Behind schedule and over budget — and still the U.N.’s Capital Master Plan (CMP) is getting high grades. “The first major renovation of the 60-year-old headquarters has been slowed by extra security measures,” the Associated Press reports, noting that “The final cost will be nearly $2 billion — about 4 percent over the original budget.” Still, the article leaves the general impression that the CMP has done a heckuva job of cost containment. Really? That 4 percent overrun amounts to real money — more than $80 million. But that’s chump change compared to the real stakes in this story. | 3/13/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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What’s Next for Gun Rights? 3.13.12 | To gun-rights supporters, the Supreme Court’s District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago decisions may have felt like a dream come true — the Court recognized an individual right to keep and bear arms, and applied that right to state and local governments. Going forward, handgun bans are off the table in the U.S. But judging by a conference hosted by the Fordham Urban Law Journal last Friday, the two sides of the gun-control debate have simply regrouped, recalibrated their expectations, and lined up for battle once again. As definitive as Heller and McDonald may seem, they offer little guidance to lawmakers and lower courts as to what kinds of gun control are still permissible. | 3/13/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Keep Fighting Drugs Giving up is not an answer. 3.13.12 | The drumbeat is starting on the left over what an emboldened, reenergized Barack Obama should focus on in his second term. (There is the inconvenience of an election first, but polling numbers and the job-creation data are inviting enough to make Democrats giddy and eager to drop any veil of centrist intentions.) On the African-American left, the momentum is building for a rollback of the War on Drugs. This is a consistently vague agenda; it shifts from legalizing marijuana, to freeing police resources for more urgent matters, to comprehensive sentencing reform, and all points in between. But at its worst, it is a dangerously misplaced priority, and a sad reminder of the leadership vacuum in the one community that is trapped in a depression. To be sure, critics of the War on Drugs have some indisputable facts on their side: Prisons at the federal and state level are crowded with relatively inconsequential, low-level dealers who are hardened by their stint behind bars, and who are often rendered permanently voteless and jobless when they resurface. A disproportionate number of those men, and ever so occasionally women, are black, a factor that helps give prisons the ugly look of a barricaded ghetto. (See Michelle Alexander’s best-seller The New Jim Crow.) Add to that the disparities in how our laws punish dealing in cocaine as opposed to methamphetamine or marijuana — or even “crack,” the rock-like substance derived from cocaine powder — and we see that the current system is outlandishly complex as well as unfair. Finally, there is the poor “kill” rate for the kingpins who are the intended targets. The war never keeps pace with the almost instantaneous succession rate in the drug trade; the critics even contend that aggressive prosecution only pumps up the illicit-drug market, by running up the value of drugs as a threatened commodity. | 3/13/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Truth about Fracking 3.12.12 | In the middle-of-frackin’-nowhere Pennsylvania, Boy Genius is showing off his giant robot: It’s about 150 feet tall, God and the almighty engineers alone know how many hundreds of tons of steel, and four big, flat duck feet on bright orange legs. “Yeah, this is kind of cool,” he says of his supersized Erector Set project. “You can set those feet at 45 degrees, and it will walk around in circles all day,” a colleague adds. But Boy Genius is not letting himself get too excited about all this — it’s pretty clearly not his first giant robot, and he’s a lot more excited about his seismic-imaging system: “It’s kind of like a GPS, but it’s underground and it works with the Earth’s magnetic characteristics.” Nods all around — that is cool. Everybody here has a three-day beard and a hardhat and steel-toed work boots, but there’s a strong whiff of chess club and Science Olympiad in the air, young men who are no strangers to the pocket protector, who in adolescence discovered an unusual facility for fluid dynamics and now are beavering away at mind-clutchingly complex technical problems, one of which is how to get a 150-foot-tall tower of machinery from A to B without taking it apart and trucking it (solution: add feet). That giant robot may walk, but it isn’t too fast: It can take half a day to move 20 feet, because this isn’t a Transformers movie, this is The Play, and Boy Genius is a member of the startlingly youthful and bespectacled tribe of engineers swarming out of the University of Pittsburgh and the Colorado School of Mines and Penn State and into the booming gas fields of Pennsylvania, where the math weenies are running the show in the Marcellus shale, figuring out how to relentlessly suck a Saudi Arabia’s worth of natural gas out of a vein of hot and impermeable rock thousands of feet beneath the green valleys of Penn’s woods. Forget about your wildcatters, your roughnecks, your swaggering Texans in big hats: The nerds have taken over. | 3/12/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Religious Freedom Is Social Justice: The Catholic Lite Brigade goes predictably astray on the contraception mandate. 3.12.12 | In his March 12 column, Washington Post writer E. J. Dionne Jr. attempts some fraternal intimidation of the Catholic bishops of the United States prior to the meeting of the bishops’ conference administrative committee on Tuesday and Wednesday. The argument, such as it is, doubtless reflects certain currents of thought within the Church in the United States — those currents that are deeply uncomfortable with the bishops’ emphasis in recent years on a robust assertion of Catholic identity. But that is about as much as can be said for it; as a matter of theological or political reasoning, its pluperfect nonsense. Dionne warns the bishops that, if they do not back off from their strong defense of religious freedom and find some way to reach agreement with an administration he insists is trying to accommodate their concerns, they risk becoming a church that no longer stands for both life and social justice. Worse, they risk becoming “the Tea Party at prayer.” | 3/12/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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America’s Energy Disaster Why we must regain our petroleum dominance. 3.12.12 | President Obama says his energy policy is a great success. In support, Democratic-party stalwart John Podesta trumpets the claim that the United States is now producing more oil than it imports. A recent article in the Bloomberg News goes even further, saying that the U.S. is now a net oil exporter. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman instructs us to rejoice: High oil prices are now good for the United States. Unfortunately, none of this is true. For the record, according to the Department of Energy/Energy Information Agency February 2012 Monthly Energy Review, the United States currently consumes (November 2011 figures, p.52) 12.93 million barrels of oil per day (mpd) in its transportation sector, 4.55 mpd in its industrial sector, 1.159 mpd in its residential and commercial sectors, and 0.096 mpd in electrical-power generation, for a total consumption of 18.735 mpd. In contrast, (page 37) in 2011, the United States averaged a production rate of 5.671 mpd of crude oil, or 30 percent of its total consumption, for a net deficit of 13.064 mpd, or 4.77 billion barrels per year. At today’s oil price of $105 per barrel, the bill for these imports runs to $500 billion per year, a tax on our economy equal to 20 percent of what Americans pay the IRS, and a reduction in the nation’s GDP sufficient to account for a loss of 5 million jobs at an average salary of $100,000 per year each. | 3/12/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obama’s Contraception Spin Machine: The administration misreads the Catholic Church yet again. 3.8.12 | The Obama White House just doesn’t get the Catholic Church in the United States these days. That blunt fact of public life was demonstrated once again by an anonymous “administration official close to the negotiations” over the Health and Human Services “contraceptive mandate.” The official was speaking off the record to the pliant David Gibson of Religion News Service, whose March 6 story took the administration’s latest prevarications at face value. “The White House has put nearly every issue requested by the bishops on the table for discussion and has sought the views of the bishops on resolving difficult policy questions, only to be rebuffed,” said the official. “Unfortunately, it appears that some bishops and staff are more interested in the politics of this issue than resolving any underlying challenges faced by Catholic social service providers.” The official, Gibson wrote, was “responding” to the March 2 letter to his brother bishops by Timothy Cardinal Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. | 3/8/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Al-Qaeda in Rebel Syria The Islamist inspiration of the Syrian opposition is obvious. 3.8.12 | On Monday, in calling for airstrikes on Syria, Senator John McCain reprised much the same role he played one year ago at the outset of the Libyan war. Last April, during a highly publicized visit to the cradle of the Libyan rebellion in Benghazi, Senator McCain called for increased American military support for the Libyan rebels. The senator famously described the rebels as his “heroes.” Never mind that these “heroes” had been caught on video committing horrific atrocities, nor that one of their commanders had openly acknowledged his ties to al-Qaeda. At the time, such details were of no greater interest to the mainstream American media than they were to Senator McCain or to the Obama administration. Senator McCain, of course, got his wish. Months of NATO bombing paved the way for the rebels’ conquest of Tripoli in late August. It was only then that the broader American public got some idea of the central role that al-Qaeda had been playing in the rebellion all along. As Tripoli fell, it emerged that the commander of the rebel forces that had taken control of the capital was none other than Abdul Hakim Belhadj, the historical leader of the local al-Qaeda affiliate, the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). In fact, no fewer than three al-Qaeda-linked militants who had at one time or another been in U.S. custody played key roles in the rebellion. The NATO bombing campaign would continue for another two months, until the last bastions of the old regime had fallen and Moammar Qaddafi had been killed. Just days after Qaddafi’s death in Sirte, the distinctive black flag of al-Qaeda would be seen flying above Benghazi and all along the Benghazi waterfront. | 3/8/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Iran Endgame The regime must be stopped from achieving nuclear military capability. 3.8.12 | The visits to Washington of Israeli president Shimon Peres and, a day later, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bring the question of the Iranian nuclear program to a head at last. President Obama came into office encumbered with the sophomoric idea that he had only to advise those parts of the world that were not mainly inhabited by white people that the United States was, for the first time, not led by someone who was white and had an entirely Christian background, and, abracadabra, there would be no more problems between the United States and African and Muslim states. As a glance at Stalin’s alliances, first with Hitler and then with Churchill and Roosevelt, or many other precedents, such as Cardinal Richelieu’s alliance with Swedish Lutheran reformationist Gustavus Adolphus during the Thirty Years’ War, would have told him, national interests are influenced by geography, geopolitical power, and ambition, and national interests determine inter-state relations. | 3/8/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Conspiracy, Again 3.7.12 | As Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio beclowns himself and his wayward admirers, it is worth bearing in mind that the manufactured controversy surrounding President Barack Obama’s birth certificate has its origins in anonymous e-mails sent by Hillary Clinton partisans during the 2008 Democratic primary. Which is to say that all these many years later, Republicans are still getting played by the Clintons. Some things never change. There is very little to add to the discussion of the facts of the case. President Obama’s short-form birth certificate (the “certificate of live birth”), which is authoritative evidence in any U.S. court, has long been available for inspection, and the archival records from Hawaii (the “long-form birth certificate”) also have been released. Public officials of both parties have confirmed that the president was born in Hawaii. Every judicial proceeding on the matter has confirmed this, and contemporaneous birth announcements in the Honolulu newspapers documented the birth of Barack Hussein Obama in Hawaii in 1961. There is not a single piece of credible evidence to support claims to the contrary. | 3/7/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Iran’s Unacceptable Enrichment By the numbers, they will soon have enough enriched uranium to produce a weapon. 3.7.12 | There has been much public discussion recently about the Iranian nuclear program, particularly the question of when it might be determined that it had crossed a “red line” defining it conclusively as a nuclear-weapons, rather than a power-reactor, program. An analysis of Iran’s actual production suggests that the line has already been crossed. Some of the discussion has been quite absurd. For example, page 1 of the February 25 New York Times features a story entitled “U.S. Agencies See No Move by Iran to Build a Bomb.” Meanwhile, on page 8 of the very same edition, David Sanger and William Broad report that International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors have determined that Iran is now producing large quantities of 20-percent–enriched uranium-235 in a facility located under 250 feet of granite protection. Since commercial reactors require only 3-percent–enriched uranium-235, a factory producing 20-percent–enriched fissile material is clearly part of a nuclear-weapons program. | 3/7/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Hitting the Ceiling Will the GOP have credibility in this fall’s budget showdown? 3.7.12 | If you liked last year’s battle over raising the debt ceiling, just get ready for the fight to come. Last summer’s agreement, you will recall, raised the federal government’s debt limit from $15.194 trillion to $16.394 trillion in exchange for promised future reductions in spending. Until recently, the consensus has been that federal borrowing will bump up against the new limit sometime between late November of this year and early January 2013. But buried in President Obama’s 2013 budget was the news that the national debt will hit $16.334 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2012, or September 30, 2012. This is just $60 billion below the current debt limit. Since the federal government is continuing to borrow at a rate of over $130 billion a month, we will likely reach the debt ceiling by mid-October — before Election Day. | 3/6/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Putin Rising, Russia Regressing By The Editors 3.6.12 | The return of Vladimir Putin to the presidency of Russia is yet another unhappy milestone in that tragic nation’s post-Soviet history. No country inspired more hope than Russia did when the Soviet Union fell 20 years ago in the wake of a peaceful revolution — and nowhere is it more evident that the Soviet Union today is being resurrected in a somewhat revised form. The election of Putin to his third term as president was hardly an exercise in democracy. Candidates capable of challenging Putin were not allowed to run, and the entire state bureaucracy was put to work on behalf of his candidacy. Nonetheless, it does indicate that many Russians still are ready to sacrifice freedom for what they mistakenly think is stability. The irony is that the longer Putin holds on to power, the more tenuous that stability will become. There are three trends in Russia that could push the second nuclear power toward dramatic and dangerous events. The first is the delegitimization of the regime. The younger, urban generation is aware of the farce that Russian democracy has become. That attitude was exemplified by the fact that 370,000 Russians signed up to be poll watchers in the presidential elections, an almost unprecedented display of distrust by a people for its own government. The second trend promoting Russian instability is its utter dependence on oil exports. In 20 years of post-Soviet economic development, Russia has done very little to improve its manufacturing capacity. Its products are not competitive in any major market except that of Iran. It has, however, benefited from the boom in the price of commodities, and, just as in Soviet times, the Russian rulers are behaving as if rising prices will never experience a reversal. A significant decline in oil prices would put tremendous economic pressure on a country in which stability and prosperity are complexly intertwined. | 3/6/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Battle Continues, Beyond Rush: The struggle over the HHS mandate isn’t over. 3.5.12 | Despite the White House’s rather successful efforts to reframe the media and congressional debate over the HHS “contraceptive mandate” as a right-wing jihad against “women’s health” — a cynical ploy aided and abetted by Rush Limbaugh’s one-man circular firing squad — the real battle against the mandate and in defense of religious freedom has continued. A March 2 letter from Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, to his brother bishops usefully and succinctly outlined the current state of affairs, which amounts to unremitting stonewalling from the Obama administration. The key section of Dolan’s letter read as follows: When the President announced on January 20th that the choking mandates from HHS would remain, not only we bishops and our Catholic faithful, but people of every faith, or none at all, rallied in protest. The worry that we had expressed — that such government control was contrary to our deepest political values — was eloquently articulated by constitutional scholars and leaders of every creed. | 3/5/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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More ‘Conservative’ Foreign Aid? John Kerry defends the international-affairs budget too broadly. 3.5.12 | Senator John Kerry’s recent Wall Street Journal commentary “The Conservative Case for Foreign Aid” fails on two counts: He does not make a solid case, and his argument is not conservative. One can forgive a liberal senator from Massachusetts for being unfamiliar with what it means to be conservative, but his mode of argumentation — cherry-picking statements by President Reagan on foreign aid — is most unfortunate. Invoking the Gipper won’t suffice to convince conservatives of the need to boost foreign aid during economic tough times. Nor should it protect foreign aid from scrutiny as we seek ways to trim the federal budget. Kerry compares the relatively small international-affairs budget to that of the Pentagon and the federal budget as a whole, but such comparisons are meaningless. Government departments have different purposes and requirements and should be funded at different, appropriate levels. The State Department doesn’t have to fight wars and deploy hundreds of thousands of trained soldiers. Building embassies is expensive, but not nearly as expensive as developing, procuring, and maintaining fighter jets, drones, tanks, nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, and so forth. | 3/5/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Crusade against Hungary The liberal punditocracy looks at Hungary’s traditionalism and sees fascism. 3.5.12 | In stark contrast to the Left’s timidity in the face of actual authoritarian regimes such as China and Russia, the liberal media’s treatment of Hungary has aggressively crossed the line. Paul Krugman of the New York Times sounded the alarm after Hungary’s conservative Fidesz-KDNP alliance won 68 percent of the seats in Parliament in the 2010 elections. He foresaw a post-Soviet “re-establishment of authoritarian rule” in Hungary. The British Guardian fell into line, describing Hungary’s new prime minister, Viktor Orbán, as an “autocratic leader.” The Washington Post, not to be outdone, compared Hungary to Belarus and Putin’s Russia. Not long after, and with great satisfaction, Hungarian émigré professor Charles Gati announced in an op-ed in the Times that Hungary is “no longer a Western-style democracy.” Having been drummed out of the West by left-wing editorialists, Hungary became fair game for the next phase of the liberal crusade: U.S. intervention. Slander has turned into absurd policy prescriptions, intent on destroying one of the most electorally effective center-right parties in Europe. | 3/5/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Tehran’s Ticking Nuclear Time Bomb: President Obama must be more proactive. 3.2.12 | With President Obama addressing AIPAC on Sunday and meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on Monday, now is the time for him to unveil a more hardline policy on Iran. Until now, Team Obama’s Iran policy has been a hodge-podge of well-intentioned but ineffective diplomatic and economic initiatives aimed at getting Tehran to alter course on its burgeoning nuclear program. While Tehran proposes another set of time-killing talks, and the administration preaches patience in hopes that economic sanctions will make the ayatollah cry uncle, the bad news on Iran’s nuclear program keeps rolling in. | 3/2/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obama’s Oil Switch: He was against drilling before he was for it. 3.2.12 | ‘We absolutely need safe, responsible oil production here in America,” President Obama said during a speech last week in Miami. “That’s why,” in the midst of increasingly troubling warnings about record-high summer gas prices, the president promised to “make available more than 75 percent of our potential offshore oil and gas resources, from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico” and take “the next steps towards energy exploration in the Arctic.” Even as the president set out his plan to open new, urgently needed drilling sites, he took credit for already opening vast swaths of land to drilling, saying that, “under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years.” America has “a record number of oil rigs operating right now — more working oil and gas rigs than the rest of the world combined.” | 3/2/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Five-Alarm Firebell Falls Silent: He never let the bastards get him down. 3.2.12 | Andrew Breitbart’s heart was too big to fail, but it did anyway. If you don’t know who Breitbart was, you haven’t been paying attention. A conservative activist, entrepreneur, author, muckraker, media pioneer, and performance artist of sorts, in his heart he was a radical. His friends saw him as a fearless truth-teller and provocateur. (The word “fearless” will have to be retired from overuse when all of his obituaries have been written.) His enemies, and they are legion even in death, saw him as the most vile creature who ever slithered upon the earth. Within hours of the news, Twitter lit up with repugnant and ghoulish statements from left-wingers celebrating the premature death of a man with four small children. I won’t repeat them because the printable ones aren’t representative, and the representative ones aren’t printable. | 3/2/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Santorum’s Uncertain Path: It’s hard to see him winning on the first ballot. 3.2.12 | It’s almost impossible to imagine Rick Santorum winning the Republican nomination on the first ballot. That’s not to say he shouldn’t press on, but there are huge challenges before him. Santorum’s main problem boils down to one word: proportionality. Many states in which his support is strong allocate delegates according to candidates’ share of the popular vote, so Santorum loses out on some big delegate hauls. Take a look at Super Tuesday. That day, Tennessee and Ohio are big prizes, offering 58 and 66 delegates each. Although Santorum leads in both states, he won’t get all the delegates — as Romney has done in Florida and Arizona — because both are proportional states. | 3/1/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Resigning to Iran The Obama administration has essentially acquiesced to a nuclear Iran. 3.1.12 | After more than ten years of diplomacy and duplicity, we are at an endgame with Iran. Only days after the second failed visit by IAEA inspectors in a month, the latest Agency report records substantial progress in Iran’s nuclear-enrichment program. This includes the start of operations at the new, and well-defended, Fordow site, which is producing 20-percent-enriched uranium, allowing a clear path to breakout. Most significant, the alarming questions raised about weaponization in the November report have not been answered. Instead, Tehran has continued to stonewall, denying access to the people, facilities, and documentation necessary to address the inspectors’ concerns. Time is not on our side, no matter how hard we may try to convince ourselves otherwise. Sanctions are taking an increasingly heavy toll on Iran’s government and economy, but there is no evidence that they are having any effect on the nuclear program. In fact, despite the hope that economic penalties will compel the mullahs to slow the program, all evidence is to the contrary. Further, despite the Obama administration’s assessments that Iran has not yet decided to build a nuclear weapon (and that, once they did decide, it would take an additional two years to complete), all evidence is to the contrary. The description of recent weaponization activities presented in the last IAEA report is just that, evidence of weaponization. To conclude that Iran has not decided to build the bomb based on the absence of definitive proof, like a formal decision memorandum signed by the supreme leader, is simply self-deluding. | 3/1/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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War Crimes and Punishment What constitutes due process for terrorists? 3.1.12 | ‘To the justice of the firing squad!” That was the toast proposed by Stalin to Roosevelt and Churchill over dinner in 1943 in Tehran. They were meeting for the first time, and the discussion had turned to the fate of Nazi leaders following Germany’s defeat. Stalin wanted no fewer than 50,000 of them executed. Churchill, much as he despised Nazis, considered mass summary executions dishonorable. Roosevelt, “in an apparent attempt to lighten the conversation, suggested perhaps 49,000 would be adequate.” William Shawcross recounts this exchange early in his new book, Justice and the Enemy: Nuremberg, 9/11, and the Trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. A distinguished journalist (a phrase I do not employ promiscuously), Shawcross brings a strong dose of common sense to the fevered debate over what constitutes due process and proper treatment for those now waging an unconventional war against the West. He also brings a unique pedigree: His father, Hartley Shawcross, was Britain’s lead prosecutor at the military tribunal that became known as the Nuremberg Trials. | 3/1/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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An Agenda for America: Solving the country’s problems 3.1.12 | After expressing serious reservations about the policy discussions of the current election campaign, it seems to me useful to remember that the country’s principal problems can be addressed fairly straightforwardly. Tax policies are available that would stimulate rational economic growth while reducing the deficit. Income taxes should be lowered on all incomes below $250,000, and taxes should be raised on elective spending, such as gasoline not consumed to earn the taxpayer’s living, as with taxis or delivery vehicles. Restaurant meals, luxury goods, and financial transactions other than simple equity or bond-market buying and selling could be lightly taxed, but very profitably for the Treasury. Taxes on capital-gains and dividend and interest income should all be reduced, and former Senator Santorum’s proposal for an extended and increased family tax credit and a reduced tax rate for manufacturing should be enacted, if not exactly as he proposes. | 3/1/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obama’s Infanticide Votes: Newt wasn’t 100 percent right — but he was about 95 percent right. 2.29.12 | In last Wednesday’s debate, when the Republican candidates were asked about their positions on birth control, Newt Gingrich parried with one of his usual tactics, a fusillade against the mainstream media. He told CNN’s John King, “You did not once in the 2008 campaign, not once did anybody in the elite media ask why Barack Obama voted in favor of legalizing infanticide. If we’re going to have a debate about who is the extremist on these issues, it is President Obama, who, as a state senator, voted to protect doctors who killed babies who survived the abortion.” Two points of Gingrich’s barrage warrant assessment. First, did Barack Obama, as a state senator, vote “in favor of legalizing infanticide,” by voting “to protect doctors who killed babies who survived the abortion”? And second, has no one in the elite media ever discussed his record on the issue? Yes; and no, but essentially yes. | 2/29/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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My Contraceptive Haul To listen to Obama, you’d think contraception was hard to come by. 2.29.12 | Were one to have listened uncritically to the more hysterical elements in America’s news media over the past month, one would have concluded that contraception is intractably hard to come by in the United States; but a cursory glance at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s well-appointed website gives quite the opposite impression. There, contrarily, visitors are informed that anyone in need of contraception is somewhat spoiled for choice. If the website’s extensive online search facility does not meet with their approval, habitués can instead call 311 and ask for advice directly. And the more tech savvy — or, perhaps, desperately mobile — can download the free “NYC Condom” app to their Windows, iPhone, BlackBerry, or Android smartphones and have its GPS service direct them to the nearest provider of free contraception with devastating accuracy. Never has a society been so precisely and easily led to safe sex. (One might well ask whether someone who can afford a smartphone and its attendant bills is genuinely in need of an app that locates “free” — i.e., paid for by taxpayers — condoms, but then this is 21st-century America, and New York’s mayor is Michael Bloomberg, so such petite questions are unavoidably consumed by bigger ones.) | 2/29/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Our Top Five Stalled Energy Projects 2.29.12 | In 2010, as a direct result of environmental concerns, NIMBY activism, and a sluggish permit-granting process, there were 351 energy projects that were being delayed, postponed, or outright terminated. This is according to a study published by the Chamber of Commerce entitled Project No Project. Together, these projects were estimated to be worth $1.1 trillion and expected to create 1.9 million jobs. The overriding lesson from the report was that, given America’s byzantine permit system, opponents of any project can find a violation somewhere within the mountains of paperwork a firm is required to submit. This lesson is still relevant today. Here are just five examples: | 2/29/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Piracy Is Not Competition: Responding to Salam and Ruffini’s criticisms of the entertainment industry. 2.28.12 | In the February 27 issue of National Review, Reihan Salam and Patrick Ruffini argue that Hollywood lobbyists have been more successful than they deserve to be, especially by nearly passing the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA). Most of their article’s main points are unobjectionable: SOPA was problematic; the Internet is a wondrous development that should not be overregulated; Hollywood has received unseemly financial favors from various levels of government; and copyright law has been needlessly expanded at the hands of the entertainment industry. Salam and Ruffini are also correct that the Web has thrown numerous established businesses, from brick-and-mortar retailers to newspapers to the U.S. Postal Service, into turmoil, forcing them to confront highly efficient online competition. They are right, too, that the government should let the market work its magic in these cases. But they are wrong to include the threat Hollywood faces from Internet piracy in this trend. | 2/28/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Michigan Mess: Because of a quirk in the rules, the winning candidate may not get the most delegates. 2.28.12 | The Republican National Convention will be contested. The main fight, however, won’t be among the candidates, but among the delegates. Because Arizona and Michigan are holding their primaries today — two days before March 1, the earliest the Republican National Committee said they could hold the elections — each will lose half of its delegates to the convention, per RNC rules. Unlike other states so penalized (New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida), however, these two are challenging the ruling. The state legislatures set the election dates, state-party officials argue, and holding special elections just for the primaries would have cost their states money. | 2/28/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Romney in Michigan Mitt is fighting like an underdog to win his home state. 2.28.12 | This may be the last state Mitt Romney ever thought he could lose. After all, his father, George Romney, was Michigan’s governor, and Mitt spent his childhood in the state, a fact he weaves into his speeches while campaigning here. But while Rick Santorum’s lead has evaporated over the last couple of weeks — no doubt in part because of the massive blitz on the airwaves from the Romney campaign and Romney’s super PAC, Restore Our Future — he and Romney remain virtually tied. The Great Lakes State is still very much in play and, with rumblings from the GOP establishment about finding a new candidate to enter the race if Romney can’t manage to prevail in his home state, it has become must-win for Romney. | 2/28/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Innovate or Legislate 2.27.12 | In 2012, a number of institutions that long defined how Americans communicated are teetering near the brink of collapse. Major newspapers in cities across the country have stopped publishing. Strip-mall anchors from Circuit City to Blockbuster to Borders have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The U.S. Postal Service struggles under the weight of crushing pension obligations, as e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and Skype render it all but obsolete. In politics, traditional modes of wielding power are also being disrupted. One prominent example is the recent battle over the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, in which grassroots activists defeated once-powerful Hollywood lobbyists. What’s toppling these formerly invincible companies and institutions? In almost every case, the proximate cause is the Internet, and the disruption it has wrought on inefficient businesses in every corner of the economy. And so we are now engaged in a war over its future. | 2/27/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Persian Paradoxes: The U.S. must not let Iran’s contradictory actions dissuade us. 2.27.12 | The debate over military options on Iran has finally started to focus on the critical issue of deterrence — that is, can the threat of air strikes deter Iran from proceeding in its nuclear-weapons program, and if so, how? Answering that question will not be easy, for it raises a number of difficult questions that nobody is asking. Here are two: First, what would Iran do if it thought that military strikes against its program were imminent? Second, on the heels of two failed visits by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, why are the Iranians still pretending to cooperate with the IAEA? The first question is the simpler one. Under several outstanding U.N. Security Council resolutions, Iran is required to halt uranium enrichment. That’s what the massive diplomatic front now arrayed against Iran — including even Russia and China — agrees on. But on virtually every other issue — the proper sorts of sanctions, the possibility of military strikes — the members of that front disagree. | 2/27/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obama’s Education Priorities: He is supposed to favor “what works.” His budget suggests otherwise. 2.27.12 | In contrast to his more partisan and ideological policies, President Obama has been lauded for his bipartisan work on education, in which he has a supposedly unflinching commitment to evidence-based reform — “what works.” But in his 2013 budget, the president proposes to cut one program, close to home, that demonstrably works: the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. This program gives poor students vouchers to attend various area private schools, helping them escape what is one of America’s worst big-city public-school systems. As President Obama faces the coming election, his budget limns his true priorities. The bloated Department of Education will grow by 3.5 percent, satisfying teachers’ unions, while the scholarship program will be eliminated, meaning fewer, and worse, opportunities for thousands of talented students. In 2003, as part of President Bush’s wider effort to emphasize school choice as a preferred route to education reform, he signed the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program into law. Since then, the program has been paying tuition at local private schools for, each year, a couple of thousand elementary- and high-school students whose families are below 185 percent of the poverty line. | 2/27/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Class War over Workfare The Left cries, “Jobs, jobs, jobs.” But does it really prefer welfare? 2.27.12 | In Britain, the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government has introduced a small change into the welfare system, and all hell has broken loose. The reform requires the able-bodied unemployed to work as a condition of their drawing welfare. More specifically, it obligates beneficiaries to put in 30 hours a week for eight weeks at private-sector placements, usually in retail. At the end of the eight weeks, the recipients may be interviewed for a permanent position, thus getting themselves onto the job ladder. If jobseekers drop out after the first week, they have their benefits withdrawn. A version of this system is already in place in Britain, with recipients being required to work for charities or in the public sector. But, now that the government has involved private companies in the scheme, the professional Left has started to scream bloody murder. | 2/27/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Devil and Rick Santorum 2.24.12 | Critics of Senator Santorum’s moral and religious views, especially in the media, have not been wholly scrupulous about identifying what they are before attacking them. He has been described, falsely, as an advocate of banning contraception. A dated joke about birth control made by one of his major supporters has been treated as a campaign scandal. A remark about Obama’s misguided environmental “theology” has been turned into an insinuation that the president is not a Christian. But the press has not had to invent controversial remarks by Santorum, who has supplied them himself. He has said that Satan is undermining America, in part by corrupting mainline Protestantism; that liberal versions of Christianity are distortions of the creed; that as president he would speak out against birth control, and that states should be free to prohibit it; and that John McCain “doesn’t have any” religious views. Some of his comments are indefensible, and even some of Santorum’s defensible assertions would have been better left to someone else — someone not seeking the presidency — to say. Santorum’s remarks about Senator McCain were unwise and uncharitable. Nor do we need political leaders to share their theological judgments about the various denominations that call themselves Christian. There is no good reason for a prospective president to pledge to lecture Americans about contraception. | 2/24/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obama’s Failure to Lead: The president has abdicated his real responsibilities abroad. 2.24.12 | In recent days, President Barack Obama has been stressing that his national-security record will help him get reelected. In a January interview with Time magazine, in his State of the Union address, and elsewhere, he not only recalls, with justifiable pride, the killing of Osama bin Laden, but also claims credit for “restor[ing] American leadership in the world.” In common parlance, leadership abroad means something along the lines of identifying the U.S. national interest and enlisting foreign partners to join us in achieving it. What Mr. Obama means, however, is more or less the opposite. | 2/24/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Romney: A Conservative on Immigration? 2.24.12 | One of the biggest myths of the 2012 presidential campaign, propagated by Team Romney and the mainstream media, is that Willard Mitt Romney is a hard-liner on immigration issues. One easily could reach that conclusion if Romney were judged on his speeches, press releases, and sound bites. However, as all conservatives should know, it is foolish to predict how a politician will govern based on campaign rhetoric. The more reliable way to determine a candidate‘s position is to review his actual record. | 2/24/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Two Cheers for Romney’s Tax Plan 2.23.12 | Mitt Romney is proposing an across-the-board reduction of 20 percent in income-tax rates. The current 35 percent tax rate would become 28 percent, the current 28 percent rate would become 22.4 percent, and so on. These tax cuts would come in addition to his previous proposals to eliminate capital taxes for households making less than $200,000 a year and to eliminate the estate tax. He would also eliminate the alternative minimum tax and reduce the corporate tax rate to 25 percent. It’s a pro-growth plan. It improves incentives to work, save, and invest, and should thus modestly increase the economy’s long-run growth. It modestly improves the tax structure by reducing the tax code’s bias against saving and investment, particularly when that saving and investment is done in corporate form. Romney’s plan should also be expected to simplify the tax code, on balance. Getting rid of the estate tax and the alternative minimum tax are major steps toward simplification. But creating new income limits for various tax breaks and an income-tier structure for capital taxation are steps backward. Those income limits could also reduce the plan’s effect on growth: Depending on how they are structured, they could amount to increases in the effective marginal tax rate even as statutory marginal rates drop. | 2/23/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obama: Leviathan 2012 2.23.12 | The scope of President Obama’s public-policy offensive commands respect. When he spoke admiringly four years ago of Ronald Reagan as “a transformative president,” he must have been sincere, though he clearly disagreed with much of the transformation. And Mr. Obama certainly deserves the same courtesy from those of us who are appalled at what he is trying to do to the country. I commented here several weeks ago on the State of the Union address, which was largely on the cusp between mendacity and delusion, as it flippantly passed over the deficit and claimed that those who doubted that American prestige was rising in the world didn’t “know what they are talking about.” | 2/23/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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ANWR: Our Frozen Energy Debate 2.23.12 | Confronted with an energy shortage, Congress debates opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling. Senator Maria Cantwell (D., Wash.) argues that “oil extracted from the wildlife refuge wouldn’t reach refineries for seven to ten years.” Senator Jeff Bingaman (D., N.M.) is more pessimistic, saying “drilling in ANWR wouldn’t get us any oil for at least ten years.” Leading the successful filibuster of the provision, Senator John Kerry (D., Mass.) echoes Bingaman, saying, “If we opened ANWR today it wouldn’t produce any oil for at least ten years.” This exchange happened in 2001, when President Bush proposed opening ANWR to drilling in his energy plan. But one need only change some of the details to update the story for today. | 2/23/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Environmentalists against the Environment 2.23.12 | Following outrage over its Keystone Pipeline decision, the Obama administration faces another choice pitting green activists against American workers. This time, siding with environmental activists would actively hurt the environment. The case — Georgia-Pacific West v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center — challenges long-established Clean Water Act rules about runoff from logging roads. In May, the Ninth Circuit Federal Court of Appeals determined that these roads come under the same section of the law as factories, mines, and chemical plants, not — as had been understood since passage in 1972 and amendment in 1987 — the section governing agriculture. The difference is that industrial facilities must obtain permits, which involve rigid rules and long reviews, and can be challenged in court. Agricultural regulations emphasize results, not lawsuits. | 2/23/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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We’re Already Europe: Our fiscal situation is far worse than we think. 2.22.12 | With seemingly every day bringing more bad news from Europe, many are beginning to ask how much longer the United States has before our welfare state follows the European model into bankruptcy. The bad news is: It may already have. This year, the fourth straight year that we borrowed more than $1 trillion to support the U.S. government, our budget deficit will top $1.3 trillion, 8.7 percent of our GDP. If you think that sounds bad, it’s because it is. In fact, only two European countries, Greece and Ireland, have larger budget deficits as a percentage of GDP. Things are only slightly better when you look at the size of our national debt, which now exceeds $15.3 trillion, 102 percent of GDP. Just four European countries have larger national debts than we do — Greece and Ireland again, plus Portugal and Italy. That means the U.S. government is actually less fiscally responsible than countries like France, Belgium, or Spain. | 2/22/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Ever-Growing Palestinian Problem 2.22.12 | Of all the issues that drive the Arab–Israeli conflict, none is more central, malign, primal, enduring, emotional, and complex than the status of those persons known as Palestinian refugees. The origins of this unique case, notes Nitza Nachmias of Tel Aviv University, goes back to Count Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations Security Council’s mediator. Referring to those Arabs who fled the British mandate of Palestine, he argued in 1948 that the U.N. had a “responsibility for their relief” because it was a U.N. decision, the establishment of Israel, that had made them refugees. However inaccurate his view, it still remains alive and potent and helps explain why the U.N. devotes unique attention to Palestine refugees pending their own state. | 2/22/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Santorum ‘Unplugged’ The candidate speaks from the heart. Is that an asset or a liability? 2.22.12 | Hour by hour, Rick Santorum is getting dinged by the press and his primary opponents. The fervor over his surge, however, is more about what he says and how he says it — not whether he is qualified or whether he’s conservative. The intense scrutiny raises the question of whether Santorum can survive the long haul — whether he can remain steady under the Klieg lights. These questions are not new. In December 2005, five Republican consultants participated in a panel discussion in Washington, D.C. The forum, moderated by Chuck Todd and sponsored by the University of Virginia, focused on the “future of the Republican party.” Stage left, hunched behind a water bottle, sat John Brabender. At the time, Brabender was an influential adviser to an influential senator, Rick Santorum, who was preparing for a tough reelection bid against Democrat Bob Casey. | 2/22/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Taliban’s Mob Rules: The Taliban is a Mafia-like crime syndicate, not a religious movement. 2.21.12 | Reports from Monday’s New York Times of the Pakistani Taliban (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan) stepping up its ransom-kidnapping campaign are a reminder of one of the reasons we have failed to achieve our objectives in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and will continue to do so: Most of us believe that we are at war with a paramilitary outfit mainly inspired by a fundamentalist Deobandi interpretation of Islam. We are in fact engaged with a very different kind of entity: an organized-crime syndicate acting out of interests that are largely economic, rather than religious or ideological. There are, to be sure, terrorist and paramilitary organizations inspired by a sincere commitment to Islam. Al-Qaeda is one. The senior leadership of the Taliban, on the other hand, bears at least as much resemblance to the old Sicilian Mafia — or to the present-day FARC, another misunderstood organization — as it does to martyrdom-minded jihadists in the mold of Osama bin Laden. | 2/21/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Phony-Drug War: Fake drugs are increasing drug-resistant tuberculosis 2.21.12 | Alice Ndlovu has tuberculosis but, relatively speaking, she is one of the lucky ones. Hers is a strain that responds to the best medicines available, which also happen to be the cheapest. At 28, this single mom knows that without treatment she would likely die, leaving her child to face the orphanage in a country that already has a million orphans. “I still have six weeks’ treatment to go, but hopefully that will be the end, and I’ll be home. I will see my son grow up,” she told me at her home in a poor suburb of Cape Town. At least a quarter of the world’s population — overwhelmingly concentrated in poorer regions of the world — is infected with TB, which generally lies dormant until the carrier’s immunity is impaired by another disease. (Often, this is HIV.) Without treatment, about half of the patients with active TB will die. According to the World Health Organization, TB claimed 1.7 million lives in 2009, most of them in Africa. The standard treatment for TB is long and complicated: It requires that patients take antibiotic combinations, at least 15 pills per day, over a six-month period. The side effects of treatment are unpleasant, including fever, vomiting, jaundice, and blurred vision. If treatment is stopped too soon or skipped, the bacteria that are still alive can become resistant, leading to a form of TB that is much more dangerous and difficult to treat. And in malnourished or weak patients, drug-resistant strains of TB can quickly become fatal. | 2/21/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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A Tax Reform for Romney 2.21.12 | We have frequently noted that, for all the rancor of the primary season, Republicans are increasingly united behind a conservative program. Almost all Republican members of Congress and presidential candidates support a free-market reform of Medicare, favor the appointment of originalist judges, and wish to lower corporate tax rates. We are seeing signs of a growing consensus in one other area, too: An increasing number of Republicans have come out for pro-family tax reform. The remaining holdout from this consensus is Mitt Romney. We hope that does not stay true for long. Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich each have plans to triple the dependent exemption and thus lower the tax bill for parents based on the number of minor children they are raising. Former candidate Rick Perry included the same proposal in his tax reform. The Republican Study Committee, the large assembly of conservatives in the House, also backs the idea. | 2/21/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Pill Is Not Good for Women: The feminist movement asked too little of men. 2.21.12 | The recent Health and Human Services mandate and the ensuing debate appear to have pitted religious-liberty claims against women’s health. But because religious leaders (rightly) focused on the need for a religious exemption, it may appear to some observers that they are unable to articulate a reasoned and weighty response to the administration’s claim that contraceptives are essential to women’s health and well-being. The Obama administration is wrong on this score as well, and the substantive case needs to be made: The contraceptive revolution has failed to be the unmitigated boon to women or to society that it was hyped up to be. | 2/21/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Death of a Long-Gun Registry: Canada sank $2.7 billion into a pointless project. 2.20.12 | Despite spending a whopping $2.7 billion on creating and running a long-gun registry, Canadians never reaped any benefits from the project. The legislation to end the program finally passed the Parliament on Wednesday. Even though the country started registering long guns in 1998, the registry never solved a single murder. Instead it has been an enormous waste of police officers’ time, diverting their efforts from patrolling Canadian streets and doing traditional policing activities. Gun-control advocates have long claimed that registration is a safety issue, and their reasoning is straightforward: If a gun has been left at a crime scene and it was registered to the person who committed the crime, the registry will link the crime gun back to the criminal. | 2/21/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Canada’s Terrorist: Why are they taking back Omar Khadr? 2.20.12 | Of all the prisoners detained at Guantanamo Bay, few have received the kind of intense political discussion and extensive media coverage that Omar Khadr has. In 2002, Khadr was accused of killing U.S. Sergeant First Class Christopher Speer, a combat medic, during a skirmish in Afghanistan. He was captured, linked to al-Qaeda, and detained at the ripe old age of 15. For the past decade, Khadr has been depicted as everything from a vicious child terrorist to a political martyr. It’s little wonder some American and Canadian observers have expressed confusion about the question of Khadr’s guilt for so long. | 2/21/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Too Poor to Marry? 2.20.12 | The most idiotic reason that single mothers give for not marrying is: “I’m too poor to get married!” Evidently these women believe they’re not too poor to educate, house, feed, clothe, and provide a stable home and an enriching moral and cultural environment for a child on their own. The “I’m too poor” defense, documented by researchers such as Kathryn Edin, refers not simply to the cost of a wedding (which of course is avoidable through a City Hall ceremony), but to the day-to-day institution of marriage itself. Now comes the New York Times validating this facile excuse for non-marriage in a front-page article on the juggernaut of illegitimacy (more than half of children born to women under 30 in 2009 were illegitimate): “Money helps explain why well-educated Americans still marry at high rates: they can offer each other more financial support, and hire others to do chores that prompt conflict.” | 2/21/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Catholic Betrayal of Religious Freedom 2.20.12 | It was not surprising that ill-educated Catholics in Congress rushed to embrace President Obama’s “accommodation” on the HHS mandate on sterilization and contraception (including possible abortifacients), or that the faux accommodation was defended, if risibly, by another embodiment of Catholic Lite, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. One does not look to Senator Patty Murray, or to Representative Rose DeLauro or Nancy Pelosi, or to Secretary Sebelius, to learn anything about Catholic doctrine or the history of the Church’s teaching on moral issues. Nemo dat quod non habet, as the scholastic philosophers used to say: No one gives what (s)he does not have. The willingness of the Catholic Health Association and its president, Sister Carol Keehan, to embrace the Obama shell game was also unsurprising; CHA is a trade association far more concerned about a friendly relationship with HHS and access to federal largesse than about Catholic solidarity on a question of first principles. CHA’s role in helping to pass Obamacare clarified for all with eyes to see what the association understands to be its primary interests. These interests define its true loyalties, which were on full display when Sister Carol helped the White House roll out the Obama “accommodation” ruse and sell it to an eager-to-be-sold press. | 2/21/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Money Bawl 2.16.12 | When the Federal Reserve decided to loosen monetary policy in September 2007, not many people criticized it. The vote was unanimous. Few congressmen said anything about the move. Three years later, inflation was lower and unemployment higher than in 2007. But the Fed’s move to loosen money in mid-2010 aroused fierce opposition from conservative politicians, economists, and journalists. Sarah Palin complained that “printing money out of thin air” would “erode the value of our incomes and our savings.” Republicans and conservatives have started to take a much harder line against inflation and a Federal Reserve they consider too inclined toward monetary expansion. In the early 1980s, supply-siders would sometimes criticize Paul Volcker’s Fed for fighting inflation too vigorously. Few on the right say anything similar today. | 2/16/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Tyrants’ Best Friend Only Mugabe and his friends benefit from Zimbabwe’s diamond wealth. 2.16.12 | Superficially, Zimbabwe is in much better shape than it was just a few years ago. Hotels are full of foreign businessmen, and luxury vehicles seem ubiquitous in the capital, Harare. Henry Ncube, a local street cleaner, has never seen as many new cars. But Mr. Ncube, 33 and married with two children, is not happy: “I only have this job part time, things are only a bit better for my family [since 2008] and I still can’t afford school” (for my children). Mr. Ncube has reason for pessimism. Zimbabwe’s growth is being fueled almost entirely by the diamond trade, which benefits only the political elite and their friends. Zimbabwe, which has had all sorts of political problems over the past three decades, is now also succumbing to the resource curse too. | 2/16/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Listening to the Syrian Resistance: Assad has created a humanitarian crisis — and a strategic opportunity. 2.16.12 | Thanks to the marvels of modern technology, members of the resistance movement inside Syria were able to have a secure conversation last week with a small group of foreign-policy mavens in Washington, D.C. What they told us boils down to this: A revolution is under way. On one side is the dictator Bashar al-Assad, backed by Iran’s rulers, Hezbollah, and Vladimir Putin’s Russia. On the other side are ordinary Syrians, facing bombs and bullets with the kind of courage exhibited in Tiananmen Square. Meanwhile, those who should be their allies dither. “Why is Syria not as important as Egypt and Libya?” asked “Muhammad,” one of the resistance leaders on the Skype call connecting the offices of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies with an undisclosed location outside Damascus. His comments were translated by FDD fellow A,mmar Abdulhamid, a prominent Syrian dissident who was forced into exile in 2005. “We are facing a killing machine,” Muhammad added. Indeed, the Assad regime is estimated to have slaughtered more than 7,000 Syrian men, women, and children to date. “We are not asking for any boots on the ground,” he added. So what do they want? Supplies, equipment, secure communications technology — and, yes, the means to defend themselves, their families, their homes, and their communities. | 2/16/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Sovereignty, Syria, and the Arab Spring 2.16.12 | Since the earliest days of the Arab Spring, U.S. policy has been waylaid by deep confusion on the vital question of state sovereignty — when we may violate it, and when we should recognize it. Answering that question will help us understand both how to handle decrepit Arab regimes on their way out, and how to shape the emergence of a new order in the Arab world. The Obama administration’s initial response to the demonstrations at Tahrir Square in Cairo was an early signal of confusion in the government. Was the U.S. position that President Hosni Mubarak had violated an otherwise legitimate constitution? Or was it that the constitution of Egypt, such as it was, was illegitimate? | 2/16/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Divide and Conquer? The administration continues to misread Catholics. 2.15.12 | In 1849 and then again in 1852, the Catholic bishops of the United States petitioned the Holy See to grant the archbishops of Baltimore the title of “primate” of the Catholic Church in the United States: an honorific, to be sure, but one that implied that the head of America’s oldest Catholic diocese would enjoy a de facto preeminence as leader of American Catholicism. But the Vatican, nervous that an American “primate” would assert himself in some fashion against Rome, declined to bestow the title (although, interestingly, it didn’t cavil about the title “primate” being given to the archbishop of Quebec City, the Primate of Canada, and the archbishop of Gniezno remained the Primate of Poland even when “Poland” disappeared from the map of Europe in the 19th century). | 2/15/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The HHS Mandate: One Battle in a Two-Front War - Obama has opened two fronts in the war on religious liberty, and may try more. | Before we turn the page on the HHS contraception mandate and focus on the current inadequate compromise, or on just how far the Obama administration will backtrack — or be forced back — let’s not forget what it nearly got away with. Twice in recent months, the administration has attempted to apply wide-reaching government regulation to religious organizations. And twice it has faced repudiation — first from a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruling and now from outraged citizens in the court of public opinion. But it is the combined effect and underlying philosophy of these proposals that has so many religious believers concerned. The perception is growing that there is hostility within the Obama administration to the role of religious institutions in American life. | 2/15/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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HHS Mandate: A Bridge Too Far Obama has set off a culture war, for real. 2.15.12 | The last two weeks have produced an astounding convergence of profound philosophical public controversies in the United States that finally does justify the phrase, much bandied about for some years, “culture wars.” That expression was coined originally for Bismarck’s mad Kulturkampf against the Roman Catholic Church (and, to a lesser degree, other churches) in the mid–19th century. It was the usual self-aggrandizement of secular states against a vast, international, unsubmissive, foreign-governed church, and recalled French and Spanish railings against the Jesuits, Napoleon’s detention of Pope Pius VII, and many other church–state frictions. But the interim final regulation in the Affordable Care Act that would require Roman Catholic–affiliated hospitals and agencies to pay for insurance of abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and contraceptives for their employees, gratis, was an astonishing affront to America’s largest religious denomination. | 2/15/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Arab like Me: Maybe, just maybe, Arabs can break out of their self-destructive hatred and envy. 2.15.12 | There are two kinds of Arabs in this world. Those who hate Jews, and those who don’t. And in my life, I have met more of the former than the latter. I am not proud to say that. Arabs will not like me for admitting it. But it is true. And it is something I wish the Obama administration understood. It is something Americans should know as the “Arab Spring” enters its second year. I didn’t know much about any of this as a Lebanese kid growing up in New Jersey. But I found out about it when I wrote my first pro-Israel column for my college paper as a young student journalist. I defended Israel on some point I’ve long forgotten, but what I’ll never forget is the backlash I received from fellow Arabs. Some were Americans, others were students from Arab countries, many of whom I counted as friends. | 2/15/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obama Wrecks the Mars Program: The president’s plans for NASA are completely flawed. 2.15.12 | In its budget submitted to Congress on February 13, the Obama administration zeroed out funding for NASA’s future Mars-exploration missions. The Mars Science Lab Curiosity, currently en route to the Red Planet and the nearly completed small MAVEN orbiter, scheduled for launch in 2013, will be sent, but that’s it. No funding has been provided for the Mars probes planned as joint missions in 2016 and 2018 with the European Space Agency, and nothing after that is funded either. This poses a grave crisis for the American space program. NASA’s Mars-exploration effort has been brilliantly successful because, since 1994, it has been approached as a campaign, with probes launched every two years, alternating between orbiters and landers. As a result, combined operations have been possible, with orbiters providing communication links and reconnaissance guidance for surface rovers, which in turn can conduct investigations on the ground to verify and calibrate orbital observations. Thus, the great treks of the rovers Spirit and Opportunity, launched in 2003, were supported from above by Mars Global Surveyor (MGS, launched in1996), Mars Odyssey (launched in 2001), and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO, launched in 2005). But after serving ten years in orbit, MGS is now no longer operating, and if we wait until the 2020s to resume Mars exploration, the rest of the orbiters will be gone as well. Moreover, so will be the experienced teams that created them. Effectively, the whole program will be completely wrecked, and we will have to start again from scratch. | 2/15/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Ball Four 2.14.12 | President Obama’s fourth budget promises a fourth straight year of trillion-dollar deficits, a fourth straight year of masking new spending with lame gimmickry, and a fourth straight year of asking Congress to yoke the American people with a historically massive tax hike. It is a budget with all the courage and resolve of an intentional walk, and just in time for spring training. It is a budget that spends a staggering $47 trillion over ten years and capitulates to the inevitability of a national debt larger than the national economy, assuring that by 2022 our interest payments alone will reach $1 trillion a year. It is a budget that hikes income, estate, and other taxes by $1.9 trillion over ten years, and uses that revenue not to reduce the deficit or shore up our existing entitlement commitments but on a raft of new stimuli that are as substantively dubious as they are politically opportunistic. | 2/14/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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If the House GOP Ruled: A thought experiment on serious rollback of overweening Washington power. 2.14.12 | Let’s conduct a little thought experiment. Imagine that the Republican majority in the House of Representatives ran things in Washington. Unilaterally. No need to negotiate with the Senate or assemble two-thirds majorities to overturn those pesky presidential vetoes. Imagine that legislation commanding majority support in the current House would become law immediately upon passage. What might our nation and our world look like? This is not an altogether quixotic exercise. A thorough review of roll-call votes cast since the 2010 electoral upheaval allows us to approximate the world view that guides the 243-member House Republican caucus. Such a review reveals a conception of America — and America’s role in the world — as ambitious, and conservative, as that of any previous congressional majority. | 2/14/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Problems with the STOCK Act 2.14.12 | It’s April 2012. You are a conscientious congressional staffer who still takes seriously the need to be a steward of taxpayers’ money. (Yes, we know for a fact there are more than a few of these folks around on Capitol Hill.) You are watching closely events surrounding an “omnibus” or “minibus” spending bill deemed even by conservative Republican members as “must pass” because it funds the military as well as other parts of government. Suddenly, you hear about an outrageous earmark about to be slipped into the bill that would enrich a Fortune 500 company. You decide to alert a network of fiscal watchdogs you’ve met with over the years to wage an instant campaign against this piece of corporate welfare. | 2/14/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Santorum’s Turn 2.13.12 | At the moment Rick Santorum appears to be overtaking Newt Gingrich as the principal challenger to Mitt Romney. Santorum has won more contests than Gingrich (who has won only one), has more delegates, and leads him in the polls. In at least one poll, he also leads Romney. It isn’t yet a Romney–Santorum contest, but it could be headed that way. | 2/13/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Compromise That Isn’t 2.13.12 | The White House has offered something it calls a compromise on the so-called contraception mandate — and by “compromise” the Obama administration apparently means offering a symbolically tweaked plan to go forward with trampling Americans’ religious liberties while pretending to accommodate them. In truth, nothing of substance has changed from the administration’s January 20 announcement that religious employers will be forced to provide services they find morally objectionable. | 2/13/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Libertine Police State Live-and-let-live is not the sexual revolution's endgame. 2.13.12 | Shortly after Prep-Comm III, the Third Preparatory Commission meeting in anticipation of the 1994 Cairo World Conference on Population and Development, one of those “Senior Vatican Officials” who like to remain nameless told me an enlightening story. For his sins, the SVO had been condemned to attend Prep-Comm III and try to prevent it from calling for a universal human right to abortion on demand, which would then be formally declared at the impending Cairo conference. His tale of what unfolded during his week of Purgatory remains quite relevant, despite its age. In fact, one moment from Prep-Comm III sheds important light on recent events, including the Susan G. Komen/Planned Parenthood wars and the Obama administration’s determination to compel employers to provide contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilization “services” those employers find morally abhorrent. | 2/13/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Wherefore Art Thou ACLU? Only certain civil liberties need apply. 2.13.12 | The American Civil Liberties Union is something of a wildcard. Marked by caprice, it can be occasionally thrilling, but it is more often frustrating, inconsistent, and ramshackle. On issues of speech, the organization can be an ally of limited government — it recently played a key role in the gutting of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance-reform bill, siding with Citizens United against the Federal Election Commission and winning a signal victory for the First Amendment — but, more often than it joins the chorus for liberty, it remains dumb. If, to paraphrase an old saying, 90 percent of defending the Constitution is just showing up, then the ALCU is an incorrigible part-timer. The ACLU’s stated mission is “to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.” Given its record, however, one would be forgiven for concluding that its copy of our charter is incomplete. Unfortunately, the ACLU appears to base its actions on the text of a tattered and torn document, from which the Second and Tenth Amendments are missing entirely, the Fourth was re-written in 1973, and the words “more or less” are appended to each paragraph along with an explicit invitation to interpret the document as broadly as humanly possible. | 2/13/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Explaining Santorum’s Surge Social conservatives feel marginalized. 2.10.12 | You could have gotten a decent bet ten years ago that Rick Santorum would emerge as a finalist for the Republican presidential nomination circa 2012: He had the telegenic presence, the savvy required to dislodge incumbents in a fiercely competitive environment like Pennsylvania, and a reliably conservative record that was middle-class-friendly. Then the 2006 midterm intervened and Santorum’s fortunes seemed destroyed. It wasn’t just that Santorum lost in 2006; that year was lethal for many Republican officeholders. It was the size of the loss — almost 20 points — and the trail of baggage from the race: a clumsy response to attacks that he had “gone Washington” and was barely in the state; impolitic comments on homosexuality; and a poorly run campaign that never seemed combat-ready. Instead of being offered a sinecure in the middle tier of the Bush White House, or getting a head start on the next governor’s race, Santorum faded into the oblivion of lobbying and consulting that is Washington’s graveyard. | 2/10/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Bungling Bundlers Some of Obama’s fundraisers have questionable associations. 2.10.12 | President Obama’s sudden reversal on super PACs — moving from outright condemnation of the fundraising vehicles, which are separate from any campaign, to dispatching cabinet officers to headline events for super PACs supporting him — threatens to overshadow a more serious issue. This one involves his campaign bundlers — upper-echelon supporters of a candidate, basically fundraisers, who, with official sanction from the campaign, persuade others to write checks, then collect them and package them for delivery. The issue bears attention. This week Team Obama had to return over $200,000 in campaign funds bundled by two American brothers of Pepe Cardona, a casino mogul in Mexico. Cardona, born in Iowa of Mexican parents, jumped bail in 1994 to avoid drug and fraud charges against him. Ever since, he and his family have been seeking special treatment that would allow him to return to the U.S. | 2/10/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Iran’s Final Solution for Israel: Persian Shiite anti-Semitism is deep-seated and points to genocide. 2.10.12 | Reza Khalili (pseudonym), a former CIA operative in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, has reported the latest restatement of the Iranian Shiite theocracy’s Jew-annihilationist jihadism: Calling Israel a danger to Islam, the conservative website Alef, with ties to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said the opportunity must not be lost to remove “this corrupting material. It is a ‘jurisprudential justification’ to kill all the Jews and annihilate Israel, and in that, the Islamic government of Iran must take the helm.” The article, written by Alireza Forghani, an analyst and a strategy specialist in Khamenei’s camp, now is being run on most state-owned sites, including the Revolutionary Guards’ Fars News Agency, showing that the regime endorses this doctrine. | 2/10/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Welfare State and Freedom: A Mismatch In order to feed the growing welfare state, Danish citizens are heading down the road | America’s looming presidential election will likely present voters with a clear choice between moving the country further toward a European-style welfare model or bucking the trend of increased public spending. This choice not only has consequences for the economic future of Americans but also for their freedom. For a while, the success of Scandinavian welfare states seemed to disprove the notion that high taxes, generous benefits, and a large public sector inevitably lead people down the road to serfdom. Indeed, by intellectuals such as Francis Fukuyama and celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Denmark has been hailed as a model state, successfully combining freedom and prosperity with “social justice.” But now, the combination of a debt crisis, an aging population addicted to public welfare benefits, one and a half decades of low growth rates, and increasing competition from countries in rapid development is revealing the dark underbelly of welfarism. As a result, the friendly compassionate face of the Danish state is increasingly being replaced with intrusive measures that were unthinkable just a decade ago. It is not an overstatement to say that the balance between the state and the individual has been shifted decisively in favor of the state. A few non-exhaustive examples may help illustrate how far down Hayek’s road Denmark has gone. | 2/10/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Unconscionable 2.9.12 | The Obama administration is now telling liberals that it is not backing down on its new health-care mandate, even as it coos of compromise to religious groups appalled by it. These messages may seem to be contradictory, but actually the administration has been quite consistent: Nothing it has ever said on this issue has been trustworthy. Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, has been the leading misleader. The administration, recall, has decided that almost all employers must cover contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients in their employees’ insurance plans — even if those employers are religious universities, hospitals, and charities that reject those practices. So she has tried to make the mandate seem more moderate than it is. In USA Today, she writes that “in the rule we put forward, we specifically carved out from the policy religious organizations that primarily employ people of their own faith.” Taken at face value, this statement would seem to imply that Notre Dame could escape the mandate if it fired its non-Catholic employees. That policy would be outrageous: What gives the federal government the legitimate authority to tell a religious institution how it should structure its mission? But in fact the administration would make the university jump through several more hoops. It would also have to expel its non-Catholic students. And even these changes would not be enough, since the university would continue to do much more than attempt to inculcate religious beliefs in its students — which is another test the administration requires for the exemption to apply. | 2/9/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Two Decades Too Late 2.9.12 | For months, former senator Rick Santorum has been talking about working-class woes and promoting a working-class-friendly economic agenda, and in late January President Obama’s State of the Union speech placed working-class concerns at the center of the election debate. Nevertheless, Santorum remains in third place in the GOP race. Does this suggest that Republican efforts to address working-class angst are politically ineffective? No, it doesn’t. The problem is twofold: Santorum has not emphasized this aspect of his campaign enough, and the agenda he has presented seems designed to resurrect an idealized past rather than to lead worried workers into a new future. | 2/9/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Global Persecution of Christians: It’s a truth the West must stop ignoring. 2.9.12 | Perhaps the gravest under-publicized atrocity in the world is the persecution of Christians. A comprehensive Pew Forum study last year found that Christians are persecuted in 131 countries containing 70 percent of the world’s population, out of 197 countries in the world (if Palestine, Taiwan, South Sudan, and the Vatican are included). Best estimates are that about 200 million Christians are in communities where they are persecuted. There is not the slightest question of the scale and barbarity of this persecution, and a little of it is adequately publicized. But this highlights the second half of the atrocity: the passivity and blasé indifference of most of the West’s media and governments. It is not generally appreciated that over 100,000 Christians a year are murdered because of their faith. Because Christianity is, by a wide margin, the world’s largest religion, the leading religion in the traditionally most advanced areas of the world, and, despite its many fissures, the best organized, largely because of the relatively tight and authoritarian structure of the Roman Catholic Church, the West is not accustomed to thinking of Christians as a minority, much less a persecuted one. | 2/9/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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CAIR’s Crusade against The Third Jihad: If you see something, don’t say anything. 2.9.12 | M. Zuhdi Jasser is a physician, a U.S. Navy veteran, an American patriot, and a Muslim who does not hold with those who preach that Islam commands its followers to take part in a war against unbelievers. The Third Jihad, a documentary film that Jasser narrated, takes a hard look at those Muslims who are waging this war — both with bombs and by stealthier means. The film had been among the educational materials used to train New York City police officers dealing with terrorism. Then, last month, the New York Times went on what one might call a crusade against the movie, publishing a series of articles branding it a “hate-filled film about Muslims” and calling on Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly to “apologize for the film . . . and make clear that his department does not tolerate such noxious and dangerous stereotyping.” | 2/9/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Coming Israel–Iran Confrontation: A failure to support Israel would have dire consequences. 2.8.12 | Events are conspiring to precipitate a cataclysmic confrontation with Iran. Time has nearly expired for international sanctions — even the so-called tough and crippling ones — to keep Iran from acquiring deliverable nuclear weapons. The U.S. soon will not be able to avoid making a choice: Will it meet the challenge of the coming confrontation or shrink from it? Either way, there will be consequences for U.S. interests abroad and at home. During last Friday’s prayers in Tehran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Iran would continue its nuclear program. His remarks were broadcast on Iranian state television. In these remarks to worshippers, Khamenei reiterated Iran’s threat to wipe Israel — “a cancerous tumor that should be cut and will be cut” — off the map, and averred that Iran will aid any nation or group that attacks Israel. The Associated Press reports that he explicitly acknowledged that Iran has supported and will support Hezbollah and Hamas attacks. | 2/8/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The President’s War on Religious Freedom: The administration decides that state-run health care trumps our first liberty. 2. | In his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus, Pope John Paul II delivered a scathing critique of socialism, declaring that “the fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature. Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated. . . . Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face of good or evil.” Pope John Paul II’s indictment of socialism is illustrated in the Obama administration’s recent edict requiring nearly all employers — including Catholic hospitals, schools, and charities — to cover sterilizations and contraception in their employees’ health-care plans. Because “contraception” includes abortifacients, this decision — made under the powers granted to the executive branch under Obamacare — also threatens many Protestant employers. | 2/8/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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A House Divided on Marriage 2.8.12 | It’s not a good sign when a 77-page judicial opinion contains a falsehood in its first sentence. Judge Stephen Reinhardt, the most notorious liberal activist on the oft-overturned Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, begins his opinion for the 2–1 majority in the California same-sex-marriage case, Perry v. Brown, thus: “Prior to November 4, 2008, the California Constitution guaranteed the right to marry to opposite-sex couples and same-sex couples alike.” This is only true in a legal fantasy land in which the California supreme court’s unilateral creation of a right to same-sex marriage is treated as equivalent to the constitution itself. | 2/8/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Highway Robbery by Republicans 2.8.12 | Anyone still wondering why there is a disconnect between grassroots limited-government conservatives and the Washington establishment need look no farther than the latest highway bill currently making its way through Congress with support from Republican leaders in both houses. The Senate version, SB 1813, would cost $109 billion over two years. The House bill, HR 7, which runs to 847 pages of pork and special-interest projects, raises the price tag to $260 billion, but extends it over five years, making it a couple billion cheaper on a year-by-year basis. In theory, of course, the highway bill is supposed to be paid for out of the Highway Trust Fund. But according to the Congressional Budget Office, the Trust Fund, which is funded by the federal gas tax, will collect only $187 billion over the next five years, meaning that the House bill spends $73 billion more than it takes in. To fill this gap, the House would rely first on some $20 billion in unspent money currently in the Trust Fund. But this is just the same type of Washington bookkeeping we’ve seen with other “trust funds” such as Social Security. That money is not “unspent.” In reality it was spent long ago, and what the Trust Fund actually holds is simply government bonds that will have to be redeemed out of general revenues. Beyond these funds, the House bill includes a number of other revenue-raising mechanisms, such as royalty payments from allowing drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and offshore areas. But those provisions will never survive the Senate, leaving a shortfall that will result in either greater budget deficits or higher gas taxes. | 2/8/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obama’s Nuclear Mistake: The president converts Bush’s anti-proliferation ‘Gold Standard’ into lead.. 2.7.12 | If President Obama hadn’t won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for his “work for a world without nuclear weapons,” his objection earlier this month to tightening nonproliferation conditions on U.S. civilian nuclear exports wouldn’t look so strange. But the president did, and this latest decision is quite odd indeed. Congress, eager to sanction Iran’s suspect “peaceful” nuclear program, now plans to hold hearings on the policy shift, and once-dormant House legislation to increase oversight over U.S. civilian nuclear exports is again suddenly vital. Congress is in the right; the president is not. What prompted Obama to kick this political nest? A stunning inattention to nuclear-export realities, his own nuclear-control rhetoric, and history. | 2/7/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Greek Tragedy Continues: It will be difficult to implement the needed reforms. 2.7.12 | Those of us who wish that the euro be brought to an end before too many people get hurt are likely to be disappointed, because European politicians refuse to admit defeat. Greece now stands on the brink of a sovereign default. Over the last few months, the slump in the Greek economy has been much deeper than anticipated, and, as a result, the Greek government is now in urgent need of roughly $20 billion to cover its immediate financing needs, on top of the rescue package of approximately $170 billion conferred in October of last year. | 2/7/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Kastelorizo: Mediterranean Flashpoint? 2.7.12 | It is the far-flung, easternmost island of Greece, 80 miles from Rhodes, 170 miles west of Cyprus, but just one mile off the coast of Turkey. Kastelorizo (in Greek, Καστελόριζο; or officially Megisti, Μεγίστη) is tiny, comprising just five square miles, plus some yet smaller, uninhabited islands. Its 430 inhabitants are way down from 10,000 in the late nineteenth century. The Lonely Planet travel guide has picked it as one of the four best Greek islands (out of thousands) for diving and snorkeling. There’s no public transportation from nearby Anatolia, only from distant Rhodes by airplane or ferry. | 2/7/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Mandatory Abortion Coverage? Watching for the next step from the Obama administration. 2.7.12 | Advocates of religious freedom were outraged on January 20, when the Obama administration announced it would enforce its new mandate for contraception and sterilization coverage in private health-insurance plans without a meaningful conscience exemption. Even most religious organizations can’t qualify for the rule’s incredibly narrow “religious employer” exception, which will remain unchanged. NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood have said pro-life organizations are wrong to oppose such mandates: After all, they argue, increasing access to contraception (especially “emergency contraception” or “EC”) will reduce abortion, and don’t we all want that? This argument conveniently ignores studies showing that such access simply doesn’t reduce abortion rates. For example, out of 23 studies on the effects of increased access to ECs, not one study could show a reduction in unintended pregnancies or abortions. It also ignores the fact that at least one EC drug covered by the mandate, “Ella,” is a close analogue to the abortion pill RU-486; both drugs can induce abortion weeks into pregnancy. | 2/7/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Again, Why Not Santorum? He’s a true conservative and he can win. 2.6.12 | Missouri’s “beauty contest” primary on Tuesday could be Rick Santorum’s big chance. If he defeats Mitt Romney in that event, as at least one poll shows he is poised to do, the punditocracy and public alike might finally recognize the considerable upside he would offer Republicans as their presidential nominee. Rick Santorum can win the Republican nomination. Rick Santorum can indeed beat Barack Obama in the fall. And Rick Santorum can and would govern at least as conservatively as Ronald Reagan did. The evidence of his principled, mainstream conservatism is unambiguous, as is his record of winning long-shot races. What hasn’t been fully understood yet is why, and how, Santorum could win the Republican nomination and the presidency. | 2/6/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Reforming Legal Immigration “Mr. President, we must not allow an engineer gap!” 2.6.12 | Jennifer Wedel (an “avid Republican”!) got the drop on President Obama the other day by asking him why, with so many American engineers like her husband unemployed, he wants to import even more engineers from abroad. Obama responded that industry tells him there’s a “huge demand” for engineers around the country, and that she should send her husband’s résumé to the White House. The Republican National Committee has leapt at the opportunity, launching a site called Not Better Off, highlighting the weak job market during the president’s tenure and urging people to send him their résumés. | 2/6/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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A Pink Ribbon for the Win 2.2.12 | So twisted are the Left’s conceptions of life and law, conscience and the Constitution, that many in their quarter praise a federal mandate that would force private religious organizations to facilitate the distribution of contraceptives, even as they condemn the decision by the secular, apolitical Susan G. Komen for the Cure to disentangle itself from abortion mega-provider Planned Parenthood. Early reports suggested Komen decided to break ties with Planned Parenthood because the latter runs afoul of a recently adopted in-house rule barring grants for any organization under government investigation. While this sounds like a perfectly sensible rule to us, Komen founder and CEO Nancy Brinker has made clear that the defunding decision was in fact made for still more practical reasons. In a new video aimed at responding to the on-cue hysterics of the militantly “pro-choice” and their adjuncts, Brinker avers that the decision came as a result of “a comprehensive review of our grants and standards” begun in 2010, part of an effort to “eliminate duplicative grants, freeing up more dollars for higher impact programs,” including such programs that are “actually providing the lifesaving mammogram.” President Obama, of course, is not alone in this regard. For 40 years now, green energy has been one of the primary opiates of the educated elite, a drug imbibed in varying doses by politicians on both the left and right. But no president has so energetically and dramatically spent political and economic capital on green energy as has this one. | 2/3/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obama’s Green-Energy Mirage 2.2.12 | President Obama is obsessed with green energy as a terrier is obsessed with a bone. He digs the issue up time and time again with a single-mindedness that is remarkable in contemporary politics. Last week, during his State of the Union address, he gnawed on that policy again, offering it to voters as the foundation of his economic recovery plan, a pillar of his foreign policy, and a hedge against global environmental catastrophe. President Obama, of course, is not alone in this regard. For 40 years now, green energy has been one of the primary opiates of the educated elite, a drug imbibed in varying doses by politicians on both the left and right. But no president has so energetically and dramatically spent political and economic capital on green energy as has this one. | 2/3/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Vigilante Films and the Left 2.2.12 | On Tuesday, director Joe Carnahan announced on Twitter that he had embarked on a remake of the Charles Bronson vigilante classic Death Wish. The main question, for any director approaching such a topic, especially with source material as infamous as Death Wish, is “Have you read any reviews lately?” Vincent Canby, in The New Yorker, dubbed the original Death Wish “a despicable movie, one that raises complex questions in order to offer bigoted, frivolous, oversimplified answers.” Dirty Harry, whose 40th anniversary passed in December, attracted similar distaste. Pauline Kael savaged the film’s “fascist medievalism,” and described it as a “single-minded attack against liberal values.” Variety called it a “specious, phony glorification of the police and of police brutality.” Roger Ebert condemned its “fascist moral position.” | 2/3/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Romney vs. Obamacare 2.2.12 | At some point in this year’s presidential campaign, perhaps on a debate stage, President Obama is likely to repeat his claim that the Massachusetts health-care law signed by Gov. Mitt Romney in 2006 was the inspiration for the federal health-care plan that he himself signed in 2010. Obama knows that his signature legislative accomplishment remains unpopular. But he also knows that policy experts of various political stripes have claimed that Obamacare is essentially Romneycare taken national. If Romney is the Republican presidential nominee, as he seems likely to be, Obama will try to block him from taking advantage of his vulnerability. Romney will be able to answer Obama effectively only if he has already vigorously made the case against Obamacare by then: both so that he has the argument clear in his mind, and so that Republican politicians, reporters, and voters are at least passingly familiar with it. | 2/2/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Big-Government Republicans: The transportation bill unveils their intentions. 2.2.12 | Forget the fratricidal warfare between two establishment soldiers so harmonious on substance that their contest, inevitably, has descended into a poisonous, personal food-fight. The problem is not the GOP infighting. The problem is the GOP. Republicans are simply not interested in limiting government or addressing our death spiral of spending. My weekend column was about the dog-and-pony show that congressional Republicans just put on to snow you into thinking they oppose the $2.4 trillion debt-ceiling increase they actually approved only six months ago. Now, get ready for House Republicans to unveil their $260 billion transportation bill. | 2/2/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Wind Energy, Noise Pollution: Living near wind turbines can be hazardous to your health. 2.2.12 | In his State of the Union address last week, President Barack Obama touted renewable energy and declared that he would “not walk away from workers” such as Bryan Ritterby, who is employed by a wind-turbine manufacturer in Michigan. But in their rush to embrace the wind-energy business, Obama and numerous other politicians are walking away from rural residents such as David Enz and his wife, Rose. A year ago, the couple abandoned their home near Denmark, Wis., because of the unbearable low-frequency noise produced by a half-dozen 495-foot-high wind turbines that were built near the home they’ve owned since 1978. The closest was installed about 3,200 feet from their house. | 2/2/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Are Sanctions Working? If the purpose is to penalize Iran’s rulers for their crimes and discourage civilized people from buyi | There’s pain, and then there’s pain. Getting stung by a bee hurts. Having a Doberman sink his teeth into your thigh is a more intense experience. By the same token, there are sanctions, and then there are sanctions. For years, the sanctions imposed on Iran were an irritation, a not-entirely-convincing message to the regime that one of these days. . . . Now, however, new and tougher sanctions are being imposed on Iran — and they are beginning to bite. The rial has lost 50 percent of its value since December. Inflation is running over 20 percent, with some unofficial estimates pegging it at twice that amount. Iran’s rulers have forfeited more than $60 billion in energy investment and $14 billion in annual oil sales, while hundreds of billions of dollars in potential sales of Iranian natural gas have been prevented. Crude-oil production is falling, and Iran’s central bank is finding it difficult to receive payments for the oil it does export. The regime is paying more to import gasoline and has had to slash subsidies as a result, reminding Iranians that they don’t have the means to refine their own oil into gasoline — thanks to their rulers’ perverse priorities. | 2/2/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Five Lessons from the Sunshine State: What we learned from the Florida primary. 2.1.12 | Five big lessons from Florida’s primary election results, where Mitt Romney won solidly with nearly half the vote and all 50 delegates at stake: 1) The gender gap returned with a vengeance: In the final days before the South Carolina primary, Newt Gingrich’s ex-wife, Marianne Gingrich, blindsided the candidate with the accusation that he had wanted an “open marriage.” The former speaker garnered roars of approval from a debate audience when he dressed down CNN moderator John King for starting off the evening with that topic. Some wondered whether that revelation, and the reminder of Gingrich’s three marriages, would hurt him in the contest, particularly among women.. | 2/1/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Mars Prize: Newt Gingrich was right to propose it. 2.1.12 | In August 1994, I was invited to have dinner with House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich. At that time, I was a senior engineer working for Martin Marietta Astronautics in Denver, where I had been responsible for inventing a new plan called “Mars Direct.” By radically simplifying the mission architecture and making bold use of Martian resources starting on the very first mission, this concept offered the potential to reduce the cost and schedule of a human Mars-exploration program. NASA analysis had confirmed these advantages, and word had leaked to Newsweek, which featured it as the cover story of its July 25, 1994, issue celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. “A manned mission to Mars?” the editors asked. “The technology is already in place. And at $50 billion — one tenth of previous estimates — it’s a bargain.” Gingrich had read the article and wanted to know more. | 2/1/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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San Francisco Tunes In and Drops Out: Even the Bay Area has turned on Occupy. 2.1.12 | If you’ve ever idly wondered what it would be like to watch the Lone Ranger being led into an ambush by Tonto, then look no further than northern California, where Occupy Wall Street has been forsaken by, of all places . . . San Francisco. When the anti-capitalists lose the support of the City by the Bay, then you know it’s all over: Up is down, black is white, and the Grateful Dead is having its amplifiers unplugged by doobie-smoking vegans. When the Baysiders love thee not, chaos is come again. According to a SurveyUSA poll published yesterday, one quarter of those in San Francisco who once supported Occupy have changed their minds, while only 3 percent have come around to the Occupiers’ cause from a position of skepticism. By such progressions do movements end. The support/oppose split is now 35/57 — down from a high of 58/34 — and while 36 percent of registered Democrats have kept their faith, 31 percent agreed with the statement, “I supported the movement when it first started but now I oppose it.” If Occupy left its heart in San Francisco, then the people of that city have broken it. It is hard to see where the movement’s dying embers could possibly be rekindled. | 2/1/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Keep Hatch: Utah should give Senator Orrin Hatch another term. 1.31.12 | All eyes are fixed on the train wreck that is the Republican presidential-nomination contest. Unfortunately, some of the zaniness that has appeared in the debates is indicative of the still greater folly occurring at the state level. Nowhere is this on more flagrant display than in Utah, where conservative activists want to oust Orrin Hatch from the U.S. Senate for being — get this — too liberal. As a former general counsel to Senator Hatch in the mid-1990s, the idea of him losing because of unfaithfulness to the conservative cause makes me think that I have awoken in Jerry Seinfeld’s Bizarro World. Up is down, left is right, and George Constanza’s confidence charms beautiful women and wins him a dream job with the Yankees. Only in that world is Hatch a liberal. | 1/31/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Understanding Carried Interest: Is there a tax loophole that benefits fund managers? 1.31.12 | Mitt Romney’s release of his tax returns has pushed the arcane issue of “carried interest” — the share of an investment fund’s profits given to its managers as payment for their services – back into the headlines. Critics have renewed their calls to tax the carried interest as ordinary income. Unfortunately, the populist rhetoric used by some critics can obscure the facts about how carried interest is actually taxed. Some critics assert that all carried interest is taxed at the lower 15 percent that applies to capital gains and dividends. They complain that these funds are able to “turn” ordinary income into capital gains and dividends by paying managers in carried interest rather than salary, and that the funds are exploiting a special loophole not available to other firms. Looking at how carried interest works reveals that none of these things are true. | 1/31/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obama’s Seizure and Truman’s: The Court stopped Truman from seizing the steel industry, and should stop Obamacare, too. | On November 14, 2011, the Supreme Court agreed to review the constitutionality of President Obama’s health-care act. The central question is, What limits does the Constitution — specifically, the Commerce Clause — impose upon the federal government’s exercise of power? This health-care act is the defining legislation of the president’s term, and the issue of limited government is at the very heart of the debate between Obama and his opponents. The political, economic, and constitutional stakes are very high. These arguments before the Court will provide a dramatic — and perhaps even decisive — backdrop for the 2012 election. Constitutional crises of this magnitude are not without precedent. Indeed, the seeds of this case can be found in the court battles of the 1930s and 1940s, as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation challenged traditional constitutional bounds. Supported by record congressional majorities, FDR and his fellow Democrats passed a blizzard of programs designed to alleviate the economic hardship of the Great Depression — and to alter the very fabric of the U.S. capitalistic system. | 1/31/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Let Us Now Praise Private Equity 1.30.12 | Every presidential candidate has to defend himself against accusations of wrongdoing — an affair, abuse of office, campaign-finance impropriety, and so forth. Mitt Romney finds himself in a predictable defensive crouch, too, but the allegation against him is extraordinary: He stands accused of doing his job too well. As the founder and CEO of the private-equity firm Bain Capital, Romney was a turnaround artist. In that role, the GOP frontrunner says, he restored failing firms to health, usually with great success. He claims to have helped create thousands of new jobs and billions of dollars in new wealth. Some of Romney’s Republican rivals, particularly Newt Gingrich, haven’t framed Romney’s record in such generous terms. They say Romney was a “vulture capitalist” who used financial chicanery to enrich himself and his cronies at the expense of helpless workers. President Obama and his allies will surely make the same case in the months to come. Indeed, a recent memo from Stephanie Cutter, the president’s deputy campaign manager, accuses Romney of having sought “profit at any cost,” and of believing in “an economy where the wealthy and powerful can rig the game at the expense of working Americans.” Romney’s verbal gaffes, including an ill-considered soundbite professing his love of “being able to fire people,” have made him vulnerable to more demonization still. | 1/30/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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We Are All Abortionists Now: Or we soon will be, if Obamacare is allowed to stand. 1.30.12 | The decision last week by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to reject the appeals of scores of religious leaders and retain a very narrow “religious” exemption from Obamacare’s so-called contraception mandate has ignited an uproar among Catholic leaders, as well it should — because it’s hard to fathom a government dictate more offensive than this one. Here’s how we got where we are: Obamacare includes within its massive delegation of power to the federal government the authority to define what constitutes “preventive services” that must be covered by all health-insurance plans sold and purchased in the United States, including plans sponsored by employers. Services defined by HHS as preventive for purposes of this provision are required under the new law to be covered by the insurer or employer with no charge to the insurance plan’s enrollees. | 1/30/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Free Birth Control vs. Freedom of Religion The administration forces organizations to violate their religious beliefs. 1.30.1 | When Pliny the Younger was a provincial governor in the Roman Empire, he wrote a letter to Emperor Trajan asking whether he should execute Christians who refused to burn incense in worship of the emperor. Pliny, in keeping with the customs of the empire, did not care about forcing Christians to believe that the emperor was a god. But in public they had to behave as if they did. Thus, the Christians were in the dock not so much because of their faith in a risen Christ as over their willful refusal to declare themselves part of the reigning social order. | 1/30/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Why Newt Left the House He didn’t have the votes to be speaker. 1.30.12 | Did Newt Gingrich resign his speakership “in disgrace,” as Mitt Romney alleged in last Monday night’s debate? No, but he didn’t have the votes to keep the job. On November 3, 1998, Republicans lost five seats in the House of Representatives, shaving their majority to 223 seats, leaving them with a dangerously thin margin. Three days later, Newt Gingrich announced he would not run for a third term as speaker. The pressure had been building for months. In January 1997, Gingrich narrowly won a second term as speaker with only 216 votes — out of 228 Republicans. (Several of them voted present, allowing Gingrich’s reelection.) Later that month, the House voted by a wide margin, 395 to 28, to reprimand the speaker for ethical wrongdoing and assessed him $300,000. (In 1999, however, the IRS declared that Gingrich had not violated any tax laws.) | 1/30/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Newt and the Earmark Era: For political purposes, Gingrich encouraged the Nineties’ vast expansion of earmarks. 1.27.12 | As a congressman in the House, Newt Gingrich didn’t just request earmarks: He also fundamentally changed and expanded their use. Gingrich’s willingness to allow non–Appropriations Committee House members to push for earmarks “really changed how members viewed earmarks,” says Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) president Thomas Schatz, noting that House members had previously had to appeal to the Appropriations Committee to grant earmarks. “So [when] earmarking became more widespread, it was going to a lot more members.” “He really set in motion the largest explosion of earmarks in the history of Congress,” Schatz added of Gingrich. | 1/27/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Do You Know Newt? He sometimes sounds just like Obama. 1.27.12 | Newt Gingrich may have a long legacy of activism on the right, but he has also enthusiastically endorsed a wide range of dubiously conservative positions over the years. In fact, it can occasionally be hard to distinguish his suggestions and views from those of President Obama. Following are 19 quotations, some of which were said by Barack Obama, and some of which were said by Newt Gingrich. Not all of these ideas are as outlandish as the space colony that Newt mentioned this week in Florida, nor as radically conservative as making students work the janitors’ shifts; but some of them could certainly be mistaken for President Obama’s ideas. Click the blue buttons to reveal who said what. | 1/27/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Sordid Business of Redistricting by Race: The Voting Rights Act has been perverted once again, in a Texas redistricting ca | Texas recently won a major battle in its congressional and state-legislative redistricting fight. On January 20, the Supreme Court threw out interim maps that had been created out of whole cloth by a three-judge panel in San Antonio, and that, in addition to heavily favoring Democrats, basically ignored the plans drawn by the state legislature. The war goes on in federal court in Texas and the District of Columbia, but the decision was a defeat not only for the NAACP, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and other seekers of racial spoils, but also for Eric Holder’s Justice Department. This case demonstrates the absurdity and fundamental unfairness of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), the supposedly temporary, emergency five-year provision passed in 1965, as well as the way Section 2 of the VRA has been perverted by so-called civil-rights organizations, DOJ, and the courts. They have used the law to make racial gerrymandering the dominating factor in redistricting, and “proportional representation” almost a legal mandate for states that want to avoid expensive and protracted litigation. | 1/27/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obama’s Groundhog Day Energy Promises: Obama proposes more of the same, but can’t get out of campaign mode. 1.26.12 | The president is clearly in campaign mode. In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, he said, “This country needs an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy — a strategy that’s cleaner, cheaper, and full of new jobs.” I applaud the sentiment. Unfortunately, sandwiched between his campaign speeches have been three painful years of failed policies. It’s like a real-world version of the movie Groundhog Day. Americans keep hearing the same promises for domestic energy production and green jobs, but then they wake up to political pandering and green scandals. This is the same administration that placed a moratorium on offshore oil drilling, costing the country up to 220,000 barrels of domestic oil per day in 2011, according to estimates from the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Agency. | 1/26/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Newt Beats Mitt on Energy Gingrich has revolutionary ideas, while Mitt enlists Bush-era bureaucrats. 1.26.12 | In the race for the Republican nomination, instead of focusing on where the front-runners differ on policy, most of the commentary has focused on their contrasting personalities, putative past malfeasances, campaign gaffes, debate performances, and other atmospherics. This is unfortunate, because in the critical area of energy policy, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney are as different as night and day. Newt Gingrich has been advancing the cause of American energy independence for years. In 2008, for example, he published a book entitled “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” and produced a movie, We Have the Power, making the same points. When oil prices soared above $130 per barrel that year, he used these materials to launch a nationwide petition campaign for expanded drilling, which gathered several million signatures and provided the GOP with one of its more compelling planks in the election. Since then, he has continued to campaign for expanded drilling, opening up the vehicle-fuel market to natural gas and methanol, and building the Keystone pipeline. Most important, he has openly called for the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the single largest obstacle to energy development (and other types of industrial growth) in the United States. | 1/26/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Can It, Nancy: Comedian Adam Carolla tells liberals to stop attacking the rich. 1.26.12 | ‘Being rich used to be cool in this country,” says Adam Carolla. The 47-year-old comedian remembers the good ol’ days, when “even if you couldn’t afford a BMW, you would buy one” to impress women. Now, “the guys who are getting laid the most are the ones with the skinny arms who are driving the Priuses.” It’s a strange world. But Carolla sees the humor in it; he exploits it, really, in his daily podcast, The Adam Carolla Show, which, with 60 million downloads, is the most-downloaded podcast in the world, according to Guinness World Records. And he points out the similarities between the rich and the poor in his new e-book, Rich Man, Poor Man, which debuted at number two on iTunes. | 1/26/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Haqqani Test: Pakistan’s treatment of its former ambassador has far-reaching consequences. 1.26.12 | For 65 years Pakistanis have been conducting one of modern history’s great experiments: Can a nation conceived as Islamic be free and democratic — the vision of Pakistan’s founding father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah? Or will Pakistan’s identity be defined by “forces that want us to live in fear — fear of external and internal enemies.” The words quoted above were spoken by Husain Haqqani to the Wall Street Journal’s Mira Sethi. Until November, Haqqani was Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington where he was a popular figure, a proud Pakistani patriot, and a liberal-democratic Muslim intellectual tirelessly making the case that Pakistan should be seen as an important ally deserving of respect, moral support, and material assistance. | 1/26/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Gingrich and Reagan: In the 1980s, the candidate repeatedly insulted the president. 1.25.12 | In the increasingly rough Republican campaign, no candidate has wrapped himself in the mantle of Ronald Reagan more often than Newt Gingrich. “I worked with President Reagan to change things in Washington,” “we helped defeat the Soviet empire,” and “I helped lead the effort to defeat Communism in the Congress” are typical claims by the former speaker of the House. The claims are misleading at best. As a new member of Congress in the Reagan years — and I was an assistant secretary of state — Mr. Gingrich voted with the president regularly, but equally often spewed insulting rhetoric at Reagan, his top aides, and his policies to defeat Communism. Gingrich was voluble and certain in predicting that Reagan’s policies would fail, and in all of this he was dead wrong. | 1/25/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Ron Paul, Weak on Entitlements? Don’t expect fiery attacks on Social Security from the libertarian candidate. 1.25.12 | Ron Paul used to be a resolute libertarian when it came to entitlements. During his 1988 presidential bid, he called them “unconstitutional” and said he wanted them gone. As recently as 2000 he signed on to a Republican Liberty Caucus statement holding that “the federal entitlement to Medicare should be abolished.” But this campaign season, Paul has moderated his tone. Oddly enough, he’s in some respects weaker on the issue than the leading Republicans. Take Paul’s official fiscal-reform plan, the “Plan to Restore America.” It has many merits — it eliminates five cabinet departments, slashes $1 trillion in spending, and purportedly will balance the budget in year three of his presidency with no tax increases. But its entitlement reforms merely tinker around the edges of the problem: He’d distribute funding for Medicaid and other welfare programs to the states in the form of block grants, keep the current Social Security system for retirees and near-retirees, and allow young people to opt out of Social Security if they want to. | 1/25/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Once More unto the Breach 1.25.12 | Just when it seemed the presidential campaign could not become odder, it has. If, as I wrote last week here, Mitt is an improbable savior for America, Newt Agonistes is an apparition that the mothers of America could use to frighten their children into eating their breakfast cereal. As theinventor last month (I doubt if anyone else would claim or even admit to it) of the Hegelian Newt — who would not win the nomination but could prevent Mitt from closing the deal and enable the Republican convention to draft their party’s best and strongest candidate — and as one who almost conceded last week, after looking at Mitt’s big lead in the South Carolina polls, that the anti-non-Mitt assassination squads had riddled Newt beyond recovery, so that he could not perform his Hegelian mission of being the supreme non-Mitt, I bow low indeed to the resurrected Newt. Even if it’s not durable, this is a comeback of Nixonian, if not Lazarene, proportions. Never mind that the attacks on Mitt’s business career were outrageous, or that Newt’s moral indignation over the criticism of some of his own whoppers by other candidates and the media was over the top, and that this level of internecine backbiting can only help the Democrats. Newt Gingrich’s perseverance in relaunching his campaign, which had been left for dead by almost everyone, is a Homeric achievement, and he capped it with a stirring presidential address on Saturday night. | 1/25/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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A Redistributive State of the Union: Obama should focus on creating wealth, not having the government spread it around. 1.25.1 | Shortly after President Obama was elected, NBC News interviewed a young woman from Detroit named Peggy Joseph. She explained that she was excited about Obama’s election because “I won’t have to worry about putting the gas in my car. I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage.” In the three years since, President Obama may not have actually paid her mortgage or filled up her tank, but judging from last night’s State of the Union address, he’s still trying. The president’s address — more campaign speech than policy platform — was long on calls for “fairness” and “opportunity,” but it really boiled down to the president’s vision of a society where government does everything for everyone — financed, of course, by higher taxes on “the rich,” who need to pay “their fair share.” | 1/25/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Draft Jeb Bush 1.24.12 | In the early months of the election year, a polarizing president with a lackluster approval rating bided his time as the opposition party unraveled. Its nominating fight dissolved into chaos as the establishment front-runner collapsed, and an insurgent with a talent for galvanizing his party’s base surged, despite persistent fears about his electoral appeal beyond the party’s hardcore. A protracted primary fight ensued, with the insurgent and the party’s resistant establishment eviscerating each other for months; by the time it ran its course, a president who seemed imminently beatable was ahead by double digits. The story ends with that same president winning by an historic margin over a party that rejected its recent past in favor of a dangerously uncertain future. This is a recounting of the 1972 election season. If it has the feel of a premonition, it’s because Republicans look dangerously on the verge of repeating the demolition derby that so weakened Democrats that year. Mitt Romney may be a better-constructed front-runner than Ed Muskie, but he is still a flawed contender whose candidacy seems at odds with his party’s mood and whose own half-answers have made his wealth seem shadowy and amoral. Newt Gingrich may be a far better-known quantity than the hapless George McGovern, but he still seems, like McGovern, more suited to the task of revolution than political persuasion. Republicans are, and should be, very worried. | 1/24/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Bain Capital’s Legacy in South Carolina 1.24.12 | Newt Gingrich’s comeback victory against Mitt Romney in South Carolina can be attributed to many things — Newt’s debate performances, Mitt’s tax returns, etc. But it all started when Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry tore into Mitt Romney’s involvement in Bain Capital. Romney’s main response to the Gingrich-Perry critique has been that it’s “kind of strange” to have to defend his private-sector record to Republican competitors. If Romney is to recover from his loss in the Palmetto State, however, he’s going to have to do a lot better than that. He’s going to have to defend his record as a private-equity investor specifically and substantively. There is no better place to start than with Bain Capital’s investments in South Carolina. It was there, after all, that Romney’s opponents portrayed him as a “vulture capitalist” who “looted” working-class livelihoods in a greedy quest for profit. Indeed, two Bain Capital–owned plants in South Carolina, a steel mill in Georgetown and a photo-album factory in Gaffney, ultimately closed down, resulting in several hundred layoffs. “If you’re a victim of Bain Capital’s downsizing,” said Rick Perry last week, “it’s the ultimate insult for Mitt Romney to come to South Carolina and tell you he feels your pain, because he caused it.” | 1/24/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Rome Redux: Detroit and the emergence of the American dictator 1.24.12 | Does Detroit’s fate foretell the end of American democracy? In becoming the first major American city to die before our eyes, Detroit is the prime case study of the destructiveness of the traditional liberal model of governance, public-sector-union rapacity, and the abandonment of any sense of civic responsibility by a governing elite that feasted like Roman senators while their city burned. And as in late republican Rome, a dictator may be appointed before long in Detroit; this has happened already in four bankrupt Michigan cities, including Flint (population: 102,000). The question is whether today’s dictators are a necessary means to save otherwise irredeemable places or whether they foreshadow an end to democracy in America’s dysfunctional states and cities (and perhaps in the country as a whole). | 1/24/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Don’t Ignore Electoral Fraud in Egypt 1.24.12 | When Egypt’s Lower House convened on January 23, Islamists held 360 out of its 498 seats, or 72 percent. This astounding figure, however, reflects less the country’s public opinion than it does a ploy by the ruling military leadership to remain in power. In a recent article (“Egypt’s Sham Election,” December 6) we argued that just as Anwar El-Sadat and Hosni Mubarak in the past “tactically empowered Islamists as a foil to gain Western support, arms, and money,” so do Mohamed Tantawi and his Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) “still play this tired old game.” | 1/24/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Why Newt? In an anti-Washington cycle, Gingrich ticks the boxes for many. 1.23.12 | In the week before the South Carolina primary, Newt Gingrich was averaging 22 percent in the polls, per Real Clear Politics, and trailing Mitt Romney by six points. But when the vote was tallied on Saturday, Gingrich had won 40 percent of the vote to Romney’s 28 percent. What had happened to give Gingrich such a gigantic boost? Talking to voters at Gingrich campaign events in the Palmetto State in the days before and the day of the primary, I heard plenty of enthusiasm about the two debates that preceded the vote — and for the feisty, take-no-prisoners persona that Gingrich projected on screen. But I also heard concerns about Romney and Rick Santorum, and a belief that Gingrich was not just a debater, but an experienced politician who had already proved that he could smash through Washington’s gridlock and achieve significant legislative victories. Take the case of Barbara Young, whom I met Saturday morning at Tommy’s Country Ham House in Greenville, S.C. This was the restaurant at which both Gingrich and Romney had scheduled simultaneous visits, and its parking lot was jammed with excited supporters of both candidates waving signs. (In the end, the two candidates did not visit at the same time.) Young, a housewife from Travelers Rest, S.C., was holding a Newt sign, but said she had been seriously considering Romney earlier in the cycle. Part of what appealed to her about Gingrich was his honesty about his past failings. “I’m just afraid that Mr. Romney — there’s going to be something brought up in the bigger campaign,” she said, adding she didn’t know exactly what could come out. Romney, she added, was “just a little too slick.” | 1/23/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Inside the Obamacare Spin Zone: Pay no attention to that iceberg ahead! 1.23.12 | Last week, the White House issued a new “study” on the supposed progress states have made in implementing the “health exchanges” that are central to constructing the Obamacare system. According to the administration’s spin, some 28 states are “on their way” toward establishing the exchanges, so everything is apparently well under control. In other words, nothing to worry about here. Full speed ahead! But is that really what’s going on here? Because, even if one were to accept the White House’s accounting (which one shouldn’t), that would mean that 22 states — roughly 40 percent of the country — are not “on their way” toward erecting the Obamacare exchanges. Isn’t that a problem? Further, upon closer inspection, it’s clear that many of the 28 states that are supposedly “on their way” really aren’t “on their way.” That’s just comical White House spin, in which the truly inconsequential — the acceptance of minor federal grant money, or the setting up of a committee to “study” the question — is elevated into a sure sign that Obamacare is a fait accompli. It’s ridiculous. | 1/23/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Piracy, Jobs, and Expression: The success of the American entertainment industry is at risk from infringement. 1.23.12 | Regarding the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), Mr. Reihan Salam writes: One gets the impression that a lucrative, politically influential industry is trying to get taxpayers to rescue it from its own incompetence and failure to offer compelling content in accessible formats. The case for bailing out Hollywood seems no more compelling to me than the case for bailing out the automotive or financial services industries. Mr. Salam doesn’t seem to take any notice of real people in real jobs doing real work, only to see the fruits of their labor taken without compensation. Who in Hollywood is asking for a bailout? SOPA seems to be dead — but something needs to be done to address the problem of online piracy. | 1/23/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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What the Sunshine State Will Illuminate 1.23.12 | Five key factors in what happened this weekend in the South Carolina primary, and five key factors in what will occur eight days from now in the Florida primary: LOOKING BACK One: The rapidity of the Romney collapse. Since the race began to take shape in early-to-mid 2011, Mitt Romney has been mocked for having a glass jaw. In both Iowa and New Hampshire, Romney and his backers could scoff at the claim, pointing out that he had (seemingly) won Iowa and overwhelmingly won New Hampshire, not to mention that polls showed him leading in South Carolina and Florida, as well as nationally. Of the first 40 Republican-primary polls released by any pollster, either nationwide or in any state in 2012, Mitt Romney led 38 of them. | 1/23/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Newt Was Right The presidency is incompatible with adherence to sharia. 1.20.12 | Newt Gingrich’s ardent admiration for Franklin Delano Roosevelt owes more to the latter’s unflinching wartime leadership than his welfare-state policy prescriptions. This week, though, the former Speaker is also undoubtedly in accord with FDR’s aphorism, “I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.” To his great credit, Newt has made an enemy of CAIR. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, that is. The nation’s best known cheerleader for radical Islam — or, as Fox News compliantly puts it, “the largest Muslim civil liberties group in the United States” — has issued a blistering press release that labels Gingrich “one of the nation’s worst promoters of anti-Muslim bigotry.” The occasion for this outburst is the imminent Republican primary in South Carolina. | 1/21/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Marine, the Nurse, and the Injustice 1.20.12 | The Manhattan district attorney is reported to be in plea-deal negotiations with Meredith Graves, the nurse who faces serious felony firearms charges after bringing her Tennessee-permitted .32-caliber pistol to Ground Zero, apparently unaware of the fact that New York declines to recognize out-of-state concealed-carry licenses, and that New York City declines to recognize even New York State permits. Ms. Graves, upon seeing the no-guns sign at the memorial, naïvely asked a security guard whether it would be possible to check in her pistol; this attempt to comply with the posted rules resulted in her arrest, and could well result in her being sent to prison — for years. If reports of a plea bargain are accurate, then District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. recognizes that justice would not be served by this outcome, which speaks well of his sense of prosecutorial discretion. It would speak even better of him if the case were to be dismissed entirely, along with the similar prosecution of former U.S. Marine Ryan Jerome, who was arrested under similar circumstances. | 1/20/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Gingrich Gains in South Carolina 1.20.12 | In South Carolina, getting to see, not just hear, Newt Gingrich is a challenge. Arriving late to his town hall at Bobby’s BBQ and unable to get past the porch, I can only hear his voice piped out. Dozens of people lean against railings; another handful contentedly sit on rocking chairs out on the porch, listening to Gingrich’s voice fall and rise as they rock back and forth. The room he’s in — a large, open one — is packed. It is the same story, just hours later, at a town hall held at Mutt’s BBQ: The room where Gingrich speaks is packed, and the overflow crowd — again, hearing Gingrich’s voice through speakers — is scattered throughout the rest of the restaurant. At Bobby’s, talking about the “energy” in the room, Gingrich emphasizes the importance of a win on Saturday. “If we carry Saturday,” he says. “I think I will become the nominee this fall.” | 1/20/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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A 2012 Reckoning Romney and Obama face the steep cliff. 1.19.12 | Though it is distressing to be enduring such a dismal election campaign, it is not unprecedented. As both parties prepare to spend a billion dollars either reelecting a president most Americans do not think deserves to be reelected, or a challenger most of his fellow Republicans don’t think can win (and as in most things, the public may well be right on both counts), it is easy to find the whole process discouraging. The liberal national media took dead aim at Mitt Romney when he emerged from the debacle of the 2008 McCain campaign as this year’s front-runner. Their great achievement has not been the serial assassinations of the non-Mitts, who were sitting ducks — Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Gingrich — but rather the deterrence of the people who could have generated real enthusiasm and might have been stronger candidates than Romney: Jeb Bush, Daniels, Ryan, Rubio, Christie, and Barbour. | 1/19/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Militant Islamism, Islamism, Islam: A senior U.S. military adviser attempts their “disaggregation” — not entirely succes | Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has described the Muslim Brotherhood as “secular.” Vice President Joseph Biden recently said that the Taliban “is not our enemy.” According to John Brennan, assistant to the president on counterterrorism, terrorists who proclaim they are motivated by religion should not be described using “religious terms.” Where do ideas such as these come from? The answer, in large measure, is from advisers — so perhaps it would be instructive to examine more closely what those advisers are actually saying. | 1/19/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Ron Paul: Wrong on the Taliban They protected al-Qaeda even at the cost of their own power. 1.19.12 | Ron Paul knows even less about the history of our enemies than he does about their proper treatment under the Constitution. He actually interrupted Monday night’s Republican candidates’ debate so he could interject the following: I would like to point out one thing about the Taliban. The Taliban used to be our allies when we were fighting the Russians. So Taliban are people who want — their main goal is to keep foreigners off their land. It’s the al-Qaeda — you can’t mix the two. The al-Qaeda want to come here to kill us. The Taliban just says, “We don’t want foreigners.” We need to understand that, or we can’t resolve this problem in the Middle East. We are going to spend a lot of lives and a lot of money for a long time to come. Everything in this statement is wrong. Everything. Let’s start with the most basic point. The Taliban most certainly were not “our allies when we were fighting the Russians.” How could they have been, considering that the Taliban did not exist at the time of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan? I won’t belabor the point that it was not the United States but the Afghan mujahadeen, with the help of non-Afghan Muslims (mostly Arab), who did the actual fighting against the Soviets. We did, after all, fuel the anti-Soviet jihad with billions of dollars in materiel and other assistance — through our intermediary, Pakistani intelligence, with the Saudis matching our aid dollar-for-dollar. Presumably, this is what Representative Paul was talking about. Nevertheless, while a number of the Taliban’s eventual founders were veterans of the anti-Soviet jihad, the fact is that the Taliban was not established as an organization until 1994. That is five years after the Soviet Union skulked out of Afghanistan and three years after it collapsed. | 1/19/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Scrub SOPA 1.19.12 | Two bills intended to help combat the online theft of intellectual property have stalled in Congress after Internet giants Google and Wikipedia protested and legislative sponsors reconsidered their support. Some Republicans, including Rep. Paul Ryan, had opposed the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act, and Rep. Eric Cantor saw to it that the bill was tabled. Conservative favorite Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida withdrew his support from the Senate’s companion legislation, the Protect Intellectual Property Act, and other sponsors subsequently withdrew. A great deal of hysteria attended the discussion of these bills, and their scope and reach were grossly exaggerated. But the bills are nonetheless defective pieces of legislation, and conservatives are right to oppose them. | 1/19/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Americans Elect: The Flaws of the Elite Center - A centrist third-party campaign doesn’t address the issues it should. 1.19 | This much should be said in defense of Americans Elect, the ambitious new venture to place a third party on the presidential ballot in 50 states: It at least defends the idea that there is a vibrant center remaining in American politics. That’s no small thing in a season where both parties have based their strategies on mobilizing the Left and Right respectively, and when the most energetic grassroots forces in the last several years — the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street — denigrate the center as feckless and dishonest. But virtues aside, Americans Elect is just a decently capitalized start-up that still hasn’t raised enough cash to compete in a California governor’s race, much less a nationwide election. It is ostensibly free from the interest-group matrix that dominates each party, but because its donors don’t have to be disclosed under federal tax law, it’s less transparent than any presidential campaign operation in the modern era. It has constructed a state-of-the-art formula for a virtual online convention to pick a nominee, but has apparently shopped its nomination to every retired or retiring self-described moderate who has done a few terms in the Senate. It is a movement of the “responsible center” whose online followers track Ron Paul — the avatar of a politics that stitches the extreme Right and extreme Left together — more than any other political figure. | 1/19/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The ‘Arab Spring’ as Winter Descends The movement had many causes, and democracy is not the only solution. 1.18.12 | Honest reflection on the past twelve months of discontent, as manifested in various forms of revolutionary zeal, rhetoric, and violence, exposes a solitary thread weaving through all the demonstrations and “rebel” and “opposition” movements that cycloned through the Middle East and North Africa: In each case, local issues were the engines of public mobilization. Whether discussing Mohammed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia, the tribal swaggering in Yemen, or demonstrators’ exploitation of opportunity (and Iranian money) in Bahrain, it is clear that the “Arab Spring” is a haphazard series of disconnected local events, united in time but varying greatly in motivation. This idea contrasts with the all-too-frequent invocation of a loose web of universal values to explain these political outbursts. The Arab Spring is a set of rebellions against current rulers, but it has never been about a regional application of new systems of governance, mechanisms of accountability, or even sources of legitimacy. While some of the more thoughtful political movements have heralded democratization as a rallying siren, their sentiments were neither widely endorsed nor convincingly pursued. | 1/18/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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GOP Should Heed Ron Paul: Republicans can’t afford to lose voters who agree with his small-government philosophy. 1.18.12 | The warnings are coming from the unlikeliest of places. First Sarah Palin tells Fox News that “the worst thing that the GOP establishment can do is marginalize Ron Paul and his supporters.” Then that sentiment was echoed by Sen. Jim DeMint, speaking on The Laura Ingraham Show, when he warned that it would be to the party’s detriment to ignore Paul and his supporters. DeMint even gave permission for Paul to use the senator’s voice in a radio ad. In the two Republican contests so far, Paul consistently won about 20 percent of the vote. Polls show that even in South Carolina, which is not considered hospitable territory for the Texas congressman, he is expected to take about one-sixth of the vote. It is very likely that he will reach the Republican convention with the second-highest number of delegates. Yet, large portions of the Republican party seem torn somewhere between reading him out of the party entirely and hoping that Paul and his supporters will quietly fade away. | 1/18/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Turkey: NATO’s ‘Open Prison’": The West needs to confront Turkey, its former ally. 1.18.12 | With Egypt’s Islamists scoring a crushing electoral victory over their secular opponents, governments and pundits alike are considering the likely denouement of the vaunted Arab Spring in the region’s largest country, Turkey. It is therefore worth noting some very troubling recent developments in the country that the Muslim Brotherhood and many in the West consistently tout as a successful “Islamist democracy” worth emulating. On January 5, Turkish prosecutors arrested Gen. Ilker Basbug — the commander, until 2010, of the Turkish Armed Forces appointed by prime minister Recep Erdogan’s government — for allegedly plotting terrorist activities against the state. Basbug now faces the same predicament as 300 other military officers who have languished in jail for years on dubious charges of conspiracy to overthrow the AKP (Justice and Development Party) government, without a single conviction to date. | 1/18/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Why the GOP Candidates Should Talk about Russia: President Obama hasn’t been nearly as successful as he claims. 1.18.12 | There’s a tendency to emphasize the obvious when critiquing President Obama’s foreign policy. Iran’s march toward nuclear weapons continues unchecked. The Israelis and Palestinians are no closer to finding a solution that would ensure Israel’s security and establish a functional, responsible Palestinian state. Meanwhile, a complete U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq has unleashed sectarian tensions, perhaps bringing into question Iraq’s viability as a unified state, and creating the conditions for an expansion of Iranian influence. But Obama’s Russia policy — the so-called “reset” — has gone largely unnoted. This is especially surprising given that the administration advertises the Russian reset as one of its principal foreign-policy triumphs. Most casual observers don’t seem to be aware that if the president were asked to rank his achievements in the realm of foreign relations, he would probably list an “improvement” in U.S.–Russia relations behind only Osama bin Laden’s death and perhaps the jumbled Libya operation. | 1/18/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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On Iran, Emulate TR: President Obama should replace his talk with decisive action. 1.17.12 | In the first week of 2012, President Obama finally approved tough sanctions on Iran’s central bank, aiming to cripple Iran’s oil trade and thwart its advanced efforts to possess a nuclear weapon. Iran’s armed-forces commander, Gen. Ataollah Salehi, threatened military action against the USS John C. Stennis, an aircraft carrier operating in international waters: “We warn this ship, which is considered a threat to us, not to come back . . . ” The next day, Iran’s parliament began to prepare a bill that would prohibit all foreign warships from using an international waterway, the Strait of Hormuz, to enter the Persian Gulf without the Iranian navy’s permission. Although recently validated analyses by the U.S. Navy confirm that Iran could not maintain a disruption of oil flows through the Strait for more than a few days, the same studies acknowledge that even a temporary loss of predictability in the movement of roughly 15 million barrels per day to the global market would send the price of crude to more than $200 a barrel for a prolonged period of time. Such a price increase could soon lead to renewed recession or the collapse of the global economy. In 1812, we went to war to preserve freedom of the seas. Two centuries later, faced with a modern threat of the same character, what should we do? | 1/17/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Ending the Palestinian ‘Right of Return’: The Israeli Supreme Court closes an oft-abused marriage loophole. 1.17.12 | Between 1967 and 1993, just a few hundred Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza won the right to live in Israel by marrying Israeli Arabs (who constitute nearly one-fifth of Israel’s population) and acquiring Israeli citizenship. Then the Oslo Accords offered a little-noted family-reunification provision that turned this trickle into a river: 137,000 residents of the Palestinian Authority (PA) moved between 1994 and 2002, some of them engaged in either sham or polygamous marriages. Israel has two major reasons to fear this uncontrolled immigration. First, it presents a security danger. Yuval Diskin, head of the Shin Bet security service, noted in 2005 that of 225 Israeli Arabs involved in terror against Israel, 25 of them, or 11 percent, had legally entered Israel through the family-unification provision. They went on to kill 19 Israelis and wound 83; most notoriously, Shadi Tubasi suicide-bombed Haifa’s Matza Restaurant in 2002 on behalf of Hamas, killing 15. Second, it serves as a stealth form of Palestinian “right of return,” thereby undermining the Jewish nature of Israel. Those 137,000 new citizens constitute about 2 percent of Israel’s population, not a small number. Yuval Steinitz, now the finance minister, in 2003 discerned in the PA encouragement for family reunification “a deliberate strategy” to increase the number of Palestinians in Israel and undermine its Jewish character. Ahmed Qurei, a top Palestinian negotiator, later confirmed this fear: “If Israel continues to reject our propositions regarding the borders [of a Palestinian state], we might demand Israeli citizenship.” | 1/17/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Obama: Incompetent or Evil? What we talk about when we talk about Romney 1.13.12 | The most acute division on the right — the one that will give Mitt Romney the most trouble — is not between moderates and hard-core right-wingers, between electability-minded pragmatists and ideologues, or between the Tea Party and the Republican establishment. It is between those Republicans who disagree with Barack Obama, believing his policies to be mistaken, and those who hate Barack Obama, believing him to be wicked. Mitt Romney is the candidate of the former, but is regarded with suspicion, or worse, by the latter. The former group of Republicans would be happy merely to win the presidential election, but the latter are after something more: a national repudiation of President Obama, of his governmental overreach, and of managerial progressivism mainly as practiced by Democrats but also as practiced by Republicans. It is unlikely that those seeking a national act of electoral penance for having elected Barack Obama are going to get what they are after. For one thing, the number of Americans who believe President Obama to be merely incompetent is far greater than the number of Americans who believe him to be, not to put too fine a point on it, evil. For another, that larger group of voters is, for once, probably right. | 1/13/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Florida GOP Forecast: A stormy, disappointing year for Republicans may extend into this fall. 1.13.12 | Florida has learned to wear its new responsibilities lightly. The other 49 states may be encouraged to stage rallies, drag parades down Main Street, befoul the air with campaign spots, and simulate the tension of last-minute GOTV drives, but when it comes to really deciding elections, Florida is prepared to do the heavy lifting. Over the last four presidential cycles, it’s been Clinton, Bush, Bush, and Obama, with Florida voters serving in each case as proxies for the rest of the country. The old saw should thus be retrofitted: As goes Florida, so goes the nation. Well then, how goes Florida these days? Just as it was elsewhere, Florida in 2010 was an annus mirabilis for Republicans. Almost everything that could go right went right. Last year was different — much different. It was only 15 months ago that the GOP elected a new governor, Rick Scott, a wealthy businessman bristling with resolve as a no-nonsense reformer. Florida sent to the U.S. Senate the estimable Marco Rubio, who glows with national possibility as a demographic game-changer. Republicans also elected a firecracker of an attorney general named Pam Bondi, picked up four new congressional seats, and retained large majorities in both chambers of the state legislature. The state GOP then installed as chairman David Bitner, a driven executive with a charter to crank up the party following the decay — or, as some would say, corruption — of his predecessor-but-one, Jim Greer. Finally, to make a great year insanely great, Florida was awarded two additional congressional seats following the 2010 census, both of them likely to be planted in Republican-friendly soil. To be a Florida Republican in 2010 ’twas perfect heav’n. | 1/13/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Crime of Leafleting: England’s war on “hate speech” ensnares five Muslims. 1.13.12 | In Britain, five Muslim men from the East Midlands city of Derby have been put on trial for the composition and distribution of leaflets. The literature — entitled “The Death Penalty?” — contends that gay sex is a sin that leads its practitioners directly to hell; it also calls for homosexuals to be given the death penalty and features on its front side a picture of a mannequin hanging from a noose. The prosecution is the first under a new “hate crime” law passed in March 2010 that makes it illegal to “stir up hatred on the grounds of sexual orientation.” In court, prosecution lawyer Bobbie Cheema told a jury comprising seven men and five women that the leaflets were “threatening, offensive, frightening, and nasty.” She is right; they are exactly that. But one has to ask the question: So what? “Offensive” they may be, “nasty” too, but there is a world of difference between material that is repugnant and upsets people — an inherently subjective designation — and acts that are physically harmful, and to which one can apply a proper legal objectivity. Note that the men are not being prosecuted for inciting violence; the leaflets call for the death penalty, not for vigilante attacks. | 1/12/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Muslims Attacked! But they’re reformers, and their attackers were militants, so who cares? 1.12.12 | It’s funny, in an Orwellian way, that in Europe there are now militant groups with such cutesy names as Sharia4Belgium and Sharia4Holland. Less funny, but perhaps more Orwellian, is this: Last month, the European Foundation for Democracy (EFD) held an event in Amsterdam featuring two speakers who favor liberalizing Islam. More than 20 members of these pro-sharia groups pushed their way in shouting “Allahu akbar!” They demanded the event be stopped, called the speakers apostates, spat on them, threw eggs at them, and threatened to kill them. Proud of these actions and apparently not overly concerned with legal consequences, they even made a YouTube video of their “protest.” Now here’s the least funny and most Orwellian part: Very few Europeans — very few journalists, politicians, members of the self-proclaimed Human Rights community, or Muslim organizations claiming to be moderate — have expressed outrage over this boot-stomping suppression of free speech in a city, country, and continent that claim to value freedom and tolerance. Imagine if the situation had been slightly different — if, say, a Muslim Brotherhood event had been violently disrupted by spitting, egg-throwing, death-threatening Christians or Jews. | 1/12/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The States Will Lose on Medicaid: And it’s a good thing, too. 1.12.12 | In its review of Obamacare’s constitutionality, the Supreme Court will examine two substantive parts of the law: the “individual mandate” that compels private citizens to purchase health insurance, and the statute’s massive expansion of Medicaid rolls. While the mandate question holds great constitutional interest, the outcome won’t greatly affect Obamacare’s operation one way or the other. The Medicaid question, in contrast, is crucial. The expanded program is expected to provide health coverage for an additional 16 million poor and near-poor, heretofore-uninsured individuals, at a cost of upwards of $500 billion between 2014 and 2019. In a brief filed earlier this week, the litigating states claim that the statute unduly “coerces” them into participating in the program, in violation of the constitutional federalism balance. Should they prevail, all of Obamacare will have to be renegotiated. That renegotiation, of course, is the holy grail of conservative agitation. However, the states won’t prevail on their Medicaid claim. Nor should they. Conservatives’ vocal support for the states’ opportunistic position is incoherent as a matter of both policy and federalism theory. | 1/12/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Nikki Haley’s Rough Start 1.12.12 | The race for the Republican presidential nomination has pivoted towards South Carolina’s January 21 primary. Because the state’s primary voters have selected the eventual GOP nominee in every contested White House race since 1980, every campaign is putting out a maximum effort. One of the aces that Mitt Romney believes he holds in the Palmetto State is the endorsement of Nikki Haley, the new 39-year-old governor who rocketed to political stardom last year by challenging the good-ol’-boy political network in the state. Fueled by endorsements from both Sarah Palin and Romney, Haley was able to marshal tea-party support to crush a sitting attorney general, a sitting congressman, and the state’s lieutenant governor, winning the GOP nomination and then the general election. | 1/12/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Z-Word 1.11.12 | A few weeks ago, a Labour MP in Britain, Paul Flynn, expressed displeasure with his country’s ambassador to Israel. “I do not normally fall for conspiracy theories,” he said, “but the ambassador has proclaimed himself to be a Zionist.” What Britain needs in Israel, according to Flynn, is “someone with roots in the U.K.” who “can’t be accused of having Jewish loyalty.” Britain’s ambassador to Israel, as you may have surmised, is a Jew, the first to serve in that capacity. He previously served in Pakistan and Iran (not Jewish states). As for Matthew Gould’s “roots in the U.K.,” they may not be as deep as Flynn’s, but they are semi-respectable: On one side, his great-grandparents were immigrants, and on the other, his grandparents. Speaking of respectability, Gould is a graduate of St. Paul’s School and Peterhouse, Cambridge. Not bad for a Semitic upstart. | 1/11/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Mr. Astorino Goes to Westchester: Slowly but surely, he’s turning the tide. 1.11.12 | What might cause the New York Times editorial board to find, in New York’s suburban Westchester County, an example of “a struggle for racial integration [that] is neither bygone nor exclusively Southern”? Why might “county leaders [be] stonewalling federal authorities over a longstanding housing desegregation case”? More or less, a Republican executive in a deep blue district. Over the past two years, county executive Rob Astorino has garnered widespread attention and praise for defending his county against racially tinged federal overreach in a mundane affordable-housing case, while also reducing the onerous costs of county government. | 1/11/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Gutting the Defense Budget: Since when does weakening your defenses deter a potential aggressor? 1.11.12 | In 2010, Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, waded into a domestic political debate he would have been well advised to avoid. By declaring that “Our national debt is our biggest national-security threat,” Admiral Mullen painted a bull’s-eye on the Pentagon for every shortsighted budget-cutter in Washington to aim at. Since Admiral Mullen’s comment, it has been nearly impossible for the Pentagon to mount any defense against even the most foolish and dangerous budget cuts. After all, if the organization responsible for securing America is declaring our national debt to be the number-one security threat, then it must, of course, lead the way in taking the cuts that will help reduce that threat. Last week we saw the outcome of Admiral Mullen’s misjudgment, when the president crossed the Potomac to announce his administration’s new strategic guidance to the Department of Defense. As the uniformed military salutes and does its best to carry out the new guidance, there are some things about it that all Americans must be made aware of. The most important is that this is not a strategy aimed at securing the country. Rather, it is designed for one purpose only: to cut hundreds of billions of dollars out of the defense budget — consequences be damned. | 1/11/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Romney’s Profitable Past 1.10.12 | Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, and Jon Huntsman seem to be engaged in a perverse contest to be the Republican presidential candidate to say the most asinine thing about Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital, the private-equity firm at which he served as chief executive, helped turn around a number of failing businesses, and, in the process, produced magnificent profits for his investors and for himself. Mitt Romney ran a firm that invested in struggling businesses, made money, and never asked for a bailout — and Romney’s rivals apparently expect Republican voters to regard that as a liability. | 1/10/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Income-Inequality Myth 1.10.12 | As we listen to President Obama, Occupy Wall Street, and much of the mainstream media working themselves into a lather over inequality in America, one thinks of “Harrison Bergeron,” the 1961 short story by Kurt Vonnegut that posited a society based on perfect equality, “not only equal before God and the law . . . equal every which way.” The government employed a “Handicapper General” to ensure that no one was smarter, more athletic, or more productive than anyone else. Beautiful people were forced to wear masks, athletic people had to carry weights, and intelligent people wore radios in their ears to interrupt their thoughts with loud noises. Yet for all the sound and fury — and beating drums in Zuccotti Park — almost everything that people presume about inequality in America is wrong. For example, nearly all reporting on income inequality in America has suggested that the incomes of the rich have been rising, while incomes for the rest of us have been stagnant or even declining. But that may represent a significant misreading of the data. | 1/10/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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GOP, What’s Your Hurry? Obama wants Republicans to give him an opponent as quickly as possible. 1.10.12 | Republicans do not need to nominate a candidate anytime soon. On the contrary, if they want to beat President Obama, they should take their time before settling on a nominee. In January of 2010, Harry Reid looked like a “dead man walking” politically. Fourteen percent of Nevadans were unemployed, and he was having a hard time getting above 43 percent in most polls. There was only one way he could win: destroy his Republican opponent before he or she ever got out of the blocks. | 1/10/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Romneycare and Obamacare: A distinction without a difference 1.10.12 | For the past year, Mitt Romney has been trying to distance himself from his record on health care, most notably from his signature health-care-reform law in Massachusetts, commonly referred to as “Romneycare.” Although the former Massachusetts governor would prefer to deny it, Romneycare shares many characteristics with Obamacare, the president’s unpopular overhaul of the national health-care system, and over the past five years, Romneycare has proven to have many of the same fatal design flaws that Obamacare has. | 1/10/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Rick Santorum, Conservative Stalwart 1.9.12 | Just as the conservative movement finally has the first real chance since Ronald Reagan to see one of its own — a “full-spectrum conservative,” as Rick Santorum now calls himself, picking up the phrase from Rep. Steve King (R., Iowa) — win the Republican presidential nomination, the purists emerge to say he’s somehow not conservative enough. The attempt to attach a “big-government conservative” label to Rick Santorum for some rare wanderings from the conservative reservation makes about as much sense as arguing that record-breaking Drew Brees of the Saints is a poor quarterback because he threw 14 interceptions this season. The reality is that Rick Santorum’s instincts and intellectual choices consistently tend toward freedom. | 1/9/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Rosenthal’s Amnesia: The Times columnist forgets how protesters treated LBJ, Nixon, Carter, Bush, . . . 1.9.12 | Lyndon Johnson was loathed enough that, in his final year in office, he dared not make a public appearance other than at a military base; it was commonplace for chanting crowds to gather and spray verbal obscenities at LBJ’s White House. Jimmy Carter’s presidency was a routine subject of cultural derision, some of it viciously aimed at his pre-teen daughter and his brother. Bill Clinton spawned so much hate that at least some of his adversaries spread strange rumors that he was connected to murder; then there was this thing called impeachment. George W. Bush inflamed some of his enemies enough that they carried signs crudely depicting him as a war criminal or a Hitler clone. I mention all these instances of ugliness directed at presidents because they are apparently unknown to Andrew Rosenthal, a New York Times columnist, who caused a stir last week by implying that strident opposition to Barack Obama is racially motivated, and that it’s all part of a racist tide building in advance of the November elections. In fairness, Rosenthal said nothing that is not an article of faith in many liberal circles, and he at least deserves credit for saying it in the light of day and naming names. However, it’s still a lazy smear that twists recent history and is worth refuting. | 1/9/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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OWS in Crisis: Occupying is so last year. 1.9.12 | Occupy Wall Street is wandering in the desert. This much was made clear on New Year’s Day. Sitting at the airport in London waiting for my flight back to America, I watched a stream of hysterical tweets from OWS’s Twitter account. They described the attempted “reoccupation” of New York City in terms usually reserved for genuine crises. It was 4 a.m. on the East Coast, and the occupiers were in the midst of an attempt to grab the first headlines of 2012 — ostensibly by encouraging their members to get themselves arrested, which is apparently the new metric of revolutionary success. When I landed at JFK, I expected to find all sorts of stories filling the Web and to head straight down to Zuccotti Park to see what had happened. After all, the disproportionate media coverage that OWS received — which was more in line with the protesters’ deluded sense of self-importance than commensurate with the public’s interest or the coherence of their aims — was its greatest achievement of 2011. But there was nothing, and nor was there much sign of OWS in New York. In the seven hours I had been out of touch with those on the ground, America’s media had gone wild with apathy and OWS had gone home. Evidently, occupying is so last year. | 1/6/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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America’s Disarmed Future: President Obama’s Pentagon cuts are indefensible. 1.6.12 | You have to give President Obama credit. It takes serious gall to tell the American military to its face that you are putting it on the road to second-class status. That’s exactly what our commander-in-chief did at the Pentagon yesterday, as he announced nearly half a trillion dollars in new spending cuts, after already chopping $480 billion during his first three years in office. He also set out plans for drastic reductions in our force size and continuing weapons programs, including the F-35 fighter — our last best hope for maintaining American dominance in the skies. Obama’s been trying to reassure Americans all this won’t endanger our national security or our strategic interests. Everyone in or out of uniform who’s free to speak knows better — and that with a full-scale war still underway we are standing on the brink of our weakest military posture since Jimmy Carter, and our smallest forces since before World War II. | 1/6/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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I Am Meredith Graves: When it comes to guns, the law-abiding get criminal treatment. 1.6.12 | I fully expect that Meredith Graves will do time for having had the bad sense to attempt to exercise certain God-given and unalienable rights at a place in which they were famously attacked. While I have enjoyed the back-and-forth between Robert VerBruggen and the others on the legal and constitutional questions of interstate concealed-carry protocols, I enjoy them the way I enjoy watching a tennis match: The skill involved in the volleys is impressive, but it is only a game. Our Second Amendment jurisprudence, like our First Amendment jurisprudence, seems to me to be simply an unprincipled political fight. We should heed the wisdom of Roy Cohn: “Don’t tell me what the law is, tell me who the judge is.” Rather than weigh in on the legal questions, let me offer another view: I am Meredith Graves. At least, I have found myself in a very similar situation, but had a very different outcome. | 1/6/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Santorum’s Tax Plan Doesn’t Add Up. 1.6.12 | Before the Iowa results rolled in, you could probably have counted on one hand the number of people who knew any of the details of Rick Santorum’s economic plan. But if the former senator is to repeat his success in Iowa elsewhere, he will have to convince voters that his economic policies are serious, could plausibly become law, and will revive our flagging economy. So far, each of the “non-Romneys” has failed miserably at that task, unless, of course, you are someone who is comforted by the fantasy that tax reform will produce 5 percent growth for a decade, so the numbers will add up. Can Santorum pull it off? The good news is that much of Santorum’s plan is centered on lowering taxes. The bad news is that much of his tax relief is either welfare in disguise or social engineering. After weighing the plusses and minuses, the conservative Tax Foundation gave his plan a D+. That score might be generous. | 1/6/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The Historian, the Diplomat, and the Spy: How the experts see the threat posed by Iran’s rulers. 1.5.12 | Iran is not our enemy. The regime that enriches itself while murdering, oppressing, and impoverishing ordinary Iranians; the regime that incites genocide against Israel, threatens its neighbors in the Persian Gulf, and vows to bring about a “world without America” — that is our enemy. This was one of the key points driven home by a trio of extraordinary individuals gathered for a dinner in Tel Aviv last week. At the table were Bernard Lewis, for my money the greatest living historian of the Middle East; Uri Lubrani, Israel’s envoy to Iran prior to the fall of the Shah and an advisor to leaders of the Jewish state ever since; and Meir Dagan, a retired paratrooper, commando, and general who was recruited in 2002 by then-prime minister Ariel Sharon to rebuild the Mossad as an intelligence agency “with a knife in its teeth.” (Dagan stepped down from that post in 2010 and has been increasingly outspoken ever since.) A small group of young American national-security professionals — from the Hill, the Defense Department, Homeland Security, even the D.C. police department — broke pita with them. None of the three minimizes how dire will be the consequences should Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s finger come to rest on a nuclear trigger. The Iranian president subscribes to an extremist school of Shia theology that, General Dagan explained, looks forward to an apocalyptic war that would “hasten the arrival of the Mahdi,” mankind’s ultimate savior. But he thinks Ahmadinejad and his associates are not as close as many analysts believe to acquiring a nuclear capability. “Two years to have such a weapon, in my estimation,” he said. | 1/5/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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2012: It’s On! A look ahead after Iowa 1.5.12 | We will have to wait to see whether Rick Santorum’s jump to a virtual dead heat with Mitt in Iowa is enough to bring out the anti-non-Mitt assassination squads. Santorum is an unusually fervent Roman Catholic for a presidential candidate and such an emergence would doubtless treat us all, one more time, to Gail Collins and Maureen Dowd of the New York Times dusting off their former little selves as intellectually abused Catholic choir girls and Garry Wills acolytes in dogmatic schism. Who better to impose the inverse auto-da-fé than the twin Zouave giggly snipers of the Times? For those of us who take an interest in the vagaries of the Roman Church, the virtuoso performances of Ms. Collins and Ms. Dowd as earnest, questing papists, almost heartbroken at the failure of the last two popes to undergo sex-change operations and turn the Church into a polling organization, and at other, less glaring illiberalities, are like the concluding number in Chicago of Catherene Zeta-Jones and Renée Zellweger. | 1/5/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Romney, Santorum, and Electability 1.5.12 | The best case for Mitt Romney’s nomination relates to the glee Democrats express whenever any other contender surges in the Republican contest. Virtually every Democrat I know salivated at the prospect of facing another Texas politico who tends to get tongue-tied under bright lights, and who once confused Social Security with Bernie Madoff’s nastiest work; or a former Speaker whose career is soaked in scandal and influence peddling, and who gets churlish under fire. Democrats also lit up e-mail chains on Tuesday night with zeal over Rick Santorum’s finish, and with snide observations about how the harder edges of his social conservatism will play with swing voters. Democrats don’t want Romney. But it is striking how much of the Romney fear factor is a reductionist, fairly lazy analysis based on the thinnest of factors. One element is the state of current polls, which generally put Romney a little ahead or a little behind Barack Obama, while no one else is close. However, early polls are gauzy, out-of-focus snapshots, and they illustrate mainly that the line of attack on Romney has largely been that he is insufficiently conservative, a charge that doesn’t exactly jar non-conservatives. Another basis for the fear is the notion that Romney has been vetted, has a largely error-free career, and has an executive polish that is not tarnished by votes in Washington. | 1/5/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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The U.S. and Biblical Israel 1.5.12 | By now, most Americans know that the “two-state solution” is no solution to the war that supremacist Muslims have been waging against the state of Israel since its rebirth in 1948. Most Americans in public life know it too, but in public, nearly all of them pay lip service to the idea of a Palestinian state. To do that plausibly, they have to studiously avoid any public mention of facts about the Palestinians that make it glaringly obvious that a Palestinian state is not in America’s national interest; and glaringly clear that empowering the Palestinians and the forces and ideas they represent is a self-destructive policy — a threat to our national security and a defeat for our values. | 1/5/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Iran’s Hormuz Threat: Expecting rationality from Ahmadinejad and the mullahs is not the best bet. 1.4.12 | For the past two weeks Iran has committed a sizable portion of its military to rehearsing how it would go about closing the Hormuz Strait. For the most part, strategic analysts yawned, and declared Iranian blustering to be an empty threat. Judging from the oil markets’ relatively muted reaction, it appears that most of the folks who bet big money on what happens in the Persian Gulf share this opinion. So what is this consensus based on? First and foremost, it relies on the belief that the Iranian leadership will make a number of rational calculations and decisions concerning their own and their country’s future. Personally, I am not sure of the wisdom of betting on the rationality of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and a few globally disconnected mullahs. As the “Iran is bluffing” crowd sees it, Iran does not the possess the military wherewithal to close the strait: disrupt traffic, yes; close it, no. Everyone also assumes that Iran’s leaders understand that closing the strait would mean that Iran’s own oil shipments would cease. As Iran’s oil exports account for a almost a fifth of its GDP and fund 60 percent of its national budget, even a temporary closing of the strait would be an economic catastrophe. Moreover, as Iran still relies on imports for much of its refined fuel, any closure of the strait would rapidly shut down huge segments of its non-oil economy. | 1/4/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
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Santorum’s Big-Government Conservatism 1.4.12 | Former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum’s surprisingly strong performance in last night’s Iowa caucus has thrust him into the spotlight as the latest potential conservative alternative to Mitt Romney. But Santorum’s success has come largely under the radar — at least until the last few days — driven by his near monomaniacal focus on Iowa and the state’s network of social-conservative evangelical voters. Now, however, Santorum’s record will come under much more intensive scrutiny — and it is a record that should give supporters of limited government considerable pause. In a general election, where the focus is almost certainly going to be on economic issues, it is questionable whether Santorum’s relentless focus on social issues will play well with independent voters, especially in the crucial suburbs. It was the loss of those suburbs, where voters tend to be socially moderate but economically conservative, in states such as Indiana, North Carolina, and Virginia, that gave those states to Obama in 2008. In the wake of the economic chaos, higher debt and taxes, and growth in government — not to mention a government takeover of health care — those voters have now turned against President Obama. The tea-party-inspired Republican victories of 2010 were a sign of that. | 1/4/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
| Total: 301 Episodes |
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