THE HEARTLAND OF ISLAM

Kafa’ah, equality in marriage, is used to establish that both sides are free from the “taint” of slave blood. The blood of Takruni, West African slaves, or Mawalid, slaves who gained their freedom by converting to Islam, is kept out of the Saudi master race through genealogical records that can be presented at need.

Challenges to the Kafa’ah of a marriage occur when tribal members uncover African descent in the husband or the wife after the marriage has already occurred. The racially inferior party is ordered to present “proof of equality” in the form of family trees and witnesses. If the couple is judged unequal, the Saudi Gazette reported, “Children’s custody is usually given to the ‘racially superior’ parent.”

These Saudi efforts at preventing their former slaves from intermarrying with them have only accelerated their incestuous inbreeding. In parts of Saudi Arabia, the percentage of marriages among blood relatives can go as high as 70%.

Saudi Arabia: The Middle East’s Real Apartheid State




MISTAKES WERE MADE

Patricia Hewitt was listed as a Communist sympathizer by MI5. Despite that she served in a number of cabinet positions, including as Secretary of State for Health under Blair in 2007. That means she ran the NHS which US Socialized Medicine advocates draw their inspiration from.

A National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) press release quoted in The Sun issued in Miss Hewitt’s sole name in Mach 1976 read: “NCCL proposes that the age of consent should be lowered to 14, with special provision for situations where the partners are close in age or where the consent of a child over ten can be proved.”

The document, which relates to an NCCL report on sexual law reformed continues: “The report argues that the crime of incest should be abolished.

Miss Hewitt, who was general secretary of the NCCL from 1974 to 1983 said: “I take responsibility for the mistakes we made."

Ex-Head of UK Socialized Medicine Claims Trying to Legalize Raping 10-Year-Olds was “Mistake”





FORWARD!

One of the list’s members defined a rogue state as “a fierce and dangerous animal, like an elephant, that separates itself from its herd,” and labeled the United States “the world’s number one rogue.” Another called former Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez “a great leader.” A third wrote a paper in which he praised the “particular model of socialism pioneered by the Soviet Union” and wrote;

"Only socialism can assure everyone material comfort, individual security, and a guaranteed opportunity to participate in productive labor, without some exploiting others. Only socialism can build a society based upon the better aspects of human nature, rather than its baser aspects, and finally enable people to become the real masters of their fate."

White House Cites Economist Who Praised “Model of Socialism Pioneered by the Soviet Union”





HELP EDUCATE A LIBERAL

More conservatives than liberals know that the earth revolves around the sun, that astrology isn’t real and that neither is man-made Global Warming.

In a new poll, the majority of Americans sensibly rejected the man-made Global Warming hoax, while only 46% continued to believe in the discredited theory.

Democrats, who in another poll were shown as 20% less likely than Republicans to know that the earth revolves around the sun, were also credulous enough to believe in man-made Global Warming by 66% to 25%.

An earlier poll had also shown that 49% of Democrats believed that astrology was scientific and only 48% knew that the earth revolves around the sun.

Majority of Americans Reject Myth of “Man-Made Global Warming”




Dartmouth Leftists Demand 47% Minority Quota for Post-Doctoral Students - “Departments that do not have womyn or people of color will be considered in crisis.”




GETTING THE POINT

Daniel is a moralist as well as a prose stylist. This becomes immediately apparent when you begin reading “Getting the Point,” a collection of some of his representative essays. These essays simmer with outrage—at a U.S. President who presides at once over the “transformation” and decline of our country; who has lied about everything from Obamacare to Benghazi; who proposes gun control while smiling at the shame of our homicidal cities where he and his parties reign supreme. (“Obama won every major city in the election except for Jacksonville and Salt Lake City,” Daniel writes. “The higher the death rate the bigger the victory.”)

...from the kind introduction to Getting Point, the Freedom Center's Best of 2013 ebook of my articles

*note. (Anyone who has donated to the Freedom Center and failed to get their copy of Getting the Point, please email me to let me know you're having problems.)





JUDGE SCHMUCK HAS SPOKEN

The great battle against the Innocence of Muslims trailer has finally been won thanks to a ruling by “Cow Sex” Chief Judge Kozinski.

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals got in trouble for putting up “a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal” on his website, but the moral judge drew the line at videos that offend Muslims writing an absurd opinion that has no basis in copyright law.

“But if shooting a single amateur film amounts to the regular business of filmmaking, every schmuck with a videocamera becomes a movie mogul,” Kozinski writes trying to claim that amateur filmmakers should have different rules than professional ones.

“Cow Sex” Pervert Judge Orders YouTube to Remove “Innocence of Muslims” Trailer




Daughter of Muslim Group Director Demands Ban of Man Who Called Her Che T-Shirt Terrorist





Anti-Israel Blogger Praised by Media Goes on Crazy Racist Rant Over Pro-Israel Black Woman





BILL CLINTON TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT OF UKRAINE

Has Bill really thought this analogy through? Ukraine was technically a case of a legislature tossing out a president after popular protests.

If America worked that way, Obama would have been out in 2010.

Clinton focuses a lot on the idea of the Ukranian president privatizing the White House and making off with the paintings.

That’s interesting considering what happened when the Clintons had to temporarily leave the White House.

President Clinton and his wife started shipping White House furniture to the Clintons’ newly purchased home in New York more than a year ago, despite questions at the time by the White House chief usher about whether they were entitled to remove the items.

Bill Clinton Urges Americans to be like the Ukrainians




“The Makeup Girls Suffered the Worst”: Piers Morgan’s Staff Speaks





DON'T BOGART THAT TOWNHOUSE

This is Spike Lee’s $32 million Manhattan townhouse bought with resentment money. Known as Hatch House, it was owned by William Vanderbilt, Gypsy Rose Lee and a host of other famous names.

Lee, who turns resentment into money faster than even Jesse Jackson and Don Rickles, returned from obscurity to complain about white people taking over Fort Greene and gentrifying it and whatnot.

Lee, who was addressing an audience at Pratt Institute during a Black History Month event on Tuesday night, became irate when an audience member said there were benefits to gentrification.

Nah. You can’t do that. You can’t just come in the neighborhood and start bogarting and say, like you’re motherfuckin’ Columbus and kill off the Native Americans.

“They just move in the neighborhood… You’ve got to have some respect you just can’t come in to where people have a culture… and you come in and knock {expletive} down and change because you’re here? Get out of here. You can’t do that.”

I’m sure the former residents of Brooklyn neighborhoods that went Ghetto felt the same way.

Spike Lee Lives in $32 Mil Manhattan Townhouse, Complains about White People Gentrifying Brooklyn




Premiums for 2/3 of Small Business Employees to Increase Under ObamaCare




MAJORITY VOTE WINS IS RACIST

In a recent article in The State newspaper, the 73 year old, seven-term congressman claims there are “barriers” in South Carolina that prevent black candidates from winning statewide office;

One of them, he said, is the state law that requires a candidate to win 50 percent plus one of the votes cast in a primary election.

Congressional Black Caucus Member Says Requiring Black Candidates to Win 50% of the Vote is Racist




WHY, OH WHY

An Arab farmer tells Edwin Black how social justice groups deliberately plant olives in a nature preserve and then stage confrontations for the cameras when the authorities tear up the trees.

“Why do they do it?” he asks rhetorically. “They are encouraged to make trouble.”

Sheikh Zaid al-Jabari of Hebron, a city that has become a favorite target of social justice activists looking to shoot viral videos targeting Israeli soldiers and residents, says, “Millions of dollars are given to these organizations, and they say it is for peace… instead of putting water on the fire, they are fanning the flames.”

Soros and Saudi Arabia Finance a Non-Profit War in Israel





RFK Jr: Locking Up Pro-Terrorist Drug Driving Sis Will Endanger Ugandan Gays



NOT AS SEEN IN THE GOOGLE DOODLE

“This generation that thinks it’s so hip could be the real lost generation,” Steinbeck said in one of his final interviews. “The proof will be in what they produce and what kind of next generation they produce. We thought we had it bad in the thirties, but I’ve never seen a time when the country was so confused as to where it’s headed.”

“It is historically true that a nation whose people take out more than they put in will collapse and disappear.”

Steinbeck: “Socialism is Just Another Form of Religion and Thus Delusional.”




Court of Appeals Allows Schools to Ban US Flag Shirts to Avoid Racist Mexican Violence





SEPARATION OF UNITARIAN CHURCH AND STATE

No one in this country should be sent to jail for a year because their religious beliefs prevent them from participating in a gay ceremony.

Protecting religious freedom is not Jim Crow. It’s the right of people to opt out of a religious ceremony whose premise their religion does not accept. The United States has Separation of Church and State, something that liberals insist upon. It ought to have a separation of Unitarian Church and State as well.

No, Arizona Protecting Religious Freedom is Not “Jim Crow”






No $$$ for Benghazi Security, but State Department Insures $200 Mil in “Art”




Obama’s Green Energy: Electricity Prices Increased 33%, Electricity Production Fell




THE LUNATIC HAS LANDED

If we’re going to treat basic human biology as a matter of self-identification, why not treat race, which is much more of a construct, the same way?

What exactly is to stop a white woman from self-identifying as black and demanding a promotion based on affirmative action?

But they can. All they have to do is self-identify as black females… and then finally everyone will be equal. And questioning anyone’s self-identification or economic policies will be considered a hate crime.

Ontario Gov Limits Promotion to Employees who “Self-Identify as Black Females”





DIALOGUE ISN'T A ONE WAY STREET

Anti-Israel activist Peter Beinart ,who apparently instigated the invite, wrote, “What does it say about the administrators at Ramaz that after immersing their high school students in a passionately Zionist environment for years and years, they lack the self-confidence to expose them to one lecture from a Palestinian?”

How many Reform or Conservative schools would invite a JDL member to provide a “balanced perspective” and “open dialogue”.

Are black colleges expected to host KKK members to get a balanced perspective? If not, then why is Ramaz supposed to host Rashid Khalidi?

Let’s put this balance nonsense to rest right now. The people calling for balance want to open up Jewish forums to anti-Jewish speakers like Khalidi, but they don’t reciprocate. This isn’t about a dialogue, it’s about a sustained assault on Israel.

Rashid Khalidi, Ramaz and Peter Beinart’s Double Standard - Ramaz Pro-Khalidi Petition Gains Support from Ahmadinejad, Arafat and Hitler





Syrian Refugee Blasts BDS Movement - "What would the detractors of such aid have a wounded Syrian do? Bleed to death."




GOOD RIDDANCE

Its top “Rabbi” for 2013 was Sharon Brous who delivered the inauguration prayer for Obama. Its no. 2 was David Saperstein, whom Newsweek described as “Obama’s Rabbi”.

Its no. 6 was Rick Jacobs, another of Obama’s inauguration “Rabbis” involved with the anti-Israel New Israel Fund.

Its No. 9 was Julie Schonfeld, the third Obama inauguration “Rabbi”.

Newsweek Finally Scrapping its Top 50 Leftist Rabbis List





ObamaCare May Put 40% of Home Health Care Providers Out of Business




FREAK OUT

Also the panicked freakout apparently consists of two mainstream Jewish institutions canceling appearances by liars and bigots. When Nation approved activists cause the cancellation of an event, they celebrate, and Michelle Goldberg calls it a victory, not a freakout.

When BDS hysteria leads to a popular musician canceling a tour in Israel because she doesn’t want to deal with death threats on Facebook, Goldberg calls that a win, not a loss. So why is the cancellation of two events involving anti-Jewish extremists considered a freakout by the activist Jewish community?

Goldberg mentions the Avi Goldwasser documentary taking on J Street, “The J Street Challenge: The Seductive Allure of Peace in Our Time” and claims it “smears the liberal pro-Israel, pro-peace group J Street as dupes of crazed anti-Semites.”

Smears, dupes, crazed. It sounds like Michelle Goldberg is the one panicking and freaking out.

Michelle Goldberg’s Anti-Israel Freakout




Samantha Power Delivers Lecture: “The War on Truth (and what we must do to win it)”




BOB ALREADY WON THE WAR

But the bigger question is why is so little of the hardware made in the United States? Reich was Labor Secretary during a huge outsourcing boom. Instead of more empty babble about income inequality, maybe he would like to discuss why so much manufacturing went overseas. Or maybe he would like to talk about NAFTA that allows Microsoft to assemble its hardware south of the border?

It was Reich’s boss, Bill Clinton who hold working people that the jobs weren’t coming back and that they needed to head to college. This is what an economy of college jobs looks like.

It was Bill Clinton who helped make the current nightmare possible with his pro-China economic policies. And the Clintons were big investors in outsourcing to India. If Robert Reich wants to know where those jobs went, he can ask his bosses, Bill and Hillary. Or he can ask himself.

Robert Reich Doesn’t Understand WhatsApp or the Internet




CATEGORIES DON'T MATTER

Terrorism however is a tactic. Al Qaeda is not conflicted about whether it’s a terrorist group the way that Western pundits are. It sees itself as a classic Jihadist fighting group which uses terrorism and more conventional armed warfare as ways to achieve its religious goals.

Whether Al Qaeda engages in terrorism or armed insurgency depends on context, not identity or philosophy. Al Qaeda doesn’t yet have the manpower and firepower to engage in an insurgency in the UK or the US, so it engages in terrorism. It does have the manpower in Iraq, Syria and Yemen so it engages in something closer to armed warfare.

The term terrorism carries special meaning for the West, but true Muslim armies don’t observe any human rights and commit atrocities regardless of whether they are setting off bombs while pretending to be civilians or moving in bands and beheading civilians. That’s the legacy of Mohammed’s murderous conquests.

Al Qaeda is a Terrorist Group… and a Guerrilla Group




THE ROUNDUP



BARUCH GOLDSTEIN

I knew Goldstein. He was my friend. He was also a doctor. A very good one. He treated both Arabs and Jews. His trauma treatment was legendary in Israeli medical circles. His on-the-spot diagnoses were, after weeks of hospital tests, found to be 100% on the mark.

He was also the only on-duty doctor in Kiryat Arba, just about 24 hours a day, seven days a week. During the first intifada, following drive-by shootings and terror attacks, he was frequently the first medical person at the scene. As such, he witnessed horrible sights. It is said that he would sleep at night with earphones in his ears, allowing him to hear reports of attacks, without disturbing his wife’s’ sleep.

When journalists ask me about our reaction to Baruch Goldstein, after replying, I inquire as to whether they ask my Arab neighbors what they think about Yahya Ayyash. About 99% of them don’t know who I’m talking about. Ayyash was nicknamed ‘the engineer.’ Bombs he assembled killed more than 70 Israelis in numerous terror attacks in the 1990s. He trained his successors to follow in his footsteps after his death at the hands of Israeli intelligence. At his funeral, attended by well over 100,000 people, Arafat called him a saint. (Two days after Goldstein’s attack, Yitzhak Rabin, in the Knesset, said, “I am ashamed to be a Jew.”)

How many Jews have committed such acts? Five, six, maybe seven. How many Arabs? Between 1989 and 2008, more than 800 Arab suicide-homicide killers have murdered Jews.

Who is the only one remembered? Baruch Goldstein.

 David Wilder: I Was Baruch Goldstein’s Friend





DON'T KILL THE KILLERS, KILL THE KIDS

Here in Brussels, Belgium news of the passage of a controversial law allowing young children to commit suicide was greeted with little surprise and few objections by the European Union. The EU has no qualms about allowing children as young as 10 or 11 to decide their lives are no longer worth living and that suicide by lethal injection is a humane option.

Ironically, children under the age of 18 are still not allowed to enter into legally binding contracts without a parent or guardian signature. They are not considered old enough to understand financial or other cases but now they will be able to decide whether to terminate their own life. They cannot marry, run for office, enlist in the service, drink a beer, smoke cigarettes, or any number of other activities on their own, but they can decide that lethal injection is right for them.

The EU prevents execution and torture in its constitution and has passed a boycott against states who produce one of the main drugs used to give lethal injections. Pentobarbital was commonly used as part of a three drug cocktail for lethal injection cases in the United States. Since there are no US pharmaceutical companies who still produce the drug, prisons had to look outside the US for purchase options. In 2011, the EU placed a ban on the sale of Pentobarbital and effectively ended the former lethal combination from being used for capital punishment.

EU OK’s lethal injections for Children but objects to US Capital Punishment




FREEDOM OF CHOICE

The “I shouldn’t have to bow to their religious/moral/fashion views” idea doesn’t fly either, because no 5 star rated restaurant is going to seat me in torn up jeans and flip flops because “I shouldn’t have to wear a dress to eat a 5 star meal.”

They don’t care, that’s their rule and I can go screw myself (that’s an approximate translation of the facial expression the maître d’ would have on his face if I said that) if I think they are going to change because I don’t think their rule is fair.

It’s their business and they don’t want my money enough to change the type of clientele they cater to. There is an all night diner down the street that would take my money if I insisted on eating with a paper bag on my head.

Different strokes for different folks as they say.

Now I might be annoyed at the rules in any of the establishments I mentioned, but I’m hardly going to sue them over it, because, after all, they have the right to refuse service if they want too. It’s their business and I don’t have a right to their service, just because I have money.

from The Snark Who Hunts Back




JUDENRAT STREET

Ben-Ami is up front. He wishes to dismantle organized Jewry entirely and replace all structures with J Street. And J Street wants America to dictate to Israel the terms of surrender. Ben-Ami comforts the cowardly and the assimilated, he supports liberalism as if it were orthodox Judaism; cleverly, he says “we make a mistake when we tell (our) children that they have to check their Jewish values at the door of Zionism”—as if Zionism is not a Jewish value or as if it opposes Jewish values.

That's from Dr. Chesler's review of the new documentary the J Street Challenge.





Finally, Primordial Slack unveils Obama's new flag of the People's Socialist Republic of Obamerica

60 years ago an uprising in the Ukraine would have been met with machine guns fired from behind the armor of Communist ideology. With the fall of the USSR, Russia didn’t have much of an ideology to deploy against Ukrainian nationalism. It accused the protesters of being fascists, an accusation with some truth to it, but not one that anyone will take seriously coming from another fascist regime.

Putin tried to replace Communism’s international agents of influence by cobbling together a crude
network of leftist anti-imperialists, paleo-libertarians and assorted conspiracy theorists and exploited it with classic tradecraft. Assange and Snowden showed how damaging this could be to the United States, but Assange, Snowden, Greenwald and all the rest of the gang couldn’t keep the Ukraine in Putin’s hands.

The anti-government sentiments projected by RT can bring in useful idiots, Assange and Snowden are evidence of that, but they lack Communism’s power to influence millions through the medium of a comprehensive ideology whose followers were willing to lie and die for it in unending numbers.

If Russia had set out to suppress an uprising 60 years ago, its talking points would have been on the lips and printing presses of innumerable writers and papers that would have immediately constructed rationalizations and denounced the protesters. Americans would have been told that we don’t understand what is going on there, that the protesters aren’t saints and that angering the USSR would destabilize the global situation and lead to war.

To see what that would look like today, just compare and contrast the coverage of protests in Ukraine and Venezuela. Putin destroyed whatever goodwill he had left from the left by coming out against gay rights. Maduro however is a Socialist in good standing. The media coverage of Venezuela and the Ukraine reflect that ideological disparity.

Russia was able to call on the remnants of its old leftist contacts in Syria, but they made little if any difference. The number of those people who supported it in the Ukraine is even smaller. Russia and China traded Communism for economic productivity, but in the process they lost the ability to project their power through the network of ideological alliances that once bound the left together.

While Russia and China have moved away from the left, the United States has moved toward the left, but Obama is no more able to rally the left internationally than Putin or Xi Jinping. Obama badly frayed traditional alliances with American allies and replaced them with nothing except empty speeches.

Russia and China have imperial visions built on a jumble of nationalism, exceptionalism and internal instability that they have a history of resolving through brutal repression or external conflict. Obama is operating on a jumble of leftist paradigms and existing pragmatic approaches that he inherited from prior administrations. The two often clash, as they did in Syria, because they are not compatible.

Obama’s foreign policy is a Jekyll and Hyde monster with a split personality of Clintonites trying to steer it away from the rocks and leftist extremists with more ideology than experience from the Center for American Progress aiming for the rocks. Neither side really knows what it’s doing and instead of picking a side, the man at the top is often willing to sit back and let them fight it out while the Washington and New York papers decide which side is right.

That’s not a good way to run a banana republic consisting of two shacks and a donkey. It’s a truly terrible way to run a world power.

Obama and the left don’t want America to be a world power. The old liberal consensus was that American power should be used to intervene in world conflicts. American power might have been abused in the past, but it would be a means to a progressive end. The new leftist consensus trashes even that much rejecting American power as a means to a progressive end because of its unilateral nature.

American power contains the potential for unilateralism. The only way to prevent the United States from acting outside a consensus is to dismantle its military and its influence. This is the aim that Obama has pursued over the years. The former community organizer did not do this in a consistent fashion, recognizing that an immediate implosion would be disastrous, but he worked toward it step by step.

The Post-American country no longer has the influence to allow Obama to do much of anything abroad, but he considers it a worthwhile trade, giving up power so that some nebulous anti-American consensus will take up that power instead.

When liberals dreamed of handing over American power to the United Nations or some international governing body, they were at least pursuing a logical plan for enforcing their values worldwide. The dream of that international governing body is long dead. Not even Samantha Power seriously believes that the United Nations is capable of doing what she would like it to.

The abandonment of power is instead the deliberate creation of a power vacuum. The United Nations with its American roots is also tainted. The neo-liberal system that leftists denounce is too embedded in international organizations to transfer power upward. Instead they transfer power downward.

Obama’s post-American agenda is the mirror image of the anti-government ideology that Russian agents of influence project into the West. Both agree that Western power is the problem. And both are not enough to command international influence in any meaningful way. Ideologies that exist in the negative space do not inspire people. They only usher in an age of apathy, cynicism and despair.

The only real difference between Barack Obama and Julian Assange is that the former was given the custody of a great power whose power he distrusts even as he uses it and the latter wasn’t.

The left is motivated by the deconstruction and destruction of every institution in the West, but it has nothing to replace them with except an alliance of likeminded activists. Its rainbow coalitions have become wrecking crews taking the mallet a new institution every day and it is this destructiveness that provides them with their solidarity. The left keeps planting bombs for the sake of planting more bombs, conducting a long march through the institutions in order to destroy them and then doing the same thing again, building institutions whose only purpose is the long term destruction of the West. Its agenda on everything from culture to race treats the destruction of that which is as a liberation.

This has been the traditional cycle of the left from cultural vandalism to a political tyranny that purges the vandals and slowly hardens into another China or Russia as its ideological rulers become the feudal overlords of a formerly Socialist republic. Instead of the caterpillars becoming butterflies, the butterflies, flighty and flashy, become caterpillars, stodgy unremarkable tunnelers, petty tyrants who look the same.

The destructiveness of the left is what allows it to make common cause with Putin or Islam, but that common cause does not extend beyond the immediate act of institutional destruction.

The Islamic movements are the prime beneficiaries of the collapse of the Pax Americana just as they were the prime beneficiaries of the collapse of the Pax Romana. Nomads, merchants and raiders can survive and exploit the fall of an empire better than anyone else, assembling shadow armies, moving vast sums of money around through invisible networks built on trust and invading other territories on short notice as no standing army could do.

The great powers have thought of Islamic raiders, in their various incarnations as corsairs, terrorists, bandits and madmen, as weapons to be used against each other. That is still the way that they think today, repressing domestic Muslims and arming foreign Muslims, encouraging Islamic terrorism against their rivals and striking back when it’s directed at them.

Like Russia and the China, the United States is eager to include Muslims in its consensus, without recognizing that they have entirely different agendas of their own. And it’s not as if our consensus is especially compelling now that we have jettisoned everything except the international projection of the left’s politics of resentment.

The Russians offer Muslims a place in Eurasia and China offers them a role in its People’s Republic; neither offer is particularly compelling. Russia and China will always exist for the purposes of the majority group and its elites and neither particularly bothers to disguise it. That is why few of Russia’s neighbors, Christian or Muslim, are especially enamored of the idea of recreating the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as the Eurasian Union, but without the Communism.

But paradoxically a post-American order has even less to offer them. Russia and China stand for something even if it is only their own power. The Post-American order stands for nothing except its own dismantling. That is why Obama sets red lines that he won’t enforce and issues threats that he doesn’t mean.

The only thing less appealing than selfishness is the complete absence of self. The only thing less appealing than empire is an anti-imperialism that so thoroughly negates its own power that it has no influence and no reason to exist.

Post-American America exists to destroy itself. Until that changes, it has nothing to offer the world except membership in a suicide pact.

The liberal defenders of government power attack concentrations of wealth, but in the true concentration of wealth is not found in the hands of a few billionaires, but in the hands of the government.

The editorialists talk about income inequality and the 1 percent, but they focus on individuals rather than institutions,  and it is the concentration of wealth and power in institutions that threaten civil liberties.

The top 10 wealthiest men and women in America barely have 250 billion dollars between them. Federal budgets run into the trillions of dollars, and the national debt approaches 15 trillion dollars. And that's not taking into account state budgets. Even Rhode Island, the smallest state in the union, with a population of barely a million, has a multi-billion dollar budget.

As the 10th richest man in America, Michael Bloomberg wields a personal fortune of a mere 18 billion dollars, but as the Mayor of the City of New York, he disposed of an annual budget of 63 billion dollars that was three times his own net worth. Spending so much money would wipe out the net worth of any billionaire in America.

That is the difference between the wealth wielded by the 10th wealthiest man in America, and the mayor of a single city. And that is the real concentration of wealth. Not in the hands of individuals, but at every level of government, from the municipal to the state houses to the White House.

Monopolistic power in 20th century America lies not in the hands of a few industrialists, but in the massive monopolistic trust of government, and its network of unions, non-profits, lobbyists and SuperPAC's. The railroads are broken up, offshore drilling is banned, coal mining is in trouble and Ma Bell has a thousand quarreling stepchildren-- now government is the real big business.

The 2008 presidential campaign cost 5.3 billion dollars. Another 1.5 billion for the House and the Senate. And that's not counting another half a billion from the 527's and even shadier fundraising by shadowy political organizations. In 2012, the price tag went up to 6.3 billion with 1.7 billion for the House and Senate.

But that's a small investment considering that the political players and their union and corporate allies were spending billions to get their hands on trillions.

Do you know of any company in America where for a few billion, you could become the CEO, run up trillion dollar deficits and parcel out billions to your friends who will then pay the money back to you so you can take over the company again four years later without the shareholders being able to force you out or have you arrested?

This company will allow you to indulge yourself, travel anywhere at company expense, live the good life, and only work when you feel like it. It will legally indemnify you against all shareholder lawsuits, while allowing you to dispose not only of their investments, but of their personal property and that of their children while obligating them to a debt slavery that will run for generations?

There is only one such corporation. It's the United States Government.

Under an ideological cloak of darkness, politicians act as if they can do anything they want. Public outrage is met with alarmist news stories about the dangers of violence, as if this were the reign of the Bourbon kings,  not a democratic republic whose right of protest is as sacrosanct as its flag and its seal. Instead the republic is dominated by political trusts, party machines, media cartels, public sector unions and a million vermin who have sucked the cow dry and are starting in on its tender meat.

Consider that in 2008, Obama pulled in 20 million from the health care industry. (McCain took in 7 million). Afterward, he conspired to pass a law which mandated that every American be forced to buy health insurance from the industry. There is no definite figure for how much money the industry will make from this, but it will be a whole lot more than the mere 20 million they invested in him. During the days of the robber barons, the government never mandated that everyone must buy a product from them. Private companies might have contrived such control over the marketplace, but the IRS was never enlisted to collect their bills for them.


How much money has flowed from the Obama Administration to its friends in the private sector in just the last year alone and how much of it was used to secure jobs for its allied unions, which they then kicked back to liberal politicians running for office.

Entire states are going bankrupt because of political trusts formed by politicians and public sector unions which pass money back and forth to each other in the plain sight of the taxpayers they are robbing blind.

This is not merely a concentration of wealth, but a ruthless concentration of power. The real money isn't coming from that top 1 percent, it's coming from unions, lobbies and companies which use political power to extract public money.

And that money goes to the party which is so determined to keep on extracting that money no matter what it takes.

The big government left keeps playing the class warfare card, but even the worst company in the world isn't as larcenously extortionate as the worst politician. Some of the greediest and abusive companies were either created by the government or operate in close partnership with it.

HMO's were created by the government. Banks fed off Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's subsidized mortgages like vultures. Do we really need to go into insurance companies, defense contractors or Sallie Mae. AT&T is considered one of the worst companies in America, and it's also one of the biggest political donors. Is there a connection there? Only that companies close to the government don't need to worry as much about what the public thinks of them.

Hate the airlines? They've both been overregulated and subsidized into incompetence. Airlines have been bailed out and protected from competition too many ways to count, because of the unions riding on their coattails.

And those unions are destroying airline after airline, while the non-union airlines prosper.

American business is looking a lot like Soviet business did, full of companies with contempt for their customers, and an unctuous smile for the government. They know where the money is coming from. And in an era of cut throat price competition, and high labor and regulation costs, it's just easier for them to extract the public's money by going over their heads to the politicians. Don't feel like paying for any of it? It's no longer a free market in which individuals make economic choices, but a collective economy with government fixing prices and then turning around and taking more of your money to pay back the companies to cover the difference. That's how ObamaCare works.

The new trusts operate out of Washington D.C. for the benefit of the public. Much like the food markets of Venezuela or the hospitals of Cuba. The money goes back and forth, lobbyists, unions, politicians, consultants, contractors, activists and lunatics huddling together and passing bills that no one has read. And still the defenders of big government treat any calls for reform as a conspiracy of the rich. Yet the two richest men in America, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, were holding fundraisers for Obama. And the tenth richest man in America runs one of the biggest bastions of liberalism. And number 14 on the list, George Soros, is the left's sugar daddy.

This isn't a battle of billionaires. Mere money no longer means what it once did. The billionaire is a dinosaur. The wealthiest men in America can't wait to get rid of their holdings. In the free market, money made you king. But under socialism, money just buys you access and leverage. The leverage to force every man, woman and child to buy your product.

The real concentration of wealth is no longer among men, but among institutions. Like electricity passing along copper wire, it jumps among unions, political machines, companies, non-profits and back again. Its function is to provide the motive power for the great beast of government to grind on. And the American taxpayer is left lying flat in the street.

The working class in the United States has no better champion than Barack Obama. Like most champions of the working class, he has never actually worked at a real job and instead divided his time between academia, non-profits and politics which explains his current work ethic in which he tries to get a speech in between every two vacations..

The progressive law professors, who are currently the only thing standing between the working class and the abyss, at least according to other progressive professors, not only haven’t worked for a living, but don't know what working for a living entails and don't even understand the concept. Other things that they don't understand include personal responsibility, consequences, elementary arithmetic and human free will.

That last one never fails to throw them for a loop. No sooner do they pass some comprehensive plan intended to ameliorate a terrible problem then they discover that the working people have made a hash out of it. But they never despair because they are certain that there is no progressive solution that cannot be fixed by an even more comprehensive progressive solution.

ObamaCare isn't working? Go Single Payer? There are no more doctors? Outlaw illness. People are still getting sick? Fine them for sabotaging progressive medicine. Like the island whose colonial overlords tried to solve their rat problem by dropping snakes only to discover that it now had a snake problem, progressives always have solutions. The trouble is that they never understand the problem.

The protectors of the working class, currently presiding over a country where over 90 million adults are not in the workforce, keep dropping snakes on the island without ever figuring out why so many people are dying of snakebites. B.O. or Before Obama, 63 percent of working age Americans had jobs. Today it's 58 percent. And Obama is trying to see if he can drop the country below the 50 mark.

The latest snake that Obama is trying to drop on the island is a minimum wage hike. A minimum wage hike sounds like a great idea to a progressive professor who, like Marie Antoinette, wonders why the poor can't just eat cake during a bread shortage. If the poor aren't making enough money, just raise their salaries. If their salaries go up, they'll have more money and the government will be able to spend more money creating jobs that it can then tax using a magic perpetual motion machine.

The first casualty of the minimum wage hike will be some 500,000 jobs. While just 19 percent of the minimum wage increase will go to those below the poverty line, the same isn't true of that 500,000. The most disposable workers also tend to be the poorest in the new economy. They are the first ones out the door when a small business comes up against the ObamaCare employer mandate or a minimum wage hike. It doesn't take much to push them out from full time to part time and from part time to the unemployment line and from the unemployment line to permanent unemployment.

Purge six figures worth of workers and suddenly income inequality becomes an even bigger problem that the Harvard and Yale Friends of the Working Class can use to run for reelection. It doesn't occur to progressive professors slash community organizers that the living standard of the poor is not defined by an infographic comparing their income to Bill Gates' spectacles budget or George Soros' villain lair complete with lasers and piranhas.

It isn't even defined by their salary, but by the buying power of that salary.

A salary is just a number. It was once possible to buy a meal for a dime and a politician for a hundred dollars. Today dinner with a politician will cost you that hundred and the politician may cost you a hundred thousand.

The businesses that minimum wage workers depend on are peopled with other minimum wage workers. Even assuming that the pay hike were employment neutral, which it most certainly is not, it would rebalance once the businesses they patronize pass on the pay hike as a price hike. And then before you know it everyone is making more money that still buys about the same amount that their old paychecks did.

Income inequality is class warfare, a subject of interest to Marxist professors and sober news anchors who are deeply concerned about the words scrolling across their teleprompters, but of very little relevance to the price of a loaf of bread, a gallon of milk and a pound of ground beef. The prices of basic staples have risen sharply under the Friend of the Working Class in Washington. While he dines on faux Wagyu beef at White House dinners, the working class victims of his class warfare are standing in Aisle 9 trying to assemble a puzzle that consists of their upcoming paycheck, a Payday loan and a grocery list.

The woman weighting a can of beans in one hand and her pocketbook in the other trying to decide what she can afford to take home doesn't need income equality with a Harvard Law prof. What she needs a living standard that will allow her to afford what working Americans used to be able to afford. A minimum wage hike is a blunt instrument that looks good until it puts her out of a job or until she comes back to Aisle 9 and sees that the price hikes match her new paycheck.

Progressives don't particularly care about the woman in Aisle 9. They eat up hard luck stories on NPR and CNN the way that their great-grandparents marveled at hunger in Africa because of the way that it makes them feel, not because they understand how those people live or care about them. They use them to feel charitable and to win elections. Each progressive solution makes life worse in Aisle 9, but they never visit Aisle 9. If they did, they would outlaw the other half of the products in it that they haven't already outlawed through various contrived legalisms.

In the Venezuelan Aisle 9, mobs are fighting over powdered milk in government stores in a country that has 85 percent of the oil reserves in the region. Everyone is entitled to powdered milk and other price controlled staples. But being entitled to something doesn't mean that you can get it. Not until the government seizes control of the entire production process of powdered milk and then when that is done, no one will ever drink powdered milk again.

The path to Venezuela's Aisle 9 is surprisingly similar to America's Aisle 9. It began with a series of blunt force measures that were meant to address the standard of living problem in a country with runaway inflation. Governments can raise wages or lower food prices, but they can't enforce the availability of food or jobs and they can't control how the working class will work around the consequences of foodless government supermarkets and minimum wage jobs that have been priced out of the marketplace.

Venezuela's Friend of the Working Class, Hugo Chavez, kicked the golden bucket with an estimated net worth of 2 billion dollars. The Friends of the Working Class are also doing comfortably well in D.C. where it pays to be an expert on poverty and an advocate for helping the working class by adding 12 million illegal aliens to the job market with illegal alien amnesty, shutting down jobs with environmental regulations and freeing the people still working from that dreaded "job lock".

For the Washington Friends of the Working Class drifting from one cocktail party and fundraising
dinner to another, the minimum wage hike is their latest gimmick for winning in 2016. They are as ignorant of the lives of the waiters who bring them their Wagyu beef and the vagaries of a working class budget as they are of Ancient Sanskrit or the geography of the moon.

The working class that they preach about is an unreal abstract to them that is reducible to their party, their movement and their agenda. Their legislation is blessed by their empathy. It does not occur to them that their programs can backfire and that unintended consequences follow from confusing magical thinking with hard numbers. In Aisle 9, things are simple and inflexible, but in politics and academia everything is subjective.

Weighing a can of food in your hands that you need but cannot afford wonderfully focuses the mind on the real, but at the cocktail parties of the Friends of the Working Class, everything is wonderfully unreal. Life is full of possibilities, vacations, conferences and elections. There are no hard facts, only ideas and slogans. Everything and everyone does what you want them to.

Like The Great Gatsby's Tom and Daisy, the progressive law professors and community organizers inhabit a "vast carelessness" of conferences and cocktail parties from which they emerge to carelessly smash things up before retreating back into it with no real awareness of what they have done and a certainty that the people on Aisle 9 whose lives they have smashed up ought to be grateful to them.

Alan Alda's wife signed a letter denouncing the newly elected left-wing mayor of New York for doing AIPAC's bidding. The Sandinista supporter had been accused of many things until then, but being an Israeli stooge wasn't one of them. Signing the letter, along with the spouse of that guy from MASH, were Martha Weinman Lear, the wife of the cousin of liberal producer Norman Lear,  Eve Ensler of the Vagina Monologues and diet guru Jane Hirschmann author of Overcoming Overeating who took a break from obsessing over food to sail on a Jihad cruise to Gaza.

Signing on to the attack on Bill de Blasio for being a dirty Zionist were such faded celebrities of the literary left as Erica Jong, who hasn't written a single book that anyone can name in the forty years since Fear of Flying first came out and Gloria Steinem, who peaked around that same time.

These familiar names of the Manhattan cocktail party circuit who grind their teeth every time they hear Netanyahu's name, give way to the professional activists, the board members of the toxic American Jewish World Service, the Nathan Cummings Foundation and Dorot, the Rabbis for Gaza and Rabbis for Obama and the men and women like Peter Beinart of Open Zion and Rebecca Vilkomerson of Jewish Voice for Peace who have built their lives around the war on Israel as much as any Islamic Jihadist tinkering with a Kassam rocket in Gaza.

Joining them was Kathleen Peratis who, according to her Nation bio is a "longtime peace activist" who repeatedly calls for boycotting Israel despite traveling there "at least twice a year for the past twenty years." It's unclear how she combined the two, perhaps she made sure not to buy anything from Jews while she was in Israel.

Their names are equally familiar to a smaller circle of those who fight for and against Israel and their signatures are as predictable as snowstorms in winter.

The radical clergy sign on; Rachel Brown Cowan, a Unitarian who married a Jewish writer for the Village Voice, added "Rabbi" to her name and has been attacking the Jewish State non-stop after her husband's death, Rolando Matalon, who has yet to find a Latin American Marxist group he wouldn't embrace,  Ellen Lippmann, a BDS supporter and Sharon Kleinbaum, a lesbian supporter of the Fast for Gaza that aids and abets the not particularly pro-lesbian Hamas.

Reading these names feels like reviewing the membership of a small familiar club. Everyone knows everyone else and everyone in the club hates Israel.

Between Erica Jong and Alice Kessler-Harris (the biographer of Anti-Israel Communist playwright Lillian Hellman, whom Kessler described as having a "streak of Jewish anti-Semitism") is Peter A. Joseph who pays for this whole dance, funding everything from Peter Beinart's Open Zion to the Manhattan JCC whose anti-Israel turn has led to a pitched battle among members.

Peter A. Joseph revived the Israel Policy Forum, which had originally been folded into the Center for American Progress, and turned it into a machine for churning out anti-Israel letters. Before the IPF merged into CAP, it put out a letter urging the United States to work with Hamas. Afterward, its tactics have become slightly subtler, its letters appearing to be pro-Israel while advocating anti-Israel policies.

The Israel Policy Forum put out a letter in support of Obama's nomination of Chuck Hagel for Secretary of Defense, despite his ties to the Iran Lobby, signed by Peter A. Joseph, hedge fund manager Neil Barsky, Marcia Riklis, the daughter of corporate raider Meshulam Riklis (not by his second wife Pia Zadora), Jack C. Bendheim, the president of a company that once dumped toxic waste in a Connecticut town, and Risa A. Levine, apparently a real estate lawyer from New York.

Why was anyone expected to listen to Pia Zadora's stepdaughter and a guy who once made a documentary about Ed Koch when it came to nominating a Secretary of Defense? The same reason that Bill de Blasio was supposed to listen to Alan Alda's wife and a diet guru who hates Israel.

Hating Israel has become a small petty club for the wealthy left and the Israel Policy Forum allows assorted obscure figures to assert their status by denouncing things or demanding things under the banner of an organization whose only asset is the wealth of a few private equity backers.

The Jewish Anti-Israel left likes to pretend that it's a grassroots movement whose voice is being squelched by some nebulous Jewish establishment when in reality it is an unelected establishment using its wealth and lingering fame to shout over the majority of American Jews who support Israel.

These sons, daughters, stepdaughters, wives and nieces of famous people, fading Feminist writers, Wall Street millionaires trying to buy social relevance, hippie social scientists who hit it big with books about food, sex or childrearing, radical rabbis holding forth to congregations who believe in religion as little as their preachers, are a phantom establishment, community leaders without a community except their own mutual approbation.

The Jewish Anti-Israel left is a phantom establishment of family foundations that direct money to networks of organizations that use the money to hire personnel and send out press releases to their own former staffers working for newspapers who then write about them maintaining the illusion of churning activity, when in reality all that is happening is that money is being moved around.

Anti-Israel Wall Street figures hire Anti-Israel activists to denounce the Jewish establishment for not paying enough attention to them. Family foundations run by privileged leftists send American activists to Israel to set up front groups to protest against something or other. They hold dinners where the nieces and nephews, the boycotters and the faded stars of the left listen to the activists that they pay tell them that any day now, American Jews will finally come around to their point of view.

Fittingly, considering the figures involved, the whole thing is a pyramid scheme except that the only people they can sell anything to is each other.

Every few weeks the Israel Policy Forum churns out another letter headlined "Prominent Jews Urge Someone or Other To Do Something" signed by by the guy who made a Koch documentary, Pia Zadora's stepdaughter, a hedge funder, another hedge funder, the guy whose company left drums of toxic waste in Connecticut, the Rabbi who loves the Sandinistas even more than Bill de Blasio and a retired Democratic congressman who attends the same cocktail parties.

The phantom establishment floats on a bubble of its own manufactured prominence. Its letter signers are important because they fund organizations that put out letters which they then sign. These antics are not limited to the Israel Policy Forum or even the United States.

A year after British comedian Stephen Fry appeared on a genealogy television show to trace his mother's Jewish roots, he signed on to a letter by British Jews, a group that he had never considered himself a member of, declaring its "independence" from the British Jewish establishment. The list included the expected collection of fading feminist authors, Marxist playwrights, historians and philosophers, as well as radical sociologists, pop psychologists and professional activists.

The "coming out party" of Independent Jewish Voices consisted of non-practicing Marxist Jews who were notorious for hating Israel, the UK, industry, facts, mirrors and human civilization announcing that loudly in a letter that was covered by their media friends.

There is a long history of such letters going back to the founding of Israel, the names of forgotten self-proclaimed leaders mixing with a few more notorious figures whose unfortunate legacy has survived into this time. None of these letters however have counted as much as a bullet in the rifle of an Israeli soldier standing watch in the night.

American Jews who worry over these letters from the phantom establishment of the cocktail party ought to look back and see how futile the rantings of I.F. Stone, New Dealer Joseph Proskauer, the rabid Elmer Berger and FDR speechwriter Samuel Rosenman proved to be.

Before J Street or the Israel Policy Forum, there was Jewish Alternatives to Zionism  headed by "Rabbi" Elmer Berger who had claimed that the Communist revolution in the Soviet Union meant that Jews no longer needed "Palestine".

Does anyone remember Lewis Affelder or Mr. and Mrs. Noel A. Buckner whose names appeared as sponsors on Jewish Alternatives to Zionism's stationary? How many remember Mary Louise `Wheezie' Gutman who collected English ceramics and owned a distillery? The wind of history has blown past their graves. Their names are smeared ink on yellowed paper while children play in the streets of Jerusalem.

The phantom establishment is rootless; it has no links to a people or to a religion. Its aims are destructive and like all destructive forces, it carries its own futility with it.

American Jews should contend with them, but should not be too impressed by them. Their kind has been at it for generations and, despite all the venom and fury, the boycotts and screeds, have made less of an impression on Israel than a single Jewish family in the hills of Shomron.

The phantom establishment is money and words. There is no blood in its veins or heart in its chest. It does not go on the way that the Jewish people do because it is not of them, only against them. When its anger is spent and its letters are signed, the children will play on in the streets and roads, the hills and fields of Israel, neither knowing nor caring that there was once a Jane Hirschmann, a Mrs. Noel A. Buckner, a Rachel Brown Cowan or a Rebecca Vilkomerson that sought to do them harm.

TOW BE OR NOT TOE BE





What this silly little exchange brought home to me once again is how liberals are invested in the appearance of intelligence, something that I wrote about in Manufactured Intelligence.

"Intelligence to a modern liberal isn't depth, it's appearance. It isn't even an intellectual quality, but a spiritual quality. Compassionate people who care about others are always "smarter", no matter how stupid they might be, because they care about the world around them.

And that is the supreme duty of the modern liberal intellectual, not to be smart, but to make others feel smart.

The thought never rises within this bubble of manufactured intelligence that all of them might really be idiots who have convinced themselves that they are geniuses because they read the right books (or pretend to read them), watch the right movies and shows (or pretend to) and have the right values (or pretend to)."

The problem isn't that our progressive friend with a PhD and a teaching position somewhere thinks that it's Tow the Line. We all go through life discovering on occasion that we got something very simple wrong. It's that he believes in his own intelligence because he has the right values. He's gay and liberal, therefore he's smart. I'm conservative, therefore I must be stupid.

Any other outcome is impossible. And so he doesn't know what he doesn't know which makes actual progress impossible. In a worldview where intelligence is just liberal values misspelled, Obama's 57 states is correct while Romney's binders of women is a huge gaffe.

It's not a debate over facts. It's a cultural difference. We're losing the ability to discuss anything because the dominant cultural paradigm is in the hands of people who care about values, not facts, and who are convinced that if they have the right values, the facts will follow.

It didn't work in the USSR. It's not working in Venezuela. And it isn't working in America.




GETTING TO THE POINT

The Freedom Center has assembled some 20 of my best articles from last year into an ebook titled "Getting the Point."

It's available here though a donation to the Freedom Center.





 9 Out of 10 Saudi Men Say Eyeshadow on Women Causes Sexual Assaults





STAGES OF WAR

September 11 was a calling card that served its purpose for Al Qaeda moving it along to its next stage from a series of isolated terror groups to a global army with the manpower to launch full scale guerrilla wars seizing cities and entire regions. The core Al Qaeda doesn’t need another September 11. It will leave that to its affiliates, some of which are already playing with WMDs.

The Al Qaeda that we think we know, the terrorist group with cells lurking and plotting attacks, was only an intermittent stage in its growth strategy. The same is true of most terrorist groups. There was a time when the Communists were just another bunch of quarreling groups. Then they became an army and a country and a whole global union of countries. That is where Al Qaeda wanted to go all along.

Al Qaeda wants to destroy America, but it doesn’t need it to do it in the linear fashion that many imagined after September 11, by scaling up to more and more devastating attacks.

How Al Qaeda Is Winning the War on Terror




Saudi Islamic Police Ban Women from Giving Birth Without Male Guardian




FROM TIME IMMEMORIAL

The “Palestinian” case that Judis retroactively constructs is a modern invention and he admits as much. Liberals of the day, like Bartley Crum of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine, heard from Dr. Hitti of the Institute for Arab-American Affairs that there was no such entity as Palestine.

Ahmad Shukeiri, before he became the first Chairman of the PLO, told the UN Security Council that, “Palestine is nothing but Southern Syria.” Abu Nidal, the ultimate Palestinian terrorist, proclaimed, “Palestine belongs to Syria.” Azmi Bishara, the Arab Israeli MK who fled the country after collaborating with Hezbollah, said in a television interview, “I think the Palestinian nation is a colonial invention.”

Judis dismisses Jewish nationalism as a 19th century invention, when it’s Palestinian nationalism that is a late 20th century invention.

The Colonialism of the Anti-Israel Left




Everyone in the Middle East Hates John Kerry




JUST ADD ENVIRONMENTALISTS

This was just what Lady Young was looking for. She had already been giving lectures and evidence to a House of Lords committee on the EU’s earlier Water Framework directive, proclaiming that one of her agency’s top priorities should be to create more ‘habitats’ for wildlife by allowing wetlands to revert to nature. As she explained in an interview in 2008, creating new nature reserves can be very expensive. By far the cheapest way was simply to allow nature to take its course, by halting the drainage of wetlands such as the Somerset Levels. The recipe she proudly gave in her lectures, repeated to that Lords committee, was: for ‘instant wildlife, just add water’.

How a Fanatical Environmentalist Deliberately Caused UK Flooding




Obama Blames California Drought He Caused on Global Warming




UNCOMMON CORE

The civil war encompasses debates over testing and charter schools. On one side are technocratic progressives backed by Silicon Valley; a small army of successful men and women turned amateur experimenters trying to tinker with schools in their free time through wealthy foundations determined to centralize and nationalize the educational system. On the other side is the traditional inertia of teachers unions still fighting for a school system that gives teachers everything and asks for nothing in return.

On one side is Bill Gates. On the other side is a fifth grade teacher with seniority looking forward to retirement.

But when it comes to Common Core, the unions aren't wrong. Every educational reform is a band aid meant to fix the last reform. Now Common Core already needs fixing.

Common Core is the Left's Latest Educational Civil War




Imam Rapes Sister, Forces her to Abort Baby, Blames Job Stress




OUT OF DAHLANISTAN

All that would make Dahlan a bit of a Shakespearean villain, killing everyone in sight to seize power, playing the United States against Russia and Israel.

Bill Clinton liked Dahlan. He was, until Abbas, the only Palestinian Arab figure to get a private meeting with President Clinton, except for Arafat. The Clinton Administration had quietly signaled that Dahlan was the future. But by then, the moment had slipped away and Bush had replaced Clinton.

It would take a certain kind of crazy ruthlessness to obtain polonium from a Russian source, poison Arafat, kill his nephew and hope to leverage that into power. And Dahlan had it. He was uniquely vicious and ruthless, eager to take dangerous risks… even when compared to his fellow terrorist gang leaders.

Dahlan was willing to take on Arafat and Hamas. His men killed his rivals and ruled over Dahlanistan. If there was anyone who had the nerve to finish off Arafat and hope to profit from the chaos, it was the Palestinian Authority’s version of Titus Andronicus’s Aaron.

Did Mohammed Dahlan Poison Arafat?





2% of Italy is Muslim, 35% of Italian Prisoners are Muslim- There are 181 Imams in Italian prisons.





LAWS ARE FOR LITTLE PEOPLE, NOT LIMO LIBERALS

When the mayor announced his 62-point safe streets initiative, which includes lowering the speed limit to 25 mph, he said, “We want the public to know that we are holding ourselves to this standard.”

As CBS 2′s Marcia Kramer reported Thursday, the mayor’s two-car caravan was seen speeding, blowing through stop signs, and violating other traffic laws. Kramer reported that if the driver of the lead car, which carried the mayor in its passenger seat, had been cited, he would have racked up enough points to get his license suspended.

Bill de Blasio Announces Crackdown on Traffic Violations, Gets Caught Speeding




Social Justice Teens Carve Swastika into Teen Boy’s Head for Calling Them “Gay”




TERROR MAGNET

He explained that PA law grants terrorists imprisoned for more than five years a salary of 4,000 shekels ($1140) a month, which continues for three years following their release from prison. This is in addition to monthly salary payments while in prison.

The terrorist explained that because his first imprisonment for planning a suicide terror attack (which was foiled) lasted less than five years, it was not enough to prompt the 4,000 shekels ($1140) monthly salary upon release. He therefore planned another attack in order to reach a total of five years in prison, which would entitle him to the additional salary upon his second release, which would cover his debts.

Muslim Terrorist in Israel Plotted Terror Attack for US Tax Dollars




California May Pass Law to Protect Black People from Soda




BIG BILL

Bill de Blasio’s runaway $73.7 billion 2015 budget is a more than $4-5 billion increase over Mayor Bloomberg’s already insane $68.5 billion budget for 2014 and $70 billion budget in 2014.

The entire New Jersey state budget in 2013 was $31 billion. The Connecticut state budget was $40 billion. The Pennsylvania state budget was $24 billion.

Bill de Blasio’s city budget is bigger than the budgets of the two other states in the tri-state area with a combined population of 20 million people.

Bill de Blasio Unveils Giant $73.7 Billion Budget




PAGING DR. CRUNK

Meanwhile in Florida, specifically, in 2012, 362 black people and 344 white people were arrested on murder charges. Now we all know that statistics are racist, all justice systems are biased and etc, but those same stats also show 1,729 white people arrested for sexual assault and 968 black people, so that’s a pretty specific bias.

(Considering that Florida is only 17% African-American, that 968 number is still really high). So it’s still entirely reasonable for white people to be afraid of a racist crime wave, not the other way around. Sorry Dr. Crunk.

Salon’s Professor Crunk Claims White-on-Black Murder Wave in Florida





PBS Broadcasts Anti-Israel Claims from Writer Who Thinks Jews are Space Lizards





LYSENKO IS BACK

The NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, predicted a hot winter. They were disastrously wrong. The mistake wasn’t just a technicality. Cities didn’t properly prepare for the coming winter leading to blocked roads, lost work and even deaths.

In New York, Bill de Blasio blamed the government forecasts for his botched handling of the snow situation. He’s not the only one. While local governments still had the responsibility to do the right thing, the Warmist takeover of climate science is leading us into disasters in which dogma trumps science until the snow begins to fall.

Did Warmism Cause the Government to Predict a Warm Winter?





Liberals Less Likely to Know Earth Revolves Around the Sun than Conservatives





LIBRARY EDITION

 The New York Public Library: Racism, Gay Rights, Muslims, No Books

New York Public Library Hosts Tribute to Anti-Semitic and Homophobic 9/11 Truther

We’re talking about Amiri Baraka aka LeRoi Jones. The author of such timeless verses as “Youth ended, I shall try/My gain or loss thereby/Leave the fire ashes, what survives is gold.”

Oh sorry. That’s Robert Browning. This is Amiri Baraka. “I got the extermination blues, jew-boys. I got the Hitler syndrome figured.”

This is also Amiri Baraka. “The fag’s death they gave us on a cross… they give us to worship a dead jew and not ourselves.”

And also, “We are all beautiful (except white people, they are full of, and made of shit).”

Princeton Invites 9/11 Truther Who Blamed Boston Marathon Bombing on “American Global Domination” to Deliver Lecture




EVEN IRAN WON'T EMPLOY NORMAN

Nowadays people don’t ask for references. They just Google your name. And if you Google my name, all sorts of horrifying things come up: Holocaust denier, Nazi apologist, supporter of terrorism. And no responsible administrator in anything, forget about academia, quite literally even the post office. And that’s literal, that’s not poetic. Even for a job at the post office, they won’t consider you.

This year, I’m down to two countries. One is Turkey where I may be teaching, there’s a good chance. The other is Iran and I’ve been working on Iran but so far it hasn’t been successful.

Norman Finkelstein Blames Internet for Being Unemployable






LET MY COP KILLING JIHADISTS GO

"In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Americans have displayed their true colors of jingoism, a militaristic spirit of nationalism…"

"The attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon did not occur in a vacuum… Rather, this attack was part of an overall blowback to U.S. imperialist policy in support of zionist Israel and opposition to fundamentalist Islam…"

Black Panther Cop Killer Who Called 9/11 “Blowback” Seeks Parole





Somali Pirate May Receive Asylum in US





BLOOMBERG HAD A MANUAL

The State scientists now regulate all such matters. Once a month our Officer of Hygiene comes and examines each member of the household. He then prescribes the kind of food he thinks you require for the next few weeks, whether it shall be more or less phosphates, or cereals, or carnivorous preparations.

The few men — by comparison, whom I saw seemed to me to be allowed to exist as specimen examples of a fallen race. Of course, this view is more or less exaggeration. But the women here do appear to possess by far the most energy, vigor, vitality and ambition. Their predominance in office just now is owing to their over-powering number, the women’s vote polled being ten to one over that of the men.

The exercises of the day began at the great Ethical Temple. Here ten thousand children were gathered to listen first to a lecture on the history of Christmas. There was a play in which Santa Claus appeared and a number of other legendary characters, to show the children in what mythological, absurd beings the children of the unenlightened nineteenth century believed in. Then ten thousand toys were distributed, dolls and whips and tops, and sleighs and skates. But as all were distributed indiscriminately by State officers to the children as they passed out on review, of course all the boys got the dolls and the girls the whips and tops.

An 1887 Science Fiction Novel Predicted DeBlasio and Bloomberg’s New York




NO BREAD AND NO CIRCUSES

Councilwoman Rosie Mendez (D-Manhattan) has introduced bills to ban the use of “wild or exotic” animals in circuses in the last two sessions of the Council, but they have never come to a vote.

Mayor de Blasio and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito both signed on to previous versions of the bill.

Animals in the circus are horribly abused. Animals in nature don’t naturally wear tutus and stand on their hind legs,” said Allie Feldman, the group’s executive director.

Bill de Blasio May Ban Barnum & Bailey Circus from New York



THE ROUNDUP

Edward Cline writes in Rule of Reason, commenting on the FBI, and among other things, my article.

The FBI has reached a point in its history and functions that it must knuckle under the liberal/left/Marxist perception of criminality, a definition of criminality which exempts genuine criminals by excluding their ideology from official approbation, and treat the ideology's victims as the true criminals. Consciously, or by osmosis, the FBI has adopted those same intrusive, oppressive and totalitarian policies.

Yes, the country is politically and philosophically polarized, between those who value their freedom and those who, no matter how innocuous or petty or grandiose their agenda, wish to extinguish that freedom.

We have reached the point that we fear the FBI knocking on our doors. The FBI, together with the DHS and the DOJ, is gradually becoming, not a counterterrorism shield, but an instrument of counter-freedom.  

The FBI has always been an instrument of policy, not law. And that's an important distinction. To the extent that avoiding terrorist attacks is policy, it will fight it, but the deeper policy is CVE or Countering Violent Extremism which means appeasing Muslims. Thus the core policy is not counterterrorism, but community policing and social justice.




ONCE THE HOPE AND CHANGE GOES IN, DOES IT EVER COME OUT?

1. We admitted that like crazed pale metrosexuals we were powerless over Obama huffing, puffing, and fluffing — that our political lives had become unmanageable, bereft of truth, justice, and integrity.

2. Came to believe that a Constitution once again greater than Obama could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our political will and our Obama addiction over to the care of Common Sense as we understood it.

...from Gerard's Twelve Steps for Obamaholics




THE DIVERSITY OF ONE

 The left likes to use words to mean their opposites. Communist dictatorships like to call themselves “democratic” republics. It’s a cynical tease, because it shows that they know democracy is better than dictatorship.

A cynical lefty euphemism much in use in America is “diversity”. It should mean “variety”, but what it has come to mean in practice is its opposite  - “orthodoxy”: a strict doctrinal uniformity of opinion.

The doctrine has achieved enormous success in the universities, which are no longer open to new ideas, no longer allow free debate, no longer question fixed assumptions. That’s what they once existed for. Now they are temples of political correctness, safes for the secure locking up of leftist doctrine.They want a pointless mix of ethnicities and of as many genders as semantic ingenuity can invent, but not of ideas.

Jillian Becker at The Atheist Conservative commenting on Hanson's latest essay.




WORTHY OF REFLECTION

Joe is hardly a down-the-line right-winger.  He’s more of an ornery, traditional centrist; 30 years ago he would probably have been a “Reagan Democrat.”  But he committed the cardinal sin of challenging Barack Obama on “redistributionist” tax policy during the 2008 campaign.  Apparently, he’ll never be forgiven: not so much for doing that, perhaps, as for failing to recant under pressure afterward.

The hard left has been sarcastic about Joe joining a union, as if it’s ironic: as if joining a union is inconsistent with believing in freedom of choice and keeping what you earn.  That’s worth a pause for reflection.

Jennifer Dyer at the Optimistic Conservative reflects on Joe's new job