Commentary - 5/13/2008
Global Blowback
William F. Jasper, New American
Long before 9/11, Osama bin Laden’s terrorist activities around the world were being cited as a classic case of “blowback.” Quite obviously, the CIA’s support for bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and other radical Islamists in Afghanistan
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Kansas Plans to Shake Up State Court Judges
Phyllis Schlafly, Eagle Forum
Kansas will have a proposition on the ballot in November that could send shock waves into the tenure of state court judges. The voters in Johnson County, Kansas (suburban Kansas City) will vote on the right to elect their 10th judicial district court judges instead of
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Mandating Renewable Energy: It's Not Easy Being Green
Michael Heberling, The Freeman
Environmentalists abhor all fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, and petroleum) and nuclear energy. They collectively refer to this type of energy as “brown” power. Along with a bipartisan collection of Washington politicians, they instead advocate “green,” or “renewable,” power. This earth-friendly alternative energy includes: geo-thermal, hydroelectric, biomass, solar, and wind. While we all know that brown power has
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A PHONY "WAR ON SCIENCE"
National Center for Policy Analysis
There are few things in American politics more irrationally ideological, than the accusation that Republicans are conducting a war on science, says the Washington Post.
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Biofuels Debate Heats Up
William Yeatman and Ryan Radia, Competitive Enterprise Institute
As such, the Corn Belt owes much of its good fortune to congressional politics, rather than market forces. But in an age of the 24/7 news cycle and poll-driven policy, political support for ethanol is even more volatile than the price of commodities on the Chicago Board of Trade, and ethanol's political
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Professors Against the War on Terror
Bethany Stotts, Campus Report
Lustick, a practicing Jew, believes that the War on Terror is a self-inflicted disaster promoted by a supremacist, neoconservative cabal intent on recreating the Crusades and Holy American Empire at the expense of innocent Muslim youth who only “sympathize” with the plight of the Palestinians and their violent methods. He also implicitly defends Palestinian activists working with charities “linked to Hamas or Islamic Jihad” as victims of an America “in search of enemies and self-justification.”
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ATR Urges Opposition to Farm Bill, will Key Vote final passage of conference report.
Americans for Tax Reform
The bill is laden with subsidies, giveaways and budget gimmicks such that the true cost of the bill to taxpayers is not yet known, but the damage to them is. Higher food prices and higher levels of government spending--without benefit to average Americans--is all this bill will bring. Every Member of Congress should oppose this bill
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Nothing is Certain but Death and the FairTax
Mike S. Adams, Townhall
Adams: I assume you change your underwear every day?
SOFTY: Yes, what the hell does that have to do with it?
Adams: That means you’ve changed underwear 8036 times in the last 22 years.
SOFTY: And?
Adams: And the I.R.S. has changed the tax code 16,000 times in the last 22 years. They change the tax code twice as often as you change underwear. How long do you think a flat tax would remain flat?
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Too "Complex"?
Thomas Sowell, Townhall
If corporate "greed" is the explanation for high gasoline prices, why are the government's taxes not an even bigger sign of "greed" on the part of politicians-- since taxes add more to the price of gasoline than oil company profits do?
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BIRDS OF A FEATHER
Chuck Baldwin, News with Views
Question: Why would ultraliberals such as Soros and Kerry give so much money to a "conservative" Republican? Answer: They know that McCain is anything but a conservative. In fact, McCain is so liberal, he actually discussed becoming John Kerry's Vice Presidential running mate on the Democratic ticket in 2004.
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Wind ($23.37) v. Gas (25 Cents
Wall Street Journal
An even better way to tell the story is by how much taxpayer money is dispensed per unit of energy, so the costs are standardized. For electricity generation, the EIA concludes that solar energy is subsidized to the tune of $24.34 per megawatt hour, wind $23.37 and "clean coal" $29.81. By contrast, normal coal receives 44 cents, natural gas a mere quarter, hydroelectric about 67 cents and nuclear power $1.59.
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'People do stupid things - that's what spreads HIV'
Decca Aitkenhead,The Guardian
Western governments are spending mind-boggling sums treating HIV-positive patients in the developing world. But would they save more lives by concentrating on prevention? Decca Aitkenhead meets the outspoken expert who says that liberal fears of appearing judgmental are blinding us to the truth about the disease
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Global Warming Won’t Harm Great Tits
The Stiletto
Scientific inquiry depends upon continually challenging hypotheses – no scientific finding is supposed to be considered “fact.” Stop people from asking the questions or dismiss research that doesn’t fit into the consensus, and you stop scientific progress and go down blind alleys.
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The Government’s Jihad on Jihad/Still lookin’ for love in all the wrong places.
Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review
In Orwellian lockstep, DHS (like the FBI) now compels many of its agents to endure cultural sensitivity training designed to inculcate this relentlessly sunny view of Islam. A year ago, moreover, I caught the Transportation Safety Administration, a DHS agency, posting a press release from CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) on its official government website.
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Measure for Measure
Jonathan Gottschall, Boston Globe
But over the last decade or so, more and more literary scholars have agreed that the field has become moribund, aimless, and increasingly irrelevant to the concerns not only of the "outside world," but also to the world inside the ivory tower. Class enrollments and funding are down, morale is sagging, huge numbers of PhDs can't find jobs, and books languish unpublished or unpurchased because almost no one, not even other literary scholars, wants to read them.
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Green Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
Roger Bate, TCS Daily
There is little more annoying for a policy analyst than when two types of wrong-headedness conspire to undermine his case. Such is the case for policies driven by the pursuit of a pesticide free -- or at least pesticide diminished -- future, which will cause an increase in insect-borne disease. When this happens, as it surely will, climate alarmists will claim it's due to your greenhouse gas emissions, not their policies, and will press for more stringent controls.
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Anarchy in the Skies
Markus Bergstrom, von Mises Institute
The thought of abolishing all government regulation of the aviation sector and handing this task over to the free market is, to most people, as unthinkable and alien an idea as that of privatizing all police and courts. The general perception is that air
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U.S. Soldiers Learning Arabic at Wahhabist Islamic Saudi Academy
Connamon Stillwell
While this would sound fairly harmless on the surface (and Arabic language instruction is certainly needed in the U.S. military), it turns out this school has Wahhabi skeletons in its closet.
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The Cost and Futility of Trading Hot Air
Christopher Monckton, Science and Public Policy Institut
Leftist commentator, Alexander Cockburn, put it this way:
This turn to climate catastrophism is tied into the decline of the left, and the decline of the left’s optimistic vision of altering the economic nature of things through a political programme. The left has bought into environmental catastrophism because it thinks that if it can persuade the world that there is indeed a catastrophe, then somehow the emergency response will lead to positive developments in terms of social and environmental justice [liberal fascism].
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Objectivism, the Journal, and the Future: An Interview with Craig Biddle
Mark Da Cunha, Capitalism Magazine
It's the widespread notion that in order for there to be moral laws, there must be a moral law "maker." But as Ayn Rand demonstrated, and as I elaborate in Loving Life, moral principles are matters not of a "supernatural" being's will, but of the natural requirements of human life and happiness.
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From Dove to Hawk
Benny Morris, Newsweek
If the documents I studied 20 years ago painted Palestinians tragically, as the underdog, this record did the opposite. It has become clear to me that from its start the struggle against the Zionist enterprise wasn't merely a national conflict between two peoples over a piece of territory but also a religious crusade against an infidel usurper.
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WIND POWER WHIPS THROUGH TEXAS
National Center for Policy Analysis
When combined with the CO2 emitted and pollutants released in the manufacture and maintenance of wind towers and their associated infrastructure, substituting wind power for fossil fuels does little to reduce air pollution
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To the Readers of Little Green Footballs
Fjordman, The Brussels Journal
The Syndicalist Youth see themselves as a part of the "revolutionary Left" and champion a "stateless and classless" society. They are passionate supporters of the Palestinian intifada because it "shows the way for the millions of workers in the West and for us revolutionaries who are fighting in the heart" of "US-led imperialism."
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Labour Government Taxation Policy Is Proving Bad For Business
Brian Durrant, The Daily Reckoning
The public finances are in a mess. That's an extraordinarily imprudent feat, given the years of above-trend economic growth. Chancellor Darling was forced in his recent budget to raise planned borrowing for 2008-09 and the next three years by £32bn
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Global Warming or Insanity?
V. Paul Reynolds, Red Orbit
I am amazed that the fish and game clubs of a once freedom- loving and politically independent state like New Hampshire would get in lockstep and petition the federal government to regulate a problem that it has little control of in the first place. I suspect that some of your fish and game clubs jumped on this bandwagon for fear of appearing out of the mainstream of popular thought.
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Facing China in the multidimensional mess in Darfur
Austin Bay, Houston Chronicle
Motivated people who really want to have an effect on the ground in Darfur should call for reform of the entire United Nations. Huge job? Yes. One that challenges the "politically correct" and "transnational" (usually anti-American) elites who always demand "international action" and look to the United Nations as a great "force for good"?
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No more arbitrary land allocation, says new minister
Samwel Kumba, Daily Nation, Kenya
However, over the years, presidents have used this power to dish out land to politically correct groups or persons. This is even in instances where the beneficiaries do not need land other than for speculation. The exercise, therefore, became a mechanism for rewarding sycophants and people who were greedy.
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Bugged by the miracle of Obama
James Lewis, American Thinker
President A'jad of Iran just told the world on Israel's 60th birthday that the Jewish nation is nothing but "a stinking corpse" that is "on its way to annihilation." Sane human beings don't talk that way. Tehran is awash in deadly hatred; it inculcates it into toddlers, and for thirty years its legions of fanatics have been taught to chant "Death to America, Death to Israel!"
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Oily Chavez Oozes Beyond Venezuela
Investor's Business Daily
Oil spiked $4 Friday on new evidence of Venezuela's deep involvement in terrorism. There's no glossing over such news: Hugo Chavez intends to destabilize the region. The U.S. will need to take action
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