I’ve got your March Madness right here.

We have a Supreme Leader in this country who is living fat off the land while the rest of us struggle through the worst recession in our lifetimes. All of this while the media sings his praises and ignores his opulent spending, vacations, parties, extravagance, golf outings, Kobe beef flown in from Japan, workout coach flown in from Chicago twice a week, and his stone ear to the will of the people.

Aren’t these some of the things that got those dictators in the Middle East in hot water?

While the Middle East is on fire, Japan is under water and shaking to its core, Dear Leader is busy filling out his NCAA Tournament Brackets for ESPN. March Madness. This past weekend he went golfing for the 61^st time since he took office and held a basketball party at the White House. Not to mention a State Dinner for a Communist Dictator (oh—I guess I did just mention it.)

Nobody thinks our President should be living the life of a pauper with sackcloth and ashes as his daily garb, but I can’t be the only one out there noticing what’s going on here. Let me make a prediction here, and this prediction comes from three decades in the media. When Obama leaves office the activist old media will let a few stories like the one I’m writing now ooze out there like they had learned this through osmosis, or something. They will even try to take a bit of a hard line mentioning how Obama fiddled while Rome burned, or something similar. Truth to power? Once he is out of power they will have an epiphany. They might even question other ideas with Obama that they dismiss as bizarre conspiracy theories today—-this absolutely will happen and they will act like they knew it all along.

Yes, this is the same Dear Leader who vacationed in Hawaii while the east coast was buried in the worst snow storm in years. As I pointed out in a Big Journalism column earlier this year, the media had the perfect opportunity to draw a contrast/connection between “Obama in the Surf” and “East Coast in the Snow,” and those who strain to make segues sing, choose to do otherwise.

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The horrific disaster in Japan is no excuse for horrible reporting.

In fact, we need accurate reporting now more than ever to tell us exactly what is going on in the wake of this awful disaster.

There seems to be more mis-reporting, than actual reporting about what is going on with the nuclear power plants. In particular, we have this nugget from CBS Sunday Morning by Lucy Craft in Tokyo:

“Those who managed to survive the mega quake, the monster tsunami waves, and landslides, are now terrified by the prospect of a Three Mile Island-like radiation disaster of nuclear power plants in the state of Fukushima.”

The people of Japan should hope that this ends up like Three Mile Island.

Of course, perception is much different than reality, and the activist old media seems to hope that the perception that they gave us after the worst nuclear disaster in America history (that killed no one) can be resurrected.  They want to bring back The China Syndrome and hope that all we will remember is Jane Fonda scaring the hell out of us. Maybe the media now actually believes the movie was real, and what happened at Three Mile Island was the fake, or, perhaps they’re just hoping the next generation doesn’t take the time to research what really happened at Three Mile Island.

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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…)

This time last year, two proud and powerful citizens of the world stood at the pinnacle of victory.  Barack Obama was being inaugurated as President of the United States.  Both on the campaign trail and in his inaugural address, Obama proclaimed the start of his “remaking America” revolution.

George Soros had finally managed to back, promote and land a winner.  Their joint venture – Obama’s 2004 bid for the U.S. Senate —  had paid off in the ultimate jackpot:  the presidency.

Soros, the instigator and funder of various “velvet revolutions” in smaller countries, seemed convinced that all he needed to bring the U.S. into submission to a global government, stripped of her sovereignty, was a “citizen of the world” president to replace the all-American president, George W. Bush.  Soros has openly referred to the “bubble of American supremacy” and has berated our lone-superpower position as bringing much more harm than good to the “global family.”

Soros explained his early support of Obama, telling Judy Woodruff in May 2008, “…Obama has the charisma and the vision to radically reorient America in the world.”  When Woodruff queried Soros on whether it might be a concern that Obama lacked experience to lead in this dangerous time we live in, Soros responded, “…this emphasis on experience is way overdone…” (more…)

It’s impossible to avoid the apocalypse these days. Whether we encounter the End in the form of news reports on Global Warming, or fears of Iran getting bomb, or plague panics such as H1N1, we seem to be living in a high point of apocalyptic anxiety, with horrible Doomsdays lurking round every corner.

And yet, the End has never been so much fun.  Roland Emmerich released his latest apocalyptic blockbuster 2012 in November, and since then we have enjoyed Zombieland, The Road, The Book of Eli, Legion and even Al Gore’s dreadful poem read aloud on morning TV in the presence of a fawning sycophant. Much more is to come, and this is to say nothing of video games, books, comics, or half the output of the History Channel.

What lies behind this fascination with the End? Dr. Richard Landes, professor of mediaeval history at Boston University, is a renowned scholar of apocalyptic movements who has been thinking about Doomsday for forty years. He is the editor of the Encyclopedia of Millennialism and author of the upcoming Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of Millennial Experience. Landes is an exceptionally interesting thinker who applies his knowledge of past apocalypses to our present fears, an analysis which frequently informs the articles he publishes at his website The Augean Stables.

Recently I phoned him from my base in Texas, to chat about mankind’s enduring love affair with the apocalypse. I caught him in Tel Aviv airport at 2 a.m, and it was then, against a backdrop of deepest night, that we spent two hours discussing the end of the world: (more…)