Divorced from Reality

Touchstone | Stephen Baskerville | February 2009

“We’re from the Government, and We’re Here to End Your Marriage.”

The decline of the family has now reached critical and truly dangerous proportions. Family breakdown touches virtually every family and every American. It is not only the major source of social instability in the Western world today but also seriously threatens civic freedom and constitutional government.

G. K. Chesterton once observed that the family serves as the principal check on government power, and he suggested that someday the family and the state would confront one another. That day has arrived. [Read more…]

Fool’s Golden State

Investor’s Business Daily | February 19, 2009

The world’s leading maker of microprocessors plans to create 7,000 jobs in new and expanded plants that will churn out computer chips 30% more powerful than the current generation of chips. But California-based Intel won’t make them in California.

Instead, the company is expanding in Oregon, Arizona and New Mexico. Anywhere but California, which is now so unfriendly to business, even its home-grown firms don’t want to expand there.

This is bad news for the Golden State, which has one of the worst business environments in the country. And it won’t be helped a bit by the recent budget deal reached between Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Democrat-led legislature. [Read more…]

OPM – The Socialist Drug of Choice

Breitbart | Endre Balogh | Feb. 19, 2009

When it comes to the wit and wisdom of Karl Marx, it’s likely that his most quoted statement is, “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” The perverse irony in that quote is that all of Marx’s pseudo-scientific philosophical and sociological musings are so antithetical to common sense and basic human nature, that in order to believe them one must take a leap of faith far greater than any required for belief in a religious dogma. Certainly, George Orwell had Marx in mind when he famously quipped, “There are some ideas so preposterous that only an intellectual could believe them.” [Read more…]

The Decline of California

The Wall Street Journal | February 17, 2009

If you thought Washington’s stimulus debate was depressing, take a look at the long-running budget spectacle in California. The Golden State’s deficit has reached $42 billion, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is threatening to furlough 20,000 state workers (go ahead, make our day), and as we went to press yesterday Democrats who control the legislature had blocked lawmakers from leaving until they finally get a deal. [Read more…]

How Democracies Become Tyrannies

American Thinker | Ed Kaitz | Feb. 16, 2009

Back in 1959 the philosopher Eric Hoffer had this to say about Americans and America: “For those who want to be left alone to realize their capacities and talents this is an ideal country.”

That was then. This is now. Flash forward fifty years to the election of Barack Obama and a hard left leaning Democrat Congress. What Americans want today, apparently, is a government that has no intention of leaving any of us alone.

How could Hoffer have been so wrong about America? Why did America change so quickly? Can a free people willingly choose servitude? Is it possible for democracies to become tyrannies? How? [Read more…]

Jet bombers planned mass killing over Atlantic

AFP | Feb. 17, 2009

Eight Islamic fundamentalists planned to kill on an “unprecedented scale” by exploding bombs on transatlantic flights, a British court heard Tuesday. The men, who were arrested in August 2006 before they could carry out the alleged plot, had hoped for a “truly global impact”, prosecutor Peter Wright told a London court.

Wright told Woolwich Crown Court that Abdulla Ahmed Ali and Assad Sarwar, both 28, led the group and were “indifferent to the carnage that was likely to ensue if their plans were successful.” [Read more…]

Unstoppable Global Warming

FrontPageMagazine.com | E. Ralph Hostetter | Feb. 13, 2009

Former Vice President and Nobel Laureate Albert A. Gore Jr. was in the news again. Braving an ice storm, he appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in its first hearing in the new Congress to plead his case on global warming. The real purpose of his appearance should send shivers down the spine of every American taxpayer. On this visit he brought the tax man with him. That’s right! Al Gore wants Congress to impose a tax that could be considered a tax on climate. He describes his new tax as “putting a price on carbon.” [Read more…]

The Law Liberals Always Break

American Thinker | C. Edmund Wright | Feb. 14, 2009

There’s a law that liberals always shatter. (And no, I’m not talking about tax law.) It’s the law of unintended consequences. Actually it’s not so much liberals per se that break it so mauch as it seems liberal thinking by definition always runs afoul of this law. Leftist policy always hangs itself if given enough rope. [Read more…]

A Chamberlain Moment

Great Britain decides that freedom of speech and truth are really not that important when it comes to radical Islam.
FrontPageMagazine.com | Stephen Brown | Feb. 13, 2009

It was a watershed moment of capitulation. On Thursday, February 12, visiting Dutch politician Geert Wilders was humiliatingly bundled back on to a plane to his native Holland shortly after arriving in London. Wilders had been invited to show his controversial, 17-minute documentary film, Fitna, in Britain’s House of Lords but was warned in a letter from the British Home Office last Tuesday he would be denied entry to the country. As reasons for his being declared persona non grata, Wilders was told in the letter he would “threaten community harmony and therefore public security.” The directive never stated, however, that the statements Wilders made in Fitna are false or misleading in any way. [Read more…]