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.

(more…)

*** Updated and Clarified

Out here along the Picketwire, we were mighty surprised ten years ago when we heard about an historian back east who’d proved that nobody to speak of had actually owned guns back in early America. This came as a big surprise, because it wasn’t what we’d heard from our daddies and granddaddies. But this historian, Michael Bellesiles by name, had all the facts and figures to prove it. This was pretty cheering to the New York Times’ reviewer (Garry Wills, “Spiking the Gun Myth,”), who said Professor Bellesiles had “dispersed the darkness that covered the gun’s early history in America” and provided “overwhelming evidence that our view of the gun is as deep a superstition as any that affected Native Americans in the 17th century.” Apparently a lot of people agreed, because Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture was given the Bancroft Prize.

Well, you probably know what happened. Some gun nuts and spoilsports started looking into Professor Bellesiles’ research, and it turned out that the evidence Garry Wills was so happy about didn’t actually exist. Professor Bellesiles had made it up, and the press had eaten it up. “Now many of Mr. Bellesiles’s defenders have gone silent,” the Times had to report a year later (Robert Worth, “Historian’s Prizewinning Book on Guns is Embroiled in a Scandal“):

Over the past year a number of scholars who have examined his sources say he has seriously misused historical records and possibly fabricated them. They say the outcome, when all the evidence is in, could be one of the worst academic scandals in years.

And in the end, they took his Bancroft Prize away, and he lost his job at Emory University in Atlanta. (more…)

We’ve blown it once again, another great opportunity to win the biggest sporting event on the planet and America comes away empty handed in the World Cup.

I thought this was our year. The world was supposed to love us. We were told that during the 2008 Presidential election that all we had to do was put Barack Hussein Obama in office, and the world would love us. Instead, what do we get? We get horrible calls where goals are being taken away from us by World Cup officials who are either blind, or they haven’t heard that Obama is now our President.

Now, before you think that sports and politics do not mix, just Google “USA Basketball vs. USSR 1972.” Sports and politics cannot be separated. Oh, there was another political incident that year involving Israeli athletes, but since Obama was only 11 years old at the time it’s not relevant to this White House.

I watched much of the media analysis of World Cup Soccer and much of it centered around who played where and why, and how USA coach Bob Bradley said “we needed stronger legs in the midfield.” You had Ricardo Clark and the Yellow Card and bla bla bla bla bla. No, forget all that, there is something much bigger here that the media is missing.  This is the biggest sporting event in this solar system, so no analysis can be ignored.

We were promised. (more…)

Much has happened since Rabbi Nesenoff emailed me his video interview of Helen Thomas containing her now-famous declaration that Jews should get the hell out of Palestine and go back to their homes in Germany and Poland.  Upon first watching the interview, I saw it a big story and was determined to make it go viral. The objective was not to go after the 89-year-old newswoman per se, as a teaching opportunity, showing that anti-Semitism still permeated through normal American society. That teaching moment didn’t really happen; instead I was the one who did the learning, and the lesson was all about how the media really worked.

The White House Press corps seemed very reluctant to touch the story. On one hand it was understandable as Thomas was a respected colleague.  Most of them had worked with her for a very long time.  On the other hand it was big news, and if the Rabbi’s interview subject were a senior member of the Administration those same reporters would have been all over the story.

When they got around to covering the story, media got the “facts” of the incident wrong.  I am not talking about Rosie O’Donnell’s idiotic statement dismissing the anti-Semitism displayed by Thomas’s call for Israeli Jews to return to the scene of the concentration camps, or her ignorant belief that no Jews lived in the Holy Land before 1948.  The traditional media’s biggest factual mistake was reporting that the controversy surrounded Thomas making an anti-Israel comment. (more…)

Dear Helen Thomas:

With a great deal of disappointment I watched your interview, replayed over and over on television, in which you said that Jews should “go back home to Poland and Germany.” I find it both appalling and unsettling that someone with your level of journalistic accomplishment would lack a basic knowledge of Middle Eastern history.

So please allow me to make the case as to why Israel has a historical, legal and moral right to exist as a Jewish state in the Middle East.

According to the Arab-Palestinian-Muslim narrative, Israel is an alien colony recently planted in the Arab world by American and European imperialism. This narrative recognizes no history prior to the arrival of the first Zionist pioneers in the 1880’s, and emphatically denies any ancient historical connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. This is the central lie, offered to justify uncompromising opposition to Jewish national rights. It’s almost as if they actually expect people to think the word “Israel” was invented in modern times. What is alarming is that their increasingly successful rewrite of history has taken hold in minds supposedly as informed as yours.

The Temple of Solomon

The historical truth is carved in Egyptian stone. According to a well-known hieroglyphic inscription, the tribes of Israel were a significant, established presence in Canaan no later than 1212 BCE. There is a vast body of archaeological evidence that demonstrates the ancient Israelite/Jewish presence in Israel/Judea as far back as 925 BCE. This historical presence is verified in the ancient records of the Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Moslem Empires. The Arab conquest did not occur until 638 CE (AD). An exercise in elementary arithmetic reveals that the Jewish people were there eighteen and one-half centuries before the arrival of the Muslim Arabs. (more…)

When I learned of Helen Thomas’ retirement I was tempted to head my column with, “ Ding, Dong, the **^ is Dead …..” but then I remembered that I’m not a liberal journalist who resorts to personal attacks instead of hardcore facts. I can’t even said I’m overjoyed that Margaret Hamilton’s doppelganger has been removed as a White House correspondent.

It would have been so much better to see her go out because of her ridiculous remarks about President Bush calling him the worst president in history. She often repeats the canard that Bush waged war on a country that did nothing to us. I wonder how she explains why we went to war with Germany after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor? Sponsors of terrorism– and Iraq was certainly one –were warned after 9/11 that they would be targets Did she think Bush was joking?

I’ve been reading the post-mortems of Thomas’ leaving and snort at the description of her as a trail-blazing correspondent. The fact is that the uber-partisan Thomas never blazed anything except a scorching dislike of any Republican president. (more…)

Helen Thomas is as fair and open minded as she is good looking. The most senior (she turns 90 this summer) of White-House correspondents has given up being a real reporter and instead spends her time spewing venom at America’s war on terror and/or anything Israel does. For example during the 2008/09 Israeli battle with Hamas in Gaza, Thomas was interviewed by NPR and compared the IDF action to Nazi Germany

I mean, you can’t remain neutral. I remember the rabbi who spoke at the Martin Luther King march on Washington. Heschel had a cameo appearance, and he said, “The greatest sin of all in the Nazi era was silence.” When you remain silent to the suffering and the incredible aggression against a people, then you are culpable.

Just two days ago Thomas berated Robert Gibbs for America’s initial reaction to the violence created by the Guerrilla Flotilla; she said Israel committed a deliberate massacre, international crime, and called Israel a terrorist state.

I used to attribute Thomas’ venom to the combination of her liberal leanings and Lebanese heritage, but the video below indicates that her intentions are more nefarious than that: Thomas is just not a big fan of the Jewish people. (more…)

“The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”
– Alexis de Tocqueville

In part one we discussed how there are only two forms of government. In part two we discussed the history of those two forms. Now we’re going to discuss how the BG (Big Government, aka statist) types have infected our political system.

We’ve all heard the sordid history of Communism and hard socialist countries, which are all totalitarian dictatorships. Nations like North Korea and Zimbabwe are economic basket cases which have famines and moribund economies; police states in which human rights are non-existent. Cuba keeps its citizens prisoner and rations food. These are just a few examples of what happens when BG systems are taken to their extremes.

Human beings operate mostly out of self interest. BG systems allow an elite class to have complete control over every aspect of the public’s lives. Those who love power love to abuse it. (more…)

As we celebrate Presidents Day today, we may observe that there have been no shortage of people attempting to link themselves to the legacy of the greatest President of these United States. This includes the current President of the United States, who commented on Honest Abe’s example in a February 12, 2009 AP story:

Lincoln “could have sought revenge,” Obama said, but he insisted that no Confederate troops be punished.

“All Lincoln wanted was for Confederate troops to go back home and return to work on their farms and in their shops,” Obama said. “That was the only way, Lincoln knew, to repair the rifts that had torn this country apart. It was the only way to begin the healing that our nation so desperately needed.”

That’s great and it obviously speaks to the “let’s forget about ideologies and principles and just all get along” message that is a central theme of the Obama administration. Nothing would please the President more than for us crabby conservatives to shut up and go back, both figuratively and literally, to our farms and shops. (more…)

A federal immigration judge in Tennessee has awarded political asylum to a German couple that was threatened by the German government with having their children forcibly removed from their home because the couple chose homeschooling instead of sending them to state approved schools.

Uwe Romeike may now stay as a legal resident in Morrisstown, Tennessee, where the family moved in 2008 after being threatened by German authorities.

The Associated Press was one of the few Old Media outlets covering this story. Of the Romeike’s plight, the AP reported:

The Romeikes took their three oldest children out of school in Bietigheim-Bissingen in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg in 2006. Romeike said the couple was fined the equivalent of about $10,000 over a two-year period. (more…)