We are told Fareed Zakaria is an intelligent man, a man of letters and a journalist. With his latest article in TIME, I’m just not seeing it. It is full of contradictions and transparent attacks on conservatives followed by praise for Ye Olde School conservatives, who espoused more or less the same thing as current conservatives.

Zakaria starts by praising the classical conservatives for basing their ideas on reality, as compared to the Marxists as socialists who start from an imagined society. The great conservative thinkers, he goes on, have tried to understand society, accept it and then help it evolve. He’s one hundred percent correct.

This is the point at which he begins to go wrong. His main claim is that conservatives have moved from the concrete to the abstract and he laments this supposed shift. His first attack is on the idea that Americans are over taxed. While it can be argued that America has a relatively low INDIVIDUAL tax rate as compared to other industrialized nations, he doesn’t take into effect two main points. If one includes State taxes, for those states that levy these as well as other taxes, the mean tax rate on Americans is approximately 40%. More importantly the CORPORATE tax rate on American businesses is the second highest amongst OECD nations, also at about 40%. Zakaria goes out his way to point to Germany as a country that has high taxes while avoiding the same financial issues that we see in the US. That is a debatable issue, one that balances on Germany’s role in the European Union and its control of the Euro, but one thing that the article leaves out is that, in 2008, Germany cut its corporate income tax rate by 8.7%, putting it as one of the countries with the LOWEST corporate income tax rates.

The next straw man Zakaria tries to build is in finding another President who has been as hostile to business as Obama. Yes, Nixon was not a conservative when it came to business. Yes, Nixon presided over 70% tax rates and price controls, but nobody can say that Nixon took every opportunity to bash business, increase the regulatory state exponentially or create such a wide swath of uncertainty in the business markets.

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JIM LEHRER:  Good evening.  At his regular briefing this afternoon, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney expressed confidence President Obama was closely monitoring yesterday’s invasion of Taiwan by the People’s Republic of China.

[Carney video clip]

Highly-placed administration sources tell me Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has been in frequent contact with President Obama’s personal aide since the crisis began. I’ll issue a statement soon in the President’s name urging both sides to seek a solution to their differences once hostilities cease.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Also on the NewsHour tonight:

Wisconsin protesters march on state capitol carrying exhumed body of labor icon Cesar Chavez

CIA is reportedly selling suitcase nukes in Afghan bazaars to lure Osama bin Laden out of hiding.

Joint Chiefs Chairman Mullen OKs burqas for Muslim women submariners.

Treasury Secretary Geithner cites rising gas prices as proof of booming economy.

RAY SUAREZ:  Up first, we interview Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, just returned from Asia, and National Intelligence Director James Clapper.  First question to you, Madame Secretary: the People’s Republic is clearly the aggressor in the Taiwan Strait.  What counsel did you give the President?

HILLARY CLINTON:  I’ll see him at tonight’s White House gala honoring America’s first black mountain man.  I will advise him to honor our commitment to Taiwan by ordering a naval blockade of the Port of Los Angeles.  That’ll hit the Chinese where it hurts, in the pocketbook.  Of course, he won’t agree. (more…)

Over the weekend, AP stories conveying the supposed outrage Asian-Americans felt toward Rush Limbaugh’s mockery of Chinese president Hu Jintao were ubiquitous. The stories were so racially charged and unapologetically one-sided that it was evident someone somewhere was either not telling the whole truth about what Limbaugh said or was not telling the truth about why he said what he said (or that their liberal minds simply couldn’t comprehend the crux of what Limbaugh was trying to accomplish).

As I looked deeper into the AP’s contention about Asian-American outrage toward Limbaugh, I quickly saw that all the news stories rested on the complaints of three different politicians, all of whom happened to be Democrats: an important point which was not brought to the forefront in the coverage. (I guess a headline of “Democrats Outraged at Limbaugh for the 1,000,000^th Time” doesn’t draw near as many readers as “Asian-American Politicians Demand Limbaugh Apology.”)

The three politicians upon whom the demands of the AP stories rest are Representative Judy Chu (D-Ca), Representative David Wu (D-Or), and California state Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco).  All three are quoted as feeling various degrees of disgust with the way Limbaugh mocked the Chinese president’s White House speech last week. Chu said she was “shocked and appalled,” Wu believed Limbaugh demonstrated a “fundamental lack of character,” and Yee called it a “classless act [that] is an insult to over 3,000 years of cultural history.” (There was no mention as to whether these same three lawmakers have been bothered by China’s blatant Human Rights’ violations, evident in China’s ongoing persecution of Christians and their forced abortion/one child policy, or the steadfast Communist mindset that robs their citizens of freedom in a myriad of cruel and unimaginable ways.)

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Did the team that promised to bring diplomatic glory back to the USA misspell Chinese President Hu’s name on the White House web site?  Here is a screen cap grabbed at 11:30 PM ET (click on it for full-size view):

With hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens browsing the internet in the middle of their Thursday work-day hoping to see the pageantry of a White House state dinner honoring their President, this blunder is not just embarrassing, it’s insulting.  It smacks of a demeaning “oh, all those names sound alike” kind of arrogance that can’t help our already strained relationship with China.  “Chu, Hu, Fu, Lu, what’s the difference?” (more…)

As if enough nonsense hasn’t already emerged from the Cancun Climate Conference, on Sunday CNN founder Ted Turner called on world leaders to address the global warming crisis by drastically reducing the number of people on the planet.

Maintaining that the very future of humanity was at stake, he urged immediate action: “If we’re going to be here [as a species] 5,000 years from now, we’re not going to do it with seven billion people,” said Turner, who went on to propose the immediate adoption of a global one-child policy.

The media mogul has long been infatuated with Chinese-style “family planning.” Appearing on National Public Radio on May 7th of this year, he praised the Chinese government for “wisely institut[ing] … the one-child family policy, … put[ting] in penalties, tax penalties and so forth, for people that have more than one child.”

Now the father of five, who has often publicly regretted having so many children, wants to extend China’s policy to the rest of us.

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Originally, I wrote that using “terrorist” to describe Julian Assange was hyperbole. Of course, this was before he double-downed. After this stunt, it’s difficult to argue that he’s not behaving like a terrorist:

The founder of WikiLeaks has warned that his supporters are primed to publish a ‘deluge’ of leaked government documents should his activities be curtailed by any country.

Julian Assange has distributed to fellow hackers an encrypted ‘poison pill’ of damaging secrets, thought to include details on BP and Guantanamo Bay.

He believes the file is his ‘insurance’ in case he is killed, arrested or the whistleblowing website is removed permanently from the internet.

This seems like a priss move.

One of the files identified this weekend by The (London) Sunday Times — called the “insurance” file — has been downloaded from the WikiLeaks website by tens of thousands of supporters, from America to Australia.

Assange warns that any government that tries to curtail his activities risks triggering a new deluge of state and commercial secrets.

Hmm.

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Friday night I was joined by Team Breitbart in L.A. at CBS Studios to appear on “Real Time with Bill Maher.” It was exactly what I thought it would be except for one thing: I was taller than most of the men on the panel. Maybe it was the heels, but I positively towered over a couple of them when I went to shake hands and I’m not a particularly tall woman.

Originally we were to discuss the Chamber of Commerce, Christine O’Donnell, over-population, and the Nobel Prize to the pioneer of in-vitro fertilization; topics changed a bit shortly before the show which was fine except that I was really hoping to see where my fellow panelists stood on free speech and the CoC because that could’ve been a party.

A few things:

1. My fact resolutely stands on my statement that we spent MORE in stimulus than in Iraq. Saying “nu-uh” doesn’t change this. The stimulus adds up to $862 billion dollars, $100 billion MORE than Iraq. Really, I could be a total and correct brat and argue that the stimulus is further beyond even this figure – factor in the second stimulus, the EduJobs bill (a $26 billion-dollar payoff to unions as we had $38 billion in unspent stimulus allocated specifically for this same purpose laying by the wayside), additional billions added for food stamps and unemployment, Cash for Clunkers – all of it an artificial mechanism to stimulate the economy to some idiotic Keynesian economic principle by spending cash we don’t possess. Correction: spending CHINA’S cash. I know how the left loves to pass cash with China, but this is becoming ridiculous.

For argument’s sake, let’s say that the stimulus (minus all the other stimulus projects I mentioned above) didn’t cost $100 billion more than the cost of Iraq. Iraq was a success. The stimulus was not. (more…)

Charles and David Koch are among the most committed and influential free-market champions in America today. According to an editorial in the New York Times, the Koch brothers have invested about a million dollars to try to save California from self-destruction, courtesy of the nation’s most ludicrous energy program: AB-32. That’s a noble effort on the part of Kansas petroleum magnates, even though debt-ridden, job-starved California seems determined to follow Spain’s disastrous path leading toward an unattainable green-energy nirvana.

Naturally the Times doesn’t quite see it that way, assuring readers that the Koch brothers are a dangerous part of sinister, right-wing forces who have aligned to kill California’s bright green future. The Times describes the provisions of AB-32 accurately, although they treat the fantastical goals contained in the bill as though they could be met with a wave of the hand:

The 2006 law, known as AB 32, is aimed at reducing California’s emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by 2020 and by 80 percent at midcentury. To reach these targets, state agencies are drawing up regulations that would affect businesses and consumers across the board — requiring even cleaner cars, more energy-efficient buildings and appliances, and power plants that use alternative energy sources like wind instead of older fossil fuels.

More regulations, more government control of private industry, more unreliable, expensive wind power: what could possibly go wrong? (more…)

Recently Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley from 1996 to 2008 and prolific journalist/author, mourned “the cascading effects of the slow-motion downsizing of one of the planet’s most magnificent landforms,” the Himalayan glaciers.  In an LA Times opinion piece surveying what no longer works in the U.S., Schell cited areas like the environment, education, and transportation, and found American hopelessness, especially compared to contemporary China.

Schell’s “studying of melting glaciers” was likely related to a much-hyped warning from the World Wildlife Fund, which was revealed to be a sham, based on an anecdotal report.  But Schell’s warnings, along with his list of American failings, suggest a general ideological bias.

A recent challenge has been identifying the bias of the mainstream media.  Oddly enough, exposing ideological bias has long been a favored project in communication studies, usually practiced by leftists.  One method, much used by recent multicultural leftists, has held that consciousness and meaning are contingent social constructs.  Following such post-modernists as Lyotard, these folks regard discourse  as a composite of  linguistic, social, and cultural formulations.  One need only examine these to reveal the consciousness or mentality of an author or work. (more…)

As we continue with America’s most left-biased, working journalist list, we feature a woman that takes herself quite seriously and un-ironically as a non-opinion-styled journalist. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour really does think that no one can tell that she is a true-blue left-winger. Sadly, there is that all too human penchant of fooling oneself as much as one tries to fool others with this one. But that doesn’t stop her from making the claim.

In 2008, for instance, Amanpour said of herself:

I stay away from commentary and I stay away from ideology. All this stuff that we have seen marching into the space of fact-based news over the last several years, the highly opinionated, highly ideological [demagoguery] that exists and masquerades as journalism. I draw a line and I stay in the fact-based reality.

Nice story, that. Reality, though, seems to diverge a bit from Amanopour’s self-serving assessment.  Let’s take Amanpour’s recent altercation with Marc Thiessen, for example.  During a recent appearance on her show, the former Bush speech writer took Amanpour to task for saying that the waterboarding tortures perpetrated by Cambodia’s genocidal communist organization Khmer Rouge was exactly the same sort used by the Bush administration on terror suspects.

Here is how Amanpour characterized the waterboarding practices during her filmed visit to the Khmer Rouge torture camps: (more…)