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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; failure</title>
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		<title>Why Are the Senate Races Close?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-horowitz/why-are-the-senate-races-close/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-are-the-senate-races-close</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 31 Oct 2014 04:55:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[battle cry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[political war]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republicans]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244181</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Republican battle cry that wasn't. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/race.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244185" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/race-450x300.jpg" alt="New York And NJ Residents Struggle To Recover One Week After Superstorm Sandy" width="257" height="171" /></a><strong>To order David Horowitz’s &#8220;<em>Take No Prisoners: The Battle Plan for Defeating the Left</em>,&#8221; <a style="color: #800000;" href="http://www.amazon.com/Take-No-Prisoners-Battle-Defeating/dp/1621572560/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1406631034&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=take+no+prisoners">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>For six years the Democratic majority in the Senate has formed a solid bloc behind a president who betrayed every American soldier who died in Iraq by deliberately losing the war and failing to secure the peace. Obama’s anti-military, anti-American zeal has brought this country to its knees internationally. His cowardice when it comes to the use of force has created a terrorist threat greater than any America has faced since the height of the Cold War. With no dissent from the Democratic majority in the Senate.</p>
<p>The Senate Democrats have supported Obama’s anti-Constitutional efforts to crush their opposition through voter fraud and the political corruption of the IRS. They have embraced his open borders mania, which has introduced tens of thousands of criminal illegals into the American heartland, along with exotic viruses and unknown numbers of terrorists who come here with the intent to kill.</p>
<p>The Senate Democrats have supported Obama’s socialist schemes depriving Americans of the right to choose their health care, destroying millions of jobs, leaving 90 million idle, and 47 million on food stamps. They have turned a blind eye when his unconstitutional executive orders restored a malicious welfare system that condemns millions of disadvantaged Americans to lives of permanent poverty and denied them a shot at the American dream.</p>
<p>Senate Democrats have embraced the lynch mob in Ferguson and used this deplorable episode in their campaigns as a symbol of Republican racism instead. This is a classic case of projection since Democrats are the party of racial categories and racial malice. The nation’s most notorious lynch mob leader and premier racist, Al Sharpton, is the president’s special adviser on race. Thanks to Obama’s policies and the support of Senate Democrats the nation is more racially divided than it has been since the passage of the Civil Rights Acts in 1964 and 1965.</p>
<p>So why are the Senate races close? They are close because Republicans are paralyzed by a political cowardice that makes them reluctant to fight fire with fire. From election to election they are afraid to hold Democrats morally accountable for what they actually stand for and have done. Where is the Republican calling out the Democrats for their support for racists like Sharpton and the lynch mob demanding blood in the case of officer Darren Wilson? Where is the Republican decrying the betrayal of the brave Americans who died to keep Iraq free? Where is the Republican standing up for the millions of poor black and Hispanic children who languish in public schools that don’t teach them and whose lives are being crushed by Democratic “welfare” systems? Where is the Republican Party’s campaign against the Democrats’ totalitarian attempts to destroy the two-party system and empower criminals? Why is their political language so tepid when it comes to the outrages that Democrats daily commit?</p>
<p>Yes there are individual Republicans who take on these issues and the Republican Party has occasionally done so as well. But consider the tone of their arguments as compared to the Democrats’ moral indictments of Republicans as racists, and woman haters, and enemies of the poor. Where is the Republican language to match these indictments and neutralize these attacks?</p>
<p>The Democrats have launched a war against individual freedom and the American constitutional arrangement that defends it. That is the meaning of their attacks on the Second Amendment, their attempts to impose speech codes on a once free nation, and their determination to make voter fraud a normal corruption of the political process. Where is the Republican battle cry in defense of individual freedom? Republican opposition to the atrocity called “Obamacare” is framed in the language of accountants. Yes Obamacare will raise health care costs for those who can pay. But like all socialist programs the foundation of Obamacare is theft. Take the earnings of those who have worked and use it to subsidize the costs of those who don’t. This is an assault on individual freedom. But where is the Republican battle cry identifying it as such?</p>
<p>Fostering terrorist concentrations of power, opening America’s borders to criminals, failing to quarantine Ebola carriers, unleashing the IRS to crush their political opposition, supporting a lynch mob seeking to coerce the judicial process, violating the Constitution and stripping the representatives of the people of their authority and power – all these have a common core. They are a war against individual freedom. Why is this not the Republican campaign theme?</p>
<p>The Republican Party is the party of small business (the political billionaires are clustered among the Democrats). But politics cannot be viewed as a business. Democrats are missionaries seeking to change the world. Like all such missionaries from Lenin to ISIS, individual freedom presents a threat to their world transforming goal. They know what’s good for you, and they are determined to prevent you from resisting it. This is what the political battle is about and unless Republicans embrace the missionary attitude, and make freedom their rallying cry, it is not just elections they are jeopardizing but the future of our country as well.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><strong>Subscribe</strong></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <em>The Glazov Gang</em>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.</strong></a></p>
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		<title>Searching for the Islamic War Against ISIS &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/searching-for-the-islamic-war-against-isis-on-the-glazov-gang/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=searching-for-the-islamic-war-against-isis-on-the-glazov-gang</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 28 Oct 2014 04:12:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ISIS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islamic state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=243922</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What's really behind the "moderate" Muslim world's failure to take out the Islamic State. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/islamicstate.jpeg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243925" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/islamicstate-450x253.jpeg" alt="islamicstate" width="274" height="154" /></a><strong>[<a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf">Subscribe</a> to <em>The Glazov Gang</em> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang">LIKE</a> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.]</strong></a></p>
<p>This week&#8217;s <em>Glazov Gang</em> was joined by <strong>Nonie Darwish</strong>, the author of <em>The Devil We Don&#8217;t Know</em>.</p>
<p>Nonie came on the show to discuss <strong>Searching for the Islamic War Against ISIS, </strong>analyzing what&#8217;s really behind the &#8220;moderate&#8221; Muslim world&#8217;s failure to take out the Islamic State <strong>(starts at 14 minute mark)</strong>. The dialogue was preceded by Nonie focusing on <strong>Tricking and Dividing the Muslim World</strong>, shedding light on the best strategies to confront and outsmart our enemy in the terror war.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/PNCUnF-FMD0" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Jamie Glazov</strong> discussing the Left&#8217;s Jihad-Denial and how it facilitates terror attacks against us: </em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/QsDu8Os3PlA" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>To watch previous <em>Glazov Gang</em> episodes, </strong><a href="http://jamieglazov.com/"><strong>Click Here</strong></a><strong>.</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/jamie.glazov"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> Jamie Glazov’s </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/jamie.glazov"><strong>Fan Page</strong></a><strong> on Facebook.</strong></p>
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		<title>Why Conservatives Have the Winning Argument</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/why-conservatives-have-the-winning-argument/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-conservatives-have-the-winning-argument</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/why-conservatives-have-the-winning-argument/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Sep 2014 04:40:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[federal government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Horowitz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Liberals]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Reagan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=240191</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[And why David Horowitz is a conservative champion.
]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/nb.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240273" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/nb-450x245.jpg" alt="nb" width="299" height="163" /></a>Why David Horowitz is a conservative champion:</p>
<blockquote><p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/42JK3ukEIbo" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p></blockquote>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
<p><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><strong>Subscribe</strong></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <em>The Glazov Gang</em>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>LIKE</strong></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><strong>Facebook.</strong></a></p>
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		<title>The Failure of the E.U.</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-failure-of-the-e-u/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-failure-of-the-e-u</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-failure-of-the-e-u/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 11 Aug 2014 04:47:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[eu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[europeans]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Identity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=238292</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Little to emulate, much to avoid.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden">
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<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/euro.gif"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-238338" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/euro.gif" alt="euro" width="265" height="180" /></a><strong>Reprinted from <a href="http://www.hoover.org/">Hoover.org</a>.</strong></p>
<p>The European Union has long excited American progressives, who want the United States to model itself after the European body. As each year passes, it has become difficult to understand this admiration. These days the E.U. acts more and more like a bloated bureaucracy staffed with elites armed with intrusive regulatory power and insulated from citizen accountability. The success of Euroskeptic parties in this spring’s European Parliament elections casts doubt on the whole E.U. project.</p>
<p>The electoral victories of nationalist and populist parties in Britain, France, Austria, Denmark, and the Netherlands reveal the chronic dissatisfaction with the E.U., which has grown worse in light of the sluggish economic growth, high unemployment, painful austerity measures, and morally hazardous bailouts that have beset the continent. More troubling for many are the E.U.’s intrusions into national sovereignty, like its increased oversight over national budgets, the Fiscal Compact Treaty that subjects nations to fiscal discipline, and moves to create a banking union with a common supervisor and mechanism for dissolving failed banks. Given these discontents, public trust in E.U. institutions has reached all-time lows.</p>
<p>To add insult to injury, the E.U. Parliament recently named Jean-Claude Junker as European Commissioner. Junker has long been a champion of increased centralization. Selecting the commissioner has traditionally been a privilege reserved for the Council of Ministers, the 28 heads of government that guard the sovereignty and interests of the member states. As the <em>Financial Times</em> reported, this “crude institutional power grab by the parliament,” ignoring as it did the strong anti-E.U. protest vote in many member nations, “is an affront to democratic accountability.”</p>
<p>Those who champion reforming the E.U. are well intentioned, but their reforms could never go far enough. The problem with the E.U. is that it was, at its founding, grounded in false assumptions about human nature and the role of the nation in creating a people’s identity. These assumptions have for 200 years been accepted as facts, when actually they are questionable ideas challenged by history.</p>
<p>The E.U. is just the latest example of the powerful Enlightenment idea that human nature and civilization, through the expansion of scientific knowledge, are progressing away from the cruelty, oppression, and collective violence created by irrational superstition, religion, and ethnic or nationalist loyalties. Once liberated from this destructive ignorance, people can create political and social orders that will promote peace, social justice, political freedom, and prosperity. Most important will be what Immanuel Kant, in his influential 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace,” called a “federation of free states” that would form a “pacific alliance . . . different from a treaty of peace, . . . inasmuch as it would forever terminate all wars.” Kant predicated the possibility of such global peace on “the uniformity of the progress of the human mind.” A universal human nature progressively becoming more rational and possessing more knowledge about itself and the world can craft a global order that would lessen if not eliminate the evils that had afflicted the human race for all of its previous history.</p>
<p>In the nineteenth century, transnational treaties, conventions, and institutions were created to realize the dream “of establishing and securing international peace by placing it upon a foundation of international understanding, international appreciation, and international cooperation,” as Nicholas Murray Butler, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in 1932. The Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions, and the establishment of an international Court of Arbitration had all reflected this ideal. The Preamble to the First Hague Convention in 1899 sounded the Kantian note in it goal to ensure the “maintenance of the general peace” and the “friendly settlement of international disputes,” based on the “solidarity which unites the member of the society of civilized nations” and their shared desire for “extending the empire of law, and of strengthening the appreciation of international justice.”</p>
<p>The assumption behind such internationalism was that the national and ethnic differences underlying people’s collective identities were not as important as the new universal, transnational identity created by the expansion of scientific knowledge, globalized trade, and globe-shrinking technologies such as the steamship, railroad, telegraph, and telephone. More important, this belief in a unified human identity assumed that all people everywhere desired the same things as Westerners––political freedom, human rights like equality, and prosperity. The other aims that peoples historically have more often pursued––obedience to their gods, exclusionary ethnic or tribal loyalty, land and resources violently appropriated from others, unequal social hierarchies and roles, revenge for injuries or dishonor inflicted by others––were deemed remnants of our barbaric past soon to be left behind by the progress of the human mind and the improvement in peoples’ material and political circumstances.</p>
<p>The unprecedented carnage of World War I, in which the peoples of highly civilized Europe killed each other with nationalist and ethnic fervor, did not lessen enthusiasm for such idealistic internationalism. In the two decades between the wars, the League of Nations, which called for collective security, disarmament, and the resolution of conflict through arbitration; the 1926 Locarno Treaty, in which “France and England Ban War Forever,” as the <em>New York Times </em>headline put it; and the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which condemned “recourse to war” and enjoined all settlement of disputes to be sought only by “pacific means,” all included the future Axis aggressors among the signatories and participants. Nor did the even greater horrors of World War II disabuse the West of its idealism, most obviously manifested in the creation of the United Nations, which has done little to save the some 41 million victims of invasion, genocide, civil war, political murder, and ethnic cleansing since World War II.</p>
<p>This record of failure would not have surprised political theorists from Thucydides to the American framers. In that tradition, human nature is permanently flawed by what James Madison called “passions and interests” that necessarily conflict with those of other people or nations, and often lead to violence between them. For example, John Adams in his <em>Defense of the Constitutions of the United States</em> in 1787 wrote, “Though we allow benevolence and generous affections to exist in the human breast, yet every moral theorist will admit the selfish passions in the generality of men to be the strongest. There are few who love the public better than themselves, though all may have some affection for the public . . . Self-interest, private avidity, ambition, and avarice, will exist in every state of society, and under every form of government.” Nor did these realists believe that better education or prosperity could permanently rein in these flaws of human nature, for dangerous world of “imperious necessities,” as Thucydides called the tragic contingencies of human existence, would always create stresses that prove “a rough master that brings most men’s characters to a level with their fortunes.” The gruesome carnage Europeans inflicted on each other in the twentieth century proved Thucydides correct.</p>
<p>Equally suspect is the assumption that national identity should be weakened and marginalized because it is irrationally exclusionary and parochial, and as such incites zero-sum conflicts between peoples. Particularly after World War II, the evils wrought by fascism and Nazism supposedly proved that nationalism is inherently bellicose and thus hinders the spread of universal human rights, tolerance, and the rational adjudication of disputes, all of which would eventually result in global peace and prosperity. This tarring of nationalism with the brush of fascism and Nazism was one of the mechanisms for selling the transnational European Union and the weakening of national sovereignty it required.</p>
<p>But this assault on national identity was not just historically dubious, but blind to the role the nation-state played in creating the collective identity and solidarity that made liberal democracy possible. For as French political philosopher Pierre Manent has emphasized, “The sovereign state and representative government are the two great artifices that have allowed us to accommodate huge masses of human beings within an order of civilization and liberty.” Shared language, history, mores, folkways, cultures, values, political virtues, and landscapes give people­­––bound as they are to a particular, concrete place and time in which they pass their daily lives––the foundations of their shared existence that transcend their individual differences. To quote Manent again, “If our nation <em>suddenly</em> disappeared and its bonds were dispersed, each of us immediately would become a stranger, a monster, to himself.” Without those complex “ties that bind,” a people cease being a coherent political community, and become instead a congeries of fragmented, discrete groups with irreconcilable interests and aims.</p>
<p>The tiny elite of cosmopolitan, globetrotting writers, journalists, professors, businessmen, and Eurocrats may live in a postmodern, post-national world, but the mass of ordinary Europeans do not. This stubborn nationalist sentiment becomes vocal at times of crisis, such as during the financial meltdown in 2009, when hardworking, thrifty Germans protested bailing out indolent wastrel Greeks, and the Greeks in turn evoked the brutal German occupation of their country during World War II as justification for demanding that Germany rescue their broken government.</p>
<p>Moreover, Europeans still have to live with neighbors who are passionate about their nationalism, none more so than Russia. The EU “postmodern” foreign policy based on “supranational constraints on unilateral policies and the progressive development of community norms,” as Oxford’s Kalypso Nicolaides puts it, has so far been impotent in the face of Vladimir Putin’s irredentist ambitions in Ukraine and elsewhere. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and continuing violence and subversion in eastern Ukraine have dismissed the economic sanctions and diplomatic warnings that are no match for the Russians’ wounded national pride.</p>
<p>The growing strength of frankly nationalist, Euroskeptic political parties, evident in their success in the recent European Parliament elections, testifies to the continuing hold national identity has on millions of Europeans. Given the conflicting “passions and interests” of human nature, this disparaged and disregarded nationalism is unlikely to remain content with sporadic protest-votes or flag-waving during soccer championships. How it will manifest itself in the future––through peaceful political change, or through violent reaction––is still an open question. But there is no question that the E.U. has little for the U.S. to emulate, and much to avoid.</p>
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		<title>The Tragedy of the Arabs</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/rogers-emerson/the-tragedy-of-the-arabs/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-tragedy-of-the-arabs</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 16 Jul 2014 04:40:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Rogers Emerson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[arab world]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Arabs]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[modernity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tragedy]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=236303</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The unwelcome truths about a failed civilization. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/ar55.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-236363" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/ar55-450x234.jpg" alt="ar55" width="321" height="167" /></a>Years ago, an Iraqi thinker and writer, Kanan Makiya, suggested that the Arab world was delusional with respect to the violence and antipathies that crippled its political culture.</p>
<p>He wrote several books documenting this harsh reality, including <em>Cruelty and Silence</em> and <em>The Republic of Fear</em>, which he wrote using a pseudonym. Sadly, a quarter century later, there is little reason to question Makiya’s perspective or to think the Arab world has any clue how to thrive and survive in the modern world. But for oil, the region would be a morass of failure and poverty – not a single working democracy or successful cultural entity (Lebanon tries, but is besieged north and south and internally); not an ounce of serious tolerance for plurality or civil discourse; no serious and sustained commitment to a culture of inclusion and government of modern law.</p>
<p>I am not convinced that any Arab thinker or writer – past or present – could honestly make sense of the disaster that is playing out in the Middle East today. I include such eminent men of letters and historians as Albert Hourani, Fouad Ajami (rest in peace) or even Edward Said, who no doubt would be tossing out the same old excuses about Western imperialism.</p>
<p>You can try to blame the West, Israel, Bernard Lewis, George W. Bush or Obama. But in fact the mess belongs mostly and squarely on the shoulders of an anti-modern, tribalist and sectarian mentality that continue to roil the region in cruelty and violence. The dominant religion and its more extreme faithful followers are trapped in in a world view that remains Medieval and frightening.</p>
<p>From Syria, to Egypt, to Iraq – the recipe for rule is tyranny and the answer to every difficult problem is violence.</p>
<p>I write this sadly, reluctantly, as someone who has lived in the region and who has had friends there and has seen the struggles firsthand of well-meaning and enlightened people. But what is unfolding today is not new to the region – read the <em>Struggle for Syria</em> by Patrick Seale or Hanna Batatu’s massive study on the political culture of Iraq.</p>
<p>It is convenient in some circles to blame the post-World War I partition of the region for the problems. But nearly a century later this feels like just another excuse for avoiding accountability and responsibility. Yes, bad line drawing and imposed regimes can wreak havoc on a culture for a time, but the underlying problem – the inability or unwillingness to live with neighbors, whether states or individuals – is a recipe for tension and violence in any culture or society.</p>
<p>No one seems to do worse at this these days than the Arab world. Even in Egypt, traditionally the most stable and civil of the Arab states, persecution of and discrimination against Christians and Jews has been rampant for decades. In recent months, there has been an almost genocidal fervor against Muslim extremists who themselves cannot tolerate an ounce of diversity or pluralism as a matter of right and justice.</p>
<p>In short, a culture either unites and coheres or it fragments. Or as Mr. Lincoln might have put it: a house divided cannot stand. These days, it is hard to argue against those who once suggested that partitioning Iraq was the best and only path toward stability.</p>
<p>As for those who argue that the United States should reengage militarily and become embroiled again in the region, sorry, but no. There is simply no way to help stabilize a region sweltering with so much hatred, animosity and insecurity. We have invested enough blood and treasure for the little return that was earned. The situation is pathological – and any power that inserts itself into this disaster will simply get swallowed up by it. We have already botched Iraq a couple of times and haven’t done much better in Afghanistan. Do we need to keep making the same blunders over and over?</p>
<p>Let the Arab League draw the new lines and remake the map, if they so desire. Our goal should be to engage constructively, negotiate as circumstances allow and to shore up our defenses and military capabilities. We should be defensive in posture and aggressive in that defense, but redeploying ground forces is simply a nonstarter.</p>
<p>That doesn’t mean we do nothing (James Baker recently laid out some ideas on next steps.) By all means, negotiate, discuss, and seek to mobilize where possible around saner options than regional chaos and war. It would be nice, too, to have a foreign policy of some kind, which the hapless Obama administration clearly does not have.</p>
<p>But let’s face it. Much of the Arab world is united mainly by its hatred of the West and of Israel.  That hatred is a sorry foundation on which to build a forward-looking or modern culture and economy. That is why a quarter century later, Makiya’s melancholy observations remain salient and true.</p>
<p>Mr. Ajami wrote some years ago in his book, <em>The Arab Predicament</em>, that the inability to accommodate others was a fundamental challenge in an Arab world where pockets of tribalism and traditionalism continued to divide and destroy. He called this delusional approach to the modern world an attempt to live in a “self-completed” world.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>The Week Europe Died</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/michael-widlanski/the-week-europe-died/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-week-europe-died</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 03 Jun 2014 04:30:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michael Widlanski]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[eu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jews]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Muslims]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=226704</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[And why Jews are leaving. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/po.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-226709" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/po-450x253.jpg" alt="po" width="315" height="177" /></a>You may not have noticed, but, over the weekend, Europe died.</p>
<p>&#8220;The First World&#8221; basically succumbed to a long illness. It gave up the ghost as an economic force, as a culture and even as a continental political entity.</p>
<p>Here are two very different signs:</p>
<ul>
<li>&#8220;Anti-Europe&#8221; politicians swept to power in the European Union (EU) parliament on a crest anger at leftist EU bureaucrats who built up layers of regulation of daily life that are unpopular with millions of people;</li>
<li>A well-trained terror squad murdered four people in Brussels, the seat of the EU—only the latest episode of Jew-hatred in Europe&#8217;s greatest cities. from London, Paris, Toulouse, Marseilles, Copenhagen</li>
</ul>
<p>&#8220;Oh don&#8217;t worry about the Fascists and Right-wingers who won one small election, and don&#8217;t get alarmist about one incident of extremism,&#8221; say the feel-good crowd, but they are fooling themselves and trying to fool others.</p>
<p>The anti-EU vote in the European Parliament elections is not just a passing phase, and it is not just an eruption of  &#8220;fascist,&#8221; &#8220;nativist&#8221;  or &#8220;right-wing&#8221; emotions.</p>
<p>There is significant anti-EU feeling among responsible and intelligent people in many countries in Europe—people who have seen years of fat-cat EU politicians living in a  fantasy world  of statist theories that leave economic and social chaos.</p>
<p>Greece—a country that endlessly rewards incompetence and then gets bailed out—is a prime example.  Some Greeks get 14 monthly salaries in 12 months.</p>
<p>Official unemployment continues to rise in most European countries—England, France and even Germany—but the real  joblessness has climbed over 20-percent in countries like Spain.  Meanwhile, people in England, France and Germany no longer want to pay pensions for slack workers in Greece and Spain.</p>
<p>Frail European economies and the falling value of the Euro currency are not as disturbing as the collapsing values on the streets of London, Paris, Marseilles, Toulouse, Rotterdam, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Brussels.</p>
<p>Europe&#8217;s core cities  have become quite uncomfortable areas if you are not a Muslim immigrant. They are dangerous &#8220;no-go-zones&#8221; if you are visibly Jewish.</p>
<p>Slick salesmen coined the phrase &#8220;buy now, pay later,&#8221; and Europe is now paying.</p>
<p>Europe bought cheap manpower, importing young men from Pakistan, Morocco, Turkey to make up for the loss of European men in two bloody world wars.  It was acceptable as a short-term policy, but Europe got addicted to cheap Muslim labor.</p>
<p>Europe made this worse with its very low birth rates, then sped up the import of Muslims laborers, without educating them about European values and history. These men kept to the edge of society, becoming bitter: good recruits for crime and terror.</p>
<p>Then the EU tried to buy the affections of the young immigrants and their second-generation families with big welfare programs. But you cannot buy love or loyalty.</p>
<p>Many of the Muslims felt un-British, un-French, un-Swedish. They could speak the language, but they had no appreciation of living in a mixed modern society.</p>
<p>Instead, many Muslim immigrants reverted to the authoritarianism of their home cultures and their tribal values. Extremist Muslim preachers&#8211;dispatched years ago to the West by Saudi money—grabbed the chance to turn the disaffected Muslim workers into a crop of jihadis.</p>
<p>The first target of the jihadis today, like the first target of fascists and Nazis in the 1930&#8242;s, is the Jews. Jews are an easy target  and popular target.</p>
<p>But Jews are also a weather vein and a lightning rod. They tell us which way the wind is blowing, and they tell us a storm is coming. Jews are the default choice for hatred whether it is Hitler, Stalin or Osama Bin-Laden.</p>
<p>And the Jews have noticed. Jews are leaving Europe, and Europe will regret it. Nations  that welcome Jews get richer in many ways. (Check out the Nobel Prize list.) Countries that evict or kill their  Jews—whether the Spain of the Inquisition or the modern Arab states—get poorer.</p>
<p>The synagogues in Europe are mostly empty. Many of the Jewish sites in Europe are really memorials or museums, but it is Europe that will itself be just a memory.</p>
<p>Yes, it will take a few years, but it really happened this week.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>Residual Failure in Afghanistan</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/residual-failure-in-afghanistan/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=residual-failure-in-afghanistan</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 28 May 2014 04:50:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iraq]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Withdrawal]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=226373</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Under Obama, expect the same tragedy in Afghanistan that transpired in Iraq. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/obama2.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-226376" alt="obama2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/obama2.jpg" width="333" height="250" /></a>Speaking at a Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery after making a surprise visit to Afghanistan, President Barack Obama stated, “By the end of this year, our war in Afghanistan will finally come to an end.”</p>
<p>Not exactly.</p>
<p>President Obama is reportedly opting to maintain a residual force of nearly 10,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan after America’s formal combat operations role concludes there at the end of 2014.  The U.S. currently has about 32,800 troops in the country.</p>
<p>The troops remaining behind would focus on counterterrorism and training. However, the plan is not for them to be stationed in Afghanistan indefinitely, only for an additional two years until the end of 2016. While outgoing Afghan President Hamid Karzai has refused to cooperate in approving the security arrangements for any residual American force, his successor is expected to sign the required Bilateral Security Agreement, a precondition for any residual forces to remain.</p>
<p>President Obama does not want to see the disaster that has unfolded in Iraq, after he decided to pull all remaining American troops out of that country at once, play out again in Afghanistan. Although he ran for president on an anti-war platform and promised to end America’s combat role in Iraq once he became president, Obama had said back in 2007: “We will need to retain some forces in Iraq and the region.  We’ll continue to strike at al-Qaeda in Iraq.”  That did not happen because of the Obama administration’s failure to reach a status of forces agreement with the Iraqi government that we were supporting. The result was that Obama’s complete withdrawal of American forces from Iraq essentially reversed the positive results of the military surge undertaken there by former President George W. Bush.  Obama managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, as Iraq once again has descended into sectarian violence.</p>
<p>As long as Obama is commander in chief, expect the same thing to happen in Afghanistan. Although he has been resolute and somewhat successful in his use of drones against al Qaeda and Taliban leaders and operatives in Afghanistan and Pakistan, his stewardship of the American combat operations in Afghanistan has been half-hearted at best. He is simply kicking the can down the road to 2016, his deadline for removing any remaining U.S. forces from Afghanistan. He will then bequeath the consequences to his successor.</p>
<p>Obama hesitated for months before ordering his own significant surge of military forces in Afghanistan in December 2009. He settled for a level that was lower than the military had advised. Then he publicly announced a fixed date for withdrawal of troops to begin, which allowed the Taliban to essentially bide their time. His administration also imposed onerous rules of engagement on our troops that put them at further risk.</p>
<p>All told, approximately 72 percent of the U.S. military fatalities in Afghanistan since 2001 have occurred under Obama’s watch. At the same time, there has been no discernible progress in protecting civilians from terrorist attacks. Nearly 3,000 civilians were killed in 2013, more than eight per day, the vast majority of whom were killed by anti-government forces such as the Taliban.</p>
<p>The civilian deaths in 2013 matched the record highs of 2011. In addition, there were more than 5,500 civilians injured during 2013.</p>
<p>&#8220;There are groups that are boasting about killing civilians, are making statements about how good it is that civilians are being targeted and killed,” said United Nations Assistance Mission special representative Jan Kubis. This is going on with three times the American troops that will be left behind under the residual forces plan. Will our own residual forces operating under restrictive rules of engagement and lacking adequate reinforcements become sitting ducks for a resurgent Taliban as well as turncoat Afghan police and soldiers? Quite likely.</p>
<p>In short, Obama’s so-called Afghanistan “surge,” which came with a short expiration period, only served to embolden the jihadists. They saw right through Obama’s ambivalence, which helps explain why any meaningful peace talks with the Taliban were never in the cards. They only have to wait Obama out and re-emerge full-force. New havens established for al Qaeda and other jihadists are sure to follow, as the Taliban and al Qaeda have maintained their ties.</p>
<p>“With the help of Allah, the valiant Afghans under the Jihadi leadership of Islamic Emirate defeated the military might and numerous strategies of America and NATO alliance,” the Taliban bragged in a statement back in 2012.</p>
<p>Karzai, our supposed ally in Afghanistan, does not have any respect for Obama either. The ingrate Karzai turned down Obama’s invitation to meet during Obama’s short Afghan visit at the Bagram air base. At least Karzai will be stepping down shortly, but it remains to be seen whether his successor will turn out to be any better.</p>
<p>In his memoir, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates wrote critically of President Obama’s commitment to winning the war in Afghanistan: “For him, it’s all about getting out,” Gates said. By early 2010, Gates added, he had concluded that President Obama “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his.” Obama, along with his key advisors, also harbored “suspicion and distrust of senior military officers,” according to Gates, who found himself trying “to manage the relationship between the commander in chief and his military leaders.”</p>
<p>Meanwhile, al Qaeda has metastasized under Obama’s watch.  His focus on the so-called “core” al Qaeda and Taliban leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan, against whom he has deployed drones, has done little to thwart the expansion of jihadism all over Africa and the Middle East.  The jihadists are destabilizing Libya, where Obama’s “lead from behind” strategy opened the door to the jihadists, who killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi and are de-stabilizing the country. Nigeria and other parts of Africa have also fallen prey to deadly attacks by al Qaeda affiliates.</p>
<p>Jihadists from Afghanistan and Pakistan are among the thousands of foreigners flooding into Syria, threatening to turn that country into another haven for al Qaeda affiliates. The Tehrek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP: Movement of Pakistani Taliban) in particular has infiltrated Syria with the help of The Islamic State of Iraq and Levant. These transplanted “core” Pakistani Taliban are providing training and their expertise in battle to other jihadists fighting the Assad regime, with the intention of replacing it with an Islamic caliphate. Al Jazeera’s Kamal Hyder, reporting from Islamabad, said the Taliban claimed that &#8220;Arab fighters in Syria had requested their help, that hundreds of their fighters were preparing to go there, or were already in Syria.&#8221;</p>
<p>Whether President Obama ends up leaving a residual force in Afghanistan through 2016 will not change the fact that Afghanistan will again become fertile ground for jihadism and a potential haven once more from which to launch attacks against the United States.  At the same time, the “core” Taliban and al Qaeda jihadists, whom Obama says are on the run, are actually busy helping to run deadly operations without fear far from their original “core” bases.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>Obama’s Mideast Nightmare</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-mideast-nightmare/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-mideast-nightmare</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 03 Apr 2014 04:55:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[al qaeda in iraq]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bush]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Middle East]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[surrender]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=222274</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How the Radical-in-Chief isolated America in the Middle East.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ali.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-222392" alt="ali" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ali.jpg" width="343" height="193" /></a>A man sits holding a cup of coffee in a restaurant. He drops the cup and it cracks. Everyone around him berates him for his thoughtless stupidity.</p>
<p>Then a second man enters and after delivering a fine speech on the virtues of making this into the best restaurant that it can be, begins smashing all the cups and then the plates. He overturns the tables, tears down the curtains, breaks the lights, tumbles all the food to the floor and sets the whole place on fire.</p>
<p>The first man was named George. The second man was named Barack.</p>
<p>During George W. Bush’s last month in office, thirty-one Americans had died in Iraq and Afghanistan. By June, the month of Obama’s infamous Cairo speech, that number had climbed to forty. And by that same time next year, it was at sixty-eight.</p>
<p>When Bush left office at the end of his second term, the region was mostly stable aside from Iran’s nuclear program. By the time Obama had finished his first term, it was in a state of endless war.</p>
<p>It is still in a state of war today.</p>
<p>While Bush only overthrew Saddam, Obama overthrew Mubarak, Ben Ali, Gaddafi and Saleh. The difference lay not only in the scale of their respective regime change operations, but in their relative impacts on regional stability.</p>
<p>Saddam had invaded other countries and cultivated terrorists, while the governments that Obama helped overthrow, aside from Gaddafi, were not expansionistic, were not obsessed with building up WMD’s and had helped maintain regional stability,.</p>
<p>Bush had sought to stabilize the Middle East by removing Saddam. Obama instead destabilized it by trying to remove every government that was in any way friendly to the United States and was not covered by the umbrella of the Saudi GCC.</p>
<p>Bush’s Axis of Evil had consisted of “rogue states”. Obama’s Axis was made up of allied governments. Bush had set out to stabilize the Middle East by clearing out rogue states while Obama set out to empower rogue states by clearing out stable allied governments… which left the rogue states in charge.</p>
<p>The fall of more modern pro-Western governments left the Middle East divided sharply between Sunni and Shiite Islamists in Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Democratic Party’s sabotage of Bush’s efforts to stop Iran had created a regional power imbalance. The Sunnis had numbers, but the Shiites were going nuclear. And a nuclear bomb is a blunt instrument for reducing population numbers by the millions.</p>
<p>Obama’s abandonment of Iraq had pushed it through another violent sectarian split that revived Al Qaeda and combined with his Arab Spring, consumed Syria.</p>
<p>Unable to match Iran on purely military terms and with the United States unwilling to do anything about its nuclear program, the Sunnis turned to insurgency. The Arab Spring had been disastrous for Sunni military powers like Egypt, but helped revive Sunni insurgencies. Syria, with a Sunni majority, was a perfect platform for taking on the Shiite axis and alienating it from the rest of the region.</p>
<p>Saudi Arabia tied down Obama’s “regional reforms” in a civil war exchanging his vision of populist Islamist regime change for violent sectarian conflict and killing his “Arab Spring”. Then killing a second bird with that same stone, it dragged Iran into a brutal insurgency, doing to Iran, what it and the Saudis had done to the United States in Iraq.</p>
<p>Except that it was no longer just about Syria. Syria had become a Sunni-Shiite fracture point stretching into Iraq and Lebanon.</p>
<p>Obama’s abandonment of Iraq led to a comeback for Al Qaeda in Iraq. Al Qaeda in Iraq had always been the most feral Middle Eastern franchise in the Al Qaeda family. The most brutal, the most senselessly violent and the likeliest to kill just for the sake of killing; its members seemed sociopathic even to hardened Al Qaeda leaders. And Bush had succeeded in burying it until Obama dug it up again.</p>
<p>The sectarian split in Iraq and Syria turned Al Qaeda in Iraq from a defeated footnote to a resurgent army with tens of thousands of fighters and a grip on two major countries.</p>
<p>When Obama boasts that the core of Al Qaeda is on the path to defeat, he neglects to mention that the most dangerous part of Al Qaeda is now more powerful than it ever was before. Or that Al Qaeda now has more numbers, more territory and more experience than ever before.</p>
<p>Obama could do nothing meaningful about Al Qaeda in Syria because he feared empowering Assad. And he couldn’t do anything about Assad because he feared alienating Iran. It was a Catch 22 situation forcing him to choose between the Arab Spring and outreach to Iran.</p>
<p>After a long midnight struggle of the soul, he chose Iran.</p>
<p>The Arab Spring had been Obama’s international ObamaCare. It was the project that he was most identified with and the one that he could most take credit for. But by the time the Arab Spring had come down to bombing Syria, it was about as popular as ObamaCare. Russia, Iran and Syria offered Obama a way out. A new, new beginning to replace the old new beginning that had gone wrong in Cairo.</p>
<p>Having sold out Iraq, Egypt and Tunisia, Obama finished the job by dumping the rest of his Sunni allies and taking a ride on the Shiite nuclear express.</p>
<p>Bush had often been blamed for isolating the United States, but it was Obama who thoroughly isolated the United States in the Middle East.</p>
<p>The United States had set out to isolate Iran, but Obama’s nuclear pandering to Iran instead allowed Iran to isolate the United States from its allies. No country in the Middle East still trusts the United States. Egypt despises Obama. The Saudis insult him. The rest don’t even bother to do that much. The Israeli Defense Minister talks of dealing with Iran alone.</p>
<p>The United States has become a fading shadow in the Middle East; a power vacuum waiting to be filled by a nuclear arms race and battlefields of the dead.</p>
<p>Obama inflicted severe damage on American influence and interests, and on the Middle East, with nothing but an inchoate notion that the Islamists who would take over when he was done would embrace democracy over terrorism.  Instead there is less democracy and more terror than ever before.</p>
<p>Obama’s foreign policy was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The left had insisted for decades that the Arab Street was angry because of the damage wrought by our interference in their domestic politics. And he attempted to “right that error” by interfering so much that the accusation was finally proven true.</p>
<p>The one thing that all the parties in Egypt, that Sunni and Shiite from Syria to Iraq to Lebanon, that Christian, Jew and Muslim can agree on, is that the Middle East would have been better off if Obama had kept his mouth shut and stayed away.</p>
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		<title>Post-Obamacare Reform</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/howard-hyde/post-obamacare-reform/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=post-obamacare-reform</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/howard-hyde/post-obamacare-reform/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Feb 2014 05:25:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Howard Hyde]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[alternatives]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=219219</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The time is overdue to get alternatives into the public consciousness.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/failure.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-219265" alt="failure" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/failure-450x268.jpg" width="450" height="268" /></a>For all of the daily noise about the latest casualties of the Obamacare train wreck (Senator and Obamacare author Max Baucus’ term), from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicting major long-term damage to employment markets to the President’s illegal delay of the black-letter provisions of the employer mandate, there is very little public discussion of what to do about all of it. The time is overdue to get alternatives into the public consciousness.</p>
<p>Obama and the Democrats love to say that Republicans never offered any alternatives to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare.  They pretend to ignore the proposed Patient&#8217;s Choice Act of 2009, the Empowering Patients First Act of 2009, the Patient Option Act of 2013, the American Health Care Reform Act of 2013, and now the Burr-Coburn-Hatch plan, a.k.a the Patient Choice, Affordability, Responsibility, and Empowerment Act, a.k.a. the Patient CARE Act (PCA), to name a few. They get away with this feigned justifiable ignorance because they know that the dominant media will hardly give those proposals any ink, tweets or air time, even to let the public know that they exist.</p>
<p>There are plenty of options for healthcare reform besides the ACA, as even Obama tacitly acknowledges every time he issues another royal decree in contradiction to the law’s (rare moments of) plain, unambiguous language; and we will have to discuss them in order to repair the damage left behind by this law and renew the world’s best medical system. Let’s first take a look at what is perhaps more important than the individual proposals themselves: the principles upon which reform should be based.</p>
<p><b>Principle Number One: Incremental (as opposed to comprehensive, all-or-nothing, take-it-or-leave-it) reform</b>. Each policy should be a net positive in and of itself, a move in the right direction rather than a costly kludge that has to be offset somewhere else in the tangled web of taxes, fees, accounting gimmicks and legalese.</p>
<p>One of the biggest problems with Obamacare, as with the immigration reform and too many other bills besides, is their sheer size and scope. No one can read it apart from a handful of unaccountable ‘experts’ to whom we are supposed to surrender our common sense, our money and our liberty. We’re still learning, four years later, what’s in the Obamacare ‘law’.  And then when we do look at individual elements, whether actually in the law or made up after the fact, they are almost all negative: taxes, penalties, prohibitions, exemptions, delays, arbitrary and capricious power granted to unaccountable officers and boards, cost shifting (or it is SHAFTing?) to those least able to protect their interests by hiring lobbyists.</p>
<p>An important aspect of the policy proposals that I list below is that each of them can be taken on its own as a stand-alone bill, to be proposed, debated in the light of day, and voted up or down more or less independently of the others. If one seems less important or less urgent than others, we don’t have to get bogged down; we can come back to it later while we pass the low-hanging fruit. Let the political horse-trading be expressed by the ordering and prioritizing of policies in separate bills, rather than in Cornhusker Kickbacks buried in the omnibus bill cooked in the smoke-filled back room.</p>
<p><b>Principle Number Two: Empower consumers, patients, families, physicians, insurance companies, counties and states &#8212; in that order &#8212; not the federal government and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).</b> At this point in our big-government evolution, solutions consist largely of divesting power from Washington and returning it as far as possible to the individual citizen.</p>
<p><b>Principle Number Three</b>: <b>Free markets. </b>Private property and limited interference from government results in the best products at the lowest prices for the largest number of people. Think iPhone; apply to health care. We need a market environment for healthcare that is just as free and dynamic and innovative as that for computers and orange juice and mutual funds and automobiles and beer. Consider that the reason we have such contention over immigration policy is that America, because of Capitalism, has become the most attractive place in the world for people to live and work. The US healthcare system, for all its warts, was until 2010 the best in the world because it was the freest.</p>
<p><b>Principle Number Four</b>: <b>Use the ‘Bush/Romney Standard’</b>: That is, we should not give any powers to Barack or Bill or Hillary that we wouldn’t be equally eager to give to President Bush or President Romney, to say nothing of President Cruz. You wouldn’t let them raid Medicare to the tune of $760 billion or make the rules up as they go along.</p>
<p>Discretionary powers should be clearly and explicitly enumerated, and those not so enumerated must be assumed not to exist; in other words to require the legislation and/or approval of the people’s representatives in Congress.</p>
<p><b>Principle Number Five: Get out of the way of the unmatched generosity of the American people to help each other.</b></p>
<p>Private, voluntary charity is not a failure; it is a blessing to be honored and cultivated. Americans donate more of their time, talent and treasure than any other nation, through their churches, synagogues, non-profits and other voluntary organizations. They serve the poor and the disadvantaged that they know personally, without need for nor interference from bureaucratic codes and protocols. They do this without demanding salaries, benefits, job security and unfunded defined-benefit pensions that are demanded by our public employee unions who run our government programs.  Voluntary giving is many times more effective and efficient than government-run poor relief and creates no burden on the economy or public finances. It is an important and integral part of the solution for which we make no apologies.</p>
<p><b>Principle Number Six</b>: <b>Envy is not a principle</b>.</p>
<p>With these principles in mind then, the specific policy proposals include but are not limited to the following:</p>
<p><b>Promote competition </b>among insurance companies across state lines without interference or dictation from state insurance commissioners. If we can buy oranges from Florida, mutual funds from Tokyo and wine from France we should be able to buy financial products like insurance from whomever gives us the best deal. As I have written before, those products are relatively freely sold in highly competitive markets across not just state lines but national borders. Health insurance, on the other hand, for decades prior to Obamacare, has been sold in severely and increasingly constrained markets, dictated to by 50 different state insurance commissioners, each with his own favorite list of mandatory coverage provisions. Competition and innovation have been crushed under the jackboot of bureaucracy and compliance. Patient-consumer choice has been reduced. If any plans are &#8220;sub-standard&#8221;, &#8220;lousy&#8221;, “cut-rate” or &#8220;bottom-feeding&#8221;, as Obama and his supporters like to say, that’s why.</p>
<p>In a truly free market, many more people than today would be able to find a plan that works for them at the intersection of their needs and their means, with consumer reports, reviews on social media and word-of-mouth from friends and family members to guide them. Companies that offer products and services in free markets live and die by their reputations. In the era of Facebook and Twitter, no insurance company could survive if a significant number of its customers assessed its products and services as &#8220;sub-standard&#8221;, &#8220;lousy&#8221;, or &#8220;bottom-feeding&#8221;. We need competition, not control, to bend the cost curve downward.</p>
<p><b>Eliminate the mandates </b>and let consumers negotiate with insurance companies for the features they consider essential (or not).<b> </b></p>
<p>In particular, re-open the market permanently to low-premium, high-deductible catastrophic coverage plans which are the baseline standard for all true &#8216;insurance&#8217;.</p>
<p>Not everyone needs coverage for maternity services, contraception, fertility treatments, quitting smoking, acupuncture, hair plugs, chiropractic, naturopathy or massage therapy. But by mandating these services and more, regulation drives up the cost of plans unnecessarily while potentially denying consumers access to things they need and want more urgently, like better customer service, lower prices, coverage for other conditions not mentioned in Obamacare or greater catastrophic coverage – or just more insurance companies willing and able to participate in the market.</p>
<p>Mandates are a dead weight on the economy, causing costs to rise unnecessarily, making us all (especially us 99%) poorer.  In 2012, the 6 most expensive states (average family premium per enrolled employee for employer-based health insurance) had premiums on average 28% higher than the 6 least expensive states ($17,167 vs. $13,387) and 43% more mandates (48 vs. 34) [Sources: Kaiser Family Foundation and Council for Affordable Health Insurance].</p>
<p>If the consumers want something covered, they will demand it anyway by their buying and not buying, preferring the offerings of one company and plan over those of others. If consumers don’t want it, it’s an extra unnecessary expense, no different economically or in terms of moral hazard than compelling non-smokers to buy cigarettes; might as well smoke ‘em if they’re ‘free’. Either way, the army of bureaucrats needed to enforce the mandate, with their guaranteed salaries, iron-clad job security and (unfunded) defined-benefit pension plans – not to mention health care – must be paid for somehow (hello taxpayer and grandchildren). Mandates are taxes dishonestly imposed. We should have no taxation without honest representation.</p>
<p><b>Repeal the medical device tax</b>, the Medicare tax, the new 2014 tax on small-business and individual-market health insurance premiums and all the other taxes that only serve to destroy innovation and make healthcare more expensive to everyone now and forever.</p>
<p><b>Promote Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) and Flexible Spending Accounts(FSAs).</b> These help people pay for medical expenses with pretax dollars and encourage people to spend health care $$ wisely.</p>
<p>No one spends other people’s money more wisely than they spend their own.  The cost curve will be bent downward to the degree that resources and decision-making power are pushed back to the people to whom it makes the greatest personal difference.</p>
<p><b>Reform the tort liability legal casino</b> so that doctors don&#8217;t have to spend a hundred thousand dollars apiece fighting frivolous lawsuits (which 90% of malpractice suits are found to be). Doctors should only order costly and/or hazardous tests if they are in the patient’s best interest, not because they need to triple-cover their own legal backsides.</p>
<p>Texas put a cap of $250,000 on non-economic damages in 2003 and reduced the number of cases by over 80%, and the number of physicians attracted to practice in the state increased 18% in four years.</p>
<p>Implementing ‘loser-pays’ laws, in which any plaintiff filing a claim found to be baseless must pay the legal costs of the defendant, would bring restraint to this out-of-control arena of legalized extortion.</p>
<p><b>Make all health plans and medical expenses tax-deductible from the first dollar</b>. Level the playing field between individuals and employers, because World War II is over and we thought we won.</p>
<p>Our current model of employer-provided health insurance dates from WWII when wage and price controls led employers to resort to non-wage benefits to attract workers (now where’s a great law like that when we need one? – MAXimum wage laws!). There is no moral or economic justification for letting one group of Americans deduct medical expenses from taxable income and others not.</p>
<p><b>Allow physicians to take a tax deduction or credit for services rendered pro bono</b> (serving the poor and/or uninsured), without micromanaging their work. If we want the poor to be served, encourage it.</p>
<p><b>Eliminate government subsidies</b> for unhealthy products like sugar, corn syrup and tobacco (yes, you read that right; in spite of all the government anti-smoking campaigns, tobacco growers received $1.3 billion in subsidies between 1995 and 2011).</p>
<p><b>Abolish the IPAB</b>. This is the Independent Payment Advisory Board, created by the ACA. Its members are as unaccountable as members of the Fed – the Federal Reserve Banking system – and all they can do is issues price control edicts and deny care.  There’s a reason they are called the ‘death panel’.</p>
<p><b>Reform Medicaid</b> according to the terms of its own mission.</p>
<p>If you ask the average intelligent Joe what Obamacare was supposed to accomplish, he might reasonably answer, provide health coverage for the very poor, uninsured and uninsurable. Well guess what? That’s what Medicaid was supposed to do! Only problem is, it’s a failure. A recent study demonstrated that people with no insurance at all had better health outcomes than those covered by Medicaid.  If we insist upon helping the poor through a federal government program, then let’s fix the program that has been targeted at the poor for almost 50 years.</p>
<p>Medicaid does best in the states where it is block-granted rather than micromanaged by the Feds. And States that take the money and buy insurance for the poor do even better.</p>
<p>Finally, <b>Honor the Medical License</b>.</p>
<p>There is a reason we confer licenses of different degrees of authority and responsibility upon people who have dedicated decades of their lives and hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to medical education, training, internships, residencies and professional practices.  In economic terms, it is a cost saving mechanism. We do it precisely because no matter how well the website works or how brilliant our genius leaders in Washington and their cadre of lawyers are, there is no way that they can know everything about medicine and every patient in the country. We need trained professionals that we can trust to make the correct judgments in the field better than anyone else possibly can, regardless of what the computers and MBA’s flowcharts say.</p>
<p>The Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman was opposed to government licensure of physicians.  Most physicians and many right-thinking people consider that view to be ludicrous; of course we need a recognition of the highest levels of professionalism; otherwise, who will protect us from charlatans and quacks? But the  government seems increasingly uninterested in using licensure as a way of delegating and trusting, and more as a sucker’s game; a means to controlling, micromanaging and manipulating. It&#8217;s about power, not about doing the right thing.</p>
<p>Traditionally in America, doctors have been self-employed, running their own practices and referring within a circle of reputable colleagues.  But the overwhelming trend now is herding the majority of doctors into employee roles at big hospital corporations and Accountable Care Organizations or ACOs (anyone on the anti-corporate Left paying attention?). A provision of the ACA actually prohibits doctors from pooling their resources to be owner-investors in new hospitals. Lawyers and hedge-fund managers are welcome, but physicians need not apply.</p>
<p>In other words, those with the most knowledge of medicine in general and their own patients in particular are being stripped of their power by those with the most ambition and the most Harvard Law degrees.  This is not an improvement for the American health care system or for patients.</p>
<p>We must eliminate the mandates that require doctors to suppress their own professional experience and judgment to comply with cookie-cutter protocols, Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) and codes dictated by Washington bureaucrats who are without any medical training or knowledge of the individual patient.</p>
<p>Right now as you are reading this, individual doctors and patients, churches, citizens, foundations and insurance companies are finding the solutions all across this great country of ours.  That is the solution, not Washington D.C.</p>
<p><b>Conclusion</b></p>
<p>Obamacare is  now a dead letter.  If its 2,700 pages of ‘law’ and 20,000 pages of regulation do not mean what they say but only what Obama or Sibelius say that they say depending upon their transient mood and the shifting political winds of the moment, then it means nothing and doesn’t even have to be formally repealed in order to be gotten past. We can ignore it and move on. The task for us, citizens and our representatives, is to construct an alternative system, one brick at a time, major priorities early, improving with each increment, without Rube Goldberg contradictory constructions, violations of the sovereignty of the individual and of the patient-doctor relationship, or massive and dangerous concentration of centralized power. The greatest health care system the world has ever known can yet be greater than it ever was.</p>
<p>It begins with We the People. It begins with liberty.</p>
<p><strong>Howard Hyde is author of ‘<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-Citizen-Pamphlet/dp/0615765939">Pull the Plug on Obamacare</a>’, available in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-ebook/dp/B00BNXX4F6">Kindle</a> and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-Citizen-Pamphlet/dp/0615765939">paperback</a> editions from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Plug-Obamacare-Citizen-Pamphlet/dp/0615765939">Amazon.com</a>. He edits the website <a href="http://www.hhcapitalism.com/">www.hhcapitalism.com</a>. Email: <a href="mailto:HHCapitalism@gmail.com">HHCapitalism@gmail.com. </a>Follow on Twitter: @HowardHyde.</strong></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>Video: A Day in the Life of Trying to Sign Up for ObamaCare</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/tommi-trudeau/video-a-day-in-the-life-of-trying-to-sign-up-for-obamcare/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=video-a-day-in-the-life-of-trying-to-sign-up-for-obamcare</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Feb 2014 05:00:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Tommi Trudeau]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218558</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[My harrowing journey. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/oc.gif"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218560" alt="oc" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/oc.gif" width="350" height="186" /></a>My harrowing journey:</p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/_gqiPw3Lr4c" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Tommi Trudeau is the producer of the new cooking show, “<a href="http://www.stage32.com/profile/6385/Project/GROOVY-FOODS">Groovy Foods</a>.”</strong></p>
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		<title>Amnesty Ends the American Dream</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/amnesty-ends-the-american-dream/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=amnesty-ends-the-american-dream</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 28 Jan 2014 05:35:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Welfare immigration is not an investment in the future.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/amnesty.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-217361" alt="amnesty" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/amnesty.jpg" width="350" height="293" /></a>Immigration is becoming unpopular everywhere else. In the UK, immigration has become so toxic that it may lead to a split from the European Union. In Australia, it helped elect a conservative government willing to tackle its migrant boat problem. Meanwhile in the United States, Republicans keep flirting with a Super-Amnesty that would be four times as big as the last disastrous amnesty.</p>
<p>Accepting amnesty as inevitable would be a mistake even if the economy were on track, but it’s an even worse idea when unemployment is so bad that a sizable percentage of the population has dropped out of the economy, national and local social services are overstrained and the country is deep in debt.</p>
<p>Politicians on both sides of the aisle promise that legalizing illegal aliens will jumpstart the economy, but the illegal alien population is already a floating economic disaster.</p>
<p>The states with the highest illegal alien populations also <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/obama%E2%80%99s-nuclear-strike-on-american-workers/">tend to have the highest</a> unemployment rates and the highest poverty rates. That welfare triangle is dragging down formerly booming states into the economic gutter. Legalizing illegal aliens won’t change that. Instead it will push those states even closer to the drain as legalized illegal aliens lose their illegal jobs and are replaced with new illegal aliens.</p>
<p>Corporate lobbies insist that America lacks workers even as the country’s immigration rate and unemployment rate remain extremely high.</p>
<p>The United States has been taking in a million immigrants a year since 2004. Are a million immigrants a year really inadequate for the needs of businesses in a country with less than one hundred million private sector employees and over ninety million people out of the workforce?</p>
<p>Black and Latino unemployment rates are already far higher than white unemployment rates. The Mexican-American unemployment rate is between 10 and 12 percent. If American companies can’t employ the millions of Mexican-Americans already in this country, why do they insist on displacing minority workers born in this country, including Mexican-Americans, by legalizing 12 million more?</p>
<p>From 2000 to 2009, nearly 2 million Mexican immigrants obtained permanent legal status in the United States. Along with them came 200,000 Haitians, part of the more than one million Caribbean migrants, who have a higher unemployment rate than African-Americans. Those figures are unusually bad because immigrant minorities are more likely to hold jobs than domestic minorities.</p>
<p>Pro-amnesty politicians use that to prove that immigrants are more likely to “contribute” to the economy than the native population.</p>
<p>The dirty little secret however is in the details.</p>
<p>To quote the <a href="http://www.bls.gov/news.release/forbrn.nr0.htm">Bureau of Labor Statistics</a> report, “The unemployment rates for foreign-born blacks, Asians, and Hispanics were lower than for their native-born counterparts, while the rates for foreign-born and native-born whites were little different.”</p>
<p>Talk to anyone who employs illegal aliens and that discrepancy between foreign-born minorities and native-born minorities stops being a mystery. They prefer first generation minority immigrants to second generation immigrants because they consider them more obedient, docile and responsible.</p>
<p>Like a man who keeps divorcing and remarrying every few years, they constantly want fresh immigrants, but they don’t want to hire their American-born children. And so the social welfare system becomes a dumping ground for the children of cheap labor immigrants and the businesses head somewhere else to escape the taxes voted in by that second generation leaving behind bankruptcy, crime and despair.</p>
<p>Taking in millions of people whose children will be less likely to find work than their parents is a brutal reversal of the American Dream.</p>
<p>It’s unfair to them and it’s unfair to us.</p>
<p>We aren’t doing immigrants any favors by encouraging them to trade Mexico’s 4.25 unemployment rate for an unemployment rate that is more than double that for Mexican-Americans and has to be balanced out with a generous helping of subsidized everything from food to phones courtesy of the welfare state.</p>
<p>That’s not an investment in the future. It’s an investment in voting blocs while stealing the futures of second generation Mexican immigrants who would be more likely to find work at home and the future of the United States which cannot afford to keep investing social capital that will never be paid back.</p>
<p>The traditional forms of immigration that worked were undone and reversed with disastrous results. There was more legal immigration from Mexico (pop. 120 million) in ten years than from all of Europe (pop. 739 million). 156,000 immigrants came from Guatemala and 15,000 from Ireland, 28,000 from Italy and 251,000 from El Salvador. This reversal might have been defensible if it had worked. It didn’t.</p>
<p>These unbalanced numbers reflect very little concern for either immigration fairness or the future. Despite the statistics showing that white immigrants are less likely to be unemployed, our immigration system perversely favors bringing in immigrants who are more likely to be unemployed.</p>
<p>The Irish are coming. One Irish person emigrates every six minutes. 300,000 have left in the past four years. But they aren’t coming to America; not legally, though there are 10,000 Irish illegal immigrants in Boston alone.  1,371 Irish immigrants became permanent legal residents in 2011 compared to 19,662 Jamaicans, 22,111 Haitians, 46,109 Dominicans, 10,166 Nepalese, 15,546 Pakistanis, 21,133 Iraqis and 143,446 Mexicans. 60,000 Italians emigrate each year, but only 2,443 became US residents in 2011.</p>
<p>American immigration has been ingeniously designed to bring in immigrants who are less likely to be employed than the white native population in either the first generation or the second generation so that the first generation provides cheap labor while the second generation provides cheap votes.</p>
<p>Pro-amnesty politicians and business lobbies talk about investing in our future with an illegal alien amnesty, but what they really want is a first generation of cheap labor for disposable service and manufacturing industries whose employees will be so poorly paid that they will contribute little if anything in taxes and whose children will be more likely to be unemployed than their parents.</p>
<p>Europeans have grown weary of the economic and social consequences of these policies. Americans however have been slower to link their economic problems to their government’s immigration policies. But Democrats and Republicans who are jumping on the amnesty express might want to pay attention to the dramatic reversal in the UK where the parties and outlets mouthing empty migration boosterism are being forced to reverse course after an explosion of public outrage.</p>
<p>Cameron and the Tories face an insurgent UKIP which has cut off the ‘conservative’ party at the knees over immigration and globalization. Democrats who are selling out minority voters and Republicans who are selling out small businesses might easily find themselves in the same sinking boat in the Rio Grande.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>Why People Fail</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/why-people-fail/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-people-fail</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/why-people-fail/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 10 Jan 2014 05:10:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amy "Tiger Mom" Chua]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Racism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214997</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Culture is just another way of saying family matters.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Success-Failure-Sign.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-215046" alt="Success-Failure-Sign" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Success-Failure-Sign-450x299.jpg" width="315" height="209" /></a>The hysterical responses to Amy &#8220;Tiger Mom&#8221; Chua&#8217;s book discussing why some cultures succeed and others fail are revealing. Even though Chua was talking about cultural elements, rather than genetic ones, the accusations of racism are entirely predictable.</p>
<p>Chua&#8217;s thesis, like most similar arguments, is plausible in some areas and implausible in others. Any explanation that tackles as big a subject as that is bound to have as many hits as misses.</p>
<p>And yet it&#8217;s undeniable that some cultures succeed where others fail.</p>
<p>The left refuses to distinguish between culture and race; denouncing everything from criticism of Islam to complaints about gang culture as racist. It treats culture as equivalent to race because it doesn’t believe that people are capable of change.</p>
<p>The cast of successful cultures in Chua&#8217;s book is more than racially diverse enough, but it&#8217;s the idea that people succeed or fail because of their attitude toward life, rather than because of their privilege or lack of privilege that infuriates the left.</p>
<p>No one succeeds on their own, Elizabeth Warren and Obama insisted. They succeed only through the grace of state institutions. It&#8217;s not family or culture that matters; only the state.</p>
<p>But the support of the state isn&#8217;t enough for individuals or for businesses. Obama lavishly doled out government money to Green Energy companies only to see them fail. With corporate welfare, as with social welfare, the need for government money is a reliable predictor of failure.</p>
<p>Those who cannot succeed on their own, will not succeed through the government.</p>
<p>Government money could not compensate for what was wrong with companies like Solyndra, Fisker or A123. It also can&#8217;t compensate for what is wrong with individuals and communities that are prone to failure, not because of someone else&#8217;s privilege, but because they have never learned how to try.</p>
<p>The left does not want to deal with the question of why some people succeed and others fail since its entire ideological infrastructure is built around the argument of unequal access.</p>
<p>Individuals don&#8217;t fail, progressives from Obama to Bill de Blasio insist, social institutions fail them.</p>
<p>The <i>New York Times</i> trotted out a young black girl named Dasani living in a dilapidated homeless shelter as its argument that the city had been subdivided between the rich and the poor. Dasani made another appearance at Bill de Blasio&#8217;s inauguration as a prop for class warfare.</p>
<p>But the city didn&#8217;t fail a girl whose parents are criminals and junkies and have burned through tens of thousands of dollars. Dasani isn&#8217;t living on the margins because Mayor Bloomberg or the institutions of the city failed her. On the contrary those institutions have lavished huge amounts of money and resources on her schooling and on every aspect of her life.</p>
<p>If Dasani fails, it&#8217;s not because the larger society failed her, but because her parents failed her. And the roots of their failure lie in communities where drug use and delinquency have become accepted and commonplace.</p>
<p>The left insists that people are interchangeable. They are not. It insists that their failures and successes belong to the guiding hand of the state. They do not.</p>
<p>Institutional determinism is why the Great Society measures failed. The progressive response to these failures has been to discover new and more abstract forms of racism culminating in white privilege to explain why the lack of access is holding some groups back.</p>
<p>There is an entire academic industry dedicated to turning out proofs of racism to explain failure and yet there are indisputable studies out there documenting things such as the diminished grade levels and higher crime rates for students from single parent homes on a worldwide scale.</p>
<p>While the left pushes harder for its post-family world of powerful institutions, there are reams of data showing how destructive trading the family for the state is. And there is no group of people that embodies that better than African-Americans whose lives have been taken over by the state.</p>
<p>Black families have fallen apart while state intervention in their lives has dramatically increased. It was a bad bargain and its consequences can be seen in every major city and in the lives of little girls like Dasani who are used as props by activists calling for more welfare from a government that can spend millions, but can’t fix the lack of responsibility of her family members.</p>
<p>Welfare not only correlates with social failures, it causes them. And it doesn&#8217;t just cause them in our own country.</p>
<p>Third World activists complain that Western aid destroys local capabilities and cripples domestic economies while promoting a culture of corruption and violence. The best evidence of that may be in the world&#8217;s biggest welfare state in the Palestinian Authority where the locals know how to do little except make demands and threaten to kill everyone if they don&#8217;t get their way.</p>
<p>Institutional determinism promotes learned helplessness. It teaches people that their failures can only be remedied by blaming someone else. Without individual responsibility, all that&#8217;s left are institutional subsidies for failure and there are only so many companies that can be bailed out and only so many individuals who can live off the welfare state.</p>
<p>Many of the cultures that Chua lists are refugees. That distrust of government may be a powerful antidote to Hillary Clinton&#8217;s village of the state.</p>
<p>And all of the cultures on the list are family oriented.</p>
<p>A basic difference between Asian-Americans and African-Americans is that the former are most likely to be married and the latter are least likely to be married. That may be why Asian students succeed in the same “bad” urban schools that are supposedly failing the other minority students.</p>
<p>The magic ingredient is a stable family and parental involvement. It is the difference between Dasani and a Chinese girl who is already working toward getting into Stuyvesant High School; that elite city institution of high-performing students that Bill de Blasio wants to &#8220;diversify”.</p>
<p>Despite the best efforts of the left, Dasani and her family are not typical of African-Americans. If they were, the city and the country would be uninhabitable and there would be no black middle class. But it is the mission of the <i>New York Times</i> and the rest of the left to convince their white readers that if not for their social justice campaigns, every black little girl would be a Dasani.</p>
<p>There are black parents who push their children to succeed every bit as hard as Amy Chua does. I have met some of them over the years. The problem is that there aren&#8217;t nearly as many of them as there were before the wheels of the Great Society began to turn and African-Americans were told that they should accept failure and even welcome it as proof of their persecution.</p>
<p>Culture is just another way of saying that it isn&#8217;t the state that makes success possible, but the individual and the family.</p>
<p>We are more than the sum of our institutions, we are our parents and our grandparents, we are the things we read and the things we believe, we are the sense of mission that brought our ancestors through thousands of years of trouble and we are their strengths and their weaknesses.</p>
<p>It’s not institutions that make our successes possible. It is our beliefs that make all the difference.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>The Poverty of Income Inequality</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-poverty-of-income-inequality/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-poverty-of-income-inequality</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-poverty-of-income-inequality/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 18 Dec 2013 05:30:44 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[inequality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[poverty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Soviet Union]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213353</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The real issue is the standard of living.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/df.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213358" alt="df" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/df-450x302.jpg" width="315" height="211" /></a>The left lives from social crisis to social crisis. Now it is leaping nimbly away from its last mess, the great crisis of the uninsured (who have decided to stay uninsured despite Obamacare&#8217;s fines) over to the great crisis of income inequality.</p>
<p>If you believe the left, the leading economic problem that Americans face today is not a lack of jobs or the cost of living, but a crisis of CEO salaries.</p>
<p>The crisis of income inequality, in which some people make a lot more money than everyone else, is irrelevant in an economy where the problem is not that incomes aren&#8217;t high enough, but that they don&#8217;t buy enough, and that there still aren&#8217;t enough jobs at minimum wage or any other wage.</p>
<p>The left’s answer to the high price of medical care wasn&#8217;t to discuss why prices were so high, but to wrap the whole thing in a planned medical economy of price controls and resource limitations administered by death panels whose existence they deny.</p>
<p>Its solution to cost of living issues is to raise the minimum wage. That&#8217;s a slogan that sounds good, because everyone knows more money means more money. At least until you remember that the dollar, like an Obama promise, has no absolute buying power value. And the availability of jobs isn&#8217;t a fixed value either. Raising the minimum wage eliminates jobs and raises the cost of living so that those who keep their jobs now have more money that buys the same amount.</p>
<p>The left’s agenda isn&#8217;t to make life better for the people at the bottom of the economic ladder. It&#8217;s to build up their planned economy with failed solutions that aren’t meant to solve anything. The left&#8217;s solutions don&#8217;t work, because the problem they’re solving isn’t economic inequity, but their own lack of absolute power. And they solve that with economic solutions that fail, necessitating more power grabs until they have complete control.</p>
<p>The progressive solution to income inequality is government intervention. But when has centralization ever produced income equality?</p>
<p>The USSR was the ultimate experiment in central planning. The Soviet Constitution declared, &#8220;The principle applied in the U.S.S.R. is that of socialism: From each according to his ability, to each according to his work.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Soviet Union was supposed to be a classless society. Western leftists assumed that was true. They were wrong. Not only did the Soviet Union have a rigid hierarchy of classes, but<a href="http://akarlin.com/2012/06/ayn-stalin/"> it also had the same income inequality </a>as any other economy in its class.</p>
<p>After WW2, the wealthiest ten percent of Russians took home <a href="http://akarlin.com/2012/06/ayn-stalin/">more than seven times</a> as much as the poorest Russians did.</p>
<p>Factory bosses took home 100 times the salary of factory workers. Managers made five times what their employees did. A small percentage of the country wallowed in luxury while a sizable underclass struggled to put food on the table. And these figures are hopelessly inadequate to describe real income inequality in the USSR because most of the real income at the top went unreported because it was derived from corruption and bribery which were and are widespread.</p>
<p>But it wasn&#8217;t income inequality in the USSR that led to poverty and misery. It was the planned economy whose control of the means of production created product shortages by not producing what people wanted, rather what it thought they should have, and whose control over the means of distribution made the black market into the only real source of needed products.</p>
<p>The gap between the rich and the poor matters less than what the poor can buy for their money. That is why the left would rather talk about income inequality than the standard of living. It wants to play around with wealth redistribution, instead of dismantling their programs that make life so expensive. The same hypocrites jabbering about income inequality dream of imposing a Green carbon tax on everyone that will further raise the prices of all goods and services.</p>
<p>The left inflicts poverty and then campaigns against it. It raises the prices of products and the cost of services, it devalues incomes, destroys jobs and raises energy prices… and demands even more regulatory powers so that it can finally solve the poverty mess it creates once and for all.</p>
<p>Even if we assume that income inequality, rather than the standard of living, is the issue to focus on, the worst possible way to achieve it is through more centralization. Free enterprise top 1 and 10 percent incomes are vulnerable to market fluctuations. That&#8217;s not the case in the Socialist sphere where incomes remain high regardless of economic performance.</p>
<p>A CEO who runs a company as badly as Obama runs the country risks his job. Obama risks nothing.</p>
<p>Washington D.C. is a great place to talk about income inequality <a href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-03-08/local/35446235_1_income-inequality-earners-dc-fiscal-policy-institute">because it has one of the highest </a>levels of income inequality in the country. Obama declared that income inequality is the defining challenge of our time. It&#8217;s a challenge localized in the very cities that voted for him.</p>
<p>Progressives might try to argue that Obama won those cities based on the support of the poor,  but he also <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/man-of-the-people-obama-won-8-of-10-wealthiest-counties/">won 8 of the 10 wealthiest counties</a> in the nation. Not only did he win them, but he won them by margins greater than the national vote. And that shouldn&#8217;t be surprising, since of the wealthiest men in America, numbers one and two were both strong supporters of his campaign.</p>
<p>But the left doesn&#8217;t actually hate the rich. To do that it would have to hate itself.</p>
<p>Occupy Wall Street wasn&#8217;t a bunch of unemployed workers looking for a more compassionate economy. <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/study-shows-occupy-wall-street-was-the-1-percent/">A third of the Occupiers</a> had household incomes of six figures. The majority were college grads and 39 percent of the latter had graduate degrees.</p>
<p>The left does hate people who work for a living. The poster child for its childish screeds is Elizabeth Warren, a populist voice of the people <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/woman-of-the-people-elizabeth-warren-buys-740000-condo/">who spent three-quarters of a million</a> on a condo as soon as she got to Washington D.C. and who <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/elizabeth-warren-didnt-get-rich-on-her-own-the-clintons-made-her-rich/">once scored $90,000 from </a>the government for serving as an expert witness.</p>
<p>Elizabeth Warren was right and wrong when she said that no one gets rich on their own. There are people who do get rich on their own. And there are people like her who get rich through their political connections. The left hates people who work for their money and get rich on their own. It loves &#8220;public servants&#8221; like her who get rich off their political connections.</p>
<p>The left argues that the income inequality in this country shows that we have an oligarchy. They&#8217;re right. And they&#8217;re the oligarchy.</p>
<p>In Washington D.C. there is an oligarchy that monopolizes wealth and loots the working people. It&#8217;s a government oligarchy just as it was in the Soviet Union. America doesn&#8217;t have an income inequality problem. It has a government problem.</p>
<p>The growth of government has lowered the standard of living. The <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/44962589">standard of living peaked</a> before Obama took office and fell in the <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2011/1019/A-long-steep-drop-for-Americans-standard-of-living">sharpest such drop in recorded American</a> history.</p>
<p>The left can shriek about raising the minimum wage all it likes, but the American worker today makes<a href="http://www.thestreet.com/story/11480568/1/us-standard-of-living-has-fallen-more-than-50-opinion.html"> 57% less an hour than he did in 1970</a>. The left can play its class warfare games, but they cannot and will not restore the standard of living that Americans had in 1970.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.  </b></p>
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		<title>The Mandela Myth</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-mandela-myth/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-mandela-myth</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 09 Dec 2013 05:47:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[AIDS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mandela]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[myth]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rapes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[South Africa]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=212731</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[And the real South Africa.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/myrr.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-212734" alt="myrr" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/myrr-450x253.jpg" width="315" height="177" /></a>White liberals are obsessed with Nelson Mandela everywhere outside South Africa.  Black people inside South Africa however are far more blasé about him. In a demographically youthful country where much of the population only came of age once he was out of office, he had already become a part of the vanishing past even before his death.</p>
<p>The generations that lived through Apartheid as adults make up a surprisingly small percentage of the black population. With its high crime rates and high AIDS rates, South Africa has a life expectancy in the fifties. Afghanistan, Sudan and Haiti all have higher life expectancies than South Africa.</p>
<p>There is a reason that many Americans and Europeans remember Mandela’s campaign against Apartheid better than black South Africans do. They are more likely to still be among the living.</p>
<p>To Western whites, Mandela is an iconic figure, a latter-day Gandhi, but to South Africans of all races his memory is entangled with the corrupt infrastructure of the African National Congress and its leaders. Even in office, <a href="http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1997-08-15/news/1997227064_1_president-nelson-mandela-pessimism-south-africa">his approval ratings were shaky</a> among whites and less than perfect among blacks who had their own tribal divisions and conflicts. Out of office he became a convenient symbol for the ANC.</p>
<p>For South Africans, Mandela was a real-life political leader. For the foreigners mourning him as the greatest leader in human history, he existed in some nebulous territory of virtue unrelated to real life political decisions like harboring mafia boss Vito Roberto Palazzolo and favoring his own Xhosa Nostra.</p>
<p>To younger black South Africans, Mandela either occupies the vague space that Martin Luther King does for younger African-Americans, an important figure whom they don’t really identify with or feel made a difference in their lives, or as a sellout who failed to squeeze the white minority for everything they had.</p>
<p>Like Gandhi, Mandela is a more controversial figure inside South Africa than he is outside it. But to many he isn’t even that. In a country torn apart by disease, poverty and crime; he appears far less relevant than he does in Washington or Brussels. Few South Africans want inspiration. Instead they want results.</p>
<p>After leaving office, Mandela blasted his own <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/southafrica/1324909/Mandela-accuses-ANC-of-racism-and-corruption.html">African National Congress</a> accusing it of being “as corrupt as the Apartheid regime” and warning that, “Some Africans have made mistakes. They now throw their weight about as a majority. There are some Africans who inspire fear in the minorities.&#8221;</p>
<p>That began a process that would allow Mandela to detach his reputation from the corrupt sinkhole of the African National Congress. But it is another of the Mandela myths that the ANC became corrupt only after his tenure. The African National Congress was always corrupt. The only difference is that it has become more flamboyantly corrupt now that it has a majority that will always vote for it.</p>
<p>South Africa is for all intents and purposes a one-party state. And it was Mandela who blasted opposition Democratic Party voters <a href="http://www.anc.org.za/elections/1999/news/en051909.html">as white racists</a> who “would one day die with a heavy conscience.” What other outcome of that could there have been except a one-party state and what outcome of a one-party state could there be except the total corruption that we see in South Africa today?</p>
<p>As a Communist, Mandela had always envisioned a one-party state.</p>
<p>“Under a Communist Party Government South Africa will become a land of milk and honey. Political, economic and social rights will cease to be enjoyed by Whites only. They will be shared equally by Whites and Non-Whites. There will be enough land and houses for all. There will be no unemployment, starvation and disease,” Mandela wrote.</p>
<p>Today South Africa <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/07/30/safrica-unemployment-nears-26/">has a 26 percent</a> unemployment rate and <a href="http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/southafrica_statistics.html">a 17 percent HIV</a> rate. There is no equality. Instead, like all wealth redistribution schemes, inequality has been spread along with resentment and a pervasive feeling of injustice for everyone.</p>
<p>South Africans distrust the judiciary and the police. And they distrust the leaders that they elect. Even without the massive brutal Zimbabwean redistribution schemes that Mandela was smart enough not to endorse, but that many black South Africans continue to demand, much of the white population is thinking about leaving. Nearly a million have already left. And they’re not alone.</p>
<p>The middle class blacks that the hopes of post-Apartheid South Africa depend on are nearly as eager to leave as their white counterparts. And taking their place are illegal immigrants from nearby Zimbabwe.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Third-of-SA-youth-wants-to-emigrate-survey-20121121">Among the 18-34 age group</a>, 56 percent of whites, 53 percent of Indians and 43 percent of those of mixed race want to leave the country. Among blacks the number is only at 33 percent which still means that a third would like to leave.</p>
<p>The South Africa that Mandela leaves behind is a land in search of a people. There is no milk and honey. Instead there is a desperate scramble for a way out of the country by every race and creed able to agree only on wanting to leave. Post-Apartheid South Africa is an experiment that Western liberals love to admire, but that nobody seems to want to actually live in.</p>
<p>“The people of South Africa, led by the S.A.C.P. will destroy capitalist society and build in its place socialism where there will be no exploitation of man by man, and where there will be no rich and poor, no unemployment, starvation, disease and ignorance,” Mandela wrote.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.timeslive.co.za/thetimes/2013/01/30/twelve-million-going-to-bed-hungry-in-sa">Today 77 percent</a> of South African households face food insecurity and <a href="http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/sa-s-shocking-literacy-stats-1.1595411#.UqT2TfSTbJ8">most teachers are not able</a> to teach students how to read independently. The Communist utopia of universal literacy, plenty and equality has not come and isn’t coming.</p>
<p>To many white liberals, Mandela has taken his place in the pantheon alongside Gandhi and the Dalai Lama as a Third World saint who led a resistance based on forgiveness and acceptance. This need for Third World saints that led to a white cult growing around Gandhi and the Dalai Lama has more to do with the decline of spirituality in the West than with the reality of the three political figures who like most leaders understood the value of symbolism when it came to cloaking their more human agendas.</p>
<p>Mandela was neither a monster nor a saint. Instead he occupied a troubled middle ground which saw him employ terrorism and align with unambiguous monsters like Castro and Gaddafi.  The man who preached a utopian creed with a violent edge proved to be a pragmatist. If there is any virtue to take away from his life, it is that when push came to shove, he chose pragmatism over ideology.</p>
<p>Those progressives who worship Mandela as a saint might instead consider that his real lessons were not moral or ethical, but political. And those lessons still weren’t enough to save South Africa.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>USA: The Next Detroit</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/porter-stansberry/usa-the-next-detroit/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=usa-the-next-detroit</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/porter-stansberry/usa-the-next-detroit/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 09 Dec 2013 05:13:35 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Porter Stansberry]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bankruptcy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[debt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Detroit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=212659</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A look at the biggest threats to wealth in the history of our country.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/detroit.png"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-212664" alt="detroit" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/detroit.png" width="350" height="307" /></a><strong>Reprinted from the<a href="http://stansberryresearch.com/products/the-s-a-digest/"> S&amp;A Digest</a>.</strong></p>
<p>One of the most important things to remember about socialism – or coercion of any kind – is it fails eventually because human beings have an innate desire for liberty and a strong need for personal property rights. In fact, the origins of government lie in the need of agricultural communities to protect themselves from violence and theft. So it is particularly ironic that in more recent times, it is government itself that has more frequently played the role of bandit.</p>
<p>When you start taxing people at extreme rates to pay for socialist &#8220;benefits,&#8221; when you start telling them which schools their children must attend, when you start giving jobs away to people based on race instead of ability… you quash human freedom, which bogs down productivity and if continued for long enough leads to social collapse.</p>
<p>I find it perplexing that only 20 years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the West continues to implement laws that mimic all of the failed policies of our former &#8220;communist&#8221; foes. Our current president won the election by promising to &#8220;spread the wealth around.&#8221; But… truth be told… we don&#8217;t have to look to Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union to find a society destroyed by coercion, socialism, and the overreaching power of the State. We could just look at Detroit…</p>
<p>In 1961, the last Republican mayor of Detroit lost his re-election bid to a young, intelligent Democrat, with the overwhelming support of newly organized black voters. His name was Jerome Cavanagh. The incumbent was widely considered to be corrupt (and later served 10 years in prison for tax evasion). Cavanagh, a white man, pandered to poor underclass black voters.</p>
<p>He marched with Martin Luther King down the streets of Detroit in 1963. (Of course, marching with King was the right thing to do… It&#8217;s just Cavanagh&#8217;s motives were political not moral.) He instated aggressive affirmative action policies at City Hall. And most critically, he greatly expanded the role of the government in Detroit, taking advantage of President Lyndon Johnson&#8217;s &#8220;Model Cities Program&#8221; – the first great experiment in centralized urban planning.</p>
<p>Mayor Cavanagh was the only elected official to serve on Johnson&#8217;s task force. And Detroit received widespread acclaim for its leadership in the program, which attempted to turn a nine-square-mile section of the city (with 134,000 inhabitants) into a &#8220;model city.&#8221; More than $400 million was spent trying to turn inner cities into shining new monuments to government planning. In short, the feds and Democratic city mayors were soon telling people where to live, what to build, and what businesses to open or close. In return, the people received cash, training, education, and health care.</p>
<p>The Model Cities program was a disaster for Detroit. But it did accomplish its real goal: The creation of a state-supported, Democratic political power base. The program also resulted in much higher taxes – which were easy to pitch to poor voters who didn&#8217;t have to pay them. Cavanagh pushed a new income tax through the state legislature and a &#8220;commuter tax&#8221; on city workers.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, as with all socialist programs, lots of folks simply don&#8217;t like being told what to do. Lots of folks don&#8217;t like being plundered by the government. They don&#8217;t like losing their jobs because of their race.</p>
<p>In Detroit, they didn&#8217;t like paying new, large taxes to fund a largely black and Democratic political hegemony. And so in 1966, more than 22,000 middle- and upper-class residents moved out of the city.</p>
<p>But what about the poor? As my friend Doug Casey likes to say, in the War on Poverty, the poor lost the most. In July 1967, police attempted to break up a late-night party in the middle of the new &#8220;Model City.&#8221; The scene turned into the worst race riot of the 1960s. The violence killed more than 40 people and left more than 5,000 people homeless. One of the first stores to be looted was the black-owned pharmacy.</p>
<p>The largest black-owned clothing store in the city was also burned to the ground. Cavanagh did nothing to stop the riots, fearing a large police presence would make matters worse. Five days later, Johnson sent in two divisions of paratroopers to put down the insurrection. Over the next 18 months, an additional 140,000 upper- and middle-class residents – almost all of them white – left the city.</p>
<p>And so, you might rightfully ask… after five years of centralized planning, higher taxes, and a fleeing population, what did the government decide to do with its grand experiment, its &#8220;Model City&#8221;? You&#8217;ll never guess…</p>
<p>Seeing it had accomplished nothing but failure, the government endeavored to do still more. The Model City program was expanded and enlarged by 1974&#8242;s Community Development Block Grant Program. Here again, politicians would decide which groups (and even individuals) would receive state funds for various &#8220;renewal&#8221; schemes. Later, Big Business was brought into the fold. In exchange for various concessions, the Big Three automakers &#8220;gave&#8221; $488 million to the city for use in still more redevelopment schemes in the mid-1990s.</p>
<p>What happened? Even with all their power and money, centralized planners couldn&#8217;t succeed with any of their plans. Nearly all of the upper and middle classes left Detroit. The poor fled, too. The Model City area lost 63% of its population and 45% of its housing units from the inception of the program through 1990.</p>
<p>Even today, the crisis continues. At a recent auction of nearly 9,000 seized homes and lots, less than one-fifth of the available properties sold, even with bidding starting at $500. You literally can&#8217;t give away most of the &#8220;Model City&#8221; areas today. The properties put up for sale last week represented an area the size of New York&#8217;s Central Park. Total vacant land in Detroit now occupies an area the size of Boston. Detroit properties in foreclosure have more than tripled since 2007.</p>
<p>Every single mayor of Detroit since 1961 has been a Democrat. Every single mayor of Detroit since 1974 has been black. Detroit has been a major recipient of every major social program since the early 1960s and has received hundreds of billions of dollars in government grants, loans, and programs. We now have a black, Democrat president, who is promising to do to America as a whole what his political mentors have done to Detroit.</p>
<p>Those of you with a Democratic political affiliation may think what I&#8217;ve written above is biased or false. You may think what you like. But there is no way to argue that what the government has done to Detroit is anything but a horrendous crime. You may think what I&#8217;ve written above is merely a political analysis. Perhaps so, but politicians drive macroeconomic policy. And macroeconomic policy determines key financial metrics, like the trade-weighted value of a currency and key interest rates.</p>
<p>The likelihood America will become a giant Detroit is growing – rapidly. Politicians now control the banking sector, most of the manufacturing sector (including autos), a large amount of media, and are threatening to take over health care and the production of electricity (via cap and trade rules). These are the biggest threats to wealth in the history of our country. And these threats are causing the world&#8217;s most accomplished and wealthy investors to actively short sell the United States – something that is unprecedented in my experience.</p>
<p><b>Editor&#8217;s note:</b> Yesterday, a federal bankruptcy judge granted Detroit the ability to make billions of dollars of debt disappear. A new, dangerous precedent has been set. This precedent sets the stage for other municipalities to follow suit.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>Michael Barone on the ObamaCare Meltdown</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/the-obamacare-meltdown/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-obamacare-meltdown</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/the-obamacare-meltdown/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 02 Dec 2013 05:37:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[meltdown]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republicans]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=212000</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How does the president's signature disaster figure in the long-view of American politics? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/obamacare.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-212016" alt="obamacare" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/obamacare.jpg" width="340" height="170" /></a><strong>Editor’s note: Below is the video and transcript of the keynote speech by Michael Barone given at the Freedom Center’s 2013 Restoration Weekend. The event was held November 14th-17th at The Breakers resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/80151310" height="281" width="400" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone:</strong> How many of you have been enjoying wallowing in Obamacare?  Let&#8217;s see the hands here.</p>
<p>We’re going through kind of, I think, an extraordinary period here in American politics.  And the widespread anticipation of the Obama Democrats have really not come to pass.  I mean, it&#8217;s fascinating.</p>
<p>We&#8217;ll go back five years, to the beginning of 2009.  And Obama and the Democratic supermajorities &#8212; thanks to Arlen Specter and the vote counters in Minnesota, and so forth &#8212; came to office with this basic assumption that in times of economic distress, Americans would be more supportive of or amenable to big-government programs.  And that was the lesson that was taught, after all, by the New Deal historians who wrote these very readable and widely read books about Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.  It&#8217;s a lesson that&#8217;s been widely believed among Democrats and so forth.</p>
<p>I tried to teach a somewhat different lesson in my historical account of American politics from 1930s to the 1980s called &#8220;Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan.&#8221;  The last time I looked on Amazon, there was a copy available for 11 cents.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>So it&#8217;s not clear that my version of this went very far.  But I basically took the view then, and take the view now, and have taken it for a long time, that Americans are basically not a big-government country.  On balance, we&#8217;re a country that tends to favor markets and initiative over big government and bureaucracy, and qualify that in various ways, and different times and places.</p>
<p>But I think that we&#8217;ve had a pretty good demonstration project of testing these different and opposed propositions in the last several years.  And I think we see with Obamacare the result there.  You basically &#8212; you know, this proposal was unpopular when it was first broached.  We were assured by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that we would find out what was in the bill after we passed it and that we would like it then.</p>
<p>We&#8217;re still waiting.  It has become worse.  It has moved downward in the public opinion polls.</p>
<p>And I think in many ways the Democrats are paying a price for the way they passed this legislation.  They passed this legislation in the face of public opposition without any support from the other political party.  And after hearing pleas from the unlikely quarter of the voters of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, saying please do not pass this bill, they passed it anyway.</p>
<p>I have an old saying that there is nothing free in politics; there is some question about when you pay the price.  And I think that Democrats thought that they were getting Obamacare for free for a long period of time, and they&#8217;re not paying the price.</p>
<p>And we&#8217;re seeing that lawyers and community organizers can put words down on paper.  And they can say &#8212; okay, the IT guys will set this up so it&#8217;ll do that.  And it turns out that it&#8217;s not that easy, and that we have in particular a President who&#8217;s not very good on follow-through implementation and getting things done.</p>
<p>If you go back to his career as a community organizer &#8212; he never did get all the asbestos out of the Altgeld housing project in Chicago.  They&#8217;re still waiting for the asbestos to come out.  He nevertheless got one promotion after another.  He got positive reinforcement for non-fulfillment of practical objectives.  And so, we&#8217;re getting what we&#8217;re seeing now.</p>
<p>But I think it has been fascinating to watch this program fall apart.  And to watch the information technology &#8212; we have the President now basically admitting that he lied when he said you can keep your insurance policies.  We were supposed to get 500,000 people signed up for insurance and making payments.  Well, 106,000 signed up, but most of those didn&#8217;t make any payments; we don&#8217;t know how many &#8212; and the IT jokes of people waiting before the frozen screen for hours and hours, when Obama said that it would be as easy as Expedia or Travelocity to use &#8212; poses a real contrast between the public sector and the private sector.</p>
<p>And it also puts this in glaring partisan terms.  The Democrats passed Obamacare with no Republican votes.  If you want to go out and defeat the RINO Republicans who voted for Obamacare, you&#8217;re going to have to look pretty hard, because there aren&#8217;t any.  No Republicans voted for this.</p>
<p>And the polling numbers that have come in continue to get worse and worse.  We&#8217;ve got majorities now thinking that the President lied.  This is not a positive result for him.  And I think that you&#8217;ve got majorities, increasing majorities, saying this program is not working.  And I think that this is really a teachable moment.</p>
<p>I think particularly &#8212; look, the Quinnipiac Poll came out last week.  And I&#8217;m hesitant to draw too many lessons from a single poll.  But I think that it&#8217;s got some very significant numbers in it.  If these are corroborated in other surveys &#8212; and I think they probably will be &#8212; I think that they have a lot of significance, and they tell us some important things about going forward.  The Quinnipiac Poll showed that Obama&#8217;s job rating was down to 39 percent positive, 56 percent negative; a low point for him.  This has been a survey &#8212; a polling firm, by the way, that has tended to produce results that are a little more Democratic than the average poll coming out.  So I think these are significant.</p>
<p>What I look at with most interest is the results among millennials and Hispanics.  Millennials being people born &#8212; you know, under-30 voters or people born after 1980.  You&#8217;ll remember the millennials voted in 2008 66-32 for Obama.  I said that the Republicans missed their chance to win when they failed to pass a constitutional amendment raising the voting age to 35.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Too late now.  Or say you can never vote if you were born after 1980.  And 60-37 for Obama in 2012.  Hispanics &#8212; that&#8217;s a growing segment of the electorate, whether we like it or not &#8212; they were 67-31 for Obama in 2008, and even more &#8212; 71-27 &#8212; against Mitt Romney in 2012.</p>
<p>You know, the general thought was among a lot of people &#8212; and not just Democratic analysts &#8212; that for the foreseeable future, we were going to see a basically Democratic country, because the millennials were going to be a larger part of our electorate.  And those of us who were born before 1980 were going to be a smaller part of it as time went on.  And Hispanics were going to be a larger percentage of the electorate.</p>
<p>So the Republican Party was doomed, and we were going to have Democratic majorities forever, and so forth.  This assumes that the parties would make no adjustments, that there would be no changes, and there will be no events changing some people&#8217;s minds about opinions.</p>
<p>Well, there do seem to be some events changing their mind.  The job rating &#8212; Obama&#8217;s job rating among millennials and Hispanics is now negative in this poll &#8212; 36-54, 41-47 &#8212; try to confuse you by too many numbers.  And their feelings on Obamacare are similarly negative.  These were people that the 2012 polls told us thought Obamacare would be nice.  These young people, of course, were in the process of getting snookered.</p>
<p>One of the basic features of the architecture of the bill is that young people in their 20s subsidize older people age 55 to 64.  This is by people who say that they want progressive redistribution of economic wealth from the poor to the rich, except that young people, in their 20s, have negative net worths on the average.  In fact, they shouldn&#8217;t have any wealth in their 20s; they don&#8217;t know what to do with it.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And people in the 55-to-64 age group &#8212; that&#8217;s the peak wealth accumulation year of most years of most Americans.  They just start to spend down their wealth after age 65.</p>
<p>So this law is transferring wealth, money, from people with no net worth to people with peak net worth.  And the only justification for that is this idea that &#8212; they&#8217;re trying to create the idea that nobody should pay anything for medical care; it should just come to you free.  Because government knows how to deliver it.</p>
<p>Well, the young people are starting to see through that with sticker shock.  It seems pretty clear that they are not signing up for this program.  You&#8217;ve got these &#8212; how many of you have seen that Colorado ad for Obamacare?  The guy standing upside-down on the beer keg?  I didn&#8217;t realize people actually did that.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And this girl that&#8217;s lusting after this sort of nice, rich-looking young man, saying that Obamacare provides her with free contraceptives, so now all she has to do is get the guy between the covers.  This is the level of political advertising that I didn&#8217;t see in my earlier years.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But basically, they&#8217;re turning against this.</p>
<p>Now, Hispanics tend to be &#8212; among them, 2012, Obamacare was real popular &#8212; hey, we&#8217;re going to get free goods.  But they&#8217;re learning a lesson that they may&#8217;ve learned in Mexico, or in the countries they came from, which is you actually can&#8217;t trust government to deliver on its promises.  It turns out that it is a weak instrumentality.  As no less than the President taught us, it doesn&#8217;t do IT good.  It&#8217;s a &#8212; in the words of the political scientist Steven Teles, it is a kludgeocracy.</p>
<p>And I think this is a teachable moment.  I think that people, particularly people tilted towards the young end of the age group &#8212; and Hispanics, new immigrants, so forth &#8212; people who have had the least experience with the American system of government and self-government are suddenly seeing what government does and what the advantages of self-government are.</p>
<p>And I think that they weren&#8217;t aware of these things as much.  They drank the Kool-Aid &#8212; we are the change we are seeking, it&#8217;s so wonderful being in this hall with all these cheering people.  And they are now beginning to learn that when people construct a system that they say is failsafe, it turns out to be sure to fail, and that there is no such thing as a free lunch.</p>
<p>And I think there&#8217;s other lessons that Republicans need to teach and to learn themselves, which is that in a vibrant economy, young people setting the course for their lives can choose their future.  They can find work and contributions that they can make to society by which they can achieve what AEI president Arthur Brooks calls earned success.  They can achieve &#8212; and that can be measured in money, it can be measured in other economic measurements, it can be measured in service to family, to community, to people abroad, whatever.  There are many ways to earn success in this society.</p>
<p>And what a vibrant economy enables young people to do is find a way to earn success that is in line with their special talents, their particular interests, their uniqueness as an individual.  This is a generation that likes to be unique and have its own music playlist and its own Facebook page, and all that stuff.</p>
<p>A sluggish economy, a kludgeocracy economy, is one in which you better take the first job that comes down the pike.  And you aren&#8217;t able to find fulfilling work, you aren&#8217;t able to find not only a good income but a sense of fulfillment, a sense of satisfaction, from having accomplished and maximized your own potential.</p>
<p>And I think that Republicans need to make the point not only that this Obamacare system is failing and is less than about what big bureaucracy teaches &#8212; produces, but that there are other alternatives available.  And this means coming forward in time with other healthcare plans, with market-oriented healthcare policy.  It means coming forward with policies that can plausibly address and strengthen the economy in various ways &#8212; and, I would add, policies that encourage or strengthen family formation.  We&#8217;ve got to have policies that give incentives to entrepreneurs.</p>
<p>We also need to think about public policies that encourage two-parent families, that encourage stability in personal life, which &#8212; you can see from the statistics that people who are raised in chaotic family situations achieve less in our society, they have greater handicaps.  We&#8217;re talking about things that happened to them as children, so they&#8217;re not responsible for these problems.  And we&#8217;ve got to think about public policies that strengthen this.</p>
<p>So looking forward, I think the political outlook for the Republicans is pretty good.  If you look at &#8212; as we know, Barack Obama won the presidency but for reasons &#8212; for demographic reasons, actually, which are reflected in my book, &#8220;Shaping Our Nation: How Surges in Migration Transformed America,&#8221; which you can get later.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>The Democrats have an advantage in the Electoral College, though I would not say anything like an [in-electable] advantage.  If you&#8217;ve got young voters and Hispanics who voted 60-plus percent for the Democrats now going 60 percent negative on their policies, you can turn a lot of those target states around.</p>
<p>But when you look at House of Representatives, when you look at equal population districts, Republicans have an advantage.  That&#8217;s because heavily Democratic groups &#8212; blacks, Hispanics, gentry liberals &#8212; are clustered in a few central cities; Republicans are more spread around the rest of the country.</p>
<p>So when you look at congressional districts &#8212; in 2012, Barack Obama carried 209 congressional districts.  Mitt Romney carried 226.  Most districts were Romney districts, and the Republicans won 234 of those districts, Republican candidates for Congress.</p>
<p>I think that means that &#8212; it doesn&#8217;t assure Republicans have a House majority, but it means it&#8217;s very much uphill for the Democrats if Obama&#8217;s job approval was at the 50 percent level it was in November 2012, and it ain&#8217;t there anymore.</p>
<p>Senate seats &#8212; we&#8217;ve got, as you know, a lot of &#8212; seven Senate seats held by Democrats, up in states carried by Romney &#8212; Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, North Carolina, South Dakota, West Virginia.  I would like to echo some of what Ann Coulter said yesterday about not getting too involved in primaries and looking for the purest candidate, even though you nominate somebody that really isn&#8217;t electable.  I think it&#8217;s important to win those races.</p>
<p>I think Republicans have an outside chance as well, in Senate seats in Colorado, Iowa, Michigan and New Hampshire.  Those were all target states, or Michigan was for awhile, in the general election.  So I think those things are possible.</p>
<p>But I think it&#8217;s important.  And this is a slower process &#8212; and it doesn&#8217;t just happen in the campaign cycle &#8212; to come up with alternative public policies that can help in particular tell young Americans, tell recently arrived Americans how they can choose their future and pursue their dreams, and pursue happiness in our country.</p>
<p>So now, let me conclude with that.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>Obama’s Competent Incompetence</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamas-competent-incompetence/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-competent-incompetence</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamas-competent-incompetence/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 09 Oct 2013 04:19:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[glitch]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=206486</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the only thing the president is good at is conflict. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/yelling1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-206783" alt="yelling1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/yelling1.jpg" width="217" height="166" /></a>Last year, Team Obama was wallowing in praise for its election tech strategy. Its strike team of Silicon Valley pros who believed in stock options and Socialism were credited with winning the election by applying the same data tools that had made Facebook and Google so creepy.</p>
<p>And then when it came time to debut Obama’s signature achievement (if you don’t count wrecking the Middle East) the implementation was every bit as disastrous as if the project had been outsourced to someone’s cousin who had once taken a web design course in 1996.</p>
<p>The ObamaCare websites didn’t go down because of high demand. They went down because of bad design. The design on Healthcare.gov was so bad that it was almost as if the website had been designed to fail. Or as one tech expert put it, the website was so cluttered with junk that it was running a denial of service attack against itself.</p>
<p>It’s not too surprising that a government website would be badly designed, but Team Obama’s digital strategy had been built around using them for messaging to bypass even friendly media outlets. The content on government websites blended with the Obama campaign so closely that it was sometimes hard to tell the difference.</p>
<p>But that is where the border between competency and incompetence for Team Obama begins. Team Obama excels at promoting Obama and attacking Republicans. It isn’t actually good at anything else.</p>
<p>The left excels at one thing and only one thing; propaganda. Great products and bad marketing are a familiar business story. But what the left has is a terrible product with great marketing.</p>
<p>The Soviet Union could not make its agricultural policies work, but it spent enormous efforts convincing its own people and the West that those policies were working even when bread was being filled with straw and the USSR was going deep into debt buying American wheat.</p>
<p>Confronted with a website that didn’t work, Team Obama immediately spun straw into bread declaring that it had gone down because ObamaCare was so popular. It was a familiar narrative shift that once again put the best possible face on a disaster. The website wasn’t bad. The product was that good.</p>
<p>That ObamaCare disaster however was being eclipsed by an even bigger ObamaCare disaster.</p>
<p>Obama, who had bent over backward to negotiate with Russia and Iran, refused to negotiate with the Republicans, and began a policy of punitively closing open air memorials to veterans, evicting people from private cottages on federal lands and even attempting to barricade the ocean.</p>
<p>It was the same game of chicken that Obama had been playing since he took office. He would never compromise or back down on anything he wanted done. He just did it.</p>
<p>The Obama myth is that he is a reasonable man being blocked by unreasonable Republicans at every turn. There are plenty of things wrong with that myth, but the biggest one is that Obama isn’t being handicapped by Republican obstructionism. He seeks out and cultivates Republican opposition.</p>
<p>Radicals need enemies to give them meaning and to keep the troops rallied behind their latest disaster. No matter how many “Cukes, Not Nukes” bumper stickers they may paste on their Subaru bumpers; they are “Guns not Butter” types who invest all their energies into war.</p>
<p>The ideas of the left don’t just fail because they’re bad. They also fail because the left is more energized by hostilities than by any of the progressive programs that its leaders claim to be passionate about.</p>
<p>Obama isn’t a reluctant warrior. He’s a happy warrior. He cares far more about fighting Republicans than about winning amnesty for illegal aliens, gay marriage or ObamaCare—all things that he introduced haphazardly to win elections.</p>
<p>Obama came up with ObamaCare because he needed something to offer at a political appearance. And then it grew into the usual government monstrosity that no one can fully take in. And what goes for ObamaCare, also goes for the ObamaCare website which loads 92 files every time it loads a page.</p>
<p>Both ObamaCare and the ObamaCare website are bloated monstrosities that no one took the time to reduce to a manageable scale.</p>
<p>ObamaCare is both a planned and unplanned disaster. Its planned provisions will seriously damage health care in America, but its unplanned measures, the collision between the incompetence of its planners and legislators and the real world, may prove to be even more disastrous in the end.</p>
<p>The ObamaCare website took itself down. ObamaCare may do the same thing.</p>
<p>The Soviet Union did not really care about building Communism, a 93% successful harvest or universal literacy. Its bosses put it on a wartime footing as soon as they could and kept it that way until it bankrupted them. The one thing they really cared about was power. And once they had power over their own people, they quickly grew bored and began plotting to conquer and subdue other countries.</p>
<p>The left runs on conflict. It excels at propaganda because that is a vehicle for conflict. You can ask it to organize a committee to denounce American foreign policy, but don’t ask it to change a tire or bring in the crops or run a health care system. It may talk about how important it is to drive out the capitalist pigs so it can do those things, but it doesn’t actually care about doing them.</p>
<p>In Venezuela, Chavez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, is obsessively picking fights with the United States even as his country teeters on the edge of economic disaster. For the Cuban trained Maduro, screaming about the Yankees is all that he knows how to do. Like Obama, he isn’t good for anything else.</p>
<p>The most important thing about Obama is that he is a community organizer. He has never been anything else. He is not capable of being anything else.</p>
<p>ObamaCare isn’t his policy achievement. It’s a pack of lies that his people came up with in time to sell him to a progressive group. The pack of lies has grown into a mountain. And now the avalanche begins.</p>
<p>Obama doesn’t care about the collapse of his signature policy achievement. To him ObamaCare is just another way of picking a fight with the “reactionary forces.” He’s not fundamentally any different than Nicolás Maduro or Kim Jong Il or any other backward Socialist boss who doesn’t know anything except how to pick fights.</p>
<p>Like them, he isn’t interested in helping people, not even in the misguided way that some liberals are. His politics and his passion are those of conflict. He doesn’t care if ObamaCare succeeds or fails. All that he cares about is using it as a weapon against the Republican Party.</p>
<p>That’s what he’s doing now.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The Five Flaws of Kerry&#8217;s Mideast Peace Process</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/noah-beck/the-five-flaws-of-kerrys-mideast-peace-process/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-five-flaws-of-kerrys-mideast-peace-process</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 05 Aug 2013 04:27:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Noah Beck]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Kerry]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Peace Process]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Washington pushes its most reliable Mideast ally into perilous waters. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/kerry.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-199082" alt="kerry" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/kerry.jpg" width="269" height="151" /></a><b></b></p>
<p>Here is a list of reasons why Secretary Kerry&#8217;s Mideast peace process is unfairly flawed in ways that endanger Israel.</p>
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<p><b>1) No Palestinian reciprocity at the outset.</b> Israel agreed to release 104 convicted terrorists just to get the Palestinians to talk peace. Would the U.S. agree to release 104 Guantanamo prisoners for talks with anyone?</p>
<p>Israel will undoubtedly be blamed if negotiations fail, so it&#8217;s unlikely that fair judgment by the international community motivated the release. Perhaps it was the price that Israel had to pay for a U.S. promise to prevent Iranian nukes and/or support Israel&#8217;s efforts to stop them. If so, is the U.S. good for its word (despite Obama&#8217;s repeated demonstrations that his Mideast &#8220;red lines&#8221; are meaningless)?</p>
<p>Whatever the explanation for Israel&#8217;s good-faith opening, there were plenty of ways for the Palestinians to reciprocate: removing anti-Israel incitement from their textbooks and/or official media, recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, promising to &#8220;freeze&#8221; their anti-Israel diplomatic offensives, etc. But Secretary of State John Kerry preferred to establish that Palestinian reciprocity is optional: if Israel isn&#8217;t volunteering what the Palestinians demand, they need only threaten to leave the talks and Kerry will compel the Israelis to comply.</p>
<p><b>2) No Palestinian good faith.</b> The Palestinians will be represented by Saeb Erekat and Mohammad Shtayyeh. <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Dr.Shtayyah" target="_blank">Shtayyeh’s Facebook page</a> displays a map of Israel&#8217;s internationally recognized borders, plus the West Bank and Gaza – all emblazoned with the Arabic letters for “Palestine.&#8221; So the person entrusted with negotiating a &#8220;two-state solution&#8221; openly admits that his Mideast map has room for only a Palestinian state. Just as alarming, during a recent sermon attended by Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas and broadcast on Palestinian television, Religious Endowments Minister Mahmoud al-Habbash <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=Q86jQX6GJKA#at=85" target="_blank">compared the PA&#8217;s decision to negotiate with Israel</a> to the Prophet Muhammad&#8217;s Treaty of Hudaibiya (in the year 628 CE): “in less than two years, based on this treaty, the Prophet returned and conquered Mecca. This is the example. It is the model.”</p>
<p><b>3) No religious freedom in a future Palestinian state.</b> Palestinians insist (ironically) that &#8220;peaceful coexistence&#8221; means no Jewish settlers in their state. But, on principle, why should Jews be banned from living in a future Palestinian state &#8212; particularly when Muslims constitute over 17% of Israel&#8217;s population? Will the future Palestinian state be as hostile to religious minorities as other Muslim majority states are? Unfortunately, recent history gives little reason to hope otherwise. Khaled Abu Toameh, an award-winning, Arab journalist <a href="http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3181/gaza-christians" target="_blank">reported the following about a year ago</a>:</p>
<div><i>According to the Greek Orthodox Church in the Gaza Strip, at least five Christians have been kidnapped and forced to convert to Islam in recent weeks&#8230;Church leaders&#8230;accused a prominent Hamas man of being behind the kidnapping and forced conversion of a Christian woman, Huda Abu Daoud, and her three daughters. Radical Islam, and not checkpoints or a security fence, remains the main threat to defenseless Christians not only in the Palestinians territories, but in the entire Middle East as well.</i></div>
<p>While Gaza is ruled by Islamists, the PA has also shown its hostility to Christians. <a href="http://www.algemeiner.com/2012/03/13/exclusive-baptist-church-in-bethlehem-declared-illegitimate-by-palestinian-authority/" target="_blank">On March 12, 2012, Algemeiner reported</a> that</p>
<p><i>&#8220;A week after Prime Minister Salam Fayyad told an [international] audience of Evangelical Protestants&#8230;that his government respected the rights of its Christian minorities, [PA] officials&#8230;informed Bethlehem pastor Rev. Naim Khoury that his church lacked the authority to function as a religious institution under the PA&#8230;[T]here is a sense among Christians in Bethlehem that anti-Christian animus has gotten worse in the city&#8230;Khoury said.”</i></p>
<p>A few weeks ago, <a href="http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/169886#.Ufk6dpJwrng" target="_blank">Palestinians vandalized the Cave of the Patriarchs</a>, Judaism&#8217;s second holiest site. How safe will non-Muslim holy sites be if there is no more Israeli presence in the West Bank? Will a future peace agreement specifically guarantee protection of and Israeli access to Jewish holy sites?</p>
<p>If Israel&#8217;s presence in the West Bank has helped to moderate Muslim rule there, will Israel&#8217;s complete departure mean that West Bank Christians can expect their persecution to worsen to Gazan levels (with abductions and forced conversions)? Palestinian insistence that their future West Bank state be &#8220;Judenrein&#8221; doesn&#8217;t bode well for the indigenous Christians there (or for religious freedom).</p>
<p><b>4) No Palestinian mandate to negotiate peace.</b> There are about 2.1 million Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank and 1.7 million in the Gaza Strip. But Hamas-ruled Gaza vehemently opposes peace negotiations and denies Israel&#8217;s right to exist. <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/islamic-jihad-hamas-lash-out-at-pa-negotiators/" target="_blank">Islamic Jihad and Hamas recently lambasted PA leaders</a> for meeting with Israelis to talk peace. The last time that the PA announced direct talks with Israel, <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Hamas-to-launch-more-effective-attacks-on-Israel" target="_blank">Hamas announced plans to launch terrorist attacks at Israel</a>, in coordination with 12 other Gaza terrorist organizations.</p>
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<p>And it&#8217;s not even clear that West Bank Palestinians favor these talks. Last Sunday, they rallied against peace until PA police violently suppressed the protest. Human Rights Watch has urged the Palestinian government <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/rights-group-wants-probe-of-ramallah-anti-peace-talk-violence/" target="_blank">to investigate the police beatings.</a><b> </b>Moreover, Abbas himself has no legal mandate, as his term of political office expired long ago yet he continues to rule with no elections in sight.</p>
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<p>At best, the PA can deliver only half of any peace that it promises, which lets Palestinians have their cake and eat it too: the PA can extract painful territorial concessions from Israel at the negotiating table, while Hamas can continue terrorist attacks to achieve the one-state solution embraced on Facebook by PA &#8220;peace negotiator&#8221; Mohammad Shtayyeh.</p>
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<p><b>5) Transferring the West Bank could be Israel&#8217;s geostrategic undoing.</b> Jordan could collapse any day from a flood of about 500,000 Syrian refugees (and growing daily); severe poverty; popular discontent over corruption, inequality, and lack of freedom; acute water shortages; and/or Muslim Brotherhood action to overthrow King Abdullah&#8217;s monarchy. These factors make the Abdullah regime&#8217;s survival increasingly uncertain. After Israel militarily withdraws from the West Bank, will Hamas topple the PA there as it did in Gaza (two years after Israel&#8217;s 2005 Gaza withdrawal)? What if the Hamas-allied Muslim Brotherhood then takes over Jordan? If Jordanian-Palestinians &#8212; the largest ethnic group in Jordan &#8212; create a Palestinian state there (<a href="http://www.meforum.org/3121/jordan-is-palestinian" target="_blank">as advocated by this Jordanian-Palestinian writer</a>), would Palestinians effectively have two states? The range and severity of threats to Israel from the combination of a post-Abdullah Jordan and a Palestinian West Bank state are considerable. Is it even possible to address these Israeli security concerns in a way that leaves Palestinian negotiators satisfied enough to sign a peace treaty?</p>
<p>With so many inherent defects in the current peace talks, why would the U.S. push its most reliable Mideast ally (and the only Middle East democracy) into such perilous waters or inevitable blame? One explanation is the increasingly fashionable idea (promoted by Arab governments) that settlements are blocking a peace deal that would produce Mideast stability. But inconvenient facts completely contradict this idea: Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, Bahrain, and Yemen (etc.) would remain the same conflict-torn mess as they are now after any Israeli-Palestinian peace.</p>
<div>
<div id=":15e" tabindex="0" role="button" data-tooltip="Show trimmed content"><img alt="" src="https://mail.google.com/mail/images/cleardot.gif" /><b>Noah Beck is the author of <i><a href="http://thelastisraelis.com/buy-the-book/" target="_blank">The Last Israelis</a></i>, an apocalyptic novel about Iranian nukes and other geopolitical issues in the Middle East.</b></div>
</div>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank">Click here</a>.  </strong></p>
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		<title>Detroit Public Schools: Bankrupting Minority Students&#8217; Futures</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/detroit-public-schools-bankrupting-minority-students-futures/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=detroit-public-schools-bankrupting-minority-students-futures</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 31 Jan 2013 04:45:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bankruptcy]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Detroit]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Exposing the racial injustice of Democrat-controlled education.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/detroit-public-schools-bankrupting-minority-students-futures/detroitschool/" rel="attachment wp-att-175646"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-175646" title="detroitschool" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/detroitschool.jpg" alt="" width="290" height="208" /></a><em>Editor’s note: The following is the second in a series of FrontPage articles that will unmask the racial injustice of Democrat-controlled education by examining some of the nation’s worst (and biggest spending) school districts. To read about the Washington, DC public school system, click <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/john-perazzo/dc-democrats-sell-minority-students-education-short/">here</a>.</em></p>
<p><em></em>In 2009, when the Detroit Public School (DPS) system was facing bankruptcy engendered by huge operating deficits and widespread corruption, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124813472753066949.html">characterized</a> it as a &#8220;national disgrace.&#8221; The disgrace, unfortunately, is much more than meets the eye: For all of the bankrupting spending, the school system&#8217;s educational results for the <a href="http://detroitk12.org/admin/academic_affairs/docs/DPS_Academic_Plan.pdf">88 percent</a> black student population remain abysmal. And yet the DPS is but a microcosm of the silent scandal haunting the Left, which controls the district and countless others across the nation in precisely the same circumstances. Throughout America, minority students find themselves conscripted into these institutions of misery, while the architects of their prisons remain accountable to no one.</p>
<p>In 2009, DPS students turned in the lowest scores ever recorded in the national math proficiency test over its then-21-year history. By 2011, school officials were patting themselves on the back for <a href="http://detroitk12.org/content/2011/02/22/dps-reaches-62-percent-graduation-rate-the-highest-since-state-began-new-cohort-methodology-in-2007/">achieving</a> the highest &#8220;graduation&#8221; rate garnered since the state began using new methodology in 2007 to calculate results. It was 62 percent &#8212; meaning nearly two-in-five students <em>failed </em>to get their diploma using this methodology. Furthermore, that graduation rate remained well below the <a href="http://www.michigan.gov/snyder/0,4668,7-277-57577_57657-255654--,00.html">state average</a> of 75.95 percent. Dropout rates for DPS have also decreased from almost 30 percent in 2007 to 19.09 percent in 2010. Yet they too did not favorably compare to the statewide average of 11.07 percent.</p>
<p>As for labeling the increase in the graduation rate a &#8220;success&#8221; story, such success was belied by a Michigan Department of Education study <a href="http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2011/02/state_education_study_finds_th.html">conducted</a> in 2011. It revealed that the word &#8220;graduation&#8221; is largely a euphemism. At Renaissance High, the district&#8217;s top high school, only <a href="http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2011/02/state_education_study_finds_th.html">ten percent</a> of the students were considered &#8220;college ready,&#8221; despite a 2010 graduation rate of 95.5 percent. As of June 2012, a dismal 1.8 percent of DPS students throughout the entire system were considered <a href="http://www.freep.com/article/20120628/NEWS06/120628034/Michigan-student-tests-2012-MEE-ACT-Michigan-Merit-Exam">capable</a> of doing college-level work.</p>
<p>In terms of the racial element, Education Trust-Midwest <a href="http://gomasa.org/news/percentage-high-school-students-career-and-college-ready-increasing-statewide">reported</a> that Michigan has one of the worst student achievement gaps in the nation. Thus, Detroit&#8217;s overwhelmingly black student body has fallen behind their white counterparts as far as any in the country &#8212; and as Michigan Merit Exam (MME) results reveal, the gap is getting larger. In 2011, Detroit <a href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-12-07/local/35285282_1_achievement-gap-racial-gap-white-students">tied</a> Washington, D.C. for last place nationwide in eighth-grade reading scores. Only 7 percent of students <a href="http://iowntheworld.com/blog/?p=160397">were</a> grade-level proficient or better, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Almost unbelievably, DPS students were even worse in math. The Education Department’s 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test revealed that a paltry 4 percent of DPS students scored highly enough to be rated “proficient” or better.</p>
<p>None of this stopped Detroit teachers from taking a <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/12/11/teachers-union-abandons-26000-michigan-school-children/">day off</a> last December 11 to protest Michigan&#8217;s <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/business/economywatch/michigans-right-work-laws-will-ripple-across-us-1C7559684">subsequently enacted</a> right-to-work law. Despite the consistently substandard education produced by the city&#8217;s school unions, their members knew that reprisals for either that reality <em>or</em> their illegitimate day off would never be challenged. The Michigan Education Association spent more than $7 million on political contributions, 86 percent of which went to Democrats. That would be the same unions, along with their Democrat enablers, who consistently lobby against reforms such as vouchers, charter schools, the closing of underperforming schools, or anything else that puts the interests of students over those of the union.</p>
<p>Yet there are nascent changes occurring that may finally put those union interests in check. The 2012-2013 school year marks the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/03/detroit-teachers-contract-dps-dft_n_1645949.html">implementation</a> of the new Educational Achievement Authority (EAA), a state-level entity that manages troubled schools. In Detroit, the EAA took <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/12/mich-achievement-authori_n_2287214.html">control</a> of 15 school districts and the per-pupil state funding that went with them. It is staffed by recruits from Teach For America, a <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/337188/bill-ayers-teach-america-creates-educational-tourists-fraud-every-level-eliana-johnson">non-union</a> teaching association comprised of top college graduates. The combination of takeovers and non-union teachers threatens the entrenched interests of the school boards and the unions. The EAA rankled Detroit school board officials to the point that they voted unanimously to withdraw from the state authority.</p>
<p>During the meeting where the vote took place, the board&#8217;s urge to eliminate genuine competition was fierce. “We also are going to call upon the parents to drive to stop the expansion of the Education Achievement Authority and we’re going to cancel our relationship with the EAA, so that by the fall we’ll be prepared to absorb those additional kids in our buildings, which are currently being leased for $1 to the EAA system,” said Detroit Board of Education President LaMar Lemmons.</p>
<p>They were also driven to act by what occurred on Election Day. Michigan voters <a href="http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2012/11/21/emergency-manager-law-overturn-troubles-michigan-schools">repealed</a> Public Act 4 that allowed the appointment by the governor of fiscal managers to oversee municipalities and school districts that defaulted on their loans. Since 2009, Detroit has had two different emergency managers. Former Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm <a href="http://www.michigan.gov/granholm/0,4587,7-168-23442_21974-207551--,00.html">appointed</a> Robert Bobb, a former president of the Washington, D.C. school board, to run the DPS. Two years later, Roy Roberts was <a href="http://www.michigan.gov/snyder/0,4668,7-277-57577_57657-255654--,00.html">appointed</a> to the same post by Gov. Rick Snyder. After the repeal of Public Act 4, the state asserted that emergency managers were subject to an older, more limited statute called Public Act 72, which still left emergency managers in control.</p>
<p>Yet in Detroit, the school board, wanting to do more than rid themselves of the EAA, also filed a <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/27/detroit-schools-public-act-4-repeal_n_2197905.html">lawsuit</a> to get rid of Roberts, claiming he no longer had the authority to run the DPS. The school district countered that the repeal of Public Act 4 simply reinstated Public Act 72 and Roberts was still in charge. The case went all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court. It <a href="http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130118/POLITICS02/301180422">ruled</a> 6-0 that it would not overturn a ruling by the state Court of Appeals, which held that Roberts lawfully holds office under Public Act 72. While all of this was occurring, state legislators drafted and passed a substitute statute to give emergency managers more leeway, and Gov. Snyder signed it into law. As a result many of the emergency manager powers have been restored, but districts and municipalities have more time to get their acts together before an emergency manager is appointed.</p>
<p>For the DPS, nothing changes. The EAA is still functional, and Roberts remains charged with the daunting task of bringing the budget back into balance. The latest financial plan for saving the system was <a href="http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20130124/SCHOOLS/301240362">obtained</a> by <em>The Detroit News</em> on January 24. It represents the third effort undertaken by DPS officials to deal with the massive deficits that have plagued the system, beginning with a $200 million shortfall in 2009 that <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/14/education/14winerip.html?pagewanted=all&amp;_r=0">rose</a> to $327 million by 2011. According to the paper, the DPS&#8217;s financial meltdown will continue through 2016. By then, Roberts expects to have a balanced budget, but the price paid for that balance will be stark: the system that had educated approximately 160,000 students in 2000, will be reduced to serving less than 40,000 pupils sixteen years later.</p>
<p>Some of the budget deficit can be attributed to a continuing exodus of students, averaging about 8,000 per year, at a cost of $7300 in lost aid from the state per student. Thus, the DPS&#8217;s expected take of $720 million in revenues to operate the district in 2013 is projected to drop to $622 million by 2014, $580 million by 2015, and $547 million by 2016. Union and school board officials are quick to point out that budget cuts are the chief source of their problems. &#8220;How are you going to sell to the community that they should entrust their children to you if you&#8217;re constantly cutting?&#8221; <a href="http://www.freep.com/article/20130125/NEWS01/301250088/Detroit-Public-Schools-to-close-more-buildings-but-is-closer-to-fixing-deficit-emergency-financial-manager-says">contended</a> Detroit Federation of Teachers president Keith Johnson. &#8220;You can&#8217;t do it&#8230;Certainly, you&#8217;re going to accelerate the exodus from Detroit Public Schools.&#8221;</p>
<p>Yet Johnson and others conveniently ignore the impetus behind that exodus, namely the alienation of their client base. A poll commissioned last October by the <em>Detroit News</em> <a href="http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20121011/METRO01/210110335/1409/metro/Detroit-parents-embrace-school-choice-poll-says">revealed</a> that a sky-high 79 percent of the eight hundred residents surveyed do not want their children educated by the DPS. They prefer sending their children to a charter school, a private school or a school outside Detroit. In other words, they prefer the one thing that is utterly anathema to the DPS: competition.</p>
<p>Competition is one of the typical fallback excuses used by the DPS and their enablers to rationalize their own ineptitude. In unionized school districts around the nation, the prevailing &#8220;wisdom&#8221; is that such competition starves the public schools of the vital resources necessary to properly educate children. In Detroit, that is simply not the case. The DPS&#8217;s <a href="http://reason.com/blog/2012/10/11/detroit-schools-are-well-funded-terrible">per-pupil </a>expenditures were $12,801 in 2009-2010, according to the Census Bureau, or as much as $15,570 per pupil in 2010, <a href="http://detroit2020.com/2011/06/21/comparing-school-district-spending/">according</a> to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which also noted that Detroit had the highest per pupil expenditures in the state from 2004-2010.</p>
<p>Money well spent? More like an unmitigated disaster, underscored by the reality that nearly <em>half the population</em> of Detroit remains <a href="http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2011/05/04/report-nearly-half-of-detroiters-cant-read/">functionally illiterate</a>. A full 47 percent of residents are, as Karen Tyler-Ruiz, director of the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund, puts it, “Not able to fill out basic forms, for getting a job&#8211;those types of basic everyday (things). Reading a prescription; what’s on the bottle, how many you should take… just your basic everyday tasks,” she said. Thus, rampant illiteracy is part of the status quo the educational establishment in Detroit is fighting tooth and nail to preserve, even as years of empty promises of &#8220;reform&#8221; creating that illiteracy go unfulfilled.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s not hard to understand why. Besides the lack of quality in the classroom, fraud and mismanagement have also plagued the DPS for over a decade. As far back as 1999, a seven-month investigation by the <em>Detroit News</em> <a href="http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2000/03/01/accountable-public-schools-squander-funds">concluded</a> that a $1.5 billion bond issue for school improvements was a disaster. &#8220;Incompetence, mismanagement, and cronyism by Detroit school officials, employees, and contractors, and a system with inadequate safeguards, have devastated a $1.5 billion school construction project,&#8221; the paper stated. In June 2009, Robert Bobb brought in a team of forensic accounting analysts, who discovered that 257 &#8220;ghost&#8221; employees were receiving paychecks. Two months later, seven more public officials were charged with multiple felonies for <a href="http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2009/08/more-corruption-detroit/">operating</a> an embezzlement scheme. It was also discovered that approximately 500 illegal healthcare dependents were costing the district millions. In 2012, a DPS contract accountant and her daughter, a teacher, were <a href="http://www.fbi.gov/detroit/press-releases/2012/former-detroit-public-schools-accountant-teacher-indicted-on-fraud-and-money-laundering-charges">indicted</a> by the FBI for fraud, conspiracy and tax charges.</p>
<p>Thus, it is unsurprising that a district boasting a $103.6 million budget surplus as recently as 2002 found itself on the brink of bankruptcy by 2009. Yet such corruption was not limited to people involved with the DPS. It is part of a larger pattern of citywide corruption <a href="http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2010/01/detroit-corruption-keeps-piling/">perpetrated</a> by people such as former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, his aide, the wife of House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers (D-MI), several city council members and a police chief who, along with countless others, were indicted, arrested and/or imprisoned for criminal charges involving bribes, embezzlement and kickbacks. As result, the threat of bankruptcy looms not just over the school system, but the <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2013/0129/Detroit-bankruptcy-City-teetering-on-the-edge-of-financial-crisis">entire city</a> of Detroit as well.</p>
<p>And make no mistake: this is a debacle caused <a href="http://motorcitytimes.com/mct/2013/01/liberal-detroit-democrat-shouting-down-democrat-blue-on-blue-infighting-race-card-flying/">entirely</a> by Democrats. Not a single Republican holds elected office in the city. The last Republican Mayor was Louis Miriani, whose term ended in 1962. It is Democrats who have mortgaged the lives of black American children in Detroit, even as they deem any challenge to their educational monopoly a threat to the students&#8217; well-being.</p>
<p>Despite all hollow denials to the contrary, Detroit Democrats and their public school establishment allies own what they have created. The Detroit public school system is bankrupt &#8212; morally and financially &#8212; and it is black American school children and their parents who are most affected.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The Feminist Assault on the Military</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/david-horowitz/the-feminist-assault-on-the-military/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-feminist-assault-on-the-military</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 28 Jan 2013 04:30:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Feminism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Horowitz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[utopia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[women in combat]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=175189</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The destructive radical idea behind women serving in combat. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: left;" align="center"><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/david-horowitz/the-feminist-assault-on-the-military/women_in_combat/" rel="attachment wp-att-175194"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-175194" title="women_in_combat" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/women_in_combat.jpg" alt="" width="280" height="210" /></a><em>Editor&#8217;s note: With the Pentagon&#8217;s recent elimination of the ban against  women serving in combat, Frontpage editors have deemed it important to reprint an article written by David Horowitz twenty years ago that now, for obvious reasons, proves extremely relevant to the issue at hand. [David Horowitz, "The Feminist Assault on the Military," Center for the Study of Popular Culture, October 5, 1992.]:</em></p>
<p>For nearly two decades after the Sixties, the U.S. military remained the one institution that had withstood the baleful influences of the radical left. Now that the cold war is over, this immunity appears to have ended. A series of relatively trivial incidents – a joke about women&#8217;s sexual excuses, a skit with sexual innuendos mocking a female member of Congress – and a drunken party at which crotches were grabbed in a gantlet ritual, have triggered a national hysteria and a political witch-hunt – referred to in the media as “the tailhook scandal” that is threatening the very foundations of the military establishment.</p>
<p>Already, the witch-hunt has terminated or blighted the careers of a Secretary of the Navy, four Admirals, a military aide to the president, and three &#8220;top gun&#8221; flight commanders. A question mark has been placed over the careers of thousands of naval and marine officers. And every male in the navy judged guilty under the draconian law of the new puritanism<em> before</em> the fact – has been condemned to eight hours of re-education in &#8220;sensitivity training&#8221; classes, designed – as in a latter-day Salem-to purify their souls.</p>
<p>The dimensions of what is happening are only dimly appreciated by the American public. The case of three-star Admiral John H. Fetterman Jr., a naval aviator with thirty-seven years of service, provides some clues. A family man with conservative moral values and a reputation for honesty and integrity, Fetterman had earned respect as the &#8220;people&#8217;s Admiral,&#8221; for his concern for the &#8220;little guy,&#8221; and for his advocacy of a wider role for women in the Navy. Capping his long and distinguished career, he had headed the Navy&#8217;s air forces in the Pacific before being appointed chief of naval education and training, the Navy&#8217;s number one shore command. A month after the Tailhook revelations, Fetterman was busted in rank. Days later, he took an early retirement.</p>
<p>Fetterman’s crime? He had been accused over a harassment &#8220;hotline&#8221; of shielding an aide from naval investigators. The aide, a chief petty officer, had made a pass, while drunk, at another enlisted man. In less fevered circumstances this incident might have slipped by without notice. But in the wake of Tailhook, the furies of sexual purity demanded blood. (One female officer, among the hundreds who rallied to Fetterman’s support, told the<em> San Diego Union</em> in horror, &#8220;They&#8217;re going after the wrong admiral. This shows you the whole world is upside down.&#8221;)</p>
<p>In justifying an otherwise incomprehensible act against one of its most respected commanders, the Navy hierarchy reached for the blunt instrument of innuendo. In an official statement, the Navy said that the relationship of Fetterman and his wife with the chief petty officer, &#8220;appears to have been unduly familiar.&#8221; In a poignant defense to his commanding officer, Fetterman replied:</p>
<blockquote><p>That conclusion is based upon observations that my wife extended the courtesies of our home to the chief in question. In response, I must note my wife is a caring and gracious person. She has always made all members of the Navy family feel like they are part of our family. That particular attribute is one of her greatest strengths and one for which I will not apologize.</p></blockquote>
<p>Then he warned that the measures being taken to root out sexual harassers might end up doing &#8220;irreparable damage to the military.&#8221;</p>
<blockquote><p>For the past few months, we have seen the reputations of honorable men and women tarnished by innuendo, falsehood and rumor. Enough! Our Navy is populated by decent, honest and dedicated people. They need to be recognized as such.</p></blockquote>
<p>But it will be a long time before the Navy&#8217;s honor is restored and the American concept of innocent until proven guilty is respected again in military quarters. The movement which has led to the current witch-hunt is far from spent. It began in earnest a decade ago, when the army attempted to introduce a sex-neutral system to test the physical strength of recruits. Designed to match individual abilities to military requirements, the Military Enlistment Physical Strength Capacity Test (MEPSCAT) provoked objections at the time from feminists inside and outside the military, who feared that sex-neutral standards might cause women to be barred from certain roles, particularly combat roles, which were the keys to military status and advancement.</p>
<p>Although the Air Force held out, and maintained the objectivity of the test, the Army and Navy caved in to their feminist critics. As the feminist objections were met, the MEPSCAT test was reduced to little more than a &#8220;guidance tool.&#8221; The double standard had taken its first step in becoming a way of life in the military as it has in other institutions of American life. The only area where a true standard remained in force was combat itself. Now, ten years later, combat has become the issue, and with incidents like Tailhook ripe for exploitation, the pressure to surrender to the feminist levelers appears all but insurmountable.</p>
<p>That pressure is embodied in the &#8220;Schroeder Amendment,&#8221; which would open the door to allow women to fly in combat. The Amendment is named after its sponsor, liberal Democrat Pat Schroeder, who appears to be the aspiring Senator McCarthy of the current investigative frenzy<em> {I have in my hand a list of harassers&#8230;)</em> In a July 9 letter to Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, Schroeder put the Pentagon on notice that &#8220;Tailhook &#8217;91 is a symptom of a larger problem&#8221; and that the resignation of Navy Secretary Garrett does not begin &#8220;to address the problem.&#8221; To do just that, the Congresswoman wants investigations and prosecutions that will enable the navy to purge itself of sexual miscreants:</p>
<blockquote><p>The Navy&#8217;s inability to complete an accurate investigation and the failure to identity and prosecute the attackers&#8230;.sends a clear message&#8230;</p></blockquote>
<p>In addition, Schroeder demands (and has succeeded in getting) re-education classes – &#8220;sexual harassment training [for] all personnel&#8221; – to cleanse the navy of existing bad attitudes.</p>
<p>Schroeder’s bill to allow women in combat (which would also make women eligible for a future military draft) is the other face of the feminist juggernaut. It is seen by supporters as a &#8220;wedge&#8221; measure that would lead to expanded combat roles and true institutional equality for women. A Presidential Commission has been appointed to review the issue and is scheduled to make a recommendation in November.</p>
<p>While the primary concern in making such a decision ought to be its possible impact on military capabilities, many of the advocates of change and many of those who will actually decide the issue have shown little interest in the maintenance of an effective defense. Schroeder, for example, was an anti-war activist before entering the House where, as a ranking member of the Armed Services Committee, she has been a longtime proponent of reductions in America&#8217;s military posture. Serving alongside her on the Committee are feminist allies Beverly Byron (who has demanded that every officer merely present at Tailhook be thrown out of the service) and California &#8220;anti-war&#8221; liberal Barbara Boxer. Another ranking Committee member and ardent Schroeder supporter, is radical Congressman Ron Dellums, a recent camp follower of Fidel Castro and other U.S. adversaries, an opponent of U.S. military interventions over the last three decades who denounced the Carter White House as &#8220;evil&#8221; for opposing Soviet aggression in Afghanistan, and a legislator who every year has sponsored an alternative defense authorization bill mandating crippling cuts in Americas military forces.</p>
<p>When New Left radicals, like myself, launched the movement against the war in Vietnam, we did not say we wanted the Communists to win – which we did – we said we wanted to give peace a chance; we wanted to bring the troops home. By persuading well-meaning Americans to take up our cause and by forcing Washington to bring the troops home, we accomplished our objective: the Communists won. With disastrous consequences for Vietnam and the world.</p>
<p>Examples of this kind of double agenda abound in the current feminist campaign and can be found in testimony before the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces. Dr. Maria Lepowsky, a graduate of Berkeley and an associate professor of anthropology and Women&#8217;s Studies at the University of Wisconsin, provided testimony in support of a combat role for women. Then Professor Lepowsky asked herself: &#8220;What would be some possible consequences&#8230; – if women were put in combat – on American cultural values and American society&#8230;?&#8221; And then she answered her own question: &#8220;I think there might be increased concern about committing troops to combat, also perhaps a good thing&#8230;&#8221;</p>
<p>In other words, Lepowsky was advocating that women be put in combat roles because to do so would make it more<em> difficult</em> to commit troops to combat! This kind of candor is unusual for the left.</p>
<p>The feminist movement, which supplies the ideological framework for witnesses like Professor Lepowsky and advocates like Pat Schroeder is typical of those in which radicals have played significant roles. It is a coalition of different voices in which radicals set the political agendas and in which not all the agendas are on the surface.</p>
<p>Moderate feminists generally are seeking modest reforms in American society. Technological developments in the 20th Century have dramatically changed women&#8217;s social roles. Women no longer risk death in the normal course of childbirth, and can choose whether to become pregnant or not. Together with labor saving devices in the home, which have reduced the demands of maintaining a household, these technological advances have freed women to consider careers in the world at large, including careers in the military, where they have historically made significant contributions.</p>
<p>Naturally these changing opportunities for women have required some adjustments in the culture, particularly since many of the developments occurred in a relatively short time span. The development of contraceptives alone, for example, would have been a catalyst of important changes. When women entered the work force in unprecedented numbers, attitudes had to be adjusted and laws had to be changed; some traditions had to be modified and others abandoned.</p>
<p>America is a remarkably open society, with remarkably responsive institutions and these changes have taken place with consequent alacrity. And they are still taking place. The best and most constructive way for them to take place is deliberately, with careful consideration of possible consequences, and special respect for consequences that maybe unforeseen. As the inhabitants of the former Soviet empire discovered, at great human cost, revolutionary cures can often be worse than the diseases they were prescribed for.</p>
<p>This is a lesson lost on feminism’s radical wing whose ideology has been described by philosopher Christina Sommers as &#8220;gender feminism.&#8221; (Sommers contrasts this with &#8220;equity feminism,&#8221; a moderate position that really means getting a fair shake.) When advocates of reform speak of &#8220;gender integration&#8221; of the military, they are often invoking the ideas of the radical feminists without necessarily recognizing them for what they are.</p>
<p>Gender feminism is a bastard child of Marxism. It is the dominant ideology of women&#8217;s studies in American universities and of feminist groups like the National Organization of Women. Gender feminism holds that women are not women by nature, but that patriarchal society has &#8220;constructed&#8221; or created them female so that men could oppress them. The system that creates females is called &#8220;gender-patriarchy.&#8221; As the source of their oppression, it must be destroyed.</p>
<p>Radical feminists are social engineers in the same way that Communists are social engineers. They deny that there is a human nature, and they deny that there is a female nature, that human biology in any way fundamentally influences who or what we are. The solution to all social problems, conflicts and disappointments in life is to manipulate laws and institutions so as to create liberated human beings – beings who will not hate, have prejudices, exhibit bad sexual manners, get into conflicts, or go to war. By changing institutions, especially powerful institutions like the military, and using their administrative power to brainwash people into adopting attitudes that are politically correct, these radicals believe that the problems that have plagued mankind since the dawn of creation will be miraculously cured.</p>
<p>Social engineers like the gender feminists have little interest in questions of Americas national security not because they are in the pay of foreign powers, but because they believe that America is a patriarchal, sexist, racist oppressor and that its institutions must be destroyed or transformed beyond recognition, if women and other oppressed groups are to achieve their &#8220;liberation.&#8221; Of course, the gender feminists are not so naive as to admit their radical agendas outside the ideological sanctuaries of Women&#8217;s Studies departments. In testifying before presidential commissions what they sound like are equity feminists. They will say that placing women in combat positions is merely an extension of women working outside the home, and of expanding equal opportunity</p>
<p>But placing women in harm’s way and training them to kill one-on-one is not a mere extension of working outside the home. Furthermore, there are definite limits to equal rights and equal opportunity when biology is involved. Do I, for example, as an American male, have a right to bear a child? Do I have an equal opportunity with women to do so? Do they have an equal aptitude for combat? Ninety percent of the people arrested for violent crimes in the United States are, and always have been, male. From this statistic alone it would be possible to conclude that males have a distinct advantage over females when it comes to mobilizing an existing instinct for aggression for the purposes of organized combat.</p>
<p>One of the leading military advocates of equal roles for women and men is Commander Rosemary Mariner, a nineteen year career naval officer. In June, Commander Mariner testified before the Presidential Commission that women should not be excluded from combat because &#8220;separate is inherently unequal.&#8221; Perhaps. But so what? The founding documents of this country recognize the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They do not recognize the rights of short people to be tall, of less intelligent people to have higher intelligence, of less aggressive people to be more aggressive, of physically weaker people to be stronger, of men to bear children or of women to be deployed in military combat.</p>
<p>Men and women are different<em> and unequal</em> in various abilities. That, to all but gender feminists, is an obvious, indisputable fact. The question is, what are the consequences of that fact?</p>
<p>The difficulty in answering the question is the emotional element that is introduced into the discussion by the moral and political claims of the feminist left. Mariner&#8217;s testimony before the Commission – a testimony infused with radical nostrums is instructive:</p>
<p>As with racial integration the biggest problem confronting gender integration is not men or women, but bigotry. It is bigotry that is the root cause of racial and sexual harassment. From common verbal abuse to the criminal acts of a Tailhook debacle, sexual harassment will continue to be a major problem in the armed forces because the combat exclusion law and policies make women institutionally inferior.</p>
<p>The basic elements of the radical view are all here. Sexual relations between men and women are to be understood in terms of racial relations between blacks and whites. The problem of sexual harassment is analogous to racism and is unrelated to the different biologies and sexual drives of men and women. At the root of the problem is institutions. &#8220;Tailhook &#8217;91,&#8221; wrote Schroeder in her letter to the Secretary of Defense, &#8220;is the symptom of a larger problem: institutional bias against women.&#8221; In feminist terms, the social construction of women that renders them different from men is made possible by a patriarchal system of institutions that causes them to be perceived as inferior. In the eyes of the gender feminists, the exclusion of women from combat is a keystone of this system. If women were to be included in combat (and thus treated as the equals they are), if gender roles were to be abolished, then sexual harassment would cease to be a &#8220;major problem.&#8221;</p>
<p>Consider the proposition: For five thousand years men have been more aggressive sexually than women. Recognizing this, societies have universally established different (unequal) sexual rules for men and women. And for all that time, men (but not all men) have failed to heed those rules and have overstepped the boundaries of decent behavior. But according to the gender feminists, that is &#8220;merely&#8221; the past. Now the U.S. military has a chance to solve this problem once and for all. By passing the Schroeder amendment. By removing the barriers to women in combat. As soon as the &#8220;exclusion law&#8221; is changed, women&#8217;s self-esteem will rise, men’s respect for women will increase, and<em> mirabile dictu </em>sexual harassment will cease.</p>
<p>It is difficult to believe that rational human beings could propose such nonsense, let alone a commander in the U.S. Navy or a U.S. Congresswoman. But this is the fundamental idea that feminists – from the ideological professoriate on our benighted campuses to such public &#8220;spokespeople&#8221; as Gloria Steinem and Pat Schroeder promote from their pulpits<em> ad nauseam.</em> And to which our military brass and political leadership are kowtowing at a frightening pace. It is an instructive example of how radical ideology, given the chance, can glue up the human brain. If anyone were seriously looking at the question of military effectiveness, they would see that the greatest threat to military morale today is being created by the onslaught of half-baked feminist ideas that are making every man Jack in the military – from the highest brass to the lowliest grunt – guilty before the fact, guilty just because he is a male.</p>
<p><strong>Item:</strong> This summer, Jerry Tuttle, a three-star Admiral who had been nominated by the President for one of the 12 top posts in the navy, was subjected to public humiliation when the President was forced to withdraw his nomination. Why? Because a newsletter for which he was responsible printed the following joke:<em> Beer is better than women because beer never has a headache. </em></p>
<p><strong>Item:</strong> Three &#8220;top gun&#8221; fliers were relieved of their commands because of their participation in, or witnessing of, a privately shown skit in the annual Tom Cat Follies at the Miramar Naval Station. The skit lampooned Congresswoman Schroeder.</p>
<p>What is going on in America that a three star Admiral can be denied a promotion over a lame joke that he didn&#8217;t even make? Or that seasoned fliers can have their careers terminated because of possible offense to a politician? How could a Republican President and Navy Department cave in to pressures like this, and why isn&#8217;t there national outrage over the injustice and stupidity of it? And, finally, what is the problem with feminists who can’t handle this kind of trivia?<em> And yet want to enter a war zone and engage in combat! </em></p>
<p>There<em> is</em> a big problem out there and it is this: We are fast becoming a nation of hypocrites and liars in our unseemly haste to humor ideological bluenoses like Mariner and Schroeder, and to submit the lives of honorable and dedicated men like Admiral Tuttle and the Miramar commanders to the tender mercies of the feminist thought-police.</p>
<p>Thanks to Representative Schroeder, her supporting wolfpack and the weak-kneed defense brass who won’t stand up to them, the men in our armed services are now guilty for being men: for having encountered women who have used headaches as an excuse for not wanting sex, for suffering the abuse of a vindictive Congresswoman in silence, and for making lame jokes to ventilate their frustrations.</p>
<p>But it is not only men who are guilty when the radical star-chamber is in session. Women who are not politically correct are equally suspect. Thus Commander Mariner: &#8220;As with racial integration, the biggest problem confronting gender integration is&#8230;bigotry. ..Bigotry&#8230;is the root cause of racial and sexual harassment.&#8221;</p>
<p>Anyone who even suggests now that it might not be a good idea to include women in combat, is hereby put on notice that they are, at the very least, encouraging bigotry and most likely bigots themselves. Studies conducted at West Point have identified 120 physical differences between men and women that may bear on military requirements. Yet the US Naval Academy has been criticized for not moving fast enough to increase its female enrollment on the grounds that this is mere prejudice. Senator Barbara Mikulski has demanded &#8220;an attitude change&#8221; at the Academy, and an official Committee on Women&#8217;s Issues headed by Rear Admiral Virgil Hill has called for the &#8220;immediate dismissal of senior officers who question the role of women in the military.&#8221; To question – <em>to question</em> – the role of women in the military is now regarded as bigotry by the military itself.</p>
<p>The word &#8220;bigot&#8221; has resonance. It is meant to invoke the specter of racism and, simultaneously, to appropriate the moral mantle of the civil rights movement for the feminist cause. This feminist attempt to hijack the civil rights movement has always struck me as spurious and offensive. Women, as a gender, were never oppressed as American blacks and their ancestors were oppressed. It is the big lie of feminism to speak of &#8220;patriarchy&#8221; as a system of oppression comparable to slavery, and to see women&#8217;s restricted role in society as fundamentally unrelated to restrictions imposed by their biology and the state of technological development.</p>
<p>Black people were enslaved for centuries. Their slavery was justified by whites who judged them to be less than human. &#8220;Three-fifths of a man.&#8221; That was bigotry. That was racism.<em> Sexism,</em> by contrast, is an inane and meaningless term invented by Marxist radicals to stigmatize their opponents. Its primary function aside from abuse, is to appropriate the moral legacy of the struggle against racism. No western civilization, let alone western democracy, has ever regarded women as inferior beings in the sense that blacks were considered inferior. None has ever failed to value and cherish them.</p>
<p>Despite the fog of feminist propaganda that has enveloped the nation, we don&#8217;t need elaborate studies to prove this. Men&#8217;s feelings for women have been richly recorded in Western culture. Homer&#8217;s<em> Iliad, </em>which gives expression to the informing myths of Hellenic society, and is a founding document of Western civilization is about a war over a woman. Even the most dim-witted ideologue can see that there is power in womanhood there.</p>
<p>As for more recent attitudes, anyone who thinks that before<em> The Feminist Mystique,</em> women in America were denigrated as mere bodies without character or brains, should catch the next showing of any Katherine Hepburn film on<em> American Movie Classics.</em> In <em>Adams Rib,</em> to invoke but one example, Hepburn and Tracy play husband and wife lawyers who wind up on opposite sides of a major case. The wife wins. Only in Betty Friedan&#8217;s febrile imagination was the American family a &#8220;comfortable concentration camp&#8221; before the advent of NOW.</p>
<p>Yet the argument is still pressed that the decision to put women in combat is somehow crucial to women&#8217;s self-esteem and to men&#8217;s respect for women. It is a constant theme of the Presidential hearings. In discussing the inclusion of women in combat, Professor Lepowsky had this to say: &#8220;There might be a significant impact&#8230;on female self-esteem, especially for young girls and young women, the idea that male fraternity and male respect of women was possible.&#8221;</p>
<p>On what planet is Professor Lepowsky living? Including women in combat would give women the idea that male friendship for and respect of women was<em> possible}</em> If men don&#8217;t respect women, why do women fall in love with men and marry them? Is there something wrong with women? Are they so brain deficient or brainwashed as to be involved intimately with a species that doesn&#8217;t even respect them? Only a feminist ideologue could come up with such malicious lunacy. It only serves to confirm the suspicion that behind every radical feminists concern for what women might be, lies a profound contempt for who they are.</p>
<p>And yet this is the kind of thinking that is being factored into the future of our armed forces.</p>
<p>What is truly worrying about all this is that there is now an atmosphere of intimidation in the public sphere that prevents any candor on these issues. Jobs can and are being lost, careers are being ruined, reputations are being tarnished because of politically incorrect views; because of bad attitudes; because the party line is not being observed. These are disgraceful times in America. And they are fraught with danger where national security matters are concerned.</p>
<p>In its Washington session in June, the Presidential Commission also heard testimony from William S. Lind, former defense advisor to Gary Hart. In his testimony, Lind referred to the suppression of information vital to the decisions the Commission was going to make. According to Lind, the Army Personnel Office had detailed information on problems encountered with women troops in Desert Storm, which had not been released to the public. They included the fact that the non-deployability rate for women in the Gulf was many times higher than that for men. Specifically, when the troops were called to battle, between three and four times as many women per enlisted personnel were unavailable for duty. The inability to deploy women troops apparently caused an immediate turmoil with negative effects on unit cohesion, which is a primary component of combat effectiveness. Another piece of important information that was not made public was the fact that despite rigid measures taken in the field, there was no drop in the pregnancy rate through the period of deployment. (Pregnancy rates in the military are now 10-15%.) Pregnancy during Desert Shield was the primary reason for non-deployability.</p>
<p>Why is this information on the back burner? Where are the famous investigative reporters from <em>60 Minutes</em> and the<em> Washington Post,</em> ever vigilant against the evils of military censorship? Perhaps a politically correct media lacks interest in information that could sow doubts about the case for &#8220;gender integration&#8221;. Even if the suppression of that information might jeopardize our men on some future field of battle.</p>
<p>(Suppression of information about women&#8217;s actual performance in some traditionally male jobs is not unique to the military. As a journalist I have interviewed policemen who will tell you – off the record – of the dangers they face because of women partners who are not as physically intimidating as men. I have talked to construction workers who will tell you – off the record – of having to carry women the law has forced onto their crews even though they are not physically strong enough to do a full share of the work.)</p>
<p>The suppression of information has provided one &#8220;answer&#8221; to these problems. &#8220;Gender norming&#8221; has provided the other. &#8220;Gender norming&#8221; is the practice of institutionalizing the double standard, so that women are measured in performance against other women, rather than men who can outperform them. &#8220;Gender norming&#8221; is now the rule at all military service academies. As is the cover-up of the adverse consequences of their new policies of admitting women.</p>
<p>The official position at West Point, for example, is that there have been<em> no</em> negative effects stemming from the admission of women to the Academy. The facts, as revealed in a recent Heritage study by Robert Knight, are quite different. Knight&#8217;s information is drawn from the sworn testimony of a West Point official taken in a Virginia Court:</p>
<ul>
<li>When men and women are required to perform the same exercises, women&#8217;s scores are &#8220;weighted&#8221; to compensate for their deficiencies.</li>
<li>Women cadets take &#8220;comparable&#8221; training when they cannot meet the physical standards for male cadets.</li>
<li>In load-bearing tasks, 50% of the women score below the bottom 5% of the men.</li>
<li>Peer ratings have been eliminated because women were scoring too low.</li>
</ul>
<p>To appease the heightened sensitivities of women in the present political atmosphere, even the<em> men’s </em>training program has been downgraded:</p>
<ul>
<li>Cadets no longer train in combat boots because women were experiencing higher rates of injury.</li>
<li>Running with heavy weapons has been eliminated because it is &#8220;unrealistic and therefore unappropriate&#8221; to expect women to do it.</li>
<li>The famed &#8220;recondo&#8221; endurance week during which cadets used to march with full backpacks and undergo other strenuous activities has been eliminated, as have upper-body strength events in the obstacle course.</li>
</ul>
<p>It is one thing to have second-rate professors in the humanities because of affirmative action quotas that lower standards. But a second rate officer corps?</p>
<p>Not surprisingly, resentment on the part of male cadets is high. One indication is that more than 50% of the women cadets at West Point reported that they had been sexually harassed last year.</p>
<p>It is a perfectly sinister combination. Rub men&#8217;s noses in arbitrariness and unfairness, and then charge them with sexual harassment when they react. It is also a perfect prescription for accumulating power and controlling resources. Which is what this witch-hunt – no different in this regard from any other – is ultimately about. For every male who falls from grace because he is suspected of sexual harassment, or of defending standards that maybe unfavorable to women, or of not reacting strongly enough to sexual harassment, there is a politically correct career officer or politician ready to take advantage of his misfortune. Rosemary Mariner is a candidate for Admiral; Beverly Byron has been mentioned as a possible Secretary of the Navy; Pat Schroeder has her sights on a cabinet post, perhaps Secretary of Defense.</p>
<p>Who is going to pay the price for these ambitions on the field of battle?</p>
<p>This brings us to another problem raised by William Lind, which is unit cohesion and combat effectiveness. In combat men will act to protect the women and this will undermine the effectiveness of the unit. The male soldier&#8217;s protective instinct is heightened by his knowledge of what the male enemy will do to females taken prisoner of war. This is not mere theory. The Israelis, who pioneered the introduction of women in combat during their War of Liberation now bar women from combat. They found exactly this, that &#8220;if you put women in combat with men, the men immediately forget about their tactical objective and they move instead to protect the women.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Israelis abandoned the practice of putting women into combat positions because it weakened their forces and exposed their fighting men to even greater risks. Is there is a reason for Americans to repeat the Israelis&#8217; mistake just to humor the feminist left?</p>
<p>No amount of sensitivity training, no amount of brainwashing can alter human nature. The Communists proved that at unbelievable cost. They could not make a new socialist man (or woman) who would be cooperative and not competitive under a social plan, who would respond as effectively and efficiently to administrative commands as they had to market incentives, who would be communist and not individualist.</p>
<p>The Communists killed tens of millions of people and impoverished whole nations trying to change human nature, all the time calling it &#8220;liberation,&#8221; just as radical feminists do. It didn&#8217;t work. Social experiments that disregard fundamental human realities in the name of abstract pieties will always fail. But they will cause incalculable social damage and irreparable human suffering before they collapse.</p>
<p>And yet, under the guidance of feminist social engineers, our newly sensitized military leadership marches on. The Air Force has established a SERE program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape), including its own &#8220;prisoner of war&#8221; camp in the state of Washington to de-sensitize its male recruits so that they won’t react like men when female prisoners are tortured. In short, in their infinite wisdom, Ms. Schroeder and her feminist allies have enlisted the military in a program to brainwash men so that they won’t care what happens to women. That&#8217;s progress and social enlightenment, feminist style.</p>
<p>Of course, it is not necessary to gain access to the information that the military has suppressed or to be familiar with military terms like &#8220;unit cohesion&#8221; to see that America’s war-making ability has already been weakened by the decision to deploy large numbers of women on battlefields overseas, even absent a combat role. Who does not remember the poignant stories which the networks elaborated in lavish detail about the children left behind by their mothers on duty in the Persian Gulf? And in some cases mothers and fathers. (In fact there were 16,337 single military parents and 1,231 military couples, who left anxious children behind during the Gulf War.) In the irresponsibly gifted hands of network reporters, even the family pets orphaned by their owners became objects of national concern. And for some, occasions to oppose the war.</p>
<p>The net result is that an American President now is under pressure to win a war in four days or risk losing the war at home. How many dictators are going to test the will of America s liberated military and compassionate citizenry in future conflicts? These changes have implications for diplomacy and long term national security that are literally incalculable. Yet Schroeder and Co. want them decided on the basis of cheap slogans like &#8220;separate is inherently unequal.&#8221;</p>
<p>In the summer of 1992, the military establishment has acted like pussies in responding to the all-out assault on America&#8217;s armed services by Congresswomen Schroeder, Byron, Boxer, Mikulski et al. In the reigning atmosphere of political intimidation, even an offending skit could send career servicemen to the stake. Among the public figures lampooned in the Tom Cat Follies were President Bush and Vice President Quayle. But it was a rhyme about Representative Pat Schroeder that sent the Navy brass into paroxysms of fear and scrambling for a sword to fall on. When the smoke cleared, three dedicated careers were in the toilet because of this nonsense. Three careers destroyed as a result of Navy hypocrisy and fear of the wrath of one bigoted US Congresswoman. When the history of this sorry episode is written, maybe someone will call it the Feline Follies.</p>
<p>One might well ask what qualifies someone like Pat Schroeder to intimidate the entire American military establishment and to shape its destiny through the next generation? During the cold war Pat Schroeder and her supporters in the Congressional left worked overtime to hobble and disarm America in the face of the Soviet threat. In 1981, when Soviet armies were spreading death and destruction across Afghanistan and the United States had boycotted the Olympics in order to isolate the Soviet aggressor, Pat Schroeder and a group of leftwing House members hosted a delegation from the World Peace Council, a proven Soviet propaganda front, thus providing a KGB operation with a forum in the halls of Congress.</p>
<p>In 1982, with Soviet armies occupying Afghanistan, with 50,000 Cuban troops waging civil war in Ethiopia and Angola, with a Communist base established on the American mainland, with a Communist insurgency raging in E l Salvador, with thousands of nuclear warheads in Central Europe and Warsaw Pact forces outnumbering NATO troops by a two to one margin, Congresswoman Schroeder proposed an amendment to reduce the number of U.S. military personnel stationed overseas<em> by half. </em>(HR6030). If ever a member of the U.S. Government proposed a prescription for national suicide, this was it. Fortunately, three hundred and fourteen Democrats joined Republicans in defeating Schroeder&#8217;s amendment on the floor.</p>
<p>In the<em> Congressional Quarterly,</em> Pat Schroeder is noted for her efforts against nuclear testing while the Soviets were still our adversaries, against further development of the MX missile, against proposed funding levels for the Strategic Defense Initiative and the B-2 bomber – and against authorizing the president to use force to stop Saddam Hussein.</p>
<p>Maybe Ms. Schroeder&#8217;s Denver constituents approve of the attitudes these positions reflect. For most Americans Pat Schroeder&#8217;s credentials on issues of national defense will be cause for alarm.</p>
<p>The military is the one American institution that survived the Sixties intact. Now it threatens to become a casualty of current radical fashions. Of far more concern than any possible injustice that might be associated with the exclusion of women from combat, is the assault on the military that is now being conducted in the name of &#8220;gender integration,&#8221; the elimination of sexual harassment and the purging of male bigots. The worst crimes of our century have been committed by idealists attempting to eradicate just such &#8220;injustices,&#8221; stamp out politically incorrect attitudes and reconstruct human nature. Let&#8217;s not add the weakening of America&#8217;s military to the depressing list of disasters of these Utopias that failed.</p>
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